Musings Of A Seven Year Old

I finally crossed the boundary between the sixties and the seventies, and can legitimately be called a septuagenarian, a badge I wear with pride. After all, it took a full seventy years of hard work to get where I am. No mean achievement, I can assure you. I crossed that invisible line in April of 2019.

Battling the odds of being in a world crammed with people fighting to stride ahead of me, and being pampered first by doting grandparents and parents, then a wife who lifted and kept to herself almost all the house hold responsibilities so that I could concentrate on the rest of the worldly matters and situations that could and were likely to affect us. Then came the turn of the children. My daughter born in 1977 and son born in 1979, decided to take active part in the family pastime of coddling their father.

Not to be outdone by these two, my daughter’s daughters, 2004 and 2005, decided to take matters - meaning me - in hand. This septuagenarian has, by some surreptitious, underhand manipulations in family gatherings, been made to feel like and treated as though the good God above has somehow managed to quietly remove the 0 from my 70 earthly years and left only the 7 behind.

I’d like to do things I did as a seven-year-old, but at times find certain restrictions, mostly due to the passage of time. For instance, when my father was posted in Jalandhar, way back sometime in early 1950’s, we lived in a huge bungalow that had a huge bathroom outside and separates from the house. My mother told me and my brother, one year younger than me, to go and have a bath. So we went! We stuffed a towel into and so blocked the drain, and then we opened the tap. When the floor was sufficiently covered with water, we, in our birthday suits, lay on the ground and kicked off from the wall and skimmed over the floor to the opposite wall. This was… FUN! It came to an end around lunchtime, when my mother realized that her precious little brats hadn’t been heard from for quite a while, and opened the bathroom to investigate the reason for all the screaming and laughter from within. I leave the rest of it to your imagination.

I tried doing this again a little while ago but found two things that blocked my effort. One I am much bigger than I was about 60 years ago, and nowadays the bathrooms are much, much smaller.

A few days ago, we - that is my wife, my daughter, her two teenage daughters, and I - went to the local club. It was a Saturday, and so a band had apparently been arranged. They suddenly started playing a catchy tune that was popular from my younger days. I was shaking in my chair when much to my delight I saw a man maybe about 40 or 45 years old, with a prominent paunch, step up onto the open area in front of the band and start dancing. I got up to go join him but was, with hisses and dirty looks pulled back into my chair by the brood. “Dad…. Gampa…. You are 70 years old! You can’t go around doing the jig whenever and wherever you want!”

 

Society is the one and the only factor that has put paid to man’s freedom. They are the ones who dictate what you can do, what you should do, what you can’t do how you should do this that. I bet if anyone were to start writing a list of societal norms, one would be writing forever. So let me stop here…. you know what I mean, and that is what is important.

When I started going to school, I had studied in ten or eleven different schools by the time I reached 16 years of age. I found I had a lot of freedom because my Mom was not there to constantly correct me. Teachers, with a little experience I found I could dodge such that either they did not know what I was up to, or simply did not care. What mattered, at the end of the day and subsequently the end of the year was that I could prove that I had learned my lessons…. And that I did at regular annual intervals. Mugging up lessons were far out of my reach. Aside from that as they say, ”Aaaalll izz welll”. Or all was. I was fortunate, I suppose, because during those days, the requirement to learn lessons by rote and reproduce the textbook words onto the examination paper had not as yet become the norm. Freedom!

My teachers were beautiful people, at least those I remember. There was a Miss Perry, in St. Joseph College Nainital. I always thought of her as beautiful. I was 8 years old. She had a squint and one usually had trouble making out whom she was looking at. But imagine my joy when about 6 or 7 years after leaving Nainital, I suddenly saw her and made it a point to go and wish her in Hazratganj, Lucknow. And best of all she remembered me!

La Martiniere College Lucknow had a host of such memorable souls. There was Gardner, a skinny small built boxer, and D’sSouza, popularly called Douse the Louse, and boy was he a buff character. He treated a Royal Enfield Bullet as though it was a tricycle. If he caught you doing anything wrong, he’d make you bow your head to him and he would call out “CHAA YA LOUSE” while he delivered a cuttleouse on your head. A cuttleouse, by the way, is a rather painful stroke administered with the knuckles on the forward portion of your head, right about your hairline. It generally left the recipient with three prominent bumps as a reminder of their misdeed.

Then there was Mrs. Nafde, a maths teacher in my last school. She must have been about four and a half feet tall, frail and with wrinkles. She always appeared to be with us. While in class we dared not take liberties with her, but when she came to supervise a spare period, we boys literally went wild playing catch in the class, running riot jumping over desks, while she stood by watching with a slight smile of indulgence.

 

Those were the days my friend, as the once popular song goes. Today when driving, if a nice catchy song comes up on the car stereo, I tend to rock my shoulders, because that’s about all I can rock while driving. My grandkids and kids indulge me with a laugh, and I suppose because no one else can see what I am doing. But if I jig while on solid ground where others can see me, I’m immediately disowned. It’s like, “This old man doesn’t belong to us!”

If you were of a mind to read and I was of a mind to type on, I have so many stories I could tell you that have made my life a pure joy from almost the day I was born till today, but this is literally thinking in slow motion. I have absolutely no qualms in admitting that, yes, I am still in the region of 7 or 70 years old and it’s a good age to be in. The only difference I find is in the fact that I have grown larger, rounder, balder and softer. I have certain aches and pains that have become my constant companions, but they have decided to just be there in the background so that I can do what I want to without being unduly inhibited by them. I can’t do front rolls and backflips, but I can think and do what I can, of course, when no one is looking.

 

I hope you have enjoyed reading this epistle and will do what you want to do…. Without inhibitions, and teach your kids and grandkids to lose all their inhibitions!