Sepia Tales

I reached home dog tired around 6 pm. Not only had we walked a lot, there was the added weight of guilt and anxiety. My mother was waiting by the door, worried sick. We lived at King’s Circle and I usually came home by 4.30 or so. “Where were you?! Why are you so late?” she screamed at me as I staggered home. “Where have you been? Why are you looking so dead-beat?"  She shook me up. I could see her worry had transformed into fury. I didn’t know what to say. How could I tell her I had walked out of school at lunch and wandered over all the way to Reay Road? No way.  “I asked you something. Why don’t you answer me?!” She was really furious. “I was kidnapped,” I sobbed. She was stunned. “What?!! What did you say? You were kidnapped?! What happened? Tell me what happened!” She held me by my collar and shook me. Her eyes were wide with residual anger and surging anxiety. Now there was no going back. “There was this guy outside the school gate,” I stammered...

I was probably eight years old then, studying at St Joseph’s High School at Wadala in Mumbai. It was one of those lazy summer days at school that seemed to drag on and on and on and the entire class seemed enveloped in the thick stupor of boredom.  When the bell rang for the lunch recess, we boys dashed out of the class in a whoosh of relief. After a quick lunch from our three-compartment lunchboxes, we headed for the water fountain. What, no water?! This was crazy! What would we drink? And sure enough, just because there was no water our throats actually felt more parched than ever before! I was with two friends, Yagnesh and Prasad. Yagnesh was a sweet, conservative Gujarati boy and Prasad, well, he was the oldest amongst us, having dropped a year. Prasad was taller than Yagnesh and me, and, though not very bright, he certainly was more confident and street savvy than both of us.   The three musketeers went around the school to see if there was a stray tap we c...

My maternal grandfather spent his entire life in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi. A high caste North Indian Brahmin by birth, he had a peculiar problem: he could read Urdu and Farsi and English but he could not read Hindi! He could speak it, he could understand it but he couldn’t read it. The Devanagri characters simply left him baffled. When we kids would go out with him we would tease him. “Nanaji, read that sign.” He would shrug and say  “Beta, main Hindi nahi padh sakta.”  (Son, I can’t read Hindi.) He could read the Hindi numbers, he could read bus routes, he could read some signs on shops in Dariba or Khari Baoli but if you gave him a Hindi newspaper he would sheepishly return it to you unread. If someone wrote him a letter, he would hand it over to his wife who would read it out to him. But his Urdu was marvellous and his calligraphic Urdu handwriting would have been the envy of an industrious maulvi. He would write his accounts in a parchment paper sewn-notebook, beginnin...

Mom decided we ought to pay a visit to the temple town Nathdwara during our Christmas holidays. Dad made a fuss about the expense but Mom was firm: we hadn’t gone to pay our respects to the family deity, Shreenathji, for quite a while and we couldn’t put this off forever. Finally dad gave in and sent somebody from the factory to queue up at the railway station to buy the tickets for the family – which meant my parents and we three boys, the youngest of them being me and I was nine at that time. Cut to Nathdwara. The Nathdwara temple has eight darshans – which means, the temple gates are opened eight times a day to allow devotees to have a glimpse of the deity. The deity is adorned differently for each darshan hence each darshan is unique. Now, if you are devout, and in love with the deity, even with its form, you would like to have as many darshans as you can. So I announced to my mother, “Tomorrow I will have all eight darshans of Shreenathji.” “Hush!” said my mother. “You ca...

It's a summer afternoon in Chandni Chowk and you don't want to venture into the drafts of sauna heat. You are ten years old and are lying on your stomach, on a huge teakwood poster bed, reading Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm . The window to your left is open but covered with a wet khus curtain to convert hot air into cool breeze. It's neither too bright nor too dark. Just enough light to read by. Swinging your legs in the air as you read, you suddenly hear a street hawker. He sings, "Peelay ras ganney ka!" Then comes the subheading yelled in a loud rustic voice... "Peelay thanda meetha ras wala!" He is selling sugarcane juice. Driven by curiosity, you rush to the window, lift the khus curtain a wee bit and peer down the narrow alley. There he is. A copperish brown man with a yellowed white saafa (head turban) standing next to his compact wooden press, the juice extractor, which he has stationed on the opposite building's porch. A pile of sugar...

Every summer vacation my mom would travel with us three kids to Delhi to spend time with our nana-nani (maternal grandparents). It would be the height of summer and Delhi would be dry, dusty and unbearably hot. My second brother would scoot off to my Dad's uncle within hours of landing in Delhi and my eldest brother and I would stay back with mom at her parents' home in Chandni Chowk. My nana owned a quaint two-storeyed building in one of the winding bylanes, on the mouth of a narrow alley. On the ground floor was a tyre godown, on the first floor were two tenants with large joint families. The entire second floor housed just four persons: my grandparents and my aunt and her husband. The floor between the first and the second story was a jaal , a see-through floor comprising half-inch-thick iron railings. You could sit on the second floor and casually look down into the bustling activity in either tenant's home! It was a bit like being in a special zoo which had horizont...