My grandma called it chamber, and at times office; my father called it garage, my grandfather called it daftar
The place where I grew up, we had a small room with a low ceiling, in the front corner of our house that belonged to my chachu. It was his workplace. On the outside, hung a board that read ‘Advocate Puneet Gupta’
Our house had an assorted flair of grandeur and succinctness. I realized this when we moved to a new house. I was 15 then and I took time gathering strewn fractions of myself from the place I had known as home all my life, and conform to the change. I remember, for many months, I would spend lone minutes thinking about the place. My fondest and most distinct memories were in this small room.
With a big table in the middle that stood on a rugged carpet, a rickety, green-colored table fan which made an annoying humming noise until we patted and it obeyed like a mannered kid, and a ceiling-to-floor large glass case in the rear wall laden with chachu’s AIR copies, it embodied an archaic compendious spirit.
Of the many memories, is one with the GLOBE. Proportionate with the table it stood on; it was a big globe. For the first time in my life, my chachu showed me India on the globe. Before that, it was a mere ball for me.
I was amazed.
By two things.
One, the very idea of this being the earth. And the other sank in as I asked him ‘jammu kahan hai’ and he showed me a tiny dot and went on to explain how scale works. I took a minute with myself to contemplate if a dot blows up into the whole of our city, this globe should swell into something gigantic. Of course, I did eventually read about the size of earth and I can remember smiling proudly to myself in a geography class. After all I had figured it out years ago while the other blokes in the class had to come to school to learn about it.
Whatever it was; a globe or a ball, I liked to sit on the table and play with it while chachu spent hours with his multi colored files and those white and green tag-threads. These things fascinated me. I often felt envious and thought I should own some, one day.
I asked him once why these files were in different colors. I can’t claim to have made complete sense of what he said, but the conversation must have sounded something like this:
Alag alag colors ki files kyun hoti hain?
Alag alag cases hote hain. Ek color ki file mein ek case.
Case kya hota hai
………
Back then, the ambition of my life was to become a carpenter. I thought to myself when I do accomplish it, I’ll have different color files for pictures of the stools, chairs and doors and almiras that I would design.
When I look back at those days, I feel I shared a very easy relationship with my chachu. It is striking, or maybe in a sense it testifies the relation we had, that I called him Tu, despite having grown up in a family where civic manners were glorified; rather beyond relevance. I can remember my grandma often pointing it to me how disrespectful I was being by calling him Tu, and now I understand her concern was obvious, but it never occurred to me then. He was more a companion than an elder.
Like most kids, I liked kites; but unlike most kite-lovers, I wasn’t very good at flying them. So I had to convince my father to come up to the terrace and fly one for me. All this while, chachu would sit in a corner in his characteristic squat, his face cupped in his palms. He would smile to me, wave to me, but never quite participated in the sport! As I grew up, I was to realize he never liked it and it dawned on me, that he sat there only to watch me go through my endeavor.
Back to the small room I was describing. This room, to a person who hasn’t been there, spent lone time there, would seem like an insignificant little thing. To me, that was and remains one of the few places where I find solace. The low ceiling, the meager space, and the packed shelves swooning under the numerous and vivid books, in a weird sense, assure me that I am not going to get lost in this world, that I have an identity of my own, and that there is one ‘rabbit’s hole’, I can return to, anytime in my life.
That’s probably why, as a kid, I added to the tally of names this room had and called it ‘my study’. As time went by, it became my full time study room. In a way, I ousted my chachu out of his own room. Gradually, it became little Setu’s study-room and while she complains it’s too small, hot, secluded, and not happening, chachu has taken to his little wedge and is happy burning the midnight oil there, his favorite squat still denying to leave him!
And as far as the story of me and my room goes, I believe he knows what the place means to me, more than anyone else. I must confess though that not much was ever spoken between the two of us. Even today morning, when I called him to greet him on his birthday, all I could muster up and burp out was ‘Raam raam chachu .. Happy Birthday’ and all he said was ‘Thank you Beta. Kya kar raha hai tu’.
But so it has been over the years. Nothing has changed, except that I stopped pronouncing him Tu some 10 years back, more out of my embarrassment than his; and he too seems to be transitioning from ‘Chhote Laal’ to ‘Beta’ which is warm and sad at the same time.
