Growing up with Onam

The sweet aroma of puttu and freshly harvested hay, the comforting and all too familiar noises – cows mooing, birds chirping, womenfolk chattering, children playing and the beautiful peaceful sights of paddy fields and mountains beyond…these were a few of my favourite things that I used to wake up to during Onam seasons at my ancestral home in Kerala.

Schools in Kerala give customary 10 days holidays during Onam season. As a child growing up there, every year I looked forward to these 10 days because my parents used to pack me off to our ancestral home to spend with my grandmother. Some of my uncles and aunts also did the same with their kids and so every year this period was Children’s camp for us. No strict adult supervision, no restrictive timelines, sumptuous food and completely left to ourselves…there was nothing more we could ask for! My loving and beneficent grandmother always used to have gifts and homemade snacks in store for all of us and she used to keep them in packages with our name tags on them. None of us could ask for more because that would mean laying hands on somebody else’s share.

Onam being a 10 day festival, various festivities are planned for each day culminating with the Grand Onam feast on Thiruvonam – the 10^th day. Every day after a long drawn out traditional Kerala breakfast, we used to gather flowers for the pookalam to make the circular flower arrangement larger every day.  My ancestral home was in a village then (now a township), so gathering flowers meant roaming around mountains, valleys and river banks for wild flowers. We applied lot creativity in choosing the colours of the flowers to make our floral arrangement attractive each day. Mornings were spent this way and even if we didn’t have to pluck flowers we still enjoyed our strolls, and occasionally we played local games like kuttiyum kolum too.  Some of our time was spent at cashew, mango and other fruit orchards of our family, devouring on freshly picked fruits. Lunch at grandma’s used to be elaborate with at least 4 or 5 traditional dishes. Afternoons were spent by our village brook playing in the cool water, catching fish using thinly woven towels or just sitting by paddy fields enjoying the breeze. Paddy fields those days were separated by narrow clay dividers on which people could walk on. One of our favourite past time was to push each other into the fields while walking down these dividers. Since paddy fields had loose clay soil and water, falling into the fields was like falling into quicksand…the more you try to get out the more you find yourself sink deeper.

Monsoons

Evenings we used to go back home for tea and snacks, after which we would lazy around on the veranda, listening to grandma’s stories of her childhood, history of our family, traditions, and general folklore. Post this grandma would send us all to take showers by the well. The older kids were responsible for drawing water from the well for themselves and for the younger ones. Since the well was situated on a mound we could see the idyllic vistas of the village, the sunset and with the chilly wind blowing on our naked bodies, the experience was luxurious.  Grandma was particular that all the kids sat down together for evening prayers after our public baths and before dinner. Dinners used to be noisy affairs; many times we used to have family visitors joining us. Since we did not have TV and due to frequent power cuts, post dinner time was spent reading story books under subdued lights from kerosene lanterns.

Hanging swings from trees is also a quintessential part of Onam. Swings usually were made of coir rope and stems of coconut leaves. Grandma used to make sure that the Onam swing would be up on the mango tree in front of our house even before we reached there. We kept bets on who could swing highest and touch the leaves of the trees or do stunts on the swings. Ours is also a typical Kerala family with a few uncles holding jobs in the Middle East.  Their wives were in Kerala and festivals seasons were exciting for them also because their husbands would come home for Onam. The radio would be perpetually on so we could listen to Onam festivities happening in cities. Someone from the village would dress up as Mahabali and would visit our house with his entourage playing the traditional Kerala drums. Some days we would have Pulikali artists who actually used to scare most of us kids. Grandma used to give them token money and her special Onam snacks. On the 3^rd day before Thiruvonam our parents would arrive and then they would also get busy around the house with activities such as getting the nellu dried in the sun (Onam harvest of rice grain), stacking them in the para (granary), milking the cows, grazing them, feeding the chicken, taking stock of mangos, jackfruit, cashews, vegetables cultivated in our fields and so on. On the day of Thiruvonam, all of us would wear the traditional Kerala attire, cook the Onam feast from everything that we cultivated and harvested. We would listen to Onam songs being played on radio while the feast was laid out on the floor on banana leaves. The feast would have dishes such as rice, thoran, aviyal, pappadam, erissery, pulissery, vazhattiyathu, parippu, sambhar, olan, moru, rasam, upperi, pappadam, achar and pradhaman. We would eat so much that we would not be even able to get up from the floor. Inevitably during the rest of the afternoon, all of us children and adults alike would go off to sleep…this I have realized over the years is the sleep I have enjoyed the most. Energy levels come down drastically the day after Thiruvonam. We would start sulking thinking about going back to the cities, schools reopening, getting grades of the 1^st term examination and the routine life. But we always had one more such occasion every year to look forward to..X’mas.

It has been 12 years since I have visited Kerala for Onam…so this year I took the resolution to be there at this time. Our modest wood and tile ancestral home has now been replaced by a 2 storey ‘modern’ house, the mango tree in front of the house has been replaced by bougainvillea, swings have been replaced by hammocks, cows have been replaced by foreign bred dogs, clay dividers of paddy fields have been replaced by tarred pathways, our village brook is almost dry and it’s banks are now concrete, wild flowers are replaced by orchids and anthuriums, mountains and valleys are now sullied by houses with characterless architecture, Onam feast can now be bought at department stores and grandma is no more…but Kerala will always be my home and I hope this Onam will also give me more but definitely different set of memories to cherish.

Article that appeared in The Times of India Onam feature - Delhi