onam.

Onam is one of those things every malayali takes time out of their lives to celebrate. Irrespective of where they are, what their lives otherwise look like, and how busy they are. This year’s onam just went by, I had exams in college, and I had lots of work to do, now that our professors have decided that we are way too grown up for them to cut us any sort of slack. 

I woke up on the day of onam, and grabbed all my things so that I could go and sit in the library, to study for a particularly tough exam. I felt something amiss. There was this hole, and it was making me uncomfortable.  I stopped everything I was doing, draped on a saree, put on some flowers, and went ahead to the library.  The stares and looks and faces I got were too many in number and variety for me to count. I’m pretty sure that if I were at home and had an exam the next day, I wouldn’t bother doing any of that, onam or not. But here, it made me feel like I was at home. That small act provided me with the comfort I was looking for. Whether or not I related to the festival, or understood its purpose or reason for such pomp and splendor, none of it mattered.

We all had an exam the next morning, and hence on the day after that, everybody decked up and went to class, malayali or non malayali. To us, who had roots in that culture, it was our way of hanging onto those bits of home that we miss even now, 4 years into the journey. To the rest, it was a matter of solidarity, and ofcourse the happy association they had made to it, having celebrated it thrice before.

It has been centuries since the advert of Onam. Things have changed so much, lifestyle, preferences, living conditions, even geographic setting. But this one festival has remained, as the ultimate mark of identity. Celebrating it is a matter of pride, and a matter of hanging onto those last bits of the umbilical cord. Where every sign of you ever having belonged to that land has been erased, there still will be those feelings that stir up, at the time of Onam.  As I have said before, having been brought up outside the overwhelming influence of an Indian culture and everything that come with it, I pretty much never understood how some things were just automatically supposed to be yours, how you were supposed to be feeling a sort of belonging towards it. But when I realized that if I had to be reading up Derrida and Foucault and Barthes on the day of Onam, I would rather do it with a saree and some flowers on, it surprised me. That was my first bout of ‘automatic’ enthusiasm.

When there are so many things I don’t like about the same people, when so many things sadden me, and infuriate me, when in other occasions their extreme sense of territory maddens me, this one time of the year, I look at every fellow malayali with a huge smile on my face. And it is as good as a hug that you desperately need, when somebody else gives you that happy smile. Does celebrating the festival do anything to fulfill some sort of an inner dilemma? Do I achieve anything morally satisfactory from it? Is it going to bring any good to somebody else? No, I don’t think so. But there is no reason for every action of mine to be an answer to one of those questions. Especially when it is about something that makes me happy, that brings my home to me, wherever I am.