If I have to nominate one person from all of Lakshadweep to be Person of the Year, I’d pick my idiosyncratic cook Shajahan..No contest really...Its not so much the fact that he’s a eunuch, a half woman if you may, and has ‘boyfriends’, or even the fact that his cooking surpasses all conceivable adjectives (even the bad ones)…It’s who he Is.
A gazillion monkeys given infinite time would perhaps compose all of Shakespeare’s work but I’ll bet they wouldn’t even come close to scratching the surface of Shajahan’s mind. He is what he does and what he does is, well, pretty much anything! He’s not just unpredictable but his lack of logic is in itself so random that any bookie worth his salt I’m sure would commit hara-kiri rather than place the odds on Shajahan’s next move. Let’s just say Kasparov wouldn’t stand a chance if Shajahan ever took to chess.
I’ll never forget the day my colleague A and I first made Shajahan’s acquaintance. Shajitha chechi brought him over on the second day after our arrival to Agatti..He seemed to me at the time like such a paavam palli, with his lank frame and long arms, a timid soul in a lungi, who would jump if we even so much as sneezed in his effeminate presence. I remember thinking that if we were to ever have a ‘safe’ male cook in the islands we couldn’t have picked a better candidate - provided of course he didn’t have ‘lesbian’ tendencies (god forbid).
It was amusing at first – giving him instructions, watching him nod vigorously and then finding out later that none of them had been carried out. For example, if we told Shajahan that he had to make a vegetarian curry everyday, he’d do it that day and maybe the next, but beyond that his concept of “everyday” would fail him and he’d have to be told all over again. And it wasn’t just vegetarian curries of course. It was everything! We figured initially that it was just a communication gap that could easily be bridged. (We were so naïve). Anyway we had our local friend Sallu come in and tell him everything in malayalam but somehow that didn’t have any tangible effect. We figured it wasn’t a memory problem or an Attitude problem (hah). It was just..well..what I’d really like to call – The Shajahan Factor.
The Shajahan Factor is an abstract phenomenon. It is to this day mysterious, unquantifiable and unreseached. But it is definitely not to be underestimated.
It wasn’t just our three square meals a day that depended on it but Shajahan and his eccentricities extended from being a mere domestic challenge to becoming an everyday battle to preserve our very sanity! I cannot the count the number of times when he’s had us both stumped out of our senses over the most basic of household chores like bringing in drinking water everyday from the rainwater tank. He seemed to have something against doing it even though the tank is practically on our doorstep. As I mentioned, Shajahan’s grasp of the concept of ‘everyday’ is as it is rather weak, but supposing on top of that, he’d intentionally decided (for no apparent reason) that A and I didn’t need to drink any more water again therefore making the trip to the tank irrelevant, how did the man expect to cook anything if there wasn’t any clean drinking water? He was, after all a cook. Well, the thing about Shajahan is that when faced with such a self-made crisis, instead of doing the obvious, which is to step outside and get more water, he’d “improvise” and come up with an alternative without having to go outside. He’d just use water from the wash basin or sink, mostly use it unboiled and of course carefully make sure not tell us anything about the whole thing.
No ordinary human brain could even want to concoct such random problems in the first place not to mention, come up with equally bizarre solutions (that’s also unhygienic by the way)..But then again Shajahan is no ordinary being. And its not that he’s evil, lazy, or uncaring. He’s..well..He’s Shajahan! (ta daa). He is beyond Logic. He is beyond Reason. Somewhere in that conical head of his is a brain that can stump a million Freuds and a billion more Einsteins.
A more recent episode revealed Shajahan’s amazing mathematical abilities. When A’s husband stayed with us for a month in between, Shajahan would often make coconut dosa-pies for breakfast (don’t ask me what a coconut dosa-pie is, it tastes like what it sounds like and I sure as hell don’t want to know more). So anyway, he would make this pie thing on more than one occasion for us and every single time he would cut it up himself into exactly 10 pieces. For the three of us. It was a mystery who the 10th piece was for. Not him surely. Perhaps he thought A’s husband, being the ‘man of the house’, deserved an extra piece. There’s also a slight chance he did it to test OUR skills of division. Even then, how does one cut a circle into ten equal pieces anyway? I guess it’s obviously Shajahan’s style to cut things into an indivisible number of pieces but to make all the pieces precisely the same size. Mathematical genius, vindictive fiend or just a dumbass? I’ll never know..
Another famous characteristic of Shajahan is to indulge in underground bartering of our provisions with our neighbors. We supposedly know nothing about it. We only witness a kilo of our grapes disappearing mysteriously from the fridge (the bowl came back though) and sooner or later we’d have extra eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner when neither of us have bought any eggs at all. Or one half kilo of chicken we’d buy would last for a month. No matter how good he is at dividing food up, even Shajahan can’t make one chicken last that long. It’s not an openly apparent system of exchange however. Sometimes eggs borrowed today would result in an exchange (maybe) a few weeks or months later if there was any exchange at all. It remained a mystery but we trusted Shajahan. He’s not a criminal mastermind or a bootlegger..He’s…yep..you guessed it..He’s Shajahan.
I got another one. There was a time when Shajahan declared war on laundry. And as was the norm for him, it was entirely unprovoked and lacked all sense. He would just refuse to wash clothes but only on the Day we asked him to do it. On those days he would pull a long face and plead “tomorrow uh..please?”. Nonetheless, those ‘tomorrows’ would hold good enough and he’d promptly wash the whole load the next day, using an entire sachet for less than one bucket. (The clothes would be soapy but it would be washed.) It’s as if he required a whole day of mental psyching to just to tackle his evil nemesis - the plastic bucket. And then as quickly as the war had begun and we were just getting used to telling him about laundry one extra day in advance, he declared a truce and accepted whatever he had to do with as little as a shy nod of his head. It’s all we could do to keep from laughing hysterically at him.
Well..I guess Shajahan’s escapades will continue to entertain me, mystify me, haunt me and annoy me for as long as I’m here, but I am certain that when the time comes for me to leave the islands for good, I won’t just be taking memories of beautiful white sands and swaying palms, I will also be taking memories of that irrepressible enigma that is, after all, my darling ex-cook Shajahan.
