The Jungles of my childhood
Living in IAF bases with forests, was a wonderful part of my childhood.
Much of weekends was spent on bicycles, finding amusement in the forest.
I was perhaps six in Tezpur, then a distant base in Assam-I would set off with a friend. Among other things, we would find abandoned old WWII watchtowers, park our bikes and climb up to the observation decks.

It was an interesting game, climbing vertical wooden ladders that hadn’t seen a lick of paint in thirty years, forcing open doors and windows, finding drawers with postcards and once a wooden cupboard that gave up an old brass compass.
And the view, oh the view. It only exists as a memory, not as a picture. In 1981, your bicycle was your primary mobile device.

We would sit there for a while, sipping water as we imagined that place full of men, machines and plans.
Later, we would roll to the library where there was Biggles and the Sportstar, sometimes stealing the poster,
and then go home to admonishments for being out too long, band-aids, conversations, food and sleep.

And then later there was Tambaram, a sizeable walled military town surrounded then by miles and miles of paddy fields and forest,
into which somebody had decided to introduce a population of deer in the not-so distant past.
It was common to get back at night after accompanying parents to a party in in the Mess, everyone tipsy with sleep or wine, and find that ones front yard had been invaded by grazing deer.

School used to be a WW2 barrack, with the runway separated from the playground by a road.
Kirans and HT2s, coming and going all day-if one looked carefully, you could see the pilots, one of whom was my Dad, look left and right as they prepared for touchdown.

And, right opposite, a small but dense forest where the thing to do on Fridays was take some chips and Gold Spot, find the abandoned temple overgrown with creepers and sit there for a while listening to the sounds.

We learned to detect, and allow, cobras to pass, and also to fix our own punctures.
The first video games played on an actual computer in the Flying Instructors School, in a fabulously air conditioned room,
we had little concept of money at 14, and shit hadn’t started getting real yet.
They are good memories.
