During Eid and other festivals, like most women, Ammi too wanted to wear bangles. Those were days of brisk business for Dadi’s brother and he would also bring Ammi bangles. But we would not even let him enter our house. Ammi would simply let her hand out of a window or the front door, leaving the rest of her unseen, and he would make her wear bright glass bangles, first in one hand, then in the other. He seemed like a simple, loving man, and even as a child I knew that he loved me a lot. However, I never went to his house. Nor did we ever let him enter our house, all because he was a Manihaar.
In fact, everybody would tease me about my dadi’s background. It was a joke to them, but gosh, did it sting! I’d put up a brave front as if unaffected by their harsh words and ask these bullies to fuck off. But later at home, I’d run and hug Ammi, wailing and complaining about how hurtful it was. I’d keep telling her, let’s all move out of this shitty place. What was here anyway! So you see, Ammi and I both wanted me to leave my home town for all sorts of reasons.
I would always wake up around 5.30 a.m., even during the freezing wintertime when the rest of the kids lay snuggled up in what was to us the greatest luxury in the world at that time of the year: heavy, cosy, warm quilts. Ammi had put this habit in me—not so gently either—and to this day, I remain an early riser. All of us children slept in one room. Only the little ones slept with the parents in the other room.
As soon as I woke up, I would feed the buffaloes their breakfast. They ate a special type of fodder called khal which were the leftovers from making mustard oil. It’s like we eat dry fruits which have so much warmth and good fat in them in the winter, similarly, the cattle ate khal. After much grinding, the fibre, peels, etc. were soaked overnight to soften in a bucket of water. Sitting out all through the wintry night, this mixture would become as cold as ice and one would shiver just touching it. I used to mix it with dried bhusa, wheat straw, before feeding it to our pet buffaloes. Then I’d quickly perform my ablutions, go to a tutor for my science tuition and only when I returned home for breakfast would the other kids be awake.
By the time I was in the ninth standard, I began teaching my younger siblings. I would also help them get dressed for school. Soon, they too became early risers. The things that Ammi taught me, I taught my younger brothers, like how to part their hair and how to dress.
To say that Ammi was obsessed with cleanliness would be an understatement. Not just our house, but we ourselves had to look meticulously prim and proper all the time. Children used to wear their shoes, and then take them off, wear chappals for greater comfort, go barefoot, and so on. But not us, the Siddiqui kids. We were seven brothers and two sisters. All nine of us would wear our shoes for school and go about our day and take them off only at bedtime. How we longed to kick our shoes off and run free in the street on naked feet! But Ammi would have none of it. She stringently ensured that our feet were spotless at all times. Not just our feet, our toenails, our fingernails. No speck of treasure could hide beneath them. Every now and then, Ammi would fill tubs with warm water and put neem leaves in them to give our feet a detailed antifungal, antibacterial cleansing, followed by vigorous foot massages. She was so obsessed with hygiene that she herself used to bathe us once a week even when we were teenagers. The rest of the time, we bathed by ourselves but on that one day her sanitary dictatorship would prevail. She would wring us like laundry. Then she would massage us almost brutally with a mixture of turmeric and fresh butter; this was a sort of an insurance to guarantee that we did not take after some of our hairy relatives. It did not matter whether we were boys or girls—all of us got kneaded like stubborn, glutinous dough. And boy, did her nuskha work! Till today, we have very little body and facial hair. Almas barely has any facial hair. And good luck to you if you’re trying to convince Shamas to grow a beard—plants might sprout faster in fallow land.
Like boys did back then in villages, we too almost always wore crisp, white kurta-pyjama made of cotton. During the jamun season, when my friends—who were mostly good-for-nothing punks in Ammi’s eyes since they were not studious—and I plucked jamuns, we hid them in the generous pockets of our kurtas. Soon, there would be pretty purple stains on these pockets, which tattled loudly, instantly, giving away the whole story and ending in a shower of thrashings from Ammi. It was not just our tidiness. Back then, I had no idea what back-breaking work it was to scrub away those stains, which Ammi had to do herself.
I was the first one in all of Budhana to own a pair of jeans. I had asked one of my mother’s brothers, my mamu, who lived in Pakistan, to get me two pairs of jeans. Ammi thought, chalo bachchey ka shauk hai (my little one wants this). So she asked him to get them and to deduct the money from the sum he
