Holiday trips

The last post was my 50th post in the blog and hence cynicism2euphoria has crossed a new milestone with your encouragement.Thanks to Gomathy and Deepa and all others who had faith in my resurrection and stayed with my blog. I will talk about holidays in detail, Gomathy. About what the girls did – I leave it to you to fill in the details.

Our family as I have mentioned in earlier posts hails from Kerala. My father had nobody left, back in Kerala, whom he would have liked to visit periodically. In fact, I suspect he with Thangi left Kerala for Dwaraka in the first place, to escape the suffocation of life as a fatherless kid in his maternal house. But my mother had her parents and six siblings back in Kerala at Moovattupuzha. So she yearned to visit Kerala occasionally. Wadi was about 1200 kilometers from Moovattupuzha but they were not connected by a direct railway line. Matter of fact there was just one single line in Kerala. The southern parts of the country were as neglected by the railways then as they are now. Most Railway ministers from Independent India hailed from Bihar, and over the past sixty years, have crisscrossed Bihar and UP with railway lines. South of Vindhyas, these ministers had a vague notion that there was a city called Madras, where possibly a railway station could be built, and to which place some black people called Madrasis sometimes went. Names like Moovattupuzha were (and still are) unpronounceable, unknown and non existent in the railway map of India.

Wadi as I had mentioned in an earlier post, is an important railway junction connecting Madras (Chennai), Hyderabad (Bhagyanagar?) and Bombay (Mumbai). To reach Kerala from Wadi, in those days, one took the Bombay Madras Mail, which had a coach going to wards Ernakulam. This coach was disconnected from the main train at Arakkonam Junction and waited there with its passengers till a train going from Madras to Ernakulam came and picked it up. AC and First class coaches were unaffordably costly those days and we invariably took the third class coach – the one that the Mahatma favoured. Sometimes it was a reserved berth. It was just me and mother who traveled alone most of the time. We reached Arakkonam around 9 or 10 AM and stayed there for over 6-8 hours. We were then picked up and reached Alwaye (Aluva), which was our station by early next morning. Somebody would pick us up there and we would take a bus to Moovattupuzha which was about 20 Kms. away. Even allowing for inflation tickets were ridiculously low priced. It cost us 55 Rupees for a ticket from Wadi to Alwaye by Express trains. One of the earliest trips I remember was in July 1969. It was then that my uncle bought a transistor radio to listen to the report of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon – on 20th July. I also remember being sick with fever at that time and uncle also bought a packet of fruit bread along with the transistor. The Transistor radio still exists and works in my uncle’s house though my cousin Sreeram, born to that uncle in March 1973 seems to have become a big electronics engineer who designs chips and systems for electronics multinationals.

The ancestral house in Kerala was a fascinating place. One got to see several things here that one had only heard about in Wadi. Water was drawn from wells. One saw mangos, coconuts and Jack fruits growing on trees. Food was cooked in earthen vessels (a special container called the Kachhatti – carved out of a block of slatestone was used regularly) in ovens burning firewood. People hardly bought vegetables in Kerala then. Yams, colacasia, other tubers, mangoes, plantains, jack fruit and coconut - in fact all native Indian vegetables, were abundantly grown and freely available at all homes. Cows gave milk and other dairy byproducts were also made from milk at home. Even oil was obtained from coconut at home. Each tiled house had a few acres of land in the back called the Parambu which was home to all kinds of trees. There was a perennially running river behind the house called the Moovattupzhayaar in which we bathed and washed clothes. Sleeping was difficult on the first night one reached Moovattupuzha and I remember Kaveri Mami, my maternal aunt's mother, a friendly old lady who used to put me to sleep telling me stories as the bells tolled. One needs to describe these experiences in greater detail so let me postpone it to another post.