A distant Onam...

In my travels, I have attended many Onam lunches in offices – my offices and offices of clients. In one of those occasions, this time at a client’s office, the HR head asked me to speak a few words about Onam before lunch. Well, not a great idea I thought keeping them away from the delectable fare of Malayali smorgasbord of celestial vegetarian delicacies. This is a gist of what I said and then a small paragraph at the end. I had sent to a lot of friends and relatives then and they did report back the deja vu of the older days! Here goes …

Onam, as we were kids was the whole nine yards. Flower patterns each day running up to Thiruonam and the visit to our paternal ancestral home at Vaikom in Kerala.  As kids , we (me and my two sisters) would be woken up early and led to the pond by our mother and scrubbed clean. We were allowed to just step a little into the water, carefully treading on the moss decorated concrete steps that traced into the water. My smaller younger sister, sat on the protected dry steps, giggling and enjoying the ablution vicariously. We were then attired in the Onna kodi (new Onam dresses) from Appooppan ( our paternal grandfather). Once we were ready, we were dismissed off to play and would roam around randomly, touch the skies sitting on the new swing tied near the kitchen, where we also had the watchful eyes of my mother, grandmother and all the aunts.

What I remember vividly is the limpid mind and our expanding tesserae of having fun with everything as innocuous as pelting the mango tree, to helping the servant cut banana leaves for lunch. The sandy courtyard was studded into patterns from the stick brooms. We ran around the Tulsi plant on the elevated plinth and then it was time for lunch.

The delicious aroma of cooked rice, mingled with whiff of spices and the woodsmoke were wafting through the raised verandah where the banana leaves were laid.  It was a long narrow bare hall where we sat in two rows facing each other – the men and the children, while the ladies were busy serving. The leaves were brightened by the silver drops of water dancing on the green contours of the leaves. The dishes were brought in from the smoke blackened kitchen which always had that pleasurable aroma even when there was no cooking.

All the dishes were arranged in an order that made the palate look like a painting. Several islands of colors spread on the leaves. Appoopan once told us that when God looks down on the world, he sees a similar profusion of color and each Onam Ela ( Onam leaf ) is a colorful microcosm of the world. Being the eldest of my generation, I always sat next to Appoopan, with a glee that I was the first among equals, on that day. The dishes came and went and we squashed and rolled the food with our hands and making it to the imperfect ellipses and spheres before we gobbled it. The piece de resistance was the payasam (sweet dish) as the end, which was poured on the leaves and seemed to have a life of its own running along the narrow clefts of the leaf. I remember having more fun encircling and barricading their movement than actually eating it …

Do I miss all those? Those were the days when the mind was opaque to the rigmaroles of life and utterly alien to anything vaguely related to commerce and growing up. Life is a myriad of potentialities of the future and soon after we were bustling servants of our egotistical minds.  Today, an Onam is a reminder on the laptop calendar and from the hundreds of messages on the mail network, I feel like selecting, reading and deleting. Matching schedules to even have a lunch together seems like a challenge.  Maybe, I do miss those days!