The little verandah I grew up in....

A different sun rose every morning in Park Circus, CIT Road.
From my earliest recollections of those days, the scant images that materialize timidly to my mind are those of beautiful early mornings that I had spent with grandma or mom, standing in the little verandah of our little two-bed roomed rented apartment, waving out to dad or Jethu leaving for office. There was certainly something magical about that atmosphere, something immensely fulfilling. Maybe it is just the rosy, dreamy haze with which we tend to enfold the images of our earliest memories, making them appear more beautiful than they already might have been, but the unrelenting thought that there might have been after all something more to those sunny mornings makes me want to keep thinking about them. There’s a special feeling to it, it’s only me to whom it occurs and it is me alone who derives a certain comfort out of it, a strange comfort resulting out of an odd chemistry between happiness and poignancy.
I was brought up till the age of 4 or 5 in that old rented flat till we all, my dad, mom, grandma, grandpa, my baby sister and jethu, dad’s elder brother and my best friend decided to vacate it and shift out, for good.
Memories of that dark, tiny flat sit heavily on my mind and I often think about the many Saturday winter afternoons I’d spent squatting alone on the sun-warmed floor of the verandah, right next to the potted creepers, playing with my jarful or marbles and those colorful, tiny plastic animals that came free with the little boxes of ‘Tit-Bits’ mom used to get me from the marketplace very often, am not too sure if you’ll know or recollect what those were. Tit-Bits were my favorite, tiny, sugar coated candies. A box of Tit-Bits would come shaped as a joker with a mouth that could be opened by pushing up the red lolling tongue of the jester into a tiny slot glued below his nose, the sweeties then could be shaken and jerked out of the mouth.
But it wasn’t the candy that I desired, candy after candy would roll out of the joker’s mouth but that long awaited sight that would lighten me up with pure, unadulterated rapture was that of a tiny red, yellow or blue tail or head of a deer or a tiger stuck between two or three Tit-Bits near the mouth, ready to be liberated in a shake or two!! So whenever I got the slightest inkling that mom might venture out to the bazaar I’d run to her and hug her sari tightly with my tiny arms spread out as widely as possible and she’d instantly get the clue.
The other afternoons would be spent sleeping right next to my grandma, with all four of my limbs on top of her; I was so tiny I could hardly ever get my arms fully around her; she was a tad big too. I remember, in CIT Road, evenings would be heralded by a resonating namaaz read from a mosque situated just two houses after our’s. The namaaz used to be propagated through large speakers fixed atop the roof of the mosque and every evening our neighborhood would wake up to that slow and haunting recital, I always wondered what the words chanted in the namaaz meant…no one at home could tell me much! The namaaz, breaking out through the cool darkness of the evening and the eerie silence thereafter used to have an strange intoxicating effect on me and I would abandon all effort to try and get up, BUT obligations at home had to be heeded too, mom would drag me out of bed and wash all the afternoon siesta off my face and sit me down for the evening puja.
Evenings were what I used to look forward to eagerly for the reason that dad and Jethu would be back from work. Jethu ALWAYS bought something for me on his way back from work without fail, but what I especially looked forward to were those big chocolate bars called ‘Fudge’ that he used to buy me very often, they don’t sell it anymore these days. A bar of Fudge used to come with free stickers of He-Man and his beefy lot, and much to my mother’s displeasure most of them would finally end up adorning grandma’s expensive dressing-table mirror and what tantrums I used to throw if mom was ever seen, so much as even proceeding towards the mirror with a wet piece of cloth!
I often managed to tick Jethu off too, I remember this one evening when I’d created quite a stir in the house when myself, having caused a large tear in one of the pages of an expensive photography manual he had just purchased and brought home, leaped off the bed where it was kept and made off, on being asked where that ‘rippling’ sound had come from, I intelligently blamed my ‘bad’ stomach. I came so close to being walloped that night I can never thank my grandma enough for having managed to pull me out of that pickle. I realized that evening, that I was a free bird in the house as long as I had grandma backing me up.
The evenings in CIT road used to be somewhat special, while I practiced Math or handwriting with mom coming by from the kitchen every half an hour to check on me, Jethu would play soft ghazals on the stereo in the room adjacent to the verandah, sit by the verandah, chatting with dad over a smoke, sometimes there’d even be whiskey flowing, with mom replenishing the plate of snacks every now and then and myself hovering around, assisting and sometimes even outdoing dad and Jethu in consuming the contents of the plate, till mom would grab me by my ears and force me back to the other bedroom, back to my books. Grandpa would just sit in his room and grumble, “Urrgh…. the music!!!”
My Jethu used to be my best friend of sorts and I was as afraid of him. He was the one buying me all the Fudges and the Citras (a bottle of which I could never manage to finish, he would never even scold me for wasting it), and later on all the He-Mans and Gi-Joes had also come from him, Jethu would always take me out to wherever one could drag a toddler around and I hardly ever came back empty handed. The first movie I ever went out for was with him, we’d watched Indiana Jones together! Jethu was also the first one to buy me a bike and of course, introduce me to sausages!! It’s been eight years since I last met him. Mom so very often tells me that I have all his traits, the love for music and for food and that I somewhat even look like him.
No matter where the rest of my day was spent, at home assisting mom in ‘cooking’ (carrying spatulas, spoons and forks and laying them by the plates) or shopping or in Kindergarten, my early-mornings were always spent in that tiny, sun-washed verandah of ours, that’s where my day began. That has been the battlefield for so many of my skirmishes, mom chasing me around with breakfast desperate to send me off to school with a full tummy, the make-believe enemies I used to mow down with my Leo gun, the little cats I used to chase around and of course exploring the big, wooden box kept away in a corner.
That particular box used to be of enormous interest to me; made solely out of planks of wood it stood higher than me, stacked away in a corner with cobwebs growing all over it forming a fragile, translucent canopy off which the morning sunlight would sometimes reflect causing a strange and somewhat fascinating glitter, with ghosts of the past peeping out from the dark inside, through small gaps between the wooden planks making up the box and dark and ferociously ugly lizards scrambling in and around the box, it assumed a highly mysterious appearance. What could possibly be inside it? Why would mom warn me never to get near it? All that she had told me was, someone very bad was trapped inside! On many an occasion I had managed to scrape together all the nerve in me to go and try to open the box but the very sight of those slithery, hellishly hideous reptiles and the fear that some hairy, clawed, growling entity might leap out to assault me, quite effectively kept me miles away from it. I was very much at hand when one afternoon some coolies were brought to open up the box and empty the contents, grandma complained it was taking up too much space, hold you breath for what emerged from inside!!!……..
Boxfuls of old documents, a few of my grandpa’s old army daggers and a bunch of his thick army uniforms, so much for all the suspense and tales mom and grandma had woven around it to keep me off it.
No philosophy here but that old verandah acted as my eyes to the outside world, since I wasn’t allowed to venture out much, standing on my toes and peeping outside was a luxury I was allowed. Why men emerging from the mosque wore white caps was way beyond me and why a haggard, filthy looking man downstairs kept wishing strangers ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ and made funny gestures looking up at me also went over my skull, but it was all okay and fun!
Considering the amount of time I’d spent staring at the street across and even at the main road on the other side through which most of the heavy traffic passed, I had acquired a reasonably good idea of who passed on the streets and around what time, there was a rubber-tanning factory somewhere nearby, it gave off a peculiar smell everyday during a particular time, the smell, if not offensive wasn’t too inviting either and I knew exactly what time during the day that smell would start coming. That was the profundity of knowledge I had attained spending countless afternoons standing all alone in the little verandah and peeping outside from there.
It was also in that little space that, probably for the first time I had witnessed the true horrors of a massive fire, this one had a catastrophic potentiality, one morning an LPG gas transportation truck caught fire in the street right across our house, the cylinders immediately started blowing up one by one, the smell was unbearable and so were the deafening explosions, each gas cylinder blast sent chunks of metal shooting off everywhere, the firemen went berserk trying to bring the situation under control as cylinder after cylinder exploded sending roaring echoes everywhere, the flames rising from the truck went sky high disappearing in a plume of black smoke rising higher and higher, I’ve never, till date, ever seen a fire that big and I still do have the images fresh in my memory. I remember being in the verandah, in mom’s arms, seeing people run wildly everywhere screaming and rubbing their burning eyes, it was the gas! Even our eyes burnt but we still had to see, later we were dragged indoors. It was all very amusing to me in a strange way and I felt totally secured in mom’s arms.

A recent couple of years back mom and I paid a visit to our then- landlady, she’s old and ailing, we had been her tenants for very long, my grandma and her were good friends and she knew us well, she wanted to see us. Her house in CIT Road was located right behind our’s. In her house I discovered that the glass windows by the stairway leading up to the old lady’s room offered a clear view of what was left of our erstwhile residence, the part of the house that could be seen through those windows was the passage that connected the kitchen and the bathroom outside to the rest of the rooms inside. Mom kept climbing on but I stopped.
A short, chill flash of pain cut through my heart as my eyes caught the very visions I had grown up seeing, through the dirty and hardly transparent glass I saw a faint image of that very kitchen where mom and grandma had spent innumerable evenings cooking and chatting with Jethu tip-toeing in and out of it carrying something to go with his whiskey, the little room right next to it where dad, mom and I used to sleep, the very room where mom used to sit and teach me nursery rhymes during those long summer afternoons and tell me stories about her younger days and dad taught me and my baby sister how to bat, the very passage up and down which I used to race, being chased by either dad or Jethu or even my sister…..but that’s all these windows would permit! But I was desperate to see the verandah; unfortunately it was totally on another side!!!! I felt weak in the knees and staggered upstairs. Where was my verandah?
Amidst all the; “Oh how grown up you are!” and “It’s been so long…where do you study…how many more years left to go??….”and so on and so forth, my mind kept wandering away, there was only one thing on my mind, I craved and yearned to take one long, last look at my old little dwelling, my sweet little verandah, oh how I craved!
Gathering up enough courage I requested the old lady to let me out to her terrace so I could see our flat properly, she obliged immediately after I fulfilled her condition, that is, of devouring two extra rasgollas!
My being lead upstairs to the terrace triggered off a hushed conversation among the womenfolk in the house to the effect of, “Oh how sentimental the boy is….oh! Just look at him…he just couldn’t forget…after all who does?!”
The terrace was disappointing and all I could see was the roof of the house, something I’d never seen during the entirety of my stay there and am sure neither did dad or anybody else. Finally, after a long examination of directions and their corresponding windows in the house, I was lead into a room that had a lucid view of my tiny little flat.
This is where the final bludgeon fell on me. Our kitchen was broken up and renovated from the inside; the new owners had made it into some sort of a store room!! The little bedroom next to it was now a mass dining room and looked nothing like it did before! And the passage was renovated to make a hallway replete with carpets and chandeliers, a servant told me that the place had been turned into a hall for conducting Muslim weddings. But where was my verandah!? Why could I still not see it? Evidently, there was no window in the house that could show me my verandah.
While leaving as we passed by the old house I stopped the car and got out, the verandah looked just as it used to, from the outside, unpainted and with creepers growing all around the outer wall. A lump appeared in my throat as I realized I was standing in the very same spot where the haggard, old mad-man used to stand, about 10 years back, looking up and making faces at me. I looked around for him; he was nowhere to be seen. CIT road was a different place now; it wasn’t the CIT Road that I had left behind.
My little verandah kept drifting further and further away as we drove away, one moment it was there, the next moment it was gone.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!”, they say. Quite right, this beggar could’ve owned a stable as huge as those in English farms, drumming with Japanese Taiko drummers, kicking out Hugh Hefner and taking his place, owning an entire winery, driving my own Lexus, being named the next potential Booker-bagger after Kiran Desai, name the steed and my stable houses her.
No philosophy here again, but am so prepared to let them all go, let them leave me dream after dream, but only in exchange of one dying wish;
‘Take me back to where I came from, I don’t like this world cause it is too cold here. Let me go back to that very tiny, sun-warmed universe of mine where I belonged, all alone with that mysterious wooden box and the lizards, the small plastic animals and the creepers surrounding me, let innocence and love prevail in that world and in that microcosm of my childhood let me stand tip-toed, peeping out, waiting for a new sun to rise!”