When everyone in my school in Delhi wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, I wanted to be Chellappan, the tandaan. The coconut tree climber. For most of my childhood that was the plan, with two detours. The first was KSRTC bus conductor. He tore colourful tickets by hand, counted change, stayed upright in a bus doing whatever speed it was doing, and signalled the driver to stop and start. There was a bell rope that ran all the way to the back, so he could run the whole bus from wherever he was standing. I was sold. The second was diesel loco pilot of the Kerala Express, hauling twenty-five coaches from Delhi to Kerala. I used to press my face to the window just to see the train curve at a bend, a kilometre of coaches like a snake nobody had told about the speed limit. But Chellappan outlasted both. A tandaan was lower caste, and usually not allowed to mingle with the rest of society. I was a kid and didn't see any of that. What I saw was a man who went up a swaying coconut tree, tal...
My appoppan, K. Kuttappan of Kollantevadakadil house, was not just my mother’s father—he was a world of stories bound in mundu folds, and the smell of Chandrika soap. He never travelled outside Kerala, except for that one trip to Bangalore to visit us, yet when he spoke, you felt he had carried entire worlds in his pocket. His descriptions of Tamarasheri churam’s winding roads, or a boat cutting through the backwaters, weren’t just stories—they were portals. Listening to him was like travelling without moving, like cinema without the screen. Though not formally educated, he had read deeply—Malayalam writers and philosophers. He carried their words in his speech, not like a scholar quoting, but like a man who had thought them through while sipping tea in the verandah. Maybe that’s why his stories always felt bigger than the narrow lanes of our village. He dressed sharp, always. Not in suits or fancy coats, but in the elegance of a mundu whose kara matched his shirt perfectly. Starched w...