Some of us have permanent addresses in nostalgia. We spend a lot of time there, both sleeping and awake, traversing the memory lanes. Repeatedly. The trouble is, it never ends. There is no conclusion to be found. You keep walking back and forth all by yourself. Yes, those who were with you back then can accompany you but they have greater priorities in life today and don’t really take any pride in being creatures of the past. Got better things to do. They have successfully buried their yesterdays whereas you refuse to even attend the funeral. So, you end up alone on these constant trips that technically go nowhere in particular.
Poor you.
How we look at our future is how we look at our past. If you think you look at your tomorrow hopefully but struggled to find hope in your past, you are mistaken. What you are today has a direct correlation to what you once were. When you are being positive, you owe it to the negativity you’ve experienced earlier. Similarly, when you are being negative, you can beckon the positivity from your arsenal. That’s called balance of life. And nothing teaches you this art better from your childhood.
To give you a peek into mine, I’ve earlier made two tiny series. One dealt with the memorable men who coloured my younger days and another with the remarkable ladies whom I won’t forget until dementia. Today, we’ll meet some of the kids who I know from my growing up days in a peaceful but distressing Bombay slum of the ’90s. Some of these punters—a local word for the clever ones who never get caught—were exceptional but they didn’t really know it back then. Our collective goal was to turn into adults at the earliest because the grownups clearly ruled our world: my most common observation from those days. Must admit I am not in touch with any of them. In fact, I haven’t been to Cheeta Camp in over a decade now. However, their memories remain fresh, and their stories, too.
Let’s start at the beginning of humankind. Aadam was the only child from his house—a rarity for a chawl that always had at least two offspring under one roof. His parents waited for him to happen for several years. They apparently visited a lot of shrines and made religious offerings to be blessed with a child. After several years of patience, our sweet dark boy finally showed up. He spoke with a stammer as well as a lisp and yet nobody cared because he was adorable. Almost everybody living in the gully adored him for his magnetic nature. A quintessential good kid. Fellow children played with him but that didn’t stop them from calling him totla—somebody who talks like a parrot—although he never seemed to mind. I remember him going to Ideal High School but he wasn’t very zealous about education. His heart was set on earning money at the earliest and before we could realize, he had quit school and was working full-time as a mechanic. I don’t remember the last time we spoke but I am sure I must have understood every word of his.
If I ask you if you remember the fastest kid in your group, would you know the accurate answer? I do. Selva. A lean Tamil kid who ran faster than a cheetah; none of us could catch him. Way beyond our reach, way beyond our age. During our cricket matches, we could conveniently rely on him for bowling really fast as well as for stopping boundaries. He was phenomenally talented. Shy otherwise, he came into own while running as if the laws of aerodynamics didn’t apply to his body. When we raced, the rest of us were already vying for the second and third position. Gold medals were already taken. Back then, I neither knew who the world’s fastest man was—it was Donovan Bailey—nor the standing world record—9.84 seconds in 100 meters—but I wonder if Selva had been groomed properly, he might have had a shot. Who knows?
While watching all those messy crime documentaries on Netflix, I am reminded of only one kid from my innocent days. He was clearly twisted and despite many medical interventions, he continued to do a lot of damage. Tyagu was the eldest of the three kids and was supposed to be a role model as firstborns are expected to but as fate would have it, his brother and sister were doing well academically while he remained a social embarrassment. Apart from killing animals—I had seen him bash an owl he found on the nearby hillock onto the ground at maidan in full view of other kids—in theatrical fashion, he was quick to turn violent during benign moments. His face resembled a very young boxer’s—cuts and gashes galore. Those were the highlights of his days back then. Fed up of his antics and with the fear of him influencing his siblings negatively, his grandfather and father moved him to an ashram in Saurashtra. According to rumours, he learned to calm down there with all the meditation and gardening and handicraft work. Never saw him after that.
One of the downsides of living in an environment where you aren’t encouraged to think big is you start believing taking shortcuts is the only way to go. Ask Shakir about it. He was 12 or 13 when he stole money from his own house and ran away. His mom was crying non-stop because she was worried sick about him while her dad was supremely furious for a different reason altogether. A police report was filed and it took the khaki-clad men four days—quick enough for non-parents; damn slow for parents—to locate the young ‘man’ who was found somewhere in Mumbra with a friend of his from Shivaji Nagar. Quite an escape for these youngsters. I remember vividly how Shakir returned home that day: a crowd surrounding him throughout as if he had won the National Spelling Bee. But what happened 2-3 hours later is what took the cake of this story. His dad stripped him naked and paraded him through the gully before cycle-chaining his leg to an almond tree on the streetside. He kept weeping and pleading for forgiveness. And if that wasn’t ruinous, liquid jaggery was poured on him while people simply gawked. Nobody dared ask that mountain of a seething man what lesson was he teaching his flesh and blood that afternoon.
Going to school makes you literate, if you are lucky, but won’t necessarily make you educated. Some kids don’t go to school and yet end up being more educated than those who made the effort to pack their bags and walk to the school gate. Shehnaz fits the bill here. She barely went to school, not because she didn’t want to but because her family preferred having an unpaid maid in the house. Instead of doing homework, she was found doing domestic chores all the time. Despite this rude misdirection, she was the smartest kid you’d find in our lane. She spoke respectfully, using aap for everyone elder and tum for everyone younger to her. And surprisingly, she had a nose for news: she picked up what she heard on radio or saw on DD so well that she would interject it in our neighbourhood conversations. My amma often used to say that she would have been a lawyer had she made it through the system. It’s worth imagining how many such girls are denied the opportunity to flex their wings when they clearly have the gift of flying on their own?
Childhood is not the appropriate time to lose friendship and yet we do. It gets worse when you lose a friend. For good. Manu lived right behind our house and was a quintessential sick boy of our multilingual neighbourhood. He spent more time visiting hospitals than doing anything else. All the parents always looked at him in a kinder way, the way they never looked at their own children. Maybe because they knew something we didn’t. Back then, we had no idea what the Big C was so we assumed that he was ill. That’s it. No questions asked about organs and diseases and medicines and stuff. But when he was feeling fine, his single mother—she had separated from her nuisance of a husband—would allow him to mingle with us. A very soft personality, almost fragile, even with his words, Manu was the first to laugh at a joke. You don’t forget such kids, now, do you? His younger sisters, Varsha and Pinky, were protective about him and the day he passed away, they cried the loudest while the mother barely made a sound.
Half of Mumbai still reside in slums. So, in a way, not much has changed from the last millennium. Speaking of a constant, nicknames catch on and run deeply in the poorer sections of society. Silly nicknames. Cute nicknames. Absurd nicknames. For instance, my mother nicknamed a neighbouring boy Buddha—unfortunately he came to be called Buddah, a term for old men—because he had the same name as my dad; she wouldn’t take his name as most married women weren’t supposed to mention their husband’s name. [Fun fact: Millions of votes were invalid in India’s first general elections of 1951-52 as women refused to mention their names and preferred calling themselves Bittu Ki Ma, Sai Ki Amma, etc.] Anyway, apart from being a close friend of mine, I also remember him for something completely unmentionable. While the rest of us boys had humble peckers, he had a long hammer hanging on him. To make it more intriguing, he seemed circumcised although there was no reason for him to go through khatna like Qasim, Naseer and other boys did. Strange. We ate together, shat together, played together and saw things together. Turns out children, in their immature understanding, learn whatever they can from whatever they see because asking questions wasn’t encouraged. Our parents had bigger problems: keeping us fed. Parenting could wait.
There are many things you do. There are many things you learn to do. And there are some things you can never do. Dancing falls in the last category for me. I can’t dance despite trying a bit in my early 30s. My body fails to catch the rhythm and I feel stupid. This has been my case since childhood. Every other kid would dance like fools without a care in the world while I remained cast in stone—conscious and awestruck. Four years elder to me, one boy named Safi was my dancing idol back then. He danced like a dream and would imitate Michael Jackson, Prabhudeva and later, even Hrithik Roshan. Thin fellow with a captivating personality, he danced everywhere: at weddings, Ganeshotsav pandals, school functions, cricket tournament celebrations, etc. Safi was everywhere. He was the one who advised me to go for morning runs if I wanted to get into the Navy—that was one of my fast-changing dreams—and he knew he was special. He was the only one around who was keen on making something out of his natural skills. Very inspirational for us peasants who looked at a school as school and nothing else. He apparently tried many times to feature himself in a dance TV show called Boogie Woogie but that never happened. A lot of things never happened in our chawl.
Ayappa resembled Sachin Tendulkar so much that he replicated his batting stance. One of the older boys in our group, when he was on the pitch, we knew we had a better chance of winning. The problem was he rarely made it to our Sunday sector matches. I later learned what kept him so busy. Our chubby boy had taken to drugs thanks to some young men who worked at the local bag manufacturing factory: the sort that keeps inhaling something from their handkerchief. His addiction gave rise to chaos in our lane, which meant we all heard the utensils falling. Without a background sound, there was no story. His amma was shattered and went through a lot of trouble for him. Don’t know whether he came out clean in the end but as long as I played cricket at the maidan (until 2000), he never showed up there again.
When you share walls, you share food, and when you share food, you share lives. That’s why kids in our neighbourhood ended up growing up in each other’s houses. One such kid literally grew up in our house. Her name was Dolly. The only daughter of a Malayali couple who both had a job, she was a little over three when I was five or so. As a result, she was left in our house to be looked after by my amma. Since we didn’t have a sister of our own, it was a good mix. To this day, amma refers to that girl as ‘my tail’ (beela in Tulu) because she was very fond of me. Used to follow me everywhere and in a way, I was practically her babysitter. Later, they left Bombay for Trichur and her mother used to write letters to amma in Malayalam, which my mother used to get read out by another Malayali lady in our lane. As of now, I live in Mangalore, not very far away from Kerala and I am certain she won’t remember me at all.
Suman lives in Chicago. He has a wife and two kids. He lost his mother at a young age. By all measures, he has to be one of the most successful (professional speaking) boys to make it out of our slums. Academically gifted and witty, he studied hard and made strides based on his merit. To avoid the neighbouring commotion, he used to study in the dim maala—ground-plus-one room which was relatively shorter in height—and found himself a charming job in an esteemed tech giant. They eventually moved him to the States seven years ago and he has been there since. Many such children tried but not all of them could achieve their goals. And very few of them came back to visit the place they grew up. That’s the norm. Once you leave, you are gone. Like Divine sang in his blistering song Teesri Manzil, “…aur gully ki madat karni toh gully se nikal…”
Children of Cheeta Camp
Beautifully written...
Last para badiya.