Family history 4

Elementary school

Venkataramana Elementary School stopped with Class V, if I remember right. It was a tallish, white washed, brick building with classrooms upstairs under a thatched roof made of coconut palm leaves--a fire hazard no doubt but very cool, and breezy. There was always some construction activity going on at the school, and the huge pile of sand by the side of the school building was a constant invitation to climb the stairs and jump from the top storey on to the sand. The only memory I have of the school is that of the friendships. Some of my mates then continue to be friends even today. The head master of the school was a poor Brahmin in his forties or early fifties maybe, with a hairstyle typical of men of his background ten—not cropped hair in the western fashion but a shaven head with a tuft of hair at the back, tied in a loose chignon. He wore khadi, the handspun, hand woven cotton fabric made famous by Mahatma Gandhi—a dhoti tied in the old-fashioned formal style and kurta or collarless shirt. He was obviously poor, shaving only once or twice a week, no doubt because he could not afford to do it more often, paying the price of razor blades and shaving soap (not cream or foam), on his subsistence wages.

At this distance of time, I cannot recall the head master’s name with certainty, it was probably Subramania Iyer or Srinivasa Iyer , but he was a man of high principle and taught us English with a considerable mastery of the language and knowledge of English literature. His classes went beyond teaching English, inculcating in his students a sense of values and ethical principles. Years later, he was a frequent visitor at our Abhiramapuram home, now really impoverished after his retirement, not even able to wear clean clothes regularly, but his mind was still active. As an impressionable young man caught up in the patriotic fervour of the time with India and Pakistan at war, I remember being upset by his remark that India should cede some of her territory in Jammu and Kashmir; after all, some of the terrain we were defending was cold and inhospitable and the money spent on ‘defence’ could very well be utilized in better ways. I was thinking aloud on my disappointment with my old teacher, when an uncle I respected, gently suggested that perhaps the old man was entitled to his views. Perhaps he was even right, he said.

Those were dream years of unalloyed joy, with no academic pressure—today’s Indian kids have to contend with it from kindergarten—and plenty of time and space at our disposal to play a variety of games with siblings and cousins. There was plenty of open space in the area occupied by the four houses on Murrays Gate Road and Eldams Road, where lived our large extended family and its branches. There was plenty of shade too with so many trees dotting the landscape, we kids were always together playing both Indian and western games.

Living so close to relatives had its disadvantages too. Our parents were rarely free to demonstrate their love for their children. The interests of the community always came first, and it sometimes meant discrimination in favour of your cousins! The unwritten rules of childhood behaviour had it that you never took your sibling’s side in a fight or argument involving cousins. There were inflexible rules and regulations governing the games you played, and they covered on-field and off-field conduct as well. The three brothers Kalyanam, Dorai and Thambipapa called the shots in all such maters. Their father Pattu was a super bully who had apparently harassed and tormented nephews including Ramani and Mouli (Appa’s cousin) and he continued to do that with the next generation in the guise of disciplining us. Tall and well built, he had been a fast bowler in his time. Now a High Court lawyer, he walked around bare-chested and dhoti clad at home, as did most of the males of the joint family, and loved to tease us kids. A favourite prank of his was to pull our shorts down to check if we wore underwear (of the Indian kind). This was ostensibly to make sure we did not hurt ourselves while playing vigorous games as we did most of the time, but we suspected he enjoyed embarrassing and terrorizing us just as much.

Dorai was the young man who made most of the rules for all our activities, including what game we played during what season of the year. He was also the author of the rules of behaviour that prevented any ganging together of siblings. Which meant that in any dispute you did not take your brother’s side. Nagan usually rebelled against all these restrictions. The games we played included cricket, the most popular, table tennis (what Americans call ping pong) and a number of local games including our version of hopscotch, marbles, gilli-dandu, tops, I spy, Deyonder (spelling? wonder from where that name came), Monopoly and its Indian version Trade, cricket on a bagatelle board—in short, nothing too intellectual. That was taken care of in a small way by the library mainly of Tamil books that Thambipapa ran in an upstairs room of his Eldams Road home. I was perhaps the most regular user of the library, where I first read detective fiction, and also a variety of children’s books and magazines, as well as ‘Illustrated Classics and Comics.’