nadirafromkannur's blog

Lots of things, good and bad have been said and are being said about Facebook, but to me it has been a real find ,spinning threads of communication and creating quite a web where I lie happily enmeshed and warm in the rays of friendships, old and new. On this trip to my hometown in Kannur , besides having been able to escape from the coldwave that has gripped Delhi, I have been able to catch up with some of my childhood friends and neighbours after many , many years. The broken contacts wouldn’t have been restored perhaps, had we not come across each other through Facebook. It’s not that we had become totally unaware of each others’ existences. It’s just that we were being updated, on our respective trips back to our roots , vicariously through our relatives who stay here.

My tentative plans to come here for a few weeks became quite concrete when I came to know that there was going to be a wedding in the family of one of those old friends, when all of the siblings , dispersed in different places across the continents , would come together. Here was a chance to meet them all . A school reunion had already been on the cards and this was an additional propeller..”sone pe suhaga” as they say in the North or “the icing on the cake” , if one has to make use of the phrases one had to memorise for the english language exam, back in school.

Ours was a shared childhood, when almost all of our time, except those spent in the classrooms or in sleep, were spent together. Whoever got ready first in the mornings , stepped across the road to the others’ house to wait for them till they had had their breakfast and had donned their school uniforms. I remember Juanabai cajoling and scolding Elsie and Stephen , the older children who went to school with me and my younger brother to have their glass of milk made from the Nido milkpowder, which was one of the things their father who was in Bahrain invariably brought back when he came home. The Pereira family had five children. We were five siblings too. Excluding my elder brother, each of us had someone in the other family, who was close to our age. So it made for a great team. Our funfilled days would be kickstarted even as we waited at the bus stop for the No.4 or No. 10 bus to come rolling along. We’d get down at the stop near the telephone exchange, some distance away, and then walk across the maidan to reach the school.

The Arabian sea stretched along the left of that maidan and this accounted for some of the most gleeful moments of those days during the rainy season. For then, the strong gusts of wind , blowing in from the sea would turn our umbrellas inside out or even snatch them away from our hands , making us race after them . We’d slip and fall and get completely drenched , but who cared? There was also this trench somewhere in the middle of the stretch that we had to negotiate. There was a small bridge , which consisted of two cement slabs placed across the ditch, but that was a little away from the direct path that we would follow. So we preferred to place one cautious step after another into the water that had filled up the ditch and climb up on the other side. We would always have a pair of our dry clothes in the school, as the rains during the monsoon months were incessant and getting our uniforms wet was the norm. So it didn’t really matter if we had to wade through. The problem was when our rubber hawai chappals (there was no question of wearing our shoes on rainy days) would get stuck in the slippery , sticky mud at the bottom . In the process of retrieving them , we would often fall into the water and our bags and books would get wet as well.

Sometimes, the buses would be off the roads for days on end ,when the repairing or tarring was going on . The concessional busfare of five paise , each way , then became a huge bonus to spend on our way back home. We would stop at the corner, half way to our homes from school, where there was this vendor who sold crushed ice in scoops, coloured and flavoured with some fruity syrup or we would buy slices of raw mango with a thin spread of tamarind pulp, red chilly powder and salt or salted gooseberries. (I still have all of these even now whenever the opportunity comes but the greed factor that was part of the process of buying and eating them is no more there and hence it isn’t as deliciously tasty as it used to be. Besides, the enamel coating on the teeth has naturally reduced in thickness). I’m quite aware how Neanderthal all this must be sounding to our children and grandchildren whose tastebuds are more attuned to the KFC chicken and dominoes Pizza and the Baskin and Robbins icecreams. But hey , our share of delight was not any less, though it came much cheaper.

We sat reminiscing about those times in Stephen’s house , the morning after the wedding, which took place in a church in Mangalore. My girls can’t even relate to the jokes I find funny, Stephen said regretfully and I could quite relate to what he said. He recalled how his younger sister Lesline ( whom we call Latha) had this habit of dozing off in the bus and how on many occasions , the rest of us would get down from the bus and realize she wasn’t with us only when we reached home. But there was nothing really to worry about because the bus would stop at their gate on its return trip , to drop off the sleepyhead.

They are Manglorean Christians, the Pereiras and their mother tongue is Konkani. Spending so much of time with them and the other Konkani neighbours, one had picked up quite a few of the words and could follow the conversations quite well in those days. Not now; the long interval in between has deleted it all from my memory. But not the taste of the “sannas” , which is something like “idlis” , except that the steamed softness of the sannas was sweeter. I got to eat them again at the wedding feast.

My friend Madhu who had accompanied me on this trip from Delhi , was also with me. We had taken an afternoon train to Mangalore and had reached the church just as the ceremony had started. We sat at the back in that beautiful church. We could see the bride and the groom way up in front, she dressed in a virginal white gown , the trailing bridal veil held in place on her head with a small delicate crown, the groom in a black suit, the best man and the bridesmaid standing beside them and the sweet little flower girls in their pink dresses and small baskets of flowers in their hands. I must confess that of all the bridal wear, I find the traditional Christian bridal attire the loveliest. So too the marriage vows. There is something beautifully romantic about the couple pledging to be together in sickness and in health and in ups and downs till “death do us part”

The ceremony was interspersed with hymns rendered by a very harmonious group of voices of the choir . Those present could sing along if they knew the songs , to facilitate which they had distributed small booklets with the lyrics . Each religion has a defining aspect in my perception. For some it is judgement and reckoning , for others it is the freedom to follow your own individual path or worship divinity in any from that is of your liking. In chrisitianity , the word love gets a predominant place in the scheme of things. Jesus therefore is my personal favourite among the prophets and saints and sages.

The religious ceremony having been concluded , all of us had moved to the adjoining hall, where the rest of the cultural traditions of a Manglorean Christian wedding followed. The bride and groom’s families were formally introduced to each other, then the newly wedded couple moved around the hall, followed by a long train of other married couples. Dancing followed, the movements of youngsters in tune to the rhythm provided by a lively band, the older ones just swaying their ample hips or potbellies any which way and according to their own internal music. Then there was exchange of gifts and the ceremony where the girl’s parents handed over the bride to the boy’s family , urging them to take care of her just as they had nurtured and cared for her. This was the part where everybody would start getting misty eyed, Elsie the eldest in the family and who is closest to me agewise, later told me. ”Babul ki duaye leke jaa…” kinds.

For Madhu too, the past days have been overwhelming. She belongs to Lucknow but had spent her childhood and growing up years in Kannur, her father having been posted here for all of that time. So she has been going around visiting her friends and the places where she stayed. . She is in quite a daze, she says. We were in Ernakulam too, catching up with friends and cruising in the backwaters of Alleppey which is about one and half hours away from Ernakulam, by road. Also spent a day and a half in Wynad. Lovely times . Footloose and fancy free, as they sayJ