MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES-I
Mangal Murty
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
-
Graham Greene
Revisiting childhood is like walking
into a dreamland of memories. Memories of childhood lie buried at the deepest
level of your subconscious mind like a precious treasure, or like ‘timeless treasures of the heart’. The entire
story of our life is written on its transparent parchment in an invisible ink
which generally gets lost in oblivion as life progresses into its complexities.
In pursuit of greater goals in our later life we become oblivious of that time
of greatest glory when we were at our divinest state of existence.
In most of the autobiographical literature
of even great writers, we find them generally unmindful of the richest, softest
and purest stretch of time - beyond the bounds of memory. Childhood, indeed, is
the time in our life in which we can search for the priceless treasures of
experience that have moulded our life, character and all our future attainments.
In fact, it is the story of our childhood which - like a kaleidoscope - can
show all the possible designs, in fascinating colours and patterns, of our
ultimale life.
In most of the great autobiographies,
we find the story of childhood quickly passed over, without dwelling in detail
on its myriad charming episodes and reminiscences. Indeed, there is so much of
value and glory in fuller recollections of your childhood than the various
mundane episodes of youth or age. We have it in Blake’s Song:
Piping down the
valleys wild
Piping songs of
pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a
child.
And he laughing
said to me...
Piper sit thee
down and write
In a book that all
may read—
So he vanish'd
from my sight.
And I pluck'd a
hollow reed…
1.
I’m reading sample extracts from Edwin
Muir’s Autobiography in Kindle. It begins with the mention of his birth
on a particular date in a particular place (Orkney) in Scotland. And that
reminded me of the singularly unique story of the actual moment of my ‘conception’
in a couple of diary entries of my father
– something so absolutely unique in any autobiographical account as to
be most incredible, indeed!
Had even Edwin Muir read this story of a
child’s conception and birth recorded by his father in a diary, he would just
have gaped in wonder – because nowhere in (known) literature one would find
another such instance of a marked moment of a child’s conception recorded in a
personal document for posterity. Here I begin my story at the very moment of conception, precisely recorded. This account must seem, indeed, a rare exemplification of the saying:"
It
was in a thatched cottage within the premises of Pustak Bhandar in Laheriasarai (Darbhanga, Bihar) which was a publication house where my father was then
serving as editor of ‘Balak’, a children’s monthly. Under compulsion of earning
a living to support a small family of his wife and three children, he had shifted
there with his family from Benares in March, 1934. The cottage had been
specially built for my parents within Bhandar’s premises– soon after the
devastating earthquake of 15 Jan. 1934 - after my father had finally decided to
come to Laheriasarai. With three of my infant siblings – Anand Murty (AM,5),
Sarojini (3) and Vinodini (1) who were all born in Benares.
It had happenened in the early hours of
one evening in May 1936, in the small courtyard of that thatched cottage –
under the open sky, beside the ‘Tulsi’ plant. My father recollects that moment
– without specifying the exact date1 - almost five years later in
Chhapara. Here are the two diary entries written in Chhapara, just one year
after my mother’s death (16 November, 1940) – when I was only a motherless
toddler of three years ten months, under the close care and nursing of my
father.
28 Nov. 1941: Every evening I go to
Shri Dharmnathji (temple in Chhapara) for darshan. Sometimes, Mangal Murty (MM)
also goes with me. The child seems devoted to Shivji. His birth I owe to
Shivji’s benediction. In Laheriasarai, Badi Didi (my wife’s widowed old sister
who often came and stayed with us in Benares and Laheriasarai) had brought a marigold
flower as ‘prasad’ from Shivji (temple
there), and given to my wife. It was precisely on that day that Mangal was
conceived. By God’s grace my wife always remembered it. When Mangal was in her
womb, my wife always remained healthy and happy. She loved Mangal immensely.
6 Nov. 1942: MM’s mother had
received from Badi Didi a big yellow
marigold flower in her hand as the ‘prasad’ of Shivji just after the act of his
conception. Badi Didi had given that flower to my wife in a blessed mood. She
had also given her the ‘prasadi’(sweets). It was in a cottage within the
premises of Pustak Bhandar in Laheriasarai. The Arya Samaj temple lay just to
the west side of Bhandar.There was a ‘Tulsi’ plant in one corner of that
cottage. It was just there, quite early in the evening, when the conception had
taken place. At that time Badi Didi had gone for the darshan of the ‘Bade
Mahadev’. It must have been by God’s Will!
It is thus with the incredible story of
the exact moment of my ‘onception’ recorded in his diary by my father that my
autobiography must begin!
I am reading sample extracts from
autobiographies of famous people like Tolstoy, Gorky, Nelson Mandela –
available free for sample reading on Amazon Kindle – retelling of their
childhood, in particular, because the samples give the beginning parts where
childhood is described. And that is of interest to me, because I’m going to
write – at least in my present design – only about my childhood, about the
first dozen years of my life.
Whereas in those other autobiographies I
find that the accounts of childhood have been hurriedly bypassed, or presented
in fictional form complete with scene-painting and remembered imaginary dialogues,
my account of childhood is not in the form of a re-created fictional narrative.
And also, it has the scaffolding of the actual diary-entries of my father which
give a parallel narrative, real and atual.
Here, in passing, I would also like to
mention my father’s own account of his childhood - both in fictional mode (in
his novel ‘Dehati Duniya’, Ch.1, pub. 1926) and in real-time mode (in his book ‘Mera
Bachpan’, pub. 1950) - thus giving an
opportunity to the reader to see how
early childhood experiences can be recalled in fascinating detail in both
modes, with the reader being able to make a comparison between the weaving of reality and imagination in a
narrative. (The account in ‘Dehati Duniya’ can be read in English translation in
full on my blog: vibhutimurty.blogspot.com. Go to this blog. Click on the year
2016, then on Aug, and find it at Aug. 8 post. You can read a short excerpt
from that chap. at the end below.)
2.
I have a very faint – but equally vivid -
vision of another small modest rented house there in Bengali Tola in
Laheriasarai where my parents had later moved, after my birth, in that thatched
cottage in Bhandar’s premises.
My memories of that second house in
Bengali Tola where my parents had moved after my birth are also very faint and
dream-like. The small rented house had a narrow oblong inner courtyard flanked
on one side by a roofed verandah with a couple of rooms. On the opposite side
of the verandah, enclosing the courtyard, was a blind wall. The entry into the
house must have been from the side of the verandah which was on a slightly
raised platform with the oblong courtyard a couple of feet below. And at one
end of the courtyard was an oleander tree. All this is still in my memory’s
perception– quite clear and vivid.
I even have a few other vignettes –
equally faint and dream-like in my memory. One of a row of green formaline jars
in a window of a hospital where someone must have been carrying me in lap –
possibly when my mother’s health, after my birth, had started deteriorating.
Then I have another memory when my parents were finally leaving for Chhapara
with all of us going to the Laheriasarai railway station with our luggage being
carried in a postal trolley. I can see the steel netting of that postal
trolley very vividly even now.
After my parents arrived in Chhapara where
my father joined as Hindi lecturer in Rajendra College on 15 November, 1939. My
mother’s health had deteriorated significantly, but she was very happy with my
father’s new status as a college lecturer. Friends in Chhapara had fixed up a
rented house for him which was an old abandoned large Haveli ( of Gulab Chand) said to be
haunted, and I was later told that my mother had once got frightened by some
ghostly shadow in one of its latrines. I was still my mother’s lap-baby and I
have a faint memory of that house, too! I remember lying by my mother’s side on
her breastfeed, in a large hall-like room. I can still visualize the very large
uncleaned golden-framed wall-mirrors and cobwebbed glass chandeliers hung up by
the high ceiling as I lay by my mother’s side being on her breastfeed. The different sights of
that house only remind me of its lonely, long-uninhabited, uncleaned broad
courtyards and numerous hall-like rooms in its double-storied structure2.
In that haunted house, my father stayed
only for a very short period, because soon he moved with his family of a wife
with four small kids into a new, freshly constructed house, built on his
request, in a nearby locality. My mother, however, had soon afterwards to move
to our village near Buxar, on persistent pressure from my uncles and my aunts -
always jealous of my mother for her urban life of comfort – to live in the
village home on the pretext of managing our farming affairs in the village.
I have, again, a faint memory of lying by
my mother’s side, being breastfed on a cot in her allotted room in that village
home of our joint farming family. That must have been in the summer months of
1940, when she had finally to go to the village home during my father’s college
summer vacation. I think now - I’ve a feeling - that my mother then was very
seriously ill and suffering, and she died soon thereafter on 16 November, 1940
for total lack of any medical care in that interior village.
I have no recollection of my mother’s
death or her being taken for her funeral to Buxar where my father arrived from
Chhapara, only by a tragic coincidence, on receiving the news of my mother’s
death by my uncle’s telegram. But a few vague images stick in my memory of some
of the events afterwards in the village home, or after we went back to Chhapara
with our father. For instance, I vividly remember how all my three siblings –
my eldest brother and two elder sisters – all within ten years in age – had
broken into bitter and prolonged crying when they had seen a photo of my
deceased mother with an obituary printed in the literary monthly ‘Sudha’ (Feb.,
1941).3
3.
Chhapara in the forties - when I was
growing up as a child, motherless and now always sticking to my father’s side -
was a small district town. It had a railway station, a district hospital and a
market. The new house in which my father lived with us – the four siblings –
and my mother’s eldest old widowed sister and a couple of others of her family
to take care of us, was at one end of the town, very close to the famous
Dharmnath Mahadev’s temple. The locality was known as Ratanpura and the road in
front of our house led to the temple on the right and to that old haunted
Haveli on the left. At the back of the row of houses fringing the road were
open farming lands which were submerged every year during the rainy season by
the flood in the Saryu river which lay, a couple of kilometers to the south.
The flood-waters came right up to the backyard of our house where my father had
a small backyard garden (‘fulwari’) with
a Kaneil tree, a few plants of marigold
and rose flowers, some plants of ‘Tulsi’ - fenced off at the back with a wild
growth of ‘Narkat’ (wild reed) bushes.
Every morning my father would get some flowers and ‘Tulsi’ leaves from that ‘fulwari’
for his daily morning worship.
My memories of my early childhood years –
now a motherless infant - are of that
house in which I lived with my eldest brother and two sisters and members of my
mother’s family who now lived with us to take care of us.
As it happens, my memories of my childhood
in my recollection have a backup of my father’s diary writing, and some of
those memories are shored up by written diary entries of my father which begin
in 1941, just a few months after my mother’s death.
1941: Sep 1-3. Last year during the
illness of my wife Mangal Murty(MM) would often sing a film-song – जिसके घर में मा नहीं है, बाबा करे न प्यार (One who
doesn’t have his mother, and the father, too, would not love him…). He often
sings that song even now. How fateful it proved. He lost his mother soon
afterwards…. He also sings his favourite song from the film ‘Tulsidas’ – तू राम भजन कर प्राणी , तेरी दो दिन की जिंदगानी (O
human, always sing the praise of Ram. You have only two days to live.)…Both my
sons (AM & MM) are showing early signs of their genius.
These diary entries of my father’s
Chhapara days are full of nostalgic recollections of his dear deceased wife.
Only a month and a half later he wrote in several entries:
1941: A letter from ‘Sudha’ office
informs that a photo obituary of my deceased wife is being published in its
coming issue. Only God knows why he desired my daling wife’s mysterious
separation from me (4.1)…Never do I forget my wife’s beautiful features or her
hair-style. I’ll never again get such a goddess-like life-partner. I pray to
God to give me that same companion in all my afterlives (17.1)…Memories of my
departed wife keep smouldering in my heart. How sweet was her nature? She would
always keep herself – and even her children - impeccably clean, dressed and
attractive (2.6) …Herself she always remained so clean and pure, in fact, that
the smell of her body – and even her breath – would always intoxicate me…Even
in heaven the gods must be treating her with affection…How sweet was her voice,
how soft, indeed, were all her limbs (8.10)… Memories of my darling wife
overwhelmed me as I prepared to sleep tonight. How much she loved me? Yet it
was not only a physical union for us, but a deep spiritual one. She had become
one with my soul. She must have come from the heaven of gods where she has gone
again…She would keep her hair, nails,teeth, lips, eyes, skin, hands and feet –
all so impeccably clean that I’d often start rubbing her lovely soles against
my cheek (7-10.10).”
The pangs of separation in his wife’s
untimely death were so agonizing that the pain gets overwhelming after every
few entries in his diaries of this whole decade of his life in Chhapara. And
there are occasional entries about me – a motherless infant, hardly four-year
old, who was just a toddler now almost inseparable from him in his daily life
routine.
1941: Oct. 26. Returned to Chhapara
from Laheriasarai in morning. Saw my playful children after many days. Hugged
and kissed MM -pressing him to my heart. Smelt Sarojini and Vinodini on their
heads. Showered love on AM. Cuddled all - making them happy….
1942:Jan.20. The surroundings of
thatched straw-hut near the Brahmsthan beside the Sangeetalay in which we lived
in Bhandar in Laheriasarai were then awfully dirty which may have affected my
wife’s health adversely. Though I was not so keen about coming to Chhapara, but
my wife was very insistent. She was so happy about the job at Chhapara. But she
could hardly enjoy her life here even for one year…MM is the symbol of his
mother’s love…
Diary entries for 1941 and ’42 are full of
such poignant reminiscences of my mother’s love, piety and devotion. But being
the youngest and last child of my mother – a mere infant in its brestfeeding
stage – my father’s attention was always focussed on me, and I always received
his maximum indulgence.
4.
Our house was a newly built one in which
by the roadside was a thatched open verandah behind which was a long
rectangular hall - as lobby - with three doors opening out on the veranda. At
one end of this hall there was a small oblong windowless room which was my
father’s personal study, specially constructed on my father’s request.
Behind that main front hall was a living-room also serving as passage to the inner courtyard which had four thatched roof verandahs on all sides.To the back side, after a broader verandah, was another small hall-like rectangular room with three barred windows opening out on the ‘fulwari’ behind the house, and beyond that were open farming fields. Here are some photos of that Chhapara house in Ratanpura, only a few yards away from the Dharmnath temple, and also two photos of the Rajendra College Clock Tower and its premises with their lecture halls, labs and offices, etc on all four sides.
FN 1. On calculation, I decipher the date to be between 25-27 May, 1936 – Google AI tells me, it’s 166 days between conception and delivery of a human child. And I was born on 16 January, 1937; possibly in a hospital, though that is not mentioned anywhere.
FN 2. Recently, in 2008, on a visit to Chhapara, when I went to see that ‘Haveli’ for my curiosity, I found it had been totally demolished and razed to the ground, now only a tractor-ploughed yellow-earthed plot of land, with the ploughing tractor standing in one corner.
FN 3. We were then back in Chhapara as my father’s diary entry shows: “ ‘Sudha’ came today in which my deceased wife’s photo and obituary are published. My childen – Anand Murty, Sarojini, etc started crying bitterly”. (8 March, 1941
Excerpt from ‘Dehati
Duniya’, Ch.1
…The ‘tamashas’ consisted of
different kinds of dramatic events. In one corner of the front terrace, we
would set up a stage. The large square bathing stool of Babuji would be the
actual stage. Willow sticks on the four corners covered with paper, to form the
roof, would make the sweetmeat shop. Broken firepots of the hubble-bubble would
form the dishes holding the brick-bits as laddoos, and green
leaves would be fried purees, with jalebis made
from wet dirt,and broken pitcher pieces would serve as batashas –
to make the sweetmeat shop complete. Pebbles would be used for weighing and
small bits of zinc would be the coins, with some of us being both buyers and
sellers. Babuji would also often turn up as a customer.
Soon, winding up our shop, we
would try and build tenements with dirt and clay. Walls made of dust, with a
roof laid with twigs. Broken twigs as pillars and empty matchboxes for doors.
Neck pieces of broken pitchers would serve as cooking stove or grindstone,
and earthen lamps as makeshift frying pan. Babuji’s pooja spoon
would be the ladle, with water as ghee, dust as dough, and sand as sugar
crystals, we would cook a grand feast, with some of us being cooks as well as
the feasting guests. When we would all sit in a row, Babuji would also
stealthily join us at one end of the row. And then, hastily undoing our
make-believe tenements, we would all flee laughing, amidst Bauji’s burst of
laughter. “When do we have the next feast, Bholanath?”, he would ask in
his chuckles.
Sometimes we would also form a marriage procession. An empty canister would be the drum, a rubbed mango rind would be the clarinet, the broken micetrap-box would serve as the palki; the groom’s father astride a he-goat, and the marriage party would travel from one corner of the front platform of our house to another, supposed to be the bride’s door. There in a small, cow-dung plastered courtyard, decorated with festoons and buntings made of mango and plantain leaves, and narrow broken wooden planks, would be the earthen kalash. The procession would reach and return from there soon, with the bride carried on a small cot covered with a red cloth. Babuji would again be there to raise the cover to have a look at the bride, which would drive us scampering and laughing off…
For Dehati Duniya, from Anamika (Mob.9773508632) &
For Mera Bachpan from Shwetvarna (Mob.9650100102)
Photos of the Chhapara (Ratanpura) house in which we lived from 1939 till 1949.
All photos & Text (C) Dr BSM Murty
From top downwards. 1. The Ratanpura house seen from the road, its outer
verandah and the road alongside. 2. The narrow single-door room of my father’s
study. 3. Two scenes from the Dharmnath Mahadev Temple nearby (where I’m seen
heading). 4. The Rajendra College Clock Tower and its rectangular set of
lecture halls across the expansive courtyard.
(I took these photos when I visited Chhapara in 2008, about 70 years after the house was constructed. Now the house is rented as a chicken coop.)
[To
be continued]
Text & Photos © Dr BSM Murty
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