Part 10 of my life in Wadi

Deepa, did you see the post "Part 7 of my life in Wadi"? Your Grandfather’s house has been marked as “Gomathy’s House”. Should bring back some memories. Frankly, I also see no relation between Ram and Saturday, and I couldn’t find any reference for this fact either. But then Narayanan Mama must have found Saturday a convenient day, since the next day was a Sunday. So he must have made it a sacred day for Ram too, so that he could visit the Lord at his convenience. That’s the beauty of Hinduism. I can't think of a person from another religion redefining sacred days to suit his convenience. A Hindu’s Gods are his own. I put an elephants head on one’s shoulders, a monkey’s face on another. I affix 8 arms to one God’s body and four heads to another. I say this day is sacred to that God and another Hindu says otherwise. For Hindu’s, Gods and religion are their friends and a way of life respectively.

Having acknowledged Deepa’s comments, We now move on to 5th Standard. I should mention here that I was a studious student. I did very well and was First in the class most of the time. Some competition was forthcoming from Geeta Menon, (daughter of K P Menon), who was a very serious sort of person. She didn’t gossip, didn’t laugh or smile, didn’t joke, had good handwriting, highly competitive and what else? Had she been born and brought up in Delhi, I would have expected her to end up in the IAS. But I learn she is a teacher in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Ernakulam these days. Mrs.Menon was a very outgoing and social lady, but all three of the Menon children, Suresh, Geeta and Ramesh took after their father, K.P.Menon, (one enduring image of Mr. Menon is of him checking people’s movie tickets with a torch with great tension, lest some unauthorized people gain entry), a very serious sort of person. Also a little bit of competition was forthcoming from M A Rafique, son of M A Hafiz, a Guard with the Indian Railways at Wadi. Rafique was an OK sort of guy. I visited his house sometimes and he came to ours. He was one of the guys who passed my grandmother Thangi’s test for acceptance. I must say here that though an orthodox Hindu widow, Thangi was extremely secular in outlook. She approved of Rasheed, one of my father’s best friends, and liked him a lot. She herself was a great friend of the Arokiasamy family (Christians) and the Joseph’s ( whom we knew from our days in Dwaraka). Joseph is now dead and gone to Jesus, and Thangi to Kailas or Vaikunth or wherever Hindus go after their death, (I again am reminded that we Hindus don’t just have a Heaven or a Jannat, but a choice of several Heavens), Kunjamma, his wife is still one of our closest family friends. More about Geeta and Rafique later.

But the Class teacher in Fifth Standard was a new teacher. I don’t remember her real name. Two things I remember about her was that, she taught English and, that she was pregnant. For the half baked guys of our class like Kanniappan, her pregnancy was a cause of a lot of mirth. She was a dark, large slow moving lady. There was in our English syllabus, a lesson on Ulysses’ Iliad or Odyssey or whatever. There was an evil witch in this story called Circe. I still don’t know how Circe is pronounced, but this English teacher pronounced the name as “sye-ris”. She also used to cane us on our palms sometimes. Since her looks and behavior matched those of Circe, we all called her Sye-ris. She left after our 5th standard exams, obviously for her delivery and didn’t return.

I was also a reasonably good dramatic talent. It was in 5th Standard that we enacted Shakespeare's "Othello, the Moor of Venice" in prose. I was the villain of the piece, Iago. Santhanam was my friend Roderigo.