Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Sathanur Days - Part 2 : Kittu mama and the broken chair

For an introduction to this series, please start here

The nearest neighbors to my grand father's house was the "
Kolathaankarai" home (kulam + aam + karai = house on the lake shore. Ofcourse, it was just a small dried up pond, which was used occasionally, when it did have some H2O, by villagers to bathe buffaloes or wash their clothes). The house was inhabited by only 2 people - kittu mama and his brother Raman mama. Both of them were sworn bachelors. It was never clear to me what they did for a living, but Kittu mama, apparently, had visited 'the States' quite a few times. So once you get him started on the topic, you might as well pull up the cot and go to sleep. He didn't really care if anyone listened, as long as there was another human being in the same room. He was also one of the stingiest people I had ever met. This, I could not understand. How could a bachelor, without any family or worries in the world, not live it up? I could never forgive him for making me walk back to my grand father's place on those hot, sultry afternoons to fetch him his OC newspaper (titbit: O.C. is an acronym for "on company" which refers to freeloading on your company's resources thanks to loops and holes in the administration), and then come back once more to collect it. Sometimes when my grandfather was not quite done with the main paper, I had to ferry the supplements to keep Kittu mama happy.

The other source of my gripe was the way we kept losing our tennis balls in their house. Sometimes in the afternoons, a few of us got together for a game of cricket right outside our home, and kittu mama's house was exactly where long off should be. So any ambitious straight loft would land right through his open courtyard, which also had an open well unfortunately. By the time we got there, the ball would disappear, and he would just tell us that the ball landed right inside the well and there was no way of getting it out. But I had a sneaking feeling that kittu mama was hiding our tennis balls just to discourage us from playing outside his home. This was a feeling shared by my cousins as well.

So as a means of getting back at kittu mama, we planned a practical joke. Every afternoon, kittu mama had a habit of taking a siesta on his 'easy' chair, which was nothing but a sheet of canvas held in place on a bamboo frame by a small stick that went through a loop. Remove this stick, and the whole thing would fall apart. We decided, in our infinite wisdom, that we would do this to the old man, watch him fall down in his sleep and disappear from the scene. The eldest of the cousins, 'periya' Karthik (since I was 'kutti' Karthik) was the chief planner/implementor with the rest of us giving him moral support and ready to abandon him at the nearest hint of trouble. One afternoon, we carried out our plan and hid behind the sacks of rice and bullock carts parked right outside the home, and waited with bated breath for the fun to begin. Unfortunately, kittu mama seemed to be in no mood for a siesta that day, and appeared more energetic than usual. After a few hours, we got bored of the waiting game and decided to get back to our normal lives.

It so happened that we forgot to put back the stick in its place. Apparently, kittu mama did eventually have a pretty bad fall the next day. 'periya' Karthik was pulled up by kittu mama after a frenetic chase and given a sound thrashing. My grand father was not pleased, even though he could not hide the hint of a smile on his face. After all, he was free to read his newspaper end to end without fear of losing it in the middle of the day. For the next few days, we all avoided kittu mama's home, just in case Karthik had squealed on the rest of us. Eventually, things got back to normalcy and we started visiting kittu mama. But legend has it that kittu mama never gets back on his 'easy' chair without making sure the stick is in its place.

2 Comments:

Blogger Ram said...

Man! Hilarious. Given the setting, the name "Kittu mama" complements his character.

You should probably link-up "OC" to that website where its defined.

The legend at the end was quite a clincher. Keep it rolling.

3/14/06, 3:47 PM  
Blogger Chandru said...

ROFLOL....fell down from my chair laughing!!!!

'periya' karthik....man, he must have had a horrendous time....

i can remember all of us running away from kittu mama's house...watching from a corner and running helter skelter before hiding in grandpa's house!!!

3/15/06, 2:41 AM  

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