By Ganesh Saili
‘There was a lady in an ankle-length tartan skirt selling fudge outside our school gates,’ remembers Sam Matthew, a schoolmate of old, and wonders who she could have been. You have to be lucky to have schooled in times that turned them into happy memories. Granted that this sideways view of the world prevents you from forgetting how we spent a childhood trying to run away from school, and today, ironically, we seem to spend a lifetime trying to get back in, if just to catch the magic of those days.
Looking for an answer, I knock on the doors of Sikandar Hall. I turn to Sandra Skinner, the daughter of the late Colonel Michael Skinner, who is winding up her father’s affairs as Sikander Hall has changed hands.
‘Be kind to their memory, Ganesh,’ Sandra tells me. ‘They were good people, Nelly and her brother Cecil Foster. Their father, Colonel Foster, owned vast tracts of land in the hills and married a girl of mixed parentage. Given a double inheritance—half Scottish and the other half Indian—they could have done better, but it was of no help in the turbulent times of the late 1950s.’
‘It’s that darn white lightning!’ Ramesh, their cook, adds, ‘The milkmen are to blame for bringing it from the villages.’
Our last thatch-roofed Maryville, or ‘Phooswali’, as a neighbour Raju Juyal recalls: ‘In the monsoon, the roof leaked, jamming the doors, windows, and skylights, while the floor looked like a plough had trawled it.’
Claiming descent from the Scottish Bonnie Prince Charles, by the 1970s they were no longer the sharpest tools in the shed. Soon after, they turned into the end balance of the remainder theorem. Bending over backwards to make ends meet, she made the pink sugary fudge; he peddled wild onion bulbs dug up from the hillside to sell to tourists as lily bulbs; they collected tea leaves from wayside restaurants, which were thoroughly washed, left to dry in the sun on old newspapers, and reused later.
I often wonder what Nelly Foster would have said upon finding out that someday the old boys would remember her pink fudge.
I think the bland food served in some of our schools was to blame. Bread alone does not suffice, as Peggy (née Evans) Hodgson recalls: ‘Our food was pish-pash—it was the best dish on the menu. You either loved it or hated it. Neither-here-nor-there variations of dal and rice looked horrible, like something for the garbage bin. Occasionally, it was rice and meat overboiled together, with cinnamon and cardamom flung in. Come now, I’m not a gourmet, just a glutton.
‘Another dish, short-lived but memorable, was sausages. There must have been potatoes and vegetables with it, but all we looked forward to on Friday nights were the two, or was it three, black sausages about the size of two flanges of a man’s middle finger. One could say it looked like what the dog left behind—delicious!
‘Then there was spinach. If we asked Snotball what was for dinner, he would say ‘grass’ if it were vegetables. And breakfasts were the same the year round: dal one day, dalia the next, spread thinly over a dinner plate. I ate the former and gave away the latter.’
Solace for small schoolchildren came from Sindhi, whose real name was Ghanshyam Das. We called him ‘Bellman’s’ after the brass bell dangling from a rope over his showcase. Up a flight of wooden steps, we arrived on the first floor to feast on comfort food—chhole-poori—while waiters scampered to bring back pale-cream ras malai from Inder’s Bengali Sweets as dessert.
Ron Way, a 1940s student of Vincent Hill, remembers the aroma of the fresh loaves baked around the town bakeries which still stays with him after all these years: ‘Couldn’t resist gobbling one, and my mother complained that there was only one loaf while she had been billed for two!
‘Seventy years later, I’ve sussed it out—she strung me along, knowing all along what was going on!’
Ah! What reward is a comb to one who is bald?
(Author-photographer Ganesh Saili has written and illustrated twenty books. He belongs to those select few who illustrate their writing. His books have been translated into more than two dozen languages.)
