I remember those days like antique pieces of a forgotten memory. I lived in a place that was old, the houses were old with brownish walls and dark interiors, the people were old with wrinkled faces and curved backs, and the air was old for it smelled thick, rusty and corrosive. When it rained, the outdoor sewage canals inundated our compounds with rich sediments and stuff, not that anyone cared, but what was becoming was that, we had to deal with the big blunt nosed predators that came as an aftermath to the deluge. It was not so rosy inside either; the already brownish walls now swelled and the plaster came off it, everything was sort of damp and wet, the floor, doors and the people too, for they were now wearing woolen sweaters. The compound I lived in had three more houses and the people were unique and distinguished. So unique that neither of them could have replaced, even in part the others.
I was in first standard, and every day after waking me up, my mom made me sit and read aloud in the hall (or the sitting room, for there were only three rooms, one hall, one kitchen, one bedroom) while she was cooking in the kitchen. I usually read aloud at a normal pitch for a while, but gradually I would fall into stupor or something, then she would yell and I would go nuts and raise my pitch real loud. Now, there was this family that lived in the house right opposite to us, a lean guy ( I mean real lean, his bones were sticking out as if pushing the skin apart to surface and feel the atmosphere, not so poetic, but that is what he looked like), he prayed and I read aloud at the same time, we had differences in opinions, and there was this time when, he stood outside for how long I don’t recollect, I was reading one of the English compositions loud and clear, which sort of ruined his praying time. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him and looked over, he made a face then a rant, in a sort of hush-hush voice, but his gestures were so expressive that his convoluted face did leak out a word or two that I was able to hear, others he kept to himself. He was only wearing a towel of some sort, after all the theatrics, I realized for the first time that I had the potential of reducing a sane and bovine person into convoluting his face like he was under excruciating pain of some sort.
The neighborhood was so full of blind alleys and pathways that we relished ourselves comfortably playing hide and seek, and we had time aplenty. We had power cuts in our area, a couple of hours at nights, so we had to wrap up our home works before the communion began. Boys got together, slipping under the noses of their parents to meet up near the street lights, while girls stayed home singing and dancing. We played exhaustively in the most visually challenging alleys, for every day one of us found a new place to hide in; sometimes it was way too far outside the neighborhood, other times it was in our own very houses. It was tricky and the trick was to cover all the known places first in a logical sequence and finding out the adherents, once this was done it was easy to find the non adherents. Consciously (for some shared common grudge), unconsciously (for, some were just driven out of curiosity) every one hitherto found cooperated in the mission ahead. We went into totally unknown territories to hide, we sought new places every day, and this relentless quench for hiding dragged us into sitting beside parked vehicles, standing tall behind a pole, crouching under dinner tables, covering oneself with blanket and making it look like a clothes heap or something, hiding behind a bush or worse hanging from the roof while your pursuer walked beneath you.
Curious things happened, not on a regular basis, but boy they did happen. There was this time, the communal rites, babri masjid breakout or something, and that was the most memorable time we in our neighborhood, we had a good and solid week of holidays. We were totally struck by the way things unfolded, there was this guy who lived just round the corner, we always went there to hide and all that, but we never knew that he sold gapchup. So, something happened on the roads, and the gapchup guy was shown his way back home. It was a quiet evening of tranquility (first day of the seven day holiday period) and we were making plans for the next six days, matches we should play, who was doing good at bowling, who was batting the hell out of all the bowlers in the neighborhood and that sort of a thing. This atmosphere was punctured abruptly by the gapchup guy’s return, it was the first time I ever tasted gapchup, my mom hurriedly brought me some and explained how to gulp it down the throat. She was hysterical that I was lazy and all that, for all the tasty syrup was getting wasted, and she went and brought some more. This time though, I was good, I gulped a good four of them neatly down my throat and my mom went to join other ladies in the neighborhood to discuss the events of the evening and brainstorm or whatever it is that they did.
Now, there was this guy in the neighborhood, he was stout, muscular and batted really well. So everyone called him dead boon (David boon was a popular figure back then) and everyone was getting crazy as hell to bowl against him. Everyone wanted him to play in their team, and some of the bright minds decided that it was better to have him play as a joker (meaning, he would be batting on both sides, but won’t be allowed to bowl). Well, these rules were sometimes slippery, for instance, on some occasions, teams decided to let the joker play only after all the other batsmen were out, and other times, joker would bowl too. Anyway, there were literally many places we would play cricket, just about everywhere, we played inside the houses, in hallways, in the compounds, on roads over rooftops, and lastly in grounds.
There was a vacant ground in our neighborhood with dead boon’s home overlooking it, but the ground was littered with pits and rocks, so we had to make a call, our bowling track would be the adjoining cement road and the fielders would be placed inside the uneven ground. But the keeper had to stand behind the pole that had three straight lines driven on it with charcoal (these represented stumps). The glitch was, the drainage system in the neighborhood was not so trustworthy. All of us attended to our nature calls in those open systems and they were all over the place. For instance, there was a canal of smallish breadth running behind the pole where the keeper was situated, and there was one running parallel to it where the bowler was standing. The ball frequently landed into one of those canals, and the keeper had to shove it out with a broken bottle, or a coconut in half discarded out, or the bat the batsman had in his hand. So one ingenious guy started it off, the term “kiran mori caught” , when the ball landed in the canal, and it became a practice to all of us. Sometimes, we washed the ball under a running tap beside the ground, other times, we simply rubbed it off with mud , hit it against the wall for a while and the play had to begin, the play had to go on.
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