Return to Jammu

Ambala: 1954-59

1

1925-50

Did I introduce myself to you? No?

Well, I am Balan. S. Balan. Actually, S. Balan Iyer. I even answer to Bala. And just to be thorough, my passport expands that S and announces my name as Subramanian Balan Iyer. But you must know that my first name is Balan and not Subramanian, even if my passport has it the other way, and that I would have even missed my flight once, when they kept making a last and final call for Mr Subramanian B. to board the flight, and I thought he was someone from another planet.

My father, Captain Chembai Kuppuswamy (C.K.) Subramanian Iyer, was the son of a small-time musician – Palakkad Kuppuswamy Iyer – who played some minor musical instrument in one of the temples in the vicinity of a little village called Chembai, some twenty kilometres from Palakkad. In case you didn’t know, Chembai is a name made well-known worldwide by none other than Chembai Vaidhyanatha Bhagavathar (also referred to simply as Chembai affectionately), whose birthplace it was.

Though my parents never produced any proof to the effect, they always told us we were supposed to be Tamilians who had migrated to Kerala some three generations ago. So the language we spoke at home was Tamil with a loose Malayalam accent.

For the record, Chembai ruled the world of Carnatic music for well-nigh half a century during the previous century. Believe me, back where my roots lie, Chembai is a big name and we Chembaians were always told, even as toddlers, to be proud of this fact.

However, the musical genes in my side of the family, at least on Father’s side, must have been running rapidly dry for a few generations. They had been depleted enough in my grandfather, who, though he grew up bang in the cradle of Carnatic music, couldn’t lift his talents beyond playing accompaniment music to a minor temple troupe.

In Subbu, my father that is, the talent trickled down to random mouthing of ancient songs with the teeth tightly gritted and a nasal twang. And as for me, to this day the only musical instrument I have ever played is the humble transistor.

Grandfather Kuppuswamy had gone blind by the time he was in his forties, whether because of a neglected glaucoma or an untreated cataract, or just for the heck of it, nobody ever knew. What with my grandmother Pattambal struggling to cope with her blind husband and a bunch of ornery sons with a meagre income, which the gracious temple doled out, my pater and his seven fratres, two of whom didn’t survive into adulthood, had a childhood of bare minimum parental supervision. Nor was there the touch of a sister to bring even a modicum of gentility to the lot. Father rarely spoke about the specifics of his childhood, except for one episode, which he would narrate rather proudly on demand.

He had apparently taken to smoking at the ripe old age of thirteen. One day he was puffing away, diligently working on his ring formations, when one of his older brothers chanced upon him. Thus surprised, Father hastily hid the cigarette behind his back, out of respect of sorts for an older brother.

The brother sternly asked him, ‘Show me your hidden hand!’

My young father (not yet my father though) quickly hid the hand that held the cigarette behind his back, and produced the other hand, thrusting it forward, palm up and clean.

The brother was angry. He shouted, ‘Show me the other hand!’

Young Subbu took the hand back, transferred the cigarette into this hand, and then produced the other palm.

By now really livid, his brother barked, ‘You scoundrel! Show me both your hands!’

Thus cornered, Father put the cigarette to his lips and spread both his palms in front of his brother.

Well, that would be my Appa in a nutshell – very direct, not overly subtle.

The brother, who probably had vices of his own to hide, didn’t take the episode to heart and went his way, and Father would go on to live happily ever after with his chain-smoking as long as he would live.

Over a period of time, putting various pieces of the picture together, it became evident that he had probably dropped out of school immediately after his matriculation in the late-1930s, while still in his teens. By the early 1940s, he left home, and on a whim enlisted himself in the British Army as a Havaldar – a non-commissioned officer. With the Second World War just under way, the British Captain probably needed Sergeants and Havaldars by the thousands so that to his eager eyes, my seventeen-year-old skinny father seemed good enough to sport three stripes on his left arm. So proud was Father of his rank that in the early sepia prints of his group photographs in the Bengal Engineering Group barracks, while most men stood straight, Father stands with a sideways stoop, much like the thespian Dev Anand’s slouch, to ensure that his three stripes on the uniform sleeve are frontally visible, lest someone should mistake him for a mere Sepoy.

In between being tossed across the many army barracks of the Bengal Engineering Group, he acquired the certificates of Licensed Mechanical Engineer and Licensed Electrical Engineer. In 1949, by which time he had just been promoted to the rank of a Junior Commissioned Officer, he married my mother, Ambika, all of sixteen then, and of a wheatish complexion and regular features, so that she could easily have passed for fair and beautiful in most matrimonial columns in the deep south of India. Father’s parents had rented a house in the same agraharam in Chembai where my maternal grandfather, Muthuraman Iyer, had built a house.

But my mother was born in Bouto, Rangoon (aka Yangon), Burma (aka Myanmar), and had spent her initial years there too. Her father had been a senior accounts officer in the Accountant General’s office in Burma, overseeing a large family of nine children. Sadly, during the Second World War, afraid of the imminent threat of closure of the sea route from Burma to India, he was obliged to dispatch his family by the last ship off Rangoon, sell his house for a fraction of its value and later walk all the way to India – a trek that lasted nearly three months – as all sea and air routes were closed by then. Within five years, having built the modest aforementioned house in Chembai from the proceeds of the sale of the Bouto home, and having added three more healthy children to the brood, he died of tuberculosis.

He was forty-five. He left behind his widow, my maternal grandmother, barely thirty-seven, with twelve living children – the oldest of the new editions being thirty months old and the youngest not yet six months. To his credit, though he died at such a young age, he was a frugal and simple Gandhian (except in the department of abstinence, of course), and had left behind just enough savings and a home, which together with the modest family pension, ensured that the huge family wasn’t on the streets. And that doesn’t even begin to describe what an amazing woman my mother’s mother was, when you consider that six of her seven boys went on to occupy some very eminent positions in various walks of life.

Be that as it may, it turned out that with her father’s death was dashed my mother’s own ambition to study medicine. She was the eighth child in the family and a bright student in school. In due course she went on to complete her Secondary School Leaving Certificate or SSLC from the municipal high school for girls, not far from the village, walking some five kilometres each way every day.

Given the family’s circumstances and ethos of the times, she simply had to be married off pronto. She might have deserved a more promising match in matrimony, but my grandmother didn’t have the luxury of options. She couldn’t afford to wait twiddling her thumbs in the hope of a better match coming along; nor did my grandmother have the resources to educate her any further, what with a fair mob of little ones yet to be put through school. After all, the eldest of my uncles had probably just graduated, and four others were in the pipeline in various stages of their education at Government Victoria College in Palakkad, not to mention a sprinkling of younger ones in the local school. With plenty of other mouths to feed, having my mother ‘idling’ away at home was clearly not a viable option.

Ergo, no sooner did the proposal from my father’s home come her way in 1949 than Grandmother seized it with both hands, and my mother was married off to the happy-go-lucky Havaldar, about to be promoted a JCO, C.K. Subramanian Iyer, Indian Army, some ten years her senior, give or take. But not before the in-laws-to-be had summoned some female relatives and descended from across the street in some numbers and tugged at her long plait of hair just to ensure the entire length was real, cupped her chin tight in their hands in effusive demonstration of love until Mother had little option but to open her mouth so now they could ensure her teeth were all in good order and in ample number; and asked her to read the day’s newspaper, lest her eyesight should be anything under 20/20. At the end of the drill they declared her fit for my father, who was grossly unfit for my mother by most objective parameters – a conclusion I would arrive at by and by. But at that time I was nowhere on the scene, obviously.

2

1950-55

The Indian Army kept Father busy for the first few years, having him shuttle around for this or that technical training, during which period Mother was confined twice, in 1951 and in 1953. Each of these times she was dispatched to her mother’s home for ‘delivery’, of which my older sister, Urmila (1951), and a still-born sibling – another sister (1953) – were the respective outcomes. Towards the end of 1953, Father was posted to the lazy little beautiful cantonment town of Ambala – Ambala Cantt, as it would be called – then in the state of Punjab, which is where I would make my ‘dramatic’ appearance in December 1954, in the military hospital. And that is where we would live for the next four-and-a-half years.

Father was posted in charge of the main waterworks facility of the town, situated in a forest by a village called Babial, adjacent to the cantonment. He was allotted a desolate little half-bungalow (the other half being unoccupied) in the forest. My mother was coping bravely in the forested outskirts of the town in the heart of Punjab, with a frugal vocabulary of Hindi, with little Urmila and not-the-most-caring of husbands. Father wasn’t the kind who would return home directly from work. He had a habit of doing God-knows-what after office hours, but it was almost a matter of principle with him not to reach home before 8 pm. If his idea was to keep my mother’s expectations of him low as a husband and a father, he succeeded splendidly from very early on.

One December, it was a terribly cold evening and the house, outside of the bed, was nearly freezing. It was past 9 pm. Urmila had been lullabied to sleep in the warm bed. But there was as yet no sign of Father. Not that this worried my mother unduly. For a habitual latecomer, an hour here or there couldn’t have meant much. But to the extent it was possible, she always waited for him so they could at least have hot dinner together, modest though it would be. So hoping Father would be home soon, she got up and went to the kitchen to heat up the food. It had been only cooked an hour earlier but was already freezing.

She entered, she shrieked,and she fainted; or Quæ intravit, clamavit, cecidit, or something to that effect as Julius Ceasar may have put it. What she beheld on the wall before her was a hefty, dark python, some fifteen feet long and as fat as an adult’s upper arm, slithering down vertically from the low ventilator. Soon it transpired that this was my father’s idea of a practical joke on a heavily pregnant wife.

Not that he was cruel by nature. Far from it. But his sensitivities were about as sharp as an old butter knife. Apparently, he had found the well-preserved skin freshly shed by a python in the forest sometime during the day. He had thoughtfully picked it up, in the firm knowledge that it could be beneficially deployed to scare the heck out of my mother, least mindful of her pregnant state. He had gone to some length to set up the stage to make the setting look as natural as possible – he could be thorough sometimes – and had been pushing the snakeskin through the ventilator, below which he had been waiting in the dark on the far side, peeping sideways through the windowpane, waiting for Mother to come in. He had gone through all this labour for the sheer pleasure of seeing her jump out of her skin. Aw, heck, who was it that said something about men being like government bonds that never mature … ?

Well, Father’s labours resulted in my poor mother, nearly frightened to death, going into labour then and there without further ado and had to be rushed to the military hospital, where I was born in the wee hours of the following morning, 28 December, probably a week ahead of schedule, but a goodly seven pounds – more flab than bones – and none the worse for the early arrival.

3

1955

You will understand, of course, that my narration of my story before my birth, and even until I was three or four years of age, can only be reconstructed from snatches of family tellings and retellings of episodes featuring me. And that’s how I know, and now you know, that Babial came into my life even before I was born. So it was only fitting that my first year of life was spent in that forest. I can’t vouch for it on non-judicial stamp-paper, but I imagine I felt a close kinship with Tarzan in my youth, because thanks to Babial, I fancied myself a forest baby of sorts!

Did I mention before that Father had been allotted one half of a nice old bungalow? I think I did. That was because the entire bungalow, built for a colonial sergeant once upon a time, would have been way beyond my father’s entitlement. But the engineer-in-charge of the waterworks had to be stationed right next to the battery of water sumps, water pumps and water tanks. So in the fairest traditions of bureaucracy, they allotted him half the bungalow with three large rooms, a kitchen and a veranda, while the other half was left unoccupied. This endowed upon the house a near-eerie ambience, what with a few broken windows and the sudden flutter of a bat or a bird that had found its way into an empty adjacent room and couldn’t find its way out; or with the mewing of a hungry litter of kittens of a jungle cat.

But there were compensations. I was told we had a milch cow at home, as grazing in the forest was in abundance, and more importantly, free. I am told that, nude as a porn star and not yet one year old, I would pick up a tall brass tumbler from the kitchen and scuttle off to the rear end of the cow, where an old villager who helped us mind the animal in exchange for two pavs or half a seer of milk every day (metric measures for volumes and weights were yet to come; a seer was slightly under a litre) from the robust daily yield of about two-and-a-half seers, would indulgently fill the glass directly from the udders for me. This frothy milk I would consume with relish, and then strut about wearing my tiny white sudsy moustache. And when Mother tried to block off the front door of the house with nailed planks to prevent my access to the cow (so that my sister wasn’t cheated of her due share of milk), I took to escaping from the rear door of the kitchen, walking all the way around the house to press my demand with the brass tumbler at the pink udders of the cow. I think the belly I acquired then shows still.

Soon it was the night of the first Diwali of my brief life (brief until that point, that is); and what’s Diwali without a bit of drama? Urmila, not yet five and puny of build, was in charge of keeping an eye on me. Taking her duty seriously and carrying the hefty me – a goodly twenty-pounder with all that frothy milk sloshing inside me – on her wee person, she climbed the bed to place some terracotta lamps on the windowsill. There was a five-pointed brass lamp, some thirty inches high with a pointy top, which had been lit for the occasion and had been placed near the bed. As little Urmila, with littler me wedged to her side, tried to step down from the bed, her centre of gravity wobbled with my weight, and with the accuracy of a buttered bread slice falling face down, she fell with my face down so that my temple, just above the right eye, hit the pointy head of the lamp. The ensuing blood, shrieks and wails speedily concluded the rest of the Diwali celebrations, as I had to be rushed to the nearby hospital of Dr Om Prakash Gupta for stitches. I escaped spending the rest of my life with a single eye. God is great, even if He causes nasty accidents to little children.

Time, for some reason, always flies, especially if you view it in hindsight. It was already my first birthday. Besides, in a couple of months we were expected to leave Babial for the more urban environs of the Cantonment proper. This, combined with the fact that I – ‘the only son’ – was turning one, and Punjab being Punjab, and Punjabis being Punjabis, the local village folk insisted that the surrounding village of 200-plus be feasted – something my parents could hardly afford. Besides, not having celebrated Urmila’s first birthday with any fanfare, my mother was loath to make any song and dance of my first birthday just because I was an only boy. She had, after all, made no song and dance for Urmila, the only girl. But try telling that to good Punjabis; they may make the warmest of friends and neighbours but do not easily take no for an answer, especially in matters of sons and feasts. Ergo, I had a good birthday bash; not that I remember.

The curtains came down on Babial.

4

1955-59

Not long after my eventful first year in Babial, with a change in Father’s assignment, we moved house into the heart of Ambala Cantt, to 55 Stables Road, having given the milch cow away in charity to the old man who had minded it, not that we could have brought the cow along anyway. A year later, I was a full-fledged two-year-old toddler.

The house was a tiny affair: One ‘drawing room’, two little bedrooms, a veranda that doubled as our dining space, a kitchen and a large courtyard. But the large courtyard – which, when I revisited years later as a tourist of sorts, turned out to be definitely larger than a tablecloth but smaller than half a badminton court (inner lines) – also accommodated in the far corner a tiny bathroom with a tap, and a tinier loo, which comprised a raised platform with a hole, under which was placed a metal tray that collected the night soil. There was a horizontally hinged rusting metal door on the far side, which had to be lifted in order to pull out the tray, which would then be emptied of its contents into the narrow, open drain running alongside and cleaned under a low tap provided for the purpose. This task, unfortunately, was performed by a woman, who was universally denied entrance into homes. All of this was considered par for the course, as much by the woman herself as by us, or so we imagined. Flush toilets were some time away, at least for us.

And yes, we had a badly kept kitchen garden, bordered with aak plants (Calotropis) on three sides, the fourth side consisting of the Siamese twin of our house, which for some strange reason was either mostly unoccupied, or my memory of its being occupied is mostly erased. A pair of loosely hanging gates, stooping like an ageing couple, stood as sentinels in the porous paling.

Lest you should suspect my first-hand account of the unfolding of my early life as one mostly based on second-hand handouts from third parties, let me assure you once and for all that even though my memories of events between ages three and four may be somewhat patchy and dream-like, from there on I can affirm the veracity of what transpired in my life on affidavit.

Urmila went to the nearby Air Force school, which years later would develop into Central School. Family anecdote has it that I would frequently bawl my head off to accompany her to school, not so much because the fire for learning burned bright in me so early, but because I missed her company through the day. Those were un-crowded and informal times. My mother, all of twenty-three now, a full-time homemaker caring for two children and already hugely pregnant with her next issue, was sick of having me whining all day long demanding to be sent to school.

And then, little adorable Supriya announced her arrival ever so gently – almost as if apologetically – in the February of 1957. She was a rather undemanding baby. She would cry precisely four times a day, and once the bottle of milk had been pressed into her little mouth she would quieten down promptly. No bawling to be picked up. No howling to be put to sleep. Not even if she had soiled her home-stitched diaper.

Of defects she had but two, and only two. One, she had a surprising talent for voiding her bowels at thrice the rate she demanded to be fed. Two, when she did her properly timed big-jobs, boy, did the stink bring the house down! Now add to that my constant harassment of my mother to be allowed to accompany Urmila to school, and you will understand why my mother cracked.

So one morning, with my infant sister in one arm and my tiny hand in the other, she towed me to the school and spoke to the headmistress, who was gracious enough to let me attend the nursery informally, as I was barely two. From then on I was no longer just Bala, but S. Balan, with an initial of my own, like grown-ups! In those times, the major talents required for entry to the nursery class were demonstration of reasonably good toilet training and the ability to sleep on demand. I was fairly accomplished in both departments, particularly in the latter (a talent I haven’t lost yet). Between bouts of sleep one was expected to eat snacks and play some games. But I turned out to be a master sleeper and happily slumbered through the year – it helped me attain the reputation of being the least troublesome kid in the class. In short, I found the demands of nursery quite manageable.

It was lower kindergarten, or LKG, that held some challenges. At the end of the year, that is, by March 1958, the Class of Nursery relentlessly marched forward to LKG. But the headmistress decided to hold me back as I was too young and sleepy to be promoted. And especially because I had been admitted only informally in the nursery, she thought I could sleep some more in the same classroom before being kicked upstairs. This meant that all my ‘friends’ had moved on and I was to start schooling all over again with some strangers. This was a clear affront to my personal dignity and I had to do something about it. So I bawled even louder than I had when I first wanted to go to school with Urmila.

Father, a happy-go-lucky man, had developed quite a talent for avoiding the avoidable responsibilities of a good husband rather early on. Having been more or less a stranger to any sort of discipline much of his life, he wasn’t about to subject himself to the requisite discipline of domesticity, which matrimony customarily demands. The only discipline he had known was the non-voluntary type, of the Indian Army. Ergo, he was usually not of much help at home, forget about babysitting a bawling kid even on weekends, convinced as he was that his debt to fatherhood was repaid in EMIs or equal monthly instalments, as he handed his monthly pay-cheque to my mother (of course, this I figured over the years and not at that time). With a modest income and a family of three young children to slog to clothe and feed, it was some task for my young mother to keep me out of her hair.

Unable to cope with my renewed nagging and tantrums with a year-old Supriya tucked on her hip (with Supriya in turn having two of her fingers firmly tucked into her mouth), mother approached the headmistress once again and pleaded that instead of having me sleep in the nursery she might as well allow me to sleep in the LKG, which was merely the adjacent classroom. The suggestion was enthusiastically endorsed by the class teacher, Ms Dyer, an Anglo-Indian, who simply loved to have chubby me (the upshot of my udder-milk days) sleep in her class, as I had been by far the best toilet-trained of her charges and rarely gave her any trouble, as to give trouble one has to be awake a lot. In any case, she had charge of nursery as well as LKG, and she didn’t mind where I slept.

But boy! Was the LKG syllabus tough! It included the English and Hindi alphabet, quite a few advanced rhymes from the Radiant Reader (nursery rhymes were passé), counting up to twenty and even some addition and subtraction with large numbers like 9 + 8. It seemed as if they had only left out integral calculus. But fortunately they still allowed ample time for sleeping, which was of course my core competence.

Come March 1959, and it was that time of the year when my class-fellows were marching on to upper KG, or UKG, and I was to be left behind again, being long on sleeping and short on learning.

I promptly resorted to my time-tested non-violent satyagraha – bawling. By now mother had become wise and the headmistress had grown weary. You guessed it. I was moved to UKG. But this time, though I was barely past four, Mother got tough with me. She was embarrassed making an annual appearance before the obliging headmistress pleading on my behalf. If I was going to bawl to continue being in the same classroom as my original nursery batchmates, I might as well earn my keep there, was her stand.

If the LKG syllabus was tough, you should have seen the UKG curriculum, what with double-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables going up to even 5, or was it 10 – can’t quite remember – not to mention some tough-looking texts in English and Hindi in smaller and smaller fonts, with smaller and fewer pictures. It was all getting too much for me. So my poor mother took to tutoring me after school and often pressed Urmila, poor thing, into the same challenging assignment. Fortunately for me though, they didn’t have any examination for UKG. Examinations would start only from grade one, which would come only after one crossed the steep hurdle of UKG. My enthusiasm for school was waning rapidly. I exhibited little promise of any early academic excellence.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to stick around in UKG for long, the reason for which you will know by and by.

I have a vague recollection of Urmila and me in white shirts and navy-blue skirt and shorts, respectively, treading a little under a kilometre to school, which shared its fence with the air field. The trek took us through some typical defence land comprising army barracks, rows of houses of junior and non-commissioned officers, and unkempt but clean grounds, full of clusters of aak plants with their bulbous buds and purple flowers. We carried our canvas schoolbags stuffed with textbooks, notebooks and lunch boxes on our shoulders.

The school itself was a simple building with yellow walls and a tiled roof, and had some five or six enormous classrooms and a playground. Every now and then we would have our eardrums all but ruptured as British-made Hunters (fighter planes) took off and landed in the air field, when all activity would cease. At the same time it was a pleasurable pastime for us during recess, to stand at the fence and watch these Air Force planes take off and land.

I also recall from time to time clambering aboard a gigantic steel roller in one corner of the playground during recess to have our lunch out of round aluminum lunch boxes. Surprisingly, when I revisited the school as an adult many years later, I would find the roller at exactly the same spot, but looking very shrunken. I could