The family priest.

At the thread ceremony we attended on Wednesday last http://digbig.com/4ypqy I saw at close quarters the presiding priest. He looked like a benevolent version of the first family priest at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://digbig.com/4xyxy. Our first family priest, hailed from Telangana (now Andhra Pradesh and a hotbed of Maoists and Naxalites), just like the presiding priest at the thread ceremony. My mother http://digbig.com/4yppp used to call him Shambha (Samba?) Bhatji. So he must have been named Shambhu after Lord Shiva. He was quite a jolly fellow, though bald and fierce-looking. I can hear inside my head the refrain of a mantra that used to be chanted at the fairly frequent Laghurudra puja commissioned by my mother. “Padma hastey sugandhe, sugandhe, padma hastey” which has something to do with the floral aroma wafting from lotus hands, I reckon. There used to be several priests chanting the mantra. They were divided into two teams and after one team finished chanting a verse, the other team would take up the refrain and so on and so forth. It was quite an enjoyable performance. Shambha Bhatji stopped coming one fine day and was replaced by his younger brother, Balkrishna Bhatji who used to earlier accompany him from time to time. I remember Balkrishna Bhatji telling me with his eyes closed and after silent chanting of some mantra (I presume) that I would do well in the exam I was about to write. He was later on succeeded by his son Datta Bhatji who and, after him, his son used to also preside at the temple of the Mankar family deity, Maheshwari, in Navi Wadi. http://tinyurl.com/4grxkp. Neither he nor his son is attending the shrine now. I lost track of them a few years back.

Playing cards.

I’m in the habit of playing solitaire and other games on my PC. I play them not to kill time but, as I had seen my father do it, to take my mind off the work I’m doing so that my subconscious (or, working mind, to use a Ramesh Balsekar term) has a free hand to spark off the ideas I’m seeking. Come to think of it, playing cards have played quite a role in my childhood. I used to watch my father, a lawyer, working on his next day’s brief in the evening suddenly interrupting his work to play a hand of solitaire before returning to it. And, every Sunday, there would be an afternoon session of my father and his five friends to play bezique non-stop for several hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezique. They would sit down cross legged on the carpet in the sitting room of our third floor flat in Khetwadi and squabble among themselves like kids. It was all good fun and cups and cups of tea. Again, on a Saturday every couple of months or so, another circle of my father’s friends met to play bridge for tiny stakes. These sessions were held by rotation at every member’s residence, I reckon. My father only hosted a session but never, to the best of my knowledge, attended any meeting held elsewhere. At the Saturday sessions, there used to be light snacks like potato wafers and salted cashew nuts in addition to tea. In retrospect, it is interesting to compare the bezique group with the bridge group. The former was a Pathare Prabhu gang made of people who belonged to our own caste and lived within easy walking distance of our house in areas like Opera House and Thakurdwar. The latter was a motley, cosmopolitan crowd and the ties, I suspect, must have been forged during my father’s working life as a public prosecutor and a presidency magistrate before I was born. The bezique group must have been the outcome of my father’s youth in Navi Wadi and Thakurdwar. The lack of snacks being served to them, I attribute to the huge lunch the reputedly bon vivant Pathare Prabhus would customarily have on Sundays. There, however, used to be a tray of ingredients to make paan, betel leaves, supari, cardamom, cloves and so on. Both the groups continued to meet, if memory serves, till I passed out of high school in 1952. Old age and death spare nobody, not even weekend revellers.

A grand old pumpkin tale.

This morning, I peeled and ate about 20 pumpkin seeds. I had saved them for drying after salvaging them from a pumpkin slice Ujwal had used to make some vegetable soup on Saturday. It brought back memories of my childhood. My mother used to give them to me ready peeled with their green covering intact. Peeling is quite a chore. Even if the outer covering is completely dry, it’s still slippery. Holding the tiny seed in your finger and trying to break and remove it takes a lot of patience. My other memory about pumpkin seeds concerns the annual fair (jatra) in Navi Wadi (literally ‘New Street’) very close to where I stay now. We used to go to visit the temple of Maheshwari, our family deity (kula devta). They used to have sweetmeat shops there where you could buy pumpkin seeds in sugar covering. It was considered quite a treat then. I wonder if it’s still available. Or, considered a treat. I also remembered a story from my childhood. It was about a bouncing pumpkin that a crafty grandmother used to save herself from a tiger and a fox. By a strange coincidence, I read it just the other day in a book for children rewritten by the renowned Marathi writer, Pralhad Keshav Atre. Delectable!