In the multi-storeyed complex in the government colony I lived in during the late ’70s, I would follow friends of mine in chanting a taunting poem to a sardarji on the ground floor. We hated him for he refused to let us play in his spacious green lawns. So we hid behind the hedges and chanted rhymes making fun of him, his turban wearing ways, words that made no sense but were meant to mock. It was our way of getting back at this crusty bearded, turbaned man who kept to himself and everyone out of his garden. The bunch of us, a gaggly group all seven-eight-year-olds, took pleasure in leaving chalk mark drawings on his black Fiat, in ringing his doorbell and running away before someone answered and of course there were those verses we chanted, peering through the hedge which looked into his window, deriving cruel, childlike fun as he turned a vague, incomprehensible gaze towards us.

Thirty years ago, ours was a disparate group. Some of us were children of government servants, and some came from the servants quarters discreetly tucked away behind our apartments, terribly dank one-room windowless places. It was an egalitarian world, though we never thought of it that way. It was but natural that Lakshmi, the maid, would take our old clothes (there was no other use for them) for her children, and though in the evenings we would return to our separate homes, there were times when we would join our friends outside, in the event of a sudden power cut, and sing songs under an open still star-filled Delhi sky. We cracked jokes too — at everyone else who was different, the Bengalis, the Madrasis, even the English, especially their obnoxious Test team that managed to beat us in the tour of 1979.

... contd.