The diary of life- page 1

Now that I've better trust in my photographic skills, i dare to upload some pictures i had taken when i went home one weekend to my place, Perinkulam. Perinkulam is my mother's birthplace. It is a village in the district of Palakkad.

It is a group of 3 Agraharams .

(more on Perinkulam and Agraharams in the next post)

I was inspired to write this post after reading my friend Smithin's blog post. He'd written a short story which took me back to my childhood. It is not like that my childhood was like what depicted there..but the places described there had an appeal, like the smell of earth after rain..the smell I cherish and which always makes me nostalgic. So i thought of writing this one.

My grandfather's house is some 100 years old and was passed form generation to generation. I spent most of my childhood there, running between my house and my grandfather's. We call it 'thatha aam'. (Aam in Iyer Tamil means house).

The house as I said earlier is very old. The doors are very strong. The front door has a tricky latch, unique to the architecture followed at the time when it was built, which makes it impossible for thieves to break in. There are elaborate carvings on the lintel and jambs.The doors are not much high. Because of this they are a constant threat to tall people, which includes me. (I had the pleasure of banging my head on the beams a pretty good number of times). There is courtyard in the middle of the house. It used be an open one, but later it was closed from the above, and glass panes were fitted in between the roof tiles for letting in sunlight.

The main room of the house , has wooden roof, which also bears the attic. The wooden roof is called 'Thattu'. This roofing acts as a thermostat, keeping the room warm during heavy rains and cool during summer. The kitchen is bigggg!!! I used to run and play around inside the kitchen when I was a kid. Then comes the 'kollathavaaram' , i.e. the back end of the house beyond the back doors. That is where the servant of the house sits and does the dishes and laundry. Then we have a well at the 'thodi' or 'kollai', meaning the backyard. The backyard also has the 'Thulsi plant', vital for a complete home. Then there is a well, wide and deep. Many a buckets and mugs were lost into the depths of the well over years. Then comes a 'padippura' i.e a small gateway to the vast backyard which lies behind.

I'm adding some pictures of my maternal grandfather's house here.

A view of the opposite house's veranda from the upstairs window.

(you can see the traditional style stairs and pillars of the house)

The old uppu manga bharani

Old fashioned windows. Each grid is made of single piece of wood and is elaborately carved.

Very strong wooden doors.

The attic

This house is so dear to me, that it holds the vibes of my past, present and hopefully my future too... :)

Nostalgia

This post is inspired by my visit to the house where we lived from 1988-1999: Amma, Appa and I. The first ever visit since we shifted in May 1999. It was our first home. Spend all my childhood there. We love that house. It was small, but we loved the ambiance. It was this love that brought about the ‘house-to- home’ transformation. 

           ____________________________________

I remember, I remember,The house where I was born,

The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn;

 

        _______________________________________

 

 I still remember the day we moved to the new one. I was 10. After the housewarming in the morning, all the things were being moved to the new house which was at a short distance from the old one.  By evening everything was moved. I was at a friend’s home, playing hide-n-seek. Amma called and told me to come to the new house before it gets dark. Our game was finally over, it was almost dark, and i was about to go home. Then my friend jokingly said “don’t forget where you are going!”It was actually then i remembered what Amma had said, i had forgotten the fact that we no longer will be living in the house where we used to. A pain stuck in my throat. I won’t be sleeping at my favourite corner of the living room anymore. Night was falling fast. The sky was cloudy. It had rained that morning. But i couldn't’t help paying a last visit to my dear home. The front door lights were switched off. So it was dark there. That turned a privilege because no one could see me crying. I was weeping and i did not know why, weeping like someone had left me forever. It was not entirely true for it was not the house that left us, we had left the house.

       _____________________________________

One year later...

 I remember, I remember,The house where I was born,

The little window where the sun,Came peeping in at morn;

 

 

I got the Std 7 English text book some days into the commencement of classes and was going through it as a part of my pre-class-reading (strictly language text books only). I read this poem and fell in love with it instantly. I kept re-reading the poetry. When we were given the syllabus for the year, i was happy and also a bit sad to find that the poetry need not be learned. Happy because i would be able to use it for my English recitation (it was my obvious event at the school competitions, every year), sad because i could have scored full marks if any questions were asked from the poem. I showed the poetry to Appa, he read it and smiled. On my asking he said that the poem made him remember the old house where we lived, before we built this one we live in today.

 

 When i thought about it, i understood he was right. The oldie was an old-fashioned one, not an RC house, had high ceilings in the living cum dining room and low ceilings in the other rooms and kitchen. It was difficult for some-what-tall people to walk straight through the doors. They always had to bend a little to pass. The house had no rooms that could be used as bedroom in the ground floor, but had a single large room at the top of the stairs which was intended to be used as bed room. We were using that room, but treated it as an attic. I used to go up there when i was left alone at home with only the servant to keep an eye on me. She would be busy with household works, but always checked on me from time to time. 

 It was some time around age 7 or 8 that i first came into friendship with a Walkman. Someone presented a Walkman to my grandfather, who in turn handed it to me. I used to climb up the stairs, sitting beside the window, listen to songs for hours, of which my grandfather had a collection. Some of my favourite songs used to be (and still remains)’chinna chinna aasai..’ from ‘Roja’ ,’ambalapuzhea...’ from ‘Advaitham’, ’njattuvelakiliyea...’ from ‘Midhunam’, ‘bohat pyaar...’ form ‘Saajan’,’ aakhiyan milayea kabhi...’ from ‘Raja’ (i used to move my eyes like Madhuri Dixit did in the song, well to some extent).

 It had this long room in the ground floor which we used as our bed cum living cum dining room. It had a single window which would capture the entire morning light and direct it to the long room, and the entire room was bright throughout the day.As an infant, I used to have my cradle set up somewhere near the window. So the first lines of the poem were dear to me:

”....the little window where the sun cam peeping in at morn...”

I would be there, confined to the room, toddling and sometimes holding to the window for support and gazing into the bright light coming from the top: being an old house built in Kerala architecture, it had this quadrangle at the middle of the house, with the opening at the top which ensured good air and light. The window opened to it .The quadrangle also served as a place for me to enjoy the rains in later years: The place where i used to sit and read children’s magazines, study, eat snacks, cry when i had a fight with Amma or Appa..

All just sweet memories now..

 

But now after some 10 years, the house is in almost blown into bits. It’s now being used as the office and store of its immediate neighbour. He is dealer of agarbathis. So one evening when we were returning home after a short trip to the town we passed the house. I told Appa my liking to visit my first home. Thanks to the now owner, he was in the office and allowed us inside. I was shocked at the site of my once-home. It was cramped with large boxes of bhathis and other such perfumed stuffs. Loads of things: dates, candles, notebooks and a million other things. I wanted to go upstairs, but the dealer warned me about the poor state of the floor and that all the wood already consumed by termite. I wonder how it stands the heavy rains and the heat. But it is standing. And i hope it will stand for years to come.

 I Googled the first line of the poem and found it.It was written by Thomas Hood.