Personal Geometry

Small, narrow room. Boy looks out the single window at the far end. A huge Mango tree dominates the view outside. Its branches snake nearly to the window grille and when the wind blows he can touch the leaves. A thousand Rhesus monkeys make their home in this tree. Hardly surprising, for the fruit is succulent and the shade is a cool respite from the punishing heat of long summer days. They are a noisy and mischievous and spunky lot, are these monkeys. For when the fruit is no longer in season, they will sneak right into the home and steal food from the table.

That boy is me. The year is 1966 or 1967. Baba works for the Life Insurance Corporation and was transferred here from Bombay a few years earlier. I am in Class I or II and this modest flat in Basotia Bhavan along the Canal Range in Kanpur has been my home for as long as I can remember.

[Wait up. What’s with the deep dive into personal prehistory?

Locations and loci. Trajectories, paths, vectors. We plot where we are and where we will likely go next. We triangulate our situation and define our coordinates. Our neural wiring makes us geometers.

This, then, is an exercise in personal geometry. A draw-by-numbers art book where I must first get all the dots together before I can start joining them. Perhaps I won’t even join them. For I suspect, I won’t be able to figure out which dot connects up to which one. The neural network probably connects every dot to every other and it is a web in there.

The oldest, farthest dots are for the most part in Kanpur.]

Dust. If there is a single thing that is all-pervasive in these memories of Kanpur circa 1965 it is the dust. With the advantage of knowledge since acquired, I now recognize in its hazy, choking ubiquity, another gift of the mighty Ganga that flowed, and still flows, through the city. This great river carries down millions of tons of the stuff from its source high up in the Himalaya and deposits it all along her banks as she makes her sinuous way down to the Bay of Bengal. As the loamy mounds dry they replenish the fertility of the endless fields on either bank. Or are blown away by the winds whipping off the river and become the ubiquitous dust.

The domestic help, Mehri as she would be referred to in those parts, would sweep the home in the morning and a substantial pile of dust would be the predictable result. Every leaf of the Mango tree was covered by dust. When I stepped out of the building, every step would be marked with little bellows. Running around during snack and lunch breaks in the grounds of West Cott High School meant churning up huge clouds of smoky yellow. The mehendi bush that lined the path to the School was laden with it. The very air you breathed was choking with it.

Quite early in the morning, 7 o’clock perhaps, I would set out for my milk run, the aluminium ‘barni[1]’ swinging in the right hand. The ‘gwala[2]’ was on the other bank of the nullah just past a couple of bhadbhoonjan[3] shops that would be redolent with the smell of roasting moongfali[4]. Vast kadhais[5] full of hot sand and whatever it was that was being roasted would sit atop wood or coal stoves fanned by large leather bellows. The bhadbhoonja would use massive slotted ladles to constantly keep turning the mix to ensure even roasting and prevent the subjects of his hot ministrations from getting burnt. The sibilant hiss of the sand as it ran through the slots in the ladle, the crackling of the charcoal in the stove and the scrape of ladle against kadhai provided a rhythmic cadence to the process, truly wondrous for the seven year old as he walked past. Four decades on, the memory of the fresh, hot roasting aromas that rose from the kadhais  is still strong enough to produce a spontaneous salivary response.

Much is made in culinary circles, particularly in the West, about the provenance of various food ingredients and the superior virtues of local produce. Back in Kanpur c. 1965, it can be safely said that everything we ate or drank was produced within a 100 kilometer radius of the city.

---

[1] A cylindrical vessel with lid traditionally used for carrying or storing liquids such as milk and oil

[2] Milkman

[3] Traditional roasters of rice, wheat, peanuts, lentils and legumes. Their main products are puffed rice, puffed wheat and roast chickpeas

[4] Peanut

[5] Indian style Woks made of cast iron

Blogged with the Flock Browser