The emergency and our humdrum luves

1975 updated mar 24 09
Adit's second birthday was quite unlike his first, as some of our friends had children just a little older and we invited them over with their parents. His aunts and uncles, and my nieces who had now joined the Delhi crowd for work were also there. The pocket lawn was just ideal in winter for children to frolick and the adults to sun themselves in. This party became a regular affair while we stayed in Delhi.


In summer I continued to take Adit swimming -he used to enjoy these dips and usually would be rotating around kept afloat by his inflatable armbands, singing nursery rhymes and delighting in cheating the summer heat. I wondered, when I thought of this years later, whether a 2-year old could repeat such rhyumes ,even snatches of them, or had I imagined it all, but now I hear Divya, Adit's daughter, doing it at the same age. Bit soon the right to use the Ford swimming pool was withdrawn from former staff. So, I became a member of the Claridges pool and we used that every summer while in Delhi.

A Bolt from the Blue
I was always the first to get up in the mornings, and on a fateful day, I made my cup of coffee and opened the front door to pick up and read the newspaper as usual. No paper on the front verandah! It had never happened! I cursed the vendor and the newspaper boy, and turned my thoughts to other things – maybe Adit woke up and soon the household was stirring. Maybe it was Ramu, who would usually used to take the paper from me or Annaiya, whoever had it by then, that thought of putting on the morning news on the radio so that we were at least upto-date on the main news. That was when we learnt that an Emergency had been declared By Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, and no newspaper was allowed to be published that day. We did not even know what an Emergency was! Soon there were police and other government vehicles blaring from loudspeakers about this or that order.

Ramu and I went to our respective offices as usual; in ours, we exchanged surmises in whispers and listened off and on to the latest news on transistor radios that some had brought along. I am sure most offices functioned in a similar manner that day. We still had hardly any information till, the next day, newspapers were available. The Indian Express, our regular paper, came out with a black front page that the Editorial explained was its protest against the censorship that had been imposed on all papers. But even the most intrepid paper could not really give all the news – it was only after the Emergency was lifted two years later that one heard about various matters that had only been the subject of rumours - the arrests, the disappearances, the hounding of the press, opposition party members, and even artists and scholars.

A trip to Bangkok
Meantime our own lives went on more or less as usual. Sometime that year, I went to Bangkok, the seat of the UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office, for an inter-regional meeting. It would be only for three days or so, not longer than many trips within the country, absences that Adit had accepted as part of his mother's life. It was a most enjoyable trip, where I got more insight into regional issues than I had had in Delhi where our office was more an India Country office than a regional one, given the overwhelming size of the country and the programme, in comparison with the other countries in South Asia. On this trip, I also met some interesting persons from HQ and the region at that meeting. I was asked to give a brief summary of the Emergency and its effects on children, but unfortunately, I did not cover myself in glory and I cannot now recall why -perhaps I glossed over the problems or was too succinct to be undersood.

The Playhouse School
By the time Adit was two years old, I was already feeling he needed some companions of his own age, though he and his Thatha were a perfect pair that kept each other company. He also had friends and went out to play in the neighbourhood park most evenings when the weather was nice. Still, he seemed a bit lonely and aching for daytime company of his Thatha.
This feeling that he should have more playmates became intensified when Venkatamma was replaced by Raji – till then the former had at least mothered him. Raji was totally uninterested in, and truly incapable of, doing that or even playing with Adit. The year after we moved to Jor Bagh, the time was opportune and, in the new academic year, in July, when he was about 2 ½ years old, we put him in the Playschool, a preschool that normally admitted only kids above 3..
At first, he seemed supremely relaxed and happy, came back beaming with his achievements, the colourful scribbles and little crafts that he had made that day, or with new songs and so on. One day, however, I was to pick him up though normally, the maid would walk him back. And I got delayed, to find one little tyke sobbing away at the entrance. Whether he was more relieved or the teacher it is difficult to tell! Very soon, however, we cobbled together a carpool and all the strangeness also wore away and he was very happy in the Playhouse school till he left it at 5 ½ to go to the Bal Bharati Airforce School.

Unlike the latter day 'factories' turning out ready to enter first graders all literate and numerate, this was a true playschool with lots of drawing, singing, and other fun activities and yes, the last year there, A did learn the alphabet and the primary numbers.