middle-class family


I come from a middle-class Christian family and have grown up in a faithful Christianity background. My father was a high school teacher and my mother a homemaker. They both are no more now. My mother passed away in 2002 and my father in 2014. I am married and have got a 2year and 10-month-old boy baby by the name of Graceson Paul. I have got three elder sisters, one elder brother, and one younger sister.

This is my family photo that was taken in 1996. Standing from left to right: Myself (Isaac Devakumar), My elder brother (Isaac Rajkumar), My younger sister (Sutha), Sitting on the chair from left to right: My third elder sister (Pushpalatha), Sister Pushpalatha’s son (Pushparaj), My mother (Saroja), My father (Isaac), Sitting on the floor from left to right: My second elder sister (Suguna) and My eldest sister (Vasantha Selvi).

My father was a high school teacher at CSI Boy’s Higher Secondary School, Erode, and was the only income-earning person and the breadwinner of my large family as well, with his meager monthly- salary from school.

This is the Inservice -Training -Course -Completion -Certificate issued to my father Isaac in the year 1974 for the Inservice training that he took from the Education Department of Erode District when he was working as a teacher at CSI Boys Higher Secondary School, Erode.

This is the “Teacher’s Service Register” of my father Isaac from the Educational Department of Erode District. As per this register, my father Isaac was appointed as a teacher at CSI Boys Higher Secondary School, Erode on 10th July 1957 and he retired from his service in the year 1992. I got this register from the Educational Department of our District when my father died in 2014.

We were living in humble surroundings in our tile-roofed house with one bedroom and one kitchen with no toilet facility. We had to go far away to the open space out of our home for the toilet. We had to stand in a long line on the street with pots to get limited drinking water from the public corporation water tap. All of my siblings along with our parents had to go to the nearby Cauvery River during the weekends to wash our clothes. We hadn’t got electricity in our home until I graduated fifth grade. We had no bed to sleep on, so we all slept on the floor placing mats jointly put together and with folded pants and shirts as pillows. As we had no gas or electric stove, my mother used to take me along with my siblings to the bushes to collect the dry sticks and wood to make a fire for cooking. Sometimes we used to buy wood from the wood store for the cheapest price. We used a traditional stove (clay stove) for cooking.

This is the clay stove we were using in our home for cooking in the 1980s

As my father was running his family with his meager income, he put all of my five siblings including me into the government public schools where all of us got free education. One of my second elder sisters namely Suguna had been an Organizer for the “Integrated noon meal system for the babies” in our town. She is a mentally affected person because of an accident that happened in her husband’s home after she got married.

These are the medical certificates stating that my sister Suguna is a mentally affected person.

She was married to a man named Rajendiran in a village called Ellispet in our district in the year 1992. One day when she was walking along the field in the backyard of their home along with her husband, a poisonous thorn pierced her foot and affected her leg severely, in due course it affected her brain as well, later she became a mentally affected person. Because of this reason, her husband sent my sister back to my father’s home. Since then, my father was taking care of my sister Suguna by providing her shelter, food, and medical treatments. Since my father’s death in 2014, I have been taking care of my sister by meeting all of her living and medical expenses until today. Even after I moved to China in 2015, still I have been supporting her financially by providing a part of my salary every month. Until today we have been providing her with medical treatments and all other sources to get her to recover, but she has not recovered yet. So we have been continually providing her medical treatments hoping that she will be recovered one day in the future.