Another story on our holidays!

Whenever we went to our grandparents' place, my cousins too used to visit them as they were also of the same age. Needless to say, each family had a minimum of five to six children in those days. My mother had only one sister and so her six kids would visit my maternal grandparents.In my father's place, he had two sisters who had been married by the time he got married and so their children would visit my grandparents there. Besides them my unmarried aunt and uncle were living there. My aunt's schooling had been stopped as was usual for girls in those days when she had passed the ninth standard. But my uncle, just a year older than her, was studying for his English Literature degree at the local college in the nearby town (my mother's place) as a preparation to his joining the law college the next year.


My paternal grandparents' house was full of books, which was a blessing for us as we could develop a love for reading books in our numerous visits there. Our aunts loved reading and because they had been educated in Tamil medium, they would buy all the Tamil magazines available then, namely, Kumudam, Kalki, Kalkandu and Ananda Vikatan. They would bind all the novels being serialized and published in weekly installments. When the third aunt got married I was some six years old and too young to start reading the grown-up's books.


Within the next few years or so, I discovered the Tamil books and fell upon them with a fervour which made my grandmother comment, "Won't you get neck pain if you keep burying your face in the books all day long?" I would reply crossly, "What do you want me to do?" She would say, "Why don't you talk or play or something", for which I would reply, "Come on, let me talk to you!'whereupon she would just shake her head and get busy with her household work. She would be making numerous trips to and from the main door and 'thinnai' where my grandfather would be presiding over his field labourers in the evening, distributing wages. Maybe this was the way she demonstrated the love she felt for her grand-daughter who was visiting!

My uncle had a super edition of Shakespeare's complete work but I could make neither head nor tail of it as you can guess. All his other books were of college level and I could not decipher any of them. Still the printed pages fascinated me and every year I would just go through his books, wishing I could understand the content. It was many years before I did understand them! I would search for more books when I had exhausted all of my aunt's collection and tried to read the few books in my grandfather's room. I was very disappointed to see that all were books about astrology. (My grandfather dabbled in amateur astrology and kept almanacs and books for that purpose). I would not leave any printed word and would read through all the packing papers. In those days groceries were sold in 'pottalam' made from papers torn from old newspapers and books. Once we had bought peanuts from a vendor and read through the paper in which it had been packed. We found the address of a girl who had written a leave letter model for English composition in her school notebook. Promptly we wrote a letter to her asking her to be our pen-friend, giving our complete address! Fortunately our uncle intercepted this attempt when we were about to post the card and explained to us the dangers in giving out our address to complete strangers.

My uncle's other interests were drawing and body-building. He would do push-ups and weights training and we children loved to hang by his stiffly held arms when he was in a good mood and indulged us! He would draw well-muscled men in his special notebook and we were amazed to see an artist amidst us! Just by copying his drawing notebook, we also tried to learn the art of drawing. We would copy the drawings which accompanied the serial stories in Tamil weekly magazines. We loved drawing the historical characters in the stories of Kalki and Chandilyan which were being published in Vikatan and Kumudam in those years, as the women characters wore a lot of lovely jewellery!

My sister V and myself did learn the fundamentals of drawing from his books and we would use pieces of chalk to draw on the cement floor of the house, as blank papers were hard to come by in the village. Every available notebook was hogged by my aunt to take down the lyrics of all the Tamil film songs and to write stories. She would keep sending her stories to magazine but I don't recollect any of them being published! We would try to leave a pathway through the 'drawings' but towards evening the available floor space would have shrunk and we would use the 'pathways' too for our drawing practice!The adults would yell at us as their bare feet (Any footwear is not used inside the house-all footwear would be left outside the main door) would start burning after stepping on the chalky figures.

The intellectually stimulating environment of our paternal grandparents' house was more attractive to us than the maternal granparents' house where no chool/college going people were available. If our parents had to go back to their workplace, leaving the kids in the care of our grandparents, we would vote for being left in our paternal grandparents' village rather than the town house of our maternal grandparents! As a result of these stays all of us developed a love for reading, listening to songs and appreciating art.