We were six siblings, evenly balanced in gender terms, growing up under one roof. I was often slightly embarrassed at the size of my family as most of my friends had just a sibling or two. They certainly had more luxuries than I did but what can compare with the joys of growing up in a large family? Life was on a shoe-string budget. We had enough of everything, but no more. Never any excess. Any kind of waste was frowned upon as a sin and everything made to last as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I look back with pride upon my parents’ amazing economy that still left all of us gratified. There were no bought pleasures as there was no money to buy them.
We played, argued, fought and made up and participated wholly in the rough and tumble of a large household, oblivious to our mother’s admonitions from the kitchen, quietening down only when we heard our father’s footsteps at the gate.
We had hordes of friends as one brother’s or sister’s friends were everybody else’s and at a time we had at least five “Famous Fives” and “Billy Bunters” from our respective school libraries doing the rounds. Besides, there was the circulating library in the neighbourhood that chiefly stocked second-hand books from generous donors and the membership fee was an affordable luxury graciously granted us.
Those were the halcyon days of growing up ever so slowly. Breezy mornings when we drifted into slumber and wakefulness and back, sun-spangled afternoons and evenings resonating with a cacophony of voices from across the playground. Everything gave us delight: the boiling heat we tried to beat by reading ourselves into a delicious doze, the cascading downpour that thrilled us just watching the puddles it formed on the street or in rivulets running down the verandah. I, the eldest, reading poetry in school, thought the rain went like Southey’s “Cataract of Lodore”.
School was a load of fun as it was not a back-breaking attempt to get” there” though we were told we needed to get “there”. There were lessons, games, examinations, fetes, concerts, Christmas and New Year celebrations and then the next class. There was the occasional movie, the book exhibition, the visit to a Chinese joint, and we felt our lives were made.
Other than those pleasures there were days and days of just school and home. But each day brought us reassuring joys in everyday things. “What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known”?
My idea of happy contentedness even in memory are those afternoons I spent with one brother lying flat on his stomach snoozing over his homework, another listening to the cricket scores in the wonderful voice of Pearson Surita and recording them painstakingly in a dog-eared notebook for later analysis.
One sister would be trying to finish her embroidery sitting by the window and myself lost in a book that had to be returned after the weekend, and the last two would be in an engrossing game of Ludo. Each one doing his or her own stuff oblivious to everyone else but still “connected”! And how can I forget those days of sitting up and caring for the sick brother or sister, which only deepened our bond.
Like Maggie and Tom Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss we thought life would never change and we would never grow up, always be together and be fond of one another.
But we did grow up one day, went our separate ways, in search of jobs and careers across the country, some even across continents, and led our separate lives. We do meet once in a rare while and the old times do come back — but not quite always.
The framed photograph with the garland of marigold flowers reminds us of the brother who once was with us but never will be. I can hear the cricket scores from the old radio far away in memory.
sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com
