Onam, the joys of being at home, and the memories they evoke

A digital camera I purchased recently and an unusually long stay at home during Onam made me walk around clicking. I had hardly clicked pictures before. For reasons unknown I always shied away from taking photographs even when I was asked to. I don’t even know how to use an SLR. Once I saw three men in a mall sitting on a bunch right under a name board that shouted ‘scary house’ with perplexed expressions on their faces. It would’ve been a very good photograph had I got an opportunity to click, but just like unheard melodies are sweeter, unclicked photographs are greater. Imagine, I try to click them and they ‘pose.’

On ‘uthradam’ my nieces came home (rumour had it that they were sent to their grandparents because their mom found them unmanageable during the holidays: D). It was real good fun. Though most of the times ‘chechi’ and ‘aniyathi’ got on to my nerves with their noisy games and quarrels, it was just great to have them around. By evening they declared that ‘tomorrow we will do ‘pookkalam’ and I was the one assigned with the task of getting flowers from the market. Yes, from the market. I hate to lament the loss of the so called halcyon days. But the fact is that the once ubiquitous ‘thumba’ or ‘mukkutti’ were nowhere to be seen. So we had to be content with whatever I got from the flower market (not bad though, we got 10 colours somehow by adding hibiscus and mosanda that grow in the compound). I’m exceptionally bad at things which are even remotely associated with art. I can’t even draw a line properly. But still, I agreed to do the floral pattern. Thus the tree of us, me and the kids, with their suggestions, quarrels, protests and even walk-outs, finished it at last. And they even congratulated me saying that it came out pretty well and was way beyond their expectations: D

I don’t how many of you are familiar with ‘Onappottan’. It’s a custom in Malabar, especially in the erstwhile Kadathanadu. During Onam, ‘Onappottan’ visits every household and is given rice, clothes and money. Nowadays the emphasis is more on money. As the name suggests, ‘Onappottan’ doesn’t talk, he communicates solely with gestures. It was when I tried to click ‘Onappottan’ that I realized that I can never be a photographer. A photographer needs to approach his subject objectively. I found it impossible to treat the figure which I’ve been seeing since childhood (As a kid I used to watch him timidly from behind the door or clinging fiercely on my mother while my sister, 3 years younger, terrified me by trying to grab me outside and in the process terrified the ‘Onappottan’ too.)objectively. I felt that I was making fun of him. So I clicked the photographs trying not to bother or attract his attention.

There is yet another figure who was an inevitable part of my childhood. Unlike ‘Onappottan’, this man clad in a neat dhoti and shirt, comes with a small drum (edakka) to ward off evil during the month of ‘karkkidakam’. He sings in his mellifluous voice while gently tapping on his drum. After years of listening to his song the only words I could pick from it was ‘mullu muratu moorkhan pambu’. I think it had been 5 or 6 years since I saw him. However, his face, the jet-black spring- like hair and the lean figure is still afresh in memory. I would like to call him ‘Cleopatran’ for the man looked exactly as I saw him for the first time when I saw him last; ‘age cannot wither him’.

No matter how busy one is one should always find time for ‘spirit’ual activities? Don’t you think so? Though me and my friends didn’t drink on Onam we had it the previous day, a bottle of Johnny Walker Gold Label and then an Antiquity. Hope all of you had a wonderful Onam!