podi-kizhi conversations

packed heat in a bolus bag. leaves picked from the streets tightly tied in a kizhi, ready for use in the kalari room, where d and i do the nadi marma massages. 

d - gurrukal - wipes the sweat falling over his beard, while i cook  the bags over a portable rusty stove. he careflly pauses for a minute to look at raesh, the body builder d is massaging. raesh the muscleman with expressions more intense than the the arab sea, which gathered every few minutes into menacing monsoon clouds that pounded on the tarp covering the shala.

i hand d one of the medicine bags, browned and dripping like a samosa. d takes it, claps it over his own bare olive skin before rapidly smashing it on the back of the bodybuilder. 

body builder glares at d like a wwf wrestler who hulk hogan broke a chair over, looks like someone who has seen the lord. d grins through his semitic beard. he knows; he has seen the reaction before. without turning his head from raesh, d holds his hand out towards me. i know the deal. i hand them fried kizhi. our transaction is swifter than a drug deal - slap, shake, grip - 20 bag and a jackson.

the kizhi consists of ella and errandi, garlic that d and i peeled wih a switchblade and coconut i grated under his tutleage, on a machete style cocount grinder. its the kind of machete my ammu whipped miracles with for my brothers and i.

13 ingredients later we punctre an egg, drip the white like icing over a cake, and d nods at me. at once, we are mixing the ingredients into brownie batter, into cake, into color.

gurrukal's boy, shantu, has appeared, was there all along, pacing in the backgrond, talking to d's sister, mom, sister in law, the babies, until it was just him and the wind talking unemployment . d introduces us, tells me that him and shantu started doing kalari at the same time, back in the day.

shantu is pudgy with a beer belly. he has the same look d's boy raveen had, when i asked him whether he still practiced the martial art. both shantu n raveen had the same hollow voiced response. with beautiful indian eyes the color of melancholy, they looked away and said no. said that they'd been drinking these days. when i asked shantu, when i asked raveen why, wondering how they could give up  this ancient mastery, they shrugged, like it was a choreagraphed dance they knew too well. They said, kalari was no longer interesting. when i asked what they did now, they laughed, said nothing, said they were looking for work and a miracle. 

shantu helps me tie the string around the bolus bag. d holds it up like an inspector, tests it out by playfully pressing it on the head of his little girl, who is on her way to terrorizing grandma, shantu, the stray dogs, the sea.

already i can see what i did wrong. d looks at me, like: come on my dude, you know what you gotta do. but i feeling lazy, want to eat coconut and lounge in a hammock well above the dying whales and sea turtles. 

do it again, d says to me with the ease of a brother, a real one, the kind who can whip your ass and you'll still be cool with an hour later. i do. 

shantu gives me advice, real detailed and long-winded, as he paces, running his hand through his receding curls. he tells me stories with morals, several of them, in the way only a broke dude with lots of time and without a job can tell.

i hold  the kizhi bag, smack it over the porch ledge, over my thin wrists, hold it  to the grey and moshing clouds.

yeah, d says. that's it.