Our Funarena!

In the early eighties, emboldened by the permanent job I finally got, I planned to purchase a second-hand scooter and found a suitable owner. The brand of the scooter was ‘Priya’ which ignited somewhat romantic feelings in me as that word meant ‘Beloved’! I also justified the purchase as it’d help me commute faster to my office, could take my father to his office and back regularly and do the odd jobs like marketing and so on. Therefore, I decided to learn how to drive a scooter. A cousin came forward to help taking me to the highways in the early mornings for days, mostly the weekends.   When I made the deal and brought my ‘Priya’ home I was quite confident of driving. And so, I wanted a license as soon as possible. My father was a high-ranking officer at that time; but he was ruthlessly honest, upright and outspoken and I knew he would never help me in getting the license out of the way. There was no other option but to go to the office of the District Transport Officer (DTO) the

As the mango season rages across India at the moment that will last till June, I remember one funny incident about buying mangoes in the late eighties in uptown Mumbai. That time I was new to the city of dreams and knew nothing about the famous mango variety, called Hapus or Alphonso (the name Alphonso is credited to a Portuguese vice-general in the early part of the 16 th century in Goa-Mumbai regions who introduced grafting on the local mango trees to produce this variety.), and the fact that this is one of the most expensive mango varieties in India, grown almost exclusively in the Konkan region of Maharashtra only, which is exported throughout the world. I joined my new job in the first week of May which was the peak of the Hapus season, and I was getting used to seeing the vendors sprawling out their small and neat mangoes of mouth-watering colors at various street stalls and pavements. I found the mangoes rather similar to the country varieties invitingly swaying in the trees of

I’ve written in these pages about my passion for movies, watching and the making of the fascinating moving images, since my childhood days, and the first of today’s funny memories is related to that kind of passion . The memories, written in a fiction format avoiding actual names of persons involved, belong to the late seventies in the city of Guwahati in North Eastern India. Those good old days the means of communication were very scarce; no phones, no calling booths, not enough transport facilities and almost a total lack of computerized operations. The only means of communication were writing letters and sending telegrams on emergencies, the ‘emergency’ of the latter always depended on how fast the department of Posts and Telegraphs worked. The landlines or the conspicuous black phone instruments were restricted mostly to senior government officers, and the long-distance trunk call services were run by a few post offices where there was no certainty of getting connected and in how m

It had been a lucky trend for Raju’s family that their relations with the landlords had always been friendly and healthy. Since Raju’s father, the head of the family, had a transferable job they had to move from towns to towns every two or three years, and as usual, his father looked for a rented house ideally suited for his family and that the landlord was also to his liking. Most of his selections served their purpose—locations often in central places, close to the market and to the schools/colleges/libraries, and almost in all cases the landlord’s family and even their relatives had become very close to Raju’s family.   This story is set in the mid-seventies when Raju’s father got a repeat transfer to a small town where they still entertained fond memories of the previous stay in a most friendly neighborhood. This time though, they could not settle for the same rented house so loved by Raju and his siblings and had to fix a small house in the market area. A narrow gravel lane br

It was many years ago, we were not exactly little ones then, we were about high school leaving age: myself and my younger brother. Thanks to our father’s ways we used to be sent to our native village absolutely alone since our primary school age; he used to request the government transport service bus conductor to look after us and to put us in a bus going to our village after arriving at the major preceding bus stations. All the time nothing adverse had happened, and therefore, we were quite used to travel alone or the both of us brothers. It is not at all necessary to identify the state, towns or localities; suffice it’d be that it was somewhere in India a long time back.   We boarded the bus at around eight o’clock in the morning after taking a light breakfast at home, from the then home city we were living in, heading for our native village to spend our summer holidays. Our journey was to take at least 8/9 hours which was to deposit us first in the preceding major station from

(Continued from the last story on a fish called Sol in Assam!)   Decades back I was working in my hometown on my first job assignment. My office happened to be very near to the riverside and therefore, the local fish market at the jetty that thrived in selling fresh and live fish directly caught from the river was within walking distance. My mother’s constant errand had been to buy some fresh and ‘jumping’ local fish on my way back home from office. I wanted to on many occasions, but every time felt too bored to stroll down to the market and initiate a buying that invariably involved touching and ‘feeling’ the fishes on show.   One day I made a resolve to fulfill her long-standing wish. So, after office hours I went to that local fish market and indulged myself fully in the pre-buying spree of seeing around. Really! The fishes there were very fresh with some of them alive and jumping, literally. There were many choices before me and I had to make up my mind. Unfortunately, I

Just when, 7 o’clock in the morning, I was about to get up the rain started. I always loved the sounds made by the raindrops on the tin-sheeted roof of out village home, and was always lulled into sleep, the audio suddenly making the hot summers feel pleasantly cooler. That morning was no exception, and as the audio reached a crescendo I, just a ten-year-old embodiment at that time, rolled over on my side tucking in my knees close to my chest and prepared for some more windfall slumber. But the reality shook me up: that was a school day and the morning occurrence was no justification for skipping the classes.   My cousin, a year older to me, sounded the wake-up call. An errand normally my grandfather used to undertake almost every working morning with painful consistency, that is say, his wake-up calls used to get louder and louder till the target had to succumb to it, with a sullen face or not he never cared about. That morning my grandfather left home very early on business to th