Talking about your hometown, which you visit for two short weeks every second year, is slightly hypocritical. Let's face it: this blog is about undiluted nostalgia, which I believe is an old person's congenital illness. If I look too closely I might find things that at the time I grew up, were a tad unpleasant.
I hated the latrine detail -- the family that came to empty our shit buckets made me desperately sad. Most of the time, it was a young man who came; he did his job, hoisted the big bucket on to his shoulder and carried it to the waiting Tellicherry Municipal Council cart. TMC. We called it, Theetam, Moothram, Cashtom, i.e. shit, pee and garbage.
Very occasionally a young woman came instead of him. She was pretty and saucy, smiled at everyone who met her eye, and would greet the telegraph poles if no one talked to her. She would ask for a drink and Achamma would give her a drink of conjee water, standing as far away from the woman as she could. I would dance around Ammamma and speak to the woman; she loved that. When I got married and left India in 1954, there was still no sewage system in Thalassery. It was only in the sixties that septic toilets became commonplace and the latrine-man became redundant.
Thalassery was a small town in which, apart from two or three businessmen, who dealt in petrol or dry good,s everyone else was either poor or a notch above.
I hated the latrine detail -- the family that came to empty our shit buckets made me desperately sad. Most of the time, it was a young man who came; he did his job, hoisted the big bucket on to his shoulder and carried it to the waiting Tellicherry Municipal Council cart. TMC. We called it, Theetam, Moothram, Cashtom, i.e. shit, pee and garbage.
Very occasionally a young woman came instead of him. She was pretty and saucy, smiled at everyone who met her eye, and would greet the telegraph poles if no one talked to her. She would ask for a drink and Achamma would give her a drink of conjee water, standing as far away from the woman as she could. I would dance around Ammamma and speak to the woman; she loved that. When I got married and left India in 1954, there was still no sewage system in Thalassery. It was only in the sixties that septic toilets became commonplace and the latrine-man became redundant.
Thalassery was a small town in which, apart from two or three businessmen, who dealt in petrol or dry good,s everyone else was either poor or a notch above.
We bought a list of dry goods,-- rice, wheat and pulses -- and coconut oil, once a month -- it cost a glorious twenty-seven rupees. To get it in perspective, though, a doctor's home visit would cost five rupees, a gunny-bag of rice was eleven rupees and a yard of printed cotton was half a rupee onward. My college saris were between ten and fifteen rupees each of them. The fifteen rupee one was the precious khatau voile. I got six saris at the beginning of each year. Indeed, my wedding-sari was a breath-taking one hundred and five rupees. Six yards of Benares silk, generously decorated with gold thread for the present price of a man's vest.
With lock-down time to spare, I have been taking a closer look at that time when we didn't consider a car an essential middle-class object, when plane travel was for the rich few, and nothing was made of plastic or nylon. Not long ago. I am talking about the early fifties when I was a young girl with limited aspirations, and life was perfect because I had three meals a day, and I knew every family who lived down our road. Without road-lights, I could see the entire night-sky on a rain-less day and a friend of my father's taught me to identify them by their constellations.
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