Ours was the first house aside a street branching off the main road in Salem Extension, a residential locality. There was a sprawling vacant land adjoining our compound wall at the back of our house. My mom, finding a vast space flanking our house on one side made the case to raise a kitchen garden, and raised a variety of vegetables in it with her green fingers. As long as we stayed in that house, we never had to go out for buying vegetables and there was no vegetable market either, in or around our area in those bygone years.
Our milkman named Savi who was dwelling in a small leaf thatched house at the end of our street, would supply us buffalo’s milk every day, a tad before the crack of dawn and also bring horse dung whenever my mom needed it for use as manure for certain plants so that their yield was copious. A host of ladies, all friends of my mom, from our neck of the wood would go with her in tow to the Ladies Club in our locality for playing badminton, ring tennis, throw ball et al in the vespertine hours on weekends.
She was fonder of me than my siblings, two brothers and as many sisters all elder to me. Sometimes on Sundays and holidays, I would be with her in the kitchen garden, curiously watching how she was tending the plants, creepers and small trees like those bearing mint leaves (Karipathha), pomegranates, sapota (chikoo), lemon and what not, by digging the ground around their roots and forming bunds for water to stay in and the hang of using the manure. A boy, all of nine years, I would on holidays be with my mom in the kitchen garden plucking sprouts of coriander, tender vegetables such as lady fingers, beans, cucumber and all that jazz and consuming them then and there absolutely unbeknown to her. There were times when she caught me red-handed nibbling some of them and tweaked my thigh till I shrieked I would not repeat it, my uncontrolled repetition of the mischief whenever I found her up to her ears in the garden notwithstanding.
It was a Saturday when mom as usual was on the go in the garden, palisading a plot of land replete with the shoots of peanut. Noticing a pandal but a step from the plot, with tender snake-gourds hanging profusely from it, I gently pressed one of them and finding it dearly soft and smooth, I held it with my palm and began sliding my grip on it joyfully from top to bottom. As I shifted my grip from one to the other something resembling a snake-gourd smack dab and showing a blind bit of movement drew my immediate attention.
As I screamed, “Amma” my mom in next to no time picked a stone and forcefully pelted at it. The reptile dropped on a dime from the pandal and vanished into the one and only side of our garden formed by barbed wire and intertwined creepers.
That I should never approach any of the pandals in the garden, I learnt the hard way.
