Once upon a time in Kerala
My story stood peeking around a corner.
It waited on tiptoes behind the curtains, waiting for an audience
It hid in dark rooms, waiting to be rescued
And it crept through long corridors on stormy nights
To ambush me
And you.
This is the story of a God that resides in coconut trees
And is sometimes benevolent and sometimes not.
It is a story of a fisherman's song
That matches the ebb and flow of the tides.
It is a story of men with red and green faces whose dance
Chases away hobgoblins.
It is a story of food that makes you weep
With its aroma of love, loss and longing.
It is a story of food that makes you love
With the memories that it evokes.
It is a story of a thousand tinkling laughs in a thousand glass bottles.
It is a story often meandering, and often tall,
Dear reader, do not judge me, for I might just trip and fall.
A strange three-headed monster on certain full moon nights
And a lesser god on the other days of the year
This tree gave birth to a hundred coconuts
That went forth and conquered the world.
And one fine day,
A hundred coconuts dropped all at once and were scattered over the land.
Riven from the sheltered boughs and protective fronds.
These orphan spheres appeared on the horizon
Like a hundred fallen moons from some distant galaxy,
The hundred coconuts came of age under the sun and by the sea.
The hundred coconuts oozed their sweet milk over the land.
The hundred coconuts nourished the daughters of the soil with their succulent meat.
The hundred coconuts were transformed into the mysterious quintessence
Of fish curries, pot roasts, avials, and custards.
The hundred coconuts cracked open
to reveal a glimpse of a colonized world of the future.
Of kitchens in thrall of this alien fruit
Of cooks offering deep obeisance to this grand oval of green
Of mothers using the hard brown nut.
As a charm against all evil.
Of little children sucking the last drop of sweet coconut water
Through neon-green plastic pipes.
Of big corporations marketing its coconut products
To divas with Gucci sunglasses perched on their delicately powdered noses
Carrying retro jute bags and eating organic tofu.
The hundred coconuts changed the destinies of men.
The hundred coconuts created food fit for kings
The hundred coconuts desiccated the swamps and turned them into plantations
The hundred coconuts became signifiers of health, wealth and prosperity
And many years later
The hundred coconuts blew away in a gale
Leaving behind a seed of doubt and possibility
In the minds of men who had lived through these times.
Many moons passed
And many a child grew into the pink of youth
In the midst of political turbulence
And economic upheavals.
Young men left the land in search of greener pastures
In the desert land across the world.
They built double-storey homes with pink walls and bathroom tiles
Perched precariously on their picturesque village greens.
They came home two weeks in a year,
An army of haggard men,
An army of bent men
An army of hollow men
Lugging their broken spirits and slipped discs along with the new 21-inch colour tvs.
The coconut crops had been failing
The water wasn't as sweet anymore.
The people forgot the lesser gods
Who presided over domestic corners.
An amnesiac race poured gallons of milk
Over the Creators and Destroyers of the world.
Only a handful of ancient, toothless women would go hunting for a coconut tree
On the hottest summer afternoon of the year.
"We must find him. The God of all our Small Things," they would mutter and hobble away into the distance.
One spring morning,
A young bride dressed herself in her day-old wedding finery
She tied her vermillion smeared hair
Into a loose knot
And walked hesitantly
To the bullock cart which would carry her toward adulthood
In a matter of a few hours.
She swayed from side to side
Her shoulders grazing those of her husband of a few hours.
She shed a silent tear
Of love, loss and longing
As the trees and fields of her childhood games
Filtered through the flimsy gold gauze of her wedding veil
Disappeared into the horizon
With the suddenness of a magic trick.
A random stone
Crippled the bull
And punctuated the doleful ride
With a much-needed stop.
The swollen-eyed bride peeked out from under her veil
And looked skywards on a whim.
And a few feet away, she saw it for the first time.
The strange three-headed monster
That was growing out of the soil.
A hundred baby coconuts hung ponderously from its delicate limbs.
The bride looked up in awe forgetting her veil and her husband of a few hours
She simply pointed and muttered a half remembered phrase from her grandmother’s tales,
“This is the God of Small Things.
He has returned to our land again
And now we will live happily ever after, she said with a watery smile."