I leave Wadi behind

My parents were married on the 6th of June 1963 and as far as I know, my father had not visited my mother’s maternal home even once since then. All our visits to Moovattupuzha involved just me and my mother. Soon after the results of my SSLC exams were declared, it was decided that I be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol every Brahmin boy carried to his grave at Guruvayoor on 25th April 1980. This necessitated a visit to Kerala by all concerned and we booked tickets by the 81 Down Jayanthi Janata Express which left Wadi at 5:15 AM every morning towards Kerala. The tickets for the 1200 kilometer journey was Rs.55/- per person (the cost of 750 grams of tomatoes this evening at Mayur Vihar in Delhi) by second class.

The brief sleep of three hours the night before we left for Kerala, like that of Calphurnia, Julius Ceasar’s wife, or that of the wife of Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov in Tolstoy’s immortal story “God sees the Truth but waits” which NRB was fond of telling, was plagued by nightmares and I was not to know that I was to be left behind by the only family I knew and that I would not come back soon from Kerala. It was to be an uprooting which plagues me to this day.

We were ready and got on the ACC Jeep at 4 AM. Soon we were at Wadi station awaiting the train. At that ungodly hour all train doors of all compartments were tightly closed and a lot of banging and shouting brought a bleary eyed TTE to the door. Since the train stopped there for hardly five minutes, and we had a lot of luggage we barely managed to get into the coach. The train took off and soon we were passing Nalwar and then Yadgir on towards Raichur. After a blistering Andhra summer day in the train, we reached Trichur again at an ungodly hour and took a taxi to Guruvayoor reaching the holy place at 6 AM the next morning. We put up at the Amrita Lodge

My Uncle Balan Mama and his wife Vanaja Mami arrived soon after and so did a sprinkling of some other assorted relatives. The thread ceremony was consummated at the house of a priest and after a lunch, the relatives left. We left a few days later to Perumbavoor enroute to Koovappady, Thangi’s maternal home enroute to Moovattupuzha. The south west monsoons were approaching the Kerala coast and the God’s own country - which it was not in those days – was verdant with strange vegetations of all kinds – the kinds never seen in north Karnataka. One saw special flowers and seeds about which one had only heard and seen diagrams of in NRB’s biology classes. It was cooler and nature was bountiful. I had an opportunity to see and talk to patriarchs like Manian Mama about whom one had only heard before. I saw food cooked in firewood ovens and water drawn from wells. Vegetables here came from backyard gardens and not from the market. It was not the Lambadis who brought milk from unseen sources, but it was the domestic cow which gave it. The food was a little different in taste and flavour too, and after the barren wastes of Wadi to which I was accustomed, these verdant greens provided a lovely splendour. I was shown the school which my father had attended and other landmarks about which I had heard ad nauseum at STRT 31/8 from a nostalgic Thangi. We spent a week in Koovappadi. It was another world altogether, a world in which I was to be trapped for a long time to come, a final and absolute departure from Wadi, the only home I knew - forever.