Being Mallu

As a child, I’d spend summer vacations with my grandparents in Kerala. Later, when I was  in Madras, I’d visit Kerala during my breaks. I loved taking the night train, leaving the heat and arid landscape of Chennai and crossing through a pass in the Western Ghats, the mountain range that segments off Kerala from the rest of the country. Rocked to sleep on the hard wooden third-class berth, I’d awake at daybreak to find my train as if by magic transported to another country, another continent even, one with a lush green landscape, waterlogged paddy fields, rivers and streams, coconut palms clogging the horizon.




On a map the narrow strip of land that is my Kerala — just 360 miles long — seems mortared like an emerald to the southwest coast of India. The Western Ghats have historically buffered us Keralites from whatever is fermenting and boiling over in the rest of India. On the slopes of these mountains, pepper, tea, rubber, cardamom and coffee grow in estates, and then the land meets the Arabian Sea in a latticework of lagoons and extensive backwaters that allow for an elegant network of boat and barge transportation up and down the state. 


I would love going to the temple in the evening for the Deeparadhana ceremony,where Lamps would be lit,drums would be played and horns would echo out into the evening sky.




The temple itself was stunning, with a long passage flanked by 365 granite columns and many elaborate wooden carvings. The deity housed at the center is the massive 18-foot long Vishnu, who reclined on the serpent Ananda. One can only view the deity in sections, at very specific times, and I was fortunate enough to be in a throng allowed to peek through one door when it was opened for a few minutes. I saw the hand and thigh of Vishnu. 


The sight would give me goose bumps. It was not just the glimpse into this sanctum sanctorum, or the passion of my fellow worshipers that moved me, but something immediate, something I had experienced in other temples: the sense that the deity actually resides there, resting in its gilded lair, hidden by doors through which mortals occasionally get a glimpse. 


This was no celestial God whom one invoked while sending up incense and prayers; this God was right there, and we were in the divine presence at the heart of the heart of the faith. As I stood barefoot and bare-chested on stone weathered by the feet of millions of believers, shoulder to shoulder with people who looked like me, I felt this faith too was also my heritage


As hundreds of lamps lit up the temple complex,I began to think what it was to be a Malayalee.I was born in Chennai,but have lived most of my life in Dubai. Even though people may tell you that the "Gelf" is just a part of Kerala that broke away and drifted west,it is different. Or at least i felt that way.


I haven't been to Kerala,since 2006.But when i do come home next time,I will be grasping for that sense of home, seeking blessings and absolution, seeking inspiration, looking to study again the ancestral rites, visit the very hearth fires where my grandmother had turned out such magnificent dishes. I shall try to break down the anatomy of my grandparents’ homes, study the wood and laterite walls, take apart the wooden rafters, trace the filigree carvings in the wood frame under the eaves, all to be able to reconstruct a house again in words.