(As narrated by my Chacha decades ago)
Mother belonged to Kizakkanchery, a small village in Palakkad. (For record, our Sobha Developers founder, Shri Chandra Menon, belongs to that area though that would hardly fetch me a better car parking lot.)
Father’s was an affluent family - filthy rich by the then standards: wholesale and retail textile business with establishments in Palakkad, Coimbatore, Eranakulam, Chennai and Mumbai. His father was credited with having performed a host of religious ceremonies including Atirudram followed by feeding and honoring 1000 learned pundits and donating to them vast paddy fields, cow, home, and what have you. So much so, the grandsons of one such recipient proudly inhabits the house that we donated, while we the donor-descendants look for a hotel in Palakkad, with no home to call our own. Upparwallah ki maya, simply put.
It is believed that if the marriage of a son is performed within 60 or so days after the demise of his father, it would be deemed to have been solemnized during the lifetime of the deceased. So began a frantic search for a bride for my father after the sudden demise of his father. A girl was identified in Bangalore. At the last minute, however, her parents backed out. So elders became all the more adamant that, come what might, they should solemnize the marriage on that very date already fixed. Efforts intensified. Someone suggested a girl with equally good family-credentials as the VKR – the Karikkar family in Kizakkanchery, 20 miles away.
Kizakkanchery is a very remote sleepy village. It comes alive only on two occasions - the Car Festival, and Ganesh Chaturti when the village deity Lord Ganesha gets all the attention denied till then. So on the rare occasions when a cart made its foray into the village with the ox’s sedative steps, one representative at least from each house would greet it at the front yard to ascertain who the visitor was. And a horse-driven cart with bells jingling around its neck and foot-tapping rhythmic gallops was a sure bet to trigger the ladies to abandon their kitchen, to have a glimpse in time.
So when my Dad and his core-group made their way into the village, with the burring sound of the car engine audible from afar, the whole village was agog – only nadaswaram was missing. It is seldom that a boy’s party took the initiative to ask for a bride. Unperturbed and absolutely clueless, my mother, a young lass, was playing merrily ‘paandi’ with her friends - the game where the player has to pass through each box through hopping and walking with eyes closed without touching the borders, if I made myself clear.
Strangely, they asked her where the Karikkar house was. She directed them, and busied herself playing the game. Ten minutes later she was summoned, was brought to her house via the neighbour’s backyard for any make-up that was possible at such a short time for such an unscheduled visit. “Oh, she is the girl. She was the one who gave us the direction to the house,” they said.
Everything was organized for the marriage in a chat mangni, phat shaddi style, giving my Mom very little time to get even her marriage dresses stitched (Pavadai and blouse, of course; she was too young). For Thozi Pongal (the bride bidding farewell to her village friends on the eve of marriage), the bride normally went around in an open car. But, for my mom a huge elephant was arranged. Expectedly, she refused to mount it, still in her teens. Pressure was brought to bear on her. It was a five-day long marriage. She was lean then, and he on the Dara Singh side. They chose to rob each other’s figure in later life.
As fate would have it, when Aunty and I were attending a temple festival in my father’s village five or six years ago, we bumped into a lady and her son from Bangalore. Her son and I got acquainted with each other, and he casually mentioned that his mother was to have been married in this village, to someone from ‘a’ VKR family, and introduced her to us. On elaboration it turned out that she was the one to have married my Dad. She said she refused it because even in the wildest of imaginations she could not bring herself to agree to cook for 30 or 40 persons day after day, let alone the coffee and tea sessions.
V V Sundaram
Maple 3195
21 May 2017
