My Native Place
I come from a small village named Chandanpur in Kerala. It is far from the towns and the cities. The paths are muddy. The village is abounded with huts where the poor villagers live happily. They work hard from dawn till dusk in the field to earn their bread.
My father was also a cultivator of lands. We had a few acres of land, left behind by my grandfather, who died at the age of eighty-two. Since then, my father somehow managed to make both the ends meet for our small family, by working hard in the fields.
Agriculture was our main source of income. But once a strong flood came in our village due to the overflow of the river called Sonamati which passed by our village, and there was no crops that year. So we were compelled to leave the- village and come to Visakhapatnam, where my father accepted the job of a labour on daily wage. He took a rented hut in a slum where I grew up with my brother and sister. As there was some hope of earning in the town, we did not go back to our beloved village, which I still remember as my native place.
I am now a student in a school named S. M. Kutty High School at Visakhapatnam. When I am alone, sometimes the sweet memory of my native place comes to my mind, and I become happy to think that one day I was born there in that thatched hut surrounded by mudwalls, having a single door and a couple of small windows.
I do not know if our house still stands there like before, or it has by this time been ruined by flood, rains or storms. Still I love to think of my native place. It is imprinted in my mind as a golden picturesque of memory.
