A blog post I read a while back,  got me thinking about my own teenage years.
I was overweight and not good-looking. I was also rather hirsute! In those days, at least here in India, not that many youngsters got their eyebrows done or facial hair removed, more so because, as I remember, bodily hair was only either shaved off or tweezed off.
I studied in a girls' school--a convent and none of my classmates would come out and say that I was fat or ugly or anything. But then I had a younger brother who had no such scruples and hummed 'Baby Elephant's Walk' whenever he wanted to annoy me.
Those were the days of shift dresses and tight skirts (so tight that you were forced to take mincing steps) and my mother flatly refused to let me get anything stitched like that because she thought I was too fat for those kinds of fashions (I was kind of bosomy and my mother felt that Western style clothes just attracted unwanted, negative attention ). I remember that, after much pleading from me and from one of my best friends, she finally allowed me to get one shift dress made, which I personally thought made me look slimmer, but which my mother wasn't too happy about. From the time I was 12, for most formal occasions my mother got me to wear saris. For school of course we had uniforms.
But when I got into the 9th standard and the class got split into sections, depending on the classes/subjects we elected to do, I found I was much more comfortable with my classmates. We were all science students and therefore considered more career-oriented and so being upto-the-minute fashionable was not given that much importance.
Even so, there were social occasions we occasionally attended, more so because of the work my father did, where there might be girls about my age, from the upper crust of Calcutta society and how I hated going because I felt fat, ugly and so unsophisticated, next to these smart svelte young women. In that sense wearing a sari was good because although I might be considered old-fashioned, at least there wouldn't be any unfavourable comparisons, as there might have been if I was dressed fashionably! That was when I began telling myself--'Packaging may count, but that's not everything; what counts is what's within the package and you have brains and you can build substance. There will be people you will come across who will appreciate the substance as long as the package is cleanly and neatly wrapped'. [:-)]
There was a kind of safety in the fact that well-behaved girls from good families did not have boyfriends as in going steady. So that kind of competition was never there. In that sense I think that the not needing to have a sweetheart at that age, took away a great part of the pressure--for both boys and girls--of having to be good-looking or attractive in an accepted mould.

I lie with my eyes shut waiting for my headache meds to take effect.  I remember a bad headache when I was maybe 5 or 6.  Then the room where I lay came into view, like watching an old movie.
It was the guest room in the palatial house we lived in, in Bandra, Mumbai.  My mother had got the walls painted a delicate shade of lilac, almost the colour of these lilacs.

(from Wikepedia)

 The curtains and the bedspreads were in white cotton fabric on which there were flower borders,   embroidered in cross-stitch, in the same lilac as the walls.  This is the nearest likeness.

 On the bedside tables were tall white metal candlesticks converted into lamps, and with white lampshades.  There was a beautiful rosewood vanity table/dressing table against a wall, which too, as I seem to remember,  had white cotton circular doilies on them.  That was the done way of dressing up the vanity table those days.
I then took a walk through the house and the thought came up, that sadly I can no longer check out how true my memories are, because that house is no more, having given way to a huge flat.

Feeling Old

These days, so often I feel so old that growing up and attendant memories seem like an aeon ago.  It's only music that can trigger memories and I guess the fact that I am trying to listen to new music these days has closed the door to many memories.  Maybe I should go back to listening to some of the music of my salad days :-)

It's strange how childhood memories suddenly come back at the weirdest times. The other night I was lying in bed with my eyes shut and on the verge of sleep when memories of a house my parents had lived in, just flooded me, so much so it woke me up!
This house was in Ranchi, Bihar, where my father worked in a Public Sector Undertaking for around 3 years. It was an old British made bungalow for some government officer I think--PSG bungalow. Spacious and airy, it was a gracious house. The thick walls and the surrounding verandahs kept the house cool in the hot Bihar summers.
There were 4 bedrooms surrounding a large sitting room and a dining area. The kitchen was far away--as was common in houses in pre-Independence India. But an area near the dining room had been converted into a small kitchen. The bungalow had extensive grounds with a number of fruit trees of different kinds.
The memory that woke me, was of the room I used while in that house. I had asked and was given a room at the front of the house, opening out onto a broad, shady verandah that ran the whole length of the front of the house. I was given the choice to do up the room the way I wanted --with available furnishings.
The memory of the bright emerald green bedspreads I had was so clear that it was almost tangible. The thought of the colour in my mind's eye, then dredged out other objects that I had loved--my guitar hung on the wall, the music system in pride of place and some posters on the wall. I saw myself as I had been then--wearing a green sari and my thick, frizzy hair in a tight braid!
There arose also, the memory of two of the fruit trees, a guava tree just out back behind the house and a huge jamun tree in the front of the house, beside the gate. The tree bore a large number of plump jamuns and all the kids in the neighbourhood would be outside the gate, picking jamuns during the season. Somehow no jamun I've eaten after that has seemed as good. Sadly I don't remember any mango trees, though I love mangoes.
I remember too, a singing master who came to teach me during one of my vacations and of all things Bengali music. I only remember two of the songs, one an East Bengali boat song and one a song of Tagore's!
I searched for the house in Google maps. But then I thought it must have been long gone--probably given way for a whole host of houses perhaps.

It's been a really long time since I posted here. But the memories have to come and so strongly, that you want to write about them.
Today, just randomly, I remembered the flat that we stayed in last, while in Calcutta (Kolkatta). It was a gracious, spacious old flat. We were on the ground floor. There were four bedrooms, with attached bathrooms and what came to my mind were the beautiful copper boilers in each bathroom, for hot water. They were huge, by today's water heater standards, and the water was heated by piped-in gas. When you wanted hot water for a bath, you had to turn the main jet out from underneath, light it and then slowly turn it back in, when the burner ring, under this great big boiler, got lit. My mother instructed us all to be very careful when lighting it, as she warned that otherwise there could be an explosion!
There was a cooking range in the kitchen,with a large oven, which too was powered by piped-in gas (natural gas). Only my mother lit the oven, as she considered it too dangerous for anyone else to do.
I also remember that there was a long corridor running through the house, from which all the rooms led off. This corridor was a scary place to traverse at night, especially for my younger sister. As there were 4 bedrooms, and we didn't need them all, one bedroom was hardly ever used. For some strange reason, we invested this room with all the scary night things children are afraid of. Now one had to walk down the corridor quite a way, to put on the corridor light. But even when the light was on, somehow the part of the corridor, near the unused room, seemed much darker. To get to our bedroom, or my parents bedroom, we had to go through this darker area and pass the unused room. So, if my mother asked one of us (usually me, being the older one there)to get something from her room or ours, it was an act fraught with terror. My mother had no patience with such stupid fears and expected action pronto. So, I would run past this room, without looking in. But, over time, I managed to conquer my fears by forcing myself to enter that room and put on the light, usually accompanied by our family dog [:-)]. But it remained scary for my younger siblings for quite a long time.

The Beatles--formed 50 years back!

I see that I haven't written a post here for around 6 months now!! I guess there were no specific memories that came up.
But for a while now, I've been thinking about the Beatles and yesterday I saw a program on India Today's Headlines Today, a tribute to the Beatles and that really brought back ever so many memories.
I did all my growing up to a background of the Beatles music. In India, in the 60s, original Western music took a long while to reach our shores. What I seem to remember is that 1964 was the time, anyway, when the Beatles came into my life. In the Calcutta of those days, there used to be a radio progamme of English pop at around 7.30 pm. I don't remember now if it was there every day of the week or only on Saturdays. But I do know how I loved it when the Beatles played. Elvis was very popular in India and strangely Country Western music was also very popular among those who listened to English music. But I remember that I was ready to get into an argument with anyone who decried the Beatles and their music, or said that Elvis was better :-)
At that time, of course, there were very rarely printed lyrics available and what we all had to do, was sit with a pen and paper and try to figure out the lyrics, If one was lucky enough to own a record, then it became easier to get the lyrics, as you could listen to the same song umpteen times. (You must remember at that time there were no audio tapes, where one could pause a tape). So I remember the excitement when my mother bought one of the English women's magazines--Woman & Home I think it was--and it had lyrics to a number of the Beatles songs. My brother and I carefully cut that out and kept it very safely. Incidentally, in that compilation was the lyrics for 'From me to you'. There is a funny story attached to that. My brother--he may have been 11 or 12--insisted that the words in the song went, "I have long arms to hold you and keep you by my side" and all my yelling at him that that sounded totally ridiculous, he just wouldn't agree, because he said a senior in his school had sung those words. So it gave me great satisfaction to show him the correct lyrics, when we got that compilation.
A large part of my studies were done with music playing in the background, and I recall my father getting really upset about that.
Later, when I got into University in Chennai, we could always listen to Radio Ceylon, which had many more programmes of Western pop.
I am, naturally, still a BIG Beatles fan and my children all listen to their music and love it too. I've added the video bar of their music, to go with this post.

Christmas Past

To my mind, my memory of Christmas is always associated with my mother. She was the one who made Christmas special. It wasn't that she cooked mountains--or even cooked much, but it was the excitement she managed to give us, wherever we happened to be, whether at home, or at my grandfather's place or even in the train! In fact that was one of my memorable Christmases, when my mother carefully put out presents for us on our train berths as we sped through the night to visit her father. I'd posted about that Christmas earlier here at the end of that post. She obviously enjoyed our excitement.
I hope my children and grandkids have good memories of Christmas with me too.