Peanuts Redux

A short anecdote to go with the peanut story:

Peanuts had to be dried on the roof. The watchman would help carry bags of peanuts up via a ladder. My mom would then climb a nearby tree up to the roof and sit there in the shade, waving a stick to scare off thieving crows. That may not have been the wisest choice of chore, though, since she herself ate as many as the crows.

Tales of My Mother's Childhood - Peanuts

The house my mother's family moved to after living in the high school was again long and skinny. The man who owned it lived in the left half, while my mother lived on the right. He had an angadi, a little store, in the front section, flanked by two thin rooms. Where the store ended, the rooms widened, though the house was still split in two.

The man who owned the house ran a peanut business. He would buy from the farmers during the harvest, toss the peanuts into huge piles in his storeroom, and sell them for a much higher price during the off-season.

Large numbers of peanuts, of course, led to large numbers of mice. To reach the storeroom, they often dug through the walls on my mother's side of the house, and again through the partitioning wall. They scurried and squeaked, making their little mouse noises loud enough to provide a constant background soundtrack throughout the night.

Tales of My Mother's Childhood - Mercury

When my mother was in 5th grade, she moved with her family to a village where her father was assigned as headmaster (principal) of the local high school. Now, this was a village, and houses were not constantly changing hands like they do in today's (more like yesterday's) market. When they arrived, there was no apartment or house waiting for them.

The office building of the high school was a donated/loaned Vaishya satram. It was a long, skinny building, consisting of a small kitchen, a large front room, and a smaller room in between. The entry side of the front room contained a desk and a few chairs for the headmaster and a few teachers. A row of saris strung behind this area created a wall separating the actual office from the area now used to house a family of 8.

When my grandparents and the 6 children moved in, there were two boxes in the back half of that room. One held the school library, and the other the laboratory.

While my grandfather bought and brought a large part of the library in that box, the laboratory was always owned by the school. It consisted of a balance, a couple of meters for measuring various physical properties (thermometer, an old densitometer, etc.), and a bottle of mercury.

My mother, being as curious as Pandora, immediately opened that box. She didn't loose multiple horrors upon the world, but she did find the shiny, silvery bottle. At the time, the dangers of mercury were not well known. So my mom, at the age of nine, played with it.

She tipped it up and down, marveling at the way it flowed. When she tired of that, she opened the bottle and accidentally spilled some on the ground. She tried to pick it up, but it broke apart into little balls and rolled away. Each ball she tried to pick up simply squished apart in her fingers, resulting in a multitude of smaller balls. Eventually she gave up and scooped them all together. This unfortunately meant that dirt from the floor joined the mercury. In a stroke of genius, she found a cleaning cloth. By rubbing the balls of mercury in the cloth, she could get rid of the dirt and keep the mercury!

She carefully put it back, but returned to play with it in secret when her father was busy and nobody was nearby. Within a couple months, though they found a portion of a house to rent. The library went with them, but the lab (luckily for her health!) stayed put.