To Kate Norton, who faced enormous hardships with remarkable courage and never lost her empathy or sense of humour.
I HAVE NEVER LIVED IN K ERALA . I AM WHAT YOU COULD CALL THE proverbial outsider, with a claim to being an insider.
My parents are both Keralites. They belong to Thrissur, whose centre is defined by the Swaraj Round, a roundabout, or the Round as everyone calls it.
At the heart of the Round sits Vadakkunnathan, an ancient Shiva temple. Each year in April, the town, the Round and my parents enter the whirlpool of the pooram , or to be more precise the Thrissur pooram.
Poorams are temple festivals, and the Thrissur pooram is the festival of them all. Keralites, even those who are not from Thrissur, descend on the Round for thirty-six hours of crushing, sweaty crowds, caparisoned elephants, drumbeats, and a theatrical changing of giant colourful parasols called kudamattom .
Staged as a fierce competition between two temple groups in Thrissur, Vadakkunnathan graces as the backdrop, presiding as a calm observer, soaking in the cacophony.
If you are a Keralite and leave town during the pooram, you are not really a Keralite, and if you are a foreigner visiting the pooram, as many do, you become a token Keralite.
I cant explain the fervour because Ive never fully understood it. Ive wondered why grown men abandon their families and their work, thronging the maidan, braving the heat that creates rivulets of sweat, making every curve of their body a messy waterfall of tiny trickles each day, all day, for those days.
My emotion has always stood at helplessness for the showstoppers the elephantswho bear the incessant cadence of the percussion orchestra, the prodding mahouts, the throbbing crowds and the thunderous fireworks called vedikettu . The pooram, to me, is a meticulously embroidered festival laced with brutality.
Ive tried to like the pooram twice, many years apart.
As a child, holding my grandfathers hand tightly, staring at the mass of legs in tucked-up mundus which looked like a thicket of mangroves, I remember being scooped up by him as the crowd broke loose amid shouts that an elephant had run amokthe anxiety of a lifetime flashing across his face in a minute.
The gentle elephants were standing still, tolerating, flapping their ears, cooling themselves. It was imagination running amok, led by a few drunk men in the oppressive vapour of the afternoon heat.
The next time I saw the pooram was as an adult. By then, I was festival-ready. I had learnt to grab good lookout spots at festivals, on the fringes of Kyoto, in Inverness and Trafalgar Square.
I was wrong about my preparedness. My second attempt at pooram, turns out, was worse than the first. I was the grown-up this time, chaperoning girls from Californiavisitors, fascinated by the festival, desperate for a local flavour.
As a child, holding my grandfathers hand tightly ... I remember being scooped up by him as the crowd broke loose amid shouts that an elephant had run amok.
Instead of legs, this time, hands were all I could see. Strangers hands, encircling hands, opportunistic hands wanting to brush their teenage bottoms. Eventually, the anxiety of it all overwhelmed us and we left sooner than we had intended.
The pooram and I never embraced, aborted by vulgar interludes.
The hero of Thrissur, the raison dtre for the Round, and the town itself remained a stranger to me until the pandemic forced me to revisit our relationship.
Isolation does that. It makes you look at things more closely, examine your relationships and surroundings in minutiae.
This book is about the unravelling of a town, stuck at the midpoint of a state, and me stuck inside my parents home in a mandatory quarantine. A stay that dehusked memoriesof things, places, peoplewho have nothing and everything in common. A recess that uncovered the townsfolk, and their relationship to the state, and my relationship to them.
A state wedged into the tip of India, imperfectly squeezed against the sea and the mountains, flexing itself for a sliver of spacea victim of high literacy, low poverty, unbending self-assuredness and elastic resilience.
The quarantine offered me a pause, even a welcome one, from things that keep us awakeambition, comparisons, responsibilities, bills, decisions, misgivings. The dreams we go to sleep onimagined discoveries in foreign places, outlandish things, new beginnings without endingsthe pandemic took away. It stamped only survival on our psyche.
In Kerala, I learnt to let go of the things that dont matter and find the ones that do. A spot between the past and the futurethe present.
This book started as a humdrum journal of my quarantine, until epiphanies emerged in the tiny detailsa remark here, an episode there that triggered a smile or a memory.
Kerala moved very quickly from a place I would occasionally visit to a place I could imagine as home. A place where Ive come to find a future in the present, the collective in the individual and humanity in the everyday. A slender passage to joy in a lingering pandemic.
M Y PARENTS, RETIRED, LIKE TO TELL EVERYONE THEY ARE SETTLED in Thrissur, but Im not sure that is entirely correct.
They are floating between two worlds. The hellish lure of Delhi with its impertinencethe street foods, the tandooris, the labyrinthine shopping streets, memories of their youth, parenting and us, their childrenall inescapably swathed in foul air. And the charm of Kerala, Gods own country to tourists, civilized, rested, efficient, unflappable and easy-pacedwrapped in shades of green.
This constant dashing about between Delhi and Thrissur means they still havent made up their minds whether they are Delhiites or Keralites, two vastly different species.
Mom and Dad are very much in the vulnerable category (only age-wise, I daresay) and are under a forced senior-citizens house arrest in the aftermath of the Covid lockdown.
In Thrissur, they live in the heart of the town, slightly away from relatives clustered in the suburbs. This choice of wanting some privacy has also left them isolated in a pandemic. Kerala has had a head start in the pandemic because it spotted a case as early as January 2020.
Its lockdown also kicked in earlier than the rest of India, leaving my parents cooped up at home for more than four months. This has taken a toll on my usually upbeat and fiercely independent parents.
Their calls to us in Delhi are more frequent, more anxious. Mom, at any rate, is conjuring up imaginary problemsa chest pain, a vague bad feeling and so on.
You both should be hereits work-from-home for everyone, so doesnt it apply to you?
She means me and my brother, my only sibling.
I tell her I am already working from home.
By late July, I give in. Ive had enough. As a former journalist, I get my share of fake news, believable news, bad news, unreported news and then some.
The latest rumour on the spread of Covid is the kind that would make headline news. Covid will grip eight million people in Delhi and its nearby areas in a few months, and it will unravel unstoppably.
