THE DIFFERENT HUES OF ONAM

 

This year, I will be back in my London home for Onam. My mother worried that there would be no home-cooked sadya but I reassured her of the customary invitation from our friend Das who now has a chain of Kerala restaurants across the city. Ever since my publishers chose ‘Rasa’, a fabulous seafood restaurant on Charlotte Street, to celebrate the launch of my debut novel many years ago, Das has become a good friend.  I’ve been lucky, as a consequence, to have enjoyed invitations to one or the other of the Rasas where staff and regular customers get treated to an extensive Onam sadya every year. 

Malayalis across the UK will gather similarly, in restaurants or in each other’s houses, not even having to choose the weekend closest to Onam as the festival falls, unusually this year, on a weekend. Not that it would have made much difference had it been a Tuesday or Wednesday because a diaspora always manages to find inventive ways of hanging on to its traditions in the midst of a sometimes conflicting world. 

There will, for instance, be no poovu-idal but perhaps a huge vase of colourful and welcoming tulips placed near the front door. Most of the women at such Onam lunches continue to sport a kasavu-mundu and traditional jewellery, keen to make use of the annual opportunity to do so, while youngsters inevitably turn up in more versatile sequinned kurtis sourced from Southall. Of course, there will be no tiruvadira-kalli but Asianet beams into more homes in Birmingham and Manchester than one would guess, bringing scenes from the homeland close enough to imagine it was next door.

And it isn’t just the Malayalis who are at it. I recall marking Onam one year by going to the South Bank Centre to watch an energetic kalaripayattu performance that had the mostly white audience absolutely enthralled. On another occasion – when my grandmother was visiting – we took her to the brand new Tirupati Balaji temple in the West Midlands. A roiling grey sky with chilly winds that whipped mercilessly at everyone’s saris did not dampen spirits or religious fervour at all, I seem to recall, and we partook of the communal lunch that was being served in a massive hall beneath the temple.

This time, I will visit Eastham instead, and make for the Malayali shops that would by now have stocked up on giant bags of frozen vadas and idlis. When I last went, an enterprising woman had advertised a range of payasams available to pre-order by the litre. Looking at the shelves stocked high with sambar and all manner of podis and masalas, it was hard to imagine a time when a karivepilla could not be sourced anywhere in London for love nor money.

But, as diasporas across the world have done, the Malayalis too have created an alternative world for themselves - one in which they manage to keep their rituals alive without losing their capacity to adapt and fit into their adopted countries as doctors and nurses and office workers of, it is generally accepted, a high calibre. 

If indeed Mahabali does come wandering further afield in search of his subjects, he will hopefully take pleasure and pride in seeing how far they have proliferated, and how they have come to celebrate Onam in ever imaginative and unusual ways.