Mutton Pulav before and Rava dosa after

నాన్న (Nanna is dad in Telugu) worked for the Government of Andhra Pradesh as a veterinary doctor. His job took us to many places around the state. We moved once every one and a half to two years like clockwork from one village to another. These were small farming villages full of farmers who needed a veterinary doctor to help to keep their cows, bulls, and water buffaloes healthy. Their livelihood depended on keeping their livestock healthy. Bulls were used to plough  the lands and pull carts, cows and water buffaloes for milk, and chickens for eggs.

Most farmers had one or two cows, at least two bulls, and several chickens. నాగలి (Nagali) is used to plough lands with two bulls pulling it through the dirt. Farmers took good care of their livestock. Cows, bulls, and buffaloes were washed everyday before they started work. They were fed very well. Hay from rice fields, గంజి (ganji is Telugu word for starch water drained from rice during cooking), and discarded vegetables and vegetable waste after preparing for cooking are saved in large cement troughs for the farm animals. గంజి (ganji) is full of B12 and considered good for health. Cows at my paternal grandparents' place were on a similar diet. We had a tall గడ్డివాము (gaddivamu is haystack in Telugu) in a corner in the front yard. It served as a climbing wall and a great hiding place to play hide and seek.

The Government of Andhra Pradesh and other states in India provide free medical care for the livestock in villages and free medical care for pets in larger cities. To ensure their doctors don’t get entrenched in one place and become corrupt, they move doctors from place to place once every two years. That is why we moved once every two years to a new home in a new place and yet another new school. We constantly had to make new friends at new schools and in new neighborhoods. In all of this constant churn, Amma and Nanna made sure we had a stable family life. We were a team of four and it didn’t matter where we moved. One move might take us to a small village with one school, one general merchandise store (if we were lucky). The lone store sold soaps, detergent, coffee, fabric for clothing, medicine, sanitary pads, birth control pills, and condoms. It was rather amusing to watch people walk in and talk in code to get sanitary pads, birth control pills, and condoms. The next move might take us to a mid-size town with several stores, movie theaters and several schools to choose from and the next one back to a small village. These frequent moves didn’t faze us. We took them all in stride for the most part.

Our first day at every new home began with Amma making పొంగలి (pongali) on her కుంపటి (kumpati). పొంగలి (pongali) is Telugu word for rice cooked in milk and sugar. కుంపటి (kumpati) is a small iron coal grill. The milk boiled over whenever she made పొంగలి (pongali) following the tradition milk boiling over is a good omen to ensure the house is now safe to live in. We were safe and sound in all of our homes. We were fully aware, one day in the near future we would be packing up all our things to move to another home.

Contrary to logic, villages weren't a great place for fruits and vegetables. Farmers grew rice, turmeric, legumes, and other crops. Rich farmland wasn’t to be wasted for growing vegetables. They grew vegetables in their yards for their families. We mostly ate potatoes and eggs. Amma raised chickens for a few years as it was difficult to find eggs. We had lots of chickens and their chicks ran around in the backyard. She occasionally grew vegetables. We had పొట్లకాయ (potlakaya is snake gourd in Telugu) almost every day one summer. I remember eating duck eggs and an occasional goose for dinner. In one village, neighbors would send us goose and other wild game meat. Amma prefers vegetarian meals and the only meat she prefers is lamb. She turned her nose up and politely declined bird and wild game meat from neighbors. Nanna was sad when he heard about her saying no to good free meat.

Amma made delicious cupcakes in a stove top oven. I remember watching her scoop out the cake batter into colorful paper cups and garnished them with slivered almonds. It wasn’t like she could go to a shop and find a bag of slivered almonds. She used Nanna’s old shaving blades to cut whole almonds into pieces. She probably had to soak them to remove the almond skin. As she baked cupcakes, the aroma wafted through the entire house. I didn’t know for a long time that Amma didn’t eat cakes and she still doesn’t even to this day. I used to think she loved them considering how often she made them. She made them for us and didn’t eat even a small bite. A lot of love and effort went into making the awesome cupcakes. These memories are so much more special now as I think about how much work she had to put in to make them. 

I attended ten schools including two or three home schools from first to tenth grade. I lived in ten different houses I called home from birth to branching out on my own to go to college. I am thankful for my parent’s unconditional love and for creating a strong family. They made all these changes seem very normal and smooth. We looked forward to moving and that was all we knew. This constant moving made me highly adaptable, teaching me the skills to adjust to new places, schools and more importantly the ability to connect with people.

At times, I attended two schools in a school year moving across the state finding myself in a curriculum nightmare. All the schools I attended followed the state curriculum. They taught from the same text books. However, the order in which the subject matter was taught differed from school to school.  I would find myself not knowing the subject matter I had to take a test in at the new school just days after getting there. This happened on the last move for me when I was in 9th grade. I loved the place we were living in and moving was very hard for me. On top of that the curriculum nightmare was a bit much. I remember catching up during weekends and holidays. After that last move, I went off to college and family moves didn’t affect me as much.

Our days revolved around Nanna’s schedule during early years. When I was older, our lives revolved around school schedules combined with Nanna’s schedule. I woke up around 7 am to the All India Radio’s news program Akashvani (Voice from the Sky). The Akashvani news program ran from 7 am to 7:15 am every morning. Amma listened to it every single day. Amma has been a news junkie all her life. Now she sits with an iPad listening to news.

Akashvani morning news program was my wake up call/alarm in the morning. It was a sign that it was time to get out of bed and get ready for school or get the day started. I usually found Amma cooking breakfast. She made idlis, upma, dosa or puri. She rotated them each day of the week. Coffee aroma mixing in with breakfast wafted through the house. She made me a glass of milk with Bournavita every morning and afternoon. She took pains to cool it down to just the right temperature to drink. I would find her rotating a glass of milk in a large tub of cold water to cool it down for me. We didn’t have a refrigerator during my school years.

Nanna ate breakfast and walked to the veterinary hospital. He didn’t own any form of transportation for a long time. There were no rickshaws in a village and bullock carts weren’t for hire. Nanna wore starched and ironed white pants and a shirt to the veterinary hospital  for a number of years. We had a చాకలి (washer man or woman in Telugu) come to our house to wash clothes and dry them. Nanna ironed his clothes. Some days he would come home with soiled shirt sleeves which were now green and red. When I asked him about that, he used to say “This is what happens when you stick your arm up a cow's bum.” He explained that is how you check if a cow is pregnant. He came home to have lunch with Amma and took a nap after lunch. He headed back to the hospital in the afternoon after having tea with Amma. He was back home before sundown for dinner when the cows went home.

We didn't have many friends and kept to ourselves for the most part when we lived in villages. We were outsiders and very much treated as such. Nanna had to maintain neutrality to avoid getting involved in village politics. He tried to maintain a distance to avoid getting pulled into the middle of conflicts between farmers and village leaders. Nanna and Amma allowed us limited access to friends when we lived in villages. We were to go to school and come straight back home. We looked forward to spending summer holidays with cousins at my paternal grandparents’ place.

Rice is harvested and brought home right before the మకర సంక్రాంతి (Makar Sankranti), a three day long harvest festival. The first day is called భోగి (Bhogi) which is a day of భోగి మంటలు (Bhogi mantalu means bonfire in Telugu, a term used specifically to convey the bonfires during Bhogi). On this day people start bonfires to burn discarded clothing, furniture etc. It is a massive spring cleaning day that takes place on January 12th or 13th of every year. It was a lot of fun celebrating Bhogi when I lived in villages. Each street had their own bonfire party and our street had it right in front of our house. We would ask Amma to give us stuff to throw in the bonfire.

As much fun as it was living in villages, there wasn’t much to do other than reading, and listening to the radio. There were no TVs and streaming services to engage in binge watching. During the course of the day we didn’t see many people other than our maid, చాకలి (washer man or woman in Telugu) door to door vendors, and Nanna’s assistants at the veterinary hospital. In some places the maid and chakali were the same person. We enjoyed sleeping outdoors under the stars. It was quiet usually other than an occasional dog barking. Once in a while there would be a movie screening for the entire village. Large tent was put up at the edge of the village in an open field. They had two shows in the evening starting at sundown and ending at midnight. The wait between these movie screenings could be several months to a year.

We were a movie loving family. We watched Telugu, Hindi, and English movies on a regular basis. It was our favorite family outing. We also listened to the movies broadcast on All India Radio. On Sundays they would broadcast audio tracks of a movie. We would wait all day for the broadcast to start at 3 P.M. We gathered around the radio sitting quietly. There was no rewind button if you missed a dialogue.

My love for James Bond movies came from Nanna. He wouldn’t miss any of them. We probably watched all the movies with Sean Connery and Roger Moore starring as Bond. Nanna was an apologetic fan of Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (NTR), a Telugu movie actor. NTR had an illustrious movie career and went on to serve as the Chief Minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Amma liked him in his legendary roles as Rama and Krishna. She being a feminist to the core, disliked any movie in which NTR was paired up with a very young actress. She especially disliked the movies in which one of the heroines he was paired up with in the past was cast as his mother. Nanna would plead with her saying, “I heard this movie is good. NTR didn’t run around the trees in a wig”. Amma would grudgingly agree to go see the movie. Of course NTR ran around the trees in a wig with his young heroine. Amma wasn’t pleased and talked about how bad the movie was on our walk back from the movies and for a few days after that. This discussion repeated when the next NTR movie was released.

Amma loved movies with a social message. Her favorite director was Kasinadhuni Viswanath. She admired his social-conscious mind and his talent to use cinema to attempt to bring about meaningful changes to societal problems such as untouchability, dowry, and the caste system.

During my 9th and 10th grades we lived in a village which is about a 30 minute train ride from a nearby town. We got up bright and early on Sundays for our movie outings. Amma made our traditional Sunday meal, mutton pulav. Amma’s mutton pulav was delicious. She made it with milky water, and freshly grated coconut. The milky water came from scraping the bottom of the pot used to boil milk that morning. She didn't let anything go to waste. She served mutton pulav with పెరుగు పచ్చడి (yogurt chutney or raita in Telugu). Her raita was made with thick and creamy homemade yogurt, diced onions, and hot Indian green chili pepper pieces. My mouth is watering as I write this.

We skipped breakfast, had early lunch, and headed to the train station to catch the train that took us to the nearby town dressed in our Sunday best. If trains were running late, we went home disappointed. If our plan was blessed by train gods, the train arrived on time and we pulled into our destination station just in time for a matinee show. We would get off the train and walk to a nearby movie theater to get tickets. We usually found tickets for the show easily. If there was a long line, I would get in the ladies’ line which was usually shorter than the men’s line.

Once the movie watching was done with a lot of live commentary and reviews from all of us, we would go to a nearby restaurant. Amma recalls eating a delicious rava dosa after the movies. The rava dosa is made out of suji (cream of wheat), rice flour, and yogurt or buttermilk batter with garnishes such as onion, hot Indian green chili pepper pieces. We would then head back to the train station to catch the train to get home. We made it home in the evening. I remember walking to the train station in the morning with excitement and walking back from the train station in the dark tired and very happy.