A filmmaker looks back

Nihalani at Satyam Cinema

‘Lights On’ at Satyam Cinema has been an eagerly awaited event in the monthly calendar for the city’s film buffs. The last one was an interaction with the filmmaker Govind Nihalani, made doubly interesting by a live interview of him by Revathy, the well known actor-director, whose questions revealed both serious homework and keen awareness of the craft of cinema. An unabashed admirer of Nihalani’s work, she adopted a natural, unpretentious approach to the interview. It was also quite evident that she could have gone on engaging her willing subject in what was proving to be an absorbing conversation, when she said she would throw the floor open for questions from the audience, but could not resist the temptation to ask one final question herself. What followed was disastrous. One loquacious guest made a long, unintelligible statement that put everyone to sleep, and nearly brought the proceedings to an anticlimactic and premature end. Of course, Chennai cannot be Chennai without this kind of theatre of the absurd, which is enacted at every event of this type. Only this time, the longhaired gentleman who usually asks one profound question of distinctly Marxist slant at every Q& A session was conspicuous by his absence.

Revathy led Nihalani admirably towards sharing with us some of the pivotal moments of his career as cinematographer and film director. He was honest and self-effacing, lacing his observations with humour. He very nearly did not get to choose cinematography as a profession; only the fortuitous intervention of the family soothsayer nudged his father to endorse his desire to join a diploma course at a government institute in Bangalore. The guru said, “The lad will make a huge name for himself with the help of a machine,” which was thankfully interpreted as a career wielding a camera.

Nihalani spoke wistfully of his early struggles, which also brought him into contact with some of the best names in serious Indian cinema today, especially of the middle of the road variety. He recalled the continual differences of opinion and arguments on the sets with Satyadev Dubey who directed Nihalani’s first film, ‘Shantata Court Chalu Ahe’, which invariably ended with a drinking session, Nihalani being the abstemious partner. He acknowledged how much he gained from his association with Shyam Benegal who brought not only intense professionalism but also a balanced perspective rooted in his deep knowledge of history, sociology and our culture to his work. He explained his continuous engagement with the theme of violence, because it is there, it is so much a part of our existence, but stresses that he never exploited it for titillation. With Revathy jogging his memory, he revisited his childhood brush with violence during the partition riots.

He also spoke of the wonderful experience of making Tamas, which was made as a TV serial and whose backer Mr Bijlani of Blaze Advertising originally insisted on a two-hour version for release in theatres, but later dropped the idea as he did not want to chop the memorable film it became. Like some of the best things in life, the idea for Tamas was born accidentally, while Nihalani was browsing in a bookshop and chanced to pick up the book by Bhisham Sahni.
Making Gandhi was a memorable experience. Richard Attenborough was a complete professional who worked with storyboards and shot-by-shot sketches in hand but rarely changed any of Nihalani’s ideas once he listened him out. Nihalani let the audience into a couple of secrets like how the funeral scene involving huge crowds was shot.

‘Deham’ was a favourite of Nihalani, who gave the major credit for the excellence of the film to the author, Manjula Padmanabhan, and also revealed some of the tricks behind the special effects of the film.

The only time the filmmaker seemed to be on slightly unsure ground was when he defended his decision to cast Amitabh Bachhan in the lead role in his recent film Dev. For once, he was unconvincing, when he told his questioner: Tell me, who else could have done justice to the role?

At the end, the audience still wanted more, so lively and rewarding had been the experience of listening to Govind Nihalani, expertly prodded by the charming Revathy, who continues to look a smasher.

Different folks

Listening to Tamil poet Kanimozhi at a recent South India heritage lecture on Tamil folk arts was an enjoyable, and for the uninitiated, an eye-opening experience. The first revelation was the vast number of folk arts in the state - villupattu, poikal kudirai, karagattam, oyilattam, silambattam, karadiattam, terukoottu, yes, even oppari, the finely rehearsed art of wailing at funerals, so on and so forth. The list was long and impressive.

According to Kanimozhi, we Tamils are embarrassed by our folk arts and decided to crush them under the weight of our classical arts, in order to compete with Victorian culture, promoting notions of chastity and 'pure' arts, devoid of the sensual aspects of our earthy traditions.

Interestingly, the oral tradition of our folk arts presents the other dimension, the other truth of our history, different from the textbook paeans of praise for our kings. An example is the Big Temple of Tanjavur, the symbol of Chola might and cultural efflorescence. "Everytime I walked in the precincts of that magnificent temple, I felt this tremendous thrill of pride and wonder - until I learnt how many people had starved and suffered hardship to build the monument," said Kanimozhi. "Six out of seven brothers who rebelled against a diktat that they work for free, when they sought work to beat starvation, were killed and they belonged to a particular, exploited community. This side of history has been handed down to us via folk songs."

Chastity was a Victorian concept imported to prove we were a superior culture even to western culture. Kanimozhi recited verses that told tales of women consorting with their brothers-in-law. The word pathini that commonly denotes a one-man woman originally meant a woman of honour, someone who kept her word no matter what the circumstances. That was when a woman was a person in her own right, not merely an appendage of her husband, whose only virtue was her fidelity to him.

There were a couple of interesting stories about funeral processions. In the first one, Kanimozhi described the superb physical condition and expert performance of the young dancers at a village funeral procession she saw for the first time. 'Oppari', she found out was a scrupulously cultivated art, not some uncontrolled expression of grief, as we might believe. The oppari artistes did not necessarily mourn the person whose death brought them to the funeral in the first place, they often sang out their own personal grief quite unconnected with the person whose death they had gathered to condole.

At one funeral she attended, Kanimozhi found one woman mourner actually using the opportunity to sing songs cursing her long-dead husband who had oppressed her in his lifetime! Kanimozhi's husband once related an incident, she said, involving his grandmother. Grandma and grandson took a bus to a neighbouring village to attend a funeral. Grandma was perfectly normal until they neared the house where people had gathered to mourn an old relative. The moment she saw some of her kin in the vicinity, grandma went into 'oppari' mode and put up an impressive performance for the next few hours. Only, on their way back home did she stop to ask her grandson this innocuous question, "Setthathu kezhavana, kezhavia?" ("Who died, was it the old man or was it his wife?")

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.’

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.

Family history 2

The Quilon years

Venkatraman—he was Ramani to his family, as Sundaresan was Raja, Pattabhiraman was Pattabhi, Visalakshi was Thangamma and Parvati was Papa—was 26 years old when he married Rukmini. He was a BABL of Madras University, which meant that after his BA Hons. Degree, he acquired a bachelor’s degree in law as well from the Madras Law College. Ramani never attended court, but instead took up a bank job with Bharat Bank which was eventually merged with the Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) Limited. By 1951, he had been posted to Quilon, a coastal town in Kerala not far from Trivandrum, the capital city of that state, as the Agent of the bank’s branch there. (He would be called the branch manager today). Three of us were born then, I, my brother Nagarajan and sister Sarada. I was the eldest, born on 8 November 1947, Nagan on 19 December 1948 and Sarada on 6 February 1950. There we lived until about 1957, when my father was transferred back to Madras as Agent of the bank’s Mylapore branch.

Ramani and Rukmini were Appa (father) and Amma (mother) to us. As Agent of IOB, Appa was an important person in Quilon. We lived in quarters behind his office provided by the bank, with a connecting door between home and office, and a huge yard behind the house where we children could play and one in front of the office. Appa worked long hours at the bank, and I remember being allowed to sit in his room after office hours and watch him at work.

Quilon was an important trade centre, dealing in spices and dry fruit and nuts. Cashew was the biggest crop and Appa’s biggest clients were cashew exporters. Families I remember are the Rodrigueses and the Janardhanam Pillais. Janardhanam’s son Rajan was to become one of India’s high profile and sometimes controversial business barons in the 1990s, and die under mysterious circumstances. But back in the fifties, he was a little boy, younger than me. Those were innocent times and the world of business was nowhere near as complex as it would become later.

Krishnan was born while we were in Quilon, on 13 May 1953, and the four of us must have been the happiest, most contented siblings. Poor Amma must have been overworked, but she at least had more domestic help at Quilon than she enjoyed in the bigger cities where Appa later worked. The old maid who did the sweeping and swabbing was Tallai; it was a generic term for old woman, I learnt later, not her name as I first imagined. She was a wizened old woman who wore only a white sari with which he covered herself from top to bottom. Her earlobes had huge holes from which dangled heavy earrings. The bank ‘peons’ would also run minor errands for the family; they always kept a watchful eye on the family, acting as our unofficial security staff.

On days when Amma could not cook or Appa decided to give her a break, we ordered food from a nearby restaurant, popularly known as Hitler’s café, thanks to the Hitler moustache its owner sported. He was perhaps an admirer of the Nazis, more because they went to war against the British who colonized India, than for any anti-Semitic reasons. The food was just about edible, but it was a treat we looked forward to because it was a change from the routine.
The first school we went to was St. Joseph’s Convent School, not far from home. I have vague memories of the nuns who taught us there and also winning the first prize in a raffle, a gold sovereign!

Some time soon, we moved to a nice, large house by the seaside, close to the backwaters or kayal in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala. We also shifted to a new school, Mount Carmels. Again, memories of school are very blurred, except for one incident which remains etched in my mind. The school was very close to the sea, a compound wall separating it from a lonely beach. It must have been out of bounds, but I remember standing on the shore with an older schoolfriend, Jayantilal, who took off his shirt, removed the holy thread he as a Brahmin wore, and tossed it into the sea in a dramatic gesture.

Appa was an excellent cricketer, a medium pace bowler who had enjoyed considerable success in collegiate and league cricket in Madras before his transfer to Quilon. Here, he built a bank team from scratch. He and his players soon became an integral part of Quilon cricket. Nagan and I accompanied him to some of the matches at a nearby college ground and proudly watched him in action. He was tall and well built and had a nice easy run-up and action as a bowler. His batting was entertaining as he believed in hitting the ball hard and taking a few risks. The handsome bank colleague Monappa and burly Anglo-Indian Clifton—a railway guard—were both good cricketers and we kids enjoyed the company of these kindly adults who always had time for us, joking and playing with us.

Appa also went frequently to Trivandrum to play for the Sasthamangalam Cricket Club there, under the captaincy of the debonair Balan Pandit, who was already a star player, captaining Kerala in the national championship. The team also had some other state and university level cricketers in Ravi Achan, C K Vijayan and his younger brother C K Bhaskar—who went on to play for India as a new ball bowler. It was a strong outfit and played entertaining cricket. I remember being taken to Trivandrum along with Nagan to watch one of Appa’s matches.

The new house was at Thangaseri, in a quiet corner of Quilon and the only friends we had there were our next door neighbours. There were wide open spaces around our homes, and we spent as much time outdoors as our parents allowed us. The high point of our stay at Thangaseri was a visit by our cousins from Madras during the summer vacation. Kannan and Raman had just been initiated into brahmacharya, and were now the proud wearers of the holy thread. They had had half their hair shaved off and made to look like members of some fierce American Indian tribe. The hairstyle was called an appala kudumi.

Kannan was some five years older than I and Raman two. Both were great company, natural sportsmen who included us in all their games. Kannan was the more talented of the two and Raman the more enthusiastic, constantly experimenting and inventing new games. Besides outdoor games like cricket which was a common passion with all of us, Raman came up with some ingenious indoor games as well. One involved a caesarean delivery with Raman playing the gynaecologist performing the surgery and cousin Rama playing the mother, with my then youngest sister the newborn. To add authenticity to the proceedings, Raman managed to collect some rusty implements with which he pretended to cut open Rama to deliver Viji.

When the elders of the house found out what we were up to, we came close to receiving the thrashing of our lives, even though most of us were no more than admiring onlookers.
On another occasion, Raman took all the younger kids to the beach and after playing there for an hour or so, made me stay back with him and sent the rest of the gang home, with instructions that they deliver the message that Raman and I had been washed away by the waves. Imagine the chaos that reigned in the Venkatraman household that afternoon!

There was never a dull moment that summer. The most dramatic episode starred a snake, one of hundreds in the huge estate around the house, which decided to pay a visit to the Venkatramans. It made its way into the bedroom where we took shelter. All of us climbed on top of beds, tables and chairs and watched the slithering snake with fear. After several loud screams from all of us, the girls next door came running into our house and effortlessly chased the snake away into the garden and killed it, presumably because it was venomous.
Not long after that exciting summer vacation, Appa was transferred to the Mylapore branch of IOB in Madras, and all of us went back there, starting a new chapter in our lives.

Family history 1

My father P N Venkatraman was born on 10 April 1919 to V Narayanan and Sarada at Madras. The family was orthodox south Indian brahmin, which among other things, means they were originally from the priestly class, though already in my grandfather’s generation, leaning towards professions of a more secular nature. Grandfather Narayanan was a lawyer by qualification, but an academician and journalist by profession at different stages of his life. He was proficient in three languages—Tamil, Sanskrit and English--in all of which he wrote commentaries on matters spiritual and theological. He was for a while Editor of The Indian Express, an English language daily, in which I worked as an apprentice sub-editor in the sixties.

My boss then, C P Seshadri, a veteran journalist highly respected in the newspaper world, often told me what a good editor my grandfather had been, how much he, a young reporter, had learnt from him. Narayanan was a major contributor to the first Tamil lexicon of modern times, as an assistant to the celebrated S Vaiyapuri Pillai, its editor. He also edited numerous publications of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the spiritual headquarters of the saivite subsect (followers of Siva) of Brahmins to which my family belongs. It is hardly surprising that Narayanan wrote beautiful Tamil, the language he spoke at home, but samples of his English writing I chanced upon some 20 years ago stunned me with their timelessness—they could have been written in this day and age, so simple yet sophisticated his style. (I hope I can unearth those samples again).

According to a family tree drawn up for me by the late M Krishnan, eminent naturalist, photographer and writer of fiction and non-fiction in English, and a great-grand uncle of mine, Narayanan’s ancestors were Avadhanis[1] who moved from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh to Tirunelveli in present day Tamil Nadu.

Narayanan married Sarada before either of them reached the age of ten, and I believe he was older than her by some five years! She grew up to be a six-footer (a rarity among women even today) and he was a short man, so they were to become quite a physical mismatch in their grown years. He died in his early fifties and she was barely 36 when she died. They had eight children, the eldest a son, Sundaresan and my father, the second. The youngest, Pattabhiraman, was only two when his mother died. In between were five sisters, Janaki, Visalakshi, Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Of the eight, only Saraswati, now in her seventies, survives.
Narayanan was a rather unworldly person who enjoyed hardly any material success. Moving to Madras from his village on marrying Sarada, the daughter of a judge of the Madras High Court, P R Sundara Iyer, he lived in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house built by his father-in-law for his daughter. This was on Murray’s Gate Road, a street in Alwarpet close to Mylapore, an ancient village turned suburb, which had become the home of the Brahmin aristocracy of Madras. Between Mylapore and Alwarpet, on Luz Church Road was Sree Bagh, a vast property that had been Sundara Iyer’s home in the early 20th century before a business misadventure by his sons had resulted in its sale along with much of his other assets. (In fact, his sons had to file for bankruptcy, and the family was able to salvage only property standing in the name of the youngest son P S Ramachandran, who was then a minor).

On Murrays Gate Road was another house, Srimukha, belonging to Narayanan and Sarada, and this was rented out in the 1940s to a young executive of Burmah Shell, the oil company which had a major presence in India then. Ramaswamy was an engineer who qualified from the famous Benares Hindu University of Kasi, the famous centre of pilgrimage in north India every Hindu of the time visited once before his death to attain salvation. (The true believer actually went to Kasi to die there). Ramaswamy was the son of Sivaramakrishna Iyer who had retired as Inspector of Schools in the princely state of Travancore-Cochin (now the state of Kerala), the southernmost tip of India. Like my father, he was the second of eight children including five daughters. The eldest, Sita, is 95 today and all her sisters are alive, the youngest, Saraswati, at 75, while Ramaswamy and his brothers Ramachandran and Mahadevan are no more.

Sivaramakrishna Iyer (known in the family as Anna or elder brother) and his wife Subbulakshmi came to live with Ramaswamy at Srimukha, and soon there developed a friendship between Anna and Narayanan as the two men shared a common love of literature and philosophy. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two and they spent hours discussing books, both literary works as well as the Indian epics. The two families became friends and before long, Ramaswamy found in Narayanan’s second son, the gentle self-effacing Venkatraman a future brother-in-law! Sivaramakrishna Iyer made a formal approach to Narayanan, horoscopes were exchanged and found to match and Venkatraman married Rukmini, Anna’s fourth daughter.

[1] An avadhani is a person who speaks extempore (preferably in verse) on different topics at a time—to an audience of eight, 100 or 1,000 people who pose a question each to him or her—and answers them all. To an audience of 100, he has to answer questions or create verses based on the questioner's hints, after every 25 questions. The art is known as avadhanam.