In the days when my mother was growing up there were very few openings for girls. Girls used to marry on reaching puberty sometimes as young as 12 years. My mother was 18 and she was considered an “old maid” then. She was a Tamil school teacher in a private school. The headmaster was a lecherous old man who likes to grope the young female teachers who were called up to his office under the pretext of discussing work assignments. When she complained of this behaviour to my mother her response was to take the convenient route. “Leave your job. Be prepared to get married. I shall send out word to my contacts to find a boy for you”.
And so at the age of 18 she married my dad. My dad was born in Durban South Africa but migrated to a town known as Palani in India before the family moved to Malaya. My paternal grandmother used to be paid in gold nuggets when working in South Africa. She had shown me the gold nuggets when I was an infant. My parents were Telugus but spoke Tamil as they lived in Malaya where Tamil was the lingua francua of the Indian migrants to Malaya. My father could speak Telugu but not so my mother who only spoke Tamil. My mother was born in Ipoh Malaya and had not set foot in India.
My father’s income was insufficient for the family’s needs and my mother had to resort to work. She was employed as a language teacher teaching Tamil to the children in the village. That helped to supplement the family income. If not for her efforts we would have been in dire straits and probably would have had to stop schooling at a young age and go into employment.
All contents (c) Ganapathy Ramasamy, mynameisgana@blogspot.com
The photo above was taken of my parents on their wedding day,
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