The Sundays of my Childhood

In the small cities of India in the late nineties and early 2000s — places neither smothered by the pace of the metros nor forgotten like the crumbling hamlets — Sundays carried the weight of rituals too gentle to be laws, yet too old to be questioned. Where I grew up, a city that couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it was a town or metropolis, Sundays drifted in like a lazy cow on a narrow street — unhurried, familiar, and oddly authoritative.

The week in India is a relentless machine. It groans into motion Monday morning, fueled by honking scooters, school tiffins, the slap of wet laundry, and the stubborn smell of boiling rice. But come Sunday, the machine grinds to a halt, as if the city itself had taken off its slippers and leaned back against a cracked cement wall. Fathers stayed home. Their presence was both comforting and inconvenient, like a large piece of furniture dragged into the centre of a room. They read the newspaper with such gravity, you'd think the nation depended on it. And in a way, perhaps it did.

The sun didn’t rise any later, but we did. Mothers would let the children sleep in, or pretend to. The air smelled of mustard oil and something frying—always something frying on Sundays. Pooris puffed up like the pride of a mother with dutiful sons. Halwa was scooped with reverence, even by those who scoffed at sweets the other six days. Sometimes, my father made mutton curry while my mother hovered near the kitchen, nervous about its sanctity. And the smell of it curled through windows like gossip — sharp, spiced, and impossible to keep out.

Men who had disappeared all week behind account books or scooter repair shops emerged into the light, scratching their chests and squinting against the sun like men reborn. Women who had fed armies of family through six days of spinning chapatis and scrubbing lentils finally sat down—sometimes to knit, sometimes to gossip, but most often to sip tea. Grandmothers sat on low stools near open doors, sifting rice grain by grain, letting the stones fall away with the ease of someone who had sorted many things in her life — some edible, some not. And the children, oh the children, spilled into gullies with cricket bats and cycles missing their chains, shouting English phrases in Indian tongues: “Howzzat!” and “Ball please!”

Sundays were for haircuts at the neighbourhood salon — “saloon,” they called it, a word passed down imperfectly but used perfectly well. Boys sat in plastic chairs and squirmed while barbers discussed politics and cricket as if they were the same thing. In that small cubicle playing Kishore Kumar tunes and the scent of Old Spice aftershave lotion, boys became men and men remembered they had been boys once. 

In the afternoons, especially during the summers, six-hour long power cuts were common and expected. The old ceiling fans would wheeze and slow, like tired beasts of burden. And then the storytelling would begin. Grandfathers told stories from epics and folk legends, interspersed with lies about walking ten kilometres to school and wrestling with leopards. Grandmothers sat cross-legged in cool verandas, their laps wide as the earth, dipping wrinkled fingers into coconut oil and working it into our scalps. And if you listened carefully, you could hear Lata Mangeshkar playing from someone’s old cassette deck.

Evenings brought a different flavour—perhaps a walk to the town bazaar, where mangoes glowed golden under jute sacks and radios blared remix songs that tried too hard. You could hear televisions playing Mahabharat reruns in one home and Kaun Banega Crorepati in the next. On some Sundays, families rented DVDs from the corner shop, the covers worn from too much handling, like beloved books or borrowed memories. By late evening, as if the air itself had been waiting to exhale, someone said India had won the match, and the day felt fuller, somehow more deserved.

But the bliss was not eternal. Around eight, a sadness crept in. The ironed school uniforms hanging behind the door reminded you that freedom was short-lived. Homework became a matter of conscience, then panic. The same hands that lovingly scrubbed you in your morning bath now turned stern and coaxed you into revising multiplication tables.

And yet, even in that creeping dread of Monday, there was something holy about the fading of a Sunday. You never held onto it, not really. You just breathed it in and hoped that next week, it would return the same way—like the rusty swing in the backyard or the dented steel tiffin that always came home empty. In such small things, whole worlds were kept alive.