The advent of Srinath Part II
The year 1980 was a blur of events. I was in Class Ten. Class Ten was a special year back then. It was the end of schooling and kids who had stayed together for 12 years since they were – well, kids - went their ways. There were the Board exams. The teen years compounded the issue. Emotional times. To top it, I was fairly important in the school with the majority recognizing that I had some special academic qualities. My aim then was to become a vice chancellor of a University and friends called me Principal. It was a heady feeling. When the other boys went about chasing girls who behaved with the utmost prissiness, I was more of a nerd. I read encyclopedias, Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse (a legacy of PVR Suryanarayana), George Orwell and the like. At home Srinath was growing up. I hadn’t really seen a baby at close quarters before that. He wasn’t a fussy baby and grew decently without much mess. I liked him a lot and remember crushing a stick of sugarcane and extract juice for him with a pestle at home.
One thing that comes to mind is a cast iron container in which one of us had to pound betel nuts with a pestle for Thangi to eat her Paan with. We called it Ural and olakkai. Thangi didn’t have teeth, and her supari had to be ground fine for her to chew it. Since she was an inveterate paan chewer, the pounding of supari was a regular if not daily feature at our house. The regular pounding in our first floor house was a source of constant irritation to those in the ground floor, Sister Irene Jaywanth and her two kids. Sister Jaywanth was a nurse in the ACC Hospital who had shifted from the mission hospital in Yadgir. Her husband Jaywanth was still with Mission Hospital Yadgir. Incidentally I had to spend about a month in Mission Hospital, Yadgir when I was in Class Six to repair a fracture Thangi incurred in her femur. Sister Irene came to 31/12 after Kaddu, about whom we read in a previous post. Arogyasamy had in the meanwhile retired and his house 31/11, opposite that of Sister Jaywanth was now the home of Francis, Arogyasami’s son, who had ultimately married his old love, our teacher of Class III, Fatima Miss.(Refer to my post on 24th July 2006). I often went to Shahabad on Sundays by Bargal to buy what was called Bhukna Supari, which was the leftover waste that was collected after supari was cut for regular paan chewers. It was cheap and served Thangi’s purpose adequately. Paan chewing was a habit I acquired from Thangi, which, added to tobacco, haunts me even today. The supari pounding pestle was the one I used to crush sugarcane for Srinath.
Originally Srinath’s face was oddly shaped. I remember his looking like a creature with an odd kind of long neck which seemed a separate entity of its own (he was called Kozhi Kittu, meaning Kittu who looks like a hen/cock, with a handy long neck by Thangi who had a propensity to call people by odd names; there were names like chaturthi, Ghatotkachan, Hidumban, Vamanan and the like for Babu's colleagues, the real names of whom I dare not even mention) and his face was shaped like what I thought was the popular jeera biscuit (hexagonal) available then. I liked to grab him by the neck occasionally and was soundly chastised by Babu for this once. This chastisement so hurt me that I refrained from handling Srinath thereafter. I hardly ever touch him even now and that chastisement may have been one subconscious reasons for this behaviour. And then again once when I was lifting Srinath, he doubled over backwards and I was terrified lest I had snapped his spine. Luckily for him, I obviously didn’t, and he seems to have more spine than I do even now. He had a saffron coloured Kurta and a lower garment of the same material which we called Jubba Jetti, of which he was very fond indeed. He hardly ever cried or made a nuisance of himself. Second borns have more tenacity as I see in Gayatri. I and Kartik get very emotional and touchy while I didn’t see Srinath ever being so concerned particularly about what people thought about him Gayatri seems just like that even now but time will tell how she shapes up.
One thing that comes to mind is a cast iron container in which one of us had to pound betel nuts with a pestle for Thangi to eat her Paan with. We called it Ural and olakkai. Thangi didn’t have teeth, and her supari had to be ground fine for her to chew it. Since she was an inveterate paan chewer, the pounding of supari was a regular if not daily feature at our house. The regular pounding in our first floor house was a source of constant irritation to those in the ground floor, Sister Irene Jaywanth and her two kids. Sister Jaywanth was a nurse in the ACC Hospital who had shifted from the mission hospital in Yadgir. Her husband Jaywanth was still with Mission Hospital Yadgir. Incidentally I had to spend about a month in Mission Hospital, Yadgir when I was in Class Six to repair a fracture Thangi incurred in her femur. Sister Irene came to 31/12 after Kaddu, about whom we read in a previous post. Arogyasamy had in the meanwhile retired and his house 31/11, opposite that of Sister Jaywanth was now the home of Francis, Arogyasami’s son, who had ultimately married his old love, our teacher of Class III, Fatima Miss.(Refer to my post on 24th July 2006). I often went to Shahabad on Sundays by Bargal to buy what was called Bhukna Supari, which was the leftover waste that was collected after supari was cut for regular paan chewers. It was cheap and served Thangi’s purpose adequately. Paan chewing was a habit I acquired from Thangi, which, added to tobacco, haunts me even today. The supari pounding pestle was the one I used to crush sugarcane for Srinath.
Originally Srinath’s face was oddly shaped. I remember his looking like a creature with an odd kind of long neck which seemed a separate entity of its own (he was called Kozhi Kittu, meaning Kittu who looks like a hen/cock, with a handy long neck by Thangi who had a propensity to call people by odd names; there were names like chaturthi, Ghatotkachan, Hidumban, Vamanan and the like for Babu's colleagues, the real names of whom I dare not even mention) and his face was shaped like what I thought was the popular jeera biscuit (hexagonal) available then. I liked to grab him by the neck occasionally and was soundly chastised by Babu for this once. This chastisement so hurt me that I refrained from handling Srinath thereafter. I hardly ever touch him even now and that chastisement may have been one subconscious reasons for this behaviour. And then again once when I was lifting Srinath, he doubled over backwards and I was terrified lest I had snapped his spine. Luckily for him, I obviously didn’t, and he seems to have more spine than I do even now. He had a saffron coloured Kurta and a lower garment of the same material which we called Jubba Jetti, of which he was very fond indeed. He hardly ever cried or made a nuisance of himself. Second borns have more tenacity as I see in Gayatri. I and Kartik get very emotional and touchy while I didn’t see Srinath ever being so concerned particularly about what people thought about him Gayatri seems just like that even now but time will tell how she shapes up.
posted by Ramdas Iyer at 11:42 PM
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