The Two-Rupee Tiger

 

The Sound of a Particular Door

Nambi began his college days in 1984, the year he learned to read a house by its noises. He was almost nineteen, commuting fifteen kilometres each way, and living under a roof shared by two people — his mother Chella and his father Raman — who could not agree on how to run it, what to save, what to spend, or, most evenings, whether dinner would survive the night.

He came to know the sequence the way you know a piece of music you have heard too many times. The gate latch. Raman's footsteps, heavier and less certain than they should have been for the hour. The particular silence that fell over the house the moment he called out for food. Chella would already be moving toward the kitchen before he finished asking — she served him without a word, plate after plate, night after night, as though obedience alone might one day be enough to end it.

It never was. Raman, deep enough in drink to have lost his appetite but not his grievances, would sit before a full plate and find that his hands would not cooperate. Rather than say so, he found something else to say. That he had never been given the respect due to a man who had sacrificed as much as he had. That Chella's family had never once treated him with the dignity he deserved. The accusation changed its clothes nightly but never its shape, and it built, course by course, toward the same ending: a plate, airborne, striking the wall with a crack that Nambi could have located blindfolded, rice and sambar sliding down the plaster in a long yellow smear, and his mother on her knees afterward with a rag, weeping quietly, cleaning a floor she had cooked for an hour to fill.

Nambi sat through most of these evenings. He watched his mother go to bed hungry more nights than he could count, and on the evenings he came home late from college, it was worse in its own way — walking in through the front door to find the wreckage already cold, his father already snoring, and his mother alone with the mess, looking up at him from the floor with an expression he never found a word for.

Winter, 1985

He turned it over for a long time before he found the courage to act. Then, one evening in the winter of 1982–83, after the last plate had stopped ringing against the wall and Chella had slipped out of the room, Nambi stood in front of his father and asked him, plainly, what any of it was for.

"Appa," he said, "what is this achieving? Every night, the same drama. You can't even eat what she cooks for you, and by the time it's over there's nothing left but what's on the floor. What do you actually want from her?"

Raman's answer was not an answer. It was old wounded pride finding a new listener. "It is easy for you," he said, "to talk of pain as though it is something you leave behind. You would need to live through what I have lived through to understand what it has cost me." And then, sharper: "You are a boy who has seen nothing of the world. Don't teach your father right from wrong."

For a couple of days, oddly, it worked. Raman came home, skipped dinner outright, and went straight to bed without a word — sparing Nambi only a resentful glance on the way past, as if being denied his evening theatre was itself a fresh injury. The house went quiet. Nambi allowed himself, cautiously, to believe something had shifted.

The Culvert

It hadn't — it had simply changed direction. A few evenings later Nambi came home to find his mother beaten badly enough that the sight of her stopped him in the doorway. When he confronted his father, Raman's defence was that she had answered him back once too often during one of his tantrums, and that this had left him no choice. Nambi gave him a final warning — the kind a boy gives when he has already stopped expecting it to be heard. Raman, furious at being warned by his own son, struck him across the face. And something in Nambi that had been absorbing blows of one kind or another for months finally gave way. He struck back.

What came after was worse than the fight itself. Raman raged and cursed at length, dressed, and walked out of the house without saying where. He returned the next morning around nine, bathed, and left for work within the hour, as if the previous night belonged to someone else's house entirely.

Three days passed in a watchful, uneasy quiet. On the fourth, Nambi came home late from college to find his mother sitting outside on the culvert by the road, waiting for him in the dark, crying. He brought her in and turned on his father one more time — what now, this time? Raman told him to shut up and mind his own business. Nambi pressed. Raman told him to get out of the house and manage his own life from now on.

Nambi did not need to be told twice. He asked his mother to come with him. Chella would not leave. But as he walked out the door, she pressed a fifty-rupee note into his hand — everything she had to give a son she would not follow.

Ponneri

He had no destination that night, only a bus to Central station and then a suburban train heading north, chosen for no better reason than that it was leaving. He sat by the window with his thoughts running well ahead of the train — quit college, find work anywhere, become nobody in a town where nobody knew his name. An hour in, the train pulled into a station called Ponneri — the golden lake — a name that snagged on an old family memory, a stop the family used on trips from the Andhra–Odisha border. It was familiar enough, in the smallest way, to make him get off.

It was close to midnight. He bought a bun and a cup of tea for a rupee and ate slowly, standing on the platform, and it was only then that a name surfaced from somewhere further back than the last few days — a distant grand-aunt, his father's paternal aunt, an old lady living alone on Hariharan Bazaar Street. She was family, however thin the thread, and thin threads were what he had left. He walked out of the station and into the bazaar, losing his way more than once in the dark, asking directions from whoever was still about, until he finally stood before what he believed was her door and knocked.

A middle-aged man opened it — a stranger, in a house Nambi had walked to expecting a grand-aunt's welcome. He asked, reasonably enough, who Nambi was and what had brought him there at that hour. Nambi introduced himself and asked for her by name. The man's answer landed harder than anything else that night had managed: she had passed away six months earlier, and the house had since been let out by whichever relative stood closest in line to inherit it. There was nothing more to say to that. Nambi thanked him, turned back the way he'd come, and walked to the station crestfallen, the one thread he'd reached for having given way in his hand.

Back on the platform, he sat on a cement bench, and sleep started pulling at him. He didn't get far into it. Two constables on their rounds blew a whistle, inches from his ear and moved him off the platform, and Nambi — in nothing but a veshti and a shirt — found himself walking the dark road to the highway bus stop instead.

An old man sitting there asked where a boy his age could possibly be going at that hour. Nambi had a lie ready before the question had finished landing — missed the train after stepping out for water, needed a bus to the city. The old man shook his head; no buses from here, better to find an auto to the main terminus, where the Andhra buses came through toward Madras. Nambi thanked him and walked, asking directions from whoever was still awake, counting his coins the whole way — he was not going to be caught penniless in the morning.

Broadway

Two hours later a bus finally arrived, close to three in the morning, and set him down at Broadway just as the next morning was breaking over the city. He had tea and a snack at a stall — and then, spotting a bus pulling out toward Tirunelveli, made the sort of decision only a boy with nowhere fixed to be can make. He ran, jumped for the moving rear footboard, nearly lost his grip and his footing both, and was hauled bodily back inside by a conductor who was considerably more annoyed than impressed.

This time he bought a proper ticket — thirty rupees — and settled in for the day with the discipline of someone protecting the little he had left: water at the stops, nothing else, however the food smelled. Somewhere along the way the plan finally took shape in his head. Trivandrum. His uncle Krishnan, Chella's youngest brother, an Engineer at TERLS, and a man Nambi had always been close to.

The Tenner Dilemma

The bus reached Tirunelveli junction around eight that evening. Nambi was weak by then — a single tea and vada at Broadway was not much for a nineteen-year-old to run a whole day on — and as he walked from the junction toward the station, the smell of fresh dosas from a roadside stall stopped him cold. He had ten rupees left and a choice to make: eat, or save it for the fare ahead. Hunger won. He sat down to uttappam and coconut chutney and ate until he was full, and somewhere in the middle of it, without quite meaning to, found himself brooding — thinking of his mother pressing him to eat more at her own table, a hundred evenings that had nothing to do with any of this. He left the stall, with some residual coins left in his pocket,.

The Two-Rupee Note

There was no train to Trivandrum until seven the next morning, so he walked to the bus stand to see if anything moved south by night. Nothing did, and the fare — twelve rupees — was more than he had. He hesitated a long while before approaching a well-dressed stranger for help. The man questioned him with the thoroughness of a policeman, and then, under cover of that same concern, let his hands wander somewhere they had no business going. Nambi excused himself, said he'd be back after answering nature's call, and did not go back — he walked straight to the station instead and did not look over his shoulder until he was inside it. For once, luck sided with him: no constables that night to chase a frightened teenager off the platform. Running short of the fare for Trivandrum, he even tried his hand at serving customers in a petty restaurant near the station, but had to leave with just a two-rupee bill with a tiger on its face, doled out to him by the hotelier for serving one customer.

Valliyoor

He spent what was left of the dark on a bench and boarded the seven o'clock passenger train the next morning without a ticket, doing the arithmetic in his head as the small stations went by — caught, perhaps a fortnight in custody, food included, survivable as long as nobody's hands strayed. He thought, with the particular gallows humour of a boy who has stopped expecting things to go his way, of the old crude wisdom about giving in to what cannot be helped, and decided he was ready for whatever came. At Valliyoor two constables stepped into his compartment, and Nambi slipped quietly through to the next carriage before they reached him, breathing out only once he'd found an empty window seat and handed the rest of the day over to luck.

Eraniel & The Rice Women

After Valliyoor, the day eased. A samosa vendor at Nagercoil got what remained of his attention and none of the money he didn't have. At Eraniel he thought, briefly, of getting off and walking all the way to Kollenvilai to see his grandfather — he would very likely have found him some menial contract work through Murugan at the telephone exchange — but decided against troubling an octogenarian living alone for the sake of his own convenience. Besides, Nambi was overcome with guilt for an act of impudence committed a few years back that earned his ire. By Neyyattinkara the compartment had filled with women carrying baskets of red rice on their heads, riding, a fellow passenger observed dryly, as if their own fathers owned the railways. Nobody troubled them either. Nambi, for the first time since Ponneri, let himself relax.

Karamana

At Trivandrum Central he stepped off with no idea how to find Karamana, and asked his way there one stranger at a time until, an hour on, the road turned suddenly familiar — past the Bhagavathi temple on the riverbank, to his uncle's door at TC/51. It was a Sunday, luckily, and Krishnan was home — startled to see his nephew standing there in that state, glad of him all the same, and entirely at a loss for how he'd arrived.

Nambi told him everything, start to end. He bathed, ate a proper meal, and slept the way he hadn't in days. Krishnan promised whatever help he needed, but talked him out of the one thing Nambi had actually come to ask for – a job for subsistence. "Don't worry, boy," he said. "Your father will be looking for you by now. Go back, finish your college, and then find work — but go back and look after your mother. I will help you with whatever you need, always." A week later he sent Nambi home with three thousand rupees and an eighty-rupee ticket to Madras. Nambi owes this sum to his uncle, even today, with interest compounded for about four decades, not less than at least two hundred grand.

Afterward

Nambi had missed a week of college. He came home to find his mother alone. Raman had left the house the very day after his son did, and never came back to it.

He lived out the rest of his years apart from them both, and died in the summer of 1995, of cancer in the oesophagus — unremarked, the way most such endings are, in a house that was, by then, no longer anyone's.

 

Author’s note

I wrote this piece as a small record of the kind of boyhood that rarely makes it into our public stories – a life measured in gate latches, bus stands, and the sound of plates hitting a wall. Nambi’s journey in the winter of 1985–86 is not extraordinary in the way headlines use that word, yet it contains what many families quietly live through: a son negotiating love for his mother, fear of his father, and the need to leave without quite abandoning either. The amounts of money in this story – a fifty-rupee note, a two-rupee bill with a tiger, an eighty-rupee ticket, three thousand rupees in an envelope – are not just details but markers of how precarious movement was for a boy of in his teens, and how much calculation sits behind every “simple” decision to run away.

I am also trying to preserve a texture of time: late-night platforms without CCTV, constables who move you on with a whistle, long-distance buses leaving from Broadway, women riding passenger trains with baskets of red rice as if their families owned the rails. These are fragments of a rural and small-town world in the early 1980s that is already fading from memory, even though its quiet violence and quiet generosities still shape the adults we later meet only as colleagues, uncles, or neighbours. If you recognise something of your own family’s history in Nambi’s, I hope this story gives it a language you can carry.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram where the evenings are long and the distant memories are longer.