Seemandham..continues

Oops!! I dont have any plan to procreate again to do justice to the above title. If you haven't read and COMMENTED on the previous post on the same topic, you can click here to read and then COMMENT!

Commenting on the topic of seemandham, I must say that the festivities and the ritual are no different from the 1043 other rituals you celebrate in a tamil brahmin household. This time around I was wise (nothing to do with the ageing process) enough to stay back for 3 days after the function, to reclaim the real estate that I lived, slept and ate in for years.

If I could comment on how it is like, the living space on a day like that would be occupied by junior, senior and executive C-level vadhiyars who could be differentiated by their distance from the central homa kundam. The closest (and hence C-Level) is always the executive vadhiyar. Another id is the fact that they sport more gold/diamond/platinum/unobtonium rings than the rest of the jama (colloquial for a seemingly calm yet unruly crowd). The C-Level is not necessarily the senior most in age. It all boils down (in the barrels of ghee used to grow-fy the homam) to how capitalistic you are! So thats so much ado about how my living space is occupied. Needless to mention that the semi-permanent fixtures like wooden tables (with plywood top), tea table (with an even older plywood top), diwan (with slightly handicapped legs) which otherwise encroach the living space in my house are moved to enighboring houses (without their permission).

The place I sleep is where the junior and mid-senior vadhyars sit (along with their improvised bags that once used to be polished white nylon packing material based rice sacks).

The place I eat is tharu-maarized by a cookmani maami who is referred through kallidaikkurchinkedin by the meg-avia-lomaniac mama of my mom. She, a host of black ants, left over coconut scrappings and an assortment of poorly cooked south indian excesses like avial, thalaga kozhambu etc. occupy the space where I normally sit n eat.

To cut the long story short, I hate functions organized at my home because they make me feel like I am a guest and there are some other enthusiastic "they" who invite me into my house after having arrived as guests. I love their hospitality but its weird to be 'welcomed' into your home. It just makes so alien a place.

The best part of such functions is that how easily i give in to believe that, by being sincere about repeating the hymns and verses from holy sacred vedas whose meanings are neither known to me or the C-Level, we could actually make the kid solve the puzzle of the universal theory that defines everything in the universe (well, that wont still define why my dad's fetish for making our house a dumpyard has grown exponentially..Gah I hate going into my own house now). Hope dad and the readers wont mind that comment.

There is a part in the seemandham where you pour a few liters of cold water on your wife in open space and she just needs to take them all on her. I couldnt imagine a better way to exert my husbandality on a hydrophobic person like my wife.

If getting up in the wee hours (3 am) is not enough to make you feel like a south indian boy eating colesaw stew in a remote german hotel in a snow-ruinned european outback, the seemandham function also tests your hand-eye-ear and bum coordination with routines like "take this quasi-ring like thing made of grass on this finger of that hand and move it in this direction from that direction three times while adjusting your bum to ensure that the veshti doesnt fall off".

At the end of it all, when it's really over, people already start to leave and you end up chauffering them to bus stands and stations (with genuine love and lot of tiredness).

I would anyday stay in an alien country and celebrate our rituals with our micro-waved payasam and head home to have a lot of time to do nothing than be a guest to my home invited inside by fellow guests.

--- For those visitors to the blog from google who came searching for punyajanam, seemandham, mallu aundie sex, avial, avani avittam, ashwin ramasamy or ashwin ramaswamy, here is to say that I dont have anything against "comments". We can sit and talk it out. So feel free to "comment"----