TEDDY BEAR TEDDY BEAR, OFF TO SCHOOL

My two teddy-bear-cubs (my daughters) go to school in a big yellow school-bus. In fact, when the younger one went to play-school, which was just around the corner, she refused to accept that it was a PROPER SCHOOL. Because there was no sunny yellow school bus full of bright, chattering children to take her there.

Neither had we. We went to school in a rickety cycle-rickshaw. Our school-special rickshaw was value-added with a narrow wooden bench tied carefully to the back of the driver's seat. This way, it could carry many more children than it would have done unadorned! The rickshaw can carry two people in relative - if rather bumpy - comfort. With the added bench, it was made to carry 7-8 children. I've tried to re-create the engineering in my mind, but the mind BOGGLES (I'm currently immersed in the world of Jeeves, so I just had to put in that word) at the effort.

Our rickshaw-driver an affable gent called, for some unfathomable reason, Jamaibabu (son-in-law). Every morning, at around eight, the punctual Jamaibabu would come ponk-ponking the rickshaw horn at our gate. Rushing out, my brother and I would hop on to the coir-cushioned back-rest-ed seats. As our house was the first place Jamaibabu halted at, it was rather easy for us to get the best seats, which we ruthlessly refused to move away from, even if the others requested.

Jamaibabu pulled the rickshaw - with the familiar kaanch-konch sound of the three wheels turning - along the winding lanes, halting at other houses and picking up...Dipto and Rumni from their mansion with the flower-fragrant garden, Bapi from the dilapidated rented house, another very formal-looking child (whom we called Mr Gon, because he carried a tin suitcase with MR. S. GON printed on it; he was always late as his mother pleaded and pestered him to finish his glass of milk), and my cousin J and her brother.

The seats filled up fast and we sat face-to-face, three in the original rickshaw seat and five clinging like limpets to the narrow wooden bench. Knees knocked together and bags knocked over others' as Jamaibabu hit the pedal hard (we always blamed the tardy Mr Gon and his hapless mother for this). Fights sometimes erupted, but even without arguing, our decibel level was pretty high. The genial Jamaibabu would sometimes turn his head to admonish us, making the rickshaw wobble scarily. The kaanch-konch of the wheels increased as the rickshaw bumped and bounced its way to Modern School like an overloaded ark full of chattering, chirpy children. Although Jamaibabu had probably never heard of time-management, we were almost never late.

And in the afternoon, the rickshaw would return, bursting at the seams with rather exhausted but still noisy children. Bagging seats was a free-for-all, and getting a good seat (which somehow was more important on the return journey, maybe our tender bottoms were sore after all that sitting around) meant making a dash from the school-gate to the waiting rickshaw. As Jamaibabu shooed us on and hustle-pedalled his way home, the discomfort became negligible in the delight of chatter-boxing!

HOW DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL?

TRAIN TO THE HEARTLAND

Staying in Barrackpore and having lots of relations in Calcutta meant that short train journeys (about an hour and a half) were a regular part of our holidays. Trains meant a mix of excitement and apprehension, clutching tightly to Baba's hands on the crowded platform, the pleasure of standing in front of the window with the wind whipping my hair into my eyes, seeing the fields and houses tush by, getting warned every now and then not to put our hands out of the window, buying candies or fruits from the hawkers on the trains. And getting the yellowish cardboard ticket as a keepsake after the journey.

But my first really l-o-o-o-n-g overnight journey on Indian Railways was when I was seven years old, and we (Maa, Bhai and I - Baba had to go to 'office') accompanied my Dadu (mother's father) to Bhopal to visit my Mashi (mother's sister). Bhopal is 1356 kilometers away from Kolkata and we went the distance in an ordinary (not air-conditioned) second-class compartment, in the summer vacation when the temperature outside was often more than 40 degree celsius, in a train that had a coal-engine (which multiplied the heat-factor considerably) and which took two nights (if I remember correctly) to reach Itarsi (the station where we alighted, 77 kilometers away from Bhopal city). But being children, being middle-class, and being part of the frugal-seventies-generation, we never felt the heat or the discomfort. We didn't know any better. Maybe that is a good thing.

Dadu was a meticulous planner, and Maa was his able ally. So we got up on the train accompanied by, among other things, one kunjo of water (earthenware pot) in a wooden stand (to get deliciously cool water - beats refrigerated water any day), unlimited home-made cakes (to last the entire journey and beyond), limited luchi-mangsho (unleavened bread and mutton-curry, for the first night's supper, in such enormous quantities that it could feed an entire coupe of people), and one bedding-roll.

Why bedding-roll? At night, Dadu slept on the lower berth, taking an air-pillow and a two bed-sheets (one to lie upon, one to cover up), Maa and Bhai (then a three-year old enfant docile) slept similarly on the middle berth, and I was put inside the bedding roll with a pillow under my head and the straps tied over my body and bundled up onto the top berth. Despite being strait-jacketed to sleep, I loved the novelty of my high vantage point and spent a large part of the daytime sitting up on the top berth, reaching up to touch the ceiling every now and then.

Only the lure of the window got me down. Travelling through the vastness of India, with its changing terrains, soils, vegetation, cultivated and barren fields, villages, crowds and miles upon miles of empty spaces was an eye-opener. Except when the coal-engine belched extra-vigorously and the sooty smoke wafted into our eyes.

Faces black with soot, tummies full of a constant supply of food, mind replete with a multi-sensory experience of a lifetime, we got down at Itarsi station past midnight, the darkness adding to the mystery of the new place. Maasi (aunt) was waiting for us, and we travelled through the dark and long 77 kilometers to Bhopal clip-clopping in a tonga (horse-drawn carriage). But that's another journey, and another story.

DO SHARE YOUR TRAIN OF MEMORIES WITH US.

GO FLY A KITE

This is not my memory actually, because I can't fly kites at all. Even though I have gamely tried to, on several occasions, kites simply refuse to obey my cajolings to string them along, and they stubbornly nosedive to the ground with a thud.

It's about my Baba (father). He was a kite-enthusiast, having grown-up in the unimpeded spaces of his village Balubhara ('Sand-full') in innocent pre-partition Bangladesh, where the green of the open fields met the blue of the wide sky without too much of human interference in-between.


So, when he came over to Barrackpore in India, he carried in his heart that love for wide emptinesses that kite-flying symbolises and that expertise with strings and winds that kite-flying demands.


Yesterday was Makar-Sankranti, and the sky above Mumbai's million chawls (shanties) were potholed with quarelling and soaring kites. But in Bengal, kite-flying is a ritual associated with autumn and September's Vishwakarma Puja. So, around that time, Baba would eagerly go to the market and bring along a number of cheap and colourful thin paper kites. They had interesting names like petkatti (stomach-cut, which meant a half-and-half design in two colours). We (Bhai and I) would tag along, like two-tails twirling behind the kite.


Baba would tie the unravelled spool of un-treated, toothless string all around two supuri (betelnut) trees in our garden. Then he would make an edgy, dangerous manja (paste) which included powdered glass and apply this to the thread to give it the desired bite.

Because kite-flying on Vishwakarma puja was not just about feeling the wind in your upturned face and the pull of the string in your hands. It is a cut-throat competition where warring kites cross glass-sharp strings and the sharpest string wins. As the winning kite soars higher in ebullient victory, the defeated kite falls ignominously to earth. All the watchers of this sky-cast reality show cry 'Bhokkata' (It's cut) and rush out to catch the fallen kite as a prize, often climbing trees and bulidings when the kite gets stuck in branches or rooftop-antennas.

We would accompany Baba to our chhad (rooftop), or to the higher roof of our neighbour's house, along with a cheering group of friends. Baba, egged on by our admiring gang, would ask one of us to hold the
kite a little distance away and throw it up into the air (a job we would perform with wide-eyed reverence), while he expertly pulled the strings in the latai (string-holder). As Baba and the wind teamed up to raise the kite higher and higher, we would crane our necks to watch, squinting in the sunlight. At a sufficiently safe height, he would hand over the latai to us to hold. It was absolutely thrilling to feel the kite pulling away at the string as if it had a fierce life of its own, unchallenged master of the blue.

But when another kite came into our line of vision, we would hurriedly hand over the charge to Baba and go back to our cheer-leading roles.And the big fight for the sky would begin.

DO SHARE YOUR KITE-FLYING MEMORIES WITH US.

USHERING IN THE NEW YEAR

When we were young, New Years were not ushered in with booze and babes, but in a more holistic, whole-family-glued-to-TVset kind of way. It really was a ushering IN, because we received

• capsules of INformation in Prannoy Roy's intelligently-edited and interestingly-compered year-end international and national news round-up: THE WORLD THIS YEAR. The highlight was a hilarious goof-up section of the high and the mighty.
• a seemingly endless programme of completely INane entertainment put together on DD 1 (shabbier version) and DD Metro (flashier version). A parade of minor non-stars in spangly dresses and loud voices, a completely-unfunny-comedian-compere who could not make anybody laugh at that late yawning-hour.

We INevitably dozed off in front of the blaring TV set, only to have our INterest revived at 23:59:59 Hrs when there were really big bangs from the TV set. Rubbing our bleary eyes, we goofily grinned at each other as crackers burst and smoke billowed on the screen (and off it, too, somewhere far away from our timid small-town neighbourhood) and everybody singing off-key at the top of their voices...

...HAPPY NEW YEAR!

STAMPED ON MY MEMORY

My elder daughter has to do a class project on stamp-collection, and we were sadly unable to find any in the house. Finally, we had a kind friend who procured some stamps of foreign countries from the Post Office. At a cost, of course.

When we were young, we went through various 'collection-crazy' phases - from stamps to coins and even matchbox covers (where it helped that my Baba was a heavy smoker and enthusiastic contributer to the cause).

Stamp collection was a hobby much-lauded by grown-ups because it was supposed to be an educational pastime. Many kids were budding philatelists, including yours truly. One cousin, coming from a more affluent family, had a proper stamp-album with sections on different countries, ready-cut pieces of special adhesive to stick the stamps therein, and whole sets of stamps purchased at a price from post-offices.

My collection was more humble, in a used school-notebook. The stamps were painstakingly collected, one-at-a-time, off torn envelopes and air-mail covers, and stuck with ordinary gum but extra-ordinary care.

I had a lot of the usual brown 25 paise Gandhiji-stamps, and another lot of one-penny (or was it five?) pastel-Queen Elizabeth stamps of England. Indian stamps dominated the album (but of course), but there were quite a few interesting ones from foreign shores, taken from letters mailed by relations abroad, or from abandoned stamp-collections of uncles and older cousins. There were triangular, colourful stamps from Bhutan and Nepal, functional-looking stamps from the glamorous U.S.A, and stamps where the letters and numbers were in foreign languages.

The true erudite philatelist would rather have one rare stamp ( a Penny Black, say) than a hundred humdrum ones. But we were philistines rather than philatelists, and for us quantity mattered as much as, if not more than, quality. So, collections were fiercely guarded and frequently counted. Exchanging stamps was a serious and competitive business, much like the Stock Exchange today.

Bright, bold, silent but eloquent, the stamps united the world in my grubby little stamp-book. In the midst of shifting from house to house, and from city to city, somewhere I have lost it. But it is a loss that I deeply regret. Because I believe although I collected stamps with a zeal as a child, I would have learnt a lot more by studying them now as an adult. But those tiny messengers of diversity and variety - speaking of lands far away and peoples long ago - have been forever lost in transit.

WHAT DID YOU COLLECT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD?

A SOAP OPERA

The other day I was looking at some communication for Yardley Soaps, and I was struck by the irony of the quaint, ye-olde-English nineteeth-century Yardley brand being bought over by the tech-hep 21st century Wipro. But then, big-business reality is often stranger than soap-opera fiction.

I tried to recall the soaps which we used as children. Lux is still very much around, although, the stars endorsing it have changed from Hema Malini to Aishwarya, with even a Shahrukh Khan in a rose-filled bathtub (shudder!!) in between. But I prefer a gracefully-ageing Hema to a nauseously-simpering SRK any day.
Liril is a soap which has fared better, I feel, and its lemony zingy appeal is quite fresh, especially during the long, sweaty summer. Even Cinthol’s deo-range, despite the masculine magnetism of Hrithik Roshan, does not compare.

But Rexona has disappeared. While the standard pink Lux was the staple soap in our home, the green Rexona regularly graced the soapdish in my Mamabari’s (mother’s maternal home) bathroom. It was a very ordinary soap, leaving the skin woefully dry in winter, but I have fond memories of Rexona just because of the Mamabari-connect.

In summer, when sweat, itching and prickly heat attacked, Maa would sometimes get the green medicinal Margo neem soap. And though the bubbles would taste bitter if they somehow entered my mouth, Margo enjoyed a sanctified status as a "GOOD SOAP WHICH CLEANSED AND CURED", so we never complained.

My especial favourite were Lavender Dew and Mysore Sandal, because they were special-occasion soaps bought during festive-seasons and suchlike. And because they had such lovely lingering fragrances. Lavender Dew, delicately mauve-coloured, smelling of gentle lavender, is now only a faint memory, but Mysore Sandal, with the more aggressive, exotic sandal-scent is still available, enduring where the former has evaporated.

There was the big and spherical Moti, which looked like a monster-pearl and which always slipped out of my grasp when I was a small girl. But it was a costly affair and lasted a very long time, which is probably why my Chhotopishi (father’s sister) seemed to favour it.

Winters, of course, were for glycerine soaps – the pure and tranparent Pears for the more affluent homes, and the murkier Chasme Glycerin for modest homes like ours.

And now, although I love my Dove and my Nivea and other post-thirty necessities, sometimes I wish I could get back those lavender and sandal days when the skin was younger and the soap seemed gentler.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE CHILDHOOD SOAP?

THE MORNING WALK - PART I

THEN :
During school vacations, sometimes my father would suddenly have the urge to go on morning walks with me and my brother. Ma (mother) would wake us all up at some unearthly hour, get us suitably attired (depending, of course, on the weather - it was sacrilege to step out in winter without being bundled up in sweaters and scarves), give us a Marie Biscuit each, and push us out of the house before, I suspect, going back to a blissfully peaceful snooze.

Half-reluctant, half-awake, rubbing sleep out of our eyes, we would stumble out, weaving through the nearly-empty roads in our neighbourhood, under the guidance of our enthusiastic leader, Baba (father).

As we left the crowd of houses behind, the gradually brightening sky showed us the way to greener fields and the banks of the Ganga. Baba always wanted to reach the riverbank - a good half-an-hour's walk from our house - to catch the sunrise over the placid Ganga's horizon. Our senses awakened to the chirruping Good Mornings of the birds and the fresh wetness of dew brushing against our legs. Masses of flowers bent over trees and hedges and tickled our noses with their scents - shiuli, rajanigandha, kamini, beli. It was, to understate, a nice way to way up all our senses.

And the high point was flopping down, all huffed-and-puffed, on the banks of the brown river, feeling the cool breeze wipe off the sweat from our faces, and lifting our eyes to watch the sun paint the eastern sky with an amazing palette of red-orange-gold-pink. The Ganga, a great imitator, would reflect whatever the sun drew on the sky, adding millions of tiny silver ripples for special effects. And a few early morning braveheart-bathers, sun-worshippers and Ganga-devotees, would step into this colour-play in the water to take their daily dip in the holy river.

While going back, we would stop at some riverside tea-stall for locally-made toast-biscuits and Baba would have a cup of tea - the first of his daily dozen-or-more.

NOW:
No birdsong. No sunrise. Maybe they happen, but morning-walkers hardly notice. They hear the latest tracks on their earphones, and see only a focussed vision of six-packs or size-zero.

And if I thought that the self was made of the mind, body and soul, then of course, I was wrong. Only the body matters, at least while morning-walking.

WHAT WALKS WITH YOU IN THE MORNING? YOUR BODY, MIND OR SOUL?