A place called home - II

This looks ominous, this little series I’ve started on. What will be the last of this series? Here’s a rendition - Draw a cube, Throw in a nice looking rug, some wood-paneling, a chair with lumbar-support, and an IBM ThinkCenter with 1GB RAM……naaaawwww!!!

There are nicer things in this world to speak about on a Monday afternoon. OK, the lunch was one of those, but I am not going into the details of that. (I am imagining that pre-Cambrian fish which gently slithered out of the muddy banks of that volcanic lake on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and he beckoned to his buddy in water, “Man, come on over, you gotta check this place out, this is way cooler than down there!” and the good ol’ buddy was a dimwit, and he preferred to stay in water and raise children instead. Thank god he did! I enjoyed the fish-dishes on the lunch-menu today!)

So let’s move to part 2, and this is where I get a room, entirely for myself, for the first time in my life! The fact that my sister was 6 years younger and from Venus, meant that there was no battle for territorial-control! Only the nights were a problem. Because, in the night, if you looked out of my window into the pitch dark outside, you could see…… nothing! And all sorts of public used that corridor in front of my window for commuting, like the Dracula, or the yakshi’s from mallu myths, zombies, the valkyries, shoorpanakha from the Ramayana(which was being aired then) and even Mr. Skeletor himself sometimes. I didn’t enjoy all the buzz you see, so mostly, I slept alongside mom! The best part of the day used to be the journey to the school in the school bus and back. The school bus was a pre-independence model Mercedes painted in sky-blue and white like the Argentine flag, and was driven by a 70 year old rhino of a man with an unshaven face, bushy eyebrows, and an irritated look on his face, always. I dunno which way the trait was passed, but the façade of the bus also looked exactly like its driver. Obviously both had seen better days. And I had this nasty little habit of associating automobiles with people’s faces – So tata buses were always cheerful and smiling, Leyland looked like they’re in some kind of a hurry, ambassadors meant business and tempos looked as if they’d just received a punch in the nose! To school took almost an hour and a half, and all the kids made sure they made the most of all that time, coz once inside school, it was business. And in the evening, it was my job to buy the milk and boil it by the time mom was back from office, so that she could mix it to make tea pretty fast. I have several times tried to convince mom that “There’s no use fretting over spilt milk”, but she would never listen!!

There was a pond in the backyard which had fish in it! Big deal, what else do you expect to find in a backyard-pond, the Lock-ness monster? If you’re thinking so, then you don’t quite realize the possibilities a pond with fish could offer to an eight-year old! Like fishing, for instance! ;-)

I still remember the devotional songs they used to play in the dusk, in the nearby ‘Kaavu’. Those songs evoke a very strong nostalgic feeling when I hear them now. A few are –
1. Chandanacharchitha … -Chitra
2. Namaha – Yesudas
3. Anivaakachaarthil - Chitra
4. Radha than premathodano…- Yesudas ... and a few more. Sweet!

We stayed there for just a year and moved to another one nearby, where we continued to live till early this year! And I don’t really consider that place as interesting or worthy of a post, So I would move on to the place where I lived during my engg college days, in the next post!