Fernanda, a lady at the coffee shop, tried to place back a book hiding its cover as I requested for a chai this morning. She looked like any other girl from Mexico working at a coffee shop. I was curious to know what she was reading. Without breaching her privacy, I gently asked what is she reading. She couldn’t speak English. So, reluctantly she turned back the book and showed me the cover. It was a pleasant surprise, as I saw Octavio Paz on its cover. The book was the Spanish original of his seminal work, El laberinto de la soledad. Famously translated into English as the ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. His words used to resonate most in the depressive evenings of college day existential incertitude. But what surprised me more, was seeing Fernanda reading it. I tried but failed to have a meaningful conversation with her about her appreciation of Octavio Paz due to my lack of knowledge of Spanish.

As I sat to experience the first chai of the day, came a surge of thoughts. On top of it was a personal failing so far in connecting the Mexican diaspora in the Silicon Valley with their cultural context of a fascinating Mexico. The Mexico that Octavio Paz or Carlos Fuentes saw, reflected and wrote about. How often we see a Mexican worker in the Silicon Valley in the social, cultural context of Paz, or Fuentes; how often we relate them to our appreciation of the prolific and influential Mexican literature among Spanish language literatures from Spain, Cuba and Argentina?. Do we just see the cheap labor and just that? But among them could be a Fernanda.

Thoughts traveled back to similarities in Dubai, the other capital of Kerala, where ‘Malayalees’ offer cheap labor servicing the oil-rich locals. How many in the Middle East would know, or give regard to the profound, absolutely fascinating richness of Malayalam literature and place such a gulf mallu worker in his/her wholesome cultural context. In Delhi, the comparable are the laborers from Bihar. Majority Delhi population, I hazard a guess again, has no clue about the spectacular legacy of Pataliputra, the famed capital of Maurya empire, where modern India’s civilization began, where a piece of history is etched in golden letters. The Assamese immigrants to Kerala, as mallus move elsewhere, are called ‘bhais’. A case of reverse immigration with people from Assam, mostly from the Bangladesh boarder, migrating to that Indian state in large numbers, nearing 8% of today’s Kerala’s population. Bhai is a common word there these days. Hindi with a Bangla touch is beginning to be better received at shops and restaurants across Kerala. Do the locals ever think of their cultural origins.

What does it take to begin understanding people more wholesomely? Fernanda is a Mexican coffee shop worker, but that’s just a part of her. She is also a student of Spanish literature, an admirer of Octavio Paz. A Malayalee construction worker could sing ‘Renuka’ more intensely than the poet himself. May be a young man who makes tea, the ‘Bhai’, at the shop on the turn towards Cochin’s Nedumbassery airport, may recite Rabindra Sangeet soulfully:

দাঁড়িয়ে আছ তুমি আমার
গানের ওপারে।
আমার সুরগুলি পায় চরণ, আমি
পাই নে তোমারে।

“Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual”, may be this is what Fernanda might be reading now.