(DGC newsletter Oct) )
If you visit a senior
army officer’s house, you are likely to be awed by the experience. Uniformed guards
will salute you smartly at the entrance; a beautiful avenue of bottlebrushes
(or other trees) will lead you to the main entrance of the house. There is
usually a splendid and well-maintained garden or two outside the home. Once
inside, you will find there are several large tastefully furnished rooms.
Liveried waiters will hover over you as the hostess tries to make you
comfortable. You will get a feeling of grandeur.
However, you have to
put in a long career in the army to be eligible for this. You have to start
from humble beginnings at the other end of the spectrum and the journey can be
very interesting. A junior married officer may start out living like a monk
with very simple and basic accommodation. This accommodation fulfils the basic
necessities of having a roof over your head and walls around you with little
else. As the demarcating walls between adjacent homes can be very thin, one has
to whisper all the time or else risk the whole regimental unit knowing your
entire family history, secrets and points of disagreement. However, things do get
better and better with each rank and after a few years one ends up living on
some fantastic properties in the cantonment.
I distinctly
recollect one of the accommodations from my father’s junior officer days. It
consisted of three long dark barrack style rooms which we called home. One of
these long rooms was our bedroom or rather, a dormitory where all four beds
were laid out in parallel. The demarcation between parental area and childrens’
area was three feet of space. The lucky parent and child on either end of this
space could swing their legs out of bed more comfortably. As this was deemed a
special privilege, my brother and I exchanged beds by rotation. The attached
bathroom was large with simple flooring and a very noisy flush. The flush chain
was situated quite high (as was the accompanying cistern) and we both had to draw ourselves up to our
full height, which included standing on tiptoe with hands fully outstretched,
to pull it down. Along with genetics, these stretching manoeuvres have probably
contributed to the impressive heights my brother and I currently enjoy. The
deafeningly loud sound of this cistern ensured that everyone knew when someone
had visited the bathroom. During dinners in the long drawing room which was
adjacent to the bedroom, we had been encouraged to sleep early and try to do
the needful for our bladders well before the party commenced. This was because if
we used the flush at night, many an interesting story recounted by a guest in
the adjoining drawing room had been rudely and dramatically interrupted by a strange
loud noise suddenly emanating from somewhere in the house….
Guests were offered
the ‘good’ bonafide chairs. There was also the ‘home-made’ furniture in nearly
all army homes, which consisted of steel trunks, cleverly covered and concealed
with cloth to simulate divans. These were fairly comfortable with all the cloth
padding on top, but years of use and abuse (over long distance train luggage
wagons) had made some surfaces uneven. Just as the proverbial saying that
artificial roses can never emit the smell of real ones, this furniture
invariably got ‘caught out’. This was when a guest sat too much to one corner,
and the structure rattled because of the unevenness. This was anticipated by army
friends whose homes also had plenty of such home - made furniture but it could
somewhat unsettle (literally and figuratively) a civilian new to this genre of
furniture.
Like the dark rooms,
the cupboards were also cavernous and dark as well as dank since the climate
was very humid. In an effort to keep out mould, the cupboards had these dim
lights in their interiors to render them drier. It made them look a trifle like
a hot refrigerator. The light was not bright enough however to identify clothes
correctly and one would often pull out seemingly matching clothes only to
discover their true colours a while later in the sun. It was a common sight for
the guards at the gate to observe family members stepping outside confidently
to start the day, then rush back screaming inside and re-emerge a bit later in
what appeared to be slightly different clothes. The guards maintained excellent
decorum during this drama, not making any expression that would reveal what
they were thinking.
The drawing room decorations
were predictable (almost universal throughout all the neighbouring army homes)
and included several daggers, swords and trophies. These were the traditional
gifts when officers visited neighbouring regiments for inspections or other
official visits. Civilian friends privately felt that the drawing rooms of
their army friends looked more like armouries.
The army wives had a strong network and not
being terribly wealthy, had a keen eye for a good bargain. Loyalty being high,
almost everyone ensured that their friends benefitted from the same economical
purchases. So there was homogeneity in non-warfare decorations as well, and no
matter where you went, you always felt you were somehow in your own home. The glasses and crockery were the borosil ones
available in the army canteens. Since army families were used to the subsidised
army canteen fare they were not comfortable spending higher amounts in the
civilian markets outside the cantonment.
It was easy to guess
what the menu would be when one was invited for a party. This was because the
army families were provided free food rations. The rations were, however, hierarchy
based. The Commanding officer’s orderly would get the choicest vegetables. Next
in turn were the Majors and finally, the poor lieutenant and captains. There
was a popular joke doing the rounds that if a dish of potatoes had to be
cooked, in the senior officer’s house one potato needed to be cut in two (being
so large), a middle level officer’s wife could serve them whole (being nicely
medium sized) but a youngsters’ wife had to fuse a few together to make a glob
resembling a potato!!
All in all, we had a
lovely childhood, progressing over the years from cramped to spacious accommodation,
muted speech to full throated yells that could not even be heard at the other
end of a palatial house, make-shift to real furniture, homogeneity to taste and
style…and finally ending up living in great splendour!!!
