For you it may sound like a silly story. But it means a lot
to me. It is the story of a lost slipper (chappal). When I see lost foot wears
on the roads I think about its other pair. Generally we do not see one complete
pair abandoned. What makes one slipper fall down? What happens to the other?
Why these lost slippers give you a sense of pathos? I know, by looking at a
pair of footwear one could weave a story around it. One can have several
hypothesizes around a pair of shoes as done by Martin Heideggar, the German
philosopher. Or like the cobbler in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’, one could
look at the footwear and identify the character of its owner. But abandoned
shoes and slippers are a painful sight. It brings the history of holocaust in
your mind. Those dead people who were once the owners of those footwear come
back to your mind and haunt your peace. Yes, the abandoned footwear is an
object of meditation.
I have strange memories about slippers. When I was a child,
in our village people rarely wore footwear. Those people who went out for jobs
wore rubber slippers made by two major companies called Bata and Corona. Those
people who could not afford to buy branded slippers wore rubber chappals bought
from the streets. They looked thin and poor like their wearers. Unlike these
days people did not throw their slippers at the slightest provocation. If the
belt was torn they went to the cobbler who either mended it or replaced it with
a strap of the same color. Mostly chappals came in two colors; blue and faded
yellowish brown. Cobblers stocked such straps as they knew often people broke
their slipper straps thanks to over use. Some people wore slippers till their
foot print gets imprinted like in a linocut sheet. Some people walked in a
peculiar way so that the pressure of their toes and heels formed similar shaped
imprints in a color hidden under the white upper layer. Looking at the slippers
removed at the doorsteps one could see islands of blue and brown in them. Some
people wore them for long years and they became wafer thin. Some developed
holes at the sole. Still people wore them. Losing a slipper was a major crime
and a cause of a lot of heart burn.
(Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh)
People were very careful about their slippers. We saw shoes
in town shops and newspaper advertisements. During the rainy season, papers and
magazines advertised plastic footwear. Duck Back was the major company that
produced gum boot like shoes. Children like us used to imagine how we would
look if we wore those royal duck back shoes. I had never seen a single child in
my village or elsewhere wearing those boots. I used to wonder who would be
wearing those magnificent boots in Kerala Monsoon. Summers brought dust on
these slippers and they got discolored in the process. Hence, visiting the
grandparents’ home or some relatives’ houses during the summer vacations
started off with this major ritual of washing the slippers clean near the well.
We spent hours in cleaning slippers. During the monsoon days, which heralded
the opening of the schools after summer vacation, slippers used to be a menace
for the mothers. As children and grown up walked alike in mud and slush, the
slippers gloriously flapped against the soles slinging mud dots behind the
dhotis and shirts. A person who could walk in slippers without staining his or
clothes used to be considered as a person who could ‘walk well’. We, children
invariably created innumerable archipelagoes of mud behind our clothes.
If you ask me one footwear that could go with any kind of
dress code, I would say it is rubber slipper. But today, slippers have become
bathroom chappals. Dashing young men of our village in those days wore
bellbottom pants with slippers. Respectable school teachers, government
officials and politicians wore rubber slippers without any problem. Shopkeepers
and fish sellers also wore the same chappals. Perhaps, the real equality was in
the case of footwear in those days. Getting a pair of abandoned slippers was
considered to be a boon for many of us during Sundays when most of us used to
turn out to be treasure hunters. Those were not the days of Chinese toys. As
necessity was the mother of all inventions we used to make our toys; a piece of
rope could turn into a train or a bus or even a covetable Fiat car if both the
ends of that rope is tied together. Depending on the length of the rope the
type of vehicles changed. An old cycle tire could become another vehicle. A few
coconut shells could create a Walmart superstore where we sold available grass,
pebbles, sands and stones as consumable items. And the money was the broken
pieces of pots.
When the fervor of invention went to further heights a pair
of rubber slippers fished out from the attic or from some pits, transformed
itself into a pair of tires fitted against a thin steel rod from an old
umbrella. This was passed through a papaya leaf stem or a reed and the middle
of it was tied to a long stick procured from some old furniture. Then a speedy
two wheeler was ready. With mouth making engine sounds and the indispensible
horn children ran along the plots of land, across the courtyards of various
houses where elders rested by looking at newspapers or listening to radios. We
kept our times in the watches made out of coconut leaves. Police chased us with
their caps, cross belts and socks made out of knitted jack fruit tree leaves. A
pair of slippers carved into a pair of tires could create a national highway
out of the courtyards. We had to confront mean machines of other boys who were
more inventive by adding more tires to their vehicles carved out of rubber
slippers. They often acted as trucks that brought merchandise to the Walmart
superstores under mango trees and tamarind trees.
Have you heard of cutting foot into size according to the
shoes? Yes, it is a cynical expression that qualifies the sized up truths. But
in villages people used to size up the long rubber slippers as per their needs.
Once I went to visit a relative with my mother. Children have the tendency to
forget things though they are very possessive about the things that the grown
up people generally consider as the most insignificant things. On that day,
after visiting that house when we got back home, to my shock I realized that I
had forgotten my rubber slippers there.
It was night and the house that we visited was a few kilometers away. I
spent a sleepless night thinking about my dear pair of slippers. Next morning
my mother engaged one of my truant friends to accompany me to the next village
to procure my slippers from that home. We walked all the way, both of us
without slippers and reached that house. I demanded my slippers back. They were
poor people. Initially they feigned that there were no slippers left behind by
me on the previous day. I insisted that I needed to inspect that house. I was
innocent enough to be rude in that way as the thing I lost was my beloved pair
of slippers. Finally they brought forth the pair. I was at the verge of tears
as I found them completely mutilated. Half of the heels were missing from them.
Some sharp knife was used to cut those pair of slippers to make suitable for a
small boy of my age in that house. With anger welling up in my mind I snatched
the pairs and ran back home with my friend following me all the while holding
his knickers going down from his waist. When I reached home my mother asked me
why I had not left them there itself. I did not understand why she asked me to
do so.
When you stand at a sea shore you always see abandoned pair
of slippers coming back to the shore seated at the crest of the waves. In
childhood we had two beliefs about seas. One, if you wrote anything on the
shore the waves would come and erase it. Mostly we wrote , “Mother Sea is a
Thief”. The next wave would wash it away. We thought that our mischief had
angered the sea and she did it deliberately. The second belief was that
whatever you threw at the sea would come back in a few minutes carried by the
waves. One day we all went to Kanyakumari as a part of our family trip. Shibu
Natesan, now the well known artist, was in the group. We were hardly ten years
old. Shibu threw one of his slippers into the sea. And it came back in the next
wave. He threw it again and it came back. Emboldened by the returning nature of
the sea he threw it again and again. But alas, even after waiting for a long
time it did not come back. He had this rebellious character then also. So he
picked up the other slipper which was there in his foot all the while, and
threw it to the sea. Take it, he called out. And secretly we believed that
after sometime both the slippers would come back. But they did not. He received
enough scolding by his parents and relatives. And rest of the journey he
finished like a true pilgrim with naked feet.
I know I have written a lot of about slippers. But I wrote
all these to tell you about a slipper that was lost recently. My daughter wears
a pair of beautiful red slippers with some pictures on it. Like any child of
her age who has this divine gift of misspelling words and making them sound
much better than the actual sound, she also calls her slippers ‘Pacchal’. It
comes from the word chappal. In Pondicherry we went for dinner to a hotel which
was a kilometer from the hotel we stayed. After strolling enough at the beach, we
took a short cut to reach this restaurant that we had fixed for dinner. After
dinner my daughter was very tired and she slept on my shoulder while we walked
back to the hotel. Just before the hotel, a man who was starting his scooter
found something and called us out. Hey, the child’s slipper has fallen. I
thanked him and picked up the cute little slipper. But to our shock we found
that the other slipper was also missing. While sleeping she had loosened the
grip of her toes and it had fallen somewhere. We were very sad. After sending
the family into the hotel I decided to walk back to the restaurant.
I could have thought it differently. I could buy her many
other pairs of slippers if she wanted in the next morning. But I knew it was
very dear to her; it was her pacchal and she wore it with pride. Perhaps, it
was one new addition of her possessions in this material world that she has
started learning about recently. I walked along the same side of the road with
my head bent down, looking for each and every object at the side walk thinking
that it was her slipper. I saw a few cars parked along the way. I even bent my
knees surreptitiously to check whether they had parked their cars over that
cute little slipper. I walked till the restaurant. Walked back but in vain.
Interestingly, I found many other single slippers lying in different postures,
but not hers. Next morning she got up and asked for her pacchal. We told her
about it. She cried for long time and then she forgot about it. Even on the
next day, I found walking the same street, by the same side with my family in
silence. When we covered that stretched, I looked at my wife and she exchanged
the same look and asked, ‘did you find’? My son pitched in, even I could not.
We all were still looking for that one cute little slipper. All these while my
daughter was thinking about a cat she had seen sitting at a fence.
2 comments:
Excellent writeup. Slippers (or Pachhals) will never be same again! I'll be watching out for more.
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