Mandaitheevu

 

Mandaitheevu

Maravanpulavu K. Sachithanathan

Saenthan Maaran (சேந்தன் மாறன்)

Saenthan Maaran (சேந்தன் மாறன்) ruled from Mandaitheevu. He had a brother who aspired to be the King. A fight broke out. At that time Buddha was in Sri Lanka. He taught them of knowledge-based values of life and of the foolishness of fighting for a throne.

Saenthan Maaran issued coins that had the ancient Tamizhi script around the Pandya fish symbol. An image of the coin is below. Mahavamsam (in Chapter 15 verses 127 to 131) mentions the ruler Saenthan Maaran from Mandaitheevu having ruled around 500 years before Thiruvalluvar.

Mandaitheevu has had a continuous Tamil legacy. It has been peopled by Tamils from pre-historic times.

Yoga Swaami

My father was a teacher at Mandaitheevu for few months, just after he completed his Teachers Certificate course. He travelled by bicycle from Maravanpulavu daily to Jaffna. He took a boat to cross the shallow lagoon, reached the Mandaitheevu coast to walk to the school.

Being a vegetarian, he ate with the temple priest. On his return, he will eat a thalisai - a cup of rice pongal at the Chathiram in Jaffna Town before cycling back 16 km to Maravanpulavu. The walls of the Chathiram are there even now.

It was on one of these cycling trips he was hailed to be halted near Navatkuli by Yoga Swaami, who was on his way to Poonakari. My father, being the only son of his widowed mother was never addressed in singular tense either at home or around.

Yoga Swaami called him, Adei, the worst form in the singular tense. My father had not met Yoga Swaami before. My father stopped. ‘Adei Kanapathipillai, I am coming to Arulmiku Vallaikulam Pillayar Koil. Will you be there?’ asked Yoga Swaami. My father replied in the affirmative.

My father enquired about the identity of the person from the passers-by. They told him that he was Yoga Swaami. My father cycled back, stood before Yoga Swaami with his folded-ironed-shawl tied to his waist, arms folding at chest level, humbly asked the Swaami for the date.

Eventually, Yoga Swaami was a regular visitor to Arulmiku Vallaikulam Pillayar Koil.

Bullock cart

Thus Mandaitheevu had some significance to my father. Later when he married my mother, she came with the landed property at Mandaitheevu, given to her by her father.

When I and my sister were studying in the 4th standard at Sakalakalaa Vidhyaasaalai, Maravanpulavu, my father decided to shift us to the school in Jaffna, where he was teaching then. It was Jaffna Hindu College Tamil Mixed School at Vannaarpannai, Jaffna town.

Initially, we three, I, my elder sister, and my father walked to the Thachchanthoppu station 1.5 km away to take the suburban train to Jaffna station. From there we walked to the school another 1.5 km away.

It was during these morning walks to the station, or during the return walk from the station to Maravanpulavu, that we sometimes saw Kesavan’s father Mr. Sandrasegaram as a student standing in front of his house wearing a sarong, with one foot on the ground and the other bent to rest on the wall, smiling at us. 

A few weeks later my father acquired a cart and two bulls. We had a sincere dedicated person in Aiyampillai who was assigned to drive the cart to take us to the station every morning and pick us back in the evening.

Once my grandmother fell sick. I remember accompanying her in the cart all the way to a doctor in Jaffna town for treatment.

Vannaarpannai

Not happy with this arrangement, a few months later my parents decided to move to the house of my maternal grandparents in Jaffna town at Vannaarpannai. We walked a km of distance to the school from this house. My father moved between Maravanpulavu and Jaffna as he could not give up his responsibilities to my grandmother who continued at Maravanpulavu. He was a cultivator. He was an elected (unopposed) member of the local Grama Sabai. He was the secretary of the local Cooperative society. He had responsibilities at Arulmiku Vallaikulam Pillaiyaar Koil.

The house where we lived in Jaffna was where I was born, at dawn on Kaarthikai Mirukaseeridam, two days after the full moon deepam day, eight years earlier. The house is still there in the form and shape it had when we were there. Thick mud-walled rooms, roofed with dried palmyrah leaves woven on palmyrah beams. We had a broad long verandah connecting the three rooms. A tiled roof shed was in front. The kitchen was a separate unit. 

I was shifted to Jaffna Hindu College for the fifth standard. My sister went to Jaffna Hindu Ladies College. 

I went sitting on the front bar of the cycle with my father to Maravanpulavu for the weekends.

Mandaitheevu land sold

My father found this arrangement convenient. However, the house where we were in was not very comfortable.

A year later, Mandaitheevu landed property was sold to buy land, four lachams in extent, one residence away from where we were living. My father started building a new house.

At Maravanpulavu, we were living under a low cadjan thatched roof, with mud walled rooms and a verandah. Kitchen was in another hut. For drinking water, there was a well in the nearby paddy field. For bathing we went to Vallaikulam.

At Vannaarpannai, it was again a mud walled house as described before.

The new house had four rooms, attached chimneyed kitchen, a back verandah, a front verandah, cemented walls and floor, neem timber doors and windows, tiled roof on palmyrah beams, a well, and a toilet. We were at the construction site during evenings and weekends.

When I was in the sixth standard, we moved to the new house which had no electricity.

Proceeds from the sale of my mother’s land at Mandaitheevu and loans from my mother’s relatives, changed our living standard. I missed, the mud-walled spaces, the fresh air, the gentleness of the wind, baths at Vallakkulam, prayers at the temple, endless walks in the paddy fields, chasing the calves, the moon-lit nights, the respectful love and care of the neighbours, and most of all my paternal grandmother’s lap.