17, Sharda Kunj, Ahmedabad, The house where I spent my formative years in the 1970s. (Photo: Paresh Pandya)
Nostalgia needs a physical context even if it is as rundown as the house above where I grew up in the 1970s. Although over the decades I have lived in close to two dozen houses, it is only when I see this particular one that I feel I am looking at home. That is despite the fact that we did not own it but rented the front two rooms and a kitchen . There is another portion behind it which was rented by my dear childhood friend Jayendra Thakkar and his family.
To the picture’s right, unseen in this frame, is another house owned by another dear childhood friend Paresh Pandya. He is the one who took this picture and uploaded it on Facebook this morning. While this place is full of mostly happy memories, the very first two things that came to my mind when I saw the picture was me skating on the terrazzo-tiled front porch inside the cage-like structure as well as my grandmother Shobhaben sitting on a traditional “Hinchka” or swing and fanning herself with a handcrafted bamboo fan.
The skates were brought by my eldest brother Trilochan when he returned from America in 1972 after finishing his Master’s in Architecture from Harvard as a Fulbright scholar. We were the only people in the neighborhood to have skates as far as I can remember and I was the only one who skated regularly in that small place with considerable facility.
The cage-like structure that became a source of amusement and consternation in the neighborhood for sometime was designed by Trilochan as a way to extend the living space for a family of six in that single bedroom place. We do not see it now but originally the edge of the extension was filled with soil and it had a lovely garden. There were also some climbing vines which had begun to wrap around the cage.
During Ahmedabad’s obscenely hot summers we used to hang thick curtains called “khas ni tatti” made of fragrant dry grass soaked in water. Khas ni tatti would cool the temperature down by several degrees because of the simple principle of water evaporation. One had to keep sprinkling water on the curtains. For someone with a strong olfactory I would consider the fragrance from khas ni tatti among the finest natural smells. I can smell it now.
There is a lot that happened here in this home during the nearly ten years that we lived here. The most enduring for me apart from lifelong friendships were my poetry and passion for physics, both of which struck roots here.
Another somewhat gross memory is my having suffered a terrible attack of chickenpox that covered my entire body, including the tongue, for several days. There are a couple of chickenpox marks on my face, including one in the middle of my forehead. Come to think of it, the attack of chickenpox would be my third instant recall about this house apart from the skates and my grandmother. Of course, those are followed by a whole flood of memories, including the 1971 India-Pakistan war during which we covered the glass panels at the top of the wooden windows with newspapers to block the light at night in the event that Pakistani fighter jets chose to bomb Ahmedabad.
Finally to wrap up, another memory that is vivid today is my no longer existent problem of waking up in the middle of the night utterly terrified several times a week. We used to sleep on the terrace during the summer and the nocturnal fright attacks happened rather frequently. In that weird state I used to see real family members, woken up by my fright, without their heads. That only added to my scare.
If I ever become famous—prospects for which are negligent now—remember to including this home as a place I was significantly formed and deformed, both.