Sunday, May 11, 2008

Chapter 1 : Amman: Happy Mother's Day

I remember her sitting under the large tamarind tree, quietly reading a book for hours at a stretch. In a way, I was responsible for that. I was in lower kindergarten that time in St Joseph’s Convent, Kamptee. I remember I was very well behaved and composed on the first day of my school; and specifically during the first few minutes that she was there. The moment my mummy had walked out and they closed the doors, my bravado had vanished. She decided that she was going to sit in the school compound reading and I could see her through the window, to reassure myself whenever I wanted. This arrangement was in place for many days. The teacher tried shifting my place after a few days so that I wouldn’t look out of the window too often. I guess I started getting too fidgety or something and was shifted back to my window seat, much to my delight.

Kamptee is a small village. It is about a couple of hours drive away from the nearest big city Nagpur, which is a prominent city in central India. My school was the only English medium school in the village. The school benches were small and painted in bright but gaudy colours and smooth oil paints that had been further smoothened with use. The class room was neat and clean, and had a tiled roof like the ones we see in bungalow shots of Hindi movies. The room had a window that faced the play ground. The tamarind tree had a circular slab constructed around it. Kamptee derived from Camp T was a typical army cantonment town with houses, bungalows and mall roads that bore the stamp of the British era.

Just outside the window was the tree. Mummy used to sit below it for the three hours that I was in the classroom. It was a reassuring sight, if ever there was one. That’s the first real memory that I have of Mummy and the visual has stuck in my mind. It looked like a picture postcard with the large tree at some distance and my mother reading quietly without looking up for those long three hours that I was in class. It was awesome. It was serene. One could hear the faint humming noise of students studying in different classrooms in a still kind of suppressed silence punctuated only by the occasional breeze or the distant grunting of grazing cows and goats. I don’t remember whether my classmates teased me since I was the only kid in the class whose mother stayed back but it didn’t matter. When you are that young explanations are neither sought nor offered, I guess or maybe it was unwritten rule. Once I felt a little more comfortable at school, I tried convincing myself that she liked reading.