A place called home - III

It was raining as we parked the car near a heap of road-metal. One would imagine the heavily pot-holed road(I refuse to call it so) will be repaired very soon, but the heap would remain there, for ever, till the last of the stones have disappeared, either going into the concrete mixtures of private construction sites nearby, or becoming insta-missiles in the hands of some really enraged/bemused school-kid.

“That’s the way”, I said, pointing in the direction of what looked more like a stream than a walkway. Becoming a little skeptic myself, I could understand the bewildered look on my uncle’s face. I rolled up my trousers, and followed the rainwater-stream. So did my uncle, and aunt and children, preferred to stay in the car. The idea was to see me off at my new abode, where I was to stay in the first year of my engineering. Bachelor accommodations can be such hazardous places you see, and no sane woman would dare to set foot within half a mile of those ill-fated dungeons.

The stream opened into a small clearing, and bingo! Appeared a concrete house- cracking roof, full of lush green moss and all that. We stepped aside into the courtyard and parted ways with the stream, which continued its course down the lush paddy fields below. The view was beautiful. I almost went into another one of those wonderful-greenery-induced delirium, only until I turned around!

There was a slightly flummoxed look on Unc’s face, and the reason turned out to be a score of multi-colored, multi-faceted, mutli-lingual .... undies, under multiple stages of disintegration, displayed proudly on the verandah!

“Ah, so this is the place for sure!!!” I said, gleefully. But my enthusiasm in our great discovery wasn’t returned.

“Shall I help you in getting the stuff inside….”

“Nope, I can manage!” I was quick to cut him off. Right now it was manageable, I didn’t want the situation to get any worse. Can’t really blame him if he felt a bit of local-guardianesque concern about the entire affair. In hindsight, my foresight wasn’t wasted.

There were eight guys staying in that 3 BHK house, five seniors, and three of us freshmen. And then there were the girls! Two of them permanently in my room, in the rest of the rooms, they kept coming in and going out all the time. Nah, I am talking about girls who occupied the walls, you pervert! The posters! You see I was this huge fan of Aish Rai at that time and and all, I wont have anyone else in my territory, and my roomie, was equally stuck up with Kajol. In the other rooms, there were posters of apparently anything and everything that looked female, in jeans, skirts, sarees, bikinis… you know where it leads to.

The bathrooms were built and maintained with only a single purpose in mind, utility! Meaning there were some really nice pictures in there, and a door was always considered a luxury! As a matter of fact, there was only one door for two bathrooms, and it was very convenient, you could just lift it off and keep it in front of the room of your choice before starting the activity of your choice, unless you hear a very loud and angry scream! Either from one of the inmates or the servant-maid! Man, really, I was always of this opinion that these maids are grossly underpaid! There’s no account of the amount of torture they have to undergo each day, so much that it will follow them to their graves, and to their afterlives. Or else she must have been some kind of really cold-blooded tyrant in her previous birth. At the gates of hell, devil himself was appalled by the amount of atrocities she/he had committed, and yelled…
“You have done such grotesque things in your life, even hell is not fit enough for you! By admitting you to hell, I fear that the last trace of sanity left in here will be compromised, so I condemn you to suffer eternally, working as a servant maid in an Engineering college host…”

“Naaawwww…….” THUD!

She took it out on us by cooking us some of the most horrible stuff I have ever put to my mouth. Anything, was welcome in those days!

I have often heard that the vicinity around where we lived had the highest density of poisonous snakes anywhere in Kerala. But I haven’t seen a single one. Neither have the snakes seen me, apparently. They’d prefer their holes, any day! The paddy field would dry up in summer and we would play cricket there. In monsoon, we had other jobs, like praying the roof don’t collapse, for instance. And yeah, occasionally, studying, a sacred act performed when you are really cornered, like - “Man, I hate that [expletive]!! Despite making it to all his lectures within an hour of start and submitting every single assignment copied/Photostat-ed/got written by juniors/girls, he gave me a measily 10 marks for sessionals, shucks! Now I have to slog my ass and get 50 for university or be damned”. Those were the days when sanity was hanging by a thread, literally!

I stayed there for a year, till the seniors passed out. Finished their courses, I mean. Then went looking for greener pastures! (Read near the women's college, yeah believe it or not, there was one right in front of the Engg college. And it was a good college… you know, good repute, run by nuns, really good courses and all that… ;-D)

That and more in next...

Cupid Strikes!

Congratulations, Pr & Dps! Live a life now!

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!

A place called home

There, everyone! How ye doing? Yeah this took a long time coming, I know, many of those who have wandered around these premises musta got bored and left by now. I don’t know what will it cost me to have them back… Whatever, I’m ready to bear the cost.

Yeah, I was sleeping all these while. Just got myself shut up in my little den in the snow, and hibernated for a month. And a lot of things happened outside, meanwhile! Some things even changed their identity. Like I got this forward titled “Katrina Kaif: Careful”. Suddenly I was slithered down into this wonderful little reverie of a skimpily clad goddess with long legs and a killer smile. My urges got the better of me and I opened it in broad daylight, one hand strategically placed on “alt+tab” to take sudden evasive action, and I was greeted by this picture of a very very sexy, well….hurricane, and a cricketer, whom some of my female friends might consider sexy, not me, naah I’m too straight for that. Katrina Kaif!! Bad taste! Very, very bad taste. Wait, if that didn’t get the mucus going haywire inside your esophagus, then this will. The best ever act of Charity in those difficult times came from none other than Britney Spears, who donated her diamond studded bikini and brassiere to be auctioned, for the benefit of Katrina victims!! Diamond studded what??? She would have done much better if she had opted to do a live performance in New Orleans free of cost, hip swinging and tummy shaking and all that! Hurricane relief, and what a relief would that be!

I digressed. This is what I intended to say...Yesterday while I was traveling home, it rained outside. You know, rain, it does many nasty things to our imagination, and it’s a wonderful dreamlike feeling if you’re sitting in a Volvo, with 80% of the sides open to nature and anything to suggest motion would be a gentle hum of the engine from the rear and the occasional lunge forward from shifting gears. (I suggest you don’t look out through the front windshield, unless u have at least 100 hours of in-flight experience in any one of these - Mirage. Mig, the Sukhoi or the F-series! Not one for the faint-hearted!) So the world whizzed past me in a hurry, and I was thrown back, around 20 years, to the place, which is the first I remember to be, my home! As a result, here’s the post-series on the places I have lived so far!

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Draw a 2:1 rectangle, longer side as the base, and divide the width into three equal sections. And the section in the middle is what my first ‘home’ looked like! Imagining the rooms are simpler still, extend the rectangle three-dimensionally backwards, and divide the length into 4, bingo, you have four rooms! And toilet was outside! That was the super-duper premium quarters of this great settlement of tenants ranging from the municipality-insecticide guy, to a group of three engineering college students, who lived in the quarter next to ours. And all owned by one man, whom my parents used to refer to (pssst…) in secret as, surprisingly, “The Owner”! He had a sprawling house in the middle of this entire cornucopia and two Tasmanian devils for children. I don’t even remember those engineering guys, any venture into their premises were dealt with serious repercussions, them having to bear this ‘dubious’ reputation of being "engineering college students”! O boy didn’t I find out the reason later!!! There was a little rock in front, where we – the gang, used to make burrows and houses. I once made an entire burrow out of characters from “Balarama”, including Kapeesh, Kaloolo, Mayavi etc. I forgot the name of the lion, which I placed in the throne inside, surrounded by all his loyal subjects, complete with thrones and council and all that! And there was this big “njaval” tree in the premises, which became the centre of activity during the summer days. Some really smart boys used to climb on top and shake all the njaval-pazhams to the ground, which, more enterprising people like us, collected and ran for our lives! Don’t remember much of the neighbors. Again, the rains were the most pleasant and dangerous times in the place, dangerous because, the ground was hard and collected a lot of moss during monsoons, which became free-waltz training floor!

We shifted after my sister was born.

To be continued…