Confessions of a Hyperactive Boyhood, Goat’s Milk, and the Cinema of Tears
Author’s Note:
Girisaṁ’s Coffee Shop, nestled under the cool shade of a sprawling tree, is a sanctuary for minds and souls to relax and unwind after a rigorous trek up the steep slopes of scholarly, educational, and technical stories. Here, there are no three-minute quick fixes for losing weight or gaining riches.
Enjoy a piping-hot cup of coffee paired with delicious snacks—where humor is the main ingredient, seasoned with a splash of high-seas maritime adventures, tales of Bhishma, and timeless mythology. No action is expected or required from you.
Pause to take in the panoramic view of the hills and cascading waterfalls before resuming your trek toward knowledge! Many doctors would surely recommend a healthy dose of humor as the perfect complement to a nutritious diet and exercise regimen. Humor is the best medicine!
Autobiographies and biographies are often viewed as yawn-inducing books — a guaranteed tonic for insomniacs. That is precisely why they so frequently lag behind fast-paced fiction and action thrillers. Personally, during my school days, I found it utterly exhausting to memorize dates of birth, academic degrees, major achievements, and every tedious chronological detail crammed into textbook biography lessons.
Yet, autobiographies by masters like Jerome K. Jerome, Mullapudi Venkata Ramana, and a select few others broke every rule. They became wild bestsellers, outpacing almost all other literary genres by many miles. Inspired by their timeless charm, I hope this candid narration of my hyperactive childhood and teenage years will be warmly welcomed by readers — offering a lively, humor-based cocktail of real-life misadventures, sea-town nostalgia, and unfiltered memories.
The Vanishing Fort and the Grand House That Shrank
I was Dennis the Menace and Budugu — the iconic Telugu mischievous boy — rolled into one hyperactive package. Driving my poor mother up the wall was my primary daily occupation, especially since my father was away at traveling for work most of the time. Looking back, it remains a genuine mystery how my parents, particularly Mother, never once raised a hand against me or raised their voices even a single decibel higher while reprimanding me. It requires nothing short of a superhuman, saintly effort to remain completely calm when confronted with the bizarre and chaotic situations I routinely created for them.
All my earliest conscious memories begin in a breezy, sprawling port city. Regarding Cuttack, the previous location from where Dad had been transferred, my mental canvas is a total blank. In this new port city, however, I remember a dilapidated, historic fort sitting directly in front of our residential quarters. Only a few crumbling, weather-worn masonry walls remained standing amidst the overgrown grass.
We lived on the spacious first floor of the building. On the ground floor level, massive rolls of thick underground telephone cables, heavy wooden telephone poles, and various other industrial utility items were stored in long rows. The house itself was grand and sprawling — featuring a huge, airy veranda, a lofty central hall, cavernous bedrooms, and a deep balcony overlooking the road. In my early childhood gaze, the high ceilings seemed to stretch up toward the heavens.
A few decades later, I brought my own family back to visit that old port-city house, eager to show them the grand theater of my early childhood antics. I was utterly stunned by what I found. The house had seemingly shrunk in physical size down to completely ordinary, modest proportions! Since I had been so tiny back then, every room, archway, and doorway had naturally seemed monumental to my eyes.
Blowing Bubbles and the Art of Lifelong Sister-Blackmail
The undisputed crown jewel of that house, however, was the heavy white bathtub in the bathroom. To this day, I do not understand why my older brothers never competed with me for ownership of it. They generously allowed me completely free, uninterrupted access, and I used to spend hours happily soaking, splashing, and frolicking in the deep water.
One bright afternoon, as I was happily splashing about in the tub, my baby sister came crawling across the tiled floor on all fours. She managed to pull herself up, holding tightly onto the smooth porcelain edge of the tub, peering in at me with wide, curious eyes.
“Do you also want to play?” I asked her cheerfully.
She must have nodded in pure infant innocence, the way babies do when they are enchanted by water and toys. Taking that as an enthusiastic invitation, I reached out, grabbed both of her tiny hands, and pulled her toward me. She promptly slipped and landed head-first into the water with a loud splash!
Panic seized me instantly. I scrambled out of the tub, wrapped a towel around my dripping waist, and fled the bathroom at top speed. In the main hall, my parents were sitting politely, deep in conversation with a couple of formal home guests.
I hovered anxiously near the doorway for a few seconds, my heart pounding against my ribs, before creeping over to my mother. I leaned in close and whispered nervously into her ear, “Mom… sister fell into the bathtub, and she is blowing bubbles underwater.”
My parents gasped, sprang up from their chairs in a flash, and rushed into the bathroom to fish her out. Surprisingly, I have absolutely no recollection of them screaming at me, scolding me, or handing down any sort of physical punishment. They treated the entire terrifying ordeal as normally as anyone would treat a small, clueless boy inadvertently pulling his infant sister into a tub during play.
However, being the opportunist I was, I took full, unashamed advantage of that bathtub incident all the way through my high school years. Whenever I wanted something, I would shamelessly emotionally blackmail my sister. I would dramatically emphasize how I had heroically saved her life from a watery grave, arguing that she should gladly surrender her fair share of whatever mouth-watering sweet or savory dish Mother had prepared for tea. Poor, innocent girl — she would fall for my dramatic narrative every single time and hand over her plate.
Of course, if she had been a boy, or if she had possessed the sharp, net-savvy awareness of today’s internet-era kids, she would have simply rolled her eyes and snapped, “Buzz off! Parents saved me, not you. Give me your share of the sweets right now, or else I am pressing formal charges against you for attempted murder!”
When I finally matured and ceased teasing and tormenting her during my high school days, I formally announced to her that I was retiring my blackmail routine because I had grown up, become wise, and she could finally relax. But the unvarnished truth was quite different: I had simply outgrown my childhood craving for home-cooked sweets, having been introduced to the irresistible street delicacies of mirchi bajji, pani poori, and the crisp, golden masala dosas at the famous local Taj restaurant.
The Art of Blackmail and the Sacred Dinner Set
I suspect I took my primary cues for sibling blackmail from my second older brother. Family lore has it that when I was barely a toddler, my second brother and our older cousin sisters went on an afternoon walk to visit a nearby freshwater lake. I tagged along on my short, clumsy legs. While the older kids were happily frolicking in the shallow water near the banks, I refused to stay safely parked on the dry shore. I marched boldly right into the water, immediately lost my footing, and fell flat on my face.
The pulling river current instantly caught me and began carrying my tiny body away toward deeper water. Acting with incredible reflexes, my brother lunged into the current, grabbed me firmly by my ankles, and hauled me back to the safety of the muddy bank at great personal risk to his own safety. Naturally, throughout my early childhood, he would frequently accuse me of being an ungrateful little monster whenever I refused to run errands or do his bidding on command. ( I suspect that he over-dramatized the rescue scene for leverage. It could be a simple pickup and deposit at the bank.)
A few weeks after the bathtub incident, an unfamiliar foreign lady wearing a smart printed frock and a stylish bobbed haircut visited our home. Who she was, where she came from, and why she had come to our house remains an absolute mystery; even in later years, Mother could not recall her identity or business. During her visit, she handed Mother a neatly wrapped parcel bound in fancy gift paper for temporary safekeeping, explaining that she was in transit and would return later that evening to collect it.
Mom carried the delicate package into the main bedroom and set it down carefully on top of a trunk that doubled as a suitcase. As if, absolutely, ill luck would have it, my daily play clothes were stored inside that exact same suitcase.
Shortly after, I took my evening bath, ran into the bedroom to change, and immediately spotted the mysterious wrapped parcel sitting right where I needed to open the lid.
“Mom! Something is sitting on top of my suitcase!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs.
“Wait! Don’t touch anything! I am coming right now!” my mother shouted back from the kitchen over the sound of sizzling pans.
In that precise moment, I behaved exactly like young Lord Ganesh in the classic mythological legend of the Atmalingam.
Contd…
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