'Naalu aappam!'
The waiter gave a faint nod, but moved ahead in a half-sprint.
'Hello, inga naalu plate aappam!', my father roared, for it was the fifth time he was placing our order.
The server pretended to be deaf and shot past us on his return.
It was my first outing in a restaurant in The Land of the Literates, and not, as you can see, the most auspicious of starts. Fortunately for him, the waiter took heed of our existence a minute before we lost all our temper. There was no reason to be polite with him. Of course, you cannot blame him for his inabilty to cater to his mealers' needs immediately; he was, after all, only one of the two waiters in the restaurant of seventeen tables. But you did not ask for his open disdain. You expected him to treat you as a fellow human, to acknowledge your impatience and help you understand, by word or gesture, that he would come to you in a minute.
Steaming hot aappams -- so divinely white, aromatic and soft that a year hence you can look at a posy of jasmines in a nuptial ceremony and remark, 'These blossoms remind me, above all things, the aappams I had in Ernakulam' -- in the society of tongue-electrifying chutney you wish you could have a ceaseless supply of off the tap in your kitchen, not to forget the kuruma of such delicacy that it would come back in your nightly dreams, were the items not placed on our table. Instead, the haste-is-my-motto waiter, pingponging between his tables and the kitchen like a honeybee between its flowers and the hive, thrust under our noses dishfuls of unpalatable stuff that, to touch, was somewhere between cotton and raw leather. In a moment, I discovered that the case wasn't different in terms of taste either. The man even had the audacity to serve us a bowl of clayey cow-pee full of dung-balls (the menu board had a name for it: channa kuruma). And what was spared in cryogenics! A crater in the night side of Pluto would have been less cold than our breakfast. The aappams had turned to vinyl rubber, and the chutney (I'd better not describe it) and kuruma were just short of freezing point. You can almost see the icy fumes.
I was to learn that it was among my best breakfasts in Kerala. The treatment was much more negative the next morning, in a restaurant en route Munnar hill-station. My brother couldn't help giving our waiter a piece of his mind; he was already in a foul mood, having vomited on the road, as is his habit when travelling above sea-level. On top of the forgettable service, the server, who seemed to wait at all the tables, handed us a bill (a number scrawled on a microscopic piece of paper) that demanded twenty bucks more than the actual sum. Truth be told, so many pet expletives crowded in my head that I couldn't select one to curse him. Only one hotel did not attract complaints in our tour, and it was run by a non-resident Tamilian.
Every Tata Indica in Ernakulam appeared to be the ombudsman's (in whose happening villa I stayed in my previous trip to the city two and a half years back), every sweet old lady with an astute face appeared to be his wife. Alas, I neither had the time nor address to bask once again in their wit and kindness. We had a rigid schedule drawn up, which laid a dam across personal interests. By 'we', I mean a not-so-small contingent of 96 people of all ages and sexes, comprising of my mother's colleagues and their nuclear families. [ 'How tall you have grown!', 'Are you the elder one or the younger?', 'Chinnu is your name, isn't it? Remember me?' ]
If you want a glimpse of life in Venice, visit Alappuzha. Its backwaters and water-lanes look so natural and inviting that you would never guess, unless you were a civil engineer of some sort, that they were fruits of tireless dredging. The lagoon is punctuated by long fingers of land, each as wide as a cricket pitch's length. People have built their homes on these strips, lined on one side by a dangerously narrow lane for two-wheelers -- dangerous not because of the water's depth, for these folk can swim in their sleep, but because of the snakes that snuggle in and out of crevices in the lower strata of the land's edges. We even witnessed a game of cricket, played by wet little boys, in progress. There was not a man or woman who didn't cheerfully wave at our two ferries in the dusklight.
That very night, our two buses carried us to a renowned Bhagavathi Amman Temple by a long journey rendered longer by the horrible highway. The road itself was reasonably fine and well-maintained; it was its width that tried the men that plied over it. The inmates of the houses running along the banks of the road must be living with a constant fear of becoming the point of collision of a drunk truck. Overtaking was ruled out on this ribbon of asphalt (unless it was a bicyclist in front), and when an omnibus or lorry confronted us from the opposite direction, our vehicles fused into one another, after which we isolated our molecules and advanced ahead. How on earth the government calls this backdoor alley a national highway is beyond me.
Once at the destination, I sent my parents on my behalf to make their one-way communication to the goddess in the shrine, and stayed back to watch the temple elephant have his supper. This was one shrewd pachyderm, availing all the grace and nonchalance in the world in his table manners. His trunk picks up a faggot of bamboos -- very, very casually -- and even as you wonder how it could fit in his mouth, Whack! -- the beast fractures the sticks by beating them against his front leg, the bamboos buckle up, and in goes the snack.
In Eravikulam National Park, the summit of the hill in which Munnar is situated, we had unfortunately picked the wrongest month of the year for a safari on foot. It was officially announced on the TV set in the govt. tourism van (which takes you up to the Park) that we were not to hope to spot any animals as the time was out of season. For a while, we travelled inside the clouds. Towards the valley-side, we could discern absolutely nothing. It was just a maddening white whichever direction you looked. At the National Park (a signboard claimed it was the 'cleanest' in the country), we found three ibices that stood still and posed elegantly to hordes of lenses. Apart from an icecream at that chilly altitude, this leg of our trip was without event.
Our stint at Munnar was marked by odious restaurants, rates shooting over MRP (as in any other hill-station), ill-managed traffic systems (terribility in this respect was at its peak {pun, as ever, intended} near the National Park), beholding scenic private tea plantations that had deforested entire hills, and losing our voices by screaming out in vain at a small vale cunningly misnomered Echo Point. A message board along the road downhill said, "World's Envy, Munnar's Pride".
Cochin Harbour was a whitemark in our tour. The industrious dockyard, splendid shoreline of skyscrapers, and armada of ships made up some real eye-candy. One staggering spectacle was that of the gargantuan liner Maersk, the deck of which bore export containers [those imposing cuboids one sees on road-hogging lorries] stacked up like matchboxes. We parked our ferry at a couple of places, once to visit St Francis Church, where Mr V. da Gama rested in peace for fifteen years, blissfully ignorant of the colonistic consequences of his voyage. He was then unburied and shipped to Lisbon. It was an old-fashioned Protestant church, with long, manually waved fans above the pews. Said the Sixth Commandment in the list etched on a plaque behind the altar: 'Thou shalt do no murder'. I wondered how many ova and schools of fish perished when Moses, without warning, sundered their part of the sea.
At the spot we had moored, a bunch of men were fishing with the aid of a ridiculous contraption. It was a Chinese invention, a large net held at its corners by a spidery wooden skeleton. The net is lowered by some kind of a pulley mechanism. Five or six men strain every sinew to tug it up, a string of rocks descending at the same time. All this huff and puff to trap six to eight fish, a cigarette packet and a pet bottle.
We were held up for a space of time near Athirapalli Falls as the Governor of Kerala and his motorcade overtook us and occupied a spot from which he had a fine long-range view. The cascade received thirty seconds of gubernatorial gaze, after which the beeline of cars buzzed off. Initially the Raj brothers fiercely protested their mother's notion of having their bath at the Falls, but gave in at the sight of the bathing site, hydrophiles being what they are. This bathing area was adjoining the head of the twin cataract, thus it was the water that washed us that formed a portion of the vertical rivulet of Athirapalli Waterfalls.
The jaunt ended on something of a disappointing note. His time constraints prevented the planned meeting between Dr Flea and I at the point of my departure, Ernakulam Junction. There again, my mom's friend's son puked generously, another kid slipped into the wrong train with his baggage, and the waiting room was packed, forcing the ladies of our group to squat on the floor near the station's entrance. It was with an effortless smile that I reclined in my berth as the train commenced pulling out of God's Own Country.
