Over the past 28 years, I was open-fired with questions like,
“Are you a Malayali?”, “Your ancestors are from Kerala, you must be a Malayali…”, “Then, are you a Tamil?”, “Why do you celebrate Vishu then?”
OK, so quite frankly, there is too much complication to explain all this, but after the long wait, my man KV Krishnan will tell all you mystified souls who is Jaidev… (if you can survive through the article :P )
QUOTE
"Are you from Palghat ?" by KV Krishnan
"You must surely be from Palghat," the fat one remarked, slurping a generous dose of Veeraswamy's piping mulligatawny. 'Surely not here in Central London,' I mused, slicing a dosai with my keen incisors. The fat one must have discovered my antecedents the way I hissed a 'thoshai' instead of the 'dosai'. Or probably I had failed the Biblical 'sibboleth' test by stuttering a hovercrafting 'zhzh' instead of a tongue-braking 'lll'. Or did I stacatto a 'chchch' instead of a 'ssss'? I wasn't too sure.
Americans, I had always held, were a weird lot. Till the other day dear Mr. Bostonian from East Lovell confided that he found Indians a shade queerer. Myself included. Armed with a dog-eared Fodor's guide, he was pottering around looking a bit confused.
"So you are a Tamil Tiger?" he asked me querulously, peering from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.
"No," I replied stoutly, quite unable to suppress my amusement.
"You must surely be from Tamil Nadu, since you are not from Mysore, Andhra Pradesh or Kerala..."
"No !" I insisted firmly. "I am a Kerala Brahmin who speaks Tamil, but settled in Bombay, and at the same time, not a Namboodiri who happens to be an original Kerala Brahmin settled in Kerala. But I never have been to Kerala, nor can Tamilians understand what I tell them. It is something which you will never understand!"
"You must surely be from somewhere?" he chipped in, quite flabbergasted.
"I don't know," I kept a square face. "I just happen to be to be an Indian settled in Bombay!"
Palghat Iyers seem to always get caught by the wrong foot. I am sure there is something about them that gives them the intelligent 'I-am-a-Palghat-Iyer' look on their face. Something about their tongue that rattles out complicated grammatical constructs faster than a machine-gun can clear magazine-loads of bullets. Or something in their genes that causes them to call the fruit a 'pazham' with an accented roll of the tongue. Tamilian Iyers, I am told, call it a 'palam', if they can wait long enough before guzzling it down their guts.
Tamilian Iyers, unlike their swifter Palghat brethren, drawl the syllables quite slowly like unsheathing a rusty sword out of its adamant scabbard. There are also the 'ssshs' and the 'ppps' and the 'eees' and the 'oooos' which I am told I mouth differently than would Salem Sivaramakrishnan or Erode Elangovan. Which anyway sounds quite unlike the Tamil they speak.
"Palghat Iyers," I often boast in defence, "don't fritter their better hours arguing phonetics or semantics." They are much too preoccupied putting their grey cells together. They don't burn their books, figuring out which person of which side of the Cauvery from which school of thought of which political party authored the works. They just read them !"
Like the Phantom of the comicbook world, Palghat Iyers were never born. They have been just there over the ages, seeping into every nook and cranny of the cruel world around them. A borderline case, they seem to have been originally Tamil immigrants seeping into Kerala. They now seem to enjoy their insouciant lives culling the best from all the possible worlds around them. Their palates have been pampered by the kitchens of Tanjore and Madurai as much as it has been garnished by the cuisine of Cochin or Chavakkad. Even as I sip up my Mysore rasam spiced by the roof-hitting flavours of Andhra Pradesh, and top it with a steaming hot Punjabi samosa with a plate of the Pune chivda, I seem to wash down all those parochial sediments deep down my guttural ravines.
My grandfather used to rave about the 'paaladapradhaman' delicacy of those good old days, steeped in the richest of cow milk (Of Kerala stock, I was told.) My grandmother savoured the 'Chakkaveratti' (jackfruit crushed and boiled with jaggery) as much as she loved frying 'karudams' and 'nendrakkai upperi' in bubbling coconut oil.
Just like the Palghat Iyer mixes the best of the world around him, he gets the best of the vegetables hotchpotched into his much-renowned 'avial'. A regular regimen of mouthwatering Olan, Kaalan, Karri, and Kichadi topped with a generous dose of mish-mashed molagootal has probably made the Palghat tongue a shade too fast for the Tamilian world. If you would call it Tamil, that is....
The 'palpaayasam', a rice gruel made of sweetened milk, seems to flow continually. For, the Iyers seem to break into festivity at the slightest provocation of a New Year. April gets their threshold splayed with 'kolam' for a colourful Vishu, the beginning of a fresh season. This is soon followed by a miniature version of the Nairs' Onam. Then comes the first of January, followed by the Pongal of their Tamilian bretheren, and lastly the Gudi Padva of the Maharashtrian neighbours. But Noorni Narayanan doesn't care a whit, and he begins his innumerable New Years with generous dosages of coconut oil (refined, please) applied upon his cranium before the cock has commenced to crow. He is all set with bold streaks of holy ash upon his expansive frontals, swathed in ceremonial dhoti, all ready for yet another celebration of the season.
Like Noorni Narayanan and Kozhikode Kondhai, I too belong to the elite gentry of the Palghat Dhoti Club. Groomed ever since my college days on the elegant 'paavu mundu' of Kerala fame, I have tried all the haute couture that fashion circles could ever boast about. The 'soman veshti', to the blue-collar Janata Brand, or the see-through double veshti to the floppy ten-yarder, many a white cloth has draped my celebrated flanks. Even as the dressy cylinder artfully drapes across my lissome lower limbs, I feel very much like the magician who has artfully whipped out a rabbit off his silken hat.
Even as I hush and swish my dhotied legs across the blazing Bombay summerscape, I have discovered the salubrious properties of the air-conditioned, bottoms-up fashion. The lower cylindrical limits are mathematically convoluted across the cycloidal midpoint and tucked in epicentrically across. They call this the 'sly, half-mast look' in West Manjapara. Talking of fashions, Pierre Cardin may have to hang his head in shame at the mere sight of such a colourful dhoti parade.
As the years rolled by, I discovered that with dedicated practice, I could swish on the attire before I could finish muttering Shivaramakrishnan. For, it takes only a wristy flick, followed by a slap of the fold across the left flank rightways, a quick inner jab with a little loose end sticking up at the top, and another left-handed upper drape across the right torso executed much like a cover drive, which holds your self respect based on the Newtonian Laws of friction.
Here again, the Tamilian Iyers beg to differ. Palghat Iyers wear their heraldry with the abovementioned right flap tucked in first, followed by a rightside pleated tuck into the nether world of the hip. Some of the tucks are executed with a seductive go-thither show-a-leg style, and some with the prudish touch-the-heel way. The style, I am told comes from the wardrobe of the Chera kings of yore. Tamilian Iyers in keeping with their tradition of prudish opposition are content to execute the abovementioned motion the other way round. Which means that the right comes left first and the left comes right next, which gets it all wrong !
Palghat Iyers seem to be always fond of long names. They seem to go in raptures when they hear that Kannimangalam Krishnan (that's where my K comes from) met Rishinaradamangalam Ramanathan and treated Vadakancherri Venkateswaran to a cup of steaming 'kaapi'. Erinjalakudai Eashwaran of South Bombay too was present. But he has never been there where his name says he is from.
However, the village legacy comes down, generation to generation, like it has done all these years. The first boy inherits the grandfather's name on the father's side, and the second, the grandfather's name on the mother's side, followed the first and second girls who get their respective grandmothers anagrammed somewhere in their names, leaving your choice to the fifth offspring. But the village is still there, puckered by a string of multisyllablic connotations that looms before all these names as an innocent initial.
But over the years, the village doesn't seem to matter anymore. Much like the Red-Sea octopus, the Palghat Iyer has this problem of having too many feet in too many places that he doesn't know where he stands. Often branded as a seasoned Keralite in Madras and laughed off as a 'pattar' in Kerala, I am sometimes held responsible for the Cauvery problem in Bangalore. So much so that I have to often moodily snuggle into my Bombay bed for that come-hither feeling that it gives me.
Interestingly, I have discovered that the 'you-must-be-from-Palghat' punchline is often used as an inherited Brahmastra. I have been through some of those hot discussions on language issues and intricate arguments on the Punjab imbroglio, when that last supporting statement would have just about won my case. My opponent suddenly seems to put his cards down, cock a snook at me like a bewildered crow, and then throws the inevitable bucket of cold water. "Are you from Palghat?" he squeaks, much like he would ask the seamer: "Didn't you actually chuck the ball?"
"Are you from Palghat ?" the fat one squeaked, breaking into precious musings. "No, I am from Palakkad," I replied dourly. "They didn't spare the name either !.."
UNQUOTE
