Hammering it in Circa 1987; Thiruvananthapuram A sunny late afternoon I was at school. To be more precise, I was on a stool, in my classroom, hammering in a banner, at school. A sexagenarian schoolmaster stopped short at this sight. “ Pattathi kuttiyalle (aren’t you a brahmin girl)?” he asked. “How come you are doing this?” My jaw dropped at this question. I was a 14-year old proto-feminist, struggling with Gandhian philosophy and passionate about Communism, but none of these had a bearing on my being so occupied that afternoon. I was working on the following uncomplicated logic: there was the banner, a few nails, a hammer, a stool, need for the banner to be aloft, no volunteers, and yours sincerely, able-bodied. Ergo. I suppose the master’s question could be rationalized—he was, after all, a provincial schoolmaster, on his post-retirement second stint, a representative of a crazy age that was on its kamikaze way of being irrelevant. It was just ironic that he was objec