The Tricolour Out My Window.

         On 15^th of August, we ate a proper festive thaali at lunch: varan-bhaath, some sweet, an expensive vegetable, some complicated ‘special’ recipe, poories. I don’t remember whether this was offered to the gods as prasad, but we children were allowed to sing ‘happy birthday’ to our country. In our sombre atmosphere of our homes, that was a big deal. Like licking ice-cream in the presence of one’s school-principal.

Ah school: Remember the early morning compulsory presence for the flag-hoisting? Still happens, because I can hear the dhum-dhum-dhum of the march-past and the village children singing the same old songs that I’d sung long years ago, which they have practiced over the previous fortnight. What’s wrong with our lyricists and composers? Other than Rehman, no one else has created a patriotic hit to match Saare Jehan Se Acchha, and even he has depended on the staid Vande Mataram.

Aside: I think no child should be made to sing the tear-jerking favourite, Ai Mere Vatan Ke Logon. It moves one to want to commit suicide (martyr sounds better?) for the motherland.

Back to my middle-class home on Independence Day. Then, birthdays weren’t a big deal. Everyone was born. One celebrated festivals, marriages, naming ceremonies and the occasional death. We went to friends’ homes irrespective of their religion to eat the biryanis, ladoos, kheers, modaks, kul-kuls, cakes, without restriction, although that was the ‘ration’ era. The two exceptions to the religious-festival rule were the I-day and the R-day when we went to see the government buildings lit up. (Those were austere times and one didn’t see fairy or neon light-pollution except this once in a year.) I knew someone who included Gandhi’s birth and death anniversaries in their list, but my mother fell in love with Gandhi’s ideals only after her hair turned grey, so in my life he played a role only in general knowledge tests.

Our home echoed with cries of “aamche goem aamka jaay” through the struggle for Goa’s freedom from Portuguese rule, and the family suffered because my young uncles concentrated on that and even got jailed for their trouble. Ever since, Goa Liberation Day evokes memories, but 15^th August makes the heart swell. All the garbage, human and otherwise, that I see around me, all the daily niggles I face from commuting to getting the ‘gas-cylinder’ haven’t been able to dilute the pride and happiness I feel when I hear the strains of Jana Gana Mana or the tricolour fluttering against the sky.

I married a military nomad, set up home in places not mentioned on printed maps and hard to find even on Google earth. In cantonments, or ‘camps’ as they were known as form the Raj days, the raising and lowering of the flag is a daily ritual. Even today, the notes of the Last Post at sunset churns my insides, as I remember those who’ve died serving the nation. They gave their lives so I could live free.

The one thing that irritates me each I-Day is the sight and sound of a white-kurta chap talking rubbish on television.

Every Independence Day was spent in a different state. Near Ghaziabad, UP, the warm breeze meant aur beer lao. In Srinagar (before the trouble began), we drove through orchards where cattle grazed on boughs so laden with ripe apples that they bent to the ground with the weight. In Tambaram, now a suburb of Chennai, we scanned the sky with desperate eyes, for in the early 1980s, that drought-stricken place depended on trains to bring in water from neighbouring states. The lessons learned in using water sparingly stood us in good stead when we moved to Hyderabad and then Jodhpur where ‘no-running-water’ was the norm. In Punjab through the curfew years, behind the hoisting, the green stretched till the horizon, for this was the season in-between the rabi and kharif crops. Shillong, Hashimara, Tezpur, Dinjan, Bagdogra: the clouds could fool you into believing they aren’t around and then, just as you stepped out in a draped chiffon, out they come and splash!! Those forests, that expanse: India’s geography is as complex as her history.

On a trek after the Kargil War, one holiday… we were dressed up to keep out the early morning chill and damp, standing on one of the most beautiful ridges in the Kumaon region of the Himalaya, in a field of fragrant Brahma kamals in bloom, with tea brewing in a flapping tent… singing the national anthem with gusto.

One of two memorable I-Days: the first in Faridabad. Like Kolhapur, Mapusa, Guwahati and Surat, this is a barely planned town with illegal buildings lining pot-holed roads, where you can’t be sure which way the traffic is moving because each vehicle faces a different direction. In a small, lots-of-profit-making private medical set-up, one of the staff sat on a cracked and discoloured plastic stool. She was not paying any attention to the patriotic nonsense spouting from a television that crookedly looked down on her from a triangular corner shelf. All of a sudden, the national anthem started. She shot up, stood at attention and sang in chorus, loud and clear. It was spontaneous. No one was watching. That twenty-something technician and I shared a sentiment.

The second incident: Shivaji Park, Mumbai, with about thirty-thousand people present. Some were attending the I-Day function, some were jogging, others sitting around chatting as they did habitually, vendors were selling their wares, children were learning tai-chi/karate/to cycle, etc. Suddenly the loudspeaker crackled, the tricolour went up, scattering rose petals as it unfurled and Jana Gana Mana started. Thirty-thousand pairs of feet came together in one instant. Thirty-thousand voices were still for the couple of minutes that the anthem was sung. A most unusual I-Day experience. The performance was impromptu and very, very moving.

Now the tricolour is available as pins, broaches, of paper, plastic, wood, to be kept on tables, in cars, worn on t-shirts, caps… whatever. The I-Day in India is to a fourth of humanity on this planet, the day when all Indian hearts beat as one. That’s the day the real, khadi tricolour always flutters out my window.