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Sashi Kodasseri

The most vivid memory I have of Calicut is sitting in the patio of my tharawad (or ancestral home in Kerala) and singlehandedly running through an entire jackfruit with the frenzy of a pit bull terrier. My mother sat nearby with a look that hovered between morbid fascination and incredulity.

Midway through the gorging I heard her say, "Don't eat that whole thing. You'll regret it."

I didn't believe her. I had a point to prove -- that I could eat it 'like a man' (that's what I told her). So she let me prove my point. Which I did. My bowels had convulsions for three straight days after that.

That was in the early 1970s. I was 9 years old. My brother and I were on vacation from boarding school. My parents, little sister in tow, had taken a month's holiday from their base in Kuwait, to tramp around the countryside with us, starting from Calicut.

Those days Calicut had the atmosphere of a village, though it was a regular town, with a municipal corporation, a mayor and other civic trappings normally associated with bigger cities.

The men only wore white cotton mundus (a dhoti-like ankle length white cloth that's tied at the waist. To make movement easier the lower end is lifted and either held in the hand or loosely tied below the waist). The women wore saris and young girls stuck to pavadas (a two piece outfit consisting of a short sleeved blouse and a pleated ankle length skirt).

Houses had roofs of Mysore tiles which let them breathe easy through the hot summer. The walls were almost always whitewashed and made of un-burnt laterite bricks carved out of the earth. In the evenings grandparents sat with their grandchildren in the pillared patios and read them stories from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, the Bible and allied stuff.

In the morning, high-pitched screams of "Voooo" signalled the arrival of the fisherman at your doorstep with an immense wicker basket of sardines, mackerels, sole fish, pomfrets, crabs, clams and mussels on his shoulders.

The men of the house sat in front of tiny mirrors, that didn't reflect more than their lip, and scraped the stubble off their cheeks with long barber's razors, while humming along with Carnatic vocals floating out of ancient transistors.

The woman of the house haggled with the fisherman/vegetable vendor and spent the rest of the morning cooking enormous amounts of rice, fish curry, fish fry, upperi (vegetables cooked dry) and pappadams to feed the entire tharawad at lunch.

I remember the fragrance of freshly fried banana chips, for which Calicut is famous, swimming out of the neighbourhood bakery and into our tharawad and blending with the smell of breakfast -- iddiappams (rice noodles), sweetened coconut milk, vegetable stew and vellappams or rice pancakes, the size of rotis, puffed in the middle with a touch of toddy or yeast and tapered at the edges like a lace net.

It was also a time of political unrest. And out from the bowels of discontent rose the extreme left movement -- Naxalism -- all the way from West Bengal and into the hearts of disgruntled Malayalees in Kerala, the state where the first 'democratically elected' Communist government in the world came to power in 1957 under E M S Namboodiripad. Those days are long gone; the Naxalite movement was brutally annihilated by the state government.

Other images have disappeared as well. Many of the tiled whitewashed houses have been replaced with hideous, multicoloured architectural hallucinations constructed out of Gulf money. Where once there was open space, now towers an apartment block or shopping plaza stocked with everything a human could possibly want. What you once found only in cities like Bombay, you now find in the shopping malls of Calicut.

The children don't listen to the Mahabharata anymore. They watch their favourite Mohanlal movie on video or channel surf. Rare is the Calicut college kid who wears a mundu these days. The long, bright red shirts with big black buttons and flares that looked like skirts, which was the rage in the late 1970s, have become extinct too. The kids stick to jeans and sneakers.

Fishermen still scream "Voooo." But they arrive at your doorstep on mopeds or Kinetic Hondas (called meen KTs) with their wicker baskets on the pillion seat.

Some things, of course, never change.

Photographs by Rajan Kallai

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