Narayanan Hariharasastry
Having an alto relief from swotting up for weeks for our annual examination we would on the last day return home and casually cast off our writing pad at a corner of our rooms.
The next day we would have to travel to a distant village for a stay of two months with our maternal uncle to while away our summer vacation. That day we would go to bed earlier than usual and sleep in the next morning till our mom reminded us of our movement to our uncle’s house. With Shiva, our car driver on the steering wheel we, our folks and my siblings, two sisters and a brother all elder to me would get at the railway station late in the afternoon.
As the train screeched to a halt on the platform at 3 P M we would quickly board it and take our seats. The clock striking the tenth hour of the night the train would halt briefly at a nondescript village nestling amidst a cluster of villages from where our maternal uncle would take us readily in his bullock cart ---- the sole mode of conveyance in rural areas those days --- to their house.
On our first visit to their house, their children, also teenagers like us would soon endear to us and guide us into their house where there were five spacious rooms and a vast corridor. The next day the children would take us round the sprawling green fields around the house, abundant in grains, crops and pulses.
During vespertine hours we boys would play volleyball in a vast playground a stone’s throw from our house while girls almost the age of our sisters would be playing badminton. Years rolled by with our family staying with our relations every summer vacation.
As we all grew up and joined colleges for our higher studies our uncle curled up his toes with a severe attack of typhoid. To our utter shock, our affectionate auntie too breathed her last the very next year. Thereafter the children had to be under the care of our father’s younger brother, a well-heeled person who helped the children in selling all their ancestral properties and fairly dividing the sale proceeds among themselves.
After their academic courses each of them got well positioned in their lives purely by working their fingers to the bone. With weeks turning into months and years each of them tied the knots within the circle of our relatives and got well settled in the Madras city of those days of the nineteen fifties.
As townsfolk whenever they invited us to any important function in the family like housewarming, marriage of their sons and daughters and what not, we had to stay only in hotels in the town for the couple of days of the function, at our own cost since their houses in the residential localities of the city lamentably lacked space and comfort unlike the ones in the rural areas where we enjoyed staying with them in rooms with open slather for our free movements in them.
These days, invitations for family functions are sent to the near and dear ones through “WhatsApp” besides unfailingly asking them to confirm their bookings for their stay in hotels in advance. Indeed there is a generation between generations.