Today I am supposed to be a real Malayali. Malayali is the linguistic title for the residents of Kerala, the
southernmost state of India, a tourist hotspot with the assumed name of “God’s
own country” (that name, I suspect is an exparte decision), a haven of monsoon
forests where you can ride on the swings of heavy raindrops constituting an
ethereal thread . It’s the national festival day today: the Onam day. (When I mean national read it
as provincial because India itself is a conglomeration of a wide variety of
ethnic and linguistic groups well within their geographical confines. For me it’s a great incidence that India never
have had the ill fate of falling on a military government for its upkeep. Our sister
land in the immediate west is not so blessed that way.) A quick google can reveal the exuberance of this
remarkable festival to you: all its
colours, noise, folk performance and of course the flyers announcing you what
you would probably miss if you miss Onam.
In flesh and blood this translates as an amplification of all the
inconveniences that a typical Malayali
experience in his hometown every single day: conveyance, logistics, and rash
drivers honking and raging like a musty tusker bull. Oldies, kids and those
with kneejerks wait for a gap to relay them to the other side of the road. As
you know, pedestrian crossing is a myth in this part of the world. Special
outlets to sell the Onam
paraphernalia mushroom up. Shopping carts loaded with greens, tubers,
vermicelli, flakes, rice chips, garments, banana leaves to serve the food (not
to mention the laminated paper variants if one is not too keen on going for the
tongue edge of the banana leaves that tradition stipulates). There used to be a
lot of folk games and village jamboree surrounding Onam yesteryears. But no more in that freestyle way, perhaps a
local organisation would hold a fete or two with least spontaneity.
Nevertheless they will hog the social media with all the mighty displays of
their exploits, the paramount of which is the laying of the flower carpet, an
intricate floral pattern made of flowers (or if you are cash-strung, stained
sawdust or salt crystals would do). Of late so much attention is made to
produce complicated and assymetric patterns that the simplicity of what was
originally a space in one’s front yard bedecked with flowers which were
available in the homestead and fields is entirely compromised. Instead they go
for looks that kill, shipping flowers all the way from Bangalore or Tamilnadu
just to pamper the irresistible ego of Kerala.
Kerala is a really wet country with all the
monsoon loosing its grip over the low rise mountains sweetly enfolding the
land. For a Malayali the word “vellam” means water and also its
cousin-word on loan from Tamil, the language beyond the hills, “thanni.” So much is the priority that Malayali attaches to it that alcoholic
liquours are also called “vellam/thanni”. Something from which one can never
back off without feeling like fish out of water. A severely inebriated man who
has lost all reserve and foothold is called in the slang as “paamb”, which means “snake/serpent”,
because of the contortionist effects of alcohol. They are also called as “thaamara”, (the lotus) because they rise
from water, where water takes its secondary meaning noted above. That may be a
good name for the ones who can keep their cool, unflailing after all that
reservoir of booze he wades in. Kerala has perfected the art of distilling
home-grown liquours. There was a time when a village distiller would hide all
the hooch in clay jars in the muddy ponds for seasoning and security and an
opportunistic whistle blower who wants to bust him would call in the enforcers
and spot the exact locations to stick a long pointed rod to bust the jars
equally well. I, as a child, was not allowed to watch any of these boozehunting
but have heard a lot in narration. Those days may come back. It is in his blood
for a Malayali to be indomitable in
spirit. You can never take away his ‘spirits’ from him, you take away the ethyl
alcohol, he will guzzle methylated spirit and will celebrate the consequent
hooch tragedy. Perhaps the western media
had found it very edifying that alcohol ban is being fast-tracked in Kerala,
shutting down all the bars progressively culling the government owned booze
outlets. You can never let Kerala run “dry”. It is no man’s secret that the
temperance movement in Kerala has been largely animated by the Catholic Church
and other Christian denominations which have a definitive say here. The losers
in this race have taken up a very interesting rallying point : close down the
Churches too, they use wine for the Services. Not entering into the legal,
canonical, statistical and chemical standing of the sacramental wine, I find it
very amusing that this proposition is raised at all. As is wont of Malayali, immense exchange of words
ensued all over the social media, channel prime times and again as is wont of Malayali the chief participants of such
“edifying discourses” would be the ones who have nothing to lose but their
sheer imcompetence and ignorance, those moronic pachyderms. As a matter of
fact, as is known to you all, Malayalis
were the avante garde in showering abuses, four letter words, lecherous
suggestions on Sharapova when she admitted her ignorance of the existence of
Sachin Tendulkar. Malayali would be
the first to come where he has no reason to be. Literally, they love showing
the fig (google the etymology of sycophants), even when there are no takers.
My tribulation, and not just mine, is that
I feel nothing upbeat about this day today. A misplaced taste or whatever! I
had thought of blasting the Sunday pulpit with a jeremiad for the Malayalis today, including me. A last
minute change of plans saw to it that I did not make it to the lectern. So I am
here, picking petals and slicing them, with a bunch of brothers to lay the
flower carpet. The brothers keep on working on the designs and when I could not
bear the gravity of eyelids and left, they still had not laid down the chalk.
The flowers had an antiquarian freshness in them. Some flowers do not wilt that
soon by their nature, and about others, no worry, you can always doctor them.
