Walking in the moon light!
Yesterday was full moon night and we- Krishna, Chinku and his friends- two Ajays and Girish – were on the beach. The night was beautiful and bewitching. The typical evening crowds had returned to their homes; so had the venders on the beach. Only few romantic couples wandered around in the cool breeze making the night cozy and lively. Girish, a friend of my son from Gulbarga Central University, belongs to Palakkkad, the place of Porattunatakkam- a sort of theatre. I had experienced this art form in my childhood, when we lived in a small house near the Bharata Puzha. The villagers organize this drama during the harvest festival on a makeshift stage in the paddy field. When the night falls, the villagers gather there in the paddy field with mats and plenty of eats; the old ones with betel nut boxes. The actors wore colorful costumes: very different from their real life drudgery. There were no women actors; so the men dressed themselves as women and with extraordinarily larger boobs as if that was the symbol of womanhood. They would use the local dialects and the songs were rusty but appealing to all. We, the girls, always sat together while the boys sometimes went to the back- stage to peep into the makeshift greenroom. In fact, they only told us that the women characters who came on the stage were actually men.

Girish sang a poratunatakam song for us and also another folk song pleasing the snakes. Snake worship was common in Kerala and we used to have a small area covered with lots of trees and climbers (Pambukavu), exclusively for the snakes. It had idols of snakes carved in rock. Snakes were fed, once in a week, with milk. It was again a belief that snakes come out and drank the milk when we moved away. And we never questioned that; though the texts we read taught us that snakes do not drink milk. Diyas are lighted every evening. And whenever we saw a snake in the courtyard (those days it was not un common), my grandma would never allow us to disturb the snake; instead, she would calmly talk to the snake, “why did you come this time? Haven’t we given your dues? If not please forgive us: please don’t disturb the children. Go away.” And unbelievably, the snake used to go away. So we always thought that Grandma had extraordinary powers.

Girsih’s songs brought so much memories of my childhood in the village; I can still the smell the paddy in my mind. Grandma is still alive; but without her magical wand. Her paddy fields are gone. And her old tiled house which became unfashionable for her children has given way to a house with concrete roof. The old house had an “ara” (a dark wooden chamber meant for storage place) which was a treasury for all the children. She used to store so many eats there – bananas, salted mangoes, unniappam, achappam and even sugar. We used to devour the ara often; especially during the vacation. Once my twin brother stole a mouthful of sugar without realizing the ants in it! Ants bit his tongue mercilessly and he cried out quietly. He did not cry aloud for obvious reasons!

Now it was the turn of Ajay to sing and a thorough a city bred kid that he is, he sang an English song and my son joined him. They brought me back from nostalgia to the realities of the present. We sat there for long looking at the moon and the magic it spreads on the sea. You may say the moon is the same. But my moon in childhood days was a very different one: it had a different meaning in my life. Here sitting with these children, though the same age group but so different in attitude, behavior and brought up in different cultural settings, I realize that I am neither here nor there!