5My Colourful Childhood
My earliest childhood memory is of the huge courtyard of my house bursting with sunlight so intense that it was bright-white and white-hot. This torridity was an ubiquitous part of my life. As there was no air conditioning those days, the sun sadistically ensured that we felt its oppression every time we breathed. We did our best to cheat the tyrant: we sprinkled water all over the floors for a little bit of respite, for a little bit of coolness· We hung heavy curtains everywhere; they were like guards, meant to absorb whatever they could of this cruel army of incandescence. We surrendered to afternoon siestas, unconsciously turning them into a ritual, because we could do little else outside.
Loo, that fierce, infamous Indian summer wind danced in its full tandav-like fury outside, mercilessly baking victims who had dared to step out. So naturally, the streets were empty and Budhana became a ghost town in the afternoons.
But every now and then, a child would be tempted by something shiny and step out of the relatively cool, dark indoors, only to be smacked by the wanton wind. We would then colloquially diagnose this as ‘Bachchey ko loo lag gayee.’ (The kid has got the loo.)
That’s when a special man, the patwari, was called. He was the equivalent of Budhana’s 911, a local medical emergency service especially for children. The patwari in my village was an old, old man with a long, thin, wispy, white beard and a default arrogance he seemed to be completely unaware of. He was not a quack—in fact, he was decently educated for those times. Wisdom dripped from his droopy wrinkles. He was highly respected, but also known for his short temper and wry attitude—for instance, he used slang even while showing affection; so people had mixed feelings towards him.
Budhana’s patwari used to address Ammi by sternly shouting, ‘Arrey oh, Nawab ki Bahu!’—the wife of Nawab. Those were days of purdah. Ammi would push us out in the front while she stood just inside the doorway, while the Patwari stood outside, respecting the invisible line like the Ramayana’s lakshman rekha. In a voice, as if chanting, he used to read out the Ayat, verses from the Quran about miracles or prayers, in front of us Siddiqui siblings, or any other sick children around. And then slowly, carefully, like a bubble artist blowing giant balloon-like bubbles with the utmost care and grace so that their art does not burst, the patwari too would slowly blow these utterly enchanting whiffs of air on our faces. It was as if there was a dark tunnel of mysteries inside his mouth, from where he pulled out these deeply relaxing breaths. In the middle of the loo, the cool puffs he blew soothed us instantly. If a child had a sore throat, he would gently rub a special holy ash as he read out the Ayat. We felt better soon. You could call it energy healing. To us, it was pure magic!
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The seasons went on quietly doing their thing without stopping for anyone and before we knew it, winter would creep up on us, one twilight at a time. We had to pull out our brahmastra, a fine little contraption that we called buraade ki angeethi. Buraad is what we called sawdust and thanks to Abbu’s business, it was aplenty. An angeethi is a brazier, a receptacle made of metal or clay to hold the coal. We would put the buraad in a funnel in the angeethi and press it down tightly along with the coal. It would burn all night and keep us warm. Every morning, we needed to rouse in ourselves the will of warriors to get out of the cosy comfort of our quilts and the heavenly heat from the buraade ki angeethi, and step outside into the biting cold awaiting us and start our day.
Just like we had our own heating devices instead of fireplaces or modern-day heaters, similarly, we had bitaudas instead of gas cylinders for the longest time. Depending on their size, these were towers or hills made by stacking uplas—cow dung cakes that had been diligently collected, shaped and dried by women. A tiny hole was cut into these miniature mountains to remove as many uplas as was needed to be used as gobar gas, a biofuel used for chulha. The insides of the bitaudas were warm, moist and dark, not unlike holes in the ground. And so it was not surprising at all that they were a favourite hub of lazy snakes who loved free housing. Often enough, somebody would put their hand inside the bitauda to pull out an upla or two for the day’s cooking, and a snake, extremely offended by this invasion of privacy, would bite her.
Immediately, someone around would run as fast as they could and call Maulana Jamsheed. He had an utterly fascinating way of curing all kinds of snakebites. You have to see it to believe it. Two people would tightly hold the person who had been bitten. Then he would vigorously slap sprinkles after sprinkles of water on the person’s third eye area in the middle of the forehead. With every series of forceful sprinkles he would question the snake, ‘Tell!’ More beads of liquid beatings. ‘Tell me why did you bite this person? Tell me why.’ Another set of water slaps. For the snake, this was no less aggressive than a hardcore police interrogation.
Every two or three minutes it would bend under this fierce questioning. ‘I am walking!’ The snake’s voice would emerge faintly from the victim. ‘I’m walking and this guy comes up in my way. What the hell!’ The snake would talk back answering the question as to why it had bitten. Sometimes, the snake was as strong as a pehelwan and it took up to