There is an English medium school to the back of our house. Same school where they did not give me admission because my family could not affor the admission fees back in those days. They are growing up pretty big, thanks to the increasing donations for admission and funding. Now they have several blocks, dedicated to CBSE & state syllabus and a teacher’s training school. As the school expanded, they needed to have more entrances than the main gate. So they started looking to buy off any available land/house from our street to build new gates to the school. One for kids who came by auto rickshaws, one for kids who walked on the way home and one for those who cycled back home.
The then principal of the school, a young Catholic priest who was later accused of buying vans for the school registered in his name, first approached our neighbor to see if they were willing to sell off their house to the school. They happily obliged and the priest gave them a good price for the house and the land. Later that house was brought down to ashes to make an entrance road to the school. But the road wasn’t wider enough. So they approached my elder brother one day and asked if we were willing to sell our house too. My brother said we wouldn’t. In our street, ours was the oldest and almost-falling-down-to-the-earth house. So the priest could not see any reason for why we poor fellows wouldn’t sell off their house for a very good price which was competent with the market price.
The priest approached my father secretly and asked the same thing. Father said No. When my brother came to know about this, he went straight to the principal priest’s cabin in the school and told him, “We were in this place for the past 60 years. This house was built by my father’s mother. This is our ancestral house and we are not planning to move from here. So stop approaching any one of our family with your price tags“. Priest stopped asking further (though the one who came after him tried another way of compelling us which we dealt with legally), I later took up the land from family, built a new house there and now staying with my family there.
When I look at it again now, it is not the count of years that makes me stay in that very same place. This is a house that my grandmother built with my father and his brothers. They built the entire house with the mud bricks and sandstone powder. My grandmother lived and died there (though I don’t have even a fainted memory of hers). My second brother lived in this house too, before he died at the age of 27 in a road accident and his body was brought into that very same house. This is family. There are emotions attached to this 5 cents of land. No power can ever buy that with their money, unless something real bad happens to our survival.
This is why I love that place. My home, because my family live in there. My street, because that is where our house is at. Our small semi-urban village, because that’s where our street is, my childhood friends are and the local community is with people whom I’ve known since my childhood. Thrissur, the city that I have grown up with it’s nooks and corners. Kerala, because Thrissur is a district in Kerala state. And my country India, because my state is part of this country and the people from our state have contributed significantly to build this country.
But the home town or home state changes to another form when it comes to define the country. It is not just home land, it is Mother land. I don’t understand what that means. Mother land? The country is seen as mother, we are taught. But why? A country is made of pieces of land and what makes us sentimental about it is because it hosts our home. If we were born and lived in America or Africa, that would be our home. When M F Hussain painted India as a nude woman, the fanatics and the so-called educated lot (I call them the qualified lot, because they are never educated in the word’s truest sense) came up in arms against him, asking if he would dare paint his Mother in nude form. Our nationalist blood boiled when we saw this piece of land as a nude woman. But we never raised much voices when girls were raped and killed in the very same mother land, just because they looked Chinese, though they were born in the same country. We had no problem in cutting the womb of a mother in this mother land, or killing the sons and daughters of other mothers in this mother land. Burning them. Raping them. But “insulting” a piece of land? That’s unbearable to us even when those killers and rapists walk among us.
Mother land, mother tongue… mother this… mother that… what do they mean really? What kind of conveniences or excuses do they give us? How are we assigning any meaning to them?
(Image courtesy: Focuswildlife.com)