Wearing flowers

When we were in school, every day we used to wear fresh flowers in our plaits whenever available. We used to hear that some schools did not allow girls to wear flowers as the jasmine and other flowers invariably got loosened from the strings and dropped on the school floor. The trash was an ugly sight no doubt and we could understand that rule. But we used to pity those girls. Wearing fresh flowers uplifted our mood and brought the great outdoors inside the classrooms in which we were cooped up.

Some girls had gardens around their houses and used to wear single roses. Or even twin jasmine flowers or 'kanakambaram' straight from the bush, with a green leaf to provide volume and contrast colour to the arrangement perched on one side of the head, usually just above an ear. Other girls (like me!) who had to buy from the vendors used to burn with envy on seeing the different and unique colours a home grown variety yielded. The common kankambaram was a boring mild orange in colour but these girls wore dark red or pleasant yellow kanakambaram strings.

Some girls wore hibiscus flowers. Not the common red five petalled ones but the 'adukku'(Layered) sembaruthi flowers in every hue of red, yellow, pink and white. Of course, the mothers would yell at us admonishing us not to wear any and every flower we found on our way to the school. It would encourage the infestation of head lice (according to the old wives' tales)! But we were so crazy after flowers that we never heeded their words and the moment we disappeared round the corner, we would pluck the hibiscus or 'arali' flowers dangling outside the compound walls of our neighbours!

Now I know why South Indian ladies (of my generation only- already girls of younger generations in the big cities have got rid of long hair and wearing flowers!) visiting other places manage to pluck a flower or two (theirs or others', it doesn't seem to matter to them) and wear it just above their ears. I grew out of this habit years ago when we moved to a North Indian city.Wearing flowers was not a daily habit as it was down South. Women wore flowers only when attending marriages or some such formal functions and festivals.

Pocket Money!

The other day I heard my sister telling us that they are giving three thousand rupees as pocket money to her college going son. When my mouth fell open, she explained that it included his fuel bills and mobile phone bills.

A few years back, I remember my kids getting a hundred rupees each when they went to high school. It was for the purpose of buying birthday greeting cards for their friends and other such petty expenses. This was before the age of mobiles and so we parents did not feel the pinch as do parents of the present generation. Besides the kids didn't have their own vehicles mostly except for bicycles. For filling in air for the wheels they needed only a few coins and the parents usually accompanied them to hand out the charge for 'bigger' expense like a puncture!

This started me thinking about my own school/college days. The notion of pocket money was not even heard of. As I have said elsewhere, we were given only bus fare and we used to save ten paise everyday. I still remember how I used the saving of 3 days to buy flowers for my Mom at the Srirangam railway station and got a big hug from her. The next few days saw her telling everyone of our neighbours about the 'jathipoo' her daughter got for her. This practice lasted for the three months I travelled by the passenger train from Lalgudi to Trichy town.

When we shifted to buses in the next town, I used the money to buy 5 'pottukadalai urundai' (Sweet fried gram balls) for 25 paise and 'treat' my friends to one sweet ball each!

Movie Time!

When we were small children, the only entertainment available was either the radio at home or the movies at the theatres. Our parents were very strict in choosing the movies for us to watch. They never missed most of the movies being screened in whichever town we were residing in at that time. But the films had to pass certain criteria before we could be taken to them. The usual process was that my parents would watch the movies first. If the movies were a) decent family entertainment or b) comedies with no vulgar double entendres or C) silver jubilee hits (i.e., they would have crossed a 100 days of screening) or D) 'Bhakthi'-religious movies.

So we got to watch most of Shivaji Ganesan's movies (category 'a') though they were mostly weepy and we kids didn't like them so much then!), most good comedies under category 'b'(Kadhalikka Neramillai, Baama Vijayam etc.,), a few of MGR's hit movies, thrillers like 'Adhey kangal' and movies like 'Kuzhndhaiyum Deivamum' (category C) and movies like 'Thiruvilaiyadal', Thiruvarutselvar and 'Annai Velanganni' (Category C) or educational films like 'Tokyo Olympiad', 'Hatari' etc., (Category E).

Category C would throw up some odd movies of MGR which we were not allowed to watch most of the time on account of their being 'romantic' movies unsuitable to young eyes! So we got to watch 'Enga Vettu Pillai' and 'Ayirathil Oruvan under this category. Once I remember us being sent to the theatre to watch the 'Ulaga Thamizh Maanaadu' clippings (under educational films!) being shown at the interval of an MGR movie which had not passed the silver jubilee criteria. The minute the clipping was shown, we were forcibly removed from the theatre under squeals of protest. we wanted to watch the rest of the movie too!

Forget today's multiplexes fully airconditioned. Most of the theatres were not air-conditioned and it felt very stuffy when it was house-full. It was not a pleasant experience as it is now. The movie part was the only event looked forward to, by us children. Not to mention the smokers' contribution in spite of the 'no smoking' signs. They would light up a cigarette inside the movie hall and would go out during the song sequences to finish it, but the hateful smoke would have caused us head aches.

Once I remember my younger sister falling sick in a stuffy theatre in Trichy and we had to go out of the movie hall to take her to the doctor! I remember how I was feeling guilty that I still wished to continue watching the movie, another part of me was praying to God that nothing should happen to my sister and that I would never ever speak a harsh word to her! Of course it was only a fainting spell because of the suffocating atmosphere and she recovered in an hour.

Snake Charmer!

This is a common sight in any small town or village in India even today. A snake charmer and his assistants (his family most of the time) would start playing an Urumi melam or some such instrument(drum) in a street corner and call out to the passers-by about the impending fight between the snake in his bamboo basket and the mongoose he has at the end of a tether.

When a crowd has been collected he would stand in the middle and would entreat them to wait for the fight as the climax of his program. In the meantime, he would provide some more entertainment for his audience, he would say.

He would make his assistant (usually a small child) lie down in the centre and cover his whole body, including the face, with a blanket. Then he would start asking him some questions about the people around him.

"Boy, what is the colour of that gentleman's shirt who stands at the eastern side of our show?", he would ask and the boy would reply with the right answer! The mostly gullible audience would be amazed how the blindfolded boy could answer all the questions correctly, but for the blessing of the divine mother-goddess Kali or Angalaparameswari whose disciple the snake charmer proclaims himself to be! Suitably impressed with the question and answer session, the audience would be ready to accept the fortune-telling session that follows and would part with the few coins that was the fees. If the business was dull and no coins were forthcoming, the man would start frightening the more gullible section of the audience with dire predictions which would always end, "You would die a horrible death vomitting blood, if you don't part with the money which I can see with my third eye, hidden in your pocket!"

A few illiterate villagers and small children would fall prey to such admonitions and would part with their money, having become wiser enough not to stand as part of the audeience the next time around! Of course the snake and mongoose would never fight as the man would wind up everything when he had collected some money! He would mumble something about the snake being hungry or tired or sleepy, to the few brave souls who asked him about it!

I remember how my friend and myself, both nine years old at that time, stood at the edge of the crowd in such a show. It was during our lunch break from the small town school in which we were studying. The fact was that we had a Twenty Five paise coin in our possession (1/4 of a rupee). The music teacher had given it to us asking us to get her some coffee from the nearby teashop as she had a terrible headache(perhaps from our attempts to sing in her class!) Attracted by the drum beats we were tempted to watch the show and at the end of it, we were shocked to hear the terrible fate awaiting us if we did not part with the money! We managed to discuss the issue between us and convince ourselves that the coin was the teacher's and in no way would it provoke the curse. But we had quite a few nightmares that week!

Oil bath!

All my stories so far have been of the playtime and travelling we enjoyed as small kids. But there was the routine life we had as school going children in our home, under the guidance of our parents. Taking oil bath was one routine which is still unforgettable just because it was a very unpleasant experience for us!

After a school week, the weekend was a welcome change from our full day of studies. But one aspect of our weekend routine used to frighten us so much that we hated getting up on Sundays. Saturdays were spent on playing and finishing our homework but Sundays were the days when my mom insisted that we had our oil baths. It is the tradition that girls have their oil baths on Fridays and boys have theirs on Saturdays. Since we had to attend school on Fridays, we girls had to undergo the ordeal of the oil bath on Sundays.

We had to wrap a towel around our bodies and stand in the open under the morning sun. Sesame oil would be poured on our head and our hair would be dripping with oil. When the oil was massaged onto the scalp, my mother would be telling us to take care that no part was left oil-free. She would have an idiomatic phrase for every part; for example, if we left out the bottom half of our head, it would spell doom for the health of our brothers, if the top was left out it would bring on poverty etc., which would prick our conscience enough not to leave any part of our head without oil!

Then came the worst part. Oil would be poured into our eyes, nose and ears amidst shrieks of protest. We had to apply oil on our bodies too. Then we all took turns one by one, to be given baths in hot water prepared and stored in big buckets nearby. The rest of us had to stand in the sun absorbing the light as it was said to be beneficial for our health. My mother and her assistant (maidservant, usually) would perform the rituals every Sunday morning.

First kid in the line had to sit on a low stool. Then the shikakai powder (home made, with many herbal ingredients added) would be made into a paste and massaged onto our head and hair. It was a great feat to escape from the shikakai powder accidentally going into our eyes, though we had to sit with our eyes closed to avoid that! Of course we would like to take a peek at the going-on every now and then! As a result, most of the kids would have reddened eyes at the end of the bathing session. It seemed to take forever to remove every trace of oil from our hair. Once my mother was satisfied she would send the child to the maid to wash off the herbal powder, soap our bodies and pour hot water, finishing our baths, pulling the next kid towards her for her turn.

Once the bath was over, we would be rolled in a towel and asked to bind our hair with an absorbent cotton towel. With eyes smarting and the whole body feeling spent after all the massage, we would dress ourselves and dry our hair in the incense smoke, prepared specially for drying our hair. Then we had to wait in line for the next step.

A mixture of cumin seeds and garlic pods would be crushed with a little salt and made into a drink and we all had to take a little of it to ward off cold and to improve our digestion. This was the last straw and we would be saying ‘yuck’ and trying to run off into various corners of our house to avoid the spicy home made medicine! After our baths, we would be given hot soup by mid morning to help us regain all our lost energy. We would all feel sleepy by the time the ordeal was over!

Oil for bath:

Heat 1/2 cup sesame oil with 6 cloves of garlic. When garlic is brown, take it off the heat. Cool and apply it on scalp when warm, with a small ball of cotton. Cover the whole of scalp and let it soak for half an hour. Wash it off with herbal soapnut powder or with shampoo.

Another oil recipe:

Sesame oil 250 gm

castor oil 100 gm

Neem oil 100 gm.

Mix all together and use for oil bath. This oil helps keep your hair grow thick and dark, without dandruff.

Herbal shampoo powder:

Powder the following finely;

1 kg Shikakai (soap nut)
1/2 kg methi
100 gm whole tur dal 100 gm
100 gm mustard
Use a tbsp mixed with half cup water every time you wash your hair. It is good for even sinusitis patients.
100 gm mustard

Summer Vacation

When we were a bit older, we didn't spend as much time in our hometowns because of the demands of school. After we came back from our trip, we stayed indoors for most part of the hot summer days. We lived in a Housing Board Colony and so, all the other tenants were also civil servants with school/college going children. In the evenings we could play organized games like ring tennis, Badminton and for the boys, street cricket.

By this time I was in my teens and in the school final year and so felt ' older and wiser'! Being the responsible eldest, I managed the younger ones all through the day. I kept them occupied with various activities.

By the time we finished breakfast the house would have been cleaned and we would be free to do whatever, in the kids' room. We would gather in the room and sit on mats on the floor. Tearing off the unused paper in the last year's school notebooks, we would divide them among ourselves. My younger sister and myself would lead the two groups (as there were six of us we had three in each group) and hold various competitions. The first was a drawing competition in which the youngest would 'win' prizes (as they were too young to write whole sentences) of chocolate bars and a 'certificate' hand made by us. The next would be a poetry competition in which the two eldest (namely my younger sister V and myself!) would win the 'prizes'. The essay writing competion prizes would be given to the middle kids (to encourage their newly found skills of writing grammatically). Though I remember one time when my middle sister U surprised us all by writing a poem which was very original and honest and so won the prize for poem which was usually reserved for the oldest, namely me! It went like this:

Oh butterfly! How beautiful you are,

And how beautiful I am!

When we grew tired of these 'intellectual' pursuits, it would be lunch time. Happily my mother had a cook at home and so she would never ask us to help us with household work. We would have our lunch and return to our room. The next part of the games was very thrilling. We would darken the windows and close the door. With a darkened room the older kids would start telling ghost stories giving our fertile imagination a free rein. The younger ones would start shrieking in fear and there would ensue such a racket that my mother who would be enjoying her siesta would be rudely awakened by all the noise and give a warning shout from the adjacent room! So I had to control the noise level through these stories and stop the proceedings abruptly sometimes.

We would read books for sometime and V and myself would attempt our hand at writing stories ourselves. We would always start a picture story with the CID officer named Shankar (influenced by the Jaishankar movies with a CID Shankar) and put 'to be continued' at the bottom of the page. We were quite good at drawing and our younger siblings would clamour for more of the story but they always were 'to be continued' as our holidays would come to an end soon and we would be too busy with our school work to continue running the 'magazine'.

We would buy pulp children's magazines in Tamil (costing 20paise each) and translated Phantom comics). Once V sent a story for a children's magazine named 'Anil' (squirrel') with a request saying that she need not be paid at all but just publishing is enough! Much to our thrill it was published, with a picture for the story appearing on the cover! Of course they did not even send a complimentary copy but we had to buy it in the shop!

Sometimes we would put on make up and dress up like grown ups and stage dramas for our own benefit. We would write a script ourselves and hold a bedsheet as a screen and with the other 'actors' who were not in the scene being the audience, we would have a hilarious time dressing up and acting in turns. Sometimes my mom, alerted by our running to and fro for her sarees, my father's veshti and face powder, would come in to watch as one of the audience. Initially we would resist her attempts to come inside our room (fearing her scoldings for 'borrowing' her garments) but she always used to enjoy our performances proudly. My younger sisters who were learning Bharathanatyam for sometime would give 'performances', though they could do only a few initial steps at that time. Once I heard her boasting to her relative how her numerous kids kept themselves engaged in the summer holidays that her neighbours would wonder whether all of them had gone to stay with their grandparents! She was happy and proud that we were such a disciplined lot:-)

I think all these summer time activities kindled our imagination and made us more creative. I think the absence of television was the major cause for all these activities and am really thankful for it! We enjoyed our childhood so much with our own activities instead of watching others taking part!

Travelling through the night

My parents were very much interested in travelling. We used to be taken to various distant cities during school vacation time on a week's trip. Our family was a big one as was every family in those days before family planning. But the size of the family never deterred our parents from lugging us all around the state. In fact I suspect that in some hotels people had started wondering whether we belonged to a school excursion party at the sight of so many children swarming all over the lounge when we checked in!

Whenever our school vacation started we would load the boot of the car, the roomy Ambassador (rented ones before my father bought his own) with big suitcases. My mother would have packed all of us one set of clothes for each day of the travel in one big case while the other one would contain the clothes of my parents. (My mother who loved dressing up in new sarees, would pack two sets of dresses for each day!) Then all the spare blankets would be shoved inside the big 'airbag'. Another basket would contain a primus stove and various ready-to-make flours to make dosas wherever we stayed for the night. They would have packed lunch and dinner for the first day too. We could see a bunch of banana leaves to be used as dinnerware, stuck amidst the luggage.

My parents would sit in the front with the driver and the smallest kid. All the older kids would sit in the roomy back seat. Since we all were thin and small this was possible! There would be a great fight for the two window seats. My younger sister V would always get to sit in the window seat as she had been sick, once, long ago and so had earned the 'right' to sit near the window to catch the fresh air blowing in from the open window and thereby 'avoid' travel sickness. (There were no air-conditioned cars then.) All the others would take turns to sit at the other window; after much fight, of course. The travel as such would be very hot and stuffy (no wonder, with all of us packed like sardines with bits and pieces of bags and snacks) in the daytime. But we all had a rollicking time at the back with various word games and anthakshari of film songs (which was made popular then by Radio Ceylon.)


We would stop for a picnic lunch at the roadside, under a shady tree, if possible, near a stream so that we could wash our hands. My mother would spread a big ground sheet she kept in the boot for this purpose and we would all have our meals there. This is one of the most enjoyable memories I have of all our travels. We would go for a walk in the nearby fields and coconut groves while the landowner would look on the 'city people' (us!) passing through their area with curiosity and would sometimes offer tender coconut milk from his trees.

We would stop for the groundnut being dried on the wayside and buy from them to munch. The usual cucumber, cucumber fruit, palm fruit(nungu), roasted cobs of corn and guava fruits would be bought from the wayside vendors whenever the car had to wait at a level crossing for the trains to pass by. These were the snacks we would usually eat while travelling, our hands sticky with so many fresh snacks and stopping often to clean ourselves at the municipal taps on the streets of passing towns.

Night time travel was something I always liked. Usually my smaller siblings would have fallen asleep by nightfall and I would be free to sit at the window. (Alll through the day I would have had to sacrifice the window seat to them, as the responsible eldest child, though I was only nine or ten at that time!) My younger sister at the other window and myself would hold a singing 'competition', each singing at the top of our voices various film songs. But we would never listen to each other. Each would be in our own world as all our singing would be into the open windows! We just enjoyed letting ourselves go free with all our 'singing' and enjoy the experience immensely. I recollect the rush of the cold night air into my face and the semidarkness inside the car, even now, whenever I hear one of those songs. If happiness is something we feel at such moments, I was truly happy then!

Being a Hindu

The first time I ever thought about the idea of my religious identity was following a childhood incident. As is usual with children, I was in the questions-all-the-time phase. With an irresistible urge to shoot questions about each and everything I came across, I happened to read an Enid Blyton book for small children. I think it was Amelia Jane or some such book. I was fascinated by the name Jane and went running to my mother.

I complained to her saying that I was not named Jane or Elizabeth or Jessica or some other nice names like those but a rather (according to me) dull Indian name.

Then she said that only Christians were given such names and not Hindus like us. That was the very first time I was made aware of the fact that I was a Hindu! Of course being a Hindu meant celebrating one festival or the other every few weeks and going to a temple whenever my parents went (which was every week or once in a month according to the availability of free time).

My mother (as almost all the mothers in our country) took on the responsibility of keeping the family in the good books of various gods by observing fasts for the various Hindu deities on the days earmarked for them according to the Hindu rituals. (Whatever religious rituals the women of the household observe, the resulting good fortune is supposed to be distributed to all the members of the family!) But she was very nice in the sense that she never forced us to observe the various fasts but just invited us to join in offering the sweet and savouries, prepared to break the fast, to the gods. We would then polish them off!

As children, our religion meant that we had to take an early shower in the mornings and pray to the gods for a few minutes standing in front of the small puja shelf (shrine) where pictures of various deities were kept. Such a routine start gave us a fresh start to each day, all of us smelling nice and clothed in freshly washed dresses. I assumed that people from the other religions kept a different set of pictures of their gods in their homes and according to me, that was the only difference between the various religions!

Playtime!

As children everywhere have done through the years, my friends and I spent almost all our waking hours in playing as I have told earlier elsewhere.

In those days toys were something that only babies had. This was in those days before plastic was widely available. Almost all the toys were made of wood or other organic material. Imported toys made of plastic were available then but only if you had relatives abroad or knew someone who would sell these imported items. So children had to improvise playthings with what was available in the house or backyard. As this had been done through ages some 'toys' were handed down from generation to generation, like the 'marapachi'-the wooden doll.

Small babies were given 'kilukiluppai' (Rattle) made of dried palm leaves with some pebbles or big seeds inside. It would also have a handle made of a stick with thin strips of palm leaves. We can rattle it to produce a sound which would grab the attention of crying babies. They were made to sleep in 'Thottil' or Yenai,( as cloth cradle is called in our side) made of old 'veshti' or saree (as new cloth would not be soft). It is basically a cloth hammock hung from the ceiling from the rafters or a hook. (Rather than the flat baby cot, Yenai gives the babies a secure feeling as the sides gives a light pressure on the babies' bodies. My grandmother used to say that it would shape the heads of the babies into a rounded form unlike the flat backs of the babies made to sleep on a flat surface.)

Colourful toys would be hung from the cross bar of the Yenai which babies could see when they woke up. Otherwise small babies were not given any toys. Mostly they were cuddled and crooned over by one or the other member of the household, usually a large joint family and were not left alone for long. Teething rings were unheard of. Small children would be admonished not to touch the babies. I remember how we would steal a peak and enjoy the thrill of the babies grabbing our fingers to bite with their toothless gums. We never thought about hygiene and germs and maybe this was how the babies developed immunity! When they were toddlers they were given a walk-cart made of wood (Nadai Vandi) with which they could practice walking. Older kids would be gifted with a Rocking Horse made of wood. Girls would be gifted with 'Choppu' set of tiny wooden kitchen vessels for playing house. These would be sold near the temple or in temple festivals in a carton of palm leaves.

By now a smaller kid would have arrived on the scene and the older kids would have been shooed off from the 'Yenai' being told that the baby would have body-ache if the Yenai is used by older kids! Our grandparents would provide us with swings made of a small plank and coir rope hung from the mango trees in the backyard (as car tires were not widely available then).

When we were 3-5 years old we were neither babies small enough for rattles etc., nor old enough to join the young boys and girls playing active games outside. We would only play inside the house or the backyard. Mostly we were left to our own devices. Somehow all the games we played in our grandparents' house using 'playthings' we made ouselves stand out in my memory rather than the games we played in our parents' house with the real toys they bought for us!

We girls would play house with enthusiasm with whatever ‘choppu’ was left over from last year’s gift and would just pilfer small vessels from the kitchen to supplement them. We would demarcate the walls with chalk pieces and play house. In the summer vacation we would make 'proper houses' with mats and bedsheets to make tiny walls and roof and would enjoy sitting in the sweltering 'house'! We would polish coconut shells and use them too. For milk we would break the ‘kaattamanakku’ plant (Jatropha plant) which would bleed white milk-like substance which would serve as ‘milk’ in our ‘house’. We would use sand as rice and finely powdered red brick mixed with water as the ‘samabar’. We would use the leaves of the wildly growing ‘athi’ plant as serving leaf instead of the banana leaf used in a real house.

We would invite the small boys to have ‘meals’ in our ‘house’ and they would come home from their ‘shop keeping’. As boys found it demeaning to ‘cook’ they would play the role of breadwinners keeping ‘shop’. They would sell the sand ‘rice’, brick powder, ‘jatropha ‘milk’ and ‘keerai’-some small wild plant.

Boys would improvise their own playthings with the palm fruits serving as the wheels for a pull cart. We could make small hand held fans (kaathadi) with palm leaves. For the fan to rotate fast we needed fine needle like sticks. We would roam around the locality in search of the wild thorny trees (karuvela maram) which provided us with the perfect axis for our little ‘fans’. We would hold them and run fast which would make the fans rotate fast too. If it was a windy day we could just hold them and admire the fast rotation.

We would make home made kites for the windy days, with newspapers and sticks of coconut leaves , ‘borrowed’ from the brooms in the kitchen. Our mothers would yell at us on seeing the loosened brooms. We always wondered how they found out that we had taken out some sticks! Most of the times the 'kites' would not take off at all as they would be too heavy with all the cooked rice we had used as gum to stick the sticks and paper!

We would make paper boats out of newspapers and note papers and float them in the huge vessels used for storing water in the courtyard.We would make 'music' out of 'pipes' made of broad leaves rolled into marrow pipes. Or we would just blow on the petals of rose and any flower broad enough to cover our lips which noise never failed to annoy the grown ups! We would play 'drums' out of brass plates and metal ladles.

Any empty powder tin or any discarded candy or biscuit tins made of metal were precious and were hoarded through the year. We would even make tiny 'toys' out of the glittering wrapper of the boiled sweets sold as chocolates in those days, especially 'Parry's' and would line up our 'house' with tiny figures of 'dancing girls' made of these wrappers.

Sometimes older teenage girls would decide to play house with us too, leaving their grown up games. Then they would bring real rice, dal and jaggery and we would build a real fire between three stones. Using these and a real pot we would make ‘koottanchoru’ which tasted heavenly just because we had cooked it ourselves!

December Flowers!

Our half-yearly vacation was always looked forward to very eagerly by all of us. For one thing the weather was very pleasant, the winter temperature never going below 20 degrees celsius in our state, in the plains. In the summer vacation we would be scolded for playing outside too much in the sun but the winter vacations were just right for the kids and we could play all through the day. Only when dusk fell we would be called home lest we caught any chill from the 'cold' weather.

My grandfather's place in the village must have registered lower temperatures as it was the only time I ever saw the coconut oil in the house freezing solid. It was always a pleasure to look forward to the scooping of the oil with our fingers (no spoon!) and letting it melt in the warmth of our palms and applying it on our hair. We used to apply oil daily on our hair and plaster it into pigtails or close-cut crop, depending on whether we grandchildren were girls or boys. In fact we came to see shampooed hair only in our teens when we moved into bigger towns! If anybody's head sported a single hair out of place from the slicked-back oily look, we were admonished by the elders why we were going around with such a beggarly appearance! Apparently only the poorest of the poor couldn't afford oil for their hair!

The winter saw the arrival of 'December flowers' in the markets. It was so called because they were aplenty in the month of December though they started flowering in November and would still be available till the end of February. All the girls in Tamilnadu used to wear flowers in their hair everyday after tying their hair into plaits, double or single.This part of our culture is still alive in the villages though the city girls have dropped this habit. The December flowers were very much sought after by us as they came in many colours and we could choose the exactly matching shade for our dresses! The flowers didn't have any fragrances and now I know why older women didn't use them so much to adorn their hair but children were crazy after the flowers. The deep blue ones and the plain white ones which were matching our uniform dresses were favoured for our school days. We used to wear long strings of these flowers.

When we went to the small town where my other grandparents lived, the December flowers were sold at a house which had a back garden full of these flowers in various colours. They were not professional flower vendors but they used to sell these seasonal flowers to make a bit of money rather than letting them fall to the ground at the end of the day, being of no use to anybody.

The only difficulty was that these flowers would have sold out by 7 am. We should reserve which colours we wanted the previous day itself. The light pink colour was much in demand and I remember one occasion when I had set my heart for this colour but the lady of the house said that it was already sold out! Seeing my diappointment she said that the order was for 300 flowers (Yes, they would count them out) but if the shrubs happened to produce more, I could have them.

The next morning, the minute I was awake, I remembered the lady's promise and jumped up from the bed. The day was just dawning. Straightaway I ran to their house which was just at the corner in the next street at the end of our street. Seeing me running, two of my cousins who were also staying at my grandparents' followed me, without even knowing what was up! Breathless from running, we knocked at their door and the sleepy-eyed inmates opened their door to see three disheveled children waiting to buy the flowers which had not even started opening their petals yet! Their son who would usually pluck the flowers muttered something and went back to sleep! In the end, myself and my cousins plucked the flowers ourselves, helped the lady to count them out and managed to buy the extra flowers for ourselves.

We returned home triumphantly and were soundly scolded by our mother for having presented ourselves like beggars at a stranger's house, without even combing our hair or washing our faces. So what, we had the pleasure of wearing our favourite coloured flowers that day! Nothing I bought later on when I grew up into adulthood had ever matched the joy I felt when I got those flowers!

Village Story

Can you believe it when I say that we never ever got any pocket money from our parents? We used to have money only when we went to our grandparents' place during school vacation or when our relatives visited us.

For that one day we would feel like kings and queens! We would run around to the little shop at the corner to get a candy or would wait for the 'ice cream' bell. In those days there were no multinational branded ice candy but locally made 'ice fruits' or 'kuchi ice' which were nothing but frozen ice sticks with flavoured and coloured sugar syrup poured on them. They cost only five paise each. At the end of licking them we would be sticking out our numb tongues to show off the orange or pink colours that stuck them! If we could afford some more money we would get the richer kind of milk ice ('paal ice') which would have milk and cooked semilina or sago balls, to make them tastier. Of course we would keep licking them very very slowly to make them last longer. It was actually an art to lick to the last bit without making them fall off in chunks when they melted!

In our grandparents' place, a sleepy village on the banks of the River Cauvery, as I have already said elsewhere, you could not spend money even if you wished to. There were no shops nearby. We had to depend on the very rare appearances of various sweet vendors on bicycles or even on foot, once a week or so, taking their turns of business along all the small villages.

One man used to sell a kind of gooey sweet, very pink in colour which was rolled on the top of a sturdy pole in a bundle of ribbon-like sheets. When we handed over our small change he would unroll a small length and pull it to form a thin strip. He would then proceed to tie it around our wrists like watches. We would be happily showing off our 'wrist watches' before licking them off and smearing our entire face with pink coloured sticky sweet! I don't remember what it was called but the memory of having a longlasting candy lingers. (Later on, when we lived in Calcutta we saw the same type of candy being sold at the school gate! Of course, now being a hygiene-conscious-mother, I didn't buy them the 'wrist watch'. I was very surprised to see this rustic candy in a metro. It is a fact that you get all sorts of village goodies in Calcutta even now! Besides this wristwatch candy, I saw 'kodukka puli' also being sold in the Lake Market in South Calcutta.)

Then the small berry-like fruits 'Elandhapazham' would be sold, both as whole fruits or, as the season ends, made into small cake like pieces called elandha vadai, which can be preserved for sometime. When we swallowd the seeds inadvertentlt, while relishing these fruits, our uncles who made into a point to tease us would tell us that the seeds would grow into trees from inside our stomachs. I still remember a sleepless night worrying over whether my head would be sprouting leaves in the morning! I was three or four years old then. seeing my worried face my mother explained that nothing of the sort would happen and then proceeded to scold her brother-in-law (my uncle) for frightening us!

Our 'town' grandparents' place was no better in these respects. A slight improvement was the presence of a petty shop run by an old woman on the 'thinnai' (raised platform in the front of the house, used for socializing) of her house. This lady used to sell 'kamarkat'-the tough candy made of jaggery and coconut-made to last for a long time, elandhavadai etc., We needed only five paise to buy a candy here. Like Smiley had commented we could use even the 'ottai kalana' (the coin with a hole in the middle, released by the Bristish I think) in this shop, though the rest of India had started using the new 'paise'! My father used to comment that this street is a 'separate economy'! I remember his words even though I could hardly understand what it meant.

School Story Again!

When I was four years old, my father had to work for a year in a place on the hills of the Western Ghats where a dam was being built. It was the first time I experienced cold weather. In fact, it was the very first time I owned a sweater (which article of clothing we had never even seen till then!) The plains of tropical South India allowed us to wear the minimum of cotton clothes all through the year. Only the babies or the very old needed to be swaddled with blankets in Novemeber, December and January when the temperature would 'plunge' to 20- 25 degrees celsius!(The British used to describe the climate of our state as comprising of only three seasons, ‘Hot’, ‘Hotter’ and ‘Hottest’!)

When we stood at the front gate of our house, we could see the tea estates at the end of the village gradually yielding way to the forest at the high hills. During summer nights, sometimes we could see the darkness of the high hills lighted here and there by forest fires. The local help who came to our house used to tell how the dry bamboos in the forest would sway in the wind and the friction would make the dry leaves hot and start a forest fire on hot sunny days. It was another first for me as a child. At the backyard, we could see the dam being built a short distance from there. We used to play up and down the hills enjoying the leafy smell of the vegetation around us. I remember trying to sip the minute drop of honey at the bottom of the cluster of flowers growing on the hedges, aping the older children.

As I was about to celebrate my fifth birthday, I was to start school that year. It was a very small village, half of them employees of the PWD. The houses were built in tiers, as level land was hard to come by on the slopes. Our house was at one level, with the school on the immediate higher level. We had just to climb a flight of roughly hewn stone stairs embedded on one sloppy side of the cubical plot on which the school had been built. Alternately we could slide along the other sloppy sides of the school plot too if we wanted to climb down to the level of our house. Truly it was paradise for children of our age as we did this most of the times. In the way of children everywhere we did this even on rainy days when our clothes were covered with stains of mud and grass. The scolding we got from our mothers who had a hard time washing the uniforms covered with mud!

We were made to learn the alphabets and numbers by the teachers who would write them on our slate first. We had to write over them again and again till we got the shape right. The 'palappam's or 'slate kuchi' (small chalks) were in great demand as the new long ones would break easily with the pressure we all gave while trying to master the art of writing. We would hoard even the smallest pieces and would use them as a sort of currency to 'buy' or 'sell' other interesting items.

Once we learnt the numbers in our elementary school, our teachers made us memorize multiplication and addition tables by reciting them in a sing-song voice over and over again. We had to start with the Number 1 table and proceed up to whatever table we had learnt so far. This was done daily at the start of each math class and the result was that most of us could do mental arithmetic very quickly. At the start of the regular classes, the teacher would teach a math problem and ask us to do it on our ‘class work’ notebook. The first one to complete would get a ‘Very Good’, the second one would get a ‘Good’ and the third one would get an abbreviated ‘G’ scrawled on as consolation. So we would vie with each other to finish our sums as fast as we could. It was always a pleasure to count how many ‘Very Good’s we had got in our notebooks. I remember the adrenalin rush and the thrill I experienced if I was about to finish a sum and see another girl too on the verge of completing, out of the corner of my eye!

Whenever we went to a new school, the children of our family found that we were the star students (the standard of the other students being abysmally low). So the rule was that the child who got less than the first rank, would be scolded by our father for playing truant! Our father was the figure of authority in our household and request for any concessions or favours would have to be presented to him only through our mother. At the end of the first term in any new school, I used to get the first rank (no wonder, with hardly any competition) and would be made the class leader, thereby becoming instantly popular and accepted. It is the unwritten rule in our schools that the first rank holder would become the class leader (or monitor), regardless of the fact that she/he hardly had any leadership qualities!

What We Ate

There were no refrigerators in those days. Fresh food was prepared by our mothers three time a day. Now I can guess how women spent their time! In the absence of fridges, food had to be prepared fresh at every mealtime. They were on their feet all the time tending to the kids or cooking meals for their (usually large) families. If they had to prepare idlis the next morning for breakfast, they had to grind the soaked rice and dal the previous evening. So, the servant maids were engaged for not only washing the vessels but also for grinding the batter. The idli batter was ground with a huge mortar and pestle, till the local technicians invented the electrically operated grinders speacially made for this purpose.

There were no large restaurants in small towns. Women and children eating in the small hotels was unheard of. Only men who had some work in the nearby town used to take their food in the few hotels the towns had. Of course, when the returned home they used to buy sweets wrapped in 'mandharai' leaf and snacks parcelled in paper cones. (Villages did not have a sweetmeat shop.)

The term 'pocket money' was unheard of. All our needs were taken care of by our parents. Every month some festival or the other would be occurring and mothers would be preparing a variety of sweets and savouries, which were specific to each occasion. Our craving for sweets was satisfied on those occasions. Moreover, there were no mass-produced chocolates available then. Our grocers stocked boiled sweets and home-made chikkis (made of groundnuts and jaggery). No wonder I hadn't heard of dental cavities till I was well into my thirties:-)

When families travelled they used to make food for the duration of the travel. Our South Indian families used to make variety rice, chutney with tamarind as preservative so as it would last longer and large quantities of 'vadaam'. With a roll of banana leaves cut into small serving size to serve as plates and a blanket to spread on the ground as a dining place, we were ready to travel. Whether it was a train journey or car travel, the food was supplied from the huge tiffin carrier, filled with the packed food we had brought along with us.

Whenever we had our school vacation we used to visit our relatives, mainly our two sets of grandparents. As the other grandchildren also used to visit them at the same time we all had a very good time playing to our hearts' content. I loved my paternal grandparents' village as it prvided us with lots of places to play, a river with a narrow stream of water to wade in, a pumpset in the coconut grove where we could take a shower with the water gushing through with the force of a small waterfall.

Every morning, after our breakfast of hot idlis, we would run to the coconut groves nearby or the banana gardens at the banks of the river. We used to climb the mango trees in our grandfather's coconut grove and swing on the low-lying branches. We could eat the fruits of the guava and jamun (black berry) trees after much climbing and shaking of trees. When we left for home, our uncle would cut a huge jack fruit from our tree in the banana garden, we would roll it in a gunny sack and carry it in the carrier of his bike which he would have parked a long way back outside the garden. We had to walk in the dirt of the garden and we love it. We would take bath in the pumpset at this time and return home for lunch. We never felt the hot sun at all but my grandmother insisted on us that we should return home before noon. She used to frighhten us that otherwise we would be accosted by spirits that came out only at noon-maybe her way of keeping us from sunstrokes!

We could look forward to a sumptuous spread of food, prepared lovingly by our grandmother and aunts, when we returned home hungrily. Their banana flower curry was a speciality. As the bunches of banana fruits were harvested and sold, they were left with lots of flowers which were discarded. So they would use only the most tender bud at the end and use the other parts of the flowers as fodder for the cows and bullocks the family owned. We were close to nature and animals in the village. My mother's place also had fields and coconut groves and a pond at the backyard. My maternal grandfather would fish for sole in the pond and we had it for lunch fresh from the pond. In both the places, a lot of the local children were our friends through the years of our visits and looking forward to our arrival. The street would be full of playing children in the evenings, we the 'town kids' teaching the all the new games we had learnt at our schools.

How we looked forward to these adventures! The day our school vacation started, moms would pack our bags and we would be on the way to both the grandparents' homes. Most of my neighbours were children of other government employees like my father and they also went away to their native places likewise. The fathers would take a few days off at the end of the vacation to visit their parents and take us back to the place of work. What tall stories we had to tell when we returned after our vacation !

Life in Small Towns

I had an opportunity to get to know life in small towns in the 1960s as opposed to life in metros, which followed a lifestyle of their own due to the greater infrastructure and a cosmopolitan populace. Of course, in the last decade or so, small towns have also started aping the metros (which in turn are aping the West) for better or for worse, thanks to the invasion of satellite TVs even in the smallest villages, the difference disappearing rapidly. But this blog is all about 'Malarum Ninaivugal' (Nostalgic Memories) of the '60s and so I shall stick to the topic! While most of the scenario I describe here might be unchanged in some places even now, I am recording these in an attempt to acquaint the next generations who might not have an idea about what makes rural India tick. As they live and work in the metros or abroad they hardly have an opportunity to know all the little details of life in small towns.

There were no supermarkets in the towns. Usually there would be a long main road, which was called 'kadai theru' (street of shops) where the needs of the population would be met with shops of different kinds like textiles, medicine, hardware etc. This street would be part of the four streets that encircled the main temple of the town, (usually a Shiva Temple). All the other streets would be arranged around them. This would be the oldest part of the town. The suburban areas that developed later would be called Colonies or Nagar and sported a building style, which was modern. The number of such colonies was very few in those days and consisted of houses mostly let out to the government employees where our family stayed usually. In really bigger towns like the district headquarters- my mother's native place was one- there might be an additional 'chinna kadai theru' (small street of shops) for the suburban areas, the main street becoming 'Peria kadai theru' (big street) As for groceries, some street corners had a small grocery shop, usually a one-man show where we could shop for all our needs. There were no plastic packs but pulses of small quantities would be weighed (or measured out in volume using 'padi' a measure of approximately one litre-there was also a big 'padi' measuring two litres) out from huge sacks of commodities kept in a row. They were packed in cones made of old newspapers and the shopkeeper would deftly bind it with jute string from a bundle hanging on a peg in the roof of the shop. For greater quantities you could buy the whole sack or take a big bag or sack with you.

Cooking oil would be stocked in huge tins- each tin holding different oils like sesame, groundnut or coconut (the only varieties available then) at the grocers and we had to take glass bottles and baskets along to buy supplies for our household needs. Each middle class household would save the Horlicks jars they bought (usually when somebody was sick, as additional nutrition) for this purpose. There were no plastic pouches or bottles for retail selling of oil. You could see that the kitchens of the middle classes lined with empty jars of either Glaxo milk powder tins or Horlicks bottles to store the kitchen items. This was because all my neighbours who also were from families with transferable jobs found it difficult to lug around too many stell or aluminium tins used for storing things and found it easier to make do with temporary storage vessels in each town. This was before the days of plastic containers, which are so cheap and best for temporary storage.

There would be vendors selling vegetables from a big basket placed on the carrier of bicycles. Sometimes we could hear women selling their home- grown produce from the baskets carried on their heads. Fruits were sold likewise by individual sellers shouting the names in one continuous sing-song phrase at the top of their voices to pull the busy housewives from the back of the houses. If you fail to get the vegetables in the morning you had to go to the one big market in the town from where the street vendors procured their merchandise. If you had to buy from the market around noon all the vegetables would have shriveled in the heat and not at all fresh. (No cold storage). So people finished their shopping for vegetables in the morning or could wait for the temporary Evening Market to bring freshly plucked vegetables for sale.

The Milkman brought the milk in big cans and measured out half litre or one litre to each house on the street. He would jingle the bell on his bicycle in front of each house and we would rush out with a washed vessel to collect the milk from him. Warned by his loud bell at the street corner, most people would be waiting at the gate for him and would be exchanging pleasantries at the start of the day. This was before the ‘white revolution,’ which has made milk cheaper than bottled water and delivered in plastic pouches at the door!

Earliest Memories

We capture some moments in our life in a snap shot memory which is very vivid in detail. In our entire life, these moments occupy only a few instances every year. Maybe we are so excited, thrilled and aware of every moment at that particular point of time in our existence. I remember the very first memory as a trip to the temple of Pazhani. I had been taken there on my first birthday as our family was living in the temple town at that time. In the sloping path down, I was being carried by an elderly woman who was my grandmother's neighbour. My mother and grandmother were closely follwing her. My Dad and some other relatives were still in the temple while our group was slowly making our way down to a shelter midway on the winding steps. All of a sudden the old woman could not control her steps as she started hurtling down the slope, with me in her arms screaming my head off! Thanks to my Mom's quick thinking she stopped us both from falling down by charging in front of the old woman and stopping her momentum. Perhaps because of all the screams, the drama of the incident and all the fuss everyone made of me, this incident has been indelible in my memory.

When I was a very small kid, we were living in a small town. I was four years old. Those days we were admitted in schools only when we had completed five years of age. Now I read about babies in the cradles being shown flash cards with 'lessons' about colors and shapes 'to help them fare better in the competitive world'! Poor things!

All the children under five years of age used to stay at home. How did we spend the time? We were roused from the bed sharp at 6 AM (as my mother adhered to the Indian custom of getting up early in the morning and welcoming the new day scrubbed and clean after our bath). When I got up, sometimes I would help my mother draw the 'kolam'. Then after ou bath and breakfast, all the kids in the neighbourhood used to gather in one of the houses in the street and play any of the indoor games-kallangai, pallankuzhi, snakes and ladders and thayam and many more indoor games which could be played sitting indoors during the hot daytime-all the games handed down from generation to generation. Each game had its own song that had to be sung along when the game was played. These games developed hand-eye coordination, shape and sizes. We learnt counting in the course of the game-sort of play and learn, I guess. Definitely better than being shown flash cards!

In the evening we gathered in the street and played all sorts of outdoor games like 'kalla, manna', 'pandi', hide-and-seek etc., These were all games played by both boys and girls till the boys could join the older ones for their own 'kittipul' and 'kabadi'. We were playing throughout the day and were learnig teamwork, and

dealing with failure and successes, without knowing that was what we were doing!

If we felt tired we used to 'discuss' all the things we saw around us and offer explnations of those things. Radios had made their arrival in small towns. This was before the advent of transistors. So, the radios were as big as a 14 inches TV. We had to buy a licence to have one and there was a long ariel wire that went across the terrace between two poles. Our house possessed a huge Philips radio which had been placed near a window. We could see its back from the outside verandah and when the radio was playing we could see some lights through the air vents. I recollect how we were convinced that there were little men who were giving speeches and playing the musical inetruments. We vied with one another to prove how we could actually make out the features of those little men we could see through the slots!

Throughout our playing, we had to be called again and again by our mothers to have our meals, so engrossed were we in our games! In the end we had to be dragged inside with the occasional slap administered! I recollect that once I rushed to join my playmates with a 'pappad' in my hand still unfinished and a crow swooping down to grab it! What a shock I got!

When it got too dark to play we persisted in playing 'kalla, manna' changing the name to 'shadows and lights' to make use of the shadows cast by the moon during the brighter nights. [In this game the catcher will declare whther he will catch those standing on 'kal(Stone) or 'mann' (sand) to our question of kalla manna? (stone or sand?)]

When it was supper time all had our dinner at our homes and gathered again for another round of play, this time it being around the knees of our mothers. The mothers (all being stay-at-home, not a single career woman in those days among the middle classes), having served dinner to their husbands and left them to complete reading the newspapers or listening to the news on the radio, would have finished winding up the kitchen. The school-going children would have finished their homework. They would sit at the 'thinnai' (raised verandah at the front of the house-usually open to the street where any passers-by who wanted to rest their feet could sit-and were offered buttermilk or cool water by kind houseowners in those days) of any house surrounded by the children. In a little while, some woman would start telling stories-usually from the Maha Bharatha or it could be any imaginary story depending upon the person. Listening to the stories, the small kids would fall asleep one by one and the respective mothers would make them lie down on their laps or after sometime take them into the house to lie down on the mats which served as beds. Then the women would have a round of 'grown-up' talk and then retire for the night. What a laid-back way of life indeed!

Nevertheless, my parents sent me to the nearby elementary school with the neighbour's kids just to keep me engaged for some hours of the day (and perhaps one less child to keep an eye on, as two of my siblings were toddlers still). My name was not in the register but I could listen to all the lessons taught to the students of the first standard and learnt to sit still. I picked up the Tamil alphabets and the numbers during this unoffcial stint at school.

One day I went to the house of the girl sitting near me (a complete stranger to my parents as she lived in another street) when she invited me to her home. I never knew that you need to inform your parents before you venture into the outsid world! When I failed to turn up after school hours my parents were worried and had dispatched all the neighbours, who offered to help find me, on bicycles to search for me. By this time my dad had returned home from office and he was also searching for me on his two wheeler. In the meantime I had finished my 'visit' with my friend and was walking back home. I spotted my father on his two wheeler coming towards me on the street and hailed happily 'Hi Appa!' and was rudely shocked when he hit me on the head asking where the hell had I gone? This was one of the very few times I got a slap from my father!