My Lighthouse off OP Road
I panicked. Raju caught my wrist and shouted,“चल रे मागे जाऊन बसू.’’ I stooped and followed him to the rear, away from the doorway in an attempt to prevent Bahadur’s piercing eyes needling into my neck, the hairs already erect.
This sos-cry by a watchdog was potent enough to push the thickest bully into a corner and sit there endlessly demurely till Bahadur went out of sight. Bahadur a gorkha, was the pagi of our school; the ‘wadi sarkari shala’. He used to take rounds ensuring no kid would wander afar from his supposed-to-be-location. A large muscular frame with broad shoulders and a deep baritone, his eyes were slits with a steely stare and very very frightening eyesight which missed nothing that was amiss. Raju then was in the kindergarten where my aunt, the teacher, tagged me - a two year old toddler - with her.
I used to huddle next to Raju who then was my only pillar of support.
And a solid sentinel against the dreaded Bahadur.
We used to just sit, rotting the weekdays and sing off the names of months as my aunt would teach us. Later in the recess, Raju would share dudhpaav with me, urging me to finish off the milk sodden with pavcrumbs. Holding my hand, he would follow the baai who left each one of us at our doorsteps, shrieking at our moms for ‘taking the delivery’ as they left.
Rajeev Murlidhar Joshi stayed upstairs in a beautiful home which was close to my grandma’s. The Joshi building adjoined with their chowk + toilet which were covered with a chappar. Climbing the wooden stairs, a branch off from the building led to that chappar which was just eight feet above ground; a roof for the chowk + toilet. Whenever I used to be at grandma’s, I used to sneak up to his place, his cousins too were my close buddies. Sitting on the chappar, we used to survey my grandma’s huge garden which bordered the Joshi building. Stories would follow which I would listen intently. Chandoba, for one. Raju was a voracious reader and blessed with an immense power of imagination and visualization that he could elaborate, gesticulate in a fantastic yet thrillingly believable way. I would be in raptures. Listening all ears, totally oblivious to the surroundings.
And he would go on. His stories would start from Chandoba, to Fulwadi, to Aspaas, Chitralekha.
As I grew up, so did his level of literature; reading. Raju’s stories now transformed into facts of science, space and life. He introduced me to ‘Scope’ a superlative vaju kotak science publication edited by Nagendra Vijay. To date, the prophetic articles and fact-stories which ‘Scope’ published, to me, remain unparalleled for their lucidity of explanation, simplified representation and drawing analogies with real life. Explaining me and detailing finer nuances of Gujarati literature, he used to elaborate the diagrams and sketches of articles published in ‘Scope’. It was exactly when I caught my first glimpses of his intellect, powers of visualization and his clear and logical explanation for the published topics.
Maybe that could be the only reason for strengthening my logic and reasoning as subsequently I could succeed brilliantly in sciences and excel in Physics and Chemistry, logicise Biology. Much later after almost forty years, still remain unimpressed by the ‘Harry Potter Anthology’. As for me, Raju was and shall be my first copy of The New Scientist, or a Scientific American; our own Indian reply to the British JK Rowling.. !
Summers
