Ever heard of Shutter Gazina?
You may not have heard of Shutter Gazina. But you might have seen him, in reel or even real. No, it's not that he has a screen name, but this is how street urchins in Asmara, Eritrea, knew him, 20 years ago.
Eritrea is now a separate country, having seceded from Ethiopia. But I believe street children, including beggars, in its capital Asmara's streets still crowd around and try to befriend Indians by delivering Gabbar’s dialogues or simply mentioning names of Amitabh, Chassis Kaapur (Shashi Kapoor), Darmendra (Dharmendra). No prizes for guessing what they called Shatrughan Sinha, though I do wonder how they pronounce Hrithik’s name, or which Indian stars they are crazy about now.
In those days, most Eritreans (then Ethiopians) could sing songs from Hindi films, and a neighbour even asked my parents if they had sung songs and run around trees before tying the knot. Another neighbour could speak perfect Hindi, picked up from the movies.
Eritreans loved Indians because of ours songs and films. They also believed that we NRIs were there because India was a poor country where none could afford a proper meal. My father tried to help me dispel this opinion of theirs with pictures and reports from India that the Indian embassy provided us.
But they were either not wholly convinced that India actually manufactured automobiles and aircraft and had sent satellites and a man to space, or were not willing to lose the debate early. But then, if I was treated as a poor boy from India in Eritrea, I was a “Junglee African” for cousins and classmates on returning to India.
Some Eritreans found Indians funny. At my father’s workplace some Eritreans had come up with a joke on Indians that went like this: An Eritrean tells an Indian, “You Indians shake your head a lot while talking.” The Indian reacted with outright denial. “No, no, no, no,” he said,each ‘no’ emphasised with a shake of the head.
A visit by then Ethiopian leader Mengistu Hailemariam to India was one of the best days of my stay in Asmara. Coverage of his India visit on TV made my friends change their opinion, but they then started assuming that India was a land of skyscrapers and three-wheelers.
There were no English-medium schools in Asmara, so I first joined an Ethiopian-medium school. My stay there (less than a month) was too short for any memory to register at age 5. Even before I had figured out how to learn the regional language Tigrigna and national language Amharic, I got admitted to an Italian-medium school. Ethiopia had been an Italian colony once, so it had a sizeable Italian population and Italian was the third language after Amharic and Tigrigna.
Worried at the lingual turmoils I was being subjected to at such a tender age, my father accompanied me to my classroom on my first day at the Italian school. But the elderly Italian lady, who was to be my teacher, put him at ease when she welcomed me with a peck on my cheek.
To help me with my Italian, she invited me to her place on weekends where she gave me free lessons. I was soon a favourite with her retired husband, who would wait for my lessons to get over so that he could show me his garden.
All my classmates were either Italians or Ethiopians of mixed Italian-Ethiopian parentage. There was also a girl who had a British father and an Italian mother. For a short while in Class II, I had an Indian classmate, who had been my best friend before becoming a classmate. On learning that we were friends, our teacher made us sit next to each other. But when my father visited school the next time, she complained that the two of us talked a lot in class. My father suggested that we be made to sit separately, but she said she did not have the heart to do that.
In all the memories I have of Asmara I am wearing a sweater or a jacket or a coat. That’s because Asmara, at 2,325m above sea level, is cold round the year. Its dry climate ensured that there was no snow. In fact there was no rain either. The famine in that part of the world is well documented.
Once, in 1985, there was a hailstorm and it took three days for all the ice to melt. Bad for me, though, I was laid up in bed with a fractured leg and could only hear the noise of cars running over roads layered with hail.
We had a bathtub that we used to hoard water, which arrived in a tanker before it was fetched all the way up to our second-floor house in pails. Thanks to the cold and paucity of water there, it took me a while to get used to taking a bath every other day after returning to India.
Another thing that I remember about my stay in Asmara was the curfew there after midnight. There was a secession war going on between Eritrea and Ethiopia. If we went to a party, we ensured we were back at home by 11.30 pm. Only armoured vehicles and tankers ruled the streets by night and gunshots announced it was not safe to venture out. In fact, the siege at the Taj in Mumbai in 2008 reminded me of a similar 24-hour operation near our home there.
But despite an ongoing war, I never felt more secure in my life elsewhere. Credit goes to the disciplined people of Asmara. Sample this. Asmara University, where my father worked, had strict rules. Office vehicles could leave the premises by producing an official permit, which had to be returned when the vehicle returned. One day my father had left the premises in an office car when he realised he had forgotten something. So he had to return. After collecting his stuff when the car was leaving again, the guard at the gate asked for the pass. My father told him that he had returned only to collect something. But the guard just smiled and said, “The pass”.
At that very moment, my father spotted the person in charge of issuing passes, a friend of his.So he requested him to tell the guard to let him go. But even the friend smiled and said, “He won’t let you go even if I tell him. Let’s go to my office and issue you a fresh pass”.
You may not have heard of Shutter Gazina. But you might have seen him, in reel or even real. No, it's not that he has a screen name, but this is how street urchins in Asmara, Eritrea, knew him, 20 years ago.
Eritrea is now a separate country, having seceded from Ethiopia. But I believe street children, including beggars, in its capital Asmara's streets still crowd around and try to befriend Indians by delivering Gabbar’s dialogues or simply mentioning names of Amitabh, Chassis Kaapur (Shashi Kapoor), Darmendra (Dharmendra). No prizes for guessing what they called Shatrughan Sinha, though I do wonder how they pronounce Hrithik’s name, or which Indian stars they are crazy about now.
In those days, most Eritreans (then Ethiopians) could sing songs from Hindi films, and a neighbour even asked my parents if they had sung songs and run around trees before tying the knot. Another neighbour could speak perfect Hindi, picked up from the movies.
Eritreans loved Indians because of ours songs and films. They also believed that we NRIs were there because India was a poor country where none could afford a proper meal. My father tried to help me dispel this opinion of theirs with pictures and reports from India that the Indian embassy provided us.
But they were either not wholly convinced that India actually manufactured automobiles and aircraft and had sent satellites and a man to space, or were not willing to lose the debate early. But then, if I was treated as a poor boy from India in Eritrea, I was a “Junglee African” for cousins and classmates on returning to India.
Some Eritreans found Indians funny. At my father’s workplace some Eritreans had come up with a joke on Indians that went like this: An Eritrean tells an Indian, “You Indians shake your head a lot while talking.” The Indian reacted with outright denial. “No, no, no, no,” he said,each ‘no’ emphasised with a shake of the head.
A visit by then Ethiopian leader Mengistu Hailemariam to India was one of the best days of my stay in Asmara. Coverage of his India visit on TV made my friends change their opinion, but they then started assuming that India was a land of skyscrapers and three-wheelers.
There were no English-medium schools in Asmara, so I first joined an Ethiopian-medium school. My stay there (less than a month) was too short for any memory to register at age 5. Even before I had figured out how to learn the regional language Tigrigna and national language Amharic, I got admitted to an Italian-medium school. Ethiopia had been an Italian colony once, so it had a sizeable Italian population and Italian was the third language after Amharic and Tigrigna.
Worried at the lingual turmoils I was being subjected to at such a tender age, my father accompanied me to my classroom on my first day at the Italian school. But the elderly Italian lady, who was to be my teacher, put him at ease when she welcomed me with a peck on my cheek.
To help me with my Italian, she invited me to her place on weekends where she gave me free lessons. I was soon a favourite with her retired husband, who would wait for my lessons to get over so that he could show me his garden.
All my classmates were either Italians or Ethiopians of mixed Italian-Ethiopian parentage. There was also a girl who had a British father and an Italian mother. For a short while in Class II, I had an Indian classmate, who had been my best friend before becoming a classmate. On learning that we were friends, our teacher made us sit next to each other. But when my father visited school the next time, she complained that the two of us talked a lot in class. My father suggested that we be made to sit separately, but she said she did not have the heart to do that.
In all the memories I have of Asmara I am wearing a sweater or a jacket or a coat. That’s because Asmara, at 2,325m above sea level, is cold round the year. Its dry climate ensured that there was no snow. In fact there was no rain either. The famine in that part of the world is well documented.
Once, in 1985, there was a hailstorm and it took three days for all the ice to melt. Bad for me, though, I was laid up in bed with a fractured leg and could only hear the noise of cars running over roads layered with hail.
We had a bathtub that we used to hoard water, which arrived in a tanker before it was fetched all the way up to our second-floor house in pails. Thanks to the cold and paucity of water there, it took me a while to get used to taking a bath every other day after returning to India.
Another thing that I remember about my stay in Asmara was the curfew there after midnight. There was a secession war going on between Eritrea and Ethiopia. If we went to a party, we ensured we were back at home by 11.30 pm. Only armoured vehicles and tankers ruled the streets by night and gunshots announced it was not safe to venture out. In fact, the siege at the Taj in Mumbai in 2008 reminded me of a similar 24-hour operation near our home there.
But despite an ongoing war, I never felt more secure in my life elsewhere. Credit goes to the disciplined people of Asmara. Sample this. Asmara University, where my father worked, had strict rules. Office vehicles could leave the premises by producing an official permit, which had to be returned when the vehicle returned. One day my father had left the premises in an office car when he realised he had forgotten something. So he had to return. After collecting his stuff when the car was leaving again, the guard at the gate asked for the pass. My father told him that he had returned only to collect something. But the guard just smiled and said, “The pass”.
At that very moment, my father spotted the person in charge of issuing passes, a friend of his.So he requested him to tell the guard to let him go. But even the friend smiled and said, “He won’t let you go even if I tell him. Let’s go to my office and issue you a fresh pass”.
