HURRY BURRY STREET
by Anjana Krishnan
The story starts 20 years ago when Anjana, a 3 years old girl who began to take her first steps of life. Being born to an Indian family who resided in the southernmost state, Kerala famous for its backwaters and sea most of her evenings were filled with beautiful beach sunsets and walks along the calm bridge across the street. That short girl used to hold tight her father’s hand and curiously point at each tree and bird she found interesting. Those days houses were never packed up closely like the carton packed with bottled water and apartments was a rare sight. The Park found at the end of the street beside the Ganesh temple seemed like Disneyland to her. Anjana enjoyed her whole childhood in the park playing along with a bunch of naughty fellows, throwing stones on the mango trees and climbing up the guava trees, swimming together in the small temple pond filled with water lilies. After spending an evening filled with fun the children used to grab the temple sweets which an old pandit used to provide them and till date no other sweet which I ate from different parts of the never overtook it. There were times when she used to cry after having hit by stone or being fell down from trees or sometimes even when her friends play pranks while swimming. On rainy evenings we were sad of not meeting and having games but during the festival occasion like Diwali, Pongal, Onam, Dussehra are filled with excitement. Most of the festivals would be during harvesting season in farmlands and enjoy chemical free vegetables cooked and shared among all families in the street. Pongal mainly provide sugarcane feast along with the sweet starting from chakkkarapongal to ghee pedas. We had fresh food which is available in satisfiable quantity. Onam days are filled rice field harvest and preparing the fields for next batch of paddy and children were given duties of cleaning, carrying the hay to storage areas, helping farmers in taking rice to mills, winnowing and so on. We never experienced extreme climate variations as the state of Kerala is located near to coastal areas and there was moderate temperature throughout the seasons. The summers might go to a maximum of 36 degree Celsius while winters never saw a drop lower than 20. During the field sowing time, we used to plant numerous trees like jamun, mango, guava, tamarind, amla and jackfruit as the old trees began to age.
As days passed by, as time and age grew, I like my fellow companions drifted apart to various cities over the world. We began to focus on our career, education and ambitions and thereby our visit to hometown and villages got reduced. We started having packed and preserved foods because of our daily congested work schedules. Anjana once sitting in her college library had a voice chat with old childhood bestie Deepak who now works in a weather forecast observatory in Mississippi. They had a long discussion regarding each other’s personal wellbeing and career then it reached to topic when both felt miserable to look back and that was the current condition of their hometown. Deepak said, “We got acclimatised with video games to social media apps, rather than going out for a walk we think about our gym workout schedules, enormous apartments started to become priority compared to the magnificent trees which gave us fruits, ponds are now filled with agal bloom instead of the lily blooms. The houses began to be sticky to each other so as to accommodate the coir making factory and the chemical treatment plant with less greenery around and more garbage. The street which earlier gave pleasant and clean air is filled with the pollutants of factory emissions and fuel exhausts. The dark blue-green sea is no more a usual sight but replaced with black dirty water along shores”. Anjana replied” Today when I visited the temple on my 23rd birthday it was heart aching to see my precious park empty with no trees around which was once overcrowded before with mangoes and guavas. Today when I hold my father’s hand which once, I stretched to hold I can’t find the same happiness but only bustling horns of buses and cars. Today when I found my younger cousins taking swimming lessons on artificial pools its painful to know the temple pond is deteriorating itself”. He sighed and said “the green cover is reducing it affects the climate of our region. The monsoons which brought heavy rains to our villages and rice fields filled with water is just like a memory nowadays. During the phone call we both got reminded about our visits to mangrove forest present along the Paravoor lake and those were the best days of our life. We had decided to take certain steps to prevent our hometown from falling apart. The first decision was to arrange a meeting with all our hometown buddies to contribute to the reimbursement of the park and to organise a tree planting session in our villages. Next, we wanted to preserve all the age-old trees in our area and clean our temple pond.
Both of them after those few minutes of talk hung their phones but the two minds had same dialogue “Alas! Let there be change of time and place”. Let the youth get struck with realisation that mother nature and environment are not be destroyed but to be conserved. The old pieces of land filled with rare varieties of trees are not to be felled and used for construction but is a valuable biodiversity. The current generation may not experience these treasures but conserving them and preserving them will help them to know and motivate them to do the same. The current scenario of my hometown tells me that the children no longer value the condition of parks or beach like we used to do. Youth thinks about online shopping rather and never cares to look upon the farming practices or cultivation leading to food production. If we plan to ignore the problems faced by farmers then as days pass by, we might again face a war of starvation as nature may not be might us by that time. We should accept the fact that if nature dies then life will cease to exist one day.
About
The author of the short story is Anjana Krishnan who is by birth an Indian. She is currently pursuing her bachelors degree in the field of agriculture and has close practical knowledge with plants and environment. She focuses on maintaining social activities to promote nature sustainability , clean atmosphere and safe environment. She is a person interesting in working with farmers and study about the cultivation practices for food production. She is interested in portraying the stories related to climate, agriculture, food and environment.