I am conscientious.
Despite how that sounds, this is not a boast. It is just an observation from a recent test I took to assess my standing on the "Big Five" personality traits, one of which is "conscientiousness." I scored above the norm on this trait.
The other four traits are openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits have specific, refined definitions, quite apart from their dictionary meaning, which you can look up, for example on the Wikipedia.
Although I was about average on agreeableness, I did not score well on openness and extraversion—a surprise!
I bring up conscientiousness—defined as a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior—because I am puzzled by the high score. I did not exhibit any inclinations along these lines as a child. And psychologists tell us that personality traits are hard to change.
Let me elaborate. My mother’s favorite past time when I visit her involves recounting episode after episode of my spontaneous misbehavior in childhood. For instance, in one abhorrent act, I convinced my younger sister that washing soda was sugar. She vomited from morning till nightfall. Frequently, such misdeeds boomeranged. Shortly after dishing out misery to my sister, I spent countless hours sloshing coconut oil in my mouth. Why? Because I had attempted to eat raw cashew nut that I had cut open with an Ashoka blade stolen from my uncle’s shaving kit. Who knew that cashew shells are a potent source of anacardic acid, which can burn and inflame the skin? Washing the mouth with coconut oil was the home remedy prescribed and administered by my mother. Fortunately, she has remained unaware of many other unconscientious acts that I perpetrated outside the premises of our house.
Such as my tryst with money and a movie.
This was back in the 3rd standard, or grade if you will. I am in Annie teacher's class at Koventha primary school, which is located in the uphill section of downtown Varandarappilly in Thrissur District. Varandarappilly was then a gateway town to the tea plantations at Palappilly and beyond along the foothills of the Western Ghats. Occasionally, you could catch the glimpse of a British Sayippu driving by in his luxury car—in those days, any car that wasn’t an Ambassador—on the way to his tea estate bungalow. At the town’s barbershop, I had overheard that Varandarappilly was once known as Vanandarappilly, meaning a place in the forest.
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| The Koventha Church |
The majestic white-painted Catholic church, Koventhapally, adorned the highest point in the town. Directly below was the church-run Koventha primary school. “Primary” was a good description for the school in more ways than intended. Besides the level of the curriculum, the facilities were quite primary as well. The school consisted of two parallel hallways connected by a third across the middle. The classes in the middle segment were separated by mara, a bamboo screen. The backyard woods served multiple purposes: playground, source of seasonal snacks from the tamarind and mango trees, and the much-needed restroom.
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| The Koventha Shool today |
In my first grade, our classroom, perhaps because it had pukka walls, doubled as a storage room for sacks of CARE1 food: wheat and milk powder, meant to be served as school lunch. The milk powder proved too tempting for some kids who shared the space with the sacks. During class breaks, when others left to play kayyiladi (a game of tag) or golikkaya (a game with glass marbles and three pits dug in the dirt in a straight line), a few of us would sneak back into the classroom, poke holes in the sacks, squeeze out milk powder into our cupped palms, and devour it as if we hadn’t tasted sweetened milk before. Well, come to think of it, we hadn’t. Considering the deprivation, I feel better about this little act of thievery.
So back in the 3rd grade at Koventha, there was this film to be screened as a fundraiser for some local charity at the Varandarapilly Jose theater.
Now please set aside your modern sensibilities when contemplating this “theater.” It didn’t promise any kind of pleasure trip to the potential patrons, as do today’s multiplexes. However, it had other plus points. It was architecturally minimalist and environmentally eco-friendly; way ahead of its time on that score. Constructed entirely out of renewable materials—mud, palm leaves, and a bare-bone scaffolding of wood—the edifice would harmlessly crumble into the surroundings if left unattended, as it did several years later when younger moviegoers, unappreciative of Jose’s low carbon footprint, refused to enter its premises.
The students of Koventha primary school were urged to canvass their parents for money to attend the screening of a movie at the Jose. First class seating cost a princely 50 naya paisa2. It got you wooden chairs at the very back of the cinema house with bed lice as companions. At one-fifth of that, the least cost option was the thara (a mud platform or floor). It would take me an entire volume of prose to convey the true essence of this unique seating arrangement. Let me just say, it involved squatting down, placing your rear end firmly planted on the ground, and watching the great sagas of Indian cinema unfold on the screen a few feet in front of you with your neck craned at a taxing 60-degree angle. Since this manner of theater seating was a popular option in those penurious days, it meant being locked into the squat & neck-up position for the entire three and half-hour duration of the movie, save for the mid-way interval. Jose’s owners weren’t totally inconsiderate, however. They generously spread a three-inch bed of sand on the ground to increase the comfort level of their valued thara patrons. Sadly, in an unjust and thoroughly deplorable development, the word thara has evolved into an adjective indicative of a person of dubious character.
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| Wives Beware!! |
Now, the film to be screened, it turned out, was Bharyamar Sookshikuka!! (Wives Beware!!), a clever title that plays up on the fears of married women and men, not to mention those contemplating marriage. Any wonder why it went on to be a bonafide hit? As to why this movie was chosen for screening to a bunch of elementary school students, go figure. All I can say is, the seemingly senseless selection fit nicely with the rest of the way life played out in and around Varandarappilly those days. Stuff happened and nobody ever questioned why or what for. If you have any doubts, let me allay it right here. Want to hear about a guy who showed up regularly each winter and briefly became the center of town’s attention by spending several days circling around on a bicycle, occasionally beating himself up with spent fluorescent “tube” lights?
Just a few yards away from the Jose theater was the Varandarappilly chanda, kind of a spot market, in this case for fish and meat, and in somewhat of an odd combination, pappadum. An entourage of families that supported the market, from the butcher to the pappadum-maker (pandaran), lived there by the roadside, in rental buildings owned by one of the Catholic clans that monopolized much of the retail and real estate business in Varandarappilly. The families’ close proximity predictably led to liaisons that flared into open street brawls every now and then. Aside from this ‘family’ entertainment, on cool December evenings, the chanda hosted a most peculiar spectator sport: the cycle yagnam. Don’t let the word yagnam—a venerable Sanskrit word signifying ancient vedic rituals—fool you. Cycle yagnam was about real worldly endurance, not other worldly mysticism.
This bicycle-bound ordeal was staged in heart of the chanda, an open area bordered by shops that was roped-off into a circular arena for the purpose. One learns of an impending yagnam either from announcements blaring off loudspeakers mounted on yellow-top Ambassador taxis, from flyers thrown out by the announcer through the speeding car window, or word-of-mouth, the surefire way to spread news in that pre-telecom era. On the appointed day, an itinerant endurance artist shows up, typically a wiry chap in shabby pants and shirt, mounts a beaten-up bicycle to great fanfare, and proceeds to pedal around the ring. The kicker is that he won’t dismount from that bike until seven days have passed. Don’t ask pesky questions, how he slept etc. It was all done bike-bound, or so my friend Sriram had assured me when I raised the same question. Him being a cleverer fellow than me, as would become apparent shortly, I accepted his word and chose not to probe further.
But if all the yagnam biker did was ride around in circles in the chanda, a place suffused with persistent odor of dead fish, there would be few Varandarappilliyans left to watch this spectacle after the first fifteen minutes. His bag of tricks included a variety of bike-bound stunts that could give any modern-day BMXer a run for his money. Among the stunts he pulled off was the aforementioned destruction of burnt out fluorescent tubes. A helper handed out tubes in rapid succession to the biker who gleefully whipped himself with them, shattering the tubes into smithereens. The crowd gasped in horror and the impressed ones threw coins onto a rag spread out on the dirt as a collection mat. Sadly, as time regressed, Varadarappilliyans and the world at large became less enamored of this sort of entertainment and the cycle yagnies soon went extinct just as the eco-friendly Jose theater did.
In this milieu, it doesn’t seem too odd that primary schoolers were canvassed to watch a movie whose title couldn’t have been clearer about the intended audience. What perplexes me to this day is why my mother actually shelled out the required 50 naya paisa to book me a first-class ticket to watch Bharyamar Sookshikuka!! May be she was taken in by the charitable cause. More likely, she took pity on the plight of my future wife and decided to take an early corrective action by exposing me to the tribulations of wayward behavior.
I didn’t care about her reasoning or the implicit commitment to watch a movie about conjugal troubles. All I cared was I had real money in my pocket. Until then all I had ever managed to have was an occasional one- or two-paisa coin isnged 3 from grandmother’s closet. I set out the next morning feeling rich and pampered. The movie screening was slated for 1:30 in the afternoon.
For a kid with paisa in his pocket, temptations abounded in downtown Varandarapilly. I felt like, well, a kid in a candy store. For a few paisa, one could have the pick of naranga mittayi (orange-flavored candy), jeeraka mittayi (cumin-flavored candy), ice fruit colored with brain-impairing substances, or the unappealingly named gas mittayi (mint-flavored candy). Or, suppress your gag reflex, the infamous but briskly selling thuppal mittayi. Allegedly, and I am not making this up, the chettichies (ladies of a trader caste) who prepared and sold this candy from prime spots around the school gate, resorted to the liberal use of their spit (thuppal) to roll the candy into shape.
I had eyed these attractions longingly every day since I started at Koventha, hygiene and health be damned. Lack of pocket change, not self-restraint or caution, proved an insurmountable hurdle between me and the treats. Now, fifty-paisa richer, any smidgen of self-discipline I had evaporated before I passed the first store. Besides, I owed a debt to my friend Sriram.
Sriram, my elementary grade buddy. Our friendship was cemented on a simple act of generosity. Just prior to the summer vacation in the 2nd grade, Lonakutty master assembled all the students in a Koventha hallway with a single purpose—administering the math final exam. The event was short as it was simple. We stood shoulder to shoulder, with the slate (a writing tablet made out of slate rock) and pencil in hand. Sriram stood to my left. Lonakutty master read the problem out aloud, which was eerily prescient.
“A mother gave her son 50 naya paisa. The son bought mittayi worth two naya paisa. How many naya paisa did he have left?”
That was it! The fate of an entire class of 2nd graders, after all the effort through the academic year, depended on that question. A cold shiver ran down my spine. The lack of experience handling naya paisas so willy-nilly began to haunt me. Suddenly, my left ear caught a whisper: “forty-eight, forty-eight naya paisa.” Without glancing, I quickly wrote down the number on my slate. Lonakutty master went from student to student, grabbing the slates and rendering the cleanly bifurcated verdict: a big fat zero or a 50/50. Needless to say, after that close call, I began to view Sriram with new found reverence.
Sriram was helpful in other ways as well. He always seemed to have spare change with him, which he spent without a hint of selfishness. With his largesse, I was even introduced to the pleasures of the treasured Paris mittayi (a brand name caramel candy). Now that I had money, it was time to return the favor.
And spent I did, at the first school recess. The original intent of the 50 paisa in my pocket was long forgotten. Starting from the downtown Umbavoo’s store, we began to work up the street toward the school gate. At lunch break, we stopped at the uptown Umbaoov’s4 and savored alli mittayi. Sriram picked up a couple of slate pencils, which, in addition to being a writing tool, had high barter value in the school economy that sprung up in the hallways during break hours. I can’t recall whether we bought thuppal mittayi. Honest! In any case, the school bell rang signaling the end the of the lunch hour and we quickly returned to the classroom. It was 12.30 PM.
There was no time left in the day for instruction. Those who had brought money for the movie were segregated and the have-nots were dismissed for the day. The haves were ushered out in a line stretching from the school gate. The teachers stood to the side and marched us in single file through downtown Varandarapilly, turning right to the chanda, and then to the Jose.
At Jose, things unraveled quickly. The students were asked to pay out and procure their tickets at the box office. I searched the pockets of my shorts and fished out two coins. Exactly 10 paisa. That’s all I had left. Just enough to squeak into the thara. I looked at Sriram. He had enough to go for the bench seating but decided to forego the pleasure and accompany his hapless companion. We bought the tickets and were herded into the thara section.
The rest is a blurry memory. I have no recollections of the story line or why the movie carried such a stark title, with two exclamation points to boot. Mother never asked about the movie and I didn’t volunteer how I had short-changed on the charitable intent.
And that was that, until decades later I took the test and was certified as possessing a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior. The memories came flooding back, leaving me puzzled by the inconsistency.
Reflecting, I wonder whether, intended or not, my mother may have had the last laugh. While I forgot about the content of the movie, I never forgot how easily I blew through the budget. And the thara seating left a lasting impression. I developed a habit of being careful with money and a diminished enthusiasm for movies and television. Both qualities have served me well—until now.
It is 8:00 pm on a recent leisurely Thursday evening. I finished dinner and stretched out on the sofa in the family room. “Aren’t you coming?” I called out to my wife. “I am about to start.”
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“Barthakkanmarude Shradhakku!!” (Attention Husbands!!), I replied.
1 Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, a charity organization that initially focused on post-war Europe and later expanded activities worldwide, including India especially in the 60s.↩
2 For you kids, one naya paisa coin was the minimum legal tender. With the rupee heading south, it is no longer in circulation.↩
3 This word isnged calls for some explanation. I have evidently anglicized it to the past-tense. The original, isngal (noun) or isngi (verb) is a Thrissur colloquial expression meaning to take possession of something, usually of relatively low value, without consent. The word osal (noun) or osi (verb), meaning to partake of things from other people without ever offering anything in return, is a close cousin.↩
