Growing and learning

We grew up in an industrial township. My life has been my field of learning (and unlearning) in that way. My father worked as a laborer in a steel factory. No. He was not an officer. He was a steel factory worker. It would not have been so much fun otherwise. Officers had ground floor bungalows, separated from others' bungalows by boundaries. We grew up with other steel factory workers' children. They were our brothers, sisters, friends, love interest and idols. Imagine a whole world made up of steel factory workers and their families!

We all had the same two room flats known as "quarters". We had two rooms; the "inside room" (bhetorer ghar) and the "outside room" (bairer ghar). The household often poured outside these two rooms. Backyard gardens of the ground floor quarters were used to store coal for fuel. Stairs going to the roof used as shoe-racks for two quarters on the second floor. When I fell in love with the boy next door, I used to always arrange my shoes next to his. It could not be too obvious to others, though. It had to look casual. Therefore, my shoes were casually thrown on the stairs after I came back from my hopscotch sessions in the ground nearby but somehow they always landed next to his shoes. And the innocent me, of course did not know how!

Our fathers always talked in high pitched voices. It took a lot many years to realize that it is not natural to talk in that high volume. Almost all of them developed some hearing issues from working in an environment where machinery made loud noises. They spent at least eight hours every day there. Growing up, when people shouted our names from the ground floor and we could hear them in the second floor "inside room", it only felt natural. Who would come up four flights of 12 stairs each to just pass a message when you could come out in the balcony and hear them (along with all the other neighbors staying in the same street).

Growing up I could not believe there can be houses in this world that had no number on them. It seemed impossible that a postman would find a house without a number consisting of a main street number, a sub-street number and finally the house number. For example, 4D/5, 5/43 etc. It seemed strange when people had a house by a name. It was even stranger when letters could reach the correct house on the basis of a name written on top of the address space, without a street number, without a house number!

Waiting for public transport (read mini-buses) for hours was the most dreaded part of any outing! At times we had returned back from the bus stop itself after waiting for hours. The buses around 3.30 pm were the most crowded as people went to visit relatives in the 650 bedded DSP hospital. During monsoon at least 900 patients had to be accommodated and their 4500 relatives made it impossible to travel by buses between 3.30 pm to 6.30 pm! None of our parents owned a car. It did not seem a commodity that we should be bothered about. We became deft in handling crowded public transport thus. Buses, mini-buses, very crowded local trains, we braved it all. As young kids we had to regularly visit the Health Centres where they stitched our gashing wounds, dressed them, gave us anti-tetanus and penicillin injections and handed out red colored undrinkable syrups for cough and cold. We were visionaries to drain the measured portion each day instead of gulping it, as the world knows now, syrups are no better than chicken soup in curing colds!

We never cared much about caste and religion. Being workers in the same factory our parents did not have much say in choosing their neighbor and I must say to their credit that I had not heard our parents or friends' parents giving us a lecture on not eating or drinking with anyone. We hence grew up pretty oblivious to our castes. Later in life when in one of my post graduation classes while explaining religious discrimination, a Professor asked each one of us to name 5 friends from another religion and that I did not have trouble doing that, could largely be attributed to my growing up years. 

Latest by the 15th of every month, mothers found it difficult to run the households. They discussed strategies sitting in a circle in the lazy afternoons. They knitted, exchanged recipes and woes. The salary was never enough. First generation urban dwellers, they found it difficult to run households with cereals and pulse bought at local shops. Durkheim's Theory of Anomy was proved every other month by news of a suicide in a quarter nearby. 

We still grew up fine. More often than not. Many of us ended up in white collar jobs in various parts of the world. No we did not become engineers as most parents in my hometown would have liked their children to be but that did not stop us from becoming authors, film makers, actors, pharmacy man,  sportsperson, doctors, dancers, globe trotters, poets and of course engineers. 

And yes! Wherever we are May Day is still a very important day and a certain Mr John Henry from West Virginia is a very important person is our lives.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZGxZbOB1Eo