Them silvery days

Yesterday I chanced upon a diary I wrote when I was 10. I was surprised I had better grammar than I remembered though a few is’s became was’s and a few s’s missing. I used to call my Hindi tuition Sir (I was always in a bad need for one, still am!), Hindan, and my Math tuition Sir, Paraman. There was a time when I called my brother, Nishu Chettan (translates to brother Nishu)! But in the next year’s diary I was glad to see it became Butthead.

As is always the case with old diaries, I was taken back, to the good ol’ silvery days (I have a particular aversion to the term golden). Mainly concerning my brother. Like Kevin Arnold says in The Wonder Years “I had an ordinary childhood, with one little exception. I had a brother”. Well we weren’t exactly calling each other butthead all the time, but funnily there was a period my brother chose to be known as Butthead when MTV had aired the Beavis n Butthead show back in 90’s.

Nish and I spent time in 2 activities: 1. Buying song books and singing them together in the top of our voice, strictly following no pitch, no notes and definitely no harmony (somehow Nish remembered it was time for his daily cough or yawn whenever we struck high notes, I remembered it was time for my daily moment of voice-breaking); 2. we played indoor cricket.

[high_pitch_song.mp3] (High Pitch Song No:1)

Indoor consisted of 2 bedrooms, which meant there were beds, desks, and a TV in the polished-mosaic “pitch”. Our crease extended from my desk to his. We had everything from a bat to a ball to a commentator. There were around 50 characters and so many different teams-we started with Nalla-jeevi’s (good creatures) Team and Cheetha-jeevi’s (bad creatures) Team and as Nish learnt about England counties went on to Surrey, Sussex, Derbyshire and Yorkshire. When I was Vita, I was a big six hitter; when I was Mini I was a fast bowler and when I was Anikom, I rolled the ball on the floor to prove I am a slow bowler. Back then I didn’t know this, but I have a sneaking suspicion Nish used these variations of me for the pleasure of seeing the ball fly in all directions when his wooden chopped bat showed no mercy.

Our wicket was the big blue laundry hamper which was almost as big as me back then. I didn’t do a good job covering it with my hamper-twin size and bat-holding troubles. Our commentator was a square face on the wall which spoke in a robotic voice that used all of Nish’s grinder-mimicking skills (at a later point we made the square face the third umpire, of course first and second umpires liked to be invisible). We even had records of the matches. In my social studies notebook. I still have an exclusive interview of Anikom, (wo)man of the series of the big series in ’95, by special correspondent, Bunkey Bond. Nish always had a peculiar taste in names. Some people think I inherited it. Hah.

When I reached 8^th grade Nish was well into college and there came one of those things in our house that stopped all brother-sister cricket relationships. A computer. Nish’s computer! If it was a non-Nish’s computer I could have lured him into thinking having a broken monitor in the premises was no big deal. And so a wicked computer and its wicked monitor ended my indoor cricketing days. I never got to find out my true skills in the game. Sad.

[high_pitch_song2.mp3] (High Pitch Song No:2)

Another activity in the silvery days were dolls. It sounds un-mature to clowns. In reality there was a lot of scope for imagination among those little stuffed bodies. We had a whole army of soldiers ready to attack the enemy. They had quality, they had character.

And Mom reminded me the worst among all were our sheet-houses. We tied up sheets around all corners of the bedrooms to form indoor-tents and partition walls. We also left them hanging wall to wall (“and giving me a hard time to clean up”- from Mom) when we fancied jumping from tables to beds (we imagined people who missed the bed had an instant death on hitting the floor. I died around 17 times a day).

Mom was also not pleased to find her newly-made beds not so newly-made after Nish and I were done with our somersault-on-bed practices for the day. She wouldn’t understand we needed to be well-trained in case the army needed us, and of course army people had to do it all the time, spin their bodies around on beds.

Good old silvery days. Quoting another Kevin Arnold line “Even today when I listen to little kids breathe next to each other, I wish for them what my parents wished for me and my brother. I wish for them, what we had”

[wonder_years.mp3]