September 30, 2011
When I go for morning walks, I am allowed to wear shorts. Amma doesn't protest. Though it attracts some curious looks and a few giggles from school kids, I like the comfort. Besides, men who have double folded their mundu and lungi to Rambha*-levels of thigh exposure have no business judging me. Jeans are aggressively detrimental to walking but opting for a mundu would mean at least a quarter of the hour long walk will be lost in stopping and retying. Thus the choice narrows down to sweatpants and shorts. Sweatpants are highly restrictive to my girth. Shorts are a symbol of freedom.
In India, before the 1970s, they were a symbol of law and order as well because the police constables wore them as uniform. Only the men that is. I wonder if there were lady constables before 1970s. Achan was ironing nearby as I was typing this, so I asked him about lady constable uniform before 1970s. He said he cannot remember there being any lady constables at that time. But then he told me about two famous sub inspectors in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum in those days) called 'Minnal' (lightning) Parameswaran Pillai and 'Idiyan' (Fist-blow specialist) Nara Pillai.
It is great when Achan gets started on a thread. Interesting stories keep coming.
This 'Idiyan' Nara Pillai became famous for arresting a Chellappan Pillai who had murdered his own mother. Chellappan Pillai ran a banana shop near our ancestral home. He "caught" his mother with some man and in a fit of rage cracked open her skull with a granite "kozhavi" (large pestle). This was in the mid-1930s. He wrapped her body in a sack and dumped it in the "Chetti kulam" (Chetti pond). This Chettikulam is long gone but Chettikulangara (bank of Chetti kulam) temple still thrives.
My grandmother used to go to this pond for bathing. Especially during her periods when for whole seven days when she wasn't allowed to enter the house as per tradition. After the dead body dumping incident, she switched to another pond. After a few visits to this new pond across the railway track, she was possessed by the spirit of a pregnant lady. Achan has only second hand knowledge of this episode as narrated to him by my grandfather. Yet when Achan retells the story with facial expressions and voice modulation, I can easily see glimpses of my "possessed" grandmother.
Her belly would expand during these episodes. She would treat her husband disrespectfully. She would stop eating or spit (emphatically and phlegmatically as Indians tend to do to show extreme disrespect and aversion) in the food. The totally dependent, insecure, fearful and suppressed lives that the young wives lived in those days were enough cause for mental aberrations. At least, 'hysterically', they could rebel.
Numerous religious magicians were brought to drive out the bad spirit. None worked. Apparently, grandmother, in her 'spirited' condition, could predict the arrival of the magicians. "Ninakkenne irakki vidan pattila,"(You cannot get rid of me!) she would snap at them. At one point, the spirit confessed that she had gotten onto my grandma when she went to bath in the new pond.
Finally, one day, just as abruptly as it started, the disorder was gone. Grandmother said that she dreamt that an old man (her father-in-law in later versions of her own recalling) came and pierced her upper arm with a pen and that drove the spirit away. After a couple of years, Achan's oldest sister was born.
Chellappan Pillai, the matricidist (matricider?), was released from prison in a few years and lived for long with the nickname Parasuraman, after the avatar of Vishnu who kills his own mother. That mythological Parasuraman's mother, Renuka, comes back to life thanks to a boon. Chellappan Pillai's mother continues to live in stories.
We were discussing about my short-sy walk before grandmother's brief madness. I walked down the main road towards Vazhuthacad, then turned towards Cottonhill Girls High School. The man who runs a shop out of a push-cart was setting it up outside the school gate. He had nail-polish, bangles, bindis etc for sale.
Past the Deccan Chronicle office, I reached the fish market at Idapazhinji. Thousands of plastic cartons formed a wall on the road side. It was a like an oversize lego construction by a terribly bored giant child. Red, blue, yellow and green colors in theplastic texture. In between these cartons, a small office run by a middle-man fish merchant. Two cartons formed his table and another the chair. A bunch of fisherwomen around him.
After 45 minutes of walking, I decided to take a short cut back home via Kurups Lane. The alluring map of Kurups Lane housing colony that was painted on the wall at the lane's entrance had a lot of do with this decision. What a great colony, I thought! Look at those perpendicularly intersecting roads! It surely is proof that Indians had town planning down to the T right from the Indus valley civilization. I simply had to walk straight from where I was standing through the road I was seeing in front of me, to get to the Vellayambalam-Sasthamangalam road. I didn't want to close my eyes and do it since I had recently read somewhere that humans go in curves with their eyes closed.
The map had put a spring in my feet for the last leg of the walk. But 10 meters into the lane, reality set in. The lane curved. Then it curved some more. By-lanes appeared out of nowhere. Perhaps the colony was initially laid out as it was mapped, but too much sun in Kerala had bent the streets, distorted and disfigured it! I quickly abandoned the straight line hope. All I could do was follow the curves, avoid the sideways. I had read that advice in Penthouse long time ago. Everything you read in life will come in handy some day, I am convinced. Only stray dogs and alley cats were in business early in the morning. Some men were visible in some verandahs reading newspapers. There was a signboard outside a home proclaiming it to be the abode of Forensic Labs director who also doubled as astrology and vaastu consultant. In fact, the forensic labs bit was mentioned in the board as an afterthought, simply because there was some space left at the bottom. Then unexpectedly, the road split into two. Like a homing pigeon, a true liberal, I took the one going left.
It took me to an obviously economically underprevileged segment of the colony. Two man were standing outside their homes at either end of a section of the street. Shirtless, in their lungies, smoking beedis**, this was like a hollywood western stand off, mallu-style. My appearance in shorts distracted them.
Backways,bylanes, alleys, backstreet boys all were appearing out of nowhere. I flagged down a mustachioed young man, walking off his rice belly. He headbobbed to my query. The street I was on does ultimately open up into the main road I was seeking. I began to recognize some of the houses. The Kurup's Lane labryinth had led me to the street where I had come last weekend to get my great Indian identity card made.
What a philosophical conclusion for the walk!
The building of identity at the end of seemingly endless twists and turns!!
After shower and tea, I sat down with the Hindu crossword. The daily half hour torment for the last 56 days finally paid off. Hello World! I finished it! Exhilarating! I needed online help with the four clues, nevertheless it was a quantum leap from my usual tally of 40-60%. I think going down and across the innumerable streets of Kurup's Lane had prepared me well.
The final clue "On the old side a tree, big, beginning to yellow(7)" will be in memory for a long time.
It was a day of leaf burning in the backyard. The constant heat and smoke from the fire pit, teak leaves followed by coconut fronds, would have made the Vedic gods happy. Nascent coconut flowers in their sheath were discovered in the heap. They are used to make an Ayurvedic jam called "Thengin pookkuladi lehyam". Supposedly excellent for back aches and post-delivery care of young mothers. Achan wanted to try a home-made non-medicinal version of it. We were not sure of the recipe. I told him that the internet has everything. If the elusive civet cat of Kerala's attics (marapatti***) can make it to youtube, 'thengin pookkuladi lehyam' recipe would surely be there. For the first fifteen minutes of googling, I regretted vouching for the internet. Only direct sales of the 'lehyam' by ayurvedic medical companies showed up. I tried different combinations of the words, different transliterations.
And then success! A blog of Kerala recipes called Salkkaaram** had it including photographs! Hopefully, we will try it tomorrow.
Most of the evening was spent with V. Shankaran Nair's etymological search for the origins of rice cultivation. How could the Swedish/Nordic name for the Big Dipper sound so similar to Bull-wagon in Malayalam/Tamil/Sanskrit?! Karlavagnen in Swedish, Kalavahanam in India! As Russell Peters would say: Mind-Blasting!
I'll wrap up with a crossword clue from the FT: Listen carefully, or a sexual perversion(5,2,4,4)
*A south Indian actress whose legs are more popular than her face.
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi
*marapatti (Asian Palm Civet) escaping
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