PROMPT RESPONSE | CHILDHOOD

Fireflies and Brass Lamps

A childhood in our ancestral home in Kerala, spent with maternal aunts and grandmother

Photo by Nidhin K S on Unsplash

…“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” ― Ruskin Bond, ‘Scenes from a Writer’s Life’

There were six of us.

My brother, sister, our three cousins, and I.

School holidays began from the middle of March, and lasted till the end of June. On the second or third day, one of our parents would drop us off at our ancestral home. Usually it was our mother. She revelled in the company of her sisters and mother. She was the youngest daughter, and the apple of everyone’s eye.

There, my mother could forget that she was a busy Sanskrit teacher in a school, which neither valued Sanskrit, nor her. She could forget her handsome, narcissistic husband who was also the youngest in his family, and whose family always wondered why their fair, darling, long-limbed Sukumar got married to short, dark, curly-haired, un-beautiful Bhavani, my mother.

She could also forget all about us, and let us be taken care of, by her mother and sisters, while she rested, and lazed the day away. She stayed for a week, or two, and then left us to return to her other life.

Around that time, our cousins came over, too. And then, the good times began.

Our ancestral home sat squarely in the middle of an extensive plot of land. Since it was near the sea, most of the soil was sandy. And yet, plants and trees grew amazingly well.

At the entrance, there were two huge mango trees, and a big pond. From the entrance where there was never a gate, or door, the path to the house led through an alley of jasmine bushes. But these were the three-layered jasmine, which bloomed at night, lived for two weeks, and quietly died. Behind the jasmine bushes were the huge rose plants. Their fragrance filled the air, driving both insects and us, slightly crazy.

The house was shaped like an uneven ‘L’. The kitchens were on the longer leg of the L. My old granduncle’s room was on the shorter side, with a huge grandfather clock tolling the hours, in the next room. The clock had to be wound up by one of the aunts. Granduncle never bothered. He sat the livelong day, staring at a newspaper, gazing into space, or eating the delectable food his nieces cooked for him.

Between these two were the prayer room, with the beautiful brass lamps, the ‘kindi’, a vessel filled with water for prayers and poojas. This is what a ‘kindi’ looks like:

The gold jewellery to adorn the Gods on the days Poojas were conducted was also stored there. It was always kept locked, and the eldest matriarch always had the key on her person. That was the only room in the house that was kept locked.

These are the shorter version of our prayer lamps. The actual prayer lamp for everyday use is as high as a person’s knee, and the pooja ones are much taller.

Photo by AJOY DAS on Unsplash

Behind the homestead with its small and big rooms, was the giant tamarind tree that all six of us would try to encircle with our arms, and there was still a gap in the trunk that could not be reached.

The entire day, the six of us ran around and played and gossiped. We were ALWAYS hungry. When we went to our aunts looking like we were starving, one or the other of them would expostulate, “ But you just had breakfast/lunch/dinner!” We would look at her beseechingly, like Oliver Twist asking for ‘more’, and she would relent.

Out would come the giant biscuit boxes tucked away in the pantry. And fries of all kinds would be revealed. That pantry was an endless source of fascination and love for us. In separate boxes were sweet potato fries, banana wafers, jaggery-and-ginger-coated banana wafers, tiny balls of savoury rice-and-cumin, fried in coconut oil, and the long, flaky flutes of rice-and-sesame seeds.

There were also pickled mango, lemon, lime and ginger pickles packed into such containers, of baked clay, and stored for the whole year.

Photo by Thuỷ Nguyễn on Unsplash

Bathing time was the highlight of the day. The girls went to bathe first. There were four of us, and we proceeded to the pond with towels, clean clothes to wear after the bath, soap, coconut hair oil, and herbal shampoo-soaps. We washed our hair every day. We sat around in the water, kicked about, played and shrieked in glee, ignoring repeated protests from my aunts and grandmothers to hush! Girls shouldn’t make such a racket! Every exhortation only made us laugh so much that we went under several times, and then came to the surface, sputtering and coughing.

Finally, either my aunt or grandmother would get hold of one of the long sticks from a palm frond, and come down to the pond muttering direfully, and waving it at us. We would all shriek in unison, and promise to emerge. She would cover her ears, and retreat, but stand a distance away, watching us.

By then the aromas from the kitchen would be making us salivate anyway, so we would conclude our baths, and rush back. After towelling our hair, we ran back to wait at the kitchen, until lunch was ready. Lunch was always boiled, unrefined rice, a curry of fresh-caught fish from the river, a stirfried vegetable dish, with vegetables that grew in the garden patch, and a lentil-based curry.

Every bit of what we ate was seasonal. When mangoes were raw, they appeared in fish, and lentils. When they ripened, we ate luscious cut mangoes, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In jackfruit season, we made aviyal with them. When the long runner beans, the snake-gourd, the ash melons, the aubergines grew and matured, they went into stir-fries and dals.

When the sun set, it was time for prayers. Prayers were non-negotiable. The big bronze lamps were lit. Then the smaller ones had to be placed at the three snake groves in the yard. We went along when they were placed, and stood behind our aunts, as we prayed, resolutely shutting out the sounds and signs of movement within the grove, which were actually mini forests, untouched by human hand.

Then we sat cross-legged on the long verandah, and recited the prayers all of us were taught from the time we could utter words. To Vishnu, Shiva, Saraswati, Laksmi, Ganapathy, and Murugan.

Then we had our dinner. We were all tired by then.

The only light in the house came from kerosene lamps or the cooking fires.

After dinner, we cuddled close to one of the aunts, or our grandmother. The lamps were extinguished, save for one. The cooking fires had died down. The room with the kitchens and the place where we ate, was open to the air. It had three walls, but not the fourth one.

One of the aunts began a story. The stories were about kings and queens, court jesters and wise men, animals and Gods. We knew that whatever happened, the good would triumph. We listened, sleepy and content. Things rustled and moved when the breeze blew. We snuggled closer to the safety of the arms that were holding us.

The stars gazed down with benevolent indulgence at six children and three women all happy in their places and spaces. Fireflies winked from the trees. Sometimes the moon peeped at us from between the tree branches, and winked at us as though we shared a secret. It seemed as though they were all listening to the story.

The world was far away. We were happy, safe and secure, in this room without a door. We knew these three old women would not let anything happen to us…and wasn’t God just there in the other room, if we wanted Him?

ⓒ 2026 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved

This story is a response to Jerv Nai Matrap’s evocative prompt, in the Challenged:

July 14: Close your eyes for a few minutes and think back to childhood. Not the memories you always remember. Wait for one that arrives unexpectedly. A forgotten moment, a small detail, something you haven’t thought about in years. What surfaces? (Jerv Nai Matrap)

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