Memories of a 90s Childhood

In the mid 90s, I was a young kid growing up in a remote police battalion area. School was 30-minutes-on-an-old-blue-jeep-ride-with-no-traffic-anywhere away. Church was a Sunday only activity. TV was only enjoyable for two hours in the evening when Star Plus rolled out kid-friendly shows, your Disney cartoons or sitcoms like Small Wonder, The Wonder Years, and Doogie Howser M.D. I forget what channel played Timeless Tales on Sundays. It was a world in a bubble, in a time before the internet. There was nothing to do on holidays.

Okay I lie. There were a lot of things to do. We climbed hills and giant water towers. We played house atop a giant replica of a table and chair set. We played The Future on a giant broken weighing machine. We swung around on giant swings. (Okay why did we have so many sets of giant things? Hmm.) We biked around the battalion compound with nothing on us but BB guns, pocket knives, water bottles and, if we were lucky, candies. Sometimes people fed us DIY treats in the form of roselle flowers and sugar in little bamboo containers; that was good then and they remain good memories now. Sometimes we had money for Ruffles chips; these would be Ruffles Lays and then simply Lays later. We ran around playing hide and seek with grasshoppers and the family dog. We messed up our stomachs eating stolen fruits aka unripe figs and passion fruits that grown-ups specifically told us to wait for till they properly ripened . On good days, we cooked random food on empty cans of tinned fish and enjoyed half-cooked vegetables out in the sun.

When there was electricity, we listened to and bloody memorized few audio tapes – Preeti Sagar’s Nursery Rhymes, and choice Mizo audio dramas: Hamlet, Genevieve (which was pronounced Jen-eh-veev by the team; who cared about French names?!), Teantisnery and about four comedy skits by the Mizo comic Thangkura drama party. If by good fortune we had broken video or audio cassette tapes in the house, we unwound and threaded the ribbons all over trees just to get that ghostly melody as the strung magnetic tapes hummed in the wind.

It was on New Year’s Day that the little town bustled and came alive. The air still bristled with Christmas cheer and the festivities really began in full swing, Christmas being largely a Christian affair that non-Christians didn’t fully engage in. (Plus there’s a lot of church during Christmas; not a lot of fun time.) Large, colourful shamianas get set up on the parade ground. A host of carnival activities begin taking shape – cotton candy parlours, tombola tables for grown-ups, a range of games and activities for kids, cheap toys to be won and given away.

The evening prior, we would have all met and waved Old Man Of The Old Year away, hoping he takes with him all our old year issues so we can make a fresh start tomorrow, hence the good feeling on New Year’s Day. [Side note: I say Old Man Of The Old Year in the hopes of making it sound cute but really we just called him Kumhlui i.e. Old Year, and he was a man dressed in dirty rags and we all heaved abuses at him and cheered for him to go away already. No one wanted to play him in later years, saying it was a cursed role. I wonder why.] Father Christmas, however, had apparently hung around for this fete and he came with a sack of little toys wrapped up in shining paper which he distributed to people; sometimes, he threw candy up in the air and we all scrambled for them. In the evening, we feasted communally in traditional Mizo style on large banana leaves.

My family moved around a lot, following dad as he got transferred. But childhood for me will always be cocooned in that little faraway, forgotten era in a tiny campus with airs of either a large village or a small town. Luangmual, Lunglei is no longer like this. I am told it is modern and technological and stuff now. A lot of the places I knew then have been altered. I don’t want to go back. But three years. Three years we were in that place. Considering I never really grew up even with all the years I have accumulated since, it is amazing how three years stretched out and defined a whole childhood for me!

All of this, by the way, being my very roundabout way of saying I am feeling rather nostalgic today.