Once upon a time many years ago, there was no Doordarshan, and Star was a twinkle in the darkling sky you could wish upon if you caught a single one. The persons who dreamt up Amazon Prime and those who had a eureka moment with Netflix were still in their swaddling clothes, or perhaps not even born. Children of the later 1950s amused themselves with simple toys and games of their own making.
I remember the joy of a shoe box projector with a piece of mirror, a light bulb and a hole to peer into. A cousin who made one used to charge us 25 paise just to peep in and see some pictures of starlets cut out of a magazine. That we could see them outside, and in a clearer manner, did not even occur to us. Or the telephone with two tin cans and a piece of string, which gave us hours of whispered conversations up and down a staircase. I still do not know if it worked, but that was not important. What was important was that we had our own indigenous version of a telephone and were free to create our own emergencies which called for an instant connection with a friend.
An older cousin who was something of an inventor once assembled a kaleidoscope. And achieved the status of a demi-god in our eyes as we followed him around begging for a chance to actually hold it in our hands and twirl the pieces of glass into the most fascinating patterns. An effect almost as good was delivered, I discovered later, by a piece of crystal broken surreptitiously from the chandelier in my grandfather’s house and held up to the sun to deliver a rainbow into our hands.
Those were the days when we collected broken glass bangles and bent them over a candle flame to make endless chains. Or stole 78 rpm records from an irate uncle and bent them into bowls. A friend who was lucky enough to live near a railway line would regularly oblige us by putting a 25 paise coin on the rails and have it flattened by the Bombay Express.
Then there were the seasonal toys.
The kite season just before Sankranti saw hordes of children on neighbourhood terraces unmindful of the sun that our mothers bemoaned darkened our skin to who-will-marry-you-now shades. The kites bought for a rupee from a special kite shop (now I wonder what the shop had sold when it was not Sankranti) which had fanciful names for each design: names like Blue Rani and Uran Khatola, which enhanced their desirability. Some kites had eyes, others had targets painted on them. One beauty had a bird in flight and a long tail of streamers. But then it was expensive and way beyond our limited budgets. One large kite I long coveted was called Maharaja. Alas, Maharaja was perhaps too heavy because he never did take off despite all the expertise brought to bear on its take-off by my obliging uncles.
When a kite did take off, it came alive in our hands with its tugs and pulls as it headed off into the sky intent on its own secret mission. It acquired a stubborn mind of its own as it climbed higher and higher on the currents like a conqueror of space. Our hearts rode with its darting and swooping motion, an electric current going through our arms as we took turns to hold the string, taking care not to cut our hands… our minds soaring way above the mediocrity of an earth-bound life. Till some villainous kite from the next terrace overrun by hooligans came to attack it. How our kite would dip and dodge till the lethal glass encrusted manja of the villains would get the better or it and cruelly truncate its flight.
Even then it died with grace, floating to the left, then tilting to the right, taking its time to find a good perch on the highest branch of a tree… out of reach of the street boys who followed its downward progress with unholy shouts while racing to catch it.
There were wooden tops… conical pieces of brightly painted wood pierced by a nail; they had a season too. They came with grooves on the slope and a piece of string that you wrapped around and pulled with a jerk. That would send the top into a meditative dervish spin that turned its lines into a blur and stilled the humming motion till it was barely visible.
We practised for hours to get the spin right, and when we mastered it the joy kept us on a high for hours. But the real ecstasy was when you persuaded an ace to catch a spinning top from an edge and gently transfer it into your hand. The palm had to be plank straight and you had to hold your breath and not move at all. The tingle of the tap spinning on your palm was equivalent to being accepted by the Universe. By God. As human being worthy of the honour.
There was something called a yo-yo. A wheel on a string that you wrapped on your forefinger and mastered a fling-and-retrieve motion so that the wheel whirred down and came up again of its own accord, went down and up and down and up….one could yo-yo for hours and seldom tire of its motion.
But my all-time favourites were silver paper, panni we called them. These were sheets of myriad metallic hues and designs that you bought from the stationers and saved inside copy books. Oh, the colours and the designs that gleamed and winked at you! There was an active barter system with the duplicates. After a quickly swallowed lunch at school the time was given to trading the silver paper and oohing and aaahing over each other’s collection. Alas, in Standard 3 in the Rosary Convent, someone stole my entire copybook with about 30 of the priceless sheets. I did not have the heart to start collecting again and stayed away from the lunch-time trade zone under the neem tree.
Marbles did not have a season and they were a boy thing, but that never stopped me. With artful wheedling I managed to get my grandfather to buy me a whole tin box full of them. The sound of them rattling in what was a milk tin with Cow and Gate on the outside, was eminently satisfying. The marbles came with beautiful colours in the hearts of the glass which you could gaze at and see infinity. The most prized ones were the biggies. I forget what they were called but they were fat, round and chalky white and felt delicious when you hefted them in your fingers and clicked them together.
I joined the neighbourhood boys in their complex marble shooting games but more often than not lost my biggies. So I stopped playing marbles and was content to keep the tin by my bedside and spill them out on the bed to just run them in my fingers and count them yet again.
I think skipping ropes and hula hoops are still around in some modern form but what I cannot find anywhere are plastic beads that clicked into each other with a most satisfying click to make a yard of necklace worth a queen’s ransom. I looked for them for a niece (that is what I told myself) in a dozen toy shops, without finding anything like it.
I think my most treasured toy was something called a ViewMaster. It was based on the bioscope principle and built like a small telescope into which you inserted a wheel with double slides of animals or fairy tales and clicked to rotate them. I had only two wheels, one of wild animals and one of Little Red Riding Hood. How magically alive the pictures looked, almost three-dimensional and intensely colourful. With a ViewMaster glued to your eyes you entered an alterative reality that was more real than the world of complaining teachers, homework and adults who bemoaned the lack of discipline just because you were having too much fun being a child.
I lived in a time when childhood was participative, get-your-hands-dirty kind of fun rather than a spectator thing. I still cannot imagine the joy my grandson gets from watching endless reams of cartoons on a TV screen. Thank God, he is beginning to pay some attention to stories I spin out for him, albeit on a made-to-order basis.
”Okay Amamma, today you can tell me about a flying elephant and tooth fairy.” He is palpably indulging me.
“You shut off the TV and you have one bespoke story coming up.” For a brief time I feel fulfilled in my role as grandmother which this wretched digital era is depriving me of.
