By Sebastian Noronha
Belonging to a very typical village setup in Goa, I have been accustomed to various unique traditions, practices, and happenings. One such thing was the regular visit of the coconut plucker.
The day would start just like any other day with maybe a typical breakfast of fresh warm pav along with the last nights left-over beef curry, heated and reduced to a tastier concoction than it was the night it was prepared. While washing down the spicy breakfast with some nice piping hot black tea and while poring into the local daily, the nondescript morning atmosphere suddenly would break into shrill but melodious howls. To an ear that has never heard these unearthly howls it would sound like nothing less than some tribal war cry. But to an ear that is accustomed to such unusual sounds it only meant that the day was going to be another one of those busy coconut-collecting holidays.
We used to have a sizeable number of coconut trees in our compound. Several have over the years been cut down to make way for tarred roads on two sides of the property. Most of our coconut yield was usurped by our own consumption. With almost everything cooked in our kitchen using some form of coconut, the coconut yield, however much it was, never seemed to be enough. Cuisine ranging right from fish curry, to xacuti, to infinite types of sweets would make the use of some form of coconut or the other.
A coconut plucking day in any Goan household used to be a significant day and had to be planned well in advance. Some local help needed to be called for helping in collecting the plucked coconuts and arranging them into a heap in front of the house. We as children were at the height of excitement. The main reason for my excitement was the eagerness that I felt while looking forward to a tasty treat of succulent tender coconuts once the plucking was done. Also there was this occasional chance of the plucker stumbling upon a squirrels nest with one or two squirrel babies still inside. I have had squirrels as pets as far back as I can remember. I no longer do because over the years I have conditioned myself to a zero-tolerance towards caging any living being. But I digress.
As children it was our responsibility to forage the bushes and the ‘paand’ (Communidade ditch) for stray coconuts that may have landed there. For some strange reason there was hardly any fear of reptiles and any creepy crawlies that might have been there. Today it makes my skin crawl just by recalling the kind of dangerous places I have reached out to for that stray coconut. All the neighborhood friends who gathered to play the daily ‘catch and cook’ or ‘hide and seek’ used to get unwittingly caught into helping with the coconut gathering chore in the hope of a tender-coconut reward. The idea being that the faster we gather the coconuts, the faster we get the reward, and the sooner we get to proceeding with our games.
After the gathering of the coconuts came the more serious section of the entire thing – the counting of the coconuts. The coconut plucker would stand with his legs apart and count the coconuts in twos by flinging them behind him through his legs into a separate pile. Then the much awaited calculation happened. And I can still picture the suspended look on my mom’s face while she waited with bated breath. I still cannot gather the method or the formula used. The equation was probably “the total number of coconuts divided by the number of tress climbed plus the angle of the sun at the time multiplied by the square root of pi…!” Whatever it was, it always seemed to mean that the plucker got the choicest of the lot of coconuts, the biggest ones at the least. And nobody would argue with him. He would then be paid some amount in cash which again I presume had a very complicated formula of being calculated.
My favorite part of the entire exercise is what came next! The tender-coconut treat! It used to be amazing to watch how the plucker would chop the coconut while holding it in just one hand and slicing away with his perpetually sharp ‘Koiti’ (chopper). I would watch the process in absolute awe. To me he resembled nothing less than Superman at that time – a very messed up and sweaty one albeit, but at least his shorter than short pants did justice to the Superman tag.
While we children used to feast upon the tender flesh of the coconuts, the plucker would expertly pull out strands from each of the coconuts in his set and string them up together in such a way that he could conveniently hang them on either side of his bicycle handle, carefully and mathematically keeping in mind the distribution of weight. And with a last final blood-curdling howl he would set out on his journey home or to the local tavern for a swig the afternoon dose of feni and some juicy gossip.
Even with the plucker having left, we at home were far from starting our play session. The task of putting the coconuts into the backyard ‘hoomp’ (thatched hut used for storage) was still looming large. This task however came with its own separate reward. This reward would be in the form of some nice delicious ‘aatol’ (rice, beans, coconut, jaggery pie) that mom would prepare for the evening tea-time.
Fast-forward – today! The trees in the compound are not as many as they used to be. And sadly, our regular coconut plucker is now a very old man who can barely walk. It is almost a dead occupation today anyways. I am open to correction if I may be wrong, but in my view I think in the whole of Goa there will be hardly any traditional coconut pluckers left at all. Coconut orchards and plantations have made way to mega-projects. The classification of the coconut tree as a species of grass had made things worse. It’s thankful that it has now been re-classified as a tree. Also, tender-coconut business has become very lucrative. And the pluckers that we nowadays see are mainly migrant youngsters who only look for buying the lot of tender-coconuts from the bhaatkars (landlords).
The memory remains, but the succulent reward of the soft tender-coconut has ceased to thrill me anymore!
