Living inside Fort St.George

When my father was transferred to Madras from Bombay, I threw every tantrum in my book of survival . I hated the thought of leaving my friends behind and when you are a teenager there is no life beyond friends. We lived in Churchgate in South Bombay which was great place to live compared to the rest of overcrowded Bombay and to me at that point of time of my adolescent life Bombay was a great place to live in anyway. So from bustling Bombay I was dragged unwillingly to Madras .
My father was allotted the government quarters inside Fort St. George which at that time was mostly administered by the Army. My father's office was also inside the Fort and the building on Body Guard Road was then only in blue print.We moved into one of those huge rambling old structures inside Fort St.George and to it me was like being confined to the dungeons. The mansion ( in the literal sense and not the Triplicane meaning of it) , for it was nothing less than that, had 18 rooms on the ground floor and 13 odd on the first floor . This was for the family of three.It had been the house in which was Robert Clive had lived while he was still a lowly clerk in East India Company and long before he became the Gov.Gen ( or so the story goes ).
From the ground floor rose a wide staircase of stone which had iron rings driven into its corners which were used to tie the horses .The drawing room was 80 ft long and proved to be a nightmare for my poor mother when she wanted to arrange the sofas and coffee tables in it.The dining room could seat forty people comfortably not that my mother ever intended throwing such a huge party at home. The other rooms had our meagre belongings . In the massive rooms our beds, tables and chairs looked like doll furniture. We did not use any rooms on the ground floor . I would often go there with my beat-up Hitachi transistor or a Thomas Hardy ( who I passionately developed a love for ) or assorted comics when I needed to hide from family and visiting relatives
I chose a room for myself at the back of the house . It had a long window which took up an entire wall and it was 12 ft high. After my bed , almirah and study table were put in there was so much of the room left over . I loved my bathroom - it was just a little smaller than my massive bedroom . My father woke me up at 5 each morning to study and I would just lock myself in the bathroom , spread a bed sheet on the floor at the other end and curl up and sleep for another half hour.
My room had a view of the spire of St Mary's Church through the foliage. The clock in the tower would strike every quarter and the bell would toll every hour. While living in Bombay we had a view of the Rajabai Tower from every room of the house and all our clocks had died and gone to clockwork heaven It was , therefore ,wonderful to have a personal time keeper . My life was divided into quarter hours from then on . For me somehow the quarter strikes meant a lot . It was like the God of Adolescents was reassuring me that life as I knew it was not going to end in misery.I would not be left friendless in the world.
After all the sulking came to nought I picked myself up and set about discovering the charms of the Fort. Soon I acknowledged to myself ( I would never let on to my parents though ) it was actually a fantastic place to live in.
The entire Fort fell silent after 5 in the evening when the government staff left after work and as security was not an issue then there was a lone policeman at the huge silver coloured gates. I would stand in the long balcony that stretched the entire length of the house and gaze out eastwards watching the blinking lights of the ships at sea and conjure up stories of sailors and sea adventures. Sometimes I would see huge mounds of yellow sulphur waiting to be shipped to someplace. I spent most of my time talking to myself as I had no one else to talk to . Seemed as normal a thing to do - just as some people sing to themselves.
I learnt to love the darkness and the silence. Bombay had been bright and glitzy and I had revelled in it then, but the magic of the old Fort soon pervaded my soul. I spent my vacations flipping through the register in St Mary's Church, sitting in the pews regarding the nave and reading the tombstones in the yard. I thought of myself as some reborn Romantic poet and just sat down to soak in the atmosphere . I wondered at the people who had left the comfort of their familiar life and travelled this far to a strange land to make it their temporary home and return to their shores again someday but had never returned .
It was so safe inside the Fort St George that my parents never objected to my wandering around in it and most of the people knew whose daughter I was .Hardly any families lived inside the Fort . There were the barracks for the soldiers and the other quarters were occupied by sundry labourers. There was a small post office from where I mailed the letters to Bombay and a small Army clinic where I went to see the Army Doctor when not too well. The Army canteen visit was a chore I had to do for my mother every month. Sometimes ,a soldier would stop to talk to me and discovering I spoke Hindi would be thrilled to hear me chatter- just to hear the familiar sounds of his mother tongue.
I often visited the Fort Museum to which very few people came and I walked around it pretending it was my private collection.Of course I missed my friends and I wrote them long letters running into 18 to 20 pages but I stopped missing Bombay. I fell in love with the history and romance surrounding me and sat up many , many nights hoping to see some apparitions. I would have settled happily for a bonnie ghostly child or a woman in white sweeping along if a headless rider would be difficult to come by . The doors and windows groaned and creaked at night and I felt they were recounting tales to each other and only wished I could understand them. My mother, however, failed to enjoy any of this and spent most of her time praying that she would be protected from them. .
I was inspired to scribble a lot of teenage poetry about silence and shamelessly copied the style of the English poets but it helped me express myself .We lived there for two years and I changed from a teenage Bombayite who loved big cities to a more mature Madrasite ( I hated being called a Madrasi even then ) capable of introspection. I often think of my early days in Madras .When I drive along Kamarajar Salai (then called Beach Road) I see the house I lived in and its long balcony and then some rude road hog leans on his horn and wakes me up to Chennai.