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!

Learning a Foreign Language!

Most of us recollect many a funny incident in the process of learning any foreign language. For us Indians English is the first foreign language we ever had to learn. It was easier for a student to learn English in the big cosmopolitan cities. For one thing the medium of instruction would be mostly English and practice made it perfect. Besides that every other person would use the language, as English was the first status symbol you acquired when you moved up in the social ladder. It showed anybody within earshot in a public place instantly that you were ‘college-educated’. They had to speak English to communicate with the sizable population of the city whose mother tongue might be any one of the fourteen official languages of India. Though these occasions were few and far between, they provided the practice, which was all that mattered in mastering a language.

Life in small towns, as I had already said, made it very difficult for the students to learn English, with none of the above opportunities at hand. What was taught in the classes stayed in the classes, as all of us, including the teachers, talked in our mother tongue. Our English teacher would talk in English only when she taught. There was no conversational English lessons (now they have revised the syllabus, I think). We would simply learn all the comprehension questions at the end of the lessons by heart and pass the ‘language’ exam.

Any other reading material was confined to the books we could borrow from our school library. But they stocked only the Classics as they were the ‘recommended’ books for young students of the ‘High School’. So, instead of any Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew mysteries that we could have read without much difficulty, we were given the Tale of Two Cities, Mayor of Casterbridge, Treasure Island, Gullivers Travels etc.,- of course in the abridged versions- during the ‘library’ period. I read them all and used to exchange my quota of books with my classmates until I had exhausted the meagre collection of English books in the library.

When we went to higher classes, we got the original novels, by which time we knew the storylines and could get to read the book with all its ‘hard’ words and try to enjoy the richness of the words and nuances of meaning in the unabridged versions.

In the small towns where reading contemporary bestsellers in the English language had been unheard of, we had developed a vocabulary where all the words were ‘pure’ and classic, with their meanings stuck in the century in which they were written! Thus we could use ‘gay’ for being happy and not know the different meaning it evoked in the present day world.

The group of classmates who shared my love for reading the library books lost no time in using any new word we came across in the course of our reading. This led to a sort of competition. We tried to use new words and phrases in our ‘composition’ notebooks whenever we were given assignments to write about a chosen topic. As my father read an English newspaper in the morning (which was again the sign of an educated man!), I got to know more words by sight and occasionally would ask my father its meaning so that I could use them in the next occasion.

I was nine years old when I was given an assignment to write an essay on Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation. It happened that just that morning my father had been explaining that there are different ways of expressing the same thing. The next day I got severely admonished by my teacher when she read aloud my essay where I had written Gandhiji kicked his bucket in 1949! I had picked up the slang my Dad had quoted in explaining the synonyms of ‘dying’ out of context.

I didn’t know that there was such a thing as slang in any language. (Whenever there was a possibility of our hearing any ‘wrong’ words in our language, for example-in a heated exchange between neighbours etc., our mother sent us all inside and we never could get familiar with those words all our childhood!). Only when I started reading the (then) best-selling crime novels by James Hadley Chase and other such thrillers, (borrowed from my city-bred friends in college) I could realize what an outrage it must have been!

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!

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!

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!