Reminisce
By Vibin Chowallur 

Eating insects was one of the lower points of my life while growing up in Kerala during the 80s. It’s not so much that I mind eating them. I am sure I would have been willing to bite into a juicy beetle just to see my mother’s reaction. But when they flew into my mouth while I rode with my father on his motorcycle, my feelings were a mix of shock and disgust (made all the worse since my mother was not there to see it). Those days I liked to go along with my father while he went grocery shopping around Ernakulam. 

We usually first went to Jaya bakery in Palarivattam to buy Modern bread and, if I had been good, Britannia milk biscuits. From stalls on a nearby street we bought onions, beans, apples, and grapes. The last stop was the Kaloor fish market where kingfish, sardines and shrimp lay in heaps on blue tarps and inside dripping wicker baskets full of ice. While my father shopped, I liked to watch the men in white dhotys and the women in colorful saris haggling over prices.

We rode home with the grocery bags hanging from the handlebars. Traffic was light. At busier intersections a police officer stood on a concrete platform in the center and guided traffic with sharp snaps of his white-gloved hands. Men in Heralds, Fiats, Ambassadors, and Bajaj scooters waited impatiently for their signal to cross. Once they got the signal, they still had to deal with men and women and goats and cows and kids and bicyclists.

A big event in my life back then was when we got our first television. It was a 36 cm Dyanora with a dial for volume, a switch for power, and twelve buttons for twelve channels. Eleven of those buttons were never used. With only one channel, Doordarshan, which aired from six to eleven in the evenings, I couldn’t afford to be picky. So I watched the Hindi serial Hum Log, and music videos where stars like Sridevi and Anil Kapoor sang and danced and ran around trees. When Sunil Gavaskar and the Indian Cricket Team played Pakistan, neighbors without TVs squeezed into our living room to cheer on our national heroes. During the day when there was nothing on TV, I listened to Malayalam songs with my mother on our Murphy two-band radio.

After the initial excitement of having a television, I went back to playing with my friends Prashanth and Lakshmi who lived across a pond behind my house. We played Hide and Seek and Kavadi and explored nearby fields and streams. Sometimes we skipped stones on ponds – annoying the women washing clothes along the shore. In summer we climbed trees to pluck mangoes and threw rocks and sticks to knock down ones too high to reach. On days I felt bold, I liked to stare at one of the stray dogs until it felt challenged and chased me. If I was lucky, on some days the older boys let me play Cricket with them. When my friends were busy I went fishing using rice hooked on a safety pin tied to my mother’s sewing thread. The fish were not fools. 

When I was seven we got our first phone. A phone line was brought down our road after years on a waiting list. Before the phone, my father went to a Subscriber Trunk Dialing booth in the Ernakulam North railway station to make calls. Now friends and neighbors without phones came over our house when they needed to reach their families.

The rotary phone was a fickle device. Every few months Post & Telegraph came to our house to fix it and if that failed, to replace it. If there was a more frequent guest in our house than the telephone men, it was the refrigerator man. A colony of black ants had found a comfortable home within the Gem refrigerator’s compressor. The refrigerator resented such an invasion of its personal space and enlightened us to its feelings by periodically refusing to work. 

Such was life. 

When I was ten, I got on a plane for the first time and two days later began a new life in the United States. 

It has been eleven years since that day in March when I first breathed in the crisp winter air of New York. In the years I have lived here since, I have returned to visit my family in Kerala three times. During each return I see a cross-section of a rapidly advancing country. 

In my most recent trip earlier this year, I landed at a brand new International Airport in Cochin. Its nearly four kilometer long runway is the second largest in India – a far cry from my two previous trips when we landed on the short runway at the Cochin Domestic Airport. During each landing at the old airport, authorities closed a busy road that ran at right angles to the runway just outside the airport boundary. I have two guesses on why they did this.

a) They were afraid the plane might land short and collide with the vehicles on the road. 
b) The powerful exhaust from the engines would cause motorcyclists and pedestrians to go airborne. 

If it is the latter case, I wish I had been there the day they discovered this. 
The new International airport with its shiny floors, regal wooden chairs, and a wide array of gift shops was my introduction into a land transforming under the powers of capitalism. In Ernakulam, the fields I played in many years ago are gone. Rows of brightly painted houses with red-tile roofs stood where mango trees once teased me with their fruits. The ponds I fished in have been filled for new building sites. The older boys I played cricket with have moved to Bangalore and “Cyberabad” to work for companies like Wipro, Microsoft, and IBM. 

On the roads, Sienas and Sierras and Astras and Armadas and many other new model cars sat along side the common Ambassador in noisy traffic. Women have become more self-reliant and it is common to see them driving cars and TVS and Kinetic scooters. At many intersections, traffic lights have replaced traffic police and the drivers have to deal with even more men, women, goats, cows, kids and bicyclists. 

During my visit I stayed at my uncle’s home in Thrissur. When I got bored I turned on their Sony Vega flat screen TV and flipped through the sixty or so cable channels provided by Asianet. I kept up with the latest cricket scores on ESPN and watched soccer and volleyball on Star Sports. I laughed at the edgy humor of the MTV veejays and enjoyed the singing of beautiful Indian actresses on B4U. For those seeking drama in their lives there was Santa Barbara and CNN, but I preferred Baywatch and Friends.

When I tired of television I used my cousin’s computer and his VSNL e-mail account to write to friends in America. Happily imagining the looks on their faces when they read my embellished stories of deadly snakes and wild elephants, I entertained myself playing DOOM and Minesweeper while listening to MP3s.

On days my motivation exceeded my laziness I walked to a nearby video rental store, side stepping monsoon puddles while avoiding languid bulls and unwieldy lorries. Billboards along the roadsides promoted the movies Fiza and Hey Ram. Hrithik Roshan and Shahrukh Khan, members of a new breed of buff and sexy actors, have replaced my childhood heroes Amitabh Bachan and Rishi Kapoor.

Most men I came across in the streets were wearing pants and dhotys weren’t as common. Some spoke casually into their Nokia and Ericsson cell phones. I passed a tiny house that clearly had no running water since I saw a man leave the house and take a bath beneath a public tap. However, I did see a black and white television tuned to Kaun Banega Crorepati when I walked by the door. 

In the video store, Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, and English movies sat on the shelves. Some were on tapes, some were on Video CDs, some were pirated, and some were not. Back at the house I slid the VCD into a Kenwood 3-CD Changer stereo system and sat down with some banana chips and a cold glass of Pepsi to enjoy a good adventure. That is, until the power went out.

The government run power company is inefficient and can’t keep up with demand from all the new houses, high-rises, and businesses – leading to unpredictable power cuts. My uncle has an Invertor, an increasingly common devise in many homes and stores that automatically turns on when the current is cut to provide battery power. But power cuts aren’t the only hassle.

Devidas uncle, my father’s friend in Ernakulam, lives in an apartment where water has stopped flowing from the public main. Every other day he pitches in with the rest of the residents to pay for a tanker to pump water into a tank on the building’s roof. In another building where my cousin lives, they dug a well to solve this problem. But my aunt has a simpler solution. When it rains, she runs out with every bucket in the house and places them under the roof drains.

Towards the end of my visit I went along with my mother to City Center, a new multi-level shopping mall in Thrissur with dozens of shops, including its own grocery store. It’s a popular hang out spot for college guys and also to some degree, college girls. Some girls wore jeans, unheard of a few years ago and some came with their “lines” or boyfriends, unimaginable a few years ago. 

While my mother shopped for saris and jewelry, I explored the mall. After using an ATM to withdraw cash from my US bank account, I browsed around in an electronic store full of stereo systems, cordless phones, microwaves, and washing machines. Next I tried on some dress shirts at Van Huesen but found them too expensive. Drawn by the blinking lights and colorful toys, I then went into a cluttered duty free shop selling items imported from the Gulf. My favorite item was a dancing hula doll. By then it was time to meet my mother at the food court on the top floor. 

Sitting across from her at a table, enjoying the view of emerald hills far away from the confusion of the streets below, I wondered if perhaps, they had beetles on the menu.