On a positive note...

It's almost time for me to leave this place....and people have most unfairly labelled me anti-all-things-mallu-and-necessarily-beautiful. Hmmm...I wonder if it has ever occured to any of them that the fact a woman keeps ranting on and on without deviance about a particular subject...even if she's whining or strongly antagonistic....is generally a sign that she loves it. Or at least that the subject has that something that forces her not to be indifferent. I really can't make generalizations, but I have always assumed that to love something you must learn to hate it, at some point. The two emotions coexist in oxymoronic harmony till kingdom come. So it is with Kerala. Hell, do you guys think I really hate all the loons who call themselves my relatives? Do you think I detest driving school? Do you think I am repelled by my sister's antics in public(or private for that matter)? Well yes I am. But believe me when I tell you I love it too. That I worship the earth my sister treads on; that I can't imagine life without my interfering relatives; that i enjoy every minute of the driving school instructor's yapiness....because it's what I stay alive for...the colour, the variety, the vibrancy.
Absence of emotion is my greatest fear and Kerala is ambrosia for a person who lives with such a phobia. A brief jolt from the anaesthesized existence one is forced into in the four walls of the modern day nuclear family or the drone of semester schedules and reality...thats what Kerala always meant to me. Once the plane rumbles it's way on the familair runway,my heart skips a beat,the first time you catch sight of those familiar coconut trees, trying desperately to see your cousins from an impossible altitude while below perhaps they are chasing your flight across the greens as far as they can keep track of it....the feeling of belonging somewhere, the first tear on your grandfathers cheek, the warmth of granny's kiss, her trying to make sense of your younger sister's anglicized wail for attention, the fact that it's always raining when we have to load or unload our luggage....the long lines of laundry the first few days, on the roof, under the fan....relatives trying to remember what we looked like the year before and trying to draw a comparison, always wrong, always desperate. My cousins trying to teach us cricket, hockey or when it rains carroms and cards...the smell of the powder they spray on the carrom board, the faint dissapointment on their chestnut brown, perpetually cheerful faces when the tin is empty, the scramble for the red coin, the deck of cards where the jack of diamonds and the ace of hearts was always missing, thats what my earliest memories are made of. While we're playing hide and seek Uncle comes in with patties and plum cake, the mad rush to take the packet from him, the youngest child, then forced into an early reckoning of his place in the family heirarhy, the bottom,wails. Paper boats in the rain, stealing our fresh-from-Bangalore-student-uncle's film magazines coz they made better boats, swinging under the mango tree, eating unripe tamarind and falling ill, being forbidden to play and consequently the nickname "saipinkutty"(foreigner's child). Kerala is what I am, what I am forced to return to no matter how hard I try to tear myself away...every inch of me is infused with her spirit...every coconut oiled strand of my hair, every bit of me fed on puttu and appams, every inch of my soul that cries out amma when I'm tired and need a guiding hand...I am a mallu and proud of it. And my critisizing her and teasing her and caricaturing her people....what do I say...love has funny ways of expressing itself...you have yours, don't grudge me mine.