In the quiet lap of a middle-class home in Trishul Park, Arin was born and raised. When he was about five or six years of age, he knew how truly extraordinary this residential abode was, where he grew up to adulthood, right up to his college education.
Trishul Park lay in the vicinity of the Sub-Area. This Army-controlled restricted cantonment zone was nestled between the town’s civilian urban locality on the western side, directly across the interstate highway, where, to say the least, it was a genuine blessing because of the naturalness of the well-kept, shipshape military surroundings: the privilege of staying at 6/1, Trishul Park residential premises and a furlong ahead, the great expanse of the Sub-Area.
Even today, Arin’s breath stalls as he recollects the heavenly magnificence of the surrounding lush meadows, clean as a whistle. He still remembers the sprawling grassy knolls in the backwater of the Park: it is where he and his childhood chum discovered Jungle Jalebi way back in the mid-1980s, pristine grey rocks dotted the reddish grounds a little afar from their dormitory, and the Jhula: the children’s park—all of which were part of Arin’s and his dear boyhood friend Rajveer’s joyful havens. During the hot autumnal months, Congress grass—a common weed—would rapidly grow unchecked, while greenish grasshoppers, praying mantises, fluttering, iridescent butterflies, and magical dragonflies hovered over the grass, searching for food and mates.
Sparrows and crows were pretty common during those days in Trishul Park, compared to today’s head-bobbing health hazard that is the omnipresent feral pigeon. Back then, it was quite common to catch chirpy sparrows nesting on balconies—corner preferences were their specialty—while glossy black crows would swoop in and caw outside for lunch nibbles. Not surprisingly, even Koels made their presence felt in the lush green glens of the residential area, while Coppersmith Barbets echoed their fine took...took...took...took notes from the trees along the deserted roads of the Sub-Area.
A lone Skylark would fly high in the cloudless blue sky, singing for rain.
While in the Sub-Area, sunlight rippled through its tree-lined, winding roads leading up to the little-known Club, the vacant polo ground, the citrus-sweet fragrance lingered in the air of the Krishna Mandir temple gardens, the colonial-era single-story bungalows sat amidst the open parkland of Tamarind, Ashoka, and Gulmohor trees, and the gentle sweep of the valley beyond the Club via the Brigadier’s bungalow revealed the dewy golf courses that looked like verdant green oases, spread out scenically among the ancient trees and scrubs drenched in peaceful morning sunlight. And during the rainy season, the entire landscape would be enveloped in the cool monsoon mist, veiling the bungalows, grounds, and pathways, utterly silent, still as a woodland.
Arin and Rajveer (easily his classic nickname: Raju), his childhood buddy, would go jogging or waltzing through the deserted yet impeccably maintained Army cantonment area, way farther until one hushed roadway wound up at the easternmost fringe of the heather-covered landscape to reach Allenby Lines. There stood the white-washed, rather staid-looking Army bungalow, The Retreat, where it’s speculated that the grumpy old young subaltern Winston Churchill, who became Britain’s prime minister and despised India and Indians, stayed for a while at the end of the 19th century. It is said that the man found his first love here, who, Urg! didn’t care much for him in return. So he, too, was not really rejection-proof! That’s like receiving pre-punishment in advance for calling Mahatma Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir.”
What was still wondrous to Arin was that he always had an uncanny aptitude to reminisce about long-forgotten days. Past experiences that mattered and made him a nostalgically-inclined person—seemingly, the quiet motivating force of those boyhood memories that wouldn’t let go of him; those and many others that his heart possessed. Not even letting a tiny jaded fragment evade his memory-grasp: of the past days coexisting with the present, even as he nostalgically, yet consciously, held them close to his heart, where they accumulated like a snowball of old sacrosanct commemorations, turning them over and over in order to try and make sense of his life story up to now. His mind kept traveling back while laughing off the unpleasant ones and rejoicing in the sweet ones that remained.
While in the Sub-Area, sunlight rippled through its tree-lined, winding roads leading up to the little-known Club, the vacant polo ground, the citrus-sweet fragrance lingered in the air of the Krishna Mandir temple gardens, the colonial-era single-story bungalows sat amidst the open parkland of Tamarind, Ashoka, and Gulmohor trees, and the gentle sweep of the valley beyond the Club via the Brigadier’s bungalow revealed the dewy golf courses that looked like verdant green oases, spread out scenically among the ancient trees and scrubs drenched in peaceful morning sunlight. And during the rainy season, the entire landscape would be enveloped in the cool monsoon mist, veiling the bungalows, grounds, and pathways, utterly silent, still as a woodland.
Arin and Rajveer (easily his classic nickname: Raju), his childhood buddy, would go jogging or waltzing through the deserted yet impeccably maintained Army cantonment area, way farther until one hushed roadway wound up at the easternmost fringe of the heather-covered landscape to reach Allenby Lines. There stood the white-washed, rather staid-looking Army bungalow, The Retreat, where it’s speculated that the grumpy old young subaltern Winston Churchill, who became Britain’s prime minister and despised India and Indians, stayed for a while at the end of the 19th century. It is said that the man found his first love here, who, Urg! didn’t care much for him in return. So he, too, was not really rejection-proof! That’s like receiving pre-punishment in advance for calling Mahatma Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir.”
What was still wondrous to Arin was that he always had an uncanny aptitude to reminisce about long-forgotten days. Past experiences that mattered and made him a nostalgically-inclined person—seemingly, the quiet motivating force of those boyhood memories that wouldn’t let go of him; those and many others that his heart possessed. Not even letting a tiny jaded fragment evade his memory-grasp: of the past days coexisting with the present, even as he nostalgically, yet consciously, held them close to his heart, where they accumulated like a snowball of old sacrosanct commemorations, turning them over and over in order to try and make sense of his life story up to now. His mind kept traveling back while laughing off the unpleasant ones and rejoicing in the sweet ones that remained.
(A notion to put forth: What seems to be a therapeutic tool for the elderly, recalling positive life events to help keep them lucid and mentally tidy, he sure liked doing what he, though of young age not yet elderly, did best in his quiet times.) Aside from that, this short/long story of sorts is about four friends whose faces, smiles, voices, and the warmth of their friendship and shared adventures have always been vivid in his mind. When it was time for him to leave his beloved Trishul Park in the mid-nineteen nineties, he wept bitterly, knowing that his childhood and then college eras had finally come to an end. First, it was Arin who shifted to the “civil area”; then, two years later, his close pal Subramanium Strong followed before residing, possibly for a year or so, at one of the Lake Park dormitories, which lay far beyond the dale of the numerous golf ranges of the Sub-Area. Reminiscing has always been Arin’s foremost prerogative.
In those early years, Arin’s neighbourhood buddies were everything wonderful and precious, great and valuable, in this part of small-town India. Peacefully remote, the town was some six and a half to seven kilometres north of the main city centre. But that no longer seems to be the case; it's no longer remotely located, which was once its reprieve from the hard dazzle of the big-town experience. Today, the city razzmatazz is nearer home and in your face, like it or not. Everything is changed beyond recognition. No longer relatable. Alwal and its surrounding vicinities fell to the curse of ‘development.’ As its biryani-scented IT card is issued forth, the city's famed laid-back urbanity has vanished since the late ‘90s, its tech hub taking over everything urbane and natural, empowering us in a weird kind of economic entrapment, promising but more menacing too. Time marches on determinedly, and Alwal too has lost its premium ease of living and its sweet, serene simplicity, just as nature had once ordained it. Everything has been made to fall from grace.
Every friend of his was close to him, with whom he had spent most of his life in and around the amazing valley of Eden, their very own close and intimate commune: Trishul Park, began to drift away, one by one, to far-off distant places somewhere up north in Delhi and Jammu, west in Baroda, north-east in Shillong and Guwahati, and down south in Chennai, Bangalore, and Kochi, never meaning to return. Sayonara, forever. Everybody faded into the coming new millennial age of aspiration and responsibility that the globalized 21st-century world had offered.
Only Satish K. Gupta, alias Demello, remained, for this place, where he and Arin grew up, had become his permanent home—not by birth, but because of his fond childhood memories and all the years spent from kindergarten through high school, all the way to college, and beyond. Where else could he go outside this classic urban-dwelling, albeit non-Tuscan existence, where Subramaniam Strong and Bhale had joined them precisely at that point in life when they all began attending college? Nowhere else in this era-shifting triptych of a place reduced, like any other town or city in our vast country, given over to absolute commercial decadence of endless economic development taking place at a breakneck speed that none of us had surmised, did his happy, largely uneventful life settle and develop domestically as he became a dedicated family man blessed with two yuppie giggling children, a girl and a boy. Eluru, his beloved hometown, had slowly receded into the distant, hazy memory of the simpler times back in the day of the relationships and family identities that mattered more than anything euphemistically called modern, only to be visited, if at all, during vacations or some marriage or housewarming functions. But Satish Gupta, his younger sibling Sailes, and their widowed mother Vijaya Lakshmi had always nursed broken hearts ever since their father passed away here in suburban Alwal when the brothers were little. The house their father built for them and their extended family was the saving grace that kept them going, knowing they had a permanent sanctuary to call home. Life was more or less happy and tidy, but just about when the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, a fatal rift began to stretch like a rubber band, going back and forth for quite some time unabated, until it snapped back—gaslighting everyone in the family! A villain emerged, and that was none other than their own—“Gumbad Queen,” Chachi (paternal aunt), a char sou bees (420), lady Frankenstein, living in the same house.
Misunderstandings and mutinous mutterings were common. Satish often recounted to Arin, on his bicycle visits, his Chachi’s fine art of grunting like a wild bison! Her everyday evil grunting, too bitchy to handle, was so atrocious that the children would flee from her line of sight to play outdoors, unwilling to return until a little after their usual study hour. This unjustifiable routine on the part of their Chachi 420 invariably tore a rift in their nice little joint family—first among the equals: the adults, and soon enough, the younger ones sensed that something unusually awful was brewing within the household, and that Chachi’s henpecked husband was also hand in glove, in shady collaboration, with his own wife to evict Satish, Sailes and their widowed mother from the house.
With Satish’s father no longer being alive, the once close-knit family split into two halves: one side strong-armed into dark oppression, the other side forceful with a glow of undeserving empowerment, living in two separate portions of the modest one-story house. Two decades later, in the early 2010s, an unsympathetic, bossy, hulk-like Chachi 420 and her suitably henpecked husband upended the apple cart by driving Satish, his sibling, and their mother out of the house. Proper sale deeds and legal rights could have come to their rescue, but there weren’t any to assert their rightful claim on the house Satish’s father had built with his own finances. Petrified of being shouted at, being on the verge of a tumultuous mental collapse, and having no guts to withstand their irascible Chachi’s contentiously filthy language that was employed day-to-day or whenever opportunity for that heartless Chachi arose, they demurred and quietly moved out renting a place in the vicinity of the area where they thought they will have to reside almost all their lives, before putting up a court case, a contentious dispute, for this bossy Chachi and her family to deal with.
Financially, a humongous weight had descended on Satish’s mother’s shoulders; fortunately, she worked in a minor government department, earning a modest salary that she could use to support her family. Missing their former home, they ensured that their rental apartment offered a view of the childhood cottage right opposite, where they grew up: a house built entirely by Satish’s father long ago... but now gone. Destiny was kind to them eventually, but at one point, it seemed as if their future would be at stake, as though it belonged only in the past.
Awakened by the desire to leave the former world a better place than they had lately found it, they lived to tell the tale. Raged against the dying of the light, as somebody has said. Sayonara.
(To be continued…)
(End of Part I)
By Arindam Moulick