A Smorgasbord of Little Events

Exceptional Does Not Mean Big!

Photo by Julian Christ on Unsplash

1970s Jamshedpur. Long, hot days and warm nights. So warm, that my father poured buckets of water on the floor to cool it down and we slept on mattresses. There used to be a light on late at night in the house next door and the bouganvilea ouside the window made shadows of leaves and flowers and branches on the bedroom wall. Years later, we had our first AC - a black, solid-looking Voltas - drawing all of us into one room on summer afternoons, drinking Mulberry sharbat. I still wonder about the origins of that Mulberry bush behind the kitchen!

One year, there was a new type of flower growing in the garden, all around the edges of the lawn. They were like miniature tulips in pink, purple, lavender. And climbing up and down the stems and eating the leaves, were the most pretilly coloured, plump catterpillars. Dozens of them. Black with neon markings in multi-colour. Oh, that such beauty is possible in the world! The catterpillars were soft-bodied, not poky-prickly like centipedes with whom I had also had some close encounters! And one day after breakfast, I discovered in the garden an upturned cane basket with a live scorpion trapped inside. The old gardener obligingly lifted the basket for a moment to let me take a peek at it.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Afternoons of discovery in the room on the roof of my grandparents’ house in Allahabad. A wooden cupboard with glass panes - what was called a ‘showcase’ in those days. Inside, on the dusty shelves, little elephants made of ivory. Sandalwood penknives. Glass paperweights with a splash of colour in the centre. Ribbons of bright blue and green and pink, frozen forever inside the thick glass for a little girl to find and hold in her hand, fascinated.

Then there is all the wonder of our jungle trips. We travelled deep into the unknown, the trees whispering secrets all around us, the air becoming cooler and greener as the jungle got denser. Suddenly, we would come upon a clearing with our jungle abode in the centre and a moat all around it to keep elephants at bay. One night, sure enough, a herd came calling and we stood silently and still on our side of the moat, watching the giant creatures and scarcely daring to breathe until they slowly turned around and walked away through the grass.

One day, as our Jeep negotiated a muddy path crossed by a jungle stream, it got well and truly stuck. There was a second vehicle behind us, that gallantly drove on, trying to push us out of the mud with its force, only managing to get stuck right behind us. So there we all sat, looking out at the wilderness, when we saw that the dip in the road where we were stuck was filled with dozens and dozens of small butterflies flitting about, looking curiously at these ugly creatures that had suddenly descended upon them!

Perhaps the wild followed us. Many years later, in Pune, our garden was overrun with tall grass and bushes growing wild. My parents liked it like that - a landscaped garden was not their style. They liked to have little creatures all around and birds twittering about in thick foliage. Until the day my mother spotted a family of Cobras airing themsleves under one of the bushes. The grass was promptly cut short but no amount of reassuring our friends would work - we were left with very few visitors to entertain!

Then participating innocently in what most urban youth would now deem as risky as a round of Russian Roulette: a Bengali-style arranged marriage in Kolkata. We sweated like pigs in the small, non-AC hall, but everyone was happy. Little girls ran around in frilly frocks. Little boys got in everyone’s way. There was marigold and rajnigandha everywhere. People guzzled the hilsa in mustard sauce and the mutton rezala as if there was no tomorrow. And of course there was that magic dish of all Bengali weddings: the disappearing fish-fry. Each time that the dish was re-filled, the fish-fry disappeared again!

Photo by Alexander Aashiesh on Unsplash

But can anything else bring the wonder that comes with a baby! “Say hello to Daddy!” her Pediatrician had said while showing her for the first time to my husband, in that deep drawl that we would come to trust over the eighteen years that he looked after her. Three years later, we watched the news with our neighbours as the World Trade Centre was attacked. While we witnessed a terrible history being written, and the world that we would leave our childen being pushed to new heights of terror and prejudice, little C, finding all the adults’ attention diverted from her, ran into the neighbours’ flat, ate chocolate from their fridge and jumped with gay abandon on the bean bag in their living room. By the time she turned twenty-five, she would take in her stride a couple of events that roll around only once in a hundred years or more - the Mumbai floods of 2005 and Covid.

Photo by Teresita Biafore on Unsplash

And how many can claim the honour of being personally escorted by security guards to the boarding gate at a foreign airport! When I got off the plane at Schiphol, Amsterdam, for a connecting flight a few years ago, all I could think about was Anne Frank. How I was breathing the air that she had breathed from the secret annex. How she never stopped believing that she would be out of there soon. That there was certainly enough goodness in man to put a stop to the madness. That she would return to her old life and be able to go to school again. And then I had found that I had walked towards the exit to the city, and they would not let me get back to where I was supposed to be - a pack of young men in black, with guns stuck in their belts. They held me there until I almost missed my flight. And then finally they let me go with a couple of escorts. I had to run to board my connecting flight. God bless the lady sitting next to me for soothing me as I collapsed into my seat, waiting for my heartbeat to come back to normal!

Photo by twinkal solanki on Unsplash

And imagine how much gratitude you would feel if your eyesight was dwindling and one fine day you woke up with a pair of new eyes! This is what happened to me when I had cataract surgeries in both my eyes in 2018. I walked up and down our balcony on the second floor, looking and looking at the trees outside, noticing things that I had not noticed before – squirrels chasing each other all day long, little birds that flitted from branch to branch and tiny yellow flowers that rained on the street below. What had been a broad, green expanse for me now revealed intricate details that my new eyes drank in and loved. And, “I can read again, Doctor!!” I said exultantly on my follow-up visit, and doctor and patient beamed at each other over the fancy instruments. “I am so happy for you,” he said quietly.

Let no one say I am not leading an exceptional life!

Parts of this essay were first written with friends in the Ochre Sky writing community.