Life in Palakkad

It was one of those mornings. You wake up hearing the rain on the rooftops, feeling the moist chill on the wall near your bed. The rain scatters the morning light, giving the morning a very contended shade. You could lie and listen to the rain, or go and watch it from the window. It looks as if it will never stop,  strangely subdued and peaceful. There are no gushes of wind, no rumbling thunder, no variations. It just keeps raining, softly, steadily. You are not too sure if you have really woken up...

Folk songs that that extol the rain come to your mind when you walk into the adukkala (kitchen) for that cup of tea. You go and sit on the door step and watch the tea steam, a little more than usual because of the rain. You take a sip, feel it go all the way to your stomach, and just keep watching the rain. There are pools of rain water all over the muttam (courtyard), shivering with the rain. Soon you are sitting sideways on the door, and the glass is getting emptied. This morning will never end.

This dream of living beside the nila , falling in love with the full-skirted girl going to the temple with her ammumma (grandmother) will never let go of you. It doesn't matter how many levels of logic you heap on it, how harsh be the rational abrasive you try to rub it off with, how much ever you laugh at yourself, how many years you try to run away from it, it follows, it always finds its way back and today you don’t want to resist it. It has its roots in an unforgettable morning view from a train near Shornur. When you wake up, it is morning and the train has stopped at an 'outer'. You look outside, rubbing your eyes. Suddenly, as if half in a dream, you see this long skirted girl with hair reaching to her waist walking on the side of the train tracks on a path that leads to a temple, holding the hand of a white-clad ammumma bent with age, walking beside her. With the other red glass-bangled slender hand , she holds up her skirt just that little bit so that it doesn't get soiled. You can see the thulasi kathir (tender basil leaf) put into her kulippinal (2 locks of hair taken from below the temple and plaited at the back of the head) and the slight moistness on her blouse where the hair ends. The sleeves of her blouse don't cut into the skin, but hang slightly loose. You catch flashes of her heavier skirt beneath the one on top, and her simple footwear. You think of the chandanam (sandalwood paste) she must be having on her forehead, the red kunkuma pottu (red bindi) beneath and the little gold chain around her neck with an aalilakrishnan on it. The sun is rising straight ahead of them as you watch them from behind. It is too beautiful to be real. But it is. Did she turn back once? Did you catch her eye? Or was it your imagination? Who was she? Why cant you forget her, whom you don't know?

Wasn't it yesterday that you were cycling aimlessly around the city, and you were shocked to immobility when you saw  her again? How can this be? Where is the gay tilt of the head gone? Where is that never-stopping smile with slightly protruding teeth gone? Where are the unruly curls of hair around the forehead gone? Who put those little bags of tiredness below your eyes? Why do you hide your eyes behind those walls of glasses? Why do you never lift up your head? I had almost stopped before you, but your eyes never left the slush on the road. What keeps your mouth so firmly closed and your neck bent? What agony burns in your heart? Why do I want to know though I can't talk to you? Why cant I talk to you when we know that we speak the same language? Or do we, anymore?

This is the ritual of separation in our land. Standing in the rain-soaked street in the middle of the irritated and wet crowd, wordless, even without looking at each other, we drift apart. There can be no return to this moment again. There is nothing more to say, no shaking voices and teary eyes. Only the knowledge of the pain of separation that has to be to be digested on every day that remains. The city moves on. Cars, busses, rains, street dogs, the next generation of students, marriages, processions..