Life in Thrissur

Yesterday night it rained in boulder. I heard the rain drops as they pattered against the evergreen pines of the courtyard around my room.

I am lying alone in a room looking out into the wild darkness of a monsoon night in Central Kerala. I can hear the rain falling in streams on the giant leaves of the coconut palm. There's a pond next to my room, and I can see the splashes the swollen drops make as they crash-land into that placid surface. 

I remember the time me and my cousin John decided to drain the pond because that was the simplest way we could get to the fish. We used buckets and relay-ed the muddying water up out of the pond. And then  when there was just a half-inch or so of water left we moved in and ran the giant "Bhraal" fish to the ground and put them into the copper or was it bronze, "Chembu", vessels that were a part of every home in Kerala, even passed on from generation to generation as valuable property. The fish seemed to lose weight in the few hours that they lived in those giant pots.

And the times we would spend watching the pond from an upstairs window, while the water snakes would ride out the storms that July would bring in courting and thrashing the surface of the water into a fine froth.

I remember being woken at 5:00 in the morning by the chanting of the suprabhatam, in a dream like voice of a woman, probably in her late   twenties or early thirties.  The Guruvayoor temple in all its glory, covered with gold and shining in the mid-morning sun. The women so freshly bathed, the men from the city embarrassed at having taken off their shirts as tradition required.

The temple had signs posted at strategic locations, reminding people that only hindus who believed were allowed. I remember going past the temple sanctum sanctorum, but using the temple grounds because it was the shortest route to get across town. And the childish pretence of calling each other by hindu names, as if being caught in the courtyard would be disastrous. I have never seen the inside of guruvayoor temple.

The thiruvilakku, at one end, with its hundreds of burning wicks never ceased to hypnotize me, haunting me with the flickering glow which seemed to dance to the panchavadyam, the five instrument ensemble, that so characterized temple music in Kerala.

Once in delhi, on the day allotted to Kerala, on the Trade Fair grounds I remember, a troupe from guruvayoor played for an hour or so, all the men bare chested in decembers cruel cold that had everyone else wrapped in wools.

And the long corridors of shops devoted to selling souvenirs and devotional music and incense. Yesudas singing those shabiri mala devotionals in his smoky voice. And the temple pond where as kids we would hope to see a flash of bare skin in the drowsy heat of that maddening summer. And the lodges that catered to those who carried these urges to their logical conclusions.

I remember the paddy fields that now are just memories. Me and my cousin had built the biggest and bestest kite in the whole of kerala, having filched, begged and worked to get the money for the string. After all this was a kite that would fly for miles together, and we must have string enough to control it. We sent it up, running in the parched paddy fields opposite our house, later moving to the balcony to control it in all its majesty. The kite soared into those blue skies, people came to watch from around muthuvatoor, our grandmother who till then was condemning us to horrible fates for not listening to her tyrannical orders began to cheer. We had kids squinting into the sky to see the little fellow bob way above our heads.

And then it happened...The thread snapped.

The kite raged on its own now, and raced across the sky. We chased it over fields and past thatched houses till we found it stuck way up in a coconut tree, sadly disemboweled. Now an engineer and a tax collecting tehsildar lived on those paddy fields, in houses that could easily make you forget that they stood on land that once was just wind blown paddy. The fields have disappeared in kerala now, with the pressure of the population.