My earliest memories trickle through my mind...My very early, pre-kindergarten years were spent in Pune, first at my grandparents' bungalow and then at the Military College of Engineering in Pune, where my father was busy with his studies. Then, when we moved to Mhow, in Madhya Pradesh, we would visit Pune once a year. It is in Pune that my memories of houses and of course the people living in them, began to crystallize. Once cannot think of a house and a garden, without thinking of the people who are so intrinsically woven into them.
The smell of Odomos, that sticky yellow cream, which is supposed to repel mosquitoes, is firmly embedded into the nostrils of every child who has grown up in India. The steady buzz of mosquitoes near my ears, as I lay beside my grandparents and tried to fall asleep on a sweltering summer night...the sound of my grandfather's hands patiently swatting every mosquito that dared to come within an inch of me...Eventually I would fall asleep, lulled by the dull roar of the Tata and Ashok Leyland trucks that sped down the highway, Pune Satara Road, a stone's throw from our house. Trucks being banned on that road and ring roads being constructed around Pune were very far into the future.
The one thing that fascinated me the most about my paternal grandparents' house was that in every room, the floor tiles were of a different colour. The kitchen and the dining room had speckled maroon tiles, the living room had a deep pinkish cream floor and my grandparents' bedroom had jade green tiles, with bits of black and cream. The upstairs bedroom had similar, colourful tiles. The children of the 60s, 70s and the 80s, who were brought up in India, will remember these floor tiles in the homes of their childhood.
Coming from the standard, Army-regulated houses, these gleaming, smooth and well-polished tiles to me, seemed to be the epitome of luxury. Ceramic tiles were far into the future...Decades later when my father, replaced the original tiles with the more modern ceramic ones, I felt as if an important part of my childhood memories had been buried deep forever!
The house had been designed in such a way that the downstairs bedroom opened into the living room and also opened into the dining room and kitchen, which also opened into a passage which had a door to enter the living room! Oh, the glorious times we had with our cousins and friends, chasing each other through all these rooms, on a circular route, as if we were playing 'Round Robin'. The very walls echoed with our raucous laughter and high-pitched screams, when we felt we were about to be caught!
Our grandmother must have been in despair as we raced like little hooligans, though her bedroom, her well decorated living room and sparkling dining room and through her immaculate kitchen. But to her credit, she never once admonished us.
Later when my father renovated the ground floor, sealed a door, pulled down a wall, added another wall and constructed a third bedroom, it was akin to our childhood playground being demolished! Used as we were to the colonial army apartments and bungalows, with their strait-laced rooms off a central passage, the design of the original family home seemed to me so unique and one where children could have so much fun.
The original garden, with the then young mango trees and the not yet tall coconut trees, the tender banana shoots and the fragrant curry leaves, was a testimony to my paternal grandfather's hard work. All the flowers that my grandfather needed to worship the gods, had been planted in that garden: fragrant jasmine, the deep red hibiscus, plump gardenia flowers, pink roses along with other flowers of peach and lavender hues. To see the gods being covered in fresh, home-grown flowers by my Army colonel transformed into a retired civilian grandfather was a treat to watch. I often sat next to him every morning watching every step of the process in a hawk-eyed manner.
Oh, the memories!
A few years later, my father was posted to Pune and we moved into the initial temporary accommodation. This consisted of one humongous room, a part of a large passage converted into a children's bedroom, a dressing room converted into a kitchen and a bathroom complete with a claw foot tub and black and white chess board flooring. Now we could boast that we had lived in a palace (well, in a tiny part of it), off the Pune Nagar Road.
But finally, we had been allotted a huge, colonial era bungalow. My mother sent us to our paternal grandmother's house that week end. (My grandfather had sadly and prematurely passed away the previous year.) We were to go to school from there the following morning. As a grand surprise, our Army school bus would drop us off at our new house, instead of at 'our' palace. Unbeknownst to my mother, our neighbour's daughter inadvertently let the cat out of the bag by asking me if I was excited about the new house. I knew immediately that my parents had moved and I got through the Monday school day with great difficulty.
When the Army bus dropped my sister and me outside our new house, life in a whole new abode, began unfolding then and there. Pune had been a British Army Hub before independence, and this house was colonial to a T. A sprawling front lawn, replete with a fountain in a little pond, a massive, red-tiled roofed house and an acre behind the house and another half-acre on each side. It had a large living room and a separate dining room, while the little pantry adjacent to it had been converted into a kitchen. The actual kitchen was at a short distance from the house, connected by a roofed passage which was open to the garden on both sides. This was in case a fire broke out in the kitchen, it could be put out before it reached the main house. The colonials certainly knew how to protect their own lives...
Many decades later when my children and I went to Karen Blixen's house which is now a museum in Nairobi, I spotted exactly the same long-distance kitchen of our erstwhile colonial home in Pune. When my parents visited the museum, my mother affirmed that this was how the kitchens had been placed in the homes of her childhood on various coffee plantations across Southern India. Coffee plantations were, of course, another colonial bastion!
By the time we moved into this house, the main kitchen had been converted into the house help's quarters, the reason being that the original helps' quarters for all the four bungalows which stood in a row down that little road, were much further down the same 'Loop Road'. Pune's famous Ritz Carlton Hotel stands there today. Yes, two of the four bungalows were demolished and all that land along with the Helps' Quarters area became civilian territory.
Since Pune is our hometown, all our cousins and family friends visited us very often. We would don our swimsuits, race around the low parapet wall surrounding the fountain, with the fountain running full blast and sprinkling us liberally with cold water. My mother would keep the huge tub in our bathroom filled to the brim with water (yes, each massive bathroom came equipped with a tub) and when we were tired of the fountain game, we would race, dripping wet, through the house and plunge straight into the cold water in the bathtub and pretend it was a swimming pool. We were tiny tots and five of us girl cousins could easily fit into that tub. Water conservation came into our lives later and is woven into every aspect of our lives today.
We were fortunate enough to be assigned a soldier who was a skilled gardener too, for my father's work. Once my father's various uniforms were readied for the next day, all his pairs of shoes had been polished, all the brass shone brightly, the person had plenty of free time on his hands. (In our house, unlike many other Army houses, the helper soldier was never made to do any kitchen or household work.) And thus it was that he turned his attention to our huge front lawn. He etched a massive flower shaped flower bed on one side of the lawn and an equally large star shaped flower bed on the other side. In these, he planted 'Pinks' in different hues and 'Phlox' in myriad colours. When these seeds grew into plants and then bloomed, we had an absolutely breath-taking flower and star on either side of our famous fountain! Even today, when I see Pinks and Phlox anywhere, my heart skips a beat.
This was the house where I spent hours reading in the garden, made up mysteries, pitched a tent in our neighbour's garden and lived there the live long day, whenever we had holidays. Our mothers would keep a steady supply of snacks and meals flowing. My friend's mother would stitch clothes and bonnets for our dolls from the fabric that she had left over after stitching frocks for both her daughters. She had also stitched my first knee length denim dungarees! My mother would make the most exquisite lace edged pillows and tiny flannel blankets for our dolls' beds. We would be under our impromptu tents all day, alternating between reading, munching goodies and playing with our dolls and teddy bears who were straight from our beloved Enid Blyton's Nursery Tales. We had nary a care in the world!
It was here that I first witnessed a father's love for his daughter. One memorable evening, our house help was working in our house, and her four-year-old daughter was asleep in their house, the one accessed by the open corridor. When she went to check on her daughter, she saw a huge cobra coiled right at their door. Then there was panic, to put it mildly. My mother phoned our Army Unit for help, but it would take time for someone to reach our house. My father was away. Just then, our house help's husband came home from work, and we tearfully apprised him of the situation. Without a second though, without even a glance at the cobra lying in the corner next to their door, he strode into the room, picked up the sleeping child and rushed out in the blink of an eye. A true hero in my nine-year-old eyes. A short while later, the snake slithered away into our garden but after that, even if the smallest twig pricked me on our lawn, I was convinced a cobra had bitten me.
All too soon, it was time to leave this beautiful bungalow, with its semicircular driveway, two stately gates, the long verandah with the wooden trellis, the flower beds of exotic lilies (we transplanted a few bulbs to my grandmother's garden and every March the lilies bloom to this day, even after more than forty years) and of course, my beloved fountain. My father had received his marching orders, and it was time to move to Guwahati in Assam, where more houses, floods and exciting adventures awaited us. It was, I felt, a pity that I could not carry this house on my back, like the turtle does its shell.
Outside our Army house in Pune, with my mother and younger sister. How green was our garden!
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