How old is 'old'...

When we are middle aged we have a different perspective on the memorable incidents of our past. Recently my daughters and I were recollecting the day's events on the day Prime Minister Indra Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguard early in the morning at her residence.

Our daughters, one 6 years and the younger 4 years old were in school by the time my husband rang up from office that the PM was confirmed dead according to his colleagues in Delhi though the state radio AIR was insisting that she was being treated in the hospital. Needless to say this news had caused the immediate stoning and stopping of all public transport and all the schools closed their gates at once as is usual in our state, with no concern for the children who wouldn't have an idea about how to reach home. All the stay at home mothers were hard pressed to think of safe ways to bring the kids home from school who had been earlier dropped by school rickshaws which had stopped pying on this news.

As the school was just one km away from our home, I thought I could go by walk with my neighbour and bring our kids home. Just a few yards on our way, we saw our daughters walking their way home with the neighbours' daughter who was in 4th standard at that time. On that day, I was so relieved that the older girl managed to bring our kids home safely.  But now I shudder to think that the 'older' girl was only nine years old at that time and not so old!

Got change?

This happened in the same trip where three families travelled together. When we vacated the hotel room we found out that the advance paid had far exceeded the hotel bill. All had taken our seats in the vehicle while my brother-in-law stayed back to settle the bill.


The owner of the small town lodge had gone out and only his assistant was at the cash register which contained hardly any cash. This was not one of the computerised lobby of a big hotel in a posh city. All accounts had been written down in a notebook and all receipts were written out. So the assistant at the reception table said that he had phoned his employer who would arrive within the hour to give us back the two hundred bucks he owed us. But we were in a hurry to set on our return journey and all were thinking of ways and means to solve this problem.
When the assistant was asked if he could borrow cash from the neighbouring grocery shop, he did so and found that they too did not have the two hundred bucks but only a five hundred bill. No change!

One of the family party looked at the shop on the other side and started , perhaps these people might have the change...' It was a barber shop (Hair stylists in big cities) and my husband said promptly,



'Where is he going to find so much money early in the day, he might only offer to shave (mottai) four heads free of charge and collect the two hundred bucks from the lodge owner when he comes back!"



All broke out laughing! The driver who had been observing all the cracks made by the passengers throughout the journey almost rolled on the floor laughing and said between spasms of laughter. "Sir I might have to get admitted in the hospital by the time I drop you all back, just because of stomach ache resulting from the non-stop laughter!"

Which vegetable is this?

I was a newly married girl just settled in my marital home in Pune with my husband .(Actually still a teenager, as my parents arranged a marriage with a 'suitable boy' when I was still in college!) In fact I was still attending the final year of my college and my experience in cooking was still in the rudimentary stage. I could cook a South Indian meal, both veg and non-veg, though my cooking was confined to the most common vegetables available.

When my parents and relatives left us after a week of settling me down in my new home, I was inconsolable. As a distraction, my husband took me shopping for vegetables. He said he would like 'poosanikkai' (ashgourd) sambar and asked me to buy a piece of it. We were standing in front of a stall which had big ball-like vegetables stacked in the front. One was yellow in colour and the other was green. I knew one of them was 'posanikkai' but didn't know which one.

I could not ask the shopkeeper for 'poosanikkai' in Marathi or Hindi as I didn't know the equivalent name in those languages. Confusion! Gathering a bit of courage, I stammered out to my new husband whether he knew which was 'poosanikkai' and then I could point it out to the shopkeeper to cut a piece of it. He was flabbergasted to find out that his wife didn't even know enough about cooking to identify his favourite vegetables and his face was a study in shock! He must have thought that his future home meals would be complete disasters, going by this experience.

But I acquitted myself well enough in my very first dinner as my chicken preparation with all the masala from my mother's recipe outshone the one he and his friend had been preparing in his bachelor days in 'British style' (with only pepper and salt)! As it was a Sunday he had bought a whole dressed chicken for me to preapre. (In our family we always prepare non-veg meals on Sundays and the poosanikkai was stored in the fridge for the next day's cooking.) So he forgot the 'poosanikkai' episode soon enough. Of course I didn't tell him until after the dinner that it was the very first time I had touched a dressed chicken! (My mother never let me prepare chicken in our house as I might have spoiled Sunday's lunch by experimenting the main dish with my beginner's attempt.) And it was quite a fight to cut it into pieces-my husband also never knew till a few weeks later, from his friend who was also newly married but a few months before us, that the shopkeeper would cut the chicken into manageable pieces, if we so asked.

But after this now-funny incident was recounted by me to all my relatives amidst laughter, any girl who didn't show any interest in cooking was immediately supported by her doting parents, quoting this incident. If 'P'(me) who couldn't identify poosanikkai could cook for a dozen people within a few days of her marriage, anyone could learn cooking in days!

Happy New Year!

As I recollect my earliest new year celebrations, I remember my mother taking 'head bath', it being a 'nalla naal' (auspicious day) equivalent to any of the countless Hindu festivals. Of course she used to wash her hair for 'varushapirappu' as well as 'mathapirappu' (new month). People would come to our house to wish my father a happy new year-with fruits, sweets and gifts-a custom carried over from the British Raj days when government officials were greeted with gifts on the first day of the New Year. My mother had bought a big coffee vessel just to keep hot coffee to serve all the visitors coffee on this day.

The season would be pleasant with just a nip in the air (as it is now) and the trees would look like they had been washed and waxed, as winter follows the rains in our state. 'December' flowers would be on girls' hair and school-going children would be enjoying the last of their winter vacation, the schools being reopened mostly on 2nd or 3rd January after a fortnight of Half-Yearly holidays including Christmas and New Year. We would have returned from our grandparents' place by then. On very rare occasions, we would have stayed back to celebrate Pongal festival.

With the promise of another bout of holidays for Pongal festival, returning to school would not be as boring as after the shorter Quarterly exam holidays in September. We were contented and happy on this day. The fad of new year resolutions had not caught on. Nor were we old enough to analyse the bygone year's merits and demerits. The new year brought no more challenges or expectations other than having to remember to put the correct number in the year's column when we wrote the date in our school notebooks!

Going to College

When we were studying in school, the educational qualification required before you could enroll for a professional degree or a degree in science and arts was 11+1 years of studies, instead of the 10+2 system high school students these days are familiar with.

The best point of this system was that we were only 16 years of age when we entered into 'college', free from our strict teachers, school uniforms, a long day consisting of 9-5 school hours and a compulsory attendance for all the classes. The worst point was that we had to cram what the +2 students study in two years in the available ten months of classes excluding the summer vacation. So we had very little time to enjoy our new-found freedom. But we made the most of our 'college girl' status and walked with our noses high up in the air whenever we passed our erstwhile juniors of the High School which was in the same campus as our college.

These educational institutions are located in a a sprawling multi-acre campus in a big town, a district capital (now a corporation) and the people were mostly middle class, not super rich as in the state's capital. Our college was one of the best known institutions in the state, exclusively devoted to women's education. It had Masters courses for Physics and Chemistry which even many men's colleges didn't possess. B.Com was introduced in our women's college, in the early seventies, our college being a pioneer in such things always. Till then we had only 'B.A'.s and 'B.Sc' s.

Our college was (and is) steeped in the traditions of our Tamil culture and arts and so had a degree course which conferred a 'B.A.' degree in Carnatic Music! A very strict dress code was enforced and students had to wear only sarees. The 'P.U.C' (Pre-University Course) class to which we belonged was the only exception as we had all completed only 16 years and not so adept in carrying off wearing a saree with aplomb! So we were allowed to wear 'Half-sarees'. We had so much grouse against the management as we all looked very 'country style' whereas the town's other women's college run by nuns allowed their students to wear such 'modern' dresses as salwar-kameez and chudidhars! They could even wear long skirts and blouses as their own High School in their campus had skirts and blouses as their uniforms. We used to envy them their smart uniform of blue skirt and white blouses, while we were in High School (clad in uniform green-coloured half-sarees) and now we were burning with envy at the 'cool' salwar kameez and other North Indian or western dresses their students sported!

Anyway wearing colours other than the green colour of our High School was a welcome change for us. We enjoyed wearing 'colour' dresses every day instead of the boring uniform. But it was no fun once we had shown off all the sets of half-sarees we possessed! We had to wait for the new dresses we usually received for our birthdays or some festivals like Pongal or Deepavali.

My classmates were mostly from my own 11th standard class of the high school and so we didn't feel as nervous as some of my new classmates who had come from other schools or other towns or even from other countries such as Malaysia, Srilanka and Singapore and were staying in the hostels. They had divided the 200 students belonging to the 'Maths Group' (Maths, Physics and Chemistry combo) into two batches, 'A' and 'B', each having 100 students. We were supposed to go for an engineering degree or for Physics or Chemistry degrees. I belonged to the 'B' batch. On the first day, I felt lost in the atmosphere of 100 students yelling 'Good Morning Miss' at the start of every class and held fast to the company of the girls from 'our school'. Some of my friends had been allotted to the 'A' batch and so I was forced to make new friends from the 'B' batch who were not so close to me in my high school days.

Initially, we were enjoying the freedom of not paying attention to the teacher as were not admonished for looking out of the window like we were in our high school and purposely gazed outside at the big trees in the campus (even though the limited scenery grew boring in minutes!) Some of the hostelers would gobble up the lunch boxes of the day scholars like me, sitting in the back benches. Then we came to know that the lecturers were just doing their duty (They could not be blamed if they could not manage to remember most of the 100 students' names in the ten months we had!)and not as interested in making us understand the lessons and get good marks as our devoted teachers of the high school! We had to look out for our own marks and we got scared of failing every course if we did not pay attention in the classes. Now we realized the value of our high school teachers who made us pay attention in the classes and who were till then 'dragons' giving out punishments like 'standing on the benches' or standing outside the classrooms', if we so much as glanced outside during classes!

For the first time we were responsible for the result of our own actions and attitudes. We felt grown-up within a few weeks of classes! But we sure enjoyed acting all 'grown up college girls' in front of our high school juniors who were lugging around huge school bags. So, even if the books needed for all the five hours of classes for our course could have filled a school bag easily, we insissted in carrying them stached in our hands, resting against our bodies-often dropping them in a very 'uncool' manner!

Of Cool Coconut Groves

My grandparents owned rice fields and coconut groves. Whenever we went to their place during our holidays, making the most of our stay there was anticipated eagerly by all of us. Full of coconut trees, mango trees and jack fruit trees, the grove was shady mostly.

Labourers would have removed all the weeds underneath the trees and hoed the dirt around the trees as the roots needed to breathe. Loose soil is necessary around the roots to let fresh air in and so this work would be done periodically and a circle would be formed around the tree to enable watering. The other parts except the circles around the trees would be filled with various weeds and grass as these would be cleaned only at longer intervals. This grove formed a perfect playground for us in our childhood.

I remember one of the old coconut trees growing almost horizontally for a length of ten feet and then upright, in an effort to find the best position to catch the rays of sun amidst the shade formed by the nearby mango tree. The mango tree in turn sported a horizontal bough, thereby providing us kids with fantastic playthings. We would sit on the horizontal boughs and the trunk of the coconut tree (though it was a bit rough compared to the mango tree's trunk) and play houses all day long.

There was a very wide well to irrigate the trees, right at the centre of the grove. The coconut palm leaves in their fronds would be left to soak in the well from time to time to make them pliable, as these leaves were used to make 'keetru' to build roofs for huts and temporary pandals. I remember the labourers' wives making brooms out of the central sticks of the left-over individual leaves, sitting on the floor, with their feet stretched out, wielding a sharp knife to remove the sticks from the leaves in a single deft move. The leftover parts all would be put out in the open and left to dry, to be used as fuel in the kitchen or for the boiler. These scenes would be seen only a few times in all our trips. If the fronds are floating on the water of the wide well, the boys would be upset as it prevented them from practising their dives and swimming in the water! But the upside was that we would be treated to the tender coconut water as the labourers could climb up the trees in seconds and pluck the coconuts and cut them for us.

The girls in the kids' group would have perched on the 'kona thennai maram' (bent coconut tree) and the branches of the mango trees and started playing already. We used to sing the popular Tamil film songs of the time very loudly, swinging our legs keeping time, as we could not be heard outside the big grove. We must have looked like little monkeys to any onlooker! Sometimes we would be fighting for the right of singing a particular song shouting, 'The song is mine, MINE!' If no amicable settlement was reached, all the claimers would be heard braying out the lyrics in many discordant notes! Silly though it might seem now, if I recollect these times even now so vividly, you can imagine how much we would have enjoyed it!

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!

Festival of Aadiperukku

Another important festival for the people living on the banks of the River Cauvery is Aadipperukku which is celebrated every year on the 18th of the Tamil month of Aadi. At this time the river would be overflowing with new flood after the summer months. From time immemorial, this festival has been celebrated to welcome the life-giving water from the distant hills of Coorg where the river is born.

In the days before dams and disputes, the natural course for the river was to flow anew during this period as the monsoons set in in the month of June at the West coast and Western Ghats. After the hot summer the monsoon rains start in June bringing the parched lands on the banks of the river, manna in the form of new flood. Farming would start and the fields would be green with newly transplanted paddy.

This festival is celebrated all along the towns and villages on the banks of almost all the rivers in TamilNadu as the monsoon rains in the Western Ghats bring new flood in the rivers of the state. Of course, nowadays, the man made dams and reservoirs stop this natural flow of the river and has made this festival meaningless:-( But I recollect, that in my childhood days we could be sure of new flood during this period. Maybe then nature was more bountifull.

Much like the festival of Kaanum Pongal, we would prepare a picnic lunch and set off for the banks of the river. Small children would be pulling 'chapparams' (a small pull-cart with an imitation of a temple-like structure which can be pulled with a string by small kids) adorned with colourful streamers. Women would offer the River Cauvery which is personified as a woman, flowers, bangles and earrings made of palm leaves ( the most common earrings for women in days of yore). Rice and jaggery would also be part of the things offered. The women would treat this festival as yet another occasion for a get-together among the ladies. Besides offering puja to the river, they would offer puja for all the various deities in the small temples on the banks of the river.

Usually there would be big neem trees and peepul trees entwined with each other on the banks of the river as it is everywhere-trees that grow from the seeds sown by birds eating the small berrylike seeds of these trees-and so having acquired a holy status would be having various statues of snakes (worshipped as deities-Nagas) and the Seven Virgin Goddesses (Saptha Kanni) placed under them hundreds of years back. For good measure the women would offer pujas to them also. After the puja they would tie yellow threads dipped in turmeric and kept in the puja offerings, as a mark of their prayers. Men would tie these threads around their wrists.

Newly wed couples would be offering puja to the river for the first time. The bride would be staying in her parents' place during the month of Aadi and the groom would have been invited to her place for the festival and would be showered with feasts and gifts. The womenfolk of the house would change the 'thaali' made of yellow thread around the neck of the bride (which has been tied as the 'Mangalasutra' by the groom on the wedding day) to a gold chain on this day, as it is considered an auspicious day.

Various vendors and merchants would camp on the banks to sell their wares. Of course all the usual sticky boiled sweets and pink cotton candies would be the attraction for us kids! Boys and young men would show their prowess in swimming by climbing to the tallest branches of the trees on the banks of the river and diving from there. I recollect how boys jumped from the bridge on the River Cauvery in Trichy. It was a thrilling sight to see them diving even from the train just as it was crossing the railway bridge. Of course many stories of death by drowning in the floods would also be heard when these thrill-seeking youngsters meet with unfortunate accidents.

The thing I recollect most about this festival is the sight of my maternal grandfather building us a 'Chapparam' . Though they were sold commercially he prided himself in recycling the old ones made of wood with colourful papers and streamers!

Tips: For puja we use:

For Kaveri Thai Puja on the banks of the river:
Small black bangles used for newborn babies
earings made of palm leaves ('kaadholai)

For house puja:

Soaked and drained raw rice, mixed in melted jaggery (kaapparisi)

Banana
coconut
Betal Leaves
Betal Nuts
Flowers
Turmeric

All puja offerings should be placed on Banana Leaf or Silver Plate for offering.

Then do the usual puja ceremony with incence sticks and camphor lit and water sprinkled clockwise over the offerings.







Banana

Kaanum Pongal

After Bhogi, Pongal and Mattu Pongal the next day is celebrated as Kaanum pongal, literally meaning 'seeing '. This day is used mostly for going to picnic spots and enjoying ourselves socializing. Thousands of people throng the Marina beach in Chennai on this day, these days.

Our native place would see people going to the banks of the River Cauvery to enjoy the day. Early in the morning the womenfolks would cook varieties of rice and side dishes to go with it, mostly some spicy chutneys and crunchy vadaams and pappads. Yumm! If at all the men would assist them, it was to cut some banana leaves from the backyard and make them into parcels for a picnic lunch. Loading the food into bamboo baskets, bullock carts would go to the banks of the river, the women riding in them. The children would skip behind the carts, the men having gone there long back.

My grandmother would lead the women to do the puja for Mother Cauvery and for the deity shrined in the small temple at the bank. The ancient steps leading to the river (built in the days of the long ago Chola kings) would be strewn with flowers and smeared with turmeric and kumkum. After this prayer was over, we would all have the picnic lunch and start upon various games. Men would be playing kabadi, wrestling and other boisterous games while the women would be having competitions on various indoor games like Pallanguzhi, Ezhu Kal etc., gossiping about relatives and neighbours even as their hands were handling the games! many marriage proposals would be finalized on this day as the youngsters concerned could be given the once-over by the elders in this informal setting. The children would be having a whale of a good time, with the whole mood of the crowd getting merrier as the time flew.

Girls who whose marriages were getting delayed would be made to sit in the centre of a ring of women dancing for 'kummipattu'-this was guaranteed remedy for getting their marriage fixed soon! After a siesta, the festivities would resume in the evening, the crowd disbursing as dusk fell. All our new dresses would be dirty and though our bodies were tired our hearts would be contented and happy with the day's pleasurable activities.

Our winter vacation would usually end by the year end and school would reopen around the 3rd of January. We are supposed to be present on the reopening day. But during some years, the temptation to extend the vacation to include Pongal festival would be very great. The state declares holidays for 3-4 days every year for this festival. Combined with Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes you might get 10 days of vacation if you take leave for one or two days. Our parents would decide that we could stay at our grandparents' for some more time and that we could return to our own home after Pongal celebrations were over. Despite the fact that we would face severe admonitions from the teachers for having been absent on reopening day, we would be enjoying the extended holidays. When your parents said that you could spend some more days -which were actually school working days- on vacation it was simply heaven! Of course, when we went back we had to copy all the class work done in our absence and work very hard indeed. But it was worth it!

Maattu Pongal

The day after Pongal is celebrated as Maattu Pongal -literally Pongal for cattel-in honour of the cattle which helped the farmers to plough and sow to reap a bountiful harvest. For city folks, this festval does not have any meaning at all. But in the farming community the cows and bulls would be scrubbed clean and their horns painted in myriad colours and the cattle adorned with colourful flowers around their necks and a paste of turmeric applied on their foreheads with a round spot of 'kumkum' in the centre. The pointed horns of the bullocks (In our district the horns of the bulls are left to grow unlike some other places where they would be singed at the time of growth, such cattle are called 'mottai maadu' meaning bald cattle, while our bulls were called 'kombu maadu', meaning cattle with horns-At the ploughs, mottai maadu would be paired with another mottai maadu while bulls with horns were paired together) would be covered with special ornamental brass covers with a colourful tassles at the end. Their necks would be garlanded after being smeared with turmeric and sandal pastes. We enjoyed making all the yellow and red marks on their bodies with turmeric and kumkum, though we were afraid to even go near the bulls and the men would do it themselves. As for us we would brave a visit to the stable where the cows would show their necks patiently to us! The smaller children would fight for the chance to decorate the smallest calves!

The cattle would be gathered at the riverside and a community 'pongal' would be cooked at the banks of the river (in my mother's place-though some people did it at their own backyard and stable too). The cattle would be fed this Pongal and fresh green grass. Usually the men would do this ritual. Boys and small girls also would accompany them to watch the ceremony.

At home, our courtyard would be decorated with beautiful kolams as is usual for the duration of Pongal festival. The ladies would build a shallow square at one side of the main entrance with cowdung and it would further be divided by two crossed lines into four squares, the walls around an inch high. Each square would be filled to the brim with turmeric water, milk and other such auspicious coloured things-I do not remember the things but only the sharp contrast in the different colours. All around flowers would be strewn and this symbol marked the welcome sign for the cattle when they made their grand entrance back from their sojourn to the riverside.

Towards evening the men would return driving them home, with the boys beating drums (and those who didn't get a drum would get hold of brass plates and sticks). All would be running behind the bulls very fast indeed! The sound of the hooves, the men's shouts, the boys' drums-the whole atmosphere in the evening twilight was very thrilling to watch! At the back the few cows would be tottering behind slowly masticating the grass and not at all bothered by the boisterous behaviour of their companions! This is a small scale 'manju virattu' taking place in almost all the villages and small towns every year. (In some parts of the state, like in Alanganallur in Madurai district, this would be conducted on a grand scale and madly rushing bulls with sharp pointed horns, trained through the year for this occasion, would be valiantly brought down by unarmed youth braving injury and death. )

When they reached home the cattle would be given a grand welcome with 'arathi' and 'kumkum' and would be made to cross the threshold over a rice-pounding wooden stick (ulakkai) and a fewstalks of burning hay, which apparently brought good luck to them and the household, according to my grandmother! This royal welcome would mark the end of this festival.

The same evening people would offer food to their forefathers in a special ceremony at home. For this they would prepare all sort of dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, along with many sweets and savouries. As it was supposed to be offered to the spirits of the dead-and-gone, the dishes would be given to us only after 10 pm or so. I can recollect how we used to grumble about being woken up at what felt like midnight and told to eat a grand feast! Finally we would eat the sweets and savouries when we got up the next morning.

The next day is celebrtated as kaanum pongal which merits a separate blog! Watch for it!

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.

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 !

Growing Up

Most of the children of our times studied in Tamil medium school, usually a government school, private High schools in small towns being rare in those days. English medium schools were a rarity in small towns. All school children had to wear uniforms, which was usually a blue skirt and white blouse for all girls under the age of twelve and a full length-skirt, blouse and a half-saree for all the girls older than twelve regardless of their figures. We, the smaller girls, could see all the older girls sporting the uniform of white ‘dhavani’(as the half-saree is called) and thought of them quite old and grown-up, though they were only teenagers.

When we were small children, as I have stated elsewhere, there were no TVs and we had no means of gaining knowledge apart from our school and what we saw in our daily experience. Ours was a middle class family comfortably off thanks to our family income being supplemented by rice, pulses and baskets of fruits sent from our grandparents’ homes. I did not know that children of all our neighbours didn’t share the level of prosperity enjoyed by us. I used to see the gypsies in threadbare tents at the roadside and people living in huts at the end of our street but they never registered in my mind as signs of poverty. (In fact the meaning of the term ‘poverty’ had never entered into my experience in the ‘real’ life. I knew the word of course, as an antonym for ‘prosperity’ in my school lessons but didn’t associate the term with what I saw in the outside world.) Rather I used to think how exciting it would be to live in a hut or a tent! I remember how my neighbourhood friend and classmate U and myself used to lie down on the sandy bed of the nearby stream in summer evenings and tried to imagine how nice it would be if only we could live in a tent all our lives!

I was rudely awakened to the reality of poverty as a fact of life by an incident while I was around ten years old. We had a Sports Day celebration in our school. I was also one of the dancers who had to perform a ‘folk dance’. Our teachers knew that most of the students of the school couldn’t afford to buy a new skirt just for this dance programme. The teacher who trained us for the dance came up with the brilliant idea of pleating the school uniform half-saree (which was white in colour) and making into skirts for all the dancers with a bit of glitter added with gold-coloured paper strips stitched onto them as designs and borders. Of course, all these logistic discussions had taken place in the staff room and we were told to bring a white half saree each when we came to school the next day. As I wore only the blue skirt, I was told to borrow a dhavani from an older girl. I was new to the town and I did not know any senior girl.

Remembering that I had a nodding acquaintance with a girl who studied in the next higher class and most importantly, who wore a white half saree to school, I hit upon the idea of asking her for its loan. I knew that she lived at the end of our street and went straight there from school. She was yet to return from school and I waited for her in the small front courtyard.

A big grinding stone pulled by two bullocks was grinding a mixture of lime and sand in a deep circular groove. Apparently this 'home-made' mortar was a substitute for the costlier cement mixture for building dwelling units. Fascinated by the sight of the bullocks going round and round in the same circle, I waited patiently. In a few minutes, I saw the girl returning from school and was surprised to see me. After the initial 'hello' I promptly requested her to lend me a white half saree for the dance. I was very sure that she would give it to me at once as this was after all a school project and she was a fellow student whose duty it was to help me. Imagine my surprise and shock when she said a very agitated ‘No!’ to me and disappeared into her house banging the door shut!

I walked back very slowly to my house and on seeing my mother at the doorstep, started pouring out the story almost in tears. I had never been told ‘no’ before that. (This incident had many ‘firsts’ in more than one aspect and that’s why it still stands out fresh in my memory with all the details etched very clearly, in spite of the long years in between.) I used to be a student who took the words of teachers very seriously and would be very nervous if I had not finished the home work/studied for the day’s test etc., I took the requisition for the half saree with as much seriousness and badgered my mom why, oh, why she couldn’t have lent me that. My mother consoled me saying, ‘She is poor ok? She must be having only that one set of uniform.’

Only then it dawned on me that being poor meant you had to wear the one set of clothes daily, washing it in the evening to dry through the night. The fact that poverty affected the way you ate, clothed and lived your life was brought home forcefully to my young mind. The world was never the same again for me!

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!

Schooling on the Move

Due to my father's transferable job as a civil engineer of the state, we had to move every two or three years to a new town. So, we children had to be enrolled in a new school every time my father was transferred, usually in the middle of the academic year. Fortunately, we didn't miss a single year throughout these moves though we had to get admitted in the school in our father's village one year due to a transfer in the middle of an academic year when all admissions had closed in the schools of the new town.

We would have just moved into a new place, got admitted in a new school and would have started making new friends and just getting comfortable in the new surroundings when a transfer would loom in the horizon to make us all dread the heartwrenching parting from our friends. We all got used to this process as we grew older but when we were very small it looked like the end of the world to leave a known place and try to grow roots in a new place.

But this experience helped us learn to adjust to any new place as we all knew that we would make new friends real soon just as we did in the last town. Had we stayed at one place we would have moved only in the limited geographical area and would not even have been aware of the wide world outside. You have to live in a place, for sometime at least, to get the feel of what makes the inhabitants what they are.

Moving from one end to the other end of the state so many times gave us an opportunity to observe the differences in the varied cultures in each place though we all spoke the same language. (After all, our state had been three different kingdoms in the ancient times and even as late as before the arrival of the British, had been ruled by smaller kings or chieftains.) So, each area had evolved its own customs and dialects. This experience helped me a lot when I had to move from state to state after my marriage and had the opportunity to observe and appreciate the cultures of people speaking different languages, as no two states speak the same language in India.

Those days there were no English medium schools through the state except in big towns and metros. As my father could be posted in smaller towns too, we all had our schooling in our mother tongue Tamil, with English as second language (from third standard onwards). When I started High School the Hindi agitation had happened and so, we did not have Hindi as a subject. In entire India, our state was the only one where Hindi could not be imposed due to the citizens' opposition. However, children who wanted to learn the language could take private tuitions and sit for the Rashtra Bhasha exams conducted by the Central Government. Many of my friends living in bigger towns did this too, which helped them when they had to work or live or travel in the North of the country.

In the smaller towns, there was no need to learn the language at all and people couldn't be bothered to learn it and they didn't miss much, they felt! Anyway, we were taught English by teachers whose teaching methods were different in each town depending on the pupils. When I started elementary school, my father had been posted in a bigger town (where a factory was being built) which had a very good school. Thanks to the teachers there, I had a very strong foundation in all the subjects, especially English. By the time I came to the fourth standard there, I was using cursive writing for English (which was taught in special 4-lined notebooks as they do now in kinder garten classes even now) and had become good at writing full sentences.

Two years later, my father had been posted to a small town, rather a big village, (to oversee irrigation projects). I was admitted to the sixth standard in the Girls' High School there. I still remember my parents telling me 'see you have come to High School, a real grown up'!) Imagine my shock when I was admonished for using cursive writing and was asked to print the letters! The teachers were starting the basics in this town as the High School where I studied was the only High School catering to the needs of all the girls of the nearby villages.

There was a Boys' High School too in this town as in many of the small towns. The villages had only the elementary schools, which had classes up to fifth standard. The children from the villages did not even know the alphabets of English, let alone words! For the people of these villages the world had not progressed at all. Some of my classmates from these villages dropped out of the school just as my aunts (of my previous generation) did when they reached puberty.

Luckily, I could weather the schooling in these small towns because of the strong foundation I had. Besides, my father had the habit of buying the Readers' Digest in addition to his English newspaper and this helped me retain the vocabulary I had learnt so far (even though I could read only the jokes like Life is like that and Humour in Uniform etc.,!) In between these schools, I had my fifth standard education (which was similar to the small town school in many aspects but for the number of students there) in a small village school which I enjoyed very much from a child's point of view and which deserves a separate write-up in the sequels to this post! Through all these years, I was growing up into a young girl learning not only the school lessons but valuable life lessons too. Schooling was fun indeed as it had the magic of childhood which saw everything with the wonder of seeing it for the very first time!

Our Entertainment-the Radio

When I think of my school days I remember them as a daily routine for ten months every year where I spent eight hours or so with persons other than our family and neighbours. Except for the three examinations that interrupted the routine, all the other days were filled with lessons taught during school hours, homework done in less than an hour and the rest of the time spent in eating, playing and sleeping. Then there were the quarterly, half-yearly and annual exams and the holidays that followed them. The routine was different, the one during the exams filled with hectic school work and the ones during the holidays filled with nothing but playing, listening to the radio and reading story books.

There were no televisions then, only radios. By the time I started school, transistor radios had become popular. Every house had a radio or transistor radio. I remember that some groups of gypsies too possessed transistor radios as they could be played on the move, with batteries! We could trust the AIR to play film songs some three or four times a day. We knew the time table by heart and used to wait eagerly for them. They were the only light music easy on the ears and easily available to us.

The rest of the time we used to fiddle the shortwave radios and listened to the Voice of America and the BBC and sometimes Moscow radio too (Moscow radio broadcast Tamil programmes every day for some half an hour or so.) We became familiar with the latest Beatles songs and groups like the Carpenters etc., thanks to the Voice of America. My father liked listening to English songs and so, we also developed a liking for them. (Of course, as he grew older he switched over to Carnatic music but he must have been in his late twenties and early thirties when we were small and had retained the influence of his hostel/college life in developing a taste for Western music and continued listening to them over the radio.)

Whenever we were in our native Thanjavur district we could listen to Radio Ceylon which broadcast Tamil film songs non-stop with commercials in-between, all through the day. So we used to look forward to the stay in our father's native village where my as-yet-not married teenage athai (the last daughter) lived with my paternal grandparents and who was an avid fan of Radio Ceylon. She kept the lyrics for all the songs, old and new, painstakingly hand-written in notebooks and we all used to sing along with her even as we were assisting her in the preparation of the breakfast, lunch, evening tiffin and supper for all of us.

When AIR introduced their commercial broadcasting for the first time, with the promise of non-stop broadcasting of film songs, we were all sitting in front of the radio in our house waiting for the first song of 'Then Kinnam', a program for popular film songs (It is being broadcast even now). The first song was, I remember, 'Pournami Nilavil' rendered by the still popular SPB. We were so delighted and thrilled to have our own commercial channel for film songs regardless of where my father had been posted, without depending on Radio Ceylon for our aural entertainment. This was actually during the time when man had landed on the moon and the Americans were watching this event live on their TVs! Anyway, economic 'Progress' had started to happen in our country too, I guess, with the first commercial ever broadcast by the state owned radio!