When neighbours are god send

When neighbours are god send

When I think of my childhood and my mother, I realise that she was always on the move, always on her feet. Walking the tightrope, balancing home and a very hectic professional life, she was huffing and puffing to make ends meet. At the end of the day she would just plop down on the bed and fall asleep in a fraction of a second. Like most working mothers, child care was always a gnawing problem, more during the school holidays, and it didn’t help that my father was often posted out of station. I spent a major chunk of my childhood in a rented house with the owners living in the same compound, along with few other renters. A series of houses, each having two to three rooms, stood in the shape of a square with a courtyard in the middle and at the rear was a huge back garden with abundance of flower and fruit plants. I still remember the blood red hibiscus shrouding every bit of green on the plant, the flowers so red that if you squash it with your fingers it looked you had blood in your hand. The houses were a hand’s length from each other, giving credential to the adage walls have ears. If there was any bickering between husband and wife, or the employer and the helper, lest be assured you would know each and every word they hurled at each other.

Ma left us on our own since we were very young. She had no other way out, the helpers often took advantage of her being away most of the time and we had no family in the city. But ma didn’t have to worry much about our well being because our neighbours pitched in, they would keep an eye on us always. Most of the doors were always wide open and we would drift in and out of them, there was no propriety. With no cushion of relatives to fall back on, they were like our extended family. Before we became fairly independent, ma would leave a pan of milk in one of the neighbours’ house to be given to us mid morning with some biscuits if we were hungry. Or some fruits. We had late lunch because we had to wait for ma to come and serve as food. Sometimes if she was late, had to work extra hours, our neighbours would call us to their house and share lunch with us, we would eat whatever their children ate. In the warm, sticky summer nights, when even the whirr of fan couldn’t provide any respite, after dinner we played in the courtyard till late hours with our neighbours’ children who became our very close friends, their cousins our cousins, there aunts our aunts, their uncles our uncles. In the evenings after our homework was over, we ran off to our neighbours’ houses to watch television with them even though we had a television at ours and they did the same. We had the hardest times when dad build our own house and we had to move there, it was like tearing us away from something which had become a part of us. My sister was heart broken so much so that she refused to come home from school but stealthily went to theirs making Ma anxious. When she didn’t come home for long, I could see lines of worry on ma’s face, her body tensing up, the ends of her mouth drooping down. She knew where she was and she had to coax her and drag her to our house. Now when I think of it, it is because we had such great support from our neighbours, Maa’s life became a tad less difficult. With time, the contours of society has changed, neighbours guard their private life fiercely, whether it is good or bad I am no one to judge but they were a major part of my childhood and memories of them are etched on my mind and fill me with toasty warmth.