Chi Chi Po Po

The only mode of transport in Wadi in those days were trains. The Factory had a Jeep or two and a car for the General Manager – an Ambassador. Whenever anyone needed to undertake a journey which couldn’t be achieved by walk (which was rather rare), like when one had to go to the railway station to receive relatives arriving by trains, one requisitioned a jeep from the factory. The jeep arrived at ones residence and having picked us up went to the station, did its duty and returned back. The jeeps were of Willy’s make and rather rickety. But other than that, the only mode of transport in those days were trains. There were trains and trains. Wadi was a Junction that is the Railway line didn’t just pass through Wadi; it came from Bombay, bifurcated into two at Wadi, one line went to Madras and another to Hyderabad. So most trains stopped there. The DOWN trains, which had odd numbered names like 9 DN, 11 DN etc. came from Bombay and the UP trains were Bombay bound. More about these trains later. But when the time came for us to go to Shahabad to study, ACC bought a bus. It was a Tata and it carried the number MEP 6210. It was painted blue and had a white stripe across its middle. Actually, as JC points out, we were the third batch to venture out of Wadi to study. (Actually that is not strictly true because people like Lakshmy and Shashi Pathy, Hemant Soley (Hemant was Bundoo’s brother, who later Married) and others before us had gone to Shahabad to study, but as individual students. Going to Shahabad for continuing education as a batch and thereby necessitating the provision for a bus by ACC, Wadi was started, if I am not wrong, in the academic year 1975-76, with Latha Thankachan’s batch. As JC rightly reminds me in advance, we were the third batch.

As mentioned earlier, this necessity to go to Shahabad to continue our education was because SACS had facilities for only upto Class 7 in those days. There were two schools in Shahabad which had high school sections. The Mount Carmel Convent School(MCC), located at and patronized by ABL colony, and the Bal Vidya Mandir (BVB) in the Shahabad Railway Colony. Most Wadi students (upto 70%) went to MCC and the remaining to BVB. I propose to go into the details of MCC proper in the next post, but a little background information. The MCC was run by the Carmelite order of nuns, who were also affiliated to the Roman Catholic Church as was the SACS. But unlike the sisters at SACS who only wore pure white habits, Carmelite sisters wore white and a dark shade of brown. They also wore pure white sometimes, but their habits were more colourful than those of SACS sisters. Suri (P V R Suryanarayana) informs me that sisters in SACS these days were sarees. Having seen a lot of things in my life, I am not easily surprised but this bit of information threw me. SACS sisters in sarees!!!! Might as well imagine the Pope in a Dhoti!

It was also in Shahbad that we saw a hotel – or call it a restaurant – for the first time. Wadi didn’t have any restaurants, though there a few seedy khanavalis. Khanavalis were eateries serving traditional Lingayat food and were typically named after Shiva or Sharanabasaweshwara. The hotel in Shahabad was located adjacent to MCC and went by the rather curious name of Chi Chi Po Po. I will never understand why the hotel was thus named (in Tamil/Malayalam/Telugu it roughly means “Bloody Shit, get Lost”). Not many patronized this hotel though it was clean and spacious. The hotel eventually shut down and was taken over by another management, which promptly gave it a more acceptable name - “Nandavan”