OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL GATES

Nowadays our children have their school tiffins from healthy, sanitized lunch boxes, or from dietician-supervised school canteens. But in our unhygienic and un-health-conscious childhood, we would be allowed a once-a-week (or more, if we spent judiciously) indulgence of scandalously-unhealthy treats which tempted us just outside the school gates.

There was the phuckha-churmur-wallah and the alu-kabli-wallah (both selling sour-and-spicy snacks of chick-pea, potato, onion, tamarind, chilli powder and god-only-knows-what-else) with their fiery wares which drew us in droves as we slurped, gobbled, licked our fingers, wiped our eyes, hung out our burning tongues, and rubbed our runny noses. My older cousins often teased us and said that the dirtier the phuchka-wallah, the tastier would be his wares. The dirt of his hands (and elsewhere?) was the secret ingredient behind his mouth-watering (and eyes-and-nose-watering) recipes. But being gastronomic bravehearts, we were not deterred by such trifling rumours, and gulped down the gruesome grub to our heart's content.

There was the hajmi-churanwallah selling numerous dark and dangerous looking hajmis (supposedly-digestive-aids) and aachars (pickles) of ancient pedigree. He was such a great favourite of mine that for a long time I fantasised about marrying his son (he himself was nearing seventy), and living amidst a treasure trove of unending supplies of amshi (dried mango pickle) and kuler achar (berry pickle).

And then, there was the cake-wallah who would take down the black tin trunk which he carried atop his dirty turban, squat on the ground and open it in front of our eager eyes. Inside that plain black trunk (on which his initials would be painted in white block caps), would be a magical bonanza of colourful pastries (which we called 'cakes' in those pre-Monjinis days). The colours would be dubiously lurid, and the cakes themselves were suspiciously stale, but who cared? The crayon-pink and neon-green, and the rather more expensive brittle-brown (which cost more because it was claimed to be chocolate) coated confectionary was regarded as a coveted special treat by us, reserved for celebrations like birthdays or sports-days or result-and-promotion-days or you-are-my-best-friend-from-now-on-days.

After school, we would burst out of the confining school gates, a chattering-clattering-clamouring flock, with disheveled uniforms and inky faces, gathering in noisy, demanding groups around these treat-sellers, who dispensed dirt and deliciousness in equal degree.

WHO TEMPTED YOU WITH IRRESISTABLE TEMPTATIONS OUTSIDE YOUR SCHOOL GATE?

RED FEET, PAINTED FEET

This summer vacation, my elder daughter and I have been reading a lot of Bengali poems (in our annual attempt to teach her to read her mother-tongue). Many of the poems mention alta (a red liquid used to paint the borders of the soles/feet):

“Elo chuley beney bou
Alta diye paye
Nolok naake, kolshi kanke
Jol aantey jaye”

(The gold-smith’s wife is open-tressed
Her feet have an alta-border
Gold nose-ring flashing, the pot at her waist,
She goes to get water).

Sukumar Ray, that inimitable genius of nonsense, of course turns everything familiar upside-down, and writes about Kumropotash (a fantastistical fierce pumpkin-shaped creature):

“Jadi Kumropotash chhotey –
Shabai jeno torboriye jaanla beye othey;
Hunkor jaley alta guley lagaye gaaley thontey,
Bhuleo jeno aakaash paaney takaye na keo motey.”

(If the Kumropotash runs fast –
Everybody must climb up their windows in a hurry
Mix alta with hookah-water and put it on the cheeks and lips
And never look up at the sky, or you’ll be sorry.)

The hilarity of these nonsensical instructions lie partly in their sheer implausibility – alta is never applied to the face, only to the feet. But my daughters, never having heard about alta, let alone seen it, did not know that.

When we were young, there was always a bottle of alta somewhere in the house. These glass-bottles full of deep blood-red liquid used to come with a tiny aluminium bowl and a long stiff wire ending in a small piece of sponge/cottonwool. The alta would be poured out in careful measure into the bowl, the wire would be dipped into it, and then a line would be drawn all around the foot, circling the heel and dipping in and out of the toes.

This was done during all religious ceremonies. And alta had a pride of place in Bengali marriage rituals – along with sindoor (the red vermilion powder applied in a dot on the forehead and in the parting of the hair), it symbolized the married-status of a woman.

My Dida (grandmother) used to say that alta would be regularly used when she was a young bride; apparently it helped to prevent/cure cracked heels. But during our childhood, my mother and aunts would use alta only on special days, although they used to put sindoor on their foreheads everyday after bathing. For cracked feet, they used Boroline.

Though we were not allowed to play with sindoor (being the exclusive preserve of married women), we were allowed to fiddle about with the alta bottle, maybe because it was no longer part of the daily routine of married women.

And all of us young cousins would sit down sometimes and inexpertly apply uneven alta-lines around our feet, painting all over our toes and leaving red footprints all over the place. Alta-paint would wash off after a few days, so the damage (to the floor and to the feet) was never too much.

When we entered our teens, we began to regard alta as terribly old-fashioned. With cheerful disregard for tradition, we neglected it totally in favour of the more permanent and more modern nail-polish to decorate our toes.

DO YOU HAVE A MEMORY OF ANY COSMETIC PRODUCT WHICH IS NO LONGER USED?

AN INNOCENT ENTRY INTO POLITICS

The current disenchantment with, and ire and fire against, politicians makes me remember my first brush (or should that be scrape?) with politics.

I forget the exact time, but it was before the general elections after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. There was a huge sympathy wave for the Congress-I, led by Rajiv Gandhi, the son of the assassinated Prime Minister. But, West Bengal, as usual, was a red bastion, a Communist (CPI-M) stronghold, or should that be strangle-hold?

Hectic campaigning was going on, with regular evening marches by the contesting party-members and their supporters (mornings were presumably too hot for slogan-shouting). Almost every available inch of wall-space was partitioned between the Congress-I and the CPI-M for wall-painting and poster-pasting, with, expectedly, the red-party hogging the major share.

My friend Mampi and I deeply felt the injustice of this unequal distribution. Why should CPI-M’s Tarit Topdar have his name written all over the place and why should Congress-I’s Debi Ghosal languish in (comparatively) lesser space? All our adolescent sympathy gushed over for the underdog (who was also the perennial loser in a chain of previous elections, and, like all losers, reputed to be a ‘good man’).

There was a dilapidated wall encircling an empty field opposite our houses, ignored by the political paintbrushes for its unprepossessing appearance. To redress the imbalance of political justice, Mampi and I took some white chalk and some broken pieces of red clay-tiles (we could not find the green favoured by the Congress-I, so we had fall back on the red colour of the 'enemy'), and, with painstaking effort, we etched the legend “VOTE FOR DEBI GHOSAL” in somewhat uneven handwriting all over the discoloured wall. We scripted the letters as big and as bold as we could make them, scraping over and over again to make the letters legible from a distance (feeling decidedly ‘un-bold’ at our own daring – we would drop the chalk and run away as soon as we saw someone coming, returning to our task only when the lane was clear). We also drew a large and rather misshapen HAND – the election symbol of the Congress-I.

And so, this was my first idealistic, if anonymous and unsung, contribution to the political circus of the elections. The Congress-I won on a landslide of sympathy, but Debi Ghosal, as usual, lost with good grace. Mampi and I, however, felt that our efforts had been vindicated because the margin of loss had reduced considerably.

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST BRUSH WITH POLITICS?

THE CINDERELLA DRESS

Every little girl has a Cinderella dress. Something which transforms her into the prettiest princess that ever lived, at least in her own mirror.

The other day, the copy-kitten (my younger daughter) went to a Diwali party at her playschool wearing a white satin-and-chiffon full-skirted dress with silver-and-yellow flowers scattered all over the bodice and skirt. She twirled and pirouetted, as enchanting a little Cinderella as her elder sister, the Lil Cat, to whom the dress had originally belonged (It is actually a gift from a favourite cousin, Didia, who picks up the most delicious dresses from Dubai each time she visits us).

I remembered my own infinitely-humbler-but-equally-cherished Cinderella dress. The material was a coarse khadi (handspun) silk from the local Khadi Gramudyog Bhavan, patterned in beige with maroon roses. There were no thorns, as befitted a princess’s party-attire. It was stitched with a plain round neck, a skirt which swirled a little when I spun around, and a sash which needed Ma to tie it behind my back. And when I wore it, I left all the thorns of awkwardness and shyness behind and could hold my head high and match steps confidently with my other friends and cousins, clad as they were in their soft-and-satiny boutique-bought expensive dresses.

I had only one, my precious Cinderella-dress, but that dress transformed me whenever I wore it. That’s the magic of a Cinderella-dress.

DO YOU REMEMBER ANY SUCH MAGICAL DRESS OR OUTFIT?

COLOURS OF CHILDHOOD

Looking back at the past
Is like shaking the coloured fragments
Of a kaleidoscope
Jewel-bright mirrored-myselves
Looking back at me.

The yellow toy-duck-on-wheels
Towing her brood of three
Waddle past my grubby infant-hands
Splash with me in my crayon-blue tub
My teether-tether orange-beaked soother.

The dark green water-hyacinth
With their delicate mauve blooms
Part – and I can see
My eight-year face rippling
In the paler green pond waters.

The sour-dark brown of tamarind
Sprinkled sharp with red chilli
Enjoyed sprawled on dappled fields
Under the benign-blue winter skies
Taste and tint rolled into a ball.

Then, the crimson-confusion of growing up
The secret pride of the red rite of passage
The even more secret ebony-agony of my skin
Wondering why “fair rules” and “dark rues”
Teenage bravado wiped away the pain.

Oh! I could paint on and on and on
Myriad-shaded memories
They swirl and shimmer and shift
And, as I refocus my eyes
To the sharper-outlined today
Fade and blur into sepia.

(This on-the-spur post was painted for display on the canvas on Scribbit’s September Write-in Contest).

MINT-FRESH MEMORIES

Not for us the ubiquitous circular Polo mints (the mint with the hole).

When we were children, whenever we would get a little spare money (say, 10 paise) we would run down the lane to the nearby hole-in-the-wall shop where the thick glass jars held tiny coloured peppermint lozenges, which we simply called peppermint. They came in lovely pastel shades - lemony yellow, candy pink, mint green and moon white - and an array of shapes - crescent, star and the four shapes from card-games: hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. The old, be-spectacled shop-keeper would scoop up these treasures with a rounded spoon and, deftly wrapping and twisting the lot inside a piece of newspaper, would hand over our money's worth to us. And then the careful opening of the wrapped coolness and the first burst of ice-like sweetness on the tongue, the mint melting in the mouth in moments (not like POLO, which simply refuses to melt and has to be crunched into submission), and sliding-cooling down the throat. The pleasure was enhanced by having a glass of water immediately afterwards.

I also remember that there was another kind of mint - a regular-rectangular shaped one available in a pack of ten or so. I have forgotten its name (maybe it was called Parle mints) but its antiseptic, packaged coolness was not a patch on the wildburst, waterfall freshness of the multi-coloured, many-shaped variety sold loose in that dingy shop. That would be our commission whenever we would go on shopping-chores for my mother - that 10 paise worth of myriad-minty-refreshment.

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE CANDY AS A CHILD?

HAND-MADE IN INDIA

As school-children our Independence Days had a comforting, ritualistic sameness. We would tear out a page from a note-book (preferably white, but, at a crunch, even red-and-blue lined ones sufficed). Then we would draw the tri-banded Indian flag and colour it orange-white (no need to colour)-and-green (after much debate, I chose light green and my brother, dark green). In the middle of the white band would be the blue wheel (oblong rather than circular, and with decidedly worse-for-wear spokes).
This hand-decorated-with-much-concentration-and-tongues-out paper would be attached with gum (also often home-made, by mixing flour and hot water) to a thin stick. Even this thin stick was home-crafted, being the middle vein of a coconut leaf from one of the many such brooms made in our house from the coconut-palms in our garden.
This flag would then be hoisted, with much singing and clapping, at one corner of our chhad (roof). 100% Made in India. 100% celebrated by us. 100% satisfaction guaranteed and gained.

HOW DID YOU CELEBRATE INDEPENDENCE DAY WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG?

PEN-SIVE

The recent Vodafone ad featuring two schoolchildren with fountain pens is definitely anachronistic, since today’s children have never seen, let alone used, a fountain pen. But it brings a nostalgic smile to us thirty-somethings, because the fountain pen was such an important part of our growing-up years.

It marked a rite of passage. You passed out of Standard 4 (nearing the end of primary school) and you were handed a fountain pen to write with. No more pencils. No more sharpeners. No more erasers, and the dirty mark they would invariably leave despite ruthless scrubbing! (Now don’t be a spoilsport and remind me that we still needed pencils for science diagrams and maths graphs). We could all be grown-up and proudly clip our pens to our pockets.

I remember having two Artex fountain pens, one green and one maroon (I was an ardent fan of Mohunbagan – the football team in maroon and green). Every week, I would take a dropper and carefully fill them with royal blue ink from Camlin or Chelpark bottles. I can still smell the faint mouri/saunf/aniseed smell which seemed to emanate from Chelpark ink-bottles. ‘Carefully’ – is the operative word (though not always the ‘operational’ word), because we had to be wary of spills and smudges, while filling and while writing. It was this very carefulness which was supposed to have an improving effect on our haywire-handwriting, unlike the more modern, use-and-throw ball-point pens, which spoilt our cursive abilities (or so the fountains of wisdom said).

Being magpie-minded, I preferred gleaming-golden nibs to the staid-steel of my Artex pens. I had a maroon (the pre-neon gel pen manufacturers were rather colour-challenged, weren’t they?) Wilson pen, with a shiny golden cap and a shinier golden nib, ‘made in China’ (when that label still meant exclusivity). It had an in-built ink-filler, so I could just dip the nib and fill it, without any spilling. The precious-pen was gifted to me by a very dear friend and was used only on special occasions and only with extra-special black ink.

One of these special occasions was my tenth standard board exams. After that, in my higher secondary years in college, I switched to ball-point pens with indelible inks (we were pressed for time, and scared that ‘our answers might wash away if it rained and if we wrote with fountain pens, if the examiners left the answersripts out in the open’ – weird logic, but exams were a superstitious time!).

And so ended my association with fountain pens.

DO YOU HAVE ANY PEN-FUL MEMORIES?

A HAPPY RAIN REMINISCENCE

This was when I was young and free of cares. It was 1980, I think. Long caftans were in fashion, at least in downmarket Barrackpore. I had a black-and-yellow patterned one, and I was very proud of my tiger-outfit. Like any other seven-year-old.

There was a khelar math (playground) near our house, used for football in summers, cricket in winters (this was way before the 24x7x365 cricket blitz), and for swimming in monsoon.

Or so we thought. A few days of heavy rain had submerged the green grass completely with only a few ‘islands’ poking out here and there. Tadpoles were swimming invitingly in the shallow ‘sea’. A few of us adventurous souls went chasing these ‘sea-monsters’, splashing about merrily…first with our kaftans (and what-not) lifted above our knees, and then, abandoning all pretense and caution, rushing headlong into the muddy water.

It was bliss to get so thoughtlessly wet, and great fun to splash the timid ones. If we jumped energetically, we could make waves in the water. We island-hopped gaily, wringing our dresses dry before plunging back into the water once more.

Full of glee and wet to the gills, I never noticed my mother till I felt the sharp sting as she literally pulled me by the ear and dragged miscreant-me off the danger zone. I was hauled back home, and was made to sit with my chilly feet immersed in a tub full of hot water and my chastised ears buzzing with pain and scolding, my bedraggled kaftan hanging on the clothesline. It never regained its original bright-yellowiness, remaining muddied with memory of my tadpole-in-tiger-disguise ‘misadventure’.

DO SHARE A HAPPY RAIN MEMORY WITH US.

THE SEA, THE SEA

My first trip to the sea was as an almost-eight year old. My parents, my brother and I went to stay for a few days at Digha, which perhaps is the beach-with-the-most-Bengali-footfalls. In the early 1980s, it was also the only beach-developed-as-a-tourist-destination in West Bengal. We boarded a WBTDC (West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation) bus in the morning, and, after a couple of stops (one for food, one for a breakdown, both accepted as ‘nothing out-of-the-ordinary’), reached Digha after sundown. Though my father took us to the beach and pointed out towards the sea, my journey-tired eyes saw only darkness and heard a muffled, equally-repeated roar – my first sea-sensation.

The next morning, after an impatient breakfast at the guest-house where we were staying, we went down to the sea, carrying towels and expectations. And though I think we lost the towel during our stay there, my expectations were more than met.

Digha is a very ordinary beach along the Bay of Bengal – brown waters, small waves, brown sands. Nowadays it is spoilt by erosion and by hordes of hooligans who go there to get always-drunk and sometimes-drowned.

But in the early eighties, there weren’t too many people around. The repeated roar of the sea was companioned by the ceaseless whispering of the casuarina and pine trees lining the beach. The middling brown waves thrilled my new-to-the-sea eyes and I loved jumping up along the wave’s curve in waist-deep water, before the foam broke some distance away and rush-rolled onto the sand. My brother was too young to enjoy the challenge of the waves, though, and started screaming when I went into the water, fearing maybe that I would drown.

The brown sands were prettified by thousands of tiny, pastel-patterned shells in pink, yellow, peach and green – all scattered here and there for me and bhai (brother) to find and hoard.

Mornings were for bathing and building sand-hills-and-caves. In the evenings, we would stroll on the beach, collecting shells, drinking coconut-water, watching the sun set slow-and-orange into the sea. And sit quietly, gazing out into the distance, wondering about the other shores that the water touched, feeling the cool-salty breeze, listening to the loud-faint-loud-faint rumble of the sea…till it became too dark to see the waves.

That sound stayed with me, captured in a large, orange, conch-shaped sea-shell (purchased, not collected). We did not have a camera, so there are no photographs of that trip, only seashells and memories.

WHEN DID THE SEA FIRST CAST ITS SPELL ON YOU?

DUCK TALES: MY FIRST TOY

The first toy I remember having was a yellow wooden duck-on-wheels, with a happy-orange beak and with three (or maybe four) little ducklings attached to it by links. It was a pull-along toy with a string attached, and I have a vivid mental picture of a curly-haired child roly-poly-toddling, pulling along a waddling clack-clacketing mother duck, her ducklings frantically following.

Apparently I was so fond of the duck that I would insist on having it with me when I was bathed in my orange plastic tub. Not being a real duck, the toy did not survive the daily duckings in the soapy water. The links dismantled, separating my little duck family, and the bereaved-bedraggled ducks were relegated to the box-of-broken-toys.

Many years later, when I was an inquisitive eight-or-nine-year-old, on being told of my fascination for this toy, I hunted around the house and found two sorry-looking ducklings, bereft of their mother, their siblings and their bright yellow paint.

To atone for my childhood duck-misdemeanor, I tried to find a similar toy for my daughters, mentally promising to take better care of the duck-family. I couldn’t find a replica, though I did find a rubber mother duck with four ducklings nestled on its broad back. Sadly, my daughters did not share my childhood fascination for ducks (preferring four-legged creatures) and the rubber toy, almost as good as new, lies (family intact) in the box-of-unused-toys. Somehow, I don’t have the heart to part with it.

WHAT ‘FIRST TOY’ DO YOU REMEMBER PLAYING WITH?

THE ICE-CANDY MAN

His would be a much-awaited arrival. All through the HOT, sweltering-sweaty summer afternoons we would doze/loll/dully-play, with tongues-almost-hanging-out-like-puppies and ears-cocked-for-THE-SOUND-(also-like-puppies).

And sure enough, when the sun was fading into a gentler-orange, the ice-candy man would trundle his small push-cart noisily round the bend of the road, crying in his peculiar high-pitched-hoarse voice, “AIIIIICE-KEREEEEM…EI…AIICE-KEREEEM”.

Wheedling money (a very small amount by today’s inflated standards) from maa (mother) or dida (grandma) or whoever else was present and awake, we would run down the stairs and out of the garden-gate.

Crowding around the ice-candy man would be a group of our friends from the neighbouring houses, all jumping and clamouring to get their choice of ice-lolly (which we euphemistically called ice-cream) FIRST. Nobody paid any heed to the fading, temptingly-if-improbably-coloured picture-list-of-products atop the van (many of which, like milk-nut-creams, or vanilla-cones were perpetually out-of-stock). We all knew what was ‘available’ and we all had our ‘firm favourites’. Admonishing us to calm down, the vendor would dig into his magic-chest and bring out the lollies (handed over only after payment…maybe somebody had run away with an unpaid ice-candy once upon a time).

Tearing off the thin-sticky paper cover with eager-fingers, we would cautiously lick the first sharp-cold-saccharine-tang, then slurp/suck/crunch, the insides of our mouth benumbed and be-dyed, till we reached the woody blandness of the pale, faintly-coloured stick. And, if in the process, a bit of ice fell off the stick onto the ground and melted into slippery-nothingness before we could pick it up and put it back in its rightful place (in our mouth), we felt SO, SO NEAR-TEARS-DISAPPOINTED.

My favourite was the orange candy, which would turn ice-white after a few moments of vigorous sucking and shade my tongue a virulent fierce-flame (completely unhygienic, hazardous-to-health, low-quality food colour, I’m sure, but in those naive-1970s, nobody seemed to care or fear).

Sometimes, for a change of shade, I’d colour my tongue garish-green with a ‘mango’-lolly. I tried the yucky-yellow ‘pineapple’, too, but the jaundice-shade did not please my tongue (or eye). My brother liked the so-called-chocolate-candy (actually ice-dipped-in-dark-brown-dye). And all this RAINBOW-BONANZA for 25 paise only (coins of this denomination are near-obsolete today). When the price was hiked to 40/50 paise for a stick, all of us howled our protest. But continued to long-for and lick-to-the-last-drop-on-the-stick anyway.

Many of these ice-candy sellers would copy the looping-scrawly logo of Kwality, the biggest ice-cream manufacturer at that time, declaring their wares Kuality or, correctly-by-mistake, Quality. The real Kwality’s vanilla/strawberry/two-in-one/butterscotch/chocolate ice-creams would come in paper-cups stocked in big shops. They were an expensive exquisite luxury we got to savour when we went to our pishi’s (aunt) house in Calcutta.

But for our daily-slaking-of-thirst, our everyday-antidote-to-parched-tongues-and-throats, we just loved the crunchy-cold, dubiously-coloured cheap-paise-purchases from the ice-candy-man.

DID YOU HAVE AN ICE-ADDICTION, TOO?

MY FIRST MEMORY

My first memory is almost the memory of a memory, it is so distant, like an image at the wrong end of the telescope.
It is just a faint image of me sitting on a battered, lumpy sofa covered in what-was-once-pink cloth. I think I was wearing a pink dress (not too sure about this, though - it seems too much pink to be true) and was around four-five years old. The elders of the family were sitting at the dining table, eating lunch. My dadu (grandad) invariably had a bowl of milk and rice at the end of his meals. While my ma was putting sugar in his bowl of milk-and-rice she came across a big lump of sugar which was coloured pink. She gave it to me.
In those days, we would buy sugar from the government-owned ration shops. There was no awareness of the dangers of artificial food colouring. I remember being extremely excited by this jewel-like pink lump of sugar and sucking on it blissfully, my tongue soon sharing the sugary pink colour.
What is your earliest memory?