The three and the wall!

For the last eight days, these three workers, two men and one woman were engaged in building a wall along the edge of of our property. It is sixty feet long, two feet wide and seven feet in height! It required four truck load of granite stones, transported from a quarry five kilometres away! The earth mover had to come twice to excavate the ground and the sides to build thus far! I admire the care and a attention with which they do their work!

Yesterday I met a school class mate, who retired as an officer in the transport department. He is similar in age to mine and spends most of his time farming currently. One produce from his farm is nutmeg. It was in the shop, I met him, where he came to sell the nutmeg, where I too had gone to sell nutmeg!  That gave us a short time to recollect our childhood.

He reminded me of the time, when the nutmeg trees were first introduced into the village. He thought that it was my father who travelled seventy kilometres to buy fifty nutmeg saplings from a government farm! He planted forty in our property and distributed the rest to his friends. So six other families too had nutmeg saplings for them to experiment with nutmeg farming. Now it is the most popular cash crops for many families. It is source of additional income for all of us, without having to pay a lot of attention during the year. The trees need watering during the summer and manuring twice! 

I was encouraged to recall this story of my father partly being responsible for introducing nutmeg to the village sixty five years ago. He had earlier introduced coconut farming five years before he got others introduced to nutmeg farming. 

The wall that is being replaced now in the above picture, was built then with loose stones, which survived for seventy years. The granite wall is a recent feature in our village. The properties did not have walls earlier! Now that most of us are building walls to our compounds in the village, I hope it would not separate us from each other.  The insularity that is growing as a social phenomenon disturbs me a lot! The privacy we seek for has the risk of becoming a behaviour of being less sociable. I remember my parents having neighbours and others coming in the evening to talk about events in the village. Now people meet in the local tea shops for their socialisation. From being a village without boundaries, it is evolving into people living in their private homes, using common facilities. It was our habit since Anna and I returned to live here six years back to visit some homes a few times in a year. That too has more infrequent! While we gain materially and professionally, we loose socially and relationally!

My parents were new people in the village when they came to live here eighty five years ago. They took the initiative to get in touch with others in the village. One way, my mother reached out to people in the village was by offering milk to some neighbours. My mother was fond of cows and we had four of them at one time, with about seven litres of milk in the morning and evening to distribute to others. She offered milk at a low cost and preferred to give milk to those who needed milk for their children. People in the village had to depend on their neighbours with cows for their daily supply  of milk as milk was not available in the packets in the fifties or sixties. That was my mother's way of getting a circle of friends for her to relate. I was an interruption to her routine when she was milking or feeding the cows. She put up with all that! Thanks to her forebearance, I was trusted when I was 12 years old to milk the cows and distribute milk! It was the first lesson in learning to accept responsibility and grow up with a sense of accountability! In fact when my father got transferred to a distant place and he came home only on week ends for three years, I was given even more encouragement to do some more chores. During the summer vacation, I had opportunities to dehusk coconuts, break and dry them for getting coconut oil for our use. My mother could gather all the oil during that time, which was needed for the whole year. The coconut oil was the only medium of cooking in the early sixties in the state of Kerala, where we lived. The other summertime activity was to gather cashew nuts from about twenty five trees we had then and get them dried to sell. That was the occasion I enjoyed climbing trees, although I was forbidden to do so. I was allowed to gather the cashew fruits fallen in the ground or use a long pole to pluck them! There were times, when  I was not allowed to gather them for a day, when domestic workers reported to my parents about seeing me climb the trees.

I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of adult conversation about farming, neighbours and their needs, church life, community needs, etc.taking place at home. The teacher colleagues of parents used to come regularly for meals. Although I got to know them personally, I felt that they were more demanding from me academically giving me no concession! That made me stay away from them when they came home! They meant well by expecting more from me! But I wanted to be given the freedom which others got from them!

One collaborative action I saw at that time through the initiative of my fathers was to make a wider pedestrian walk from the main road, to the village, by making people volunteer to do that, with my father offering to gift away three feet of land along a stretch of 300 feet! It is that road which developed into a motorable road for the last thirty years.

When I go out to the local shops, they identify me referring to my father. Having lived away from the village for forty-five years, I am gradually establishing contacts with others in the village! Some even identify me from my look, walk and mannerism, which they say are similar to those of my father. It is others who give me more insight about my childhood! I am grateful for this.

I am discovering myself by remembering my roots and connections!

M.C.Mathew (photo and text)