Mathew Thomas

Mathew and I never ever spoke in all 7 years in our Presentation School stint. I don't think we were in the same sections ever. But Mathew Thomas became an instant star in my mind; when he was one of the few boys selected to do ball dance in primary school at the Presentation school annual day. I have no idea who he danced with. But I lived in an era or may be in my own mindset where little boys considered it un-cool to be seen talking to girls; despite wanting to; for the fear of being teased. In that scenario; dancing!; on stage!!; with 10 other girls!!!; with 1000 odd people watching!!!! (Oh My God!) would be enough incident for me to run away from home.
Already he was the star roller-skater in school and sometimes he won prizes that said he did skating for 12 hours non-stop. (wow! how did he do it.. but then.. didn't he have to....? may be there is a trick to it... ) random thoughts crossed my mind while I stood at the assembly while Mathew and sister Achamma brought back trophies from the REC Calicut Wheels competition or other events for very many years ; from the time I could remember. He inspired me to buy roller skates, and I inspired my brother to buy roller skates. I could not inspire myself to fall and hurt my knees. My brother started rolling on and would eat and sleep with them; till one day he inherited mine that was so unused that the ball bearings had got rusty.
May be it was eighth standard may be it was ninth; Mathew just shot up in height and had a rapid movement backwards in where he stood in the school assembly. Maybe that also gave him the reason to take permission to go to school in a bicycle. BSA - SLR - Maroon colour. With almost 90% of the route from Silver Hills to home being common; we started connecting. he showed me his cottage-looking house at Golf Link Road at Chevayoor. I have never been inside, but it looked lovely from the outside and Mathew talked about cocoa and pepper getting cultivated in plenty in his backyard and I used to visualised a huge playground full of black seeds and brown seeds that smelt like chocolate. Then he moved to Hill View Colony, where Praveen already stayed. I don't know the house number; but you drive straight into the colony, skip the first intersection and look for the last house on the left; that is his house. Keeping in touch wasn't an issue - in the five digit telephone exchanges that we had, I subtract 10 from my home phone number, it was Mathews. If I added 10, it was Calicut Medical College Ladies Hostel. Both came handy at different points in time. The first, to co-ordinate start times from home on bicycles, the latter to co-ordinate meeting times outside homes.
Then the usual suspects got rounded up again at Ouseph sir's house and Nambisan Uncle's house and as explained earlier in Anil P's write up; Ouseph sir; going by Mathew's maths marks; predicted Mathew's taking up engineering after school. and he did.
Post that, I met Mathew once in a cinema hall? not sure.. or was it at the railway station booking counter? anyway, he was straight out of a Beatles album - long flowing hair, printed shirts and very faded jeans. He visits once in a while and would take a mid-night bus that would take him to Kothamangalam at 6 in the morning! That was quick. He had evolved in life, like how all college goers evolve eventually. If not during first year, they evolve in the second or third year. By final year, one is actually so evolved; that sometimes it takes a warden or a hostel raid to put to back to ground reality.

Mathew moved to Pune, I moved to Lucknow. E-mails and messengers were being put to proper use those days, unlike the days of maniacally forwarded jokes. mattkanjickal and ashrk connected as online entities with yellow faces that had smileys that winked, in a language we had never ever spoken to each other before - even in the language class - English.

After a long break of may be 5 years, I heard from him again when his junior announced his arrival. I hope someday he reads this; and asks his dad "where was your cottage in Golf Link Road?". A different structure stands where his colonial cottage stood, but am sure he will feel the walls and rooms strongly enough to paint the picture for a young son to dream about.

Praveen Balachandran

I don't remember the first time i saw Praveen. He was not there in my Class 2 A group photograph. So may be he joined school later than that or he was in a different division - class 2B. At Class 4 we were together; with Sister Rose Mary being the class teacher. Sister Rose Mary believed in relationships; and may be in jest; she did a good job of pairing up the boys and girls in the class to sit together. The reason she quoted Praveens' getting paired up with Swapna was that they look lovely as a couple. Now looking at that class 4 photograph, she was right. Praveen and Swapna were two of the best looking people in their respective genders and am sure he did start creating a flutter in innocent 9 year olds in blue skirts, pig tails, pony tails and white ribbons.

Praveen's house was on the way to school. In Hill View Colony. The house had a rear entrance that was accessible from the road and the main entrance that one had to go through their colony for. Every morning, i would sneak in; through the rear entrance. For a reason that I still don't know of, I avoided the main entrance through the colony road. Even after 1 year of daily visits, his mother would open the door with a smile; to let in a nine year old; who increasingly thought it was his right to be let in. I also remember Praveen's uncle, who was his college's star in Volley ball and could actually jump and touch the ceiling of the house that was 10 feet high (Wow!!).

Now I don't even know why I used to visit his house. The only reason I remember, which was valid for a short time, was television had just arrived Calicut in 1984 and we still had not bought one. The Indian Cricket Team was in Australia to play the Benson & Hedges World Series of Cricket. It was the first time cricket was played in coloured clothing and India had Blue and Yellow. The regular morning starts in Australia meant a start at about 4:30 am India time. By the time I was in Praveen's house at 8:00 am or so (20 minutes ahead of my usual visits) ; the match would be interestingly poised.

At school, the guava tree in the left end of the playground was a hang-out point. Coming to think of it, Presentation High school had the ambience of a resort. There Praveen, with roots in Vadakara would argue why Vadakara was the best place to be. It seems so, that majority of Volley Ball payers in the Kerala state team was from Vadakara, and it seems so was Thacholi Odenan, the great hero of Malabar folk songs. The rest of the gang would not refute. One, his uncle was a volley ball player. So we presumed that what Praveen said about Volly ball was correct. Two, none of us knew the origins of Odenan, so we gave it to him.

I moved to Silver Hills after standard 5 and Praveen joined two years later. Silver Hills had a strong migrant population from Presentation (not Presentations' fault. But boys were not allowed in Presentation after standard 7), so getting imbibed was not an issue for Praveen. By now he was a member of the Under-12 Kerala State team for cricket; and was at the age of 13, also getting considered for the Under 15 team. Cricket took care of fans and admirers among all sections of the society

Maybe it is because of Praveen that I had the courage to ask Amma for permission to go to school in my bicycle, and it was definitely because of Praveen that I changed my bicycle handle from a standard one to a sporty one. All that resulted in our being a band of boys who travelled 14 odd kilometers every day, to and fro, on their bicycles - Mathew, Prameesh and sometime Biju MV were to join in.

The last I met him was in 1991. The tenth standard exams (that happened in March) results were out in May. Praveen had done very well and he would also have extra marks given by the education department because he represented the state in Cricket in January. Then I heard that he was in Kolar for his under graduation studies. then came the dark ages (when letter writing as an activity was on the decline; when there were no mobile phones; when the phones mentioned in school facebooks did not exist anymore and of course no Internet). Little did I know he worked two blocks away from my favorite pub in Bangalore for almost 2 years.

And in 2007 when I was inducted into Presentation's newly created e-group; a casual glance at some of the earlier mails had a subject "where is Praveen Balachandran???". No marks for guessing the gender of the enquirer. It had to be from an old classmate who was once in blue skirt, white shirt and pigtails

O T Sivaraman Nambiar

It was before the 80's and after I was born (that gives it 4 years), that I have my first memories of Sivamama. O T Sivaraman Nambiar for his colleagues in Kerala; O T Shivaram for his colleagues in the rest of India; Siva-mmama for me.
In the traditional hamlet of Thiruvannoor, the first address that I remember living at, there used to be a temple pond. I have memories of small boys running along the 6 foot high ledge and do a plunge towards the pool, splashing water in the faces of happy onlookers. Sheer moments of joy. I am told Shivammama was the one who used to take me there on those walks. In the extreme ends of my memory, I remember his room in the Thiruvannoor house - a cot, a study table, and a row of books. Which actually summed up the man - working professional, part time student ambitious about higher studies and a voracious reader.

His mother (my grandmother) would tell me about how Shivammama got miraculously cured from a bout of polio as a young child. Part providence, part Ammoomma's faith and part destiny. He has been on the move ever since. Kannur to Kozhikkode Guruvayoorappan College - where he graduated in Chemistry and had his first brush with writing fiction. Calicut to Ernakulam as a professional in the F.A.C.T, Alwaye and then onto Kerala Soaps and Oils.

As a street smart personal products sales man; he traveled across South India as far as distribution networks reached, competing with some of the big-wigs of the global industry at that time. May be it was because of his quick wit, his very warm smile and the sense of being earthly genuine, may be hundred odd people from all over the country made an earnest attempt to travel to a corner coastal town, that is Calicut to attend his wedding to Sobha-ammayi in Nov 1 1980.
He had his life split between Calicut and where his markets were; all across India; just as he had his self split between the rigours and tact of a street-smart marketing professional and the romance within, of a writer waiting to explode. On those stints at Calicut, he would take me to school in his Bajaj scooter [Yes I was one of the very few in class who got a lift to school on rare days like these - the rest, like me walked, or took the public bus system or the school bus system] In those days of Ambassador and Fiat; cars were a rarity; let alone people who got dropped to schools in a car. On the weekend nights as a bachelor, he would sprawl himself on the cool red oxide floor and listen to Vividh Bharati or other Radio song shows in our old Murphy portable radio and fall asleep.
He has that incredible gift of falling asleep where and when he wills; be it a crowded day train or a peaceful Sunday afternoon; and also the gift of getting up in the wee hours of morning to put pen on paper; thus giving vent to literary ideas drumming within. Getting up that early in the morning was not new for him, for sometime in the 80's; despite his gruelling work schedule, he had worked his way to top the MBA course at Osmania University
As I stepped into college and as he moved into Cochin as one of the marketing forces behind the Spices Board operations in the city; I got to know Shivammama better. The power distance between the uncle and the nephew was broken; and I started reading between his conversations that he would place with a wink of his already narrow eyes - to decipher tongue-in-cheek humour meant only for the select few. More and more people in niche circles started looking forward to that humour - be it in management circles or on social occasions - and a leadership office bearer position in the Kerala Management Association provided the platform for that.
Now as he travels through the world on official work; he realises the richness of his experience - back-room business battles won and lost, stories of ordinary people who achieved their dreams, what goes on behind a front page article on the leading business dailies and is already putting pen on paper. When the output is ready, I don't have to tell you its arrival.

It will announce itself.