Lucid Intervals of Parental Custody

 

When this story begins, Ambi was all of ten, a boy of the fifth standard, and precisely the sort of child for whom the word wander-struck seems to have been coined. In those days the family lived at the west end of the township, near the hospital — a respectable enough address, but one that offered painfully little to a boy whose chief ambition in life was to discover what lay just a little further than he was permitted to go.

And he was not permitted to go very far. As a sub-junior of the household, Ambi operated under a strict radius, an invisible tether pegged somewhere close to the front door. There was nothing beyond the hospital, he was given to understand, and most certainly nothing beyond the nursery — and so his adventures were confined to the local repertoire: Kings, Gulli Danda, the mysterious “iron rod” game, and the grave diplomatic business of winning other boys’ marbles off them.

Now and again the iron rod game — in its more ambitious prick-trek incarnation — would carry the boys past the OCC market and out towards the ragged edges of the township, to unknown country far from the dignified precincts of Sector VII headquarters. It took a full week of rain, in the end, to set the great expedition in motion. Cooped up for the better part of a working week, the boys emerged the moment the skies relented with the restlessness of prisoners on parole; and an unscheduled expedition — got up, as always, in the innocent guise of the iron-rod-prick-trek game — steered them towards the north-western corner of the township. And it was there, that afternoon, that Ambi and his friends discovered the railroad to Suku: the line that came stealing out of the factory sidings and meandered down to Suku, a modest station on the Koraput–Vizag stretch of that German engineering marvel.

Within a few months of these mystic discoveries, Ambi’s world underwent a metamorphosis of sorts. The family moved up in the world — quite literally, to Sector III, a posher and more elite locality altogether, where the carefree GZ type-3 way of life was regarded with the sort of distaste reserved for something tracked in on the sole of a shoe. And carefree it had been. Ambi and his fellow adventurers had been, if one is honest about it, only slightly better than vagabonds with lucid intervals of parental custody — a condition advertised plainly in their persons: clothes simple and minimal and expected to last a full twenty-four hours at the very least, no slippers or footwear to boot, hair unkempt, feet muddy, and hands perpetually soiled from the honest labour of handling mud-soaked marbles, earth-pricked iron rods, and rubber balls retrieved from slush.

Amidst PZ quarters in Sector III, this would not do.

Ambi felt, from the very first, like a fish out of water. Mr Dey, the neighbour, took it upon himself to chide the boy for going about without footwear; and Mrs Dey, not to be outdone, rendered unto Ambi’s mother a great deal of free advice upon the merits of the same. The upshot was that Ambi was duly furnished with footwear — not one pair but three: one for pottering about the immediate vicinity of home, one for walking long distances, and one for school. He detested all three with equal fervour, but was compelled, at the very minimum, to wear the shoes to school.

For all that, Ambi looked forward keenly to falling in with the boys of the new neighbourhood. He prepared for the encounter rather as a soldier prepares for a campaign, marshalling his ammunition — marbles small and large, the Gulli and its Danda, a couple of rubber balls, a worn-out cycle tyre with a stick to drive it, an iron hoop for rolling, and sundry other trifles calculated to command the respect of boys of a certain age. The boys of the new neighbourhood, however, looked upon these treasures askance, and wondered — without ever quite putting it into so many words — of what earthly use such things could possibly be.

Ambi was crestfallen. Not one of his hard-won assets could purchase him a single friend in the locality. Some small comfort came from two boys in the immediate vicinity — one a classmate, the other a senior from school — though even they could muster little enthusiasm for Ambi’s heirloom possessions.

But Ambi was not a boy to hold back. If the others would not play, then he resolved to play alone. And so, on most afternoons, he was to be seen careering around the blocks driving his cycle tyre before him with a stick, or walking the double road behind his rolling hoop — barefoot, naturally, upon tar roads gone soft and treacherous in the summer heat. A dozen rounds of the ten blocks of buildings thus accomplished, he would settle upon the grass opposite the house to prise the melted tar from the soles of his feet, succeeding chiefly in transferring a good portion of it to his fingernails. His mother, Chella, having first admonished and then instructed him, would set him to work with a little kerosene — of which there was never any shortage, it being the very fuel that lit the fire on which the household’s meals were cooked.

In the course of a year, the games that all that ammunition had once promised quietly petered out. Between the need to maintain a certain dignity before the neighbours, and the settled indifference of the local boys to his primitive amusements, Ambi’s assets were, one by one, laid aside. School, until now, he had not troubled to take seriously. It was his mother who reframed the matter for him. “If you want friends around here,” she told him, “you will have to do well in school. That is how the boys will come around to you and treat you seriously.”

It was in the course of one of his exploratory wanderings around the new neighbourhood that Ambi strayed into the man-made forest that lay ahead of his home, down the double roads that ran parallel to the blocks of apartments. Some twenty acres it covered — eucalyptus and neem and a scattering of evergreens — reaching all the way to the Bhanja Mandap Cinema in the west and the DZ quarters to the north. Pressing on beyond the trees to Bhanja Mandap itself, Ambi came upon the central library, standing next to the cinemas.

One evening he tiptoed inside. Ranged behind glass panels stood a great host of books, and from their titles Ambi made out sections on mythology, on history, on novels, and — the discovery that quickened his pulse — a section given over entirely to folk tales. Gathering his courage, he approached the librarian: a stylish, lanky young man, impeccably turned out in bell bottoms, scholarly spectacles perched below a head of well-groomed curls. How, Ambi asked him, might one borrow books from the library?

The librarian regarded him much as one might regard an insect, and delivered himself, in terse Hindi, of the following: “Yahaan bachchon allowed nahin hai. Baahar jo likha hai, padke samaj lo. Ab niklo baahar.” Outside, as it happened, a board announced with perfect finality: Non-members are not allowed. Scared out of his wits, Ambi made for the door and fled home through the evergreen forest.

He sat forlorn at the dinner table that evening — a Friday — awaiting the return of his father, Raman. When Raman came home, Ambi poured out the whole tale of the library and its books and his great desire to get at them. Raman was unmoved. Only adults, he explained, were permitted to enter the library, borrow its books and carry them home; Ambi would do far better to confine his reading to the books prescribed at school. Ambi was disappointed. Long after he had been put to bed, the folk tales section returned to him in the dark, and he lay turning over the single question of how he might yet lay his hands upon those books.

Ambi wanted that access very badly indeed. He turned Chella’s advice over in his mind — how better marks at school would draw more friends in the locality — but Ambi, as it happened, had ideas of his own. Beyond the craving for the folk-tale series, there was a second attraction: a library membership was just the sort of thing a boy might flaunt about the neighbourhood, and stood to make the other boys take him seriously far sooner than any report card would. One way or another, there was no question of Ambi letting the library go.

The next morning he was up early, and presented himself at his father’s bedside to declare a hunger strike. “No food, and no school,” he announced, “until you get me those books.” Now, Raman was an indulgent father where Ambi was concerned; and rather than sit down to negotiate terms with a striking ten-year-old, he soothed the boy, bade him keep to his routines, and promised to find a way.

Raman found a legitimate way out of the challenge thrown to him by Ambi. That very evening he came home with an indemnity letter, neatly typed, undertaking to bear full responsibility for any books his son should borrow. He walked Ambi over to the library, introduced him, paid the nominal fee to enrol him as a member, and submitted the letter. The librarian looked askance at the boy still — plainly unconvinced that so small a person could be trusted to carry off his precious volumes and return them intact — but he relented, all the same. And Ambi, happy beyond measure, made straight for the folk-tale series: every last one of them bound in white, in hard case-bound covers.

Ambi became a fixture at the central library soon enough, borrowing folk-tale books one after another at intervals of a day or two — a pace that did nothing whatever for the librarian’s peace of mind. Folk Tales of Finland, Folk Tales of Poland, Folk Tales of Congo, Folk Tales of Persia, and heaven knows how many more of the series, were carried home and consumed one after another, until the day arrived when Ambi had foraged his way clean through the entire folk-tale run on the classified shelf.

His eye then fell upon the regional histories — books dealing with the very country in which the township stood. He stumbled upon the modern history of erstwhile Chikapara, the hamlet that had been evacuated and razed to the ground to make room for the aero-engine factory. It was a slim thing in coarse print, got up in a hurry — the work, most likely, of some senior hand at the factory, and meant not for any public circulation but for the handful of local history enthusiasts about the township.

The next day, home from school for his lunch, Ambi settled himself at the dining table and put it to his father directly. “Did you know,” he asked, “that your factory was built only after the desia people — the aborigines of these parts — had been chased away from here?” Raman, mildly startled, asked how on earth he knew any such thing. Matter-of-fact as you please, Ambi replied that he had read all about it in a book from the library — and produced the very volume to prove it. Raman turned to Chella. “This boy,” he pronounced, “will turn out an investigator yet.”

But it was a book on the “Nandapur- A Forsaken Kingdom” that truly took hold of him, the more so when he learned that Nandapur lay no great distance from the township. He read it from cover to cover, and as he read, the little kingdom assembled itself in his mind, its images and its events conjured up vivid and whole. Now Ambi had always been a boy given to wanderlust, and it was not long before he began to toy with the notion of going over to Nandapur himself, to see what different world might be waiting out there. He was, in short, the very “Naughty Boy” of Keats’s poem.

A couple of months on, a Telugu-speaking family of four came and settled into a portion of an apartment in the block next to Ambi’s — a middle-aged man and his three sons, Prakash, Nagabhushanam and Babu. The father took up work as a security guard at the township factory, and all three boys were duly admitted to the local vernacular high school, while Ambi carried on at the English-medium school that stood close to his home.

To Ambi’s sweet surprise, he found these boys to be every bit as rustic, as touched with the rural, as he himself had been in the old GZ days. He lost no time. He went about recovering his play equipment from wherever it had been abandoned to its fate, and set forth to renew his acquaintance with the “heirloom” assets. Books, for the present, were bundled into the back seat, while Ambi flung himself into Gulli Danda, the iron hoop and ring, the iron rods and all the rest of it with gay abandon. He was, to his great contentment, back in his GZ home days.

One day an elder cousin of Naga’s — Ramayya by name — descended upon the household from Berhampore, bringing with him an old treadle grindstone: a foot-operated affair with a flywheel, used for the sharpening of iron tools. Ramayya’s plan was to stay put for a month or so, earn a little money by his machine, and then return whence he had come.

Ambi took an immediate liking to the man and, quite as much, to his machine. He carried his iron hoop and ring across to have the bends straightened and the edges roughed out, and Ramayya made a clean job of it — the whole thing done, with precision, in a matter of minutes, and done for free. Ambi was thrilled. He hurried home and returned bearing a large knife and, for good measure, the kitchen Aruvamanai — the floor-mounted vegetable cutter — which he plucked clean out of his mother’s hands before dashing off. Chella was left looking distinctly worried, wondering whether the boy had armed himself to go and settle some score with a neighbour. He was back before long with knife and Aruvamanai alike honed to a professional edge, all of it once again for nothing and all of it in minutes — and Chella looked askance at him and asked however all this had come about.

Then, on an early morning, Ambi was rolling along with his iron hoop when Naga hailed him. “Ramayya and I are off to go round the township with the machine,” he said. “Are you coming along?” Ambi begged them to wait, hurried the hoop and ring back home, and ran back to where the two stood waiting. Off they ambled, down the double road beside the school, in the direction of the next town, Semiliguda; and skirting the circle, they turned right towards the L Zone quarters. There Ramayya set up his hawking, crying himself hoarse in the local Odia dialect — “Churi Kachi Tangia saan deba,” “Loha-patara saan kariba ke ochi?” (roughly, “Knives, scissors, axes — shall I grind them?” and “Any iron blades here to be sharpened?”) — and alternating, for the Telugu households, with “Sanai pettali, Kattulu paduna cheyyali?” (“Shall I set the grindstone to your knives and give them an edge?”).

Ambi went about the business with the air of a Sales Supervisor accompanying his firm on its rounds. He helped carry the heavy equipment, fetched the tools out from the households and delivered them back again. It was a Sunday, and most of the breadwinners were at home. One of them, a factory man named Panigrahi, recognised Ambi — though Ambi had no notion of it — as the son of his own RA-department engineer, and asked him, “Are you related to Ramayya?” “Of course!” Ambi announced, with enormous pride.

Half a dozen homes in the LZ quarters thus attended to, the three made their way to the central market. There Ramayya bought three packets of mixture from the vendor, who assembled his concoction from the various elements stowed in his rectangular glass box, topping it off with finely cut chillies and onions and a sprinkling of that pungent mustard oil which lent the whole a hot and fiery character all its own. To Ambi, after the labours of the morning, it came as sweet relief, and he consumed his share gleefully the whole way home. And before they parted, Ramayya — who had earned all of seventy-five paise over the morning’s session — handed Ambi a ten-paise coin as his rightful portion of the revenue. Ambi accepted it with gratitude, and marched home victorious.

(To be continued…)