Sehra I : Rip Van Winkle Dream

[Ever wondered at emerging and dissolving emotion of awe, adventure, fear, chaos and anxiety in a little child holding her Mom's hand tightly while waiting to cross a busy road!]

Even though this far in time, the images are crisp and sharp, crystallized in clear focus as if I went to sleep as a child one afternoon like Rip Van Winkle and woke up thirty-five years later. That stone built house with 'roshandaans' and red tiled sloping roof, which I once called home, looks so endearingly romantic, yet as a little boy I felt it depressive and bleak. The construction in crudely cut boulders gave it a deep gray tinge of a forbidding castle while new sharply geometric, cubical constructions on the rear of our house looked cool, impressive and very trendy. Roshandaans are no more in vogue, these simple contraptions were constructed high on wall and operated through two strings attached to vertically swinging panels. But the strings were hardly used, for most of summers Roshandaans remained open and closed through the winters, in between some gaurayya (sparrow) will find a mate, build nest, rear children and fly away to annoyance of Mom. Once I took my rubber ball and offered to knock down the nest but one look at Mom's aghast face made me wonder until a long time at mysterious ways of grown up people's non-linear thinking. It also gave me first glimpse of life being lived in the gray rather than in black and white. Rajamma gave me my name 'Babu', she came to wash dishes and mop the house. Some times she would come with her young and very attractive copper complexioned married daughter Poshamma but then I was too young to flirt with her. Some times she would come drunk with 'taaRi' then Mom would push us out of the house off the front door. If Poshamma too came drunk, her bulging red shot eyes transformed her beautifully chiseled face into a fearsome psychopath's face. Some times Rajamma would come with a basketful of 'sita-phal' (called shareefa up north or the 'Custard Apple' in English) and pester Mom into buying the whole lot. That day we would eat sita-phal until we got sick of it.