Children in the woods…not the old the ballad… Children in the woods…not the old the ballad… “Children would love to listen to stories when they were children.” Let Elia-hypothesis prevail. The relics of the rubrics once made us- my sister, my cousin and me- the lovers of the attic passage of my Grandmother. Today I remember, my Grandma, for no particular reason. She was there in unintentional forgetfulness. She would call my name with the iteration of a vowel that made my name humorously polyphonic. I loved her for two reasons, in addition to the reasons of the meters’ of binding ties’ reading density of blood as compared to water. She would play the role of our trickster friend, would stand with us in our horse play, and would share our false guilt and sorrow when some golden-ager shower collective drops of stones on for the mischievous pranks. Indeed, my mother is also in a similar role play with her grandchild. Grandma-world may likely to be driven by the trifling-busy-ness of the grandchildren, an everyday reality, unbeatable, applicable to the once well employed grandmas of patriarchy, and once well deployed grandmas of matriarchy. So long as we were children, our parents preferred us bathing in the drizzles of the artificial shower. Grandma would take us to the natural ocean of river, passing under the bamboo shrieking forests under the pretext of preserving water, to meet the never arriving drought. It has been heard that the bamboo forest would hide the voyeur-audience, arriving to have a first-eye experience of eying ladies’ bath. (They haven’t heard of mobile phones, eye pads, or even cameras were perceived to be sophisticated devices, only professionals could handle, and our place was too innocent a place where professionals were not too ambitious to have live telecasts, or live anonymous casts, to satisfy the itching desires. (Not from prehistoric period, I am speaking, I suppose. This is on a typical Kerala village, twenty-five years ago). Since they would wear helmets rarely, since accidents of those types seldom caught the victims, but the accidents of these types very common, a voyeur had to take care of his eyes hiding very carefully, so as to keep it out of reach of the sun burnt stones of high potentials. The apparent safety of the bamboo, for them equaled the apparent cure and care of Feng Shui bamboo could offer. The journey from our ancestral home to the river was a pleasure trip, like a trekking pilgrimage where my grandma’s sister would chant some sloka or something, or my grandmother would be talking about a happy accident in the neighborhood, or of some remote relatives and my sister would hum the lines from a film song, or she would talk about something that might not have relevance to the big, but more relevant than less relevant to the circle of the trio, equally young, equally old, diminishing the difference of one year and a few months. Two Kilometers’ walk was not tiresome, but a steroid to our muscles and nerves to function without panting and to rest without tranquilizers. Now I feel that my grandma of seventy was younger than me of thirty, and the feminist motto of regaining the kitchen, which I would always selfishly resist, would be better for at least health if not for ideology. We passed through the green fields, bordered with coconut trees, with no mansion as an eyesore in between, overtook the homogeneity of the crops farmed and the border of coconut trees, heterogeneity of the inner yard, where nose frowned at the odor of the sour jackfruit, the giggling of the minor streams of irrigation, the chirping of the flying mysteries, signals of man speaking to man through innocent whistles from bank to bank- the exposure of the treasure of enchanting pastoral she opened, I feel, my language fails to translate. I love my Grandma for the fullness of this sumptuous breakfast. In order to preserve the purity of the household Gods preserved in the attic, she would make us scare, telling fairy tales coined now and then as connected with the Ancestral home and attic. There was no inbuilt staircase to the attic, and we, the children were not allowed to enter the space decorated with lights and shadows, coming out of the door-less windows. All these add to the enigma, created and circulated. Still now ‘or’ then, we tried to tell lies to us about our courage to break open the tradition, with individual talents. But our sense of truth prevents us to excel the conscious and hence the attic, the second floor, was a sealed treasury or an unopened envelop of quick-tales meant for children, where fairies, imps, multipurpose satans serving the house, the ghosts of the ancestors, or the apparition of doyenne who would pass through the family cemetery, at midnight, whom my grandma swore, she had seen through her window from the first floor - all occupied black holes, making us shiver to the peeks and enjoy to the cliffs…The stories heard, told by design or accident..Lamb is right.”Children love to listen to the stories when they were children”, and they would tell those stories when grow up. Aswathi.M.P.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 10:00:38 +0000
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