I’m brimming
with memories these past few weeks. Not happy, not sad, just random, yet heart
warming recollections that suddenly peek out at me from nowhere, surprising me
and making me smile- memories from a simpler, more relaxed time; a time that
doesn’t seem like very long ago. A time when we only had one channel on TV,
Doordarshan, and that was enough and when Sunday morning entertainment meant,
rushing back home from church service to catch Mougli and his animal friends on
Jungle Book, while mum whipped up breakfast for me in the kitchen.
It’s been two years since I’ve been married
and have started living a life that I earlier used to associate with “Older
People”, and by that I mean working at my job, making important decisions on
various matters, having an insecure moment sometimes, or suddenly being seized
by frustration, and on rare occasions deciding what to cook for dinner
(clearly, I don’t cook that often). Patterns of behaviour I had earlier associated with “Grown Up’s”,
well, welcome to real life!
Lately I’ve
been having this nagging and absurdly fearful feeling that now life is going to pass me by
at such an insanely, accelerated pace and before I know it I’ll be an old, old
lady wondering where life went by so hastily. And so, driven by this ridiculous
fear, I’ve decided to lock my memories in words, so that when I do get old, I
can go back and read, and smile, and know how wonderfully fulfilling my life
has been- good and bad, happy and not so happy, laughter and tears- just as our
parents told us life would be.
I was born an
only child to much older Anglo-Indian parents in Delhi,
a rarity in the nineteen nineties I grew up in. I remember the very shocked and
sorry responses I’d get from people when they’d find out I had no siblings, like
I had a dreadful disease or something, which at that age I couldn’t comprehend.
With both my parents working full time I spent most of my time with my reed
thin, elderly and devout Catholic maid (my parents made sure of that) from
Bihar, whom I shall call Lily. Lily, who always wore soft cotton sari’s and
perpetually smelled of Lifebuoy soap and coconut oil and whose white hair would
be tied into a tight little knot behind her head. Lily had a particularly
shrill, sing song voice and I often heard her singing church hymns in a
language I couldn’t understand, while she sat on the veranda floor in a patch
of sun on winter mornings and picked the grit out of the rice. The only word I would
catch onto was “Yesu”, which she had told me, meant Jesus.
I’m sure Lily
couldn’t have been very old when she began looking after me, but to me she was
the oldest person I had seen… around the house at least! She had skin the
colour of chocolate, eyes as dark as charcoal and fine wrinkles around her eyes
and laugh lines around her mouth- she was as quick to anger as she was to
laugh. To me Lily was friend, caretaker, sibling, playmate and grandmother all
rolled into one. She was the one who soothed my bruises when I’d hurt myself,
amuse me when I’d play with my dolls, feed me lunch, rock me to sleep and tell
me unbelievable (and sometimes scandalous) stories from her tiny little
village, where apparently tigers roamed free in the jungle and where fruits as
sweet as honey hung low from the branches of trees.
I remember winter
afternoons when she’d lay me down on a string cot in our front yard and
vigorously rub warm mustard oil on my body(she didn't believe in the new
fangled Johnson’s Baby products), constantly trying to get me to stay still
while I giggled continuously; her calloused, work worn hands firm, yet gentle
as they massaged the pungent smelling oil into my skin- it’s funny how even
today the rich and balmy scent of mustard oil is capable of effortlessly taking
me back to a time, when Lily would sit on the stairs with me as a toddler on
her lap, assuring me that Mummy would be back home real soon.
Even after my
parents were back from work, I’d still hang around Lily, following her to the
kitchen and playing besides her feet while she washed the dishes. She used to
tell me to go to my parents but I’d still follow her around until it was time
for me to have dinner with my parents and be put to bed.
Being Anglo-Indian's, my
parents only spoke English at home and I learned no Hindi, which they decided was
important for me and they thought who better a person to entrust with this
responsibility but Lily. But the consequences of that were not as they had
hoped, and instead of learning Hindi, I picked up the dialect Lily would pepper
most of her broken Hindi with and I ended up calling rice, bhaat, jhaal was my new
word for spicy and to my mother’s horror, instead of learning “Ek, do, teen, chaar” I picked up Ek tho, do tho, teen tho and so on. It
was then that my parents decided to pack me off to day care right next door, as
they thought I needed to interact with children my age; daycare was something I
was to hate for the next couple of years that I was kept there.
Lily still
remained with our family, but I no longer stayed with her during the day and I
would spend afternoons longingly look
into the direction of our home hoping for Lily to come rescue me from my misery
of being teased by the nasty little bullies from day care who made fun of me
not knowing Hindi. On afternoons like that I would stand in the veranda trying
to catch a glimpse of Lily, aching to bury myself in her lap and instantly be
surrounded by the softness of her sari and the comforting fragrance of Lifebuoy
soap and coconut oil and just be there while she patted me to sleep, telling me
stories from the Bible and how Jesus gets angry with little girl's who didn’t
take afternoon naps.