Recollections……..

 People do not believe me when I say that I remember everything after the age of two years ….. But I do, how else can you explain the following episodes?

In 1939 my father purchased a new Austin sedan 8 HP from Calcutta. It was brought by road to Keonjhar. In those days Calcutta or Kolkata as it is known now was a Shangri-La, where everything in the world was available and was the most modern city in India! I could feel the excitement in the air. My father had just been promoted; he was now the Chief Medical Officer . In those days it was a great position. Maybe the car was necessary as a symbol of this position.

The house, then recently built, was quite imposing. It had a lovely covered veranda in the front just outside the drawing room. The frame was covered with Madhumalati – a fragrant creeper with small bunches of flower with the double colors of pink and white or red and white. It was in full bloom. In front of this was a round garden plot and on the periphery of this was the circular driveway.

I must have been tiny then for I recollect the car as being huge, standing majestically on this driveway. The sunlight glistened on the new paint and it was the most exciting moment of my life then! I also remember that a table fan was taken out of the dickey (The boot) of the car- another status symbol!

World War –II had begun and there was a lot of tension in the air but I remained unaffected. What has stuck in my memory is the urgency with which all the gold and silver of the house were buried under floors. If and when the enemy came they would not find it! Who exactly was the enemy, nobody knew.

In a large family like ours no one knew what was happening with the other person. That I was now old enough to go to nursery school was something nobody realized.

I was not sent to any school, but there was a resident teacher cum gumasta for my elder brothers, from whom I might have learnt something. There was a book known as trivasi in which Oriya, Bengali and Hindi alphabets were written one below the other from which I must have learnt the alphabets. I seem to remember the multiplication tables up to 10 x 10, but not beyond that.  Being a curious child I would pick up my siblings books and spend hours on them….English alphabets and the picture books lying around the house were the teachers of my initial education. To be brief no formal teacher or classroom was there for me at the lower primary stage.

A strange childhood filled with living life to the fullest. Eating the best food; climbing trees; swimming; catching fish in the pond; breaking things to learn what was inside! Living life without fear or pressure; a carefree childhood which the children of today cannot even imagine! But change is constant so maybe the children today have things which we could not imagine of in those days.

I think we were a good generation to be born in. Our parent’s generation had a lot of deprivation and our children and grandchildren have a lot of pressure and competition to actually enjoy childhood the way I did.