madayi - the fish curry experience

i was promoted as Officer. It was in 1984. After years of homely food, i have to depend on hotels and a veg hotel in Malabar is different from a brahmins hotel in east fort, trivandrum. In those days the bosses used to get things done by threatening that you will be transferred to Malabar and Malabar beyond Palakkad is as good as landing in remote villages cut off from mainland. In kannur, it was six months raining and i abandoned wearing shoes because many a roads have rivulets and either walk with shoes on and mostly it will become useless or with due respect take the shoes and cross the small rivulets passing across the roads and mostly it will walking with shoes held high in your left hand and right hand pulling up the pants and sometimes with an umbrella tugged between the face and neck.

The fish experience is one that i can never forget. The first day i joined the madayi branch and in the noon, food was brought to our office from a near-by house. It was self service. I took some rice and made a big whole in the midst. Before pouring the yellow coloured "pulisseri" into it, i put my fingers into the dish and stirred it. I felt happy because i can have pulisseri here. But my Manager who was seeing all these, asked my whether i was a veg or non veg and i answered that i was a Pure veg ( I exactly didn't know the difference between veg and pure veg curries). He then asked not to take the curry..He said that it was fish curry.
Fever went down my spine..My god i have landed in a land where i cant make out whether a curry was veg or non veg. In the south kerala, we can know the fish curry by its bad smell or by the dark colour. I wondered how i will live here as a pure veg. but i was known not as a veg but as "pachakari"