Immeasurable pleasure of small things
‘Fun,’ says author Bill Bryson recalling his childhood, ‘was a different kind of thing in the 1950s, mostly because there wasn’t so much of it… You learnt to wait for your pleasures, and to appreciate them when they came.’ If Bryson can say this of his childhood in the America of the Fifties, surely the most prosperous and hedonistic country of those times, then where does one even begin to describe the kind of waiting that we did here in India when we were growing up in the Fifties in small towns and in middle class homes?
Lucknow in the Fifties or Allahabad in the Sixties seem so far away in time, yet the life we had there often comes back to me now in black and white dreams. I am constantly taken aback by how much I remember from that time and how a stray taste, smell or melody can set off a train of thoughts, always accompanied by an unheard-by-others-but clearly-by-my-ears Raga Piloo played by Pannalal Ghosh. Perhaps it is because it was the signature tune that always accompanied the Films’ Division newsreel screened before the Sunday morning show of the children’s film at Lucknow’s Mayfair Theatre. The sonorous voice of Melville de Mellow or Romesh Thapar that accompanied the film footage of a drought or villages marooned by flood waters in Assam rings clearly in my ears even now after almost half a century.
We suffered these delaying tactics because they made the whole experience of watching a film on a Sunday a treat that would last us for the next month. Seeing films at reduced rates, as at special children’s shows, were the only indulgence allowed by our frugal parents. We were also allowed either a packet of chips or a small bar of chocolate, not both together. So my brother and I shared our packet of chips, down to the last one broken in two neat halves, and a small bar of Cadbury’s measured and carefully cut into two. To date, I feel guilty about eating a packet of potato chips or a whole bar of chocolate all by myself.
And how we waited for those interminable train journeys with masses of messy luggage: holdalls, a word that will probably send youngsters to Hobson-Jobson for reference, tin trunks (suitcases were an unheard-of luxury in my family) that required determined haggling over coolie rates on platforms that were always reeking of stale pee and phenyl. The wars fought over window seats and the lurching rattle of the steam engines as they were finally flagged off. We bought comics (only allowed to be bought on railway platforms) and re-read them for months. Superman, Phantom, Illustrated Classics were the stuff we’d sell our souls for. I cannot now remember whether I read Lorna Doone in the original or as an Illustrated Classic. For this reason, perhaps, the new graphic novels, hailed as an exciting new genre, move me not: how can something that gives you secret pleasure be liked and encouraged by grown-ups?
How times have changed and how indulgent today’s parents seem when compared with ours. Among the many lessons that were instilled into us as children, I think the most valuable was patience. I considered myself quite impatient but when I see the world around me, I realise that it is not just patience that was inculcated at a subliminal level into us but forbearance, the quality that gave us the courage to take things in our stride and not complain about those things we cannot change. It seems to me — and no doubt to many of my generation — that we have adjusted very well to the lockdown. It has been months since we have stepped out except for our walks and the occasional visit to a bank. I would be lying if I said it has not become tedious to spend day after day inside the same house, with just each other. Yet we know that we cannot do anything but wait and hold ourselves together.
Of course, one must admit that there is much cause for the young to feel anxious, what with the dismal economic situation and shrinking salaries. Life no longer seems as secure as it was just a few months ago and many young people, after spending huge amounts of money and time on earning their degrees, are no longer sure whether they can earn enough to pay back the loans they have taken. For those who have jobs, the worry is how to pay their EMIs and the school fees for their children after their salaries have been cut. Despite this, few are willing to give up certain luxuries that are now no longer affordable. They had become accustomed to instant gratification of their desires and were easily seduced into buying whatever was dangled in front of their eyes — a larger flat, a bigger car, a more expensive vacation or whatever. Now that that is not always possible, panic attacks and depression have overtaken many young people. The most recent example is that of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput, whose life and death are being played out every day as a morality play for the millennials.
Never forget you are not alone and that it is within your own power to keep your head above water.
