ONAM...

It is 00.01 am, what just passed by was the thiruvonam day of 2010 or rather 1186 as per Kollavarsham (the Malayalam Calendar). I don't exactly remember the last time when I had celebrated onam at my home. Guess it was in 2002 or some other year near to that. Nevertheless this is probably the first time that I am feeling alone in celebrating such an event. In the last 8 years I had celebrated onam with my classmates and friends in CoH and then in IRMA. I did enjoy them despite the fact that those pre-professional semi-matured ways were a far-cry from the way we used to celebrate during our childhood with innocent games during the ten day holiday when schools were closed for onam. I do remember how the tiny white flowers of thumba (Leuca Indica) interspersed with the yellow flowers of mookkuthi (Galinsoga parviflora) made our whole yards, fields and roadsides look beautiful. Thumba plants used to come up only during this season of post-torrential rains of SW monsoon and its flowers were very easy to pluck, if you could master a peculiar massaging motion over the plant. No wonder for us the children it was our favourite for the white portion of pookkalam. However in the last 10-15 years, the plant has become sparse and sporadic. I don't know whom to blame for its painful gradual vanishing act. Ofcourse I can rhetorically name 'global warming' and the fucking USA for that but, .....it is just rhetoric.

Thumbapoo

Thumbachedi Leuca Indica

Nonetheless I can recall a number of things that have changed in the last two decades since my schooldays. There was this vast paddy field whose mud bunds were part of our daily route to school. We used to catch crabs and frogs in those green fields. Sometimes an occassional snake used to appear from nowhere just to scare us and go on its way. The field was landfilled longtime back, soon after our municipality had made bypass ring roads right through the middle of those fields. For development of transportation anywhere in Kerala, paddy fields were the first choice as martyrs. They were far cheaper than uplands with connected plots of wetlands covering amazing distances without touching even a single house. Most of the time the roads were built right through the middle of wetlands. The blind and unscientific pattern ensured that the conventional flow of water is impeded leading to floods on one side and shortages on the other ultimately making all of the wetland unfit for cultivation.

We used to walk around the three kilo meters to school in about half an hour. Our primary school army used to raid mango, guava, jamba, mulberry, tamarind and every other fruit tree on our way. In fact in one of our great adventures we had tried to slip away with a giant jack fruit. We were too small to carry the fruit weighing something like 30-40 kilos, yet we successfully rolled the fruit for about two hundred meters and even that had took us something like ten-fifteen minutes. However our enthusiasm went in vain when the lady of the house discovered that we were stealing something from her field and tried to follow us. We fled like thorough professionals leaving behind the evidence but none of our IDs. (quite smart ;0 ). And we even swapped the route for a longer one as a precautionary measure for the next two months.