Family Histories — Part 4
Different Shades of Childhood
1956–1957
Location: Shornur
(Read Part 3 here)
Achan’s memories of 1957 start with a treasured gift. He was at home in Shornur, where his father was posted in the railway station. Their house was nearby, surrounded by paddy fields, the nearest road half a kilometer away.
Achan stood watching as he saw a sight far across the fields. A coolie — as day labourers in Indian railway stations were called, walking towards him with a tricycle hoisted on his shoulders. The man was followed by Vasu Ammavan — one of his mother’s younger brothers. Vasu Ammavan was working in Bhilai at the steel plant, located in Madhya Pradesh at the time. Achan was thrilled at the gift.
Though there was not enough space to ride the tricycle in their yard, within a few days, they ended up moving to new quarters which had ample space to ride the tricycle around. The new house was within a colony. There was a ground and other big houses nearby. You could see the railway station from there.
At the time, the colony had a posse of young Tamil boys who worked as coolies at the railway station. Achan remembers them being as young as 8 years old. Chief among them was Vayaran — an orphan from Tamil Nadu who had somehow ended up in Shornur. He had a small pot belly and a bald head. Achan’s mother, my grandmother would feed him and he would come running whenever called. He would also push Achan around on the tricycle
The term ‘Coolie’ has since been retired from the lexicon. Originally, a term used by the British to call indentured labourers, it was a word used to call people who carried baggage. Though it never became as racially charged as it is outside the subcontinent’s borders, it was widely accepted as a term that needed to go. Coolie is said to be derived from the Tamil word — ‘kuuli’ meaning wages. Yet as Indian labourers were shipped across borders in the service of colonialism, the word ended up as a derogatory slur to mean labourers of Indian and Chinese descent. The accepted term today is porters.
The second thing that stands out to me in this memory is the children who are also working in the railway station, the orphan who seems to rely on the community for care. A world where luck determined largely how your life would turn out. One flip of the coin and you could be born in a family where you might be one of many and far from wealthy, but certainly cared for and the other determining that you were literally on the wrong side of the tracks.
((Read all chapters of Family Histories — The Personal is Political here))
