Childhood memories of Makhu have kites stamped on them
IT must be a significant town now, but it was a small dot of a village when I would visit Makhu as a child travelling with my family during school holidays. Located on the railway line between Jalandhar and Ferozepur, Makhu is my Dadi’s parental home.
Vidyawati, my Dadi, was the youngest of many brothers and sisters. She was still an adolescent when both her parents died. Her oldest brother’s wife was the young woman in their home, and I would hear grateful stories of how she took the responsibility of her teenaged sister-in-law. Vaddi Mami, my parents called the woman who was like a mother to my grandmother. I remember her as venerable and always smiling.
My father, Trilok Chand, was a star visitor to the home in Makhu. He had been to America for training stints as a young engineer and returned with a Pentax camera and an album of colour photos. He brought a steel thermos and Wrigley’s chewing gum to the village. His mother’s childhood home was his safe place; he was loved and celebrated here.
Talking to Trilok’s city-bred children seemed to amuse everyone. Growing up in Ranchi and Calcutta, we referred to all our extended family homes in various districts collectively as Punjab. When we spoke, everyone laughed. It was hard for me to understand whether we had said something very smart or stupid. We were bathed in the open verandah with water from the hand pump, combed and dressed for display. Adults argued over whether we looked more like our mother or our father. They taught us to eat sugarcane and tried to make us appreciate the virtues of ghee and jaggery.
It was our Punjabi-speaking adolescent cousin who cut us down to size. I remembered her name till a few years ago. At home, she was called Nanni. She took my brother and me to the terrace to fly kites. If I was eight years old, Bhai must have been 11. I was witness to the scene when a teenaged girl discovered that Bhai did not know how to fly a kite. “I’ll teach you,” she said and proceeded to tutor him in Punjabi. That scene on the terrace is etched as a visual memory in my mind.
As far as I was concerned, Bhai was the gifted boy who knew everything. Now I watched him struggle with a new skill. Kites are notoriously disobedient. Amateurs willing them to rise fail repeatedly. The complexity of how to release the manjha, when to let go of the kite and how to keep the kite from collapsing demands a delicate attention that needs practice. Nanni remained calm as the chief pilot of the operations. She knew the language of kites and the wind.
After Hema Malini as Basanti, the tangeywali in Sholay, my kite-flying cousin in Makhu was the second role model I added to the list of women I wanted to grow up to be.
On the morning that we were to take the train to return to my grandparents’ home in Jalandhar, an aunt went into labour. She was in a corner room at one end of the courtyard. There was a flurry of action and nervous energy at home. Papa’s cousins exhorted us to stay back for the feast and celebration that would follow when the baby arrived. I watched my parents being overwhelmed and agree.
That morning, a girl was born in our home in Makhu. There were still a few minutes before our train would reach the railway station. A tonga was summoned in haste. Some young men ran through the fields to stop the train till we reached the station. Hasty goodbyes were said and we were sent off on a bumpy ride over village roads to catch the train.
There was no need to pause for a celebration now. The birth of girls didn’t count.
Decades later, that scene replays in my mind and I think of all the women who did grow up in that home, despite the fact that their birth may have been treated as a disappointment. My grandmother overcame the loss and tragedies of her childhood to raise three sons, my father being the first of them. My mother never tires of sharing how gentle and strong my Dadi was. I would watch her sew and cook and learn what it meant to be nurturing towards others. The baby who was born that day would grow up playing under the same skies as her older cousin, Nanni — the one who was an expert patang-baaz.
I would grow up and write our story together, erasing the lies that generations before us were unable to call out. Girls count. It is never too late to examine and discard the unjust bias we have accumulated over the years. It takes skill and patience to raise children. Each one of them is born to soar. Like Nanni, each one can tame the winds and conquer the skies, as if it were child’s play.
— The writer is a filmmaker & author
