Mango, Jackfruit, Guava & Pigeons!

Every now and then, I have moments where thinking about the present gets overwhelming and I resort to thinking about the past. And since the last several years of my life haven't been particularly pleasant, my mind wanders off to my childhood. If you have followed my blogs, you must have read the bits I have written about certain incidents from my childhood - be it the memories of having sweets with my father, triggered by "balushahi", or the various fragrances of trees and shrubs which take me back to a certain time in my life. While most of the time, I think about certain incidents that highlight my childhood, if I try to remember my childhood in general, I keep landing on visions of the backyard gardens of the several houses I have lived in. 

The earliest one I remember was behind this house in Sector 31, Chandigarh. I can barely remember the house itself - it was one of those generic air force quarters, maroon bricks and a grey door and a mix of wall and barbed wires making the boundaries separating one house from another. But the memory of the backyard is still vivid and alive - there was a guava tree that had a  smooth whitish bark. There were a few other trees there - a banana tree and a flower-bearing shrub and maybe a neem tree too - but I preferred to climb up on the guava tree because it appeared cleaner than the other trees around and I could see the little black ants clearly and could avoid them better. I was around two and a half years old at this point in time. I was a curious child. I even remember bending down to smell dog poop this one time in the same backyard. 

Other fond memories from that house include that one time my father and his friends brought pigeon meat and cooked it for lunch. They said my father had been assigned the duty to shoot down pigeons from the runway so that jets could take off. On second thought, that might have been a story they tell kids and it could have been just chicken or quail. I remember trying to identify the difference in taste. Strangely, I always remember that backyard as eerily bright and radiant, with yellow sunlights streaming through the leaves and foliage and lighting up the bald patch of dirt in the middle of the yard. Could it be because it was a happier time? Or maybe because I remember it from the eyes of a two-year-old? Or maybe because there's a picture of that yard with my mother holding me on a chair and since the picture was taken on an afternoon, the sunlight is bright and reflects off my mother's clothes?

The next backyard I remember is from Choudwar - it's a small industrial village some ten kilometers away from Cuttack in Odisha. There is a factory called Indian Charge Chrome Limited and there's a colony for the employees adjacent to the factory premises. That's where I lived for a few years between the age of six to ten. These were also staff quarters but there were four flats in each house block and the houses were painted beige with the paint peeling off at several places near the terrace. I remember the insides of this house better - especially the old-fashioned switchboards with the black thick switches which had to be pushed up and down and sparks would fly off them because they were old. The walls were a light green for a few seasons and then my father had them painted white so that the rooms would look brighter. The grilled windows in the bedrooms opened to the front of the building - which overlooked a street lined with other houses.

Coming back to the backyard, the red-colored soil was almost all covered with grass and there were two giant jackfruit trees on one corner of the yard, which bore huge jackfruits every season. And my father would climb the tree with a machete to cut down the jackfruit and I would stand below with a quilt to catch the falling fruits. If the fruits were raw, my father would cook them with meat masala so that it tasted almost like chicken. If they were ripe, my father would eat them, because I hated the painfully sweet smell of ripe jackfruit. We would save the seeds of the ripe ones and dry them. Once dried, we would peel the outer cover and fry the soft inner seed, and snack on it. There also was this old mango tree that bore fruit every alternate year. It flowered up every summer but there would be mangoes only every alternate year. It was really frustrating. I think 1998 was one of the years when there were a lot of mangoes on the tree. I remember one afternoon, my father and I sat in the yard with a few raw mangoes we picked, and we cut them in slices and sprinkled salt and paprika. I loved the tangy taste of raw mangoes.

There was a patch in this yard that my father cleared off, and sowed some coriander seeds on. Several weeks later, we had coriander leaves. My father was great at gardening - his plants always bore fruit. He grew some tomatoes, some chillis and there was a lemon tree as well at some point. I was especially excited about this mango tree we planted which grew up to around four feet in a year and three little mangoes grew on it the first year. I was too excited about those mangoes and even though my father had forbidden me from picking them early, I only let one of them ripen on the tree. I think I have a picture of my father and me in this yard. This yard didn't get a lot of sunlight in the hours that I was at home - so I remember it as a little dark. Beyond the backyard, there was a large plot with wild shrubbery as far as the eye could see. I imagined that it was a jungle teeming with wildlife. It actually was - to some extent. There was a monitor lizard that had wandered onto our yard this one time. One rainy afternoon, there was a thick yellow python that was curled up on a flowering tree and I remember my father just grabbed it and set it free away from our yard. I remember thinking my father was some kind of a superhero.

The rains also brought with them two of the creepiest crawlies into the house - these black and red millipedes. The red ones would curl up like snakes if you touched them but the black ones looked more sinister. I remember detesting the creepy little things. I retain my dislike for bugs to this day. I would use a magnifying glass and a flashlight to burn as many of them as I could. I realize how cruel that sounds, but in my defense, I have read that most insects' nervous system is so rudimentary that they don't feel pain like we do - so that absolves me (somewhat). This yard also saw the Super Cyclone of 1999 - I remember the two days of devastating winds that leveled out the trees and shrubs and uprooted even the oldest of trees. After those two days, so much water had seeped into the ground that water would start coming out even if you dug half a foot into the soil - this came in handy because there was no electricity to pump up water for several days after the cyclone. And then my father brought a baby otter-like animal that he found near his office. We nursed it for a few days before he handed it over to forest officials.

The next significant backyard is also the last one where I lived as a child. It's the one at my house in Sambalpur. Today it looks very different from how it looked in the early 2000s. It actually doesn't exist today - there's an outhouse where once was a quaint little garden - a berry shrub that grew right on the boundary, a tulsi plant which my grandma lit 'diyas' around and a curry tree, the leaves of which found their way into most of our meals. The rest of the space was mostly grass and puddles created by neighboring drains leaking into our compound. I didn't play in this backyard as much, because by this time I had become a couch potato of sorts - teenage and whatnot. But I would go there to pick berries and sometimes I would chase around stray cats that stopped by. I even followed around garden lizards at times to see what they do all day - I liked to think of myself as a NatGeo explorer. And that sums up the major phases of my childhood.

As I write this, I realize that I can't go back to any of these backyards today. The first one - I don't even remember the address; the second one - well, the house and the place is now home to some of the worst memories of my life; the last one - has a house over it now, like I mentioned. And that gives them a certain mystical character. Like those fantastic dreams, the ones we forget right after we wake up. I wonder if other children have similar memories associated with their backyards. I know for a fact that kids in urban areas today don't know about such spaces because of the apartment lifestyle and if possible, I'd like my children to grow up in a house instead of a high-rise building. 

So, with that note, I am signing off today. Until next time.