Providence

Home is a place called Aroor. Which, like many places in this part of the country is essentially an amalgamation of several back-alleys and mundu clad Chaettas.
It has a butcher and a baker and a man that can source literally anything and is self-appointed ombudsman for all disputes. (On account of wisdom gained during his several months in the ”gelf”)
The internet hasn’t been invented here yet and the local “Hypermarket” swears there is no such thing as a triple A battery.

But, small towns have a strange civility to them. I think this is true of most of them. Reduced anonymity means you have to take time to be courteous to survive. The rules of “personal space” and “personal information” are a little different mostly because the value of community interference in ones life is (at least in the scale of small town living) generally beneficial and the obtrusion is something of a lesser (and hence tolerable) evil.

Aroor is a tiny piece of land that occupies the several hundred square feet between south Kochi and north Alapuzzha. Which has rather interesting corollaries such as my cell phone’s insistence that my walk from the bedroom to the kitchen spanned two cities
Which incidentally is not the first time
a bathroom slipper clad me,
has arrived at a whole new city.
for an Assam tea with honey.

Apart from its cellular coverage ambivalence, Aroor has little else to distinguish it. Apart from the fact that it is dead bang in the middle of Kerala, which in it self is so full of corollaries that attempting to delineate them is like looking for the end in an idiappam. Before you even get half way there the Kadle curry arrives and then you’re just too hungry to bother.