Gelf Experiences

Rainy Tuesday night on a crowded train from Kerala to Bangalore. Sweltering hot. Raised voices that makes you want to take a swan-dive off the next bridge.
While I was musing on how best to spend my time, this cloud burst of an inspiration struck me: Study of human subjects. Specifically, my neighbors on the train in the next bay. Made an amazing case study – this motley crew just returned from the ‘Gelf’ J
Dig this: How do you ascertain if that chatty family is immigrant from Kerala who found their calling in the Middle East?
Lemme give you some infallible tips after my wonderful experience with this family in that ten-hour long train journey.

Point One: The first indication is the whiff of perfume. Expensive Davidoff Coolwater, fragrances of rose-water ‘attar’, mixed with a lot of exotic heady ladies cologne. And while you wonder where on earth is such heavenly fragrance wafting from, a cacophony of noises drown out any reaction that you would have wanted to make. A family of about nine (for want of not offending any body’s puritan senses, I am restricting the family size to nine which is actually quite a modest number) huffs and puffs through the narrow passage way of the sleeper-class compartment in the train. Lugging luggage (American Tourister and Samsonite no less!) the size of mini golf-carts piled sky high one on top of another.
That’s your first brush with these characters.

Point Two: Do you spot that one male, who is probably the size of a beached whale resting on the Miami Beach, hair colored a weird shade of orange and graying at the sides and definitely on the receding end of things, at the centre of everything, controlling things? He’s probably sweating bullets and sports a huge clean white kerchief, mopping his brows and now splotched dark with sweat stains. (This is like the hundredth time he is coming back to his motherland, and yet, having been used to the air-conditioning in the middle of Gobi desert, he’s yet to adjust back to the humid air of Kerala!) That’s the patriarch. The buck stops here. The rock around which others rally. Our man is leading the whole family back into their native land – Good old Kerala from Gelf.

Point three: The Patriarch is by default surrounded by at least three to four ladies, lending voice to the chaos in high pitched falsettos. Against conventional beliefs, these ladies usually are given to brazenly uncovering their hair and only have a dupatta casually draped around their shoulders, stand tall in their Jimmy Choos bought at the last Dubai Shopping Extravaganza and smell of a thousand other fragrances which would send your nose into a tizzy just trying to unravel. Mostly on the healthier side, these ladies would be cradling at least one to two toddlers who would be bawling their lungs out for attention.

Point four: The Rich Spoilt Brats. Boy: Young, Natty, clad in expensive Puma/Adidas footballer tees, and shorts, sporting very large gaudy Casio sports-watches on their wrists and always with a video-game in hand that looks like it will cost you at least 2 months salary. The older ones (mind you, when I say old, I mean like nine or ten) always have the Nokia N-series which they casually flip around in their hands.
Girl: Very young, usually looks like the DOLL. Very pretty, completely dolled up in the latest western outfit, hair cut in the latest French fringe style and wearing five-inch heels ( beat that!). Slightly older girls fare no better, with the complete doll outfits, and hair let loose without a dupatta covering it up. Always with that frosty-nosed stare, eyes made up, and nose stuck-up in a richie-rich snob look and dresses that glimmer and shine in the dark.

That makes up most of the nine-member family from Gelf who are out for a summer vacation back at the ancestral home in Kerala. You can’t go wrong with these pointers; All Gelf Returnees! Hail “Mallu-land Dufaaaii”!