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And a poem that started with, 'The boy stood on the burning deck', about our childhood idol Casabianca.
But when my turn came after just a year, my didi's book got changed and thrown out and replaced by a completely new one that I had to learn all anew. Well, the sweetener turned out to be my all-time favorite Rip van Winkle that I was doubly like when I returned to AP after sleeping for all of 40 years in Bengal...AP had changed beyond recognition.
Notebooks too were no problem. Father never believed in buying the company notebooks with fancy covers with pictures of elephants on them. He just bought in the wholesale market a ream or two of what we called thao-size papers...I guess they were twice as wide as the foolscap. And he had what was called a kanthani in his toolkit, which was sort of a huge fat needle with a rounded wooden handle like an awl. And he had rolls of twine thread which he inserted into the eye of the kanthani and sewed up notebooks of foolscap size for us and covered them with old calendar art papers. And each of us could only use a few of its pages....these were neatly scissored away when we passed on to the next class and the remnant notebook was inherited, grudgingly, by my younger sisters till the notebooks became as thin as us.
And Father found it cheaper to give us fountain pens at an early age than buy expensive pencils whose tips used to break a hundred times an hour...our handiwork was sturdy and the pencil tips made of roughly glued graphite needles were delicate. And the used half-razor blades that Father gave us from his shaving kit to shave the pencils shaved our fingers instead. The hi-fi pencil sharpeners ate up their shavings bellyful, and their screwed half-blades got rusted quick.
The advantage of fountain pens was that they were all made of hard plastic and so were fragile and became rapidly unusable. So, many of such used pens were found abandoned in class rooms, playgrounds, and street-side; and we had instructions to collect them and deliver them to Father who had a sort of library of these with dozens of them in a wooden box. And he was expert at repairing them which simply meant picking parts that were unbroken in one pen and grafting them on to the offenders.
Fountain pens were primitive those days. Each pen had a barrel into which ink was poured with what we called a 'pillar'...a defamation of the word, 'filler' (dropper). This device had an eminently breakable glass tube with a nozzle, and inserted into a highly wearisome rubber tube. It acted as a suction and delivery pump when inserted into the ink bottle and lifted up. We never used it since we were always in a hurry. So we just tilted the ink bottle into our pen's barrel, thereby spilling a lot of ink on the floor, and getting spanked. We found the solution by and by...mom gave us what we called a kora napkin...a big hanky made of rough cotton fiber that was a great absorber of ink. The napkin soon turned blue all over and mom used to wash it for our reuse. This kora napkin was placed under the barrel while the infusion went on.
And into the barrel went a screwed up plastic part called 'feeder'. I thought feeder was a good word specifically used for that pen part till Father was transferred to Kovur and started living in what was charmingly called 'The Railway Feeder Road' leading to its picturesque railway station, like the Malgudi's.
Into this feeder was inserted a combo of a corrugated convex plastic tongue on which stood the slit metal nib with its tiny hole for ventilation maybe. On this device was screwed up the cap with its pocket-clip. The cap was screwed on to the barrel while the feeder was screwed into it. But the technology then being what it was, the inner and outer threads on the barrel didn't hold properly and whenever we tried to unscrew the cap to start writing, the feeder got unscrewed as well and hid inside the cap. This called for pulling it out with our teeth that made our lips blue.
And the hard plastic barrel used to crack up at its neck and our thumbs and fingers turned blue. And we rubbed our fingers on our heads and our hair turned blue. And before our food was served we were asked to wash up our hands till the ink spots got cleaned up but water was no solvent for our ink that seeped deep into our skin. And so we imbibed a lot of ink and it helped our digestion somewhat.
Whenever Father felt that enough was enough he would bring out his library of 'found' pens and transplant the working parts of one replacing the damaged parts of the others with the help of his nose plier. Since used and thrown pens came in different colors like red, black, blue, green, and flowery, we landed up with pens which were illegitimate siblings of one another and came in exotic combos of colors...like a pen with a green barrel and black cap and blue feeder...
Who said, 'Raising seven kids is seven times as tough and costly as one'?"
For the record, my MIT pen-friend in Boston, just a decade older to me, raised all of seven kids and was seven times as proud of them as I with my singlet son...
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I once asked my mom:
"How could you raise seven of us when my wife and I find raising a single son a full-time job and at times heart-breaking and back-breaking?"
And she smiled and replied:
"Raising the first one was no problem...either my mom was with me or I was with my mom for the first one's first two years. And within two years the second was born and the first one looked after the second one quite eagerly...and so on"
That reminded me of the Champak joke:
"I asked you to draw a cart and a horse. Why did you draw only a horse?"
"The horse will draw the cart"
I then asked my mom:
"But what about the expenses? Seven kids must be seven times more expensive than one"
"No, it is like this. Milk was no problem for most infants...they were raised on mother's milk. And then on coffee. Food was anyway cheap. Clothing was a little costly, but the second daughter inherited the first one's clothes, the third the second's, ad infinitum. You were the sole exception since you were the only son and were too young to wear your father's worn-out clothes"
"So a lot of daughters have been good?"
"Not exactly...the expenditure on your clothes was less than the expenditure on your sisters' ornaments. You see, every girl kid has to have a bit of gold of her own here and there till her marriage"
I then thought I was lucky not to inherit my dada's used clothes, like Duhsala, the sole daughter of Gandhari. Her hundred brothers were also equally lucky since they were all of the same age more or less. But their dad was a king...
Things were not unique like this to our Telugus. My Bengali friend, DB, was the last of nine brothers and two sisters and used to bitch about his used clothes. But he was the darling of his siblings unlike me since I have no brothers and vadinas (S-i-Ls).
And our enlightened British rulers were no exception...Edward Lear, the doyen of limericks, was the twentieth of twenty-one kids. And was sore about it and never got married for good or worse.
And Father didn't have to spend seven times as much on our textbooks at school. Most of them, except our English texts, remained unchanged for decades and they got passed on from sister to brother to sister till they were in shreds (books).
I don't know why English textbooks were subject to change every two years. And I was sore about it. For, I used to read and listen to the prose and poetry selections in my didi's English book and loved most of them like the story with cute pictures of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz and the 'alien corn', and used to dream of all those exotic names and culture, including agriculture...for corn was not grown in Muthukur and we used to seasonally get to bite a grilled older sister of hers that Father called maize.
And I was hearing and reading with wonder the Southey poem, 'After Blenheim', with its Peterkin and Wilhelmine and Marlboro ending in "But 'twas a famous victory":
“Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won,
And our good Prince Eugene.”
“Why, ‘twas a very wicked thing!”
Said little Wilhelmine.
“Nay, nay, my little girl,” quoth he;
“It was a famous victory.
“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;
“But ‘twas a famous victory.”
And our good Prince Eugene.”
“Why, ‘twas a very wicked thing!”
Said little Wilhelmine.
“Nay, nay, my little girl,” quoth he;
“It was a famous victory.
“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;
“But ‘twas a famous victory.”
And a poem that started with, 'The boy stood on the burning deck', about our childhood idol Casabianca.
But when my turn came after just a year, my didi's book got changed and thrown out and replaced by a completely new one that I had to learn all anew. Well, the sweetener turned out to be my all-time favorite Rip van Winkle that I was doubly like when I returned to AP after sleeping for all of 40 years in Bengal...AP had changed beyond recognition.
Notebooks too were no problem. Father never believed in buying the company notebooks with fancy covers with pictures of elephants on them. He just bought in the wholesale market a ream or two of what we called thao-size papers...I guess they were twice as wide as the foolscap. And he had what was called a kanthani in his toolkit, which was sort of a huge fat needle with a rounded wooden handle like an awl. And he had rolls of twine thread which he inserted into the eye of the kanthani and sewed up notebooks of foolscap size for us and covered them with old calendar art papers. And each of us could only use a few of its pages....these were neatly scissored away when we passed on to the next class and the remnant notebook was inherited, grudgingly, by my younger sisters till the notebooks became as thin as us.
And Father found it cheaper to give us fountain pens at an early age than buy expensive pencils whose tips used to break a hundred times an hour...our handiwork was sturdy and the pencil tips made of roughly glued graphite needles were delicate. And the used half-razor blades that Father gave us from his shaving kit to shave the pencils shaved our fingers instead. The hi-fi pencil sharpeners ate up their shavings bellyful, and their screwed half-blades got rusted quick.
The advantage of fountain pens was that they were all made of hard plastic and so were fragile and became rapidly unusable. So, many of such used pens were found abandoned in class rooms, playgrounds, and street-side; and we had instructions to collect them and deliver them to Father who had a sort of library of these with dozens of them in a wooden box. And he was expert at repairing them which simply meant picking parts that were unbroken in one pen and grafting them on to the offenders.
Fountain pens were primitive those days. Each pen had a barrel into which ink was poured with what we called a 'pillar'...a defamation of the word, 'filler' (dropper). This device had an eminently breakable glass tube with a nozzle, and inserted into a highly wearisome rubber tube. It acted as a suction and delivery pump when inserted into the ink bottle and lifted up. We never used it since we were always in a hurry. So we just tilted the ink bottle into our pen's barrel, thereby spilling a lot of ink on the floor, and getting spanked. We found the solution by and by...mom gave us what we called a kora napkin...a big hanky made of rough cotton fiber that was a great absorber of ink. The napkin soon turned blue all over and mom used to wash it for our reuse. This kora napkin was placed under the barrel while the infusion went on.
And into the barrel went a screwed up plastic part called 'feeder'. I thought feeder was a good word specifically used for that pen part till Father was transferred to Kovur and started living in what was charmingly called 'The Railway Feeder Road' leading to its picturesque railway station, like the Malgudi's.
Into this feeder was inserted a combo of a corrugated convex plastic tongue on which stood the slit metal nib with its tiny hole for ventilation maybe. On this device was screwed up the cap with its pocket-clip. The cap was screwed on to the barrel while the feeder was screwed into it. But the technology then being what it was, the inner and outer threads on the barrel didn't hold properly and whenever we tried to unscrew the cap to start writing, the feeder got unscrewed as well and hid inside the cap. This called for pulling it out with our teeth that made our lips blue.
And the hard plastic barrel used to crack up at its neck and our thumbs and fingers turned blue. And we rubbed our fingers on our heads and our hair turned blue. And before our food was served we were asked to wash up our hands till the ink spots got cleaned up but water was no solvent for our ink that seeped deep into our skin. And so we imbibed a lot of ink and it helped our digestion somewhat.
Whenever Father felt that enough was enough he would bring out his library of 'found' pens and transplant the working parts of one replacing the damaged parts of the others with the help of his nose plier. Since used and thrown pens came in different colors like red, black, blue, green, and flowery, we landed up with pens which were illegitimate siblings of one another and came in exotic combos of colors...like a pen with a green barrel and black cap and blue feeder...
Who said, 'Raising seven kids is seven times as tough and costly as one'?"
For the record, my MIT pen-friend in Boston, just a decade older to me, raised all of seven kids and was seven times as proud of them as I with my singlet son...
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The first pen I used did not have a feeder that could be screwed out. Barrel and feeder came as one piece. One had to pull out the nib and tongue to fill it with ink and it was more messier than with pens with screwable feeders because we had to, but could not, align the nib and tongue properly after every filling.
ReplyDeleteWhat is that metallic thingy on the pen-barrel in your picture here ?
I never saw any thing like that.
Is this a double headed pen, somewhat like the red and blue pencils of those days ?
I tried but couldn't get a postable picture of our good old fountain(!) pens on the net. So I picked the best I could. The metallic clip on the barrel came with fancier pens that we used to play with in our university days. It was a self-filling barrel that had a rubber lining in it...meaning you pull out the clip so it is at right angles to the barrel and push the barrel into the ink pot. It was supposed to suck up the ink from the ink pot by the vacuum created in the rubber tube. But it never worked well. So I think it got extinct pretty soon. By then the first versions of the use-and-throw ball pens arrived in the market. But they were expensive. And then the refills came...that's quite another story...
ReplyDelete