Pulingome
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As in 2023
Sandip G, May 14, 2023: The Indian Express
Indeed, the story of Pulingome, like most villages and towns that sprouted in the migration wave, begins with rubber. Of men and women cramming their lives, luggage and livestock into creaking buses that ferried them from central Kerala to the foothills of the Western Ghats, where they scythed endless bamboo groves, planted crops, fought poverty, survived droughts and floods, duelled with wild boars and leopards, to build their life.
First it was areca, before rubber became a liquid white gold of sorts. Now, rubber has lost its sheen, so nutmeg and jackfruit trees have sprung up. “We have to adapt, there is no other way,” says Jolly Mathew, father of Treesa, who, with Gayatri Gopichand, reached the doubles semifinal of the All England Badminton Championship in March.
Jolly, the youngest of seven siblings, was born in Pulingome, where his father had migrated in the 1950s from Pala, the headquarters of Kerala Congress (M). His wife, Daisy, hails from Thodupuzha in Idukki. Both speak Malayalam with a distinct central Kerala dialect, largely unaffected by the Kannur or Kasargod inflections. So does Treesa.
The dad coach
Jolly maashe (literally, teacher), as the locals fondly call him, is a practical man. Every year, barring this year when the price of rubber has fallen steeply, he would wake up before dawn, strap a torch on his head and carefully cut thin strips of bark into a little cup tied to the trunk below. “I used to tap hundreds of trees every single day, but this season it is not worth investing,” he says, pointing to the endless columns of rubber, interspersed with coconut trees, up a red-earth path beside his house. Most of the houses here, like Jolly’s, are dimly-lit, single-storeyed, with large verandahs and courtyards painted in pastel shades.
One of the spacious courtyards, hugging a garden of wild, blazing lilies of purple and orange, and the car-porch, is tiled with black and grey bricks. With a sudden burst of nostalgia, which he stifles into a sniffle, Jolly says: “This was once a volleyball court, then the court where my kids learned badminton.”
Making the court was arduous, consuming six months. First, he cut the trees. Then he dug the land, removed the deep, hard roots immersed in the belly of the earth, and refilled the rouged-up land with clay. The first roof was tarpaulin sheets latched onto areca poles but the wind would blow the roof away and the tarpa would leak with the apocalyptic intensity of the downpour. The only alternative was a metal roofing sheet, which was expensive. He broke his savings and forked out Rs 5 lakh in the early aughts. “It was my dream to develop young players. Some of them thought I was mad, but it did not matter to me,” he says.
But when his eldest daughter Maria turned five and his youngest Treesa three, he changed tack. “I wanted to introduce them early to some sport. But they were too young to play volleyball. So I brought them a pair of badminton rackets,” he recounts.
That was to change their life. As another indoor stadium sprung up in a local school, he stopped coaching volleyball and taught neighbourhood children badminton instead. “I am not Prakash Padukone that children will come from different parts of the world,” he says with self-deprecating humour. The coaching was free. It was where Maria, an U-19 state player, and Treesa honed their game. It was where he realised that Treesa was primed for bigger feats.
But once Treesa’s career blossomed and Maria was forced to forsake competitive badminton, he decided to demolish the court. “I had to spend a lot of money to maintain the court and I was not taking any fee. So it was not viable,” he says. The roof was repurposed and fitted over the crumbling red-tiled roof of their house, a protection from the devastating monsoons. His biggest achievement thus lay buried under interlocked tiles. “It’s the way of our life, we just move on,” he says.
It’s the same practicality that prompted him to tell Maria that he could afford to nurse the sporting dreams of just one of them. Maria moved on to a much-trodden path — nursing, while Treesa continued her sporting journey. “With our resources, we can only support the badminton career of one. I chose Treesa because she was winning more and was more talented. It is heartbreaking for a father to choose between his daughters, but if I had not, both of them wouldn’t have got anywhere in life,” he says, a lone tear rolling down his face.
Even managing Treesa’s expenses became difficult after a point. “We did not beg for sponsors, and no sponsor came looking for us,” he says. Till her teens, her father doubled up as the coach. He was neither a certified coach, nor tech-savvy enough to glean tips from the internet. “All I had was the drive that I wanted to make my child a good player. Coaching was expensive, costing over Rs 15,000, and we had to take her to expensive cities. So, if I could take care of her coaching, I could save a lot of money for buying feather shuttlecocks, shoes and jerseys,” he says.
Together they travelled the span of the state, gathering medals and fame. The medals gleam from a glass-fronted plywood-shelf set along three sides of the drawing room. There are trophies displayed in the corner of the room as well as in the adjoining bedroom. In there, a large cheque leaflet from an award she received two days after she reached the All England semi-finals also finds pride of place.
Treesa moves out of home
When Treesa turned 12, Jolly realised that she needed a more professional coach. “I knew the basics, the rest I picked from some of my friends who coached badminton or from coaches of other players. Thus, I would rely on my game sense. But I knew that she needed a qualified coach,” he says.
In many ways they were naive. For one, they were unaware of the concept of state-ranking tournaments. “I thought winning the state-level tournaments was enough to get into the state team. A coach told me that she had to compete in a fixed number of state-ranking tournaments, and depending on the average of points she gets from every tournament, she would be picked,” he says.
So she shifted to Mundayad in Kannur, where she could train on the wooden indoor court of the Kannur University. Convinced of her talent, Dr Anil Ramanathan, director of the Kannur University, let her train without fees. But that meant not only staying away from home and being on her own, but more expenses. “Suddenly, she had to cook and wash, be independent and deal with nagging seniors. We knew she would adjust, because that was the only way forward. The one thing we have is the ability to work hard,” says Jolly. The large swathes of semi-prosperous farming towns and villages that fringe the Karnataka-Kerala border stand as a vindication of their sweat and labour. “There was nothing here before we settled,” he says. The start of a journey
The migrant rush peaked in the 1950s, just around the time the state was taking shape. The state was officially born on November 1, 1956. Five months later, EMS Namboodiripad formed the first Communist government in the country. There are not too many people in Pulingome who are old enough to remember those days, but they remember the stories of struggles passed on to them by their parents and grandparents.
The roads were un-tarred and narrow, strewn with stones and carcasses of half-eaten wild boars and bison the leopards left behind. There are tales of female ghosts dwelling amid the swarthy Alstonia trees, devouring accidental passers-by. All the village had was a masjid where the body of two Muslim saints were buried sometime in the 14th century, and where Tipu Sultan used to come on an annual pilgrimage. The village got its first electric connection in the mid-’70s, post office, school and a full-fledged hospital in the mid-’80s. Growth was steeper from the ’90s, when the rubber boom modernised their lives.
Now, urbanity has seeped into the remotest corners of the migration belt, and the buses that ferried them to the hills are taking them down the curves of Malayora Highway, too. “There are a lot of locked houses here, as many have migrated to Europe and Australia. They came to the hills for a better life, now they are leaving the hills for a better life,” says Jolly. “It’s inevitable too,” he adds. How else would Treesa have become a world-class player had she not left her village? But often, people who leave take the village and its virtues to wherever they go. Treesa was one of them, bearing with her both home-grown traditions and the lessons she learned organically.
Even before she hit her teens, Treesa would travel alone to previously unheard parts of the country. Jolly’s English is basic, his Hindi non-existent, but it did not matter in their burning ambition to be a world-class player. Treesa would soon be a Commonwealth Games (2022) multiple-medallist (silver in mixed and bronze in women’s double), a trainee at the Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad, and the doubles partner of Pullela Gopichand’s daughter Gayatri (they are World No 18). “She has the fighting spirit. She was just 15 when she travelled alone to Indonesia for a coaching camp. She is fearless,” says her father.
Among the sacrifices he made were selling land and gold, valuables that Malayalis hold closest to their heart, and quitting his job as a school sports teacher so that he could travel with her. But he was careful not to impose the burden of their sacrifices on her. “We make sacrifices for children, just as our parents had for us. The cycle goes on. We don’t keep reminding each other of these. We do this out of love, without expecting anything in return,” he says. Underneath the pragmatic exterior of Jolly maashe is a simple, uncomplicated man, forged by the simple ideals of an uncomplicated farming village.
A village plays its part
Three years ago, just before the pandemic, Pulingome got its first indoor badminton court. The facility, constructed by the friends of YMCA, is a large hall with two courts. On the pastel yellow walls are large posters of Treesa. It’s where she trained during the lockdown, but Jolly has a larger vision: “I hope more people start playing again in the hills. When I was young, there was a volleyball ground in every neighbourhood. Did you notice any here? Hopefully, the hills will get its sporting culture back,” he says.
There are scant reminders of a throbbing sporting culture, but for the scattered banners celebrating Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona. From a bamboo pole, an Argentina flag flaps in the breeze. A handout of a local volleyball tournament is distributed in a private bus.
Slowly, like the drifting clouds over the Kottathalachi Mount, the identity of the village, too, is shifting. The village that once prospered in the rubber boom is now most famous as the birthplace of India’s brightest young badminton talent. Treesa’s story though is not just her own, but that of her village — it is the ceaseless story of migration, which continues, from the plains to the hills and from the hills to the plains again, an endless cycle.
