Monsoon Diary (9 page)

Every time someone in our community got married, the bride’s parents would come and beseech Mom to do the “bridal makeup.” After a few self-deprecating noises that failed to mask her pleasure, Mom would agree.

Once, a local politician’s daughter was getting married, a lavish affair that got reported in the society pages for months on end. The size of the hall, the guest list, which included every bigwig in town, the diamond jewelry, the flowers, the caterers—all were fodder for gossip. The bride’s mother was an acquaintance of my mom’s and insisted that Mom do the makeup.

On the afternoon of the wedding reception, a gleaming limousine arrived. Mom and I set off grandly, armed with makeup cases, yards of flowers, boxes of costume jewelry, and reams of ribbons, hairpins, and accessories. The bride’s parents received us as if we were dignitaries, anxiously asking if we had everything we needed and pressing tea, coffee, and snacks on us, all of which my mom waved away before I could say a word of assent. Instead, she sailed in like a general and took charge completely, sending various lackeys scurrying in search of the freshest flowers, silk threads, and sandals of a particular shade.

The bride’s parents led us deferentially into an air-conditioned room, where the bride was ensconced. After some pleasantries, my mother seated the bride in front of a mirror and surveyed her as if she were a blank canvas. The whole entourage watched with bated breath. “Hmm,” Mom said thoughtfully. “I think violet, don’t you?”

Everyone nodded. A few deliberations later, my mom shooed the entire crowd out of the room and began her operation. Together, we cleared some space and spread our wares—hair clips of various sizes, safety pins, bangles, hair spray, and makeup. Since the bride was the center of attraction, being close to her made me feel powerful. Occasionally, I wandered out of the room and asked for snacks or soda with a snap of my fingers, thrilled at the speed with which it was delivered.

An hour later my mom teased and twirled the bride’s hair into an elaborate coif and sprayed it into place. I inhaled deeply, reveling in the potent smell of hair spray, perfume, and flowers. I nestled amidst the rustling silks, surrounded by eyeshadows, lipsticks, and blush in a rainbow of colors. The soft murmur of the air conditioner soothed me and cooled my cream soda. I felt like a princess.

After she had painted the bride’s face, put up her hair, and sprayed errant strands into submission; after she had helped the girl get into her bridal attire and carefully tacked various pieces of jewelry on her, Mom surveyed and approved her work. Only then did my mother order a
thandai.
Three of them, actually: one for her, one for the bride, and one for me. It was the only thing she drank when she was on duty, for it was refreshing and nutritional, a “picker-upper,” as she said.

THANDAI

I was sixteen. It was Holi—the festival of colors. The streets of Delhi were awash in light, a riot of colors. Teenage boys and girls ran around in laughing groups, throwing colored powder at one another, shouting, “Holi Hai!” I was at a
mela
(carnival). Strapping lads stripped to the waist and gulped down glasses of
thandai.
They sang and danced to the pulsating drums, their cheeks streaked with purple and pink, their hair colored red, blue, and green. Ferris wheels and carousels spun. Across the crowd, I saw him: tall, tanned, and muscular with eyes the color of blackberries. I was entranced. He poured a glass of
thandai
down his throat and slowly made his way toward me. A kiss and he was gone. Was it me or was it the
thandai?

Thandai
fortified by
bhaang,
a local intoxicant made from the cannabis plant, is a favorite drink during the Holi harvest festival.
Bhaang
seeds are similar to coriander seeds. They are powdered and added to the recipe below to give it an intoxicating kick that lasts hours. This is a benign but delicious version.

SERVES 4

1 tablespoon almonds
1/2 teaspoon poppy seeds
1/2 tablespoon anise seeds
1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder or
15
whole pods
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns
1/4 cup dried or fresh rose petals (available as
gulkand
in Indian grocery stores)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon rose water (optional)

Soak the almonds, poppy seeds, anise seeds, cardamom (if using cardamom powder, mix it in later, with the milk), peppercorns, and rose petals in 2 cups of water for 2 hours. Drain, then grind all the soaked ingredients into a very smooth paste in a blender. Add 4 cups of water and blend well. Strain through a fine sieve or muslin. Add the sugar, milk, and rose water to the extracted liquid. Mix well. Chill for an hour or two before serving.

EIGHT

Vaikom House

IN APRIL, the “fire star” arrived in Madras, auguring days and nights of unrelenting tropical heat and humidity. Schools closed for their annual summer vacation, enabling city dwellers to flee to cooler climes. Those that could afford it took retreat in the hills; others went to their farms or beach houses, and the rest parked themselves on unsuspecting relatives.

My family and I summered in Kerala. Kerala State extends like a finger along the South Indian coast. It is a land of pristine white beaches, rough gray seas, and swaying coconut palms (Kerala means “Land of the Coconut”). Lush tropical trees fairly burst with nature’s bounty—ripe mangoes all year round, bananas, jackfruit, tapioca, cashews, cloves, cardamom, and of course, the ubiquitous coconuts.

My father was born in Kerala, and several of my uncles and aunts still live there. They are a large family—six brothers and three sisters, spread out all over India, knit closely by a love of their native land.

I am from Kerala, which means that regardless of where I live at any other point in my life, I will love coconuts in any form, I will habitually douse my hair with warm coconut oil and wash it off with ground herbs during a weekly “oil bath,” I will be enchanted by the sight of large expanses of water, and the smell of the rain will transport me back to my childhood.

We took the train to Ernakulam or Kottayam, then hired a taxi to take us to Vaikom, our ancestral village on the banks of sprawling Vembanad Lake. Vaikom didn’t have the kisses and caresses of the Indian Ocean to soothe and calm its people. Yet with its three religious groups—Christians, Muslims, and Hindus—coexisting in sporadic harmony over the years, it produced a handsome, distinctive race of people.

The women had long, curly black hair, and the salubrious soil and water endowed them with golden skin. Their flashing eyes, flaring skirts, tight blouses exposing bare midriffs, and swaying, sensual walk would all seem openly erotic were they not so casually displayed.

The men were hirsute and stocky, with eyes that were permanently hooded from the potent
kallu
liquor that they imbibed in large quantities. They sported a certain machismo, with bare torsos and broad moustaches displayed like badges of honor. A Kerala man would be lost without his moustache, or his
mundu,
which every man in the state wears like a uniform.

The
mundu
is a remarkably versatile garment, considering that it is but two meters of white cotton cloth, sans tailoring or texture. Kerala politicians wear sarong-style starched white
mundus
that fairly crackle with every step. Men working on the farm or going to the temple wear the
mundu
without a matching shirt, simply draping the towel like a shawl around their upper body. When involved in menial jobs like shelling coconuts by the hundreds, they tie the upper cloth into a turban to rid themselves of its constraining embrace. During summer months the stifling length of the
mundu
is cut in half by lifting it off the ground and doubling it around itself to resemble a pair of shorts. This works equally well when men have to wade through the knee-deep water that is the blessing and the bane of the southwest monsoon.

Although it’s a small state, Kerala has the highest literacy rate in all of India. It is the only one of two Indian states that sporadically supports a Marxist government—the source of equal parts affection and denouncement. Kerala men will stand on culverts and street corners chewing tobacco and arguing for hours about Marxism. Every so often, like the coming of a cyclone, they will take up their knives to settle a quarrel.

The volatile tempers and simmering passions of Vaikom were good business for my grandfather, a criminal lawyer, and a superb one at that. The entire village called him Swami, which meant God. My grandmother was referred to in a less grandiose fashion as Subbe-Akka, which meant “elder sister.” Legend had it that men in drunken brawls would yell that they had Swami on their side—“
Ennikku enda
Swami undadoi
”—before sinking a knife into another man’s throat.

My grandparents were an odd couple. My grandfather was a tall, imposing man, with penetrating eyes and a sharp nose. He was fair for an Indian, to the point where people sometimes mistook him for an English sahib. A stern disciplinarian who followed an unwavering routine all his life, he rarely smiled, and spoke only when it was necessary.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was short, gentle, and garrulous. She had the cheerful fatalism of someone who had given up trying to control her world. She was always busy, fussing over people, feeding them, taking in strays, hovering over projects that never seemed to get done, and holding multiple conversations, all at the same time. Her activities intensified in the summer, when the entire clan descended on her.

It began, as always, with a feast. Several feasts in fact.

The coming of the summer heralded many things in my paternal grandparents’ life: the arrival of the colonel, the grandchildren, the southwest monsoon, weddings, betrothals, and births too numerous to count, and to celebrate all these, a series of
sadyas,
or feasts.

It wasn’t that my grandmother, Shoba Lakshmi, after whom I was named, planned on throwing multiple feasts. Indeed, she lived in mortal fear of her thrifty sisters-in-law, who clicked their tongues and said that she ran the house as if it were a railway station, with constant comings and goings, and food being spread around like coconut water. “You need to tighten your sari, my dear, and exert iron control over the household,” her sisters-in-law chided as they chewed on betel leaves after dinner. “You can’t dance to the tune of every visitor that passes through this house.”

The author’s paternal grandparents and family. The author’s father
is standing, far right.

My grandmother nodded. She had every intention of asserting control and bringing order. It was the goal of her life, one that she was in eternal pursuit of. But then, things happened. The coconut trees in the backyard tripled their yield to the point where even the local temple didn’t want any more donations of coconuts. Mangoes rained a harvest that littered the earth like golden globules. Prickly, bulbous jackfruit hung like engorged breasts from branches, begging for release. My grandfather’s poorer clients left large baskets full of vegetables in lieu of legal fees. Knowing that my grandmother would chase them out if she caught them, they took to bringing and leaving their “fees” in the middle of the night when the whole house was asleep.

As my grandmother rightly asked, what was she to do? She couldn’t just throw away all those coconuts, bananas, mangoes, and jackfruit, not to mention the forest of tender green beans, plantains, and ripe pumpkins that masqueraded as a garden in the backyard. So she instructed the cooks to make shredded pumpkin with coconut to mark the arrival of the colonel; banana chips fried in coconut oil for her eldest son’s family from Bombay; jackfruit
payasam
for her eldest daughter and family from Madras; and mango pickles when her sister’s children arrived from nearby Kummanom.

So it went throughout the summer.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER BOUGHT Vaikom House from an upper-caste Namboodiri priest in financial distress. Legend has it that the priest subsequently committed suicide by hanging himself on a tamarind tree at the edge of the property, almost as a revenge for being forced to sell his home. Inevitably, over the years, frills were added to the story, until it was spiced with details of family disputes and affairs with women.

A handsome bungalow with a red-tiled roof, graceful arches, and whitewashed pillars, Vaikom House was perfect for our large family. There were numerous eaves, nooks, and crannies that a child, lost in the anonymity of a large family, could take refuge in or make into special places, especially when the number of inhabitants swelled during the summer. A spacious verandah swept around the house, with bamboo chairs and tables for the adults to lounge in while reading a book, drinking tea, or playing endless card games. All around the house were acres of gardens overflowing with fruit, nut trees, and flower vines.

The living room was the size of a banquet hall and had served as one during countless weddings, christenings, engagements, and death ceremonies. The dark red terra-cotta floor was burnished to a high sheen by generations of feet. On each side of the living room were two small bedrooms. My grandfather used one as his law office. The second was known as the nuptials room, for it was here that the marriages in the family were consummated. On the wedding night the room would be decked with flowers and incense and provided with fruits and milk and honey. The women of the family would lead the newlywed bride to this room, where the bridegroom waited. Shutting the doors on the couple, the women would sing some suggestively salacious songs before leaving the couple to themselves. Today, with the disappearance of the joint family, people prefer the privacy of a hotel bridal suite for this event.

The other two bedrooms were used by the seniormost members of the household, a pecking order that changed with each influx of visitors. When my elder three uncles visited, naturally, they got the three coveted “private” rooms, while the rest of us sprawled willy-nilly in the open bedroom upstairs. When the colonel came, he took one of the rooms. And during the rare occasions when my parents were among the senior members of the household, they slept there. None of the bedrooms had bolts or locks, which made them a source of endless fascination for us kids, especially when they happened to be inhabited by newlyweds. On many occasions my cousins and I waited outside the door with held breath in the middle of the night, just to hear what newlyweds did on their first night together. Once a couple of us even managed to sneak into the room and hide under the bed before my mother caught us and dragged us out by our ears.

My grandparents had a bedroom upstairs, which remained sacrosanct and off-limits to all guests, except pregnant women who wanted to sleep in my grandmother’s “lucky bed,” which had been used for many deliveries.

With more than a dozen children and a dozen adults in the house, something was always happening. Children fell sick and recovered; couples fought and reconciled; babies were born, usually in the middle of the night, with the help of a local midwife. Cousins got engaged, then married, and all the ceremonies were conducted in the house. Relatives visited for a few days or stayed for a few months. People from far and near came to seek my grandfather’s legal advice and my grandmother’s reassurance.

Then there was the staff: a nanny whom we called Ammu, two servants to clean the house, two cooks and their daughters, who served as assistant cooks, a gardener, a driver, their children, who ran errands for my grandmother, and two law clerks who ran errands for my grandfather when they weren’t taking down case notes.

For us children Ammu was our main contact with the rest of the household. She was a thin, wrinkled woman of unknown age and uncertain disposition, wearing a permanent frown of concentration as she tried to keep track of her errant charges.

Every morning the whitewashed walls of the house were bathed in the orange and yellow hues of a tropical dawn. A crack in the sloping, red-tiled roof caused a shaft of sunlight to shine right on my grandmother’s eyes, waking her up. Generations in my family have argued over whether that crack was natural or the work of my great-grandfather, who wanted his coffee at the crack of dawn.

Ammu woke us up at five-thirty. Muttering sleepily, we trooped downstairs, where my grandfather was waiting for us. We followed him to one of the four bathing ponds dug in the clearings in the coconut garden around our house. As he stood at the edge of the water and washed himself with small, dignified buckets of water, the fourteen of us would get neck-deep, clothes and all, in the fiercely cold water.

My grandfather finished his morning ablutions and looked up. This was our cue. Together we sang the Sanskrit mantras and chants that he had taught us. My grandfather believed that every Brahmin child ought to know the Sanskrit verses that were codified in the Vedas. It was his opinion that singing in neck-deep water at dawn would strengthen our vocal cords. We detested that opinion with a passion but were powerless to do anything about it. As the sun’s rays warmed our heads, our voices lost the hoarseness of sleep. Half an hour later we finished the chants in beautiful harmony.