Never a dull moment

 It has been a long desire to spent time in my village in Kerala which we left in 1990 Though we had been there for a few hours each on three or four occasions since. The visit was restricted to a family of our ilk where the guardian angel was an old aunty. She passed away in 2016. Since our visits were during the day, the temple next door used to be shut I was keen that I would visit our village during monsoon. The monsoon gives a different mood. Should I walk down the memory lane at all? Did I have the emotional tenacity to visit the village which was like a huge stage where all the main actors close to me have left. A part of the set has since been dismantled but some significant memory markers were still there. Where would I stay ? This question had a simple answer. I will stay with Vishnu. Cricket crazy summer holidays of 1978 was the only time I had interacted with Vishnu. He was my friend's friend. Social media ensured that he became a dear friend. He was a professor of chem...

  Our school requested us, old boys, for articles for school magazine. Only after penning my piece, I was told they need a 300 words one against my 1000 words piece. Why waste it when I can use it to make my friends suffer ! Here is the long piece. Walking down the memory lane Having spent six years from 1970 to 1976 across three sections, where do I start my memoirs ? After some thought, I have chosen our days in class XI as focal point. I had taken my own sweet time to switch to long trousers. I wore shorts till class X. So when I turned up after summer holidays in full length trousers in XI E, some friends made some appreciating noises to the effect that I was finally growing up ! Class seating was in strict alphabetic order and found myself sandwiched between Sasikumar and Suresh Thomas. The seating was a single seater row, two three seater row and a single seater row adjoining the windows. As befitting my name, I was towards to fag end of the class. There was a choice to ma...

  Train! Train! Cigarette packets and match boxes were my Lego bricks. From childhood, I have been fascinated by trains and buses. A wooden red and yellow bus with "Kottayam" in Malayalam was my favourite toy. I would suddenly feel thirsty on entering platform no 1 of Trichur railway station. My dad knew my thirst was induced by the stock at the shop at entrance - Coke and Fanta. Dad used to oblige me. I used to make trains out of match boxes and cigarette packets. My dad was a smoker and that helped me build up my railway rolling stock faster than my friends. I used empty biscuit cartons and LG Asafoetida packs to building stations and overhead walk ways. Longer the train, tougher it was to make it travel in a straight line. Out of curiosity, I used to assemble railway system well into my high school days whenever I could gather long slender empty packs for stations. Nowadays all cigarette packets have flip open tops. Till the turn of the century, only premium brands had fli...

My Andhra athai's ( bua )  last son Murali fell into viraku aduppu ( firewood choola ) when he was around three years old leaving him with 50% burns.  He was two years older than me. He used to be brought often to Madras for a fortnight's confinement and treatment at children's ward in Stanley Medical College  Hospital, popularly known then as 'kanji thotti'. Superintendent there was a close family friend.   I used to be in Chennai during my long  holiday breaks at school in Kerala. If Murali was admitted during such school breaks,  I used to go and stay with him wearing hospital dress and sharing his cot.  We used to play with all the kids in the ward. Of course, we ate 'sick diet' served by hospital kitchen. I can not think of such a possibility now. This was in 1960s.

Some of you may still have this opportunity My mom would have petted me, consoled me and tickled me as a baby and toddler. But I am unable to recall any of those tender moments. My tender moment recalls are of my maternal grandmother- her gnarled fingers combing my hair as I laid with my head on her laps listening to her singing songs and telling stories in Tamizhalam and Malayalam. A mercantile song talking about items of import from and export to Britain tracing the ship's route through Suez Canal and Gibralter Strait I learnt once again from my Periamma. She sang it with gusto at ripe age of 93 few years ago. I made up for what I could not remember in mother's last couple of months. I became her mother for few hours every day. I slept with her. She had gone frail. I took her permission and went to sleep hugging her. I was worried I would hurt her as a friend had told me 'your hands are hathodaas!". My mother said I should ensure my elbow did not dig into her. I use...

An article in BBC News on line saying coconut is a wonder fruit  has brought up a lump in my throat. As kids, we used to love watching coconut climbers doing their job. I would say they were the early Nadian Comanecans.The global public had to wait till 1976 Montreal Olympics, to get an acrobat exhibit the coordination and aesthetic beauty of coconut tree climbing in the form of Nadia Comaneci. We tried to emulate the free style method of the climbers but ended up with bruise marks on our chests, calf muscles and inner thighs. The higher our freehand climb took us, deeper were the bruises as we used to "give up" in exhaustion and hug the tree dearly to slow down the  fall. The payment for the climbers was partly cash and partly in kind - it was related to the number of trees climbed and not related the yield. So in summer months, the cost per tree comes down as the yield is much more. In the lean months, it was a tug of war between grandma and the climbers as th...