Part 9 of my life in Wadi

Kanniappan joined our class while we were in the 5th standard. Again we didn’t understand what his name meant. Frankly we in Wadi, were more acclimatised to names like Saibanna (our barber – the one who ran the Modern Hair Cutting Saloon), Appanna (the priest or poojari in the ACC colony Ram Temple), Yenkavva (our maid servant) Devappa (the local quarry owning landlord and the one who dominated Milk supply to the ACC colony – a local Verghese Kurien), Ghanate (tailor to the rich people of ACC colony) etc. or Muslim names. Other names were odd sounding to us. In other words, even our own names sounded alien. For example, frankly I couldn’t see much sense in the name Santhanam, which was the name of one of my closest friends. Even the names of Hindi film actors or cricketers made little sense to us. For long, till I was in 7th standard or thereabouts, the Indian Cricket team was so filled with Marathi’s that we thought that “Kar”, like “Sir”, was a honorary term attached to the name of an individual who happened to get selected to play for India. Hence Gavas”Kar”, Sol”Kar”, Wade”Kar”, Vengsar”Kar” and the other bunch of Kars. Also names like Amitabh Bachhan and Shatrughan Sinha made no sense to us, except that we liked watching them bash up the bad guys in the open air movies that K P Menon screened.

The above mentioned Santhanam and his whole family of 2 sisters, five brothers and parents were musically talented and sang with a nasal twang. Ability to sing Hindi film songs made Santhanam, a sort of an authority on Hindi films. He explained to us that people like Shatru Bhaiyya (Shatrughan Sinha) belonged to far away North India and had superhuman powers. They could really fight off 10-15 villains single handed. Rajesh Khanna was a guy who had the power to ensnare girls by his songs, (though why one should ensnare girls, we didn’t really know at that time) but not fight as valiantly as Shatru, we learnt. A new fellow by the name of Amitabh Bachhan could really fight off bad guys. Girls fell for him on their own. He didn’t have to ensnare them with songs, like Rajesh Khanna, but frankly he didn’t care for girls. That was real manly, we thought. This was the essence of the briefings we received from time to time from the likes of Santhanam.

Back to Kanniappan. His parents it seems were in Madras. He was staying with relatives at Wadi, we didn’t know why. It was also rumoured that he was an orphan and had no parents. It was also rumoured that his parents were too rich, they didn’t much care for him. He was a dark small fellow who told us wicked things like sexual activities involving our classmates. He was an interesting, but mysterious character. He used to create a lot of mirth when he said that he had a paternal uncle (chacha or chitappa) who was younger to him, and whom used to carry around. He suddenly left after 6th standard as mysteriously as he had come.
The other one who left us was Bhaskar, the son of a railway engine driver called Kalyanaraman. Belonging to our community of Iyers, his family became friends of our family though they stayed in the railway colony. They visited us sometimes. Bhaskar had a brother called Balu, who was much junior to us and a sister, whose name I don’t now remember. Anyone who can remind me wins a prize. Bhaskar was not very good in studies. He dropped out soon. I hear his father passed away in an accident after we lost touch with them, but I really don’t know for sure.

Part 8 of my Life in Wadi

Jayachandran called me up last night while I was posting my blog. When I started I hoped that the blog will attract attention from people who existed in the vicinity of those space time coordinates I am writing about. I also hoped that people who knew me well and those who didn’t know me as well, would gain a deeper understanding into what it was like growing up as the son of a clerk in a factory township in the 70s. I am glad to see that my hopes are not being belied. My only request to those friends who stumble across the blog and find it interesting, please forward it to all you know so that Wadi, like Malgudi becomes an iconic town.

While we came to the new school that Devassia built, (I guess I have been calling it “the school that Devassia built” for too long now. Let us call it by its proper name, The Saint Ambrose Convent School now. Or to ease up on the typing, let’s call it SACS, though such abbreviations hadn’t quite become the norm in those days. The SMS culture was too far in the future and even HAHK, DDLJ etc. were two decades in the future. QSQT, the first in these series was a decade away. Still let’s call it SACS. As I had mentioned, we had 17 students while in 4th Standard. We got a class teacher called Thavaseeli Miss, who was a Christian girl who hailed from Tamil Nadu. Frankly the name sounded really silly and meaningless to us at that time, but as time passed, I learnt that Thavaseeli meant a person who practices penance as a matter of routine. This teacher didn’t betray the meaning of her name. She was very soft spoken. She stayed in the convent, which is what we called the nunnery attached to the school where the nuns stayed. A nunnery I have seen, and since, learnt from experience and from reading authors like Dan Brown, is a very harsh place for a young girl like Thavaseeli. We used to see her weeping silently many times. It was assumed that the sisters may have been harsh to her. We all liked Thavaseeli. The first Principal of the school, the one who took over from Mrs. Saldanha was Mary Jane. We called her Mother and the other nuns, sisters. Frankly with their Habits and names we didn’t really at that think of these sisters as women or men, but a new formidable gender altogether. Mother Mary Jane was one of the kinder sisters I have encountered. By the time we reached 7th Standard we were 15 students. The two who dropped out were Kanniappan and Bhaskar. It is about them that we will talk about in the next post and talk about the other 15 at a later time.