A tribute to Pavada Sir & Jumper
Last week while reading Kigsley Amis' Memoirs, 'Jumper' came to me. The context was different, but still 'Jumper' took me to my school days.
We had a neighbour, a Singapore-returned, who used to wear only bell-bottom pants. To the 'creative' locals, it looked like a skirt, so they called him '*Pavada Sir'. The stout, polite man was also a magician. We got to know about this when he performed a show in the local temple in my hometown Attingal. Pavada Sir started off well, but failed while lifting a flowerpot using a thread. When the crowd laughed, Sir tried to pass the buck. “See, I told you guys, I needed a very calm atmosphere. Since you people made noise, it didn't work out.” That was the first and last public performance of Pavada Sir.
Pavada Sir didn't mingle much with the locals. The only person who he used to talk was Raghavan Nair, his childhood friend. But Nair never thought that he would have to pay a huge price for this friendship. Since both were always seen together, the locals wanted to give them a matching name. '*Jumper'... one of them said, and others agreed. The nickname bill was passed.
However, Jumper was not popular as Pavada. While the former wore white shirt and mundu, the latter was always seen in neat bell-bottom pants and branded T-shirts. This was enough for us children to identify him with his 'surname'. We even used to decide which way we should go to school, either 'Pavada Sir's road or the main road”?
Although we liked Pavada Sir we hated Jumper a bit. Reason: He would buttonhole us for hours, asking the same questions again and again. One day he asked my friend who had just passed his SSC (it was not SSLC, thanks to T M Jacob, the then education minister the total mark was doubled for that particular year — from 600 to 1200) examination, how much he had scored. The friend said he got 470, and Jumper was happy. “Oh wonderful, great mark. If you had tried, you could have got a distinction,” he said. I could soon sense a 'dont-say' expression on my friend's face.
Both Pavada Sir and Jumper died five years ago.
(*Pavada means skirt in Malayalam. *Jumper is a 'primitive' form of blouse that was once popular among older women in Kerala.)
We had a neighbour, a Singapore-returned, who used to wear only bell-bottom pants. To the 'creative' locals, it looked like a skirt, so they called him '*Pavada Sir'. The stout, polite man was also a magician. We got to know about this when he performed a show in the local temple in my hometown Attingal. Pavada Sir started off well, but failed while lifting a flowerpot using a thread. When the crowd laughed, Sir tried to pass the buck. “See, I told you guys, I needed a very calm atmosphere. Since you people made noise, it didn't work out.” That was the first and last public performance of Pavada Sir.
Pavada Sir didn't mingle much with the locals. The only person who he used to talk was Raghavan Nair, his childhood friend. But Nair never thought that he would have to pay a huge price for this friendship. Since both were always seen together, the locals wanted to give them a matching name. '*Jumper'... one of them said, and others agreed. The nickname bill was passed.
However, Jumper was not popular as Pavada. While the former wore white shirt and mundu, the latter was always seen in neat bell-bottom pants and branded T-shirts. This was enough for us children to identify him with his 'surname'. We even used to decide which way we should go to school, either 'Pavada Sir's road or the main road”?
Although we liked Pavada Sir we hated Jumper a bit. Reason: He would buttonhole us for hours, asking the same questions again and again. One day he asked my friend who had just passed his SSC (it was not SSLC, thanks to T M Jacob, the then education minister the total mark was doubled for that particular year — from 600 to 1200) examination, how much he had scored. The friend said he got 470, and Jumper was happy. “Oh wonderful, great mark. If you had tried, you could have got a distinction,” he said. I could soon sense a 'dont-say' expression on my friend's face.
Both Pavada Sir and Jumper died five years ago.
(*Pavada means skirt in Malayalam. *Jumper is a 'primitive' form of blouse that was once popular among older women in Kerala.)
Comments
Post-modernism, globalization, and liberalization… whatever you may call it. It liberates ordinary; it turns trivial to significance and forgettable to countable. Every nut and bolt are important here; on occasion, of no import paper clip would be more functional than WMD; a bullock cart is far more majestic than Air Force One. Interstices, voids, silences, and margins speak for themselves when the surface has got depth. Sometimes a bit of history is more profound than poetry. Other times a memory is larger than history itself subdues all pervasive grand narratives. You have got a tremendous sense of ‘defamiliarization’, as Russian formalists would terms; a miracle of commonness that makes things countable. Simplicity oozes out… but not simple!
-Shibu Shanmughom