AFVOA Newsletter of Year 2021

Section 7 – Panorama CV 2 No. 01 / 2021 Page 97 of 123 coil wound around it, connected to an electrical supply and dipped in water. I lived, my long-suffering spouse says, to give other proofs of a challenged intelligence. I wasn’t the only such specimen he knew, and it wasn’t a gender thing, for there was an officer (only males in those days) who wanted to check the level of petrol in his mobike tank with a lighted match. He lived, too, though we don’t know what his insurance company or wife thought of the incident. Another time, someone put petrol instead of kerosene in a Nutan... we took such incidents in our stride. Nothing in my past (or future decades, now that many have gone by) prepared me for winter in Srinagar. Menus were potatoes-rice, rajma-rice, graced with sun-dried slices of brinjal/gourd (kindly gifted by the landlady). When Banihal was blocked by snow, which was often and for weeks at a time, we were isolated from the rest of the world. Once hydrated and cooked, the aforementioned vegetables tasted quite good. (Says the veteran watching me type: ‘Anything tastes good when you’re young and hungry.’) This was the era when the brown summer kit was upgraded to no-starch terrycot. After September, the blue/orange overalls were worn over white/pink (!) inners. When the temperatures dropped, the man had to drag home a 20+ kg block of coal over stretch of 20+ m unpaved, slushy-mushy road. This (the block not the road) was broken with a hammer into small pieces, in candle-light sometimes, when the current could be measured in nanowatts and the bulb barely glowed. The small pieces fed the bukhari that heated and blackened the room and helped us set curd. The kangri inside the feran and the hot kahwa saw us through the season. Nappies froze into ice-sheets when they were left out to dry. Taps were kept on drip- mode so that the pipes wouldn’t burst—water turned to ice expands. A fun way to learn science and geography, we thought. Nothing prepared me for Tambram (do not confuse with Tam-Brahm, the people who give us regular humans a complex with their aptitude for maths and secret rasam recipes). A five-day journey in January, across the sub-continent, changing trains and platforms with infant and black trunks in tow, ended on the east coast where it was 40 deg C. Had to buy elementary easy-to-learn Tamil pre-primary books to communicate with neighbours and vendors alike. Vendakka, inji, paal, punda, tanni, moon-kaal, naal- ke, rund-rupa-ambad-paisa, arsi, tenga, manga, tayr... have been etched in our family vocabulary. Every morning we had to toss a stone in the well to check whether there was water so we could the pump on. Of such events are memories made. This was a precursor to shortages in Hyderabad and Jodhpur, which made me water-kanjoos