Kerala Chronicles - Part 2

A long long time ago,i.e. before Khushwant Singh had learnt about the birds and the bees, it was believed that all waves needed a medium in which to propagate, hence the concept of ether as the universal medium facilitating the transmission of waves was put forth. Ether was supposed to be all permeating and the theory was unchallenged for a few centuries. However, in the early part of the twentieth century, the theory was debunked by sophisticated scientific experiments.
If the proponents of an all permeating ether theory had ever visited Kerala, their views would have had a much sounder grounding and the course of modern science would have arguably been different. Of course, instead of calling it ether, Keralites call this substance coconut oil. If you go there, you can pretty much smell it in the air, which is not too surprising considering its ubiquitous presence, from the food you eat to the hair of women walking the streets, the whole State is one big coconut (ok slight exaggeration, but try subsisting on a coconut diet for a week and you'll see). To paraphrase a saying about GM in the 50s, "you can eat anything in Kerala as long as it's a coconut".
If you think that being ambushed by oceans of coconuts has oriented me unfavourably towards God's Own Country, well then all I can say is that you have a coconut for a brain. In IIMA parlance, Kerala is certainly in my Top 5 federal administrative sub-units of the Indian republic, and the 7 odd days I spent there were at times so heavenly, it was scarcely believable. So what I'm gonna do is give a day by day account of our coconuts...I mean our adventures in the land of Parshuram

Day 1
So its 3:45 am and we disembark from the Gandhidham-Nagercoil express and find ourselves at Thiruvananthapuram station. A number of porters approach but armed with the power of "venda" we succeed in repelling their unsolicited attention. Shashu takes us to a nearby lodge, where the innkeeper is shocked to be woken at 4 am and asked for a room...I could swear he's thinking that it could only be North Indians. Anyway, the four of us make our way through a dimly lit passage reminiscent of the Green Mile and we find ourselves in a room which is quite decent, give or take the odd swarm of mosquitoes. Anyway, we're settling into the Three men in a Boat frame of mind, so we're not overly concerned. I'm about to settle in for a nice long snooze when Shashu tells us that we'll leave at 7 for a darshan at the Shripadmanabhaswamy temple. I am thrilled at the prospect till he clarifies that he means 7 am. 7 am? I have no memories of what that time of day looks like, having sacrificed discipline for convenience a long time ago. Anyway, Pubiii and Cita agree readily, and not wanting to be left out, I agree as well.
So when the clock strikes 6:30, I am rudely yanked off my bed and told to dress up. After uttering some impious imprecations, I sleepwalk with the others and we decide to sip some coffee at a wierdly shaped restaurant called India Coffee house, a vertical tower where people are seated around a spiral staricase. Recharged with energy, we make our way to the "demble", located nearby. It's a magnificent sight, built in the classical South Indian style, a massive "gopuram" the entrance to the main temple inside. Admission rules are much stricter in the south too, no one can enter wearing a shirt and jeans, one has to wear a "mundu", akin to a dhoti and nothing on top. The latter came as a bolt from the blue for us, the most that happens in temples in the North is that you're not allowed to wear shoes or slippers inside. With ill conceived discomfort we discard our outer shells and are soon at one with nature. But one can't deny the aura of the place and one can almost feel the divine inside. coming back, I feel that the day has got off to a good start and after we get our clothes and our dignity back, we pose for pictures outside the temple gate with our mundus still on. As we came out, we went to another smaller temple where people were smashing coconuts against a granite wall as an offering to the Gods. Swept away by my emotions, I too flung a specimen with exceptional power, watching it disintegrate against the wall.Little was I to know that the coconuts would have thier revenge very soon. But more of that later.
From there on we make our way through to Thiruvananthapuram's museum of natural history...which as we later find out, houses both nature and history in the same complex, having a zoo, a reptile house and a history museum within the premises. The history museum is very impressive, with a number of atrifacts, some as old as 5000 years. After ambling around in all of these for a while, we take lunch in a restaurant called Kadalivanam, which is a 'health joint'. However, what I, and I'm sure the other patrons present at the time, will remember would be my misadventures with payasam. The invention of payasam poses the single biggest challenge to the theory of evolutionary biology, for the life of me I cannot see how one can eat the thing with hands. I mean the human hand is a thing of wonder, opposable thumb and what not, but one thing it was surely not meant to do is scoop up fluids from a flat banana leaf. After a few initial attempts, I was pretty much down to leaning into my banana leaf and licking the stuff, for no matter how adroitly I tried to do it, the journey from leaf to mouth was too much and there was more dripping down my forearm than my oesophagus and matters were not helped by the fact that Cita and Pubiii were served theirs in a glass. My Lord, why have you foraken me?
After having nearly drowned in payasam, I decide I might as well tempt fate and go to Kovalam beach. So we get a car and make the hour long journey to the place, the highlight of the trip being a road which descends almost vertically. Not having got any bathing trunks, we decide to plunge into the raging Arabian Sea with all our clothes. The irony isn't lost on anyone, we were wearing more on a trip to a beahc than we were inside a temple. However, a dip in the waters was the perfect antidote to the fits of perspiration caused by the heat of the Kerala winter (another irony?).
After the trip to Kovalam, we go to another beach to do some boating before watching the sunset. The highlight of this particular journey is a giant statue of a nude sprawling in the lawns by the roadside, accompanied by a plaque stating proudly that it was commissioned by the government....By this time I'm pretty much feeling as though I've stepped into the twilight zone. I try and distract myself by chanting 'un..rand..moon...naal..anj..aar...edh..ett..umbada..patta..' - Malayalam for 1,2,3...10, the next step in our immersion in the local culture.
In the boatclub, we enter with a bang, quite literally, when Cita kicks a coconut that smashes a flowerpot lining the gravel path. We walk away nonchalantly, likre true Delhi-ites and hire a row-boat. The four of us take turns in manning the oars and in between hitting pylons of overhead bridges, going around in circles and almost knocking the other guys' eye out with the oar, we do manange to have a relaxing time. Shashu came close to dropping the oar into the water a couple of times and my wise-crack about us in danger of being 'up the creek without a paddle' wasn't appreciated wholeheartedly. I wonder why.
Anyway, after this we hire a couple of paddle boats that turn out to have a mind of their own as we find ourselves helplessly drifting out into the sea, before we are helped back by the wake of a passing motorboat. Pity, remarks Cita, we could have seen Sri Lanka as well. This time it's my turn to give the dirty looks.
Anyway, we decide that that's about enough adventure for a day and quietly sit down on the sand to see the sunset. And it was an enchanting sight, to see the sun disappear gradually over the horizon, as though swallowed up by the vast blue explanse in front of us. As we make iur way back to our lodge around 8pm, we make plans to check out the nightlife in the town, maybe even take in a lat night Malayalam movie at the mearby theatre. At 8:30 we're all sound asleep in our beds.

Day 2
We decide that we haven't gone south enough and decide to pursue the equator to the maximum extent possible on the Indian mainland...in other words, we decide to visit Kanyakumari which is a couple of hours away. So we once again set off, this time to the mystical edge of India, the land of confluence of three great waterbodies, the place where Swami Vivekananda spent three days meditating on the nature of the world and life. Before we landed there, we made a detour to a place called Sucheendram to visit a temple there and the visit was a real eye opener to me, chaning my view of the world completely. A Tamil caretaker of the temple spoke in Hindi to me...read that sentence again...and he did it of his own accord, before I had even said a word...that one incident forced me to revaluate my belief that Hindi ceased to be a language in Tamil Nadu outside the signboards in Kamaraj airport, Meenambakkam, Chennai. All those awful memories of summers in chennai, of heated arguments with auto drivers who ripped you off and spoke Tamil at an intimidating pace to put you off, were now forgotten. In a sense, I had finally found peace for the turbulence that had been raging inside. Forgive and move on.
After that life latering experience, we proceeded to Kanyakumari with some truly amazing scenery on view. One thing in which I have to admit Uttar Pradesh lags behind...ok one of the many things in which UP lags behind, is in scenery. Go down below the Terai and you've pretty much exhausted all the scenic beauty of the state, not counting Priyanka Chopra that is. Of hills we have none and the moment the land starts showing signs of elevation, ou realize you're in the Chambal ravines and the only scenic beauty there are hirsute dacoits, more moustache than body. The south on the other hand seems to be seeped in gorgeous landscapes, and this road trip too had its fair share of lush,green fields (ok I'm obsessed with those adjectives) and hills.
After a refreshing journey, we found ourself running out of land and that's when we realized we were in Kanyakumari. It's a quaint little town with a remarkable tourist economy centred around the fact that it's at the edge of the country. All the businesses and hotels are concentrated around the sea, one almost gets the feeling that the city is a giant human being leaning into the water. The two main attractions of the place are the temple, which we declined to enter because of the 'shirts off please' clause and the Vivekananda Rock, a giant rock a few hundred metres into the Indian ocean ,where Swami Vivekananda meditated. Another thing about Kanyakumari is that it's the most cosmopolitan town in Tamil Nadu, where the next person is as likely to be a Bengali or a Punjabi as he is to be a Tam.
We took a ferry to the rock and reaching there we made our way to the vivekananda memorial, which is a place of amazing tranquility amidst the raging ocean. I spent around five minutes in the meditation chamber and the peace and silence there are indescribable. Even as I write, I am trying desperately yo recreate those moments in my mind but I am unable to do so, there's something magical about the place.
The rock also houses a temple dedicated to Goddess Parvati, it's main attraction being a projection in the ground shaped like a woman's foot. Legend has that this is an imprint of the Goddess' foot, when she prayed here to be married to Lord Shiva (hence the name of the town- Kanya Kumari).
While on the rock, the sky got overcast and we decided to make our way back before it started raining too heavily. By the time we got back, there was nothing much left to do, except roam the marketplace and see the remarkable varieties of bananas and coconuts on sale. In the evening we went back to India Coffee House for dinner and for whatever unfolded subsequently, I hold Shashu squarely respnosible. Had he not told me that I bore an uncanny resemblance to superstar Dileep, the flavour of Malayalam cinema in recent times and a worthy inheritor of the proud cinematic legacy of Mohanlal and Mammooty, I would have never harboured any illusions of my knowledge of Malayalam being sufficient to carry out the routine task of ordering food in a restaurant. Feeling quite smug about my extensive knowledge of Malayalam numbers from 1 to 10, I took it upon myself to place the order in chaste Mallu. I even asked cita to record the conversation with his digi cam. It went something like this:

Superstar Dileep: Un (1) vada, moon (3) maala dosa, un mineral water bottle, un coffee, rand (2) cutlet, un ulliuttapam

Waiter with deadpan expression: sdfsdsdgdfuaiiajnrshd annagierhj ulli uttapam skdfsfsmfss fdfdfg dgdgdgfhfgh (exec summary: something in Malayalam)

Superstar Dileep: Huh!!

Well I was pretty much stymied, and yet as I carried the hopes and dreams of Malayalam cinema squarely on my shoulders, I could hardly bring myself to admit I knew as much Malayalam as I knew open heart surgery

So I end up staring at Cita who by this time is rollicking in his seat. Anyway, by astutely analyzing the situation, I estimate that the waiter's trying to tell me that ulli (onion) uttapam isn't available. So I order un of something else on the menu and the waiter goes away and I sit back satisfied that I had redeemed myself.

5 minutes later:

The three of us are staring at the table, on which are kept, 3 bottles of mineral water, 3 vada sambhars, 3 masala dosas and 0 coffees. I call the waiter back and explain to him firstly in Malayalam, then in English, then in sign language that I wanted 1 bottle of mineral water, 1 vada sambhar and 1 coffee for us...he apologises for misunderstanding and takes away the excess and makes up the deficits. However, I can't look at him in the eye after that. Not out of any embarassment but in order to avoid him as he is now convinced that I speak Mallu and of the three of us directs all his conversation to me, much to the entertainment of Pubiii and Cita. At one point of time he seems to be making an impassioned plea for us to do something, at the end of it I'm exasperated and ask Pubiii and Cita to move to the next table. Turns out that was indeed what he wanted us to do and he goes back, more convinced than ever about my mastery over the tongue while I am left behind to contemplate a pyrrhich victory. Before he comes back to engage me in a debate about the role of gerunds in Malayalam, I quickly gulp down the food and beat a hasty exit. I did leave a large tip for him though, for having given my linguistic skills the respect they clearly did not deserve. And after all, how would it look if superstar Dileep, hero of the masses, skimps on tips?