This is the third installment in a set of four, on extracting natural plant fibres to fashion lamp wicks. The first was on vaazhai naar or banana fibre, the second was on lotus silk and the last in this set will be on giant milkweed/madar or erukku thiri.
The first thing that needs to be said of this post is that the use of panampazham நார்/naar or fibres to create lamp wicks is not at all a conventional use–quite unlike banana fibre and lotus silk, which have histories and belief-systems buttressing them. The second thing that needs to be said of this post is that although this comes now as third in a set, these were the first wicks I made–last year, for Krishna Janmashtami, which fell at the end of panampazham season, the end of August, and well-near the end of my father’s life, as it would turn out.
I’d had vaazhai naar thiris [banana fibre wicks] in mind, but much more of the panampazham fibre on hand, left over after sitting for hours coaxing the pulp from the fruit and straining it once, twice to get all the residual fibres out before the next call from my parents would return me to Chennai in a flash. I’d once clogged up the drain pipes at home with these fibres, making the mistake of doing clean-up after processing the fruits at the kitchen sink. That had called for a plumber’s visit to clear out. So I’d taken to being very careful in straining and was left with a mass of fibres that had been washed clean and now looked considerably more compliant, not to talk of the fibres left still on the panampazham “nuts” themselves, combed out like the hair of wild troll dolls that might resist if you dared wash them.
I collected just enough to try a little experiment in wick rolling.
So the process of making panampazham fibre wicks is really no different from the process of processing the fruit itself, which I have documented in some detail here. At the end of that, from the clean-up in fact, what you are left with are the fibres–raw material for lamp wicks.
Of course, using panampazham fibres as wicks means that you can use only of the freshly-fallen ripe fruit, not the roasted; as we say with rice, the purer offerings are always raw, not parboiled. Collected fibres are then dried in the hot sun and pulled and twisted into wicks. Panampazham fibres are wiry, not unlike coconut, so they make rather unruly wicks, rather too reminiscent of Rastafarian dreadlocks, quite unlike the well-behaved vaazhai naar or those delicate, precious lotus silk wicks. Even so, soak them in oil, light your lamp and say your prayer.
I gave the fibres to my mother-in-law, who’d complained of smoking, sooty cotton thiris. We both marveled at how well this wick held a flame even in a breeze and how long it burned, though that certain recalcitrant wiriness is the panampazham’s tanmay or fundamental quality. In the very fibre of the toddy palm’s being, in the very parts ignored and discarded, something able to hold light like that. They made me think I’d like to learn to clean and twist my own stiff, unyielding, recalcitrant wild troll doll urchin self into something that can burn so steadfastly and hold a flame for so long.
It became hard, between hospital visits and sudden dashes to Chennai to be with my parents, not to think of the toddy palm fruit as something of an exemplar of a life well-lived and of the panampazha naar wicks as an extension of myself. Really, we should all be so lucky as to have a body like the panampazham, which gives such delight and summer respite in its ice apple youth, warmth in its ripe, saffron old age and then gives itself so readily to the flames burning within.
