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I remember her sitting under the large tamarind tree, quietly reading a book for hours at a stretch. In a way, I was responsible for that. I was in lower kindergarten that time in St Joseph’s Convent, Kamptee. I remember I was very well behaved and composed on the first day of my school; and specifically during the first few minutes that she was there. The moment my mummy had walked out and they closed the doors, my bravado had vanished. She decided that she was going to sit in the school compound reading and I could see her through the window, to reassure myself whenever I wanted. This arrangement was in place for many days. The teacher tried shifting my place after a few days so that I wouldn’t look out of the window too often. I guess I started getting too fidgety or something and was shifted back to my window seat, much to my delight.

Kamptee is a small village. It is about a couple of hours drive away from the nearest big city Nagpur, which is a prominent city in central India. My school was the only English medium school in the village. The school benches were small and painted in bright but gaudy colours and smooth oil paints that had been further smoothened with use. The class room was neat and clean, and had a tiled roof like the ones we see in bungalow shots of Hindi movies. The room had a window that faced the play ground. The tamarind tree had a circular slab constructed around it. Kamptee derived from Camp T was a typical army cantonment town with houses, bungalows and mall roads that bore the stamp of the British era.

Just outside the window was the tree. Mummy used to sit below it for the three hours that I was in the classroom. It was a reassuring sight, if ever there was one. That’s the first real memory that I have of Mummy and the visual has stuck in my mind. It looked like a picture postcard with the large tree at some distance and my mother reading quietly without looking up for those long three hours that I was in class. It was awesome. It was serene. One could hear the faint humming noise of students studying in different classrooms in a still kind of suppressed silence punctuated only by the occasional breeze or the distant grunting of grazing cows and goats. I don’t remember whether my classmates teased me since I was the only kid in the class whose mother stayed back but it didn’t matter. When you are that young explanations are neither sought nor offered, I guess or maybe it was unwritten rule. Once I felt a little more comfortable at school, I tried convincing myself that she liked reading.

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In a month’s time, Mummy had managed to convince me that I was hardly looking out of the window any more and that the studies demanded more attention from me. Also, she could not be expected to be sitting under the tamarind tree reading throughout my kindergarten days! The subsequent trips that I made to the school were with the company drivers escorting me. I was made independent without me realising it. I think I liked it.

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Mummy used to tell me a lot of stories, but not all were necessarily from story books. She had a habit of narrating anecdotes about her family, her childhood, her toys, her aspirations, her siblings or whatever was the stream of thought running through her mind. Somehow, she could connect all the stories to some vague central theme of believing in the truth, creating a sense of determination and respecting elders. She told me once when we were in Kamptee and I was perhaps four years old that she and Daddy had decided to ensure I had access to the best education I wanted. She suggested that I should seriously concentrate on my studies if I wanted to study abroad. I asked her whether we would all be going if I went abroad to study. She replied that the possibility existed but I would have to proceed alone initially. I lost the glamour of studying abroad somewhere immediately around that time.

I remember she used to let me play with my cars and planes after I was back from school and right after my lunch. She would clear the table and the food and keep the dishes for Parvati Bai, the domestic help, who would come late in the afternoon to handle the chore. Once Mummy was done with her work, my playtime was over and she would read out a story every afternoon. This was a daily ritual for us. I had enough supply of story books, though some days the books would be repeated. I specifically remember the story about Shivaji’s young age and how he used to listen with rapt attention to the stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata narrated by Jijabai. My five year old brain had created a parallel and asked Mummy whether she thought she was Jijabai and I was Shivaji, because I listened to stories she narrated totally engrossed. I had not quite understood or heard what she told me but it sounded like the comparison ended there. I gathered that parallels could be drawn only if I stretched myself to accomplish something in life. I managed to squeak that people don’t ride horses and capture forts these days but her expression conveyed that I had missed the point. I didn’t think I had missed the point but was just not sure of what would be the equivalent of capturing Torna and establishing Swaraj with reference to my life. Mummy had attempted

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to satisfy my innocent queries. The problem that my age presented was that I was not aware of my ignorance.

I remember she used to read out a pictorial story book from the Amar Chitra Katha series or a story about Smarty, the young rat with whom I immediately identified for some reason or any book for that matter with a lot of dramatic intonation and action. Sunday afternoons were devoted for reading out stories from the Sunday editions of some newspapers that used to carry kids’ stories then. I used to love those a lot. One of the stories I still remember was about a guy who came to a stingy businessman and offered him Rs. 100,000 everyday for thirty days if the stingy businessman promised him to pay 1 paisa on the first day and double it up everyday. I remember doing the Maths in my rough book just to get the amount right. I don’t think I progressed beyond fifteen days but that story got me thinking. I used to peer from under the book with all the attention I could muster. I would have my head on the pillow and absorb the story like a sponge, sometimes memorising sentences without understanding the meaning. She had winced once when I had mixed up between Buddha and Pralhad because of what I thought was a visual similarity between the two. She asked me to take my spelling and reading seriously and not go by visuals just because both Buddha and Pralhad looked serene and had folded hands. I must have done the equivalent of biting my tongue because I never did such a mix–up ever again.

The other thing I remember about those story sessions was that she had a knack of placing the facts without passing any judgement. During one of our sessions, I had commented that Kaikayi was a bad woman because she banished Ram. Mummy had replied that her actions were cruel but that I should form my opinions after I got to know all the facts or when I grew up. She said maybe Kaikayi was just playing a pre-ordained role and it would be too unfair to judge her on the basis of the few facts I knew. That lesson is so strongly etched in my mind that even today; I rarely categorise or judge people with the superficial inputs of actions and behaviour. I am not sure if that’s a good thing but it surely keeps a lot of hurt outside the window. Most of the time I consider the other person’s compulsions and mindset and attempt to understand that person as if he were some puzzle and not as if he was somebody who hurt me. Some lessons learned so early and in a scenario where learning was not even my objective are so profound that they just stick. I don’t know but maybe Mummy knew that simple stories had a lot of encrypted lessons that one interprets as one grows up and I suppose it’s just enough to plant the encrypted codes of value systems very early.

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It was in Kamptee and when I was in the first standard that Mummy decided I had enough books to have my own library. I agreed that twenty five books was a decent number to start a library. I had no idea whether the minimal number required to start a library was five or twenty-five but I was highly motivated at the conceptual level to bother about the nitty-gritties. She gave me a new notebook where she listed down all the books. The first book in my library was a blue coloured pictorial ‘Alphabet Book’. She gave each book a number and cut out an old wall calendar that had large numerals and pasted the appropriate number inside each book so that the library was well indexed and extremely retrieval friendly. She gave me the most formidable looking cupboard and one whole wide shelf to house my `library’. She declared that the milestone that I should look forward to was of having 100 books in my library, which would only be accomplished if I could read all the books in my library on my own and explain the meanings of all the words in each book! That was a daunting challenge since I was used to books being read out by Mummy. The task of reading books on my own appeared insurmountable. The amount of time it took to decipher each spelling and form each word was too time consuming but the thrill of being the first kid in town, owning a proper library with 100 books was too irresistible. I clawed at it like my life depended on it. Each book that I finished reading was my milestone and soon, I had put almost all the books behind me except one book; it had the word ‘generous’ in it. I asked Mummy but she was clear that if I wanted to find out the meaning of the word, I could use the dictionary. The dictionary was five times thicker than the collective thickness of my entire library and I was not expecting to have an encounter with any thick book till I was a teen so this task was somewhat unnerving. Mummy volunteered to teach me how to use the dictionary. I tried to guess the meaning of ‘generous’ but the number of options I offered made my mother even more resolute in her insistence of me using the dictionary. I was assured as an additional bonus that no word would ever bother me once I mastered the dictionary. This was a promise that looked too good to be true and it was like holding a key to the language and to having my own library. I have never been able to motivate myself better in my entire lifetime. Mothers know, and my Mummy most certainly knew, when motivation tactics were to be deployed and how effectively.

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Our home in Kamptee was called Usha Deep Bahar and it had a very nice, cozy cottage-like look. It was a desolate place and hardly any

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habitation around. The first time when Dad had mentioned to Mummy about Kamptee being a possible destination, she had asked him whether she would be expected to fetch water from the well. When she landed in Kamptee, she realised that fetching water from the well was not expected or required but beyond that there was not too much progress to write back home about. The few bungalows around were far apart and even if you were to shout from the top of your voice, nobody would hear you. The doors were wooden but flimsy, especially scary considering that there was a robber’s settlement a few miles north along the river Kanhan. It wasn’t exactly heartening to know that robbers had a settlement and an address. We had to make it a point not to be too ostentatious. I find that precaution very funny now when I think of it because I am not sure whether all our display of ostentation would have made any robber look our way. We were well to do and my Daddy was a senior person in HR at the Brooke Bond Tea factory, but we were not rich-rich. I didn’t know that then because childhood ignorance is bliss. Usha Deep Bahar was however, a really lonely cottage.

My Daddy was a brave man and would brush off the solitude and allied insecurities as if it was no big deal but he worried a lot about me and Mom. I remember Mom telling me once that Dad was grateful and had expressed his gratitude for her in his measured style of speech for having stayed in such a desolate place for so long. I am surprised too. Kamptee was perhaps the tiniest village, and Mummy and Dad had come there from Bombay. What an anti-climax that place must have been for the young couple who had spent a good portion of their college and professional life in Bombay! Having a four-year old kid must not have helped matters in any way, I am sure. I remember the electricity used to regularly go off in the evening for three to four hours at a stretch and at various intervals during the day and night. It used to be hot in summer but very pleasant between November and February.

Kamptee was near a place called Ramtek and used to be frequently visited by the black-faced langoors, an Indian breed of large monkeys. They had black menacing faces and grey bodies and really long tails. Sometimes they used to sit on our roof and their long tails used to rest on the glass windows thumping them with a deadly thuds and scary grunts. Dad used to take a stick and walk out alone in the middle of the night to shoo them away. He was that brave. He used to drive the monkeys away and quietly go back to sleep as if nothing had happened. I’d hope I never have to stay in that house again but at that point, I was a kid and it was fun. I thought houses are supposed to be like this. Mummy was particularly scared of the monkeys since there

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had been instances of monkeys snatching babies and generally harassing ladies for eatables.

Evenings in Kamptee used to be long and dull. I would play cricket with Dad and do my homework. There used to be a session of English Conversation with Dad everyday after dinner where we would make it a point to converse in English without resorting to Marathi, our mother tongue. The necessity of that session lay in the fact that Dad had observed too many Indian-isms slipping into my conversation and he wanted to correct them before they became a part of my regular speech. I was in the second standard then and I am not sure I understood the objective but chatting up with Dad every night on seemingly important issues was a great thing. I remember pauses in conversations used to be punctuated with my chants of ‘Talk Na’. I used to frequently say that to keep the conversation moving little realising that removal of such Indian-isms from my speech was one of the objectives of having a dedicated conversation session with Dad. He had an excellent command over the language and a terrific vocabulary. Peter Funk’s feature ‘It pays to enrich your Word Power’ in the Reader’s Digest was a cakewalk for him.

He was very affectionate but certainly on the stern side and I used to be a little afraid of him. I remember I had read some wildlife book where there was a sentence that the Father Tiger does not necessarily care for his cubs and would eat one too. This sentence had, I suppose, made a profound impression on me and I remember blurting it out when Dad had scolded me for something. Mummy had laughed and hugged me, and many years later Dad and I had a hearty laugh about this sentence.

I remember one incident when I was having my afternoon milk and a very nasty looking woman came to our veranda and stood in front of me. I am not sure about what her intentions were but I later learned that she was a part of the gang of robbers that lived along the banks of the Kanhan River. I am not sure whether she wanted to hit me or whether she was thinking about stealing our chairs or wanted to run away with me. The door was open and she could have easily walked in. I just kept looking at her, frozen as she took a step forward. Mummy came out at that instant from inside the kitchen and she shouted at that woman. Boy, did she shout! I haven’t heard her shout like that till today. She shouted so loudly her eyes blazing fire, hands raised and approaching speedily and menacingly at that woman that the woman who was probably carrying a dagger or some such weapon turned back and ran away. Mummy closed the door with a bang and hugged me tight. I remember retelling this incident for a long time at school.

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It was not always that Mummy would don such a fierce persona. She would be quite anxious when my Dad was late because of some gherao or some such worker unrest. Those were the not very pre-militant days of labour activism. My Dad was in HR though I don’t think people used to refer it by that name then. I think Industrial Relations was the nearest it had come to in terms of jargon. Workers used to sit around their bosses and the top management team of the plant with some demand and not let them go home or eat or drink. It used to be tough for us, more so for Mummy. I had the advantage of my innocence and ignorance. Mummy, on the other hand, knew how ugly things could get.

There used to be instances published in the newspapers of workers getting too unruly, violent and murderous. An incident where one of my Daddy’s close friends was badly roughed up in some Bombay factory was discussed between them without letting me know. I remember Mummy telling me that Dad had told her that if things got ugly and he wasn’t able to speak directly in front of others around him he would call asking whether a parcel from Calcutta has come and that would be the signal for her to ring up the police and direct them to the factory. Dad never used it but Mummy knew that if she ever got a phone like that it meant Dad and his colleagues were in the middle of a very ugly, very violent scenario. She used to be most calm during such trying times. I remember her expression and her silent prayers for eight to ten hours at a stretch without transferring any of her worries to me. She used to keep a ladle hooked to the main door because it was believed that it makes the awaited come back home faster. My Mummy was not superstitious but it was more like…whatever works!

The other time I had seen Mom so super calm was when we had a storm in Kamptee. It was the kind of storm they show in Hollywood movies. I had never seen trees huge or small, getting uprooted in front of my eyes so dramatically and so painfully and with noises that sounded very similar to human groans and cries of anguish. I saw electric poles come down in a pile of mangled wires and dazzling sparks. I was with Mummy sitting on her lap wearing a green sweater that I thought looked very ugly on me. She had locked the cupboards, taken a lot of woollen clothes and the cash that was at home for any emergency that could necessitate vacating the house. We were sitting on the veranda watching the rain and the destruction around us. I was shivering and she was comforting me but I was neither too scared nor worried. It’s that beautiful feeling about childhood where you know and firmly believe that you don’t have to worry when you are with your parents and that’s the phase when you think that being brave and super-human is a two minute job for your Mum and Dad. The realisation, that they were normal human beings trying to be brave

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and look brave at the same time so that you don’t get scared, hits you very late in life and often, only after you are a parent yourself.

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One of the things that would come up once in a while was the epidemic of jams and ketchups and this was largely triggered by the discovery of a canning centre in Nagpur. The ladies used to get together and plan a trip to the wholesale market and buy tomatoes and fruits in large quantities. I remember accompanying Mummy to such expeditions. It used to be fun till we reached the market because we would go in a company car or a company mini-bus. We had a company car at our disposal if we wanted to go to Nagpur or Kamptee and I used to thoroughly enjoy the rides. The time spent in the market though was very boring. The smell of fresh vegetables sprinkled with generous quantities of water would mix with that of rotting fruit and would get irritating after some time. I would tease goats, observe people, chase other kids, and pretend to be interested in things around me, put on an act of being a well-behaved kid and still get bored. The act of being the best-behaved kid was the easiest since there were some absolutely incorrigible kids around me who would make me look like a saint in comparison. Mom would get a lot of compliments for my well mannered disposition.

One year we had stashed the tomatoes directly in the boot of the old-fashioned Ambassador car and we had a nice puree on the floor of the dickey by the time we reached home.

The ladies used to land up at the Canning Centre with their agendas, fruits and empty glass bottles picked during their various expeditions. There would be substantial amount of team work as well as pulls and pressures involved in the process of guarding the bottles and fruits. One of the ladies, wife of the Factory Manager, was a kind but practical soul who had mastered the science and art of Inventory Management better than anybody else. She was also the most vigilant of the lot. Most ladies would quarrel or argue with a perceived usurper but this lady would earmark territories and domains with tags and flags and leave no room for confusion. She would invariably allocate some duty to me during the visit to the canning centre and I would take the responsibility very seriously. I must have guarded purses, sugar packets, oranges and supervised bottle cleaning, boiling jams and basically done a lot of work that was almost useless, uncalled for and unnecessary, except that it served the most important purpose of keeping me from becoming a complete nuisance. I must have been six

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then and Mummy would ask that lady to assign me some responsibilities so that I would take it more seriously.

The amount of jam that Mummy made in one season was sufficient to last us for two years even if we had decided to eat nothing but jam. Mummy would carry adequate quantities for her cousins and siblings and it would be very normal for us to have one suitcase dedicated exclusively for ketchups and jams on our trips to Bombay during the vacations. I remember entire sessions dedicated to the display of ketchups and jams in Bombay in front of Mummy’s parents, Anna and Mothi-Aai (I used to call my grandmother, Mothi-Aai). Mummy would be very happy about the fact that she had been able to get something that made them so happy. I could never understand, as a kid, why some one would take so much effort to make someone else so happy.

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