Star-Crossed

Early fall here on the Maryland countryside. The receding sun conspires with a compliant vegetation to bathe the land in hues of orange, yellow, and gold. It seems like a place far far away from the irrepressible greenery of Kerala, until a perfectly blended breeze brings the scent of ripening wild berries, reminding me of the essence of gingergrass swaying on the hillsides of the Western Ghats. Nature likes to play tricks on you, taking you far away one moment and holding you close in the next. Or it could be that our interpretation of experiences is colored by childhood memories.

Which is why the unrelenting rain that forms the backdrop of Ennu Ninte Moideen (a recent hit Malayalam movie) was a comforting presence than a distracting nuisance. The gripping tale of love across unbridgeable feudal taboos … wait a minute … this is not a movie review. I am not a movie critic, nor a poet or given to philosophy. I am here to talk about how watching this movie and some inside knowledge about its producers brought memories of my close encounters with the Malayalam filmdom—encounters that kindled hopes of, you know, starpower, celebrity, and the good life, only to crash and burn like a half-smoked beedikutti (a cigarette butt) thrown on the roadside.

I had read somewhere that moviemaking is the graveyard of NRI dreams, a land where overseas Indians enter to divest themselves off their hard-earned earnings. The endeavor carries enormous risk, foremost being the unknowable, or more likely nonexistent, rules of financing and dealmaking in Kerala. Throw in the noxious mix of the astrologers, superstition, and the underworld that hold sway in large swaths of life, and you get the picture of why the less risk tolerant left for safer pastures in the first place.

A bizarre meeting with a leading Malayalam movie actor added to my puzzlement when I heard the news that local Malayalis were venturing to produce a movie in Kerala. On a fine Saturday evening a few years back, I found myself in the company of about five other long-term Washingtonians seated around an ornate dining table at a friend’s house. Holding court at the head of the table was the actor, by all appearances a decent fellow. The actor’s identity is not germane to my point, so I will skip that. What is important is that he was describing in excruciating detail certain goings-on inside the Obama White House. The tale involved some Hindu sacred verses, a priest, and one of those tiny statues of Hindu gods that are handed out in some temples. It was a totally delusional account with not a hint of a connection to reality. Yet there he was speaking with an air of certainty that would put a mathematician contemplating the permanence of the Euler’s Formula to shame. Even worse, not one among his captive audience mustered the courage to challenge his fantastic account. We sat around nodding our heads like eager kindergartners listening to their school teacher reading the Rumpelstiltskin.

Risky move, remarkable success

So, naturally, I raised my eyebrows in disbelief when my wife mentioned the local movie entrepreneurs. I was struck especially by the irony that the encounter with the imaginative movie star had occurred at the home of one of the producers! But then it is for good reason that he is an entrepreneur and I am not. Against seeming odds, the movie went on to be a critically acclaimed hit, catapulting the producers into the frontlines of Malayalam moviedom.

"Sour grapes, huh?" my wife asked, seeing my skepticism. She had heard evolving versions of my brush with the stars, each retelling slightly bitter sounding than the previous.

It started in the 8th grade. I was walking along the school campus with a bunch of classmates when a teacher yanked me from the group and paraded me in front of some visitors. They looked me over head to toe, discussed in hushed tones what sounded like my physical inadequacies, a lack of height in particular, and dismissed me as quickly as I was summoned. I later learned that the visitors were scouting for a young actor. Tantalizingly close, yet not to be.

Being considered and rejected is one thing, being ignored altogether is quite another. And when the person ignoring you is the great Balachandra Menon (a Malayalam actor-screenplay writer-director with a pronounced self-aggrandizing streak), the pain sticks with you. Here’s what happened.

It wasn’t until college that I had my next brush with the film world. Due to strikes and hazing (ragging)-related closures, our academic calendar was in shambles. To make up for the lost time, our batch was in a rare summer session, while others were out enjoying their break. However, it turned out that the stars were aligned in our favor, so to speak. A film crew landed on the campus and started shooting a movie. Naturally, our class provided the backdrop, and we the extras. 

(Courtesy: gaana.com)

It was Mr. Menon and his cast filming Prema Geethangal (Love Songs). Although we put on airs and showed an adversarial front initially, things turned amicable as soon as Mr. Menon began shooting scenes in our class and the beautiful actress Ambika smiled at us from across the set. I ended up fleetingly in some scenes. The result was momentarily pleasing. For a few days after the movie release, kids in my neighborhood chased me around yelling "Prema Geethangal!" "Prema Geethangal!"

Ambika

A few years later I was visiting Girijacheechi (an elder relative) in Thiruvananthapuram (the capital of Kerala). She is a gentle, soft-spoken woman of grace and exquisite beauty. She also makes the most delicious idlis (steamed rice cakes typically served at breakfast) in the world. That morning, she made an idli breakfast and left to visit the Sree Padmanabhaswami temple. Her husband, the editor of a movie magazine, was away on business. As I was devouring the fluffy milky-white idlis by the mouthful, someone knocked at the door. Holding my right arm behind my back, I opened the door. There in front stood Mr. Balachandra Menon. For a moment I thought I saw his eyebrows furrow in strained recognition. After all, I was on the frontlines of the group that gave him grief at the college. But if he did, he drew on his deep experience and feigned ignorance.

“Is Mr. Gopi around?” he asked.

“No, he is away on travel. May I help you?” I answered, seeking to prolong the conversation.

“No thanks,” he said. “Just tell him I came by.”

With that, he turned around and headed for his car.

For days, I played around alternative scenarios in my mind, rueing the lost opportunity. But none provided a realistic pathway to regain Mr. Menon’s attention and leverage that as a springboard to stardom. I went back to preparing applications for my graduate studies in the U.S.

My father had better luck, at least for the length of a train journey. He was traveling from Thrissur, AC 2nd class on the Madras Mail, for a business trip. He was alone in the cabin and was browsing through his papers when a bearded gentleman joined him on the opposite seat. After some initial pleasantries, the gentleman introduced himself.

“I am Joshi,” he said. “I am a Malayalam movie director.”

It didn’t help that my father wasn’t a frequent consumer of Malayalam cinema. He was aware of Nazeer and the buxom Sheila from his youth, but Joshi, a director, not. The conversation would have ended right there, except Mr. Joshi bent down and picked up his suitcase. He placed it carefully on his lap, opened it, and produced a bottle of scotch, which he planted squarely in the middle of the shared tray table. Needless to say, the rest of the journey was quite pleasant, with free-flowing conversation about the superiority of Malayalam films over Bollywood fare.

For me though, bad luck continued. Back in college, the university youth festival was approaching. By then I was a Master's student and thus accorded some undue respect. Perhaps because of that, I was recruited to a stage play based on an Anton Chekhov story. After some intense practice sessions directed by a talented student from the nearby School of Drama, the play went on to win the top prize at the youth festival. Although in the beginning, it seemed I was the lead character and another student played the supporting role, he ended up winning the best actor award. I was given the 2nd best actor.

“You know, there is no such thing as a 2nd best actor. There is the best actor, and the rest,” a friend helpfully pointed out.

That put a quick end to my acting bid. The fate of the play’s director went in a quite different direction. He was Shyamaprasad, who would go on to direct several substantive movies, winning well-deserved fame and recognition¹.

Let the fact win at the cost of dignity
(Courtesy: Mathrubhoomi Weekly, July 13, 2014)

And that’s why I was so excited when, a few years back, my wife announced:

“Hey, they are screening a Malayalam movie in the Montgomery College auditorium. You wanna go?”

“What’s so special about it to sacrifice a Saturday evening?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s Ore Kadal. It’s directed by Shyamaprasad,” she said.

“Wait a minute. Shyamaprasad? That’s interesting,” I said recalling the connection.

“The movie is about the extramarital relationship between an economist and a housewife,” she continued, tempting me with the storyline.

“Now that’s really interesting! What are the odds of that?,” I said, knowing a thing or two about economists, if not housewives. “We gotta go.”

Aside from curiosity about what this fictional economist was up to in his spare time, I had an ulterior motive for going to the movie. The announcement said the director will meet with the audience after the screening for a Q & A session. I could meet with Mr. Shyamaprasad, bring up how we were buddies one time—heck I believe we had a drink or two during the rehearsals—and get a toehold that was denied earlier.

So I went to the movie with my wife and our friend Lekha. I don’t remember much about the movie except wondering, “Why an economist?” “Why an economist?” At the end of the movie, Mr. Shyamaprasad appeared at the front of the auditorium. Once the Q&A was over, I walked down the steps to meet him.

I shook his hands and said “ I am Jayachandran,” using my full first name.

“Hello,” he greeted in return.

“You once directed a play at the Kerala Agricultural University youth festival. Remember?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“The play won the first prize for best drama,” I continued.

“Yes,” he said, looking sideways at an attractive woman who was approaching from his left side.

“I was in that play,” I persisted, prodding his memory.

“Yes.”

He glanced to his left and started wringing his hands as the woman drew closer. Then he turned back at me. His face had a look of boredom and he appeared ready to yawn, bringing the back of his palm toward his mouth.

“OK, nice meeting you. Best wishes, “ I offered. But he had already turned toward the woman. Beaming at her, he asked “Cinema ishtappetto?” (Did you like the movie?).

I turned around and headed for the exit.

Seeing my skepticism about the movie business, my wife asked “Sour grapes, huh?”

I think not.

---

1 I thank Vinod Variyam for providing me a copy of the Mathrubhoomi Weekly with the picture of Mr. Shyamaprasad and the cast of a college stage play he directed. For the record, the picture is of a play staged in my senior year. The Anton Chekhov play mentioned in the article, which won me the nonexistant 2nd best actor award, was staged a year later.^↩

Aanavandi: The Elephant Ride

The morning after

I was among those caught in the great traffic logjam of the 2010 Washington, DC, Snowmageddon. Left the office at 4:00 PM that February evening, spent 11 hours in a standing-room-only commuter bus, and reached home at 3:00 AM, driving over 20 inches of snow on the road. As harrowing as the trip was, one thing stands out in memory: the two Malayalis on the bus endured the ordeal well, taking all the hell breaking loose around us in stride. But there is no mystery to this.

Icicles

I hadn’t met the guy standing beside my aisle seat before, but he was recognizably Indian, perhaps a Mallu. About 3 hours into the journey, I offered him the seat, volunteering to stand for a while. He gratefully accepted. A little later, he whipped out a smartphone and started talking to what sounded like his son, instructing him about homework and telling him to obey his mother. The conversation continued with his wife, more genially. It was all in Thiruvananthapuram-accented Malayalam, the “entharappi?” kind. (Sorry, there ain't no English words to translate this. “How’s it going mate?” doesn’t even come close.) When he was done, I turned to him and, with what might have looked to him like a pulicha chiri (sheepish grin) said, “Malayali analle?” (Malayali aren’t you?).

We had a quick catch up conversation, the techi informing me that he was talking to his family in Kerala. Cool! Meanwhile, the bus was stuck just outside downtown Silver Spring in the massive traffic jam. Snow fell unrelentingly, cars lay strewn all around having slipped off the lanes, and part of the town lost electricity from downed wires. Hordes of men sloshed around in the snow trying to unknot mess by pushing cars up a hill. People on the bus were restless. A guy in the back yelled a series of instructions to the hapless driver on how to drive in the snow. The lady seated in front of me appeared distressed. She kept repeating “we won’t reach home tonight, we will be stuck here for ever, what are we going to do?” Finally, she looked at us and said, “You are calm. How are you so calm?”

Aanavandi heading to Vagamon
(Credit: ksrtcblog.com)

The Malayali and I exchanged knowing glances. As if to finish his thought I said “Aanavandiyil yathracheythittundengil ithonnum onnumalla!” (If you have been on the elephant ride, this is nothing!)

* * *

There are many theories why Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) buses are called aanavandi or the elephant ride (strictly translated elephant vehicle, but I like ride). One is that the name comes from the pair of elephants from the State seal embossed on the KSRTC logo. But other theories are equally plausible. The buses themselves are lumbering giants, plodding along the roadways, paying little heed to what else is on the road. When they speed up, much like a tusker in madham (heat), aanavandis have great potential for mayhem, with little liability. And the sight of them arrayed in the KSRTC bus stand, with a touch of imagination, resembles the caparisoned elephants lined up during a pooram (temple festival).

(Credit: ksrtcblog.com)

With the aanavandi it’s a love-hate relationship. There are plenty of reasons for the hate, built on a lifetime of missed appointments, sordid bus stands, and unionized staff down to the imperious peon behind the customer service counter. The source of love is nebulous. That the competition, offered by rickety private buses, was weak, maybe one reason. The private buses employed the kili (the conductor’s sidekick), whose antics, particularly around attractive female passengers, forever sullied the enterprise’s reputation. Private buses fought for passengers, employing every trick in the book, including the kili's rather undignified route announcements: “Guruvayoor, Guruvayoor, Guruvayoor; Mundoore, Kaiparambu, Kecheri, Koonammoochi vazhi, Guruvayoor, Guruvayoor, Guruvayoor.

The scenic Udumbanchola
(Credit: allkeralatour.blogspot.com)

The aanavandi crew cared little. No route announcements or rounding up passengers here. Being a public enterprise, revenue wasn’t a concern. Aanavandi took its own sweet time to show up—or not, as was often the case, halted 50 yards past the designated bus stop and sped off, boarding half the waiting passengers. Like a coy love interest, this don’t-care attitude added a certain degree of hard-to-get appeal. To top it off, the Corporation held a trump card—a monopoly over long-distance routes. Whether for a romantic outing or an urgent family errand, there were few other options if you had to travel from Ollur to Udumbanchola.

* * *

My experiences with aanavandi were forged early. Every once in a while, traveling from our tharavadu (ancestral home) to Thrissur, my mother took the circuitous Mupliyam route. The only available bus was an aanavandi. And boy did it stand us up! On more occasions than I care to remember, the bus cancelled—a no show. When it did show up, it was going in the opposite direction at the appointed time! That meant an hour more of wait until the bus went to Mupliyam, turned around and came back. Luckily we had Karthavinte peedika (a friend’s shop), where we sat on a bench and caught-up on the latest happenings around Nandipulam (the village).

Who needs doors?
(Credit: ksrtcblog.com)

My mother was no exception; elders seemed to prefer aanavandi over private buses. My father had the aanavandi schedule by heart for short trips from Poochatty to Thrissur. He ignored private buses packed with unruly "concession" students paying a fraction of the regular fare and waited patiently for aanavandi. Aanavandi returned the favor, preferring quiet office goers over noisy college kids. It admitted concession students only if they got a pass from the Corporation headquarters in the town. This extra hurdle dissuaded most students except good looking coeds going to St. Mary’s college or the Vimala. Which is precisely why I made the trip to the Corporation HQ and procured the said pass. For about a year, I tried this tack, taking the aanavandi to Thrissur town and catching the college bus back to the varsity—a route that looks like an upside down U on the map. This transit pattern added an hour to my college commute, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The girls on the aanavandi weren’t a least bit impressed. I ended my pursuit and switched to the lonely and shorter ride on a bike to the college.

My connection with aanavandi though, wasn’t all about missed buses or futile pursuit of college beauties. There is a deeper family connection that accounts for my fascination with aanavandi: Raviammaman, my uncle, whose ambition it was to become a KSRTC conductor, a job he ultimately secured and cherished for years, ably serving the passengers along the Thrissur-Vellikulangara route.

Raviammaman was a KSRTC aficionado, especially fond of those long-haul “Fast Passenger” buses headed to obscure destinations in the Western Ghats. If he caught a “Kattappana-Mananthavady Fast” to travel from Alwaye to Amballur, you were sure to hear him crow about it. Amballur was by no means a regular stop for a long-distance bus. But Raviammaman had his way with the crew. He’d cosy up to conductor, exchange gossip about the employee union’s wrangling with the Corporation for a higher Dearness Allowance (a perk), and convince him to make an extra stop at Amballur.

Thiruvananthapuram-Mananthavady Express
(Credit: ksrtcblog.com)

A trip I took with him from Thiruvananthapuram to Thrissur is seared in memory. By the time we polished off a meal of masala dosa and coffee at the Arya Bhavan and walked over to the Thampanoor bus stand across the road, it was getting late in the evening. But the late hour didn’t deter Raviammaman. He was hellbent on taking the “Express” bus. Compared with the red and beige-painted Fast Passengers, the Express buses were painted green, their seats had headrests, there were fewer of them on the road, and they charged a higher fare—not exactly attributes that called for extra adulation. But I was pretty young, in sixth grade I think, and had little voice. I followed him through the crowds as he darted from one bus to another looking for the Express. When he found one, it was through the dreaded mountainous MC road, not via the placid coastal Alappuzha. No matter. Raviammaman, he must have been in his mid-twenties then, had a smile of satisfaction on his face that said, “exactly what I was looking for.”

When we started boarding, it quickly became clear that this was going to be one long night’s journey. The bus was standing room only. We were pushed to the front, near the driver’s seat, which Raviammaman viewed a privilege. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the overhead handrails, so I held on to a stanchion, resting my back against a seat corner. As the bus sped from Kottarakkara, Adoor, and Pandalam on the way to Kottayam, the bumpy ride tossed me around like a pinata hung on a pole. The bus’s headlights cut bright swaths through the pitch darkness, dancing about in unison when the driver switched from low beam to high beam to warn the oncoming traffic. Out the windshield, I watched in terror the bus screeching past overloaded lorries, careening dangerously close to vertical drops. I was sick to the stomach and sleepy. My knees buckled when I nodded off, jolting me awake every other minute. Twisting and turning past Muvattupuzha, Perumbavoor, and Kalady, the bus reached the plains of Angamaly and continued on the wider and level NH-47.

It was close to 3:00 AM when the bus made an unscheduled stop at Ollur. Raviammaman tapped me on my shoulder and pushed me out the door.

“Why did we get down here?” I asked. “I thought we’d get off at Thrissur and take a bus to Poochatty.”

“This is the easy route. It is a short walk from here to your home,” he said, avoiding looking at me.

When I insisted with the questioning, he admitted the real reason for cutting the trip short at Ollur: He had run out of money!

So, after a 9-hour red eye journey traversed standing up in the Express aanavandi, all we had to do to get home was an hour and half’s walk on foot at 3:00 in the morning. But Raviammaman had it figured out. Here’s how he put it:

“Athineda? Evidennu korach nadanna Padavaradu. Athukazhinja Anddi Company. Ennittu valau thirinja Kuttallore. Kuttellorennu paadathekkirangi neere nadanna Variyathethi!” (What’s there to it? Just a short walk from here we reach Padavaradu. After that it’s the cashew nut factory. A turn later we reach Kuttanellur. From there we walk down to the paddy fields and a short walk later, we reach home!) I didn’t know Raviammaman had looked up Lao Tzu for inspiration: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Little wonder 11 hours seated in a stranded bus was a cake walk.

* * *

Oh my! Sleek.
(Credit: ksrtcblog.com)

But listen, that’s all in the past. Aanavandi has moved on. And gotten hip too. There’s a website, a fan blog (quite a good one), and an Android app. Double decker buses and AC low-floors adorn its fleet. Admittedly, there’s bit of the long-standing issue with revenue. Hey, which public entity in Kerala isn’t a white elephant?

Recently, the esteemed Kerala High Court had the gall to suggest KSRTC be dismantled and turned into a private corporation. Nothing would happen if KSRTC is shut down and liquidated, the court allegedly claimed.

Really? Folks, if you have been on the elephant ride, tell me how that would make you feel.

You can count on one fan being unhappy. Very unhappy.

---

[Author thanks ksrtcblog.com for all ksrtc pictures as credited.]

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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