A Privileged Childhood?

(This post has been inspired by the Mad Momma's angst about her son's nursery school admission and her unease at the prospect of him having only privileged, rich children as peers)
In retrospect, yes, I was extremely privileged. My father was a junior government employee who went, on assignment, to England when I was not even two years old. We lived on the first floor of a house with a beautiful bay window, and we had toys, books, good clothes and a good education in private schools. What we didn't have was a sense of belonging. This was in the late fifties and early sixties, when Britain was nowhere as multicultural as it is today. A sense of alienation was a part of my psyche for a very long time after that. We returned when I was eight years old, to an India of which my sister and I had neither memory nor concept. Since our knowledge of Hindi was rudimentary at best, despite my mother's sincere efforts, our educational options were restricted to 'English medium' schools. We went to a convent school for four years, where our fluency in English was an asset. My father paid far more than he could really afford, but my sister and I were happy students and did well. Other children's socio-economic status was neither apparent nor distressing. Some girls did come to school by car, and a rare invitation to a birthday party took us to a larger, fancier home. My sister and I used public transport, along with several other girls from our school. As academic achievers, we were generally confident and self-assured.
Our home was in a middle-class, government 'colony'. The several hundred houses of the kind we lived in were divided into blocks. Each house had a large front verandah, a small room, a big room, a small back verandah, kitchen and store room, a bathroom and a toilet. If you were lucky enough to live on the first floor, as we were, you also had a large private terrace with high walls, and an open 'barsaati'.
In our particular block of eight flats, we were privileged for several reasons. We had lived in England, and so we had material goods that were considered to be luxury items in the early sixties- a fridge, a transistor radio, an electric cooking range, Pyrex dishes, good cardigans and coats. (We had no furniture for a long time, but our home was comfortable with aesthetically covered trunks as settees, and pretty covers for our beds, which were, of course, string cots - charpais). We also went to a convent school, which was considered very expensive then. All our neighbours' children went to government schools. Our particular block of eight flats had a peculiar demographic- three families had eight or nine children each, the others had maybe four or five. The people with many children all sublet the smaller room to a tenant. In our immediate neighbourhood, we were at the top of the heap. My father also had an uncle and a cousin in the civil services, so we also had people with cars visit us fairly often. I assume that the rest of our colony was as mixed as our little part of it was. My father had an old friend who lived in another block, he also had five children and had also sublet a room, but he did make sure that his children went to better schools than the government run ones.(One of his sons went to one of the IITs, a daughter did a PhD). The same structure was used in several ways. Several people got the front and/or back verandah glazed, or the upstairs barsaati 'covered'. There were many fairly prosperous residents whose homes were well decorated as well. We used to play outdoors with our neighbours' children, but though they were people we played with, with whom we had lots of fun, lots of wild games of cricket and 'pitthoo' and 'staapu', they were not friends, not people we confided in or shared our deepest thoughts with. We were far too snooty ourselves to think of them as friends. Our 'friends' were all part of the 'decent', English speaking world of our school! ( Any sense of compassion and equality that I now possess is a result of my fabulous college education). Our extended family also thought we were very special girls because of our stay abroad at an early age, so we were generally made much off and yet kept thoroughly grounded by various relatives at different times!
After four years in the convent, when my sister was about to enter the ninth grade, my father decided that we should now move to a government aided higher secondary school, where the syllabus would be more conducive to college admissions later on. This was a school with an excellent academic record. At the time of the admission test the crowd of applicants was enormous, even that many years ago. Well, we got into this school which was very different from our convent. For one thing, there was no uniform- the Principal loved seeing all the students in different kinds of colourful clothes. The hours were also much longer, so instead of the sandwich snack we were used to, my sister and I carried a 'proper' lunch of parathas and sabzi. Tiffins became an introduction to different kinds of cuisine. There are many dishes that I became familiar with only from school friends' lunch boxes! Since our school had a large percentage of Bengali students, the week after the Puja holidays was rather painful to the non-Bengalis, because for four to six days, all the Bengali girls would wear a brand new outfit every day! Once we realised that this was an annual affair, and the only time of year these girls got new clothes, it ceased to matter. For the rest of us, new clothes were perhaps bought for Diwali, or for a family event like a wedding. And they were simple clothes which were quite multi-purpose: the churidar kurtas I wore for my cousin's wedding were simple enough to wear to school. My mother would sew skirts and blouses for us, and also had lots of interesting material that she'd bought in England, and would pull it out of her stock and sew whatever was needed. (My sister was a very determined sort of person- she stitched a beautiful frilly dress for me when she was all of twelve years old). My brother was still studying in England when we came back to India, and once he started working, we were really in clover. He would bring us lovely twin sets and really fashionable trousers and tops and the knee-length lacy white socks that were in fashion then. ( Socks we were supposed to wash ourselves. My mother would wash our clothes, but our sweaty, smelly socks and handkerchiefs we had to wash ourselves.
For years and years we only had the rather smelly and one-eyed, scary looking sweeper woman who came to clean the bathroom and toilet, as our sole employee. My mother would cook, clean,launder, sew, make pickles, and always but always have a dabba-full (an old Cheeslings tin) of some home-made snack. She would also read magazines ( we used to get Femina regularly) and have an afternoon nap. I was probably in the ninth or tenth grade when she finally employed a part time maid. During the summer holidays, my sister and I had to take over the cleaning of the house i.e. the sweeping and swabbing, and in the evening we would take turns making dinner. As I child I loved going out, anywhere. My father used to buy vegetables every week from a small mandi that was atop a slope. I would tag along for the sheer pleasure of coasting down the hill on his bicycle. Putting the veggies away was fun too- first I'd be a sabzi-wali, and arrange all the vegetables neatly, and then put them away. We didn't have much money, but life was good.My father's uncle was very pleased whenever we did well in our exams, and as a reward would take us to the bookshop near his house and allow us to choose one book each. We also used to borrow books from him. Buying books and music was a luxury. In those days the Delhi Public Library had mobile vans, which would park near our house every Monday afternoon. We managed to read a great deal, borrowing from various sources, and having a few good books of our own. My father also had a beautiful radio, a record changer and a few records, and lots of music taped on his spool playing tape-recorder. As we grew older and less interested in ruffianly games in our 'block', we would be allowed to visit friends who lived within an easy walking distance of our house, which meant people of a largely similar social stratum as ours.
Our school had a large fleet of buses, including a double-decker, so practically everyone used the school bus. There was one rather well-to-do girl in our class who would occasionally come to school in her chauffeur-driven Ambassador, but that was it, I think. Among our peers, what really mattered was how well you were doing in class, in sports, in dramatics, writing, art and photography... Whatever talents you had were nurtured. Science students were encouraged to sit for the Science Talent Scholarship exam.
My sister also happened to become the head girl of the school, so I inevitably got to bask in her reflected glory. We had the usual teenage woes, crushes, complexes, but, although we knew that there was not much money available and we weren't rich, we were most certainly not poor either. I have rather broad and unbeautiful feet so I can rarely find or wear fancy footwear that fits me, and I used to be quite miserable about it, until my father very gently pointed out that I should be thankful for having functional, healthy feet. Reminds me of the saying, "I cried because I had no shoes till I saw the man who had no feet".
I honestly don't think I ever felt less than privileged as a youngster. We were so much better off than many other people whom we saw everyday.