MINING MEMORYSCAPE

I do not remember where I was born. But on being told that I was born in Anantpur, it remained in my mental register and school certificates. I remember our daba and radio song “Godari Gattundi.” I remember my mother in a green sari and wept when I once saw a green-clad woman traveling on a train thinking that she was my mother going somewhere. I remember the creeper and noises of insects in the night, my new born brother who was black and giggling whenever we gave chakkali gintalu. I remember a snake killed, a puppy and a friend called Jyoti and visits to a balawadi centre where I used to be given a glass of milk.

B is for Brahmana Kodur where I studied tenth class. If you don’t believe, see the writing on the wall( literally) of my school Gokhale Zilla Parishad High school. My name as topper in tenth class is still there. ( I fondly hope so if the wall is not whitewashed.) there I learnt dignity of labour in our craft class when we were asked to fetch water for the plants and vegetables which the students grew. Here I also found that my Telugu language was quite good in scoring marks and my mathematics was quite bad. Particularly algebra proved my undoing as I used to score low marks. Nehru’s biography was our non-detailed text and it certainly imprinted on my mind. Teachers were very good and amiable. My English teacher was very tough and he taught us grammar well. Once he helped a student financially and when the student offered to return the money he staunchly refused and said, “you can give me money when you earn”. This impressed my mind so much and set an ethic in my mind. My Hindi was also good but not the verbs whom I executed in my sentences. If I got good marks in the end exams, the credit goes to the examiner who was as kind as many of his tribe even now who award marks first and read the scripts next or don’t read them at all. The influence of missionaries was strong here and snakes were revered a lot and were allowed to escape alive. Here I learned cricket and tried to become a spin bowler under the aegis a non-conformist dropout from a college who used to relate how he threw a record of a science subject at the face of a science teacher and got himself thrown out of the college. We also saw films on 16mm in the compound of some big man rather than walk to Chebrole in the distance of four kilometers.