Five decades ago…

The summer vacations fifty years ago were something different. Zeema Kanakambaran, a retired headmistress, revisits the memories of the 1970s, when she was a school student. She would eagerly wait for the last day of school, and tell her father to inform her uncle to pick her up from Ithipuzha to her ancestral home in Vaikom, Kerala. Summer vacations meant “taking dips in the river, playing under a bushy plant called Kalyana chedi, going to streams and catching fish, making a stove-like structure.” Summer vacations were also a license to indulge in mischief. “Cashews start fruiting in the summer. We (she, her cousins, and her friends) would trade cashews for crackers. On guava trees, we would hang these crackers, and if we noticed anyone passing by, we would start bursting them,” she chuckles. Evenings meant staying indoors. As dusk spread over the day, and lamps were lit her, appuppan (grandfather) would teach her and her cousins to chant prayers. But for them, nothing was incomplete without a blob of playfulness. She says, “We would otherwise never chant prayers in the evenings, but at our ancestral home, we try our best to chant louder than the neighbour kids.”

Similarly, Anil PV’s vacations were usually spent at Moolamattom, Kerala, where his dad used to work. His vacations were spent outdoors, with bottled-up secrets and untold tricks. Narrating his childhood stories from the 1970s, he says, “There was a pond near my home; if I would come to know that snakes appeared in the premises, my friends and I would do our utmost to find them and kill them.” This was one of his activities from his tight schedule. Hunger in between playtime would be satiated with intermittent snacks, which could be found in and around the village. “We would roast cashews and eat.”