Family history 3

Back to Madras
Appa was transferred back to Madras around 1955 or 1956. We came to live in Suprabha on Murrays Gate Road. It was a two-storeyed house, which still stands there more or less in the same form, now used as a corporate guesthouse. It was a tall brick building, white- washed, red-floored and with balconies all round upstairs. We lived upstairs while uncle Raja’s family lived downstairs. Upstairs, there were five rooms in all besides the kitchen and bathroom. There was a large open terrace at the back, with a hand pump at one corner and a work corner where the maidservant washed vessels and clothes and hung up the clothes to dry.

The furniture was mostly of heavy rosewood and made in the hybrid Indo-British style of the day. There was a beautiful rolltop desk in the study room earlier occupied by Pattabhi, my father’s younger brother who had gone to the USA to study. Pattabhi was some 15 years younger than my father and had been a victim of polio as a child. He had a wasted right leg, wore calipers and had a pronounced limp, but that did not stop him from leading a vigorous, active life. In his youth, he played a number of indoor and outdoor games. The table tennis table in the garage (the family did not own a car any more) was his.

On transfer to Madras, Appa was first posted to the IOB’s head office on Mount Road, the arterial road that ran from the ‘Island’ in the north to St. Thomas Mount in the southwest, a distance of several miles. From the head office, was later transferred as Agent of the bank’s Mylapore branch, a couple of miles from home. He would cycle from home to the office before he bought a motorcycle, a Norton 350 cc machine. His office was on the first floor of an old building on the main road of Mylapore, facing the Kapalisvarar temple tank.

Living on the ground floor of Suprabha were uncle Raja and his family. We called him Raja Appa, and his wife, Kamala Manni. They had four children, Kannan, Raman, Sarada and Ambulu, the last two, girls. Raja Appa was shorter than Appa (who was 5’ 11” tall) and stockily built. Amma and Manni are both short, but while Amma is on the slim side even today and was thin in her youth, Manni has always been stout. In the early days of my parents’ marriage, the whole family including Appa’s sisters yet to be married and leave their parents’ home, lived together in Suprabha, with a common kitchen, and Manni and Amma did most of the house work. It was hard work and Amma remembers Manni’s friendship and affection during those difficult days with gratitude. Manni is a kind soul and Amma and she have enjoyed a warm relationship through all the ups and downs of life.

When we came back from Quilon, it was no longer a common kitchen, though we lived in the same house. The upstairs part of the house was quite independent and we had a separate entrance on the northern side of the house. On the way to the staircase, we had to pass two rooms (on either side of a verandah) which were let out to bachelors to augment Raja Appa’s inadequate monthly income. He was then a sub-editor in the Indian Express on a meager salary, often supplemented by contributions from Appa. Appa also helped his defray the expenses incurred every time a sister came to Suprabha to have her baby. (It was, and still is, a custom in India for the daughter to come home to her parents’ to deliver her baby, especially the first one). Appa’s monthly salary was perhaps about Rs. 150 or three dollars by now, while Raja Appa was probably earning about half that or even less.

We all led a simple, frugal life. The food was simple but nourishing, never rich or oily. We would eat a meal of sambar, rasam and buttermilk with rice and vegetables in the form of mildly spiced curries in the mornings, take a ‘tiffin box’ of curdrice for lunch, have dosai or idli for tea and a meal similar to the morning meal at night. Starting with a cup of milk or ‘Ovaltine’ first thing in the morning, the kids would eventually graduate to coffee as we grew older. Childhood obesity was unknown.

Our clothes were again simple and utilitarian. For the boys, Appa would buy cloth in bulk that would be tailored into identical shirts and shorts, so that we wore a family uniform of sorts. The girls wore frocks when very young but switch to pavadai-chattai, as they grew old enough to go to secondary school. Footwear was minimal. We wore the Indian ‘chappals’, a kind of sandals, though we ran about barefoot most of the time, especially within the expanse that surrounded the three houses Suprabha, Sri Parvati and Sri Sundar, where we were free to roam around. Chappals were meant to be worn only while going to school. (I remember an occasion when I was 8 or 9, and proudly wore my new pair of sandals to go to a nearby shop on an errand. Raja Appa stopped me on my way out and asked me where I was going. ‘To the corner shop (about a quarter of a mile from home)”, I replied. “Take off your chappals, you don’t need them to go to the corner shop,” said Raja Appa, and of course I obeyed instantly.

We had a family rickshawwallah Kathan who took us everywhere in his hand-pulled rickshaw, when we were not walking or taking a bus. The tram service in Madras had just closed down as we were growing up, but the tram tracks were still intact on the main roads. Kathan was a tall, strong, superbly built man with rippling muscles, probably in his thirties then. There were also some other rickshaw pullers we used. There was one called Munuswami (?) who took us kids to school sometimes, and that must have been because Kathan was doing some other regular route for some member of the extended family of Suprabha. Kathan also doubled as a gardener, something that came in handy when he was too old to pull a rickshaw.

We were five children when we came back to Madras. Another girl, Parvati or Bapu, was born in 1957, soon after our arrival in Madras. She was a beautiful baby adored by all of us, but did not survive beyond six months. She died of dehydration following a bout of dysentery. The shock and sorrow of her loss stayed with the family for a long, long time. On 2 August 1959, our youngest sister Sarojini (Papu) was born, and she brought us the greatest joy. Like Bapu before her, Papu was petted and fussed over by all of us, turning out to be the brightest, most charming of the siblings.

The first school we went to back in Madras was the Venkataramana Elementary School at nearby Abhiramapuram. We were still considered too young to take a city bus to school—in fact, the school was not even on the bus route—there was no school bus either, and it was not within walking distance. Kathan or Munuswami would take us to school in their rickshaw. It was an exciting ride, with Kathan often running all the way, racing against other rickshaws and bicycles on the road.