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.

For me though the enchantment of the Sunday didn’t end with the Biriyani. Thereafter would be the Sunday movie. In my childhood, Shoranur boasted of three movie theatres, if you could call them that! Jawahar which was right in the middle of the town. SMP which had a thatched roof, hard wooden seats and many bedbugs. And then there was Shanmuga Talkies which was across the railway line and hence necessitated crossing the railway bridge.

As manic movie goers, my mother and her siblings felt this need for a weekly fix Sunday after Sunday. And so after a high tea of Biriyani, sated and satiated, we would walk to one of the theatres for a Malayalam movie.

Jawahar was the more sophisticated of the theatres. The other two were quite ramshackle and their projectors of a great and venerable age. Very often the film would come to a halt and whistles and shrieks would fill the theatre as the hoi polloi made sure that the projectionist knew of their displeasure.

My brother and I would ache to join in but a frown from our mother would clamp our mouths and so we would nibble on warm peanuts in a paper cone and wait for the screen to come to life.

When the movie was over, the family car would be waiting to take us home. To supper and a dissection of the movie. Later in bed, my grandmother would want me to narrate to her scene by scene the entire movie. For while my grandmother was a great facilitator of Epicureanism, she was quite a stoic herself, staying back at home to look after the one million things that needed her personal attention and intervention.

When my grandmother died, the pattern of our summers changed, But the habit of high tea and the Sunday movie was set forever in my life. The Sundays I am at home I set aside the evening for this bit of hedonism. A tea remarkable for its high calorie content and enough cholesterol to make even the healthiest of hearts cringe. And a movie on one of the Malayalam TV channels. For the habit set included a clause. The Sunday movie could only be a Malayalam movie.

Perhaps like the recurrent breaking down of the projectors, I need the TV advertisements to complete the experience. A DVD would be too orderly and too much within my control. As I sit here in Stockholm on a Sunday evening, I feel a great pang of home sickness shoot through me. I am in a beautiful hotel in a picturesque street. But something in me will not allow me to step out and wander. To seize the moment.

Instead I plonk myself in front of the TV with an apple and watch the Simpsons. I think of my grandmother and her wealth of folk sayings — when a tiger is desperate, it will even eat grass!