It was the thumb of my left hand that had shot to my mouth soon after I was born, maybe a prescient thumb, the one that indicated a growing thirst. The pink soles of my feet had kicked up a frenzy. Initially, I hadn’t really cried, a failing that pursued me through my life. “Pushpa, I hate tears,” a deified matinee idol had said in a film – a line that became famous in the seventies as an expression of understated emotion quivering in the subconscious but fighting shy of an overt appearance. However, my tear drought had preceded all such popular antagonisms with emotion.

In school, quite inadvertently, they had cast me in the role of the princess who would not cry. The king had sent far and wide for physicians. And needless to say, no one could unplug her tear glands. Finally, a dhaba owner, or an equivalent thereof, set her to chop onions and presto, she was crying. The palace cook was dejected. “Onions, onions, why didn’t I think of onions,” he said, shaking his head sadly, pronouncing the “o” with an “oh” and sculpting onions in the air.

When they tried to dislodge the thumb, I fought valiantly. They tried everything. They wrapped my thumb with a thick wad of bandage, which I quickly drenched in saliva and dislodged. They tried coating my thumb with Iodex. I puckered my face when the thumb went into my mouth but sucked at it nevertheless, perhaps realising early that things bitter often generate illusory magic. They recognised my tenacity and washed away the Iodex. What finally did it was a single, mighty shout from my grandfather.

“Don’t do it,” he had hollered.

And added for good measure, “I am going to feed you to that buffalo there if you don’t stop.”

I had screwed up my face, looked fearfully at the buffalo in the distance, given my thumb one last, longing look, and then tucked away my thumb in the clasp of my fingers. I did not cry. I had not sucked my thumb after that.

*I was not an accidental birth, though. Not one of those unbidden pregnancies which are too late to truncate. I was a plan. I was the right time for a child. I was not the daughter who should have been a son. My parents were looking forward to the arrival of their child. I, Bubbly, was the daughter Billo and Randy had hoped for, born in the unlikely setting of a canvas tent. *

Once upon a time, though this is no fairy tale, that was all the accommodation that was available to engineers who were building Chandigarh, a city that was meant to be a projection into the future and was often, in later years, accused of being a repudiation of the past. No history, no culture, they said of it. The undulating landscape, with sashaying wheat fields, stretched all the way to the Himalayan foothills in the distance and was a clean slate – well, almost – subject to the wiping out of 22 villages, for the architects to draw the contours of a city and its skyline. Le Corbusier, with crayon in hand, had sketched a grid of sectors based on some calculations done in Spain between 1929 and 1949, and a geometry based on the stride of a man, horse, or ox, subsequently adapted to mechanical speeds. Of course, cars were not being chased by the devil in those days and, therefore, he never really factored that in. In any case, the devil had a low profile in the years gone by. The past is always swathed in the gossamer of nostalgia. And the devil of the past is never quite so devilish as is the devil of the present.

The relationship between my parents developed on this evolving landscape. Exactly at five o’clock every evening, he set out on foot from his office in Nagla and headed home. Preparations had started fifteen minutes before his scheduled departure.

He had tied up his files and stacked them on his table, put away his pencils and sharpener in his drawer, blown away the last speck of dust that had caught his eye on his table, tied his wristwatch back on his arm, bent over and tightened his shoelaces, and was ready to go. He was perhaps offsetting the untidiness of life’s contours with the meticulous neatness on his table. And even if this be a bit of pop psychology, where shortfall and compensation have a clandestine relationship, it does explain a lot of things.

She had switched off the transistor when her favourite programme on agriculture, “Kheti Barri”, which featured Thooniya Ram with his nasal twang, walking into a gathering of farmers as they sat discussing farming, came to an end. Those were politically incorrect days and she laughed when Thooniya Ram’s flawed speech became the butt of banter. A thoroughbred city girl, born across the Indian border in Lahore in Pakistan, farming was not a part of her reality. But then, here she was in a rural, tending-to-urban, Janus-faced setting, where fields were sprouting buildings instead of crops. She had tied her chunni diagonally across from her shoulder, the knot dangling at her hip, and had pulled on her walking shoes. She left home. He left office. They walked along the already laid-out roads from opposite directions.

*I, yet waiting to be born, watch them on my app above like two cabs inching their way towards each other. *

Little dots on expansive roads, closing in on each other. The wide roads were seen as an indulgence of plenty, an extravagance in the extreme, for that one odd official car or a few cycles or then a bullock cart. There were no roads in the villages that were to be supplanted by a city. Villagers were aghast. And this sense of outrage perhaps never really faded away, living on as a subterranean sentiment in the hearts of the displaced. Even in the early ‘80s, when protesting farmers arrived in Chandigarh to battle for support prices for their crops, they saw the wide roads as an affront to their own diminished realities, and made sure of treating them with the disdain that they thought they deserved, describing them as a waste of cultivable land, bathing in the decorative water bodies, looking at the parks as an extension of their fields back home.

The rendezvous for Billo and Wolfy was the Government Press Building, the only big structure visible for a few miles around. It was a new-age building of glass and bricks. The brick face of one block was pockmarked with 132 square windows recessed into the façade. The second block had an all-glass frontage broken up into 2,754 glass squares, some of them opening out onto Madhya Marg. And it did look like it might burst into robotic speech and movement any minute. Inside, large machines printed forms and gazettes and official stationery. The couple met at the gate and together walked home.

Home was a “married” tent. There were “bachelor” tents for the unattached. I was conceived in one of those “married” ones that allowed for placing two munjis side by side, the jute of the weave pushing out angry tendrils that sought revenge for being sat upon, the overlap of the mattresses, however, binding the two beds together over the hump of the frame. A table and two chairs occupied the rest of the space, fronted by a cotton durree on the grassy floor, which was quickly picked up and folded away when it rained. My mother would usually pull a chair outside the tent even as clouds glided into the sky and then proceeded to chuff themselves from gentle grey to belligerent black.

Occasionally, my parents went to see a movie in the makeshift movie hall in Nagla – an enclosure of corrugated sheets. The screen was sheltered by a cloth awning, which sometimes came loose with the breezes that blew in from the mountains. They doggedly watched Mela even as a dust storm swirled around them. In the parking lot, a long row of engineers’ cycles went down like skittles. My parents, Billo and Randy, rode the storm through in their cinema seats, being reluctant to tear themselves away from a Dilip Kumar starrer and also wanting to make sure of extracting the worth of that 50-paisa entry fee. After the movie, they challenged the receding storm on their cycle as they made their way back to their tent.

A happy routine of this nature, and then I think the stork brought me, or at least planted me in my mother’s womb. You will have to forgive me this little delusion because it is my parents that I am talking about here, and that necessitates some delicacy of thought and expression.

My mother was Billo, fondly called so because of her large, light-brown cat eyes and her spirited temperament. Billo with an attitude is part of popular Punjabi culture. She sat drawing pictures in the sky, extending a mental finger to tweak a grey cloud, pulling a face, punching eyes, giving it a nose, lulled by its lazy movements, her mind becoming a haze. It was her body that had precedence just now as the baby – that was me – grew inside her. She was watching two little puffy wisps racing to the horizon when a pair of white, flailing arms abutted into the picture. Barfi Ram, as white as driven snow, his clouded expression anxiously grey, was running up, his windmill arms hampering forward movement even though he seemed to be using them as oars to negotiate the wind.

Barfi Ram was making slow progress, shouting himself headless all the while.

“Saaaaaahb, saaaaaahb! Tethered to a tree, tethered to a tree. Like a dungur, like an animal. Help, help, bachhaao, bachhaao.” And as the sound of his wailing resonated, his head responded to it like a tuning fork, becoming an agitated blur. “Beebee, beebee, saaaaaaaahb…saaaaaaaaahb.” He was calling out to her and following it up with a long lament referring to her husband. “Beebee, beebee, saaaaaaaab… saaaaaaaaab.”

In Barfi’s world, his boss, his sahab, was a part of the firmament. Just when everything had been going to pieces in Barfi’s life, Randy sahab had appeared, as if sent by the heavens.

Excerpted with permission from I in the Sky: A Chandigarh Chronicle, Neel Kamal Puri, Speaking Tiger Books.

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