1. I must have been 13 or 14 when I went to
Pirotan Island. If I cannot remember the exact age I can remember the mood of that time, that cusp between childhood and full blown adolescence. We lived in the cantonment, a speck on the speck of the map that was
Jamnagar. An army green
Shaktiman took a motley group of defence children to school, we came home to the same people. We played cricket with Ronnies, Buntys and Sunnys; an assortment of unchanged names that accompanied us each posting. I had just learnt to ride a bicycle and my brother, willing victim, sat pillion. We endured a million falls which left the tar and dust of the cantt roads in our mouths. In the evenings, we played with our dogs on the small patch that we maintained as a lawn, perpetually brown in Jamnagar's saline heat. My mother, conscious that she no longer had a child but a daughter on her hands, tried to instill manners and the use of cold cream every night. I, both precocious and not so, eschewed both in pursuit of books on
Dialectical Materialism. At 13 I was a Marxist without understanding a single word of what I read.
2. The memories of my life that have remained crystal clear are often associated with water. These memories are so visceral and sensory that I can recall the feel and taste of every kind of water, from the slanting sheets of a Mumbai monsoon to my first taste of the Australian sea. It need not even be its physical presence; it could for example be a school lesson on the monsoon, my father's recitation on a summer night in Delhi making it a movement of winds, evaporation, condensation and precipitation, of water running over conversation and textbook. Likewise, the old tank hoisted above my grandparents house is gone but the splendid sense of isolation and coolness one felt sitting atop it and the thrill of opening the lid and peering into its dark waters hasn't. That single memory can encapsulate my entire childhood and everything I feel about my grandparents and their old home.
3. Circa 1979 if my mother was wary of sending me to Pirotan, she did not say so. Because I was in many ways a child, she perhaps did not want to frighten me into the awareness that I was nearly a woman. For like everything else in my life, I came to that realisation late. The girls at my school were different; there were rumours of boyfriends, older men they would meet on the sly. One girl was rumoured to be a lesbian (and when I think of her now I wonder how it must have been for her in that small town; nothing other than Radclyffe Hall's
well of loneliness). But I was remarkably uncurious in some ways. I heard it all but it meant nothing and I remained preoccupied with Marx, politics, history lessons, old songs and novels in no particular order. I wore my frocks high above my knees, read my mother's books, dreamt my days away and had few friends unlike our previous postings.
4. The school's expedition to Pirotan Island was the first of its kind. There was nothing on the island bar a lighthouse; I cannot remember any residents. Our guides for the expedition were a few young zoology students from Rajkot's university and by the time we arrived a few long huts with a thatch and nothing by way of walls had been built. This was where the girls were to sleep. In the day we would explore the island and at low tide the sea. The students would find and explain marine specimens - crabs, jellyfish, mollusks – the jellyfish a white, cold slab - and we would hold them and make notes in our books. In the night, the food would arrive laced with the kerosene from the stoves on which it was cooked. The bolder girls would slip off under the Sister's eye (for I studied in a convent and the good sisters had organised this trip) and spend a few hours with the zoology students. One night, the wind howled through the open huts and we huddled inside the meagre blankets our mothers had provided, I have never been as cold as on that night. The last day of our trip, the wind increased and the girls struggled through a turbulent sea to get onto the boats. The head sister, a plump woman in a habit, was the last on the shore and as she waded into the water was suddenly lifted onto the waves. For what appeared to us a long time, she seemed to float and waft on the waters further and further away from us, her wimple and habit billowing, almost silently, dreamily, slowly. Then, the reverie was broken and the strong, sure hands of the men grabbed her and hoisted her on to the nearest boat. A collective prayer of thanks escaped from the distraught sisters, the more romantic girls voiced their own desire to be saved by the wiry arms of the students. I never saw the students or the island again.
5. I wonder what happened to the students. I also remember that year as being the one when the
Morvi dam, somewhere between Jamnagar and Rajkot , broke due to torrential rain. The news came through my father as the Army had been called out. It had rained ceaselessly for days, in Jamnagar there was no electricity or water and I can remember the solitariness of those days – our little community contained and hemmed into its already isolated pocket. One day, in particular, I remember clearly only for its quotidian details – the day was a blue-grey, the rain had stopped. But the world itself was all slush, a watery mess from which we carefully collected any available clean water for the vessels. It had an odd sense of permanence and romance, as if we would always be so marooned, perpetually scooping the water from around us. For the old Morvi dam itself, the rain had been too much and when it broke, the waters carried away everything in its path. The dead were too many to count.
6. When I was 13, I had a room of my own. The room was intended for my brother and the dogs too. When night fell and our room was lit with its 40W bulb and I turned on the transistor, they would put in an appearance and mill around, perhaps even pretend to fall asleep for a while to lull me into the false feeling that they intended to stay. My brother would be the first to decamp to my parents room. The younger dog, male and erratic, would bound after my brother and they would (I assume) both curl into particular corners of my parents' bed for that is where I would find them the next morning. Mini, the older dog, loyal and kind, would humour me by sleeping at my foot, some days I would put my arms around her and she would stay till I fell asleep. But in the morning, she too I would find had left in the night. And this is how I would find them all in the morning, drowsily entangled in thin sheets and sharing the warmth and conviviality of my parents' bed.
7. In 1980 we left for Mumbai and I think I was never as happy again. Happy is the wrong word, really all I mean to say is that life has never been as seamless, pure and beautiful since.
Jamdani in a new avatar
