It is not often that someone from our childhood reenters our lives after half a century and leaves an imprint deeper than ever. Potteth Narayanan Unny was such a person for me.

We grew up together—but only briefly—in the mid-1960s, when my mother, a young college lecturer, was posted to Chittur Government College in Palakkad. I was seven years old then, my sister barely two. My father was in prison at the time, jailed with his comrades for his political activities. Because of his absence, my grandmother came from Pandalam to stay with us.

The years we spent in Chittur unfolded against a backdrop of political storms that swept through our family. After the Vimochanasamaram, the Congress-led government—rabidly hostile to the Left—had thrown my mother out of her teaching job solely because

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