A journey back in time

As our school broke up following our half-yearly examinations in the late 1940s, I took a keen interest in playing tops with some of my schoolmates in our neck of the woods. That day after I returned home from the game, my father asked me whether I would like to see our ancestral house in Thiruvananthapuram, where he had been a research assistant in the department of archaeology under the Travancore (Thiruvananthapuram) government for decades. To my query if we would return to Madras (Chennai) within 10 days since our school was to reopen after 12 days, he said we would be back within at most a week. 

Filled with thrills and spills at the very thought of visiting my birthplace I had not been to for over a decade, I started packing my habiliments in a suitcase and got ready for our move. The next day, boarding the Madras-Trivandrum Express and occupying our seats and berths reserved in a first-class coupe, we set out for the capital of Kerala. After about 16 hours of pleasant journey, we got to Thiruvananthapuram, had our breakfast at a hotel far from the railway station, and hailing a taxi, reached a sizeably big house nestling amidst a clump of trees. “That’s our house,” my father told me as I stood having a panoramic view of the building and its environs. Soon my father handed over a bunch of keys to Sahadevan, the watchman, to open the entrance door. Once inside the house, we opened the doors and windows of all seven spacious rooms flanking the long corridor leading to the kitchen and the rear door so as to let out the musty odour remaining trapped inside for long. 

For five days my father and I were up to our ears listing the furniture and all odds and ends lying in the house for years. After we had crashed out on the next day following our tiresome work for hours, a loud clunk from the rear side ruffled us from our profound slumber.

Springing up at once and switching on the light, we armed ourselves with a stick each from the adjacent lumber room and moved towards the kitchen, where a dusky bloke with his dhoti slovenly folded up and tucked up at half mast, raising his shirtfront to show his concave belly, said in a feeble voice that he had had no food for the past two days and added that he merely consumed the leftovers from the vessels and at once prostrated before my father. Touched by his pathetic condition, my father commiserated with him and told him to wait a while. Soon bringing a ten-rupee note from his purse, he held it out to him. Pocketing it quickly, he left through the rear door wishing well of both of us. Locking the door straight, we fell back to sleep.