Ruabandha Sector, Bhilai

I don’t have stories from Bhilai. I have only a series of snapshots that, put together, don’t merge neatly into a well-rounded, satisfying story. However, as memories will, they come back at the oddest times and float in the background, hoping that they will occasionally become as important as the present. Some prevail; others, defeated by age or competition, stand less of a chance.

My father was transferred to Bhilai soon after I was born. Consequently, most of my early memories are a blur of names (not so much faces) from Ruabandha Sector, where we lived. There wasn’t much to do, but you could spend hours with neighbours, walk in and out of people’s houses whenever you liked. Bhilai had seasons: searing summers with their hot, dusty loo winds (accompanied by nosebleeds) and biting winters. Importantly, Bhilai had friends.

Conveniently for my mother, our neighbours across the road treated me as one of the family, to the extent that I had my own chair in their house which nobody else was allowed to sit in, irrespective of whether I was around. Legend has it that if I spotted anyone sitting there from our window, I’d walk over to the neighbours’ and request the visitor to move to another seat. (But you know how adults exaggerate.) The neighbours bore this and other acts of tyranny with equanimity. I could always go back there for kadhi-chawal or kaala jaamun.

At the end of the road was a Hanuman temple, to which I accompanied my mother once a week. While she circumambulated the shrine, praying for whichever subject was priority that season (my school admission, her brother’s wedding, a niece’s Board exams), I hopped on and off a narrow platform, pretending that I was a bus conductor. I had barely ever travelled on a bus — Bhilai was so small that we went everywhere on our scooter — and a bus conductor’s life must have held a tremendous amount of fascination for me. Imagine tearing off tickets, jingling a pouch full of coins, blowing a whistle, and calling out names of places that you would otherwise have no reason to go to! I would make you a list of places in Bhilai, but I remember only Risali Sector, Durg station, Maitri Bagh and, of course, Ruabandha.

If I were older, I might have wanted to get out of Bhilai as quickly as possible; for many of us who grew up in small industrial towns, the height of ambition was to move out. At that glorious age, though, all I cared for was Chitrahaar, Madhuri Dixit, and fairy tales. I sat at our bedroom window, watching the grown-up people streaming out of St Thomas College across from our colony, and asked my mother if I would study there one day. Everything was permanent, after all. I was also attracted by the stained-glass windows of the college. St Thomas College coming to mind a few months ago, I looked it up on the internet. To my disappointment, there were no stained-glass windows and the structure is now entirely different from what I remember. Where did imagination end and reality begin? The white horse that flashed by in our Ruabandha bedroom, did it not actually exist?

Thanks to the trickery of the brain, spaces from childhood seem larger than they actually were. This is probably true of our Ruabandha garden, with its rose, ixora, lily, and other flowering plants. I enjoyed watering them with the yellow hosepipe, putting my finger on the opening to experiment with different kinds of showers the plants might enjoy best. I was smart enough not to think that dripping water on dry soil and watching it clump, then bubble up in puddles was a waste of time. When I was given a book of Russian stories, in one of which a couple of boys stood on a hill and tried to decipher cloud shapes, the garden became my hill over a vast valley. The sky grew large and open. The grass was always green and fresh.

And so it goes. What does anyone do with memories, but to use them to escape a writing or imagining rut? There are several other little things I could list, but there will be other writing blocks to overcome.

I’ll close with an incident that shook me out of my cocoon. One afternoon, when my mother was reading in the bedroom, I loafed on the verandah. There wasn’t much loafing to do, with everybody at school or work or taking a nap, and there was barely ever any traffic on our street. In a little while, though, a girl of roughly my age walked by. From the safety of my verandah, I spoke to her; we asked each other our names. To take our new-found friendship forward, she asked:

“Mere saath gobar uthane chalegi?” (Will you come with me to collect cowdung?)

I declined abruptly and ran into the house. The idyll was gone.