Childhood Stories: The Story of the Silent TV

My father was in the Army – which meant that we got transferred to a new city every two to three years. Army officers are usually packed off to areas furthest away from their homes and being from Punjab, we invariably found ourselves in far-flung states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. When television came to India, most of the content was in the local language, except for some time in the evening, when it was time for National programming. We therefore could not convince our dad to make the substantial investment in a television for so little returns.

Consequently, we came late to the party, having bought our first TV in 1986, while vacationing in Patiala just after I had completed my Class X. It was a Binatone Colour TV, quite fancy with prominent speakers on either side, and we were all very proud of it. Right after that vacation, my dad, mom, my sister and I were to travel to Bishnupur in West Bengal, where my father was headed for a new posting for a duration of 2 years. The TV came along.

We knew that Bishnupur was a small town with few good schools, and we were to stay there for only the summer vacations, while Dad found us a house to rent in Kharagpur (of the IIT fame), about a three-hour train journey away. When we moved there, he planned to travel every weekend to be with us. The TV stayed packed.

After his first few house-hunting trips to Kharagpur, we realised that the scars of the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984 were still fresh in the minds of the people of Kharagpur, and not many were ready to rent their house out to a Sardar army officer. This made his search long and painful.

Finally, we had to settle for the first storey of a house that had a tenant on the ground floor. That tenant was not vacating the house after multiple requests from the landlord and a few altercations with him. The landlord had then exercised his divine rights to get the electricity supply turned off the whole house. A matter of a few weeks, we were told, before the offending family downstairs found it too hard to live without electricity and moved out. Then the electric supply would be restored, and all would be well.

We did not know then that we were to stay in that house for 6 months without electricity.

Since my childhood, every move to a new place has been a very exciting time for our family, so the first few weeks passed by easily enough. Living in a dark house was a novelty, and my sister and I went about our tasks enthusiastically. Even studying by candlelight was exciting for the first few days, and so was pulling water out of the well and lugging the buckets upstairs.

All this did not stop us from staring longingly at our brand-new TV, secure in a prominent position in the living room, swathed in its zip-up plastic cover that was mandatory for all electronics in middle-class houses in India. The TV stared resolutely back, with nary a spark or a squeak to excite our senses starved of entertainment. 

When a joy is held back, the longing for it assumes mythical proportions.

However, the novelty of our situation soon began to pall. Nights came early in Kharagpur since we were in one of the easternmost states of India and followed the time zone of a longitude that ran through the country’s centre. Studying by candlelight or a hurricane lantern was hard, and we would soon start feeling drowsy. But homework had to be done, so we soldiered on for a few weeks. We soon learnt, however, that an early evening also meant an early morning and we could escape the torture of studying in feeble lights by waking up into bright mornings very early in the day.  This left us free in the evenings.

This was when we started gravitating towards the terrace of our house. Every evening, when the neighbours began switching their lights and their televisions on, we would make our way to the terrace and start chatting. Dad joined us on the weekends.

Until then, we had rarely if ever spent so much time together. We did not realise that we were entering into a special phase of our relationships with each other. 

In the first few days, we engaged in a desultory conversation about nothing in particular, but soon we started talking – really talking. Every class was discussed in detail. Every new friend, every new teacher and their peculiar mannerisms were given focused attention.

I told them how my new school was different from my previous ones. By then, I was somewhat of an expert on schools since I had gone to six schools in different states in my ten years of education. Having attended a co-educational school before I came to Kharagpur, I was surprised at the lack of interaction between the sexes at Kharagpur. While boys and girls were quite friendly in my last school at Varanasi, there were very few times that we actually talked here.

For example, most of my classmates were children of IIT professors and staff, and since my school was within the IIT Campus, they would all cycle to their respective homes for lunch. At lunchtime then, I was usually the only boy left in my classroom along with a few girls whose homes were even further away from school than mine. They would all sit together for lunch while I would sit alone in the other corner of the class. The girls did not think that it was proper to invite me to sit with them, while I thought it too forward to take the initiative without being first asked to.

Of course, I could not recount the story about the time when I held the hand of one of the prettiest girls in class – one could not talk of such things at home. It was surprising that this happened in a class where just talking to a girl was a momentous occasion. For our Biology project, I had chosen to demonstrate the test used to ascertain blood groups. The lady in question was aiming to be a doctor, so when she heard of my project, she immediately offered to help. I was quite dumbfounded when she held out her hand, and it took great force of will for me to reach out and hold it. I knew my friends were watching and knew that they would rib me mercilessly, and this added to my bemusement. With nervous, shaking hands I used the needle to draw blood, and failed. Again and again, I tried to lance her finger, while she looked at me with amusement and some disdain. It was only after many fumbling attempts that I was finally able to draw blood and test it to reveal her blood group. That incident, however, put paid to any ambition I had of ever becoming a doctor!

Mom first talked about her hunt for the new helper (maidservant was the word then – but I suspect that this word is anathema now in these times of political correctness), and later told us about the troubles of training the lady to match her expectations. When my sister spotted her in the dressing table mirror with her hands in my mom’s purse, we had the ammunition for discussions for several evenings – wondering how much she had stolen before being found out.

Stories of her interactions with our neighbour downstairs were also very interesting. She longed to tell them off for being the cause of all our sufferings, but good manners held her back. So, there was always a guardedness in the relationship, but we discussed every nuance of Mom’s stories about them endlessly to glean a possible date of their departure.

My father, alone in his home in Bishnupur for the whole week, was also eager to talk. We learnt how he coped with his staff comprised of many practising communists, ready to unfurl the red flag of protest at the slightest sign of perceived injustice. He had never encountered this behaviour before in any of his previous postings, so he never got over his wonder at how offices in West Bengal managed to get any work done under these circumstances.

Every work trip that he made from Bishnupur was a chance for him to play the raconteur – the time he left home, his mode of transport, the meals he was served, the people he met and their peculiarities, ending with his return journey.  Of special interest were the stories of one of his colleagues who tended to transliterate from Hindi to English when he spoke – so his blanket “belonged to” 200 Rupees (since in Hindi, we say “Yeh kambal 200 rupaye ka hai!”)

Many times, our friends Shivaji and Jayshree would join us on the terrace, bringing along new experiences and thoughts to discuss. We have special memories of great evenings spent with them there and when we would go to the more normal setting of their light-filled homes. 

One of our sweetest memories of those times was that of a neighbour a few houses away, a schoolteacher who sang Rabindra Sangeet and old Hindi movie songs in a very melodious voice that carried to us only during a power cut. How we looked forward to power cuts, and not just because all our neighbours now joined us in sitting beside lamplights!

Even sweeter were the large, luscious and amazingly aromatic jackfruits that grew on the tree beside the well, and we would munch on them while we talked. Or the special spongy Rassogullas that are a speciality of West Bengal.

As a family, though, we were never closer than we were during those 6 months. We looked forward eagerly to our daily ritual of congregating on the terrace.

Then one day, we heard that our good neighbours from downstairs were leaving. Aah, the joy! The TV finally came on, and we were able to see Chitrahaar, Star Trek, Air Hostess, Karamchand and other wonderful shows that we had only heard my school friends discuss. Every evening was spent joyously partaking of these wonderful visual and auditory delights and sometimes, our dinner was also taken sitting in front of the TV.

Like most other families. For six months, we had been special. Now, suddenly, we weren’t! Our long talks on the terrace became few and far between as we became busier with our studies, and of course, the television. When we think back to those times now, it is with a special glow of joy and happiness undiminished by the years gone by. In some ways, I also think that our bonds were immeasurably strengthened during that time, which stood us in good stead in tougher times ahead.

The television was never silent after that day, though. We seemed to have traded our silences with it.