Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 13
At Holi, tradition suggested that both sexes throw inhibition to the winds, mingle freely, throw colored waters and powders on each other, dance, sing, and, yes, for the adults, drink and even partake of hashish. The couplet that we chanted with some frequency on Holi Day, “Kahay, sunay ka bura na mano, / Aaj human Holi hai,” could be translated as “Don't be offended by anything we say or do, / For today is our Holi.” For one day in the year, we had been “freed.”
Holi's origins probably lay in India's distant pantheistic past, when the spring harvest must have been celebrated with a certain abandon. In India, you rarely lose a tradition. You simply layer one on top of another. We still recognized its harvesttime beginnings. On the night before Holi, we would build a bonfire and throw into it sheaves of newly picked wheat from our faraway farms and, better still, sheaves of freshly harvested stalks of chickpeas. As soon as they had roasted sufficiently, we dragged them out with long poles and fell upon them, separating the wheat grains and peas from their blackened skins. Our fingers and mouths turned sooty as we ate, but we could not stop munching until the last chickpea had been found and devoured.
The next day we let go. We played Holi. Preparations for the “playing” had already begun. The mali (gardener) had scrubbed out the cement water tank in the garden, plugged it, and filled it with about two and a half feet of water. Into the water were emptied several baskets of dried tesu flowers, which, when soaked, released a yellowish orange dye and a pleasantly musky aroma. The flowers floated to the top, swelled, and, looking rather like large bumblebees, covered the surface of the water.
The children's preparations were less benign. First we made sure that all the gulaal, the colored powders, had been ordered, the reds our parents preferred and the more vile and newfangled yellows, greens, blues, and purples that we liked. Then we went into the garage and asked Babaji's driver, Masoom Ali, for the darkest grease he had lying about. He tried to put us off with “You children are always eating my head. Go away. Don't bother me.” But in the end he always relented. The grease was put into jars and reserved for those we disliked. And for those we liked or even loved? Ah, there was the gold powder, carefully mixed with oil and hidden in a special spot from where it could be whisked out to transform the faces of the desired ones into those of gods and goddesses.
We awoke at dawn on Holi Day, made sure our brass water-squirters were ready for ambush and pails of colored water and colored powders hidden strategically. The first people to be attacked and overwhelmed were all the cousins themselves. We had already planned our moves. As our parents shouted, “Not inside the house. Go out. Holi must be played outside the house,” we tackled each other and were not content until we were all fully wet, had received a dunking in the tesu tank, and had had our faces smeared with a variety of powders.
Once we had finished with each other—the elders got a more polite version of the treatment—we, old and young, gathered on Number 7's driveway to march on to all the neighboring houses: Number 16, Number 14, Number 12, Number 10, Number 6, Number 4, Number 2 … Each household was equally prepared and gave as good as it got. Everywhere we went, we were offered food and drink, the same papris, goojas, bara pickles, whiskey, and the hash-laced drinks and fritters. Our numbers and raucousness increased as members of households we had attacked joined us. We ended up in Number 7, a few hundred of us, sitting under the jujube tree on the front lawn, right on the grass. A harmonium and a set oftablas (drums) were brought out, and the singing and dancing began. “Holi ayee ray kanha, / Bruj kay basiya, ” we sang. These were mostly hymnlike medieval songs about Lord Krishna playing Holi with the milkmaids—hymnlike and lusty.
I remember one particular Holi when I was about twelve years old, neither child nor woman, my hair all smeared with green and purple, my face golden, and my body wet with tesu water, an unrecognizable creature shivering on the grass under the jujube tree. My head was aching, I remember, aching so it felt as if it might explode. Everything had gone into slow motion. I remember someone turning towards me and saying, “Who is she? She looks quite pretty.” I wanted to explain, “It's only the gold paint. This is me. I don't have my glasses on.” My mouth opened to speak, and then shut again without uttering a word. Then my parents got up and started dancing. I must have begun fading away, for the next thing I heard was my brother Bhaiyyadada's voice: “Are you all right? You seem feverish.”
Bhaiyyadada walked me to Number 5, where I had a quick bath and crawled into bed. Big blisters had begun appearing—on my face, my arms, my body. I had a severe case of chicken pox.
NINETEEN
Chicken Pox • Soup-Toast and Sewing •
A Fancy-Dress Party
The chicken pox lasted a good three weeks. I was convinced I that I would come out of it severely deformed, as many of the blisters had filled up with pus and some were a good three-quarters of an inch in diameter. No one was allowed to visit: I was completely quarantined. The blisters first hurt, then itched, never allowing me to lie in comfort. My father's eldest sister, Bhuaji, offered me little food packets over the Number 5 wall filled with mutthris (savory cookies). I devoured these quickly with thick layers of my grandmother's meethi chutney (sweet chutney made with shredded green mangoes and ginger). One good thing that came of this long illness is that our family began eating all its meals in Number 5. Our much smaller kitchen was humming all day now, and we were ecstatic.
My mother, whose calm ministrations had so comforted my father during all his minor illnesses, now turned her full attention to me, but her tactics were entirely different. Besides spoonfeeding me “soup-toast,” simple chicken and meat broths with slices of toast for dunking, which I loved, she approached me with another of her talents. She began teaching me how to sew. She had already taught me knitting at the age of five. By now I was knitting the most complicated designs, many of my own devising, requiring several colors that snaked their way across and up the insides of cardigans, vests, and pullovers.
Sewing was another matter. We had a tailor, Ram Narain, to do the simple stuff. He came to us from the Old City on a bicycle and worked at one end of the Number 5 dining room for weeks at a time. We bought the fabrics and sketched out the designs. He sat on the floor on a mat with my mother's Singer sewing machine and did his best to interpret our thoughts. If there was a wedding on the horizon, he stayed for months. He irritated us, because he never followed our designs to the letter, and because his finishing was hurried and careless. His buttons were never aligned, and his hemming was slipshod. Besides, he always cut the thread with his teeth. My mother kept reminding us that any help was hard to find and that we should be grateful to have him at all.
I considered myself highly stylish and was not content with Ram Narain's bumbling approach. There were no ready-made clothes in India then, so, with my mother's expert help, my chicken-pox days were happily employed with sewing. In this period I made two kameezes (shirts) to go on top of the shalwars (baggy trousers) that we wore. One was a delicate white poplin with a turtleneck, and the second was a cream silk. The first I boldly embroidered with an anchor placed just above the left breast. A “rope” (which I made by twisting some silk threads) wound around the anchor, going in and out of the white poplin through strategically placed buttonholes. The second shirt had embroidery placed in the same spot, above the left breast, but it was much more elaborate. It consisted of the ace, king, and queen of hearts fanned out prettily.
Encouraged by my skills, I began preparing for my twelfth birthday—and the start of my thirteenth year—in the coming August. It would be a fancy-dress party, and I would think up and make something really grand. Cousins and friends were duly informed. Everyone's dress was a secret. Enthusiasm poured in from all quarters, even from Shibbudada. He insisted there be a photographer to cover the event. He would arrange for one. My birthday would be held in Number 7, he said.
Suddenly the stakes had got higher than I wanted, and I was nervous. I still did not have anything to wear. I thought up and rejected idea after idea. It was already early August before I settled on being a hula girl with a grass skirt and a short blouse. The blouse seemed easy enough. I already had decently large breasts. I would wear a white blouse and tuck it up so my waist was visible and my breasts were defined. The skirt I would make. I would cut up hundreds of strips of paper and sew them onto a waistband. My hair? My hair was long, and I would just leave it loose.
The day dawned, and I began to dress. I put on the blouse. It just looked like an ordinary blouse. I rolled it up at the waist, but it kept rolling down, and the bulk hid all definition of my newly formed breasts. There was no time to worry about that. I tied on the skirt. Every time I moved, a few of the paper strips tore off. I undid my two long braids and combed out my hair. I still looked just like myself, not like a hula girl at all. I cried. My mother insisted that I looked just fine and that I hurry on to Number 7 before the guests arrived.
My cousins and friends came—girls dressed as boys, boys dressed as girls; there were Arabs with daggers and Japanese damsels with fans and milkmaids with a ton of silver jewelry. I
My twelfth birthday and the start of my thirteenth year. The party consisted mostly of cousins, with the honorable exception of my friend Sudha (front row, fourth from left), her young sister, and two of Sheila's friends. Fancy dress was the order of the day. I am seated on a moondha, a cane chair, in the center.
blew out the candles on my cake from Wengers, helped pass along the slabs of three-in-one (chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla) Kwality ice cream, and nibbled on the spicy samosas from Ghantaywallah in Chandni Chowk. Finally, I posed in the center of my group birthday photograph. But my heart was not in any of it.
TWENTY
Learning to Fly • School Days in Summer •
Mrs. McKelvie • Discovering Drama • Fearless
Amina • Art Appreciation
I think that I started growing up right about then. School, Queen Mary's, helped. I was out of middle school, and Hindi was no longer the medium of instruction. Even though I had mastered it, I felt easier with the English we would use through the upper classes. Instead of plodding, I could now fly. The school, a dour, gray stone building with Gothic arches, had changed.
The summers, for one, had been quite unbearable until then, as none of the classrooms had been armed with electric ceiling fans. The shirts that we wore on top of our shalwars (baggy pants) did not help, either. Even if made from the thinnest voiles, they did not stop the perspiration from trickling down our bodies and down our legs. When we picked up our pens to write, sweat trickled down our arms and over our pens onto the notebooks. The pens slithered about in our fingers. Wearing all white did little to inspire a sense of cool well-being in that stone school building.
What the school did provide to all classes were cloth pulley fans. Imagine, if you will, a long rod or beam suspended above the length of a classroom near the ceiling, almost bisecting it. Imagine a curtain with many pleats, about two and a half feet in length, hanging from the full length of this rod. Now imagine a simple pulley system attached to the rod that allows someone to pull the entire contraption back and forth, thus “fanning” the whole classroom as a handheld fan might. Ingenious? The operative words, of course, are “someone” and “handheld.”
The “someones” that the school hired were our local village women, who came to their fanning jobs every day wearing their bright forty-yard skirts, provocative brassiere-sized blouses, and head-to-toe silver jewelry. Their job was to take the pulley rope in their hands, extend it through the classroom door to the veranda just outside it, sit down on the veranda floor, and start pulling and releasing, pulling and releasing.
The first few pulls were quite exciting. But the weight of their clothing, the sheer boredom of their jobs, and the numbing heat slowly lulled the women into ever-slower and then nonexistent motion. First they could be seen half sitting, then half lying down, then lying down and pulling the rope with their toes, then lying down and snoring. Every now and then one of my schoolmates would give the rope a tug, which would waken them briefly, but to no long-term purpose.
We would rush out for a drink between classes, but the only water we could get was from the tap at a small tank in the courtyard. We cupped a hand and drank it straight from the source. It was always too warm and offered no respite.
There was one bit of relief, though. Every day at midmorning, there was, if we signed up and paid for it in advance, a break for do phal, do biscuit, or “two fruit, two biscuits.” The English school nurse, in full uniform, dispensed these from a special table, checking us against her list as she did so.
I was always of two minds about signing up, as I did not care for biscuits (having lost my sweet tooth in Daurala) and the fruit was always a mediocre orange and an unripe banana, the only variation being two mediocre oranges or two unripe bananas. What I really loved, and what I could have only if I splurged on the biscuits and fruit, was a glass of cold, cold milk.
This was no ordinary milk. It did not come straight from the cow's udders, as ours did at home. It had not been boiled in a kitchen pot and cooled. No, this was homogenized milk from a proper dairy and came in a glass bottle. I just loved it. Sometimes I paid for the whole package just to get the milk, but most of the time I gave up, as the fruit was not even good enough to give away and ended up rotting slowly inside my desk.
It must have dawned on the school at some stage that pulley fans were a losing proposition all the way around. By the time I was thirteen, they had been replaced by ceiling fans.
Many of the teachers had been replaced, too. I was blessed with Mrs. McKelvie, a Parsi lady of about the same height as I was, perhaps even shorter. She was married to a Briton, which accounted for her name. With a sweet, round, light-skinned face, and brown hair that she wore as a braided wreath around her head, she could easily have passed for an Englishwoman. In a school where there were both English and Indian personnel at that time, she wore only sarees to class (though with European blouses), so there would be no mistaking who she really was. She wore her sarees oddly, though, as if she had lived in England too long and lost the grace of wearing them well. What struck me when I first saw her was the combination of her laughing, intelligent eyes and her small, even teeth, which were caked with nicotine.
Mrs. McKelvie was my history teacher. She didn't just teach me Indian history and British history, which were part of the set curriculum; I also learned from her that any subject could be fascinating if I delved into it deeply enough. She showed me how history, for example, could be researched from a hundred angles, some obscure and seemingly unrelated; that the study of maps and drawing of maps led to ever-greater clarity; that understanding the character of emperors and generals was sometimes as important as memorizing the dates of their battles. She wanted me to read everything, 1066 and All That, Shakespeare's plays, Emperor Akbar's biography by Abul Fazl, Nehru's books written in jail when the British had imprisoned him. She wanted me to see everything, the Red Fort in Delhi, the paintings of Turner, Moghul miniature paintings, Buddhist art. Because I loved drawing, she set me to making monstrous maps that the school then framed and hung up in the library.
When the school decided to do a performance of Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream, she suggested my name for the role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Until then I had acted seriously only once, at St. Mary's Convent, playing the brown mouse in a musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin at the age of five. Because I could not sing, I pursued acting no further, chalking it down as another great disappointment. Of course, I fooled around with my cousins, writing small plays and performing them for the family with rigged-up curtains and make-believe clothes, but I knew I could never be like my older sisters, who sang and were given leading roles in all the school musicals. I could perform under Shibbudada's rolltop desk before an audience of aunts and uncles, but the real stage was for others.
Titania—and Shakespeare—opened up the possibilities of a future I did not think I had, or deserved. Here I was, floating outdoors on the lovely grass stage of Queen Mary's School, eyes outlined with black, lips a luscious scarlet, body swathed in shimmering green robes, declaiming in righteous anger to a slippery Fairy King:
These are the forgeries of jealousy;
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
I felt elated and at home. Every atom of my being felt energized and utilized. My cup, suddenly, was full. That constant, critical chatter in my head stopped. Whatever was missing in me had been completed. I was consumed with purpose.
I knew enough to say “pave-ed” and “beach-ed.” Another new and excellent teacher—Miss Dutt, who taught us English— had just been covering iambic pentameter. I was prepared for Shakespearean niceties. Besides, the college of my grandfather, father, aunts, and now my brothers, St. Stephen's College, had been doing performances of at least one Shakespeare play every winter for as long as I could remember. I not only could be found in the first row year after year, but was known for my firm opinions on the niceties of the performances, such as that of Joyce Christian as Rosalind. Joyce, a tall, shapely Anglo-Indian, was one of the few women at St. Stephen's. This college seemed unable to decide whether it wanted women pupils or not, and seemed to reverse itself every other year. Joyce got in during one of the “yes” periods but was one among a very small minority. All the boys were half in love with her, and so was I, especially when she was on the stage.
