Part 6 of my life in Wadi

I received my first comment on my blog today from a person I have not seen. Thank you Deepa. Keep in touch with the blog and send me your email id’s all of you who record their comments. I can reply them individually. And for Deepa, I will be writing a whole post on your grandparents and their influence on me and on Pedda Akka Janaki and HER influence on my life. Keep reading and supporting. Also please remember that I am simply recording my thoughts as they occur to me. Since it involves some real people, who as I realize from Deepa’s post, may have become grandparents or great grandparents or such other venerable figures, some comments of mine could offend some of you. But I write this recollection of my days in Wadi with such a deep sense of reverence that no reference to anyone in the blog is ever meant to hurt. Some Hindu readers may remember the epic composition Soundarya Lahari on the Goddess Parvati or Lalita by Adi Shankaracharya. It is a detailed description of the body of the Goddess. But at no point does one take offence because it is done with such reverence and devotion. The only thought that occurs is that one worships every aspect of ones mothers body because one emanated from it. The ultimate homage that a male pays, by virtue of his nature, is sexual. Do not please be offended, but this could possibly be the source of incest fantasies and the Freudian Oedipus complex. For me Wadi is mother, Gulbarga my grandmother and Karnataka my ancestress. From a measly 14 kilogram child of three in 1967 to a strapping 25 year old young man of 55 kgs in 1989, every single milligram of those remaining 41 kgs was added out of the soil and water and air of Wadi. So, once again, I reiterate that no reference to anyone in the blog is ever meant to hurt on demean anyone. I wouldn’t dream of that.

Having said that, a brief post for today. When I was in third standard, the Sisters of St. Anne, who had taken over the school I was studying in, and had changed the name of the school to St.Anne’s school solicited and collected enough funds to build their own building. The authorities of ACC allotted them land in the midst of the ACC colony. The Club I had mentioned in the earlier post had a huge football ground on one side. The land allotted for the school was on the other side of the ground. The school duly appointed one Mr. Devassia, who was the brother in law of Mr. Verghese, owner of Santosh and Mini Theatres in Gulbarga and about whom we will talk more at a later stage, to build the school building. Mr.Devassia, a Malayali Christian like Mr. Verghese was a curious character. He was dark and had a head full of curly hair like that of the Saibaba of Puttaparthi. He insisted on speaking Englinsh in a curious Malayali+American accent which made him a butt of joke amongst us, the students of the school. However he built a beautiful building for our school, of which we were all proud. There were schools that were built in Wadi after this, like the DAV Public School, in which I taught, but the school that Devassia built was the first real school of Wadi.