अहं तेभ्यो अकरं नमः
शारदा शारदाम्भोजवदना वदनाम्बुजे ।
सर्वदासर्वदास्माकं सन्निधिं सन्निधिं क्रियात् ॥
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Life with Mom #1
After the passing away of Dad I must say Mom lost much of her verve and vitality. Diagnosed a diabetic in her fifth decade of existence she wasn't in the pink of health anyway.Most of the time she breaks down, lamenting her being left behind. Her insecurities have increased and she is showing behaviors that are not her wont. Mom and her Sis (our aunt) were living together in my aunt’s own home, while our own Gautamnagar home was let out on rent as noted in My Nostalgic Trip to Bolarum. Our aunt had gotten into debt by borrowing to help people- her neighbors through their, hard times. They had given her a hard time in return, by defaulting on the return of the loan. She had retired as a teacher form government service. She had just a decent pension to live on. Yet she borrowed money to lend a helping hand to her neighbors. The money was much beyond her means to service the interest payments, much less return the principal. After trying every trick in the world to persuade the neighbors to return the sum she took the extreme step of selling her house to wipe off all the standing loans, and still be left with a tidy sum to live by for the rest of her life which she has gambled would not be very long. She is 76 now. Ever since my aunt disposed the house off my mom has become very insecure. Nowadays she insists on having her belongings in physical proximity to her. Ah! Recently they moved house as they had to hand over the keys of the house they sold, to the new owners. The house they have moved into is smaller, so the first problem was to accommodate their possessions in that space. Now, neither mom nor my aunt would want to throw away any of the items they hoarded. Not that those things really were that useful. But both of them are touchy about relinquishing any of those mostly worthless stuff. My sis told me just the mere suggestion of throwing away of any of those things that mattered least is enough for either of them to go off into a tantrum where they would start saying, “We have also become dispensable. Throw us away then.” My sis has since been silent about such ideas. I saw this myself when I went to Hyderabad to help them with the job of moving house. It took three days to set the new house in order after the major items were moved. Some of the items used were moved by physically carrying them long after the movers had left with their truck. The very process was so quick that we had to take recourse to moving things by ourselves. When we picked up these sundry items, I couldn’t help suggesting their removal by either simply throwing them in the dustbin or disposing them off at whatever price they go for. My mom and Aunt simply heard me and tended to agree. My sis confided, had the suggestion been from her there would have been scenes!So, I learnt that my Mom at 74 needed all those things that had little relevance to their lives to feel reassured that everything is going fine. Mom was then worried about the rent payments to the landlord. That was a genuine concern. The rent was pretty high. They could ill- afford a drain on their finances. The landlord for his part needed assurance of monthly rent payments from someone he could have reason to trust. I gave him my mobile number, my sis’ house was visited by him. He made a mental note of the fact that it was an own house my sis lived in. He told me that as regards rent receipts he would only contact my sister. I assured my mom and my aunt that my brother and I would take care of the rent payments. My sister would be the administrator. IOW assurances were not only required by the landlord for he wasn't trusting the mere retirement pensions of two persons would guarantee his monthly income, they were required by my Mom and my aunt [to a lesser extent] for they weren't sure how we seriously we would service this obligation!
This condition of their minds is pathetic but a reflection of the old world order crumbling. The culture in India was that sons were supposed to take personal care of parents and other elders. It is yielding place to more old aged finding shelters in Old Age Homes.To the classically trained minds of ours this was nothing short of ignominy ! To them it was a bad turn from Providence. They-especially my Mom had done their best, in caring for their own in-laws. In return, they weren't welcome to live with the fast-paced current generation!
This condition of their minds is pathetic but a reflection of the old world order crumbling. The culture in India was that sons were supposed to take personal care of parents and other elders. It is yielding place to more old aged finding shelters in Old Age Homes.To the classically trained minds of ours this was nothing short of ignominy ! To them it was a bad turn from Providence. They-especially my Mom had done their best, in caring for their own in-laws. In return, they weren't welcome to live with the fast-paced current generation!
Friday, February 15, 2008
My Nostalgic Trip to Bolarum
I make trips to Hyderabad now and then, some official, and mostly personal. Whatever be the reason, I do get to visit my sister, my mother, and above all the place where most of my formative years and a considerable portion of my youth have been spent. So, it is not merely coincidence that waves of nostalgia burgeon within me whenever I set my foot on this part of India. Thanks to advancement in technology and the associated boost in economy, the geographical boundaries within the city might have shriveled, and the temporal artifacts seem to choke the air one breathes, yet my mind and heart always seems to soar above these imposed limitations! Many of my friends whom I had grown with, the pranks we played together – they may have been relocated to distant lands either by providence or by their own volition – but the memories remain, as fresh as ever.
This particular trip gave me some free time on my hands. On an epiphanic day, my sister and I decided to let our emotions take the better of us, and off we set out without any particular plan in mind. Amidst reminiscences, we sauntered to our own Sweet Home – the house that Dad had proudly built and lived last. With Dad’s passing on and now with each of us siblings located wide asunder, the house has been let out on rent. My mother refused to stay at ‘our Home’ alone what with past memories constantly haunting her, and therefore chose to live with her sister (our aunt), just two kilometers away. Well, our visit to our home from the past was not entirely purposeless. One Mr. Janakiraman, our late father’s friend wanted us to search for a book he claimed to have lent our dad. This book was titled in Malayalam, a language my sis was neither very comfortable with, nor had the patience to decipher. I did not wish to miss a chance to show off my polyglot skills!
After rummaging through the books we got every other book than the one being sought! The efforts were not a waste since we could lay hands on a treasure trove of books, most of them devotional – a cornucopia of songs penned by great devotees of the Lord and transcribed patiently by my dad in his wonderful handwriting. An added bonus turned out to be the one I had almost given up – our father’s first volume of his memoirs!
We carried this treasure to our aunt’s place and one look at the heap, our mom went ballistic. She complained about additional junk being brought into a house where space was scarce. After pacifying her that they would be taken by me to Bangalore, albeit in smaller chunks, our mollified mom sat down along with us to go through some of those books. A few glimpses of the recorded past set her into bouts of depression and brought unrestrained tears. She was vacillating between recollections of all the people that she missed – sometimes her late younger sister, and sometimes our dad, finally blowing her nose loudly in sheer desperation at the condition that she was now in: to fend for herself all alone (at least according to her!). My sister and I had to intervene in our own ways to reassure her and bring back the equilibrium!
We had a quick lunch and then drove to Bolarum – once a little sleeping hamlet where we spent considerable part of our childhood between 1972 and 1983, but now another concrete jungle. Each time I visited Hyderabad, I wanted to make this trip, but it never seemed to happen. At least for me, it really had been a very long time since I was the first bird to flow out of this nest as the oldest sibling, so to speak, because of my employment in Bangalore!
We safely avoided the gridlock problems by opting to use the narrower but safer network of roads of the cantonment, an area that spans the land between Malkajgiri (the place where my mom and sis live) and Tirumalagiri (or if you want the British desecration of Indian words for the same place – Trimulgherry), and further beyond Bolarum. We could reach Lalbazaar, a junction located midway to our intended destination, fairly quickly. Up further, we paused at the distinctive gradient that defines Alwal. Here, we could see the addition of ‘Raitu Bazaar’ – a place where farmers from nearby villages assemble to market their produce directly. It gave me immense pleasure that the government had condescended to eliminate the usual stumbling block – the usurping middleman! We drove along Doveton Road and found the post office still as it was when we had visited it as children – the familiar smells of stationery, glue, shellac and ink for the stamps drifting amidst noisy interactions between the clerks, still wafting through our minds. The Government Primary School still stood opposite the house where my cousin once lived and where her children grew. That house is anyway sold. Her neighbor’s place had been razed to the ground perhaps by another buyer planning a more modern dwelling. We turned around the corner to see if our old, familiar grocer’s shop (where we used to buy our groceries by the month) was around, but found no trace of it. Another detour along the non-descript lanes made us reach the Bolarum Bazaar railway station. We beheld drastic changes to the environs! There was no trace of the fields of maize that bordered the railway tracks; the verdant milieu was replaced by residential and commercial erections. With a sigh, we moved on, crossed the turning to Risala Bazaar, and continued to go along the curve to Turkapally. We finally reached the Bolarum railway station – a familiar structure that we grew up with.
In a brief moment of silence, I could distinctly remember the first time we had set foot there in 1972 during the summer holidays after my secondary school. We parked the scooter in the station yard and walked up to our old house. The house was part of a strip of quarters assigned to railway officials working at Bolarum. These once housed officials encompassing two levels down the totem pole of professional hierarchy. Station masters and booking clerks lived in absolute harmony sharing each other’s joys and sorrows. Now, we found that these were totally abandoned. We walked into the verandah and then into the empty rooms! How tiny they looked making us wonder, how a family of five could live under the same roof with just two 8x 10 rooms to spare! Yet, we knew that we were a lot happier then! Wondering about the vicissitudes of life, we blew the dust on the floor to seat ourselves and just let our minds wander. We remembered our bold experiments on rocketry on the leeside of the railway station. We recalled our efforts to make the rocket shoot into the air – all it had done was to make a disgruntled effort (much ado about nothing!) and then lie dead! It certainly was amusing to think of our exploration into laws of physics and the ways we wanted to discover them despite extremely limited resources at hand.
Turning our heads, we could still see traces of the blackboard that our father personally set up with cement and paint. Despite multiple whitewashes, our dad’s instrument of education still showed through. All of us, including mom had used the blackboard to teach students and get some pittance in return for the efforts we put in. Yet, these small amounts of cash did help us scale the crests and troughs of inflation down the years. And above all, there was pride in our self-made earnings. All of us siblings used to contribute half our earnings to mom who managed the family’s finances under strict control measures. While most of today’s children are pampered with monetary benefits as pocket-money, we had to sweat it out even if it were meager! But, as I said, there was extreme pride and honor in the rewards of the efforts put in…
The venue for tutoring our students was this same verandah around which our father had erected the wooden trellis to give a semblance of an extra room. Dad had the least of tools to work with, but he somehow managed to get things done either by borrowing tools or thinking of some other practical means to achieve an end. The quarters were designed by the British where one could see the enforced diminution in the design for the blue-collared workers. Our father attempted to redefine these perimeters in his own way! Across from our quarters in the open government lands, once lived karnats, a nomadic tribe and free to do what they wanted. The tribe avowed allegiance to the Hindu faith and upheld their caste-based values so much so that, I remember their refusal to partake even a glass of water from our neighbor who was a Muslim.
To our left was the tamarind tree – which still stood the test and ravages of time. It would have been at least a century old – strong and deep-rooted and one of the immutable signs of our childhood days and across generations! My sister fondly remembered her teaching students al fresco on the heap of ballast that was heaped in neat trapezoids in front of our house. We then walked the length of the platform, which seemed to have been extended to thrice its size! The atmosphere was surprisingly silent except for a few crows cawing and a few roosting on the branches of a banyan tree. I remembered the times when I, engrossed in assimilating the concepts of Fourier series to differential equations, would be jolted out of my concentration with the ear-piercing hoots from the teeny-weeny YM class steam engines which made more noise than movement. The rumble of the cars (what the British call as rakes), the grunts and groans of the wheels while they braked to a grinding halt and the general hubbub of passengers alighting or boarding…for once, I wish I could hear the same cacophony once again!
As we walked along the now-lengthened platform, my sister silently shed tears remembering our dad. Our dad worked as the Assistant Station Master at Bolarum. Those days, it was a block station, with signals and switches operated under the directions of the station master. “Line-clear” tokens were exchanged between Medchal and the Cavalry Barracks (mispronounced by the simple village folk as “kairalvee barkaas”) block instruments. Ajanta Express was one of the premier trains that ran between Secunderabad and Manmad. It was a great feeling to see it zoom past by several stations without stopping and leaving a trail of dust behind because of its speed. But the same train stopped at our station – Bolarum, even if it was for a measly minute! We felt proud that even the famed express train had to bow down to our railway station and pay due respects by stopping at Bolarum!
The landscape around the station once dotted with green maize fields was now replaced by high-rise flats with the fanciest names. My student and I used to jog along the then dusty village road and walk back home along the tracks. As I looked around, we could see no familiar face from the past.
I fondly looked into the station which now had a layout of the tracks on the desk. Now every block section was interlocked and under the centralized control from Secunderabad – the headquarters of South Central Railway. The station master now conveniently shortened just to a set of initials – S.S., also had his duties shortened, perhaps. I had seen my father spend sleepless nights doing the nightshift way back in ’72! I remembered those nights when I gave him company with tea to keep us awake while I prepared for the Engineering Entrance Examination. All my father’s colleagues would either have retired or crossed to the other side.
As the sun began to go down, we left the station to make it to Koteshwar Mandir in the Defense Area. We were lost as the topography had changed substantially. We had to make a few enquiries before we could reach the temple. The exterior of the temple had metamorphosed but the idol of Lord Shiva in the sanctum sanctorum was still the same (at least time and people had left Him alone!). The steps leading to the temple now were canopied with fabricated structures to protect the devotees from sun and rain. As we stood in the temple lounge where our dad had sat and sang the song he had specially composed in English for this deity (it goes like: “Come all, come, let us sing his praise!/He that blesses this fort temple dais…”), our eyes grew moist.
On our return journey from the temple, we took a different route; we rode right through the arterial road in Risala Bazaar, staying close to the Sadhana Mandir High School. We turned right to take the road that led past the Zilla Parishad High School. This was the same school, I told my sis, where Mr. Sambamurthy, well known for his high school math book, had worked as a principal. Though his first love was math, he taught the English language. For some uncanny reason principals in Hyderabad always taught English whatever their individual specialization was.
Well, so much for the education system!
We finally took the road via the Hanuman Temple to reach the main road. As we drove along back home, we could hear the strains of ‘Swamiye Saranam Ayyappa’ being vociferated by the throng of devotees. We reciprocated it with a simple humble prayer in our minds. We reached home around 9 PM just in time to sit for a hearty meal. After a nostalgic journey down the memory lanes, we were famished. As the lights were turned off for the night, we decided that we should make a trip to Bidar and Parli Baijnath – two places where our father had worked and we had spent our summer holidays!
This particular trip gave me some free time on my hands. On an epiphanic day, my sister and I decided to let our emotions take the better of us, and off we set out without any particular plan in mind. Amidst reminiscences, we sauntered to our own Sweet Home – the house that Dad had proudly built and lived last. With Dad’s passing on and now with each of us siblings located wide asunder, the house has been let out on rent. My mother refused to stay at ‘our Home’ alone what with past memories constantly haunting her, and therefore chose to live with her sister (our aunt), just two kilometers away. Well, our visit to our home from the past was not entirely purposeless. One Mr. Janakiraman, our late father’s friend wanted us to search for a book he claimed to have lent our dad. This book was titled in Malayalam, a language my sis was neither very comfortable with, nor had the patience to decipher. I did not wish to miss a chance to show off my polyglot skills!
After rummaging through the books we got every other book than the one being sought! The efforts were not a waste since we could lay hands on a treasure trove of books, most of them devotional – a cornucopia of songs penned by great devotees of the Lord and transcribed patiently by my dad in his wonderful handwriting. An added bonus turned out to be the one I had almost given up – our father’s first volume of his memoirs!
We carried this treasure to our aunt’s place and one look at the heap, our mom went ballistic. She complained about additional junk being brought into a house where space was scarce. After pacifying her that they would be taken by me to Bangalore, albeit in smaller chunks, our mollified mom sat down along with us to go through some of those books. A few glimpses of the recorded past set her into bouts of depression and brought unrestrained tears. She was vacillating between recollections of all the people that she missed – sometimes her late younger sister, and sometimes our dad, finally blowing her nose loudly in sheer desperation at the condition that she was now in: to fend for herself all alone (at least according to her!). My sister and I had to intervene in our own ways to reassure her and bring back the equilibrium!
We had a quick lunch and then drove to Bolarum – once a little sleeping hamlet where we spent considerable part of our childhood between 1972 and 1983, but now another concrete jungle. Each time I visited Hyderabad, I wanted to make this trip, but it never seemed to happen. At least for me, it really had been a very long time since I was the first bird to flow out of this nest as the oldest sibling, so to speak, because of my employment in Bangalore!
We safely avoided the gridlock problems by opting to use the narrower but safer network of roads of the cantonment, an area that spans the land between Malkajgiri (the place where my mom and sis live) and Tirumalagiri (or if you want the British desecration of Indian words for the same place – Trimulgherry), and further beyond Bolarum. We could reach Lalbazaar, a junction located midway to our intended destination, fairly quickly. Up further, we paused at the distinctive gradient that defines Alwal. Here, we could see the addition of ‘Raitu Bazaar’ – a place where farmers from nearby villages assemble to market their produce directly. It gave me immense pleasure that the government had condescended to eliminate the usual stumbling block – the usurping middleman! We drove along Doveton Road and found the post office still as it was when we had visited it as children – the familiar smells of stationery, glue, shellac and ink for the stamps drifting amidst noisy interactions between the clerks, still wafting through our minds. The Government Primary School still stood opposite the house where my cousin once lived and where her children grew. That house is anyway sold. Her neighbor’s place had been razed to the ground perhaps by another buyer planning a more modern dwelling. We turned around the corner to see if our old, familiar grocer’s shop (where we used to buy our groceries by the month) was around, but found no trace of it. Another detour along the non-descript lanes made us reach the Bolarum Bazaar railway station. We beheld drastic changes to the environs! There was no trace of the fields of maize that bordered the railway tracks; the verdant milieu was replaced by residential and commercial erections. With a sigh, we moved on, crossed the turning to Risala Bazaar, and continued to go along the curve to Turkapally. We finally reached the Bolarum railway station – a familiar structure that we grew up with.
In a brief moment of silence, I could distinctly remember the first time we had set foot there in 1972 during the summer holidays after my secondary school. We parked the scooter in the station yard and walked up to our old house. The house was part of a strip of quarters assigned to railway officials working at Bolarum. These once housed officials encompassing two levels down the totem pole of professional hierarchy. Station masters and booking clerks lived in absolute harmony sharing each other’s joys and sorrows. Now, we found that these were totally abandoned. We walked into the verandah and then into the empty rooms! How tiny they looked making us wonder, how a family of five could live under the same roof with just two 8x 10 rooms to spare! Yet, we knew that we were a lot happier then! Wondering about the vicissitudes of life, we blew the dust on the floor to seat ourselves and just let our minds wander. We remembered our bold experiments on rocketry on the leeside of the railway station. We recalled our efforts to make the rocket shoot into the air – all it had done was to make a disgruntled effort (much ado about nothing!) and then lie dead! It certainly was amusing to think of our exploration into laws of physics and the ways we wanted to discover them despite extremely limited resources at hand.
Turning our heads, we could still see traces of the blackboard that our father personally set up with cement and paint. Despite multiple whitewashes, our dad’s instrument of education still showed through. All of us, including mom had used the blackboard to teach students and get some pittance in return for the efforts we put in. Yet, these small amounts of cash did help us scale the crests and troughs of inflation down the years. And above all, there was pride in our self-made earnings. All of us siblings used to contribute half our earnings to mom who managed the family’s finances under strict control measures. While most of today’s children are pampered with monetary benefits as pocket-money, we had to sweat it out even if it were meager! But, as I said, there was extreme pride and honor in the rewards of the efforts put in…
The venue for tutoring our students was this same verandah around which our father had erected the wooden trellis to give a semblance of an extra room. Dad had the least of tools to work with, but he somehow managed to get things done either by borrowing tools or thinking of some other practical means to achieve an end. The quarters were designed by the British where one could see the enforced diminution in the design for the blue-collared workers. Our father attempted to redefine these perimeters in his own way! Across from our quarters in the open government lands, once lived karnats, a nomadic tribe and free to do what they wanted. The tribe avowed allegiance to the Hindu faith and upheld their caste-based values so much so that, I remember their refusal to partake even a glass of water from our neighbor who was a Muslim.
To our left was the tamarind tree – which still stood the test and ravages of time. It would have been at least a century old – strong and deep-rooted and one of the immutable signs of our childhood days and across generations! My sister fondly remembered her teaching students al fresco on the heap of ballast that was heaped in neat trapezoids in front of our house. We then walked the length of the platform, which seemed to have been extended to thrice its size! The atmosphere was surprisingly silent except for a few crows cawing and a few roosting on the branches of a banyan tree. I remembered the times when I, engrossed in assimilating the concepts of Fourier series to differential equations, would be jolted out of my concentration with the ear-piercing hoots from the teeny-weeny YM class steam engines which made more noise than movement. The rumble of the cars (what the British call as rakes), the grunts and groans of the wheels while they braked to a grinding halt and the general hubbub of passengers alighting or boarding…for once, I wish I could hear the same cacophony once again!
As we walked along the now-lengthened platform, my sister silently shed tears remembering our dad. Our dad worked as the Assistant Station Master at Bolarum. Those days, it was a block station, with signals and switches operated under the directions of the station master. “Line-clear” tokens were exchanged between Medchal and the Cavalry Barracks (mispronounced by the simple village folk as “kairalvee barkaas”) block instruments. Ajanta Express was one of the premier trains that ran between Secunderabad and Manmad. It was a great feeling to see it zoom past by several stations without stopping and leaving a trail of dust behind because of its speed. But the same train stopped at our station – Bolarum, even if it was for a measly minute! We felt proud that even the famed express train had to bow down to our railway station and pay due respects by stopping at Bolarum!
The landscape around the station once dotted with green maize fields was now replaced by high-rise flats with the fanciest names. My student and I used to jog along the then dusty village road and walk back home along the tracks. As I looked around, we could see no familiar face from the past.
I fondly looked into the station which now had a layout of the tracks on the desk. Now every block section was interlocked and under the centralized control from Secunderabad – the headquarters of South Central Railway. The station master now conveniently shortened just to a set of initials – S.S., also had his duties shortened, perhaps. I had seen my father spend sleepless nights doing the nightshift way back in ’72! I remembered those nights when I gave him company with tea to keep us awake while I prepared for the Engineering Entrance Examination. All my father’s colleagues would either have retired or crossed to the other side.
As the sun began to go down, we left the station to make it to Koteshwar Mandir in the Defense Area. We were lost as the topography had changed substantially. We had to make a few enquiries before we could reach the temple. The exterior of the temple had metamorphosed but the idol of Lord Shiva in the sanctum sanctorum was still the same (at least time and people had left Him alone!). The steps leading to the temple now were canopied with fabricated structures to protect the devotees from sun and rain. As we stood in the temple lounge where our dad had sat and sang the song he had specially composed in English for this deity (it goes like: “Come all, come, let us sing his praise!/He that blesses this fort temple dais…”), our eyes grew moist.
On our return journey from the temple, we took a different route; we rode right through the arterial road in Risala Bazaar, staying close to the Sadhana Mandir High School. We turned right to take the road that led past the Zilla Parishad High School. This was the same school, I told my sis, where Mr. Sambamurthy, well known for his high school math book, had worked as a principal. Though his first love was math, he taught the English language. For some uncanny reason principals in Hyderabad always taught English whatever their individual specialization was.
Well, so much for the education system!
We finally took the road via the Hanuman Temple to reach the main road. As we drove along back home, we could hear the strains of ‘Swamiye Saranam Ayyappa’ being vociferated by the throng of devotees. We reciprocated it with a simple humble prayer in our minds. We reached home around 9 PM just in time to sit for a hearty meal. After a nostalgic journey down the memory lanes, we were famished. As the lights were turned off for the night, we decided that we should make a trip to Bidar and Parli Baijnath – two places where our father had worked and we had spent our summer holidays!
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