Sorry for the diversion into dark and sweet (and forbidden) chocolate territory.
When I was young, birthdays were celebrated at home in the evenings. The pampered ones had balloons and streamers put up on the walls (with a glittery golden cutout HAPPY BIRTHDAY in the background) and specially baked cakes with frosted icing (shaped like Mickey Mouse or a house in the woods or a cricket pitch - this was before the invasion of Cartoon Network), which would arrive in a white box from some shop (strictly untouchable with an invisble handle-with-care sign).
Being a more frugal sort, we neglected the wall decoration bit and concentrated on the food - not 'ordered from out' but home-made. Maa and Didia (my intrepid cousin) would bake two round cakes with holes at the centre in the trusty Murphy oven. They (the cakes, not the oven) would be full of bits of cherries, petha (a white candied bottlegourd), and kismis (raisins). One cake would remain plain and plump brown (this was held in reserve for second servings) but the other one, meant to be displayed and cut, would be decorated with white icing sugar, mixed and poured through a paper cone. My Didia's painstaking effort in writing my name on the cake would usually result in illegible semi-transparent squiggles on top of the cake. She moped, but we were happy because we got to break off the stiff pieces of icing sugar and suck them even before the cake was cut.
A few of my close friends in the neighbourhood (Mampi and Soma, Sujata and Sonali, with their plaits and pigtails neatly combed and oiled for the occasion) would come, as would my cousin J and her family. I would go ooh and aah over the gifts [faking my surprise, because they had all told and 'consulted' me before buying the gifts - pens and pencil boxes, a jhola/shoulder-slung-bag, crayons and water-colour sets, Amar Chitra Katha-s (comics about Indian history and mythology), inexpensive Bengali storybooks]. One grand present (costing the princely amount of Rs. 40) was a Tintin comic-book given by my Dida (mother's mother) on my tenth birthday - it occupied the pride of place in my bookcase for a long, long time.
The cake-cutting would be a swift and perfunctory affair, with some half-hearted attempts at singing the birthday song (I suspect many of my friends and family were uncomfortable with all that singing in English). The gusto would be reserved for the food.
There would be hot just-fried luchis (puris/ fried hand-made flour pancakes), alurdom (potato-curry) and chicken-curry, followed by the cake ( a nod to our colonial heritage) and payesh (rice cooked in sweetened condensed milk - a traditional Bengali birthday treat).
I remember a certain birthday when the payesh was replaced by a complicated caramel custard (from a recipe in Chic - a popular 'women's' magazine which was diligently devoured by Ma and Didia). My grandparents were slightly dismayed at this deviation from tradition, but everyone else enjoyed the novelty. Later on, in the nineteen-eighties, when Chinese cooking was making incursions into Bengali cuisine and long blue packets of egg-noodles were showing up on grocers' shelves, the luchis were replaced by chicken-chowmein-Bengali-style. But it was all still cooked at home. And after eating (surely the focal point of all Bengali celebrations), the grown-ups would settle down to a round of adda (conversation, often extremely animated) while we kids would be left to play (and sometimes fight) on our own. Unsupervised by any DJs or event-managers or hired men in grotesque Mickey-Mouse-looking-like-Gorilla costumes.
In these hard times, maybe it would make a lot of sense to revert to those simpler celebrations of yore.
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS? SELF-SUFFICIENT OR DJ-DEPENDENT?
Showing posts with label neighbours. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neighbours. Show all posts
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
HELLO?
We did not have a telephone in our house when we were children. Perhaps this childhood deprivation scarred my psyche somehow, because till today I’m not really a phone-person, being rather abrupt and let’s-get-it-over-quickly on the phone, even on my soul/cell-mate mobile.
But when we were children, phones were immobile, kept majestically on their special pedestals (usually the top of some bureau/showcase covered in flowery-embroidered cloth, out of reach of pesky toddlers) and attached to wall with a special curly wire. I always wondered where it came out after going inside the wall. The phones just SAT, menacing in their big black boxiness, emitting a shrill loud unmistakable tring-tring to beckon the entire household if there was a call.
The neighbours across our house had one such big black phone (far more solemn than the colourful light cellphones we carry nowadays). My mamabari (maternal grandparents’ house) had another such. Having a phone in the house raised the status of the family in the social pecking order. It also meant having an enormous social responsibility. Because all the neighbours would troop to your house to make calls from your phone if the need arose (as it inevitably did). Also, inevitably, it meant taking calls on behalf of your neighbours and shouting from the balcony to them to come and speak to whoever was calling them. Because of these, er, network (social, not telecom) problems, telephone calls were restricted to necessities, not frivolities. Which is not a bad thing at all.
I was very scared of speaking on the telephone. Because, in those days, you never got directly connected to any familiar, friendly voice of the person to whom you wanted to make the call. The calls had to be made via the local telephone exchange, where there would be some gruff-voiced disembodied telephone operator who would listen impatiently to your request to connect you to the required number, BARKING at every hesitation you made, and, with an almost audible sigh of irritable exasperation at being disturbed, he/she would condescend to do so in a voice dripping with unfriendly sarcasm. I am SURE it was NOT like that at all, only that it SEEMED so to my shaky-scared ears and trembling-stuttering voice.
Even when the call was put through and some familiar person was on the line, the crackle and distance would somehow de-familiarise the voice and make it cold and distant (pun intended now but not felt then). And because I was nervous about not being able to hear clearly, I always spoke very quickly in a very loud voice, trying desperately to end the conversation ASAP and putting down the receiver with relief, my hands clammy with gripping too hard and ears burning with effort.
WHAT ARE YOUR EARLIEST TELEPHONE MEMORIES?
But when we were children, phones were immobile, kept majestically on their special pedestals (usually the top of some bureau/showcase covered in flowery-embroidered cloth, out of reach of pesky toddlers) and attached to wall with a special curly wire. I always wondered where it came out after going inside the wall. The phones just SAT, menacing in their big black boxiness, emitting a shrill loud unmistakable tring-tring to beckon the entire household if there was a call.
The neighbours across our house had one such big black phone (far more solemn than the colourful light cellphones we carry nowadays). My mamabari (maternal grandparents’ house) had another such. Having a phone in the house raised the status of the family in the social pecking order. It also meant having an enormous social responsibility. Because all the neighbours would troop to your house to make calls from your phone if the need arose (as it inevitably did). Also, inevitably, it meant taking calls on behalf of your neighbours and shouting from the balcony to them to come and speak to whoever was calling them. Because of these, er, network (social, not telecom) problems, telephone calls were restricted to necessities, not frivolities. Which is not a bad thing at all.
I was very scared of speaking on the telephone. Because, in those days, you never got directly connected to any familiar, friendly voice of the person to whom you wanted to make the call. The calls had to be made via the local telephone exchange, where there would be some gruff-voiced disembodied telephone operator who would listen impatiently to your request to connect you to the required number, BARKING at every hesitation you made, and, with an almost audible sigh of irritable exasperation at being disturbed, he/she would condescend to do so in a voice dripping with unfriendly sarcasm. I am SURE it was NOT like that at all, only that it SEEMED so to my shaky-scared ears and trembling-stuttering voice.
Even when the call was put through and some familiar person was on the line, the crackle and distance would somehow de-familiarise the voice and make it cold and distant (pun intended now but not felt then). And because I was nervous about not being able to hear clearly, I always spoke very quickly in a very loud voice, trying desperately to end the conversation ASAP and putting down the receiver with relief, my hands clammy with gripping too hard and ears burning with effort.
WHAT ARE YOUR EARLIEST TELEPHONE MEMORIES?
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