IN my younger days, I enjoyed going to school with my friends carrying books, bound with an elastic band, on my shoulder. There was four kilometres’ journey to tramp. We set off very early in the morning from house. Dragonflies and flowers along the street attracted us. We were not worried about time. Anxiety to get in the school on time didn’t prevent us to peep through the gate of a big house, in front of which there was a garden and ask whether we could get some ‘Unda Thechi Poovu’. If we were allowed, we would be delighted that day to decorate the pale flower vase, which was kept always in teacher’s room when it was not used, with the flower and keep on the teacher’s table.
At times it would be after the proclaimed time when we reached school. In such days we did not use the main gate to enter into school compound. There was an access on the right side of the school premises. We entered inside by that way on such occasions. When we approached the main gate every morning, we would be flooded in the wave of a classic music from ‘Sree Mukundha Restaurant’. The restaurant was wealthy of tasty foods. The smell of Saambaar, spread in western wind, made our mouth watery. It fascinated many strangers to its dining tables and made the small coffer full with dirty one-rupee notes. It was the delicious foods that invited people to the eatery than a tin board which announced ‘Meals Ready’, hung on the side of restaurant threshold. Teachers in my school spoke in praise of the old man who cooked everything in the restaurant. He was a short and fat man with a paunch from Nair community. He did not wear a shirt to conceal his hairy body but a loincloth around his waist. Chewing their breakfast, teachers discussed about his talents sitting in the teachers’ room where I went frequently to collect chalk piece and duster for my class teacher. My class teacher was also a regular customer of the restaurant. She had even an account there. Every morning by ten o’clock she would command, ‘Balu, go to Mukundha and bring the parcel you are given’. It was Balu whom she invariably asked to go and fetch her breakfast. Some days she even dared to tell him to go to her house that was two kilometres away and bring her lunch. Balu was happier to go outside and roam about than sitting in the classroom. He was not so smart in the class but outside he was a hero. Our class teacher did not say anything against when she knew that he had taken a bicycle on hire from ‘E.V.K. Sound’ and cycled to her house along the road that was busy with flying buses. In those days I did not know the rudiments of cycling. One day Balu invited me to ride on the bicycle but I was afraid. I said that I would be happy to sit on the back carrier instead of riding alone. When I tried to climb up to sit on the carrier, Balu lost his balance and we both fell onto the road. After that I gave up even the idea of riding with another person on a bicycle for a long time. But he continued to go home on bicycle to have his lunch and fetch my class teachers’.
We used to bring our lunch every day. Behind our school there was a house where we went to have lunch as if to a dining room. In the small veranda we pupils sat in circle and ate our lunch sharing everything amongst us. The old lady in that house would give us gruel water. She would clean the place where we sat and had our lunch. Why she did all these things for us students, I didn’t know. In our school there was no water pipe but there was a well with stonewall around it. After lunch there would be a melee almost every day to wash our tiffin boxes near the well. Many students returned home without their tiffin boxes being lost them into the well in the commotion. Often we went to the nearest pond, which would be drained in summer season, to wash our tiffin boxes avoiding a fight. We had to do away with going to the pond after we had seen the dead body of a person who was said to be a patient suffered from fit.
After lunch, pupils engaged in games. But I went to the nearest house where they broke coconut and collected the coconut water in a cauldron. Taking a half piece of the broken coconut, I would drink some coconut juice. All the front yard of that house would be full of broken coconut to be dried in the sun. The smell of copra would penetrate our nostrils when we got there. In those days copra business was a profitable one. In our village everybody went to work in coconut plantation in season. People, who owned coconut plantation, got a good income. My father worked continuously one month in a landlord’s plantation every year. At that time he could give me how much I asked to give. In the morning there would be boiled tapioca for our breakfast. Our belly would be filled enough when we went to school. By the time we left for school, my father might have gone for work somewhere. When he was at home, he would remind us “Go along the side of the road. The road is full of vehicles.” I was calmer and quieter than my elder brother who took every chance to be a villain. Once he threw a granite stone to the beneath of a running bus. The bus suddenly came to a halt and the bus conductor charged out towards us. When we saw him charging to us, we tried to flee away. But alas! He captured us and scolded roughly. I began to shiver all over and my eyes became blurred with tears. He even threatened that he would take us to police station. If he took us there, we would be put in jail, I thought instantly. What to do then? I was so upset that I could not even cry. Passengers in the bus peeped out at us. Someone said, “Hey, we are late already. They are children, let them go.” We were so escaped because the passengers did not have enough time to spend. Not having enough time would save us sometime. Such an incident happened in one of those days. In our village almost all the houses that time did not have a privy on their land. People went to relieve themselves to the nearest hill top in the morning. They would sit behind the bushes to empty their bowels. One day when I went to the hill top to engage in the same process, I took a beedi from my father’s shirt pocket. While I was enjoying smoke from the beedi, my elder sister came that way and saw me smoking. She did not tell me anything hard but said this matter had to be taken to our father. I felt a sort of bitterness in throat. For she was busy with kitchen work, she did not come to the front veranda, where my father used to sit and chew his betel mixture, to tell the story to my father. And I was saved so from such a predicament. Otherwise he would have manhandled me the way I deserved.
My sister was so busy that she did not get enough time to go through her daily school lessons. She had to wash our dresses and prepare our dinner after getting home from school. It would be dark in the evening as my parents reached at home after their tireless work in paddy field. If there was no school, my parents coaxed my sister to work with them in the field. I heard them advice my sister that it was necessary for a girl to learn everything before she went to other family. They took me also in the days there was no school. I was in ecstasy to work in the soil. I went to field with my father when the sun rays broke out in eastern sky in the morning. He gave me an old hoe and the new one he took. “Be careful when you break the earth” he said. But I shrugged it off. It happened as he had warned me. I got injured with the hoe. I went to the hilltop instead of going to consult a doctor and plucked some green leaves of a ‘communist pacha’, a wild plant growing in disused land, pressed in my palms and put it on my injured foot. Within no days the cut healed up without leaving a scar. My father worked in paddy field from dawn to dusk perspiring enormously. On his way back to home in the evening, he imbibed toddy in comfort with fish curry from the toddy shop. Yet he did not forget to keep aside the small amount that his children asked for some days ago to buy books. Chewing his betel mixture in the light of a kerosene lamp, he would retell every night about his days of schooling and how he had to discontinue it........!
It was hardly surprising that he had to discontinue his study. In those days famine lashed out its whip on our village mercilessly, he said. No one wanted to send their children to school. They wanted them to work in the soil and bring the bread. My father’s story was not different. “Today, you have everything. TV set, refrigerator, motor to pump out the water from the well, even a privy. You don’t have to go to hill top to empty your bowels as we used to” he often reminded us. “Now you are showering in the bathroom. Not even a pond in our village.” In the morning I went to the pond to bathe before I went to school. Often it was late when I returned from the pond. After my school occasionally I would visit ‘Yuvarashmi Arts & Sports Club’ in our village. In rainy season the club would be crowded almost the whole day, people playing caroms and tabla. Even in the veranda people would be milling around the players of chess. The teashop near the club reaped a nice harvest in those days.
In rainy season our villagers, who were workers in soil, had almost no work. They spent their daytime relaxing with a cup of tea in the teashop near the club. On August 15th club dignitaries organised to hoist our national flag and chanted ‘Ki Jai to Bhaarat Maatha and Gandhi’. No leaflets about freedom fighting or fighters were distributed but sweets and paayasam. We sang the national song in chorus with flower showering from the hoisted tricolour flag. To know about those who laid their lives for our motherland, we did not have a library or a reading room. Even today our village did not flower with a library.
RAJAN VENKITANGU,
08 December 2008
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