Changing times: My story then and now

Ira  Pande

I am often reminded of Almora of a long ago, when my beloved grandmother was alive and all of us cousins would land up in her home over school vacation. Running a house was not easy then in the absence of kitchen gadgets, water and milk supplies were unreliable. There were just only local fruits and vegetables to choose from and no recourse to eating out. How did my poor grandmother cope with the enormous amount of food and work that our annual descent into her peaceful life must have meant? There were over a dozen of us cousins and at least half that number of adults to say nothing of constant visitors who came to see, meet and adore the children and who after long walks expected hot tea and some nashta to go with it.

These thoughts have haunted me in the last few weeks because my Brazilian family is visiting and my carefully run house is about to collapse under the weight of keeping everyone going and happy. The babies have one kind of food, we another, the visiting son wants only Indian food and the Brazilian daughter-in-law would occasionally like some western food too! My poor maid and I are busy churning out tea, coffee, milk shakes, bottles of warm milk and endless rounds of food and drink as their friends and ours drop in. I feel like the manager of a boy’s hostel canteen.

As families shrink into smaller and smaller units, the old gracious ways of sharing homes and warm hospitality of our typical Indian homes are under threat. Perhaps it is to do with the lack of proper domestic help where once old retainers and helpers welcomed the visiting family members with as much warmth as grandparents did. Or perhaps it is to do with how varied our food tastes are becoming and with the fact that all little children now, I find, prefer to stick with known flavours. In my grandmother’s home, you quietly ate whatever was the menu of the day, without throwing a tantrum about what you want. As I said, we have all changed and not always for the best. Even those children who live here in India are now getting harder and harder to please. Most little ones only want chicken, naan and paneer, if it isn’t pasta and junk food. Khichri, hot-buttered rotis and vegetables such as lauki and tinda are now forgotten flavours. As for regional delicacies, they are politely shoved aside.

I find that parents are now in such a hurry to go back to their phones that they speed through mealtimes. Sitting down together at the dining table, with banter and jokes flowing freely, is slowly going, going, gone.

Mind you, I am not making any value judgements here. This is the tempo of our modern lives now. So I often think of my grandmother. We were the generation that had no phones, televisions or mobiles. There were hardly any toys available so we invented our own. In the absence of cartoon networks, we had a family clown who produced funny tales and songs for us to learn. We must have celebrated scores of weddings of dolls, where feasts were cooked for the baraat and put up plays written by my sister (who showed early promise as a writer). The adults were invited to the ‘premiere’ and tickets were sold by the younger ones to the neighbours to fund the tea and jalebis at the ‘afters’ party. That lovely childhood has sustained us all through so many decades, so that we have kept up with the extended families and far-flung cousins who are as dear to us even today.

I believe with many of my generation that ours was a special link between an old way of living and a modern life. We started off by writing long letters by hand and are going to end our lives with emails and WhatsApp. The movies and photos recorded those times in black and white, but we filled them with the colour of our memories. Smells, sounds and flavours – these made up the collective world we shared. I wonder what the future generations will remember. I hope it is a world where relationships and bonds are as strong as they were for us. However, as old dialects and local languages wilt under the onslaught of English, the shared network of these cousinly ties may give way. And more’s the pity.

However, to be fair to the coming generations, one has to admit that their parenting is a response to the changing times. So, sweets are rationed and many new parents decide to not instal a TV. Schools, too, are changing rapidly, and involving parents in their experiments. There is an explosion of information today and all of us oldies will agree that the new generation is far more aware of what is happening in the world. Those little cocoons of domestic lives are being smashed as the children deal with a wider and wider circle of languages, cuisine and clothes. 

As a long ago mother of twins, my vote goes to the inventor of disposable diapers. How I wish we had them then! Those cloth nappies that leaked still bring me nightmares.