Time and the Malayalee - I

Gravity has a field (sic) day in Kerala. They say that gravity has the effect of “bending” time, seeming to make it go slower or faster. If that be the case, then in addition to the sea waves that pound its coast during the monsoon, gravity waves move around Kerala each day. And the strange thing is that the waves seem to arrive and depart differently for the malayalee man and the malayalee woman.

Let’s take an average suburban malayalee household, where these days both partners have jobs, and typically two children go to school. A sudden wave of gravity overtakes the woman as she wakes at some ungodly hour when the sun is still to make an appearance. Then it’s a rush to get her basic ablutions done before she dashes into the kitchen to put some water on the boil for cooking the rice. All the while her mind is in a whirl, working out whether it is a day for fish, meat or eggs, and rolling over the vegetables at hand to decide the two statutory vegetable dishes that must accompany the cooked rice along with the fish, meat or egg. All this is in preparation for the lunch boxes for the children, her husband and herself. The knife slices insanely through onions, garlic, ginger and vegetables, while another hand (from heaven only knows where) is setting pots on the fire and pouring oil, curry leaves, mustard seeds and sundry other condiments in preparation for the two statutory vegetables and the said fish, meat or egg dish.

All the while, she has been working out whether it’s going to be appam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appam), idli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idli), dosa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosa), puttu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttu), or poories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puri_(food) ) for breakfast, or whether she will get away with bread-toast (the malayalee does not believe that toast by itself exists, unless it is referred to as bread-toast) for breakfast. Since each of these involves the preparation of another curry and some of them depend on some preparatory work the previous evening, the choices eventually settle down and get decided according to the time that’s already gone (God is it nearly 6:30 already?). Then it’s time to pack the children’s schoolbags, hunting for the homework books that have splashed all over the house during the vain effort the previous evening to sit the children down to an hour’s study. The lunch has meanwhile cooked, and is now packed into a bunch of stainless steel containers and two sets are loaded into the schoolbags, along with bottles of water and a snack each – did we mention snack before? Fortunately this last comes ready made out of packets – either some biscuits or cookies, or some exotic Kerala savoury or sweetmeat. If you’ve followed the links above (thank the lord for Wikipedia, otherwise we’d be here all day just writing out the recipes), you may have found some of the more common Kerala style snacks. Now it’s time to gently nudge hubby awake, scream at the children to get out of bed and get dressed, and rush in herself into the bathroom to change for the day ahead (God, after all this, is there still the whole day ahead?). The kids have spoonfuls of breakfast loaded into their mouths, then their shoes wiped before they are shooed out of the door to catch the school bus, or the auto-rickshaw (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw ), which is already loaded with 14 other kids and is blaring its horn outside her door. Kids away, she does a quick check to make sure hubby has indeed left the bed before she prepares the coffee, shouts out a couple of errands (which she will eventually end up doing herself), grabs a breakfast snack washed down with a mouthful of coffee and picks up her handbag to run to the bus-stop. She makes it just in time to be greeted by the 30 other women also tryng to mount the bus through the front door (the men use the rear door, and even if there aren’t any men this early for the bus, the women aren’t allowed to board the bus from the rear) and the driver pressing his horn persistently to rush them in while the conductor leers his way through the lot – young, old, skinny, fat, it doesn’t matter to him, the leer is the same. Finally she’s on. Whether she gets a seat or not, the gravity wave now reverses, and she gets her first peaceful moment of the day. And she dozes.

Meanwhile, gravity has a wholly different experience in store for the Malayalee man. Having gently chided his wife for shaking him out of his sweet reverie, he lies in bed savouring the remnants of his pleasant dream. Then he leisurely rises and drags himself to the bathroom where he lazily brushes his teeth and sloshes himself before scraping the razor across his growth. Donning a freshly ironed dhoti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhoti) that his wife has thoughtfully left hanging on the towel rack, he saunters to the verandah where a hot coffee and the morning newspaper lie beside his easy chair. Draping himself on the chair with his legs up on the arms of the chair, he sips and slowly digests the newspaper systematically from beginning to end. Around him there are several whirls of gravity as children dash out and the auto scampers, and his wife also goes down to the gate (did she say something? Never mind). Half an hour drifts by. The sports section is gradually coming to an end. The man gently chides his wife in his mind for not waiting to provide him with a coffee refill. He then saunters to the breakfast table where he finds breakfast laid out, coffee in a flask, and his lunchboxes already packed. He helps himself to great mouthfuls of breakfast, which he washes down with his next coffee. He puts the dishes in the sink (his wife will have to deal with them later), puts his lunchboxes into his briefcase and then drags himself to the bathroom for a leisurely bath, after which he dons the neatly pressed shirt and trousers his wife has again thoughtfully laid out for him. Then he goes out the front door to his motorbike /scooter /car (depending on which rung he occupies on the social ladder), starts up and drives out of his gate.

And gravity does a sudden U-turn. While his wife is gently dozing and swaying to the arrhythmic convolutions of the bus driver’s frantic efforts to avoid potholes while simultaneously avoiding an auto and overtaking a competing bus, the malayalee man transforms into one possessed by the devil himself as he competes with children, cows, dogs, pedestrians, cyclists, other two-wheeler drivers, cars, trucks and buses all weaving drunkenly across and along what passes for the road, in every direction on the compass with scant regard for rules and fellow-users, in a mad rush to be the first in the jams that have piled up haphazardly around each junction, bus-stop, school-gate, railway crossing and pothole. Nobody knows how these untangle themselves. The liberal use of the horn, shout and curse-word probably has something to do with this, although some think it has more to do with rapid stamps on the accelerators and brakes while dragging the handlebars or steering wheels around to thrust a bumper, nose-wheel or headlamp into the microscopic gap that has mysteriously appeared between the rear end and front end of two cars in the adjoining lane.

Did we say lane? Malayalee drivers are adept at creating lanes slightly narrower then their own vehicle’s breadth. Six vehicles converge on the junction designed to allow two. Not all these vehicles are pointing in the same direction, and not all of them intend to go where their respective position in this melee will take them. More shouts, curse-words and blaring horns assault one from all sides as the lights change. The guy seven vehicles to the rear is absolutely convinced that nobody in front of him has seen the lights change and so stands on the horn until the vehicle in front is actually able to inch forward. Then it’s a mad rush to see if one can avoid being caught or collided with as one jumps the red light ten seconds after it has lit up. The mental state of all road users, whether navigating a vehicle or using limbs, is a mixture of anger, anxiety, fear, dread and plain intolerance, and time is at its nastiest peak, each second ringing out with a thousand thoughts and options on how to move another inch. Scrapes and bumps are occasions for further practice of cuss-words. We’ll save discussion of graver confrontations to another day.

Somehow, and being Kerala, only the gods know how, eventually the bus carrying the malayalee woman reaches the stop where she needs to alight, and magically she has just come out of her reverie. Gravity does its next switch, and it is momentum, push and shove that literally propels her from the bus to the shelter, where she picks herself up from the untidy heap into which she was reduced, mustering up what’s left of her dignity as she checks that all her appendages are still intact, even if bruised. She checks her watch and realizes that she has less than two minutes for the eight-minute walk to her place of work. So begins her trauma as she joins the stream of other pedestrians, dogs, cows, cyclists, two-wheelers, autos, cars, trucks and buses that are moving every which way but loose, trying to keep herself in the general direction that will take her to her destination. At this point, both husband and wife are subjected to the same whim of gravity, and eventually they reach their place of work.

And gravity does them a good turn and allows them to slow down again. We hope to pick this thread up in a sequel.