A finance expert writes a novel to reveal a warmer side with a nostalgic ode to childhood

Our beautiful little bungalow had more or less the same configuration as the one in Ambala, though the drawing room was in a far corner of the courtyard. A large peepul tree (Ficus religiosa) stood in another corner. Although we were happy at first to have a magnificent tree right in our courtyard, the tree would turn out to be a bit of a nuisance as it would litter the courtyard perennially with little rotting figs and dry leaves. But when beautiful new purple leaves burst out before the rains each year, tender as a newborn baby’s bottom, we didn’t mind the mess the tree made the rest of the year.

To me the major disadvantage of the tree was that it was simply not climbable, what with its trunk and branches mostly gooey with white, viscous milk.

We also had a kitchen garden and a majestic mango tree right next to it, overlooking the drawing room. Many would be the hours of my pre-teen years spent atop this tree with a host of friends, with even Urmila joining us from time to time, doing our homework, reading comics and eating raw mangoes straight off the tree, with the juice from the raw fruit causing blisters around our mouths.

Father’s workplace in the Military Engineering Services (no one referred to it as Money Eating Services; at least not those days) was right next door to our residence, where he had taken charge as Assistant Garrison Engineer. However, as he was working in a field area, he was issued a 26-inch green Avon bicycle and a beaten-up, tarpaulin-covered Willy’s jeep. The neighbouring houses, about twenty-odd two-room tenements, located about 150 yards away, were occupied by other junior civil officials of the MES. This arrangement was called a mohalla. Here I would forge a significant childhood friendship and also carry away a lifetime of memories, many also the cause of my miseries, of which I’ll tell you by and by, if you stay with my narration to the end.

From the residence, our school was about two-and-a-half miles away, and we had to leg it to and fro on a daily basis. The schoolbags were truly heavy, weighing anywhere between four and six seers each.

By now there were a good ten of us from the mohalla going to Luthra Academy. Typically, we carried our canvas bags on our backs with the slings going over our heads, mimicking the mountain-folks, backs bent. But from time to time, for variety, we would break a fat stick off an aak plant that grew in abundance on our way to school, sling five or six of our bags on the stick, and then by twos – one person at each end of the stick – take turns to carry the load for a few hundred yards, while the others enjoyed the pleasure of not having to carry their bags.

The route to the school involved walking parallel to a sub-sub-canal which flowed through our mohalla and then through the grounds of the adjacent Government Boys’ School, crossing the opening in the canal (where we had first alighted, coming in from Ambala), climbing the far side of the embankment and walking parallel to the canal over the ridge for some 300 yards, and then turning left on a busy road to Gandhi Nagar. A mile ’s walk on the road, a right turn and another 400 yards brought us to the school.

Jammu, like Ambala, was a place of extreme heat and cold. Summers were unbearably hot and winters freezing cold. The school timings were 7.00 am to 1.30 pm in the summer, and 9.30 am to 4.00 pm in the winter. We had to make it to school in time. Reaching late could entail having to wait at the gate and being caned by the principal.

Fortunately, winters meant having to bathe only once in two or even three days, in buckets of water heated with an electric immersion rod. Our family immersion rod, with its spiral aluminium-cased heating coil at one end and its discoloured green plastic casing on the other, had seen repeated episodes of burnouts, and its innards had been repeatedly tinkered with until the plastic was black in parts and melting. One day, in the middle of an intense winter, it decided to die on the family for good in a final spectacular display of sparks, which also melted a part of the upper end of the coil itself through the aluminium casing.

Father, who took his dual-diplomas seriously and fancied himself a hands-on electrical and mechanical engineer, fabricated a home-made immersion heater by wrapping a naked electric heater coil over a cylindrical piece of wood, fastening each end of the wire to two embedded nails at the two ends, to which were also connected the two red and black wires of an electric cable leading to the electric socket. Clearly, no one had advised Father not to try such things at home.

This deathly contraption was suspended in a metal bucket full of water kept atop a small wooden stool! That none of us was ever electrocuted by this gadget has provided me with ready testimony that miracles do happen. Or at least we had learnt quickly to navigate our way around the dangerous contrivance.

On the days we weren’t bathing, we would just scrub our face, hands and legs in half a bucket or less of lukewarm water, hastily dress up and snatch a quick breakfast – which had to include a hateful raw egg beaten into a glass of milk as a prophylactic against the frequent colds we caught – before trudging to Luthra Academy. On Sundays, we would each be handed a loofa – dried bottle gourd – plucked from the lifeless vine in the kitchen garden. We were expected to scrub the backs of our hands and feet – which would be all crinkled up in lacy designs of dust, dryness and disregard – raw.

If the long summer evenings afforded us fun in the form of extended hours of play, the short winter evenings had a character of their own. The sun would fairly set by 5.30 pm, and the rapidly darkening evening air would be darker still, thanks to the dense smoke emitted by coal-chulhas, which were chief means of cooking, both for homes as well as the communal tandoors, where one could take the family dough to have tandoori rotis made, and what’s more, pay in rotis, like one for every ten rotis baked. The home coal-chulhas were called angithis, and were also the source of heating for our bedrooms. Once the coal in the angithi was burning bright, it would be moved indoors to the kitchen or bedroom, depending on whether it was for cooking or for keeping us warm.

At around 6.30 pm, by when it would be pitch-dark, and we were back from play, we were expected to torture ourselves by washing our hands and feet in ice-cold water (these were mere subsidiary washes, not warranting hot or even warm water) and sit down for homework on a blanket spread on the ground. This was prime homework time for Urmila and me. Even Supriya would join us with her colourful books. We would often sit around Mother – who would usually be busy knitting a sweater for one of us – doing our work and eating peanuts out of shells roasted in hot sand, and revaris, which were essentially sesame seeds mixed with hot jaggery and rolled into little pellets the size of goat- droppings but a tad flat. When Mother wasn’t knitting, she would be chopping vegetables or cleaning the rice or one of the many lentils as her brood did their own thing.

Another feature of the Satwari landscape in general was an abundance of a weed called bhang. In time I would learn it was the cannabis plant.

At the time we were often amused to see many workers of the sub-staff category rubbing the leaves between the palm of one hand and the thumb of the other and sniffing or licking the resulting paste.

It was also in Satwari, soon after we had moved there, that I heard frequent references to Sputnik in conversations among the adults. Mother seemed to be particularly fascinated by this. I also heard from her that a certain dog called Laika, the first ever pooch to be put in space, had died in space aboard Sputnik 2. I had understood that Sputnik was a Russian rocket – evidence enough to me that Russia was the supreme and most advanced power in the world. I had no doubt that if Russia and America fought, Russia would whip America’s arse clean, just as our Dara Singh could whip King Kong’s, as my father had assured me when I had asked him a pointed question once. I was familiar with rockets, especially as my father had shown me what they were during the Diwali just gone by. He told me that Sputnik was more or less the same, just bigger – maybe as tall as the mango tree opposite our house – so it could go much further and faster, all the way to the stars. This sounded incredible, but logical enough.

Excerpted with permission from Return To Jammu, V Raghunathan, HarperCollins India.