Milky Ways - 2

==========================================================

Milk and I never agreed...we just nod when we meet and part grimly like Buddha-da and Mamata-di.

This is because the first among my many humiliations in my long life was due to an embarrassing encounter with milk at the tender age of 8.

We had an AP chulha in our village home. It was made of iron and shaped like a huge wine glass with a side-hole at its bottom for the draft of air entering from below and running upwards through its narrow neck which was covered by an iron grating to hold charcoal. It had a pair of cute ear-rings for lifting and carrying...with age it got deaf first on one side and then both sides and housewives had to improvise using hearing aids..

After loading the charcoal above the neck to its brim, it was lit up by placing old newspaper pieces or cloth soaked in kerosene and fanning.

Once the charcoal caught fire you had no control over it.

One morning my mother placed a bronze vessel half-filled with milk on her chulha, lit it and asked me to see that the boiling milk did not spill over and douse the fire (wet chulha with wet coal is a curse for housewives); and she went away on some other urgent household errand.

But she didn't tell me how.

So, I applied my Theoretical Physics brain (premonition) and whenever a film formed and surged upwards angrily I poured in a spoon or two of cold water to cool the damn thing.

By the time mom returned, the vessel was full to the brim with diluted unboiled milk.

She simply said (prophetically): "You will come to no good".

Since then I avoid facing boiling milk and run away round and round in circles like Montmorency around the hot tea-kettle whose spout he grabbed by his mouth, offended by its uppish nonchalance emitting steam with a hissing sound and lifting up its lid into a James Watt dance.

******************************************************************************************************

There are however two occasions when AP womenfolk deliberately let the boiling milk to overflow and douse the chulha (they too 'come to no good' by and large).

1. On the morning of Ratha Saptami

This comes in early Spring (in February or so) when the Sun-God (mercifully) starts retreating from His southward dip and not get lost down South bitterly.

To please and felicitate Him, a vessel full of fresh cow's milk {;-} is kept in the Sun on a chula till it boils over and douses the fire; and then the vessel is re- placed on the secret second chulha brought down from the attic.

Payas is made and offered to our Sun-God who is destined to forever ride on his chariot pulled by seven horses along his annual zodiacal tour, driven by Anur, a chap with no legs at all.

Some fancy stuff!

On the ground a mini-chariot is made of tender beans punctured by sharp broomsticks arranged in a lattice, and Sun-God is duly worshiped.

Another queer Ratha Saptami ritual is to fetch a number of broad jilledu leaves plucked from wayside bushes (when they are nipped they yield a milky juice...coincidentally) at dawn. Father used to strip and stand me, place two leaves one on each shoulder, two more on the outstretched palms, two on the feet, and one on my dumb head making 7 in all!). And place some rice mixed with haldi and kumkum on each leaf.

And pour buckets of water drawn from our well on my head. And chant the magic rhyme:

Sapta Sapta mahasapta,
Saptadveepa vasundhara
Saptarkaparnamaadaya
Saptami! Ratha Saptami!

************************************************************************

2. House-Warming

When we shift home to a new one, the first thing our womenfolk do is to boil milk till it spills over their chulha in their new kitchen as a Sanctifier, and do Puja thereafter.

Some heathen custom...

We didn't have no chulha in our mod kitchen and had to borow one from our hospitable landlady recently.

*************************************************************************************************

Talking of shifting house, the only sweet fruit of bitter labor is that some long-lost relic of long years gone by surfaces from nowhere and carries you into stupid nostalgia.

Just now my son retrieved and gave me a file he has kept safe all of eight years.

When I turned 60 (anyone can do it with some luck), some students past and present and younger colleagues celebrated the august (I was born in August) occasion by compiling a few write-ups on their good-old gps.

Most of them read like fond Obits...they were in a hurry...

All of them were from Physics folks except one from the highly respected Professor and HoD of Mechanical Engineering, Amalendu Mukherjee.

It was a little latecomer and ran like this:

**************************************************************************************

Dear Sastry Garu:

Ever since I came in your time and space my life has not been the same. You taught me how to look at both life and science. You banished lots of murky fog and unshackled me from dwarfing chains of self-glorification. You taught me how to learn and unlearn. I came to you whenever I had problems in my life and in science and always wondered to whom do you go.......

Answer by gps:

To my psychiatrist Dr G. Prasada Rao

===========================================================