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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Echoes of gathās in the tub of floating dried leaves


Even though, at times it was difficult, being the first-born has its own perks and privileges. One of them perhaps was the chance I got to spend my early childhood having my two grandmothers side by side.
Amma and Thaththa, still fresh to the frustrations and agonies of finding baby-sitters for their first child, were more than happy to have their mothers down here to look after me when their professional commitments did not allow them to follow my tumbling footsteps or enjoy my baby-cries.
Amma would leave home while I was still dreaming in my cot with the feeding bottle hanging lose from my mouth. So, it was Achchi’s kind and cheerful face I saw when I opened my eyes to the disturbing sunlight. Those days, we didn’t have pipe-borne water. Gamé Achchi (Amma’s mother) and Weligama Achchi( Thaththa’s mother) would either bring in pails of water to fill my tub or if the weather was good, they would take me to the well with them. The time that followed was my fun time. I would count the turn of water on my head from Achchi’s pail; without stopping from there, I would pick the dried leaves and things from around me and make them float in my tub, pretending that I was bathing in a river amidst flocks of fish swimming around me.
When I look back, I realize the fact that, they gave me such a lot of liberty and free moment with the things that surrounded me. That was a kind of freedom I couldn’t get even from my father.
Feeding time for them was not a battle as Amma took it to be. Achchi would serve me a little bit of rice and vegis on a small plate, just to pacify me while she handfed me from a big plate full of things I liked and hated to gulp down. Both of them had so much time to spare for me, and moved about with their day-to-day lives without a single cry of complaint. For Amma spending thirty minutes with me after coming home looked like torture, but my grandmothers never got bored by my mischief, rather they were my first partners’ of crime!
When I was fairly manageable, Gamé Achchi returned home, but Weligama Achchi stayed behind. She read out so many stories for me from the books as well as from her memory. In the evening, she would recite the gathās and read out the Dhamma Pada for me to listen. The words in them made a very little sense to me as a three-year-old. But the musicality in her recitation and the soothing effect in her words tempted me to kneel by her side with my two hands bound in a gesture of worship in front of the little Buddha statue.
Gamé Achchi was the walking encyclopaedia of plants and animals. She worked wonders with the ‘pol athu’ we had in our home garden. She would make the most common fruits and vegetables taste heavenly with her culinary magic. Even at the age of eighty, she has all the charms in tact which drew me to her some twenty-years ago.
It was just the other day, when Amma took out a lace tablecloth, hand-woven by Weligama Achchi, the feeling of guilt overwhelmed me. The fact that I couldn’t see her before her life was unfairly snatched away by the massive Indian ocean tsunami is still something I’m trying to come to terms with.
If I’m ever to dip my pen into writing a novel, Gamé Achchi and Weligama Achchi have already reserved their places in the undecided plot among the characters that are still unknown to me. After all, that is where they deserve to be for gifting me a wonderful childhood and the best memories that I can recall like the Daffodils that kept dancing in Wordsworth’s poetic mind.

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