Looking for a book to read, I took a paperback off one of our shelves. On the flyleaf was the date on which we had purchased it and the price we had paid for it. We had bought the book in 1978 for all of 10 rupees! Today’s price would be in the region of Rs 250, and indeed, 10 rupees would not even buy a box of crayons.
This reminded me of an incident that took place many years ago, in the late Fifties. We were then living in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, with its many advantages. The air was pure and clean. We had a large garden where our children, then toddlers, could run around. A kitchen garden provided us with fresh vegetables, and an orchard yielded, during the season, a vast crop of mangoes and lichis. Tethered at one end of the garden was a cow that ensured a supply of pure, un-watered milk. And, available at just one rupee a seer, was the finest quality of basmati rice.
This was extraordinarily cheap, even for those times. But not according to my mother, who was visiting us. “That’s daylight robbery!” she exclaimed. “We used to pay a rupee for a maund!” Her reaction was a source of great amusement to us and for years we dined out on the story of how she bought rice for a rupee for forty seers.
However, the story no longer strikes me as being funny. We have come full circle, and it is I who am now appalled when, for instance, my daughter pays Rs 140 for a pair of very ordinary tennis shoes for her 12-year-old daughter. Which age are you living in? she asks, in tones very reminiscent of mine to my mother.
Those were the halcyon days of the Fifties and Sixties, when on a pittance, you could live like a prince. I have an old tattered cookbook that tells it all. This is a cookbook with a difference, written by a memsahib called Pat Sharpe, for the benefit of other memsahibs, and it includes not only recipes but also detailed menus and prices for each week of the year. “For the last two years,” she writes in her introduction, “weary of the nightly battle over the cook’s book and the fact that cooks expect to double their exorbitant salaries, I have done the marketing myself ?and I know it is worth it! For, not only do I get much better quality food, but I save about Rs 3 a day!”
Three whole rupees a day! But then, that was a lot of money considering that, according to Pat Sharpe, lobsters were 12 annas each, mutton was Rs 3 a seer, and potatoes and onions were six annas a seer. Oranges, available the whole year, came at 6-12 for a rupee.
Incredible? But those were the prices though they sound as hilariously improbable today as my mother’s story of basmati for a rupee a maund! And they say that inflation has been contained!
