Drop on a Lotus Leaf
an excerpt

well its a long unknown journey in an untrodden path. well we all know that is what life is all about ,or rather that, it is a poetic way of putting it. we see day, night, sun, the moon; go through tunnels with light at the end, or we would like to believe so. but sometimes we come through the other end and realize its still dark- only this time its dark outside too... and cold. life. ya its that unsolved mystery; that complicated puzzle with missing pieces.

Chapter 1
Spring

like everyone else, i do not remember the first few years of my life. maybe the fifth year; but even that is not very clear. i remember my mother's sari and the smell on it whenever i hugges her or cuddled against her. it was a mixture of jasmine and sweat but that is the sweetest smell i could remember. it was a smell that brought comfort and security along. i remember my father's one-day old beard pricking my skin like tiny needles when he used to lift me up and kiss me. oh and i remember my grandmother.
see i come from a traditional indian family. my gradfather and great grandfather were traders. while my great grandfather was content with his trading between India and Burma, my grandfather wanted to travel more. cant blame him though. he was the only son in the family and at six foot something, was tall and well built with a lean, masculine body. he had long hair which he used to tie in a knot at the nape of his neck. tradition required that he had both his ears pierced as a child. so he had two diamond studs glittering on both ears. he loved theatre and martial arts and was good at both. and oh ya he was young and handsome.
so one fine day, this impulsive young man, at seventeen, boarded a ship from India and headed to Sri Lanka where his father already had some business dealings. he landed here but had no idea of taking up his family business. he, like many other young men in the brink of manhood, he wanted to go his own way and do his own thing. so he went and joined the municipal council instead. thus began his career as a government servant.
the woman he would marry soon was the third of three daughters of a middle class businessman in the island. she was four foot something with huge piercing black-grey eyes and an engaging face but with a flat nose. this somehow never tarnished her looks though. although settled here, she also came from a very traditional indian family. her name was Chellamma. this name is particularly endearing to me since its the same name carried by the daughter of my favourite tamil poet Barathiyar. he not only loved his daughter a lot, but also wrote many poems for he and about her. anyway, getting back to my grandmother; so she was this traditional being with the smell of village air still strongly upon her being. i have never seen her wear anything but her sari which she wore in a particularly different way. the head pieace or 'pallu' of the sari, which usually is draped over ti cover the breasts and is left hanging over the shoulder in the traditional south indian way of sari draping did not apply to her style. she would wrap the sari around her waist once, do something then which i never could figure out or follow, then cover her breasts... take the left over piece hanging behind and pull it in front over her stomach area tuck it into her inskirt on the left hand side of her waist. wuff; i am feeling tired trying to describe it and i am sure i would have ended up confusing all of you too. well my grandmother was a really extraordinary woman i must say. she not only had a complicated way of wearing her sari but also had a complicated way of wearing her earrings! as is tradition, her ears were pierced when she was still a baby. as she grew up, she was required to wear earrings with large round screws which made the hole in her pierced ear very large. following this, she started wearing hanging earrings which are actually cylinder shaped and very heavy. the 'cylinder' was actually worn around the now very large hole in her earlobe horizontally. the idea was to pull the part of the lobe even further down and widen the gap between this hanging part of the ear and the rest. the longer the year, the better it is since a girl's grading for beauty and desirability depended greately on this. so by the time i got to know my grandmother, she had ears long enough to almost touch her shoulders. as a child i used to like putting my finger into this huge hole and gently pulling this string like bit hanging from the rest of the ear. my grandmother was like a wonderland to me. apart from all these fascinating things about her, she had tattoos all over her arms- fore arms as well as at the back of her arms. these tattoos, green and old, shining through her wrinkled skin must have looked fresh and bright on young skin once. i remember pulling her wrinkled, very soft skin using my finger tips from both sides to 'straighten it out' and look at the images of peacocks, flowers and leaves that have been living there on her arms, in the warmth of her skin and wonder how they must be knowing all the secrets of her life.
when my grandfather marrie her, she was only thirteen years of age and was in the budding, refreshing stages of womanhood.so as you can see, i am a descendent and far away product of child marriage. but please do not under estimate my grandmother; she had ten healthy children one after the other and lived a healthy life all throughout. yes, undoubtedly she was a healthy woman physically, but she was strong mentally too: stronger than my grandfather and stronger than most women i have come across. she was the kind of person who would somehow accomplish a task if she set her mind to it. she would move heaven and earth to feed her children and faught her battle till the day she took her last breath.