A Tribute to my Favourite Aunt

She was a wonderful person and I loved her. My world would be different without her in it. Not that i visited her often. Of late, me being away from kochin, and then my illness had prevented me from what i loved doing – looking up my aunts and uncles.

I regret it now. Intensely. Whenever we get a chance, we must visit them. Having not enough time should not be an excuse. For we’ll have all the time in the world for regrets when death , like a thief, snatches them away, without prior notice.

As it happened in the case of my ammai. To think that she’s no longer there when i feel like seeing her or talking to her – it’s painful. The knowledge that she has left my world for good – it’s difficult to digest.

She was my mother’s brother’s wife who inhabited my earliest memories very prominently. She was fun, great fun. Come vacation and she’d come home and take me to her home where i had female cousins around my age with whom i could have girlie talks and games. (i grew up among six boys. My sister, was already across the seven seas by the time i was six).

She used to spend lots of time with us, the small girl’s gang and make us laugh, and laugh at all our stupid stories and the silly things we said and did.

And she was a GREAT cook. The greatest I’ve met, I’d say. She’d announce the special dish she was planning to make and get us all highly excited.

“Today, we’ll make Kashmiri Biriyani”, she announced once.

I was excited. My mother made excellent Kerala biriyanis, and i didn’t know then (I was in high school), biriyani came in other forms too. I hung around her while she made it, and she explained to me at each stage – not the way the divas of the cookery shows do. She did it with so much earnestness and love, in a language that a teenager would understand - a sincere and earnest effort at grooming her niece.

How much garlic do you need, ammai? I’d ask.

The size of a lemon when ground.Ginger too, that much.

And the final product was simply awesome, the taste, the visual appeal and all. I am not exaggerating when i say I’ve never, ever tasted a better biriyani than the one Alekutty ammai made that day.

It’s going to be cashew sweets today, she announced another day.

After she cooked crushed cashew nuts in milk and sugar, she brought it to a consistency where it could be made into small balls, and then threw them into a tray in which she had mixed sugar and mild rose milk colour. My cousins and i sat across her and rolled them in the mixture so they’d come with a beautiful pink coating, and then pop them into our mouths.

Memories. Of the lovely days i spent in ammai’s house. Am getting overwhelmed by them. She was so full of love. So full of fun. So full of laughter.

And her narrative skills were simply incredible. She’d have us all agog with suspense one moment, then have us dissolve in uncontrollable laughter.

She was a unique person and i loved her.

My fondest memories go back to the days i went to boarding school in Pondicherry. She’d come home with a huge tuck box, full of my favourite snacks. Then she’d come into my room to see if she can help with packing. She’d give me bits and pieces of advice – things a growing adoloscent should know, in a light hearted way which’d make me smile but not miss the message.

And when i got married, she asked for the privilege of buying my wedding saree. I still treasure that beautiful piece in golden brocade.

I was her niece, but i have always felt that she loved me like her own daughter.
And it breaks my heart hat I’m so far away that I can’t be there to bid her the final good bye.

Mebbe it’s better that way. I’d rather remember her as my vivacious aunt with a heart full of fun and love, with that irresistible twinkle in her eye!

I Miss Trivandrum

Looking out from my apartment in Kochin, my mind travels back to my four year stint in Trivandrum, in the 11th floor of an apartment in that capital city. The feel is different. it was the tops of coconut trees that greeted me there, with a few high rises here and there peeping out apologetically for interrupting the vast stretch of greenery. It’s different here in Kochi. The view is perhaps very good, considering i am in Kochi. Coconut trees are there in plenty, here too, as we look out from the 4 balconies of my apartment near Vytilla. But the difference is something we cannot wish away.

The trees themselves are not as healthy as in Trivandrum. Besides, the high rises are too many – and ominous. They seem to say ‘we’ll take over soon!”.

I long for those visions of undulating stretch of swaying coconut palms visible from my Cliff dale Apartment –that green taking on a Nilgiris blue shade as it stretches towards the periphery of the range of vision, and finally transforming into a bluish green gray misty hue trying to merge into the distant horizon!

No such misty vision from my habitat here in Kochin. The edge of green is concretely frontiered by high rises and whatever promises they hold. But they are concrete – nothing left to the imagination.

That is not all. Trivandrum is a laid back little city, and it suits the temperament of a retired person like me who’d like to hang on to the remnants of a lifetime of academic activity which was cut short rather prematurely by circumstances. Thus i get to attend a seminar, or a conference, a poetry reading session, a music performance, all of which are a plenty there. Not that Kochi is starved of those activities. Among the other huge multi crore happenings, these don’t get the type of media attention which a slight cultural stir gets in TVM.

Interesting things happen in Trivandrum. Socio-cultural-civil activisms mushroom in that little city. A group of youngsters, for instance, meet once a week to plan out how they can contribute their mite to minimise production of degradable waste in the little city. They have no funds, hence no venue which would incur expenditure. So they meet in the museum. I once attended their meeting. It’s a medley group. Students, professionals, unemployed –all young people from different walks of life but who come together to put their resources together to find ways and means of making optimum use of existing infrastructure for minimising waste. Their earnestness was touching.

This is but one instance of social activism that’s part of the character of the city. It is a city with a lot of awareness about social injustice and failure of governance. The enlightened in Trivandrum refuse to settle down to the easy existence of armchair critics. They try to contribute their bit, knowing full well their efforts are not going to move mountains; but they are willing to do whatever they can to make that small difference. The group of youngsters i mentioned earlier went around with dustpans and baskets during a human chain to prevent the littering of the streets of Trivandrum. Their action not only spared the corporation the massive task of clearing the streets after the mega show, but lighted small sparks in the hearts of many a citizen about responsibility of every individual to protect the environment.

Strange that no one asked how, after such a massive turnout of human beings, the streets of Trivandrum were spick and span. These motivated youngsters did not come out to claim the credit either!

And the brain behind this movement is a chit of a girl who created this group through a website.

I know a leading academician in Trivandrum who made a firsthand study of the predicament of adivasis. She presents learned theory heavy papers on the mode of development that causes a large section of humanity to fall by the wayside. But that’s the less important fact. She has inspired a group of students to acquaint themselves with this ‘other India’, with the result that the guru and shikshyas give financial support to deserving people among these neglected Indian citizens in the deep forests of Wyanad.

None knows about this even in the institution where this conscientious lady works. I came by this information by accident.

That’s Trivandrum. It houses such noble people who walk the talk, who don’t take their privileges as their exclusive birthright.

I miss the Trivandrum with its colourful secretariat. The things people go on protest against! The delightful slogans! A mockery of democracy as some people say? Well, not really, i guess. The tents on the footpath of the Secretariat represent the power which rests on the people in a democracy- the right to protest, the right to be heard, the right to be seen by the powers that be.

It was my greatest desire to sit in protest before the secretariat and have my voice heard by the people and their elected representatives about a couple of issues i felt strongly about. My husband laughed each time i told him about it, but never stood in the way, the surest indication that the footpath before the secretariat offered a respectable and accepted platform for protest.

And then those beautiful old buildings reminiscent of the days when the rulers of Travancore tried to accommodate the best of the western culture within the time tested traditional frames of indigenous way of life. The drive from the LMS junction to Statue always gave me goose bumps from a sense of history stirring in some remote regions of my consciousness - - -.

The LMS church in grey rubble is an artefact frozen in time. The avenue from Kowdyar to Vellayambalam remains almost unchanged - as it was years ago, is now – and most probably shall ever be.

The Paliam junction with the church, mosque and the temple in a triangle belies the artificially whipped up image of India as a country breaking up along communal lines. The university behind these with the lackadaisical movements of the people on its campus enforce the image of Trivandrum as a thinking state but laid back in deeds.

It is easy to belong to that city.

Trivandrum, I miss you!

Monsoon ramblings

Monsoons is a stale topic for writers but it continues to invade the print, electronic, audio and virtual media the same way it does my mind, flooding it with memories which spread in my being sensations that defy description; sensations that warm my whole self with feelings pleasant yet sad, feelings of longing for days that have been claimed by the past.

I have always loved the monsoon. I continue to love it. My love for it has never waned. I suppose all keralites have loved monsoon some time in their lives, because before we grew into adults, we were all children who yelled and screamed and ran into the open to get drenched by the first showers before the elders dragged us inside to safeguard us from the pollutants that the first rains bring down with it. When practical wisdom dawns on us, man becomes wary of the rains. It becomes the season of fevers and chills. It becomes the season when the going gets tough. It becomes the “rainy day” of the English idiom.

Monsoons dominate the imagination and conversation long before they actually arrive. Traditional households start preparing for the rains from January. If houses are to be painted, it has to be before the rains. Every minute of the scorching heat of summer is utilised to dry tamarind, raw mango, fish, tapioca - you name it. Those with stubborn loyalty to cotton saris, starch them in advance with a vengeance, while others who are practical refurbish their wardrobes with “Garden saris”, (as nylon type synthetic saris are called) for the monsoons.

In my home too, the monsoon mood arrived long before the showers actually came down to cool the molten hot earth. Every time the “mazhakaalam” (rainy season) was mentioned in the house (all elders and domestic helps mentioned it all the time in some context or the other), we children counted the days. Sometimes by mid May showers came but did not stay. Some called it summer showers while others, feelers sent out by monsoons. But these brief showers which were kind while they lasted, sent humidity shooting up with the return of the sun, and made summer more oppressive. When edavapaathi, as South west monsoon is called – arrived, it came in right royal style, pouring down like sheets of water, drenching the earth, cooling it, pausing and then pouring down again before the sun could get into action.

As a child, i loved the rains. As an adult too, i love it. My honeymoon with the monsoons was never over. It defied the laws of honeymoon. Even while i commuted 200 kilometres by train every day, or when my job involved travelling in overcrowded bus with rain pouring down mercilessly, or when i got drenched and had to walk into the classroom for my lectures in a sari wet and mud sullied at the bottom and the blouse sleeves wet and clinging uncomfortably to my arm depriving me of that portion of dignity i allotted to my sartorial self, i still loved the monsoon.

Why? I honestly do not know. Perhaps it evoked nostalgia of childhood days of coloured umbrellas and raincoats, of splashing water on my friends and siblings, of amma scolding and roughly drying my hair and giving me hot glass of ovaltine, of sitting in the class and looking at each other to find out who is the wettest of us all, of sister S once taking me to the boarding to give me a change of ill-fitting dress which made my class laugh when i walked in dry borrowed clothes of some obese senior.

Or maybe it is something in my personality which makes me feel comfortable with day when monsoon clouds hide the sun, making the day from morning to sunset look like evening. As a commuter, sometimes travelling in compartments flooded with rain water let in by the gap filled widows, I’ve heard people curse the rain. Hitching the sari up so that it remained above the ankle, I’ve silently told myself that it’s better than the scorching heat of summer which tires you out utterly. All i have to do once i reach home is to get into warm clothes after a shower and settle down before the TV with my children and a hot drink. The thought itself was so cosy that once a friend who was huffing and puffing, feeling harassed by the discomforts of the rains asked me why i was smiling to myself!

I’ll conclude this rather pointless rambling with a monsoon incident which visits me every year with the rains. I was in 5th standard, and went to St. Teresa’s school in Ernakulum. My house was quite far from the school, and my over protective mother never permitted me to walk back and forth to school alone. She either sent a familiar cycle rickshaw or the car. One year, the monsoons did not arrive on the first of June. It was delayed by a few days, and on a Wednesday, in the last period of the day, the world suddenly became dark. I felt the familiar thrill rise within me. I switched off from the classroom happenings and looked out at the sky from my window seat. I could feel the rains crouching and get tense up there before the leap. And then it came down. It poured with a thunderous sound. The music teacher stopped her struggle to teach the excited class “akhilanda mandapam”. She sat down while the excited class shouted at the top of their voices. The bell rang and i ran out with a few like me while others stood on the veranda shouting out to the teacher that we were playing in the rain. The teachers shouted their students back into the veranda and gave us a dressing down. We the students without umbrellas were asked to wait till the rains subsided and then go home.

Finally when we were allowed to go, it was some fifteen minutes after the bell. I ran to the place where our car was usually parked only to find its back disappearing way down the road. Now, you must be wondering how i recognised the car? Well, those were days when there were not many cars on the road. Traffic jams were unheard of in Ernakulum. Besides, my car was a Hindustan and was painted - hold your breath – parrot green. So everybody knew my car. As i stood watching the receding back of the car, the rain came down again, and i decided to run home. I didn’t want to wait for the car to come back, which i knew it surely would. So i ran, without umbrella or raincoat, with the light school bag strung across my chest and the Hawaii chapels splashing my uniform skirt with a generous quota of dirt.

As i crossed the MG road and entered the cutting to Chittor road at what is now the Shenoy's theatre. I saw the green Hindustan with its ugly face coming towards me. It stopped near me, and the back door opened to reveal the angry and anxious face of amma.

“Why didn’t you wait there? You knew the car would come back”

Now, how can i tell her i wanted to run in the rain and get wet? I was young but old enough to know that besides the anxiety about falling sick, there was this anxiety about a growing nazrani girl defying the laws of discipline prescribed for the poor girl children of the community.

“My friend gave me a lift”, i lied.

“Which friend? And why did she let you out in the rain instead of dropping you all the way home? And haven’t i told you not to accept lifts from anyone?”

It was better not to have lied, i realised, but to admit the lie would have raised issues of the breaking of the Ten Commandments. So i decided to take the lie forward.

“She said her father needed the car, so she’ll drop me here.”

“What?” Amma really looked angry. How can anyone do that to her little daughter whom she was bringing up like cut glass?

“Who is this girl? “She asked in that deadly quiet voice which warned me about giving any genuine name. I knew amma will drive straigt to the nonexitant friend’s house to speak sweetly but sternly to her mother.

“I don’t know her name, amma. She’s not in my class”, the lie began to take an identity.

“So you came with a person you don’t know at all? You don’t even know her name!”

“Amma, i see her every day, when i wait at Baby’s shop for the car or cycle rickshaw, but we’ve never spoken to each other”

The next day, as i was going to school, amma said; “Molly. Find out the name of the girl who gave you the lift yesterday. If she has a phone, get the number, and find out where she lives”.

I realised that if i didn’t kill that lie, it’ll haunt me and hunt me.

“Amma, i will not do it.”, i said.

“Why?” she asked angrily.

“If i get her details, you’ll go and talk to her mother. Then she will come to school and tell all her friends and my class mates and they will ostracise me. If that happens, I’ll never never go to school again’.

That did it. Amma knew she’d have trouble with me if what i feared happened. So she let it go at that, but not before extracting a promise from me that i’ll never ever take a lift from strangers.

Even the week before she died, almost a quarter century after this episode, she spoke to me about it, and expressed horror at me being left out in the open all alone to brave the rain. She was a much more mellowed person by then and i was sorely tempted to tell her the truth. But something prevented me from destroying that resentment that she nursed for so long.

We humans sometime need certain shadows to be used as punching bags, and if those shadows vanish, they leave behind a certain vacuum which might let in more hostile shadows.

I'll miss Shikha!

Strange. She exists only in my imagination. She was born there, bred there, suffered there, evolved there. Now she has outgrown me, as children outgrow their parents. That’s how it has to be. But that doesn’t change the truth that this weaning is painful.

I’ll miss Shikha when my e novel The Holy Nazrane Family concludes this week. Once the final chapter is uploaded, the umbilical cord is severed. But then that severing took place long time back – the minute she, who was conceived in my brain, took a local habitation and a name in a Nazrane family in Chennai. She has been on her own since. I had no control over. Rather, i had only as much contol over her as a mother, in the final analysis, has over a child. True she conceives it, nurtures and protects it for nine months. But once the infant is out of the protective womb of the mother and breathes in the air of the world, it is an individual.

So was my Shikha. She grew out of me the minute she took her place in the fictional world of my novel. I saw her behaving and dong things that pained me sometimes and made me happy at other times. Many a time she did me proud too. But i must confess that there was little i could do to change her, her life, her travails. Shika is the child of my imagination, but she carried on like any human child. She developed a life of her own, views of her own. She made her mistakes and learnt from them. She suffered, battled with her own conflicts and evolved. I could only stand by and watch – unlike a reatime mother who tries to shape her child and prepare it for life, and extends a supportive hand when the child trips and falls.

A virtual mother doesn’t have that privilege. She can only watch her offspring move about in her world and suffer the trauma of developing an individuality. I could not give Shikha those warning signals. I could just watch her unfold herself and learn the lessons of life the hard way.

Wont a realtime mother make an effort to deflect the course of her child’s life when she sees the child enter the road to peril? Why then does a virtual mother refrain from this intervention?

The reason is simple and that is, the rules are different in the two worlds. The mothers of this world take upon themselves the onus of preparing the offspring for the world which lies before them like a land of dreams, but in truth is also a land of nightmares. They also take upon themselves the equally serious task of ensuring that the offspring does not travel down the road to perdition. But the virtual mother knows better. The minute her child enters the fictional world, she loses control over her. It’s her life after that, which the mother can only record.

And when she finally steps out from the final page into aery nothing, Shikha will sink into oblivion like the millions of others like her. She is not of the material that’ll go down in history.

And I’d have seen the last of her.

But, I’ll miss her.

And there’s no way of letting her know that!

Annual Fete and Cashew Nuts

‘Molly, i hear that you get the best cashew nuts in Kerala – and cheap too”, said Mother Peter, our HM, arching her eyebrows , enlarging her large blue eyes and shaking her wimpled head vigorously up and down in that typical European style. ‘Write to your father and ask him to send us some for the fete’.

It was to be my first fete about which my friends had raised such expectations. It was a two day event hosted by our school for which the little town of Pondicherry looked forward to the whole year. The school was St. Joseph de Cluny. It was the headquarters of the Cluny convent in India. In Pondicherry, besides the convent, it had two schools – English medium which was going from strength to strength and the French medium with it dwindling population. There was an orphanage too and we boarders were not allowed to mingle with them, though in the same campus.

I joined Cluny in the first year of high school – in the 9t standard. Ever since i joined in June, I’ve been listening to the boarders raving about the annual fete. They spoke about the happening in the previous fete. Most of the conversation was about some boy or the other who could on those two days gain entry into the tall walls of the convent which guarded the chastity of the wards entrusted to them with a fierceness which, at times, was almost comical. At every opportunity, the nuns warned us about the Romeos who waited at the corner of the street.

The streets in Pondicherry are absolutely straight and were cut at regular intervals at 90 degree by equally straight roads. The Cluny convent was spread over three campuses. From the boarding to refectory, we had to cross the street. From refectory to school, we had to cross another street. The Romeos knew our routine, and the fact that the nuns were paranoid about punctuality made it easier for them to wait punctually at the street corners to catch a glimpse of and exchange smiles with their crushes.

Among the senior boarders there were two groups – the ones who had boyfriends and the ones who did not. I belonged to the latter though i had sneaking admiration for those who had the guts to have boyfriends. Now let me get this clear. The ‘boyfriend’ in those days did not mean what it means now. The girls had not spoken even once to their Romeos. All they did was to look down the street and smile at the boy whose looks they liked. And then they would go ‘steady’ with them, i.e., faithfully smile at them whenever they crossed the road. Sometimes the boy would wear a kerchief tucked in the collar. When his girlfriend crossed the road the next time, she would tuck in a kerchief in her collar (our uniforms were collared), and then their eyes would lock and they would smile. And the day would be made for them.
During the recreation time, the girl would talk with high excitement about the kerchief. She would blush and smile and bask in the comments of how handsome the boy was. All of us would laugh and giggle and tease.

I remember the handkerchief episode cos it landed me into trouble. The nuns knew that i was new and uncorrupted and therefore could be used as an agent. The boarding mistress once called me and spoke to me about this and that and without my quite realising it, the conversation veered to the boyfriend topic. In all innocence, i let her into the handkerchief incident and who’s whose boyfriend. She then gave me a French chocolate which i rushed to share with my friends who immediately got out from me what had happened. They ridiculed me for walking into the nun’s trap and yelled at me and called me James Bond and Mata hari and ostracised me. When they got their dressing down from the nuns along with the punishments like cutting out bi weekly walks on the beach(where the Romeos tore down on their bikes with silencers off), they got downright nasty with me.

I was very very miserable cos i had no intention of getting anyone into trouble. My friends from the no boyfriend group consoled me, and taught me how to evade the interrogation of the nuns. I have never walked blindly into their trap after that, but it took a long time for to gain entry into the boyfriend group.

The fete was the time when all these roadside Romeos got entry into our fortress. They quickly found out in which stalls their girl friends were and used to hang around there.

The middle campus which housed the convent, refectory and the orphanage was the site for the fete. The Pandal as the huge semi open auditorium was called, and the playground which he orphanage girls used accommodated the stalls which sold items brought/bought/donated from France. Then handicraft items, embroidered kerchiefs, tea cosy, and delightfully beautiful things done mostly by the orphanage girls were sold at exorbitant price. Things sold like hotcakes. The stalls were manned by us, students of English medium school. Sometime the crowd was so heavy that me with my over protected Nazrani upbringing used to panic. Sometimes tempers rose, for the young crowd was not free from inebriation. Commotion would immediately bring the members of the discipline committee (made up of big shots in the local community), and they would put their foot down. That’s when commotion arose and people flared up. Once this happened right in front of my stall. My partner in the counter had a street corner boyfriend who had been hanging around the whole day, smiling at her and buying things from our counter. In the afternoon, after lunch, he had apparently helped himself to some French liquor. Then he became bolder. He asked my partner for a clandestine date and she was horrified.

‘”i didn’t know you were such a rotten person”, she snapped at him.

“What did you think you were doing when you smiled at me every day?” he asked.

‘I didn’t think you were the type who would get fresh”, she said, getting scared.

‘Fresh? all i asked you was to come with me for a cup of coffee”, he said

Then she said something which made even me want to laugh.

‘You are a very bad boy’, she said, almost sobbing.

By then someone had reported the exchange and the watch and ward arrived and threw him out.

After the fate, for the rest of the year, she stared at the tip of her shoes whenever she crossed the road.

Now to get back to the cashew nuts (i got carried away by memories, sorry), i wrote to my father who promptly send 5 kilos of roasted cashew nuts of the best quality. It arrived four days before the fete. I instantly became the pet of the nuns. Five of us high school students were picked to pack cashew nuts. We put 8 pieces of cashew nuts each into small plastic packets and stacked them on a tray from which the junior boarding mistress took each of them and sealed them with a contraption I’d never seen before. Because of her presence, we couldn’t pop even one piece into our mouths. However, when the work was over, she took some broken cashew nuts which she apparently had sorted out, and gave half a handful to each of us.

These packets would be put on a tray which would be carried around by the students who were members of the JVC Club. The trays were suspended from the necks on pretty satin ribbons. I so wanted to do that duty but as i was not a JVC club member, i was denied the chance. Each packet was sold for Rs. 5, which in the mid sixties was considered to be an atrocious price.

The big day arrived. Being my first year, i was not given stall duty, so i generally went around with my friends and bought things and delicacies and French chocolate drink.

On the second day, my parents sprang a surprise on me by landing up for the fete. They were on their way to Velankanni, and decided to see me and the fete about which i had been raving and for which had asked for more pocket money for the month. Besides, my father had sent cashew nuts (for which he had paid less than Rs. 100/including parcelling and shipping charge). All these had made him curious about the event. So they decided to reroute the trip through Pondicherry.

My mother was simply horrified at the crowd through which her 14 year old daughter was running around freely. She called me and asked me to remain with them. With a protective arm around me, we went around looking at stalls.

My mother always had a fascination for embroidered stuff and so i took her to that stall. She was so taken up by what she saw that she started buying up, despite the fancy price. Both of us were engrossed in selecting the items. After the purchase, we turned around, looking for my father. And lo and behold, there he stood taking out Rs.5 from his wallet. The JVC volunteer (known for her aggressive marketing ) with the cashew nut tray suspended from her neck with colourful ribbons beamed at him as she took the money from him, and handed over a tiny packet of cashew nuts .

Then holding up the packet for me and amma to see, he winked, smiling from ear to ear.

Carriers of Oral Tradition

This topic suggested itself to me yesterday when I came across a reference to Chanson de Rolland. The very mention of the epic and I found myself in the midst of a royal banquet in honour of Charlemagne emprior (Malayalam corruption for emperor . Tho’ chakravarthy is the word, this is the term my story teller used). A little hungry boy runs into the hall and snatches the hors d’oeuvre from the emperor’s table and dashes out. The emperor orders the boy to be brought in and soon discovers it is none other than his nephew Rolland, whose mother had been banished from the kingdom. The exploits of Rolland then came to me in snatches. I remembered the sense of horror that gripped me at the image of Oliver with his body full of cuts and scratches from the battle being dropped into the well of salt. The Saracens were the villains, I remember, and Charlemagne’s army that Rolland joined was God’s favourite. I remember the final scene of the epic where Rolland, knowing he is about to die, breaks his sword to smithereens, knocking it again and again on a rock. He did not want anyone else to use his precious sword!

The above details may not be accurate for many reasons. It is recaptured from memory of the story I heard as a child from Cicily thathi (thathi is a word for sister among a certain community of Kerala Christians), the seamstress who’d been around in my house ever since I remember. I must have been around 5 or 6 when my brothers and I, with our mouths hanging open at the sheer power of her story telling , sat in front of Cicily thathi as she embroidered delicate flowers on the bed sheets or pillow covers or table cloth or sarees.

Thathi told us a lot of other stories too. Of those, I was fascinated by the story of Pulomaja, the virtuous princess who guarded her chastity fiercely.

The source of her Charlemagne stories was the verses of chavittu nadakom, a Christian art form popular in rural kerala in those days. She was a voracious reader who read novels, magazines, newspapers. She had studied only up to the 4th standard, but was a huge repository of stories, which she gathered not only from what she read, but also from what she heard from her elders.

This set me thinking. Who were the story tellers that shaped my imagination as a child? My mother? No. Not really. She didn’t tell me stories when I was a kid. She did when I grew up and had children of my own. But when I was a school going kid in the lower primary, I used to tell her stories and episodes from school and she used them as illustrations to impart to me practical and spiritual wisdom. But amma was not a storyteller.

Most of the stories I heard were from the domestic helps we had in the house – and we had quite a number . Those were difficult days and amma used to look for the slightest excuse to engage these helps so that they’d get at least 2 square meals a day. Thus it was that there was Cicily thathi who told us literary stories, Rosa cheduthy (term of respect for elder sister) and Maria cheduthy who told us stories handed down by word of mouth.

The cheduthys were not literate and so their stories had a different quality. Besides, they were not discreet enough to know that certain details should not be shared with the children of a very prudish Syrian Catholic family. Their stories sent us into peals of laughter. They were rich in physical description. The women who were the face for vices were invariably shrivelled versions of once well endowed wanton ladies. Mariacheduthy took immense pleasure in graphically describing the now pathetic condition of these sinful women. I once shared the details with amma who was furious and admonished the two cheduthys.

But Maria cheduthy could not be stopped. She resorted to blackmail. She said she wouldn’t tell us any story if we shared them with amma. My brothers, who preferred outdoor games, were not affected by the threat. But I loved Mariacheduthy’s stories with the sleaze she injected into the story of saints and virtuous people and her demo in the form of dance (this almost seventy year old lady showed me how Salome danced to seduce Herod!) and mimicry (she could imitate the emperor’s gait as well as the old wicked half naked witch, bent double on a dirty stick with her shaky grating voice).

Looking back, I realise that a whole new world opened out to me during the time I spent in the company of these cheduthys. Many looked askance at amma for allowing me to spend so much time in the company of ‘those’ people. But I loved them and their stories. The values imbedded in their stories were the same that were taught by amma and my catechism teachers. In the stories told by the cheduthys and lessons taught by the nuns I learnt the same thing – the greatest sins were those against love and chastity. I learnt that there was no sin on earth that God wouldn’t forgive; so there should be nothing on earth that i too can’t forgive. Only, the cheduthy’s had a way of making the value system appear more attractive.

Sometimes, these stories acquired a class colour. I remember Veroni cheduthy, who came into my world when i was a little older, telling me that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to go to heaven. I laughed out loud ‘cos i knew what she was getting at (she was taken to task by amma for playing truant for a week) and also ‘cos i was taught in my catechism class damage control strategies for being economically better off than her. She became furious at my reaction, and came close to me, stuck her face close to mine and said, wagging a her furious forefinger at me: “You wait and see. When you are roasting in hell, i’ll be reclining against the chest of father Abraham up there in heaven. And when you ask for a drop of water to quench your thirst, i will not give you”. She then did a right about turn and walked off from me, throwing a couple of backward glances to see how the idea appealed to me. Her face, however, was beatific, probably at the thought of amma and me roasting in hell!

I wonder if we have that category of people anymore in Kerala. Highly improbable. Universal literacy dealt the first deathblow to them by giving access to all potential carriers of oral tradition to newspapers, ma magazines and serious magazines. And now with the onslaught of the visual media, who has the time or inclination to be carriers or recipients of oral tradition?

Christmas Then and Now

Was reading a few blogs and looking at pictures and reports on Christmas – in Dubai, New York, Florida, in the giant metros and in small cities, towns and rural areas too in Kerala. And my mind slid back to sixties and seventies - - -

My earliest memories did not involve Xmas shopping, ‘cos I was a kid. Shopping must have been there, but the instant ready to use items, I’m sure were not there. Not just us children, but those of all age group got involved inn making the pulkoodu (Crib). I still remember a day before Christmas. My father in a Jubba, with his hand on his hip discussing with Mathai who was employed in his office across the street, about the ideal spot for the crib (and mind you, my father was a very busy business man!). I remember anxiously waiting to see if the spot I preferred would be decided on. It wasn’t, and then the six year old me threw tantrums. I was given a hearing and Ichayan (that’s what we called my father) agreed there’s a lot of sense in what I said – on the narrow veranda it was to be. It faced the front compound which could be accessed by a small flight of steps. It would look like the crib is on top of a hill, I said excitedly (am not sure now if the manger where Christ was born was on top of a hill). Yes, the hill effect could be easily achieved if the crib was where I wanted it, agreed my father enthusiastically. Mathai also agreed. And my day was made.

Every bit of item for the crib was gathered by my brothers and I. Some supervised, some moved in an out of the house, in the compound and the adjacent vacant plot getting bits and pieces to put the crib together . I still remember Mathai telling us siblings that if he could cover the superstructure we had built up with brown paper which could be crumpled to get that crushed effect, that’d make it look like a mountain. Some paint was remaining from the maintenance that was done in the house a couple of months back. It could be used to touch up the brown paper to improve the effect. It meant a lot of brown paper, and a lot of money.

“Mollykochey”, suggested Mathai. “You ask Ichayan. He will agree”.

I do not know if I was the favourite, but I remember I was not scared to ask him. He readily agreed, took out a note and gave me.

There was jubilations when I ran back with the money.

It was a great crib that year! Grass was uprooted from the vacant plot and arranged at the bottom of the step to create an impression of a green valley. There was even a lake in front of the crib, at the foot of the mountain, in the middle of the grassland! Mathai dug a shallow hole on the sand, placed a basin in it poured water into it and even put a few live fish into it.(I do not know if there was even a puddle in Bethlehem! But that did not matter).

In the kitchen, amma would be making cake in bulk. Yes, really bulk. Baking was done in the most primitive manner. The small oven which could be kept over the aduuppu (firewood stove) was inadequate. So a temporary firewood stove was made in the backyard, and a huge bell metal vessel (chembu) was kept over this make shift aduppu. It was filled with sand which took a long time to get hot. My brother who was closest to me in age, and I used make occasional inspection of this outdoor oven to see if the sand was hot enough for the cake mix to be arranged in the many dishes it was already poured into. Amma kept a hawk eye on us to make sure we didn't land up in the oven.

Regarding the wine, amma would have bottled it a week before Christmas.

The spade work for Christmas cooking would start late in the evening. The only thing that used to sadden me was the sight of the chicken and duck that were awaiting slaughter. I remember asking Verghese, our very versatile odd job man and who took over the role of the supervisor on that day if it would hurt them when he cut their heads off. We were shooed off when the actual killing took place.

Of course, I could block out that part of the story of the duck roast which was served with appam for Christmas breakfast.

Every Christmas of those decades has memories for me. In my time too, I have tried to keep that spirit of Christmas in my home. Even today, my crib is a cardboard carton, with some grass from the roadside and a few painted clay figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, three kings and shepherds, a few sheep and cattle and an angel suspended from the hole pierced through the “roof” of the carton.

But the world has moved on, while I continue to wallow in nostalgia. How different things are now! How commodified is that festival now! The malls and shops glitter with optic fibre lights, eco friendly glare, bright colourful and fluorescent decorations. Cakes – you get any variety of them from the shops. And wine too.

Guess I’m an old timer. All these glitter and glare leave me cold.

The Coconut Tree

she was five
when sitting on the step
of the veranda
behind the kitchen
she bent her little head
at right angle
to see the top
of a coconut tree
and the branches
swaying in the wind
beckoning to her
to join the birds
and the crows
disappearing into it
or flying out of it
and soar into the sky
soft in the dying day
and wished she were those birds
and could fly high
and wander into the heavens
and say hello to the angels
and then return
and disappear into the coconut palm.

Now five decades later
she looks down the eleventh floor
of a high end apartment
in the capital city
at the riot of coconut trees
at her feet.
Watches the birds
playing hide and seek
among its branches
and envies the birds
and the crows.

And when she roams
in lands without coconut palms
her heart swells
at the colours of fall
at strange trees that flourish
in softer climes
and looks for birds
and crows
and feels stirrings in her heart
and mind
and her whole being
and looks for her coconut trees
in vain.

Of Mallus, Bongs, Van Gogh and Don Mcleans

Am no connoisseur of art. To tell you the truth, I'm unworthy even to undo a connoisseur’s sandal strap. Have a mere smattering of the history of art. The paintings that appeal to me are usually the ones that anyone who knows anything about art would jeer at.

As a kid, I used to pour over a gigantic book of paintings which had more than 300 famous paintings. I enjoyed them ‘cos there was a footnote at the bottom of each full page painting, which gave interesting information about that particular work. There was this painting by I don’t remember who, which shows a huge potbellied Cardinal Woolsey walking with his head down. The annotation given below the picture was Cardinal Woolsey’s words in prison to the effect ”If I had served my God as I served the king, he would not have left me to the wolves”.

And then there was this painting by I don’t again remember who(Some West?) which shows Admiral Nelson dying in the battlefield. His last words formed the caption: “My God and My Country”.

Some of Rembrandt’s bathing themed pictures shocked me. I thought he was a vulgar person! So much for my knowledge of art :-).

As I grew older, whatever I knew about art was what I had picked up from my scanty reading on the subject. I remember being very angry with Sri Aurobondo for ridiculing Raja Ravi Varma who was my hero because he, Ravi Varma, was a mallu. Mr. Aurobindo thought Ravi Varma’s use of realistic style was like using the cast off clothes of the west! The western artists had already graduated from the realistic to impressionistic. I found umpteen numbers of explanations which smacked of ignorance and parochialism and the fire of youth to explain away Mr. Aurobindo’s take. He was a bong, I once argued heatedly with my friend during a seminar, when Mr. Aurobindo’s article came up for discussion. Bongs think that only what they have adopted from the west are worth it, I snapped. They behave as tho the rest of India has no right to appropriate anything of the west, I snarled. And they claim to be the seat of the renaissance in India during India’s miserable colonial days - the ones who lit the lamp of creativity in the Indian soul darkened and skewed by centuries of colonial subjugation. I’d have none of it, no matter what Mr. Aurobindo said. I argued that Bengal’s creativity smacked of slavishness and slavery, for Calcutta was the seat of the Company and the Empire for long years. I remember the lecturer intervening at that point and asking both of us (my rival, by the way, was not a bong but a tambram who was just trying to needle the usually silent-as-death mallu that was me) to shut up as neither of us knew anything of what we were talking - one more uninformed than the other, she fumed !

Needless to say, I later felt ashamed of my unusually vocal performance, but I justified myself to myself on the grounds that this mallu needling had gone too far this time!

To come back to the subject of my post, despite being such a huge dimwit about art, I developed a huge fascination for Vincent van Gogh during my graduation days. In a very strange manner, this fascination grew into an obsession through a strange coincidence.

It all began with the book LUST FOR LIFE by Irving Stone. I had just finished reading THE MOON & SIXPENCE which was Maugham’s book about Gauguin, and was persuading a friend to read it when she gave me THE LUST FOR LIFE. I loved the book ‘cos we had been introduced to impressionism and its impact on literature in the lecture classes. But it was the character of Van Gogh which scared and fascinated me. I still remember reading with utter horror the way he shaved off his ear because he kept hearing strange whispering (he had these bouts of insanity), packed the dismembered ear, walked into a pub holding the packet and bleeding profusely, and left it to be delivered to one of his prostitute friends there. Her scream when she opened it rang in my ears for many days. The despair which might have made that great painter who found his calling in life a little late in life, haunted me. After completing the book, I went picture hunting – for Van Gogh’s paintings. The book I mentioned earlier had only a sample of Van Gogh’s work. I hunted in the libraries and found some paintings in encyclopedias and other reference books. I began to get a little familiar with his works.

Now comes the coincidence.

It happened on one of those early days of my Vincent Van Gogh euphoria. It was just past seven in the morning on a Saturday, and I was listening to the Voice Of America Morning Show which was a favourite programme with a lot of people in those days. Suddenly the host announced a new composition by Don McLean’s titled VINCENT. It was, he said, about the Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh whom he briefly introduced with facts I was more than familiar with.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I had by then developed a sense of proprietorship over the artist. And my excitement knew no bounds at a song having been written and sung about him, just after I had discovered him.

Then the song began.

To date, I can’t forget the moment the first lines of the song -STARRY STARRY NIGHTS- wafted in to the room from the telefunken radiogram which had the radio at the bottom and the gramophone on top. I sat doubled over on the moda, my ear close to the speaker of the radio, listening to the incredibly beautiful song. The melody was the strangest I had heard. And listening to the tragic story of the artist ( ‘how you suffered for your sanity’ ), the details of his paintings, the insanity that he grappled with till he died and the brilliant colours that literally ‘blared’ out of his works (all of which formed part of the lyrics) gave me goose bumps. And the words “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you” sung so soulfully, melancholically had a sort of hypnotic effect on me.

Wondering why I’m waxing so eloquently on what must appear to be trivial nonissue? You see, for a young woman trapped in the little town of Kochin, in the most conservative of Syrian catholic families, books and the radio were the only window to the big world out there. For her such experiences are not mere trifling matters.

I still haven’t got fully away from the shadow of Van Gogh. Every time I hear Don McLean’s number, some of those old sentiments are revived, leaving behind a hangover of the encounter with an artist whose work I understood less than superficially, but whose insanity changed my perceptions of the very concept of sanity.

That I guess should explain the mildly(?) insane jumble of heterogeneous themes in this post?

The Tendulkar Impact

When the nation celebrates Tendulkar’s twenty years sway over its imagination, a voice keeps ringing in my years. My son’s:

“If not for you, amma, I’d have been another Tendulkar”

He grew up in those days when the one dayers were reducing the work output of the entire nation on the day the matches were held, when grandmothers in thuni & chatta were clapping hands and yelling adiyedda! Piddiyeda! oddeda! (hit, take that catch, run) discarding all ‘dignity’ and restraint that were traditionally associated with the grand old ladies of the Christian household. It was an age when television and one day cricket gave birth to a new class of cricket lovers. My son was born into that age when India lived cricket, breathed cricket, thought cricket and dreamt cricket.

My daughter too was obsessed with that sport. She too could rattle off statistics, but her interest got snuffed out the minute her hero Azaruddin was dropped. After that, it was mostly an academic interest in the game for her.

Ever since Mathew was old enough to walk steadily, he used to play cricket, with plastic bats, sticks, paper balled up & tied with jute string or with whatever that could serve as bat and ball. He would play with whoever was willing to play with him, irrespective of age and gender. Once, while in Bombay, when all the parents of the apartment complex had kept their boys indoors during the weekend to prepare for exams, I caught my son playing cricket with a three year old child who could just about walk, with his baby bat and ball, much to the delight of its young mother – and Mathew seemed to be enjoying it too!

When Mathew was in the 7th standard, he decided to get serious about his cricket. WE had just moved to Trivandrum. He found out that there was cricket coaching in the Police Parade ground by Kerala Cricket Club at 6.15 am.
“Not fair to ask papa to take you everyday. He works late “
“I’ll go by bus”.
He persuaded us to allow him to take public transport. Thus the first time he traveled alone in KSRTC was to go for cricket training.

Those days, he used to come home excited and tell me all about cricket. The only thing I remember from what he said was “Batting, amma, is all about body balancing!”. Sounded pretty odd to me – so I remember.

He was in 9th standard when he persuaded us to allow him to go the Khar Gymkhana Club for cricket coaching. I was dead against it.
“Amma. Imagine being in Bombay and not going for cricket training!”
The idea didn’t sound as preposterous to me as it did to him.My husband, a great respecter of individuals and their individuality, okayed this demand instantly, leaving very little opening for my veto.

And Mathew went for coaching four times a week, on the way back from school. On those days, he reached home by 8, bathed, ate and slept, without touching his books. The following mornings, he’d get up just in time to perform his daily ablutions, down his breakfast and rush to school.

The other mothers of the boys of Mathew’s age group in the apartment complex admonished me for letting him go for coaching in this crucial stage of his high school. Their children were pestering to be allowed to go for coaching. Mathew’s mom became a hero with them! But I was besieged by doubts about the wisdom of our decision to give in to his wishes. Since his performance in studies was good, I could find no excuse to stop the coaching.

But when he was promoted to the 10th standard – the final year in school, that crucial year which would decide his future , and therefore which makes all mothers paranoid and nervous and anxious – I put my foot down. No more coaching. Mathew tried every trick in the book to convince his father who was in half mind seeing how earnest the son was. Also, he had greater faith in Math’s cricketing abilities than me. And he was indulgent too. I remember getting a call from him once while I was at work to say that he’d given Mathew permission to go for the one day, day and night match between India and Sri Lanka (I think) - ALONE. Mathew has already reached the Wankhede stadium, he told me. So there was no point in me kicking up a racket, I thought. But how the poor hypertensive me survived that time till the boy came home, only God knows! It must have been a conspiracy between the father and son to tell me only after he was dropped off at the stadium.

As for me, I wasn’t sure how good he was at this game. True, older boys who belonged to various cricket clubs used to call Mathew as a substitute when someone did not turn up for the one day tournaments. Mathew used to come home ecstatic at his performance – literally with stars in his eyes, no doubt seeing himself as a future Tendulkar!

But I had my way. His cricket coaching was discontinued.

For a very long time, my son never missed an opportunity to tell me that if not for me, India would have seen another Tendulkar.

Today, I hope that my son, who is doing pretty ok in his chosen field (academics) would say “Amma, if not for you, I’d have been a wannabe Tendulkar”

My post on Criket: http://pareltank.blogspot.com/2006/09/cricketalk.html

Can I Speak to Mr. Baxter?

I don’t know why we called him Pathan. His real name had nothing to do with it phonetically, orthographically or lexically. No did he have the tall sturdy built of that mountain breed. Our Pathan lived bang opposite our house in Ernakulam in the sixties, and he was a fat man, totally out of shape. I remember an episode when my friend came home to copy some notes she had missed. She waited in the verandah which was used as our study room. I went in to get the note book. Suddenly, I heard her shout AIYYOOO!! My mother and I ran to the verandah to find her with her little hand covering the eyes and her lips drawn back in disgust. “Aiyyeeh Aiyeeh” she kept saying.

“What happened Chithra”, asked my mother?

She pointed to Pathan’s house, and with the other hand still over the eyes, she said “A lady is standing there without her chatta (the upper garment the Kerala Christian women wear).

Amma & I looked across to see Pathan standing on his verandah, clothed only in a huge turkey towel around his waist, well oiled for a bath and swinging his arms.

I’ve never seen amma laugh so helplessly.

So, you can imagine what Pathan looked like. Perhaps, it was because of his awkward size and shape that we children were so uncharitable as to make him the butt of our jokes and object of pranks.

Pathan’s double storeyed house had identical long verandas on the ground and first floors and we could see them from all the rooms from that side of our house. Once, when my brothers were home for summer vacation, one of them came up with a bright idea. It was past 10 o clock at night and my parents were away in our native place, which meant that the telephone which was kept in their room was free for our use or misuse.

As per the plan, one of them picked up the receiver and gave Pathan’s number to the operator. We could hear his telephone ring. With the lights off in our room, all of us watched his house. His telephone was kept in the extreme end of the upper verandah. We watched excited and tense. The phone kept ringing and ringing. Then the lights came on in a room inside and the verandah. We saw the door to the verandah open and Pathan came out, looking comical as he tried to walk fast. He took up the phone and hollered into it.

“Hello hello araanathu? (Who is it?)

“Can I speak to Mr. Baxter?” said my brother in a highly sophisticated accent.

”Sarry. Wrong number”. With great delight, we watched him bang the phone and walk away muttering.

My brothers waited for him to close the door to the verandah, and then switch off the light in his room. They gave him enough time to get back into bed and called again. Again the phone rang for a long time, then lights were switched on, door was opened and Pathan walked again towards the phone.

“Can I speak to Baxter?” This was another brother who outdid the other in the accent he put on.
“I told you there is no Baxteru here. You have the wrong number”, he screamed into phone and, and hearing him from where we were, we siblings dissolved into silent laughter. I remember tears were streaming down my face in sheer ecstasy.

The poor guy went back to bed. And then, another brother took up the phone. He could hardly control giggling when he gave the number to the operator but was cool when he asked for Baxter.

This time, what Pathan said cannot be written here. Repeating what he said would be a violation of my undertaking as a blogger not to pollute the blogsphere with obscenities.

And we saw another figure appear at the door. It was Pathan’s son, his exact replica in size and shape but younger of course. Apparently he was disturbed by all the sounds and Pathan’s loud obscenities.

“Enna appa?” he shouted. Perhaps it was the silence of the night which exaggerated all the sounds. And those people had loud voices too.

“Some ****** is playing a prank on us. They are asking for some bloody (mildest version of the real word he used) Baxteru”.

“Keep the phone off the hook appa”.

“Yeah. That’s an idea” he said.

And thus came to an end a supremely entertaining session for us.

We repeated this a few more times. But once, after banging the phone down, he stood on the veranda for sometime, looking in our direction in the dark. My brothers then decided that it was time to call off this game.

Looking back, I wonder why he didn’t try tracing the call. Maybe he wasn’t aware it could be done – and I’m sure we too weren’t aware it could be done. Phones were a pretty new and rare thing in our part of the world in the early sixties. I shudder to think of the consequences if the calls were traced to our house, and the hiding that’d have followed!

Or maybe we wouldn’t have got that hiding. Maybe we’d have been let off with a warning only. My father too had a terrific sense of humour, and he too had had a couple of mild brushes with Pathan for the latter's habit of blasting the Suprabhatham from his radio early morning and waking up the entire neighbourhood.

Mohan, my nephew and William, the Conqueror : On being an aunt

I became an aunt for the first time when I was just 6 years old. Within ten years from then, I got that honour three more times. By the time my nephew and nieces came down to India for their schooling, I was already in college. It was great fun watching them grow and feeling myself grow young with them.

Looking back, I feel foolish at the way I used to compete with them to lick the cake mixing bowl clean. When amma made cake, all of us – nephew, nieces and me – used to hover over her in order to grab the big but light vessel in which she mixed the ingredients into the cake batter. We would wait for her to transfer the batter into the last baking dish and then pounce on the vessel which would have the remnants of the cake batter. Amma always did things on a large scale; so we were glad that there would be plenty to attack, particularly when she saw to it that she left enough in the vessel for her drooling daughter and grandchildren.

Once I beat them to it. The minute I saw that amma was done with the vessel, I snatched it and ran with it, into the five acre compound. My nephew and nieces followed me, screaming, yelling and waving. Seeing that I couldn’t shake them off my trail, I gave up and dropped myself down on the grass, and the four of us fell to attacking the vessel. Wipe with the index finger, lick the finger. Wipe- lick, wipe-lick. That was me. They went at it with the whole hand and took longer time running the tongue over the hand. The fastest got the most. So we licked frantically.

We must have been quite a sight- one grown up and three children seven downwards in age, squatting in the grass, desperately licking our hands as though our lives depended on it! Believe it or not, I was already a graduate by then!

Poor kids, they used to be at the receiving end of my creative bouts. These kids were so credulous and uncritical that I could weave tales around them and watch as they looked at me with complete fascination at whatever I churned out. More often than not, my tales bore just the bare minimum similarity to the original. The rest was the product of my imagination which was always sensitive to the mood of the listeners and adjusted itself to suit the requirements of the moment. The whole exercise was a learning experience on how to customize my imagination and narrative skills. Sometimes my imagination would go berserk, and encouraged by the breathless attention of the kids, I would plunge into the wild jungle of my fancy and be carried away by my ability to fabricate details.

I remember telling Mohan the story of William the Conqueror. My little nephew had large beautiful eyes which grew larger and larger as he listened to that bit about William chopping off the hands of those who reminded him of his modest lineage. By the time I came to the end of the gruesome maiming episode, Mohan’s face was all eyes, filled with horror and sorrow and bitter anger and helplessness. The little fellow then plunged into a tirade against William the Conqueror, gesticulating savagely. The outburst must have lasted ten minutes, after which the seven year old angry young man shifted gear to become a brilliant inventor of torture techniques, devised specifically to deal with the brutal William of Normandy.

“When I get hold of him I’ll - - - “, and he’d go off into the minutiae of how he would inflict the worst possible pain on the brutal king. His descriptions were complete with the nature of the knives used, the concentration of chilly powder meant for the wounds and eyes, the size of the pieces into which the Conqueror would be chopped live - - - - - . His fury stretched over days and weeks and I began to wonder if he was losing sleep over it, for each day he would come up with new ideas regarding tools, techniques and methods of torture!

Wonder if my dear nephew remembers William the Conqueror!

Then there were those days when I was quarantined with chicken pox and put on an oil free diet. The three of them, like little monkeys, would clamber on to the window. The youngest one, being imperious by nature, would insist on being hoisted first so that she won’t be left out. The kids would pass on through the window banana chips, banana fry (pazham pori, as they called it) and whatever goodies they managed to pilfer from the kitchen. How I used to look forward to their clandestine visits through the window in those days of isolation!

My nephews and nieces – what a lot of fun they were! Recently, when I saw them, all grown up, taking in their stride the responsibilities of adults, my mind slid back to the days when the three little kuttichathans (little devils) brought such fun into my youthful days.

A Slice of Memory

‘Where are you going, amma?”

“To meet a big professor”.

“Its getting dark”, said my seven year old son, Mathew. “Shall I come with you?”

“Sure, if you can get ready in five minutes”. An instinctive gentleman, a truly chivalrous young man, I thought. Hope he remains that way always, I prayed ruefully.

“How big is this professor, amma?’?

I’d meant important but if this is what he understood - - -Well. I’ll pull a fast one on him, I decided.

“He’s very tall, taller than Monichayan uncle”.

Mathew stopped in his tracks; his jaw dropped; eyes became the size of saucers and he breathed,”My God, Monichayan uncle is 6’3”. This professor is taller?"

I nodded in agreement.

“Oh my God’, muttered my son. His eyes still remained the saucer size.

A moment’s silence and then, “Is he fat?”

“You remember that fat man in the movie into whose backside Mohanlal poked an injection needle?”

He had stopped again and was looking up at me with bated breath, in utter amazement.

“Hna“, he grunted, his eyes fixed on my face, his breath suspended as he waited for me to continue.

“Well”, I said nonchalantly ‘He is fatter than him”

Mathew stood there absolutely immobile, looking up at me, his eyes growing larger still, his jaws almost hitting his knees. Then I noticed that his eyes were turning glassy, and as he turned to walk, his hand sneaked into mine.

“His voice is gruff”, I volunteered”Like a bear’s”

He nodded silently. I smiled to myself as I felt his grip tightening.

A dark blue Ambassador car went by. “And Mathew”, I said, “He is that colour”.

Silence.

He didn’t speak a word till we reached the professor’s house.

I rang the door bell. Mathew’s face looked like he was about to enter a zoo which had a much publicized rare and dangerous animal.

The door opened and a little boy, a little bigger than Mathew, opened the door.

“Gurukal Sir here?” I asked the boy who apparently was his son.

“Please sit down. I’ll call him”, said the boy and went inside.

“Does he have lots of kurukkal (carbuncle) on his face?” Mathew whispered in my ear. Apparently, he hadn’t heard the name Gurukkal.

“SHHH”, I cautioned.

Both of us waited. I took a sidelong glance at him. His fists were clenching and unclenching... The eyes had returned to their normal size as he waited with bated breath.

The professor came in.

“Good evening sir", I said rising.

“Good Evening", he said in his soft, pleasant voice and lowered his 5ft 7inches, slim frame into the sofa.

“Who is this young man?” Dr. Gurukal asked, a smile spreading across his pleasant fair face.

"My son", I said looking at Mthew.

I then realized that my son was waiting for the “big" professor to make his appearance.

“Mathew", I said, “this is the Professor I was telling you about”.

Suddenly, Mathew’s jaw dropped. This time it nearly hit the floor. His eyes, which had abruptly reverted to the saucer size, darted from me to the prof, perhaps, 500 times in the space of a minute. The expression on his face – how does one describe it? Well, you can imagine what it’d be like when shock, disbelief, utter disappointment, amusement and anticlimactic feelings battle it out on a seven year old human face which is under the compulsion of appearing normal and polite and well behaved.

Did I see Dr. Gurukal looking at him in a puzzled manner? I can’t be sure.

I was in the Prof’s house for 10 minutes. Through the corner of my eyes, I could see Mathew’s small frame being shaken by occasional paroxysms of laughter which the marvelous boy kept under iron control.

As the door of his house shut behind us, my son doubled up and dissolved into a hysteria of merriment.

Ps. Dr. Rajan Gurukkal is the Vice Chancellor of MG University now. My son is in the final stage of his effort to earn the title of Doctor in his field of research.

Babuchayan, My Brother

On February 1, 2005, Babuchayan passed away. He was Father Abraham to the world, but to us, he was Babuchayan, our brother. He was the eldest and I, the last but one in the family of eight. He joined the seminary after graduation, but used to come home twice or thrice a year, and whenever he came, it was always like the old times.

Sure he was intelligent, but was not the most brilliant of human beings. But he reached heights that are denied even to the most brilliant of the brilliant. Both in worldly and otherworldly achievements, and also in the hearts of the people he dealt with.

Being the first born, he was intensely conscious of his position and responsibility. But that couldn’t suppress his joie de vivre. Like those occasions when we siblings cracked jokes that a priest was not supposed to appreciate. He would hoist that very serious look on to his countenance to mask his struggle to contain laughter, and would admonish us like a good priest should, till one of us told him something like “Come on Babuchayan, you better laugh or your sides will burst”. His control would then crack and he would dissolve into helpless laughter, and in the intervals of the paroxysms of merriment, he would say ”Naughty jokes, you must not crack such naughty jokes”

One of my earliest memories of him goes back to the time I was around 5 or 6. The radio was in his room, and for some reason, he disapproved of my sister listening to it for too long. I still can’t figure out if this is on account of patriarchal hangover or because he thought she should be studying. On this occasion, he had gone out for his evening walk. My sister sneaked into his room to listen to the radio, keeping me posted in the balcony to announce his return. As soon as I saw him open the gate, I ran in and informed her, and she quickly switched off the radio, ran into her room and buried her head in her books. Babuchayan came into his room, and immediately put the back of his four fingers on the radio (like we check the temperature of a person), and then marched into my sisters room.
“Were you listening to the radio?”
“No. I was studying”
“Then how come the radio is hot?”
“I don’t know”
To me,” Was she listening to the radio?” I was too young to have learnt the art of saying white lies, and blurted out the truth.
He shook his index finger at her saying, “Just you wait. I’ll tell amma”.

I have fond memories of him which take me back now to an afternoon in the drawing room of our house where my brothers and I were having post lunch gossip and fun session. One of my brothers asked me to get something to eat from the larder. I came back with a large plate full of laddoos, and all of them pounced on it. Then Babuchayan made an announcement.
“For one week we’ll give Molly some rest. We won’t make her run errands. Even girls need a break”, he said.

I wanted to fling myself on him and give him a bear hug but, he, being averse to any such demonstrations of affection, would have jumped up and run for his life had I tried. So I limited myself to just clapping my hands joyfully and looked gleefully at the disapproval writ large on the faces of my siblings closer to me in age. That one week that followed was bliss. That’s when I got an inkling as to what it feels like being a male child in a Nazrane family!

After his ordination, he was posted as the assistant parish priest in a big parish in the Nilgiris district. He was so earnest to do, to the best of his ability, his duty to his Lord and Master that he visited all the homes of his parishioners twice, on foot, within the space of six months, at the end of which period he fell ill with over exhaustion.

His next appointment as the Vice Principal and then the Principal of a boy’s school in the diocese brought out the dynamic person in him which we had not seen before. He had a major role to play, right from getting students for the school in the year it was founded to its development as one of the most innovative schools in that town. He was the first to introduce yoga, computer courses, and classical Indian dance in boys’ schools in that district.

In the late 80s he organized a national Chess tournament in the Nilgiris District. He got the public sector banks and companies to sponsor it. Young Viswanath Anand and the then big names like Dibayendu Barua and Manual Aron were some of the participants. Difficult to think of a priest, even today, taking such initiatives.

He was the member of the Lions Club. He encouraged his teachers too to take membership in clubs. I got this information from a teacher who worked with him. As we stood outside the IC unit two days before my brother died, he told me this:

“I was a shy person from a remote village in Tamilnadu. A month after I joined, Father arranged to have me inducted into the Rotary Club. Seeing my reluctance, he explained ‘You are good at your work but you need some more exposure when you deal with the type of students who come to this school. Besides, it’s good for your growth too’”. He continued “He made me what I am today. You talk to the other teachers who worked with him. They’ll also tell you similar stories’

From the conversation I had with the stream of visitors who came from his diocese and school in Nilgiris, I came to know, for the first time, of the enormity of the monetary help he had been giving to individuals, both lay and religious, and to institutions, after he rook leave from the diocese to work in the USA. “No one who approached him for help was turned away”, his close friend, a priest, told me.

All this was news to us siblings ‘cos he never told us about this. I now wish I had known this. May be then there would have been another dimension to the great regard I had for him – you know that special reverence that we always have for an altruistic person. To me, he had always been my brother Babuchayan, always generous with advice and admonitions, laughing uncontrollably at the jokes we cracked, scolding me for giving up the music lessons after seven years of training – scolding me not just once when I did it, but every time he saw me in the 35 years after that.

“You should not have stopped”, he said rolling his eyes in his typical angry way. “To be able to play piano is such a rare thing in our country. If you had perfected that skill, you could have made plenty of money giving lessons and helped people in need with that extra money. Besides, it is a kala. No. you should not have stopped. You should not have stopped” Almost the same words each time he saw me all those 35 years after I took the decision to stop getting trained in piano.

Last September, I started music lessons again, after 35 years. As I was going for the first lesson, I remembered his words and found myself thinking wistfully that had he been around, I could tell him. I smiled to myself thinking of his reaction and his “you should not have stopped” encore.

In the funeral address delivered by the officiating Bishop from his diocese, there were repeated references to the enormous monetary contribution my brother made to various worthy and humanitarian causes in the diocese. We siblings looked at each other. Why we were kept in the dark, I wondered. A true follower of Christ, I guess. The left hand should not know what the right hand was doing.

During his hospitalization, all who visited him from Nilgiris spoke of his ‘innocence”. Strange word, I thought, to describe a 66 year old person. But yes. He was that. Innocent. Not really a man of this world in many ways. He thought the world was a good place and a good person could do good things if he set his mind to it. He didn’t know how to hide his feelings. He was so transparent that you would know if he was angry or happy or nervous or amused or tense or embarrassed. No. Babuchayan could never conceal his feeling. Childlike. That’s what he was. A simple, honest, straightforward, innocent person with a tremendous drive and confidence in himself which made him rush in – with success too- into areas that the average person would hesitate to tread.

When he was finally laid to rest in Kochin, we, his siblings, stood around the grave, our feelings under iron control and maintaining a poised demeanor. As the casket was lowered, suddenly his colleagues from the school and his friends from the diocese where he worked burst out in unison. loud and clear into a Tamil song, tears streaming down their faces!!

That’s when I realised that they have seen a side of him which we siblings didn’t get an opportunity to see. There was much more to Father Abraham than the Babuchayan we knew and loved and still miss after three years.

Ramblings from a Magic Carpet

My brother downloaded some music and sent me a CD full of our family favourites - of the sixties and seventies. I played them and ---

Do you know that music can transport you through time and space? And then soft land you through mists of oblivion into forgotten regions in the vast realm of memory?

Yes. That’s exactly what happened for more than an hour when I sat in the room of the staff hostel listening to the songs we used to listen to as children, sitting before the Telefunken radiogram or the Grundig spool tape recorder. The first number was Cliff Richard’s Young Ones - and the mists begins to clear. I saw us siblings (we were quite a number) sitting together around these gadgets, listening, talking, arguing – S Janaki is better than P Leela, Jayachandran is a better than Yesudas in certain types of rendition(my music savvy brother), Jayachandran potta potta potta ,(my youngest brother –too small to take on the senior one on one), MGR is a hopeless actor (the youngest one takes a swing at the speaker), Umrigar is the greatest - none like him(that was the last but one), stories of the ongoing tussle between Minnal (nickname of an upright and uptight SI) and Sarkar Mohammed (a dashing dare devil , I think), I’ll tell amma you are actually playing book cricket when she thinks you are studying(the youngest). Then I’ll tell her you ate meat cutlet from the fridge on Friday (The last but one).

Yes. Music, more than anything else, can stir up memories of distant days and breathe life into the hazy shadows which never desert the mind but lie inert in some uninhabited alcove of that region. Scattered bits of memory fall into place like a jigsaw puzzle and images flit thru the mind, one after the other, images which move, speak, laugh and quarrel. Delicious smell of olath Irachi or chemmen frying come wafting in from our kitchen on the other side of three/four decades, to complete the images regrouping themselves in the mind with every song.

And then, one after the other, came the numbers Atlantis and Foot Tapper – both by Shadows. I got a jolt. For I was flung far far away from my childhood into the imaginary(?) city of Camelot. Images of King Arthur and his knights sitting around the round table, with their metal helmet and metallic woven armours (forget what they are called) riding leisurely through the streets of Camelot, the Excalibur, the Holy Grail. I stretched my memory to include Knight Lancelot and Queen Guinevere but couldn’t. Possible that the children’s version of The Knights of the Round Table that was gifted to me for my birthday was a sanitized one with no space for romanticized adultery. On that same birthday, my brother brought home the small turntable record of Shadows with Atlantis on one side and Foot Tapper on the other. These days, I listen to those numbers often, now that I got them with me once again. I think they are the best pieces of instrumental music I’ve ever heard. And, I guess their power to transport me to the chivalrous, idyllic world of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table through childhood memories, has something to do with what those numbers do to me.

Amma Buys Me a Saree

I was looking through some old photographs and saw one of me in a saree which took my mind to the day my mother and I went to the newly opened Parthas to buy it.

I am not one of those who pull out all the sarees in a shop before I choose one. If I find one I like, I stop looking for more "selection', and make the purchase immediately.

On that day, amma and I went straight to the cotton saree section. A youngish sales boy was at the counter. He pulled out one stack of sarees and I immediately found what I was looking for. It was a beige coloured plain saree with a lovely temple sculpture figures on the border in dark maroon. Usually, amma is the one who takes the initiative to close the deal, but this time, she just stood there, her eyes fixed on the saree. Perplexed, I turned to the sales boy and asked him to bill it and pack it. Then I felt amma's gentle hand on my arm. I turned to her and was startled to see that she had bent over with her face close to the saree and was squinting down at it. Alarmed, I asked her

'What is it, amma? What's wrong?"

She looked up, gave me a strange grin and said,

"I forgot to take my glasses"

"But surely you can see the saree without them" said I, more alarmed than ever. Oh God! Could something have happened to her vision - something I had failed to notice?

Suddenly, she straightened up, looked at the sales boy, pointed to the silk section and asked him to bring some sarees from there. My heart leapt - she was going to surprise me with a silk saree, I thought.

As soon as salesboy started walking towards the silk section, amma grabbed my arm, lowered her voice, and in a conspiratorial tone urged me.

"Moley, this saree you've selected. See if those women on the border are wearing clothes. You said they are temple sculptures, didnt you? Quick! Before he comes back"

Eighteen years after that incident, amma and I were sitting on the veranda of her house when a house to house saree vendor came in with his wares. I was about to send him away when amma called him in. It was the 21st of December, I remember, and she asked me to take a saree. It was to be her Christmas gift to me. After the vendor left, I reminded her about the way she tried censoring my saree years back. Tears of merriment running down her face, she denied ever having done it.

She didnt live to see another Christmas after that. I have maintained her last gift to me in perfect condition - wear it once in a way and relive those moments.

My Mother and My Son

It was great watching them together. Amma was 75 and my son, 6. They could carry on serious conversations for a long time in the most casual fashion. I used to love coming home to that sight of the two of them in the cane chairs in the veranda, so comfortable with each other, engaged in conversation.

One day, I came home from work and saw amma sitting in the veranda and laughing helplessly. The chair next to her was empty. I sat down in that chair and she told me this:

‘Mathan was telling me about his dangerous adventure in the school today. He and a group of students were throwing stones at a snake. It was a very big snake. When the snake turned and looked in their direction, his friends ran off but he remained there looking for more stones. Just then, the PT teacher came rushing and took him away, dragging him by the hand. I tried telling him that snakes are dangerous things and he shouldn’t ever provoke them. He insisted he was not afraid but I drilled it into his head that a snake bite can kill in a matter of seconds.

“Ok ammamma” he said, “I won’t do it again”. Hardly were the words out when two passers - by on the road called out to me, pointing to something creeping in from under the front gate. I saw a large snake easing itself from under the gate into the compound. It was a rat snake. So I relaxed and turned to mathan to see if he will keep his promise made just a second ago. His chair was empty! I was terrified. Thought he had gone to look for something to attack the snake with, as the cemented compound did not provide stones. I rushed into the house and----saw my brave grandson, the snake killer sitting on top of the dining table, crossed - legged, looking petrified! I tried to explain to him that rat snakes are harmless. But he refuses to budge. Says he’ll get down from the table only after his papa comes home!’ concluded amma, wiping the tears of laughter streaming down her face.

She laughed even more when I told that the snake he was talking about was a python, safely imprisoned in a strong concrete and steel mesh cage in the corner of the school playground.

Strange, how even at that tender age, little boys imaginatively re-enact the St. George feat!

Bringing up a Nazrani Girl Child

I do not know if all young nazrani girls born in mid 1950s were brought up like me. I was the last but one in a family of more than half a dozen male children. As a very young girl, I enjoyed climbing trees, chasing dogs, throwing stones at squirrels and playing cricket(I made up for the shortage of players in both sides!-was a left hander) or Kili(our diluted version of kabadi). My hair, neatly tied up in a pony tail in the morning, would be a terrible mess in no time. Whenever amma caught me running around with my hair looking like a golliwog’s, she used to summon me immediately and tie it up again. This happened several times during the course of the day. On certain days, when it crossed the decade mark, I would get a sound spanking but I would always manage to wriggle out of her grip before she had her fill of spanking.

Of course, she often made remarks about my gender, reflecting her anxiety about my unladylike behaviour. But it was that eventful day, when I squeezed through the window bars of a room on the first floor to get on to the tiled roof of the verandah adjacent to the kitchen, that changed my fun filled vacation routine drastically, tragically. I still remember how I achieved that feat. I worked my way carefully down the sloping roof and reaching the edge, sat down dangerously, with my feet on the metal water drain. I remember feeling literally on top of the world seeing the kitchen backyard in a new perspective. Amma came out to the backyard for something, and I called out to her with all my love for her in my voice. She looked around, not knowing where my voice came from. Then suspicion dawned on her and she lifted her eyes slowly to the roof. I can never ever forget that look of horror? terror?, panic? or all rolled into one? that spread over her face. Then, a slow strange, weird smile spread on her face while she spoke sweet nothings to me. In the meanwhile, our odd job man arrived with the ladder and brought me down from my perch in the heights. Amma’s expression changed the minute she realized that I was out of danger and I saw red lights which warned that I had better bolt. I tried to but she was quicker. What a thrashing I got!! but as usual, I managed to get away when she was only half way through and ran for my life, but not before turning back to look at her and do a little jig to show her I had outsmarted her once again.

That jig did the trick. I was so unrepentant that she decided that it would not do for a girl to grow up like a tomboy. From the next day onwards, I was sent to a convent in the neighbourhood, where I learnt running stitch and hemming and chain stitch and French knots and satin stitch and lazy daisy and and and . I also listened to the lives of saints. The nuns taught me the prayers that would help me to become a saint. I refused to say those prayers because I didn’t want to become a saint. They threw the scare of the devil into me about the devil and hell; told me how beautiful it’d be to go to heaven and sing “holy holy’ day in and day out!

From nine to four, during every midsummer vacation till I reached the fourth class, I went to the convent. After that, we shifted to a different locality where there was no convent within walking distance. Anyway, by then, I had begun to think in a gendered fashion.

How Amma made Appams

It never ceased to astonish my mother that I could make appam and stew twice or even thrice a week. I told her that mixies and shortcut methods have made this once considered delicacy a routine and common item on the normal menu of even a busy working housewife.

But, I asked her, are my appams anything like what u used to make, amma? Yours were incredibly delicious! Amma was not one for gloating over her culinary competence, and so replied that they were all the same.

But they were not the same. Starting from the process to the method to the final product, it was a very very different ball game.

In her days, making appams was an event. It was usually a breakfast item, though once in a way, it was served for lunch too. The event would start the day before with her announcement that the next day’s breakfast would be appam. Her helpers’ faces would fall and they would look at each other meaningfully. She would then take raw rice, measure the required quantity, put it in a muram (large bamboo tray) and give it to the youngest help in the kitchen – ‘cos her eyesight was the best - for cleaning. Amma would hover around her to see if she is doing a neat(literally!) job of it. Once the cleaning is done, amma would take the muram from her for inspection, and with her inferior eye sight would pick out small stones and black rice and put them one by one into the girl’s extended palm. Then it would be handed back to her to be washed thoroughly and soaked for 30 minutes and then drained. ‘Wash it well’ she would say several times while the maid would nod with a long suffering look.

Then the preparation would start for pounding the rice. The oral (stone with a hollow, used for pounding) cleaning would be ordered and amma would be around to see it was done properly. After the maid was done with cleaning, she would look at amma who would nod in approval but nevertheless take a clean towel and run it into the hollow of the oral – just for her satisfaction. The maid dared not snigger or make any remarks.

And then the pounding would start. Amma refused to leave the work area where this activity took lace. She’d hang around with a hawk’s eye to make sure the maid did not scratch her head or put her finger into her ear. The maids knew her well enough to grin and bear any itching or discomfort in those parts of their anatomy while she was around. When the first round(trip, as the maids call it) of pounding was over, amma sat on her low stool and would herelf sift the rice flour through a fine sieve. She didn’t like entrusting that to anyone else, cos none had her immaculate hands. I remember, as a small child, I once ran up to her asking if I cold sift the flower. She told me my hands were not clean enough. Promised to allow me the next time after she’d cleaned my hands to her satisfaction!!!!! I didn’t ask her the next time. Didn’t quite fancy the idea of getting my skin scrubbed off.

Once the pounding and sifting were over, amma would take over completely. She would make a porridge out of the rough rice flour left over after sifting, make a soft dough with it and the fine rice flour after heating the latter mildly, mix yeast and keep the dough overnight.

Next day, early morning, she would extract coconut milk from grated coconut, add it to the dough to make a thin lose appam mix, add sugar and salt to taste and keep it aside for an hour or so.

Then the preparation would start for the actual appam making. She had a quiet corner which she always used for the purpose. The kerosene stove was placed on the flor in that corner and she would sit besides it on her low stool, after she had taken care of details like the big steel tray to keep the hot appams, the lidded vessel to keep the appams after they cooled etc. The area was cordoned off with make shift objects to prevent people(particularly childrem) from coming too close to the stove. The appam manufacture would start – one ladleful of the mix poured into the paalappachatti(wok meant for making appam) giving out a hissing sound, the wok taken up, twisted round so as to spread the mix into complete circle and then replaced over the fire and closed with a lid to trap the steam inside the pan. After a minute, the lid is removed and, lo and behold! There lay the appam ready to be eaten with crisp lacy edges and spongy centre. The production was fast and soon appams would start piling up inside the lidded vessel ,on being transferred from the steel tray. And we children would help ourselves generously to them. How yummy they were! They simply crumble and melt in your mouth leaving behind a delicious aftertaste of coconut milk. I've never ever eaten such delicious appams after she stopped making them. I think, the best appams I ever ate were made by amma.