Chirayil

Amminikutty & Kunjomachen

The story that must be told — the complete family book, all 94 pages, just as it was printed.

Book page 1
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About this book

Thomas V. Chirayil — Kunjomachen — was born in Edathua on the eighth of September 1925, an answered prayer on the feast of Our Lady's nativity. Ammini Thomas — Amminikutty — was born in Mavelikara in 1933. They married on the fourteenth of September 1950, and the bride came to Edathua the Kuttanad way: by boat.

Together they raised twelve children, welcomed twenty-six grandchildren, and kept a table so long that no one ever left it hungry. This book gathers their story — the ancestral house by the riverlet, the LECO years, the faith, the feasts, and the family that grew from them — in words, photographs and memories collected by the family.

A companion picture book for the youngest readers, A Kuttanadan Saga, retells the same story from Appachan C. T. Varkey's own voice — you'll find it below in English, Malayalam, Hindi and French.