The town in the East

Some memories emerged from the haze and smoke  – so I’d written a bit of what I do remember. I thought I had clear enough impressions but while I remember incidents – I don’t really remember how I felt. And I’m quite sure that my experiences since then have sort of erased what I found difficult or annoying or what I enjoyed. I don’t know whether this will fit the bill and I'm not happy with it but let me give at least a glimpse of some of the memories that did turn up upon digging. I lost one of the drafts that I’d written – so this jumbled one is all I have for now about the 'return of the native'.

I remember the cows on the roads. This should not mean that I had never seen a real cow – I simply do not remember whether I had before that, to be honest. The sight of so many cows and in so many shapes and sizes wandering around as free as you please had felt a little strange at first, and the fact that cow dung therefore was a regular feature. It was a lucky day if I managed to come back to the house without trampling some, and then managed to slink in through the gates without having a cow following me. They’d eat up all the vegetables and flowers and it was not uncommon to find a placid cow chewing on something at some point of the day during a holiday and I’d go out sometimes to merrily herd the cow out of the gate and would feel like a ‘rakhal chhele’. No dustbins outside the house was also something that raised question marks in my head. The first time was also the last that I visited a public latrine (till I was way into college)...The lack of pavements too made me curious.  And there were very different odours and smells and fragrances and colours….and the matter of language although this last one was not something I consciously thought about.

The neighbour-didi who used to teach at Carmel used to go to school in a rickshaw. I accompanied her for awhile before I started taking the school-bus. One morning while she was getting on to the rickshaw – she said, “catch my bag”. I got very nervous – and this, I remember. I thought she was going to throw her bag at me and I was supposed to catch it in mid-air and I didn’t know why she would want to throw her bag at me. I must have looked stupid because I was waiting and as ready as I could be while she was patiently holding her bag out to me with one foot on the rickshaw. I realized what she meant after long painful minutes but it stayed inside and gnawed away at me…why would somebody want me to “catch’ her bag when she meant for me to “hold” her bag. In school an incident occurred one day when the class-teacher asked me to say a nice prayer that could be used for prayer service.  I rattled off one from memory and finished it off with a, “guard India and watch over us”. The teacher – no matter how dim she was in some ways – said that that could not be. I insisted and very firmly that that is what the prayer was and how it ended. She looked at me with disbelief and that prayer was not used for assembly as far as I remember but indeed many years later I realized that I had pronounced ‘guardian angel’ wrong for all the years I was in England, and for that one prayer. Otherwise there was the ‘crisis of communication’ but in a very non abstruse manner. I started having the same problem with the inmates of the house but there I now know the breach had to do with the fact that nobody wanted to listen to anybody else  (which was the best thing that could have happened, I also now feel and with a quiet vehemence). I found a way of tackling the school problem myself. I simply started speaking the way I heard people around me speaking. For at the beginning if very few people understood what I was saying – I happened to understand very little of what others were saying even though we were ostensibly speaking the same language. And so one of the first words I mangled was the humble, earthy potato.  I pronounced it neither ‘puh-tay-toh’ nor ‘puh-tah-toh’ but I said ‘put-e-to’, and the Indian-isms (or what I’d imagined was Carmel lingo) such as ‘did you go there today only?’ ‘why don’t you tell me no?’ ‘open your shoes’ slipped into my conversation satchel until I raked some of them out but more than some remain and pop out in a most embarrassing fashion, while I have been reminded of quaint English phrases and words and idioms through the years, and not just from books  – phrases and words I’d almost forgotten.

School and home both used to bore me to the gills when both weren't scaring me witless especially during the first year of readjusting whether it was a day that the class teacher of Class 2 was either doting on me or was debating whether to give me five whacks with the ruler across my palm or ten. I was her pet, and she let me participate in every school and class competition and liked hearing me speak but she was also utterly exasperated with me - and so I can’t blame her for the whacks which I bore with no visible expression but a smarting palm. I used to dream all the time in the class in a lazy, vacant, empty and sluggish way and never finished classwork (although I was very helpful towards my bench-mate and others if they wanted to know the names of vegetables or what-have-you for making a list of ‘ten somethings’), and I didn’t even care. I must have come across as being annoying. I don’t know quite why I was so lackadaisical in the classes because there had been regular classwork earlier but I was  remarkably vague in the first year (and vague, slow and aggressive in the second) although I did fairly well for extempore and poetry recitals and liked reading stories. That apart I was very forgetful about organizing my affairs, and so every day I would leave something or the other behind – either at school or in the house so punishments and/or scoldings from both ends were not uncommon. It was a daily thing – forgetting books or exercise books or a water bottle or a tiffin box or a pencil or an eraser. Class 3 was even more horrific in this regard. I am very vague about breaks and game periods during the period of fitting in but I remember the smell that hung around in that primary school corridor – it was the smell of squashed boiled eggs. Maybe children hated the boiled eggs that they got for tiffin or maybe with all the running and jostling and shoving, eggs were dropped by the dozen and then squashed by running shoes…but that still floats in my head and it was anything but pleasant.

There was some exam or the other within ten days of joining school and I flunked almost all the subjects, and brilliantly. I didn’t even care whether I knew the answers and for the history exam, I remember having folded my exam script carefully and just sitting after 15 minutes. I can’t remember how many exams I sat for in class 2 but the exams were a painful experience; I did a bit better in the second one or whichever one it was but the Bengali teacher especially wanted me to be kept back in Class 2. Given my incredible feat of scoring what I had – I’m not surprised. Why I was sent up a year I have no clue but I made it to class 3 which is a different story, and with a terribly unpleasant teacher too.

Reading was still fun but more than that I read bits of what I could because I could read. I borrowed my second Enid Blyton from a didi who was a neighbour, and it was a Famous Five. I understood very little from the first reading actually and got very confused but I kept at it, and I read an assortment of different books and comics both in English and Bangla in the first year. There were two functioning libraries in the township, and I started borrowing books from there too, and sometimes books were bought. I had some ‘books on tape’ and I remember listening to the ‘The little Match-girl’ over and over and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ but I didn’t listen to too much of the old music, not until I was in class VI or IX…

I had a very interesting time learning Bangla from what I remember – and the initial experience was lovely. I learnt the language rather quickly but I didn’t learn it well (very much like swimming, learnt at the same time more or less). The script and everything about it came across as being very intricate and very involved and much more ‘curvy’ and undulating with dips and rises, an absolute lack of immediate edges and angles, especially in its sounds in relation to the script. 

Reading, writing odd bits, wandering around the neighbourhood where I had motley groups of friends with whom I’d play away the late afternoons and early evenings, enjoying the phuchkas greatly when I had them, playing with and trying to take care of the newborn pups that were born within a season along the street where I stayed for five years in the first house, E-47, joining the pool, learning to sing with the harmonium, watching movies at the local club are what I remember from the very first few years. School was a nightmare till I became a rowdy rebel from class 4. From VII, school was fun because of participating in every possible extra-curricular event (including singing) and then there were the plays a group of us used to put up through the year.

I did a lot of cursive writing in the initial years – writing in both English and Bangla – something I’d never done before, and the practice used to keep me utterly occupied. I’m quite sure that I practised more handwriting than I did studying anything, and practised more handwriting than did any of my contemporaries. I could have become a forger I sometimes think if I had been maybe street-smart and hadn't had a conscience which jumps on me or been hired as some ‘calligraphy-writer’ if they had jobs of such a  nature.

In those very first few years the times that I badly missed that other town far west (where a bit of me was probably wandering around) was when Christmas would swoop down. Then I couldn’t help it, and used to feel cranky, tearful, cheerful, garrulous, querulous and quiet in bouts – and it was the same way with sudden smells. I don’t remember any longer what it was that I so badly missed with the sudden smells but singing those carols in school made me feel incredibly nostalgic, and while I’d sing them with great fervour and with the brimming spirit of Yuletide there would be lumps somewhere jostling  but I had somewhat mastered the stiff upper lip if nothing else...

In a way, from what I can see now all the different experiences, hits and misses and the rest from then converge...to The Beatles' 'In my life' and Tagore's 'Purano shei diner kotha...'