Childhood stories and blurry memories

I romanticized these stories in my head, adding details offered by my generous imagination, snipping and accessorizing a bit here and there, until I didn’t know the real from the fairy tale.

"The boundary between memory and fiction keeps getting blurred." - From the preface of 'Raw Umber' by Sara Rai.

My family comes from a small sleepy town called Karwar, a short drive from Goa. My mother was born into a middle-class business family. She was the eldest of four siblings, convent-educated, highly creative, timid, soft-spoken, a bookworm worm, and easy prey to her siblings’ pranks. When the business went bust, the family struggled with day-to-day living and my mother worked her way through college.

My father, on the other hand, was a village boy. He was the son of a retired forest range officer and the eldest of six children. Several other children were living in that little village home, as my grandfather had lost two of his previous wives to childbirth. Hence, there were too many mouths to feed, clothe, and educate and not enough money to go around. They made ends meet in tiny pursuits like selling firewood, weaving and selling mats from dried palm leaves, and other such sundry items, which I cannot remember now.

A recent rainy day visit to Karwar

I have gathered these nuggets of information as stories from them. When my father told me these stories of his childhood, I felt like I was listening to tales of magical forests with quaint cottages, woodcutters, fairy godmothers, and big bad wolves. I romanticized these stories in my head, adding details offered by my generous imagination, snipping and accessorizing a bit here and there, until I didn’t know the real from the fairy tale.

My father studied in a Kannada medium school. He worked after school and helped put food on the family table. Later, he worked to pay his engineering college fees. He told me how difficult it was to switch to the English medium, to study and write exams in a language he hardly knew. He told me these stories in English, which is the language we now converse in. The message of survival and surging ahead, despite the odds being stacked against you, was not lost on me, even then.

View of the river from my father’s ancestral land in Karwad

My mother told me tales of jinns and possessions from village rumours and folklore, which sounded deliciously intriguing. I hung on to each word and savoured the multitude of flavours. One of my favourite stories was about the haunted hospital that my older brother was born in. The details she narrated and experienced could have been mere coincidences and exaggerations, coming from an overly anxious young mother. Yet, to my ears, they were a glimpse into a time, the access to which was only her words, her voice, her tone.

She told me of the blissful days of her childhood when everything was peaceful and happy. And then on other occasions, she told me how the house of cards came crashing down, scattered around them, leaving them in a disarray of financial troubles, an alcoholic father, a bickering mother, and a hand-to-mouth existence. But this was also a story of a phoenix. My mother was nothing short of a wondrous mythological bird, rising from the ashes to regain her happiness, her choices, and her flight.

She told me the story of how she met my father through common friends, at a party on a beach, and how she had sung in her beautiful voice that day. I conjured up, in my mind’s eye, the quintessential love story of the village boy and the city girl. They fell in love and got married. Except, this real-life romance had details that the movies always skipped. They took loans for their wedding and worked to pay them off. They supported their own families separately and together. They dreamt big and paid attention when opportunities came knocking.

Tough times make the most dramatic stories. I grew up on a healthy dose of these stories. Not in the “When I was your age…” kind of way. I was never made to feel like I was ungrateful and privileged, which I probably was, within the bubble that was my childhood, but my parents were gracious enough not to point this out to me. The stories were told for the pristine reason that stories must be passed on from one generation to another – to keep alive that part of our history that would otherwise fade into oblivion. To show us who they were before life happened to them. To hope that those stories will serve as clues to figure out our own lives one day when we feel like we are failing at the game and ready to give up.

But this is all hindsight. When these stories were told, I soaked it all in like a sponge, not questioning the rhyme or the reason, but enjoying the feeling of being privy to these precious moments of a faraway time and a faraway land.

As it often happens, life shows us that it comes full circle. Or rather, we consciously circle back to familiarity. And we find ourselves taking the place of those who came before us, entrusted with the responsibilities they once carried. Our stories are treasure troves of love and loss, hits and misses, pleasure and pain, ecstasy and anguish. They are heavy and dripping with meaning for both the storyteller and the audience. That is why they need to be told.