The Hindu Business Line : The village after time

Uncle, ek kahani boliye na (Uncle, tell me a story)," pleaded 5-year-old Sujata, as one watched a few girls and boys locked in a scrimmage on the lawns of our housing society in Borivili. For me, the summer months of April and May are the best as one gets up in the morning to the feverish calls of the koyal, red-vented bulbul and house sparrow mixed with loud guffaws from a pack of kids, free from school. One is not sure who hits the lawns first — the birds or the kids.

One starts the day laughing and that indeed is sufficient. "Hamare pass kahani nahin hai. Aap mere ko ek kahani bolo (I have no story. You tell me one)," I replied and Sujata yelled back with glee, "Sunenge (Will you hear)?"

From her bedroom she has been watching a koyal calling and a couple of crows shooing it away from their nests atop a peepal tree for quite some time. She has been following the ways of crows building their nests with sticks and waste picked up on the daily rounds. Sujata wanted to know why a koyal never built a nest for her chicks and why the bird comes alive in summer and is absent the rest of the year. Her parents had no answers nor did I.

Sujata had retailed an event and was searching for links to complete the story. The upset girl walked back to the swing on the lawns and asked me to help her enjoy a good heave up and down. Some mornings one offers the kids a few cups of Yogi — Amul's popular yogurt costing Rs 5 a cup. They like it though Sujata waits for me in the evenings to buy her a bhel puri. Through the week Sujata and some of her friends are packed off to a crèche by their working parents by 10 in the morning and come back home late in the night. They have no grandparents at home to weave them embroidered fiction; they have no caring grandmothers like the one of Swami in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends.

A thought troubling me at 60 after becoming a grandfather is whether one has a bag of old man's tales to engage my granddaughter, Shreya. Also, will the tale earn her approval or whether she will just walk off to her grandmother, Rama, who can come up with a grandmother's katha in no time. One has time, as Shreya is a lisping one-year-old walking all over the place with mischief in every stride.

Brought up in Alleppey with an aged grandmother as a comfy furniture, Rama will not run short of fables told to her by the old woman. Rama's telling will have all the nooks and corners of a heritage building with humans and ghosts sharing space. "In our times in villages, grandfathers were stiff figures and grandchildren never went near them. Grandmothers would protect us from beatings and scoldings. She will be around to put you to sleep with a story, which invariably started with `Once upon a time ... '. The next day, the storyteller and the children will forget the story and repetitions never bothered us. Sometimes she would sing shlokas. That seeded the first affections for story and song, laughter and tears," Rama told me.

She had made an important point and confirmation came when one read the book, The Village Before Time, by Madhavan Kutty. The Malayalam original has been translated into English by Gita Krishnankutty. It is a huge grandmother's narration with characters bobbing up and down the pages to tease the readers' imagination. On the flap, O.V. Vijayan comments: "Whether this book is fiction or memory is besides the point. There is an incredible abundance of characters and situations. This sheer exuberance leaves us with a deep fictional experience."

Kuttimmalu Valiamma is indeed a pathetic existence. Then comes grandmother Kachi Amma. "All of us called our grandmother Kachi Amma. It was she who explained to us our ancestry; that we belonged to the Poothiri Vamsam. A deep, subconscious wealth of history was contained within her," writes Kutty. The book ends with a verse from the poet Vylopilli: "Whatever imaginary world you've grown in/Whatever industrial society you've lived in/May the radiance, the fragrance,/The compassion of your village/Always be within you — / And a handful of konna flowers."

That could be because village homes had ancient grandmothers. In recent months one has been putting down in a bound notebook narrations of old men and women as told me by friends. My friend Veena told me about her grandmother who lives alone in a capacious, multi-tiered home in some village near Palghat. She is 82.

Her children have left and gone to make a living in some city or other though that does not bother her. She turns down every invitation from her children as she spends time touching up her memories. She cooks her own food and has not even a maid at home for company on eerie nights. She sleeps on a double cot, occupying an entire room. Under her cot are buckets filled with currency and other knick-knacks, as she does not believe in a bank. "One only hopes she is not raided by thieves," says Veena. In villages, after some time, there will be no grandmothers and grandfathers. One will find them in old-age homes in cities. With that a fine piece of fiction will be lost.

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