Mitsep, Morton and more....

We inherit not only values, customs and rituals, but also appellations from our friends, neighbours, cousins, parents and grandparents. The specific words for mundane household items and experiences become a part of our everyday lives, and even when we get to know the correct words, we continue using the ones which were imbibed onto us since birth.

Take the word 'mitsep'. The not-so-high wooden cupboard with cover of wire gauze was a part of every household around two decades back, and some continue to grace dining rooms and kitchens of Assamese homes even today. Unable to find the meaning of this oft-heard word 'mitsep' in any dictionary that I came across, I consoled myself by cooking up the word "mid shelf" for this familiar piece of furniture. I even hammered this into the brain of my brother, who in turn imparted this gem of knowledge to his wife.  So it was "mid shelf", though I never contemplated why it was not "high shelf" or "low shelf". Years later, my brother excitedly messaged me from Melbourne, where he now lives, that at last he knows the correct name of ‘mitsep’; it was actually the mutated version of  "meat safe",  a ventilated cupboard (that explains the wire gauze cover) used to keep meat away from flies and other pests.

‘Mitsep’ memories are abundant among the Assamese who are in their forties now. At my ancestral home in Lahoal, Dibrugarh, we had a 'mitsep' in the kitchen, right near the earthen fire stove (souka). I doubt if it was used for storing meat; as far as I remember, it was used as a crockery unit to store breakable glass and bone-china utensils. It was also the place where ‘cream-biscuits’ were kept hidden behind a white teapot. My spouse recalls the days when his mother used to keep fried fish inside the 'mitsep' during his childhood, thereby doing something right to justify the name ‘meat safe’. This familiar yet unremarkable piece of furniture, taken for granted and placed at any available space in the vicinity of the kitchen, is an epitome of the fact that we never realize the value of something in our life until it becomes a memory. Alas! Today’s modular kitchens within the confines of high-rise apartments have no place for and have no use of this token of nostalgia.

Then there is the ‘gilas’. We have had the opportunity to attend schools which laid immense emphasis on diction, grammar and pronunciation. In our times (here I go again, talking of ‘ our good old days’!), we also read a lot of English classics and children’s books (Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to name a few). Yet, in our everyday life, we drink water in a ‘gilas’ (which is usually made of steel, the glass ones being reserved for guests) and never in a ‘glass’.

Adi Godrej will be an immensely happy man to know that every almirah (from Hindi almārī, via Portuguese from Latin armarium ‘closet, chest’.), irrespective of the make, is called "Godrej" in Assam. It's always been the "old Godrej", "keys of the Godrej" ; it's an alien feeling to hear someone talk of the "almirah that was gifted to the bride on her wedding", it's always the "Godrej".

Then there's the game ‘ice-pies’. I know that it’s an almost extinct entity now, the game. The guessing game gained a level of sophistication when my neighbour Ivy shouted ‘ice-pies’ at the top of her voice in her Assam-type house’s campus decades back.  I try to rectify my memory with the proper ‘I Spy’, but I miserably fail to do so. ‘Ice-pies’ rings familiar, feels like home.

There was a time when we did not eat chocolates or candies. It was always ‘morton’. All candies, chocolates and other sweet treats came under the common category called ‘morton’. We got a ‘morton’ when we got good marks in exams, and guests used to come with eagerly awaited morton-treats for the kids. It was ages later when Google became the one-stop solution for everything in life that I searched and found that the Allahabad Canning Ltd manufactures and markets a huge range of products under the brand name ‘MORTON’, which includes ready to eat matar paneer and mango jam. ‘Morton’ is also the name of a village in Illinois, USA.

Reminiscing is a good hobby. I have realized that the older I grow, the more nostalgic I become. Midway into this colourful and profound journey called life, I have understood that the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around me to challenge my account of things and events as I remember them, to remind me that my life is not my life, but it is merely the story I have told about my life - told to others, and most importantly, to myself. As Haruki Murakami had so correctly said, “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

 

 

 

Days of Tic-Tac-Toe

 

We have all been counting these days, these dark ugly days, and praying that they get over soon. For adults like me, who fortunately has a vocation that falls in the ‘essential’ category, life has been more or less fine. But think of our kids, those bundles of energy , cocooned up for and endless time inside their homes and peering into their laptops and mobile phones, trying to catch on with the ‘online knowledge’, with the Indian Constitution, French Revolution, Newton’s laws, algebra , calculus and Pythagoras Theorem – and more, trying to grasp everything in the confines of the four walls. Extraordinary as these times are, I try to recollect my own days in school when the best way to block incoming calls when the teacher threatened to call the parents was to put the landline phone ’s receiver off the hook so that a constant ‘busy’ tone thwarted the teacher’s efforts.

In the last pages of our note books, we had an entire world of indoor games – ‘name-place-thing-animal’, ‘chor-police’, ‘FLAMES’, ‘XOX’(tic-tac-toe). And the mathematics class was spent mostly (by backbenchers like ‘you know who’) wondering how to use the divider in the geometry box or by savagely making uncountable stabbing dots on the pristine white eraser. While the front-benchers wrote copious notes when the History teacher explained in details about the Quit India Movement, many of us kept the yawns at bay by filling up the ‘o’, ‘p’, ‘d’, ‘b’, and similar letters in the textbook with our fountain pens.

On the personal front, my most feared class was the Art class. Having been unable to even draw a mango properly, I resorted to the safest option chosen by many of my generation (read ‘the 90s kids’), that is sticking to drawing the ‘scenery’ – the sun popping out in between the two hills with a blue river flowing down, and a hut and tree sitting pretty by the river-side! And yes, sometime during our discussion with the geniuses in the school bus on the way back home, we also got to know that if we sharpen the pencil and put the waste in hot water, it will become eraser after a few days; now it’s an altogether different matter that we did not get the desired product any time. In this context, I also recall another episode, and this is true ONLY for the 90s kids. Remember Ramar Pillai?  This gentleman claimed that he had prepared ‘herbal petrol’ from commonplace plants and herbs. While I was too eager to actually find out what herbs the man used to make petrol and the laboratory requirements for the same, I distinctly remember trying out preparing petrol at home by boiling leafy vegetables and leaves from the flower-garden with salt and lemon juice , albeit with not-so-good results. 

These days the school kids are swanky and practical. And I too regarded myself so when I was young. Thoroughly inquisitive and enterprising as I was, I remember collecting peacock feathers and trimming them to proper sizes and putting them inside my story books and textbooks – not to use them as elegant bookmarks, but rather I got to know from some legend that if I keep a peacock feather inside books, it will give birth to many more feathers! I did come across many such ‘senior’ legends and geniuses in school who filled me up with ‘intelligent’ garbage. One such information handed out was that only the black part of the black and white ‘Camlin’ eraser could erase ink. Due to this misinformation, I spent a good part of my school days using the white part of the eraser for erasing ink by first licking the white part. Today, after authenticating the fact myself, I know that both the white and black parts can erase ink.

And what did we do when the teacher was either late for her class or was absent? Yes, we spinned litchi-seeds attached to match-sticks, and we rotated out pens on the table (desk). Mimicking the teachers was a vocation reserved for the artistically talented ones. The more adventurous ones got busy smearing the teacher’s table with chalk dust so that when the teacher leaned on it while teaching, his trousers would get a clear chalky impression.

In the absence of proper extracurricular activities like abacus, piano classes, tennis, swimming, etc., free time was actually ‘free time’ for us. We went out to play seven-stones, kut-kut, ghariyal-paani, hetaali and balancing marble in spoons. Another favourite activity was sneaking into the kitchen when our mothers had their mandatory after-lunch siesta, and opening that alluring tin of Amulspray and putting spoonful of the heavenly milk powder hurriedly into our mouths. And savouring the ambrosia little by little by sucking the sticky mass in our hard palates – it was heaven!

And then there was this extra edge over others when you owned the ‘pen-pencil’. They came in two varieties; one, with extra slender graphite lids, and the other type which had multiple graphite tips which needed to be rotated when the previous one wore out. Losing a piece of such a tip was one of the worst nightmares that we had.

Munching on Poppins, Eclairs, tenga-morton, and proudly displaying the Phantom cigarettes on our lips, we had a very different childhood. I tell my kids and their friends, and they roll their eyes and they wear the same expression which we had reserved for our parents when they had told us stories about their childhood. The memory of the long drawn ‘Gooood morning ma’am’ in our classes remind me of the different air and the uplifting charm of my school days when there were no online classes or smart-tech tuitions. The loud shout of ‘stand in line properly’ from the PT teacher echoes in the corridors of my mind, and I realize that the most beautiful raindrops are perhaps those that cling to our eyes, bearing silent testimony to everything beautiful and fragile that still endures. And outside the calculus of real and imagined agendas, rests the days of the kids of my generation, the 90s kids, when life was just different, and where we had effortlessly and happily belonged.