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!