My Dear Suranwale Kaka

Back after a long break. Anyway, this is not one of my grandma chronicles. Hence before the actual post begins, here’s a prologue.

I believe that every miniscule thing in this world is some or the other way related to each other.  It definitely may not be very obvious but something common, a link sorts runs through all these elements.  And I am not talking only about living beings.  The link exists between me, the laptop I am typing in, the bed I am sitting on, the air with all its impurities me and you are breathing in, you, your ring, the fan above you, the dog barking in your street, a car parked in your society, Ground Zero in the US, a macaw from the Amazon forest and so on.  One thought that casts itself in my head every time I travel by train is that every person, on this journey has some or the other story; a story of their life.  And those stories, all of them are some or the other way related to each other.  They are all plots and sub-plots, twining and inter-twining, within each other.  This is one such story.

It all began when I went to the Khanderao market for the first time.  I don’t know if I hadn’t been in that part of the market before or was it because I noticed only then.  However, there he was.  A genial smile, glittering eyes, sparse scattered hair and sitting amidst small mounds of yams and sweet potatoes.

The Khanderao market always attracted me.  Whether it was the humungous amount of veggies there or the assortment of people, something always stayed on my mind after a visit.  One look at him and I knew this time, it would be him.  We went to buy yams from him.  He also had sweet potatoes and being absolutely in love with them, I insisted my dad on buying some.  Seeing me, he smiled and weighed some sweet potatoes as well.  As he started loading them into a bag, he gave a wide smile, said something and put some more.  However, when my dad paid him, he took money only for half of what he gave us.  It was then that I realised that he had given us some extra sweet potatoes and had said  that it was because I loved them.  There it started.

Since then, every time I went to his section, he would give me extra sweet potatoes, and a wide one-tooth smile.  For some unknown reason, he had taken a fancy for me and I liked the withered face and baby-like smile.  Our family has a routine dialogue after we come back from the market. Dad says, “He likes you, really. Or why would he give extra sweet potatoes, even when prices are soaring!” Mum says, “His fingers too look like yam outgrowths, poor thing, so old and sitting there in the sun.”  All I do is reflect upon this unspoken, very common yet unique relationship and wonder.

Wonder that there may be so many relationships like this.  Bonds which exist only in the eyes of the doer or through their acts.

It's all about giving tests.

Tell me, how many of us have not given tests or left them half-way, on the pretext of not having a pencil or pen to write?  I know that for me at least somewhere in fifth or sixth standard, not having a proper pen or pencil was one reliable excuse for fewer marks in tests.  Not for my granny though.  She has a heroic act to her name, even for this situation.

This happened, as she remembers, when she was in first standard.  At that time, they had oral tests.  Sort of a math dictation, I would say as per her description.  The master would speak out some sums and the students have to write down the answers.  Now that, for utter non-math people like me, is one absolute torture. 

Those days they had no notebooks or pens.  Slates (made of lime chalk) and chalks were used for scripting.  And chalks were very expensive commodity.  For one aana you used to get a small piece of chalk, which was a little more than half an inch.  That used to last for a month or at least the poor students tried to make it last so much.  And losing the little more than half an inch chalk, was a sin.  Then you go chalk-less till its time to buy a new one i.e. after a month.  (When my grandma was narrating this, I was thinking, ‘Ha! What a great way of treating spoilt brats!’ But then, a rebuttal swooshed across my mind. ‘Don’t spoilt brats have more than enough pocket money, which is why most of them are spoilt?’)

And so as the story goes, my granny committed the great sin of losing her chalk pencil and she was chalk-less at the time of this math dictation.  She knew all the answers and could remember all of it, but a missing chalk was stopping her from writing them down.  The time kept its pace and the test was about to get over.  The students were beginning to look relieved as the test neared its end.  Granny was rigid with tension, with only her mind working at a lightening pace, thinking of ways to write down her answers.  Asking the neighboring kid was not an option, copying would be the offense.  Telling the master was also not an option, losing the chalk would be taken as an excuse.  So what to do now? ‘Oh damn, the first boy in the row has got up to give his slate to the master.  He is going to get it checked.  There goes the second girl.  Three more and then, it will be me’ thought granny.

As the girl in front of her stood up to go the master, my granny started to chew on her slate’s edge in her frustration.  All of the sudden a piece from the edge broke and simultaneously an idea struck her.  She picked up the broken piece of the slate and tried to draw a line.  It was not very clear, but visible enough.  Quickly she wrote down her answers.  She remembered them clearly and hence, was quick enough.  And as the girl in front of her returned to her position, it was time for granny to go the master.  She scored full in the test and returned, a big smile on her face.  No one knew that granny hadn’t given the test, along with others.  It is after all, about giving the tests.

It was two days later that she saw herself in the mirror and found out that a piece of her one tooth had broken off, along with the piece of slate.  I giggled as she pointed out the broken tooth now, with laughter dancing in her glowing eyes and said, “That one is for math.”

Peek-a-boo writing

See what I said in my very first post.  That’s exactly what is happening, all over again.  Irregularity in writing!  I mean my last post was on 22^nd September.  Since then, I have not got what I call ‘the urge and surge’ to write!!! Sad, isn’t it??

Uh oh! Don’t think I haven’t asked people what to do with this.  The last I asked was the illustrious Shobha De.  This happened on 11^th October, when my batch was ‘exclusively’ invited for a ‘personal’ tête-à-tête with her, along with some other 100 people.

After her impressive speech and a war between my brains and heart, I put out the rather personal question to her.  I asked her, if long bouts of gaps between my ‘urge and surge’ to write is a good or a bad sign.  I had put out the question exactly as this, after my heart gave approval for its contents and my brains, for grammatical errors and required modulations of voice.

And she, being Shobha De- author of books like Spouse, Surviving Men, Socialite Evenings etc., asked me a counter question.  She asked me what I did during the gaps.  People laughed, I laughed and rephrased my question, she rephrased her reply and I sat down, still as clueless or you can say, more clueless than before. 

All through the evening and the next day, I was pondering over whatever reply she gave me.  Should I be a little acidic and say, ‘Oh she’s Shobha De, the I’ve-to-poke-my-nose-in-everyone’s-life writer? Or should I just keep mum and forget all about it thinking she made fun of me but what the heck, who knew me there anyway?!  Honestly, I am more than ever confused about my writing.

(Sigh) All I can say is anyone who is reading this, if they have a solution to my ‘peek-a-boo writing’ trouble, please comment here. Oh, but I would be able to thank you only after some days, ok!

Ananthashayanam

I know, I know. After reading this story, you might think that all my old lady had in her life were adventures or sort of it, and nothing else.  But, I would say it is something like that.  And no fictionalized moment is involved in any of it.  The living legend still lives and all you need for a live documentation, is to come to my house.  So, coming back to stories, do you know what ‘Ananthashayanam’ means?  Before you google it and ‘navigate away from this page’, I will tell you.

‘Ananthashayanam’ is a Sanskrit word that comes from ‘a posture of reclination of Lord Maha Vishnu on the great snake called Kaliya’.  His very famous posture is lying on the curled up shesh naag, with one elbow popped up and his head resting on it.  So, imagine a human being in an ‘Ananthashayanam’ posture!  Don’t worry. My granny did not do it.  She just sort of did something like it.

Those days, she wasn’t living with us.  We were here in Baroda and she used to visit us often.  And yes, with a ticket and her baggage, she used to travel alone.  All the way from Trivendrum to Baroda, when no 28-hour Konkan railway existed and when it took more than 48 hours for the journey.  So, once it so happened that she had reached back home in Kerala, after a long journey and it was past 2 am.  She used to live alone in her house, though her eldest son and family lived just a few yards away.  On her insistence, we had not informed her son about her arrival.

As she had arrived late, she just opened the door, dumped the luggage and slumped on the rolled up bedding.  She slept soundly till her daughter-in-law came knocking with tea and breakfast in the morning.  After exchanging news and having breakfast, both of them decided to make the place a little inhabitable.  As they both lifted up the rolled bedding, the daughter-in-law shrieked. 

There, under the first set of mattress, stretched leisurely was a serpent.  Almost nine feet long, shiny black and silvery tones here and there, it was lying on the second set of mattress.  Grandma says that it had a look of being disturbed out of a pleasurable siesta, but certain calmness, unlike the humans, shone in its luminous eyes. 

Pushing my shrieking aunt out, grandma stood outside for sometime.  About 10 minutes later, they saw it get out of the nearby window and vanish among thick bushes beyond.  When they got inside the room, they saw that it had left a gift for my granny.  A still-shiny piece of its old skin! Bizarre gift, I know. All the same, she kept it carefully wrapped, till she came here to stay with us.  No one till date knows whether granny was aware or not of the snake, through out the night.

My granny is known for the incident in the village, thanks to my aunt and her group of what we call over-the-fence-gossip-mongers.  They call her ‘the lady who slept on a snake’.  The lady who did something like ‘Ananthashayanam’.  

Something Unseen

All stories that my grandma tells me are not hilarious. I realised this the day she told me about her eyes. Nevertheless, it is definitely a story of courage of a 12-year old girl and ends on a happy note. But there is ‘something or someone’ in this piece, about which if I say now, it might sound, exaggerated. So let me get on with the story.

My old lady narrates this story or bits and pieces of it whenever she sees me drawing my eyes. She loves eyes that are well drawn. She drew my eyes for the first time in my life, when I was an infant and was the one who taught me how to put kohl in my eyes. However, I sat, without blinking my kohl-drawn eyes, when she narrated the story of her eyes.

When she was twelve, there was a dreaded disease called small-pox which had engulfed the nation. When it affected the eyes, they got horribly distorted. Returning from school one day, granny experienced stinging pain in her eyes. By the time, her mother came back from temple the little girl’s eyes had swollen up like plums, with severe pain. After a whole night of unsuccessful home-made treatments, her mother took her to the local government hospital. Towards evening, the doctors confirmed that it was not small-pox. According to them, the pain and swelling was due to abnormal growth of optical muscle inside her socket which might even mar her sight, if not operated soon. No name for such a disease existed. They operated and removed some mass of flesh from her eyes. After a gap of 10 days, she could see, though not as clearly as before. And after a gap of three months, the disease was back, with all its fury.

As the doctors kept on operating and removing the mass of growth from her eyes, the disease kept coming back every 3-4 months. Neither could the doctors name the disease nor could find the cause of the growth. Hence, within two years, she had had more than 12 eye surgeries and innumerable breaks from school. The school finally cut her name off from its list and my grandma’s tryst with education ended there.

After two years my granny’s maternal uncle came to stay in the village due to a transfer in his government service. When he saw the condition and the endless surgeries she had had, he had a word with her doctors and took her to the city hospital. At the city hospital, the doctor found out that the growth is the result of pus being formed from some gland near her eyes. A crucial surgery was prescribed for the following week.

My granny was sad on the day of the surgery. Four days later was the great ‘Kartika’ puja at the temple which is held at a great esteem. People from all over, come to see this puja during which, the deity is taken around the temple in its entire lit-up splendor. The mere sight of it is considered auspicious and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The little girl knew that she would never be able to come back to the village to see her favorite deity, all decked up, just within three days of surgery. She cried when she went to pray before going to the hospital and breathed a silent prayer, a whispered request.

When she was taken inside the operation theatre, she was greeted well. Then she saw that the doctors had a bowl of live leeches. Real blood-sucking ones! While she looked around, two doctors held her upper eye-lid and two held her lower eye-lid. The main surgeon, then, released three leeches in each eye. All this while, she was fully conscious, being only given the needed anti-poison injection.

The doctors had told her uncle beforehand about the procedure. There was no way to suck out the pus without disturbing the optical nerves and hence this kind of a technique. She should be kept in full consciousness during the surgery to avoid a coma-like situation and so no anesthesia was administered. After they removed the swooned leeches, they stitched up sutures by using the flesh from her thigh. The surgery had lasted four hours.

The next day the much-bandaged girl complained of severe pain in the eyes and the doctors removed the bandage to see blood oozing out. After they cleaned up the blood, they decided it was better to leave the area without bandage. By the third day, the pain and swelling had come down. On the eve of the third day, a depressed girl told her uncle about her desire to visit the puja, scheduled for the next day. The main surgeon heard this and kindly got the discharge papers done. It was quite later that he told my grandma that he himself was neither sure of the recovery nor why he had discharged her. By morning of the day of puja, my grandma was back in her house, eagerly waiting to see her beloved deity, in all its grandeur, though with bleary eyes.

The disease never came back after that and since then, my grandma goes to her beloved deity, every year, to see and thank Her. Just to be with Her.

Of leopards and coconut-graters...

We, Mallus are madly in love with two things. Mohanlal and coconut.  We use coconut in God alone knows what all forms.  There is this one way where you scrap the white insides into small fine pieces.  Before the modern grater was invented, we in Kerala invented an iron equipment called the ‘Cherava’.  Now the ‘cherava’ is scary looking machinery.  It has an iron part attached to a wooden plank that looks like a seat, with the iron part having pointed claw-like ends.  The whole thing weighs around two-three kilograms.  To scrap out the coconut, one has to sit on the plank and work in a particular rhythm.  Believe it or not, you still find it in some of the modern households in Kerala and very much in use!  Now, how does an ancient coconut-grater connect to the story that I am going to tell, is something to be known by the end of the tale. 

Now, starting with the story, last week, the paper was full of photographs about a crocodile which had strayed onto the road following heavy rains and rising level of river water.  I came up to show my old woman the clearly-taken (I should say cleverly-taken) shots of Mr. Croc.  She gave them all a little less than two minutes and then gave a oh-please-I’ve-seen-better look.  Seeing me a little disappointed she told me about a funny encounter she had when she was six.

During that time, her grandparents were living with them.  I’ll get confused, first, if I try to put it like my grandmother’s grandmother.  So my grandmother’s grandmother is GM and her grandfather is GP.  So while GM and GP were living with them, their village was very remote.  So much so that dense forests separated two neighboring houses.  Hence, wild animal sighting was normal, and this I mean in kitchens and backyards of houses. Shudder!

Anyway, one particular day, GM took my old lady and her siblings ‘to shit’ towards the pastures a little beyond their house.  Making them all sit, she came back to attend to GP who sat in the porch, chewing betel-leaf.  Now, during those few days, there was a huge leopard scare.  Apparently one large male had left its deep forest abode to check out the streets and some new markets.  While GM was in kitchen, GP in the porch, and the kids shitting (And NOT shitting bricks, as they didn’t know about the lurking hero then…), somebody from the neighbourhood shouted about the leopard being around the house. 

GM heard this and throwing everything around, ran towards the kids yelling her lungs out.  GP did not move.  She reached the area (the kids kept moving from one spot to another after every helping) and found all four kids out.  Two she picked up (my nani being one of them) and literally dragged the other two (all of them only half done with their helpings).  GP did not move.  She ran inside, put all the whining and shitting kids down and banged the door close.  GP still did not move.  She kept yelling at him to get inside the house and to close it, but GP did not move.  Then she saw something move among the plants, got very scared and closed the door.  Now the door was made of coconut leaves (see what I mean when I said we Mallus love coconut!) and it did not have a latch. 

As GM searched for heavy things to put against the door to shut it tight, GP, still sitting coolly outside, still chewing betel-leaves, says, “Dear, put the ‘cherava’ against the door.  The leopard will never be able to break the door down.”

Very silent and almost about to shit bricks (I am sorry, I couldn’t resist my temptation to put this!), I, paused for a minute after that dialogue, imitated in a croaked voice, by my super story-teller, and burst out laughing.  I laughed till my insides hurt and till I decided that this story, of leopards and coconut-scrapers, is going to be a part of my nani chronicles. 

An ode to my ol' granny...

Grey eyes and grey hair with a bundle of cream clothes is all one can see of her.  She sits in one corner of my house, semi-vacant expression on her fully-wrinkled face.  You can feel soft warm aura around her.  She is full of energy (after all she went to Vaishnodevi shrine at the age of 79!), full of anecdotes about her childhood and her village (she may not remember where she kept her specs the day before, but that’s her!), and full of 79 year old experiences (Yes, she’s soon to be one year younger!).  She is the coolest ol’ granny-nani or Ammu (short form for ammamma- maternal grandmother in Malayalam).

I am called her secretary because apparently only I can understand and to quote my mum, ‘deal with her’. Not that she throws tantrums; it is just that my mum lacks the patience to sit and listen to 100 stories before she calls her for dinner.  I have the patience, not only to sit and listen but to make her understand that I am here to take her downstairs for dinner.  Not that she demands anything in particular (except her 6 pm Bhagavatham on Asianet.); she is the most undemanding, non-tantrum throwing oldie I have ever seen! And I say this NOT because she is my granny.

She came to live with us when I was 10 and since then, my tenure as her ‘secretary’ has continued.  Right from what she is to where, what she is to eat, where she is to go, her medicines, her little knick-knacks everything is…decided by her, executed by me.  Nobody is allowed to be angry with her even if she falters.  It is primarily my domain.  She gets easily hurt if anyone else talks against her.  I have frequent squabbles with mum over her getting hurt by mum.  But getting back to her, I admonish her if it’s her fault.  Then she feels good about it.  She is always the first to figure out that I have an issue in my heart by merely being around me.  And there have been surprising times when I have brought her something that she wanted to call for, at that exact moment.  No, don’t take me wrong.  I don’t believe in cosmic connections. But there sure is something I cannot name…

She is one Pandora’s Box of anecdotes.  You give her one word and she can give you more than five real life stories on it.  And stories, they definitely are! I am actually thinking of writing a book on them titled ‘Gradma’s tales- Reloaded. Based on true life incidents.’

I’ll narrate the one that comes to my head right now.  Last week, it rained for one whole day and we had lots of creepy crawlies centipede look-alikes in our garden.  They petrify the living hell out of me and I told my old woman how I was about to paste one on the garden floor with my foot by mistake.  That was when she remembered a thread from her yarn of stories.  She used to live in a thatched house of coconut leaves and mud till the age of 10, as her mother was a temple garland-maker.  Their family of five (four children and a mother, the father being irresponsible and always out) survived on the left-over prasadam that the temple ‘Goddess’ (read: management) had the mercy to spare.  Once when she came back from school, famished as usual, her mother had left her some spoilt beaten-rice from the night before.  She nearly fell over it and started gulping down, mouth full.  As she was chewing the last mouth full, she felt something moving and scraping the insides of her mouth.  Since she did not want to spit the mouth full (She was definitely not full. What do you expect three small bowls of spoilt beaten-rice to do?), she put two fingers inside her mouth and pulled whatever was there, out.  And what she said almost choked me on the lemon juice that I was having.  It was a live centipede.

Now if you have seen a centipede, you might know that it is not quite a good sight to see.  At least not when you almost chewed it like a piece of vegetable in your lunch!  Seeing my face go pale and eye bulge out, my super fun-loving oldie went to great extents to describe the centipede’s beautiful features, as if she was describing Ranbir Kapoor! It was six inches long, the width of my middle finger and black, with cream-coloured numerous legs.  It had two long stings or whatever zoologists call it, on both ends and hence it was difficult to figure out its head and tail.  Now how does that matter, I don’t know.  The fact that it was found where it was found, made me have enough of any creepy crawly for a lifetime!

So now you can imagine my weirdly fun-loving and naughty dear ol’ granny.  I’ll try chronicle more of her anecdotes here.  Watch this space…

Here's to Dad and writing...

My dad compares me to Velukutty. 

Now, before weird thoughts jump around, Velukutty was a genius of a writer who lived near my dad’s old house during the latter’s boyhood days. Velukutty wrote in some of those weeklies, which were a favourite among the women between the age group of 15- 40 during that era.  He had made many a lady cry with his portrayal of the quintessential Malayalee woman, who lives and pines for her lover, then her husband and her child.  Velukutty was a genius with only one flaw, if that could be considered one.  Velu drank like a fish.  He is said to have made drunken scuffles at all alcohol shops in Thrissur.  Finally, at the age of 34, Velu’s popularity declined, due to his habits.  One day, he was found lying near a canal, on the way to his house, dead!  Many believed that his flaw killed the genius of Velukutty or he would have risen to unprecedented heights.

I am no genius.  But I used to write. Write something or the other. My dad remembers my first essay at the age of 5, when we were only writing our first sentences.  I wrote a page about myself and my ambition to be a writer.  My cupboards are filled with diaries I wrote right from standard 3 till 1^st year of college.  After that I got a laptop and MS Word took over dog-eared leather-bounds. 

I kind of lost my diary writing practice somewhere after graduation.  “Why don’t I see you writing nowadays?” my dad questions me after his anecdote on Velu draws my attention to him, this time more seriously. “Look, I don’t know what has got into you. You may like your field of journalism or watching and dreaming about making films, but I always thought your true calling was writing. So come what may, don’t stop writing.”  I looked at him for him to continue.  “Start a blog. I want you to do it. Begin it for me and I am sure you will do it for yourself before you’re through with your second post. I don’t want a Velukutty in my family.” It was warning or a request I cannot say, but conclusive, it definitely was.  And that is when I decided, enough of whiling away time, thinking I need a blog. Now, it is time.