Oral tradition in a time warp

In a time before hands-on parenting was a term, we took it for granted in our home. Dad didn't have all that much time to spend with us since he toured a lot, but when he was around he was always in the thick of things, often creating the crazy situations that had us in Mom's bad books at the end of the day! And Mom, of course, was ever the friend, the one we turned to for the solution of all problems — except Math!

So, while many of our friends couldn't share confidences with their parents - often couldn't even get close to the truth when reporting on their plans for the day, their whereabouts and their doings, we could give a mostly true account of what our day had been like.

We never mentioned the many times we were accosted as young girls making our way home alone on the unsafe streets of our country's capital and we glossed over many of our minor misdemeanours with the face-saving ‘All of us were punished', or something on those lines, but by and large we had a lot of tales to exchange at the dinner table.

Without television or radio and with long evening blackouts and many air raid practices of two wars, we never really bothered about listening for the all-clear.

For, while we all sat in the dark, we were treated to a blow-by-blow account of two different childhoods of the 1920s and 1930s.

The build-up of suspense created by the sound effects of those appropriately modulated and expressive voices had us spellbound, even if it was only about the time an uncle's nightmare had the whole household in a spin or when one brother threw the other's stamp collection into the well!

We came to know our aunts and uncles when they were kids, taking sides on sibling fights of another generation and starting minor skirmishes of our own depending on who we sided with. (Second generation opinion is still divided on the stamp collection issue — each set of cousins questioning the other about whose Dad was the victim and whose the culprit!)

Generation gap

Our parents had had adventure and deprivation and idealism while we went through a humdrum existence. To us, it seemed that all the excitement and romance in our country had ended by the time we were born.

Now there were only people and problems. But how we perked up when we opened our history books - for those held the stories of their lives! It was easy to connect with the Dandi March, the Bombay Dockyard explosions of 1944, the Indian Naval Mutiny, the ‘Tryst with Destiny' speech... and so many other historical incidents.

We knew what our parents had been doing when these had happened!

Sometime around the time when we started to have the odd memorable experience of our own, we suddenly woke up to the fact that we couldn't possibly store all our parents' stories in our heads, to be pulled out of the hat at will and mulled over or taken as a frame of reference when we were in their old hunting grounds.

We were going to forget!

"Write it down," we said, to now retired parents who had, in our opinion, time to do it at last. "Keep it for your grandchildren as a testimony to your times."

But somehow, they never got around to it. We try to recall their tales now but our facts are faulty and the stories that do the rounds at family gatherings are highly suspect.

Our oral tradition, sadly, has created a time warp all our own.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.