Indian Writing

Its multiple facets - pen and ink drawings by Manohar Devadoss. Lovely, and so is the text accompanying the sketches:

When I was an adolescent, a small miscellaneous group of my school-mates and I, belonging to different castes, communities and faiths became very close friends. One of the boys in our close-knit group was Satagopan, hailing from an orthodox, middle class Iyengar Brahmin family. His parents were so old-fashioned that they solemnised the wedding of his sister, Jeyamma even before she completed her schooling. Unfortunately, her husband was drowned soon after in a railway accident caused by a swollen river. She was a teenager and was expecting when she became a widow. Back then in Tamil Nadu, Brahmin widows belonging to traditional families were made to suffer the harshest of punishments. Our group of friends was justifiably apprehensive. Would so young and beautiful a girl be forced to take on a widow’s mantle: shaven head, coarse off-white saree, isolation, ostracism et al? On the contrary, her parents moved away from these cruel customs, one step at a time. They shifted to another town and put her through college. She passed her bachelors’ degree examination, winning the first rank in the state. They returned to Madurai to enable her to pursue her master’s degree. At this stage, our friends and I were spending a fair share of our time in Satagopan’s house. His parents could perceive that we tacitly followed a code of not looking at our friends’ sisters with amorous eyes. They allowed Jeyamma to roam around with us, as long as Satagopan too was in the group. In those days it was not an everyday event for a comely well-dressed young woman to go out with a group of indifferently dressed somewhat unruly young men. People stared at us indelicately, be we happily ignored them. In this drawing, finished in February 1988 I have tried to recapture a scene belonging to the early 1960s.

Jeyamma went on to pursue her higher studies, remarried and recently retired as a professor in California University at Davis.

The whole collection of extracts from The Hindu Magazine, here.