Fading sights and sounds

I was gobsmacked by his untiring rolling on the hot tar road, clad only in a dhoti.

One of the common sights and sounds, apart from the cries of street hawkers, that we heard in the early 1950s was the rhythmic utterance of “Govindho Narayana” by a man rolling along the tarred road in the hot midday sun in Madras.

 A student of the fifth form (class 10 of today) then, busy with my school assignment, I would close my notebook as soon as I heard his cry, rush from the study to the kitchen, take a handful of rice from the gunny bag and transfer it to the pail the rolling man held above his pate, arms fully stretched.

Following this offer, I would retreat to the entrance of our house and keep gazing at him, listening with rapt attention to his rhythmic repetition of the same two words, interspersed with an unintelligible murmur in Tamil. What left me gobsmacked was his untiring rolling on the scorching hot tar road, clad only in a dhoti with his torso uncovered, while adroitly holding the copper pail containing rice grains and a few coins well above the noggin, not letting even a wee bit of it drop. Such phenomenal dexterity was all but impossible without much practice.

This form of worship among Hindus is known as angapradhakshanam, where after an ablution of oneself, a man or a woman rolls on the ground around the sanctum sanctorum of the temple with arms stretched out and joined together in fulfilment of any vow promised by them.

Other than the occasional movement of cycles and hand-pulled rickshaws, there were almost no motorised vehicles plying on the roads in residential areas those days, thus leaving the man uninterrupted to his rolling. I would gaze at him wide-eyed from our house, my ears enjoying his continuous utterance of the same two monosyllables till he rolled over to the next house. At this point, I would advance to the gate and continue to feast my eyes on that the strange sight. While my mother never tut-tutted at this activity since it also involved giving alms to cadgers, I would indulge in staring only on Sundays and during school vacations.

Another cry, shrill and fairly loud, with a prolonged accent of a single syllable, “O” and distinct ring to it, would emanate from the crossroads mostly in the afternoon hours. That belonged to a Chinese man with a pack of colourful pieces of cloth tied to his bicycle carrier which he sell to his usual customers in our residential locality.

Now, over three scores later, as numerous condominiums are supplanting the independent, compound-walled houses of the residential areas, my contemporaries and I can only think of where these people have vanished to with the flavour and fineness of that era.