Gladiom kliom kliom

I am not sure if I ever wrote about Gladiom Kliom Kliom..

My school was an old missionary school. It occupied acres and acres of land at one time and over the years selfish management with vested interests sold parcels of the land to developers.
What I remember the most of my school days was the walk to my classroom. It was almost 2 km from the main road, the pathway was very wide with casuarina trees lining on either side.On a windy day, you can hear the leaves whispering in an unusal tone. I used to sit on the knobbly exposed roots and listen to the chula maram pattu during lunch break !
The gravel on the ground was so smooth after being trodden by hundreds of students every day for over 100 years! I was always on the lookout for specials stones. By the time I completed 10th std, I had a horlicks bottle full of ‘unsual’ stones, which my mother threw away because she was making pickle and needed a bottle !
 The pathway eventually takes you to an old house  ( the boarding school)constructed in an L shape. But it isn’t the house that fascinated me. It was the garden in front of the house . 6 raised garden beds full of all kinds of flowers you can imagine.

In a school of over 500 girls, with every single person having to walk past the garden twice in a day, no one ever dared to pinch a flower. The reason was the gardener.
He was a very short man. He was abandoned as a child, most likely because he had learning disability and was raised by the missionaries and was given the job as a gardener. He even managed to find a wife because in those times, if you had a secure  job, you could get a wife because the girl’s parents were happy to dispose another burden without having to pay dowry and also convince themselves that they aren’t doing anything bad because ‘he has a permanent job and what more does she need?’
If you as much as touched a flower in the garden, then you faced the wrath of the gardener. He would scream at you so much and then he would march to the school and complain to the headmistress. No one dared to go through so much trouble for a flower. The stories of how mean the gardener is was passed on from seniors to juniors !
I don’t know his name because he was always called Gladiom kliom kliom. The story is that when someone asked him the name of a certain plant, he couldn’t say it right and said  it was “gladiom kliom kliom” ( for gladioli)

I enjoyed going to him and pointing to the gladioli and asking him what was the name just  to hear him say Gladiom kliom kliom. I must have done it so many times that he thought I was fond of the plant and so one day as I walked to my class, he was standing there with a newspaper wrapped parcel. He gave me few bulbs of gladiom kliom kliom.
The walk to the school from the garden  that morning was probably one of the hardest I had ever walked. The bulbs felt so heavy in my hand. I regretted all the times I teased him and it was painful to know that he never knew the malicious intent behind me asking him for the name of the plant and instead felt kind enough to share the bulbs with me. It also didn’t make it easier that my mother tried many stunts to get plants from him and he never gave her any. ( he was not known for sharing the plants!)
It was a hard lesson to learn..it taught me to look at others without prejudice.

I did plant the bulbs he gave me and it did bloom pink and red colout flowers. They were so beautiful.It was one plant that I didn’t kill but met a sad end when the retaining wall collapsed and dumped a ton of earth on top of my precious gladiom kliom kliom.

Yesterday I planted few gladiom kliom kliom bulbs. ( I should have planted it few weeks ago in the beginning of winter, but then again…..)

3 thoughts on “Gladiom kliom kliom

  1. WOW, UR speaking abt my LP school(yea eventhough it was a girls highschool we were allowed in LP classes) :). And also its very sad that one business minded priest had sold all the property and made out of money from that.

  2. WOW, UR speaking abt my LP school. (eventhough it was a girls high school, we were allowed in LP classes) 🙂 and how can we forget the VBS days in the school. Its also sad that one greedy priest had sold the prime property of the school to make money out of that.

  3. Naughtybutnice: not just the priest! The principals, professors etc all had their greedy hands in the proverbial golden egg laying goose. I was told that one mahan even stripped the hardwood ceiling from the halls!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *