“They say, a coconut tree never harms anyone,” said my botanist uncle to me as we stood under one laden with ripe coconuts at the entrance to his house in Kerala. Just a day earlier, another family member had mentioned the exact saying when I pointed out a tree that was leaning majorly to one side, right at the edge of the Vembanad lake.

There are few trees that are so interwoven into the culture and milieu of a place as the coconut tree is in Kerala.

For instance, how many parts of a tree—any tree—can you name? Not in English, but the language of your parents and grandparents?

I realised I knew the Malayalam words for so many of the coconut tree’s parts by virtue of how embedded they were into life in Kerala, a state I spent all my childhood summer vacations in. To the extent that I did not know the English names for virtually 80% of them.

Do you know what the coconut flower’s spathe is? Or its spadix?

Do you know what the young coconut fruit is called when you can fit two–three of them in your palm?

What is the word for each stalk of its giant leaves? And what do you call the spine that runs through each leaf, the dried versions of which are used to make broomsticks?

The reason I realised I know the Malayalam names for all of these, and more, is because most parts of the coconut tree end up being used in some form of the other.

Its dried wood, leaves, branches, and even flower parts were used as firewood in my grandmother’s traditional kitchen stove. It was the highlight of my day when my grandma would entrust me with the responsibility of fetching an assortment from the shed.

Its dried husk was thrown into cordoned off enclosures in the backwaters so they could soften up, and then beaten and woven into coir ropes by the women of the neighbourhood working in groups.

Its leaves are woven into rooftops, privacy partitions and even traditional fishing traps.

We used its individual leaflets to catch prawns, dried spathes as play boats, leaflet spines to hook and carry the fish we caught, and baby coconuts that had fallen off trees to make throwaway slingshots.