Morais
• Kerala. Three generations removed, yet vividly present in daily conversation at home in Malaysia. In the fronds of a language that could only be spoken with excitement and a landscape that ran the whole gamut of green. In the signature coconut palms planted in the garden of every house we lived in to recall the home left long ago by those who had made the voyage to the shores of Malaya, land of new dreams. In the yearning for the home by the sea in the homeland left behind. Miles and miles of white sand, long walks to school, return, ing home to ripe mangoes plucked off the trees in the family orchard. "Nothing less than a whole mango," my mother said. Having trudged back from school, books cradled in the crook of her arm, tired and famished, my patient mother spoke ofgirlhcxxl. petulance. "Who would want just a piece of mango!" she asked. "No, it had to be the entire fruit, uncut. A plump, ripe mango that we could make a hole in at one end. Then, cupping it in our hands, we would suck the juice and pulp out slowly." Thus we learned about Kerala: in stories of family we had never met, feasts we had never attended, a wandering tale of which we, in Malaysia, were one chapter. For sixteen years, busy rais~ ing a family, never wanting to leave her husband's side, my mother did not return. But watching, sometimes listening, to her read letters from Kerala, and watching her sit down at the dining table to fill blue aerogrammes with weekly reports to our grandmother, written in the rounded Malayalam script she still remembered, we learned to fill in some of the contours of the land of our ancestors. Literacy: Ninety percent. Nearly a hundred, my mother said. Kerala was special. Kerala, where the women wore signature kassatla saris of cream and gold; where real power rested with the women through whom family names and property were passed to the next generation; where everyone had a degree or two, even if they had no job. "In which case, they'd tuck a rolled,up newspaper under their ami and head off to the coffee shop to talk politics," she said. If they did have jobs, money was still modest and so the daily morning breakfast of putu and bananas, mangoes or jackfruit was as important to the farm laoorer as to the civil servant in his starched whites. It provided an inexpensive, nutritious start to the day that would sustain them, peas~ ant or peon, till tiffin at twelve. Tiffin~carriers. My mother remembered classmates at school in India, rich Brahmins, who had their lunch delivered to school in tiffin, carriers. She made the simplest meal sound sumptuous in the colors 96
FUGUE #28