Memories of Palikunnu
All it takes a person with a modicum of intelligence and a little experience in what is called LIFE, to preserve a sliver of it for posterity as well his own private pleasure, while the activities that brought him rice and sambaar, are behind him, and the balance of his tenancy of the planet is to be spent in reliving his past full of joys and foibles, by chronicling his journey until he opened his Computer to punch the keyboard to release his genie that he had bottled within him.
Karunkar T. Nair, whom I last saw about 50 years ago in my home village Pallikunnu, Kannur, would be a cousin, if researchers could find the connection through my father’s larger family. He wrote an autobiographic novel “Sunrise Hill” weaving together the story of his life linking three continents, Asia of which India is a sub–continent, East Africa, where he emigrated to for his education under the tutelage of his father who had pitched his business tent there, and Europe particularly England, where he, a total slave of His Majesty, found freedom in spite of racism, to grow into manhood, and start life afresh as a citizen of UK. He however did not marry an English girl, but chose one from his original country, for but for his occidental orientation that like magnet, attracted most young men those days, he remained at heart, a villager of Pallikunnu, on the slopes of Sunrise Hill, and devoted to the presiding deity of the temple. To the locals he was known as Kuttan. He draws the autobiographical curtain close thus.
“With eyes closed in prayer, Kuttan stood with folded hands. In the tranquillity of the evening, the serene images of his amma and Pallikunnamma coalesced silently to bless him.”
That spark of divinity is the foil against which Kuttan’s story is to be read…
How he overcomes the harsh realities of the dark continent where he spent most of his formative years, and escaped to the White continent which embraced him but kept the little light of nostalgia alive, is the story that strummed the nostalgia string in me. Though I left Pallikunnu in 1946 seeking ’better education’, which, according to my mother, was available only in Madras at the M. C. C. School, and I think that she was right, I still remain a villager of Pallikunnu, though not a devout temple goer, for a ray of wisdom tells me “Aham Brahmasmi”. Let me stew in my own foolishness, but if Kuttan needed that trans before the deity, that is his choice in a free world to reach his destination, through what is now increasingly called, the “roadmap”… The book by a debutant Malayalee-Englishman, priced at Rs. 250 (at my local bookstore in Chennai), is a good read.
