Park benches, iron slabs and thogayal

My Saturdays have recently taken on a solitary hue, what with the wife's taxing schedules making her work week six days long. Yet, she fixes the lunch for me. Or, as it happened last Saturday, a part of it. The menu last week was thogayal (an Indian dip, vaguely). Saturdays have their own character and they don't drop it just because some project is running behind schedule somewhere. This Saturday was no exception and despite all efforts, it was well past late when our day began. The thogayal, for the uninitiated, has two distinct parts to its preparation. There's the frying-the-ingredients part and assigning-the-grinding-to-the-husband part. To her credit, my wife completed both parts before scooting out the door. As her bus pulled away, all I had to do was blend the already fried ingredients into a fine paste and sit down for a good meal. Sounds simple, right? Yes, if not for a "but" coming. But, there was a small catch. I had to add just one more ingredient to make it complete: coconut gratings. Still sounds simple, right? Yes again, if not for a second "but" coming. But, in an effort to move away from using frozen food, combined with the recent acquisition of a mixer, or the more fancy, "food processor", we had purchased a full husked coconut instead of the usual frozen coconut slab. Okay, it was the size of a football and was on sale for under $1.

If you are familiar with the anatomy of the coconut, you would notice a hard shell that protects the kernel from anybody trying to access it. There is no implement in our house that comes anywhere close to being capable of cracking a coconut shell. I gave the situation at hand some thought and donned my shirt, picked up the coconut, locked the door and stepped out into the sun. Being the optimist that I am, I also had and an empty utensil for collecting the liquid inside when I succeeded in breaking it open. My first stop was the apartment unit down the corridor which has served all my hardware requirements successfully on earlier occasions. As I was about to ring the doorbell, I found that it was locked. Unexpected, yes; cause for panic, no. I proceeded to the lift lobby and took a crowded lift down to the street. It is not everyday that the occupants of a lift car expect to have a person carrying a coconut and an empty vessel for company and they were suitably amused. I tried my best to not appear embarrassed. I stepped out into the street and surveyed the landscape and that was when the gravity of the situation started sinking in.

While you chew on that, let's do a quick comparative study of houses in India and the rest of the world. Houses in India come equipped with grinding stones, the size of mini cars. Since the average Indian has moved on to electrical grinders or the readymade, refrigerated batter packets that are available in stores, these stones are now primarily used for breaking coconuts. In those modern apartments that don't have grinding stones, there is still available an aruvaal (Indian machete?) stored in some corner which would serve the purpose. But I don't live in a house equipped to meet my coconut breaking needs and hence I found myself in the streets, literally, with an intact coconut and an empty vessel.

Necessity mothers invention or at least innovation. On that note, I set about testing various installations for their worthiness in being able to crack a coconut. When young, I had learnt, the hard way, that stairs or any other piece of masonry won't help in my mission. I could easily chip away the plastering and end up getting a memo from the housing authorities. The stair railings were steel with rounded edges and a chrome finish - ruled out. Walking a bit further, I tried the wrought iron park bench installed near the play area. I had credited a course in engineering materials nearly 10 years ago in college. While there was much elaboration on its properties, it's tensile strength, Young's modulus etc, I don't recall a professor ever saying in clear terms if it was capable of cracking open a coconut shell and it was time to test it myself. Exactly 3 hard, surgical and noisy blows later I learned it was not. The coconut remained intact but I could sense windows opening and questioning glances thrown at me. I shuffled away from the scene in search of my next tool, wondering why the world was prejudiced against empty vessels for being noisy.

By this time, I was about quarter of a mile away from home, eliminating, on my way, masonry, manhole covers, cars and other people as candidate tools on some reason or the other. I could not locate even one single piece of stone or a small rock anywhere. Which probably explains why there are no riots or violent protests here. Anyway, just as I was about to turn around, prepared to settle for a coconut-free thogayal, I noticed one missing iron grill cover running along the length of a rain water drain that gave me unhindered access to the hard, iron edge of the next grill and it was all that I had been looking for. In the next 15 seconds (Okay, 30!), I proceeded to break open the shell and collected every drop of coconut water. Mission accomplished! One might have even detected a touch of swagger in my walk back home.

Suffice to say that thogayal was particularly tasty that day. My prayers now are that the missing slab doesn't get replaced by Singapore's ever efficient HDB authorities.