War brings my cousins home

 My uncle, Achan's elder brother, Sankaran Velyachan,, ran away to Malaya, in his late teens. He had good reason to run, rumour hath it. A maid in his house got pregnant and he might be forced to marry her, being the only bachelor in the house. So, he persuaded his sister to part with her gold necklace, sold it, and bought tickets to Malaya, before the elders in his household had added 2 and 2 to make 5.

   A few years later, in Singapore, he became a doctor, licensed to practice medicine. This was not an uncommon story in the nineteen-twenties. From my father's family, two more young men ran away in search of fame and fortune. One worked in the post office in India when he returned home in the late forties after the war in the East had ended. The other didn't wait for the war to end; he returned to Madras (now called Chennai) in 1944, in a Japanese submarine, armed with many toys-for-spies. Actually, he just wanted to go home; he abandoned his spying goodies on reaching Madras, and forever after, was known in his village to which he vanished, as Japan-Balan. He was my father's nephew and I I knew him well. He was handsome, lazy, good-natured, and often drunk. But, there was no guile in him.

   During the second world war many families were split up, with the men stranded in Burma, Persia or Malaya. My uncles's wife, however, was with him when the war started. He was in Penang and Singapore and Sungei Patani, working in rubber estates, until he returned to India after six years, with many hair-raising tales about the Japanese army in Malaya. 

Photo specially taken for the edification of Velyachaan and Velyamma. We were dressed up for the event. Appu, being male, got pride of place on the chair. Of course.

   In 1940, Velyachan sent his two children, aged six and nine, to Thalassery for their education. There were no schools on the rubber estates where he worked. So Achan became their beloved Elayachan (younger  father.) Achan loved those two, Appu and Mani. (Sometimes I was jealous of Mani.) They melded into our extended family and I now had siblings. A money-order and the odd letter arrived every month for my father. When Japan invaded Malaya the letters and the money stopped. Subsequently, my father went to jail and money became a rare thing.

   Velyachan and his wife, Velyamma, Ammu, were stuck in Malaya for six years -- when they returned in 1946, Velyachan's mother had died, and us children were now savvy teenagers. My father and I were sad when Appu and Mani went away with their parents in the direction of Velyamma's home in Ottappalam soon after. After that, I saw my cousins only during brief visits every year. I missed them; my father missed them.

   UNTIL, both Appu and Mani became old enough to travel on their own. They ignored their parents and made a bee-line for my Achan's house and the town where all their friends and family lived. Velyachan gave them an education and lost their loyalties. 

   As I grew older, I travelled to India from wherever I was posted, once a year. I went straight to Mani's house. Wherever she was, was home. 

   She died two years ago and I now have no great desire to go to India.

Freedom, they Call it

 Today, it is not my father, I remember. It is Sankarotty Nambiar. Yes, my father went to jail. Along with two others, a lawyer and a businessman. There was deprivation and anxiety. And madness and death for my grandmother. 

BUT -- I recall my Achan, (father,) talking about his imprisonment, first in His Majesty's (King George, the V1th) prison in Vellore and then in Tanjoor. They were well-fed and not locked up in rooms, he said. they were allowed access to the kitchens and to newspapers. (until the British lost Andamaan Islands, briefly, to the Japanese, and the Government did not want any more news of defeats reaching the prisoners.) My father also told me about his friend, Sankarotty, who was not a professional, a lawyer or some such -- he was a congressman, who had no particular job, like so many in India at the time.)

My Achan - raising the flag on Independence day, at the Tellicherry maidanam, '48 or '49. I was in that crowd somewhere. He often wore a top, over his jubba, like Nehru did. So Thalassery folk called him Kundilal Nehru.

Sankarooty was not identified as a 'class one' prisoner, like my father. He was treated cruelly. Not enough food, knocked about by the warders often, locked up. Apparently, the warders would bring rice and a thin curry to the likes of him, then take it away before they could eat it. A game they played. The rice was full of sand and stone.

I once asked Sankarotty why he was not married. My achan shut me up. He was in prison during the years when he would have married, or got a job, my achan said later. Achan found him a small job at one point. And in our house we had standing instructions: whenever Sankarotty came, we had to welcome him, feed him, and give him a bed. I remember him, always clothed in Khaadi, carrying a kind of dignity on him. He was one of many. Many men lost their youth to the freedom movement; I don't think they dwelt on it.

Even in our household, there were tragedies not spoken about. Achan was away for two years; he was the only wage-earner, who sustained an extended family of sisters, nieces and children. In those years, we had no new clothes, no fancy food... Once, in school, I needed to dress up in a decent frock for a concert. The nuns borrowed one, a pink satin one, from a girl called Sourya. The satin was, well - satiny. I glowed in it. 

My Achamma (paternal grandmother) firmly believed Achan was being beaten up by the warders. She never had any love for her daughters who cared for her; the sons were her precious children. One died of small-pox when he was twenty-two years old, another was a doctor in Malaya and the family had no news of him for a long six years, while the second world war raged in Europe and later, in Asia. So, when the youngest, Achan, went to jail, she lost it. She went mad and died before he came back.

When Achan came home in 1944, he was anxious that his fledgling law-practice would have been wiped out. He need not have been afraid. Every week, the other lawyers in Thalassery, sent him briefs, till he built up his practice again. Thalassery offered love and respect to him all his life. And, all my life, roam the world as I have done, I have loved that little seaside town.

However, when we celebrate freedom, I HAVE to think of all the women who are second-class citizens in India, pushed around by the men. I think about the house-servants who do the dirty jobs the rich don't want to do - like the woman in Bangalore sweeping up dog-turd into a torn newspaper from the street. She had no gloves or bin bags.

So, freedom, yes. And we have gone a long way to better living for all. Still a long way to go.