The only time my father beat me

My father, who died in 1981 when I was 24, beat me only once in my life. He was a totally relaxed person. When at home, he would sit quietly in the veranda with a smile on his face, mulling over some pleasant and humorous thought, smoking hard on a beedi. He would be watching everything happening around him, but would not interfere in anything. We children could do any mischief in the house without fear of his raising his voice to enforce discipline.

I was six or seven years old when he beat me the only time in my life. I was playing goli in our front yard with my friend Mohan, who was around my own age. The goli game we used to play those days was similar in principle to the golf game. There are three holes in the ground about three feet apart and you have to put the goli in each hole a particular number of times ahead of your rival to win the game.



What you do each time your turn comes is to pitch the thump of your right hand at the spot where the goli had last come to rest and shoot it with your middle finger, as from a catapult, from between the thump and the next finger of your left hand. The goli has to be shot with the right precision to fall into the next hole. You are also allowed to hit your rival's goli with your's, so that it shoots far away from the holes, making it difficult for him to score his next hole.

I was a devil at this game and I won it by quite some distance that day. The rule of the game is that the winner is entitled to have a particular number of knocks with the goli at the knuckles of the loser as the reward for winning. The goli has to be propelled the same catapulting way from the first hole to the next, where the loser would hold his knuckles to receive the knock.

The moment I started sharpening the knife for my pound of flesh, Mohan started whimpering, his face a vivid red. The first knock landed spot on and he started outright crying, wringing his hand in pain. Suddenly my father sat up and shouted: "Eda Venu, venda! Stop!"

But I was entitled to some more knocks and was intent on having them all. Mohan placed his knuckles once again at the appointed spot to receive the next missile, because he was a proud little boy and could not think of backing out of the punishment he had to take. I bent down to take aim for the next shot at his knuckles and was suddenly sent face first into the sand by a resounding slap on my buttocks, my father having jumped out of the veranda to hit me. I had never seen him angry before and was so terrified that I ran away from the scene and did not dare come back until he had left home for the day's work.

The next day, he introduced us to a new way of playing the game. He had bought for us half a dozen new marbles from the town to play goli. The new rule was: no knocks at the knuckles of the loser. When a game is won and lost, the winner is entitled to two pieces of 'naranga mitai' (the yellow pear-shaped toffee of those days), while the loser will get only one. He placed a packet of these toffees on the steps of our home and asked us to start playing. He had bought the toffees too from the town the previous day for the specific purpose of changing the rules of the game.

(Why do I write this piece now? I just happened to remember him this morning. For a couple of years in 1960's, he involved himself in the cultivation of the paddy fields belonging to our family at Punnapra in Alappuzha district and received accolades from the Agriculture Department for reaping a big harvest. His picture given above was published along with a report in a leading Malayalam daily about his achievement as a farmer. He is posing for the camera squatting in our family farm, examining the paddy ready for the harvest.

Anil Kumar Sivasankara Kurup sent me the other picture showing a tense moment in a goli game.)
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