It is not often that someone from our childhood reenters our lives after half a century and leaves an imprint deeper than ever. Potteth Narayanan Unny was such a person for me.

We grew up together—but only briefly—in the mid-1960s, when my mother, a young college lecturer, was posted to Chittur Government College in Palakkad. I was seven years old then, my sister barely two. My father was in prison at the time, jailed with his comrades for his political activities. Because of his absence, my grandmother came from Pandalam to stay with us.

The years we spent in Chittur unfolded against a backdrop of political storms that swept through our family. After the Vimochanasamaram, the Congress-led government—rabidly hostile to the Left—had thrown my mother out of her teaching job solely because my father and uncle were active in the Communist movement. The Communist Party itself had split, cleaving friendships and families, ours included. My father, who had been an editor with the People’s Publishing House run by the CPI in Delhi, lost his position after choosing to join the newly formed CPM. With no work and no home to anchor us, we returned to Kerala. Then came the India–China war, and with it the mass arrests of CPM leaders including my father.

Amid this churn, Bharatappuzha, which takes the name Sokanashini as it winds through Chittur, offered us a breather. My mother was reinstated after three difficult years, and her first posting was this quiet corner of Palakkad. For her, it was a second chance; for the rest of us, a temporary shelter. But to the child I was—bewildered, fearful and unable to fully grasp why his father had vanished behind prison walls—Chittur might as well have been an unfamiliar planet.

I joined Class IV in the Ambattupalayam Government Lower Primary School. Everything about me must have appeared strange to my classmates and even to my teachers. Since I had been in Delhi’s Kerala school in the previous, I continued in the Delhi student’s sartorial style in Chittur too; tucked-in shirt, shoes and socks, etc. My Malayalam tinted with a southern accent. In that rustic 1960s Chittur, all of this made me an outsider instantly. 

Most children kept their distance. Except for one boy. A fair, lean, soft-spoken child with an easy smile introduced himself to me without hesitation. He was Narayanan Unny.

He became my anchor in those bewildering months. Our homes stood not far apart. My family occupied a modest rented cottage called Lekshmi........

© Mathrubhumi English