Ruskin Bond began narrating his stories on All India Radio at 10.10 pm since yesterday. It is an endeavour to keep listeners engaged during the lockdown owing to the COVID 19 Pandemic. We decided to sit in the balcony that faced the garden of the building and listen to Bond. The tiny expanse of the garden would usually have families and kids hustling and bustling noisily but these days there is no one in the vicinity. The uncanny silence helped us listen to the low voice of Bond with clarity as he narrated his story. Bond’s stories revolve around the magic of childhood and this story was no exception. He narrated the story of bonding with his father who would talk about umpteen things when they rambled on the streets of Delhi. The quietness of the night and the narration propelled me to my childhood.
My family was a large one with four siblings and the extended family was much bigger than that. My father had a treasure of stories to narrate. He had one for every occasion. When we wouldn’t sleep in the night he would often narrate our favourite stories related to Yakshi, an Indian supernatural that transferred us into a world of fantasy. We feared to listen to it but yearned to know the mystery in the stillness of the nights. In his narration, Yakshi would sport long black hair, a white sari and the stories would be woven each day with expertise. If there was a full moon shining in the sky, the story would have dark cloudy sky but with a full moon. My father would create a newness every time and it was difficult for him to repeat the episode when we pleaded to say, ‘Why don’t you tell us the story when Yakshi went near the well?’ He would then drive us away with some excuse.
My mother was a generous and kind lady who bore the naughtiness of her children meekly. She would love us as we were. She would listen to the Dohe or couplets of the saints like Kabirdas, Surdas when we recited them while learning our school lessons. These couplets spoke of insight and mastery to be a better human being. When we would be unruly she would reprimand us by reciting the couplets that conveyed her thoughts. It secretly made me contemplate on taking her for my school examinations. She would sing the latest Hindi songs while cooking. Sometimes, we would trouble her by locking ourselves in the kitchen and cooking a sweetmeat. She would worry about the ration that would get over before time but when we all sat to eat the sweetmeat she would appreciate us and ask us for the recipe. My elder sister who was just a couple of years older made the best chutneys since her childhood. My mother would ask her sometimes to make these accompaniments for dinner and watch her curiously as she added an Andhra touch to our Konkani food.
The governing body in Hyderabad, the city where we lived would often declare a curfew when there were communal riots owing to differences between the Hindus and Muslims. The colony where we lived had Hindus and Muslim families but we lived in harmony. The curfew would be relaxed for a few hours intermittently to help people buy provisions, vegetables and fruits. The prices would be inadvertently raised but my parents were industrious. We had a lot of fruits and some vegetables grown at home which made it easy to manage the cost of living. We had the freedom to go to our friends' homes and play but people were prohibited from roaming on the highway. This kind of curfew had soon become an integral part of our curriculum, it would mostly begin after the Ganesh festival. When the workload in the school would increase, we would begin praying for a short break in the form of a curfew.
We would play in the garden in the day time. We would play cricket when my brother would bully us and bat until the game got over. The stumps would be an imaginary line on the boundary wall and when we were exhausted we would slip away to another corner which had smoothened ground to play Marbles. A large circle was drawn with a twig and in the centre in a tiny groove, we would keep a large marble. Then, we had to put our hands in a jar filled with marbles and blindly pick three more marbles. We would then stand a little away from the circle and hit the large marble with great energy to dislodge the large marble from the groove. We would sometimes disperse five-six marbles in the circle and hit each marble with the marbles we had. If we could hit all we would get a booty of marbles.
We would help my mother in watering plants, grinding soaked lentils for idlis and we would also saunter with her to the shop to buy groceries. We never got bored as we had no time to get bored with friends and a large family. We would write long letters, and we used special letter-pads to make the letters special for people. We would sketch and paint on paper, and draw rangoli on the ground.
Evenings would begin with a quick dinner and then we would read a lot of storybooks. The books would have been borrowed from friends or we would read the old ones that were at home but we were voracious readers. Some of the evenings were special. The house we lived in had a large veranda in its backyard. My parents would call us for a watermelon meet that would be held on the veranda. A large watermelon would be cut into long slender arcs and handed around. We would then talk to each other and sink our teeth into the juicy watermelon to eat it till the bark. We also had lots of plants that were planted haphazardly to fill the backyard. The trees were the fruiting kind. It included coconut, pomegranate, guava, lemon, tapioca and others. These trees swayed during those summer evenings with the breeze and my father would hum the songs from the movie Pyasa. We would follow him with our crooning. We would listen to News, plays, Hawa Mahal, Chayya Geet on the All India Radio.
The lockdown has given us the time to slow our pace of life and reflect life once again. We gaze at the clear evening sky for long in search of the stars and the sublime moments that have remained close to our heart.
*Yakshi means "Super Nature, Mysterious" and is of Indian (Sanskrit) origin.
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