Ch 1 The early years (contd.)
Catch the baldie!
Before the euphemestically named "New Water" in Singapore ravaged what I once fondly referred to as my flowing mane, and left it in the sorry state that it is in these days, I had a shock-full crown of curly hair.
It was during this time that my parents subjected me to the ritual tonsuring of the head that every kid is put through in South India. We happen to be an ultra conservative-South Indian Iyer household..wake up to MS subbulakshmi's suprabhatam, filter coffee, the venerable Hindu newspaper..you get the general idea. Consequently, my parents went overboard with the tonsuring ritual. If they saw a microscopic growth of hair follicle, they shipped me off to the nearest temple to emerge all shiny-headed.
It was during a trip to Pazhani, a place made famous for offering the best tonsuring services for all your divine needs, that the next incident of my juvenile adventures took place. There was a shop on the Pazhani hill selling something..I think it was ghee, but my memory deceives me often in these advanced years, so I cant guarantee that. These boxes of ghee were arranged in some sort of pyramidic structure- inherently unstable. I am told there were a good 100 boxes that day (business was not very profitable, I presume). As a kid, I loved to play the house of cards game, where you remove the card in the foundation of the structure and the whole thing collapses. I mistook these ghee books to be an extension of my plaything and yanked off the box in the lower most rung. Gravity took its toll, and the boxes scattered in all directions.... Of course the happy-go-lucky rowdy youth around that place made away with most of the scattered boxes, but most of the shopman's ire was directed towards the newly-tonsured-me. I did the only manly thing at my disposal, and made for the nearest exit...
Unfortunately (quite luckily for me), the unthinking shopkeeper yelled "Mottaiya pidinga-da!!", roughly translated as "Catch the bald goon!"...Pazhani being the place it is, does not have a paucity of tonsured heads...While the intervening good-samaritan-chase-party (read idle youth looking for a piece of action) was trying to figure out which one of the gazillion baldies the shopkeeper was referring to, I made my escape.
I always had luck in such matters. But then again, maybe my current hair-loss is a strange karmic-payback for this long forgotten childhood incident.
Before the euphemestically named "New Water" in Singapore ravaged what I once fondly referred to as my flowing mane, and left it in the sorry state that it is in these days, I had a shock-full crown of curly hair.
It was during this time that my parents subjected me to the ritual tonsuring of the head that every kid is put through in South India. We happen to be an ultra conservative-South Indian Iyer household..wake up to MS subbulakshmi's suprabhatam, filter coffee, the venerable Hindu newspaper..you get the general idea. Consequently, my parents went overboard with the tonsuring ritual. If they saw a microscopic growth of hair follicle, they shipped me off to the nearest temple to emerge all shiny-headed.
It was during a trip to Pazhani, a place made famous for offering the best tonsuring services for all your divine needs, that the next incident of my juvenile adventures took place. There was a shop on the Pazhani hill selling something..I think it was ghee, but my memory deceives me often in these advanced years, so I cant guarantee that. These boxes of ghee were arranged in some sort of pyramidic structure- inherently unstable. I am told there were a good 100 boxes that day (business was not very profitable, I presume). As a kid, I loved to play the house of cards game, where you remove the card in the foundation of the structure and the whole thing collapses. I mistook these ghee books to be an extension of my plaything and yanked off the box in the lower most rung. Gravity took its toll, and the boxes scattered in all directions.... Of course the happy-go-lucky rowdy youth around that place made away with most of the scattered boxes, but most of the shopman's ire was directed towards the newly-tonsured-me. I did the only manly thing at my disposal, and made for the nearest exit...
Unfortunately (quite luckily for me), the unthinking shopkeeper yelled "Mottaiya pidinga-da!!", roughly translated as "Catch the bald goon!"...Pazhani being the place it is, does not have a paucity of tonsured heads...While the intervening good-samaritan-chase-party (read idle youth looking for a piece of action) was trying to figure out which one of the gazillion baldies the shopkeeper was referring to, I made my escape.
I always had luck in such matters. But then again, maybe my current hair-loss is a strange karmic-payback for this long forgotten childhood incident.
posted by Venkat at 9:13 AM
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