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My resolve to get married at 36 was more daunting than Edmund Hillary's. He was equipped with spiked boots, snow glasses, windcheaters, ice picks, helmets, ropes, oxygen cylinders, and hundreds of porters to do his bidding.
All I had was two provident fund loans and one credit society loan to repay.
My wife understood it within a week and we two decided to climb our marital Everest come what may...and what came soon was a bonny son.
During the first year of our marriage we decided to give ourselves some gifts as sweeteners. I wanted a pack of Wills Flakes everyday (the norm was 2.5 packs) and she wanted a printed cotton sari every month. I promised to give up smoking on our first wedding anniversary and upgrade her sari to a synthetic one every other month with the money saved on cigarettes. Maybe I cheated once in a while on my day's quota of a mere ten cigarettes during the grueling first months but I kept the anniversary promise...till now.
In our vast Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP we didn't have a fridge, nor a sofa set, nor a dining table, nor a TV...not even a Telugu newspaper to which my wife was addicted. But we had a gas stove and a plethora of stainless steel utensils and plates of all sizes gifted by my wife's granpa.
My wife was born and brought up in AP where she had either idlis or dosas for breakfast both at home and hostel; and at all restaurants in Tirupati.
And the only place where we could get them in our campus at IIT KGP was the Nair's canteen. And she found the idlis there hard to swallow, and dosas neither crisp nor fluffy.
On my first trip back home to Gudur after marriage, I was strolling along the road and discovered several stone wet grinders of all sizes...the famous Saidapuram ones...Saidapuram is a village ten miles from Gudur. And I was tempted by their price...just Rs 60 for a 80 kg grinder. And bought one then and there and carried it home in a rickshaw...the rickshaw-puller was hard put to lift it up into his hooded vehicle.
When I arrived home and got my stone grinder lugged in, Father, who was himself no aristocrat, asked me if I planned to carry the damn thing all the way to KGP. And I said yes. And he smiled meaningfully...all his daughters were buying the latest Coimbatore electrical wet grinders. He didn't know my precarious finances...the electrical things cost Rs 2500.
I had to pack the stone thing in a gunny bag and get it ticketed as luggage.
My wife was pleased as Punch with the grinder....it looked better than what her mom had at Jalgaon.
During the early years of our marriage I decided to show my wife how our students at IIT KGP lived in their hostels....like church mice except on their annual Hall Day. So I accepted invitations to all their Hall Days and took my wife along for pleasant evening-outs.
At the end of it all, my wife and I decided to host our own Hall Day at Qrs C1-97 and invited the 19 boys plus 3 girls of the fourth-year MSc batch to an idli-party at our place. Except Ms Naganandini, everyone else was a non-Southie and so little knew what an idli party for 25 hungry youngsters entailed. And they were dubious if there would be enough idls to fill their growling bellies.
And the night before the party, myself and my wife took turns at grinding a massive amount of idli-batter, with my infant son lying on his floor-mattress beside our stone grinder. It was 2 in the night by when we were through. The plan was to feed at least 9 idlis per belley, give or take a couple.
It was hot summer and the batter would get spoiled and weather-beaten by the next evening and so early in the morning we shifted our huge batter-vessels to the ground floor compartment of our neighbor's fridge, to be taken out at 4 in the evening.
And I took leave next afternoon and helped grind a mammoth amount of coconut chutney...all of a dozen coconuts broken before our prayerful god.
The well-dressed gents and ladies arrived at 6 in the evening and were accommodated in the lawn on folding cots, plastic chairs, and plain green grass.
We underestimated the starvation levels of our students...the scores of hot idlis accompanied by ladles of chutney and sambar were gobbled and guzzled...there was no criminal wastage ;)
They sang songs, told stories, took pictures, and the event is still fresh in our memory. They had to be thrown out at 10 in the night.
Krishna Kumar (KK) so liked those idlis that he joined me as a project student next year and was a frequent visitor to our place. He said that he had never tasted idlis like that at his Jamshedpur or IIT Kanpur, not to speak of Germany, France, US and Cal. The ones he tried stuck in his throat and he had difficulty swallowing.
Twenty five years later, he became Professor KK, back at IIT KGP, and he came down all the way from KGP to Hyderabad to attend my son's wedding reception at the Taj Mahal Hotel at Abids. And the first thing I did when he arrived there was to feed him high-class idlis at its heritage restaurant...auld lang syne.
Half a dozen years after we equipped our Qrs C1-97 with our stone-age grinder, we bought a Sumeet electrical mixer, and the stone grinder of Saidapuram slowly went out of commission, though no one can quite demolish a 80 kg stone like it.
It lay hid in its past glory.
And eventually we shifted to the first floor apartment, B-140. And our friends NPs (again) helped us in the shifting. And young Seshu helped us in that. He took a keen look at our stone grinder and asked me if we were using it. I had to be honest and said 'no longer'. And he asked me if he could buy it off...he had a big joint family to support. And, on an impulse, I asked him to take it for free as a memento.
And he was pleased as Punch.
But not my wife, when she came to know about it. She had a sentimental attachment to that grinder...like Edmund Hillary must have had to the vintage oxygen cylinder in his backpack..
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