The Beginning of the End of Innocence
We heard the cow mooing angrily and galloping down the dusty path long before we saw it. A hysterical female voice shrieked at us to get out of the way. Our heads flung around wildly, trying to locate which direction the cow was coming from, as we ran helter-skelter away from the dust cloud.
We were a gaggle of seven-year-olds on the way back home from school and, for a few minutes, the connoisseurs of pure, unadulterated panic. We regrouped in the middle of the path in the wake of the errant cow and her frantic owner. Still shaking, we looked around uncertainly, mutely debating whether to continue on or wait for evidence of the all-clear.
The rest of the details are lost in the recesses of my memory, but suffice to say we all made it back home safely that evening.
The two years we spent in Kuppam, in the Chitoor district of Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s southern states, could well belong to someone else. It all seems so far away in distance and time now, except that while large patches are missing from my memory bank, certain memories still clamor for attention. There is no pattern or time table for when they come and go. But it is also this distance of time and space, and conscious effort, that makes the memories malleable, amenable to being organized.
During our time in Kuppam, I was six and seven, my brother was two and three, my dad was a bank manager and my mother was the underpinning that held our itinerant life together. We moved every two years, following my dad wherever his job postings took him.
For the first time and really the only time in all the years we moved from town to town, our home was right on top of my father’s office. The entire ground floor was the bank and the entire top floor was our home. The house was massive. Certainly larger than anything we had lived in up to that point. Huge bedrooms, a large living room, a separate dining room, a fantastic kitchen and sprawling terraces in the front and in the back.
There were two problems as far as I can remember. One, the fact that we were right on top of my father’s workplace and two, the monkeys.
First, the house. In those days, during the late 70s, most homes did not boast of mixer-grinders. My mom ground batter for her savory pancakes (dosas), rice and lentil cakes (idlis), and made spice powders the old-fashioned way — with stone grinders, by hand. The first few times she tried it, an office boy from the bank came bounding up the stairs, quaking in his bare feet, probably cursing his fate at having to convey an angry message from his boss to the boss’ wife. The grinding made a godawful noise downstairs. Plus my dad could not have relished the thought of everyone knowing what was cooking for dinner that night or breakfast the next day.
Second, the monkeys. They were everywhere. They were bold. Sometimes they were aggressive. It was a delight to watch them go about their life — taking care of the babies, grooming each other (although it was slightly gross when they ate the lice), fighting, playing. But you could never tell when they would get aggressive. So when the monkeys came out, we stayed in.
And for the only time ever in all my academic life, I went to school for two years in the servants’ quarters, stables and barns of one of the lesser known palaces of India.
To my seven-year-old eyes, the front of the palace was an awesome sight although years of neglect had rendered the edifice a mere shadow of a palace — with pock-marked walls, broken doors, crumbling steps — whose former glories could only be imagined. Countless small arches in the deep yellow exterior walls offered a peep into mystifying darkness. It was made very attractive by the fact that we were forbidden from setting foot in the palace. It was still occupied by a lone man, a descendant of royalty we were told, and he hated having the kids mess up his space with food crumbs. So we reluctantly stuck to the back of the palace, which I must say was pretty memorable on its own.
The Yvonne Douglas Primary English School (which we pronounced ‘Why One Douglas,’ Yvonne being a very strange name in India, indeed) was started in the memory of the wife of Mr. Douglas, a British expat whose first name I don’t think I ever knew. The only English-medium school in town, it was run by Mr. Douglas’ two children. As far as I knew, all Mr. Douglas did was walk around the school with a fly swatter in his hand, swinging it wildly at insects big and small, real and imagined.
Ms. Douglas spent ten minutes every day during assembly teaching us the difference in pronunciation between words starting with ‘v’ and ‘w’. She taught us to bite our lower lip for the ‘v’ and pucker our lips into a circle for the ‘w’.
One day, she noticed one of the male students wearing all black. The boys were supposed to wear khaki shirts and shorts. So she called him out and asked him why he was wearing black. The boy looked confused and said, “I am wearing khaki-colored clothes.” Back and forth they went, she demanding an explanation and he repeating his assertion. Then it finally dawned on one of the Indian teachers — ‘khaki’ means ‘crow’ in Telugu, the official state language of Andhra Pradesh. So the boy’s family had dutifully bought him black-colored clothes.
The Kuppam years are also notable because I remember lying to and manipulating my parents for the first time.
The town had one big cinema tent. The entire town, rich or poor, congregated under that one tent for movies big and small, for the super hits, the also-rans and everything in between. One day a friend asked if I wanted to go with her to watch a movie the whole town was buzzing about. To a seven-year-old it was mighty tempting. I ran up to ask my mother. She said I could not. So the friend suggested I ask my dad. My dad, who never involved himself in any of these sorts of decisions, absent-mindedly nodded his head and I was off. I wish I could tell you that I was influenced, nay corrupted, by my friend, but that would not be the entire story. All I could see at that moment was me in that movie tent. I did not think about obedience or consequences.
When I returned home later that evening, my parents were waiting for me. Their eyes brimmed with disappointment and sadness. I remember very clearly being stood there in the living room and handed down THE RULE. If one of them said no, I was not to go running to the other. I was to simply assume that the other would say no too. And they stuck to it. They never played one against the other. As far as the children were concerned they were one.
Most of all, those two years are memorable for that idyllic small-town life in India that is the stuff of sepia-tinted novels — the weekly village fair (santhe) was a big to-do where farmers and traders from the near-by villages congregated in town; when my brother became ill, we had to get him on a train and take him to Bangalore, the nearest city, because there was no one in Kuppam who could tell why his fever was not going down; a carpenter who lived and worked across the street from our house just took it upon himself to make a toy bullock cart for my brother; summer nights were spent under the stars on the terrace or whatever open space was available nearby; festivals were a communal affair — everyone had their little rituals at home, but then congregated in a central place to celebrate them together; bicycles and mopeds were popular, but four-wheelers were rare — everyone just walked wherever they needed to get to.
We moved to a lot of other cities and towns after Kuppam. Each comes packaged with its own memories. But for me our time in that town signifies the beginning of the memories of me as a being separate from my parents, as someone who experienced a set of events distinct from anyone else in my family, and was able to recall them years later.
