Today i feel different. The effect of sleeping early & waking up before first light and don’t recall in how long. Looking at the royal blue morning sky with flocks of cranes making a ‘V’ on their delimited route, i heard a distant hymn and it was so faint that i thought that it was again one of those those usual dejawoo moments. It seemed to be from the distant past same way we relate scents, or places to some specific long forgotten memories . “Shri Venketshwara Suprabhatam” sung by Bharat Ratna M.S. Subbulakshmi is one such hymn. It is a musical hymn to awaken Lord Balaji early in the morning.
Staying in a rented house in the outskirts of Pune, it was the mid 80’s. Our neighbors were a Madrasi family of Iyars. They had a son called Ramesh and a daughter Aruna.Mrs Iyer is whom I remember most as she would care for me as if i was her own son. Just a wall in between the two families left us reaching out for each other time and again. After school evenings, weekends all were spent with the iyer family and a few other kids from the neighborhood. One typical recollection of Mrs Iyer was the manner in which she used to feed rice to her kids and me too sometimes. It is a common way of using ur hands for mixing the rice & Yogurt or Sambhar together and feed it with ones hands till the yogurt or sambhar came dripping down the chin . It was fun spending time with the Iyer family. Playing marbles, building small mud houses, making tunnels in sand dumped for some construction site, playing hide & seek & some other indoor sports like playing toy cars etc . Alas once we shifted to our own Bungalow we just lost touch with the Iyars.
“Shri Venketshwara Suprabhatam“ was the record that used to play in the Iyer house each morning and so was synonymous with my childhood days. Whenever i heard it play, i get tale-ported back to the mid 80’s where my life as a kid was carefree, mystical & joyful. Sleeping with mom, holding dad’s hand fighting with my big brother and complaining his bullying with tearful eyes to mom so as to teach him a lesson etc etc. This particular hymn is like a antediluvian link to all those early childhood memories which never seem to fade away with the passage of time.
The Wonder Years 