I Am Three

It just happened one fine day and night. Technically it was day but it really was dark and the electric lights were a blessing. But still I was confused and that is what usually happens when you choose to come to this world at wee hours, like 2 am.

Born in Thiruvananthapuram or Trivandrum at a government hospital called ‘Kottakkakam hospital’. Kottakkakam means inside the fort. There were four forts built by the old Travancore Kings around this place.

Though I was the second child to my parents, I was the third. First child was a dead child. Story says, mom happened to see a snake in a window next to her, accidentally, and that shock and scare killed the unborn child.

I don’t remember anything till I became 2 and a half or may be 3. The only one thing I remember is a black and white memory of me sitting in a coffee plant/tree and one of my legs got struck between two branches. And it was said that there was a boy (whose name was Vijayan) to take care of me who ate most of my food and caught for giving me milk which had a dead fly and thus got sacked. But there are some incidents told to me by mom or other relatives.

One fine evening, I was lying in the cradle and somebody gave me a wooden scale (12 inches one) to play with. Naturally, I kept that in my mouth. There was a temple nearby and like many other temples, here also they had the offering of ‘bang!**’. There came a bang sound and I got frightened and that scale pierced into my throat and thus became a ’bloody’ incident.

(**I don’t know the exact word for this offering. It is like this. There is an iron cylindrical thing of about 5-6 inches long with a diameter of about 2 inches. There is a hole in the middle, where thy fill gun powder and top it up with some mud or brick powder. And a small hole somewhere in its body just a few centimeters from the bottom, used to put the wick. When they lit the wick, ‘BANG!!!’)

This happened when I was 1 or two. I don’t know whether this is the reason, but when I happened to see an ENT doc for a throat infection, when I became adult, he told me that my throat is not symmetrical. Then I narrated this story and he said he can’t comment on that but just informed me what he just observed (clever)

About the same age, I fell down from one of my aunt’s hands. She was a teenager then. Neither my head nor the floor got broken!!

We had a Pomeranian dog that used to lie down under my cradle when I was sleeping in the cradle. Thanks buddy!. I had seen his pic and it looks like I lost it. My dad took it with his own Kodak camera, which looked like a box!