Glimpses of my childhood
When I recall my childhood years, I remember eagerly waiting for
school to end, and summer vacation to begin. Summer vacation meant two
months at my mother's ancestral home in Bihar, in the eastern part of India.
Summer vacation signaled endless, aimless hours, where no school or homework
intruded. Summer allowed a loosening of the rigid rules and regulations that
bound our lives during the school term. Summer was the season to devour lots of
sweet, juicy mangoes. I looked forward to those idyllic times we spent in the
three-storied house owned by my maternal grandfather and grandmother (Dadu and Didima in Bengali),
where a gaggle of aunts and uncles and cousins would gather for the
summer.
As a kid, I assumed that little people living inside the radio sang the beautiful music, and I would try my utter best to catch a glimpse of them. When I failed to see them, I thought that they were playing hide-and-seek with me. Some years later, I was relieved of my fanciful notions when my cousins took apart a radio to fix it. alas! It was all physics and electronics.
We had to travel
by train for nearly 2-3 days (depending on where we lived -in Delhi or near
Bangalore) to my grandparents' house. Even though I was impatient to get to our
destination, the chugging rhythm of the train soothed me. At night, the
rhythmic movement of the wheels rocked me to sleep. My parents always worried
about how they would keep us occupied during the journey, and the remedy was to
buy us books --a decision my sister and I greeted with great joy. My
father (Baba in Bengali)
would take us to the bookstall on the railway platform, and we would ask the bookseller
for books written by the famed English children's author, Enid Blyton, who was
very popular in India. My sister and I would get one book a piece, which
we would manage to finish by the end of the journey. I still have these books
on my bookshelf in the US.
Once we reached our destination, we didn't bother much with the
adults, as we now had our cousins to play with. During the day it would be too
hot to go out and play, so we would confine ourselves to the cooler rooms on
the ground floor of the house. Our favorite spot to crawl into, was the space
underneath my grandfather's bed. The smooth concrete floor felt so
cool. My cousin, Tumpadidi, would entertain us for hours with vivid
description of Hindi movies she had watched. My parents did not allow us
to watch movies, as they considered movies inappropriate for children, but my
aunt (Bodo mashi --my mom's
oldest sister) did not harbor such notions. Years later, when
we watched the same movies, we realized how faithful my cousin to the movie details,
and gained new appreciation for her strong memory.
Of course, no Indian movie would be complete without music --often
the plot was secondary to the music. Music pervaded our lives the entire
summer. At night, we would go to sleep with the radio playing Hindi movie
songs. When I first moved to the US, I missed the blare of the ditties on
the radio, especially the channel, Vividh
Bharathi. Even now when I hear those tunes, I become nostalgic
about the carefree days I spent in my maternal grandparents house (called Mamabari in Bengali).
“Gaata rahe mera dil”
from Guide, “Dekho maine dekha
hai yeh ek sapna” from Love story. Wednesday evening at 8 PM,
we gathered around the radio on the terrace to listen to our favorite music
program “Binaca Geetmala” (later renamed Cibaca Geetmala when Binaca was
rebranded to Cibaca) on Radio Ceylon, whose host was a man with a
mesmerizing voice, Amin Sayani. We would hum along to the "Top
20 Hindi songs of the week." I still remember the Hindi
phrasing he used “Toh paidan
number....” (translation “at rank number”).
As a kid, I assumed that little people living inside the radio sang the beautiful music, and I would try my utter best to catch a glimpse of them. When I failed to see them, I thought that they were playing hide-and-seek with me. Some years later, I was relieved of my fanciful notions when my cousins took apart a radio to fix it. alas! It was all physics and electronics.
Of course, a description of summer would be incomplete without a
mention of rain. The end of the dry summer season was signaled by the
onset of monsoons. The parched soil soaked up the water, permeating the
air with a warm, sweet smell of wet earth (as we say in Hindi “mitti ki sondhi kushboo”).
Some years later in school, we would the poem “Rain in Summer” by Henry
Wordsworth Longfellow. Now my sentimentality for rain is forever
intertwined with this poem, with its simple but elegant description of the
downpour:
"Across the
window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and
wide,
With a muddy
tide,
Like a River
down the gutter roars
The rain, the
welcome rain!"
In Bihar (later Jharkhand), hailstones often accompanied the rain in summer.
Oh, how we loved getting wet in the rain to cool off, and picking up the hail
to suck on them. We would have competition among us cousins to see who
would gather the largest hailstones, or the largest number of hailstones. While
other mothers might warn their kids not to get wet in the rain, my mother (Ma in Bengali) always
encouraged us to get soaked. She said the rain provided us relief from
the fevered heat of the sun, allowing our bodies and minds to calm down.
Even some of the adults would join us kids in our celebration of the
rain. we would whirl and dance in the rain on the terrace. What a
glorious end to the summer it made!