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But Ishani is not one to be outdone. So at the end of it, she would pick up a fistful of akshatas from the plate and ask me to bend and bow to her and would throw her handful of rice on my head chanting:
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As I was saying the other day, our Nellore district was the etymologically ingrained rice granary in my childhood...rice was dirt cheap. And no part of the rice plant, from hay to husk, went unused.
Rice husk was dried and used as a poor man's fuel. In 1953 my Nagpur Auntie brought and gifted my mom the brand new version of a rice husk chulha made of iron. It had an inlet hole into which rice husk was shoved and padded up into a thick mass and lit. But it didn't catch on maybe because it was too smoky and my mom reverted to the more expensive charcoal furnace with iron ears.
A half century later a colleague of mine at IIT KGP hailing from an arid town in North India where not a grain of rice grows discovered an efficient way of extracting high grade silicon from rice husk. And took a patent on it. And another colleague from a rice bowl state was rumored to have bought the patent, resigned from his cushy teaching job, set up a silicon extraction plant, and duly went as broke as a pitcher pot flung from my seventh floor apartment in Hyderabad.
This gent was also rumored to have discovered a way of making rice husk briquettes using a secret glue that could be used as building bricks instead of the usual mud clay bricks in our infamous AP kilns. And took another patent on it. Apparently nothing much came out of it since rice husk, glued or dried, remained as flammable as ever...a case of 'no fire without smoke'.
And the outer layer of de-husked rice grains, the bran called thavudu, used to be a favorite dish of our holy cows who yielded mounds of free cow-dung which was collected and made into hand-clapped briquettes that were a cheaper fuel than charcoal. The cow-dung was a green manure to grow even more rice...some sort of bio-recycling there.
No table manners for us or our cows.
The rice grain itself remains a holy part of our rituals. Whenever a puja takes place in our homes, a handful of rice grain is admixed with watered haldi (akshatas) and used as a substitute for puja patri that were not available...for instance, during Ganesh Puja in our homes, we are supposed to collect all of 21 different leaves of 21 different trees and worship the idol throwing on him in a prescribed order all of those 21 leaves chanted by their names one by one. Well, we don't know the meaning of half the Sanskrit names for those 21 leaves and can only collect less than half that number. But the puja must go on as prescribed and so whenever a leaf is mentioned that isn't there in our plate we throw the yellowed holy rice instead and that is that.
At the end of the puja li'l Ishani would come to me and lie prone at my holy feet and seek my blessings. And her mom would place a few akshatas into my right hand and I bless her chanting the ritual mantra:
Shatamanam bhavati
Shatayutpurusha:
Shatendriya:
Ayushyevendriye' pratishthati
But Ishani is not one to be outdone. So at the end of it, she would pick up a fistful of akshatas from the plate and ask me to bend and bow to her and would throw her handful of rice on my head chanting:
"Om bhom bhom bhom bhom..."
And in our marriages, after the lagna gets over and the fun starts, the happy bride and her bewildered hubby sit facing each other. And a huge plate full of white rice grain (unooked) is placed between the couple. And they have to ask each other to bow their heads one after the other and throw on them handfuls of rice again and again till the groom gets tired of the game and picks up the whole plate and dumps its remnants on his wife's unbowed head.
Wiki tells me that this confetti game involving rice traveled from Nellore to the whole of Europe and they too started playing this weird thing. But soon they couldn't afford the imported rice and so they replaced it with paper cuttings.
A few centuries later, during Ishani's grand first birthday celebrations in the 'NKM Grand Hotel' I noticed a sudden heavenly burst of paper confetti showering on the cake-cutting Ishani's tiny head, with a popping sound. And I was told that it was shot from a 'confetti gun'.
And in February 2004 when I was officiating the marriage function of my niece at our small town Gudur I heard another popping sound and suddenly a huge shower of tiny multicolored balls rained on the newly wed couple. And I asked them what happened and the bride asked me:
"What is today's date?"
"February 14"
"Haven't you heard of Valentine's Day?"
"Oh, yes! I did...but what are those colored balls?"
"Oh, they are thermocol"
And I kept quiet brooding this is what is meant by 'reverse grain drain'...
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