End of March 1972: Rettakudi and Kunnam Villages, Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu, southern India, India, Northern Hemisphere, Earth.

Rettakudi was my father’s ancestral village. Kunnam was my mother’s. Most of the summer we were in Rettakudi, but sometimes we would go over to Kunnam, which always seemed far away.

Rettakudi was near the train junction of Punthottam. I remember it well. We were going down to the south for the summer––March, April, and May. It was way too hot to stay in Delhi. I would be so excited about going south. It was a different world there, as if I were going backwards in time and could live life as it was lived before modern life had really begun.

We would leave Delhi and travel for three days on the  magnificent brick red steam train to Madras, eating the idls, dosais, yogurt rice, tamarind rice and lemon rice my mother had made and packed for us in five round bins stacked on top of each other, making a tall tiffin carrier. I would be responsible for carrying and watching over that carrier; I was the security guard. It was our food for the three days, so we did not have to spend too much cash on the way down to Madras.

We would still get the occasional chai or coffee once we were south enough. They would be in those disposable clay cups which we would give back to the tea wallahs once we were finished or just throw down on the railroad tracks. I imagined them breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until you couldn’t identify them having ever been part of a clay cup, dissolving back into the skin of the earth as if it had never left.

Sometimes we would get those special snacks of vadas wrapped in disposable banana leaves. These we would throw out the window and a wandering cow would munch on it and our leaf plates would be gone in a few minutes. The cow would look up expectantly, as if we had many more where they came from. I would solemnly shake my head. The cow would look over occasionally at me, hoping for more. The train would start moving. I would wave goodbye. The cow would look at me, without changing its expression.

We got off in Madras and then we would stay a few days with my father’s best friend from college, Mr. Jayaraman, who had a son Mohan close to my age, in West Mambalam near T. Nagar. Then, we would catch a train to Thanjavur, where we would transfer to Mayiladuthurai and then there would be a short train ride to Punthottam.

Once we got off there, it was a five mile oxen cart ride to Rettakudi. Sometimes I would ride part of the way on the oxen cart. Pretty soon the glamour would wear off and I would want to walk along with my father and grandfather to overhear their conversations and see how much I could understand. So I would clamber down quietly and start walking with them. I loved the dusty wasteland we would go through, thorns everywhere. I had to make sure my thin, rubber sandals would not be pierced by them. The hot sun would burn on us.

Daily work was organized around the high heat in the summer. Most everyone in the village woke up at 3:30 am or at the latest 4 am or 5 am, when it was cooler, and the village was bustling as if in broad daylight.

The darkness provided its own special coolness. I loved pallethu, the leftover rice covered with water the night before in an old brass bowl. It always seemed like a magic act to me, of how the rice became filled abundantly with water, swollen, but still recognizable as rice kernels, as its thick, lovely abundance would enter our bodies, too, filling ourselves up in that darkness. The watered rice sometimes, if my grandmother or mother would remember to, would have added to it, a thalchi kottu mixture, with fresh mustard seeds and cumin fried in a long handled spoon, over a fresh fire lit, just before a quick, filtered coffee would be made.

We could hear the talking of the workers going to the fields and my grandfather would need to go there to supervise the planting or transplanting of the rice.

I would beg my grandfather to go to the fields early with him. Sometimes he would let me go with him. I would get to light the kerosene lamp and if there was no oil left in it, pour the kerosene into the small hole on the side with an aluminum funnel. I loved that smell of kerosene. It was the smell of pre-dawn and post-dusk, and the only times we needed that kind of artificial light.

As a nine year old, hearing the thick kerosene oil sloshing around like a little ocean of waves always made me smile to myself. I would circle my fingers around the thin, curved steel handle, sometimes which would pop out of its slot, and I would carefully squeeze it back into its small holes. I would get to bring one of the two kerosene lamps, to light the way. I could not wait to get to the dark, rice fields separated by the narrow raised earth bunds, slip sloshing my bare feet, and me, too afraid of falling down their softly hand built sides into the water swollen rice fields.

***

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

And then there is that beautiful, haunting song from the early 1980s that I remember once again from within the shadow of the deeply bizarre orange sky of today, a kind of early testimonial to unconscious consumerism that took off in the 1980s, to having more and more and more, so we needed a huge storage industry to contain all the stuff that was bursting out of our homes.

We need to ask ourselves once again:

How did we get here?
How do we work this?
Once in a lifetime question

We can’t just let the days go by.

Let’s fire up our energies and go work for the Green New Deal!

Once in a Lifetime,
from the album Remain in Light
David Bryne and Talking Heads, 1980

And you may find yourself
Living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
Letting the days go by,
let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by,
water flowing underground Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime,
water flowing underground
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!
Water dissolving and water removing
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again into silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
You may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say yourself “My God! What have I done?”
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by,
water flowing underground Into the blue again into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding up
Time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was S
ame as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Letting the days go by
Same as it ever was
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was)
Same as it ever was (same as it ever was)
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was)
Same as it ever was
Once in a lifetime
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by

Sunday, September 13, 2020

A beautiful, haunting sketch that somehow miraculously landed in my in box the other day.

by the wonderful artist, Suhita Shirodkar, published with her permission.