Six going on Seven

Father was one of the six surviving children of Lakshminarayana and Durgamai. He was the fourth child of his parents and the second male child in the family. Grandfather was a station master in the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway and relocated often owing to transfers. Grandmother would make a trip every two or three years to her maternal home, also in Jaggayyapeta, bearing the unborn and return to grandfather after delivery. Like all his siblings father too was born in the spacious bungalow on Brahmana Veedhi in the small town of Jaggayyapeta situated on the banks of Munneru, a tributary of the river Krishna. He was born on Nagula Chaviti, a day considered auspicious by the Hindus and celebrated by pouring milk into snake pits and offering prayers to Adiseshu the Lord of the Snakes. It is customary to name the new born with a name that was synonymous with a snake. Hence the name of my father - Nageswara; a shortened form Nagam was used to call him at home.
Nagam treated his sisters affectionately, though he kept himself beyond arm's length of his elder brother who was about five years older. He was closer to his younger brother Sarma with whom he sometimes went to the playground, but otherwise their interests differed a great deal. The brothers had little in common and so rarely got together. When grandfather died in a rail accident, Nagam was seven and it is not clear how he took the sudden loss of his father. Uncle Sarma was too small to understand the implication and Murthy peddananna was just 14 when the burden of running the family fell on him. Grandmother Durga received a rude shock - she had probably spent more time making babies than being with grandfather. The loss apparently affected her greatly and she lost faith in the gods - never again the image of a god or goddess adorned the walls of her home. She went back to her maternal home with her seven kids (the last one did not survive his eleventh year). After the last rites of grandfather, the talk goes that relatives did not treat her properly and so she travelled to Hyderabad and settled down with the help of other relatives and well-wishers. That is how father came to Hyderabad, leaving his ancestral home and property for good, in which incidentally he spent very little time. His father's home was a stone's throw from his maternal home, but due to his father's travelling job, he did not spend much time there either. And so the story of his life from now on would unfold in the town of Warangal and the city of Hyderabad.