Welcome Currents

They stand astride the landscape like an alien life form, towering over us, but gentle. The earthlings have parted a way for these giants on their march across the valleys and over the hills, fading into the distance in the morning fog. Surely you have paused to take a second look, feeling dwarfed by their presence, or to ponder over the mysteries of the force they carry.

Manali river, near Moorkanikkara

I first noticed them—those soaring four-footed high-tension transmission towers—up close on either side of the Thrissur-Valakkavu road, about a half-kilometer ahead of Moorkanikkara “city,” as they called it. I trekked this route as a child with my achamma (paternal grandmother) on our way to pray at the Veembu temple, situated a few hundred yards east of Moorkanikkara city center, on the shores of the Manali river as it meanders southward on its way to Puthur. The “city” moniker was about the only thing modern about Moorkanikkara and its greater surroundings. The region was untouched by development, except for the paved road and a few buses that plied the route. Along the roadside, particularly centered around Nadathara, colonies of Kumbhara households engaged in pottery in the same way the craft had existed for a 1,000 years. They spoke a peculiar fast-paced dialect, which I later learned is a blend of Malayalam and Telugu. The rest of the folks worked in the paddies or in the Anddi Company (cashew nut factories) around Kuttanelloor.

Veembu temple today

Amidst this rural setting, the high-rising transmission towers added a touch of other-worldliness and industrial might; a promise of better things to come. And, perhaps because they passed so near-by, electricity came rather early to my paternal home at Eravimangalam—in 1974. Life has never been the same since! While nocturnal illumination was a welcome relief, the arrival of electricity set off several unanticipated and occasionally unsavory changes in the way we lived our lives. Among other things, it would turn our pious Variyam household into a den of thieves.

Just as the arrival of the British did, the advent of electricity pitted us against our neighbours, and worse, against each other. Well, at least the kids against our grandmother. If you recall, by 1974 the Apollo missions had wound down and a dozen men had walked on the moon. But achamma had little regard for these giant leaps of mankind. Badayi! she would say dismissively. How could you ever land on the moon she asked, for approaching the moon would see you burst into flames faster than a bone-dry konjatta (coconut sheath) thrown into a raging pit fire. She was the iron lady before the likes of Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher came along and nobody dared confront her with reasoning to the contrary.

Yet, a Luddite she wasn’t. One of her precious possessions was a radio. She was an ardent radio fan, and her routine, which rarely deviated from a mode of continuous work starting at 3:30 AM, was synced from wake-up to bedtime with the AIR schedule. She appreciated the convenience electricity provided. What she hated about it was the monthly dues. Her distaste created constant friction with the kids, who were more in tune with the possibilities of this modern marvel, and didn’t give a hoot about the electricity bill. Chills go down my spine to this day when I recall the dressing down I got for sleeping through a steamy summer night under a running fan. My cousin, aptly nicknamed Naradan (a puranic rishi known for double-dealing and stoking conflict between unsuspecting victims, allegedly for the greater good), who instigated the splurge, slid away quietly, leaving me alone to face her wrath. Who could blame her though?  It took the meagre returns from her kazhakam (inherited Hindu temple duties) at the Veembu temple to balance the household’s monthly budget.

And so, on a glorious summer day in 1974, with the house newly wired to welcome the current, and three agonizing hours of wait after the appointed time, electric lights flickered on in our house for the first time!

It is one thing though to get the posts erected, the cables drawn, the house wired, and have the electricity flowing in flickers and bursts, quite another to keep it flowing reliably day and night. Apparently, this part of the deal is something that a mammoth State apparatus, fondly called the KSEB (aka the Electricity Board), hadn’t mastered (and hasn’t since). So, our euphoria over electricity’s advent didn’t last long. The grim reality of battling the bureaucracy, the nature, and drunken “linemen” soon became a parallel reality in our daily lives.

Gathering thunderstorm ...

It didn’t take much for the lights to go off. A moderate wind, the hint of a thunderstorm, or a cross lineman, all led to instant blackout. Calling the electricity office was out of the question since it would take another good 20 years for the telephone to show up in our household. The only option was to get on a bike and go after the lineman, bribe him suitably (should you be lucky enough to locate him), and pray that he can fix the blown fuse during the brief instances when he snapped out of his inebriated state. Soon enough though, we developed some workarounds.

... and Edavapathi (monsoon) not far behind

The first involved the clever use of a signal for deciding the next move. This arose from the primeval instinct, or plain jealousy if you will, that comes from knowing that your neighbor has electricity, you don’t.

With electricity’s arrival, Kamalettan, our next door neighbor, developed a habit we found handy as a binary signal. If he lost power, he would be out of his house in seconds bellowing “currendu poyi!, currendu poyi!,” (“lost electricity!”) which we could hear comfortably from our living room. We never figured out what he hoped to gain by running out of his house and yelling currendu poyi—it certainly wasn’t to inform us. But we took it as a signal that there was a general power outage, not just at our house. Our response? “Oh samadhanaayi” (“oh what a relief”). With that, we scrambled to light up the arriccalambu (hurricane lamp), mottavilakku (a small kerosene lamp with a bulbous chimney), or the plain old nilavilakku (a tiered ceremonial oil lamp).

If we didn’t hear Kamalettan yelling currendu poyi!, currendu poyi!, the news was worse: he had electricity, we didn’t; we were alone in the outage. Chathichu!, (betrayed!) we yelled and peered across the paddy fields for the faint light from homes on the other side, with the desperate hope that they went dark as well. More often than not, Kamalettan’s signal proved reliable: Houses across the paddies would be lit, confining us to endure the many dark hours ahead, alone.

Author's daughter on a walk along the paddy fields

Desperation breeds discovery. Being left in the dark one-night-too-many, we discovered the “post-shaking” maneuver. During one exam season, after spending the daylight hours waiting for the lineman to show up to no avail, we set out to look for him. We walked toward the nearest electric post from which the line to our house ran and which housed a fuse box. As I loitered, cousin Naradan, the clever and purposeful one—graduating from a local school of no particular distinction, he easily aced the hyper-competitive state medical entrance—started tugging the post’s anchoring cable. After a few tugs, the post started swaying and suddenly out flew a shower of electric sparks from the top. As Naradan looked up triumphantly and I ran for cover, we heard someone yelling from the house, “currendu vannu!” (“electricity is back!”). Voila!

The word spread about the maneuver and the next time when the current went out, the order came straight from achamma: “poyi aa postonne kulikki nokke,” (“go try shaking that post”). The effort had a 50-percent hit rate, not bad considering the alternative of rounding up the oil and kerosene lamps. Soon though, an even more … I am groping for the best word, … reliable, method fell into our lap when the lords at KSEB kindly granted our application for agricultural power supply.

Now, the agricultural power supply scheme is the crown jewel of poorly designed policies promulgated by pandering politicians. I won’t go into the nuances; you can easily look up how this and other vote-bank subsides bankrupt the country, while the disenfranchised poor struggle without food, water, sanitation, and health care. But we were beneficiaries, thank you, and it added another weapon in our arsenal to put electricity on the table lamp.

The pumphouse, less used now

The tariff on power for agricultural use is much lower than for household use—that’s where the subsidy comes in. But the subsidy wasn’t the best part. An agricultural connection meant now we had extra lines of power into our homestead. So, when the lights went dark in the house, the question was, did the the pumphouse have power?  If it did, the only thing standing between us and getting the lights juiced up was an irksome edict against electricity theft. But this little objection never entered our calculus. Perhaps we were hardened by the years-long suffering as a paying customer of the unempathic monopoly, which seemed to consider your standing in an endless line to pay for services not rendered as a privilege it bestows upon you. If the pumphouse had power, a mini-celebration broke out and the foolhardy ones got on with the risky task of drawing a line from the pumphouse switchboard to a plug in the house. This single line then powered the entire household until the current was back up in the regular household line. Looking back, I have absolutely no idea by what freakish stretch of luck this arrangement never led to an accident.

Electricity’s arrival brought a curious societal upheaval: the rise of the wiremen. Suddenly, a section of able-bodied but unemployed youth who were into full-time thera para nadakkal (sort of like endless hangin’ out) found an acceptable alternative. Get a set of pliers, pick up a couple of screwdrivers, and hang some electric wire coiled around the shoulder and there you have a wireman ready and willing to attend to your electrical needs. Granted it looks dubious from your vantage point of ISO 9000 certifications for all and sundry, but hey, someone had to lay the wiring, install the fans, and repair the motor pumps. And the KSEB, in the mold of other ossified public enterprises, was unwilling to swim with the current.

From this upheaval rose up the tag team of Joy (pronounced Joyeee) and Cleatus that served as our pump repairmen. Like fellow wiremen, their qualifications for the tasks they sought, accepted, and carried out remained murky. And the results were all too evident—the pumps were in a permanent state of disrepair. Yet, through carefully staged deference and liberal dose of flattery, the enterprising duo continued to earn business from our grandmother. Upon the slightest hint of pump trouble, she commanded: “poyi aa Joyeeyem Cleeshousnem vilikku” (“go call that Joy and Cleeshous”). She could never pronounce Cleatus.

Joy and Cleatus, though, had to be content with our motor pump business; they were never able to reel in our wiring jobs. In this, they were one-upped by a newly minted wireman, Ramankutty. Ramankutty hailed from Moorkanikkara, near the Veembu temple. There, he slyly cornered achamma as she chatted up homeowners and shop owners on her way back from kazhakam duties. Whatever her strengths, achamma had a pronounced weakness for flattery. Ramankutty homed in on this just as Joy and Cleatus had, and Choli Govindan before them (read about Choli). Pretty soon he was at our house doing odd wiring jobs, replacing broken switches, and fixing noisy fans. It would have been fine if he was confined to these tasks. But he had his eyes on a bigger prize—wiring our kitchen and dining room during the remodeling.

Our house was showing its age. The corner of the house that enclosed the kitchen was settling and the roof tiles were beginning to slip as a result. Bamboo pillars supporting the eaves were in danger of crumbling any moment. Ramunnair, a well-mannered rasikan (a person with a way with words), pointed out the urgency to achamma:

“Ammini Varasyaree, veedinde ee bhagham aana kombukuthiya polendu!”  (“Madam, this side of the house resembles a supplicating elephant!”).

Work began in short order to redo the kitchen and dining hall. What transpired is a comedy of errors of the first order, a story for another day. It began, however, with Ramankutty winning the sole-source contract to install the electrical fixtures and concealed wiring.

To say Ramankutty bungled the job would be heaping praise on him. Let us see: when the circuit was switched on, the adage that anything that can go wrong will go wrong took on a whole new meaning. One fan in the dining room spun uncontrollably while the other wobbled violently from side to side. An external flood light came on and refused to go off. Switches in the kitchen lit up dining room lights. Several switches appeared to be there for the show; they weren’t connected to anything. Conversely, some lights didn’t have switches. A junction box started fuming and acrid smoke filled the air. To top it all off, the kitchen wall got wet from an overflowing water tank above. When our mother rested her hands on the wall while cooking, she got an electric shock; a concealed wire was feeding current into the walls!

When asked what went wrong, Ramankutty’s response was a classic in the annals of weasel words: “Athangane varullo,” (“That’s the way it comes about”). So we pulled the plug on Ramankutty, right? Wrong. He survived the fiasco and did the rewiring and refitting. Achamma accepted this because she wanted a measure of redemption for her poor judgement. Over the next several years, as we children grew in age and achamma’s power declined commensurately, Ramankutty’s influence waned and eventually disappeared.

Happy faces in front of the three-phase circuit box

The “post shaking” maneuver and the stealthy pumphouse connection lasted another good twenty years until the KSEB gave us a three-phase connection to the home and the backup “inverter” technology came along. Joy, Cleatus, and Ramankutty were replaced by a new band of wiremen. The problems shifted to fixing the water heater, internet backup power, and voltage stabilizers. The monthly ritual of standing in line to pay the dues was cast aside by a simple automatic withdrawal from the bank account. Thus, four decades after electricity’s arrival, there is progress to report. But, where one woe ended, others took its place: weak voltage and capricious “load shedding” blackouts. At one time, the current was so weak that we used 110 volt bulbs on the 220 volt lines. It worked brilliantly until sudden surges in power burned out the bulbs unpredictably.

And so, the electrified life in the Eravimangalam environs remains as entertaining as ever. Whether providing such entertainment to the masses has been a secret goal of the benevolent KSEB, I do not know. But the Board remains committed to customer first, that much I am sure. How else to explain the notice erected in front of our venerable electricity office?  In short, its says:

Announcement: For the attention of respected customers and the public. Our office building is ancient, leaking, termite-infested, and extremely dangerous. The office cannot continue to function at this location in this state. Therefore, considering the safety of our workers and customers, we are forced to relocate our office to another building.

Awwww. Do you feel a lump in your throat?

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