Reclining on memories: How my brown air leather armchair offered an unsolicited trip down memory lane

I bought a recliner. So what, one might ask. Until recently, this voluminous piece of furniture never made it to my shopping list. Neither here nor in India, nor in Singapore — places where I lived most of my life. For a person who spends part of his weekend meandering in and out of furnishing stores, buying a recliner had never occurred. Neither had I fancied or sunk into any one of them on display to try out the comfort and opulence it’s known to offer.

Perceptions changed overnight when I snoozed off on a recliner at a hospital reception whereas I struggled to get 40 winks on a flat bed the whole week. Just a glance at the couch or the bed typically triggers my nocturnal panic attacks. None of the coping mechanisms that the psychologist teaches in sessions costlier than a cardiology consultation would help you when a panic attack strikes in the night. Keeping the bed lamp on dimmer, thinking about positive things, reminiscing about an old romance, focusing the eyes on a nearby picture — in my case the iconic Che Guevara poster, parting the draperies to let the streetlight stream in, etc. never work for me.

“But why does a flat bed scare me?” I posed the question to my psychologist.

“Lying on a flat surface probably triggers the fear of dying.” I thought she made sense.

So when the fear of the panic attack recurring at night gripped me in an evening last week, I bought a recliner online in a jiffy and told Puja, a friend working for the furnishing house, to arrange an immediate delivery. I was so desperate there was no time to fact-check and cost-check.

The brown airleather armchair offered not only sound sleep but also an unsolicited trip down memory lane. It catapulted me to an era in my hometown in India when remnants of feudalism were still ingrained in societal mannerisms and habits during my formative years. The Indian equivalent of the modern-day recliner, the wood-and-fabric armchair called charukasera that adorned the porch of a traditional Kerala house, is one of the seats of such aristocracy.

The picturesque porch, known as poomukham in local lingo, was a protruding sitout or a verandah propped up by pillars where guests outside of the family were entertained. People of a certain stature were offered seats on a parapet connecting the pillars while labourers would cool their heels in the courtyard to hear from the patriarch of the family who would place himself in the armchair, also known as easy chair, cooling himself with a palm leaf vishari, or fan, and spitting betelnut juice into a brass cuspidor. He would put his feet up on the extended armrest, which doubles as a leg rest, baring his thighs and beyond while gobbing out edicts tainted in red.

While storytellers and historians have euolgised this piece of wood as an emotion for Keralites and an indispensable part of their culture and lifestyle, I personally find it historically wrong to romanticise it. Whenever I visited my class-conscious uncles, they would make me stand beside the chair for hours listening to their sermons until they dozed off in the fabric seat.

There was no class ban per se on the charukasera, but it took a long while for this unassuming chair to make its way down to bureaucratic and educated families. Headmasters and male teachers soon found it easy to evaluate answer sheets by placing them on a wooden board placed across the armrest. They read newspapers sitting in the charukasera placed under boughs loaded with mangoes.

Though a social revolution freed up the traditional recliner from the chains of feudalism, it remained a patriarchal symbol for a long time. Women rarely occupied the charukasera, except in upper class households that followed the matriarchal system. A patriarch typically passed on the revered relic to the next in line in the family lineage. After his demise, a saffron-sandalwood mix was dabbed on the wooden piece, which was kept unoccupied for a long while as a tribute to the patriarch.

Many a grandpa was hospitalised with broken backs as kids who were strictly kept off the charukasera avenged the parental diktat by removing the wooden rods that held the fabric seat to the frame. School-going ones were denied access with parents and teachers nicknaming the recliner as “lazy chair” where wards would fall asleep without completing homework. Yours truly is anecdotal evidence, having failed in phonetics, thanks to the lazy chair.

After an architectural revolution following the petrodollar wiped out the charukasera culture from Kerala households for decades, the relic of the past is making a comeback as a showpiece in contemporary homes. In the post-Covid age, where mental health is of paramount importance, maybe the charukasera could come in handy for a generation of anxiety patients.

suresh@khaleejtimes.com