Ode to the Toddy

On the road from Parvathagiri I found enlightenment. It was during a routine field visit to a remote part of Warangal District, 90 kilometers north by north east of Hyderabad.  Our task was simple: ascertain the condition of our new field office in the village and investigate the possibilities of building community toilets in the locality. Although the chance to escape the chaos of the city for a day was enticing, the trip itself promised only to reinforce what I already knew: the abysmal conditions of semi-feudal rural India, the inefficiency of state and central government schemes, and the dreadfully dull nature of official visits. Thankfully, upon our arrival, once the pomp and pageantry had been dispensed with, I managed to sneak away quietly to a local Dargah. A Sufi shrine, erected in the honor of some half forgotten saint, whose name and deeds have long ago faded into fable and now transformed into a typical Deccani amalgamation of heterodox Muslim eschatological lore and Hindu ritualism. A few half-muttered Arabic words, a broken cocoanut, incense smoke and a rose petal on my tongue and my soul was guaranteed entrance to the seventh Jannah. True salvation, however, would wait until we started our return journey. All along the road, against the setting sun, sat groups of villagers under cocoanut palm trees. This, I was told, was the traditional rural South Indian drinking ritual. Every night after a day of arduous laboring in the fields the farmers collect under the trees. Sitting on the bare ground, using leaves as glasses the drink is poured from the clay pots that have been bound to a cut flower where the sap has been slowly fermenting during the day, turning from innocent nectar into otherworldly delight. To my amazement and utter surprise, this simple drink was the tastiest I have ever had the pleasure to consume. To think that thousands of years of painstaking effort, complex formulas and advanced distillation processes that have led to our present hodgepodge of alcohols had not improved upon natures own recipe. By comparison our modern bars and pubs appear crude and crass. Here a palm, the earth and the endless sky. Squatting on the ground the villagers consumed their toddy, some in silence others chatting away, until they all, one by one, pass into bliss and oblivion where they sit. Surely, this primordial state was the first communion of the spirit and spirituality, pure and undiluted by power, dogma and hierarchies. I had always known that there were a million roads towards illumination. And thus I found another one.