Knot, Knutten, Cnyttan
We were driving through Garia Hat yesterday evening, on way to a stopover at Bunkaari and a meal at
Tamarind, when my wife pointed out at a shop whose goods are about as rare today as they were plentiful during my childhood- skeins or balls of wool. I did not spot the shop as we sped past- as such the traffic and the footpath canvasses/ plastic sheets of street shops do not give you much chance of a second dekko. But with my mother sitting in the car as well- and mention of wool skeins triggered a torrent of childhood memories.
Winters and knitting activity were inseparable then. The magazines would bring out special supplements and features on designs of sweaters - much as they do for food recipes and electronic gizmos nowadays. Shops and footpaths would swell and spill over with these skeins- of pure wool or cashmilon, of different plies, shapes and colours ( including bicolours and tricolours) and weights. During visits to markets with our mother, a stopover for purchase of wool was mandatory. And probably the only time our consent was taken for anything bought for us was regarding the choice of colour of the sweater - it also helped that unlike books and summer uniform, winter wear was not of any prescribed hue in my school. It was, indeed, quite teasingly odd that while the boys could wear sweaters and jerseys of all colours, across the road and beyond a pond, a school persevered with its unfailing , and fairly successful, endeavour to convert itself into a nunnery- prescribing an unattractive navy blue for its grim faced students. What is the fun of being a girl if you all have to dress alike- takes away the whole fun, I 'd say!
As boys, we were not expected to learn knitting but could never remain unaffected either. However much we three urchins could mess up and get away with other things in the house, there was zero tolerance about messing around my mother's knitting station- that one and a half meter radius from the chair she would sit to knit, as the colourful skeins bobbed about like Zoozoos , threatening to entangle hopelessly amongst themselves- especially when the more serious two colour knitting would be in progress, or when she had other women, chatting and knitting simultaneously ( which I always felt they were not capable of doing) . We hardly helped our mother with kitchen or other household chores, except doing our beds and carrying our plates to the kitchen sink, but it was quite par for the course to assist her with rolling crimped wool, recently unthreaded from an old sweater, into balls.
And very early in our lives we understood that hell hath no fury than a woman whose knitting pins had
been misplaced . The house would be agog with chatter of ladies regarding which the 'number' of pins to be used, the right combination of colours, 'do ultaa do seedha for the border' and "Mrs. Jain, yeh oon ka sample sambhaal kar rakhiyega, lagta hai you may have to buy extra ooon" and so on and so forth. And many would flock to my mother for advice when their knitting entered the critical phase- the stage of the neck ( boat, round, high, V and what not), when three or four 'both sides pointed' needles would be used in tandem. And she would preside over these sessions, almost like a matriarch, with her box of needles, a packet of 'design tiles' and some dog eared 'sweater specials ' of foreign origin which she could have picked up during her visits to Calcutta - guiding, admonishing, and even rolling over the floor with laughter during the many "Honey, I shrunk the kids" enactments of knitting by the odd inexperienced hand.
A sweater was always a labour of love. Even today when ready made garments are the order of the day, my mother prefers to knit sweaters for the newborns in the family- a particularly fecund branch has recently been blessed with three , and my wife's next shopping errand for her mother in law is to buy the wool for them. I was torn apart from this activity when I left my home to join college at Delhi where to my amusement and surprise , I found the male Gharwali Hostel staff knitting sweaters during their off hours in winters - though I continued to wear sweaters knitted by my mother even after joining my job towards the last years of the 1980s. But khaki uniforms are such a killjoy for home knitting - and slowly, home knitted sweaters passed into that drawer of memory, which one shares more with one's siblings than with spouse and children- young parents, the childhood house, school and schoolbags, Carmel girls and pretty school teachers, pranks and picnics, fights and frolic, Sholay and Trishul, etc.
Nowadays, I hardly see much of knitting in my house. My wife is a veteran of ten odd sweaters and as a mark of her attachment, silent atonement, and probably token respect for her mother in law's passion for knitting, has kept her needles tucked away in the drawer of an old cupboard- though does nothing else with them. I was pleasantly taken aback when in the year 2000, on day One at Eden Gardens, we sat next to a septuagenarian Australian couple. The woman was knitting, and in between her knitting work, was writing scores even as Martin Hayden and ( was it?) Justin Langer were batting- and we would ask her for the scores since the Scoreboard was not visible from where we sat. Watching that woman knit and write scores I realised why Australia is such a great cricketing Test playing nation - abounding in the virtues of patience and passion.
