“The current page three liaisons seem a passing show while the liaisons of the wealthy with the nautch girls remained enduring news for a couple of generations,” he said. “Maybe being few and far between, the affairs of yore had a charm of their own but in their current day profusion, they seems to have taken away much of the naughty sheen out of them; whether in life or in sport, rarer the fare, all the more it’s memorable; oh what aura cricket’s ‘3Ws’ - the West Indies’ Weeks, Worrell and Walcott – had, and all of them put together didn’t play in as many test matches as the Tendulkars of these days.’
“Maybe Bradman, Dhyan Chand, Pele, and even Laver, in spite of Federer, prove your theory of aura.”
“Well, the lesser gentry were left content to gossip about the card-playing and the cunt-craving sort, pardon the turn of phrase,” he said. “Once a troupe of nautch-girls performed at our village temple, and as the show was on, our neighbor’s servant went up to the lead dancer, and having drawn her attention to his master, he handed her a hundred Rupee note that she took nodding her head; though I couldn’t grasp the import of it all then, her naughty smile as she coyly tilted head is still fresh in my mind. Soon after, when I happened to witness a Bharatanatyam performance by our neighbor’s granddaughter from Bombay, the sensuous nuances in her classical movements insensibly shaped my sense of the feminine sensuality; how I find repellent the bawdy gestures of those gaudy women-in-trade. Well, whatever be the proclivities of the folks, the kids were left alone for the most part as the rat race for private schools had not yet begun then; and to be fair to my father, he was never behind us to come out with flying colors at school; but these days how parents have come to push their kids to excel at studies. It’s as if kids have become the parental means of fulfilling their unfulfilled dreams; what funny times we’ve come to live in; how sad that parents are averse to accept less than A+ grade for their kids; if only the progeny starts demanding to know about the parental scores!”
“Who knows, that day may not be far off.”
“Maybe that’s the only cure for this parental paranoia, why I know a mother, who forced her second daughter to study medicine simply because the elder one was already pursuing a course in engineering,” he said, and continued with his childhood saga. “Summer times were made memorable by the annual visits of my paternal aunt, the one who saved me from drowning in our village tank, and her husband, who was a lecturer in a college of physical education, and so he had a long summer vacation. Being childless, they used to love me and my siblings like their own children; how all of us used to cling to him all day; he being a jovial person, it was a great fun to be with him. And where do you think we used to spend the summer times, well, on foldable cots right under the neem tree shade in the side yard. That was the only time when I used to leave my grandma’s bedside, why, I never heeded my mother’s call to sleep in their bedroom, not that I loved my mother any less but my affinity with my grandma was compelling, may be it was in part due to her story telling. One of my uncle’s favorite taunts was that, being the namesake grandson, he hoped that at my marriage, I would present him the wedding suit promised by my granddad. When I was five, he taught me how to make the opening moves on the chessboard but in spite of my later-day penchant for the middle game, I’m clueless about the endgame till today; well, neither could he master the art of partaking the palm fruit directly from its socket that I tried to teach him; how our kapu, who plucked the fruits from the tree, used to tease him saying that the village kids were smarter than the townsmen.”