Kandukuru is a small town that has registered itself on my mind for a long time . Here I had elementary school education. Teaches were kind, severe and abused us on occasion. At times we used to bunk classes and prayed to God to save us from beatings. Tuitions were becoming common. One teacher Narasimha Rao , a stern looking but kind-hearted man gave us tuition in the afternoons. His wife was another kind woman who looked after us well. The relation between the teacher and the taught was more of affection than of commerce. At two in the afternoon we used to have evening session. We learned our alphabets of four schools. We read our textbooks avidly and filled our mind with all kinds of stories. Local library beckoned us and appeased our appetite for excitement and yearning for knowledge.
Politics made inroads into us. our local park was our Jallian walla Bagh. We trembled at the historical memory and imagined piles of corpses in case of shooting . Jai Andhra movement gave a sense of history and a year of leisure. Marches by reserve police were regular. Election violence also claimed its victims.
The temple premises were our play ground in the evenings, Once we heard of the impending visits of two poets-Arudra and Atreya to the town. We imagined them coming to us on horseback as we studied in our text books. At last when they arrived on foot surrounded by many, we felt happy to see them but disappointed as they did not come riding on horses.
The college there excited us through its labs where snakes were kept in bottles, annual competitions for children of college staff were held, prizes given and films were shown for twenty five paise to one and half rupees. For long time I preferred to spend fifty paise for bench ticket on buying of which we had the privilege of sitting on wooden benches, a step away from floor where people and spitting were common. Akkineni and Nandamuri were our main heroes. Nellore kanta Rao was a villain who terrified us. The walks to cinema halls were pleasant though we walked back home rather sleepily and regrettably after the excitement of watching the film was over.
I also remember a con man who pilfered post cards from us promising to write to the directors to give us the roles of child actors after we were enthralled by the film “Balaraju Katha.”
There was another bizarre character called ‘konda bandodu’ who used to come frequently for begging and when given nothing would vomit before the house which refused him food. He was harmless creature except in form which was tall, hefty, black in complexion and half-clad with a sword like thing in his hand. The children were scared to death when this ‘Kidnapper’ appeared before their houses.
We also used to don roles in amateurish enthusiasm and pasted red tooth powder to our faces as make-up, wore card board masks, wielded knives (sticks), climbed treed, jumped from there to emerge as heroes but suffered unspeakable pain in unspeakable parts. Under the direction of one Ramakrishna whom we nicknamed “scientist” we enacted Ali baba and forty thieves and many other movies we watched. There were street fights between children of different streets and the fights were marked by throwing of pebbles to small red bricks as missiles from safe distances and thank god, no one’s head got broken in those petty struggles among foes cum friends.
We heard about IIT when we came to know that the sons of a maths lecturer cracked that exam. Maths was my betenoir. We longed for tube lights and white upma ( upma using rice flour rather than wheat) as we had seen in their house and after eating a little upma I used to exhort my mother to save it for tomorrow which used to make her laugh and laugh.. Mt eldest sister once teased me saying that I had been a foundling from a park and laughed a lot on seeing my consternation. This had been so effective on my mind that i imagined myself as Swetaketu, the second son of a Rishi who was rescued from being sacrificed by Viswamitra in a story. Monkeys ruled the streets those days scaring us a lot.
To our small feet at that time those streets seemed too long and this was reversed when we visited the same place after many years throughout which our nostalgia remained intact.
Here also we had enjoyed the affection of one Bibi, a muslim woman who we did not forget. We also heard a rumour about corpse in the sky being carried by four men and followed by a woman and we were so deluded that we felt we had seen it. we avoided sleeping on the dabha and I didn’t know why adults did nothing to scotch this rumour.
We also heard and read about left extremist violence by the educated and were soothed by our the elders’ assurance that it would never touch us since we were not at all rich.
I also should write more about our father who was a thinker and writer. He brought us epics in prose brought out by Emesco and illustrated books that developed a taste for literature. This helped me score better than almost all my class mates in Telugu till my graduation. I came to read his Sulochana, Chandragupta Vijayam, Birbal stories. His sudden demise due to heart attack left a permanent void in our hearts and certainly influenced our psychological profiles to an extent or other. His legacy remained in the form of books in a wooden box for a long time and even occasional theft could not deprive us of that legacy. I still have his complete works of Shakespeare and some of his own works nearly four decades after his death. His writing table was donated to our servant maid recently after I could cure myself out of sentimentalism of decades. His colleagues and students revered him and his memory. He used to don the role of Timmarusu in Bhuvana Vijayam enacted by lecturers of his college. After his death we moved to a house in the street nearby where scorpions fell from walls when they were scratched and once a scorpion bit my mother who had been grateful for it spared us and thus anticipated the poem “ scorpion in the night” by Nisim Ezekiel. The small town called Kandukur has certainly carved a niche for itself in our unconscious and haunted me in my dreams for a long time like Ankalama temple where the portrait of Kali putting his feet on who appeared like Shiva (?) shocked and terrified viewers, particularly children a great deal.