Type-II: Memories Of My First House
Read Type-II: Memories Of My First House Online
Authors: Abhilash Gaur
Tags: #childhood, #memoir, #1980s, #1990s, #chandigarh, #csio campus
Of My First House
By Abhilash
Gaur
Copyright 2014 Abhilash Gaur
Smashwords Edition
Cover Photo: S C Sharma
***~~~***
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***
From the second
day of my life to the time I was 19 years old, I lived in a small,
one-bedroom flat on the top floor of a three-storey building in
Chandigarh’s CSIO Campus. It’s the longest that I have lived in one
house. Since leaving it in 1996, I haven’t stayed at any one
address longer than five years, and I doubt any house now will
serve me for two decades.
That house had
many problems. It was infernally hot in summer and bitingly cold in
winter. Rainwater seeped into its walls and stained them, but the
taps mostly remained dry. And it wasn’t big enough for a family of
four. Yet, I haven’t loved any other house like it. It was the only
one for which I felt a sense of belonging.
But this book
isn’t all about that house. It isn’t, strictly, a memoir of my
childhood either, although it is both in parts. It’s about a way of
life that I miss very much. If my childhood is a scene hanging on
the wall, this book is all the things that my eyes alight on first.
I was equally fond of my school, St Anne’s in Sector 32, but I have
written about it in detail in my book,
Super Days
. Here, I have tried to remain within the
compass of CSIO Campus, and to prevent the narrative from extending
beyond my teens, I have anchored it to that small house on the top
floor.
Why call this book
‘Type-II’, you may ask. Because that’s how the government
classified my house. It was a Type-II house, and my parents’
abiding prayer was to someday graduate to a bigger, warmer
Type-III. They eventually made it to Type-IV with all the comforts
they missed. But I still miss my Type-II.
***
To my parents,
who undoubtedly remember more of it, and Ritika, who is not a CSIO
girl
***
I remember, I
remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn...
-Thomas
Hood
***
We were a
family of four: papa, mummy, my sister and I. I was the youngest,
six years my sister’s junior. In my earliest pictures she’s at my
side, supporting me gently, a slim little girl with shoulder-length
hair, wearing a flower-print sleeveless frock. I can’t tell you the
colour because the photos are all black-and-white. But later, I had
a shirt of the same cloth. Mummy altered it for me, no doubt. I
envied my sister for being older. I have heard she dropped me once,
but I wasn’t harmed.
We lived in a
three-storey red-brick building inside a sprawling campus that
could have been greener than it was. Large plots of ground inside
it wore an untended look, overgrown and bald in patches. The campus
was bounded by brick walls of the same, unplastered red.
CSIO Campus,
Sector 30-C. It was an impressive name, more so when expanded:
Central Scientific Instruments Organisation. Papa’s office was
inside the campus, and it was a boon to us because he used to get
home within five minutes of closing time. Mummy would brew tea in a
steel tumbler at 5.30pm sharp, and as soon as she heard his step at
the door, she would boil a little milk, so that by the time he
washed and settled down at the table, tea was ready.
I remember little
of the office, and the first thing that comes to mind is a white
sign with cold blue flaking letters: ‘Photography Is Prohibited’.
It taught me the word ‘prohibited’.
Other than that,
let me see, there was a library from where I got my first science
fiction books. During summer vacations, papa brought old Time Life
books on a variety of subjects. I started my first diet in class 6
after reading one of them, but when I look at old photographs of
that age, I realise I shouldn’t have. Once, there was talk of papa
being sent to Syria, and one of the books he brought was about that
country. Only, it was published in the 1960s while we were living
in the late-1980s. Not the best reference book for our purpose.
Twice every year,
the office was open to children for Science Day and Foundation Day.
And on one of those days, near the end of the rainy season, there
used to be an essay writing competition in a low, red-brick
building inside the ISTC area. I think every child won a prize in
it. Prizes were distributed inside the office auditorium where the
ceiling dripped in a downpour. One year, I skidded in my slippers
while hurrying to the stage. I didn’t fall but people noticed, and
my ears still burn with embarrassment when I think of it.
Sometimes, in the
early years, old movies were screened in the auditorium. I remember
Jab Jab Phool Khile because it left me smitten with Nanda and her
impossibly coiffed hair. Later, I saw You Only Live Twice with a
friend. It remains the only 007 movie I have seen on the big
screen.
The year Halley’s
Comet came, 1986, telescopes were set outside the office building
at night for sighting. There was a mad rush, and although I got a
turn at the eyepiece, I am not sure I saw what I was supposed to
see.
There, that’s all
I can think of.
***
When I think of
the campus I grew up in, all that empty space, I feel happy, but
also sad because space is at a premium now and I will never again
have so much of it.
At home, I learnt
to call it CSIO Colony. Later, I started calling it ‘campus’ like
the more sophisticated older children I moved among. There’s
snobbery in these fine distinctions. Colonies are down-market:
labour colony, jhuggi-jhonpri colony, Rajiv Colony, Kumhar Colony,
Kathputli Colony. If it’s a slum it’s bound to be a colony.
Pre-Independence, the whole of India was a colony. But campus,
there’s nothing dirty or smelly about the word.
The red,
naked-brick buildings of CSIO Campus weren’t really red at the time
from which I have my first memories. Every rainy season a green
velvety moss covered the cracks and the pores of the bricks, and
when it dried, it turned sooty black. Year after year, the walls
became more and more mottled, and in truth I only remember them as
dirty and black-patched.
We lived on the
top floor of a three-storey building. It helped me learn the
distinction between American and British floor conventions. We were
on the second floor but the third storey. Our house was of the
smallest type—Type II—with two rooms, one of which was our
drawing-cum-dining by day and became a bedroom for papa and me at
night.
I spent 19 years
in that house, the longest I have lived in one place, and it was
the only one I became attached to although it had a hundred
shortcomings. My parents were always looking forward to moving out
of it. Once or twice every year, their hopes rose. This or that
house had been vacated. But always, somebody else got it. And I was
happy to stay put. It was my house after all, the one to which my
parents brought me straight from Government Hospital Sector 16.
Four narrow and
steep flights of stairs led up to our floor. During the day,
sunlight from a brickwork screen that fronted the building lit them
up. And after dark, dim bulbs at the top of each side wall painted
them yellow. The stairs were too narrow for two people to pass
comfortably, and the whitewashed walls got chipped every time a
family moved in or out with its furniture.
Often, the 60-Watt
incandescent bulbs at the top of the stairs ‘fused’ and imaginary
ghosts and demons invaded the dark space between the ground and my
house. Then I crept up slowly, clinging to the cold and thick iron
railing that smelt like flint wheels that produced sparks inside
toys those days. Perhaps, sulphur from sweaty hands gave it that
smell.
I was afraid of
the gaps in the banister but not as much as of the lizards that
crawled on the walls. Sometimes, a stray dog made its home on a
landing of the staircase and then I had to retreat timidly, stand
under our bedroom window and shout for papa or mummy to come and
fetch me upstairs.
Those stairs had a
special place in our daily life. Of course, we needed them to get
in and out of home, but we children also played on them when the
weather was too hot to go outside, or it was raining. My favourite
game was to jump off steps. Three steps was a good start, and by
the time I was in senior school I could do seven or eight. We made
a loud ‘dhum’ sound on landing, and if two or three of us were
playing, one of the ground-floor aunties whose siesta we had broken
was bound to step out and reprimand us gently.
The stairs were
also a place to swap notes between ground and upper floors. It was
a sign of warmth to continue conversing with departing guests in
the staircase. If you saw somebody off at your doorstep, you were
being cold and rude. But if you went down all the way to the ground
floor, and even to the turn of the road, your affection for the
visitor was deemed genuine. At times, we saw people off right up to
their doors. Even if you didn’t go that far and lingered long
enough in the stairs, talking and laughing over the banister, you
showed your heart to be in the right place.
There was a boy on
the ground floor, one year my senior at school. His father had
studied more than papa, and was at a higher position too. But I was
too small to understand this. One evening, after his father and
mine had returned from work, we argued loudly about whose father
was smarter. When I came home after giving him a mouthful, I found
my parents sitting in armchairs at our centre table and suppressing
their laughter. They had heard every silly word through the front
door that was always open.
On Diwali, we lit
candles and diyas on the railing and in the squares of the brick
screen as high as our hands could reach. Not many people used
decorative electric lights those days, and even those who used
seldom had anything longer than a metre or two, with about a dozen
round bulbs encased in red plastic cherries. If it was a windy
night, and most Diwali nights started out windy, the diyas died out
repeatedly and the candles fought against the draught valiantly,
the flames feinting this way and that like a skilled swordsman. The
light was dimmer but the sight more beautiful than anything rolls
of blinking Chinese lights can conjure today.
***
Not one house
in our block had a telephone at the time, and news of family and
friends arrived by real mail: letters and postcards. The postman
came every afternoon without fail, unless it was a Sunday or a
public holiday. By the time he reached our block it was noon,
sometimes he came just minutes before papa walked up the stairs at
lunchtime.
The postman rode
up to the first ramp of the stairs at ground level and rang his
cycle bell. And unless it was something special, a telegram or a
money order, he left the letters on the highest stair his hand
could reach from the bicycle saddle. Everybody knew his bell. Doors
unlatched together and slippered feet pattered downstairs to grab
the day’s mail. Nobody got letters every day, but some people
seemed to get a lot of junk mail. There were roughly printed
pamphlets in Hindi and Urdu, seemingly about medicine and politics
and poetry, completely impersonal but for the handwritten name and
address. Our neighbours must have had diverse interests, I
guess.