Holidays' Travels
Summer also meant travel by taxi to Howrah station on the other side of the Howrah Bridge and long-distance train trips. Dad, Maa, Chordi, Suku and I would be away at a summer health resort like Puri or Bhubaneswar or Ranchi or the Sunderbans. Either Dad would not plan much in advance to organize reservation or there were limited reservation facility for seats and berths in trains those days. Those days there were three classes in the trains: the First, the Second and Third: air-conditioned saloons were probably attached in some trains and not all. Mostly, we would travel in the third class compartments. There were coolies in the Station who would carry our luggage on their heads and hands from the Station gate to the platform and then they would jump on to the empty train slowly entering the platform and occupy seats and berths for us (nowadays, the coolies may have lost this extra jobs as most seats and berths are available for reservation in advance in long-distance trains). The journey to Ranchi or Puri was overnight: but took at least 4 hours longer than they do now. There were still trains that run on coal to generate the steam and a few diesel powered engines. Electric trains on long distance routes were yet to come.
Dad would either rent a house in the health resort for two/ three weeks or move us into boarding-cum-lodging hotels on lower longer stay tariff. We would go on local trips by taxis or buses for sight seeing tours. Around Rancho, there were the Hoodoo and Zona falls and Netarhat. We would also make a short trip to Aunt’s place in Tatanagar, Jamshedpur – one of the oldest and still modern steel cities of India. It is the same city where Dada used to work at that time as an engineer with Telco (Tata Engineering & Locomotive Company). Within Ranchi we would go up the Ranchi Hill and other places of interest including a Jain Temple. The only other Jain temple I had ever visited was the Pareshnath Temple in Calcutta. Much before I had learnt about the Tirthankaras in history books, I had the chance to read the literature the Ranchi Jain temple distributed to the visitors. Ranchi at that time was a beautiful place. During a winter holiday trip to Ranchi, Suku, and my younger brother started shouting one morning from the second floor balcony of the hotel “ Chordi pore gelo, Chordi pore gelo”. Everyone went out of the room to the balcony to find out from where Chordi would have slipped down. Suku was only referring to his running nose and pointing down referring to Sardi.
My Aunt (elder daughter of my grandfather)was sufferring from mental disorders: she became virtually silent after she lost her youngest daughter at an young age. She was in a private hospital (not the Ranchi mental hospital run by the Government for which Ranchi was partly well known those days) for treatment. We visited her in the hospital when we went to Ranchi. She was fond of me again probably because my name was Basudeb. My parents were discussing with Dr. David who was running the hospital. Suddenly my mother requested Dr. Davis to examine me. Dr. David asked for the reason and my mother said that this son of hers sleeps less and is a chatter-box. The renowned doctor told my mother that these were perfect signs of being normal. I got a certificate of being mentally healthy at an young age and yet my wife and children still are suspicious of the conclusion of that experiemnced doctor.
The trip to Bhubaneswar and Puri was equally enjoyable what with the guava trees in the rented house that we stayed in Bhubaneswar, the Bhubanewar temple and the different taste of the sweets offered to the deity that were duly returned later for our own consumption. Old Bhubaneswar was a city of temples, with temples all over the place at every nook and corner of streets. The new capital city of the State of Orrisa was yet to come up with its animal park. Puri was a few hours away. The Jagannath temple and the complex were beautiful and not as clean as it was at Bhubaneswar. The Bhog arrangements for the deities were remarkable as much as the taste of the Bhog offered to the deities. Getting a glimpse of the three deities in the darkness of the room lighted with a few candles was an experience. Puri also had a number of temples around, besides the deity Jagganath's Chariot which would be drawn by thousands of people on two days with an interval of seven days every year for deity Jagganath’s annual trip to his aunt’s residence and back. I also had an aunt there at that time. My aunt (second daughter of my grandfather) who became a widow early in life lived in Puri for sometime before moving to Benares (Kashi). We visited her place and she was a devotee of Govinda, Lord Krishna also known as Jaggannath (He has 108 names including the name Basudeb and this was probably one reason why this Aunt was very fond of me). Puri still has its wonderful sea beach that merged with the blue sky and the blue Bay of Bengal unlike the beaches along the Arabian Sea on the west coast of India. It is this blue that caused the Union of the blue skinned Lord Krishna and Sri Krishna Chaitannya, a great Sanskrit Scholar and Philosopher, who led the non-violent revolution of a special Bhakti-Yoga cult that spread into the hearts of homes across a large part of India even at a time when the Muslim kings ruled. Stricken by intense love for the Lord, Chatayana had all the way from a distant city of Bengal to Puri and merged himself with the blue of the sea at Puri.
Of the summer travels, one was as part of a children’s group of 50 or so. The children were in the age group 8 -10 and came from various parts of Calcutta. Mejda got this information from the newspapers that a certain association was organizing a three-week trip to Kurseong and Darjeeling on the eastern parts of the Himalayan range. The association was named something like Mukta Bayu Sevan meaning Breathing of Free Air. With my clothes in a suitcase and a small bed-roll along with a Kg of sugar (probably not easily available in hill towns we were visiting, Mejda reached me to the Howrah Railway station and handed me over to the organizers of the freedom air trip by train. It was long journeying ahead and would be the first experience of living with complete strangers at far away places with no communication with parents and siblings back home. Mejda gave me a few stamped and addressed printed post cards that I have to mail at regular intervals during my stay away to keep everyone at home informed about my experience, health and safety. The train ran throughout the night and reached at a lonely station just before dawn. We alighted from the train and walked a long stretch with out luggage to the banks of river to board a motor-driven steamer to ferry us to the other side of the river where another train was waiting for us to Siliguri. From Siliguri we were on the last leg of the journey to Kurseong. And, that was one of the most thrilling experiences of travel. It was a journey by what was called toy train, moving very slowly up the hill in circular tracks along the edges of the hills often with a road running alongside the rail tracks. The speed was so slow even small children in the localities through which the train passed would board the running train and after a few minutes jump out of train with ease. We reached Kurseong and stayed there in a school building for most of the days enjoying all the time, except certain nights when there was problems with digestion and upset stomach: the lavatories were at quite a distance and the summer in Darjeeling district hills was cold enough for us from down south near the Bay of Bengal.
The breakfast with steaming hot glass of tea began the struggle with the cold climate and daily walks through the up and down roads of the hill resort. The evenings were reserved for an hour of study and cultural activities. One evening it was made compulsory for every child to give a performance. There were so many talented children performing and I did not know what to do. One of the shiest persons with weak memory that I have ever seen is of course Basudeb Sen till he mustered strength to get into love and marry. On that evening, his performance was as good as reciting a poem in the same way as he did in his class, looking at the book just before recitation class started to post the sentences in the relatively easy to pop-up short-term memory cache.
With Kurseong as the base, we had a four-day trip to Darjeeling. Another joy ride on the toy train higher up the sky piercing through the clouds to a still colder environment where we go up the Tiger Hills early in the morning to see the run rise from below on the horizon. The Sunrise at Darjeeling Mountains and the Sunset in Puri beach got deleted from weak the Recycle Bin long time ago. But the visit to the Raj Bhavan in Darjeeling, then somewhat in the nature of summer capital of West Bengal (and now in search for freedom from West Bengal), where we would be individually offered some packet of sweets by the wife of the then Governor of West Bengal.
The Mall of Darjeeling and the pony ride that I avoided in fear are still in the memory cache, though somewhat corrupted to make sense. One of the acquisitions in Darjeeling was a set of picture post cards that remained long in my possession till they got lost.
With so many things lost, the life has become wealthier along the unfolding voyage. The postscript diary may be the best way to lose things one by one to reduce the burden of memory and await the ultimate Freedom trip.
16. The Secondary Period
The seven years in the secondary school that followed was only an extension of the 5 years at the primaries. Enhance the skills, test the various parts of the basic learning and enjoy life to the brim as the rule enforcement adults at home, in the neighborhood and in the school become less vigilant with you. At home the main control points were the school progress reports, complaints from the neighbor and adherence to the rule of’ back home before street lights are on and getting into studies at the fall of dusk. And, you get some share of the small household tasks: ‘go and get something from the neighbor or the market’ or ‘be a delivery boy or a messenger’.
This was one of the busiest periods of life and at the same time the most varied. The range of exposures was so large and varied in the space of just four years: in retrospect, I feel that the period was so short. The freedom was going up, the vigilance and controls were fewer, and the opportunities to experiment were more, the exposures varied and responsibility minimal with very little household work to be shared.
School has become manageable. You just keep your performance steady. Any decline in performance would threaten return of controls while occasional improvement brings you rewards here and there. In the schoolteachers have stopped training you with effort and critically examining what you learn every day or week (we did not have had to go through weekly tests). Both the school and the neighborhood like you to engage in sports and games and in cultural activities. The home may or may not appreciate these activities but would tolerate everything if your school progress report were as per their reasonable expectations. While some classmates had hard time living with the high and rising expectations from the parents, most of us had no pressure at home unless you show declining performance.
So, games and sports flourished.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Summer Episodes: My Unfolding Voyage 014
The Summer Episodes
Story telling is an art everyone does not excel in. I did not inherit this quality, probably because I did not have a paternal grandmother in childhood to listen to stories and fairy tales. My father was born half a century ahead of me but he was a reasonably good storyteller. I could not perform the way he did in my childhood. One of the best stories that I could manage to narrate to my sons when they were tiny tots was about how I had managed to kill a Royal Bengal tiger that happened to stray into the streets of Calcutta city on a Saturday afternoon as I was coming home from office. The people had deserted the streets in fear of the tiger and I was in the minibus. The tiger was chasing the minibus. Everyone panicked when the bus jumped on top of the minibus. I just wanted to look up through the window of the minibus and found the tigers tail hanging from the roof. I caught hold of the tail and pulled, the tiger pulled back and stretched out its paw through the window to get hold of me. As it slid one of its front paws through the window to give me a blow, I quickly pushed the window shutter to close the window and trapped its paw inside the bus. The tiger lost its balance with a paw and tip of the tail stuck in the window and fell down on the street seconds before the speeding minibus just behind ours bus crushed the tiger to death under its wheels. And then so on. The sons liked this story and wanted me to repeat the story often. But every time the story would add or delete something from its previous version depending on my mood. Unlike them, I never like to hear the same story again and again probably because I would forget most stories within a few hours of listening and had the opportunity of listening to new stories from Dad.
For peaceful story-listening sessions I would long for the two summer months when the school would close after the first term exams got over in April. The heat would be too much to go out and play. We kept ourselves mostly at home with the windows shut and curtains drawn during 10AM to 4 PM. All play outside was either early in the morning before 7 AM or after 4 PM. Southern breeze would flow in with some relief and most enjoyable in the evenings. We had no electric fans in the rooms and we did not require any those days. There was no two-story building within a distance of 250 feet in the West, 100 feet in the North, 200 feet on the East and 600 feet on the South of our Gurudham residence. Ample breeze would need to be exploited effectively to enjoy the school homework-free evenings. As soon as the dusk fell we would take a quick bath with cool water pumped up by the pressure of hands from the tube-wells at home and then hurry up the stairs to stretch out the mats hand- woven out of finely slit and polished bamboo tapes on the floor often already sprinkled cool with a few buckets of water. Then, we would cool the mats by wiping with a wet cloth, throw in the pillows and lie down on the mats till dinner time and a few hours more after dinner (and some occasions, sleeping throughout the night there under the cover of the night sky). This was the time to enjoy listening to stories, collecting new information, getting answers to questions that bothered the children’s minds during the day and gazing at and learning about the stars and the moon in the sky above.
Much of what I remember about the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, the stories from the Puranas and about various Hindu gods and goddesses, the tales from the Buddhist Jatathkas, Aesop’s fables, the lives of various Hindu sages and saints and the stories of Upanishads was picked up during these summer evening sessions with Dad. These helped me run through these books rapidly when later I happened to stumble on the books dealing with these. Dad also told us about his life experiences and the ancestral history. The dark skies during the fortnight from no moon night would provide appropriate setting for the dreadful stories of various types of ghosts and spirits. A little time on recognizing the celestial bodies (the North Star, easily identifiable constellations and the various phases of the moon) and the occasionally falling stars would mix well with the moral lessons Dad would try to impart from the tales and stories he would narrate. Often, Dad would quote Sanskrit verses and explain the rationale behind the moral lessons with regard to what man should do and what a man should not do.
It is difficult to pin point how and when these evening episodes would impart certain values, behavioral standards and inhibitions to a child and get locked into forever. Dad would tell us the meaning of the various prayer verses in Sanskrit he used to recite from the Chandi and other scriptures every morning in the prayer room adjacent to the terrace from 4-45 during five to six am. Often we would fall asleep as he would continue with his stories and we would not how he took us down for dinner and how he got us in to bed in our rooms. For a longtime since those days of childhood, I had nursed an unconcious belief that the Krishna-Arjuna conversations including Lord’s assumption of the Universal Form during the Kurukshetra war in the Mahabharata were mere fairy tales and tales to promote promote heroes and our religious past and never cared to read the relevant section called Bhagwat Gita. I first read portions of Gita in Bengali translation form till I was in the mid- thirties and went through the English translations of the Eighteen Chapters of Gita only after I was past fifty. I did not imagine until in my mid-thirties that the story of Gita that father narrated when I was well below 10 years of age had such ancient and profound philosophical foundations with empirically testable hypotheses on psychology and human behavior and that the Gita was not merely a story about God as I had assumed. The same was true of the Upanishad stories Dad narrated at childhood and I read some of them at the age of 15. These appeared to me at that time as children’s stories about God and meditation on God written not so competently by some ancient people. How I wish the Hindu scholars in the modern ages had liberated themselves, Gita and Upanishads from the darkness and bondage of ancient Sanskrit composers’ communication styles and techniques and completely rewrote the Upanishads and the Gita and interpreted in the same style over the milleniums for a child born half the way in the 20th century AD. It is surprising that school mathematics textbooks are re-written using set theoretic approach while the Gita and Upanishads remain bonded to the traditional commentary interpretations of Sanskrit words and verses that can have multiple connotations and meanings. No one has even tried to remove the lack of continuity of thought, repetitions of same ideas again and again and inconsistencies among definitions and ideas expressed in different chapters and at different sections within a chapter. Are scriptures so sacred to be touched up by modern age brainpower gifted by God and remain unreadable by the third millennium children and adults?
Evenings however did not exhaust the summer: the days also contributed to considerable enjoyment. No more home work or routine studies during the holidays except challenges to be taken. Chordi was certainly not really ok with arithmetic. But she took a lot of interest in my doing the sums from the different chapters of the textbook and closely monitored my proficiency in doing sums. She encouraged me to do sums from chapters not yet taught in the school. Sooner than later I would satisfy her that there were no more sums in the textbook that I had not solved. She would prod me to go to Fathikda who lived across the lane and borrow his arithmetic book and enjoy trying to solve the sums for exercise from that book. Fatikda was two classes ahead of me in the school.
That was a great pastime until Chordi got married.
Story telling is an art everyone does not excel in. I did not inherit this quality, probably because I did not have a paternal grandmother in childhood to listen to stories and fairy tales. My father was born half a century ahead of me but he was a reasonably good storyteller. I could not perform the way he did in my childhood. One of the best stories that I could manage to narrate to my sons when they were tiny tots was about how I had managed to kill a Royal Bengal tiger that happened to stray into the streets of Calcutta city on a Saturday afternoon as I was coming home from office. The people had deserted the streets in fear of the tiger and I was in the minibus. The tiger was chasing the minibus. Everyone panicked when the bus jumped on top of the minibus. I just wanted to look up through the window of the minibus and found the tigers tail hanging from the roof. I caught hold of the tail and pulled, the tiger pulled back and stretched out its paw through the window to get hold of me. As it slid one of its front paws through the window to give me a blow, I quickly pushed the window shutter to close the window and trapped its paw inside the bus. The tiger lost its balance with a paw and tip of the tail stuck in the window and fell down on the street seconds before the speeding minibus just behind ours bus crushed the tiger to death under its wheels. And then so on. The sons liked this story and wanted me to repeat the story often. But every time the story would add or delete something from its previous version depending on my mood. Unlike them, I never like to hear the same story again and again probably because I would forget most stories within a few hours of listening and had the opportunity of listening to new stories from Dad.
For peaceful story-listening sessions I would long for the two summer months when the school would close after the first term exams got over in April. The heat would be too much to go out and play. We kept ourselves mostly at home with the windows shut and curtains drawn during 10AM to 4 PM. All play outside was either early in the morning before 7 AM or after 4 PM. Southern breeze would flow in with some relief and most enjoyable in the evenings. We had no electric fans in the rooms and we did not require any those days. There was no two-story building within a distance of 250 feet in the West, 100 feet in the North, 200 feet on the East and 600 feet on the South of our Gurudham residence. Ample breeze would need to be exploited effectively to enjoy the school homework-free evenings. As soon as the dusk fell we would take a quick bath with cool water pumped up by the pressure of hands from the tube-wells at home and then hurry up the stairs to stretch out the mats hand- woven out of finely slit and polished bamboo tapes on the floor often already sprinkled cool with a few buckets of water. Then, we would cool the mats by wiping with a wet cloth, throw in the pillows and lie down on the mats till dinner time and a few hours more after dinner (and some occasions, sleeping throughout the night there under the cover of the night sky). This was the time to enjoy listening to stories, collecting new information, getting answers to questions that bothered the children’s minds during the day and gazing at and learning about the stars and the moon in the sky above.
Much of what I remember about the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, the stories from the Puranas and about various Hindu gods and goddesses, the tales from the Buddhist Jatathkas, Aesop’s fables, the lives of various Hindu sages and saints and the stories of Upanishads was picked up during these summer evening sessions with Dad. These helped me run through these books rapidly when later I happened to stumble on the books dealing with these. Dad also told us about his life experiences and the ancestral history. The dark skies during the fortnight from no moon night would provide appropriate setting for the dreadful stories of various types of ghosts and spirits. A little time on recognizing the celestial bodies (the North Star, easily identifiable constellations and the various phases of the moon) and the occasionally falling stars would mix well with the moral lessons Dad would try to impart from the tales and stories he would narrate. Often, Dad would quote Sanskrit verses and explain the rationale behind the moral lessons with regard to what man should do and what a man should not do.
It is difficult to pin point how and when these evening episodes would impart certain values, behavioral standards and inhibitions to a child and get locked into forever. Dad would tell us the meaning of the various prayer verses in Sanskrit he used to recite from the Chandi and other scriptures every morning in the prayer room adjacent to the terrace from 4-45 during five to six am. Often we would fall asleep as he would continue with his stories and we would not how he took us down for dinner and how he got us in to bed in our rooms. For a longtime since those days of childhood, I had nursed an unconcious belief that the Krishna-Arjuna conversations including Lord’s assumption of the Universal Form during the Kurukshetra war in the Mahabharata were mere fairy tales and tales to promote promote heroes and our religious past and never cared to read the relevant section called Bhagwat Gita. I first read portions of Gita in Bengali translation form till I was in the mid- thirties and went through the English translations of the Eighteen Chapters of Gita only after I was past fifty. I did not imagine until in my mid-thirties that the story of Gita that father narrated when I was well below 10 years of age had such ancient and profound philosophical foundations with empirically testable hypotheses on psychology and human behavior and that the Gita was not merely a story about God as I had assumed. The same was true of the Upanishad stories Dad narrated at childhood and I read some of them at the age of 15. These appeared to me at that time as children’s stories about God and meditation on God written not so competently by some ancient people. How I wish the Hindu scholars in the modern ages had liberated themselves, Gita and Upanishads from the darkness and bondage of ancient Sanskrit composers’ communication styles and techniques and completely rewrote the Upanishads and the Gita and interpreted in the same style over the milleniums for a child born half the way in the 20th century AD. It is surprising that school mathematics textbooks are re-written using set theoretic approach while the Gita and Upanishads remain bonded to the traditional commentary interpretations of Sanskrit words and verses that can have multiple connotations and meanings. No one has even tried to remove the lack of continuity of thought, repetitions of same ideas again and again and inconsistencies among definitions and ideas expressed in different chapters and at different sections within a chapter. Are scriptures so sacred to be touched up by modern age brainpower gifted by God and remain unreadable by the third millennium children and adults?
Evenings however did not exhaust the summer: the days also contributed to considerable enjoyment. No more home work or routine studies during the holidays except challenges to be taken. Chordi was certainly not really ok with arithmetic. But she took a lot of interest in my doing the sums from the different chapters of the textbook and closely monitored my proficiency in doing sums. She encouraged me to do sums from chapters not yet taught in the school. Sooner than later I would satisfy her that there were no more sums in the textbook that I had not solved. She would prod me to go to Fathikda who lived across the lane and borrow his arithmetic book and enjoy trying to solve the sums for exercise from that book. Fatikda was two classes ahead of me in the school.
That was a great pastime until Chordi got married.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
