2-2004
Biography
MEPRAL - THE ANCESTRAL VILLAGE OF POOTHICOTE FAMILY
Roy P. Thomas, MD.
"Tell me where you are from and I will tell you who you are" - Saul Bellow
Mark Twain once said
that he wants to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, because every
thing in Cincinnati happens 10 years later. It is much truer of
Mepral, my father's ancestral village in Kerala, because every thing
there also happens several years late.
Mepral is a 1.9
square miles of land situated on either side of the small Mepral River
which is a branch of one of the tributaries of the Pumpa River. It
juts in to the huge water-logged paddy fields which extend up to the
Vampanda Lake on its northern side. It is to this river, soil, and to
the people here that I am ancestrally linked. My ancestors came to this
village in the early part of the 18th century and were living here for 300 years since they moved here from Kuravilagad, a northern village in Kerala.
Before King Marthanda
Varma unified the small principalities in 1729 to form Travancore,
Mepral was part of Thekkumkur kingdom, and Azhiyidathu Prabhu was the
chieftain here. Before the advent of modern automobiles, country boats
were the chief mode of transportation and lands closer to the rivers
were the most valuable. Mepral, with rivers and canals crisscrossing
the land, became a major attraction for the rich and powerful in the
earlier centuries.
Mepral was the center of my universe for the first 14 years of my life
till I left for college. It may have been a poor place to prepare one
for the 21st century, but was a delightful place to spend the childhood with friends and relatives.
Then it was an agrarian-world where tribe and territory were very
important. Our family owned a major share of agricultural property in
Mepral. People were deeply rooted in their rural feudal values. Even
in 1950s, people in Mepral had little in common with their
contemporaries in London, Chicago, or even most other cities in India.
We were still innocent of the many basic innovations of the industrial
revolution. It was only 100 years after their inventions that
electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones made their appearance in
our village. I was 12 years old, when the first railway lines connected
our part of Kerala with the rest of the country. Though motor engines
came to Mepral in 1920, even in 1950s, people were using chakrams, the
huge wooden water wheels operated by several men with their feet to
irrigate the paddy fields. Wooden plows, drawn by 2 oxen or buffalos
guiding along the furrows in the field by bare-legged workers were a
common sight even in 1960s. All our food was produced locally.
As there was no running water, my mother or our servants hauled
water from the well every day with a bucket for use at home and they
washed our clothes in the near by river. I studied by the light of
kerosene lamp till I went to college. We lighted the oil lamp every
evening and all the family got around the lamp and said our evening
prayers. Even as a child I loved reading in bed, and usually I went to
sleep with kerosene lamp burning near my bed. My father would walk
slowly in to the room without disturbing my sleep to blow of the lamp.
My father's house in
Mepral was made of brick and wood. Most houses had thatched roofs, and
99% of the people in Mepral never traveled beyond 100 miles from their
home in their lifetime. In fact, people never moved out from this place
except when they died. No hospitals, no police stations, and no
doctors. The village still seemed to be in the middle-ages though I was
spending my childhood there in the middle of the 20th century.
Mepral is situated in the middle of Kerala state, in an area called Kuttanad. In the ancient South Indian language, "Me" stands for west and "pral " for land and so Mepral means western land.
It was all sea here in the not too distant geological past. This area,
like Denmark is under the sea level. During November or December, a
narrow raised bond over its outer lake borders is built by people to
prevent seawater flowing in. In this temporary dry land thus created,
rice was cultivated. Most of the present houses in Mepral are built on
land reclaimed from water-logged paddy-fields. Several of our house
names like Paikandam, Nanchenkandan, and Kolankandam denotes they are located on reclaimed paddy-fields.
During floods that
regularly visit 2 or 3 times every year in the monsoon season,
Kuttanadu is covered with water except for some raised land areas. In
a severe rainy season, there used to be water in our family rooms,
bedrooms, and kitchen. Then we moved our cooking and sleeping to Ara, which was a raised, wooded room at a higher level. Other times, Ara was reserved as a barn for storing harvested rice grains.
Because of these frequent floods, every one in
our village learned swimming early in their childhood. I don't
remember when I learned to swim because I mastered it before my
memories started.
As there was water
everywhere, people generally didn't use footwear and the first time I
ever used shoes was when I went to college. When the monsoon floods
receded, house floors were given a fresh coating of cow-dung. Cow-dung
was considered to have antiseptic cleaning powers. Cement or concrete
were rarely used for floors as it frequently got wet and damaged during
the floods.
The nature, rivers, and rains gave a natural rhythm to the life of
villagers. Every morning, I used to wake up to the sound of the
nature's orchestra of parrots, minas, crows, fowls, chickens, and
ducks. Even teals used to fly thousands of miles from Siberia to join
us in our merriment of the harvest season.
Most of the work in the rice fields was in the summer months of
December to April. The rest of the year people leisurely tended to
family, community, or church activities, and other recreational
pursuits. Fishing was fun for the rich but a livelihood for the poor.
The large prawns (Mepral konchu) from our rivers were well
known in central Kerala. Boat racing was a common recreation for all.
People sang special songs when they were racing boats called vanchipattu. But there were special songs for every occasion.
Everything one owned could be lost in a flood. So people became
fatalistic and deeply religious. There were special prayers in the
books for every calamity one can think of like floods, locust in the
land, or epidemics.
Still rays of modernity were showing its glimpses in the horizon. My
preschool education started at home when I was 3 years old. An old
teacher called Manikandhan Ashan used to come to our
house to teach me Malayalam alphabets and basic numbers. On the first
day he made me write with my fingers on rice grains spread over the
floor and later on sand. I often sat on his lap as I was writing. The
first words I wrote were praise to Hindu gods of learning, but next, in
deference to the religion of my parents, he made me write "Sree yeasu
vijayam" , meaning victory for Jesus. The Ashan wrote homework to read
on dried palm leaves with a sharp iron pencil. I had heard horror
stories that Ashan may not mind to use the sharp edge of the iron
pencil on the buttocks of the students if we they did not keep up with
the homework. But Ashan was very kind and nice to me. May be, it was
because my mother prepared pootu, the rice steam bread, for the Ashan which he relished eating at the end of each teaching session.
I joined the regular school when I was 4 years, one year
earlier than the regular enrollment because I had learned all Malyalam
alphabets by that time, and my parents were eager to start my education
at the earliest. They may not have heard of the advantages of
head-start, but they started my education sufficiently early. There
were 3 primary schools in Mepral. The one most children attended was
called Ashupatri pallikoodam, the name meant hospital school.
It was called so because the building when it was originally built in
1921, it was for a hospital. But they could not get a doctor to come
and practice in our remote village, and so it was turned into a school.
I still remember my first day in this school. It was 1947 and Indian
independence struggle was in full swing. As we were sitting in school,
volunteers of the Indian National Congress Party came wearing white
Gandhi caps and Indian tricolor flags in their hands. They asked us to
join independence struggle against the British colonial rulers by
boycotting the school. Many children started crying. I did not
understand what this commotion was all about. My father came and took
me home. That was my first and only participation in the Indian
independence movement.
I never again went to the same school. I was sent to another private
school in our village run by the Salvation Army. Here dicipline was
stricter and no participation in freedom struggle allowed. This was a
school run mainly for the untouchable Pulayas, Pariahs, Ezhavas, and Christian boys from poor homes. I was perhaps the only child in the school who had any claim to a high birth. I
wore a trouser reaching up to the knees and a sleeveless cotton shirt.
I was the only one who wore shirts over the trunk in that school. The
other children wore only small loincloths. I was much respected and
looked up to in the class because I was from a "rich" aristocratic
Syrian Christian family. Many of the other student's parents worked in
our farms. My richness was of course relative. Actually our family
belonged to the middle class and unlike many others during that period,
we were prosperous enough to afford 3 meals a day. There were
two other classes below us, lower middle class, and the poor. The
lower middle class was mainly Christians from less well known families,
and then Nairs, and Ezhavas who worked in our farms. This class also
included craftsmen, smiths and other skilled labors. The lowest poor
class was the untouchable pulayas who worked in our paddy fields. My
best childhood friends were these pulaya children. Most of these bare
chested dark skinned children dropped out after 2 or 3 years of
schooling to take up work in the rice fields and helped their parents.
I did not have any toys to play with, no music to listen to, and no
children's book to read. Fishing, climbing trees, swimming in rivers
with those poor children were my recreation and even now I treasure
those memories.
After primary school I continued my education in the St. John's Middle
School, the only English school in Mepral started by a great visionary,
the Very Reverend Kanianthra Alexander Corepiscopa in the second decade
of the 20th century.
Sex was a subject never discussed by cultured people in our community.
We were taught about the breeding of the animals and the pollination of
the plants. But how the human beings propagated the species remained a
mystery to me till much later, and the information was given to me by a
friend during my senior years in school. Kissing was a taboo and men
and women of that generation did not kissed each other in public. There
are no movie theatres in Mepral even today. There were occasional
dramas shown in schools, but always men dressed as women acted the
female roles. The Onam, the Kerala harvest festival was always celebrated with gusto in the month of September.
.
In the feudal system prevalent at that time, any one who owned land was
considered rich. There were 3 rich well known landowning
families in Mepral, Poothicote, Manammel, and Kaniyanthra, and we were
all interrelated through marriages. So I had legions of cousins, and
bonds with cousins even 5 times removed were very strong.
Then there were other Christian families
like Kolath, Plamood, Panagad, Panickerveetil, and Panachayil who were
already in Mepral even before our ancestors moved over there, but we
dominated the social and economic spheres of the village during that
time. The Nair families of Erikad, Puthupally, Kayilath and Vachur,
Ezhava families of Valliyaparampil and Pulliyattu Panickers, and
Brahmin families of Kizhakkamadham and Padinjaramadham were also living
in Mepral for several generations. There were always extremely cordial
relations among different religious communities in our village.
But how rich our family really was? Even if we didn't have a lot of
money, we were supposed to dress well and act rich. During those post
World War II years, there were lot of poverty all around the world, but
more so in the remotest areas like ours. Our staple diet was rice, and
because we cultivated it, there was no scarcity for rice to eat. From
our rivers, we could catch fish, and with coconuts grown in our own
lands, women made delicious dishes to go with the rice.
The Portuguese merchants brought wheat bread to Kerala in 1500. The
place where bread is made is still known by its Portuguese name "borma". But
wheat was not cultivated in our area and the bread was a luxury those
days in our village. There was an old man coming to our village with
bred in a basket carried over his head. Occasionally my mother will
buy bread for us and it was considered a treat.
During those
pre-refrigeration days, people were careful about the amount cooked
each time. Only enough food was cooked for the day so that the food was
not wasted. Excess food was always distributed to the neighbors or
servants. Beef was served only few times a year like for Christmas
and Easter when cows were slaughtered in the village. Every house was
a small chicken farm. When guests visited us, we ran after squawking
chickens to catch and behead them to make fresh chicken curry. I always
liked guests, because then we could also get the sumptuous chicken
curry. Eggs laid by the hens were often bartered for kitchen utensils
and dry salted sardines brought by merchants from the sea. We owned
cows and buffalos to give milk and oxen to plough our paddy-fields.
Those animals were more like members of our family than livestock.
Though my mother did all the work at home,
the supremacy of the mother-in-law was accepted in all matters as was
the custom. At my grandmother's funeral, our priest referred to my
mother as a modern day Ruth, the biblical Old Testament figure who
loved and obeyed her mother-in-law. My mother loved and took care of my
grandmother as she grew old and suffered from advanced Alzheimer's
disease. My mother was her sole caregiver, and she never uttered a word
of complaint, or gave the slightest sign that she was unhappy with the
household drudgery. In our custom, a woman was not only married to a
man, but she was married in to the family of her husband.
All marriages in the village were arranged marriages, and
most of them worked out well, but occasionally I have seen instances
where two people got married and then they lived with a lively aversion
for each other for the rest of their lives.
My grandparents were good and loving souls. My grandmother's earlobes
were large holes, stretched by heavy gold ear rings adorned in her
younger years, evidence of an era of prosperity and affluence. When
we children did little mischief, grandma used to protect us form the
punishments of our parents. Once after I did some mischief, I was
running as my father came after me with a stick in his hands. I ran in
to my grand mother's arms as she was standing outside the house. Ammachi fell to the ground and broke her wrist.
My grandfather was a stout healthy man even in his eighties, and he
could do hard physical work for hours without getting tired. He had
rough callused hands, but a gentle affectionate touch with those hands
was more effective in reducing any fever or pain for his grandchildren
than any medicines.
The families stored the grains and sold it in the months when price was
high. We got some extra money by selling coconuts, but never enough for
all our needs.
After the dinner every day, my father and grandfather strolled in the
porch for two hours and used to reminiscence the good old days, when
life was bright and sunny. More than being a father and son, they were
best friends. I have often wondered what they had to talk this long
every day as nothing new happened in Mepral in ages. But they talked
about the farms, weather, politics, religion and everything under the
sun.
There was a strong bond between the pulaya workers and our family. One
of the surviving members of the pulaya clan that served my family is
Kochukunju. Even now when I return to India, he comes and stays with
us. He has told me that his great-great-great-grandfather was a bonded
worker bought by my great-great-great-grandfather. Slavery was
abolished in Kerala in 1812. Still Kochukunj's family took care of our
farmlands and stayed with us. There was a lot of poverty and hunger
around us. But our family treated our workers well and provided them
food and shelter at all seasons. Kochukunj's is a converted
Christian. Still we did not allow him and his people to join our
churches as ours was strictly for the Syrian Christians following the
St. Thomas tradition. But we supported the churches of pulayas. Even
after coming to America, my brothers and I used to financially help
Kochunkunju. Now Kochukunju is nicknamed American Kochukunju by his neighbors.
The only government office in our village was the post office and my
father was the postmaster there. On days my father had to supervise the
workers in our fields, my mother performed the duties of the
postmaster. Post master's monthly salary was Rs.15 from the British
government, as postal service was under them. Post office handled mail
from outside the state and local mail was carried by a service called "anchelappice" under the local government. Anggelapese
had a much lower status than the post office. In 1950, when Indian
republic came in to existence, these two offices were combined, and my
father resigned rather than being assigned to another locality.
The longest travel I ever made as a child was to Kottayam, a town 19
miles away from my home. It was my first glimpse to the outside world.
It was the time a young American preacher named Billy Gram was there
giving sermons. There was a large crowd to listen Gram and I had never
before seen such a big crowd. My father took 5 Rupees and wrote down
on a piece of paper the address of his sister in Kottayam and put both
in my pocket. He told me that in case I got lost in the crowd, he
wanted me to take a "rikshavandi" and go to my aunt's house. I
never got lost and kept on holding my fathers hand very firmly. But I
didn't understand anything Rev. Gram was speaking but he saved many
souls on that day, at least that is what I was told.
A word about "rakshavandi".
It was a mode of transportation where lean poor miserable looking men
physically pulled fatty prosperous men or women in a cart to their
destinations. Very often these "raksha pullers" died of tuberculosis
and malnutrition. The socialist leaning congress party government of
Jawaharlal Nehru in late nineteen-fifties outlawed "rakshavandi".
I can remember of only 2 serious illnesses from my childhood. One was
when I had a severe sore throat followed by terrible fleeting pain in
all my joints. I could not walk or sit with because of excruciating
pain. I will remember to the last day of my life, how my father
affectionately held me in his lap, day and night soothing my joints
with Ayurvedic herbal ointments. I know now it was rheumatic fever.
Rheumatic fever usually licks the joints and bites the heart. But in
spite of the primitive herbal treatments I received, I survived with
out my heart getting bitten.
The other illness was an attack of chicken pox. Though smallpox was
eradicated in our area following universal vaccination, it was still in
the memory of old people. I have heard about the deadly rampage of
smallpox in our village from my grandfather. People were very
frightened of the disease and no help was available even to bury those
who died in hundreds. There was a superstitious belief that the local
Ayurvedic physicians could make corpses of people died of smallpox walk
to their graves. There is a horrible possibility that as there were no
close relatives near the patient, the physician made the people who
were about to die walk to their own graves and then he waited near the
grave for the death to come.
When I had chickenpox, my local ayurvedic physician mistook it with
smallpox. He undertook my full time care. I was visited by my father
and grandfather; but I was isolated from everybody else. I remember
that my physician was always drunk, and he even offered me one day
toddy, the local alcoholic drink, and told me that it was good for my
condition. So I had my first alcoholic drink for medical reasons under
professional supervision. My father and grandfather were
teetotalers. But on my mother's side everybody enjoyed a drink or
two, and at least two of my maternal uncles enjoyed it a little too
much or till they lost their motor and cerebral controls before the
bars closed.
Though these are the only two serious illnesses I can remember from my
childhood, today serology report of my blood shows that I had measles,
mumps, whooping cough, hepatitis A, and many other illnesses which I
survived only by the grace of God.
Though death made house calls for the young and the old
regularly in our village, nobody tried to camouflage it. There were no
hospitals or funeral homes in our village to hide the obscenity of
death. Death was always a family matter happening in the presence of
the family and friends.
I remember the death
of my grandfather at the age of 90. He planed the details of his
funeral with the family. As the day of his departure finally arrived,
he called each member of the family near to his bed. He blessed each
one of us by placing his hand over our head. Then he breathed his
last. His death was painful to all of us, but his funeral was a
celebration of a great life.
I had tutor, Annamma teacher, who came to our house
on all weekdays at 7 am and gave me and my sister special tuition. Her
fee was only Rs. 6 a month, but more than the money, she appreciated
the morning breakfast of rice gruel known as "kanji" , as she
came from a poor family. Those tuitions were a head start for my
sister and me in academic achievements. My headmaster, Purackel Mammen sar was
also very affectionate to me, and during rainy days he carried me in
his shoulders to the school. He was our family friend and owned
paddy-fields near ours.
One day my father's younger brother "Chackochen appappan" came running
home crying and shouting, "Gandhi is shot and killed." Though I was
only 6 years old then, I had heard the name Gandhi before, but I did
not know who he was.
During this period, another one of my father's brother, Cherian wrote
to us from Singapore that he had survived as a Japanese prisoner of war
and was now free and working for a British company as a senor
supervisor. He is one of the few individuals from Mepral who dared to
leave our village and try to make a living in another country. He left
Kerala when he was 18 years old and spent the next 70 years in Johore
in Malaysia with his children and grand children, but always made
sentimental journeys back to Mepral when ever he could.
I never got any gifts for my birthdays. It was not a custom and my
parents could not afford costly gifts. But on my birthdays my parents
used to invite 12 poor kids from our locality and gave them a feast of payasm,
a special rice desert made for such occasions. Looking back, I did not
have gifts, but loving parents and grand parents made up for every
thing that was missed. In fact those were the happiest years of my life.
I visit Mepral every year since I left the country 35 years ago. Even
today I feel I was blessed to be born in the Poothicote family as the
son of Kunjukunju and Kunjamma, and grandson of KunjuVarkeyachen and
Achiyamma in Mepral.
But now, every year on my return visits, I find to my dismay that the
life as it was lived for hundreds of years in our village is
disappearing very fast. Even the Mepral River, which was very clean and
transparent and where I used to take bath in the morning and evening,
has changed with the times, and I do not feel comfortable taking a
bathe in it now. As the green revolution has taken hold, it is cheaper
for people in Mepral to import rice grains from other places than to
cultivate it themselves. High cost of labor is making farming here
prohibitively expensive. Many among our new generation have already
left Mepral looking for better pastures elsewhere.
Now when I go back to Mepral, I feel like an
emissary from a world which is no longer there. Even my cousins who are
still living in Mepral do not follow our old ancestral ways of life.
They too go for fast foods, wear clothes from Gap, watch CNN for news,
and keep in touch with me via email
