The Old Picture Album
The large
heavy photo album was kept on a shelf inside my grandparents’ ancient teak
almirah. Sometimes, one of them would lift it down carefully to turn its pages
and show me old pictures, some of which went back to the late 1800’s. I recall
seeing several sepia-toned posed photographs of my paternal grandfather’s
parents, my great-grandparents, one sitting, the other standing, with their
young children around them. I learned to point to the serious-looking toddler
who, I was told, was my paternal grandfather. I remember searching for even the
slightest resemblance to my grandfather as I knew him then while I was still
little; he was aging, medium-built, lean and bald with an aquiline profile and
not finding any congruence, I accepted it as fact anyway, as one of those
things that would probably make sense by and by in a world that I was still
getting to know.
My
grandfather would often tell me anecdotes from his childhood. He grew up in a
large joint family in their family home near Udipi in South Kanara district now
in the state of Karnataka, going to school and then attending university in the
port-city of Madras (now Chennai) on the east coast of India as the 19th
century drew to a close. My grandfather graduated with a bachelor’s degree in
finance and accounting and took up a job as a bureaucrat with the central
Indian government in the Ministry of Finance. He left his ancestral home and
family behind in South Kanara and undertook the long journey north to Delhi, to
India’s capital that was to be his home for the next four decades.
Then
followed portraits taken during this ensuing period of my grandfather as a
young man in a formal suit, trim, with aquiline features, a neat mustache and
serious countenance, in studios, outside his home or in front of the stately
building where his office was. In some, he wore a stately turban, looking
serious and important.
There
were family photos too. Some of them showed him posing with his growing family
- his first wife sitting holding a baby, a toddler at her knee, and her
daughter standing next to her, shoulder-high. I learned early on that my
grandfather’s first wife had died early of mysterious female medical
complications, leaving behind three motherless children and her young husband
who had just begun his career in government service a few years before.
It
was only when I grew up that I began to realize what this experience might have
been like for my grandfather at a time when his adult working life had just
commenced, to lose his young wife and to have to care for a daughter and two
very young, almost infant, sons. He never spoke to me about how he had felt,
only about the objective events that took place although he would often lapse
into a thoughtful silence after mentioning them. His mother and an elderly
female relative traveled all the way to Delhi to help him to tide over the
immediate disruption and loss. I would imagine that not long after that a
collective decision was reached about the advisability and necessity of
remarriage, if not for himself, then most definitely for the young children, No
one could deny that they needed a mother. And his mother was not at a stage in
her life when she could have taken on the surrogate care-giving
responsibilities.
It
did not happen right away although a suitable match was found soon. The girl
was from a family in Kasaragod, the eldest daughter of a school-teacher but she
was still very young, in her early teens. The elders felt that she had the
right background, temperament and skills to fit into the life that my
grandfather had built for his family in Delhi and so both families waited for a
couple of years until they felt that she was ready to make the transition. My
grandmother was 16 when she made that first train journey up north to Delhi to
join her new husband, my grandfather, at long last. There was an age gap of 19
years between them. She never really shared any details about how that first
phase of her new life went, only about discrete events that followed. She had a
good deal to adjust to, having grown up in a largely rural region in South
India, a
quiet and slow environment where she helped her
mother with household chores and childcare, she being the eldest of many
siblings. Now her life was transformed on many levels and she must have felt
challenged and perhaps even overwhelmed, caring for three young children not
her own and running a full-fledged household while her husband worked and
steadily moved upwards in the Finance Ministry.
Before
long my grandmother had three children of her own, two sons and a daughter and
each time she traveled back to her parents’ home in Kasaragod to give birth. My
father was the youngest of the four sons in the family. He was good-natured and
loved to play pranks and crack jokes. He looked up to his brother and
step-siblings who were several years older, but who liked and were protective
towards the younger children, by and large. The album contained very few
pictures taken during this phase; in the few that were there, the basic facial
features of my father as a young boy and those of my aunts and uncles did
resemble the way they had looked as I was growing up.
The
family’s lives settled into a predictable pattern. They spent the cooler months
of the year in Delhi and the hot months in Shimla up in the hills. Every year,
they moved house twice between Delhi and Shimla along with the government,
every April to Shimla in the hills and every October, back to Delhi in the
plains. My grandmother would talk about the Herculean effort involved in
dismantling and then re-establishing the household twice a year. In Shimla,
they lived in a house on a hill near a temple, and my grandfather would walk to
his office which was a small distance
away. For years my grandfather would go to work everyday and return home most
evenings via the local club where he would play tennis. Sometimes, my
grandmother and he or their children would go on walks together up and down the
steep inclines and levels that made up the picturesque hill-station. The album
had pictures of them pausing during a walk to pose for a camera, in some of
them, my father’s younger sister, a growing adolescent smiling shyly at the
lens.
Decades
later I came across the following description for Shimla on a Delhi Tourism
website: Shimla, the famous holiday resort that was once the summer capital of
the British Raj, is now the state capital of Himachal Pradesh. Draped in
forests of oak, pine and rhododendron, it is situated at a height of 2,130 m
and is blessed with perennially cool air and superb panoramas. Like most hill
stations, it sprawls across ridges at many levels, connected by steep lanes. It
has now grown
into a large, prosperous town and is on its way to
becoming a cosmopolitan centre. It is famous for its buildings styled in Tudor
and Neo-Gothic architecture reminiscent of the colonial era. The British
government used to leave the winter capital at the end of March or beginning of
April and move to Shimla until the end of October. Once the Kalka-Shimla railway
line was laid down in 1903, Shimla became the favourite haunt of those wanting
to escape the summers.
They
had visitors now and then, family and old acquaintances. Anyone from their
particular Saraswat community who was connected to any of their family branches
would look them up and visit or come to stay for brief periods when they came
to the north for any reason, for work, to go on a pilgrimage, to visit their
own families. Life revolved around work and family routines and the hosting of
family and close friends. Although she had all the household help she needed,
my grandmother discovered that she enjoyed cooking and took it upon herself to
make many of the traditional dishes and snacks she had learned to cook. Every
time that someone visited, it was an excuse to cook, and over time, she became
very proficient at it, developing her own recipes and variations. Years later,
we would hear her discussing with a visitor how she made something crispier
than the original recipe called for or how many different variations there
could be of a recipe.
The
children grew up; eventually the older ones married and moved to the plains and
down south to Bangalore and Bombay and other places. They came back to visit.
During a family reunion in Shimla, they all posed for a family picture during
an outing, the young people looking tall and lanky, draped against a large
rock, some like my father, a strapping young man climbing up to a higher level,
everyone looking at the camera. I could recognize most of them, some decades
older and changed in appearance, including my father who filled out a little
over the years and lost much of his hair to his great chagrin.
But
in that family photograph, there was one person I did not know and did not
recognize because I never met him, He was my grandmother’s first-born son, my
father’s older brother whom he was very attached to and looked up to, who died
prematurely at the young age of 18 from typhoid. It was before the discovery of
the antibiotic drugs that could have cured the condition. I could not begin to
imagine what that must have been like and how it must have affected them all. I
don’t recall anyone speaking about him much. By the time I came along, I
realized, much time had gone by and all the tears had been wept and some kind
of peace made with his loss and absence from their lives.
When
my grandfather retired in 1939, he had worked for the government for almost
four decades and all those years were spent in the north, in Delhi and Shimla.
The north had become a home to them, the house on Allenby Road in Delhi, the
house in Shimla, their routines were familiar and settled. Now, my grandparents
began to consider where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives.
My
grandfather received an offer to serve as financial advisor for two years to
the Maharajah of Bikaner, Maharajah Ganga Singh, in the state of Rajasthan to
the west of Delhi, which he accepted. Folding up their house for the last time
and sending all their larger belongings to my grandfather’s brother’s house in
Madras, my grandparents traveled to their new temporary home at the edge of the
Thar desert, dry and hot year round with no respite, except in winter when
nights could be freezing cold.
The
album had some pictures of them posing on a bench with the royal gardens behind
them. Their quarters were more than comfortable in the Laxmi Niwas palace and
they often took walks, admiring the gardens and palace. But all too soon, the
idyll ended and this time, they were headed south towards their next destination,
homewards, back to where they had each started from, decades earlier.
The
old picture album traveled with them and became a treasured possession over the
years that they would turn to now and again, as they moved into the twilight
phases of their lives. It became our only link with their lives spent living in
other worlds and times now past. It occurred to me that when someone brought
out that old worn album that we all felt oddly animated. For us who had not
shared that phase, it became a window into those worlds, a tacit validation of
the stories we heard from them. For my grandparents, and my father and his
siblings, the album held proof that their own memories, fleeting and ephemeral,
were also real, of a long phase of life lived, true and complete in itself.
* * * * *
(c) 2017 PRB
My Indian Childhood
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