Memories of my uncle and the ancestral home

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Pics: Mathews Vadakel; the Vadakel family in the 1940s; the Vadakel House; Foliage where the Vadakel House used to exist

Mathew was my mother’s youngest brother. He had come to Calcutta from Kerala in the 1960s to earn a living. He worked as an accountant in a private firm on Chittaranjan

Avenue. On Saturday afternoons, he brought a chocolate bar for me. It was something that I looked forward to. If he was in a good mood, he took me for a spin on his motorbike.

He drove fast, and I had to cling to him, my arms around his stomach, my cheek pressed against his back as I looked sideways at the road that seemed to speed past us. He was a gentle person, silent and calm. 

One December evening, in 1969, my parents took my elder sister, a younger brother and me by train for a holiday to Kerala, to meet my grandparents, both from my mother’s and father’s side, to spend time with cousins, to enjoy Christmas and to be in touch with our roots. 

My uncle stayed behind.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be the worst Christmas for us. On December 24, my uncle had gone for a celebration with a few of his friends at a bar on Amherst Street. After midnight, Mathew was returning with two other friends on his bike. On Chittaranjan Avenue, he had to swerve abruptly to avoid a car and hit a lamppost at full speed. He rose several feet up in the air and landed in a crumpled heap on the pavement. His friends suffered injuries too. But my uncle had suffered a fatal head injury and died a few hours later at a hospital.

When the news reached Kerala, it was like a thunderbolt. Who could have imagined that my 24-year-old uncle, so alive and lively, was dead? For my grandmother, it was the biggest shock of her life because Mathew was her favourite child. At a family meeting, they decided that my father and grandmother would go to Calcutta for the funeral. We stayed behind — my mother and the children. 

My mother told me to pray for Mathews Uncle’s soul. So, I knelt in front of a framed picture of Jesus Christ, a white halo behind his bearded face, hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s house, and prayed for the soul of my dear uncle.

But my grandmother took years to recover.

On every Christmas Eve, she took out his blood-spattered maroon pullover, which she had brought back from Calcutta and cried over it. I still remember the pullover with its dark bloodstains. Sometimes, she cupped my face in her palms and said, “You look just like him.” This could be true. All my relatives said that I had the face-cut of my mother. 

My grandmother lived in a large house that her husband had built in the town of Muvattupuzha. On the ground floor, there was a spacious hall, with four bedrooms on the left and the right, a bathroom, a dining hall, a kitchen, a verandah, and a room where she stored her food stuff.

On the first floor, there was a large hall devoid of furniture. Since the building was shaped like an E, there were two bedrooms on both wings, apart from the bathrooms, one of which was big, almost like a spacious room. In this house, which once housed nine children and was a babble of noise and activity, there was now a silence. The children had grown up, got jobs, married, and moved elsewhere.

My grandmother lived a life of going to church, being active in social service activities and hosting her children when they came home with their growing families for the holidays. My grandmother was very generous. When we would leave to return to Calcutta, she would give me a gift of Rs 100 or Rs 150. In the 1970s, it was a lot of money. I felt so happy, even as I gave it to my mother for safe-keeping.

There were so many memories of that house.

Of how, on hot, silent summer afternoons, I would wander up and down the empty hall and wonder about life and what it meant. Sometimes, I climbed over the balustrade of the balcony and walked by the side, holding onto the railing. I felt scared and thrilled at the same time.

Cousins came over. I remember playing cricket with Joseph in the courtyard. The bat was made of a coconut branch, and it would make a ‘thwack’ sound when you hit the ball. We had good fun. 

I also remembered my grandfather, Abraham Vadakel. He was a short, squat man with a broad face. Always dressed in a white shirt and dhoti, he sat on an armchair facing the door. It was open throughout the day, but he could not see.  He was afflicted with glaucoma when he was in his mid-sixties, and gradually lost his eyesight.

My grandfather was a man of habit. He got up at 5 a.m., said his prayers, went to the bathroom, had his bath, and later, his breakfast. He had two small round tin boxes on a table placed against the wall near his armchair. One contained cigarettes that had been cut into half, while the other contained sweets.

He had a sweet tooth, so he ate sweets throughout the day. When I was a child, I tried to steal them from the tin while he was sitting there. But he had sharp ears.

“Who is there?” he said in his gruff voice.

Inevitably, I said, “It’s me.”

He smiled and said, “Take a sweet.”

He did not mind me taking sweets, but I had to tell him first. So, it became a challenge for me to take it without him knowing. I doubt whether I tasted ‘sweet’ success more than twice.

My mother would read the newspaper aloud to her father from end to end every morning. This was something she enjoyed doing. Years later, when I would ask her to explain to me a news report, since I don’t know how to read Malayalam, she would start reading it the way she did to her father. I feel bad saying this, but I would immediately interrupt her and say brusquely, “Just give me the gist.” 

The dining room in my grandparents’ home was a narrow hall with a large table, with chairs all round. I still remember my grandfather sitting at the head of the table and having porridge in a white bowl. And there were the rest of us, my grandmother, my brother and sister, my mother, and my two aunts who lived nearby.

One aunt, Philomina, was married to an engineer, worked as a professor of biology at a nearby college, and had three children, while the other, a nun, Sr Mary Carmel, was a teacher in a nearby school. While Philomina would later become the head of the department, Sr. Mary ended up as the principal. 

All of us sat at the dining table and ate and talked and enjoyed ourselves. A moment frozen in time. Who could have imagined then that deaths in the future — of my grandparents and Philomina — and the march of time would dissolve the scene altogether, never to be replicated. 

There was always this unforgettable image at lunchtime: my grandmother would make balls of rice with her fingers, dip it into the curry and throw it straight into her mouth. She had perfected her aim: it always went in without missing.

Outside the dining room, there was a pipe placed over a thick cement slab on the ground. There was no washbasin. When you washed your hands, the water fell on the slab and slid away into the mud of the courtyard. Because of the water falling constantly on it, the slab had green moss growing on the edges.

There was also a golden container, called a kindi, which was like a mug, with a thin, long, curved snout and you filled it up and went to the steps which led to the courtyard and washed your feet, again allowing the water to run off into the mud. 

This sandy courtyard was long and narrow. Across from it, there was a cattle shed, with a couple of cows, a hen’s coop, and a bathroom. Now this bathroom was strange: it was a large room, with a tiled roof, the walls painted a light blue, and instead of a commode, there was a hole in the ground. You sat, resting your feet on two upraised cement bricks, and the waste fell quite a distance. Apparently, there were pigs which lived underneath which ate whatever you left them. 

In later years, my grandmother installed commodes in all the bathrooms.

My grandmother was the second wife of my grandfather. With his first wife, he had five children, before she died of typhoid at the age of 30. My grandmother was only 20 and my grandfather 45 when they got married. Why did a young woman marry a widower with so many children?

My mother told me there were financial difficulties in my grandmother’s family. So they agreed to this marriage because my grandfather was a wealthy lawyer with a reputation of being a good man. So, my grandmother married my grandfather and began having kids of her own. The first, the eldest, is my mother. 

Thereafter, she had three sons and a daughter. Incidentally, two sons followed the footsteps of their father and went into the legal profession. While one, George Vadakel, became a judge of the Kerala High Court, the other, Joseph practised for several decades in the same court. 

Years later, my mother told me that her mother never discriminated between the two families. She treated everybody the same. It worked. There was no friction between the two sets of children. This revealed a maturity far beyond her years.

But it must have been a hard life for my grandmother because the age difference was so much, and it must have been difficult to handle such a big household at such a young age. But she managed it well and efficiently. Once, she told my mother that no matter what happened, husband and wife should never argue in front of the children. My mother told me how true it was. In the 18 years she lived with her parents, before she got married, she had never heard them argue. But decades later, when my grandmother was old and trembling, her husband having long passed away, she told my mother it was a difficult marriage and left it at that.

All these memories got triggered when, in September 2020, my aunt Philomina, at age 77, died in Muvattupuzha. My mother and I attended the funeral. On the way back, I stopped the car so we could have a glimpse of the ancestral house. 

Imagine our shock, to see that the house no longer existed. Instead, the entire area was blanketed with plants and grass. It was a translucent green because recent rains had washed away all the dust. My cousin had sold the house earlier. And the new owner had kept it the way we remembered it. But it was resold recently.

The newest owner did not find the traditional design useful. So he demolished it. It was a thorough job. Nothing remained.

As I stared at the green expanse, I could feel my heartbeat quicken. It seemed to me a building of memories I had constructed inside me about the house collapsed in the undulating waves of sorrow I felt. 

My 85-year-old mother stood next to me staring silently.

There was a look of devastation on her face.