| Chapter 1

Memories and Musings

With heaviness he casts his eye
Upon the road before,
And still remembers with a sigh,
The days that are no more.

Robert Southey

Not all would take a backward glance upon the road before like the poet Southey. Some may not have reason to recall their past with any great joy. “We are what we remember” writes biologist Rebecca Rupp in her book, ‘Committed to Memory’.  If you stretched that aphorism, you could say that if you did not want, for whatever reason, to remember your past, you could then wish away your past altogether. Or, at the very least, whatever it was that you wished to ‘delete’ from your memory.  It would then be the same as not having had a past to speak of. For someone who wanted to break with his old associations from an indifferent past, this line of thinking might be hugely appealing although the reasoning behind it would prove to be flawed, let alone less than honest. To doubt your very existence, including its past without which there could not have been a present, is to deny the dimensions of time and space. That would be as good as denying that your present persona has evolved, by choice or by chance if you like, from an earlier part of your life.

You may not have come into this world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, but you cannot doubt that you had your antecedents. Call it the DNA or the Double Helix if you are that way inclined. You would then know that the parent and the offspring are parts of a genetic continuum in this ‘bank and shoal of time’. Or, if you have a philosophical turn of mind, you may bank on the Wordsworthian aphorism, ‘The child is father of the man’. Whichever way you look at it, that you are what you are depends largely on whatever provenance you had started your life’s journey with. And, for those who believe in reincarnation, time and space could keep stretching back further to earlier cycles of life as your Karma would have it. But of course, a memoirist, regardless of his particular persuasion about how the present is bound up with the past, can gloss over his memories or opt for selective amnesia to sanitize his account if he so wishes.

It was Christina Rossetti who wrote: ‘Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad’.  Doubtless, she has a point.  It is true that for some people the past never seems to hold any memories worth treasuring.  Nor is there a pause in their daily grind to let them worry about what their future holds in store for them.  For, it takes them all of their present to grapple with the grim business of everyday survival.  The few, however, who have made their stately progress through life almost seamlessly, by blind chance if you like, will have largely happy recollections to savour, although their vividness may have somewhat blurred with time.

For most people, on the other hand, their plodding along the path of life has had its long, hard moments as on a trek across rocky terrain.. Given to falling by the wayside from time to time, they however pick themselves up again by their bootstraps, shake the dust off their clothes and resume their course. And when they look back, they may regret the times they have tripped up or faltered  but remember more their redeeming moments, big or small, that came their way and will have reason to be content.

They are the multitude. Being one of those unknown plodders is like being a battle-weary foot soldier who is asked to advance with his comrades-in-arms into the thick of the fray. You win some you lose some. You may yet feel secure, for practical wisdom has it that there is safety in numbers.  It is comforting to know that you are not alone.

Whether or not that is a self-evident truth, the very act of having to cope with life’s ups and downs like most others has in and of itself been an educating experience for me.  At least, it has taught me how to take the rough with the smooth with equanimity.  I dare say the old maxim ‘all’s well that ends well’ would be an apt enough epitaph on every such man’s tombstone.  Hopefully that will wait until after I have had enough time to look back at the story of my past with a “calm of mind all passions spent”.

Yet I have often baulked at the thought, for there are some stages of my salad days that I feel down in the mouth about and yet others, downright ashamed of.  And the feelings of self-reproach have refused to go away.  Hanging in my study is one of these comical quotes, which reads, “When you’re over-the-hill, you don’t have to worry about yesterday’s mistakes…YOU CAN’T REMEMBER THEM!”  Far too often, people offer the advice that a person ought to put his past behind him. A fat lot of good that would do! You see, from time to time when you least expect it, your past has a way of stealing back on you and crowing over your misfortunes. Call it your inner voice, if you like, which says, ‘I told you so!’. Thus your ‘original sins’ continue to dog your footsteps. Your past has well and truly come home to roost!  And, wish hard as you might, you couldn’t start all over again to create a different set of memories.  If that were possible, you could have gone back in time to chart another course with the benefit of hindsight to guide you.

I may, however, hazard a guess, with all the detachment I could muster, on how my life could have taken a different direction had I so willed.  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves etc. etc.  Some, on the other hand, might blame their karma in an earlier incarnation for this rotten deal in their present life. With a sense of abject resignation, that is; maybe even with relief that they have at least been spared the shame of regression to a vermin in the food chain. Others who feel they were victims of circumstance carp at the rest of the world for their predicament and look back with a sense of rage. Yet others with a discerning eye have often put pen to paper more objectively to throw light on the whys and wherefores of the human condition obtaining then that has made them what they are now. Memories thus hold perpetual possibilities for those who would like, for whatever reason, to delve into the past.

I have long crossed the Biblical Span of  ‘three score and ten’ years.  Yet, having failed to achieve anything particularly remarkable judging by the skewed standards of a judgemental society, I doubt if I can recall much of my past with a great deal of pride. In any case, pride would sound hollow without an audience to apportion what is your due. However, I may, judging on my own, winnow whatever ‘wheat’ I can from ‘the chaff’ in what was after all only a lean crop.  That exercise would take a great deal of time and effort, and there’s the rub. You see I have more years to look back upon than I have to look forward to, so I must make haste while I can as time is of the essence.

T. G. David, a dilettante philosopher I knew from my Tambaram days and a retired professor of economics to boot, had kept cautioning me ominously not to trifle with time.  By his own admission, regardless of his having repeatedly failed to inveigle publishers into having his attempted first novel published, he doggedly continued to write. And he was going on eighty when he passed away!  And if I know him, he would be smirking at me, pushing up daisies from six feet under, and daring me to defy the way of all flesh. Therefore,  I had better make haste slowly.

Yet, since memories are difficult to retrieve intact the deeper one has to delve, the task is likely to be long and drawn out. Sifting through more than seventy five years of slowly crumbling memories and brushing off the dust of years to pick up odd shards of interest is an exercise that calls for reflection and discrimination and choice, no less. And, in doing so, I could be tempted to tinker with the truth or leave some of it out altogether, couldn’t I? Yes, that is a distinct possibility.

I should, however, be as forthcoming as I can without being overly ashamed to divulge the minutiae of my past.  One may not always choose to reveal the whole truth, warts and all. Then again, one may be tempted to tell it all.  With a mischievous glint in my eye, I could easily shock the more squeamish in the family if I wanted to. No doubt, the stuff would make for piquant reading to the inquisitive, of which tribe there’s generally no lack around us.  But, they are not going to miss what I choose not to reveal.  Nor will they know if I have doctored my story, either. Editing or even embellishing memories could be a memoirist’s narrative option.

Besides, autobiographical memories do not have a reclusive existence. They share a space with social memory or collective memory, which is the sum-total of the ‘hand-me-down’ recollections of a community you grew up in.  So when you try to retrieve your personal memories, often you cannot tell them apart from the shared memory of your community. Willy nilly, they get confused with your own. By Time’s sleight of hand the two kinds have become one.  And even if you try hard to separate them, you are apt to confuse one for the other.

So, every time I attempt a recall, the memories that rush through my mind get more mixed up than ever, without logical or sequential progression. The fastidious reader who has an eye for spotting flaws may find it all grist to his editorial mill. The casual reader, on the other hand, can amuse himself, if nothing else, by trying to put the jigsaw pieces together.  That they may not all snugly fall into place will surprise only those who are not familiar with the story of my disjoined days.  Looking back, I too have often been surprised at how disconnected they have been.

Yes, ‘surprise’ is a familiar feeling when you mull over the events of the past. You realize that many times your life has had a disobliging way of ‘dashing your dreams’ as dreams in your sleep often do.  However desperately you try to shepherd a dream and guide its outcome in your state of slumber, it proves to be a will-o’-the-wisp.  Even as your subconscious ‘views’ the series of pictures that each dream is made up of, you would despair of ever being able to create a ‘serial’ that ends meaningfully. It becomes a clever delusion in which the players and the props keep changing without rhyme or reason. Its backdrop morphs like a surreal canvas, characters in the plot change face inexplicably and shades of colour keep altering drearily from one half tone to another. You lose yourself somewhere in that maze, unable to retrace the path you took, for you have walked hitherto untrodden ways. Strangest of all, you see yourself in the dream mostly not as you are, past your prime, but as in your callow years when you had opportunities to make things happen but did not.  And, it cuts to the quick as you wake up to the reality of your current predicament.

Perhaps, embedded somewhere in that mélange, there was a clue to giving each such dream a past meaning. I have often wondered if a dream were not some sort of an allegory for real life in which one’s cup of hope had, through inexperience and irresolution, been snatched away from the lips of fulfilment.  Do these dreams gone awry, point to how, in real life, one could have hoped for a different set of personal memories if one had opened the door when opportunity knocked?  Hindsight, they say, is an exact science.

My earliest memories are those of my childhood first in the city of Madras and later in the village of Kumbanadu. Incidentally, the name ‘Madras’ has since been changed to ‘Chennai’ by the powers-that-be. Some say the change was prompted by the compulsions of Dravidian pride. The Dravidians have always resisted, often with passion, the crass attempts of an obscurantist fringe among the ‘Aryans’ of North India to impose a non-existent cultural, religious and linguistic homogeneity on an India that never was. The Tamils were certain that these attempts were part of a conspiracy to thrust upon them not only an alien language but also the myth, dressed as history, of a monolithic Hindu Nation or Ram Raj that encompassed the whole of the sub-continent. Perhaps the Aryans inhabited the hypothetical Gondwanaland as well? Driven by pride in their ancient Tamil heritage that pre-dates by far the Aryan saga, and as part of a strategy to counter this apparent Brahminical distortion of history, the Tamil people may have fired their first salvo by giving the city a name that sounds more Dravidian than the name ‘Madras’ does. Or, for that matter, the pejorative cognomen ‘Madrasi’ for all South Indians. Interestingly, the mentors of the University of Madras, in their measured wisdom, have retained the old name of that citadel of learning after making light of this perceived threat on their culture and language.  Whether this confidence is misplaced or not, only time will tell.

The Tamil commonality, however, have eagerly taken to the change of name. In contrast, the people of Kumbanadu, who had all those many years ago hit upon the name ‘Kumbanadu’, or at any rate its etymological antecedent, have continued to call it ‘Kumbanadu’ to this day.  They have no reason to be uncertain of their past.  Many believe that the place name, Kumbanadu, in time led to the naming of the family viz. Kumbanattu Kudumbam.  On the other hand, some say that the name of the family came first. Oral tradition has it that some two hundred and fifty years ago, the family’s progenitor, one Kocheasaw Panicker, had cleared forestland and settled in what is now Kumbanad to claim it as his own. The place, however, had not always been forestland before the new owners appropriated it.  And, thereby hangs a legend.

Long before the establishment of the family here, tradition has it that the place was a prosperous village inhabited by two score or so Kerala Brahmin families or Illangal and their retainers.  According to oral tradition, they lived in large, sprawling houses; each one called an Illam, and cloistered within it a four-sided roofless courtyard or Naalu kettu, not unlike Spanish patios, paved with flagstone slabs, in keeping with their status. None of these houses is standing now. But, many a stone-bound pond or Kulam that had reputedly been dug by them, with granite steps leading down to it, such as Manalkulam, kollarkulam, Kaniyaamittathukulam, Kariyilakulam, Manakkattukulam, Korekkaakulam and Nellimalakulam survive to this day.  Most of them, though, have fallen into disuse or have dried up. Tradition has it that there were eighteen and one half ponds in all, the half being an uncompleted one. These ponds must have been used for rituals and ablutions, as is the custom in many a rural Brahmin community even today.

As proof of human habitation that goes further back in time than even this Brahmin settlement, large clay pots believed to have been funerary urns have also been dug up in several spots in Kumbanadu. According to tradition, in the olden days, dead persons were ceremonially interred in these pots. Archaeologists believe that the far south of India and what is now Sri Lanka at one time shared a culture with a strong Buddhist bias.

 As a matter of fact, Tamil Sangam Literature has a number of references to pot burials but their chronology is still not clear although many archaeologists have hazarded an informed guess after carbon-dating the pots to date the burial sites around 3^rd Century B.C. or 2^nd Century B.C. at the latest.

Three large jars fitting the description of funerary urns were spotted as the foundations for our rebuilt Nadavallil house were being dug, back in 1979. All attempts to retrieve them intact failed as the pots had become too brittle with age to save. They crumbled during efforts to ease them out. We reckon that at least a part of my grandfather’s homestead stood on an old burial ground.

Having lived here, off and on, since 1981. we might then venture to say, tongue firmly in cheek, that its ancient occupants are all resting in peace now. For, we have yet to experience the presence of restless spectres wandering in our neck of the woods or poltergeists throwing things about in our house or around.

What I mentioned earlier must have happened much, much later. According to oral tradition the inhabitants of this Brahmin village had to flee from their settlement in disarray, not having been forewarned of coming danger, leaving no trace behind them.  T. K. Joseph, a well-known writer of St. Thomas Syrian Christian history of Kerala, has made an educated guess that a marauding band of Paandi parayar, a nomadic tribe from over the Western Ghats (the mountain range that runs part of its stretch along the west of Malabar), might have descended on the village and having plundered it, put its inhabitants to the sword.  Such forays were not uncommon until well into the 18^th Century A.D..

Incidentally, as a sequel to the story, only a woman and her son from among them managed to escape unharmed.  At one point during their flight, they were given succour by a forest dweller, who later became romantically involved with the woman and set up home with her.  Some say it was one of the more calculating of the raiders who spared her and made her his helpmeet. Either way, many believe that their progeny came to be known as the Ranni Karthaakanmaar (the Karthaas of Ranni), the first feudal family of Ranni.  Ranni is only ten miles or so, as the crow flies, from the village they fled from.

In course of time, the overgrowth of trees and shrubs turned the place into a jungle, offering a haven for wild animals to range freely.  It was not until a little after the middle of the 19^th Century, nearly a hundred years after it was re-inhabited, that the place had more or less been rid of leopards, tigers and elephants. And that was largely owing to the ongoing ‘depredations’ of its new owners, the Kumbanattu Kudumbam or the Family of Kumbanadu. Where did they come from?

Popular legend has it that St. Thomas the Apostle of Christ established several churches in Malabar and that the present-day Syrian Christians can trace their ancestry back to the high caste Hindu converts to one or the other of these churches, especially Quilon and Crangannore. Folklore would have us believe that those who had dwelt on the northern side of the theruvu or the high street of Crangannore (Vadakkumbhaagar as they later came to be called)) had by and by migrated further south to Kuravilangadu in search of a better life and established themselves there. Much later still, a few of their descendants, who had enlisted in the Raja of Edapally’s army, moved further south and settled down with their families at Eraviperoor Plankoottathil. It is generally believed that they collectively came to be known as the Eraviperoor Panicker family, ‘Panicker’ being an honorific title that had been bestowed by the Raja on the family for their martial antecedents. Kocheasaw Panicker, the founder of the ‘Kumbanattu Kudumbam’ or the ‘family of/in Kumbanadu’, hailed from the Eraviperoor Panicker family.

The first half of the eighteenth Century was a time of great political ferment in this part of the world.  The feudal chiefs known as Ettu Veettil Pillamaar along with the petty chieftains of principalities, in what was to become the greater Travancore later, were vying for power with Marthanda Varma the Rajah of Venaad. Intrigue and treachery were the order of the day.  Several attempts were made on his life. The rajah, however, not only prevailed but also succeeded in annexing their fiefdoms and unifying them into a new entity known as  Thiruvithaamkoor, or Travancore as its aglicized version would have it. It was sometime in the late 1750’s, corresponding to the Malayalam Era 930, that a Vellala Brahmin Court Official in the service of the Maharaja Marthanda Varma of Travancore, and later of his successor Dharma Raja, became a Christian, gave up his privileges, assumed the name Yohannan and set out from Trivandrum to preach the Gospel. 

He made his way north in stages, staggering his progress as his mission demanded. In course of time, he came to be known as a Sanyaasi or a sage for the ascetic life of an itinerant preacher that he was known to lead.  His reputation had preceded him wherever he went. Four years after the start of his missionary journey, he arrived at Eraviperoor, near Tiruvalla, to be received as an honoured guest by the then head of the Panicker family. That host was none other than Plankoottathil Vallya Easaw Panicker, a brave soldier who had fought against the invading Muslim hordes of Mysore.  He was also a devout Christian and a member of the ancient Jacobite Syrian Christian Parish of Kallooppara. While the said itinerant preacher was living under the roof of his latest host, he expressed a desire to build for himself a dayara or a monastic refuge that would also serve as a halfway house for other like-minded gospellers to rest while passing through. The hermit solicited his host’s help. The kindly host readily agreed to locate a site that would offer him a quiet retreat and, having done so, followed it up with whatever assistance that was within his means to help the hermit build his shelter.

In their efforts to find a secluded spot, they came upon a wooded area barely two miles to the east of Eraviperoor. They took possession of that unoccupied expanse of land that had been abandoned by its earlier owners and had remained desolate for so long that it had been over-run by wild beasts.  This might have been before the introduction of land records to demarcate private property in these parts. The first site chosen was relinquished after some months of work as they were constantly in danger of being attacked by wild animals, especially wild elephants.  They looked elsewhere for a safer place and found one on a higher ground, roughly in the centre of what is now Kumbanadu, and built the retreat there and, next to it, a makeshift church, the first of its kind in Kumbanadu.  The year was circa 1760.  As the work was still in progress, the youngest son in the Panicker family, Kocheasaw or Easaw Junior, would sally forth every day with his father Vallya Easaw or Easaw Senior beside him to help the Sanyaasi build his hermitage. 

The protagonist of our story, Kocheasaw Panicker, was only twelve then. The sage was impressed by the boy’s sincerity and hard work, and, in course of time, made him his acolyte.  Respecting his mentor’s wishes, the boy moved to Kumbanadu.  Staying in the relative security of a tree house, the youngster helped clear the land around the church and beyond.  In time, he became a successful farmer and, at his mentor’s instance, married one Kochumariamma of the Kuttickaattu family from the nearby village of Thattekkadu. The Sanyaasi had earlier chanced upon this family during his ministry in the surrounding areas. In the year circa 1786 the Sanyaasi passed away and is buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard in deference to his wishes. 

By that time, a house had been built to the north of the church for Kocheasaw Panicker to move in.  And it was named Valliaveettil or ‘big house’ and it still stands as the family’s ancestral seat. (Incidentally, in response to the wishes of many in the family that this house ought to be converted into a heritage house, John Titus a sixth-generation member of the family –now a member of the Indian diaspora in America- has acquired it from its present owner.) By and by, the proliferating progeny came to be collectively known as the Kumbanattu Kudumbam. 

And in the early years of the family, it is said that they jointly farmed the land as a large collective that covered the whole village from end to end. It was near Kaniyaamittathukulam that they customarily got together to decide what crops to grow, come the next season. Clearly, crop-rotation was not unknown to them. I have heard it said that down to the third generation of our forebears, the few homesteads of Kumbanad that had sprung up had remained seamlessly interwoven in all directions. Apparently, everyone was free to move about from homestead to homestead without let or hindrance, doubtless ‘without malice aforthought’. It was not until the fourth generation set up homes of their own that boundaries were drawn to demarcate land bequeathed to each head of the family.  And even then, the flimsy wattle and palm-frond fences of yesteryears had been a far cry from the off-putting brick and mortar boundary walls that have since come up as a reflection of man’s increasing acquisitiveness and the sense of insecurity that goes with it.

Kocheasaw Panicker and Kochumariamma had raised five daughters and three sons. The second son, Maammachen, had moved to the nearby village of Edanadu, where he had earlier acquired property.  The eldest, Kocheasaw, was bequeathed the family seat.  The youngest, Yohannaachen, built a house to the south of the church and moved in there. The eldest and the youngest were the progenitors of the Southern and Northern branches i.e. Thekke Veedu and Vadakke Veedu of the Kumbanattu Kudumbam.

But, the perennial conundrum, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” stubbornly persists.  The family name or the place name?  One version has it that since the place was once infested with elephants, it derived its name from the pachyderm. The theory is that the word kumbhi which means ‘elephant’ was tagged on to the word, nadu, which means ‘land’ or ‘region’, to make up the blended word, Kumbhinadu or ‘elephant land’ and that this coinage must have much later elided to Kumbanadu.   Did the original settlers use the word to name the place first and later adapt it to name the family that struck roots there?

If so, it is possible to make an educated guess and argue that the final voiced vocalic consonant ‘du’ of the place name, Kumbanadu,  was modified to become the retroflexed, voiceless, vocalic consonant ‘ttu’ to derive the prepositional form, Kumbanattu.  This form carries the meaning ‘of/in Kumbanadu’ and thence must have logically arrived at the form, ‘Kumbanattu Kudumbam’ or ‘The Family of/in Kumbanadu’.  It is less logical, although it has also been posited by some, that ‘Kumbanadu’ the place name is a subsequent back formation from the form i.e. Kumbanattu in ‘Kumbanattu Kudumbam’, the name that was given to the family.  Either way, it is interesting that ‘Kumbanadu’ as a place name does not exist in the Land Records of our State to this day.  Incidentally, perhaps as a minor concession to the increasing use of English, especially with the opening of a Post Office there as early as the 1920’s, the place name was further shortened, in English print, to ‘Kumbanad’ with the final vowel ‘u’ discarded to indulge anglicized ears..

Anyway, the etymology of the place name does not deserve the same urgency of expression as do my unspoken memories, groaning to find release from a tangle of recollections, of the people and events that characterised Kumbanad.  Strictly speaking, I cannot stake a claim to being a native of Kumbanad born and bred.  I was born in far-away Mesopotamia, the Babylonia of ancient times, on 9^th September, l929.  And, except for the few months that I was there before I was carried in my mother’s arms to India, I was brought up, for the next four years or so, in Madras, where my father had found work as Assistant Secretary to The Employers’ Federation of South India. The ‘true sons of the soil’ of Kumbanad might, therefore, look askance at my credentials to hazard a guess on the origin of the word or, come to think of it, to assume the role of a chronicler of Kumbanad.  In any case, the linguistic theory, such as I have attempted here, would only sound so much gibberish to the denizens of Kumbanad. I would like to believe that my ‘recollection’ of memories will cause them no such confusion except perhaps in its desultoriness.

Given the peripatetic nature of my father’s job with the engineering firm of Harrisons and Crosfield after he had earlier returned from Madras to be nearer home, I had to change schools more than once; doing only short spells at each place. Needless to say, the images of each of those places have lost its sharpness over the years. And they come into focus again, without regard to sequence of events, only when some present stimulus nudges them back into the field of vision.

The one picture that refuses to go away is the memory of how I gulped down a mouthful of paraffin mistaking it for soda water. It was the bottle that had fooled me.  It was in fact a soda bottle, but not a bottle of soda.  My father was away at work. We were staying at 17A, Broadway in Georgetown, Madras.  My mother was distraught and did not know whom to turn to for help. A kindly neighbour, who providentially came by, rushed me to a nearby clinic and had my stomach pumped.  I was none the worse for the experience. 

Another image is that of the white nuns, at the play school on Broadway I went to, in their well-worn habits, each one with her forearms crossing, tucked one under the other, as they padded about soundlessly. Yet another memory that still lingers is the flavour of the smoked and cured bacon that we sometimes bought at the Broadway Butchery just up our street.  If I closed my eyes and willed my senses, I could still taste the salted strip and savour its aroma.  Twenty-two years or so was to pass before I would relish a similar flavour again; this time, that of the excellent, Kenyan made Uplands bacon.  I had moved to Africa by then in search of a better life.  I was in Tanganyika at the time.  It was still a British colony and the butcheries prominently displayed bacon among other things.   But, that can wait.  Let me now resume my story in Madras.

The itinerant milkman with his milch cow in tow, turning up like clockwork every morning at the bottom of the steps leading from 17A Broadway to the sidewalk, is another moving picture in my stream of consciousness. The milkman would then deftly work the cow’s udder, squeezing the teats, first the nearer pair and then the other, each time his hands alternately moving from top to bottom like pistons to direct the stringy jets of milk unerringly into the loud pail below, not a drop missing its mark.  When he is done, he measures out our usual portion before making the next ‘house call’. I would often be standing beside my mother all that while. And sometimes to my wide-eyed wonder, the occasional electric tramcar plying in George Town would trundle by a stone’s throw away, grating harshly on the tramlines set in the street.  The bells of the street car would be ringing clangorously and its articulated ‘arm’ on the roof spewing sparks as it slid over the joints of the cable overhead. 

Fourteen years later, when I went back to Madras as a college freshman, the trams, grown rickety with use by then, were still spewing sparks and plying their familiar routes. But, set beside the newer commuter buses and electric trains, they proved painfully slow to someone in a hurry.  However, to the first-time tram rider with time on his hands, there is nothing more edifying than unhurriedly observing the city streets and its hurly-burly. And, if it is after dark, one tends not to see their squalor as the city wears a mellower face. The streets look less harsh and more endearing with the lit-up wayside lamps refracting benignly, especially after a heavy downpour has cleared the air and washed the fetid streets. After midnight, the city seems to slow down to a crawl before it comes to a standstill, only to stir again later before the break of day.  I was too young to see Madras in that garb while I  was a child staying with my parents at 17A Broadway in George Town or later after moving to 110 Barracks Street in Chintadripet.    

When we moved to Travancore, it was first to a place called Pallam, nearly twenty miles away from Kumbanad, a longish  ride by bus at its usually sedate pace. We lived in a rented house at Pallam. Earlier, for a short spell, I had been a reluctant boarder at a kindergarten in the company of girls my age, in an all-girls’ school at Tiruvalla called Baalikaamadom,  which had been founded by Miss Brooke Smith, an intrepid Scottish teacher.  She was only one of several such pioneers who had run schools for girls in this part of the world at that time.  It was part of a silent revolution that unwittingly helped bring the unemancipated girls of Central Travancore out of the protective bosom of their hidebound families.  And, Baalikaamadom, along with Nicholson’s Syrian Christian School for Girls at Tiruvalla and Baker Memorial School at Kottayam played no small part in it.  Mahilalayam at Alwaye was its illustrious counterpart in North Travancore.

How a boy like me found himself in a girl’s school remains a mystery to me, still.  It might have been a halfway house for me before I could join a boys’ school nearer home. The only vivid image that still sticks in my mind is the day my parents and grandparents together visited me and presented me with a toy train that could run on a wound-up spring tucked away in its underbelly.  Was this offered as a sop?  My stay at that school was an eminently forgettable one, anyway, as I had from the start felt ill at ease in uncongenial company.  Hopelessly outnumbered by the girls, perhaps I may have felt miserably insecure there and may have made my feelings obvious as only a child can.  I was withdrawn soon after.  

Of Pallam, there is one singularly bloody episode that stubbornly refuses to leave my mind. One day, some of my father’s cousins descended on Pallam unexpectedly and noisily barged into our house.  In our part of the world, people thought nothing of turning up thus, unannounced. Social proprieties like giving time to the hapless ‘host’ to receive visitors, with a semblance of hospitality, were not observed.  It would seem to be a ‘courtesy’ that was more honoured in the breach especially among the Malankara Syrian Christians. This, regardless of their professed high-caste cultural antecedents going back nearly two thousand years!  Perhaps, their ancestors were not so highly cultured after all and therefore were not sticklers for  standing on the oh-so-necessary ceremony typical of gentlemen everywhere!

Then again, one might ask how they could have given notice without having easy means of communication.  A telephone was almost unheard of in those days.  Couriers, so common these days, were some fifty years away, albeit there was the mail runner or the anchal ottakkaaran whose ‘footsore’ beat did not extend beyond the surrounding villages.  Incidentally, the mail runner would wear anklets with bells that would tell the news-deprived villagers of his approach. The long staff he carried primarily for support as he ran, and incidentally to parry unwelcome attention from stray dogs, also had bells attached to it. Anyway, the absence of a quick means of sending news led to the ‘surprise callers’ overlooking such social niceties.  Sociologists might rationalize this oversight as ‘environmental determinism’. Central Travancore in those days was a backwater, largely untouched by modern trends.  Visitors were likely to pitch up at odd hours of the day expecting to be received with open arms and a laden table.  My mother was in a tizzy not knowing what she would serve my uncles for a repast.  It would have been gross not to do your best to make them feel welcome.

Then she remembered her free-ranging rooster, a Rhode Island Red, as I recall.  It was her pride and joy as she was to tell us later, for it untiringly climbed her hens that in turn unfailingly gave her a steady supply of eggs for the kitchen.  She persuaded herself to make the ultimate sacrifice. Besides, as she recalled, she knew she had a cockerel waiting in the wings to be the new cock-of-the-walk! But, who would run the crested rooster down?  My uncles, who could not be denied a ‘meatsome’ meal, were eager to do ‘the honours’ and I joined in the chase, all cock-a-hoop. Sensing danger, the cock ruffled its neck feathers, lowered its head and darted this way and that with the pursuers closing in to cut off its angle of escape.  After several frantic squawks and fitful flutters to be airborne, the bird came crashing down helplessly no more than a few feet away from its ‘launching pad’.  It was gasping for breath, with fear palpable in its dilated eyes.  When one of the uncles performed the ‘last rites’, he failed to hold the luckless creature down firmly enough.  The result was that the chicken, with its head lopping limply down from its neck at a clumsy angle and blood spurting from its severed veins, broke free and thrashed about briefly. Then, it subsided, twitched once or twice and lay still.  

Later in life, every time I came across the phrase ‘like a headless chicken’, the image of this quivering end to a culinary quest would flash across my mind. And on the rare occasions that I had to do it at a pinch, I would first make sure that I held the bird down firmly under my feet.

We moved from Pallam to Perumbavoor, further afield. We were put up there at the residence of Thayyil David Lonappan, an evangelist, who was married to my step-grandmother’s younger sister, Aleyamma.  They were kindly souls who had warmly welcomed us into their household. 

The construction of Pallivaasal Hydroelectric Project was still going on at the time we moved in.  Harrisons and Crosfield were the project engineers. Dad was in charge of the materials for the project.  What stands out in my memory of our stay there was our car with a retractable-top - I do not recall what make it was.  Apart from the rare occasions that he would take us out for a spin, I remember the times he went hunting game with his friends in his car.  Later in life, I have often wondered how my father could have reconciled his Christian passiveness as a member of the Plymouth Brethren Society with his uncharacteristic fondness for this ‘blood sport’.  Fond indeed he was of hunting!  The ‘hunters’ once or twice brought back warthogs.  Mostly, they came back with giant mountain squirrels. Once, I remember, they brought in a monkey with a black coat?  What kind of a simian was it? A macaque?  I don’t know.

The venerable Lonappan, the austere evangelist, had, nevertheless, no qualms about skinning these animals each time and conjuring up a delicious goulash or a tasty soup. He also had the knack of distilling the essence of Narunandi Veru, viz. sarsaparilla root with which to make a sweet drink with a pleasant root-like tang.  I loved it.  But, I remember him most of all for his once-a-month, early Saturday morning ritual of faithfully dosing himself with an ounce of castor oil, that foul-tasting purgative which, apart from Epsom salt, was the most in use those days to detoxify oneself. He would religiously chase down the ‘drink’ with large quantities of tepid water, every hour on the hour, through much of the forenoon.  The ‘water treatment’ was intended to work up a copious cleansing purge.  Nothing else was ingested until the irrigated colon was fully flushed out.  Even an enema could not have been more stirring!

We children, meaning my brother Georgie and I, who had no stomach for it, became his unwilling subjects in this masochistic ‘experimentation’ with ‘the stool of repentance’.  Perhaps, he was made in the mould of the severe Cistercian monks of old or, nearer home, of the Vairaagees (Sages) of Ancient India.  It is common knowledge that the late Princess Diana had a penchant for colonic irrigation with water. We also know that this was eagerly aped by a host of anorexic fashion models in their yen to look like so many ‘Twiggys’ before they would sashay up and down the ramp ‘in the line of duty’, with their hips swaying like metronomes and their faces expressionless like those of zombies.  This too was self-denial of sorts, but I doubt if even they would ever be so bold as to flush their insides, of all things, with castor oil before they were put through their paces!   

The mention of the foul-tasting castor oil brings back memories of our mother force-feeding us –Georgie and me again- with the nearly as disgusting cod liver oil, doubtless with the best of maternal intentions.  During the war years when supplies of cod liver oil from abroad dried up, we had to put up with its local substitute in the form of shark liver oil, which inflicted far worse punishment to the palate. Especially since I suffered from chronic rhinitis and a touch of wheezing at the time, I had to continue to suffer these well-meaning ‘cruelties’ much longer than my brother did.  Later, graduating to Seven Seas’ cod-liver oil capsules -not to speak of endless bottles of Scott’s Emulsion, Kepler’s Extract, Waterbury’s Compound and what have you- was to my till-then tormented palate a welcome relief.   But, I am jumping ahead of my narrative. 

After Perumbavoor, my father moved to the engineering section of the company at Quilon.  While he was looking for a place for the family to stay, my mother, younger brother George and I ‘stopped over’ in Kumbanad.  This was a stopgap arrangement to obviate any break in my schooling. I was enrolled in Class Two of the Aannpallikkoodam (the school for boys) at Kumbanad, just south of the Thyparampil homestead lying to the west of the road to Arattupuzha.  The Northern Branch of the family had earlier built that school, as part of a reciprocal agreement with the Southern Branch that had simultaneously built Pennpallikkoodam (the girls’ school) to the east of the road.  Both schools were later handed over to the local government authority. That was at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Those schools offered four years of primary schooling. Until these two schools came into existence, the only ‘institution of learning’ obtaining in Kumbanad had been the Kudippallikkoodam (church school) attached to the Mar Thoma Valiapally of Kumbanad. The parishioners learned the three R’s (Reading, wRiting and Reckoning) there. That had been the sum total of their education and their preparation for life. For anything beyond that they had to go further afield to Vennikulam, a good four miles away.  Only a few among my grandfather’s generation were known to have ventured beyond the confines of Kumbanad to enlighten themselves.  For the majority, the compulsions of having to supplement family income and make a living must have weighed against it.

My grandfather’s generation, however, had made sure that their children did not have to travel far for their primary education.  As for post-primary education, there was the St. John’s Junior Secondary School at Eraviperoor, two miles due west, and for secondary education the Syrian Christian Seminary at Tiruvalla, six miles away.  Incidentally, it was from the latter that my father had matriculated in the year 1916.  He was twenty-two, then.  He would often recall how he had to trudge that distance back and forth every day for many months until a kindly kinsman at Tiruvalla took him under his wing!  Although, he had secured admission in the Miraj Medical College of the erstwhile Bombay Province the same year, his father did not have the wherewithal to send him there.  Later in life he made sure that at least one of his siblings become a doctor, an ambition he could not himself achieve, having earlier been compelled by circumstances to set his sights lower.

It was thus that my father became a teacher and taught for two years at St. John’s Junior Secondary School before leaving in 1920 for Madras en route to Mesopotamia, soon to be coextensive with the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. He was to serve in the civilian arm of the British Expeditionary Forces for the next twelve years.  In 1920, Iraq became a British Mandated Territory with Faisal 1 as its Hashemite king.  More about the Iraqi connection, I shall write later.

The Aannpallikkoodam, as I remember it, consisted of just one long, leaky, thatched hall.  On weekdays, four teachers would be seen gamely competing to be heard above the children’s insistent hum of artless excitement, each one from the wards under his individual care. No class was properly partitioned off from the others.  The four blackboards resting on rickety easels had peeled off badly with years of use. There were no desks for the children to write on; only benches to sit and your very laps to rest your slates on. And when you did lift your slate to rest it in the crook of your arm and begin to write, your tongue often unconsciously contorted in your efforts to form the squiggles you scratched on your slate.  We sat six or seven to a bench.  Each pupil carried to class only an all-inclusive Reader apart from the slate and its stone pencil, unlike his present-day counterpart ‘with his shining morning face’, dragging himself to school weighed down with a backpack full of assorted books, besides water-bottle, snack box and what not.

I do not recall very much about my ‘attainments’ there.  I do, however, recall the system of sanctions that the school followed with single-minded zeal because I was a resentful victim of that system.  And, its ‘experiments’ on me are seared in my memory.  The only ‘teaching aid’ was the cane, which was virtually a long-reaching extension of the teacher’s unforgiving arm.

Except for its infrequent use as a pointer to draw attention to something, the cane was sure to be applied with considerable force on the extended palm of an ‘erring’ pupil. It could be for acts of omission or of commission that the children were naturally prone to.  If the teacher were in a more ‘lenient’ frame of mind, which was not often, he would make the errant pupil stand ‘in situ’ on the bench as an object lesson to the rest of the class. Or, he would be compelled to stay on bended knees in a corner of the classroom, at the teacher’s pleasure, as an object of ridicule. Whether these punitive measures had any salutary effect on the pupils, either as a deterrent or as an ‘instrument’ of reform, is open to question.  The fear of the cane notwithstanding, pupils continued to fall foul of the teachers, and that for the most trivial of infringements.  In the final analysis, punishment in any form is self-defeating if it does not eventually become unnecessary.

As for rewards, the system was equally blinkered.  I remember I was allowed to move ahead of others, just once  -physically that is-  from the obscurity of the grubby back row to the relative limelight of the equally grubby front bench. It was for no better reason than that I was the only one in the class who could name the King Emperor of India of the time!  In the princely states of India, thankfully, school children did not have to sing ‘God Save Our Gracious King’ and therefore had no particular reason to find out who they were asking God to save.  We had been spared such alien impositions, I was to recall later in life.  We would, instead, lustily intone Vanchi Bhoomi Paathe, Chiram, (Long live, the Lord of Vanchi Land), an anthem singing paeans to the Maharaja of Travancore. 

If anyone deserved ‘credit’ for my ‘esoteric’ knowledge, though it was of doubtful value to me at that time, it was my father. He would keep me unfailingly updated on world events during his weekend visits from Quilon. The year was 1936 and, as it happened, Edward VIII had just succeeded to the throne.  My ‘promotion’ to the front bench was a dubious mark of honour, for it only served to invite invidious comparisons with my classmates most of whom were cleverer than I was.  I do not recollect any other form of encouragement that the class teacher consciously employed to motivate us. 

That they would, however, be compelled to shake themselves out of their torpor was apparent from the lengths to which they went to make sure that their wards measured up in the eyes of one who was higher up in their pecking order.  It arrived in the person of the Inspector of Schools, known in the local lingo as Melaavu. His annual visit was a ‘nine days’ wonder’ in the village. The teachers would religiously prime the children with answers to likely questions that the inspector might ask.  He could, on a sudden whim, randomly ask any question to any one on whom his eyes happened to fall at that precise moment.  And the children generally managed not to disappoint their anxious teachers.

With a few exceptions, the children looked grubby and usually wore only a wrap-around loincloth, or mundu, and sometimes a short-sleeved shirt to cover their torsos.  This would be the worse for wear after long use. On the day in question, however, each child would be well-scrubbed and clad in a clean mundu.  On pain of the direst consequences if they failed to pass muster, I might add!  I remember being rigged out for the occasion in a white shirt tucked under a pair of shorts with braces holding it up, no less!  Needless to say, I stuck out like a sore thumb.  For the rest of the day, I was the cause of snickering among my classmates. Theirs was the inverted snobbery of the disadvantaged.  If the teachers noticed it, they kept their own counsel.  To the poorly paid teachers getting a clean chit from the inspector was what mattered most, however remote the prospect of their  getting preferment might have been!  This was not to say that teachers in general were not committed to their calling, despite the day-to-day compulsions that detracted from their pastoral responsibilities. Most tried hard to measure up.  And, quite a few did.

One such teacher was Mylamoottil Kuttysaar alias Painkilisaar (the suffix –Saar is a corruption of the word ‘sir’ as a Malayalam synonym for ‘teacher’) who augmented his meagre earnings with the modest fees he charged for tutoring children in the evenings and over the weekends.  Mylamoottil was his family name; Kutty was the name he was locally known by and Painkili, his nickname.  The first impression one got on seeing him was that of a shrivelled-up man with a squeaky voice that did not exactly inspire confidence in him.  But, that notwithstanding, he was a well-meaning soul. He gave of his best.  It was not for lack of trying that he did not get very far with the thankless task of making me any more responsive to my studies than I was.  As a hyperactive child with a short attention span, I could be managed neither by reason nor by rebuke.  Boxing my ears or rapping me over the knuckles was his modus operandi when rebuke failed.  Sometimes, in exasperation, he would use the rod on my outstretched palm.  And yet, away from his wards, he was a mild-mannered man whose homilies at prayer meetings, of which Kumbanad has never had any dearth then as now, were often received well by his pious peers.

That was the beginning of my association, off and on, with my ancestral village.  It lasted for almost twenty years until I left the shores of India, like my father before me, for fresh fields and pastures new.  I left towards the end of 1955.  It was not until almost forty years later that I was to return to Kumbanad to take up permanent residence, which is not to say that I kept away from Kumbanad in the meanwhile. In fact, every two years or so, the ‘native’ would dutifully return.  And as a disinterested spectator of mankind, I could see the incremental socio-economic changes that a span of nearly half a century wrought on the place and its people.  Should I have also said, ‘detrimental changes’?

The changes have not all been happy ones.  True, the material circumstances of the rural community have steadily looked up over the years.  One need only look at the gargantuan brick and concrete houses that have gradually replaced the quaint old, thatched cottages to be convinced of this.

Each such cottage would have, just behind its façade, an Arra -rather an all-wood store-room, complete with a heavy wooden door- for keeping pickled food and such like edible durables that need be replenished once a year. Like, for instance, Uppumaanga which is local mango in season pickled in salt or cured Kodanpuli, a sour-tasting fruit, which gives our Central Travancorean Syrian Christian fish curry its characteristic flavour, or again sharkara or molasses and, the ubiquitous, dried black pepper corn. Then, there would be Waattu kappa and Upperi kappa, both varieties of boiled and dried cassava -tapioca as we choose to call it- for long-term use. Most of all, it would store bags and bags of paddy rice after each harvest.  

There would also be a Pathaayam or a large, rectangular, top-loading, all-wood receptacle, roughly ten feet long, four feet wide and four feet high, much like a rather large, oblong table except that panels box in the sides top to bottom all the way round to provide storage space in the Pathaayam.  It would have partitions inside to make cubicles for storing the paddy seeds set aside after harvest for sowing come the following season, as also the spill-over paddy rice, which the arra would not hold especially after a good harvest. Wooden bolts or Saaksha, sliding flush with the underside of the ‘table-top’, could be shot across to fasten the hatches of the cubicles from beneath. After unbolting them, the hatches could be lifted off the top of the cubicles.  Interestingly, wooden dowel pins, and nary a metallic nail, held the different parts of the Pathaayam together!  At a pinch, for instance, if you needed to yield your only bedroom to put up visitors for the night, it would also double nicely as a bedstead.

Then there was a Nilavara or a cellar in the basement, with a trap door and steps to go down into. This was for safely putting away heirlooms such as copper and bell-metal cauldrons used for cooking large quantities of food on special occasions or for parboiling unhulled rice before husking it for domestic use. There was also a Nira or a wood-panelled façade; which is fashioned from seasoned hardwood like Teak or like Plaavu; that is wood from the Jackfruit tree.  Along the length of the façade, ran a veranda with wooden latticework or a screen enclosing it to double as a sitting room.   In addition to these there would be at least two stone-built bedrooms –and maybe more if the family was compulsively fecund, which was not uncommon. A kitchen with a lean-to as work space completed the picture.

The traditional kitchen had food cooked on open fires, with each cooking pot resting on a tripod of fixed stones on a raised ledge above which there would also be a smoke vent or Pukayera to allow the smoke to escape. Even then, if the firewood wasn’t tinder dry, which was a tall ask in the rainy season, the smoke would get into your eyes and make them smart because of the soggy, slow-burning faggots. The vent was only an apology for a proper chimney. But during monsoons when the sun played hide and seek with you, the wickerwork strung across head high above the fires provided ideal shelving for curing Kodanpuli and such like.  Before the arrival of the more modern meat-safe or the food cupboard with sides of netting to keep out flies, a permanent fixture in every traditional Kerala kitchen was the Urri.  Very much like the hanging flower pot, it hung from the roof on three lengths of thick coir strings.  Starting from the bottom, it held two or three horizontal tiers of much thicker rings made of the same material strung to it to hold different dishes of cooked food, especially the Meen Curry, to save it from the depredations of the family cat.  No cottage would be seen not to have this, for what it is worth, to fend off the feline.  

These cottages, which were thatched with palm fronds, stood on raised, oblong stone plinths.  The stone used was laterite, which was locally quarried.  In fact, almost every homestead would have a Kalluvettaam kuzhi or stone quarry sunk within its boundaries to cut building blocks from.  Traditionally, the village Kallaassaarees or stonemasons did the cutting and shaping. 

In contrast, the house my father built in 1934 was one of the earliest of the tiled houses in Kumbanad, and he named it ‘Hopeville’ in a severe Christian frame of mind.  Could he have foreseen that his youngest son, Thomaskutty, who has since inherited the house, would one day become an American citizen?  ‘Hopeville’ would have been just the kind of name the founding fathers of puritan America settled for. More than seventy years on, though somewhat the worse for wear, the house stands drawn back from the road on a gentle slope, still reflecting glimpses of its old charm. Well, that is another story.  Wire-cut and kiln-fired clay bricks and concrete blocks have since then replaced laterite blocks, as cement has now replaced lime mortar for joining building blocks together.

The houses of Kumbanad have grown bigger and more ornate, but the once unspoiled countryside has been scarred by these mushrooming structures.  They loudly shout their presence; especially the ones belonging to those who were at one time with no land to speak of, but are now threatening to push out the true natives of Kumbanad, the erstwhile ‘landed gentry’, relatively speaking that is. But at what cost! These people, mostly the traditional journeymen workers of Kumbanad, having eagerly made a beeline for the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf to fulfil their dreams, soon realise that they have to slave long hours doing odd jobs for their Arab employers who are, by and large, notoriously bad paymasters. 

Nevertheless, the money that they manage to scrape together with their blood, sweat and toil in the harsh expanses of the unforgiving Arabian Desert, is blithely spent by their dear ones back home buying up land from their erstwhile masters to build these monstrosities.  The hidden sneer of these Johnnies-come-lately at having upstaged their old employers is all too apparent in the buildings that they make as a statement that they have arrived!  But sometimes the sneer turns into an unmistakable sulk when they find themselves out of work and clueless as to how they could maintain themselves, let alone maintain their dream houses.

Predictably, the broad sweep of the old landscape has been fast shrinking with these ‘encroachments’. The green fields of Kumbanad have been turned 'dry, bald and sere' not so much by the parching sun as by the incursions of these land-parched folk looking for a place of their own in the sun. One can hardly fail to notice the crassness of the flashy lifestyle of the more fortunate ones among them.  The screaming colours they use to paint their houses with can only argue a certain lack of good taste. The village has been robbed of its character and largely stripped of its greenery, thanks to this rash of houses breaking out over what was once a gently rolling countryside. That is the price we have to pay for growing prosperity.

Again, the creature comforts we, erstwhile masters and servants alike, now enjoy have sadly put our once strong social relationships in danger of falling apart, to say nothing of our social graces being diminished.  The firm, familial bonds that once knit our extended families together are, alas, slowly fraying.  This would seem to be the curse of a community that likes to flaunt its newfound wealth.  We see too the spectacle of every man being ‘an island unto himself’. Sadly, this insularity compels their less fortunate kinsfolk, despite their innate goodness, to distance themselves from the snobbery of such people for having set themselves apart as a new class. When the family had faced difficulties in the past, it was the principle of -to use a cliché- ‘all for one and one for all’ that sustained them.  That now seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

There was a time when making preparations for a marriage in our family was an occasion for a reunion, when the members set aside their differences and closed ranks to help each other with their time and effort.  Not infrequently, they also helped with money.  There was a tacit agreement in the family, from the moment the Banns were published, that the preparations for the marriage would be a collective effort. No invitation cards would be sent to the members of the family lest they felt that they were no more than invitees in the function.

And the homestead where the marriage was approaching would keep an open house, starting several days before the event itself. Young and old alike came and joined in with the family in the preparations, or lingered to be asked to run errands. Or, with nothing left to do, they would catch up with the latest gossip, largely spicy but occasionally ‘made tedious by morality’ as Oscar Wilde would have put it. That is, they would in the same breath be equally snide in their comments about others and be holding the moral high ground. 

The lazier of the species hung about and simply twiddled their thumbs. ‘They also serve who stand and wait’ might as well have been their life’s motto!  Some others would bob up suddenly from God knows where and bustle about, going through the motions of doing something without actually doing anything. And, the bride-to-be or the groom-in-waiting, as the case may be, would chafe under pleasurable anticipation, with thoughts of the wedded bliss to come, wishing clocks would be swifter, yet often sobered with bouts of self-doubt.  All in all, a marriage in the family was a time to be savoured by all, in their different ways, whether they made themselves useful or merely pretended to be busy or did nothing of any consequence at all.  Even the freeloaders, who turned up on the day of the marriage hoping to partake of a rare treat, went away ‘fulfilled’ for the day.

The children would have a rollicking time playing Hide and Seek or Hopscotch or Cops and Robbers, or whatever else that took their fancy, if they could find enough legroom for themselves in all that hustle and bustle.  The older boys could be seen in unobtrusive nooks and corners engaged in one of the most delightful frills of adolescence, namely flirting, with their nubile cousins, but stopping short of getting too fresh with them for fear of being taken by surprise, or because of a pesky twinge of conscience.  “Speak for yourself!” their latter-day counterparts might snort.

The men were busy with either putting up a marquee or a pandal - a canopy roofed with plaited palm-fronds sometimes lined inside with white cloth- or doing up the house before the appointed day.  At the same time, the women busied themselves with cooking in the kitchen or in a lean-to that was specially erected for the occasion.  Strange as it may seem to us now, in the patriarchal society that Kumbanad was, it was the men who decided what stuff to buy to prepare the marriage feast, and how much. The men arrogated to themselves even the right to decide on the quantum of spices that would be needed to cook the dishes!  

I remember seeing what large quantities of the unused dried red chillies and coriander seeds were left over after my marriage!  It would have been more than ample for another marriage in the family!  So much for men’s self-assurance!  The women might well have inwardly sniggered, but tactfully chose to keep their own counsel.  They would on such occasions openly say nothing that might get the male chauvinist hackles up.

They would, however, have their own way with a host of helpers, mostly men, to dice the large mounds of beef, to dress and joint the chicken, to clean and fillet the fish, to chop up the vegetables, to grate the coconut, to prepare the condiments and to clean the rice.  Among these drudges, I recollect the faces of Muthirakaalaayil Thoma, Perumbalathu Mathaichettan, Pullukaalaayil Pappychettan, Keezhukara Chackochettan and Ovanaalil Elichedathy.  The suffixes, chettan and chedathy meaning ‘elder brother’ and ‘elder sister’, were attached to their names, by the younger members of the family, in deference to their age and seniority of service.  As a boy, when observing them, from the other side of the fence, as it were, I did not see anything amiss in their lot that might have aroused in me something akin to a social conscience.  That they did not join the family at the table, but were separately served food in the kitchen or its work area did not at that time seem to me anything but natural.

By the time I became aware of the exploitative ethos of the system, it was already on its last legs and, with it, the system of keeping retainers that had sustained it.  Society in general soon underwent a sea change that swept away many of the inequities therein.  I understand on good authority that these old retainers were among the pioneers who moved due east to the Malaria-infested forests on the slopes of the Western Ghats and to Vayanaad in Northern Malabar to clear and cultivate virgin land, theirs to sharecrop for the asking. 

Often, the absentee landlords in these areas were only too eager to get off their hands, no doubt for a consideration, vast stretches of fallow land in their possession to willing sharecroppers.  Later, with the passage of time, they claimed squatters’ rights and ownership changed hands. Not infrequently, some of these erstwhile tenants made modest fortunes by their toil.  Yet others have found avenues other than sharecropping opening to them, with more than a little assistance from the Pentecostal assemblies to which they belonged.  I know of two such retainers- one that of my grandfather and the other that of his brother Rev. Mammen- whose progeny have made it good in the United States of America.

Then there was a lower order of servants to fetch and carry for you all day, everyday, except the day of Sabbath.  They were the farm labourers who lived on their masters’ lands virtually as bonded servants, and always at their beck and call to work on their lands. And the children never addressed the older ones among them as Chettan or Chedathy.  They were just plain Mailan or Karathakutty or Chaathan or Mathai or Thoma or Pappy or Chacko or Eli or Maria.  

Clearly, the caste distinctions of the Hindu ethos had rubbed off somewhat on the so-called Syrian Christians as well. If the family retainers, all of them Syrian Christians yet not social equals, sitting on their low stools or korandi, had to eat out of enamelware or earthenware bowls at the back of the kitchen, the bonded labourers were relegated to the backyard of the house to eat their meals squatting on the ground.

Looking back, I recall that the most demeaning part of this ritual was that they had to dig holes in the ground and cover them with banana leaves. These leaves would blanch and soften and nicely hug the sides of the holes like moulds, as soon as the hot rice gruel or kanji and to go with it cooked cassava or whatever, was dealt out of coconutshell ladles with long handles.

Thus, even the impoverished homesteaders of Kumbanad were not above treating their servants as such. But the masters could not get by without the help of this lower order of servants, for especially during special occasions like weddings they were indispensable.

The Chembu and the Uruli, huge copper or bell-metal vessels, needed for ‘community’ cooking had to be moved from the cellar, with considerable effort, to be placed over open fires stoked up with faggots and firewood. Those were the days when houses were without plumbing, which meant that enormous quantities of water had to be drawn in vessels and fetched, vessel after tedious vessel, from the wells, often some distance away from the house. And they chopped more wood to stoke the fire as the day wore on. These helpers were veritably, like the sons of Ham, ‘drawers of water and hewers of wood’.  Using long-handled iron spatulas, they would then, robot-like, mix and stir for long hours the food being cooked over slow burning fires while the chief cook would occasionally look over their shoulders.  This was, for what it was worth, certainly an ‘improvement’ on the practice of caste Hindus who would not let the likes of these ‘menials’ come within earshot of their kitchens for fear that they would pollute them!

Dishes such as Irachi Veivichethu, Erisseri, Pulisseri, Kozhikkurry, Meenkurry, Pachadi and Thoran were the standard fare.  That is, (1) Diced beef and coconut cooked and seasoned with condiments, (2) Diced raw banana curry, (3) Buttermilk seasoned with shallots, turmeric, mustard and condiments, (4) Chicken curry, (5) ‘Red hot’ fish curry seasoned with meenpuli (fish tamarind), (6) Hotchpotch (for want of a better term to describe this yogurt-based relish) and (7) Sautéed vegetables, in that order.  A lot of the cooking was done outdoors. 

At the marriage feast itself, all these would be served up, along with steaming rice, on a banana leaf.  The cut end of the leaf would be placed to your right and the tapering end folded in as tradition prescribed.  For starters, they served Paayasam, a rice pudding of sorts. The main dishes followed, and the dessert Pooven Pazham, a special variety of bananas, was served last. The guest would forthwith elaborately mash and mix the banana with yoghurt and Paani - a kind of treacle- or sugar and would make short work of the resulting mishmash with great zest! To say that the guests downed it with great slurps might be closer to the mark.  Their satisfied belch at the end of the meal was rather like the obligatory ‘honourable eructation’ of the Pacific Islanders after a banquet.  It was an expansive backwash of their paunchy fulsomeness!  Neither the slurp nor the belch looked or sounded too indelicate to anyone except the unaccustomed partakers of this dessert.  Its present-day substitutes of caramel pudding or ice cream or fruit cocktail eaten out of wafer cones or dainty little dishes, with scoops and all, may not offend fussy eyes or delicate ears.  The older generation prefer to this day the tried and tested system of the past, slurp and all.

The specially prepared pantry called the kalavara, which was actually an extension of the marquee itself, would be garnered with all the goodies long before the guests arrived.  With few exceptions, the older men manned the pantry and the younger men served the food. Women were expected to hover discreetly in the background just in case they were beckoned. 

There was a time, not too long ago, when guests used to sit, cross-legged or with their legs drawn under their bodies, on the matted floor of the Pandal, and ate with their hands.  They still eat with their hands, but not to be outdone by the urbanized, they raise their backsides to sit at tables in order not to put too much strain on their atrophying ‘nether regions’.  Oh, but let me backtrack to the days prior to the marriage.

The elders of the extended family, while they kept a watchful eye on the helpers, exchanged pleasantries and talked about old times. They had already paid their dues to society, so understandably it was their right to put their feet up.  Their gossip, spiced with oblique references to old scandals, would often knock hidden skeletons to come tumbling out of the family cupboard.  Whispering tongues, as Coleridge has it, can poison truth. But it mattered little, for the long dead walked no more. And, in any case, those who happened to overhear these tales privately envied these erstwhile sinners the more for their peccadilloes. The helpers within earshot would nudge each other and keel over with suppressed laughter even as they tried to stick to their assigned tasks. One or the other of the elders present might chide them in mock seriousness for slacking off, but that was all.  This, easy-going, informality is now no more.  These helpers of yesteryears are now as thin on the ground as snowflakes in summer.

Weddings have now become occasions for showing off or scoring points.  Naturally, weddings have promoted a thriving industry that cashes in on human vanity. We have event managers, videographers, beauticians and caterers turning up on the day in question and frenetically doing all the legwork, so that in fact the family need do nothing more than fork out wads of banknotes at the end of the day.  Cars bedecked with exotic flowers such as orchids and roses and such like ferry the bride and the groom from the church to the reception hall, where they would be installed on gilded chairs on the stage all resplendent with tinsel and satin drapes, with flower pots on pedestals, no less, as stage props. Their few moments of fame under the limelight is all meticulously stage-managed and recorded for posterity.  All for a hefty price, that is!  Even the vicar, who does not ordinarily seek to be in the limelight, cannot be denied his occasional privilege to discard his priestly reserve and act as master of ceremonies, even if somewhat tentatively.  The old austerities have now become distant memories.  The  clergy like the laity join in the festivities. Up to a point, that is, within the bounds of propriety.

We have come a long way from the days when the parish priest would be the only clergyman present to solemnize the marriage.  We now need a bishop, no less, with a galaxy of other priests in attendance, to conduct the ceremony.  And the invited guests have to suffer in silence, in deference to the Bishop’s eminence, if he does not get to the church on time; which is not infrequent!  We have also come a long way from the days of the humbler Velleim Karimbadome (white cloth and blanket) to seat the elders of the family, beside whom the newly-weds would first be ensconced, on arrival from the church, before they are asked to join the guests in the Pandal. Even the Kalyaanaurappu or the engagement ceremony before the marriage is now used as an occasion for tasteless ostentation.

That the most intimate moments in family life are being turned into public spectacles to be gaped at compulsively by nosey passers-by is fast becoming a common practice. Gaping is the national pastime of India.  It hardly makes any difference to us whether the occasion is a private one. A death in the family is perhaps the most bizarre example that one could think of. 

I remember as a boy, when there was a death in the family, the youth of the extended family would fan out in different directions without having to be told, mostly on foot but sometimes on bicycles if they have to travel further afield, to convey the sad news. The occasional line bus that plied the route might take too long to turn up.  In the meanwhile, the mortal remains of the dead, even while the body is still warm, would first be carefully bathed, prepared and placed on a raised framework, usually a bed. Then would begin the solemn vigil by the kith and kin, all of whom lived within hailing distance, to watch and grieve prayerfully, over the departed one, often through the night before the burial. And, in the meanwhile, the many comforting hymns sung and the tributes paid recalling the life of the deceased helped reconcile the bereaved to bear their grief with dignity. It was catharsis of sorts.

After the final goodbyes were said, the pallbearers would carry the coffin to the church on foot, in a slow, subdued procession with the company of softly singing mourners bringing up the rear.  Among the hymns they sang was a particularly evocative hymn that continues to echo in the minds of people, cutting across faiths, to this day.  It begins, “Samayaamaam radhathil njaan swargayaathra cheyyunnu…and two or three lines later resumes Ente yaathrayude anthyam innalekaal aduppam.  Roughly translated, it means, “In Time’s heaven-bound chariot do I make my way…my journey’s end is nearer by far than yesterday.”   Interestingly, the music is set to the tune of that old cowboy favourite, ‘Oh my darling Clementine. …You are gone and lost for ever…’ A bit soppy perhaps, but apt, one would have thought.

Things have changed since then.  More often than not, no sooner did a person die than the body was removed with unseemly haste and wheeled off to a mortuary.  It is kept there for as long as it takes the diaspora, of whom every family would have at least one, to come and pay their ‘guilt-ridden’ respects to the frozen dead.  Usually, the obituary column in the local newspaper is the only source of information to the near and dear ones. They could hardly have turned up to pay their respects before the body was relegated to the freezing cold confines of the mortuary. Finally, in place of pallbearers or a traditional hand-drawn hearse carrying the body to the church, an ambulance that doubles as a hearse carts the body from the mortuary to the house and thence to the church.  Sadly, a time of private grief, when members of the family would come together to draw strength and comfort from each other, is turned into a public spectacle.  The cameramen and videographers hired for the occasion have a field day as they inveigle the mourners into posing beside the lifeless form in contrived attitudes of sorrow.

Then, there is the matter of floral tributes pointedly offered by the stragglers in a mawkish show of affection, so that, often, the body is soon all but submerged under a mound of petals and paper and plastic. Larger versions of the Shoshappa, the brocaded piece of cloth that is normally intended to cover the Eucharist at Holy Communion, now double as half-shrouds to cover the lifeless form.  As if it were the Sacraments!  But, the most banal of all is the not infrequent presence of a band like in some Latin American funeral cortege, playing cheerless tunes of teary-eyed farewells.  Sometimes, a funerary vehicle, all draped in black, would be in attendance to broadcast pre-recorded hymns and homilies through a public address system. 

One could speculate that if this is carried too far, it is just a short step away from ‘celebrating’ death as a festive event! Like an Irish wake. That reminds me of the day I was present at an African wake in Lusaka, Zambia. My colleague at the United Nations Institute for Namibia, Billy Modise, a Xhosa from South Africa, had earlier that day lost his only son. No doubt, there was audible grieving from the mourning women whose keen of sorrow almost sounded Irish in its sadness. But, later that night, the men ate and drank and had a generally good time, with only a hint of moderation in deference to the dead. And yet, this would be no more than a throwback to our aboriginal past.  To this day, the tribal societies in some parts of India continue to celebrate death with the joy of life. They dance like dervishes to the accompaniment of tinny drums and squeaking clarinets, as they accompany the funeral bier, all decked with marigold, the cadaver propped up on it lifelessly swaying to the exertions of the pallbearers, on that final journey to the cremation grounds.  If we can celebrate a birth why not celebrate death as well, they might well ask, for has not life come full circle?  If this is what we are moving to, one wonders whether there is any dignity left in dealing with death any more, or whether a crisis in a family is any more the unifying catalyst that it once was.

The effect of all this is that the family reunion, which had once helped, through thick and thin, to strengthen family bonds, is lapsing into a charade.  Time there was when the elders had helped initiate the younger generation into taking life’s vicissitudes in their stride.  Family re-unions would give them ‘hands-on’ experience. Such occasions were virtually ‘rites of passage’ into adulthood for the youth of the family.

In contrast, we now see the spectacle of waning parental authority.  The elders, who were once looked upon with reverence that almost bordered on awe are more likely now to be put away like unwanted pieces of furniture in the lumber-room, as it were.  The old authoritarianism has yielded place to a more permissive dispensation in which the youth is free to make choices and take matters into their own hands.  This is not in and of itself harmful to all youth.   Thankfully, many make the right choices

Some of the youth, however, have veered off from their moorings, drifting helplessly. Without an anchor to hold them down, many a misguided youth are cast adrift.  It is as if they have discarded the familial work ethos that was once sacrosanct.  Instead, they believe that everyone owes them a living without their having to earn it.  Some may see this as an alarmist view about youth, but the truth is there is enough shiftlessness among them to cause us disquiet.  Nevertheless, every now and then, the youth do get a chance to backtrack and find their way again.  Many were the times I could have fallen by the wayside or lost my way, but did not, for Kumbanad and its vestigial old-world values had a way of whispering timely words of warning in my ears. 

Not that many of the youth in our own extended family have been alienated or lost their way.  Some may have become estranged for a while, but in time they too are rehabilitated as they rediscover their traditions like the generation that went before them.  It is not as if the so-called ‘generation gap’ is a new phenomenon.  In fact, the youth in every generation have been holding out against their elders’ patriarchal efforts to guide them. Maybe, such resistance is born out of a natural instinct to determine their threshold of defiance and see how much they can get away with. As part of their struggle for survival! The need for peer approval may also be a factor.  The trouble is, if they fail to discern the critical moment to adapt or ‘yield’ to familial counsel, they will have forever lost many precious years of their lives. And with that, the opportunities to find the right niche for themselves at the right time!  

My ‘affair’ with Kumbanad goes back to the early 1930’s. When I look back at Kumbanad as it then was, at its sights and sounds and at the familiar spots in it that I grew to like, I cannot help but feel a sense of loss. In some ways, life seemed less complicated in those far-off days.  True, distance in time tends to give places and events in the past an improbable aura that may not be real and may blur the boundaries between memory and fantasy.  Philip Roth, the American novelist, once said in a letter to his friend, ‘Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts’.

Indeed, the recollections of the past are constantly being ‘updated’ in the telling and retelling of it. After lying dormant for long at the level of the subconscious, the memory of a past incident or experience is suddenly triggered off by a new stimulus. And the old memory is thus once again ‘rudely’ awakened.  But in the re-telling of it, you may add a new twist to it by whatever it was that jolted it out of sleep in the first place. That then sinks back into forgetfulness, only to be revived again later with a fresh look.  It is more than likely, therefore, that the latest ‘edition’ of your recall could ‘read’ differently with every new ‘revision’. In short, you may never remain your ‘first edition’ for too long!  If my impressions, therefore, look anything like having been ‘revised’ or even ‘redone’ in places, I do hope that those who know my antecedents will indulge me as I press ahead, regardless.  The ‘medium is the message’ as Marshall McLuhan would say.  The medium of a writer is not only the words he uses but also the flow of feelings and images he wishes to make manifest in these words.

A stretch of gravelled road running from Kozhencherry in the east to Tiruvalla in the west, passed through Kumbanad. It still does, only it is wider and  tarred. The section of the road that passed along our village doubled as its high street, such as it was. Coming from the east along this stretch, you would see a road branching off at right angles to the left leading to the Arattupuzha river crossing, three miles due south.  Lush green paddy fields would meet your eyes on either side of this road as it led you down a gentle slope before it slowly climbed up again.  In the south-west corner where the two roads met stood the stone-built, single-storey cloth and tailoring shop that ‘Mishien’ (read machine) Kuttichaayan ran.  His Singer sewing machine was the first of its kind in Kumbanad. Thus it was that the nickname ‘mishien’ was added to his name. His shop is not there anymore. In its place, we now have a high-rise under construction towering over the other structures, old and new. Which is only natural, for Kumbanad is now a bustling township.

And obliquely across on the north west side of the street was Mannil Paappichettan’s grocery store. It was really an extension of Kunnumpurathu Manager’s cloth shop. Next to it was a bookbinder who, apart from re-binding old books, sold Bibles, hymnbooks and Christian literature. As a sideline, he also sold drums and tambourines on which the born-again Christians of Kumbanad could try their percussive skills when they were seized with religious fervour, which was often. Then there was the Chempanaalil teashop on the south side and a few ramshackle kiosks on either side of the street selling odds and ends like Bidis (native cigarettes for smoking) and Murukkaan (tobacco and betel leaves for chewing) and Naranga Vellam (lime juice for slaking your thirst). Once or twice a week, a butcher would set up shop under a makeshift canopy, made of plaited palm-fronds, propped up by four stout poles.  He usually sold beef and, on rare occasions, mutton.  For the villagers, mutton was too dear to be part of their spartan fare. Even beef, which cost only a third of mutton, was a luxury for many.  Mostly, they made do with sardines or mackerels for an appetizing relish.  They would stretch their resources to buy anything more expensive only as a rare treat.

There was also the Anchal Aappees (the mail service for sending and receiving letters and articles within the state) and further east to your left, the Post Office for national and international mail. While the cast-iron Anchal Mail Box, with the Maharaja’s insignia of a twisted conch embossed on it, was painted a dark shade of green, the Post Office Box sported its characteristic shade of red. This then was the sum-total of the public service on offer to the people of Kumbanad.  Oh, I almost forgot.  To the wayfarers passing through the village, the public well sunk by the family, a few yards to the east of the main junction, offered sweet water for slaking their thirst.  And for the farmer who wended his way to the market to sell the fruits of his labour, it was a welcome relief to see the load-rest, or in local parlance the Chumadu Thaangi -a rough-hewn granite beam held up by two granite piles- on which to lower his burden and rest from his exertions before picking it up again and moving on.  Kumbanad had more than one of those.

The common means of transport in those days was the bullock cart, open and flat-bedded but occasionally covered, moving on iron-rimmed wooden wheels.  Those were the days when carts ruled the highways and byways of the land. The cart was made of hardwood to make it last long.  It often went by, well into the early hours of dawn, as part of a long convoy, noisily trundling along at an unhurried pace.  The carter, who did not appear to have deadlines to meet, would occasionally doze off or, waking up, sing rural ditties to break the tedium of the journey as the heavy-laden cart rolled forward. Occasionally, he would crack his whip and click his tongue if the animals were moving too slowly for his liking.  The cart would then set a brisk pace for a brief spell, its unmistakable bells all jingling faster, before relapsing into its usual trundle once again.  Suspended from its under-carriage would be a hurricane lantern that swung with the moving cart, throwing an arc of dull light between the wheels. How this could have lighted the path of the cart has always baffled me. The sure-footed animals had no doubts at all.  The soft jingle of the brass bells as the cart swayed along the rutted roads seemed to keep time with the pace of the cart. It carried mostly farm produce to the market and, sometimes, people.

Now and again, one might see a villu wandi or a covered carriage, mounted on leaf springs, carrying its well-heeled occupants, of whose tribe Kumbanad could not boast of many.  One such carriage was owned by Kizhakethil Kochumathai, a fourth-generation notable of the family. He was a prodigal spender who never gave tomorrow a thought.  Towards the end of his days his family was in dire straits, but he never wavered in his faith.  Like Dickens’ Micawber, he was a hopeless optimist who believed that ‘something will turn up’.  Something did turn up in good measure for the family by and by, but he did not live to see it.  He always sat in the same place in the church and always led the hymn singing on Sundays.  He had a deep, resonant voice that challenged the congregation to a louder choral effort.   

A motorized vehicle was a rarity in those days. There was, of course, the KCMS (Kozhencherry Changanassery Motor Service) eight-seater bus that plied in either direction once every two hours or so during the day. There was a sort of personal relationship between the driver of the bus- mostly the owner himself- and the regular commuters. There were not many commuters, though, in those days. One would wait in front of the house to flag down the bus one usually took as it hove into sight. If one of the regulars was not seen waiting at the appointed spot, the driver would pull up and wait for his ‘co-passenger’ to come.  In the meanwhile, he would tweet-tweet his quaint little horn once or twice as a wake-up call.  The horn looked somewhat like a bugle with a hollow rubber ball attached to it and pointing towards the driver for him to squeeze and signal his arrival. Such intimacy! Ah, you will have to whistle for it now! I recall the time my brother George and I were at Quilon doing primary school. Come summer vacation, we, mother and children, would repair to Kumbanad bag and baggage to spend the school break there. In those days, there was, as I recall, the ‘Balaram Bus Service’ that plied along the coastal road between Quilon and Alleppey. There was also the ‘Popular Bus Service’ that ran between Tiruvalla and Quilon via Kottarakara and back once a day.  The lone bus that plied the route would be parked in front of our house on the appointed day, long before its scheduled departure, to take us all on board with all our effects.  And, after reaching its hub at Tiruvalla and having ‘unloaded’ the other passengers, it would make a beeline for Kumbanad to drop us off at our very  doorstep. That was personalised, doorstep-to-doorstep service for you! 

This was before the coming of the State Transport buses for all and sundry, brought into service by none other than Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer, the Dewan of Travancore. Interestingly, he appointed as its director his own chauffeur and general factotum, a London Cockney by the name of Salter.  Strange as it may seem, also as a member of the Viceroy’s Privy Council, the Dewan may well have enjoyed certain privileges that made him an honorary white in the eyes of the powers-that-be like the assimilados did in Portuguese colonies!  And hence, the curious spectacle of a uniformed chauffeur, a white man no less, driving an Indian around all that many years ago.  In the streets of London now, such a sight will raise no eyebrows anymore. 

As for cars in Kumbanad then, Edward H. Noel, and his redoubtable wife, both resident missionaries of the Brethren persuasion, had a Model T Ford for their personal use.  Metti Yonnaachen was their butler cum chauffeur.  And, Chempanaalil Yonnaachen had a car (I cannot recall the make) that plied as a taxi, of which he was himself the cabbie. Many years later, Karipuzha Kuttychaayan was to add another taxi to make up the sum total of three cars that Kumbanad could boast of.  But coming down to the present, like the proverbial camel in the Arab’s tent, the ever-growing ranks of taxis and auto-rickshaws in Kumbanad are threatening to push the hapless dwellers of the village off the road. 

Kumbanad ‘High Street’, such as it is, has lost its old charm of uncluttered openness and friendliness.  In those days there was an air of familiarity about the street, especially in the evenings. To the locals who gravitated to it, it was a meeting place to share news and views and, not least, the latest gossip on the grapevine. All that is now history. In its place, we see the strange and none-too-friendly faces of the interlopers, mostly political hatchet men, that crowd out the natives of Kumbanad and add a palpable air of menace to the street.

In those days, the village had a grid of country lanes running between hedges or between stone banks, allowing only enough elbowroom to make way for passers-by. People using these lanes after dark were obliged to pick their way gingerly for fear of venomous snakes that might venture out of the undergrowth at night. Flashlights were still a long time in coming. They would usually carry a kindling torch of dried palm-fronds, which they would swish to and fro from time to time to keep the flame from petering out when they were out and about after dark. The occasional straggler in the night can even now be spotted surreptitiously carrying one at unseemly hours. Such an improvised torch is called choottu in our neck of the woods.  It would throw a moving arc of light that lit up the ground beneath their feet with every wave of the hand that held it. Snakes were generally nocturnal and kept well away from people during daylight hours..

Sometimes even daylight did not deter a determined reptile to emerge from its hole  to find a quarry, usually a rat or a field mouse.  On occasions the tables are turned and the serpent itself would be the quarry to another predator, that is.  Once, I remember, about sixty years ago as Pallitheckel Mathaikutty and I were on our bicycles making our way to a neighbouring village, all of a sudden a cobra slithered across the road with a mongoose in hot pursuit. We dismounted and watched in fascination even as the mongoose caught up with the snake and circled it in an end game, but keeping out of the striking range of the puffed-up cobra’s repeated lunges.  Soon the hissing grew weaker and the lunges slower. Like lightning,  that furry long-tailed predator sprung, caught the serpent by its neck and slunk as swiftly as it came into the paddies, not far from Thondu Kunjammen’s homestead near the Koipuram Primary School at Kadapra. 

Thondu Kunjammen was a copra dealer who earned his nickname from ‘Thondu’; that is, the fibrous husk of the coconut shell. He met an untimely death at the hands of a rival trader who was known to be a snake in the grass. The mention of Thondu Kunjammen brings to mind his neighbour the mild-mannered Chakkakuru Mathai who, in a fit of sudden rage, split his wife’s head in two with an axe. And they say, it was all because the hapless woman had forgotten to cook Mathai’s every-day must as his relish:  stir-fried Jackfruit seeds or chakkakuru mezhukkuperatti, in local parlance. Hence the curious moniker attached to his name. He spent a few years in prison for second-degree murder, I remember my grandfather narrating the story to us. He would have made an interesting subject for psychologists to study how a Jekyll turned into a Hyde for the most unlikely of reasons. By all accounts, Mathai was no snake in the grass.

There were snakes aplenty, of the ophidian kind, in Kumbanad in those days. The most common were the chera or the ratsnake and the polakan or the water snake, both harmless varieties. Of the poisonous ones, the cobra, the krait and the viper were the most feared. Snakebites were not uncommon in those days.  Should that happen, one had to travel long distances to get to a hospital, so more often than not victims were rushed to the nearest indigenous ‘poison healer’ or in local parlance, the visha haari in the fond hope that he could save the victim. The Pentecostals, on the other hand, opted for the healing power of prayer to treat snakebites, or any other life-threatening ailment for that matter. I remember how, some seventy years ago, a young man by name Chittezhathu Kochucherukkan died after he had been bitten by a krait. His kinfolk refused to take him to a hospital and relied solely on the power of prayer to work a miracle.  Much  more recently, my cousin Kizhakothil Thankachen, a pentacostal pastor to boot, died of septicaemia because the injuries he had sustained in a road accident were not treated at all. The pastors of the local Faith Home would not hear of it. When darkness of the mind and of the night meet, it can be lethal.

With the benefit of hindsight one could say people retired for the night unseasonably early, not long after darkness fell, but they would make a virtue of that necessity. There was no electricity in those days. There was no cinema and no form of entertainment to speak of. That they would have frowned upon such worldly diversions is another matter. Their spartan lives had no room for such ‘frivolities’. They therefore donned the mantle of ascetic Christians. ‘We are not put on this earth to enjoy ourselves’ they might well have been heard to say.  In this life of denial, women had the worst of it.

The naked oil lamps that barely dispelled the darkness in their dimly lit houses were doused not long after the evening prayers were said and a spare meal eaten in its wake. If there was the odd lamp seen flickering after that, it was sure to be from a kitchen where the uncomplaining womenfolk would be winding down from their chores for each day. And, we unctuously continue to extol the virtues of these long-suffering unfortunates as icons of faithful Indian womanhood!  ‘Bhaarata naari th’n bhaava shudhi!’ Typical of men! Looking back from the relative comfort of the modern kitchen, with domestic appliances to assist them for every chore, a fair-minded person cannot help wondering how the women had once put up so cheerily with their unrelieved drudgery all day long. 

The only night life on offer, for what it was worth, was limited to the revivalist Christian conventions that vied with one another in saving souls and filling the night air, especially in the months of December and January, with sound and fury. With the weeklong Maramon Convention, the largest Christian convention in Asia, held in February on the shores of the River Pamba not far from Kumbanad, the season of revival would reach its grand climax. 

In those days, a familiar presence at the said convention used to be the American evangelist, Stanley Jones, whose assertion that he could not think of a heaven without Mahatma Gandhi incensed no end many a Bible-thumping evangelical Christian of Kumbanad and beyond.  One of them certainly was the evangelist P. V. George the author of the book, “Unique Christ and Mystic Gandhi” making invidious comparisons between them. The local wags have it that, at the Second Coming, Christ would appear first to those archetypal arbiters of the absolute Truth in Kumbanad.  The place had for long been known as the Bible Belt of India, for such was its Christian assurance of the things hoped for, but as yet unseen!

In retrospect, as one who had gagged on faith, having been over-fed with homilies that they would have done well to let me ingest in small measures, I could not reconcile myself to the life of constant denial that my kinsfolk felt certain would win them reward.  Like the early Christians, they believed in forgoing what little pleasures they could have had for a greater good. Viz. ‘Bear the Cross and win the Crown’.  Almost every household in Kumbanad had this text hung up on the wall, often in a tacky wooden frame.

The Roman emperor Julian’s complaint about early Christians, as Ibsen put into his mouth, was, “…the sun shines for them but they do not see it; the earth offers them its fullness but they desire it not: all their desire is to renounce and suffer and die”. Anything else was construed as hedonistic. Even a harmless cup of ‘water’ that blushed at the sight of the Lord, as Byron put it, and turned red at Caana! To them, a life on earth without joy and laughter was the quintessential offering on the altar of faith to claim the ineluctable bliss of chanting ‘Hallelujahs’ in heaven for all time to come. To me, all such anticipatory pieties could only inspire gloom in the here and now. If that sounds facetious, I plead guilty.

The number of people who subscribe to such old pieties is slowly but surely declining. Unless one loses all sense of time, one may well ask how in heaven’s name one could ‘bear’ such endless bliss in the many mansions promised for them.  A proverb in Malayalam aptly admonishes against such zealotry: ‘Adhikamaayaal amritum visham’; that is, ‘Taken in excess, even ambrosia is poison’.  Of course, this would equally apply to the wine-bibber!  Either way, with some luck, you may also lose all sense of time. Is it not the Good Book that tells us that the Earth is the Lord’s, and its fullness thereof?  Was it not God’s purpose of creation that Man must have dominion over the earth and partake of its bounties?  The eminently sensible words of Prophet Mohammed come to mind: a`amal li`dduniyaaka ka`innakka ta`eeshu a`abadan, wa a`amal li`aakhiratika ka`innakka ta’amoothu ghadan. Freely translated, it means, Prepare for this life as if you would live forever, and prepare for the life to come as if you would die tomorrow.  Ergo, I believe it would be foolish to deny ourselves the simple pleasures that this world has to offer us.

William Barclay, a New Testament scholar of international distinction, in one of his devotional books writes of J. P. Mahaffy, that great Irish churchman and scholar thus.  When asked if he was a Christian, his answer was, “Yes! But not offensively so.” What he meant was that he never allowed the thought that he was a Christian to interfere with his enjoyment of the innocent joys of life. 

The only caveat that he might have added would be: ‘the way we enjoy this life should in no way offend the society of which we are a part’.  Such harmless pleasures I dare say would offer the harried Christian Pilgrims welcome respite from the tedium of wading through the Slough of Despond in their Progress towards the Hereafter.  Instead, for people to have denied themselves even the innocent pleasures that this life had to offer for the projected bliss in the life hereafter was to deny reason. Nay, it was masochistic!  But deny himself many a ‘Christian Pilgrim’ of Kumbanad did!  

The day began early for them. Even before cockcrow, in the pre-dawn haze, oil lamps would dimly light up in ones and twos. These were mostly small, naked lamps. And, only occasionally, would you see lanterns with chimneys or the classier brass lamps.  Any empty four-ounce bottle, with a wick pushed through a hole in the screw top to reach the oil below, would also serve nicely as a lamp.  Every morning, from every homestead would rise the sounds of family prayer that began with a hymn of praise, not always sung in harmony but always with great conviction. The rural air was so clear and the other sounds so thin that the strains of these hymns carried long distances over the uncluttered countryside. There followed readings from the Bible. Last to come was an impromptu prayer offered to God, expressing, in equal measure, gratitude for the small mercies they had received and eagerness to bear the hardships of this world.  And if you were not an Episcopalian family, there would be a homily too before the final prayer. Their certitude of ‘things unseen’ was unshakable. By and large, the younger members of the family, bleary eyed with sleep, went through the motions of this daily routine in varying degrees of wakefulness. Although nothing was said about this during the prayer itself, the unspoken disapproval of the elders was always palpable. 

The day also began early for the ploughmen who could be seen at first light, in their loincloths and conical headgear wending their way barefooted to the paddy fields, with their ploughshares slung over their shoulders, as they cleared the paths for their oxen. To this day, try hard as I might, I have not been able to hit the falsetto high note with which these men hallooed each other across vast distances, yet unerringly recognizing the author of each such wordless call and its intent. It was uncanny. This form of bush telegraph, one hardly hears  employed these days.

And in the fields, equally unerringly did these men, their bare torsos shining, cut up the resisting earth with their ploughs. It did not seem to matter to them that the sun was beating down, harsh and unforgiving, or that the rain was coming down in buckets. Their teams of oxen were harnessed in pairs to pull the ploughs round the paddies in ever-widening circles starting from the centre or, sometimes, the other way. The furrows they made rose and fell as they prodded their animals on, round and round, clicking their implosive tongues in their customary style. In this fashion, they worked their masters’ fields, all plotted and pieced, from dawn to dusk and, come harvest, bring the crops in, their loyalty to their task never in question.  That this loyalty was not always rewarded in equal measure is another matter.

Like the agricultural labourers, there were craftsmen and artisans too to serve the villagers.  There was strict division of work in a labour-intensive world such as was ours.  Kunjankaran, the kollan, or the blacksmith, just up the road within shouting distance of our place, was a busy man.  He could be seen at his smithy the livelong day, pumping air with a pair of bellows into a flaming forge to heat pieces of iron that he would then beat and shape into knives and hoes.  The inward hiss of the red-hot piece of iron as he dipped it into a trough of water to temper it still echoes in my ears.  Kunjankaran has passed on and his progeny have closed shop. These days, we can buy factory-made knives and hoes sold across the counter without having to wait for the blacksmith to handcraft for us at his pleasure. Cycle Pappichettan, who repaired bicycles, and his brother Unnoonni, the coppersmith, were also part of the local scene. The locals knew the latter as Chembunnoonni, ‘chembu’ being the Malayalam word for copper. A word about Pappichettan will not be out of place here.  All those who knew him as a dyed-in-the-wool Communist, and a sourpuss besides, were surprised when, later in life, he turned out to be a born-again Pentecostal with an impish smile that always shone owlishly through his thick glasses till the end of his days at the ripe old age of ninety-three.  Perhaps, there was something about Kumbanad spirituality that he could not fend off!

Gopalan, the village barber, who had practised his tonsorial skills on three generations of the family, has now more or less laid down the tools of his trade. With predictable regularity, I remember he would turn up to give my father his customary haircut and shave.  His haircut was only an apology for one, for there was only so much hair the barber could work on.  My father’s that is. But there was no let up on the click-click of Gopalan’s scissors before each tonsorial clip, his eyes cocked at a critical angle. The shave was more elaborate, face first and then the armpits! And between the two shaves, the razor would be vigorously stroked on the palm of his left hand, first one way and then the other, many times over.

If we children were back home from boarding school during the holidays, our scalps were not spared either.  After Gopalan was through with us, we would look like army recruits on the first day of camp.  As we grew older, we dreaded more and more, as did my sons much later, the prospect of yielding our pates to him, so would keep out of harm’s way under some pretext or the other. Gopalan is now a sprightly old man who could still wield the tools of his trade, at a pinch. His sons have become professionals.  And in place of the one barber who called on you at regular intervals, we have several barbers plying their trade from their poky little shops. We even have a beauty saloon or two that boast of hairstyling and facials.

The village once had its traditional washerwomen too. I forget their names. I remember their men, though.  Especially Kittan and his son Thankan whose womenfolk washed our ‘dirty linen in public’ at the nearby streams. The men felled coconuts in the homesteads of Kumbanad.  With the aid of a thong slipped round their ankles to get a splayfooted hold on the tree trunk and of their hands clasped round the trunk for leverage, they leapfrogged up and up each coconut palm, their rippling muscles straining to ooze sweat.  Often, they had to scale fifty feet or more to get to the top. They would then swing round the treetop, with practised ease, to prune the palm fronds and to fell each ‘loverly’ bunch of coconuts from those dizzying heights. Which reminds me. Looking down from his lofty perch, Thankan was once heard quipping that he was closer to heaven than any of the earthbound Christians looking up at him would ever be. These fellers o