The most interesting aspect of my life so far has
been my very peculiar childhood. I keep going back there to draw up inspirations
for my speeches here. I have already spoken about various incidents from my
childhood in my previous speeches. Today I am going to talk about my hobbies
and pastime as a child. I was an only child for nearly all of my childhood.
That meant that I had all my free time to myself. Unlike other girls of my age,
I had no interest in dressing up, make up, or dolls. Instead, I preferred to
climb tree, make bows from broken branches, arrows from midribs of coconut
leaves and target practice on barks of banana trees. I loved to play and drench
myself in the muddy waters in the paddy fields behind. I did not have friends,
not even imaginary ones! I was not
imaginative enough to create imaginary ones and there were no children in my
age group in my neighborhood for the real ones.
I might have been around 8 when this girl,
Manju, who was about my age moved, in to
this new home next door with her family.
I went over and made friends with her almost immediately. We would play
badminton and other more civilized games in the evenings. Every now and then, I
got to take her out to the paddy fields behind and score her some shouting from
her mother. On one such occasion I spotted a vegetable that was grown in our
backyard growing in abundance in the water without any care or supervision. I wondered
why nobody had paid any attention to this! Manju and I decided to go ahead and
enlighten our folks with this new discovery of ours, but before that, we decided
to test it to see if it was indeed the same thing. We both took a bite of the
root. Within minutes both of us developed hives all over, threw up continuously
and could not breathe. We were both
taken to hospital and were given antihistamines. After I was better, my
grandfather took me out to the fields and asked me to pinpoint what exactly I
had eaten. I showed him the plant. It was Wild taro, a plant known to be so
toxic that even its sap is harmful. People wear gloves to touch it even. It
looks just like a thinner version of the regular taro which is used extensively
in the kitchen at home. I learned it the real hard way never to taste test
strange substances, way before my first chemistry lab! I also learned that
looks can be deceiving! Real life lessons learned firsthand! Manju and her
family moved out shortly after. I wonder if I had any role in that decision of
theirs. Maybe, my spirit was a little too free for them to contain and they
were not interested in her learning such valuable lessons with me anymore.
I did not really mind my solitude all that much
before, but having had Manju to play with for a while, I missed companionship.
I went back to my usual loitering on and around trees, climbing inside our
well, figuring out ways to get to the ground from the second floor terrace of
our house without using the stairs. Climbing sort of had become my passion
then. I admired the person who used to climb our coconut trees. Now, climbing a
tree is easy. Anyone can do that! They have branches that allow for a strong
hold or grip. Coconut trees are palms and thus have no branches. I took it up
as a challenge to learn to climb coconut trees. I started on one that was may
be 30 or 40 feet tall, probably quarter the size of a typical coconut tree. I
learned that it was all about coordinating the hands and the feet movements. I
plucked (wonder if plucked is the right translation, it is said that Eskimos have 1000 synonyms for
snow, similar to that we, Malayalees,
have 1000 names for the different aspects of coconut and coconut trees. The
literal translation for what I want to convey, would be to drop a coconut.
Anyhow, I will stick to plucked. I plucked my first coconut and was so proud of
it that I had to share it with my grandmother, who promptly chided me for
climbing trees. She said it was not an appropriate thing to do for a girl. I
had not paid any heed to her words and continued climbing until the day that I
climbed to the very top of a not-so-small mango tree. The thin branch decided I
was too heavy for it. In a moment, I was lying on the ground with the tree top,
bleeding from a straight line cut on my lower abdomen caused by the sharp
corrugated edge of the severed tree top and covered in a million fire ants. My
grandmother had heard the loud thud and had rushed to my rescue. I remember
clearly that even at that distressed moment, my grandmother firmly reminding me
that decent girls do not climb trees. In
her opinion, hobbies for good, decent girls were activities such as singing, dancing,
and stitching, not climbing. She was eternally in an attempt to make a good
girl out of me. As part of that attempt, I was taught south Indian classical
music (Carnatic music) for 12 years, I cannot sing a single line in the right
pitch, not now and not then. I was taught south Indian classical dance (Bharatanatyam)
for about the same time. I was also taught to stitch, sew, and knit. I remember, as my first stitching project and
probably the only one I have ever undertaken, I stitched a yellow blouse for my
grandmother with a crooked neck line and sleeves at different lengths. She
would proudly wear it and embarrass me so often. In short, I cannot sing, dance,
nor stitch. I always wondered what talent God gave me, and always concluded
that God just forgot to include talent in my package! Nevertheless, I enjoy
being me and would not have it any other wayJ!
