Boy wants to marry classmate-girl. Boy's father forbids it because girl's family is not so well-off. Pays off the girl's father to get her married elsewhere. Sends boy off to do a Teacher-training course far from home.
One day, boy calls father to say he has a stomach complaint, and will the fathe...
EB (Electricity Board lineman) Vellian came by one morning, a couple of weeks ago, to say he "thought of me". There had been a terrific hailstorm the previous evening; and I had been very surprised to find that the electrcity supply had been restored pretty soon after the rain stopped.
Vellian inf...
Early in the morning, while the milk was on the boil, Chandran and Selvam from Valagapattu came by, to exhort me to vote: "Your voting slips are with us, you are in our ward, come by 8 o'clock before the rush".
I said that I knew that I was in their ward; and that I would definitely come to vote....
[caption id="attachment_105" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Frisky by Varun"][/caption]
Yesterday, early in the morning, Ananda and Rajkumar came up to say that Frisky had attacked a sheep and skinned it. Badri, Varun and I went down to see: Kumar, Parman and their families were there n...
Murugesan and Chinnamma's son Ponnusamy hanged himself last Sunday sfternoon. I went down to Valagapattu, later, to meet the bereaved parents. and found the whole village in a state of bewilderment. Ponnusamy was 12 years old. And why did he commit suicide? Because, that morning, his father had sold...
Meeta came from Dilli last week
We met after ten years or so.
She brought us all clothes from Kaladera
Vegetable-dyed, don't you know?
Sunny was nursing a migraine at home
But was here, in the spirit, so to speak.
Just one phone call from him, and
Our ears were ringing for a week....
One evening, about 3 weeks ago, Sonati spotted what she thought was a baby python behind the house. She squealed, and Frisky came running to see what was up. The snake made a dramatic "leap in the air" and then coiled itself up, and started "hissing like a pressure cooker". The rest of us came to th...
Gautam Doshi, a friend of ours who works at Intel visited us last month for a few days. He wanted to "immersively" find technical solutions to rural problems; to see what solutions Intel may have to offer here...
It was good to have him over, to sample a different world-view (both parties). He bro...
The last couple of months has seen us deluged by visitors (hence our disappearance from cyber space:-). One couple, uninvited but very welcome was the Paradise Flycatcher. On a couple of occasions we thought we had seen the male but were not sure. One day, last week, we heard a lot of bird alarm c...
Arunachalam, Chinnathambi and Thenan were working with mud, one day last week: we are in the (slow) process of converting our cowshed into a room. The first step in this was levelling the floor and knocking down and rebuilding a crooked wall.
While the clay was available, Arunachalam kneading it...