It's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish... this month and I'm still with essays. Or memoirs, if you prefer. But there's a slight difference this time, more about that later. Here's my entry for Red Wheelbarrow...
Wheeled In, Wheeled Out
Memory is a cloud on a Himalayan slope,
slinking in through the open shutters and leaving everything misted with a
certain coolness, bedewed with moisture. Memory is a jewellery box, an old
radio, a cigarette holder between gnarled fingers; it is a suburban house that
morphs from cage to polestar depending on who is looking and if they are inside
or out. It is a mossy pump housing against which pinwheel flowers
bloom. A rockfall on NH 31 somewhere near Sevoke, the Coronation Bridge
on its peripheral vision. The smoke from a grandmother’s coal fired stove
stinging early morning eyes. And it’s also a decrepit wheelbarrow that Matthias
the gardener wheels in from somewhere with a heap of suspiciously smelly black
lumps.
Memory is forever a smell – of animal
dung fertiliser, of petrichor, the rains hitting parched ground in a needle
thin, sharp sheet of silver. Of the bushfire crackling across the drive from
the windows, of your mother spraying you playfully with Revlon’s Charlie as she
completes her dressing to go out. Everybody was crazy about that perfume in
those years caught between kiddiekidness and grownuphood. The Harmattan haze
like teased out cotton candy falling on the bougainvillea, just like that
Himalayan cloud only a different colour, a different smell, and dry as a
bleached bone.
From Dover Lane to Delhi. And then wheeled across several borders and seas nearly 7000 kms away, only the world
hadn’t gone metric yet so it was all miles still. When your mother told you
that you all would have to leave Delhi - your school, your friends, your entire
hitherto familiar world, you don’t remember being overly dismayed. Which was
strange for a child, now that you come to think of it more than four decades
later. But the bonds loosen automatically as soon as another home, another
city, another life of a different texture dawns as a possibility on the
horizon. That is what it has been like for nearly all the moves, bar
one.
Memory is the name of a friend from a
childhood city, a fixed telephone line recalled from another one, the exact
sound of your father’s car turning into the driveway when you were
thirteen. It is an atlas first and later a spinning globe, seablue
and mudbrown and icewhite and all the little countries marked out in different
colours – India in pale lime, Nigeria in peach. Memory is a strange sequence of
numbers and words – 18/68B Dover Lane and E-79 NDSE Part I and E-823 C.R. Park
and 46, New GRA. That small white painted sign listing next to the culvert
and the green 46 stencilled on it - memory is even tinier than the footprint of
that sign, but still as huge as the 46+ years that have lapsed since you saw it
first.
 |
| Parents and I in Maiduguri, early 70's. |
***
Airports in the early 70’s were more
basic everywhere, at least those you travelled through. No sleekness or
softness anywhere, no gleaming granite floors, no fancy lighting. Signages were
cruder, functional. No barcodes on baggage - bags got misplaced regularly. A
collection of hard chairs and hard floors, uncomfortable seating arrangements
in less-than-plush transit and departure lounges. Planes, on the other hand,
had something called legroom and seats that reclined more than 5 degrees, even
in economy.
Rome had uniformed security personnel
toting machine guns and an air of complete chaos – intimidating. Heathrow
even back then bristled with maps to go, the underground one was your favourite
right from the first. Kano had bright blue and orange agama lizards alongside
the runway, stopping to nod, nod, nod, three times in quick succession, before
skittering on. So much more interesting than the drab sand coloured geckos on
the walls back home in Delhi. Maiduguri was a windsock and a control tower
perched on the fringes of the Sahara when you landed on 29th April
1972.
Memory is a child’s delight at finding
the bottle of Coke supersized by a continent move, just like that - 300 ml
instead of the 200 ml available at the local paan biri shop
in C R Park. It is the wonder at seeing the baobab illustration in a favourite
vernacular story book come alive in the Sahel, so close! After the first
roundabout in the GRA and then again just before the turn into the drive of 46.
Something that a fictional hero might have sat under, now miraculously
available within the range of your own senses, to see, to touch, to scoop out
and eat the tartness of it fruits.
***
In the square hollow created by the
garage, walkway and the external wall of the kitchen, your father planted a
golden cassia sapling for shade so that future visitors had somewhere to park
their cars. It grew ramrod straight, its lower branches longer and heavier than
the higher ones, like a comical Christmas tree, the whole idea of shade and
parking somehow gone wrong. It topped the roof and rose higher in the years you
spent there. Memory is about vaguely wondering now, 46+ years later, if that
tree in 46 GRA still stands, and if by chance it does – has it grown a canopy
under which a car can be parked for shade on a scorching hot Sahel afternoon?
Memory is all about not knowing and having no means of finding out.
 |
| Leaving for Bauchi, March 1976. |
In the album there's still the last photo of your family with friends come to see you off when your father was relocated out of
Maiduguri. Your face reflects your misery – the only time you were
beside yourself with desolation, completely out of love with the idea of a
move.
The
humongous North Eastern state had been carved up into three, and two brand new
towns needed to be built up – from almost-villages to the state capitals. Resources
in Maiduguri were allocated to the new states and your father was one such
resource allotted to Bauchi. So goodbyes were said, the last bread broken,
promises of undying friendships made and addresses exchanged. One March
morning, NES 4579 was loaded up. You sat at the back window with an entire universe
worth of resentment churning within you, your elbow against a pile of stuff
teetering on the seat, held up at the other end by your mother’s help, Balai.
And so you were wheeled out of 46 New GRA and the Sahel for the last
time.
WC 1070 FCA
I'd be particularly interested to hear your views on the second person POV in the excerpt above. Do you think it works? Does it distance you from the narrative? Would you prefer to read memoirs in the first person only? Thank you as always, for your feedback.
Incidentally, 'Sahel' is an Arabic word meaning shore and it is used to refer to the fringe of the Sahara. The Sahel Savannah is a geographic zone stretching more than 3000 miles across Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.
This is a scheduled post as I am travelling this month. I will be reading as and when I can, but will catch up with each one of you once I am back. Meanwhile, happy reading!
