The Flat

Sorrento. Amalfi. Capri. Italy? Think again. Think buildings.

Buildings in Bombay all have names - some for exotic, faraway places, some descriptive (Sea Face Park, Samudra Mahal, Usha Kiran), others after their owners (Sunita, Suraj, Vimal Vihar).

Our building was called Rockside, because it abutted a sheer cliff of bedrock. From the dining room and the kitchen, you could get a good view of the rocky escarpment, which in the monsoons was covered with green moss and resembled the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Vishnu buried our first dog Sweetie somewhere in that rocky expanse and it took me a while to risk looking in that direction without thinking of him.

Buildings have flats (apartments for Americans) and ours was on the first floor (second for Americans), accessible by a rickety lift (elevator for Americans) that took Herculean effort to open and shut the metal grille doors. By the time one of us helped take Ba up, the others had not only taken the stairs, but were sitting at their desks with almost-completed homework.

No wide, marbled foyer and chandelier here, the front door opened to a long corridor, which led off to three rooms on the right. The first door to the right was the Diwankhana or the Living Room. Next, the Vachliroom or Middle Room because it was sandwiched between the Diwankhana and Dad’s room.

The Diwankhana was where we put on performances every time my Anand and Madras cousins came to town. That is also where my dad had his parties...at least once a week if not more often. The heady, repugnant smell of cigarette smoke coupled with the smell of whiskey persisted in the air-conditioned room long after the guests had left, and the freezing room was the reason why we would draw lots as to who would get to use the Diwankhana to study late at night. The luckiest one got to study in the Vachli Room at their own desk, and the other loser got the dining room, with the uncomfortably upright, grey vinyl, elephantine chairs, guaranteed to prevent you from falling asleep. Rote learning was the rule in good old Walsingham. We were made to memorize everything, leaving no place for imagination or creativity. Teachers would rather have had us drink hemlock than think of implementing the Socratic Method. Peripatetic was the way I learned everything - pacing up and down as I recited soliloquies from Macbeth (Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand), to poems by Wordsworth (I wander’d lonely as a cloud, That floats on high o’er vales and hills), to multiplication tables (sevenonesareseven, seventwosarefourteen, seventhreesaretwentyone) to French verbs (je suis, tu es, il/elle est)...and more.

The Diwankhana had an old Grundig radio, which was about as big as a Smartcar. The wooden lid, propped open with a steel hinge on one side, sometimes buckled without warning and came crashing down. Only sheer luck and quick reflexes could save you from amputating an arm or guillotining a couple of fingers. From time to time, the needle would get stuck, in which case slamming a fist against the side worked - a little too much force would send the needle skipping maniacally to the end and then sway back and forth like a windshield-wiper out of control. There were more knobs on the thing than on the control deck of a submarine, most of which we had no clue what to do with. Dad would get records of Pat Boone (Love Letters in the Sand), Bobby Darin (Multiplication) and Paul Anka (Diana) and the latest tunes (Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie and Che Sera Sera) - 33rpms, 78s and 45s. We would huddle around the player listening to Greer Garson reciting fairy tales. Being of the ‘beekan saslu’ persuasion, my stomach would turn into a knot the moment she started on about a little girl in a red hood. The moment she started with “What big...you have” I would go haring out of the room. Years later, when I read the same story to my children, the fear still resonated. I would skip some pages, going directly to how she lived happily ever after with her Ba.

The three of us shared the Vachliroom with Ba, who had her bed along one wall, as did Nina. Varsha and I had a bunk bed. A long table ran alongside one whole wall, which served as our desks. It was cleverly designed - drawers for our school supplies and together with numerous bookshelves, it made optimal use of the big room, leaving us lots of room in the middle to play HouseHouse or SchoolSchool. Leading to the balcony was a door and a window, half of which was permanently shut because of the air-condition. Pigeons would come to roost on the aluminum cover and strut to and fro, the scratchy noises and fluttering and cooing making it difficult to concentrate on anything. They would shit up a storm, which Vishnu would clean periodically, all the while threatening to make pigeon chutney.

The last room on the right was Dad’s room, and straight across was the dining room - always redolent of the agarbatti that my dad lit every morning in the corner mandir. A huge table, big enough to seat ten people comfortably, was where Varsha and I would set up for a game of table tennis. Correction: Varsha played...while I spent the majority of the time cowering on the floor. Her eyes gleamed with every high lob, the paddle went up and the ball came crashing down. I would duck before it took out an eye or even my frontal lobe. Never underestimate the power of a small celluloid spheroid. In spite of this, I came third in the Ping-Pong Tournament at school - a feat which unfortunately impressed no one in the house. Foiled in sports as well, because Varsha, the athlete, regularly brought home first-place silver cups on Sports Day.

One did not have to leave the flat to buy groceries. The doorbell rang constantly. If it wasn’t the dudhwala bringing milk, it was the shaakvali, standing at the door, waiting patiently for a servant to help take down the humongous basket of vegetables perched on her head. On principle, Ba would object to the flaccid baingan with no discernible purple color and the wilted dhaniya with no discernible green color, and toss them back in the basket. The next day, the shaakvali would make it a point to ring our doorbell first with the freshest greens, before climbing up the rest of the floors, where doubtless the same spiel would be played out.

The dudhwala came twice a day. Again, the wait till he was aided in unloading the big aluminum can from his head. He would measure out liters of buffalo milk into our steel tapeli. The milk would then go into the kitchen to be boiled and cooled, the fat skimmed off the top, to be made later into ghee. The amount of fat was directly proportionate to how much water the dudhwala had used to augment and adulterate the milk. Store-bought yogurt being unobtainable, extra milk was bought to be made into curds.

Another knock on the door was the khari-biscuitwala, her dabba filled with delicate, flaky, puff-pastry treats. A pity we were not allowed tea in those days, as dunking them in tea and having them is a pleasure not even remotely close to the pleasure of dunking biscotti in espresso. (This will probably ruffle a few Italian feathers, but what the hell, it’s true.)

All day long you heard the cries of hawkers touting their wares: the jharipuranawala, who exchanged old clothes for brand-new steel vasans. How did that work? You don’t need an business degree to tell you there’s a reason you don’t see those anymore. The bhistee, who carried water in sacks made from the cured hides of animals. It probably had as much, if not more bacteria than the Bisleri bottles of today. When the gaiwali passed by, we were to alert Ba, and she would give us char anna to run down and feed the cow.

Scarier than a fairytale was the orange-clad sadhu, a copper vessel and rudraksha mala in one hand, and tapping a cane with the other, his cries of Alakh Niranjan echoing up and down the length of Walkeshwar Road. Recalling a scary story by my cousin Binduben, we ducked down, lest he see us and cast his evil eye our way or worse throw some ash.

Dad’s room and the Vachli room led out to a balcony, where we would stand and watch the world go by....or... in my sisters' case, the two handsome boys who lived across the street in the Afghan Consulate. The balcony faced the Governor’s Gate, from which emerged several visiting dignitaries in flashy motorcades. If we were lucky, we would get a glimpse of somebody noteworthy, like Indira Gandhi, but this paled in comparison to the Apollo 11 crew and we got to see them up really close and personal.

When I was sixteen, we moved from Rockside further down the road to a huge, duplex apartment with a spectacular view of the bay and the Queen’s Necklace. Strangely, it is always Rockside that appears in my dreams. Apparently, if you dream about revisiting an old house from childhood, it signifies dealing with the same old fears and these issues need to be looked at, analyzed and healed.

Time to burn the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tale book.