Of conductors and drivers...

I think I was in fourth standard when it started. I used to be fair and delicate and I was going thru a phase where I would insist to wear a gajara to school everyday. My sister and I would go by bus to school, Aai Baba would drop us at the bus stop. All the conductors and drivers were interested in me. I was too young to understand their laughing and teasing each other and whistling and stuff when I would walk by so it wouldnt affect me and I would forget about them the moment I would walk into the school. But slowly over time, one conductor emerged as the main "hero wannabe". He started getting bolder and would not let me get off the bus and keep me till the end. He wouldnt do anything or ever touch me but would smell the flowers in my hair etc. I think this went on for quite a while and I didnt say anything to anyone (I was an idiot or maybe I was just really young). My friends (boys) started to stand two behind me, one in front of me and would refuse to get off the bus if he wouldnt let me get off following them. They started shielding me with their hands. Bicharey, tey pan same age hotey. Maybe boys have a protective instinct from young age? At that time, I finally mentioned it to Aai Baba over dinner one evening. Babani ardhavat ghaas tasach panat takun, lagech uthun gele. He went to meet Mr.Kunder who used to own the buses and run the bus service. Overnight that conductor was fired ani dusryach divsapasun none of them dared to look in my direction. The issue was solved so quickly, I tolerated it for so many days for no reason.Most times it helps to speak up.

Many months later I bumped into that conductor on the road. He gave me a horrible angry look and kept staring. I was terrified but I also looked at him sternly and he turned away. Anil (my gay best friend) was with me, he asked me later why I was so white and shaking :( I dont know what is the right way - not to show you are scared or to ignore and walk away. I mostly ignore and walk away. Ughich kaay karayacha ahe na. These are all things in the past. I dont meet any sleazy people now. I have become accustomed to the US where even though it might be super crowded sometimes, like if we go to a carnival or a fair or the city in summer, no one ever bumps into you or touches you.

My childhood - part I

My earliest memories are staying with my grandma and brother. My parents had my sister soon after I was born and they went back with her and left their son – who was the darling of my grandma and birth ma with them. I really cannot remember much about those early days. I can’t remember when my birth mom got married; I remember going to their wedding. A little while later I remember writing my name over and over - my new name. I guess it was a novelty for me to have a full name.

I went to stay with my parents at age 3-4 sometime and went to school with my sister, same division same school. Our brother stayed back with Grandma. My sister has inherited our father’s qualities of sincerity and she was a model student while I was the popular one who spent most of her time outside the class. Our parents never ever differentiated between us. Only when someone used to praise me to Mom, she would immediately say – But she is not mine, she is my sister’s. She would feel guilty accepting credit for me. It hurt me to no end and she has stopped doing that now :)

As soon as any vacation would start – summer, Diwali, Christmas, I would be shipped off to my Grandma and our brother would go home. Baba would drop one off and pick the other up. We would write letters to each other and all the three of us siblings are still very close. I struggle to write about my grandma and birth mom because they are good people, they always had my best interests at heart but somehow they ended up hurting me the most.

After my tenth standard exams, my grandma declared that I was to stay with her and attend college there. The night before when my mother and sister were going to leave, leaving me at Grandma's was the first time I spoke up against my Grandma. I said I didn’t want to stay and she never kind of forgave me for it after. Neither did my birthmom in a way.

I was living in two worlds sort of – a normal life when I went back home and when I came to my grandma's, I was expected to feel gratitude and sorry for my birth mom and all the sacrifices that she has done for me etc. For many years I had the tendency to feel lonely when I was tired or sad, I always thought my parents have their family, my birth mom has hers, my birth father has his and I have no one. I think it is the effect of many years of brainwashing by my grandma by telling me how I have no one in the world except God and my birth mom. But now I consciously push away those thoughts and focus on the positives in life – I was lucky to have such an awesome family, I have a good husband, our own children, a loving mother and grandmother and now I am so lucky to find my birth father in my life now.

Maybe because I spent half of my time at home and with my grandma's respectively, I got to see two sets of approaches and attitudes towards life, two sets of issues, I knew how a normal family functioned, I knew what it felt like to be the child of divorced parents...

To be continued

I like to move it, move it.....

My mother was a housewife and I remember running up the stairs home after school to find out the entire house in a state of motion, a huge project unraveling, it used to be such a rush! Such excitement! My sister and I would immediately jump in and help our Aai move cupboards, beds around the room. She would be on this deep spring cleaning initiative and it would also involve reconfiguring the set up of the room. I would just love it. We would change the sheets and everything would sparkle and gleam and look brand new! That simple act of dusting, cleaning, reaching previously inaccessible surfaces and most important of all, the rearranging of the furniture felt like a fresh breath of air. We would all be smiling by the end of the exercise. I remember one of my mother’s friends visiting with her daughter and she happened to stay in both the before and after states and was so enthralled – she had asked me, does your Mom move furniture around all the time, its so cool, I am going to go home and do it too :)

When life gets too routine now and when I am stuck in this never ending cycle of alarms, get R ready, drop offs and picks up from daycare, work, cooking, cleaning, laundry, weekend clean up the mess lying around the house mandatory exercises, there is little time and energy left to take on a new project. But its when life is too routine that I miss those days, the days of coming home and opening the door to a new room; not exactly new, but newly arranged, you get it, don’t you :)

I have tried to do it here but its so difficult now, Godrej cupboards could be pushed from one end of the room to the other but what can you do with built in closets here! TV cable and power outlets are fixed and predetermined and the whole room kinda revolves around the TV. I scratch my head and try and think of which room can I move furniture around in and come up with nothing :(

So my ambitious plans over the next couple of weeks are to first finish filing the towering piles of bills/receipts accumulating and taking over the study. Then paint the room :) Then on to R’s room and get curtains and pretty rugs and what not and then move around the paintings and other knickknacks in my house and take out all those new bed sheets which have been languishing in their original plastic covers in my closets. I am keeping a goal of having a gleaming, organized house by the end of the year and starting the New Year with a new outlook and new house :)

Down memory lane....

You know you are old when your mind is left clutching on to memories of things which do not exist anymore and the world has moved on and this generation – i.e. my baby’s cannot even fathom a life with those things.

Remember the song “Mere saamney waali khidki mein”…..my beautiful building is now going to be torn down to be rebuilt into a towering skyscraper. My parents will move from the 4th floor to the 14th floor – elevators, parking spaces, intercom systems between apartments; everything has been thought of and planned….my parents will move from the brand new one bedroom kitchen living room flat that they moved into, newly married (almost), 33 years ago, to a brand new three bedroom three bathroom kitchen living room apartment in their golden age. We were a family of six – us three siblings, Aai Baba and Aaji sharing about 900 sq feet of area. Now it’s just 2 and more space than they know what to do of it.

I will sorely sorely miss standing in my gallery or my bedroom and chatting nonstop with my friends; friends whose houses/galleries/bedrooms overlooked ours. Everything from going to the movies, going out to dinner, morning jogging plans to evening walks/games would be discussed/debated/planned through those windows. I miss my friends calling me from downstairs – all my neighbors could identify which friend was yelling my name, so familiar were their shouts. I miss staying up late at night and studying for a final and seeing my friends sit at their desks in their respective homes too. We used to make a pact to stretch and say Hi (through signs and signals of course so as not to disturb the sleeping residents) every hour so we could keep focused. It was a team effort – studying for exams.

I miss sitting on the compound wall overlooking our local post office and hassling the post officers to give us our report cards over the wall instead of delivering it to our mailboxes. I miss hanging out with my friends and loitering through our building campus, lush with green trees and flowering shrubs, fruit bearing trees; climbing trees, picking fruit, picking those cherished ananta flowers (without waking up the irate owner of the tree who zealously guarded her flowers), miss making zhopdis out of the coconut tree branches which fell down without any warning, miss making tea over an open fire, miss hassling the building residents; our neighbors to contribute a different ingredient for the tea, miss the outdoors, miss the soil and the grass and the flowers. Today’s generation has many wonderful opportunities and a different lifestyle than we had when we were growing up; all of this is vintage now, they get a glimpse of it in carefully planned vacations to native villages and beach side towns, I wonder if there is anyplace in India where the kids still gather in the evenings and play chhor police or host cricket matches late into the night or gather together to tell ghost stories in a power outage. I miss my past.