August 23, 2011
The old paper collector who comes around the neighborhood every morning yodeling "pay-par, pay-par-ay, pay-par" was summoned home today. His ilk used to collect lot of other things in the past. The yodel used to be "pay-par, pazha kupi thakara patrangal, plash-tik, payparee" (paper, old bottles, metal, utensils, plastic, paper). Though our man of the hour was a paper specialist, he was happy to take the card board boxes in which all the stuff had arrived from Chennai and Kochi. Three weeks worth of old Hindu and Mathrubhumi newspapers fetched us Rs. 10. The cardboard boxes fetched Rs. 20. "I get only four rupees per kilo for these!" he said while making empty spaces disappear from within the boxes that collapsed into flat sheets which easily stacked on his bicycle's carrier.
Achan cooked vazhapindi (banana stem) thoran, thakkali (tomato) ozhichukoottan and mangachamanthi (mango chutney). Some neighbor was deep frying sardines. That strong smell served as the non-veg element for our lunch. Escoffier was right about nose mattering more than the mouth!
As guests and visitors are bound to increase from tomorrow, I have moved my base upstairs. The rocking chair and the breeze are grand conspirators against reading and typing...in fact, for any activity other than day dreaming and napping! Post lunch dormancy is divine. I wonder how I got all my school work done here 15 years ago! Sitting here, through the open window, I can keep an eye out for the elusive, mythical tree-dwelling cobra on the upper branches of the trees in the backyard.
While Achan slept in the afternoon, I quickly browsed through the opening chapters of a biography of Lakshmi N. Menon, the first woman foreign minister of India. Wikipedia page gives a quick overview of her illustrious life. Time and again, I hear her name invoked as a relative. The book was supposed to tell me how distant the relation was. Here's what I gathered from the book.
"Melackal" family, from which both Lakshmi N Menon and my grandfather trace their descent, was set up in Kollam (Quilon) district by one of the warriors who assisted the famous Travancore prime minister Velu Thampi Dalawa in his final journey after being defeated by the British. Lakshmi N Menon's mother comes from this family. 170 years ago, the priest of Padmanabhaswamy temple married a Nair woman from this family and brought her to Thiruvananthapuram. Her cousin sister, Kunjikutty, is traced back in the book as the first resident of our ancestral home, in Thiruvanathapuram. One of Kunjikutty's daughters married Velu Pillai, my great grandfather.
When Achan woke up, he showed me the brass pot on our TV stand which had the name Velu Pillai, fading, in old Tamil script. Velu Pillai hailed from Kanyakumari district, now in Tamil Nadu, but at that time part of the Travancore kingdom, hence the Tamil. This pot and almost all other furniture we have collected from our ancestral home have the initial R-N-P also inscribed on it standing for R. Narayana Pillai. It seems there was a threat of eviction and seizure of all family property 100 years ago. At that time the initials R-N-P was inscribed on all the property so that it could be claimed none of it belonged to our family and so couldn't be seized.
Soon afterwards the Panamoodu house and the 18 cents of land it stood on was legally split among 36 people. Both Lakshmi N Menon and my grandfather were recipients of these half-a-cent portions. Grandfather quickly repurchased the bits from everyone else.
My granddad got married when he was 23. First marriage! There was a practice of pair of brothers marrying a pair of sisters in the same ceremony for convenience. Accordingly, he married the young sister of the lady his older cousin married. But his 13 year old bride refused to live with his mother (my great-granny, Mr. Velu 'pot' Pillai's wife). A classic example of the daughter-in-law walking out of a marriage because of the mother-in-law. I felt good learning that there were women who stood up for themselves a century ago in a society that even today continues to portray through mega teleserials that essence of Indian womanhood is silent suffering and tears.
Grandfather remarried 14 years later when he was 37. This bride, my grandmother, was 22.
Granddad had two direct brothers, one elder, one younger. The elder one had a revolutionary love marriage to a nurse. But both the husband and wife passed away at a young age leaving behind three daughters. They grew up in the local orphanage and all three went onto become nurses. I have met only one of them.
Grandfather's younger brother was a Hindi teacher. Achan said that he was a connoisseur of cuisines. This brother married very late in life.
In old Kerala, among the Nairs, I believe there was a "tradition" that once the older brother marries, that wife sort of "takes care" (wink! wink!) of the younger brothers as well which means they don't really seek marriages of their own.
Achan recalled older women in the family blaming my grandmother for not being "enterprising enough" when her younger brother-in-law decided to have a wife of his own!
As recently as 1970 one of my maternal aunts was horrified when a 90-something granny in the house reminded her of this "tradition" when she married my uncle who had two younger brothers!
I assume it was the skewed sex ratio and major difference in life expectancy between men and women that led to such arrangements.
It is the tales of similar arrangements on my maternal ancestral side, that I had mentioned earlier in this journal, that Amma was afraid that I might end up using for future scripts!
Achan rattled off a lot of names and relationships which will take a while to sink in. When clarity emerges, I will put them down in future journal entries. The phlegm situation has much improved, I hope to get back to gardening tomorrow.
Lakshmi N Menon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi_N._Menon
Velu Thampi Dalawa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velu_Thampi_Dalawa
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