Lovely piece, Veena! Here are a few recollections of my childhood I grew up in Bombay and it was a very different Bombay. We lived in a small house in Malad, a distant suburb that my uncle, in a fit of pique, called 'the armpit of Bombay'. My father had a busy medical practice there, which meant he couldn't move very far, and the house was small. It was perennially run over by out of town relatives. My parents, who had to sleep in the kitchen sometimes, under the dining table at other times, and often in the little balcony, depending on how many people were living in our house, desperately wanted a larger house. But the only one my father could afford turned out to be in the middle of a mangrove forest swamp. They took it without another thought.
When we moved there, I was ten. There wasn't much to do. We would play cricket but if the ball went into the mangroves, as it often did, everyone had to chip in to buy a new one, which caused great fiscal problems. And the mangrove forest had its fascinations. It had little waterways in which fisherfolk would row little canoes, fishing for crabs and small fish. They were generally nice, friendly folk who would give us kids rides in their boats if we asked nicely. Sometimes they would charge 25 paise. I remember one time, thanks to the generosity of a visiting uncle, I had an entire rupee in my pocket. The fisherman to whom I offered this was so overwhelmed, he took me all the way to Versova, which Bombay folk will know is a good 15 km from Malad. But through the waterways, it's quite close. My rupee had still not run out, evidently, because he took me out into the ocean. I remember being terrified. I didn’t even know how to swim. The gigantic waves buffeted the canoe around like it was a leaf. My fear seemed to amuse the fisherman. I think he genuinely thought I was having a great time. Eventually we reached shore in Versova, an entire universe away. I didn’t have a penny in my pocket but such was the kindness of Bombay, people gave me rides all the way back home, which is a story in itself. I got off at the Versova jetty and found a BEST bus there. I went to the conductor and asked if this bus went to Malad. "Malad?" the conductor asked, with unconcealed astonishment. I tearfully told him my story. He asked me to get into the bus, which went to Andheri station, stopped another bus theere which went to Malad, and handed me over to that conductor with a brief account of my tale and a "mulga veda aahe" (Marathi for "the boy is crazy"). This other conductor dropped me off to Malad from where I walked home. My parents of course had no inkling. If I had drowned and died, I’m sure no one would have known. This sobering thought sorted me out for good and I started doing better at school. And there were the murders and ‘half murders’. This latter term always fascinated me. A half murder, I now realise, is a failed murder attempt. Back in the day, I thought of a precise, scientific killer who would stab someone just enough to kill him fifty percent, and would spend hours trying to think of what it might mean to kill someone fifty percent. But on with the story. Where were we? Right. The mangrove forests. So the mangrove forest and the fisherfolk’s boats made it an ideal conduit for smuggled gold. These were the glorious days of socialism when the powers of the day had outlawed gold entirely, making gold smuggling the number one industry in the country. Steel making, agriculture, automobile manufacture, all came a distant second, third and fourth. The gold would be brought in big boats which would moor themselves outside the 12 mile Indian waters limit. Small canoes and fishing boats, like the one that had taken me to the ocean, would row there and carry small consignments of gold back, which they would hand over to the landing agent and receive a handsome fee. The gold bars would be sewn into jackets which the fisherman would wear, and hand over to the landing agent, who would then wear it under his shirt and transport it wherever instructed. The personnel involved in this supply chain were called jacketwallahs. Naturally, none of them acknowledged that they were in this trade, but Bombay knew. Whenever a jacketwallah passed by, there would be surreptitious nudges and nods with “jacketwallah” whispered. An uncle of one of the boys in my class was a jacketwallah and he was the coolest guy we knew. He used to wear Ray Ban sunglasses and smoke 555 brand cigarettes. That boy was our window into the dark underworld of the jacketwallahs. Ever so often, the thought would strike a jacketwallah that if he simply disappeared with a jacket, it might be written off as an accidental death. Gold bars are really heavy. If you wear a jacket laden with them and fell into the waters, you would drown without a chance. If I feign a drowning, the ingenious jacketwallah would reason, and laid low for a while, I could trouser all the cash and live happily ever after. Sadly, this almost never worked out. Retribution was swift and brutal and the corpse would usually be laid out in a visible spot in the marshes as an example. Our class mate would whisper “Murder!” and all of us would run to the spot in the lunch break to get our glimpse. Usually, the corpse would have been moved, or if it wasn’t, by the time we reached there would be a lot of policemen who would shoo us away, but once, I saw a murder victim. It was a young man, his face pale, mouth slightly open and no sign of any blood. It was super scary but gave me a thrill nevertheless. Then I realised I knew who he was. I had seen him around school. He was a relative of a boy a year junior to us. It’s strange how death affects us if we know the deceased person, even slightly, as opposed to a stranger. My thrill turned to sadness and I lost my interest in going to see murders and half murders. Thanks and regards Narendra Shenoy On Sun, 14 Apr 2024 at 19:51, Suresh Ramasubramanian via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > Also, lovely article Veena. Spending most of the early 90s in a small > town with 4 digit phone numbers was even more fun of the sort you describe, > so this resonates a lot. > > > > *From: *Silklist <[email protected]> > on behalf of Udhay Shankar N via Silklist <[email protected]> > *Date: *Sunday, 14 April 2024 at 12:25 PM > *To: *Silk List <[email protected]> > *Cc: *Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> > *Subject: *[Silk] Summer holidays, and boredom as creativity enhancer > > Silklister Veena Venugopal has published this powerfully evocative picture > of her childhood: a time before screens and the internet - where the only > constant wass endless stretches of time fading into the horizon. > > > > A highly similar account was from former silklister Ramu Narayan of his > childhood holidays (written ~25 years ago, but the period in question > would've been ~60 years ago), which sadly I can't locate a URL for at this > time. > > > > Reminds me of the saying that "creativity needs constraints". > > > > Any folks here have similar stories to share? > > > > > https://www.thehindu.com/society/charm-80s-school-vacation-leisure-holiday-kerala-veena-venugopal/article68031842.ece > > > > Udhay > > > > -- > > ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) > > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist >
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