Kapi with Kamala

One pleasant evening when I was enjoying my coffee in veranda ,I got a call from Kamala inviting me for her birthday. This was the shortest conversation me and Kamala ever had. Usually it goes on for hours together till the line gets busy for another call. My thoughts drove me back to those pleasant, sometimes awkward moments we had together.
Kamala is highly impossible to manage even more than what you think. Even a person who holds a master’s degree or a PhD in psychology would fail to put her back to normal. As a single child, I consider myself intolerant to the nuisances​ around me. Sometimes because of the fear of getting exploited, I maintained a water-lotus leaf relationship​ with all whom I met. So I preferred a short conversation mostly.

Me and Kamala got introduced to each other in our last year of schooling but our acquaintance traced back to the toothless days.We were raised up in the same neighborhood when we were one year old . With no contact after that for almost 15 years, we got in touch now.
She all seemed to be normal , but gradually I realised she gets an emotional outburst more often, at least once a day. A small trigger or a word is enough for a waterfall to gush out of Kamala's eyes with a noisy roar. Once it so happened on a midsummer ,while on a taxi to the way back home she got reminded of a bitter past and bawled so loudly that shocked me suddenly ,and the poor old taxi driver stopped​ the car in  midway turning around looking at her equally startled. Poor old driver never spoke a word after that heavy shock Kamala gave him, till he dropped me home saying" take care of yourself kid". Perhaps he thought myself to also be one of those unstable, volatile mad kid. I was sure that he would have resigned his job after that to get back from the worst shock of his life.
The other day when we got our math marks, Kamala's​ uproar with the jump distracted the whole class towards us. I was not used to this kind of sudden attention towards me (as I was seated next to her). Though I was used to this kind  of high intensity sound from my previous experience ,I turned towards her at the stroke of time just to make sure the source of noise for the benefit of the rest. After a while when heads turned back to carry on with their respective work ,she asked me in a serious tone " was I too loud?". I had no choice than to nod my head both ways.
Kamala had an inherent capability to talk so loud that a person seated in a class four floors away from us could recognise it .Kamla was an expert in worrying .Connecting things from nowhere to somewhere , this resulted in her constant high pitched talks all day, non stop. So, most of my answers to her questions reminded diplomatic from then on.
Kamal's legacy did not stop here .Once when we went to an amusement park into a Ghost House. Her unique scream and shrill voice made the ghost ( a man dressed as a ghost) afraid and retrace its way back .The ghost  got eerie up its spine and stood motionless waiting for a better entry( to the ghost house) to scare. Thinking of Kamala, and thanking her for those days which gave me a reason to laugh, I sipped my coffee again peeping into the newspaper.

By
Balanth

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A forceful holiday

It is not the usual scenario in the households of southern Chennai region to have vociferous discussion on a topic. The voices were too loud that it penetrated the neighborhood houses, deafening all the others in the street. One high pitched voice especially was ear-splitting. Everyone from opposite flats peeped out through their windows out of curiosity. Rather me out of embracement shut tight those old wooden windows and sealed them. It was anyways futile, but I was a little Panglossian those days to accept the harsh reality. I couldn’t believe the fact that, a sudden arrival of a confused clamorous family would stir a curiosity in the whole neighborhood. Being in nearest proximity I was technically the most affected of the serendipity. “Baaalaaaaa! Baala!” shouted Kamala…. She was wearing a long nighty kind or a night gown. She panted heavily, with a panicked expression came running down, her dress was dangling very similar to how a tent would dangle in a forceful wind. Well is it...
Read more

The drama around the skit( silapadigaram struggles)

It is been a tradition that all of us in our high school need to perform a skit for our language assessment. The best play would participate in intraschool competition. Our Tamil class had always been very perticular about staging a play for the assessment and narrowed it down by giving it a topic “kapyams and idhihasams”. There are 2 Idhihasams( Ramayana & Mahabharatham) and 5 kapiyams in Tamil. Quickly there were 3 groups which was formed out of nowhere and choose Ramayana, manimegalai,and valayabathi. Only sevaga sindamani , silapadigaram and  kundalakesi were left in the topic of kapiyams which we had no clue about the storyline to make it a script and stage a play. Mahabharata play on the other hand had too many characters to be staged which could not make a justice with just 7 of us remaining. Hence for our Tamil skit, remaining group of girls left out , finalised to stage silapadugaram.  Silapadigaram tells about the protoganist merchant named Kovalan w...
Read more

An encounter- a close shave

Image
Being brought up in an urban city , it is nearly impossible to have any sort of wildlife encounter. It is mostly  dogs, cats, crows, pigeons, sometimes cows and buffaloes are the only species that we were in contact with. In Chennai, though places like Guindy park, Vandaloor zoo, IIT-M promise you of a fabulous encounter with the kingdom of Animalia, it is quite difficult to encounter a monkey outside these places as evolved species(of monkeys) are quite dense. Perhaps the later evolved species(the humans) are rather too busy to notice it. My first encounter with this interesting animal was when I was an year old. It was when we went to Solingar hill to have my hair shaved. As a kid, it was so confusing to differentiate between a saloon and temples, as most of the time I was taken to temple with long oiled hair, and return back shaved. My Paati had preyed to the Lord, that she would shave my hair in five different temples and Solingar temple on the hill top was my first(encount...
Read more