Theek Hai: Notes from the Nineties
Week 1: Welcome, and please keep your chappals at the door
There was a time when a phone had one job: to ring at the worst possible moment. It sat on a crocheted mat in the drawing room, black or beige, with a dial that took forever to return. The whole family knew who was calling by the length of the ring. A long one meant a relative from far away. A short one meant a wrong number. And if it rang at 2 AM, everyone woke up, sat in the dark, and stared at it for three full rings before anyone had the courage to lift it.
Nobody photographed that moment. Nobody posted it. We just lived it, and then went back to sleep, worried.
Now, a few decades later, we find ourselves missing it. Not the worry, of course. The phone. The mat. The whole slow, slightly inconvenient, thoroughly human arrangement of it all.
If you are reading this and smiling at the crocheted mat, welcome. You are in the right place.
Who exactly are we?
We are the children of the nineties. We were born somewhere in the late seventies or the eighties and we were schoolchildren, college kids or first-job people when the decade ran out. I was seven when it began and seventeen when it ended, which is a perfect age to remember everything. Old enough to understand what was going on, young enough to still believe the adults had it under control.
We grew up in middle-class and lower-middle-class homes, in towns and small cities across India: Ranchi, Patna, Nagpur, Coimbatore, Bhopal, Cuttack, Ludhiana. The big cities had their own version of the decade, but this column is for the rest of us. We lived in homes where the almirah had a key that only one person was allowed to keep, where the good steel plates came out only for guests, and where nobody ever threw away a plastic bag, because it might be needed. It was always needed.
Ours was the last generation to remember life before the TV had forty channels, and the first to be handed a mobile phone and told it was important. We are the bridge. We can tell you what a trunk call costs and also explain, patiently, to a ten-year-old why you cannot "pause" a radio.
What did the nineties look like from inside?
Let me describe an ordinary Sunday.
It began with oil. Somebody, usually Ma or Dadi, caught you before you could escape and applied enough mustard oil to your head to run a small lamp. Then came the bath, then the clean clothes, and then the long, glorious stretch where the television was allowed to be on. The antenna on the roof had its own personality. Sometimes the picture was clear. Sometimes it looked like a snowstorm in a cricket stadium. There was always one uncle, or one cousin who had no business being an engineer, who was sent up to the terrace to turn it a few degrees while the family shouted instructions from below. "Thoda left! Not that much! Wapas! Haan, haan, aa gayi!"
That "aa gayi" was one of the great moments of Indian family life. The entire household cheered for a signal.
Lunch was serious. Sunday meant meat in some homes and something special in the others, but in every home it meant a kitchen that smelled so good that even the neighbours' children found a reason to visit. After lunch came the nap. You were not tired, but you were told to sleep, and so you lay there with your eyes closed, listening to the ceiling fan, the crows outside and a distant radio playing somebody's request.
That was it. That was the great entertainment of the decade. And somehow it was enough.
The vocabulary of our parents
One thing I want to do in this column is bring back the language of that time, because it was a language of its own.
Our parents did not say "I am feeling overwhelmed." They said "Thoda adjust kar lo." They did not say "Let's budget." They said "Paisa ped pe nahi ugta." They did not say "That is a premium product." They said, "Itna mehenga? Pehle wala kya kharab tha?"
And our elders, the grandparents especially, had a way of ending any argument with a single sentence. "Hamare zamaane mein toh..." and then the story began, and you knew that you had lost. In their zamaane the school was five kilometres away and they walked, barefoot, uphill both ways. Nobody ever confirmed the geography.
Yet that vocabulary carried a certain wisdom. "Theek hai" was not just agreement. It was a whole philosophy. It meant: it could be better, but it is fine, and we will manage. It meant we could live with a little less, that complaining would not change the electricity bill, and that tomorrow would probably turn out okay.
The small things we have quietly stopped noticing
This is what I really want to write about. Not the big events of the nineties, which are in every history book, but the small, specific things that made up a day.
The smell of a new textbook in April. The brown paper cover that your mother put on it, with the name label written in careful capital letters. The dot pen that leaked into your shirt pocket exactly once, on the day of the photograph. The tiffin box that came back home with a suspiciously clean look, because the paratha had been traded for a friend's sabzi before the second period.
The ice-candy cart outside school, with its colourful sticks and its owner who knew everybody's name. The doodhwala who arrived before dawn and argued about the water content. The sabziwala whose call you could recognise from three streets away. The kabadiwala who weighed your old newspapers and gave you a rupee less than you expected, and somehow you were still friends.
The calendar from the neighbourhood shop that hung in every home and doubled as a family record: the milk account, the gas cylinder date, someone's birthday, a cousin's train. The gas cylinder itself, and the quiet joy when the delivery man finally showed up after a three-week wait.
The power cut. Oh, the power cut. The moment the lights went out and the whole street became a single large family. Candles appeared. Somebody told a story. Somebody sang. Children ran outside and stood in the dark road, looking at stars that the city lights have since taken away.
All of this was ordinary. None of us thought it was special. Which is exactly why it is worth writing down.
Why are we homesick?
Here is the odd part. Most of us would not go back, if we are being honest. We like the air conditioner. We like the fact that a doctor can be reached on a phone. We like that a train ticket can be booked without standing in a queue that curled out of the station and down the road.
So it is not the nineties we miss. It is something about how we felt in them.
We miss being young without being told it was a phase. We miss a world where the neighbours knew our names and our marks. We miss the feeling that a Sunday was long, and a summer vacation was endless, and a letter from a faraway relative was worth waiting for. We miss our grandparents, who sat on the verandah with their tea and their radio, and who are now, many of them, only in photographs.
That is the real homesickness. It is not for a time but for the people who filled it.
And I suspect that is why, when someone mentions Parle-G or Doordarshan or the Bajaj Chetak, you suddenly feel your chest do something strange. It is not about the biscuit. It is about the hand that passed it to you.
What will you find here?
Every week, I will take one small thing from those years and write about it properly. One week it may be the almirah. Another week it may be Maggi, or Chhath, or the great Tuesday of a board exam result. We will go into the kitchen, the street, the school, the railway platform and the living room. We will talk about the parents who worked hard and said very little, the grandparents who said a great deal, and the uncles who always had an opinion about our future.
There will be fifty-four of these in all. Some will make you laugh. A few, I hope, will make you quiet. Most will make you reach for your phone and message a school friend you have not spoken to in years, saying only, "Do you remember...?"
If that happens, I will consider the column a success.
One request
This column will not work without you. You were there too. You remember things that I have forgotten and you saw things from a different street, a different town, a different kitchen.
So here is what I ask. When something in a column stirs a memory, write to me. Tell me what your father said when the report card came. Tell me what your mother hid in the almirah. Tell me the name of the sweet shop, the cinema hall, the teacher nobody forgot. The best of these will find a place in a later edition, with your name beside it, if you like.
Think of this as a verandah, with a few chairs and a pot of tea. Everyone is welcome. Nobody needs an introduction.
Next week, we begin where all good Indian stories begin: with a Sunday. Oil bath, rangoli, television and a very long lunch.
Until then, do one small thing for me. Call somebody older than you. Ask them what they remember. Then keep quiet, and listen.
Theek hai?