The coveted cowrie shells

Seven decades on, the sacred shells find a cherished place

My paternal grandma, Kanthimathi, fondly called Kanthapatti by everyone in our family, was staying with us in the mid-1940s in Coimbatore. She was fonder of me than my three siblings—two sisters and one brother—all my elders.

She always remained mewed up in a room in our house with her pate tonsured slick and hooded all the time with one end of her pale yellow sari, her forehead slathered with viboodhi (sacred ash). Most of the time, she was engrossed in passing the beads on a string of Rudraksha while her lips kept moving constantly in inaudible prayer with her eyes closed. The rest of the time she spent reading a few Tamil weeklies. In the bygone years, widows were proscribed by society to stay always aloof and withdrawn from others. 

Sometimes patti, as a grandmother is called in Tamil, would call me into her room and tell me some moral stories or narrate some interesting anecdotes from her personal life, as she was a skilled raconteuse. I would sit beside her, listening to her with rapt attention. Patti was also a wizard in playing an ancient, traditional indoor game called Pallankuzhi (alagulimane in Kannada), which originated in Tamil Nadu and was played by using cowrie shells. Every time I played the game with her, I was only smitten hip and thigh since she was invincible in it. My sisters, who at times played the game with Patti only to be chagrined and trounced, were sighing for possession of those shiny, dotted, and attractive shells. As the years rolled by, my father, an employee in a transferable occupation, moved en famille to Salem with Patti in tow. My eldest sister, who had done her Masters in English, was led up the aisle while my brother and my immediate elder sister both joined The Salem Municipal College to do
their Intermediate Second Year (the present Second PUC) and graduation, respectively.

After passing my SSLC, I enlisted in the Air Force. On completion of my training, I was posted to a remote unit in the extreme north-eastern region, where my father, who was promptly filling me in on everything and everyone at home by post, once wrote to me about the state of Patti’s deteriorating health. Scarcely had I applied for a short leave to go home when another letter I received from my father stated that Patti had breathed her last. Months later, when I had been home on leave, my father, as requested by Patti, handed over to me a small box containing those very cowrie shells coveted by my sisters. It is now over seven decades since I took possession of those cowrie shells and am preserving them as not mere keepsakes of my grandmother but sacred objects among the idols of god in my pooja room.