Every year Kerala celebrates Onam, and every year our house celebrates it as what we are. When I dictated this note I said we are "half Tamil and half Onam" — and I am keeping the slip, because it is truer than the correction. Two states, two festival calendars, one kitchen. And now a third: my partner brought Madhya Pradesh into this family, so a third state's festivals have started arriving at our door too. It is lovely to be part of such a cultural amalgamation — nobody planned it, and that is exactly why it works.
The story under Onam is Mahabali — a name you can loosely read as the great sacrifice (mahā, great; bali, offering). The one to sit with is the story of Mahabali and Vāmana: a generous asura king at the height of his power; Viṣṇu arriving as a small boy asking for just three paces of land; two strides covering earth and sky; and the king, understanding, offering his own head for the third. What looks like defeat is read in Kerala as the deepest victory — and Onam is the ten days each year Mahabali is welcomed home to see his people happy. Read it slowly, the way we read Panchatantra stories as children — for what sits underneath the tale.
ReflectionMahabali gave his kingdom, then bowed his head — maybe the story’s quiet way of saying: give up the kingdom of the ego, and the heart opens. A mother gives her years, morning by morning. What have you and I truly given up for someone — and who is still waiting for us to welcome them home, the way Kerala welcomes him?
But what actually brought this page is my mother. She is past seventy-five now, and she is unwell — and she still has a skill I have never seen anywhere else: she wakes before everyone and gets the whole house ready. The pooja room. The kitchen. The threshold. By the time the rest of us stir, the festival has already started, and it started with her. Her energy to celebrate is just amazing to watch.
Onam at home runs almost ten days, and it opens with a pookalam — the flower rangoli. Hers this year are on this page: chalk-white kolam drawn freehand on dark granite, fresh flowers packed into the centre, an uruli of blossoms floated at the door. And at the threshold, the whole family in one greeting — welcome written in Malayalam, in Tamil, and in English, one under the other. Three scripts, one door. That is us.
My relationship with my mother is a bit complicated, and I would rather say that plainly than write a greeting card. I love her as a mother; we also differ on many things. I do not like control, and like any Indian mother she is over-protective and over-controlling — I laugh about all of it now. Both things are true at once, and Onam is somehow the season that holds them together: whatever we disagree about the rest of the year, at five in the morning she is on the floor with rice-flour and flowers, and I am the one photographing it.
I love her for who she is. I do not think I will ever manage to say any of this to her face — we are not that kind of family, and maybe no Indian family is. So this page is the attempt: written down, published, shared at least in spirit. Happy Onam, Amma. The house is awake because you woke it.
അമ്മേ, ഹൃദയം നിറഞ്ഞ ഓണാശംസകൾ 🙏
Amma, heartfelt Onam wishes.