Skip to main content

My search for an old friend in India

 





I had some close childhood friends who left for India when their parents migrated to India. We had attended the same school for a number of years. I was too young to think of taking down their addresses and lost contact for a number of years. 



Some 30 years later,  I had the opportunity to visit India when my son found employment in India. I looked up a relative of the family who had migrated and was fortunate to find that he had their address in India. He told me the family in India was scattered. The eldest son was in Mumbai. I was not close to him though, as he was very much my senior. The rest were in Chennai and surrounding towns. He was not certain of their exact locations. 


I had a friend who was a Christian nun by the name of Sister Selvi who travelled around Tamil Nadu to visit primary schools. Once when she came to Kuala Lumpur to visit friends I met up with her and casually related the case of my missing friends. She asked for details of the family and I gave her the only information I had i.e. the names of my friends and their old location in Ipoh.  She is a resourceful person and said she would attempt to locate them. After a few months the nun known as Sister Selvi, contacted me from India and said she had managed to trace my old friends. According to her she had visited a sundry shop in Chennai to inquire whether the shopkeeper has heard of the whereabouts of my friends who were Malaysian born but migrated to India a few years back. She gave the names of the siblings I had provided to her. The shopkeeper had not. However a young boy who happened to be buying sundries in the shop was intrigued by the conversation and told my friend, “it looks like you are inquiring about my family members”. My friend was pleased to hear that and struck a conversation with him. Some of the siblings had passed away, some had migrated to North India leaving some in the South, notably Chennai in Tamil Nadu. 


I obtained the addresses in South India and told my son about it. He arranged a car and driver for my use while I was in India. I decided to contact the second eldest known as George who was reported to be living in Tanjore, South India. When I called at the address I was given a warm welcome by the daughter who told me her father, my friend, worked for the Electricity Board (EB) in Tanjore and only came to Chennai for family gatherings. She prepared a sumptuous meal for me and the  driver and invited us to stay with her. I extended my thanks and apologised to her as I had already booked into a hotel at a nearby town. I told her I would pay her a visit with my son on some other day. She gave me the telephone number of George. When I was getting away from her house my phone rang. The caller said his  sister gave this number and he would like to meet up. As I had moved out of Tanjore he suggested we meet up at the Railway Station. I drove to the station and was looking around to see Henry the second brother in the family. I was wondering how was I going to meet up with this friend who I had not seen for many years. Soon a young man approached me with a smile and identified himself. I asked him how he had identified me. He said I was the only foreign looking person in the whole station - though I am Indian in looks, but looked lost and foreign and my clothes which are typically not Indian, gave up the game. Sure enough, our Malaysian clothes looked different from the cotton worn by the Indians.   I was glad I had not given up and had waited to meet up with Henry the second brother in the family, who was happy to see me and kept me company for the duration of my stay in Tanjore. I realised that Henry’s daughter was a Muslim and must have wondered aloud when she told me she married a Muslim man and had to convert to keep her marital home intact. But I also realised that quite a number of families in India had a mixture of Hindus, Muslims and Christians among the family members true to the secular nature of the country. 


There’s a photo of me & Henry somewhere, which we took in his house.




All contents (c) Ganapathy Ramasamy, mynameisgana@blogspot.com


Images are for illustrative purposes only, and are sourced from the web. Please drop us a note if you are the owner and wish to be credited.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My first car

  After my Higher School Certificate examination, I was appointed as a labour officer. This job paid well enough that I could finally afford a car for work. It involved a fair amount of travelling, the allowances for which could well cover my petrol bills. This first car was a second hand Volkswagen 1200, reg. AF 1085 in white. However I had just learnt driving and was not confident in taking out the car for my duties. So for the first few weeks, a friend of mine agreed to be a co-driver while I learnt to drive in my neighbourhood.  Once I gained confidence, I told my friend that I was confident and he need not assist me while I drove around. The first day of independent driving, I reversed into a child’s tricycle. Fortunately the child had abandoned the bike in my driveway and went away to look for other pursuits that drew her attention. There was a dent to the rear of my vehicle    that would require some money to have it fixed back into its original shape.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pigeons always look for variety

One of my female pigeons left her nest and moved over to my neighbors pigeon Coop where she had taken a fancy for a male pigeon. I spoke to my neighbor and told him I shall trap my pigeon later that evening. But my neighbor like a budding lawyer told me “possession is 9/10th” of the law and since the pigeon was in his coop it is rightfully his. Now when I feed my pigeons I usually give a loud whistle for them to attend to their food. I told my brother to spray some green peas on the ground. My house was about 5 houses away from my neighbors where my pigeon had sought refuge with her boyfriend. When I gave a whistle my pigeon with 3 other pigeons left my neighbors coop to peck food at my coop. The neighbor was stunned seeing his 3 pigeons heading to my house. He mellowed and asked me to allow him to go over to my coop later in the evening to trap his birds. I used his same words and turned down his pleas despite his apologies. In the evening when the birds got into the coop I caught hol...
Post a Comment
Read more

SENIOR CITIZENS AND THE QR CODE

Age is certainly catching up for me and my friends of my generation. Technology is moving fast and I find we are no longer able to fit into the fast paced modern age. The other day Ben, my friend and I set out to Bukit Damansara to meet up with an Investment banker. Both of us are retirees. I am in the 80's while Ben is a lot younger. We have been residents of KL for a long time, used to Pusat Bandar Damansara area as we had worked in that area many years ago. We decided to take a Grab to go to Bukit Damansara. As we got into the car and buckled up with the safety belt, the driver told us to scan the QR code a small piece of plastic stuck to each side of the window. It took some effort as the sticker was slightly bigger than a postage stamp while we are used to a big placard attached to the back of the front seat. It was quite a challenge to scan it as the car was in motion through some humps and bumps. To our surprise Pusat Bandar Damansara wasn't the place we knew. Our office...
1 comment
Read more