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India

Roadside Coconut

The weekend between Noida and Bengaluru, I spent on the road with my direct manager, one of my peer managers, and three of the team leads, in the boss’s car road-tripping to Mysore. That’s an entire adventure worthy of a blog of its own.

Somewhere along the way, and I don’t recall clearly where this falls in the sequence, the boss decided he wanted a coconut. This was how things were done, I discovered. The boss would say, I’d like a coffee, and everyone would agree, yes, it was time for a coffee. In this case, he was driving, so we pulled off next to an ox cart loaded with coconuts.

No kidding, this farmer had loaded his cart with coconuts, hitched up his ox, and driven into town to sell them. He pulled a coconut from the pile, hacked off a slice with a machete, stuck the slice edge-on into the opening, dropped in a paper straw, and handed it to each of us in turn.

There was a massive pile of coconut detritus behind the cart. Apparently the farmer had been using this location for a while, because some of that was pretty well composted. When I was done, I hucked my coconut onto the pile, and missed out on part 2 because I wasn’t watching my coworkers.

Turns out, when the coconut water is gone, you hand the coconut back to the farmer. He then chops it in half with the machete, and you use the sliver of shell to dig the meat out of the two halves. No fresh coconut for me that day as I got ahead of myself. Keep an eye on what the locals are doing, and follow their lead, is the rule, and I’ve known that for decades. Heat of the moment, I suppose.