Return journey from Delhi was always nostalgic! One year would have gone by, when I return home! Jayanthi Janata starts from the Hazrat Nizamuddin station at seven in the morning. Coming to the station gives a heady feeling, a feeling of expectation, a feeling of unexplainable joy! The early auto rikshaw ride is always cool. Once in the station, walk with a friend or room mate to the Station canteen for tea and snacks. Then go and sit in the train already in the platform. All the train was full of second class only (which changed later).
The train pantry had a wonderful set of people as staff who ascertained our seats as soon as we entered. Thereafter a rappo starts with their bringing us time to time meals and tea all the time. We enjoyed a lot of tea, the very nice tea served by an all Malayali group of pantry car bearers who were always affable (This changed lately. All kinds of odd guys started coming and the affability was gone). Once the train started moving we looked on to see the sights around, the train passing Tuglakabad, Faridabad to Palwal and picking up speed. The sun started to rise up and it started to get warmer and warmer.
We looked on to see the Sikandra Fort by the side of which the train passed. The train ran and ran with all kinds of little traders entering and departing the train from time to time. We had fruit juice at Vijayawada or Warrangal. Bought oranges at Nagpur. Purchased ground nuts and gauvas in Andhra. By Tamil Nadu we are tired of waiting to reach Kerala and this is the second night we are spending in the train. Many people played playing cards. I disliked the card games. Many beggers came and begged at different stations regularly. Some of them blessed you, some came with blesses and when they did not get anything cursed and left. A few children's gangs led by their leaders or parents came to show small acrobatics after drumming for a few seconds and started asking for alms! If they got less, their leader or parent punished them severely, taking them to the entrance area of the coach where they rested until they got out at the next station.
Some beggers somewhat better dressed brought small printed cards and left them in the train seats for the travellers to read and make their own assumptions and help them. They invariably collected the cards back before they asked for help. Then there were sellers of different kinds of wares from playing cards, tooth picks, ear cleaners, chains to secure your boxes in the train, locks, soaps, tooth brushes and tooth paste and assorted other items. They all came and went from time to time after selling their wares as much as they could. These were always the norms in the Jayanthi Janata at that time.
The feeling of the lost world will fill the mind when we think of home. The smell of Kerala will start from Coimbatore. The train will pass under a number of criss-crossing over bridges and enter the Coimbatore station. There will not be many people awake at that time as it will be generally early morning hours! Some die hards, interested in travel will be up and looking through the windows searching for little lights far away or checking for houses or people if any being seen.
After the Station the train will be running through darkness with the eastern sky turning slowly crimson which filled my heart with a kind of joy that I am reaching home again.Father and Mother waiting for me, brothers and sisters discussing my return etc. etc. I will always be up and anxious to see the Walayar Station which is a boundary station. There after the mountainous terrain on either side of the train will be panoramic, dipped in the morning due and foggy blue far away! The Palghat Station always filled our hearts with joy! It is morning by now. The Bharatapuzha on the way will give way and we reach Shoranur where a piece of the train is detached and joined to some other train going to Mangalore!
At Palghat the smell of fresh Pazhampori (fried bananas) used to come. In those days, the train used to reach Palghat around seven or eight in the morning. It was nice to have a first bite of the fried banana and follow it with the best of teas which were available in those days!! The present method of cheating by giving a paper cut with over sweet milk liquid and a throw tea bag in it with below measure quantity was not there then! Tea was always served in glass tumblers which were washed and reused. That hygiene is now gone! That has become nostalgia now.
Then we passed on to Wadakkanchery and Mulloorkkara with the peacock dance of the trees and plants greenery on either side of the train and one awaited the board of Poomkunna where the train stopped for two minutes. The station which did not have a plat form in those days! There after it majestically crawled into the Trichur Station where we heard the Malayalam of the Trichurians in its traditional sing song slow slithery sweet manner where everything was still, peaceful, no urgency for anything style!
Once on the platform or even before it, every one wanting to disembark start looking intently at the platform to see if any of the relatives or brothers or sisters or even parents have come to receive him and find one or more of them and are overjoyed. But the general difficulties of travel mostly limit the receivers to one at a time and the arriver really get elated by the sight of the relative or friend. But as time passes by at times, there will be no body even though how hard one looked, and slowly a kind of unhappiness and pessimism creep in. Once on the platform, I take a deep breath, the same old air, which I was missing so far for the last one year, the old air of trichur full of oxygen, the smell of paddy fields and cut grass. The smell of the mango leaves and cashew nut trees! The breeze that comes touching several coconut trees! Then some one came close to as in your ears "Saare vandi vende, evidekka?" (Sir, you need a vehicle? Where to?) He will be asking as if he is your brother or near relative. It is common in Trichur when they need a fare. I looked at him. He really looked like my brother. Very thin built, a khaki shirt on. I can make out that he may be a taxi or auto rikshaw driver.
I asked him "How much to Ollur?" He won't answer straight "All that we can settle later, Sir" That gives me the danger bell. Now I have to be careful with him. He is going to take my brotherhood for a ride, indeed!
"OK. If you tell me how much it is, we can walk further" saying this I put down my suit case and stop walking.
He comes back "Oh..Sir. I never charge more. Only sixty rupees."
"All right..Go on and find another ride for your car" I replied.
"Oh..Sir, we get something when people like you who are generous come down only" This is a black mailing number which many a time works well. But not with me. I am dead se t not to throw away my meagre earnings to this brotherly guy for no reason.
I bargain now: "Just understand, if you are on a level stand, you get a ride from me. Twnety five ruppes or you leave and I can very well go by bus"
That bring him down. "Sir, make it forty and we go"
"Think of it well. Final, Thirty rupees for you. Otherwise the bus is waiting.Do not spend my time, if you are not serious"
Ultimately, he agrees for rupees thirty. Then I come out with him and he put my suit case in the boot and I climb into the back seat. I sit elaborately in the back seat. I am thrown into nostalgia. Earlier times my brother or sisters used to come. Now time has passed. All have become tied up with their individual families with various household matters.The pleasant air was stroking me deepening my brotherly feeling to the only human being in the driver's seat. He is a neat guy. He is slowly turning and twisting the wheel and manoveuring with great ease. He is a expert of course. I start a conversation with him as always. The best way to acclimatise me with the lost ground of the village is to start a conversation with the driver. If he is a good talker, he will give a general picture of the place and by the time we part we would have become friends.
The important incidents in town, the building of the largest mall or greatest building, the terrific accident or rain havoc all will be referred to. In between, there may be questions about me and my family too. In old Kerala it is like that. The Taxi Driver is also somebody belonging to some respectable family and they would want to know about the rider too. Once it is given, if he is good and belonging to my own village will find out a couple of my close relatives who is known to him and relate their relationship itself. Earlier times, they used to know my father and will tell about him which used to make me happy.
But now a lot of time has passed after the death of my father, the village has progressed, new people have settled down in various pockets, the old people have either moved out or gone outside the State like me. At times the guy may not know my people or near and dear. Then the topic will shift to the conditions of the roads and the Government.Mostly the driver will become eloquent when it comes to roads in Kerala. No one will say roads are good in Kerala. The incessant rains always did its work and the roads get broken up. The drivers suffer. When it comes to Government, each driver will have his view point and suggestions how the Government should be run. So also their grievance agains the Police who trouble them at times. If the Driver become too critical on any subject, I change the subject and steer to some good and hilarious conversation and slowly we turn the last road corner to my by-lane, pushing up my nostalgia. The bamboo clusters on the road turnings are gone!
New houses have come on the block. New people around. Some of the thorn hedges of compounds have been replaced with stone walls. People are slowly changing and wanting to bring up stone walls among them. Now the car reached in front of my half finised house, which we always called the "pani theeratha veedu" The Driver has become a friend by now.
He comes back to the boot and take out the suit case. He addresses me: "Appo sheri saare. njan potte" (So, right Sir, Let me go) This meant, it is time that I paid him. I pay him the designated thrity rupees. He takes it and looks at the money, count it and look down and say again "Appo....Sheri Saare, Varatte.."
This is a prompt to allow me to give him anything further, if I want. His face is without a smile. I pull out a ten rupee note and give him. Once it was in his hand, his face let up as if the full moon has come up on the blue skies.I know this. Every time I come, this is repeated. This is another nostalgia.
Mother will be standing at the door looking at me intently! She always kept on looking out from the door if I am coming. Once I settle down, it is as if, I have come back forever! I normally do not open my suit case or any thing when I come. Just put it in the corner of the room. I go and settle down on the corner of the bench near the huge table where father used to sit. Now, mother sits there when I am not there. When I come, I sit there and she stands on the other side of the table. Even if I tell her to sit she will not. She will just stand there opposite me saying "let me see you" For a long time she will stand there and then she will find out that I am tired. Then she will just go inside the kitchen and come back with the black tea and put it in front of me! I start taking the tea, as if I have just come to have tea! It is an endearing action repeated every time I come home.
Then the fish fellow will call "Poooyi" Mother will ask "you have some money, I shall buy some fish". When I come, there after, I make it a point that I pay for these small things, which alleviate a little of my brother's burden, who looks after the house, otherwise. Mother is happy! Then she will start slowly narrating the incidents around the house, the village, the church, the convent, and the town city of Ollur. Those stories will take me through the 20 days of my leave time. I get the feel of going through an intense film movie and then I pack up for the return which is always painful!!
The day before my departure used to be a kind of festival. Mother will arrange all kinds of foods she can and fry the recipes which I like. Mainly are the achappams and kozhalappams (Two kinds of rice receipes, which I still know only to eat and enjoy..making them are difficult and takes a lot of patience and perseverance, which mother had) which she packed in biscuit tins which I brought from the market. These are for me to carry with me to Delhi. The day of parting, she will stand opposite me serving my food and asking that painful question. "Now, when are you coming next?" that is a really painful question, as I was a part in the house always evident in each and every single particle there. I will pretend to be happy and answer "Coming here is not as difficult and all as in the olden times, you just say and I am here" My mind cried out loud at a super decibel which nobody could hear! But all that pretention did not fool mother. She slowly said " I will watch the calendar, to see when you are coming next." That was a real fact. And that is the same with most of the parents left back in Kerala, if their loved ones are away.
By the time I finish lunch, she would be packing a special pack of food for me in the plantain leaf from our back yard and that is the last meal from home in that trip while returning. This I usually took after settling down in the return train and when the dinner time arrived around eight o' clock. My eyes used to well up while I ate that meal alone as otherwise I would be taking it with all at home. I ate slowly and deliberately, remembering each word that transpired among us in the house.
Luckily such soliloquies did not last long as there would be a lot of other passengers and a few will be just near by who would be in conversation and I also used to join in and suppress my anguish and family thoughts for the time being. Slowly a family camaraderie pick up among the co-travellers and me.
The train pantry had a wonderful set of people as staff who ascertained our seats as soon as we entered. Thereafter a rappo starts with their bringing us time to time meals and tea all the time. We enjoyed a lot of tea, the very nice tea served by an all Malayali group of pantry car bearers who were always affable (This changed lately. All kinds of odd guys started coming and the affability was gone). Once the train started moving we looked on to see the sights around, the train passing Tuglakabad, Faridabad to Palwal and picking up speed. The sun started to rise up and it started to get warmer and warmer.
We looked on to see the Sikandra Fort by the side of which the train passed. The train ran and ran with all kinds of little traders entering and departing the train from time to time. We had fruit juice at Vijayawada or Warrangal. Bought oranges at Nagpur. Purchased ground nuts and gauvas in Andhra. By Tamil Nadu we are tired of waiting to reach Kerala and this is the second night we are spending in the train. Many people played playing cards. I disliked the card games. Many beggers came and begged at different stations regularly. Some of them blessed you, some came with blesses and when they did not get anything cursed and left. A few children's gangs led by their leaders or parents came to show small acrobatics after drumming for a few seconds and started asking for alms! If they got less, their leader or parent punished them severely, taking them to the entrance area of the coach where they rested until they got out at the next station.
Some beggers somewhat better dressed brought small printed cards and left them in the train seats for the travellers to read and make their own assumptions and help them. They invariably collected the cards back before they asked for help. Then there were sellers of different kinds of wares from playing cards, tooth picks, ear cleaners, chains to secure your boxes in the train, locks, soaps, tooth brushes and tooth paste and assorted other items. They all came and went from time to time after selling their wares as much as they could. These were always the norms in the Jayanthi Janata at that time.
The feeling of the lost world will fill the mind when we think of home. The smell of Kerala will start from Coimbatore. The train will pass under a number of criss-crossing over bridges and enter the Coimbatore station. There will not be many people awake at that time as it will be generally early morning hours! Some die hards, interested in travel will be up and looking through the windows searching for little lights far away or checking for houses or people if any being seen.
After the Station the train will be running through darkness with the eastern sky turning slowly crimson which filled my heart with a kind of joy that I am reaching home again.Father and Mother waiting for me, brothers and sisters discussing my return etc. etc. I will always be up and anxious to see the Walayar Station which is a boundary station. There after the mountainous terrain on either side of the train will be panoramic, dipped in the morning due and foggy blue far away! The Palghat Station always filled our hearts with joy! It is morning by now. The Bharatapuzha on the way will give way and we reach Shoranur where a piece of the train is detached and joined to some other train going to Mangalore!
At Palghat the smell of fresh Pazhampori (fried bananas) used to come. In those days, the train used to reach Palghat around seven or eight in the morning. It was nice to have a first bite of the fried banana and follow it with the best of teas which were available in those days!! The present method of cheating by giving a paper cut with over sweet milk liquid and a throw tea bag in it with below measure quantity was not there then! Tea was always served in glass tumblers which were washed and reused. That hygiene is now gone! That has become nostalgia now.
Then we passed on to Wadakkanchery and Mulloorkkara with the peacock dance of the trees and plants greenery on either side of the train and one awaited the board of Poomkunna where the train stopped for two minutes. The station which did not have a plat form in those days! There after it majestically crawled into the Trichur Station where we heard the Malayalam of the Trichurians in its traditional sing song slow slithery sweet manner where everything was still, peaceful, no urgency for anything style!
Once on the platform or even before it, every one wanting to disembark start looking intently at the platform to see if any of the relatives or brothers or sisters or even parents have come to receive him and find one or more of them and are overjoyed. But the general difficulties of travel mostly limit the receivers to one at a time and the arriver really get elated by the sight of the relative or friend. But as time passes by at times, there will be no body even though how hard one looked, and slowly a kind of unhappiness and pessimism creep in. Once on the platform, I take a deep breath, the same old air, which I was missing so far for the last one year, the old air of trichur full of oxygen, the smell of paddy fields and cut grass. The smell of the mango leaves and cashew nut trees! The breeze that comes touching several coconut trees! Then some one came close to as in your ears "Saare vandi vende, evidekka?" (Sir, you need a vehicle? Where to?) He will be asking as if he is your brother or near relative. It is common in Trichur when they need a fare. I looked at him. He really looked like my brother. Very thin built, a khaki shirt on. I can make out that he may be a taxi or auto rikshaw driver.
I asked him "How much to Ollur?" He won't answer straight "All that we can settle later, Sir" That gives me the danger bell. Now I have to be careful with him. He is going to take my brotherhood for a ride, indeed!
"OK. If you tell me how much it is, we can walk further" saying this I put down my suit case and stop walking.
He comes back "Oh..Sir. I never charge more. Only sixty rupees."
"All right..Go on and find another ride for your car" I replied.
"Oh..Sir, we get something when people like you who are generous come down only" This is a black mailing number which many a time works well. But not with me. I am dead se t not to throw away my meagre earnings to this brotherly guy for no reason.
I bargain now: "Just understand, if you are on a level stand, you get a ride from me. Twnety five ruppes or you leave and I can very well go by bus"
That bring him down. "Sir, make it forty and we go"
"Think of it well. Final, Thirty rupees for you. Otherwise the bus is waiting.Do not spend my time, if you are not serious"
Ultimately, he agrees for rupees thirty. Then I come out with him and he put my suit case in the boot and I climb into the back seat. I sit elaborately in the back seat. I am thrown into nostalgia. Earlier times my brother or sisters used to come. Now time has passed. All have become tied up with their individual families with various household matters.The pleasant air was stroking me deepening my brotherly feeling to the only human being in the driver's seat. He is a neat guy. He is slowly turning and twisting the wheel and manoveuring with great ease. He is a expert of course. I start a conversation with him as always. The best way to acclimatise me with the lost ground of the village is to start a conversation with the driver. If he is a good talker, he will give a general picture of the place and by the time we part we would have become friends.
The important incidents in town, the building of the largest mall or greatest building, the terrific accident or rain havoc all will be referred to. In between, there may be questions about me and my family too. In old Kerala it is like that. The Taxi Driver is also somebody belonging to some respectable family and they would want to know about the rider too. Once it is given, if he is good and belonging to my own village will find out a couple of my close relatives who is known to him and relate their relationship itself. Earlier times, they used to know my father and will tell about him which used to make me happy.
But now a lot of time has passed after the death of my father, the village has progressed, new people have settled down in various pockets, the old people have either moved out or gone outside the State like me. At times the guy may not know my people or near and dear. Then the topic will shift to the conditions of the roads and the Government.Mostly the driver will become eloquent when it comes to roads in Kerala. No one will say roads are good in Kerala. The incessant rains always did its work and the roads get broken up. The drivers suffer. When it comes to Government, each driver will have his view point and suggestions how the Government should be run. So also their grievance agains the Police who trouble them at times. If the Driver become too critical on any subject, I change the subject and steer to some good and hilarious conversation and slowly we turn the last road corner to my by-lane, pushing up my nostalgia. The bamboo clusters on the road turnings are gone!
New houses have come on the block. New people around. Some of the thorn hedges of compounds have been replaced with stone walls. People are slowly changing and wanting to bring up stone walls among them. Now the car reached in front of my half finised house, which we always called the "pani theeratha veedu" The Driver has become a friend by now.
He comes back to the boot and take out the suit case. He addresses me: "Appo sheri saare. njan potte" (So, right Sir, Let me go) This meant, it is time that I paid him. I pay him the designated thrity rupees. He takes it and looks at the money, count it and look down and say again "Appo....Sheri Saare, Varatte.."
This is a prompt to allow me to give him anything further, if I want. His face is without a smile. I pull out a ten rupee note and give him. Once it was in his hand, his face let up as if the full moon has come up on the blue skies.I know this. Every time I come, this is repeated. This is another nostalgia.
Mother will be standing at the door looking at me intently! She always kept on looking out from the door if I am coming. Once I settle down, it is as if, I have come back forever! I normally do not open my suit case or any thing when I come. Just put it in the corner of the room. I go and settle down on the corner of the bench near the huge table where father used to sit. Now, mother sits there when I am not there. When I come, I sit there and she stands on the other side of the table. Even if I tell her to sit she will not. She will just stand there opposite me saying "let me see you" For a long time she will stand there and then she will find out that I am tired. Then she will just go inside the kitchen and come back with the black tea and put it in front of me! I start taking the tea, as if I have just come to have tea! It is an endearing action repeated every time I come home.
Then the fish fellow will call "Poooyi" Mother will ask "you have some money, I shall buy some fish". When I come, there after, I make it a point that I pay for these small things, which alleviate a little of my brother's burden, who looks after the house, otherwise. Mother is happy! Then she will start slowly narrating the incidents around the house, the village, the church, the convent, and the town city of Ollur. Those stories will take me through the 20 days of my leave time. I get the feel of going through an intense film movie and then I pack up for the return which is always painful!!
The day before my departure used to be a kind of festival. Mother will arrange all kinds of foods she can and fry the recipes which I like. Mainly are the achappams and kozhalappams (Two kinds of rice receipes, which I still know only to eat and enjoy..making them are difficult and takes a lot of patience and perseverance, which mother had) which she packed in biscuit tins which I brought from the market. These are for me to carry with me to Delhi. The day of parting, she will stand opposite me serving my food and asking that painful question. "Now, when are you coming next?" that is a really painful question, as I was a part in the house always evident in each and every single particle there. I will pretend to be happy and answer "Coming here is not as difficult and all as in the olden times, you just say and I am here" My mind cried out loud at a super decibel which nobody could hear! But all that pretention did not fool mother. She slowly said " I will watch the calendar, to see when you are coming next." That was a real fact. And that is the same with most of the parents left back in Kerala, if their loved ones are away.
By the time I finish lunch, she would be packing a special pack of food for me in the plantain leaf from our back yard and that is the last meal from home in that trip while returning. This I usually took after settling down in the return train and when the dinner time arrived around eight o' clock. My eyes used to well up while I ate that meal alone as otherwise I would be taking it with all at home. I ate slowly and deliberately, remembering each word that transpired among us in the house.
Luckily such soliloquies did not last long as there would be a lot of other passengers and a few will be just near by who would be in conversation and I also used to join in and suppress my anguish and family thoughts for the time being. Slowly a family camaraderie pick up among the co-travellers and me.
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