The life of my childhood (I am referring to the India of 1970s/80s) was very simple and very fulfilling. If I think back, I find so many memories of how a middle-class family stayed happy and content and enjoyed life to the fullest. You see, money in those days was simply not associated with happiness. A certain income was expected every month, and a certain lifestyle was built around that income.

And yet, we were deliriously happy.

Television was a special treat reserved for the Sunday movie. A family or two in the entire building would have a TV in their home and on Sunday evening, those households would open their doors and hearts to the entire apartment complex to cram into the living room and watch the movie together. Was it the collective positivity of so many people in one room that generated that vibe of happiness? Who knows! But it remains to this day a special memory of a bunch of people laughing together, crying together, sighing together, enjoying every minute of the movie together. The other occasions the TV would come to life – to watch Chitrahaar on Wednesday and Chayageet on Friday. Or to watch the beautiful Tabassum interview celebrities in flawless Urdu and share epic scenes from movies in India’s first ever talk show Phool Khiley Hain Gulshan Gulshan.

Eating outside or ordering food was simply unheard of. Families survived on fresh food cooked every day, the lack of a refrigerator in most households making it impossible to cook more than necessary. Who knew fresh food would become such a rarity in the decades to come! Restaurant food was reserved for that rare trip to the movies.

Salary day was super special. Almost every earning member of the family made it a point to commemorate the occasion with a bar of Dairy Milk or batata vadas hot from the vendor, or anything else as simple as that but no less special. Children would wait for their parents to arrive with treats. An old song from the black and white times, “Din hai suhana aaj pehli tareek hai, khush hai zamanaa aaj pehli tareek hai” (It’s a great day, it’s the first of the month! Everyone is happy, it’s the first day of the month!) stands testament to the joy every first of the month brought. Not for the salary so much as the treats and the simple joys of celebrating salary day!

The ring of a telephone didn’t always mean the call was for the owner of the phone. Typically one in every ten or fifteen homes owned a phone and it was very common for the entire apartment complex to have knowledge of this telephone number. Thinking back, this was one of the reasons my father was probably vehement about not using the phone for more than a minute or two. He was quite conscious of the fact that the instrument served as an emergency service for so many other families and he was responsible for its availability.

New clothes were reserved only for special occasions and festivals. There was no concept of buying clothes just because we felt like, or there was a sale on. Hand-me-downs were eagerly awaited. My sisters also suffered through the era of parents buying dress material in wholesale rolls and there were multiple sets of clothes that they owned, where all of them had dresses in exactly the same material! Still, I would admire some of my sister’s clothes and eagerly await the day they tired of it enough to hand it down to me. It felt so grown-up to wear an elder sister’s clothes!

Every New Year’s Eve was a chance for all families to cook up their specialties for the entire building and then assemble on the terrace for an evening of games, song and dance and a giant pot luck dinner that would have been cooked by twenty or thirty different families.

Receiving letters made our day! Relatives residing in our native village or in different cities would write about the latest news on their end. I still recall my mother sitting down to reply to all of them and share what was happening on our end of the world. Every letter always began with the word “Safe” on the top right corner of the letter, to let the reader know there was no bad news in the letter and it was just a general update.

Winter was the signal for badminton nets and a rudimentary court drawn out of chalk powder to appear. We would play tournaments all of winter, enjoying the weather and the game. In fact, it was how my sister met her husband. Love bloomed on the badminton court for them and the rest is history!

Guests from far and wide just dropped in. Lack of mobile phones and telephones simply did not allow for prior notice. They would just arrive like a pleasant surprise and suddenly the day would turn into a frenzy of activity as the household got busy preparing snacks and entertaining guests with games and chitchat. No one ever frowned at anyone for showing up unannounced and there was never a lack of hospitality.

As I write this, each memory washes over me like a warm salve, serving to remind me how lucky I am to have at least experienced those glorious days. Today’s generation will never know the joy of watching television with ten other families, or savouring a small sliver of Dairy Milk with siblings and parents. But the fact that such a generation, such a time once existed gives me hope. Like old fashions come back as today’s hip trend, who knows… one day old lifestyles may become the norm. And the children of today just might get a glimpse into the simple life of the past that brought great joys.

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Author’s Note: Image for illustration purposes only generated via AI image generator at firefly.adobe.com