NORTH MALABAR IN THE NINETEEN-FORTIES

NORTH MALABAR IN THE NINETEEN-FORTIES 

Sometimes, the world disappoints – the squabbling for power at the top in many countries, the huge gaping void between the lives of the rich and the poor, the careless wars started for the aggrandizement of the Arms industry… In the Summer I can escape into my garden; in the Winter gloom descends.

                I take refuge in the past; I can pretend the bad things that happened never really happened! It was another world anyway. I flip the pages of old photo albums and the years slip away:

There’s me and my Achan. We are in Gunther’s studio. Gunther is not a Malayalee and I never found out how he got washed up on the second storey of a narrow building on Big Bazaar Road in Thalassery. He puts me on a high stool and I am terrified. Achan quickly pulls a chair up and sits next to me, with his arm behind me. We were a team even then.

                As I grew up, he organised massive rear-guard action to prevent me from going ‘native’ like all the women in his extended family, who stopped going to school as soon as they became literate. Around ten years of age and well before puberty set in. They spent their lives in one kitchen or another. In the 1940s there were few schools in Thalassery; it was not considered worthwhile to send girls to school. They would marry at fifteen years or so and disappear into an in-law kitchen.

    When I started my periods, my aunt thought she had won the battle. She pounced. ‘She is impure now. For three days, this girl should sit outside, not touch anything, sleep in the utility room…’ ‘Nonsense,’ Achan shouted back. He won. We never mentioned periods thereafter.

     Achan would not even let me spend time in the kitchen. He took me with him walking most days, and gave me poems to learn in Malayalam and English. Vallathol and Tennyson were my worst enemies. I still hate both. Later I discovered Aashaan’s Karuna and became a convert to Malayalam poetry. English, of course, was the language of instruction in schools until Independence; school took care of ‘Wandere’d lonely as a cloud’ and Paradise Lost, Book 4, and Merchant of Venice… I migrated around from there, like Omicron.

We didn’t have a radio till the late forties. But, I do remember that I heard of Gandhiji’s death on the radio, when they started his favourite hymns and songs on a loop. ; Vaishnava Janathom… ’ and ‘Raghupathi Raghava raja ram’. My father’s name was Raghavan and he insisted that song was sung to honour him!

                Till the late forties we had no theatre either. During the dry season, when the harvest was in, a field would be levelled and a tent erected on it. We saw travelling cinemas in there; if it rained, water poured down the sides of the tent-poles and we ran for our lives. We had to make up our own amusements – gossip, visiting neighbours, religious ceremonies, temples…

                Life was simple and make-do.