Read on Twitter
Was helping a friend pack up and empty her apartment in London today and found this old relic from the past amongst her things and OF COURSE there is a story from my life involving the orpat alarm clock (doesn’t everyone?)
So, every summer holidays we would make the long 48-52 odd hour journey from some part of Gujarat (Baroda, Surat, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad) to Chennai in the sleeper compartment of Navjivan express
And spend the summer at my grandmother’s place in Chennai along with our mother, aunt and cousins. Now my mother is a FORMIDABLE woman and very strict and to this day my sister and I pretty much toe the line she draws
Every summer vacation we would have a strict schedule of reading, writing and math and every single day (except Sundays) we would follow the study schedule she laid out for us
It involved getting up at 7:30 am, helping my grandmother make a garland out of jasmine flowers and do her morning prayers, take bath, spend an hour saying slokams and finish lunch by 10:00 am
Then from 10-11 we would sit for an hour and do reading comprehension where we would read passages and stories from wren and martin or whatever instrument of literary torture my mother had for us
Then from 11-1, we would do Math for two hours. Now this math would be the syllabus of the next year. So if we were going to 6th grade, by the time summer hols of grade 5 got over, we would have finished half the syllabus of 6th grade
Then at 1 we would get a break for 30-45 minutes and eat fruits or something and my mother would go down for a nap for about 1-1.5 hours at 2 pm
Now this was our time. I have such fond memories of lying down on the cool mosaic floor of our paati’s Madras house, reading Gokulam, Tinkle and Champak while the hot Madras sun blazed outside and the fan droned on
We would read books, play cards, plays ludo, dayankattan, snakes and ladders, make fantastic stories about random neighbours, play name place animal thing with my mother’s gentle snores and a lone crow cawing as BG music
We LOVED that time. And while it seemed like 10-1 took 14 hours to get over, 2-3:30 seemed to be over within 5 minutes and before we savoured our time and did everything we wanted to do it was 3:30
Now stickler to schedule that my mother was, she would set her trusted orpat alarm clock to 3 or 3:30 and then go to sleep so she could get up on time and drill us some more
The sound of the alarm ringing was the sound of dreams and creativity shattering for my sister and me and we hated to hear it go off
One day my sister came up with a diabolical plan to get ourselves more time. (In most of my childhood stories, I would like you to remember that my sister was the villain and I was the poor sheep who followed her. She may tell the story differently but she lies)
She decided that 5-10 mins before the alarm was due to ring we would turn the clock back 5 more minutes so we could get more time to read and play.
We figured that since the only other clock in the house, my paati’s wall clock in the hall ran 20 minutes fast, leaving all of us frantically calculating the time and subtracting by 20, we could somehow get away with it
Also, what is it with paatis setting the clocks in their house ahead by 15 minutes? My paati always said it made people hurry and be on time and be disciplined but all it did was make us strong at Math.
Anyhow, we decided that we would set the clock back, get 5 more minutes and when amma went to the bathroom to freshen up we would set it to the correct time
So armed with the thrill that comes from doing something wrong and illegal, with hearts beating, palms sweating my sister turned the clock back 5 minutes on the first day
We got 5 more mins, amma woke up 5 mins later, we set the clock back to its correct time when she went to the bathroom and life was amazing for a few days. We would eat our tiffin and drink our milk and before we knew it, it was 5 pm
From 4-5 we had to handwriting for an hour where we copied random articles from the newspaper in our notebooks in beautiful handwriting and sharp at 5 my aunt would come from work and take us to the beach.
Everyday we turned the clock back by a few minutes more. 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 10 minutes and life was good. Then my sister (always her, remember!) suggested we be daring and turn it back by 30 mins
Her logic was that if we did that we would have to do 30 mins less of handwriting because sharp at 5 my aunt would come and we would leave but if amma woke up only at 4 then by the time she drank her coffee and started handwriting it would be 4:30
Now I was a fool so I thought anything my sister did was amazing and intelligent and clever so I went along. Anything to get 30 more minutes of games and reading and time with my sister.
We were fools and carried the confidence and sense of superiority that comes from being a child. We set the clock back 30 mins, grinned superciliously at each other and got 30 more glorious minutes of reading time
So amma got up at 4 (she thought it was 3:30) had her coffee, gave us our milk and tiffin and sat us down for handwriting and we had hardly written a few lines when our aunt walked in
Now in our excitement of having done some excessively naughty we had forgotten to set the clock back to the right time and my mother shocked at time having passed so quickly went to look at the orpat alarm clock
And saw that it showed 4:30 while the hall clock showed 5:15. And of course like any logical human being would, she thought the clock had stopped working or had become slow and set it back to its right time.
We never did get caught because who would have thought children could be so devious. But we didn’t try to set the clock back by 30 minutes ever again knowing that it was only a matter of time before amma smelt a rat
We had a GLORIOUS summer. Did very little handwriting, had lots of fun at the beach, read a ridiculous number of books and played an insane number of games. All thanks to Orpat :)
#FullMealsTellsTales
#FullMealsTellsTales
