The attempt to secure an Engineering seat

The June of 1982. Engineering and Medicine were the only two options boys and girls in Gulbarga district considered after their 12th(PUC, PDC whatever). No other career avenues occurred to them. Thinking back, very few students from Wadi or Shahabad even aspired to take up Medicine as a career. Securing a job in the ACC factory was the priority, and a simple ITI or a Diploma or, if you were extremely ambitious, an engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering was what one aspired for. Engineering colleges in those days were few and far between. The mushrooming of private engineering colleges was a nascent phenomenon which started in Karnataka and spread to Maharashtra. But in the early 80s Karnataka had something like five government engineering colleges and close to 20 private engineering colleges. Most of the private engineering colleges operated from sheds with asbestos roofs like the Raichur Engineering College. The HKE Society’s Engineering College in Gulbarga was fairly well off by private engineering college standards. HKES by the way stands for Hyderabad Karnatak Education Society. The four northern districts of Karnataka, Gulbarga, Raichur, Bidar and Bellary along with the northern districts of Andhra Pradesh like Medak, Rangareddy etc. were considered to be an integrated cultural unit with similar culinary, linguistic and sartorial traditions. The culinary traditions of Hyderabad Karnatak area is elaborated in the post http://cynicism2euphoria.blogspot.com/2009/08/some-north-karnataka-recipes.html.

The HKE Society was run by the Lingayats who overtly conducted the affairs of Institutions like the Sharanabasaveshwara Group of Colleges and covertly ran the affairs of the HKE Society. More about the Lingayats and the Sharanabasaveshwara Institutions later. The HKES Engineering College is now called The Poojya Doddappa Appa (PDA) College of Engineering.

It was on a June morning that I and my father boarded the Bargal, with my PDC Certificates with the hope that I could secure a seat in engineering in the HKES Engineering College. I understand that it rains heavily ,and Gulbarga goes green and verdant these days during the mid summer months, but in those days the rains were far and few between and June was a hot and sunny month. The ticket from Wadi to Gulbarga, I remember was a paltry(by today’s standards) one rupee and fifty five paise. But then, my father drew a salary of Rs. 753 per month too. We therefore reached Gulbarga at a cost of three rupees and ten paise. Ten paise coins in those days were made of alnico and had a wavy border.

Surprisingly the Bargal was on time that day, and we reached Gulbarga station by 8.45 am. We had enough time to have a breakfast of huge bondas and idlis liberally covered with dilute coconut chutney at the newly opened Janata Café at the Aiwan-e-Shahi Road, followed by coffee. We had to reach the Engineering College only at 1030 am. My beard was just sprouting, and I had not yet thought of shaving. We reached the college gates and I had my first glimpse of a Fighter aircraft that was displayed prominently in the front of building. It was an unimpressive building built of grey limestone blocks and mortar. The Principal of the College that time was SV Mallapur, a dark balding gentleman. My father and I were led into the Principal’s chamber where sat the Principal, with the redoubtable Shankar Rao Chincholikar who was the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I learnt later that Chincholikar had a Java motorcycle, whose engine he had modified to run on kerosene oil. He rode this invention of his around the college, exhuming noxious fumes. The kerosene engine created deposits of carbon in its insides, which Chincholikar used the First Year BE (Mechanical Engineering) students to clean.
Be that as it may be, the interview with Mallpur, Chincholikar and the other professors present, did not go as well as presumed. After a cursory perusal of my certificates, the Principal demanded a 25000 rupees donation to the college, which on negotiations came down to Rs. 20000/-. Considering that my father was earning a mere Rs. 750 per month at that time, this was more than two times his annual salary. Neither he nor I took this seriously and having paid our respects to the HKE professors, left.

After dining at the Timapuri Circle Kamat, we took 9 Dn Bombay-Madras Mail to Wadi , during which journey my father told me that I had better take up a B. Sc. Degree course in the Sharanabasvehswara College of Science. I acquiesced. In fact I was so enamoured of the Organic Chemistry that Cyriac taught, that I was more inclined to do a Masters in Organic Chemistry rather than in manual pursuits like Engineering. That day the 9 Dn Mail reached Wadi on time at 11.50 AM and we were home for a lunch of keerai molagoottal, vendakka kichadi and rice.

Back in Wadi and face to face with a Telugu Proverb

This was narrated to me by my friend Nissankara Bhargava, presently Exhibition Officer at Visvesvaraya Industrial and technological Museum, Bengaluru. There appears to be a folk festival in some village in Andhra called Kanchukotsavam, the festival of blouses. On a particular day of the year, womenfolk of the village go to the river bank, take of their blouses and throw them into the river in spate. The menfolk, who used to wait downstream jumped into the river the moment they saw the blouses floating downstream and grabbed what came into their hands. One for each. They then went back to the women. The man with a blouse belonging to a particular woman got to spend the day (night rather) with her. Good fun and change of bed for all.

One such kanchukotsavam day, as the womenfolk were waiting with bated breaths and bared breasts, all women got their share of goodies while one particularly dumb husband – one like me- seemed to have grabbed his own spouse’s blouse. As she saw him coming towards her she gave vent to her frustration with a phrase which has since become a proverb in Telugu, meaning “Gosh! The same husband even on the festival day!” meaning nothing worth talking about even on a special occasion. “Panduga rojulo kooda paata magudena” May it be said that my homecoming to Wadi evoked similar frustration in the absence of familiar faces and circumstances. Everything had changed. Srinath now was the centre of attraction of the Family. I was a new entrant in the household I possessed and held on my palms. No old friends. Nothing. It was the first time that the truth of passing time changing the space time coordinates of a place was brought home to me so forcefully. I was a new man in Wadi. I had left a favourite child and had returned a new man. I was as much a stranger in Wadi as I was at Moovattupuzha. Happy homecoming, but same old circumstances.

And finally like the singer in TV programmes, I shout, to all of you who are reading this "come on come on comment, lets all comment together" Else gentle readers, I stop writing altogether. Or is that what you want?

Final Part of my life in Kerala - Cyriac and JP

What with my homesickness and culture change, as also with my preoccupations with other activities like music and things, my marks in the first PDC went spiraling down so much so that I just about passed the maths paper. It was not something I could take easily, nor was it something that I blamed myself for. I blamed everything other than myself – the system, homesickness, gods, ill health - for this debacle. There is a Ganapathy Kshetram (temple) and a Noottettupadi (108 stepped) Sivakshetram in kavumpady which were not as well known as the Puzhakkara kavu and the Ramangalam siva temple. I used to be a regular visitor to these temples and after my first PDC debacle cut down on my visits to just two of the famous shrines.

Tutions were something that were frowned upon in Wadi. They were for students whose IQs were in the dangerously low zone of 40-50 and not for geniuses like me. Like a gym going stud who effortlessly runs 100 meters in 12 seconds, just being diagnosed with diabetes, I learnt that IQ, like blood glucose levels tend to rise and fall. Thus having fallen to the level or a moron, I resorted to tuitions. Of course equally lion hearted geniuses like Pradeep and another friend Ajay, were already into tuitions. So I enrolled myself under the venerable JP (god knows what JP stood for) for Maths tuitions and with the lovable Cyriac for Chemistry. Physics I thought I could deal with, myself.

JP was a white bearded old man of indeterminable age with long white hair who taught maths effortlessly. He functioned from a first floor room in Thodupuzha road. He advertised his skills with the catchphrase “Phys an angel of JP an angel of Maths”. Though he taught effortlessly the learning was not as effortless. Sines and cosines danced like slim snakes slithering in and out of comprehension. And god alone (and perhaps JP) knew what surds were. But I plodded on. Enough to get a decent score in second PDC.

Cyriac was another thing of course. He was a fair chubby bachelor, struggling to find a job and we had fun learning chemistry from him and being young, he connected well with us. Pradeep attended the chemistry tuitions with me. He functioned from a rented house in Piravom Road. The way he taught organic chemistry, I fell in love with it. It costed me less that 100 rupees per month altogether. We spent hours with Cyriac synthesizing alcohols and aldehydes on paper. Eventually Cyriac married one of our Nirmala college lecturers Valsa. The joy of learning came back eventually but not to the extent one experienced at MCC. Suffice it to say that with all my handicaps I topped in chemistry in second PDC scoring 136/150. My total score was 78% rendering me ineligible for any decent engineering college.

By the time I ended second PDC it was fairly certain that I would leave Moovattupuzha forever and come back to the familiar climes of Gulbarga for further education. So two years after I left Wadi, I came back, bag and baggage, to Wadi, but totally changed. I left an innocent boy and came back as a worldly wise adolescent, with a moustache to boot. That ended my brief sojourn out of Wadi. But Wadi had changed too. None of my old friends were around. No JC, no Santhanam, and achingly no Janaki. All gone. Poof!

Note: There were hundreds of other characters in Moovattupuzha whose lives intertwined with me in one way or the other whom I have not mentioned here, but they deserve special mention for shaping my personality to a large extent. Ajay, Rajkumar Kunnel, Rajalakshmi the class beauty, Nawas PP. Radhakrishnan, a lot of relatives and scores more. Andariki na vandanaalu.

Part V of my life in Kerala

Rains in Kerala are a phenomenon. It is the gateway to the South west monsoons on which most of India depends for is its survival. It is more than just a climatic phenomenon, it has over the years acquired the status of a climactic phenomenon. The earth, parched during the torrid summer months, eagerly waits like a loving female for the climactic drenching to occur and like clockwork, precisely on the morning of the 28^th of May every year, the people of Kerala wake up to dark brooding skies and the downpour starts soon thereafter. The green landscape of Kerala becomes further verdant during these four months till September and all sorts of vegetation sprout up. All the quaint little rivers of Kerala are in spate and considering their relatively short lengths and proximity to the sea as also to the tapering topography of the state, they are drained much faster unlike the long lasting floods of the monotonous and brutal plains of northern India.

Anchu Muri Madhom being on the banks of one of these rivers, also experiences these floods almost every year. They bring with them all kinds of washed in reptiles and arthropods like snakes and scorpions, which are left behind when the deluge recedes. When it rains it pours. Water falls down in sheets. People wore rubber hawai chappals and carried umbrellas everywhere. The ubiquitous red KSRTC buses, cramped with corrugated rubberized windows made the interiors into cauldrons. But when the rains ended by September the whole landscape was a silky green, freshly washed. The sun shone back and it was time for Onam, the festival celebrated to welcome back Maveli – the Malayalam version of Mahabali, the sixth dwarf incarnation of Lord Vishnu - Vamana, who ruled Kerala once. Maveli, though an arrogant demon was a benevolent monarch for his people and was cheated by Vamana into being buried under the earth, though not before the monarch extracted a promise from Vamana that he will visit his beloved kingdom on the anniversary of his death every year.

The people of Kerala eagerly await this day on the Tiruvonam star of the Malayalam month of Chingom (August September) every year for it also marks the end of the torrential south west monsoons. Onam vacations are long in Kerala and it was during these vacations in 1980, that I got a ticket to return back to Wadi for a brief sojourn. As the verdant greenery of Kerala gave way to the red hot earth of Tamil Nadu and the redder and hotter earth of Andhra Pradesh, the train entered the familiar black soil of northern Karnataka in Raichur. What a contrast! But what a relief!! I am back in familiar territory – one of dust and searing heat, one of love and brusque etiquette, one that evoked pleasant memories from childhood. Kerala these days is called the God’s own Country, but Wadi was not that. It was My own Country. And forever My own Country will be dearer to me than God’s. I can only marvel at Kerala but in my Wadi I had my rights. It was like going back to your hutment from a five star hotel. Home after all is home.

Part IV of my life in Kerala

Opposite to Anchu Muri Madhom was a house in which lived Manohar Dattatreya Deo a Marathi Bank Manager at the Union Bank with his family. From my previous post it may be deduced that Manohar was his name and Dattatreya his father’s name and Deo, the surname. The Deos, Manohar and Vijaya had two sons Pradeep and Arun. Pradeep was of my age and was also a student of Nirmala College, in the second group morning session. He aspired to be a doctor. Being from Wadi, I developed a natural affinity to Pradeep who became eventually a close friend. Arun was two years younger. Unfortunately, I recently learnt that Arun passed away at the age of 42 in September 2010. These people who originally hailed from Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, were the scions of a respected business family D V Deo and Sons, of Mattancheri, Kochi, manufacturers and exporters of essential aromatic oils.

Pradeep was learning to play the Mridangam from one Panangad Chandran, and was familiar with Carnatic classical music. They had a record player and he had a stack of records featuring masters like Chembai, Ariyakkudi, MS Subbulakshmi and the like. He had a great fascination for Palakkad Mani Iyer, the Mridangam Maestro, and had many legends to share. At his home in the evenings I learnt to appreciate the nuances of carnatic music. It was my first exposure to this treasure trove of culture. Incidentally it was around this time that the epic movie Shankarabharanam, directed by K.Vishvanath and featuring Somayajulu was released and it became quite a success. I watched it several times in Latha Theatre.

Pradeep was proud of forcing me to listen to the records and pointing out to me the fine distinctions that differentiated Adi Taalam from the roopaka taalam. He was more enthusiastic about percussion than about melody, though we did learn to identify Kalyani from Mohanam, Sree from Madhyamavati etc. While Pradeep was inclined towards heavy dignified Ragas like shankarabharanam and Kalyani, I preferred soulful ones like Sree, madhyamavati, sahana, kanada, Darbar and the like. There was at that time a gentleman called Sundaresan, who was also very keen on carnatic music and who also was an astrologer in Moovattupuzha, who in a white shirt and Mundu visited the Puzhakkara Kavu daily. There was at that time a cultural organization called the MELA or the Moovattupuzha Enlightened Lovers of Art, which organized cultural events like Kathakali performances and as a part of MELA, under the leadership of Sundaresan, we boys started an organization called the Shatkala Sangeeta Sabha to bring carnatic music to Moovattupuzha. The inaugural concert was by Dr. M Balamurali Krishna who sang a detailed Shanmukhapriya exposition followed by his own composition, “sada tava paada” during the concert. He was accompanied by his wife Abhayambika on the Tampura and by local percussionist Panangad Chandran, Pradeep’s teacher on the Mridangam. Though Chandran was not of the class of Dr.Balamurali Krishna, the concert was a roaring success and I had the good fortune to be alongside Balamurali during the concert.

Eventually I was enamoured of carnatic music, and though I could not sing, I became adept at recognizing and appreciating ragas, and learnt the basic theory of music on my own. An incident I remember was, when I and Pradeep traveled overnight to Vaikom by bus to listen to Madurai Somasundaram during the Vaikkathashtami concert of 1982 and reaching Vaikom well past midnight, listening to the concert till 4 AM, and leaving back to Moovattupuzha. I have been a fan of carnatic music ever since, and I owe Pradeep for that. It is another story that Pradeep fell to the lures of western pop music later in life.

It was also at this time that I became interested in astrology. Most of the theory was self taught. I gathered enough courage to make predictions and lo and behold many came true! I continued this practice for a long time later till about a few years back and my record of success in astrological predictions was well above par, in fact a roaring success. My services were sought after by the high and mighty and as a matter of fact I landed my first job owing to the predictions I made for one of the Managers of ACC, Wadi. I also learnt the elements of Palmistry and Numerology to supplement my knowledge of astrology. It was only later that I realized that I was naturally gifted with the ‘divine’ skills that astrologers learn – 1) to make vague predictions crouched in astrological terms, 2) to glean information out of the supplicant and then present it back to them in a packaged form and 3) to suggest remedies which are useful and harmless albeit not related to the problem. Things like stating ‘you must have performed below par in atleast one exam between 3rd October 1978 and 12th July 1986’ and having elicited an answer of yes or no (formula 2), saying that ‘you have a danger of failing in your exams this year owing to your Mercury being in the combusted mode because of its 2 degree proximity to the Sun in your horoscope and Saturn being placed in your fourth house, which happens to be Virgo the house of Mercury, the karaka of knowledge - by gochara (formula 1), if you study really hard and chant this particular incatation to Saraswati thrice every morning and offer white flowers and rice to a swan, you might avert failure(formula 3). More about the art of making accurate astrological predictions later.

A third thing I got interested in and pursued at that time was vedic mantras. I used to wake up very early (4 AM – too early by my standards) and listen to records of Rudram, Chamakam, Sookthas and the like and memorise them. Since Balan Mama did not have a record player, Vanaja Mami took me to the house of one Saroja Mami who had the player and the records and I mustered enough interest and enthusiasm to learn these mantras.

Part III of my life in Kerala

The river as already mentioned was the lifeline of Moovattupuzha. Early in the morning, the women left for the river in groups. What we call a ghat in northern India is called a Kadavu in Kerala. Anchu Muri Madhom was adjacent to a Kadavu, called the Thondu Kadavu. Before bathing, the women washed clothes which they carry with them in buckets. After the bath they proceeded back home. The washing and bathing was accompanied by much gossip and mirth. They were all back by 7 AM after which it was time to get the breakfast ready. Elderly people had baths at home using hot water. Cooking was in mud ovens with firewood, coconut shells and husk for fuel. Water was drawn from a well and it was during my stay in there in the early 80’s that piped water came to Anchu Muri Madhom. It was a novelty there though we have had it in the ACC quarters at Wadi ever since I could remember. After cooking breakfast the women went to the Puzhakkara Kavu Bhagawati temple. They served breakfast after returning.

The College I attended was called the Nirmala College. It was run by Christian missionaries. I was surprised by the number of institutions that the Christian missionaries were running in Moovattupuzha. From a maternity home where kids could be born, through child care centres, pre primary schools, high school, college, there were even old age homes, where these kids could spend their old age and finally, with even a cemetery, the Nirmala group of institutions could well take care of a human through life and thereafter.

The College ran courses from Pre degree level (Classes 11^th and 12^th were conducted in Colleges and degrees were awarded by Universities those days in Kerala) to post Graduate levels in Arts, Science and Commerce. There were four groups in the Pre degree level (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th Groups) each in two shifts – morning and evening. The first group which I took up, included Physics, Chemistry and Maths. The second Group taught Biology, Physics and Chemistry, the 3^rd was the Arts group and the 4^th was the commerce group. I was in the second shift, from 1 PM to 5:30 PM. The group was coded MS2. There were about 80 students in MS2. Since the classes were after 1 PM, I could leave for college after lunch. The college was on a hillock on the Thodupuzha road and was about 4 kilometers from Anchu Muri Madhom, which was normally covered by walk, though a bus ride cost just 10 paise. College politics was active in campuses in Kerala those days and the two rival groups were student wings of the Congress and the Communists. There were clashes often and strikes called “Samaram”, which meant a holiday. Our Principal was a Father called Dr. Mathew Thottiyil, a Ph.D in Chemistry.

The teaching was tolerable and the lecturers were well informed. There were rather remote, unlike school teachers, and did not mix a lot with the students. This is something that students out of schools realize as soon as they take up college in India. Often the relation is less personal and warm than school teachers were. When I mention Mathew Thottiyil, I must digress a little to talk about Kerala family names.

Surnames are arrived at in different ways in India. In north India, especially the so called cow belt, these names derive from castes mostly. Yadav, Aggarwal, Jain etc. In Bengal there are caste/sub-division- among- caste based surnames like Mukhopadhyaya,(a Brahmin, and a chief priest) Mitra( a non Brahmin and a kayastha), Sen ( a non Brahmin and a Baid) etc. Bengal also has what are called titles, like Roychoudhury, Sarkar etc., primarily given by the British. Where the caste was not high up in the hierarchy, people preferred to use titles, if they had one. Some high castes like the Tagores, who were Brahmins to begin with, used titles too, instead ofsurnames. Often a Bengali name can be represented by the formula N.Kumar.S where N was the given name, and S the surname, just as in Punjab, especially among the Sikhs the name could be represented by N.Singh.S. Punjabils have surnames like Ahluwalia, Chawla, Kapoor, Chopra etc. which are used both by the Hindus and the Sikhs, with the difference that the Hindus did not use Singh. Maharashtra had another unique method. The given name followed by the father’s name (in its entirety - unlike a patronymal form like in Russia) and a surname formed from the name of the village they originated from. A typical name would be Shrikant Sitaram Rahalkar, where the guy is Shrikant, his father Sitaram, and Rahalkar would indicate that the person came from the Rahal village and constitutes the surname. Incidentally higher castes like Brahmins had surnames ending in Kar and others had names ending in “e”. So two people originating from say Tendul could be Tendulkar or Tendule depending on their caste. There are caste based names like Deshpande, Kulkarni, Patil etc. too in Maharastra.

In Kashmir, surnames usually depend on caste or profession and are universally used by Hindus and Muslims. Thus, typically Hindu surnames like Pandit or Guru can be used by a Muslim like in Mohammad Usman Pandit or Abdul Ahsan Guru. This discussion on surnames merits an entire article, but on to Kerala surnames.

In Kerala, the practice of using the house name before or after the given name is prevalent. For example Thomas Valiyapurackal could be a valid name, where Thomas is the given name while Valiyapurackal is the house name. The houses usually were named depending on some characteristic of the house. A house located to the north of some significant location was called the Vadakke Veedu (northern house) and the inhabitants were called ‘something or the other’ Vadakkeveettil. This applied uniformly to all religious denominations so that surnames didn’t denote either caste of religion. There can technically be a Jameel Puliyanchottil, or a Jacob Puliyanchottil or a Janardhanan Puliyanchottil. The given names themselves, these days, like Sibi, Jiji, Mobin, Shaji etc. are often not indicative of the religion, and could be Hindu or Christian. Muslims normally have a Muslim first name. There again were caste names like Nair, Menon, Panikkar etc. More about this later.

Part II of my life in Kerala

Those were the days. Soon my parents and Thangi left for Wadi with Madhu. I started my first sojourn in life away from the only family I knew, in a town to which I was a mere visitor earlier. Moovattupuzha was a small town. It had two centres of power, Kacherithazham (the court complex) and postaapisumpadi (the post office). The whole town was centered around the river. We had the Kavumpadi and the Kizhakkekkara on the opposite sides of the river. Atleast in the early 1980, Iyers mostly occupied Kavumpady and Muslims the Kizhakkekkara. The Kizhakkekkara area was called the chantha – or the market - and housed a cinema theatre the Apsara. There were two other theatres Latha and Lakshmi. Latha was on Thodupuzha road and Lakshmi n Velloorkunnam. There being no TV, cinema was the only means of entertainment then. The Malayalam heroes then were Premnasir, Madhu and a young one called Jayan. Mohanlal and Mammooty were yet to come on the scene. Jayan died in a helicopter accident while shooting and there was a lot of grief all around.

Now like in the rest of India, movies in Moovattupuzha too were released on Friday. Every Friday morning, a cart with triangular cross section, bearing movie posters on either sides and drawn by a man, accompanied by another who beat drums walked the streets of Moovattupuzha. This was for information and publicity of the public. The movie tickets were low priced like 2 Rupees for second class, 3 for first class and 5 for balcony etc. I was introduced to Malayalam cinema and they were all invariably good. Unlike the love romance genre or the gory violence of Bollywood movies these had social messages. They felt real. Actors like Nedumudi Venu brought a lot of realism to movies. Later in Coimbatore, I learnt Malayalam movies had a different connotation in other parts of the country. But I have hardly seen one such movie while in Kerala. In fact they remain some of the best movies to be made in India. Charting a middle path avoiding the gaudy, overacting themes of Tamil movies and Hindi movies of those times and also from the overpowering reality of Bengali movies they blended realism with entertainment in a healthy ratio. Since TVs were yet to invade living rooms, apart from radio and books these provided wholesome entertainment.

Often I accompanied my uncle Balan Mama and Vanaja Mami to these movies. Sometimes I went alone. A few words about Balan Mama and Mami. Balan Mama was the last son and indeed the last child of my maternal grandparents. The eldest son/child, Ponnanna, left home early and was employed with a British company Pierce Lesley and Company at Cochin. He had set up a separate establishment and after the daughters got married off one by one, and as my grandparents aged, Balan Mama became the head of the family. He was a Government of Kerala employee who retired as the Assistant Registrar of Cooperative societies. He was not a man of many words. He was silent to the extent of being dour. The main Anchu Muri Madhom had two portions. The three rooms on the left were rented out to one Subramania Iyer of Trikkariyoor. Subramania Iyer and his wife Kaveri had two children, Rajan and Vanaja. Vanaja grew up at Anchu Muri Madhom. Balan Mama took a fancy to Vanaja Mami, though given the character of Balan Mama this seems strange to imagine. Vanaja Mami on the other hand was a vivacious girl. Eventually they got married and had two kids, Sreeram and Lakshmi.

Most sisters of Balan Mama were married off into ordinary families and they stayed in some godforsaken places and invariably some of their kids, my cousins came and stayed in Anchu Muri Madhom for their higher education. I was one of them. To the credit of Vanaja Mami, she endeared herself to all these cousins of mine and was friendly in a comradely sort of way. Maybe it was because she was of an intermediate generation. She tried her best to treat her husband’s nephews and nieces very much like her own kids. Like my own mother who spent a majority of her life under the overpowering influence of Thangi, my maternal grandmother too functioned under an overpowering mother in law and hence she was a shadowy woman. Vanaja Mami was therefore the face of the family amongst outsiders.

Part I of my life in Kerala

Now Kerala was a different place altogether as I said. Moovattupuzha was in what is known as the Kochi Tiruvitankoor area and was in the plains. Kerala sweeps dizzyingly from the hilltops to the seashore in a matter of 80 kilometers along its width and Moottupuzha lay somewhere in the middle. Wikipedia, the all knowing one, tells us “Muvattupuzha was part of the Vadakkumkoor Kingdom until it was captured by the Travancore Kingdom, now merged into the state of Kerala. Old documents show that the lands of Muvattupuzha belonged to ‘Edappally Swaroopam’, but were later transferred to ‘Manas’ (Brahmin Families) St. Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, who introduced Christianity to India, is believed to have visited Muvattupuzha and converted several families to Christian faith.”

Moovattupuzha literally means the river of three streams. Three streams apparently meet at Moovattupuzha and become one. People there even celebrate the river as a triveni sangamam like the Allahabad sangam. Unlike many great rivers of the Indo Gangetic plains, the streams that constitute Moovattupuzha and the final river itself meander a lot as you can see on any map, and hence one is not really sure whether one is on the west bank or the east, north bank or the south. But fortunately for us, people in Moovattupuzha talk about “thekku puram” or the southern side and “vadakku puram” or the northern side to indicate directions rather than use terms like “Bittu ke dookan ki taraf” or “Ram Mandir ke taraf” that we see in Delhi. I therefore deduce that Anchu Muri Madhom, the ancestral house of my mother was located on the western banks of Moovattupuzha.

It was located in an area called the Kavumpady, meaning the steps of the Kavu, which traditionally is a shrine dedicated to the Goddess Bhagawati, who is a consort of Lord Shiva and is the sister of Lord Vishnu. Please click onto my post dated 24/08/2006 for more details. There are innumerable Kavus in Kerala and one needs to visit them to imbibe the atmosphere that surrounds them. I have visited most temples in India and the feelings that one gets in Kavus of Kerala can be matched only by the feelings that one gets in the Dzongs of Bhutan. A surreal 15th century feeling, that permeates the bones of even a diehard atheist and fills him with awe.

It was a diametrically opposite life for me. I had to speak in Malayalam instead of Wadi Hindi. Wear Mundu with the freedom to walk around topless in the neighbourhood instead of shorts and shirts as in Wadi. No rotis, just red boiled rice. Lots and lots of coconuts, heroes like Jayan and Premnasir to substitute for Amitabh Bachhan and Shatrughan Sinha, and most importantly, for an adolescent, beautiful girls. The girls of Kerala win the bronze, with Telugu girls winning the silver and the gold goes to ………hold your breaths there like you do in TV reality shows, ……Bengali girls!!!.

I leave Wadi behind

My parents were married on the 6th of June 1963 and as far as I know, my father had not visited my mother’s maternal home even once since then. All our visits to Moovattupuzha involved just me and my mother. Soon after the results of my SSLC exams were declared, it was decided that I be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol every Brahmin boy carried to his grave at Guruvayoor on 25th April 1980. This necessitated a visit to Kerala by all concerned and we booked tickets by the 81 Down Jayanthi Janata Express which left Wadi at 5:15 AM every morning towards Kerala. The tickets for the 1200 kilometer journey was Rs.55/- per person (the cost of 750 grams of tomatoes this evening at Mayur Vihar in Delhi) by second class.

The brief sleep of three hours the night before we left for Kerala, like that of Calphurnia, Julius Ceasar’s wife, or that of the wife of Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov in Tolstoy’s immortal story “God sees the Truth but waits” which NRB was fond of telling, was plagued by nightmares and I was not to know that I was to be left behind by the only family I knew and that I would not come back soon from Kerala. It was to be an uprooting which plagues me to this day.

We were ready and got on the ACC Jeep at 4 AM. Soon we were at Wadi station awaiting the train. At that ungodly hour all train doors of all compartments were tightly closed and a lot of banging and shouting brought a bleary eyed TTE to the door. Since the train stopped there for hardly five minutes, and we had a lot of luggage we barely managed to get into the coach. The train took off and soon we were passing Nalwar and then Yadgir on towards Raichur. After a blistering Andhra summer day in the train, we reached Trichur again at an ungodly hour and took a taxi to Guruvayoor reaching the holy place at 6 AM the next morning. We put up at the Amrita Lodge

My Uncle Balan Mama and his wife Vanaja Mami arrived soon after and so did a sprinkling of some other assorted relatives. The thread ceremony was consummated at the house of a priest and after a lunch, the relatives left. We left a few days later to Perumbavoor enroute to Koovappady, Thangi’s maternal home enroute to Moovattupuzha. The south west monsoons were approaching the Kerala coast and the God’s own country - which it was not in those days – was verdant with strange vegetations of all kinds – the kinds never seen in north Karnataka. One saw special flowers and seeds about which one had only heard and seen diagrams of in NRB’s biology classes. It was cooler and nature was bountiful. I had an opportunity to see and talk to patriarchs like Manian Mama about whom one had only heard before. I saw food cooked in firewood ovens and water drawn from wells. Vegetables here came from backyard gardens and not from the market. It was not the Lambadis who brought milk from unseen sources, but it was the domestic cow which gave it. The food was a little different in taste and flavour too, and after the barren wastes of Wadi to which I was accustomed, these verdant greens provided a lovely splendour. I was shown the school which my father had attended and other landmarks about which I had heard ad nauseum at STRT 31/8 from a nostalgic Thangi. We spent a week in Koovappadi. It was another world altogether, a world in which I was to be trapped for a long time to come, a final and absolute departure from Wadi, the only home I knew - forever.