The Little Lessons of Life

I sat there chewing on the sugarcane that grandma gave me. It came right from her kitchen garden. She'd watered the few sugarcanes for ten long months. The last time I visited her, the canes were only waist high.

"A lot of people have been asking me for the sugarcanes. But I told them they were there for my grandchildren, and the canes can wait there till they come"

Kerala is a sight to behold when the monsoons roll in. The summer heat was trying harder to gut the land. As a child , whenever I visited my grandparents in the vacations, the summer evenings where invariably spent in the stream that flowed a few hundred meters from home. I will always remember that stream where I tried to learn swimming in knee deep water.

Then there was Vignesh, my childhood pal. We werent really the naughty types, except for that one time when the green mangos in Sivaraman's garden tempted us.We spent an entire afternoon standing outside the fence of Sivaraman's mango garden flinging stones at scores of green mangoes . After over an hour , maybe two, and a few hundred stone throws, my throw found its mark. And , we watched in awe as a mango got freed of the tree's hold and sliced through the air to fall on the ground bedded with dry leaves. Hitting a mango had been easy, compared to the risk involved in jumping Sivaraman's fence and collecting the trophy that lay on a bed of dry mango leaves.

That evenin I walked back home, grandpa stopped me.
"Did you hit mangoes from Sivaraman's garden?"
My pulse was racing now. I was not prepared to face the shame of gettin caught.
"Sivaraman is your uncle. He is related to us. Next time walk right in and take what u want"
This was worse. I was hoping to be a martyr , not a moron.

While I was in school every vacation was invariably spent with grandad. Each day was an adventure with him , and a learning experience. He was holding my hands when I took my first underwater dip. I was hardly seven years old then. Ofcourse in a few weeks I was addicted to freely floating on the stream like a corpse, face down ,for minutes together, an addiction which I'm yet to get over. Lyin face down on water, it is ectastic to look down at the many smoothened pebbles on the river bed, and slowly drift downstream as the current drags ur limp body. It became a regular sight at the stream for my grandad then, to watch me run upstream and float like dead-wood back downstream. Each trip to the stream invariably had to end with me pleading to him that we should stay another hour. Ofcourse the sun was setting, and I did relent always.

During my last visit, he was too old to walk to the stream. I went to the stream with Vignesh. The stream wasn't deep anymore., or maybe I had grown too tall. We sat there and smoked thinking of old times. It was more than a year then, since I had visited him last , and something had nagged me to stay a few days with him. So I stayed with him for two days , which made him awefully proud. He had boasted to his neighbours how his busy grandson had taken two days out just for him.
This time we just sat and spoke. No visits to temples or streams. He had been sweet enough to buy a basket of Neelam Mangoes, and Jackfruits, something he has done during every summer visit of mine--except this one.

This time, I'll have to make do with sugarcanes from Grandmas's kitchen garden. I was thankful for the canes., and for the people who nurtured me. I am thankful for the little lessons in life that I learnt along the way with them. And, the biggest lesson that he ultimately taught me--- to let go.