The radio sometimes took time to warm up. But that was becoming a thing of the past. The light behind the panel threw into limelight the streaks, numerals and letters that served as a guide for the positioning of the red vertical bar through the rotating, scalloped knob that countless anticipating fingers had twisted. The furniture of the house was invariably of wood. Trusted makers delivered the product to the house and installed it in its unique spot. The blades of the fans on the ceilings would be silent in the evenings but the mosquitoes would be active.
A horn would sound from the street and the cyclists would move to the dust shoulders. An unduly elongated car would skim past and offer a sight of two heads in different rows. The partial snowy curtains on the house windows let us see who was going by. The world—the distant world of which you were aware only because it made geographical sense—arrived through the media of the newspaper, the radio and the live raconteur. The announcement concerning the batsman at the crease in the international cricket test match was the epiphany of the planet and the answer to the longings at breakfast time for news of an exciting nature.
Somewhere the world was moving but the little room of the late evenings saw no movement save in the occasional new story. The rulers ruled from the horizon; the subjects were content. There was fresh meat and fish when you went to the market. The crunchy fried rice tasted delectable when it was fried even further and hardened to a puff. Floods did sweep the land but that was just another normal event on the horizon. No one could deny to us, the young ones, the thrill of the news from the cricket batting crease; the older ones built affinities with the stars who were projected on the white screen of the movie theatre and followed their lives closely. While these stars smiled and leaped on the screen, the rulers frowned to themselves and kept the support stable. The cricketers sported themselves in immaculate white across the yellowing pages of the eagerly grasped, storyful magazine. Their eyes, lips, cheeks and hair were scrutinised to check the correspondence between the sound of the name on the radio and the pictures now en face. The great saga of voyage and discovery of that age was to be practised upon a little irregular piece of ground late in the afternoon, when a polished cricket bat with a daunting insignia would go out to strike innings in front of three quite dissimilar wickets, remembering the feats of the giants whose names were pronounced with bated breath.
The adults would sometimes converse on intrigues of authority; those topics were a little difficult to understand for little minds, and even if they should be understood, they were not really serious enough to cause worry. The worry was in the more difficult lessons, hence the more difficult homework—and hence the more exasperating meddler in the distracting fun of games—when the next class in school came around. The worry was also in the difficulty of emulating the innings of the giant in the late afternoon.
When people came to the big house they sat on the cushions of the sofas while the light of the room gave out a faint hum and some mosquitoes showed themselves on the white walls. One of the doors had a huge bolt that properly should have clanged as a drumstick against a large pitcher of the same colour of brass. The windows were set in a recess affording a sill on which you could rest your elbows. When the window frames in the guest room were brought together, the slats reminded you of strong guards with beetling brows outside royal chambers. The eye was often drawn to them in the hope that the story that had just been recounted and that had caused a kind of flutter in the emotions would emerge in a finale from their direction. The chatter of tongues created an easy bolster in which to nestle even if you could not follow what was being said.
It was the little room that contained the essence of the world in that time. The world was fertile; it yielded our meals. The world was interesting; there was the test match to follow the next day. The world was frightening; there were ghosts in the darkness and demons in faraway lands. The world was a yoke; there was school at the end of the holidays. The world was divided into oceans and countries, and each country had a government. It was good to become an engineer, scientist or doctor. If people sometimes killed each other, their actions belonged to aberrations at the furthest margin. Boys and girls often fell in love but that was something to be contemplated and practised later, although the films initiated you at least into the idea. God was someone to be worshipped and loved.
There was such a sense of comfort in everything that it had to be taken for granted. Of course there were rich families that could flaunt their possessions and gild the walls of their houses. But despite our lack of their ostentation we missed very little. The world lay open to discovery. It was not a hostile world. You belonged in the little room and you would belong in the world as you grew up. The machinery of the world was trustworthy. Your mission was to excel in one of the brain-taxing professions and benefit the rest of mankind. Everything would move smoothly towards the time you became an elder. Sometimes you were lost in the contemplation of justice and in the goodness of God. Sometimes a passage in a book spoke of closeness between two people and you were surprised to be drawn to the book for hours on end. There on the terrace you would sit on one of those round wicker stools and forget all passage of time as you identified yourself with Pip in his love for Estella. That is how you would fall in love and you would marry the object of your love. The home that you would make would distinguish itself from all other homes by its supreme nobility. The great stars above would be conquered by the meaning you bestowed on them as you linked arms with your beloved on silent evenings while a fire burnt the last of the wood and sank lower upon the bare open earth.
Brilliantly evocative. Reminiscent of The Enigma of Arrival, but the writer has a voice all his own.