Close encounters with coconuts

RECENTLY, when I was away from home, my wife faced a problem. Nothing serious, but not quite trivial either —how to crack open coconuts without fuss. We use coconuts extensively at home. It is I who always break them. She has seldom tried her hand at it, if I discount her one attempt when she escaped injuring herself by a whisker. This put her off. “It is a tricky job and I won’t try it again,” she said emphatically. “You don’t have the perseverance of spiders,” I chided her. Thus, my absence from the house always begs the question: Who will open the coconuts? It’s as if someone is asking: Who will bell the cat?

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We get de-husked coconuts from the grocery shop. Once during my absence, my wife bought one and asked the shopkeeper to break it. Though he did not have the requisite skill, he pretended to be adept at doing the task. He struck the coconut with an iron rod with great force as if it were a rock. The coconut split into smithereens. Since that was the only shop selling coconuts in our neighbourhood, the owner had the upper hand. He refused to refund the cost. She had to take the pieces home without demur.

Once a coconut is cracked open, it has to be scraped, which my wife does herself. There are professional coconut scrapers who do it at weddings and other functions where there is a large attendance. I recall a scraper, Krishnan, who lived in a distant village. Whenever there were weddings in our village, which were quite frequent, he would be there to do the job. People used to joke that his olfactory sense was stronger than that of a dog!

When it came to work, he was very sincere. This made him unpopular among fellow scrapers, who were shirkers. He scraped all the coconuts given to him, even as not many followed his work ethic. They were dishonest to the core. If five or six professional scrapers were given broken coconuts, Krishnan scraped all, while others, to save their effort, furtively cast a few of them into the fire burning under massive vessels.

Villagers who owned coconut groves gave dried kernels (copra) in large quantities to a man named Vaniyan, who ran a bull-driven oil extracting mill in our village in Kerala. Two famished bulls straining under the heavy yoke, moving around the mortar — this was a common sight for people who walked by the mill.

During a recent visit to my village, I was taking an evening walk when I saw Vaniyan’s oil mill still in operation, albeit with huge changes. He was conspicuous by his absence; so were his bulls. His grandson, who ran a mechanised mill, had liberated the poor beasts from the agonising task. Time stood still for a while. After complimenting the young man, I moved on.