N.k.raghupathy MY CHILDHOOD DAYS- PART I Govind’s successful attempt in entering the IAS against heavy odds, with the support of his father, kindled nostalgia. There have been similar instances in the past and present and will continue to be so in future too. I am sharing a part of my personal life with the hope that it will motivate similarly placed youth of today to strive to reach the levels which Govind and countless others have been able to reach despite economic and other hardships. My father, my hero in my childhood and forever, was the third son of his parents who unfortunately carried the social stigma of inter- caste marriage of my great grandparents, which was unheard of and not tolerated in the 19th century. My grandfather, who was from a village called Singiri Koil, in Cuddalore District of Tamilnadu, in an attempt to flee from social stigma and isolation, left for Africa and never returned. His name was Srinivasan Kannan. Till date we do not know the country of his destination or whether he married again and left a family. Perhaps this post will help in locating hisrfamily in Africa, if any. My father and his three brothers were left to fend for themselves though they were no more than kids when their father left. The eldest of them came to Chennai and settled down in Pudupet. Though I had never seen him, his children, my cousins, are close to our family. The youngest of the brothers followed him to Chennai after a few years and initially lived a life of hard toil and penury and after he set up a milk and lussi shop in Pudupet led a relatively comfortable life till he passed away a few years ago at the age of 83 or so. The second and third brothers had to find jobs to earn a living at a tender age and joined Raju Vilas, a small hotel in Valavanur, Villupuram District, Tamilnadu. The hotel had a benevolent owner who became their foster brother and whom they highly regarded and respected till he passed away. He and his family were their family too as far as they were concerned, grateful as they were to him for providing shelter, food and livelihood. They worked as cook cum bearers in the village hotel. I have already posted about my uncle Tyagi Duraisami Pillai who became a freedom fighter and much later, after independence tried his hand in setting up a restaurant in the village, cooking being the only skill he had time to acquire. Because of his magnanimity the venture was doomed to fail and after the restaurant closed in the early 1960s, he lived only on the freedom fighter’s pension and occasional cooking assignments in weddings etc which he would take up only if the families organizing weddings were close to him. He was a proud man and lived life on his terms. After his wife passed away, we lost touch with his children, two of whom have settled down in Thiruvannamalai, a district town and famous for its Ramana Ashram and Arunachaleshwar Temple. My father tried his hand in acting in theatre as a child artiste and joined a famous drama troupe for some time. Those were the days when women were not allowed to be in the entertainment business. My father would don the role of girls in theatre because of his long hair and melodious voice. He started smoking beedies at an early age itself perhaps out of frustration of becoming an orphan very early in his life. This habit dogged him all through his life, ultimately led to throat cancer and his death in 1982, at the age of 65. He did not heed to the repeated warnings of the owner of the drama troupe to stop smoking and this led to his leaving the troupe. He went back to the hotel where his elder brother continued to work. In our childhood, when he was in a good mood, it was our favourite pastime to make him reminisce about his days in the drama troupe and sing his favourite songs. Whenever he would sing a song which went something like, ‘if only we had parents, we would not have been subjected to all this ignominy’ (thanthai thai irundal tharaniyil enakkoru thazhvelom varumoyya), tears would well in our eyes. In all family gatherings he would always accede to our plea to sing our favourite songs of his short theatre days. His narration about his youth, his dare-devilry and knowledge of martial arts, especially ‘silambam’ (the art of stick wielding), kept us spell bound and I have always wished that I could be as brave and fair-minded as him. The narration about his hoisting the Congress flag, then the symbol of nationalism, on the police station during the Quit India Movement, was my favourite. Along with a few of his friends who were equally fearless, he was dreaded and respected in the village. Though he was only just about literate, he was wise and taught me basic English and Hindi in my childhood. He was vociferous about the need for a national language and was much sought after for resolution of family disputes in Valavanur and other villages around it because of his impartiality, knowledge of law and fair- mindedness. Inevitably, when my uncle and my father started growing up, there was friction in with the owner of the hotel under whose shelter they grew up. They left the hotel. My father vowed then that he would never cook again and he never did. He set up a cycle shop for hiring out and repairing cycles and the shop continued to exist till 1969 or so. He picked up the basics of mechanical engineering and fabricated cycles of different sizes, for 3 to 15 year olds, his shop being the only place where children could get them on hire. His cycles were fast and he fabricated foot brakes to control them. His other novel ideas were coconut grater using rotary movement and ‘jockeys’ for removing steel tubes from deep tube wells. He was a multi-faceted personality. He could cure sprains in no time at all through gentle massaging. He would enthral us with how he cured a District Collector, a white, of sprains when he was little boy using his feet rather than his hands! People would line up before our house early in the morning sometimes before day break for instant cures offered by him. He never accepted money for the treatment , but would offer tea at his own expenditure to the visitors. I had seen him curing someone who suffered multiple fractures due to a fall from a tree, using only a few exercises and no bandage at all, over a period of a month. It was a joy to see people coming in with agony on their face and pain in their limbs returning from our house completely pain-free and, of course, fortified by a free cup of tea! He knew the medicinal uses of herbs and common plants and used them to good effect to offer relief to countless persons. Jaundice and insect bites were among those successfully treated by him. A few treatments were also learnt by me and in his absence I was authorised by him to treat cases of insect-bites. He claimed that he had cure for snake bites though I had never actually seen him treating someone bitten by a poisonous snake. In 1945 he met my mother, who had studied up to Class VIII which was a rarity those days, in her house while on a visit for participating in a chit fund auction and proposed marriage to her parents. Though her father, who was an ‘Attender’ in the Taluk office (a coveted government post those days, the same as MTS posts now!) did not like the idea, partly because my father did not belong to his community and partly because my father had studied up to Class III only and was a ruffian in his view, his wife, my maternal grand mother, prevailed over him and they married in 1946 ahead of his elder brother who had owed that he would marry only after the country attained independence and did so after 1947. Because of the ease with which he handled machines, my father acquired a’Bore Set”, a set of equipment necessary for sinking shallow and deep tube wells (up to normally 100 feet or so) and hired them out to agriculturists and household in dire need of water. The bore wells created by him in and around my village up to a radius of about 50 kms and near Trichy earned him the name of “Bore Set” Kannan, Kannan being his name. Recently I met a senior scientist of DRDO who is from our village and was curious to know whether my father and ‘Bore Set’ Kannan were one and the same. It was nice to know that people still remember the path breaking work done by him for three decades in tapping ground water potential in the area. He would use simple techniques, which I later learnt had scientific basis, for selecting sites for sinking bore wells. Water diviners use them even today in different parts of the country. During the peak of his business, my father had over 20 cycles , three ‘bore sets’ with teams of personnel and two ‘jockeys’. The only problem was that my parents never believed in investing in properties when they had surplus funds. The ‘bore- set’ business being seasonal, they had to save money for meeting the family expenditure during the lean months, mostly during monsoon and till Pongal which signified the commencement of the harvesting season. But the major problem was that they had too many mouths to feed and too many children to educate- they had nine children, six sons and three daughters. They did not have any favourite child and all were equal to them. But the fact remained that after a comfortable childhood bordering on prosperity, I used to dread the monsoon season because of the misery it brought to the family. The cycle shop went out of fashion as well known cycle manufacturers started bringing out versions meant for children and the locally fabricated cycles did not catch the children’s fancy any more. Yet, the cycle shop provided income which contributed marginally in other seasons but was the only income for the family during monsoon and up to completion of harvesting. We had no cultivable land and my father had a small piece of dry land about 4 kms from our house which was never cultivated and a small plot of homestead land. We lived in a rented house which had no electricity though almost all other houses in the street were electrified, as the landlord, belonging to a higher caste and envious of academic achievements of children in our family, refused to provide any additional facility or repair the house and was more intent in evicting us and making us homeless. Monsoons with family income dwindling to almost nothing were dreaded. For days we would go hungry without our neighbours, who included my maternal grandmother too, having no inkling about it at all. We were a proud family who shared good news with others but kept our misery to ourselves. This is typical in Indian villages- happiness is for sharing with others and rejoicing but misfortune and misery are our own to endure. I remember an occasion when we went without a morsel of food for two days at a stretch. Someone offered two rupees for completing a skill game within two minutes. I completed it within a minute, took the money, bought 32 idlis and took it home for sharing with the family. As the children grew up, the expenditure on education increased in geometric proportions. I appeared for a merit examination in 1961 while doing Class VI and was the only successful student in the school to bag the merit scholarship, an amount of Rs Four per month. Though education was made free in Tamilnadu by the great Kamaraj, then the CM, the scholarship came with a rider that I should pay a monthly fee of Rs 2.75. The scholarship would come in a lump, Rs 48) during the summer holidays and my father had to find the money to pay the monthly fees till then. Monsoon meant inevitable delay in paying the fee and for weeks I would not be allowed to sit in the class room because of defaulting in payment of fee but the kind teachers would allow me to listen to the teachings standing outside the class room often in harsh sunlight or fully drenched when it rained. When i was offered an increase in the merit scholarship of Rs 8 per month from Class IX onwards, i gave in writing to the Head Master, without even informing my parents that I was not interested, as otherwise I had to find Rs 5.50 per month for paying the monthly fees! Free education was better than standing outside the class rooms for days together every month. New books in this environment could only be dreamt of. Fortunately, yhe son of my father’s friend, Mr Vaithilingam, was one year senior to me in school and he would hand over the old books after the results were published every year. This continued up to Class XI, the then S,S.L.C. Mr Vaithilingam joined politics and was the Chairman of our Town Panchayat for several years and continues to be known for his politeness, kindness and magnanimity. I started learning Hindi, initially on my own and later through private tuition. Finding the money to pay the teacher for the tuition was another monthly ordeal. This continued up to 1966 when I passed Rashtra Bhasha Visharad examination( fifth in the series) conducted by the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha. One had to manage with only two sets of school uniform with virtually no other dress to wear at home. If one of the uniforms was damaged or torn, one had to manage with only one set, washing it once a month and virtually going shirtless till it dried. Chappals were unheard of and the only footwear I had worn were the NCC and ACC(Auxiliary Cadet Corps) till I joined Pre University in a college in Vellore. After passing Rashtra Bhasha Visharad, Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha held a convocation in Chennai and I was the only ‘graduate’ in half trousers and without footwear. The Khadi shawl given to me on the occasion was a proud possession of my father for several years and he regularly used it during the winter. But, childhood was enjoyable and games after school hours kept us busy. Walking barefooted for about 3 kms during lunch time to home every day for lunch was a routine we thoroughly enjoyed. A small group of about 10 of us, in the same age group, played and studied together and also slept over in an elementary house opposite our house during the examination season once I entered class IX. The watchman of the school had taken a liking to us and had obtained special permission from the Head Master for our group to use the school premises during the examination season. Kerosene fuelled lanterns provided light in our house and also in the school for our study. I do not remember any school examination from Class 1 to 11 where I had not stood first in the class. The credit for this went to my father who taught me Elementary Mathematics and Tamil in my early years. He was demanding when it came to performance, often punishing me for each mark I lost in any paper, especially Mathematics. If I fell short of 100% in any paper, it was difficult to explain to him. He taught me that I had to compete with only myself and not anyone else. Even during my college days he would not accept any position other than first mark in any paper. If I secured 90% in any paper, his first reaction would be to seek information on the first mark. He also taught me that if I undertook a responsibility I should perform it with perfection; otherwise I should not perform it at all. There was a Brahmin friend of my father, Mr Ranganathan, who was a school teacher. When entry of non Brahmins into the ‘agraharam’, the part of the village reserved for Brahmins, was frowned upon he not only taught me without any tuition fee but would also allow me and a few others, who were also tutored by him, to sleep in his house during the examination month till we completed 8th standard, wake us up at 4 am everyday and clear our doubts. He was so broad minded that he would visit our house on Diwali days and without any hesitation accept sweets offered by our mother. He dared to be different though very traditional in his approach to religion and treated everyone as an equal human being. If only people of his kind are in large numbers in India, there will be no issues arising out of caste, community or religion. A fantastic thing about village life is that if one does well in his studies most people derive pleasure out of it as if their own children show such accomplishment. Even the barber while giving me a hair cut would try to test my intelligence through questions rather difficult to solve and advise on the need for consistent hard work. I owe my good academic record to a large number of such fellow villagers whose words of encouragement and advice have stood me in good stead all through my life. After my elder brother joined the Commercial Tax department, Tamilnadu in 1964 at the tender age of 16 and started contributing to the family things improved. We were by no means prosperous after that but his contribution ensured that monsoon did not play a significant role in our life any longer. Those days, the service rendered till completion of 18 years of age was counted as ‘boy service’ during which one did not earn any increment; nor did such service count for retirement benefits. My elder brother who was a good student, perhaps more intelligent than I was, nursed a grouse for a few years that my parents did not allow him to study beyond SSLC. My father had assured me that if I secured first rank in SSLC in our village High School he would somehow finance my college education. I stood first in the school in SSLC in 1967 and my father sold our only plot of homestead land to fulfil his promise. I joined Pre University Course in Voorhees College, Vellore in June 1967 and was filled with joy when for the first time in my life I had two pairs of full pants and a few decent shirts to wear to the college. The choice of the college was partly due to my maternal aunt’s house being located in Vellore and partly because of its reputation for academic excellence. Though my father desired that I should stay in the college hostel, I insisted on staying with my aunt’s family. My father reluctantly agreed but laid down a condition that he would pay Rs 70 per month to my aunt towards my expenses. That was the beginning of my college education. PS: I will post other parts only if I feel that it is serving a purpose!
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 12:00:38 +0000
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