I write these memories down because it is only with age that I realise how strange my childhood was -- strange, that is, in comparison with other Indian girls of my age. I think other girls in my school-year found me a little strange too: my reading marathons, my political views, (most of my friends had no views at age ten), my short, boyish hair, and my careless clothes and appearance.
After Achan (father) went to jail in 1942 for being a local leader in the Independence battle, things went further downhill. I remember I was in a school concert in 1943 and I didn't have a dress suitable for the stage. The teachers produced a pink satin dress and Rukmini teacher took her gold necklace off and put it round my neck. She had borrowed the dress from another girl in my class; It helped that the girl had a mother.
My father did not notice little things like clothes anyway even when he was around. He checked my hair, clipped my nails with a '7 o'clock' second hand blade, which he had finished with, and taught me things like how to write the number eight. A bit of a battle that; I had trouble getting the loops to close, especially as my writing lessons were on sand spread on the parapet of our veranda.
Achan had good reason to keep my hair short, however -- it was full of lice. Every weekend I had to spend time getting the lice and nit out, only for them to come back with a vengeance a week later. When I got married I was terrified the lice would migrate to the hair of my new husband. That would have been quite a scandal. At some point during my early married years, the lice left. I wonder, was there a message there?
As for books, there was a small glass-fronted almirah in the narrow corridor that ran the length of my school block, one for each class. Except it was for children with only a moderate desire to read - if forced. I generally finished the almirah's stock of fairy tales (fairy tales from Greece, Rumania, every conceivable country in Europe) and moved on to the next almirah in a term. In my standard 9, I had travelled the entire corridor and was looking for another book-habitat. My father took me down to the Victoria Library in town, and enrolled me. It was a dark and musty room with hardly another visitor, still a necessary right of passage. And - it stocked Malayalam books too.
It was only when I joined the Brennen College at age fifteen, that I went ballistic. Here was a library with long alley-ways full of books. You could get lost in there. I visited so often that the librarian started saving new consignments for me before he stamped them. What a discovery that library was! By the time our lecturer started on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in my first year at College, I had read it and knew Mark Antony's speech by heart. I stumbled upon 'The Tempest' next and realised how limited my understanding was.
Today, I think-- why did my young,widowed father spend so much time doing his Professor Higgins act on me, when he should have been out at the Cosmopolitan Club having a good time with his friends? That club is a whole other story.
After Achan (father) went to jail in 1942 for being a local leader in the Independence battle, things went further downhill. I remember I was in a school concert in 1943 and I didn't have a dress suitable for the stage. The teachers produced a pink satin dress and Rukmini teacher took her gold necklace off and put it round my neck. She had borrowed the dress from another girl in my class; It helped that the girl had a mother.
My father did not notice little things like clothes anyway even when he was around. He checked my hair, clipped my nails with a '7 o'clock' second hand blade, which he had finished with, and taught me things like how to write the number eight. A bit of a battle that; I had trouble getting the loops to close, especially as my writing lessons were on sand spread on the parapet of our veranda.
Achan had good reason to keep my hair short, however -- it was full of lice. Every weekend I had to spend time getting the lice and nit out, only for them to come back with a vengeance a week later. When I got married I was terrified the lice would migrate to the hair of my new husband. That would have been quite a scandal. At some point during my early married years, the lice left. I wonder, was there a message there?
As for books, there was a small glass-fronted almirah in the narrow corridor that ran the length of my school block, one for each class. Except it was for children with only a moderate desire to read - if forced. I generally finished the almirah's stock of fairy tales (fairy tales from Greece, Rumania, every conceivable country in Europe) and moved on to the next almirah in a term. In my standard 9, I had travelled the entire corridor and was looking for another book-habitat. My father took me down to the Victoria Library in town, and enrolled me. It was a dark and musty room with hardly another visitor, still a necessary right of passage. And - it stocked Malayalam books too.
It was only when I joined the Brennen College at age fifteen, that I went ballistic. Here was a library with long alley-ways full of books. You could get lost in there. I visited so often that the librarian started saving new consignments for me before he stamped them. What a discovery that library was! By the time our lecturer started on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in my first year at College, I had read it and knew Mark Antony's speech by heart. I stumbled upon 'The Tempest' next and realised how limited my understanding was.
Today, I think-- why did my young,widowed father spend so much time doing his Professor Higgins act on me, when he should have been out at the Cosmopolitan Club having a good time with his friends? That club is a whole other story.
