The grass eating tiger

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: I am mostly mild mannered. Even when irritated by strange calls at midnight, I seldom bang the phone down. But on Sundays between four and seven in the evening, I turn into this vicious creature who will snap anyone’s head off if they even dare poke their head into my room. It is perhaps the most sacred time of the week for me and I can’t bear for anything to come between me and my Sunday movie. And like perhaps Freud would confirm, this strange behavioral pattern can be traced back to childhood. To summer vacations in particular.

My grandparents had their home in Shoranur, a railway town. Both my grandfathers were railway men and during my childhood it was to Shoranur, that we retreated to every summer. So intrinsic were trains to that rail town that much of life was punctuated by the hoot of the railway engines that found its way into the station.

I would often see my grandmother cock an ear and say to no one in particular, “The Mail is late tonight!” Or, she would use it as a clock to structure the day. I would hear in an order barked, “The Coimbatore Passenger is already here. You better hurry to the market.” And the servant would grab a bag and rush to the market before the fresh vegetables had all been sold out.

Trains were both conversation topic and clock. It was romance of the unknown and the regulator of routine. It was the leitmotif of our lives. But it was on Sundays that the magic of the railway junction truly came to life for us.

On Sunday evenings, my grandmother had an arrangement with a railway porter to bring home the much famed Shoranur Biriyani. Such was the impression that this Biriyani made on me that I had to introduce it into my first novel The Better Man. Later I would meet strangers who had read that passage and they would bring up the Shoranur Biriyani with much nostalgia in their voices and hunger in their eyes. Sometimes their acquaintance would have been fleeting: either a brief stint in Shoranur or have merely passed through Shoranur railway junction.