My Indian Childhood

The Tool Drawer * Growing up in Mumbai in the early-1960s, my sisters and I would sometimes gaze awestruck at the old china and tableware in our dining-room sideboard. We siblings had no idea then about the origins of these artifacts from another time. Nine, four and two, we were too young to be aware of the British retreat from India about a decade earlier, or about the detritus of colonisation they had left behind. Fifty years later, I still don’t know how these objects came into our possession. Today, however, I feel ambivalence, not awe, about these objects that once had such pride of place in our home. Occasionally, my sisters and I were caught handling the china and rebuked by adults in the family. One day, we discovered the top left-hand drawer of the sideboard with its mélange of rough-hewn pieces of metal and wood. The drawer was heavy. My sisters and I held on to the handle and pulled with all our might. The drawer flew out into our hands, we fell backwards, and...

Rhythms of Day and Night The scenes beyond our balcony had a certain rhythm and a predictability in spite of the randomness of the confluences of disparate events and individual propensities. Kohinoor Road was like a wide stage where life was displayed, objectified, and the hundreds of people who strolled across it were like a large cast of characters, ever changing, and providing endless possibilities for imagining. Early mornings were exciting with the promise of the new day ahead, with regular office-goers walking briskly in both directions, towards the train station or the bus stops. Cars with people on their way to work. Teenaged boys delivering newspapers and magazines tossing ours adroitly onto our balcony.. The Aarey Milk Colony milk-truck arriving to deliver ice-cold bottles containing pasteurised milk to the  booth behind our house that our cook brought back and poured into a large utensil to bring to a boil. When the bell rang at a certain time, it meant...

Driving down Memory Lane More than a decade after Shelter, the old spacious beautiful villa, part of which had been our family’s home for almost four decades, was razed to the ground, passing in a taxi edging down Kohinoor Road, I found myself looking up at a nondescript rather drab-looking multistoreyed structure that now occupied the plot where our old house had stood for the better part of a century. This new building seemed to be some kind of minor hotel or residency, judging by its sign and the uniformed doorman sitting on a high stool next to some potted palms and a flight of steps leading up to a large wide door. Striking dread into my heart at first sight, the nondescript edifice rose straight up, most unaesthetically, just feet from the sidewalk, the potted palms in the front the only flimsy reminder of the prolifically blooming garden that had once occupied part of the space. Looking around, I could still recognize some of the older houses on the block,...

The Street Performers As a child growing up on Kohinoor Road, I never had a dull moment. Just when I would begin to get bored, I would go running to see the source of a sound I heard from the street outside - the rattle of a twirling handheld noise-making drum would announce that the monkey man had arrived with his primate entourage. Manic and mischievous, they would cavort and dress up and behave like people in funny silly ways until we and others threw coins down to them. Or a different sound, deeper and grave, would let us know that the man with the dancing bear had stopped by. Or the man with the accordion and the traveling picture-show that you could peek at through viewing holes, all innocent, of course. Sometimes, whole troupes of amateur trapeze artistes and high-rope walkers would materialize, announcing their arrivals by calling,  singing aloud, drumming, and using other sound-making instruments. Within minutes, they would have re-diverted the sporadic traffic, s...

Lunch Express! At certain times of day, at daybreak, in the middle of the afternoon and again late in the night, factory shift-workers carrying their tiffin containers on their way to the Kohinoor Mills just beyond the corner of our road where it intersected with Ambedkar Road, would fill the sidewalks spilling onto the road until it looked like a human river. And every time the work shift changed at the cotton mills, a loud siren would sound and other workers whose shifts had just ended would stream down our road in the opposite direction back towards the station. And then all would be quiet again until another train arrived and cars and taxis loaded with luggage would noisily turn the corner next to our house, speeding down Balchandra Road in the direction of Tilak Bridge. Sometime, in between the sirens and millworker deluges, every weekday rain or shine alike, In the middle of the morning, the tiffin-carrier men - the dabbah-wallas - would arrive and park their long s...

Dance Lessons When I was about seven, my mother suggested dance lessons. I was at the age when I had newly discovered the charm of Hindi movies and of the lilting songs that would come over the radio on Vividh Bharati . We did not have television then in India and from the handful of movies that I had been taken to, I recalled the scenes that had accompanied some of these songs and tried clumsily to reproduce the dance movements. Naturally, to my untrained body, these did not come easily and my movements were blindly repetitive and I would twirl around until my head spun and I fell down dazed. Enthused by my budding interest in music and dance, my parents took me to a series of Indian classical dance recitals that further fired my imagination. We watched dancers perform the traditional Indian dance forms – Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kathakali and so on. I almost bounced in my seat with excitement and tried to commit the action sequences that I was watching to memory....