Honest lie and spirits
I remember little about my schooling in Tirunelveli. Also, I do not have an enough memory about my stay at Tamilnadu. We stayed in upstairs of two storied- line building.
Once I and my sister was playing throwing the towel towards the rotating fan. We enjoyed the way it whirls the towel around and its fall down by the rotation of the fan blades.
Suddenly mother entered the room, and she switched off the fan. The towel also disappeared. She started scolding me for playing with electricity and fan. My sister acted innocence and so she spared her from the scolding.
But my inquisitiveness was to find where the towel has gone.
I asked mother.
“Where is the towel?”
She answered.
“It went inside the fan”
It surprised me.
How and where it would have gone?
Many days when no one was there, I tried to make towels disappear by throwing to the rotating fan and switching off the fan suddenly. But no expected outcome resulted.
I perceived from this age itself to think differently and convince yourselves. Also, I understood to be ready to take on responsibility for doing mischiefs, even though you do it in a group or for a group. You are always alone.
Lone…
Unexpectedly, we returned from Tirunelveli to Trivandrum. Unusually our travel was in a bus. I still remember this as my first longest bus travel of about 4 hours and 160 kilometers. Though the bus we alighted was a colorful one, I missed the Chak Chak of the train.
We did not have an owned house in Trivandrum. So I think we started living in a rented house near Pettah railway station and then we switched house to West fort.
The house near Pettah railway station gave the sight of the train and its magnanimous sound of arrival and leaving. We could feel the vibration inside the house while the train pass by. The only concern I had is that the washroom is a little farther and has to walk through a corridor. The corridor has mesh and I could see outside. At night there were movements of shadow outside, of course it is nothing but the movement of leaves of coconut tree. Somehow a thought came into me: they were spirits hovering around our house.
My sister always got a company of my mother and she enjoyed the safety and care of my mother.
On most of the days, I preferred not to go to washroom before sleep and longed for the day to come quickly. Later I found solution myself for this by considering the spirits as my friends. Jokingly I say spirits are friendlier than living beings even now.
Instead of the teacher at Sarah Tucker School, I had three elder girls of a family who were very fond of me. I learned from them I am cute. They pinch my nose and say “cute”. I thought they relate it to nose.
Later in my life of literature, both spirits and cute nose had influenced much. My writings give a reflection that they appear in different forms and imageries.