By Mukul Kesavan | http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120506/jsp/opinion/story_15457508.jsp
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When I think of my childhood in late
middle age, I remember people less vividly than I remember things. I
remember scented erasers made of opaque rubber topped with a strip of
translucent green. Also a cheaper eraser enigmatically called Sandow.
And soap. The history of middle-class India in the 1960s and 1970s can
be written in soap and detergent.
Red Lifebuoy
was the soap you washed your hands with afterwards. Cinthol (green) was
the bar to bathe with except for people with aspirations who bought
Moti, a fat round of soap too large for small hands, or Pears. But Pears
was posh; any household that routinely used Pears wasn’t middle class;
it was the sort of place that bought crates of Coca Cola instead of
bottles of Kissan orange squash, where the children went to boarding
school and owned complete sets of Tintin.
The only detergent that seems to have survived as a brand is Surf. Not that anyone used the word ‘detergent’ in the 1960s. Surf was
detergent: it was the generic word for any powdered soap that came in a
box and was used to wash clothes. Nobody had heard of Rin or Nirma; a
cheap yellow cake of washing soap called Sunlight was widely used, but
it was an inferior thing, used offstage by the hired help, not the
housewife.
There was a
soap to wash woollens with called Lux Flakes, which smelt nice but
disappeared from the market early on. I think our parents liked the
thought of collecting petrol-perfumed woollens in giant brown paper bags
so much that they were willing to pay Novex and Snowhite a bit extra
for that privilege. Dry-cleaning was a way of being modern, smart and
confidently middle class.
Apart from
soap, childhood was defined by toothpaste. Nearly everybody used Colgate
and that hasn’t changed, but for a while Binaca Green was a real
contender. My earliest experience of difference was realizing that mine
was the only family amongst the people we knew which read The Statesman and brushed its teeth with a green toothpaste. Everyone else took the Times of India
and gloried in the peppermint joy of Colgate. We were pioneering
ecological puritans: we brushed our teeth with a horrible non-foaming
toothpaste that left us with a bad taste in the mouth entirely because
it claimed to be made up of chlorophyll. The only good thing to be said
for Binaca Green was that it sponsored a Radio Ceylon programme of filmi songs called Binaca Geet Mala.
There was a
short-lived star in the toothpaste stakes, though, called Signal, which
came in white and red stripes. Even a child my age who could barely
recognize a polysyllabic word knew that the red stripes were made of a
magical substance called hexachlorophene. Not that we cared: our
interest was limited to our scientific curiosity about how the
toothpaste worm came out continuously striped. It was later that I
learnt that hexachlorophene caused fits and paralysis and was especially
bad for children.
My
grandmother claimed that this bore out everything she had always
suspected about toothpaste; her solution was to make us scrub our teeth
with index fingers smeared with powdered coal. She called it ‘kala manjan’,
literally black tooth powder, and it came in small bottles with crude
red labels. It left you feeling gritty in the mouth for hours afterwards
and we resented it as we resented anything that seemed unmodern or
vaguely home-made, but in retrospect it had an important virtue: you
could swallow it without convulsing or dying.
There were
some not-modern things that were diverting for brief periods. Just
before winter, an old man with a giant single-stringed instrument that
looked like a misshapen bow would camp in the stairwell that led up to
our government flat to card the clumped-up rooi or cotton-wool inside our razais (quilts). His massive ektara
made a deep thrumming sound which was amusing for about five minutes
before you realized that it was the only sound it could make and left to
play cricket or ludo or something.
Likewise, summer was announced by the ganderiwala
or the sugarcane man who stationed his cart outside the house and ran
giant sticks of sugarcane, six at a time, through his hand-cranked
press. Then he’d double the husked sticks and run them through again.
The juice ran through a sieve filled with broken ice into an aluminium
jug. Before he gave you the glass, he mixed in a patented powder that
was nine parts kala namak, a kind of rock salt that tasted — there’s no way of saying this politely — of fart. The juice, the ganne ka ras,
was nectar and no one really minded about the dirt or the germs or the
deep black of his fingernails for the same reason as no one boiled water
at home or bought water outside except from vendors who sold it for two
paise a glass: because we were stupid and didn’t mind dying young.
The cotton
carder and the sugarcane man are nearly extinct in metropolitan Delhi as
is Bapsi Sidhwa’s ice candy man. When I was a child in Kashmere Gate,
the chuskiwala would visit once a week with his brown wooden box
lined with a kind of woollen felt. He would then shape for us roughly
conical lumps of shaved ice and colour them with radioactive liquids.
They were horrible, unnatural colours; I ate the ice lollies because
all my older cousins did but I hated the taste. When we moved to a
government flat in New Delhi, I became an enthusiastic patron of the
four-anna orange bar peddled by the Kwality ice cream man in the neighbourhood.
But because
my childhood happened in an autarkic India, committed to the twin gods
of self-sufficiency and high tariff barriers, it was the things that we
didn’t have that I remember better than the ones that we did. Orange
bars, HMV records, Godrej refrigerators, bond paper, Cadbury’s Fruit
&; Nut, Naga shawls, Phantom peppermint cigarettes and ugly walnut
tables from Kashmir were nice but they were available (if your parents
had the money to spare) and therefore not nearly as desirable as the
things you couldn’t have except from that supermarket in the sky called
Foreign.
Wrigley’s
Spearmint, Quality Street and (for unknowable reasons) Kraft cheese was
the toll that foreign returners routinely paid for going abroad without
their families, but these were perishable things from an inferior
heaven. The real loot, or maal, was impossibly rare consumer durables.
Seiko
watches, for example, with 17 jewels and radium dials. Not one of us
knew what jewels were doing inside a watch but they were precious and
the number gave us a way of measuring value in the same way as 17 gun
salutes told you something about the standing of a princely state.
The thing in
question didn’t have to be expensive: it merely had to be foreign and
better in some real or imagined way than its Indian equivalent. So if
you played table tennis you craved Japanese Nittaku balls instead of the
deceptively foreign-sounding but actually desi, Montana. Later
the Chinese came up with cheap, virtually indestructible balls called
Shield but those were never as fetishized as the Nittaku balls because
they became increasingly available in India and where was the romance in
that?
But nothing
was as glamourous as a can of Dunlop tennis balls. Unlike Indian tennis
balls, these were sealed in pressurized containers and when you pulled
the metal tab, there was a little whoosh and you breathed in a
compressed burst of scientific-smelling foreign air.
So geometry
boxes by Staedtler, table tennis bats called Butterfly, Bic ballpoint
pens, little flat torches that dangled off keychains, and Parker 45 pens
with impossible-to-buy-in-India ink cartridges… these were a few of our
favourite things. We almost never got them, but when we did, we
experienced a gloating fulfilment that only scarcity can induce.
Pundits
sniff disapprovingly about the consumerism that the liberalization of
the economy has encouraged. This would seem to suggest that before 1991,
Indians, willy nilly, lived in a state of non-consuming grace. This is
just not true; the middle-class children of the 1960s loved things much
more intensely than their children do simply because they didn’t have
them. You can spot us at a distance in airport terminals: we’re the
grey-haired men who can’t tear themselves away from the cigarette
cartons even though we stopped smoking three years ago and won’t part
with money to buy any for our friends. We are that odd cohort, a Duty
Free Generation that never went abroad in its youth… connoisseurs,
therefore, of the unavailable.