Basking in my childhood memories.

Belated Onam wishes to all my malayalee friends.

It has been more than a week since I posted my last blog, and as per my latest mantra, which I found a month back, I am supposed to pen in a regular blog or at least a microblog every Thursday. Last Thursday, I did key in some text in a word document on my laptop, but was unable to beat my inertia and the incessant evening rains to walk down till the nearest Internet Cafe and post it online. Now, to make the link up easier from my end, I have set up this 24x7 unlimited broadband connection at my home in Kannur, and so, am now closing off my much delayed weekly blog.

As expected of this holiday, the sequence of events has so far been pretty eventful (?). For the last few days, I was mostly tied up reconnecting with my cousins who, like me are on their usual staycation or; otherwise working around this new house, setting it up. Rest of the time, which incidentally can also be classified as the major part, was spent hogging, boozing and lazing around.

Although I wasn’t dumped off the flight this time, I did have a good ‘Lesson Learnt’. At the Airport, I found out the real reason why most people detested travelling on a budget airline. Whilst most of the ‘Check In’ counters had beautiful young girls, the Airport’s Authority deputed for us a team of two pathetically slow and lost men. One of which, was an old Chinese man and the other a North Indian guy, who resembled, both by his looks and tongue as a Halwai from one of those streets in Old Delhi. As per the Air India Express norms, I was carrying fifteen kilos of extra baggage, which I later got discounted to ten. Anyways, I ultimately ended up paying a total fare more than the regular ticket. It pained as wisdom dawned at the wrong time, just to remind me that I’d now be travelling on a budget airline (with congested seating) by spending more than the amount that I should have otherwise on a regular airline. And to make matters worse, I’d now have to pay for the earphones and liquor too.

With four hours to spare, I was waiting at the departure gate, fidgeting with my laptop and experimenting ways and means to catch a stronger wireless signal to get online and share my miseries with my facebook friends, when this mid fortyish something lady approached me enquiring for ‘Gate no 17’ in Malayalam. I was sitting right under the board with ‘17’ written on it and so pointed my hand towards it while still focussing on my laptop monitor. She asked me if the seat next to me was free and if she could sit there. I didn’t respond and she didn’t wait for one. She just sat down.


For some time she kept observing me as I was working my way trying to get appropriate WiFi connectivity. She finally broke the ice and enquired if I was a Computer Engineer. That was it. I closed my laptop and packed it off. She had just managed to find what I was so desperately trying hard to - Find a stray sounding board. Like me she was also all excited to go home and seemed brimming with a motley mix of various degrees of joy, coupled with an overwhelming excitement and nervousness and what not. She was travelling on her first return journey back to India after her first ever gulf stint as a Housemaid with a young Qatari family, where she’d just finished her 2 ½ years before she earned her first vacation. And here I was: My last vacation to India was just eight months back and I’d been away from my wife and kids for barely a month and look at the ruckus and drama I was creating. As she kept talking to me, I started getting this feeling that my longing was so puny compared to hers; and more so because I just realized that, that’s the common story of those countless Indian forced singles working on those innumerable menial jobs in the Gulf. I am just so fortunate enough to have my family by my side all the time and I thank God for that.

She had many good things to say about her fertile hometown; the weather she expected back home; the people in general; and above all her kids, who she portrayed as the most naughtiest and yet the most adorable ones on earth. As she kept blabbering about her ‘God’s Own Country’, I kept wondering about my own identity. All that I could contribute about my hometown to our little chat was that I knew my town had beautiful beaches, power cuts, bad roads and lots of strikes. That’s all. I was so embarrassed with my miniscule knowledge of my home town that I got up on the pretext of going to the wash room and just vamoosed off from her vicinity.

I walked away from gate no 17 and hid myself behind a bunch of Nepalese boys lounging on the floor next to the cafeteria and far away from her sight. Till my boarding announcement, I sat there in that corner hugging tightly to my laptop, questioning myself “What am I?” and “Where do I belong to?” Although I was born in Kerala, I am certainly not a pure Keralite. I cannot vouch myself for that identity. I actually know nothing about my so called hometown, Kannur, let alone Kerala. Just because I love being in this place or enjoy savouring the local food and manage to converse in a little bit of broken Malayalam does not qualify my malayalee status. Again, although I spent all my childhood in Gujarat, I am not a Gujarati. I have lived and worked in Maharashtra for ten years but, I certainly am not a Maharastrian. So, where do I belong? Am I just another modern day nomad with an Indian identity? And if I am just another drifter, why do I long to visit these few places again and again and again and what is it that one thing that keeps taking me back to Kannur and Kozikkode and Baroda year after year, every year? Is it the food, or the people, or the place itself? A question, which set me deliberating for days.

At Trisshur, aided by my MIL’s cooking I ended up undoing my strict diet regimen and went about on a hogging spree. On one such hogging spree, as I was devouring a sumptuous stack of Appam and Stew, I overheard Tara conversing on phone to her grandmother, her Ammummu, based in Kozikkode, firstly explaining her as to how they were related and then later on wishing her as it was Ammummu’s birthday today, to which Ammummu asked back, how old she had turned today? Tara’s Ammummu is eighty eight years old and passing through the initial stages of dementia. She cannot remember anything for long; doesn’t even remember her immediate family and so doesn’t have any memories at all. It is all wiped off. I was instantly taken aback by this sudden spate of anxiety and was found asking myself as to what would happen if I were to pass through a one-way phase like that? With the kind of work stress and pressure that our psyche is subjected to these days, that stage doesn’t seem very far off. I am someone who lives and breathes each day by recalling my good old memories and going through something like that would be as bad as being born again every day. Through the consequent days I kept talking to myself reminding me of those wonderful days I spent as a child in Baroda and those many two/three week long annual visits we made to Kannur visiting our relatives and celebrating Christmas every year with my cousins visiting from all over India. Those were the days.

My dad grew up in a joint family and he was the eldest kid in his Tharavad, which comprised of four families with sixteen children in all, living under one roof. My dad’s ancestral home falls within the Naval Defence Security Corps Zone and we had a small pristine beach aptly called ‘The Baby Beach’ all for ourselves. As kids we used to laze around there the whole day and I guess it is there that I actually fell in love with the beach. As I kept fishing deeper and deeper into my memories I drew out reels of us kids sitting potty on those beachside rocks shoo-shooing those little crabs with small sticks in our hand, while dragonflies hovered around us. Each day our respective parents, would drag us from the beach and our many hideouts within those niches in the rocks to take us back home and make us squat in a line on floor on our forced lunch and later in the night deposit all of us in a row in the portico room with a firm reprimand to go to sleep instantly, which we would otherwise spend fighting for that elusive blanket all night long and end up dosing one over the other.

As time went by, people got busy with their routine lives and the usual Christmas crowd went shrinking. Families started visiting at their own convenience and we kids hardly managed to regroup under one roof. The tourism industry in this place flourished and some of our playground, the verdant backyard to our Ancestral Home was taken over by the Mascot group, who later developed a resort at that location and the navy released a restraining order on the use of the Baby Beach by civilians. I guess it is these events coupled with my unquenched childhood longing to be free that keeps haunting me and pulling me back to Kannur. I now firmly believe that my childhood memories keep wandering around in the form of ghosts around those loosely dumped rocks along the azure seaside and such myriad places that I carry good memories of. These spirits keep calling me and pulling me back enticing me into this familiar neighbourhood year after year. This I believe is true.

Few years back, my dad wilfully relinquished his rights off his ancestral home, and for many years, we didn’t have a house of our own in Kannur, but we kept visiting. There were times when there wasn’t enough room at any of our relatives, but we still visited the town and stayed at the very Resort which gobbled up our playground. Last year I brought myself a property in Kannur and laid institution to my own home within my so called hometown. I have since promised myself to relinquish myself of this nomad tag and make myself eligible and worthy of belonging to this place. I also know that I need to expend a lot of effort towards that, which I will do for sure. Meanwhile, till my abilities to reminisce are still intact, let me just stretch out, relax and bask in my good old childhood memories.