Sepia Tales

My very first crush was a pretty girl named Lorna. I might as well tell you that isn't her real name. As they say in the newspapers, all names have been changed to protect identities. To get back to the story, I was fourteen then and Lorna was a year older. She lived in a small bungalow opposite my apartment house. The two were separated by an open plot in between where construction had been begun and abandoned. I would stake out Lorna's place from my third storey balcony with keen telescopic eyes. They had a largish verandah on the ground floor where her brothers would hang out in the evening with friends - I could see them lounging in rattan chairs laughing, having tea, chatting, occasionally having a drink. As backdrop, there would be loud music playing from inside the house. Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, Abba, Boney M. When her brothers were chilling out with friends, Lorna could be seen making an occasional appearance in the verandah, joking with her brothers' friends, gett...

It was D-day and I was jumpy. I had decided to take part in the singing competition at school and today were the finals. I peeped out of the wings and saw rows and rows of unruly boys in the school auditorium whose rowdy buzz would have shamed the bees. These kind of competitions, I knew, tend to draw out the boos and the fangs of schoolboys in a school auditorium like nothing else. Ask me...I had been in the audience on other occasions. One look at the gleeful, anticipating faces and I broke out in sweat. The chatter of a few hundred kids rose to an excited crescendo till the principal signalled Miss Rosemary to launch the proceedings. One withering look from the veteran and everybody hastily lowered their volumes to mute. As Miss Rosemary got set to introduce the first singer, I sighed deeply. There was no going back now. Any retreat would mean loss of face in the classroom. In fact, it would be akin to social suicide: the blackguards in the class would be ragging and sneering for mo...

Soon after our school final exams in May, my mother would set off with my two brothers and me to spend the one-month summer holidays in Delhi with my nana , my maternal grandfather. I hated Delhi summers (still do) because I found the dry heat unbearable but the trip was an unavoidable ritual: that was the only time my grandparents got to spend with us kids. The preparation for the train journey included a heavy wicker basket with the food (puris, two varieties of dry subzi, mango chutney, pickles and fruit), napkins, disposable leaf-plates and stainless steel glasses and spoons. Then there were two hold-alls with the beddings and towels (and later my novels), and a small, almost inconspicuous, rectangular wicker basket wrapped in a silk cloth carrying the family gods. My mother couldn't leave her pooja (altar deities) behind while she travelled...after all, the gods needed caring too. The silk cloth was to insulate the holy basket from "unclean" influences during the jo...

Can a 'family film' traumatize a child? Well, this one did. I had tagged along with my mother to see an Ashok Kumar film. I don't remember what the film was called and I don't remember the storyline. I just remember that it was a family drama in black-and-white, typical of the family dramas produced by Gemini Studios. And I remember too well the single sequence that absolutely traumatized me. It is late night and the hero (played by Ashok Kumar) has not returned from work and his wife and child are waiting anxiously at home for him. The child catches the mother's anxiety, without actually knowing why her mother is anxious. The mother's face is taut and she rises hopefully every time she hears a sound in the street. Now she paces, now she tries to console the child by holding it close, now she dozes off to wake up with a start. The entire restless night passes away and the father doesn't return. The next day they learn he has died in an accident. May be it wa...

It was late afternoon, probably around 4 pm, on Ram Navami day. I was lazing around at home, doing the usual things that seven-year-old distracted boys do on lazy holiday afternoons. Suddenly I heard a huge commotion. I saw my mom and the other neighbours on our floor rush to Chetana's apartment. Chetana's mom, it turned out, had doused herself with kerosene and set herself afire after a particularly bitter scrap with Chetana's elder sister, Hansa. The door to the apartment was clogged by anxious neighbours. Chetana must then have been 12 years old and her sister around 17. Though it was a bank holiday, her dad was at work. When Laxmiben had set herself afire, Hansa had panicked and poured buckets of water on her to douse the flames. I tried squeezing in between the legs of the elders to get a dekko but was firmly prevented from doing so: the scene was truly horrendous, the lady was screaming, the neighbours were shouting contradictory instructions and Chetana was somewher...

Around the time we children grew up in King's Circle in Mumbai all the lanes had gaslights. During monsoon I would stand in my balcony and watch the rain at twilight. I was a short five-year-old boy then and barely came up to the verandah railing so I would have to stand on my toes to watch the street. As the lane would get darker, the 'gaslight-man' would come cycling into the lane wearing a black Duckback raincoat with a large hood - somewhat like the murderer in I Know What You Did Last Summer . At each streetlight the lightman would alight from his bicycle and then slosh through the rain with a tall bamboo pole in his hand. The pole had a metal hook at the top and once he reached below the lamp post, the lightman would peer through the rain at the gaslight and then pull a lever with the hook. The rain would be falling hard and the light would come on slowly, ever so slowly, becoming brighter till it became a blazing glow. But by that time the lightman would have already...

I have always hated carrying lunch with me. More so in school. I simply hated being bogged down by the lunch box, especially the empty box after the lunch recess. My dear mom would wake up early to pack my round lunch box which would typically have a paratha (Indian bread) and some dry subzi (vegetable dish). One day when I was in the second grade, in my first school, I went out to the school grounds to have my lunch with a friend of mine. I must have been about six then and I was a shy boy and did not like having lunch with the others. Besides, the boys tended to get rather boisterous during lunch and were prone to giving you portions of their lunch even as they whacked portions from yours. This horrified me since I was a vegetarian and most of the boys weren't. My friend and I hunted out a shaded spot on the field and had just opened our lunch boxes when, swoosh, came the shadow of a large wing and the next minute my lunch was in the beak of large kite! Before I could recover, th...

After my running-away-from-school fiasco, my parents moved me to my brothers' school, in the hope that my two elder brothers would be able to keep an eye on me. I was in the fifth standard then and had been shaken very deeply by my ability to cook up a story. My mom told me glumly that at the rate I was going I would be in jail one day. In my little heart I knew this much: I didn't want to be a criminal. I didn't even know why I had lied about my "adventure". I was just an eight-year-old child then and I was as freaked out by what had happened as by my conservative family's reaction to my escapade. That is how I decided I would be a "good" boy from then on. A decision that was to become a weighty albatross round my neck because I got into the habit of being good in order to be perceived as being good. It took me many years to see this and to finally become comfortable with who I was. Meanwhile, an incident happened in my new school that was to influe...

I was always threatening to run away from home, even when I was five or six years old. Till it got to be a family joke. Some kids sulk when they are unhappy. I would say to my brothers, I am leaving home. And I was all prepared for this. I had a golden-yellow rectangular tin toffee box from Ravalgaon sweets which was about three inches deep. In it I had placed an array of personal effects: there was a neatly folded old handkerchief, a comb, some paper, a ballpoint pen and a tiny bottle of scented hair oil. There were some loose coins but absolutely no foodstuff. Interestingly, the cover of the toffee box displayed a splendid, peaceful Buddha. It was as if he was inspiring the sentimental child to take sannyas. Each time I threatened to leave, the entire family would conspire to mock cajole me into not going, probably suppressing the urge to burst out laughing. My eldest brother would say, "Look, why don't you leave tomorrow? Bhabhi's (that's what we called our mom) mad...