December Flowers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Village Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!