Flash back to November, when Matt and I were exploring Kerala, getting bitten by leeches and sneaking up on wild elephants. After the adventure in Wayanad, we took a bus on beautifully paved roads, in the twilight, to the coast, where we stayed at Kannur Beach House, a cozy little place right on the water. Our hosts there, Rosie and Nasir, cooked up lovely meals of seafood and vegetables, always with fresh fruit for dessert. And then they packed us up and sent us down to Kochi by train.
I mentioned before that what had pulled me toward Kochi was the setting of one my favorite books, The God of Small Things. Re-reading the book now, after visiting the story’s landscape, is a pleasure. In her opening chapter, Arundhati Roy describes a small town near Kochi:
“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. They they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green…”
We were there in November, after the monsoon had dried up, and before people start longing again for the rain to quench their crops’ thirst. But the region, halfway between Karnataka and the tip of the subcontinent, still had that mysterious, swollen sense to it. Palm trees hung heavy with coconuts; coffee trees burst forth with green berries turning the slightest shades of red; paddy fields yawned across the landscape on both sides of the train we were riding, their wild green browning slightly in the dryness.
A hint of revolution carried on, in stenciled red sickles marking each small town a dozen times. In Kerala, socialism meets globalization on a local scale. Locals talked about the new Asian Trade Agreement that would make the coconuts dripping off every palm tree practically profitless. It costs too much to harvest the fruit, given the strong labor unions in the state, and now that Kerala coconuts will compete with those of Malaysia, Indonesia, and half a dozen other countries, they may just rot 100 feet above ground. One day, we went out to watch a coconut cutter on Rosie and Nasir’s land. A wiry man, who must have been over forty, placed a bamboo ladder halfway up a palm, deftly scaled it and then wrapped his arms and legs around the tree itself. He shimmied the rest of the way up in thirty seconds flat, and then began to swipe at the coconuts with a small machete. It’s an art that is slowly losing ground in this state where a coconut is not just a fruit, but a way of life and a symbol of identity. (The NY Times has been following the story of coconut harvesters in Kerala)
In Kochi itself, the atmosphere was certainly less rural, but no less interesting. You have to take a ferry from the major city of Ernakulam to the more manageable island town of Fort Kochi, and we couldn’t do it fast enough. Indian cities are tiring; towns, even if they are tourist traps, are rejuvenating. Fort Kochi is one of the best. After a day of bumming around the Princess Street tourist track, and eating all manner of international cuisine, we walked back toward the ferry landing and found a place to rent bicycles for the day.
Oh to ride a bike again, even for a day. Mine was purple and had a wire basket on the front. Matt’s was taller and blue-green. Both had self-locking back wheels, which made it easy to hop on and off at every antique shop, palace, and temple we saw.
First was the Dutch Palace, former home of Kerala’s maharajas and colonial Dutch royalty. While under construction, the Palace showed us neatly through the recent history of the city, from bare-breasted maharaja women to the introduction of European silk blouses, leading to the modern sari and (this is at least how we took it) contemporary Indian modesty. What a bastion of tolerance Kerala was! Until recently, it had been a matrilineal society, and thus boasted some of the broadest women’s rights in the subcontinent. The ancient rajas, nearly two thousand years ago, had given refuge and sovereignty to a group of exiled Jews. Until they started fighting among themselves for power, the Jews had set up their own kingdom, north of Kochi in the town of Cranganore. Leave it to colonialism to dismantle this legacy of tolerance, and to subjugate women as best they could by outlawing matrilineality.
Next we were off to Jew Town, a short bike ride along the edge of the island. Jew Town is where most of the small collection of Jews left over from the kingdom just north of Kochi ended up after the uprising there in 1471. The man who had killed his own brother for the throne had been exiled, and escaped his family’s wrath by swimming across the backwaters to Kochi with his wife on his back. This is how Jew Town began, and the old synagogue there tells the story in simple, vivid paintings of the event. When we visited the synagogue, the aging Indian man who collected our 10 rupee entrance fee kept leaning into the room to his right and hollering to the influx of guests that ‘you need to start at the left! And then walk right!’ to get the story straight. The story that begins with the man swimming across the channel with his wife on the back, and ends with most of the Jews returning to Israel and abandoning their temporary kingdom.
Later, when we were in the synagogue itself, an airy blue and white tiled temple, the same man came in behind a group of ten or twelve foreigners and explained that he was one of ten Jews left in Jew Town, the last Jewish family remaining. They still gather here weekly to pray. I tried to picture the family here, in this most simple of holy places, in this country where most expressions of faith are tinted in extravagance. The giant gold-painted Ganesh that a temple just hoisted next to the highway to Bangalore. The fire-blowing Dasara floats. Even the Santa Cruz Basilica, which we had visited the day before, had decorated its altar to Jesus with dancing Christmas lights, and blasted hymns to what sounded like a synthesized surf rock beat.
The small courtyard surrounding the synagogue was lined with old layers of slate marking the deaths of various members of the community. It was closed to visitors, or I would have perused the history there. It was a quiet place; a place of exile and loss and community, but also a place still alive with faith and practice, tucked into the alleys of a small tourist town.
Jew Town’s narrow streets burst with antique shops selling a mixture of faux-antiques and actual artifacts from the last few hundred years. Iron and bronze are at home here, and hanging oil lamps and rusted gothic keys rub shoulders with gigantic metal and carved-wood elephants. At one shop in proper Fort Kochi we befriended a shopkeeper and his mother who just happened to come from Kottayam, the town of The God of Small Things. Trying to be unobtrusive, I peppered them with questions. ‘But why would you want to go there?’ the mother said wearily. ‘There’s nothing there.’ When she said that she knew the family who became the story, I got really interested, but uncomfortable as well. It’s a sad tale that Arundhati Roy writes, of caste conflict and violence and a small town growing up into something uglier than it was. I have found that most Indians are not fond of the novel, and will instead point me to literature that is a little less confrontational, a little less blunt about the state of things in India. When Roy’s narrator returns to Ayemenem and Kottayam a decade (and a hundred pages) later, she observes:
“Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed…
Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles under water. Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it. Splay-footed, cautious.
Once it had had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers.”
Both the earlier and the later descriptions of India’s countryside are familiar to me now, not just in literature but in my own personal memories. While I did not make it to Kottayam itself, I saw God’s Own Country, as Kerala is known, from a tourist’s and a literary eye’s view. It is a beautiful place, full of ripe fruit and lushness, and cultural collisions of every shape and size. What I took from the trip was a deeper experience of my favorite novel, and also an antique oil lamp bought from the Kottayam family we befriended. When we rubbed off the old varnish covering the darkened metal alloy, we discovered its convincing faux identity. “1980” read the date carved into the bottom, between curling Malayam letters that only a Keralan will know.
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