The number of visitors we have each morning is going up perceptibly. There is the young calf which comes every morning; he started off by nudging the latch of the gate. Initially, we used to think it was someone knocking. Now we know better. He has grown so audacious that now he has learnt to open the gate and come in after a few nudges. Then there are a couple of cows who rest under the neem tree in front of the house and occasionally call out for water. All the overripe bananas and old bread in the home go to these bovine visitors. There are two regulars, mongrels, who we feed twice a day with bread slices. They are unpaid securityguards outside the house, while our pom manages the interior. We call them ‘karuppan’ and ‘vellayan’ because of their colour. Vellayan is a soft-natured fellow who would willingly forgo all the bread I give if only I would scratch his ears. He would stand docilely all the while I patted him while karuppan would clamour around for attention. There is this white cat which delights in playing the ‘catch me if u can’ game with my pom, Brownie. It would stylishly strut the length of the compound wall daring Brownie to come and get her. The other day, my husband playfully threw a couple of seedais at the cat and to his surprise it picked them up and ate them. Cats eating seedais!!! Now the cat comes in regularly looking for seedais and murukkus. There were two little sparrows which used to spend their night on the ‘mullai’ vine which hung in front of the house. I haven’t seen them for quite a while. There are the occasional snakes too. There was a squirrel that raised its family in a carton in my kitchen loft. I got to know about this family only when the young ones grew bold enough to scamper around the loft. The latest addition now is a crow. Attracted by the smell that wafted from the chappathis that I was making, a crow came and alighted at the kitchen window. I threw her a piece which she caught neatly in her beak and flew off. A couple of minutes later she was back again for a second helping. I told her that she was welcome but that she would have to wait. My daughter, curious to know who I was talking to in the kitchen came in to investigate and burst out laughing.

It has become a bad habit this of talking to animals. But I just cannot help it. They understand so much and respond in their own inimitable way.

The Banyan – it evoked images of a sprawling campus dotted with trees with a magnificent banyan towering over all of them. Silly, I know….very childish, in fact….but what I actually saw over there was too overwhelming…..it left me mute…the few minutes I spent there left me drained emotionally…the building itself was too drab, and the interior was also dampening…dampening on the spirit and on the senses. The inmates of the Banyan, so many of them, all women, most of them mentally retarded in different degrees, were scattered all over the place, lining the corridors. And as far as I could see, there seemed to be very few people to look after them. They were all being cared for in the best possible manner possible, I was sure. Running for a home for the aged and the infirm and orphans seems no big deal when compared to looking after destitute mentally unstable women. They are not easy to control, they are not in their ‘right senses’ literally, and therefore cannot be expected to fall in line with the routines of daily life. They have to be tackled with great care and sensitivity. A large park with shady trees and flowering plants to cheer the senses and interspersed with lots of benches to sit and relax could have a soothing effect on this mentally retarded people. The building itself could be made more cheerful. All this would mean more space and more people to look after the place, which literally means more money.

 The young girl who took us around surprised me, in fact, made me feel ashamed. At her age, most girls would be dating or freaking out. Finding her there, and that too on a Sunday of all days left me feeling guilty all over. I believe there are about 350 women there now. They are picked up from the streets, found abandoned or wandering aimlessly. There are rehabilitation programmes for these women, but it is not always that their relatives are willing to take them back after rehabilitation. There is stigma attached to these people. Even if they become alright, and are willing to earn their keep by working as maids or else, there are not many takers. Sad plight. They were all smiles when they saw us…some of them greeted us with folded hands…yet others attempted to make conversation with us. One of them even asked if I would take her out for a movie. I was so overwhelmed…was very near tears.  The girl told me that they could do with a lot of help around the place, both administrative work and to take care of those people there. Money is not the only need, volunteers are also required in large numbers to run the place. Some large-hearted doctors visit the place on a regular basis treating the inmates there. What the place needs is still more large-hearted people.

Tact…I need a lot of it…so people say. Do I? Sometimes I wonder if tact is analogous to compromise. It must be. If not why does one not come out a winner when one is not tactful. Managing people is all about tact…they say. Is “Monkey Management” about tact?

Seems ages…….since I blogged last…….what a way to live…..What is life if full of care you don’t have time even to blog…….for me blogging is thinking aloud……on screen. Probably haven’t been thinking at all……just going through life’s motions. Feel like throwing up everything….literally…..running away….just to keep running….like Forrest Gump. His running brought him fame and laurels. My running would just end up leaving me panting and exhausted. In retrospect, life hasn’t been so bad after all……there were a couple of good feedbacks for my job….got to see “ayudha eluthu”, and oh yes got to see ‘Amadeus’ again. What a film and what a performance….superlative is the word. Wheedled my spouse into buying me a couple of sarees which I haven’t got around to wearing yet…..waiting for an occasion. But have anything of these been worthwhile? Nay! But it might be if I get to go to ‘Banyan’ this weekend.

What is this ‘inner voice’ that everyone keeps referring to? Some say it is one’s ‘conscience’, some say it is your ‘better sense’, ‘sixth sense’. Another extreme says it is God speaking to you/through you. My ‘inner voice’ is forever at loggerheads with my rational voice and manages to win all the time, though of course the win has not always been to my benefit. I wonder if that is that part of you that wants to be heard out and therefore dictates to you and makes you do things that will be noticed, not that it will be appreciated…….the suicidal streak!

Good things never last, do they? My idyll days came to an end when my father married again. Not many children get to attend their father’s wedding. I was one of the privileged few. I remember I was wearing a light blue buttersilk gown and so were my sisters (my sisters were under the care of my own paternal granny). I found that if you spun round fast and then sat down suddenly the gown fluffed round you like blue froth. I taught my sisters how to do it and all three of us were perfecting this skill in one corner of the marriage hall while my father tied the auspicious knot. My stepmother was no different from the average woman (that she has changed and mellowed over the years is a different story). I was packed off to Singapore to our parents after their marriage. They lived in a two-room flat that left me suffocating after the vast expanses of space in my earlier life.  Books became my sole companions. More than ever I began retreating into my own small(?) world of books. But I could never find the time to read them. My mother and now my father too were against the reading of storybooks. It always had to be my schoolbooks or my homework and lights had to be put off by nine. I despaired. But necessity is the mother of invention. I found that the moonlight that streamed into the room was quite enough to read. (Probably that is one reason why I had to start wearing specs at the age of twelve.) And so my clandestine affair with books continued. My school library was a treasure-house that spewed and churned books of all kinds. This was the period when I set my sight on distant realms other than Enid Blyton and Hans Andersen. I read everything that came my way, classics, trash et al. But soon I became a discerning reader and the rendezvous continued until I was packed off again, this time to India, to my granny. I was stashed away in a boarding school. But luckily for me it happened to be a convent run by nuns, headed by an American nun. So they had funds aplenty and the school was well run with all the necessary facilities and of course all the books one would want to read. This was where I got myself introduced to the real unabridged Dickens, George Eliot, William MakepeaceThackeray, Maugham and the rest. This was also where I got to read books in my vernacular. My grandfather had taught me the Tamil alphabets and I had read primers but never the real thing until I reached India. Saandilyan, Kalki, Jaavar Seetharaman, Mu Va., Puthumai Pitthan, Devan, Bharathi, Barathidasan………..oooh the list is endless.

…I truly roamed the hills and dales as a child. The small town in Malaysia where I grew up as a child was a picturesque little place. Everyone knew everyone else. So there was no way I could ever get lost. Walking back home after school itself was a delightful experience. It was a long straight road from school to home, a road lined with trees on both sides so that the overhanging green canopy intertwined forming a virtual verdant cover overhead. One never felt the sun nor the heat. And there were neat little houses with well-kept gardens all along the route and a large park in between. So there was always a riot of colours everywhere. I just drank in the sight greedily, peeping into every garden to see what new flower had bloomed that day. As soon as I reached home, there would be grandpa waiting with a mug of milk and biscuits to feed his supposedly starved grandchild. I gobbled up whatever he gave me and would start off to find my playmates. The town was dotted with small knotty hills and meadows just behind the main thoroughfare of the town. This is where we set off to after school. There was also a small stream that ran through one of these meadows. The water was so clear you could see each and every pebble and stone at the bottom of the stream. I haven’t seen clearer water since. The water would only be knee deep so we splashed about in the water hunting for the smoothest and roundest pebble that we could find. I remember having a tin full of these pebbles. Once tired of the water we would race each other to the hilltop. The winner would get the pick of the day’s pebbles and I did lose quite a few pebbles this way for the boys always outsmarted the girls in sprinting. Then I dragged myself home tired but happy. But it would still not be time for bed until I had read a couple of my favourite stories for the night. I supplemented the books that my father gave me with more from the school library. There were Grimm’s fairy tales and Hans Andersen’s tales that lulled me to sleep. My heart went all out to the ugly duckling. (To continue…..)

It is really heartening to know that the present generation reads historical fiction and that too in the vernacular. Very few youngsters now know about Kalki and his masterpieces. When I read Ponniyin Selvan I remember it being an exhilarating experience. I felt privy to every character in the novel. I roamed the hills and dales with Vanthiyathevan, delighted in the repartee between him and Nandini, enjoyed Alvaarkkadian’s skirmishes, was awed by periya pazhuvettaraiyar; the list is endless. I have carried memories of this novel all my life. Sivakamiyin Sabatham had an equally powerful impact on me.  The characterization of Nagananthi adigal is fascinating. He left me mesmerized for a long time. The only other character that meets this halfway is the Egyptian Arbaces in The Last Days of Pompeii. There is an uncanny resemblance between the two characters.

Ponniyin Selvan was staged as a play sometime back, by Koothupattarai I think. I wonder how they were able to pack this epic within the confines of three hours. Unfortunately, I missed the event. The other good news that I read about this novel is that it is being translated into English right now. Am curious to see how it has turned out.

  After many aborted attempts we were finally trying to tackle all the papers and bills that had accumulated over the months. We had just started sorting them into piles when there was a knock at the door. Days at home are always punctuated by unwanted intruders at the gate. My husband went out to investigate. It was the EB man come to calculate the electricity consumption. The electricity board was beneath the staircase and the stairs could be accessed both from the outside of the house and from the inside. My husband unlocked the wooden door and then the grille gate and went down two steps and bent down to look into the meter. The next second he was back in the hall, pale and rattled. But he hadn’t lost his cool. I heard him tell the EB man that there was a snake down there, coiled around the meter box. The EB man went down to have a look, but the snake had vanished. Nevertheless, we asked him to come back in the evening and closed the wooden door that led into the hall from the staircase. Then we took turns keeping watch at the other entrance from the outside while my husband called the fire department for help. The fire department in turn gave us the velachery forest dept number and asked us to contact them. The forest dept was very obliging. They told us to make sure that the snake did not leave the premises until they arrived. The official arrived within an hour of our calling. During the intervening one hour that we were keeping vigil the snake did try coming out a few times. We saw it poking its head out, surveying the terrain outside to make good its escape. But we made noises and shooed it back in. Let alone it might have found its way out and escaped. But we wanted it caught for we had seen it too often within the house premises. Each time we sighted it, we never ventured into the narrow strips of garden around the house for at least a week. Even when we had to out of compulsion it was with a lot of trepidation. It was only two weeks earlier that we had seen a very long grayish black snake. Our pom Brownie sighted it first, went chasing it, and at one point they were both confronting each other near the well. The snake reared its head and hissed venomously at Brownie. Brownie retreated a step and in the meantime the snake climbed up the well and onto the compound wall and made a clean jump into the house beyond.

This time the snake was of average length, but it was doubtless a cobra as its dirty yellow colour and its slow gait indicated. The forest official examined the area beneath the staircase, high and low, but couldn’t find the snake. It certainly had not left the staircase, so the only place it could have gone into was a deep hole beneath the electricity board. It was through this hole that the main cable came into the house from the road. The rats had made this a bigger hole. So finally we had this hole packed with a lot of sand and cement and dug the snake’s grave in the process.

The next day was another day of heavy cleaning, removing all scraps and rubbish and rat hideouts all around the house, making sure that there was no place that any other snake could be tempted to come to.

However fascinating snakes may be, at close range they are still terrifying aren’t they?

However many books I may read by James Herriott I don’t think I can ever bring myself to love reptiles, let alone suffer them; and snakes top the list. Ugh!