Like It Happened Yesterday (2 page)

Our family lived in Burla, a very small, peaceful town situated beside the river Mahanadi in the western part of the state of Orissa. Hirakud Dam, once known as the world’s longest dam, was just four kilometres from the place where I lived. Because of its importance, Hirakud Dam had become a landmark for Burla—a dam which the little, sleepy town was very proud of.

If you ever happen to be in Burla, you will see this 4.8-kilometre-long dam that connects Burla on one side with the Hirakud town on the other. On either side of the dam, in both towns, there are two tall constructions, which serve as lighthouses. The one in Burla is called Jawahar Minar, named after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who, people say, came to visit the site while the dam was being built.

From the top of the Jawahar Minar, the view of the dam is breathtaking. The length of the dam holds back the huge water reserve of the river Mahanadi on the left, releasing it partially through the canals, from which the water passes through the gates on the right and flows further east, right through the Burla town. Giant pulleys along the length of the dam and a high-voltage electricity plant fill the scene in the east. In the south-west, there is a scattering of green islands rising out of the water. Looking in this direction, it appears as if there is no end to the water—it is hard to make out the line on the horizon, miles away, where the water meets the sky. The sound of the running turbine is the loudest noise one can hear. One can see the whirlpool of churning water as it drops down the open gates and goes ahead to rotate the turbine. On the east of this, stands my beautiful town Burla.

Back in my childhood days, everything about Burla was small. Anyone who owned a Maruti 800 was considered extremely rich. For what it was worth, only a handful of people were privileged enough to have this car in their garage. The town was so small that one could easily travel from one corner of it to another in less than half an hour, that too on a bicycle.

In spite of being tiny, Burla was pretty self-sufficient. We had just one market to shop from, which primarily was divided into two sub-markets. People used to call one the ‘Kaccha Market’ and other the ‘Pakka Market’. There wasn’t
any difference in the infrastructures of these two markets, which could have been the reason why they were separated by names. The only difference was that the Kaccha Market was primarily a place to buy vegetables; while, just one hundred metres ahead, the Pakka Market was made up of a range of kiraana, grocery stores and clothes’ stores. Come Sunday and the Kaccha Market would turn into the most populated area of the entire town. A number of small trucks and jeeps would bring in fresh vegetables in the morning, and everyone, including my father, would go to the Kaccha Market to buy them. But if someone had to buy anything big, like a home appliance or furniture, he had to travel to Sambalpur, the nearest city, because a wide variety of such things was usually not available in Burla.

The town was also treated as the knowledge hub of Orissa. In Burla there were Veer Surendra Sai (VSS) Medical College, one of the most well-known medical colleges in Orissa, and a well-to-do engineering college called University College of Engineering (UCE). Apart from the engineering and medical institutes, we also had a branch of Sambalpur University. As far as the primary and secondary education was concerned, there were three different schools, each of them affiliated to a different language medium—Hindi, Oriya and English. My parents had admitted me to the English-medium school. It was called Sri Sathya Sai Kiddies Abode.

Burla was a secular town and had religious institutions for
all the religions. Temples of Hindu gods, including Lord Ram, Lord Jagannath and Lord Krishna, provided the religious platform for the majority of the people. Every day a lot of devotees would visit these temples to pay homage to their deities. The biggest temple in the town was of Lord Krishna. It was well known as the Krishna Mandir, though it had idols of other gods and goddesses as well inside it. The yearly Janmashtami celebrations were held with great enthusiasm at the temple. Apart from the Hindu temples, there was a mosque at the Kaccha Market, a church near the road to Hirakud dam and a gurdwara right at the geographical heart of the town. And this was where I lived with my family.

My father worked in the gurdwara as a priest and our house was located within the gurdwara’s complex. We were a family of four—my mother, my father, my younger brother and I. The entire complex was a vast rectangle, with the central portion of it taken up by the gurdwara building, surrounded by an open courtyard on three sides. Beyond the courtyard on both sides, a series of seven living quarters marked the boundary of the area. These quarters were owned by the gurdwara management, and the rent from them was one of the sources of revenue for the gurdwara.

To the front of the complex was the gateway to enter, and on the right corner was our house. Of course, it wasn’t a house we owned, but a service house offered to my father
because of his job at the gurdwara. It wasn’t a well-planned house, but a good enough arrangement of brick and mortar, divided into four rooms. If you saw it, you would know what I mean when I say that it was barely meant to provide shelter. At the entrance itself was the kitchen; but because of the three chairs placed against one of the walls, it also served as a sitting room when the women from our neighbourhood occasionally turned up for a leisurely chat with my mother. The arrangement worked well for Mom, as she could cook while chatting with her friends.

Our second room was where we used to spend most of our time, and so, technically, we called it the living room. This room, every night after 9, turned into our bedroom. I guess I was in Class III when Dad bought a black-and-white Rohini Deluxe television set encased in a brown wooden box. It had shutters as well, which we would pull down at night and pull up again in the morning. It had slots for storing twelve channels, though there was only Doordarshan that all the antennas in Burla could tune to—so the rest of the channel slots were just a wastage of TV memory. Ever since the TV was brought into that room, we had started spending most of our time in there. I remember Dad watching the Hindi broadcast of Doordarshan news at 9 p.m., after which my brother and I used to watch serials along with Mom.

On one side of this room was a wooden cot which had an in-between kind of size. Its width was more than that of a
single bed, but less than that of a double bed. A wooden dressing table and a multipurpose wooden table occupied the rest of the room. The table was primarily a study table, but we also used it as a dining table for all our meals. Mom even used to iron our clothes on it late in the afternoon.

When I look back, I see how we needed only a few things to keep ourselves happy. Apart from the bed and the table, our living room had a lot of free space. A three-feet-tall and five-feet-wide trunk served as the storage for all our requirements, for the winter and otherwise—blankets, mattresses, bed sheets, cushions and a lot of winter clothes like sweaters and things that we needed to use after long intervals. On the other side of the room, there was a closet with a glass door, full of religious books that my father used to read. My brother and I used the remaining space in that room to dance, fight and do all sorts of crazy things.

The last room was not quite a room, but actually functioned as a store. It was full of wooden logs to support the intermittent construction of the gurdwara building. Against one wall, there was a wooden rack holding large containers of rice, pickles and flour that Dad would have managed to get dirt cheap as part of a bulk purchase. A rope ran from one corner of the room to another. This was used to hang out clothes after Mom would have ironed them, for we didn’t have an almirah to keep our clothes in.

Our house was tiny, simple and yet complex in its
arrangement. We loved to live there primarily because of the vast courtyard outside, where my brother and I used to play. No one in the entire Burla enjoyed as big a playground as we used to.

My brother and I had rhyming names. It was quite common in many families to do so. While my parents named me Ravinder, they named my brother Jitender. But the usage of these names was only limited to our school. At home, and, for that matter, in the rest of the town, we were known by our shorter names. I was called Rinku and my brother was called Tinku—rhyming pet names as well!

Tinku was two years younger to me, and, by the time he was getting admitted to nursery, I was getting into Class I in the same school. One of our oldest pictures—in which we are together for the very first time—goes back to this time. It shows us perched on a two-seater red tricycle at a photo studio. A day I can still clearly recall …

It was a Sunday and Mom had got us ready by the noon. She made us wear the new clothes she had bought only a day before. The two of us looked nice. We had first looked appreciatively at each other and then stared at our own selves in the mirror. As soon as we were about to leave, Mom applied some talcum powder on our faces with her handkerchief. I guess that was the make-up sure to make us look fairer!

After that, we proudly climbed on to Dad’s bicycle. In no time, we were at a photography store in the Kaccha Market. We had been all excited knowing the fact that someone was going to take our pictures with a camera! It made us feel special, and, on top of it, our new clothes made us feel extra-special.

At the photographer’s studio, Dad shook hands with the studio owner and exchanged a few words. All this while, Tinku and I were helping each other to tuck our T-shirts in and rearranging the creases of our half-pants.

When Dad called, we both ran inside the studio with him. We looked around wide-eyed. For us little boys, it was an amazingly beautiful place, full of the possibilities of all sorts of adventure. Till then, we’d only seen a studio from outside, and this one offered so many things to explore!

There were big stands with white umbrellas on them inclined at different angles. While the corners of the rooms were dark, the centre was fully illuminated with the light reflecting off those umbrellas. There was a lot of light in
that space, much more than we would have seen at our home.

My brother and I ran around in the studio and explored everything. There were wires running here and there on the ground. The wall in front of us had a number of background options. They were a sort of curtains. We pulled out a few to see how they looked, and then pulled out a few more. There was a dressing table with a mirror in one corner, along with a small plastic comb that had a few missing teeth, some talcum powder and a few lipsticks. All those items smelled bad, so I kept them back as soon as I lifted them. There was a huge carton in another corner of the room. It was way above our height, so we could not find out what was in there. At that time we didn’t know that the box contained something that would change our lives forever!

Soon, the door opened and someone walked in. He said hello to us. There was a camera hanging from his neck. He was our cameraman. He was paying us so much attention because we were special for him. And, sure enough, he told us that he had got something for us. While we wondered what he was talking about, he walked towards the big carton at the other end of the room and pulled out a red kids’ tricycle for us.

‘Oh, wow!’ Tinku shouted. Then, as soon as the cameraman placed the tricycle at the centre of the room, he ran to grab his seat on it.

I too ran after Tinku. We were about to enter into a
scuffle when the cameraman intervened and shifted Tinku to the back seat. I loved the cameraman when he did so! Tinku protested, but the cameraman told him that the one who would sit on the back seat would look better in the photo. I silently thanked the cameraman for being secretly on my side. So my brother took the rear seat without protest, while I sat in front and jammed my feet into the pedals. Somehow, the front seat with the handle in my hands made me feel more powerful and special!

Sitting on that tricycle, with the umbrella lights focused on us, we were the centre of attention for the cameraman and our father. We took a considerable amount of time to settle down well. It wasn’t easy to stay put in one spot, or to hold a pose. But the cameraman was an expert. He kept on guiding us and then suddenly he said, ‘Smile karo baccha log,’ and we did, and he clicked us.

But our smiles did not last long. They vanished as soon as we realized that this place wasn’t a toy shop selling that cute red tricycle to us. It was only a photo studio, and that tricycle was a prop belonging to the studio owner. We never wanted to get up from that tricycle. We wanted to pedal it down to our home.

‘Daddy, asi eh chalaa ke ghar javaange na?’ [Daddy, we are going to ride this to home, right?] Tinku asked, trying to establish our claim over it.

Dad laughed along with the cameraman and explained to us, while pulling us out, that it wasn’t our tricycle to take
home. As soon as Tinku heard this, he gripped the front seat and almost dug his feet into the ground, retaliating at Dad’s attempt to pull him out. While I’d understood the truth and got off, my brother was screaming and shouting. Dad tried to scare him with his big eyes and also raised his forefinger to his lips and said, ‘Shhhhh …’ It was a warning for him to stop shouting and behave himself.

And thankfully, in no time, his melodrama was over.

I held Tinku’s hand in mine as the two of us followed Dad out of the room. The red tricycle remained in the centre of the room, alone, surrounded by the focused umbrella lights. It was heartbreaking to leave that beautiful toy there.

But I will never forget my younger brother’s eyes in those last moments, when Dad was making the payment at the counter on the other side of the room. As the two of us stood next to Dad, another family with two kids entered the studio. The same cameraman led them to the same tricycle. The kids joyfully ran towards it and climbed up the seats of the tricycle, which was only a few moments back Rinku and Tinku’s tricycle—
our
tricycle. The parents lovingly adjusted the positions of their kids on the tricycle. It was as if, right in front of our eyes, those kids were celebrating their victory.

My brother stood calmly and watched everything without blinking. I watched that family, and then turned to look at my brother. I felt protective of him. It hurt me that he had wanted something so much, and yet he couldn’t have it.

Soon Dad was through with the payment and asked us to follow him back home. I remember saying those final words to my brother as I continued to hold his hand, ‘Ae taa chhoti tricycle hai. Asi taa vaddi cycle lavaange!’ [This is a small tricycle. We will buy a bigger one!] It was my way of consoling him. With that, I tightened my grip over his hand and we walked out of the studio.