Christmastime in Kerala

Two factors make listening to Christmas music in Tirur slightly depressing. First, nobody around here is in the Christmas spirit, which is understandable since most everyone around here is Muslim or Hindu. Secondly, it is hot as hell right now.

Not hot like the Indian summers of the upper Midwest. Not hot like the occasional warm fronts south Texas gets in December. Hot as in tropical. Hot as in sticky, dog-day-in-August humidity. Hot as in: “How can Christmas possibly be three weeks away?” We feel like we should be gearing up for the Fourth of July right now, so reminiscent is Kerala’s heat to the American Midwest’s summer temperatures.

Even our normally stoic co-workers have become affected. “It’s HOT!” Santosh complained one day last week, breezing his face with a handkerchief. Maybe he was truly hot, or maybe he felt compelled to say something once he saw me, with sweat dripping down my nose and dark circles spanning my armpits.

I had noted when we first began working at JM in October that trying the much-used American conversational tactic of discussing the weather was useless. “Wow, it’s hot, huh?” I would say to a co-worker. She would squint in that way that made me think either she did not understand me, or she thought I was an idiot.

“Hoooot!” I repeated, miming the motion of wiping my brow.

“Hot?” the co-worker would say, with a tone that suggested she was thinking, “It’s always hot. So what?”

And indeed, in Kerala I have noticed that it is always hot. Or rainy. But the monsoons have stopped so it is rainy no longer. Just hot.

The early mornings are pleasant enough. I wake at six most days to do the laundry. We have moved our laundry line to the front atrium since Jaime moved in to the spare bedroom, so each morning I take down the laundry that had been hung up the day before and replace them with clothes that had been soaking overnight. At these times, a mild breeze blows in the atrium windows and produces that now-foreign sensation of a chill on my skin. I glance out and see the cobalt sky and the lustrous tops of the palm trees in the distance and think for a second that I truly love the tropics. But by 8:30, a languid humidity has descended and the pleasant breeze has been deadened into the dusty earth. The sky now radiates a white-yellowish glare the color of a hydrogen bomb blast. The frantic movement of rickshaws and buses and pedestrians crowding the street serves to raise the temperature even more.

So, when I listen to Nat King Cole sing, “Chest-nuts roooasting on an open fiiiiirre!”—his masterful elocution drawing out the word ‘fire’—I can think only of the fire occurring on my brow and in my armpits. The line: “Jack Frost nippin’…at your noh-ose,” only breeds in me a sardonic harrumph.

Tony Bennet’s Silver Bells seems impudent with its suggestion of holiday shoppers happy to be out in the cold weather. Kids bunch here in Tirur, but no snow crunches. Likewise, Frank Sinatra’s Jingle Bells has a good swing but its image of a sleigh dashing through a wintry landscape seems impossible at the moment.

More appropriate for my present circumstance is Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas Island—a hit from the 1950s that seems quaint when listened to in America but wholly lacking in irony when heard in southern India.

“How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? How’d you like to hang a stocking from a great big coconut tree? How’d you like to stay up late, like the islanders do? Wait for Santa to sail in with your presents...in a canoe?”

Having myriad coconut trees to choose from around our apartment, I might very well take up Ella’s suggestion. And as for Santa, he can get to our apartment via rickshaw, though the driver might charge him extra for his bag of toys.