Alvida Agra

I have come to Agra several times in the last couple of years. My main attraction here is not the Taj, it is a campus where I spent 8 of the first 10 years of my life. My Dad was posted here in the 80s, and in a lucky coincidence, my brother-in-law sometimes gets the same postings as my Dad. This providence allows me to revisit the places I grew up in.

Tomorrow we leave Agra for good once again, a new posting beckons. I doubt if I'll ever be able to return, seems quite unlikely. Therefore, I'm filling my backpack with as many memories as I can take away from here.

A few days ago I read a poem by Gulzar in which he reminisces about his ancestral village - Dina, now in Pakistan - and memories from his early childhood. One particular stanza touched me immensely, in it he describes the cosy comfort provided by childhood nostalgia. It goes..

Kaise veeran ho jaate hain saal purane
Veeran ho jaata hain bachpan
Phir bhi ek mahak rah jaati hain seelan ki
Tah-khano mein utro toh..
Tah-khano mein neend si aane lagti hain.

Here, my dear friends, are some glimpses from my tah-khana (basement).

1. The Movie Hall - My first movie hall experience was here, then called the Bluebird theatre.

I saw several movies here, though, I now remember only the terrible ones - Dak Bangla, Mard etc. After watching Mard, a friend and I wrote 'Mard' (in Hindi) on each other's chest with a red sketch, just like Amitabh has it etched on his chest in the movie, with a dagger no less. I hid it from my parents, but they saw it the next day and couldn't stop laughing, I felt like a foolish idiot :)

The entry fee here was nominal, and as the theatre is inside a campus, meant only for its residents, the ticket checking wasn't stringent. We would park our cycles on the way home from school, discreetly enter the hall from the side gates and watch the remaining movie standing behind the curtains of side exits. A part of that child is still in me I think; going to the cinema is one of my biggest passions. There, within its four walls, I feel transported to another world, one I hate to return from most times.

2. Yeh Dil Maange More - I have never been to a place where I saw more peacocks than here. However, there can never be enough of these beautiful birds.

3. Dakota - Dakota is actually the name of a famous plane (like Boeing Dreamliner). The fairly new structure in this photo is called Dakota because when I was a kid there was an actual Dakota plane here in its place, with just the fuselage and tail, no wings or wheels. It was a small snack and tea shop, people would stand and buy their stuff from the aircraft windows. This new building lacks that 'wow factor' I think.

4. This is the road where I learnt to cycle. So obviously this is also the road where I fell the maximum number of times in my life. Our house was a ground floor flat on the right (picture later). I also had a near escape from losing my left eye here, it wasn't a bike accident though. Our TV had broke down halfway through the popular cartoon 'He-Man', and I was running up the stairs to a friend's house to watch the rest. I slipped and fell, landing in such a way that my eye nearly smashed into the corner of a step, a narrow escape luckily. A big 'X' stitch mark on my eye-socket is my souvenir from that injury.

5. Heritage Hall (School) - In my memory this was a big hall, it seems so small now.

This is where I won my first quiz competition. There's an interesting story behind my win. Please forgive the vanity in my retelling, I can't think of any another way to narrate this story. My success, though very modest, does echo the old saying "Behind every successful man there is a woman" :)

I was in Class 5 at that time. The brand 'Maggi' was organising a series of quizzes in my school to pick two winners - one each from primary and secondary - who would then represent the school in an inter-school competition. In the initial rounds I was doing OK, but my Dad was working harder than me. He had this habit of preparing booklets/notes of information he deemed useful to me throughout my student life. He personally typed an entire dictionary, bound the pages like a booklet and gifted it to me when I was doing my Engineering (his habit is a story for another day). For the quizzes, he bought a few books and prepared a booklet with a selection of important points taken from them (Country Capitals, Book Authors, Currencies, Sobriquets etc).

Our class monitor was a very pretty Malayali girl named Reshma, the typical studious and strict first ranker. The boys were head over heels for her. Incidentally, Reshma was also my immediate neighbour (a picture of that house is given later), which is one reason why my birthday parties were well attended by my friends.

One day when I was playing outside my house, Reshma asked me how I was preparing and I told her I was reading only my Dad's notes. She requested if she could have it for 1-2 days to copy it. Of course I said yes, my rare chance to impress her; I ran inside, fetched the notes and gleefully handed it over to her.

When my Dad noticed that I was not studying in the evenings, he enquired my reason. Me - "Daddy, I gave the notes to Nair uncle's daughter. I'll resume my study once she returns". My dad was so disappointed that he didn't even hit me, he just gave me a sad look. I felt so ashamed, so filled with guilt; I had gifted away all his hardwork to another competitor. The next day I asked my notes back and finished reading it. In the following days I started going through the books which my Dad used as his source. I still remember one of the handy books "Upkar's General Knowledge", I had pretty much the whole book memorised by heart (albeit without much understanding, that happened later). I sailed through the next few rounds, fought off all competition (including Reshma) and eventually won the school championship. For the inter-school, I was paired with the Principal's daughter but we didn't win that one, we came third if I remember right.

This incident started my long association with quizzing. I was in a quiz team every year of my student life since then, and represented my schools/colleges several times. Collecting information, especially obscure triva, became an obsession. By the time I came to do my Post-Grad in Mumbai I started seeing people several times better than me at competitions, some of the best quizzers and quizmasters of India, they were unbeliveable. But strangely, it was also the same time when I began to find this kind of "knowledge" very superficial. I couldn't understand the point of knowing it - a snobbish vanity, hollow from the inside? I felt as if I was running around in the rain trying to catch as many drops as possible. I gave up, stopped going to quizzes completely, not even as an audience. Now, I just want to stand in that rain with outspread arms, close my eyes, and feel the drops that hit me.

6. School Water Tank - This watertank has always been a haven for large beehives. At least on one occasion the school was forced to close abruptly when some smart-ass threw a stone at a beehive. I was talking to the security gaurd this time, he's been at the school since 1982 and said that in his time such bee-attacks and school closures happened several times. Some tricks don't change.

Talking about security gaurds reminds me another story. I was a forgetful boy, some complain that I still am. On a few occasions I went to the school on my cycle and absent-mindedly took the school bus on the way home. Each time that happened I had to go back and beg the security gaurds to let me in to take my cycle home. They can be very difficult to please.

7. Jungle Area - This open area, recently cleared to make way for a Basketball court, used to be a jungle of bushes, trees and weeds (like you see on the other side of the wall, that is Agra Airport by the way).

This bushy area was the place where some boys played "Who Pees the Farthest?" competition. Very common, funny game at a young age. I have indulged in that sport in other schools too. My personal favorite was at Sainik School Korukonda (SSK) because of something unqiue there. A common weed at SSK was the 'Touch-Me-Not' plant (Chui-Mui in Hindi). It's a magical plant whose leaves fold up when touched. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend you to see it on Youtube (Link). When playing the game, as one covered the ground it used to turn from light-green (open leaves) to dark-green (closed leaves). It was truly magical to see the changing colors as we messed about, a great fun. Looking back, perhaps my first foray into modern art ;)

8. Home - These are some of the quarters where we lived, all tiny 1 bedroom flats.

Some of these quarters were shared between two families, meaning each family had just 1 room and a shared kitchen/bath. I was too young to understand the domestic issues back then, but now I know things weren't all rosy. Anyway, the house on top-left is the one next to Reshma's (her's the one on the right in that picture). The person we shared the bottom-left house with was a keen gardner, he would dig radishes from the garden and make children eat them. Bottom-right is the house where I got my first cycle (BSA SLR) and the eye injury.

It was very nostalgic for me to go back to these houses after 30 years. The saddest part was to see the swings taken out from the trees. To me, the creaking of the swing was like the hearbeat of my childhood.

9. Before/After - And finally, here's a picture of us taken when we were last in Agra, paired with a recent one also taken in Agra. I must confess that despite a few attempts we were unable to recreate the twinkle seen in our childhood picture.

Alvida Agra, thanks for being a happy place for us. If we are lucky, we'll return to you one day.

The End

PS - I honestly do not expect anyone to read this long, tiring, saga of personal stories. It was primarily meant for my own record. But if you have come this far, I'm thankful for your patience and time. I will make it up for you by posting something more interesting next time.