The day I rode a cop car

Well, this is not a memory from my youth but one that happened around three and a half years back, at the ripe old age of 58.
I was in the US to help out with my son and daughter-in-law, on the birth of my granddaughter.  But in between that, I took a short break with my brothers over in the Los Angeles area.  Well, a niece very kindly offered to take me out to listen to some music--Latin music, which I love.  As it was summer, it was street music.  We duly parked in a free parking lot--around 7pm this was--and went to enjoy the music.
After enjoying the sounds and sights, we decided to leave.  By this time the parking lot area was more or less deserted.  We walked through the indoor lot, and oh dear, we just could not remember where the car had been parked.  All we could both remember was that it was in a corner.  We walked around on several floors for about 15 mins and no car!  It was a fairly expensive car and so my niece was convinced it had been stolen--after all this was like a downtown area and it was certainly not early evening.  So first my niece rang her dad and then called the police and then we waited on the street outside the parking lot, on the street.  The only thing open near bye was a tanning parlor--at around 9 pm!  As we waited we found we were getting strange looks from some passers-by, male of course.  By this time my niece was getting frantic at the non-arrival of dad/and or members of the police force.
Finally her father arrived.  Now, I forgot to mention, neither of us knew/remembered the number of the car.  So, the first thing that was done, on arrival of my brother, was to get the car number.  Just then a police car came and asked whether it was us that had reported a missing car.  On being told that we were, he asked for the number of the car.  Then he asked my niece to get in for one more ride around the parking lot.  She insisted that the car was not in the lot.  But he said, what's to lose by one more ride around the parking lot.  She then asked one of us to please get in with her, as she didn't want to ride alone.  So I promptly got in the back,as, after all, I felt this was a rare opportunity to experience the hospitality of the LAPD.  While we were getting in, we got even stranger looks from the passers-by than earlier, as you can imagine.  After all, what would you expect, when a cop car stops and makes 2 women get into the car late in the evening....
Now friends, I don't know if you know this already, but there are no cushioned seats in the back of an LAPD cop car!  It was a shock to find I was sitting on hard blue metal.  I kept moving, trying to find a comfortable spot on the metal, but with no luck.
By this time we had taken a turn through the lot and lo and behold there stood the car in the dim light.  The young policeman was triumphant and both of us felt extremely foolish.  We proceeded to apologize profusely, which made him grin even more widely and then he left, after which we got into the recovered car and drove home.
Now there is an even funnier postscript to this.  I had taken a camera with me and when we got home, I found the camera was not with me.  It had been left in LAPD's luxury limo!!!  So there was my brother--at 10.30 pm, calling the police dept office to find out if there had been a camera in a cop car.  We were told that the camera had been found at left at the main Police Dept office in the area we had visited, but that we would have to come and fetch it then itself as the next day was Sunday and the office would be closed.  Hence, my poor brother made his second trip all the way there, with me, to the particular office and then we had to wait, till the young policeman came in for a break, to claim my camera.  It wasn't that this camera was a fancy camera.  It was just that I had  quite a few pictures in it of my new granddaughter and family in general.  So anyway, a long and eventful evening filled with interactions with the LAPD.

 I am now 60 years old and have been married for 40 years.  I realised that, therefore I have been married for double the number of years that I was not married!  So now memories of my youth are hard to dredge up, though they surface at the oddest times.  Now the memories that I recall are largely post marriage and of my children's childhoods.

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!  This picture is the nearest to what our water heater looked like (as I remember).

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.