A long trip

Seen in a recent Facebook status message: "Going to a 90's themed party this weekend! Trying to remember what I wore back then".

Excuse me?! A 90's themed party? Boy, I feel old. Maybe Facebook should have age appropriateness filters for its news feeds. Something like "Trust me, reading this will only make you reach for a tub of ice cream". To me the 90's feel like just the other day, I am always caught by surprise when I do the math and realise how many years it has been. Or when I indulge in nostalgia and realise how far back my memories go...

Far back indeed, to times and people that are nearly forgotten unless I go searching for them. Things I expected to remember always, like the time I spent in Bangalore. Right after college and before I went to grad school in New York, I spent some time working in Bangalore. It was my first time living away from home. I was looking forward to the experience and the freedom. The experience was interesting, although the freedom was a little wanting.

As a young, single woman, you see, living alone was quite out of the question. And since I didn't have any friends to share a house with, my best option was a PG (paying guest) accommodation. In theory, this meant living with a family in their house - occupying a bedroom, sharing the family meals - you know, sort of like a guest, except paying for it. In practice, this picture turned out to be somewhat optimistic. Paying guest accommodations were a lucrative business in Bangalore, since a large number of single people migrated there for work and college. And so people tried to maximise their opportunity. Most of the places I saw accommodated several girls in a single room. Beds were lined up along all the walls, 5 or 6 to a room, with some more in the hallway shielded by a thin curtain for privacy.

I saw such appalling places that Mrs C's house seemed like a veritable luxury. She lived in a very quiet, pleasant and upscale neighbourhood. A simple 2 story bungalow in a cul de sac. "Aunty-ji" was a cultured, well spoken, military widow about 75 years old. She was clearly a cut above all the other landladies I had encountered. The living quarters consisted of three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, that were shared by 7 women. By now I had realised that this was about as good as it would get, and signed on immediately. I moved in the next day and Aunty-ji became my landlady.

Aunty-ji was a very interesting person, and I always respected her. If I felt no warmer emotion, the fault was not mine. She had lived a full life and in her benevolent moments she would tell us stories. The time she been brought out to sing in front of Mahatma Gandhi, an eight year old girl with an angelic voice. The picture of her as a school girl giving something to (or was it receiving something from) then Prime Minister Nehru. How she and her family were living in Lahore before independence, and had to flee when the partition happened. And her brother, an airforce pilot, commandeered a military plane and flew them out to India with 'nothing but the clothes on their backs'.

We respected her for her forceful personality and her fierce independence. She was determined to earn her own keep, although she had two wealthy children who could look after her very well. So she opened her house up to paying guests, and taught music lessons in her garage. She took no nonsense from anyone, stood strong on her principles and usually got what she wanted.

But while admiring her in the abstract, we objected to many of the particulars. She had an overbearing personality and a fickle temper. She was snobbish and looked down on many of her "girls" as not being her social equals. To hear her, you'd think she was doing charity work - giving home and shelter to young women out of the kindness of her heart, and the rent was a purely nominal business. Worst of all was her inexcusable prejudice against South Indians, ridiculous considering she had spent most of her life living in - South India. She would often pass snide remarks about their collective character, hygiene and courage. And how it was the North Indians who fought for independence and all the subsequent wars. On the one hand I was disgusted by her views, on the other a lifetime's ingrained values made it literally impossible for me to remonstrate with someone her age.

It was ironic that the girl who most liked her and always stood up for her was from Kerala. For a time, we had three sophisticated Punjabi girls living with us and Aunty was thrilled to bits about it. She would talk to them in Punjabi, share jokes and discuss food and was downright rude to the Keralite. The Punjabi girls were disgusted by the accommodations and the rules, told us we were silly to put up with it all and left within a couple of months. Aunty was crushed and forced to fall back on her unwilling friendship with the Keralite. I got along fine with her, being neither from the north nor the south and although no socialite, my family background was graciously deemed good enough.

But to truly understand our relationship, you have to hear about the rules. We had to be home by 10pm and we could never have visitors. We weren't allowed to eat any food in our bedrooms, only in the kitchen. Which would be fine if only Aunty didn't hover over us lustily watching us eat all the stuff she wasn't permitted to. We weren't allowed to come in the front door, only through the back door and we had to take our shoes off and walk barefoot up to our rooms. And we weren't supposed to ever run the taps, just fill up a cup of water and use that to brush our teeth. Fill a bucket of water to bathe with, never run the shower.

It is fair to say that we regularly broke every one of those rules. But they did make life exciting, an evening snack of samosas felt so much tastier when I had smuggled them in under a sweater, while another girl distracted Aunty with conversation. And I was going to use as much water as I needed for my daily ablutions, rules be damned! Alright at this point I have to admit - through gritted teeth - that Aunty had a point. Her rules were conceived for the silliest, slyest girls and she must have seen lots of those through the years. It's very annoying to see prejudices come true, but I have to admit that my fellow-PGs occasionally justified her stupidest rules with their actions. There was the girl who constantly ate in bed, leaving crumbs scattered all over and under the bed. And then there was the girl who couldn't turn off the bathroom tap, and so simply left it running and walked out of the house! In a short while water was pouring down the stairs.

Oh but the antics of the other girls are a whole new story, and I'll leave them for another day.

It was a pity about Aunty though, she was good and she was lonely. She was surrounded by people, yet she put up a wall between herself and us - a wall of arbitrary rules, pride and prejudice.

Of futile gestures

Isn't it funny the memories that pop into one's mind when one is sitting around on a lazy weekend afternoon! Today I suddenly remembered an incident from when I was in college in Pune, living with my parents.

One weekend morning, our cleaning lady brought her daughter along when she came to clean our house. The girl was about 10 or 11 years old. She did some minor tasks for her mother, but mostly she just wandered around the house, drinking in the novelty of it all. I was in my room brushing my hair when I noticed her in the doorway. She was trying to be unobtrusive but was clearly immensely interested in me and my room. She stood there watching me with a mixture of curiosity, admiration and envy. I invited her in and chatted with her a little. I can't remember what we talked about, only that she was very pleased and excited at the attention. So I gave her a bottle of nail polish from my dressing table. She was thrilled to bits by the gift and ran off excitedly. Which of course made me feel quite good about myself, all generous and kindly.

A few days later, I noticed a red stain on the steps outside our house and pointed it out to my mother. She told me it was the nail polish. The girl was showing it off to her mother as they left, and dropped it on the stairs. Someone had cleaned off the mess but the stain remained. I remembered the girl, so pleased and excited and proud of her gift, and I imagined how she must have felt when she dropped that bottle right as she left. Too late for me to see it happen and too soon for her to have got even a minute's use out of it.

She never came to our house again, at least not while I was around. So I couldn't give her a new one. Perhaps I should have sent one through her mother but that seemed strangely inappropriate - like placing too high a value on my own trivial gift. Or maybe I was just too shy to make a deliberate present like that and talked myself out of it. But I would wince every time I passed that stain on the stair, imagining a little girl's bitter - if fleeting - disappointment.

The girl - I knew her name at the time - was married off when she was 15 or 16 years old. Today she probably cleans houses like her mother did, probably has a litter of kids to feed, and very probably a husband who comes home drunk and beats her up. It is safe to say that she has long forgotten that incident - likely drowned out in her memory by other, more weighty disappointments. Why then does it still come back to me occasionally? And each time I feel her disappointment (as imagined by me) in the pit of my stomach and my heart turns to lead. In vast disproportion to the actual incident - I wonder why. Perhaps it is my own disappointment, at my failure to make even the smallest improvement to her life. Or maybe it's the reminder of just how cruel the gods of fate can be - not content with robbing us of the great happinesses of life, sometimes they take particularly malicious pleasure in depriving us of the small trivial joys.