A friend of mine shared an interesting problem with me. The problem was not hers but that of an “auntie” in her neighbourhood: she wants a machine that can break coconuts. “A machine to break coconuts!” you may exclaim. You may even laugh at the idea, as I did. But you will symapthise with the old woman if you hear the story fully.
Abruptly uprooted from her country home and replanted in a two-bedroomed flat on the fourth floor of a huge block, the old woman is already a fish out of water. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor.) To make matters worse, she doesn’t find in the kitchen a mortar or some such object on which she can break coconuts. The flat is paved with stones of different kinds – the carpet area with marble of one kind, and the bathrooms of another, while the kitchen slab is an elegant piece of granite. But where is that good old stone, the mortar, on which she used to break coconuts in her country home? It’s like the problem in The Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.”
“Can’t she use an iron rod or a heavy knife?” I asked after my own practice. “No”, said my friend. “Her hands are failing. It’ll be risky, trying to hit a coconut in one hand with a rod or knife held in another.” “Then she must make do without coconuts”, I said. “Don’t be silly”, my friend admonished me. “A coconutless meal is inconceivable for a South Indian. And Auntie comes from Palakkad.”
I thought the matter over. There seemed another alternative. “Tell her”, I said, “to have her coconuts broken at the shop itself.” Dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand, my friend said, “She is an orthodox brahmin woman. She believes in breaking a coconut at home and offering it with its water to the gods before she uses it for practical purposes. A coconut broken at a shop becomes unfit for ritual offering.”
“So, that’s why she wants a coconut-breaker – like a mixer or a grinder?” I asked. My friend nodded her head. Then she said, “We have some ideas for the design of such a machine. I have a friend called Gopalakrishna Murthy who has suggested that the machine should be fashioned somewhat like the guillotine, which was used for cutting people’s heads off in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The frame must have a sharp blade at the top with provision for placing a coconut at the bottom. If you turn the machine on, the blade will drop onto the coconut and break it in equal halves – and the water will flow into a stainless steel tumbler attached to the machine.”
