A NARRATIVE : LIFE AND TIMES IN BOMBAY

 LIFE AND TIMES IN BOMBAY

My schooling had begun in the small town of Jalandhar, where life was comfortable and familiar. When my father was posted to Bombay, I was admitted to a missionary school. The class had sixty students. Then came our teacher—a tall, strongly built Christian woman of Anglo-Indian origin. She carried herself with confidence and authority, and her presence immediately commanded the attention of the entire class. I remember standing there nervously, clasping my hands and looking at her. I was in Class IV and could hardly speak English. Most of my classmates spoke English as if it were their mother tongue. The teacher did not want to embarrass me. Let her take her own time, she seemed to think. I did not have the courage to tell my parents that I could not cope with the school. I could understand only a few sentences of what my teachers said. In the middle of the night, I would lie awake, dreading the next day. In that moment of great personal pain, I withdrew into myself and nursed my pain in private. I tried to find a way out. The growing silence within me could not remain unnoticed by my father. He was a strict disciplinarian but also an extremely sensitive man. Slowly, he tried to build my confidence. After a hard day at work in a city like Bombay, he would sit with me and translate every sentence of my schoolbooks into Hindi, the language known to me.

 Things began to change, and gradually I found myself becoming part of the mainstream of Bombay life. One day, the teacher gave us a very difficult English grammar assignment for homework. I finished it at night before going to bed. Our class teacher was very strict. The next day, she checked the notebooks of a few students in the front, middle and last rows. None of them had completed the homework in such a short time. She was furious. She shouted at the entire class and ordered all of us to kneel down after class for half an hour. We were then to complete the work before going home. Such were those days—strict teachers . Seeing the teacher's temper, I did not have the courage to tell her that I had already done the homework. So I too knelt down. While everyone else was hurriedly completing the assignment, I sat quietly. After some time, she came over to me with a stick in her hand “What are you doing?” she demanded. I quietly showed her my notebook. She looked at it. The work was excellent—completely correct.

“Oh, my girl! Why didn't you tell me?” she exclaimed. “Go, go home.”

I reached home late. My mother was worried. Father's office was about fifteen kilometers away, and those were the days when telephones were rare. Mother had been waiting near the colony  gate with my younger brother in her lap. When I told her what had happened, she too scolded me for being stupid.I said nothing. That night, my pillow was wet with my tears.

We lived in a rented house in Dockyard Colony. The house consisted of just one room, which served as the kitchen, bedroom, study and drawing room—everything in one. Life in Bombay was hard. My father had many responsibilities, and a major part of his income went towards supporting his parents. Yet he was determined to complete his ICWA. After dinner, which was usually at about seven o'clock—a habit typical of the hills—he would sit down to study and continue late into the night. The tube light was switched off, and a small bulb hanging from a wire provided light over his books. The room was small but neatly kept. There was a hospital-type bed on one side, with a row of utensils and groceries kept underneath. Two buckets of drinking water stood beside the stove. On the other side were two old trunks containing woolens and other unused articles. The trunks were placed side by side to make a makeshift bed. A bedsheet was neatly draped over them, its sides tucked in with safety pins. At night, this became my bed. During the day, I kept my bags and books there. My mother  cooked on the stove. Sometimes, after returning from school, I had to stand in a queue for kerosene oil. It was not an easy life, but it was our life.

At the age of twelve, I began travelling alone by local train. My school was far away. I would cross the vast Dockyard Colony, cross the main road, pass over the railway crossing and then board the local train to Bhandup .I had received some training for this journey. On the first day, my father accompanied me on the train. While returning from school, he told me to get into another compartment and meet him at the station. I often lost my railway pass. My mother kept a two-rupee note in my pocket as a spare. Somehow, on the way back, I would manage to make up for the lost pass.

 One day, I travelled in a first-class compartment with a second-class pass. That very day, the ticket checker caught me. I looked at him and said, with all the confidence I could muster, “The second class was very crowded, and I would have been late to school.”I don't remember what he said after that, but I remember the fear in my heart.

 Bombay was drenched in the monsoon. One day, the class before lunch was Hindi. I watched dark clouds gathering outside the window, and, in the blink of an eye, it started raining. Tan, tan, tan—the school bell rang. The children ran towards the canteen. It was a canteen maintained by the schoolchildren. Crispy, hot chili-and-onion pakoras were being fried.

 I opened my tiffin and was disappointed to see a plain parantha and some cold green vegetable. I searched my pocket and found five paise. I ran to the canteen“Could I have a pakora, please?”

The tall boy in charge, who lived in our colony, laughed. “You can't have a pakora, but you may have some Kuchur Muchur.”Kuchur Muchur were the small, crisp bits of fried batter left floating in the pan after the pakoras had been removed. I took a handful of Kuchur Muchur in my little hands, rolled them into my chapatis and sat alone on a deserted rock to finish my meal. The boy did not give me any chutney. The other girls enjoyed their pakoras with tangy tamarind chutney served on paper plates.

 That evening, I was playing with my friends when the canteen boy came over and began teasing me. “Do you know what she did in school? She purchased Kuchur Muchur—the bits that would otherwise have been thrown away. Anyway, it is a gain for us. We earned five paise from the waste ”. My little heart stopped for a moment. I felt as though I had been accused of theft.Even today, I remember that feeling.

 My school dress was already three years old and was on the verge of tearing. One day, as I was getting into the train, it came apart at the back of my shoulder. It was the twenty-fourth of the month, and father’s  salary day was still several days away. On the second of August, I quietly approached my mother. Papa was preparing for his ICWA examination and had to pay his examination fee. It was going to be a tight month. My mother stitched it—and re stitched it again—until there was no more she could do

Amid the strict discipline at school and at home, there were two beautiful things that I enjoyed doing. We had a very big hall for our drawing and painting classes at school. Lots of colors and paper were available to us free of cost. The drawing teacher was an extremely talented person from West Bengal and a very warm human being. He encouraged me a lot. I spent hours drawing and painting. I became so absorbed in it that I often carried my drawing sheets home. Whenever my father returned from the office, he would find me drawing and coloring. My parents worried that my growing obsession with art might affect my studies. So, in the next class, I was asked to take music instead of drawing. Music, theory classes which I detested!

 The other source of joy was learning French from our beautiful and delicate French teacher. I loved her classes. But French was not to remain a part of my education. My father decided that learning the local language of the state  was more important than learning French. He was right. So I learnt Marathi , the local dialect instead. .Looking back, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had continued with drawing or French. Life, however, had other plans for me.

 Life in Bombay was tough, and our resources were meagre. Yet those four years gave me something that has stayed with me to this day—a collection of memories of struggle, small joys, embarrassment, discipline, courage and discovery. Bombay taught me to adapt. It taught me to travel alone, to manage with little, to face unfamiliar situations and, above all, to find my own way in a world that initially seemed too large and too difficult for me.

 Those were difficult years.

 But they were also the years in which I began to grow.

-Pankaj Mala Bhattacharya

A Narrative : THE LITTLE GIRL

 The  Little  Girl

(Illustration created with AI assistance.)

As I walk down the lanes of memory, I often encounter a little girl walking beside me. She is not quite the girl I remember myself to have been, and yet I know her well. Perhaps she is the inner me—the one who resisted orders, questioned pursuits, and quietly went her own way—while the outer me learned to say yes to almost everything that life placed before her.

I was a serious little girl, more thoughtful than playful, more observant than joyful. I wore my long pigtails and a frock whose hemline had been let down and stitched up so many times that it had acquired a patch or two. Ours was a small, uncomplicated world where things were bought because they were needed, not because they were desired.

   But little girls have their desires.

Whenever I saw girls of my age walking about in high heels, I longed for a pair. I imagined the sound their shoes would make as they walked—tak, tak, tak—and somehow that sound seemed to me the very sound of elegance. One day, the road in front of our house was being repaired. There were drums of tar lying about, and tiny chips of stone were scattered across the road. Looking at them, I suddenly had an idea. I picked up several pieces and carefully chose two that were almost identical in size. Then I took off my plastic slippers, smeared tar on the stones, and stuck one onto each slipper.

                               And then I walked.

                                 Tak! Tak! Tak!

There it was—the sound I had imagined high heels would make.I was wonderstruck. Delighted. Exhilarated. For those few precious moments, I was no longer a little girl in patched-up clothes and plastic slippers. I was wearing high heels!Perhaps this was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with shoes, slippers, and sandals. When I was well settled in life, I had a whole collection of them. But with age, my feet began to ache, and finally I decided that I would rather flaunt my comfortable Kolhapuri slippers.

Shyness was another companion who stayed with me for years. I was shy of crowds, shy of people, shy of unfamiliar places, and, at times, almost shy of the world itself. Yet there was another side to me. If someone made me feel comfortable, did not nag me, and created a warm and welcoming space, I could talk for hours. Perhaps that is why, wherever I went, I created a little world of my own—a cocoon in which I could observe, listen, think, and quietly be myself. I was always fascinated by the thoughts and ideas of others. I listened carefully, absorbed whatever I found worthwhile, and then tried to make it part of my own journey. I did not always follow the world, but I was always willing to learn from it.

   Then there was the night.

I have always been a nocturnal person. While others seemed to come alive with the morning, I found something strangely comforting in the stillness of the night. During the day, I preferred to keep my curtains drawn; at night, I would open them and let the darkness in. Winter, in particular, awakens something in me that I have never been able to explain.Every year, when the sun begins to set on one of those not-quite-cold winter evenings, when the skin first begins to feel dry and the air carries that faint, unmistakable touch of winter, I am overcome by a strange emotion. It is difficult to name. It is not quite nostalgia, not quite longing, and not quite sadness.

It reminds me of the mood of Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper—of a traveller somewhere in the mountains, suddenly hearing a song from a distant land and being moved by something he cannot fully understand. There is a peculiar sense of belonging in that feeling: the feeling of being drawn towards a place that is far away and yet somehow familiar. Perhaps I understood that feeling long before I could put it into words.

 There was nothing particularly glamorous about me.

I could admire women in stiletto heels, their elegant saris falling perfectly around them, their long hair gathered into graceful chignons, their faces enhanced by cosmetics, their beauty sparkling with diamonds. I could look at them with genuine admiration. I could appreciate all that glamour without ever wanting to become part of it.Because when it came to myself, I preferred my favourite faded purple salwar-kameez, a thick cotton dupatta thrown casually over my shoulders, and my trusted Kolhapuris on my perfectly feminine feet. My short hair was usually tied into a little bunch at the back—a hairstyle that probably had no recognised name in the vocabulary of hairdressers. A bag hung from my shoulder, more often unzipped than zipped. Inside were a few books related to my work, a pen or two, and several handkerchiefs that somehow found their way into the bag every day and remained there, day after day, without ever being taken out. I was myself.

Rumi, the great mystic poet, said, “What you seek is seeking you.” I have often thought that I am not much of a seeker. I have led a quiet life, never chasing after too many things or searching restlessly for what may lie beyond my reach.But perhaps I have been seeking all along—only in my own quiet way. I have sought comfort in the night, wonder in nature, companionship in books, beauty in simplicity, and meaning in memories. And perhaps, without my knowing it, these things were seeking me too.

Maybe that is why, even after all these years, I still find that little girl walking beside me. She reminds me that some of the most precious things we seek do not arrive from outside. They grow quietly within us, waiting for us to recognise them.Perhaps the little girl was never lost.

 Perhaps she was simply seeking the woman I would one day become.

- Pankaj Mala Bhattacharya