“Amma, it feels like you have put
on the AC. Air has grown cold”, said my 7-year-old lifting up her beady eyes
from her maths homework. A cheery hurray followed.
I shook the clothes firmly and
filed them neatly on the cloth stand. Yes, indeed. There was a light nip in the
air. Not due to AC. And, certainly no change in the temperature. It was still a
blazing 38 degrees outside.
I smiled and was whisked off to my
childhood days. To my nondescript haven that would have looked more picturesque
in a child’s sketchbook than in reality. A chawl which housed 14 flats adjacent
to each other, spaced out at an arm’s length. A place where people were knitted
closely together regardless of what social standing they were in. A place where
we children had not one but many houses at our perusal to watch television, eat
lunch, sleep under the warm covers and take refuge from the angry monsoon
spells. A place where aimless wanderings were honoured but not bothered by ruthless
meanderings of the routine. A place where mothers were not tired of cooking
even if the sneaky rats were merciless and snuck out of nowhere to have a first
bite every time the hot rotis came off the stove. A place where our father made
sandwiches on Sundays and the screentime meant watching the DD channel together
with family. A place where childhood was
all about playing ghar-ghar in our 4-foot muddy verandas and tucking the grownup’s
bags in our shoulders to play office-office near the community tap with its
noisy sigh playing on the background. Where playing outdoors was our only
agenda. Going to a road was one fence-jump away. A place where we were young, scatterbrained
and unsure of ourselves but our sledge-hammered conviction of becoming like our
20-year-old neighbourhood didi was palpable. Where in monsoons we made our aquifers
using the gravels and rocks and made pools for the crafty crabs to swim over
but a few stray ones bathed in puddles were swiped off by the neighbours and
became their delectable dinners. Also, the muddy puddles played out as river in
disguise for our Dongar ki paani game. Where failings and foibles of mankind
lay far off from our sights and air was heavily drunk on love and little joys.
I stood rooted to the spot, my
reverie still unbroken. The memories
fleetingly dislodged from the recesses of my mind as my daughter’s eyes
hungrily looked on, waiting with bated breath, for I started regaling the reminiscence
of my bygone but never-to-be-forgotten tales. Fleeting as they were but even in
its fleetingness, some memories stayed deeply etched and memorable. Like author
Ruskin Bond, the boy from the hills did say, “Childhood memories linger forever”,
it is undeniably true to the word.
Every nook and cranny of the
horizontally expansive chawl was home to me. The more I blink back my tears that
gush in remembrance of the place I grew up, the more I think of it. And withdrawing
all restraint, I allow my tears to flow down in gay abandon. The atmosphere
grows even more cooler. “Kavita”, a whisper gets out in the loose, and slowly prisoned
feelings break the invisible chains and an inexplicable feeling tugs the heart.
My daughter arches her eyebrows and ponders at the moniker that comes out of my
lips.
Kavita was my close friend. We never
had friendship tags at that time. A friend was a good or close friend and never
graduated to bestie, best friend forever, Bae or Bro etc. We were far-off
neighbours, 10 flats away but intimate friends. Kavita stayed in the last flat number, which lay
at the turning of our chawl and lived cheek-by-jowl with the neighbourhood chawl.
Eldest among the three, there hung a
heavy weight of responsibilities on her shoulder and the furrowed lines on her
forehead were the proof of it. Theirs was a vulnerable, low-income family which
struggled to make ends meet. Kavita’s house was often my respite and refuge. A
shelter to run under avoiding one too many whacks and angry scowls of my mother.
She was also the first one to introduce me to the game of stones which we children
took pleasure in playing. A simple game with a few smooth-skinned stones was
our everyday game. Hardly we knew that it also promoted hand-eye coordination,
one of the key milestones in children. I got the hang of the game yet it was
not easy when Kavita was part of the game. She, with her sharp, superior eye, was always
the winner of the game.
One sultry afternoon, I was at
Kavita’s house waiting ardently for her to join me in the play of stones. That day,
I felt like I was an intruder that came in her and her toil’s way. The
blistering sun beat on her back yet she drew out the soiled utensils and sat on
her hunches to wash them in the scorching tap water. I held my gaze on her when
after washing the utensils clean, she dipped a rag cloth in cool water and
started to run it on the floor. In an instant, a child in Kavita grew up and
became a domestic goddess. Her conversations with me did not stop all this
while and her dexterity in handling household chores marvelled me. She chatted
with all honesty, doing justice to her friendship as well as guiding her hands
to finish her worldly duties. The sweltering tiles of the roof of our chawl sent
all our efforts to keep us cool down the drain. Yet Kavita had a secret magic
wand. She pulled all the rag clothes, ran them in tap water, wrung them to remove
excess water, and hung them in a neat line. The occasional breeze brought in
the coolness of the clothes along with it, casting a pleasant spell on us. We
sat at the threshold of her house and savoured the cool breeze that tickled our
faces. The failings and foibles of life forgotten; we inhaled the lingering fragrance
of the innocent little joys. Kavita found a solution to the sunny days. Much to
my delight, she gifted me a life lesson. She did not have any comfort to her
name yet she found a way to be comfortable. She had enough reasons to crib but
she chose to make do with what she had, turn her life around and see a ray of
sunshine in all her adversities. Kavita was a giant wave that chugged wavelets
of challenges with unwavering spirit.
I don’t know the whereabouts of
Kavita. We drifted apart, each with their priorities. Yet in the unknown, there
is some sort of sweet joy. Just like Ruskin Bond in the Night Train of Deoli
did not alight the train to connect to his past and wished it was better off not
knowing the unknown so that the image that we brew in our minds of our past
lies undiluted. What I know is today after all these years, my present is
deeply entangled with the past. Sometimes it is difficult to prise apart the
present from the past because they look identical to each other. Just like
today, the whiff of cool air coming off from the wet clothes put me on the same
threshold that I was decades before with my good friend Kavita.
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