The Mystery of the Cool Drink

  When I was just a little girl...my father ticked me off for offering ‘cold’ drinks to guests, gently admonishing “you must say ‘cool’ drink!” I retreated in embarrassment over this massive linguistic blunder. Every year, every summer, I heard this refrain, it is “cool” drink, not cold drink, you know!

Now, my father was neither an English man nor an English teacher, so what did he know that all the others didn’t? I wondered because no one in my whole wide world (limited of course to home, school, friends and teachers in Delhi) used this expression. The skeptic in me, however, never verified this from any other authoritative source.

Then years after Papa was gone, the little girl now a woman discovered Papa’s secret in Kerala. Travelling by train through the length of Kerala and by road through its towns and villages, I saw signboards offering ‘cool’ drinks for sale at every shack, shop and restaurant.

My father was a travelling tradesman selling his wares in Kerala, six months a year, every year of most of his grown up life. He recalled the ‘cool drink’ every time he was served a ‘cold drink’ up north, muttering under his breath....“it is cool drink, not cold drink.”

It is conceivable that the cool drink needed to quench thirst in balmy/muggy Kerala had to transform into a cold drink to quench the fiercer thirst of the northern plains. But, now I know, Papa was not interested in etymology, he was just...nostalgic.

In my travel through Malyalaland and conversations with its many English speaking natives, I discovered why Papa’s spoken English had sounded so strange in Delhi in those little girl years, because long after he was gone, I was hearing him everywhere.

Now, I know, why as a little girl, I had to learn unn, rand, moon, nal... and so on upto hundred, when all my friends counted one, two, three... I found why as a child my house resonated with the sound of M.S. Subbulakshmi singing ‘Suprabhatam’ on a screechy audio tape every morning, while from every other house in the vicinity, the sounds of ‘Om Jai Jagdish...’ emerged.

Now, I know why he ate rice with his fingers, unlike every other social climbing adult Punjabi man in the Delhi of 70s and 80s. I know why idlis in Delhi were never soft enough for him and the food at home never good enough. I discovered why the mother goddess in my house did not sit astride a lion, because she was Mookambika.

As a child, I had wondered why he carried gold bordered dupattas in his suitcase. I knew why when I saw the men in Mund and Angavastram in the temples. I saw Papa everywhere. My Punjabi father in Delhi was a Malyali at heart and disguised it poorly.

As I sat looking out of the train window watching the stations whizzing past, I recalled all those tongue twisters of my childhood, Cannanore, Wadkkancherry, Nagercoil, Kottayam, Quilon... exotic destinations from the Arabian Nights Tales to a little girl in Delhi. It was as if I had been to all these places.

I know now why my mother would mumble in Punjabi, “it is time he travels again”, every time he would bicker over some inanity.

It is not a mystery to me anymore because now I know, each time Papa left God’s Own Country to return to what was supposed to be home, he left a little piece of himself behind. And then suffering from Parkinson’s when he couldn’t travel anymore, the rest of him slowly withered away forlorn in the place we called home.

And now as I keep finding those pieces of him everywhere I go, Kerela holds the delight of hunting for hidden eggs in the playground of my childhood on Easter Sunday.