So P got his first ever certificate yesterday. He has been attending Kumon maths for the past couple of months. His dad and I were surprised when the teacher told us couple of weeks back that P would be taking his current level test. A test? After just 7 weeks? Oh well, we thought, nice experience.
Imagine our pride when he aced the test! Woo-hoo! So yesterday, he got his ‘Achievement Certificate’ and got his picture taken with it. It was hilarious watching him play to the camera. Now that he is comfortable with this, we decided to sign him up for Kumon English too.
He had the assessment to get over with first, to see where he was at. And my son is such a card, I tell you! A girl, she must be in her A levels or something, was throwing words at him and he had to spell them. Another friend of hers was sitting at the same table, watching him. Every time she gave him a word, P’s instantaneous reaction would be ‘oh that? That is too easy!’
After the third such comment, the girls picked up the refrain and chanted along with him ‘oh it is too easy, innit?’
Anyways, the teacher came and told us he did well and they were ever so pleased with the way he is going. We were both well chuffed, understandably.
I know there have been discussions going on in various mommy bloggers’ websites about the suitability of extra coaching for children and how soon is too soon etc. When I first heard of Kumon, P was in his Foundation class and was 4 and 1/2 and we both deemed him too young for such extra coaching and decided to leave him be. He loves his school and though is a bit of a chatterbox, he still does really well. When we decided to move back to India at the completion of his Infant’s school, we decided that we needed some extra help and enrolled him with Kumon. He also goes for weekly swimming and random football and kickboxing lessons so it is not all work and no play!
Would I continue with it once we are back in Chennai? I don’t know. I want to give him the chance to settle down in the new environs and get used to things first. And then, if he seems fine and if the situation warrants it, then we’ll see.
In the meantime, it sure is fantastic to see him chock full of pride over his certificate, which is already showing signs of wear, thanks to some rather enthusiastic playing last night. He is all set for the bi-annual tests at Kumon and wants to win the Gold, this September. If it makes him happy….
My Baby is 6 today! I know, I cannot believe it! I keep looking at him, looking just the same as he did yesterday and the day before and today, suddenly, he is a year older. How surreal is this? Where was the red-faced, wrinkled, squalling baby I held seconds after he was born? When did he go and become this child-person who talks cohesively? What the hell have I done with the years?Already, he is concerned that he is becoming older (!) and that in a few years his voice would break ‘into pieces’! I am not ready for this!In the meantime, happy birthday dear heart! May you spread happiness and cheer around you always. And, more importantly, may you always have it in you.
Premalatha tagged me to put baby (ish!) pix of self and the Hubby. I wondered for a while at the sanity of such an act. Then I thought ‘what the heck!’ and decided to give in.
The babe in brand new undies is me. I must’ve been 2-3 months old at that time. Check out the hair!
This innocent (ish) looking child is the Hubby. No clue how old he was at that time – 6 months or thereabouts, I guess.
And this is P, when he was 4 months old.
Now, who wants to take this up? All brave souls who comply, please put the links in the comments section for my viewing pleasure!
Yesterday, I heard my not yet 6 year old son emphatically tell me:
“I am not going to get married – not to a girl, not to a boy, not to an old woman. No. I am not. Ok?”
Ok, my boy. Whatever you want.
A little later, a request to make him put his shoes on before setting foot outside the door got his dad the comment: “whatever!” And I thought I had to wait at least till he hit 10 before hearing a “whatever!”. Is 6 like the new 10 / teenage now?
Who am I? This is a question I have often posed myself since I could formulate those words. Not because I had amnesia like Jackie Chan in that god-awful flick but when I was old enough to differentiate between dialects and accents, I figured the dad’s side of the family in the Village spoke totally differently to us folks in Madras. And this was before taking Madras baashai into account.
One of my earliest memories of visiting the paternal relatives in the Village was sitting down for lunch with most of the cousins in one or the other of the aunts’ houses and the first taste of sambhar neatly lifting the roof off my mouth. After losing my fair share of taste buds, I remember screaming for water only for everyone to hoot:
“kaarardha? Appo bus uduma?”
(Sorry – loses essence in translation. Suffice to say I said it was hot and they made fun of the words employed. Simply put, kaaram, uraippu = spicy hot
Apparently, in the Village one must say ‘orakkidhu’ – I had uttered the TamBram equivalent of that, which was found to be incredibly funny. After that, though I tried to watch what I said, it was still a difficult task as those were the only words I knew and I couldn’t come up with different words just to stop them from wetting themselves.
It was during those lonely, puzzling days that I figured my mum and dad came from different communities. As my dad had always spoken like the rest of us at home, I never had realized the difference.
That was when the problem of what I am and where I belonged started. I tried to say it was to the maternal side as I grew up with them, spoke like them, behaved like them, ate like them, and dressed like them, so I should be one of them, right? My school was inhabited predominantly by TamBrams so it was easy for me just to fit in. And I continued to think I was one of them till the day a (maternal) cousin said ‘but you are not Iyengar anyway!’, bursting yet another bubble.
It was confusion time all over again. What the hell am I? Annual trips to the Village reiterated the belief of ‘never the twain shall be met’ and I came back more confused than ever. Being surrounded by proper TamBrams and wanting to belong made me exaggerate the accent and the behaviour and every time it was checked by dad’s remark that I wanted to be a Brahmin. Well, I wanted to belong, that’s what I wanted, without having to choose between one and another. Mum choosing to follow whatever Iyengar traditions she was comfortable with, dad speaking Iyengarese when surrounded by Iyengars added to the layers of confusion. Not knowing much about the paternal culture and background didn’t help me in identifying myself with them either.
This confusion continued for a long, long time, even till my wedding day. When the time came for the wedding pandal to be put outside the gate, I had thought it would be the tricoloured strips of cloth being strung from pillar A to pillar B, like I had seen in most houses nearby. Till mum shushed me and said ‘adhellam non-Brahmins podaradhu!’
I wanted to scream “then what the heck are we?” I was tired of being stuck in the limbo land and desperately wanted a way out.
Well, I found a way out – to far off UK, by way of my Telugu husband. Whose family preferred to highlight my Brahmin roots as it was much more amenable to their clan than the Padayachi dad half.
If I had thought I had left my confusions back in India, I seem to have taken on new ones. Now to which country do I belong? I have been living in England for almost seven years now and it feels home in many ways. But I still do not inherently understand the English and their xenophobia makes it hard to make proper friends. But I am cut off from Madras and India and cannot understand 100% what is happening there – the societal issues, the changing culture, the politics, mega serials….
At the same time, I cannot fall in with Eastenders, the celebrity obsession, the near-zero importance given to academic achievements, the cold shoulder, the prejudice….
Once again, I’m asking myself – who am I? What am I? Where are my loyalties?
Music – it is about feelings and emotions, right? My choice of music came under much (friendly, of course) ribbing and I shudder to think what kind of comment this post might attract but I can’t help it.
I heard this song after a long, long time today. And with the first bar, it took me back to the time I heard it on my walkman, while on the train back to Madras from Bombay. It carries with it that gentle sway of motion, the sweet ache of parting and a hefty dose of nostalgia.
Summertime in Chennai used to be the days of mangoes (raw and ripe) and vadams. Those were the days when the 3 weeks of kathiri veyyil were the only time the sun beat down on the good people mercilessly. Rest of the time, the folks of Chennai were just left to perspire freely and go about their daily business. But most of May was ruled by the dreaded kathiri and children were generally kept under lock and key.
These kathiri days were ideal for the maami past-time of making vadams and vathals. This laborious process would start around daybreak, with the biggest pressure cooker in the household given a spit and polish and put to use. Copious amount of raw materials, enough to make vathal and vadam for most of the population of the Western world, would be dumped into this cavernous vessel and cooked over a slow fire. Once the koozh reached the desired glutinous consistency, it would be hefted upstairs by the family Bheem-boy, after a significant portion was reserved for Tiffin.
After the initial prep, the paatis and maamis of the household would gather around the plastic sheet and start spinning koozh patterns on it. Kids of the family would be given the important jobs of weighting the sheets down with huge bricks, guarding the vathal from thieving crows and bringing back tasters of half-dried vathals on demand to various members of the family.
At the time of the following incident, I was a wee thing of three summers* and as such, was exempt from guard duty. While the women folk were hard at making vadam, I tried to break land speed records by going faster and faster around everything. My gran, the harbinger of doom, kept cautioning me to cease and desist. ‘Keezhe vizhundida pore dee!’ (mind you don’t take a toss) but of course I paid her no heed. Within a few minutes though, there was a loud yell and an almighty crash.
Deciding to step it up a notch, I tried to move faster but my delicate balance could not keep pace and I fell headlong into freshly laid vathal, just as Grandma Doom predicted. This concoction, laced heavily as it was with fresh green chilies, wasted no time in permeating into my epidermis and within a few moments, I was on fire. After running around like a headless chicken, I was grabbed forcefully and dunked in cold water repeatedly till I stopped shouting and the chillies stopped eating my flesh.
It was a while before I was present for the vathal making ceremony.
A few years later, sibling and I were dispatched to the Other Gran’s household for a small portion of summer. As we did not have much to do with ourselves, apart from twiddle thumbs, we generally tried to get out of these compulsory visits. But senior counsel prevailed and dispatched we were. This summer too was no exception. After exhausting the supply of books, we decided to explore the building block. As the children of the flats were playing downstairs, we went the opposite way. Other Gran, being not very au fait with the rules of kid-dom, repeatedly appealed to us to make friends with the children. But as the sibling and I were cool beyond comprehension, we would never demean ourselves by stooping to others’ levels and extend hands of friendship. Thus, we pottered about the joint by ourselves.
Once we finished examining minutely the perimeters of the terrace, we wondered what to do next. Playing tag was the next order of play. I was (and am) generally rubbish at all things sporty while the sibling excelled in most things. He proceeded to run like greased lighting while I huffed and puffed in the distance. Suddenly though, it seemed like he put on the breaks and started moving in slow motion. Even as I watched amazed, he proceeded to give the impression of walking under water. When I eventually reached him, I discovered the reason – brother had stepped on some old granny’s morning work of javvarisi vadam. The old dear might have well been the one we passed on our way upstairs as the steam was still rising on the ones sibling hadn’t stepped on. In trying to get out of his sticky mess, he proceeded to moonwalk all over the plastic sheet, unpeeling himself only after demolishing every single vadam.
This gag cracked us both speechless. After we had finished creasing ourselves, we proceeded downstairs, while sibling left huge javvarisi footprints on the stairs. It rather looked like Bigfoot made of koozh had made his way down. Narration of our mornings activities did not bring forth peals of laughter from the grandparents. Other Gran, modeled along the lines of Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, proceeded to chew bits off us. Our explanations of how the clear plastic with its blobs of goo was camouflaged against the dirty floor was to no avail.
She frogmarched us to the OAP neighbour’s house, to our lasting chagrin (and possibly scarring us for life!) and berated us soundly in front of that shocked lady. We thought the old dear was going to faint when she saw her morning’s work laid to waste thus. I can still hear her anguished splutters and the Other Gran’s outraged squawks.
It seems such a shame that the annual vathal season isn’t practiced with the former gusto anymore. A quintessential part of Chennai life, they provided us with hours of mirth and joy that no Playstation or amusement park could ever give.
Every night, as he prepares to go to bed, P and I have a routine. After a story, I generally make him lie down on my lap and he’ll moan ‘can I go to my bed now?’ Off we’d go and I’d lie down with him for a while, wish him good night and slink away. Last night, I got a rude shock. As I started the ole song and dance, P went ‘can I go to my bed by myself now?’
One of the best things about growing up in Chennai, IMHO, is the accessibility to one of the best hangouts in the world, Elliot’s Beach. All through my school and college life, this beach was the ultimate cool hangout. There was a hierarchy to the place and one picked up on it pretty soon.
The layout of the beach is such that, there was a low-lying parapet wall, running alongside the bike park area and sat on this would be the sight-seers of various age, shape and size. Where you sit depends on the degree of cooldom of your clique – the closer you are to the Cozee circle, the cooler you become. To be actually sat right at the Circle is the ultimate in cooldom – that normally signals that there are no heights left to scale.
The actual beach, with the sand and the sea, is generally of no importance whatsoever. Unless you happen to be a ‘love bird’, doing a spot of billing and cooing from behind the catamarans and assorted boats, that is. To the regular folks, Elliot’s is the parapet wall and Cozee corner. There is no greater entertainment than watching the odd built bloke and the multitude of wannabe-Salman Khans strut their stuff, atop the latest motorbike.
That was then.
This Summer, when hubby mentioned ‘beach’, I responded with my normal derision. Coming from Chennai, these excuses of English beaches generally strike me as majorly funny and I never want to patronise them. The sole exception was when we visited the Isle of Wight – this being a tiddly island, one cannot escape the beach and I let the cool waters bathe my feet.
My snort was snuffed out when a shiny key was dangled in front of my eyes. Turned out, a female colleague had generously lent us her beach hut for the day. When I quizzed my work mates about Frinton and its beach huts, the resounding ‘wah-wah’s that came my way made me rethink my viewpoint of a Brit beach. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a medium-sized cottage, something along the lines of those in Fisherman’s Cove and in jubilation we set a date.
On a fine summer’s day, we set off to Frinton, armed with all the usual paraphernalia. The whole caboodle seemed overkill to me, who had gone to the beach for the sole purpose of viewing some eye candy. As that isn’t the tack a responsible mum of a 4 year old is supposed to take, I gamely went along to buy the requisite sun block, Noddy kite, buckets, spade and other assorted gear. With the GPS in situ, we set off on a rare early note.
The miles sped by, as we bowled down the A12, aided by the disembodied voice of the Sat-Nav. After a hour long drive, we finally could see the coast in the distance and I felt an odd feeling of glee. As we neared Clacton, we could see a bit more of the sea and its bluish hue raised my spirits. Buoyed by the vista and A R Rahman, we finally entered the town of Frinton-on-Sea.
The salty air, the brisk breeze and the masses of sand (it was low tide) made me long for Elliot’s and those bygone days. Shaking off the despondent mood even as we drove around the town, I started looking out for cottage #776. To say I was disappointed was putting it mildly. I was expecting designer cottages but what awaited me were itty-bitty plank shanties on stilts!
Grinding my teeth, I looked at the instigator of this plot, who blithely went ‘M promised me there would be deck chairs and things inside so we can drag them out and relax’. Determined to enjoy myself, I started to get our things from the boot, even as hubby proceeded to the ‘beach hut’ to check out our home for the day.
Ten minutes went by, then fifteen and finally, a good half hour. By then, aided by my little man, I hauled out the kite, the hats, towels, spare sets of clothes and enough food to feed those at the beach while there still was no sign of the man. Leaving the thayir sadam to fend for itself, I dragged my son and we went looking for his missing father. To my mounting annoyance, I found him outside the hut, staring at the horizon, with a far-off look in his eye.
Even as I revved myself to come up with a few well-chosen epithets, he turned a curious shade of green. Swallowing the curses, I went with a milder ‘What gives?’
‘Er, Houston, we have a problem,’ he quipped. He finished with a sheepish grin.
‘It seems like I have forgotten to get the keys to the beach hut’.
I remember getting dressed in my pattu pavadai (silk skirts) and walking up and down our streets with my group of friends during Navrathri. Our job was to go to every house that had kept a golu, stand outside their gates and recite the above-mentioned chant. It normally resulted in the lady of the house coming out with a grin and inviting us in for that Navrathri staple. If the oldies of the house were present, then we were urged to earn the sundal by singing a song dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi, usually to their own peril.
After the resultant cacophony, we were given the thamboolam, with some steaming sundal wrapped in old newspaper. Objective accomplished, we used to rush out with the booty, devour it on the way, discuss the merits of that sundal with respect to the previous house’s efforts and then go to the next house. By the time we finished the street, it was usually dinnertime and we would all be feeling slightly sick. But that never stopped us repeating it the next day and the next, till Vijayadasami.
Why am I prattling about Navrathri and sundal now? Well, last night, when I was walking home from work, I came across many a wicked witch and evil magician walking the streets, armed with broomsticks and wands. The Jack O’ Lanterns gleamed evilly on some doorsteps and the dark creatures were on the prowl. It was Halloween after all, and pretty soon, the ubiquitous ‘trick or treat’ filled the air.
‘Treats’ in the form of teeth rotters like gooey marshmallows, toffee apples and other assorted sticky sweeties that children so love were dispersed at every house. Most of these ‘monsters’ were too little to figure out what the ‘trick’ part of the threat entailed. One tubby skeleton was really confused when I asked him what trick he had in store for me and looked ready to burst in tears as he thought he wasn’t going to get a fistful of chocolates for his trouble.
But the older ones preferred the tricks to the treats. More than a month beforehand, the Council had put up notices in shops, tersely warning the shopkeepers not to sell flour and eggs to ‘suspicious looking teenagers’. To me, all teenagers look shifty-eyed at the best of times; how does one weed the ‘regular’ ones from those buying Halloween gunk? Seemed like the local teens agreed with me as some unfortunate souls got their windscreens covered in eggs, despite of the warnings.
Despite the hype and the hungama surrounding the whole Halloween thing, to me, it lacked the magic of our old Navrathri days. We dressed up in our finery and got yummy (healthy!) sundal from most houses. Belting out Carnatic music songs that bore no resemblance to the original in various sruthis was pure enjoyment. Though pain flit across several of our audiences faces, I am sure they enjoyed it too.
But the tiny terrors banging on the doors, creating a din outside definitely seemed to be having the time of their lives. Though they had the parents’ nightmare, sugar rush, to contend with at the end of the day, the accompanying adults seemed to be enjoying themselves as well. Jack O’ Lanterns flickered away and the loo rolls wafted madly in the autumn gust.
Maybe it is just I, getting jaded and old before my time. Trick or treat, anyone?
This Summer, when hubby mentioned ‘beach’, I responded with my normal derision. Coming from Chennai, these excuses of English beaches generally strike me as majorly funny and I never want to patronise them. The sole exception was when we visited the Isle of Wight – this being a tiddly island, one cannot escape the beach and I let the cool waters bathe my feet.
Ten minutes went by, then fifteen and finally, a good half hour. By then, aided by my little man, I hauled out the kite, the hats, towels, spare sets of clothes and enough food to feed those at the beach while there still was no sign of the man. Leaving the thayir sadam to fend for itself, I dragged my son and we went looking for his missing father. To my mounting annoyance, I found him outside the hut, staring at the horizon, with a far-off look in his eye.
