Chapter 10: chapter 10

6During the Bonalu festival the whole city would resonate with joy. All the streets would be filled with much fun and fanfare. It’s a five-week festival. One week it would be celebrated in Golkonda, another week in Secunderabad and so on. In the fifth week the Bonalu procession would start from Rani Gunj and the whole city would be a merry go round literally!The Chief Minister or some other V.I.P. would flag off the procession.The Mulaipaari carried in the procession and the Samiyaatam drew the crowd in large numbers. During the flood hit days the little deities had to guard the town. Little goddesses like Kattamesthriyamma and Maisamma were there to see that the lakes in the town did neither overflow nor go dry! The lakes like Hussain Sagar and Osman Sagar should not go dry. To worship the little goddesses that guarded the lakes, the festival Bonalu was celebrated every year. It also offered an opportunity for people to refresh themselves forgetting their mundane life.But the same festival that brought a lot of joy would also sow the seeds of communal violence in the town.The bakery that was in the lane opposite to Secunderabad Railway Station was an age- old one! It was dirty like the ladies wearing kosha. The mosque that was opposite to it was also dirty. It took a long time for me to realize that the bakery was run by a Tamil. He had a fair complexion. He gave orders to his workers in Urdu. His brother and he were living together as a joint family. His brother also worked in the bakery. They had another shop in the second bazaar. His brother could be seen there too! He would appear as though he was carrying all the dirt of the bakery. It was surprising to see him walking merrily in the streets with his wife and children on holidays. His wife looked as young as their daughter. It was because of her beauty. It took many days for me to recognize her as his brother’s wife. She used to spend her time reading Mills Boon and Jeffery books as big as pillows, bought from the book shop in M.G. Road. She became friends with my wife accidentally!The English daily Deccan Chronicle was started by Tamil people. The important posts of its governing body were held by the Tamil People. For years it was a popular main-stream magazine occupying Number 1 position in daily circulation. The proprietor of Eenadu, Ramoji Rao had started the daily, News Time, to establish it as a rival to Deccan Chronicle! Its front page was very colourful! The quality and the details of the news content were surprising. During the Hyderabad film festival, it published an eight page supplement in colour covering the event in great detail. At that time its circulation grew many folds. Noted Tamil writer Ashokamitran was drafted to write in that paper.Ashokamitran was shocked with the exorbitant room rent and the high cost of the food served in the five-star hotel allotted for him by the paper. He was complaining that he could have been accommodated in an ordinary hotel and the money so saved could have been given to the writers who wrote film-reviews in magazines; that would have been a more appropriate, he felt. At that time the Tamil weeklies Ingae Inru and Vannaththirai run by the Kungkumam group published a detailed account of the scenes which were numerous and the central theme of the film Muthal Mariyathai made by the famous Tamil film director Bharathi Raja resembled those in my book Gounder Club. One of the reporters of Deccan Chronicle told me that if Bharathi Raja came to the festival he would raise the issue through some reporters. Ashoakamitran told me that the literary magazine Kanayazhi had received many letters regarding this issue. He also told me that such things were quite common in the film industry! I was later told that Bharathi Raja did not attend the festival. Earlier my interest in world cinema had not been sharp enough to analyse and comment on them. Still I attended such festivals in the Ramakrishna Theatre just to ‘see’ them. I also saw one or two films in Lamba theatre.After some days, I started attending almost all film festivals because I felt that I should not miss even a single film. Because of his poor health, Ashokamitran used to see only one or two films daily. He would write a review about one of them. He spent his time meeting his other friends too! During his stay, his father’s anniversary day came. As his wife repeatedly told him that he should do the anniversary rites without fail, he asked me to arrange for a prokithar to conduct the rites. We went to a place in M.G. Road where many prohkithars usually assembled. He fixed a prohkithar and asked him to come to the pillaiyar temple near the Secunderabad Railway Station. In the cold morning next day, his lean body shivering badly, he observed the anniversary rites. Then after some days I went to his house in Chennai. Somehow, he failed to introduce me to his wife as a fellow writer. He introduced me to his wife as the one who had helped him to conduct the anniversary rites of his father in Secunderabad!The wife of the bakery owner’s brother liked the supplements on the International Film Festival very much. One day she literally begged my wife Suganthi to lend them to her and took them home. At times, she requested Ramaiah to go to our house to get the copies of the magazine News Today! Her house was just four or five houses away from ours. Her family was a rich one. It was not a big thing for her to buy them herself. But her husband said it was enough to buy one newspaper. “Is it not enough to buy only Deccan Chronicle?” he would ask often. That’s why she got copies of News Today from our house through Ramaiah. Ramaiah was a Tamil. But, as he had been living in Secunderabad for years, his Tamil was not chaste. However, he could talk in Telegu fluently.During the Bonalu festival Ramaiah would observe fasting, a type of religious vow. Once when I asked him what he would eat during those days, he replied that he would take tiffin. In our idiom it meant some snacks. I asked, “What tiffin?” He replied, “Cake…bun”. I told him that they contained egg. He nonchalantly replied, “So what? That too was vegetarian!” He also told me that he would take part in the religious processions conducted during the Bonalu festival.That year I saw Ramaiah in “Kingsway” during the Bonalu festival. I walked along the festival thinking that I could walk in a slow phase up to Hussain Sagar. There were many people who were giving oracular responses, as if they were possessed by some spirit. They were dancing wildly and violently shaking their bodies and sending out furious sighs with their mouths wide open. They were predicting that in future people would face many problems like water shortage and famine!After five minutes when I returned I saw that Ramaiah too was possessed. Two people who were standing near me were discussing in Telugu the dangerous effects the wild changes in climate would bring. Ramaiah was shaking his body wildly and blasting out words which nobody could understand. He was always surrounded by a small crowd of four or five people. Then that also began to dwindle. I immediately understood that people left Ramaiah because they could not understand his words as he was talking in Tamil. At last, he was left alone! He was doling out curses and boons loudly in Tamil and Telugu. I started listening to his rustic Tamil with care.He was repeatedly telling in Tamil, “In the future there would be fighting in the name of religion and rivers of blood would be flowing! Which goddess is going to come and save you then?” The Telugus rejected Tamil, dubbing it as an unchaste language. As Ramaiah was talking in Tamil I thought people had left him thinking that Tamil was an unchaste language. Ramaiah’ s words filled my heart completely until they occupied my way of thinking and I became very tired, physically and mentally.Ramaiah’s prediction became true a sooner! Even on that day itself, there were riots in the name of religion and 144 was imposed in that region.***mulaipaari: pot in which nine kinds of sprouted seeds are kept (used as an offering to deities during marriages and religious festivals).prokithar: a (brahmin) priest who officiates at marriage and other rituals.Samiyaattam: a kind of religious activity in which one gives oracular responses whilepossessed by a spirit.