Our family was still living in Hirode when I was about two years old. I was the eldest child and my sister Seetha was born in 1925. I was a toddler running around the house and the front steps into the garden full of mango trees. I could speak fairly well and was many times a naughty child, wanting to have my own way and sometimes getting into tantrums. However, since I was the only child, everybody made quite a lot of me. I remember the following incident very well as one of my earliest memories.

It was getting dark, about seven o'clock in the evening, and my mother had finished giving me my supper consisting of some boiled rice, lentils, vegetables, and yogurt. I was getting sleepy as I had run around the whole day. So my grandmother called a man who was doing odd chores in the house and said, "Mancha, the baby is feeling sleepy. Get the bed ready." The bed was a thin cotton mattress spread on a reed mattress on the floor of the bedroom, a small cotton pillow, and bedsheets, and a thick woolen blanket called a Kambli. All this was rolled up in the morning and kept in a corner of the bedroom.

This memory of mine was there for many years, but I was not sure that it was really true or not. When I was in my teens, I told my mother about it. She said, " Yes, there was a man named Mancha in the Hirode house, and he used to help in the household chores."