R.S. Vaidyanathan shares his love for his walking stick
“I am a nonagenarian”. I use a Walking Stick. It improves my posture and keeps me in perfect balance when I walk. I feel comfortable with my walking stick, even though I resisted using it for a while!
I bristled, therefore, at the poet W.B. Yeat’s verse: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick”. I may be aged, but nowhere near paltry or tattered, I am happy to report, that I do love my walking stick!
My father started using his walking stick as a style statement in his late forties. He would come back from the Post Office where he worked, around 8 pm each evening, announcing his arrival with the “tok-tok” sound of his walking stick. We always waited for him to come to have our dinner together. He used to hand over the stick to one of us at home. I considered it a privilege to hold it in my hand and caress it fondly.
Memories take me back to my quaint little village in Kerala- which in the 1940s, had two rows of brick and mortar houses, with sloping terracotta tiled tops, separated by a 25-foot wide road. A total of ninety houses, 45 on each side. The length of the road from one end to the other would not have been more than 1500 feet. There were two deep wells for drinking water, one in the middle and one towards the end of the road. There were two temples at each end of the road. Beyond that was a vast open space with a large water tank next to a majestic banyan tree, with evergreen leaves.
The village had no electricity. Lamps lit with kerosene oil were the norm every evening. Adjacent to the two deep wells stood two iron poles. On top of the poles was a glass-enclosed lamp with a shade, lighting up a fair distance. The village crier, whose duty was to light up the lamps in the evening along with his duty to walk the length of the village with a stick in his hand, which he used to strike the road with a mild thud. The villagers were thus lulled to sleep, reassured with the thuds of the stick that there was no fear of thieves!
