Back in Wadi and face to face with a Telugu Proverb

This was narrated to me by my friend Nissankara Bhargava, presently Exhibition Officer at Visvesvaraya Industrial and technological Museum, Bengaluru. There appears to be a folk festival in some village in Andhra called Kanchukotsavam, the festival of blouses. On a particular day of the year, womenfolk of the village go to the river bank, take of their blouses and throw them into the river in spate. The menfolk, who used to wait downstream jumped into the river the moment they saw the blouses floating downstream and grabbed what came into their hands. One for each. They then went back to the women. The man with a blouse belonging to a particular woman got to spend the day (night rather) with her. Good fun and change of bed for all.

One such kanchukotsavam day, as the womenfolk were waiting with bated breaths and bared breasts, all women got their share of goodies while one particularly dumb husband – one like me- seemed to have grabbed his own spouse’s blouse. As she saw him coming towards her she gave vent to her frustration with a phrase which has since become a proverb in Telugu, meaning “Gosh! The same husband even on the festival day!” meaning nothing worth talking about even on a special occasion. “Panduga rojulo kooda paata magudena” May it be said that my homecoming to Wadi evoked similar frustration in the absence of familiar faces and circumstances. Everything had changed. Srinath now was the centre of attraction of the Family. I was a new entrant in the household I possessed and held on my palms. No old friends. Nothing. It was the first time that the truth of passing time changing the space time coordinates of a place was brought home to me so forcefully. I was a new man in Wadi. I had left a favourite child and had returned a new man. I was as much a stranger in Wadi as I was at Moovattupuzha. Happy homecoming, but same old circumstances.

And finally like the singer in TV programmes, I shout, to all of you who are reading this "come on come on comment, lets all comment together" Else gentle readers, I stop writing altogether. Or is that what you want?

Final Part of my life in Kerala - Cyriac and JP

What with my homesickness and culture change, as also with my preoccupations with other activities like music and things, my marks in the first PDC went spiraling down so much so that I just about passed the maths paper. It was not something I could take easily, nor was it something that I blamed myself for. I blamed everything other than myself – the system, homesickness, gods, ill health - for this debacle. There is a Ganapathy Kshetram (temple) and a Noottettupadi (108 stepped) Sivakshetram in kavumpady which were not as well known as the Puzhakkara kavu and the Ramangalam siva temple. I used to be a regular visitor to these temples and after my first PDC debacle cut down on my visits to just two of the famous shrines.

Tutions were something that were frowned upon in Wadi. They were for students whose IQs were in the dangerously low zone of 40-50 and not for geniuses like me. Like a gym going stud who effortlessly runs 100 meters in 12 seconds, just being diagnosed with diabetes, I learnt that IQ, like blood glucose levels tend to rise and fall. Thus having fallen to the level or a moron, I resorted to tuitions. Of course equally lion hearted geniuses like Pradeep and another friend Ajay, were already into tuitions. So I enrolled myself under the venerable JP (god knows what JP stood for) for Maths tuitions and with the lovable Cyriac for Chemistry. Physics I thought I could deal with, myself.

JP was a white bearded old man of indeterminable age with long white hair who taught maths effortlessly. He functioned from a first floor room in Thodupuzha road. He advertised his skills with the catchphrase “Phys an angel of JP an angel of Maths”. Though he taught effortlessly the learning was not as effortless. Sines and cosines danced like slim snakes slithering in and out of comprehension. And god alone (and perhaps JP) knew what surds were. But I plodded on. Enough to get a decent score in second PDC.

Cyriac was another thing of course. He was a fair chubby bachelor, struggling to find a job and we had fun learning chemistry from him and being young, he connected well with us. Pradeep attended the chemistry tuitions with me. He functioned from a rented house in Piravom Road. The way he taught organic chemistry, I fell in love with it. It costed me less that 100 rupees per month altogether. We spent hours with Cyriac synthesizing alcohols and aldehydes on paper. Eventually Cyriac married one of our Nirmala college lecturers Valsa. The joy of learning came back eventually but not to the extent one experienced at MCC. Suffice it to say that with all my handicaps I topped in chemistry in second PDC scoring 136/150. My total score was 78% rendering me ineligible for any decent engineering college.

By the time I ended second PDC it was fairly certain that I would leave Moovattupuzha forever and come back to the familiar climes of Gulbarga for further education. So two years after I left Wadi, I came back, bag and baggage, to Wadi, but totally changed. I left an innocent boy and came back as a worldly wise adolescent, with a moustache to boot. That ended my brief sojourn out of Wadi. But Wadi had changed too. None of my old friends were around. No JC, no Santhanam, and achingly no Janaki. All gone. Poof!

Note: There were hundreds of other characters in Moovattupuzha whose lives intertwined with me in one way or the other whom I have not mentioned here, but they deserve special mention for shaping my personality to a large extent. Ajay, Rajkumar Kunnel, Rajalakshmi the class beauty, Nawas PP. Radhakrishnan, a lot of relatives and scores more. Andariki na vandanaalu.