This post is my entry to the Kissan's 100% Real Blogger Contest. And here I am recollecting my memories to come up with my 100% real experiences from my childhood years. To list all of them in a post will be a disgrace to the 16 years of my experience of living in all the remote locations of my country. By remote, I mean they are not the cool sounding places that are worth a google-check in, mainly because I am still not sure if those places could be traced on the location searching devices. I have many stories that hail from different times of growing up and include different locations. Locations were many, because my father was serving in the Indian Air Force as a pilot. But to keep this one a post and not a book, I have decided to put in the most hilarious and astonishing one. This experience was in fact the first one in the series of experiencing a life, i.e. 3 - 5 years of age.
I am dedicating this post to my father and the IAF. If it was not for him and the IAF bases set up at the borders of our country, I would not have had so many thrilling experiences that I cherish till date. I thank both for the beautiful and real childhood that I have experienced. If you end up smiling while reading this post, I would be honored.
Kumbhirgram, Assam 1985-88
Today if you have to catch a flight to or from Silchar, you will land up at the Airport station there, which is located in a place called Kumbhirgram. I do not know what it looks like today, but I can explain what it was more than 2 decades back. I was 3 years old then, but was really big and mature for my age. My maturity graph shot up the day my younger sister, who is 2 years junior to me, was born. 6 months after her birth my dad got a transfer to the helicopter base of the IAF at Kumbhirgram, Assam, the place which became an important landmark of my life. If you check the images of the place on google, you will find the place to be an excellent vacation destination, with greenery, lots of fauna and beauty spread all over. However, the real beauty that you get to experience is something more than that, that I would love to share.
Considering the fact that I lived in the remotest village of the remote locales of North-Eastern part of the country, you can imagine the ignorant World that I grew up in. Compared to the kids of today, back then there were no Playstations, X-boxes, or the Pokemon series, Google or even a calculator; in fact I had no idea of a television, radio, telephone or even a COW. My world included the following - playing in dirty muddy water with other kids, playing peek-a-boo in the wide-spread tea-gardens, playing with the poultry that were farmed in the military base; preventing my little naughty sister from going close to jackals; avoiding stepping over the snakes while roaming in the house, identifying poisonous snakes from the non-poisonous ones; preventing my sister from picking up and eating the snakes, leeches, snails, spiders, scorpions or any other stuff that crawled like her; informing and reporting to an elder about the locations of the poisonous snakes, of any human being who is infested by a leech or bitten by any other insect, and also report about any new looking animal roaming in the campus. In return for these reporting of the first hand information I used to get a toffee and praise, which was a lot in those days. Also, I along with other kids used to shoo away an aging tiger that used to roam around in search of left-over food from the inhabitants in the place !!!
Yes, each and every mention in the above paragraph is a truth and not a work of fiction. Also the floor in our house and the neighbours' and of every one in the vicinity was of pure mother Earth. The floors were not cemented; though we were rich and lucky to have a thatched bamboo covering us. Yes, we used to live in a bamboo house and everything around us was of bamboo, including the furniture, mats and the walls. I am sure this all would not astonish you as much as the coming paragraph would.
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And by the way, did I mention that I and my little sister and all the kids that were with us in those parts of our world during those years never drank a cow's milk. We were fed on the formula milk, Nestle milkmaid or the Amul milk spray because the Cows never existed there. They were also sacrificed and eaten as a local tradition. That is the reason I got scared when I saw the cow for the first time when we moved out of Kumbhirgram to a bigger town in the northern part of the country. That is in fact the reason that I have put the term "cow" in upper case in the previous paragraph. Also, it is worth mentioning that the memories of Kumbhirgram haunted me for many years after leaving the place in the year 1988. I used to feel that sensation of a vomit the moment I would see chocolates or the Maggi noodles. Chocolates were hated because the brown colour reminded me of the peculiar variety of worms that were found swarming in groups everywhere in the IAF base camp of Kumbhirgram just after the rains, and their form was just like the Maggi noodles!!!
Also, there were few more Indian military bases that were situated close to the China border. My dad used to get ad-hoc calls to serve flying duties at those places. We used to look forward to such instances because on his return my dad used to get imported smuggled Chinese stuff from there. The stuff included torches, fancy looking nail clippers, lighters, a transistor, alarm clock, a hot plate, or a fancy toy that could blink a light and could also make a sound. All this used to make us feel so rich and hip in those times.
Today I would feel embarrassed to admit purchasing a Chinese product, but in those days it was an accomplishment worth putting in the local newspapers.
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