REPENTANT MEMORY OF AN ONAM

Yesterday being ‘Onam ‘ festival day my loved one was recollecting her childhood days’ onams in Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram. Going to local temple with her friends wearing new dress after a lavish bath, playing thiruvathira wearing the bath towel, duppatta etc. as the set mundu , all such stuff we shared and laughed at ourselves. Nostalgia evaded her on the previous day itself and she took off from College on onam day. A three member family, father at Trivandrum, we in Bangalore, she had to celebrate her onam this time by watching two movies , thanks to Asianet and contacting her friends in mobile and internet. I was busy in office. We made a small sadya . Payasam I didn’t plan because nobody to take. Pappadam in hurry worry I forgot to fry.


Somewhere in my heart an ache started in the evening when she asked me to narrate the onam celebrations of my childhood. But I could tell her proudly that my childhood onams and youthful onams were celebrated in the same way we celebrated your childhood onams. “Now the case is different for both of us. So let us forget it.” I said . She was not to leave me and wanted to know about my school days, half of which she heard from my cousin of my same age studied in same school.. I narrated the way boys used to play the out door game of gambling with cashew nuts instead of cards. As a child viewing such games was my hobby. Once I was hit by the stone indented to hit the cashew nuts in the pit. My forehead got injured. Blood fell on my yellow silk frock, which was considered to be very costly dress those times. One of the teachers washed my wound and frock and made me sit in the class wearing only underwear covering my chest and back by the jute school bags of another two students, held by them sitting my both sides. This is when I was in first standard. She wonders and laughs a lot without understanding the circumstances this happened. Those days the upper caste girls were supposed to cover the full part of their body with good dresses whereas under castes were left to their choice to cover or not to cover. In order to uphold the custom without fail for a couple of hours until the frock is dried in the sun, the teacher made such an adjustment in the case of a 5 year old. That was the kind of moral support we used to get those times. Nuns we used to call adding amma with their names. There were pettirikshamma
( Sr. Patricia) , Rotticossamma( still I don’t know her original name), Placeamma
( Sr.Bless/Blaze), Lusiferamma( Sr.Lucina)etc. Though we got a good education there, they used to reprimand us more severely than other children, because my maternal uncle was a well known communist activist of EMS’s time. A small stream which was to be crossed on the way to school looked like a river for me those days. Me, my siblings and cousins were a group of 10 members from one house to same school. Grandma used to accompany us from home with a stick in her hand to handle the lazy ones. She holds our hand and make each one of us cross the stream after the paddy fields . She was so keen to save from drenching our dress especially. From there we go our own and she goes back home to bring break fast for the labours in the field. By evening she comes up to the stream, make us cross the stream and stays in the field until the labours finish the day’s work. As our grandfather died in her youth, grandma became a very strong woman of those times and used to manage all outside works attached to the land and people of the house while her two sons managed the business. Starting days of schooling, each one of us were unhappy to leave home . I am the one who was most fuzzy. Fear to cross the stream was my pretext to bunk school when grandma is not free. Eldest cousin brother takes charge of grandma in such occasions and his beatings, I still remember, with the same stick grandma used. It resembled the way a shepherd take the lambs to graze. The taste of the very tender paddy inside the bud he plucks and give us on the way is also unforgettable. By the reaping time there will not be paddy on the plants near to the both sides of the small bunds we used as foot path. There were no facilities of communication like present time, but interaction was far open and better. Now how easy it is? But how sophisticated it has become?. Adjust children! Adjust! What else I can tell you. We also feel suffocated. Dear daughtoo, the single girl child, when I restrict your freedom as the situation calls for it, I remember the innocent way we used to enjoy the same freedom that I restrict to you now. I am not protesting, but protecting you by that, because I know prevention is better than cure.

Thus another onam is over leaving the reminiscences of suffocating repentance. No one is happy as much as they deserve to be happy. But all are satisfied within the available satisfaction level. After all and at the least, all are equals on onam day, isn’t it?