It was a sunny Sunday morning in the dog days at Madras. I was assisting my father in arranging the books in his room. There were wooden racks groaning with rows of books on a wide ken of subjects like archaeology, Sanskrit literature, English plays as also a number of voluminous as well as slender books on Malayalam and Tamil literature. Two revolving wooden shelves of the early years of the bygone century packed with books added to the literary repository.
Besides all this a long wooden bench with a row of steel trunks over it, each containing tightly tied bundles of dry palm leaves bearing script in Grantham, a language all Greek to everyone else in the family but of frequent reference to him lay close to a wall. Books on Sanskrit epics like Kumarasambhavam, Avanthisundhari, coupled with an anthology of his own works that included an English translation of Arthasaasthra were there on a big table. This is a thumbnail sketch of my dad’s paraphernalia.
A very fair and frail stature in his mid-seventies, sporting a thin, well-knotted traditional tuft at the crown of his noddle with dense, salt-peppered stubbly hair, my father spent hours in his belles-lettres alone. As I kept opening the trunks one by one and taking out the palm-leaf bundles, the sight of something grisly made my hairs stand on ends for a moment. “Oo-er”! I saw a couple of big red scorpions in the box. Instantly I drew my father’s attention to the poisonous creatures and began scouting for a stick to kill them.
My dad checked me from taking any violent action, downed the lid of the trunk, asked me to accompany him to a barren outside, opened the trunk and overturned it. Out the two creatures emerged and crawled into the shrubs. I remember an incident that occurred in Salem district of the erstwhile Madras state when I was a lad all of eight. As my dad returned home from outside and took his shirt off, I noticed a centipede clinging to the inner side of the shirt and instantly pointed it to him.
Unfazed, he moved outdoors and ruffled off the garment, dropping the reptile that had enjoyed a jolly ride in his shirt. Squeezable wooden coat stands were in vogue then. With wooden pegs attached to them for hanging clothes, they were hung from nails driven into the walls. Hence creepy-crawlies could easily enter the habiliments on the coat stand. This instinct of not harming any reptile creeping on or around him, I often think, might have kept him safe from them.