Breezy chronicle of lockdown days in a Kerala town

Pandemic literature has begun to hit bookstores in a big way. It seems like a deluge – there’s Amitava Kumar’s The Blue Book, A Writer’s Journal, in which he transfers his thoughts during the “terrible days” of the lockdown in watercolours and in words; Barkha Dutt’s Humans of Covid: To Hell and Back; Abantika Ghosh’s Billions Under Lockdown… There is so much of that time people want to capture (as a way of catharsis probably); of a time when we almost disappeared into ourselves fearing a virus that could come from anywhere and consume us.

It was like being transported onto the sets of a Hollywood or Korean disaster movie. But it was horribly real when a kind, gentlemanly neighbour died a lonely death in ICU pleading till the very end with his doctors to see his family at least for the last time. Time wound down to make us absorb the sounds and sights around us, keenly listening to details of dried leaves crunching underneath one’s feet on empty streets or enjoying parakeets insouciantly swinging on the broad leafed branches of rubber trees.

Journalist-turned-content strategist Anjana Menon’s Onam in a Nightie too is a chronicle of that chilling time when the pandemic first struck but set in a town of “great antiquity”, Thrissur in Kerala. In the 2020 lockdown, the author, who shuttles between Delhi and London, went to live in Thrissur with her ageing parents. At first, Menon writes that it was meant to be a “humdrum journal” of her quarantine period but her random ruminations finally ended up as a book. And it turns out to be a charming telling of her sojourn in her hometown.

What makes this non-fiction extremely engaging is that Menon, who has lived in Singapore and London, takes a delightful outsider/insider approach. “I am what you could call the proverbial outsider, with a claim to being an insider,” she starts off, as she dives into Kerala’s cultural milieu of her childhood days.

She weaves in the day-to-day happenings around her munching on deep-fried banana chips, (the sweet variety), interspersing it with rantings on the Indian television media or her experiences in Singapore like bumping into her hero, the late J B Jeyaretnam, the leader of the opposition party (hounded by the ruling party) on the subway or even a goodbye letter to President Donald Trump!

It’s narrated in a witty style as she interacts with women cops visiting her during the quarantine on the “macho” 350CC Enfield Bullet or when she’s writing about the antics of her parent’s help Shivankutty, a drunk. The details are all in the small things in life in her book! As Andy Warhol would say, you need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.

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It is a quick read, the chapters are short focusing on motley matters – ranging from her chats with health counsellor Stella (Kerala’s famed healthcare system kicks in) who to Menon’s surprise scrupulously calls her everyday to check how she is faring during her compulsory travel quarantine period, to a chapter on cravings for palada payasam, which she eloquently describes as a confetti of steamed rice pancake bits cooked in milk and sugar until it’s creamy beige or pale pink.

Actually, the book is sprinkled with conversations about food in many places. (We Indians love to snack) Besides raving about the steaming idiyappams, nicely rounded like fat-bottomed puris and crispy crackling ‘doshas’ at the must-eat, famed pure vegetarian Bharat Hotel in Thrissur, she rattles on about the elegant hard-working jackfruit from which you can cull out anything from jackfruit flour to pickles.

She lists some of the exotic foodstuffs prepared by the members of the 20-year-old Kudumbashree, Kerala’s famed all-women’s collective – Indian asparagus in wild honey for restoring hormonal balance, papaya jams, jackfruit and rice powder mixes – and drops in on their canteen to tuck into home-fried kilimeen or pink perch (even as she explains how this homegrown laudable enterprise which empowers women works).

She even details a homemade remedy for a snakebite that is: “a strong dose of powered asafoetida and pounded garlic mixed with water”.

Menon describes the menace of slithering snakes in Kerala, her daily perambulations at the Punkunnam railway platform; of her tryst with Maya, Kerala’s most famous Malinois who nosed out many bodies in the aftermath of the Idukki landslide, in August 2020.

For Menon (obviously a dog lover) meeting Maya was memorable enough to devote a chapter on this canine and elaborates on how the Kerala Police introduced the Belgian Malinois breed in their K9 squad, after this breed became famous when a US Navy Seal and his Malinois Cairo stormed into Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed him.

(Incidentally, there’s a book about this dog, by its handler, Will Chesney: No Ordinary Dog: My Partner from the SEAL Teams to the Bin Laden Raid.)

Onam in a Nightie features black and white illustrations (done by Anujath Sindhu Vindyalal) and there’s one of a bride decked up in layers of jewellery “starting with her choker cascaded down covering her ample bosom, spreading over her wide waists and ending suggestively at the crotch”. Well, Menon cannot but devote a chapter on the Keralite’s legendary fascination for gold (she recounts how a Middle East returnee hid gold in the breathing valve of his N95 mask) and expresses wonder at Keralite men’s adoration for Bollywood bombshell Sunny Leone!

In the end, she wraps up her book with a visit to the heart of the city, the Round, a roundabout which also houses Vadakkunnathan, an ancient Shiva temple estimated to be at least a thousand years old that has been restored by a trust owned by the TVS motor company.

It is also the venue of the Thrissur Pooram in April, which cannot be complete without caparisoned elephants. The festival gives Menon the chance to launch on her favourite elephant story (which all Keralites ostensibly have) on Guruyavoor Kesavan, who belonged to the Guruyavoor Temple. The elephant’s innate intelligence always ensured he never harmed children or a leper when he was going wild with rage in musth. Elephants are so “woven into the psyche of the state, its traditions and folklore” they are also treated to Ayurvedic rejuvenation camps!

There’s such random nuggets to savour in this enjoyable book for a non-Keralite like me. There’s one also which I enjoyed on how the Malayalis raged when the government put an 18 per cent tax on the indigenous parotta and Twitter erupted with the hashtag: Handsoffparotta. Check it out.