A vintage desk.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
In my rural ancestral home was an immense jack-wood desk, 5ft. x 3 ft. x 3 ft., made to order by our legendary great uncle Kuttammaan. He had died long before I was born. From my mother and other elders in the joint family, I had learned quite a lot about this uncle, a near six-footer with a strong build and a stronger will.
When I first knew it, the desk had nothing in it belonging to this uncle. My oldest brother, the first university graduate from my family, used that desk for some time and left his imprint with piles of issues of a Malayalam weekly. He had been a regular contributor to the weekly. In those days, contributors did not receive any payment, only complimentary copies of the weekly.
As a boy, I used to have occasional peeks into the desk. At 16 or so, when none of my older brothers were around, I had my first free run of the contents of the desk. Rummaging through the heaps of books and magazines in it I had come upon Wodehouse’s The Crime Wave at Blandings Castle, Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a selection of Kipling’s verse, and a few other titles. All the books carried on their title page a Christian name. I later learned the books had been gifted to an older brother of mine, then an Indian Army officer, by a returning British officer.
There was another prized legacy in that desk — the matriculation English textbook (1896) with the name of my great uncle on it. He was my maternal grandmother’s younger brother, a surgeon long retired from the then Indian Medical Service. Although technically the head of our joint family, he lived separately but kept visiting us regularly.
That textbook was a revelation. It was a thick book and contained essays by Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and so on, and poems including Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, and extracts from Shakespeare. My ‘school final’ English textbook (1945) was a pygmy in comparison.
The desk also held several Sanskrit books, including Kalidasa’s Abhignana Shakuntala, a legacy from three of my brothers, who had had their early education in a Sanskrit school.
When we finally moved out of the village some 60 years ago, we did not know what to do with that humongous desk. To transport it all the way to our new home in Thrissur was not easy. To make room for it in that house, which was far smaller than our large village home, would have been a challenge. A local grocer, our long-time supplier of provisions, expressed an interest in the desk. He got it gratis. The desk was emptied of the books and taken to his shop, where it replaced his old rickety one.
I had felt a pang about it all, not that the desk had been given away but that my once private ‘library’ and treasure house, where I had discovered P.G. Wodehouse, Havelock Ellis and such, had been relegated as a grocer’s desk. It seemed like a legacy wasted!
pmwarrier9@gmail.com
