RIDDLE OF THE COCONUT TREES

Kovalam is the Mona Lisa of beaches- too famous for its own good. After all that you’ve heard about it, you run the risk of initial anti-climax when you see it. Matters are not helped by the fact that the signboard that says Kovalam beach points to the wrong beach. I follow the sign and come to a thin strip of boulder-strewn sand where the sea hisses and spits like an angry cat. “Must be because of the monsoon; must be nicer in season,” I mutter. “Must be,” my mind concurs dubiously.

I plod back to the fork and take the other road that is signposted Lighthouse Beach. Round a rocky headland, two perfect scallops of beach open up in front of us, fringed by palm trees and souvenir stalls selling “I’m a son of a Beach” T-Shirts. A string of open-air eateries offer ‘You buy, we fry’ food. Now this is more like the Kovalam of Picture-Postcard fame. What with the surf purring like a kitten.

“Seafood wanting?” A young man, dhoti worn at half-mast in true Malayali fashion, asks me in touristese, the local lingua franca. “Seafood not wanting. Vegetarian wanting,” I said as he leads me to a thatch-roofed shack. Meanwhile, I ask for a drink: “A coconut bringing, please.” My host nods vigorously in negation. “Pepsi bringing!” he beams.“Coconut bringing,” I correct him. “Beer bringing!” he counters. “Coconut,” I reiterate. “Dollar changing?” he asks in a ploy to throw me off this coconut fetish. “No dollar changing; coconut bringing-now!” I admonish sternly. “Coconut cannot bringing,” he says glumly. “Why cannot bringing?” I ask, indicating at the literally thousands of coconut trees, each laden with fruit, that surrounds us. “Climbing man gone,” he explains. “Why can’t you climb the tree?” I ask, losing my touristese for the moment. My host looks horrified, as though I had made an indecent proposal. “I management; climbing man, climbing man,” he says. “Management cannot climbing,” So I settle for a Pepsi and learn my first lesson about Kerala.

The supple mudra of the coconut palm as it caresses the sky is an eloquent symbol of Kerala. Surging out of the bountiful earth, the kalpaka groves represent the spirit of the land, its creative zest and its generous hospitality. The coconut is Kerala’s Kalpataru, supplier of all that the heart desires. It provides condiment and cooking medium, votive offering and ceremonial accessory, building material and decorative gewgaw. It is central to the economy. Alleppey is said to be the biggest coconut market in the world, with the next three years’ crop sold out in advance. Yet try to buy a single green coconut drink in Kerala. Chances are you’ll hear the same refrain I did: “Yes, we have no coconuts today.”

Perhaps it’s because of being of inestimable value in its generic totality, an individual coconut is literally priceless, and therefore unsellable. Who would want to buy it and why and for how much? There could be another reason, one that reveals more about the Keralite than about the coconut. And that reason may lie in the Malayali’s passionate belief in the Malayali’s progressiveness, a capacity that has enabled him to escape the clutch of customary circumstance to embrace the new and the unexplored.Passion, of course, is the core of the Malayali being.

To the Malayali, it doesn’t seem to matter so much what you do or don’t do, just as long as you’re passionate about it. So he is passionate about faith and he is passionate about skepticism; he is passionate about communism and he is passionate about petro-dollar capitalism; he is passionate about indulgence and he is passionate about abstinence. Which is why in Kerala you might see a lot of religion but not too much religiosity; ideology but not necessarily indoctrination; a lot of drinking but little drunkenness. Such cultural crosscurrents give the Malayali his innate dynamism.

The Malayali’s get-up-and-go has chalked up a number of firsts for the world. The first part of the country to conduct foreign trade, long before the advent of Vasco da Gama. The first to rise in rebellion against foreign rule. The first to have a family planning programme. The first state in India to achieve a hundred per cent literacy.Not satisfied with all these landmarks of progress, the Malayali continues to pursue the progressive, so much so that often he progresses himself right out of where he comes from. Kerala is a small state, comprising only 1.03 per cent of India’s total land area. Densely packed, it does not have the traditional divide between town and town or between town and country; one seems to flow into the other. So if you have someone going to Thiruvananthapuram and he is asked where he is going, by the time he replies Thiruvananthapuram he’ll probably not only have reached Thiruvananthapuram, but left it behind and be in Kottayam instead and by the time he’s realized this and corrected himself, he’s no longer in Kottayam but in Kozhikode.

This baffling velocity is aided and abetted not only by the fact that most places in Kerala have two name, the new and the old, like Thiruvananthapuram and Trivandrum, but also by the Malayali capacity to introduce more syllables, consonants and vowels into them than they intrinsically possess. Malayalis are passionately proud of Malayalam and make all their place names and descriptions sound like epic poetry. Thus Kerala-spelt Kay-Yee-Yar-Yay_yel_yay-becomes Kairralluh and the sobriquet of Alleppey or Allapuzha, the Venice of the Eat, becomes Thee Vennis of Thee Yeastuh, spelt Yee-Yay-Yes-Tee.

And by the time you’ve got that all figured and spelt out you’ve left behind not only Kozhikode which is also Calicut but also Kannur which is also Cannanore and are now in some place called Delhi, or Dubai, or Dallas, or whatever, where you might as well set up shop and become an award-winning novelist like Arundhati Roy, or a cartoonist and designer like Ravi Shankar, or a newspaper editor like B G Vergheese, or the dudhwala of the nation like Verghese Kurien. Which is why finding a Keralite in Kerala is almost as difficult as finding a Coconut. But then that’s the price of Malyali progressiveness.