Being a Malayalee pedigree I travelled to Kerala about once every year when I was a boy. Coimbatore, the city I lived in at the time was reasonably close to Kerala. In that the distance alone was reason enough for my mother haul herself and us there. Having absolutely no exposure to anything even remotely Mallu these trips to the motherland were rather painful. Not that they didn’t have their moments. It’s just that on these trips, my complete lack of knowledge of anything Mallu would be pulled up and slow roasted. They’d laugh at my pronunciation of words, deliberately crack jokes I wouldn’t understand, then look at me like I was some escapee from the nut house nearby.
There’s a lot more to Kerala than everything coconut. Really. And I’d best put them down in some sort of order. Alphabetical would be a wise decision.
The food. The food in Kerala was glorious. Everywhere we went we had steaming home cooked meals. Meals that you could taste long after you crossed the state line. One of my favourite dishes was the ‘Kareemeen’ a particularly nasty looking fish. Is resembled a piranha, maybe a bit smaller, and had these tiny bones that could choke you if you got one sideways. But it was a taste to savour. There was also no objection to eating the thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And that suited me fine.
The houses were another thing to marvel at. They were all monstrous. Some had 40 or so acres of land attached to them. Some even had little streams running through them. And my great grandfather’s house opened out onto the backwaters.
Visiting Kerala meant visiting relatives. Lots of them. And they all stayed in different towns. I guess that was one of those famous silver linings. And since we mostly drove there, it was really easy to get around. Driving through Kerala is a really pleasant way to spend an afternoon. The scenery is almost constantly green. It’s always wet and fresh. And the roads are lined with lazy Malayalee men, smoking cigarettes and intently watching cloud formations. In that respect, I consider myself to be very Mallu indeed.
The visiting part however, wasn’t a pleasant experience. More because I always felt a kind of pressure. Everyone I met was always very nice to me. People who knew my grandfather, my mother, my father, their friends, everyone always had some story to tell. The problem was keeping track of all this. Almost every Malayalee is related. It’s like going through a forest of family trees every time you met someone.
Maybe a little story about one of my little visits would be apt, around here. We’d gone to some relative’s house. If I remember correctly, it was the father of my mother’s first cousin’s son’s wife that we had gone to visit. Sprawling mansion, and it was him, his wife, his youngest daughter and her baby who lived there. Anyway, one afternoon he decided to take my brother, my cousins and myself out to the pond. And of course, the baby. Now the ponds in Kerala are fairly large. This one was square, about fifty feet from the top to the level of the water. Stairs that ran all the way down the side. And if I were to guess, it was probably something like 200 feet deep. So we climbed down and paddled about for a bit. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but in the heat, the cool green water was a welcome break. After about an hour or so of just hanging about the foot of the stairs, the chap that owned the house, decided that it as time to go. So he proceeded to climb up. Leaving us to sort ourselves out. At this point, I must mention that my brother cannot swim. And my swimming is something of a joke. My cousins however, having been brought up in the aridity of Delhi, swim rather well. So it was left to them to pull some sort of episode from this rather mundane afternoon. Sure enough, the youngest of the lot, dared my brother to jump in the pond. Deep emerald green as the pond was, dangerous in its appearance, this brother of mine, the one that cannon swim decided that balls were more important than brains, and jumped in without so much as a ‘whoo’. What followed can be summed up as comic. As my brother attempted to keep himself alive, with my cousin trying to get himself out of some serious trouble by providing much needed assistance, the two proceeded to drag the other down. Now the chap whose pond this was, stood watching from the top, baby in hand. And left with no choice, he laid the baby on the ground and leapt off the top, in attempt to rescue the Einstein twins in the water. But fifty feet is a long way and the poor chap lost his lungi (a long loincloth if you will) somewhere about foot number 15. Which left my cousin and myself with the extremely disturbing sight of balls flying overhead. The two were saved, no harm came to the baby, and dinner proved to be a very solemn affair.
There’s a lot more to Kerala than what you’ve read here.
Perhaps a part 2 is in order.
