The old "Bonda" seller & the water merchant

Today these 2 people somehow came into my thoughts. I do not know what incident caused them to come out into the main memory from the deepest corner of my internal hard disk. Still, it is said that there are some people whom we cannot forget whatever we are, whereever we are. I dont know how many people can visualize them through my explanations.

This was the time when this fat old guy was doing his schooling (from 4 th class to 12th class). I know that is a long span of 8 years. But those memories of my school days and the friends I had at that time, are still fresh and so often they come into my dreams. They are people whom I grew up with. I studied in a kendriya vidyalaya. (Now, the teachers at KV used to tell us that we are not like the common folk in other schools in the town, bcoz except for the convent school in my town exclusively for girls, there werent any good English medium school at that time. Not that there werent bright people, in other schools, but most of them were affected with the nasty school politics prevalent in that time). Now the teachers tried to convince us that we had pretty high standard compared to other schools. So we were restricted on doing certain things, that other kids were doing. We had to wear shoes, tuck in the shirts and pretty much had to be well dressed. Other than these, we were not supposed to play certain games that other kids used to play (like the "Kuzhi oppi" the game you play with marbles, that were common in my village), bcoz they considered that those were below standard games. Still we had lot of freedom compared to other neighbouring KVs which were far different from our KV. Anyway coming to the subject of the 2 characters who gave me some thoughts today,

The first one is "Krishnettan", the "Thattukadakkaran", just close to our school building, He should have been more than 65 at that time. He used to have a small tea stall just close to the 5th std (If I remember correctly) building. This shop should be visualized as a big rectangular box sitting on 4 wheels. Even though it had wheels, Krishnettan's shop never moved. It was always there, painted in the blue color. He used to open the shop in the morning around 7:00 am or so, (I used to be the first person to reach the school and in my whole student life at KV, I was late just once for the morning assembly). Krishnettan used to stand just close enough to the bix box, without even bothering to put a shirt, and just with the saffron colored lungi, which could be opened from 3 sides. It was open 7 days a week, probably till 7:30 p.m or so. He used to make different snacks on different days of the week. The most famous of the snacks was the Bonda (A snack prepared with a filling of mashed potato with masala, and fried after dipping in a batter, normally known as Aloo Bonda). He used to also prepare Undakkai (This is a slightly sweet stuff made of banana and sugar, I dont know what it is referred to in other part of kerala). I was one person who used to be a regular customer of krishnettan along with a few bad guys there at the school, who dared to slit open, the partition and jump through that to go to Krishnettan's shop without being noticed by the teachers. We used to go there once or twice a day for this shopping. Thankfully we were never caught by the teachers for going to krishnettan on eating from a road side shop which a normal KV student is not supposed to do. Krishnettan used to charge Rs 1 by the time we reached 12th std. for all these snacks even though it was around 70 Ps or so to start with. He used to give me the snacks on loan, and I could repay them when I had cash. Well, I was probably getting the highest pocket money of Rs 10 a day including my transportation charge of 4 Rs. So I could afford it compared to my other friends. Still we had a very good time with Krishnettan. I dont know if he is still alive, but he was a very nice person, I can still see his smiling face and he was a person with whom we all had pleasant memories.

The next person to talk about is "Karunakarettan", far richer than krishnettan and owned a shop. The shop was a big one with 2 rooms. He was also a tailor. He used to stitch clothes from one room, and in the smaller room, he used to have a refrigerator. Also he used to put some candies in the front. This was not accessible to us as was krishnettan's place. Still we could go here during the lunch break. We used to go to the back side of the school, go behind the Khadi building, again to be not noticed by the teachers and reach the shop. The speciality here was the packed ice, called "kotta ice". He used to sell it consistently for 50 ps. This was the main item there. Only people who used to risk it during the lunch break could go there. But it was accessible to everyone after the school hours, since we had a walk of 1 Km to get onto the town and this was on the way. But Karunakarettan was a very greedy person and he tried to really suck money out of the kids. During summer time, he used to make money even selling water. He used to sell it after refrigerating for some time for 25 paise a glass which was huge amount for water at that time. We used to hate him even though he had a pretty daughter :-))

Well, those are the memories of those 2 characters who were intrinsic part of most of the guys among my batch. I think all of us had a special attachment to that building, and that school. There are more things from that school that needs to be written, but that is left for later dayz when I might be tempted to write about them. True that I have lost touch with lot of my class mates, Still some of them come into my dreams. I play cricket with them, with that bat made of the tuft of the coconut leaves, left handedly (we put this restriction so that we didnt hit the ball so hard to be lost), with the trunk of the coconut tree as the stump. Well.......