trivandrum ahoy

it's about 750 km from madras to trivandrum. the roads are great, other cars are aggressive and the entire drive is like a long videogame. pac-man has those little buggy, crabby things that try to eat you. how simplistic. imagine avoiding cyclists, autos, cows, kids, dogs, squirrels, low-flying crows and trucks with wobbly wheels. all at 120 km/h. all with a mom in the backseat who keeps complaining about the bumpy ride, emits sharps intakes of breath just before you attempt that brilliant overtake manuevour that would have had shumacher taking notes and a dad whose calculations of time and distance have no bearing on the 3 dimensional world. it was, to put it mildly, an interesting experience.


the house in trivandrum was exactly how i remembered it, but much nicer. it used to be the one-stop venue for all my summer vacations while growing up. my grandparents lived there alone with a coterie of servants. more accurately, my grandmother lived there and my grandfather ruled his fiefdom from the porch, traumatizing all the passersby whom he know from when they were in diapers. i remember him from when i was little, wiry and full of life. he'd call on the telephone every sunday afternoon and ask to speak to the 'great man' even before talking to his daughter. that was how he used to call me ever since i can remember.

when in trivandrum we had a routine all to ourselves. mornings were spent on the porch. he'd read a couple of newspapers and read some bits out loud occasionally. i'd have my head buried in my latest alistair maclean novel. my grandmother would direct the endless flow of mangoes, tea, juices and coconuts from the kitchen to the porch. we were a tiny island of humanity in the middle of a crowded colony of people rushing to work, moms shopping and kids late for school. passersby would inevitably call out to my grandfather from the road and pause by the gate to be amused by my grandfather's description of my latest escapades; most of them shamelessly concocted. i sat there alternately preening and mortified. the paucity of water in madras and my making up for that by depleting the water levels in trivandrum was a sure-fire way to get a few chuckles.

if i was lucky a couple of kids down the street would get a game of monopoly going and i'd roll the dice with the best of them. there were three of them on udarashiromany avenue that i used to spend most of my afternoons with. choopa, the leader and dabbler in amateur theatrics. sajji, the serious academic one. harikrishnan, mama's boy whose fate was sealed with a dad who ran an industrial strength tuition center in his house and who kept forcing his son to study harder. we'd hang out mostly at harikrishnan's house. i suspect the three of them didn't hang out usually but those months of summer when i'd visit we'd all somehow naturally come together. their houses were right across the road from ours. there were of course other boys who came and went, none that i really recall well enough. choopa's now an established actor in malayalam television serials and has small roles in movies. he's got the typical 'acchayan' look with a receding forehead, gold-framed glasses, an amply well-fed body and a luxorious moustache. saji is married with a kid and unsurprisingly he became an engineer with a construction company. harikrishnan surprised everyone by settling down in california with a wife and a job with cisco. i got to see the first two this trip, it was a slightly awkward meeting, perhaps it was just the monopoly and cards that kept us together.

some evenings my grandfather would walk across to the neighbor's house to play cards. the house belonged to an academic called karim who eventually became quite famous in kerala. i'd simply jump the wall and run into their kitchen to be pampered. they'd play rumy with coins as stakes. i inhaled enough second-hand smoke there to convince me to never take up smoking ever. they'd sit on wicker chairs around an ancient wooden table in the porch that was covered by a frayed felt cover, karim smoking his imported cigarettes and my grandfather smoking his usuals 'wills'. time used to slow down during those evenings, maybe it was the way the smoke rose lazily from the cigarettes held languidly in their long fingers. fingers which were always shuffling and rearranging cards, perpertually looking for an advantage in the game. the games were never about winning, it was more two friends needing an excuse to spend time with each other.