Childhood is a box of things
The columnist on a visit to Kolkata, the city of her childhood
For more than 20 years after I left that city, I refused to belong to the new one I had moved to. Calcutta was the city of my childhood. It had captured my imagination and Delhi did nothing to move me.
I was seven years old when I first arrived in Calcutta. I had boarded a flight from Ranchi, without my family, in the company of my father’s colleague, to take a school entrance exam in Calcutta. My father was already there, he received me at the airport and took me to the Ashok Hall School. Perhaps it was my first grown-up moment, arriving in a new city and being received by my father at the airport.
Last week I went back to Kolkata. The taxi I took at the airport was an old Ambassador car. Maybe I have sat in this car before, I thought, as it took me into the city at midnight. I passed Gariahat. I could hear the noise and commotion from my childhood, my parents haggling with shopkeepers, their three small children in tow.
I had learnt to lie in Calcutta. When I wanted new colour pencils, but was afraid I wouldn’t get them, I lied that it was compulsory to take them to school. I remember the guilt when my parents bought me a new set of 12 pencils. I started crying in this market, somewhere here.
Bhai, my elder brother, played football in this city. He learnt to play the sitar. It was a feat, buying that sitar and bringing it home in a public transport bus.
My younger brother, Manu, and I played in the street outside our home. There was an open drain. A milkman’s family lived in one of the empty plots. Manu used to play with the milkman’s son. For them playing meant fighting. They got entangled in a Bengali man’s legs one day, as they were wrestling each other on the street. The man’s white dhoti came undone. He was so angry, he dropped his umbrella and began to smack both the six-year-old boys. Manu was fine soon enough, but I cried hysterically for a long time afterwards.
“Did he beat you also?" my friends asked me.
“No, he beat my brother," I said between sobs.
“Then why are you crying," they asked.
“He beat my brother," I kept repeating.
When I sat on a rickshaw last week, I took out my smartphone and made a video of riding through Kolkata streets. There were white kittens. Fresh yellow flowers over an old iron gate. A Jyoti Basu poster on the wall, almost eliminating the 30 years in between.
The first time my school bus brought me back home from school, the bus conductor had woken me up at my bus stop. I remember his face like my life depended on him. I didn’t recognize where I was. My mother had gone to pick up my brothers from another bus stop. They parked the school bus and took me around to help find my new home. It must have been cute, a groggy seven-year-old child unable to remember her home in a new neighbourhood.
Bhai came home from school with a fractured arm one day. I was fascinated. I tried to get a fracture too. I kept pushing my elbow out of the school-bus window till it grazed against a parked truck. I didn’t know how to stop the bleeding and I didn’t want a fracture any more after that.
My mother let me go for a haircut to the barber at the end of the street all by myself. I carried a Richie Rich comic in my hand and showed him Gloria’s long, blonde, waist-length tresses.
“I want a haircut like this," I said.
I had short hair. It was called a boy-cut in those days. He gave me a haircut. I was so disappointed I could have cried. I came home and read Asterix comics to console myself.
We were in Calcutta when the news arrived that my mother’s mother had died. She left for Delhi with my younger brother. I was diagnosed with chicken pox while she was away. Our neighbours from downstairs supported my father as he struggled to send Bhai to school, tend to me at home and somehow manage his office work as well.
Papa cooked aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower) in the pressure cooker. It was watery and bland on the dining table. When Mummy was away, Papa was mellow. “I make pretty good rotis," he said, showing us his skills.
I went to our Bengali neighbours’ home and returned home with alta on my feet one day. Papa hated it. I washed my feet too soon, heartbroken. I’ll wear it again one of these days, a boundary of red around the soles of my feet. Alta reminds me of goddesses.
We used to go pandal-hopping on our scooter during Durga Puja.
Midway through our Calcutta years, we bought a TV set. We were late adopters. On cricket match days and Sunday film evenings, children would crowd outside the windows of homes that had a TV set to catch a glimpse of the wonder inside. Bhai spent hours tuning the set to pick up the signal from Dhaka. They showed Star Trek in Bangladesh in the 1970s.
My mother was preparing to bake a cake when the telegram came with the news that my father’s mother had died in Jalandhar. She sat down, holding her face in her hands, and sobbed. “My mother loves my grandmother," I remember thinking.
Childhood is a box of things. The string that we wound around our wooden top, my doll’s broken arm, the packets of Wrigley’s and Big Red that Mum kept in her Godrej almirah to make them last for years. Papa cleaning his scooter on Sunday mornings, my mother writing to her sister on inland letters that cost 35 paise.
I went back to that Calcutta and had to keep pressing backspace to spell it as Kolkata this time. Okay, okay, I will call you Kolkata, I surrendered, feeling annoyed that my childhood friend had taken on a new name.
“If you leave me alone anywhere, I’ll just go back to my old home in New Alipore," I said to my friends when I was there.
Natasha Badhwar writes a fortnightly column on family and relationships.
Also Read | Natasha’s previous Lounge columns
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