For Grandpa
“….Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I`ll dig with it.”
Seamus Heaney-Digging
1
I remember the first half of palapea,
My mom offered me one afternoon
As I was squatting opposite her
On the newly daubed floor
Of the old kitchen
Chatting with her about some matter at school
As she was preparing the dinner.
With the crispy skin, ridged,
And yellowish like butter on the head,
With a crown of brownish fibrils,
And snow-white on the bottom,
With soft cottony flesh,
It tasted so coolly delicious,
On my tongue,
Tingling my proverbial taste-buds.
2
My grandfather used to bring us many of them,
Strung like white bulbs on a raw ekle,
When he returned from Siriwardena mudalali’s,
Where he removed husks from coconut,
My father would say, for chickenfeed,
Until a rash on his legs,
Forced him to quit his job.
3
Once Jusiappuhami, the cart-man, sold palapea,
By the road-side,
At the northern boundary fence,
Of our school.
In an open box made of rough-hewn mango planks.
He`d keep his merchandise.
His charges for them were proportionate:
The bigger ones would fetch five rupees each,
And the prices would rise
In direct proportion to the sizes.
But the cheaper smaller ones, we found out soon,
Tasted better.
We would constantly badger our moms,
For money to buy them,
During the interval,
Over the barbed wire fence,
Until our principal,
For reasons that we never knew,
Forbade him to ply his trade,
At the fence by the jak tree.
After some time, we heard,
Jusiappuhami was confined to the bed
Having been attacked by his own bull
That dragged his cart,
And a little later on
We learned he’d died.
4
One August over two decades ago
I persuaded my next-door friend,
To go to Siriwardena mudalali’s,
Where with dagger-like, spiky knives,
We coerced palapeas out of the coconuts,
Split with a curved machete,
By a shabbily-dressed, stony-faced woman,
Who seemed to fit the definition of a shrew,
And put them into the old grocery bags,
We`d taken with us stuffed in our pockets.
Once I`d been cloyed with my spoils,
I offered them,
With uncharacteristic generosity
To my mother and my brother.
5
Now my grandfather and his employer
Are both no more here, either
And my friend is a coconut vendor himself,
And I, a rustic poet with an unshakeable past
Trying to link the two worlds together
With the bridge of language.
Let me be the bridge.
Let me fill the gap.
