What's your Smultronställe?

That Wild-Strawberry Feeling!

This may or may not form a part of the larger project, where movies and memories are intertwined, but this too is in the same line. Following are the two sections from the project that were published earlier.

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Spoken by the Mute, Heard by the Deaf

Do share if you wish, ‘What is your smultronställe?’

What is that place or a memory you keep returning to?

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Note: You can listen to an older version of this story by clicking the youtube link provided at the end of this post.

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When my colleagues asked me via an email, how far I wanted to live from the workplace, I simply replied, 

‘Where grow the wild strawberries!’

I don’t think they got what I was trying to imply.

For me Sweden is synonymous with that oft talked about movie by Ingmar Bergman “Wild Strawberries.”

Everyone knows what strawberries are. 

Fresh strawberries were not common in Delhi when I was growing up. But outside of India, I bought strawberries in the stores. Neatly packed in plastic containers covered with saran-wrap. 

Sometimes, when we put them in our baskets, the  sticky-red juice from overripe strawberries stained our hands, leaving their marks on our fingers delighting  our olfactory lobes.

But what were these wild strawberries that Bergman titled his most famous film after? Were they just as sweet as the store-bought ones? 

Smultron, is the Swedish word for wild strawberries. But it sounds nothing like the word for strawberry, ‘Jordgubbe’. Jord, meaning earth and gubbe, meaning — old man. But that is how languages work. Each with its own cultural sensibilities that cannot be contained in a formal language lesson. 

Smultronstället, the original Swedish title for the movie, Wild Strawberries, means a place where wild strawberries grow. 

Smultron, meaning wild strawberries, ställe, a place. 

Only it is not just a place. 

It's a feeling!

Wiki defines Smultronställe as:

- a place where smultron grow abundantly. The word can describe a place or sometimes a period of time in life where you feel joy and well-being. It could be a secret place that has a personal, sentimental value. For example, a cottage by the lake. 

Wild strawberries are fine bead-like, pea-sized berries that perfume the Swedish summer. They are tiny, but distinctive. Although they prefer sunshine, they are known to grow even in shady areas. Being a creeper, wild strawberries can easily cover the ground around them, but their leaves with serrated edges make them stand out. The flowers for wild strawberries are white, before they magically turn into glorious red. 

And Smultron’s sweetly aromatic taste is quite unique. 

It’s hard to describe. 

Like the taste of a mango. 

It’s a feeling!

When ripe, wild-strawberries melt in your hands before you can taste them. You carry the smell the entire day within your being as if they are packed with some of the nostalgia that lingers in Swedish summers.

I have many "Smultronställen". I guess everyone does. 

Here, I share one of mine. 

I lived only a few minutes walk away from the school I attended, so I had no need to take the school bus. School ending time was noisy, when the children rushed out of the school. Those who lived far were ushered into the school buses by their class teachers screaming, ‘Fall in line, Fall in line.’

I must have been around sixteen. We needed to take extra classes after school to prepare for competitive exams. 

By the time we left school, all nervous energy had calmed down to the level required to focus on solving physics numericals or trigonometry problems. 

Add to that the intense heat of late summer in Delhi - there is no way anyone could be anything but sleepy or reflective.

After the class, I packed my bag and headed home, quiet and contemplative, with my head towards the ground because the sun was unrelenting. 

Suddenly, a stick with a metal bottom tapped itself between my shoes on the ground, as if demanding me to stop. Jolted from my reflective state I looked up, flicking the right ponytail over my shoulder. 

I looked up to see my grandfather. We were in a narrow lane in between two public parks, and it was too hot for anyone to be out at that time. It felt like we were the only two people in that hot boiling universe.He was no taller than I. Five-feet-two. He looked straight into my eyes and gave a lopsided smile, that he had acquired in the last year. Then he tipped his neck backwards and raised his eyebrows.

I smiled. 

I heard no words but I knew he was asking me, ‘What thoughts are you lost in?’

A year ago he had had a stroke. With determination he had taught himself to walk again. To have walked a quarter of a kilometer away from home without anyone’s assistance was a big achievement for him. 

I don’t remember what we talked about as we walked towards home. But I remember clearly when I saw him give me that knowing smile, I felt secure. 

My grandfather, whom we affectionately called Papaji, lived with us, for all of our lives together. 

Despite the growing popularity of nuclear families, it is still common in India for parents to live with their sons and their families. The security that brought me cannot be described in words. I was not just my parents’ child, but also Papaji’s granddaughter. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him by his habits.  He spent most of his time in the front yard, either reading the newspaper or tending to his garden.

School teachers often teased me, "If you don’t behave, I’ll report you directly to your grandfather!" indicating a familiarity with him, but without having met him. 

Papaji had to leave Pakistan in the prime of his life due to India’s partition. He lost all of his savings and most of his friends with that move. He became a refugee in his own country. Shortly after moving to India he lost his wife of two decades. 

I remember how he read all the time: newspapers, magazines, and even our textbooks. But he talked very little. Was it the buried pain of having left his life behind? I would never know. 

He loved plants and planted every fruit he could. Even though he hardly went to the temple, he bowed to plants, and would never let us touch them after dark,

‘They’re sleeping. Leave’em alone.’ He’d say.

Sometimes I shared my writing with him, especially the writing that I would not dare to share with my parents. 

It was a narrow lane in between two public parks, and it was too hot for anyone to be out at the time. It felt like that we were the only two people in that hot boiling universe.

Upon entering college, I encountered a different world. I needed to process the new ideas of identity and questioning the status quo. Strange, because I went to an all-women’s college that exclusively taught Home Economics with a focus on women maintaining a household, albeit with the knowledge of scientific concepts behind home making. 

Until then, our identities were defined by our parents, rituals, language, country and sometimes the subjects we chose to study. We had no need to establish a separate identity.

The indoctrination about questioning traditional male-female roles at college was not direct, but a general environment was being developed, laying down a ground to dishonor what had gone before us. 

Impressionable as I was at eighteen, I wrote a story about a young girl who questions tradition and wants to ask herself who she is.

‘What did you think?” I asked Papaji after I shared the story with him.

‘OK’.

‘OK, what? What was the story about?”

“A girl who is questioning everything”. No judgement. No anger. 

I smiled and hugged him. 

Individual identity, as we are taught in the modern world,  as separate and free from any collective identity is a misnomer.

A professor at a university in the US, began his class on Ethics and Technology saying so lucidly, ‘‘Folks, you can ask for individual rights, only when you are benefitting from living in a society. Build a cottage in the woods, with no neighbors for miles around and people will not care  what you do.”

My ideas about individual versus community have altered much. 

To sum it up, although they offer an advantage over real life communities of geographical proximity, digital communities are only a semblance of what communities are supposed to do. Intergenerational connections are nearly impossible in digital communities. 

At that moment, on a narrow street, in the middle of two public parks, under the scorching Delhi sun, I was home.

The Delhi that I knew does not exist anymore. The city is three times as populated as when I was growing up. A city that was filled with houses with generous front and back yards, is now a city of apartments where the yards have been conjoined to turn the entire ground floor into a parking lot for oil-guzzling vehicles that proudly stifle the roads. 

The row of houses where we heard squeals of young children on the streets, followed by street vendors beckoning their regular customers, is now submerged in sounds of TV series that never seem to end. How would they, if they, in the true fashion of the American soap operas, keep reviving the dead and the lost to extend story lines? No one can hear the street vendors inside their homes anymore. They listen to fictitious characters on the TV who seem to change faces every few years. 

Yet, there is this lane, a two-minute walk from where I grew up, that evokes my childhood. Although still tree-lined, one side of the lane is littered with parked cars. 

The moment I step into the lane, a rucksack full of memories rush into my being: children playing badminton amidst name calling, ducking an incoming cricket ball; the sound of children in green school uniforms rushing out of school, screaming, fighting, making plans to study or play, trading cards of Hindu Gods and cricket players; and a yellow house where every Tuesday there was a kirtan, a sangha of women singing devotional songs for hours. That yellow house is now a four-storey apartment building, with a working elevator, and little space for children to play. But a few seconds later, at the turn, only a few houses down from where the yellow house had been, comes this narrow lane. 

That lane where Papaji stopped me.

It is still intact, looking pretty much the same, maybe because it lies between two small public parks, maybe because every Thursday evening for the last seven decades, the lane turns into a night market that sells everything under the moon.

Flowers that we remember from our childhood never loose their fragrance

I clearly remember Papaji’s lopsided smile, as he tried to raise his walking stick to my left shoulder, poking at the banana curls of a ponytail resting there. 

We both knew, he was showing off his new found ability. 

Without words. 

He was also exerting his right to stop me midway, and question me. 

With immense love and care. 

Without words.

At that moment, on a narrow street, between two public parks, under the scorching Delhi sun -- I was home. 

I knew who I was, I knew where I was going, I had a whole life of possibilities ahead of me, and my paternal grandfather, whose genetic coil I carried, provided a filial shade. 

Without words. 

With a knowing smile that linked my sixteen years to generations of the past and a hopeful future.

That was my Smultronställe, only I did not know it.

Or maybe, I called it by a different name.

Maybe Mangoställe?

So what’s your Smultronställe¹, even if you call it by another name?

You can listen to the story below (a slightly older version—by two weeks), when I read it to a writing group I belong to.

1. ^[1] Smultronställe Literally: wild strawberry place. A Smultronställe is a spot in the woods where delicious wild strawberries grow. A positive place that you keep returning to, I’ve been a favorite location in general. One of Bergman’s first classics was actually called wild strawberries – 1957, Smultronställe in Swedish. The professor, played by Ingmar Bergman’s great idol, film director Victor Sjöstrom, revisits meaningful places from his early life.

Example: “This beach is my own secret Smultronställe”

From: The Book of Lagom, Göran Everdahl