Funny Short Story – The TamBrahm milieu in me!
Photo Credit: www.cepolina.com
As the day dawns and sweet music enunciated by the gifted MS Subbulekshmi [Kausalya Suprajha Rama Purva…] fills your ears, you yawn, stretch yourself and cuddle nicely in the bed when suddenly a man in his late fifties clad in white dhoti, chanting mantras, reflecting the sun’s rays from the oily pleats of neatly combed hair and three neatly made white streaks on the forehead with bone ash, comes to wake you up. Well! It’s my dad. I can’t depict a so called south Indian Kerala origin Tamil Brahmin more than this. Your day kick starts wonderfully from a cliched phrase from your dad, ‘deii Suryan Vandu romba neramachu, endruda , sandyavandanam pannu ‘which can be perfectly translated into ,’ you lousy bag, its high time that you get up and start your Surya namaskara’ !.
The day you enter Brahmacharya , i.e. since the day you have the sacred thread around you, you have to play by the rules. The set standard protocol goes thus, get up early in the morning, take a refreshing shower, perform the morning rituals and chant the Gayathri mantra. It is said to open your third eye (Upanayanam), and imparts more knowledge in you. Well! Having difficulty in opening my god given two eyes every morning and promptly getting rebuked by your father, no amount of alibis or tantrums can make your day worse.
After much more insults and sardonic statements from your father, you get up from the bed fussing about being born in a Kerala TamBrahm family. You go downstairs, enticed by the sweet aroma, lingering in the air, coming from the kitchen combined with caffeinated scent from a filter coffee cup left unwashed by your bespectacled grandma, you rub your eyes and stand in front of your mother with a sheepish grin ready to take in more scolding. But you see, the generous lady having her hair tied with a bath towel and very busy in her chores, console you, and offer a steaming cup of coffee. With great affection, you take that and walk towards the veranda to see your sister in law, adjusting her hair adorned with beautiful Jasmines, showcasing her artistic skills of Euclidean geometry on the ground with her embroider dress smeared with various colors of Rangoli powder. After all, she was drawing the ‘kolam’, the daily routine of drawing a pattern on the ground with a special flour mix. The tradition was that it served as the food grains to the ants. Every ritual did have a meaning and served a purpose, but born in the digital world, youngsters like me seemed too preoccupied with their smart phones to care about all this. I nodded my sister a hello and was busy texting my friend when a hand comes out of nowhere and smears oil in my head, it was my granny, a 70 year austere soul dressed in cotton draped lengthy sari of 9 yards, who usually loiters around the house with a Bhagavad Geeta in one hand, and a bunch of Ananda Vikadans (Tamil Magazines) in the other.
The heavy odor of warm coconut oil indeed smelled good. ‘Boy, go and take your bath’ she tells. I go inside to find my elder brother savoring his idli pieces floating in Sambhar licking his fingers with great extent, eyes glued to the Hindu newspaper lying on his lap. ‘Amma , where is the curd’ he asks. Hmmm you see, TamBrahms are supposedly to be so fond of food, boasting about a large sized pot belly as the only thing they inherited as wealth. Especially when it comes to milk products, TamBrahms have a born affinity for it. Contrary to this, I seemed not interested in milk and its derivatives, and detested curd more like anything. Maybe ‘Cow’ was not ‘Wow’ for me. Lanky enough, I ate little and have never had curd rice in my entire life. It may sound puzzling to hear, but you see they were many cousins in my family who advocated me in this behaviour. About 5 of us hated curd, butter, buttermilk etc.
Another fact about being a TamBrahm born and bought up in Kerala was the typical distinguishable slang you developed. Perhaps the linguistic characteristics had its foundations in Tamil but embedded Malayalam words popped up here and there making it sound like a new language called Tamayalam. The only fact that amused me was the slang which made the rest of the world brand us as Palghat Iyers. Hmmm, but when people find out, ‘No I’m from Trivandrum..’. ‘Oh! Your lot is there in Trivandrum too’… I just have a stoic expression and say ‘Yeah my LOT is there too, in fact lot of us ‘.
Being every day in a week significant to us in one way or other, we celebrate every Moon Waxing and Waning, Sun Rising and falling, with such zeal, yeah it’s hard to remember the myriad festivals and auspicious days we have. We don’t light lamps during ‘Deepa’avali (meaning : group of lights) , instead we have a special day called Karthika where we embellish our Trivandrum roads with all the lamps and oil we got in our house blocking the whole Agraharam (street) infuriating many pedestrians and drivers out there.
Music runs in our blood, sorry don’t ask whether it is artery or vein, we are said to be very brilliant that we rarely visit doctors. Yeah! So everybody in the family knows some art form or the other. Yes and as you realized, we give the TamBrahm girls a tough time, we make her sing, dance, cook etc. It’s presumed that she knows a bit of everything! We have the TamBrahm wedding ceremony for about 3 days, (don’t worry; food is served for all the days!)…with festivities starting about a week ahead with paternal and maternal athais (aunts) to sharp nosed periammas (mom’s elder sister) swarming your house calculating the no of betel leaves needed to the no of gifts you need to give the guests, yeah let’s call it ‘The Great Iyer Wedding’.The Bride and Groom can enjoy sitting in the swing and enjoy their duet song, sit on their maternal uncle’s shoulder for a breath-taking Garland exchange sports, the groom getting tired with all the paraphernalia, decides to visit Goa (oops that was not in the plan, its Varanasi!) to get out from this, but reluctant enough by giving way to the pleading cries of his father in law!. Hmmm, maybe the whole screenplay and dialog makes our wedding 3 days to last long. Marriages so are made in Heaven !
After all, it’s good to enjoy for being what you are once in a while!.
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