Meandering Through Literary and Literal Kerala

Kerala, Part 2

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. 

“There’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle”

Trip to Kerala, Part I

Last week, Matt and I took off from the farm for a week’s trip through Kerala.  Known for its backwaters, its communist government, and – to some – its literary prowess, Kerala is India’s southernmost state to the west.  The state meanders along the Arabian Sea, connecting Karnataka to India’s southernmost tip at Trivanduram.  Apparently, Kerala attracts 90% of the 10% of tourists who choose to visit South India over North India.  I had been eager to visit the place since setting foot in the south, mostly because it is home to the story and the characters that once entranced me in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  So when I heard about an agriculture and export conference in Kochi, Matt and I jumped at the chance to take our first big trip through a new part of India.

Our first impressions were of motion and comfort.  We had taken a bus from Madikeri three hours south to Wayanad, to spend a few days looking for wildlife before heading toward the coast and down to Kochi.  As we passed through Kutta, the last town in Karnataka, and headed into Kerala, our rickshaw suddenly sped up, and Matt and I stopped bouncing into each other.  Well, we thought, the roads are certainly better in Kerala. 

We were greeted by breakfast and coffee at the guesthouse we had booked, and ushered up to a tree-house bungalow.  Wooden walls! we noticed happily, after months of cement rooms necessary to withstand the hefty rains of Madikeri.  The bungalow was built on wooden stilts, and attached to a real live tree.  It was raised, we mused, in case a wild elephant came crashing through the coffee plantation. 

We wasted no time, jumping at our first opportunity to explore the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary across the road.  We did it safari style, piling into a covered jeep with two French tourists and two Indian guides, one in front and one behind.  As we entered the reserve through a big iron gate and drove through the first towering stands of teak trees, I imagined I could hear the wildness of India breathing huge sighs of relief.  Here was a natural place thoroughly protected by the Indian government, in a country that is hungry for space for its bulging population.  Not only is it a fairly large wildlife refuge, but India has done well in connecting it with several other nearby national parks to create a massive, continuous habitat for the big and small animals that desperately need it – elephants, tigers, giant squirrels, deer, and monkeys, to name a few.  Helping to cement its longevity, India also uses the area to create several streams of revenue, such as tourist dollars and profit from carefully sustained teak “orchards” grown within the reserve. 

Our experience confirmed the wildlife’s relief.  Almost as soon as we were 100 meters into the reserve, our safari driver slowed down.  “Spotted deer,” he whispered, pointing to a herd of fifteen or twenty deer, full grown fawns to my North American eyes.  And then, “Hanuman langur monkeys,” as he pointed up into the trees.  Within another ten minutes we had spotted the elusive luna moth, a trio of bison, a sambar deer, and a malabar giant squirrel.  And then, as we rounded a bend and headed deeper into the jungle, our guide in the back of the jeep called for the driver to back up.  He cut the engine and we all leaned out the open windows, listening.  There was crashing in the brush just beside the road, and I could see young stands of bamboo waving wildly against some mighty force.  Elephants, the guide mouthed to us.  And we all leaned a little further out the windows of the jeep, straining to see the cause of all the ruckus in the brush. 

Soon another jeep pulled up behind us, and we moved on.  Hearing the elephants was powerful in itself, perhaps even more than seeing them right away, as it made me begin to understand the vast appetite of the animals, and the sheer power of the lumbering beasts.  They pull whole trees down when they’re snacking, and make no effort to quiet either their footsteps or their munching. 

Partly because of our unrequited encounter with the elephants, and partly because of a longing to connect with the reserve in a more personal way, Matt and I splurged the next morning, and hired our very own guide and guard to take us, on foot, into the reserve.  This is a rare privilege, and to do it you have to pay for these two men, one a local tribal guide, and the other a man touting a rifle, to personally walk you through the place.  The duo in serious brown uniforms added some clout to our small entourage, and as we stepped past the gate, rather than rumbling past it in a jeep, I immediately felt a sense of adventure overcome me. 

We walked along the road for a while, spotting an isolated langur monkey here and there, and marveling at tiger prints and bison droppings.  Soon enough, our guides pulled up short and stopped to listen.  Silence, and then a muffled crushing of sticks and leaves and bamboo.  We looked for the source, and there, not 50 meters away, a tall, skinny bamboo stalk wavered and fell, and was shortly dragged away into the undergrowth.  This time, we knew what stood behind the brush.  Matt and I walked back and forth along the road, testing views from every angle, and getting short glimpses of a fanning ear, a dusty gray back, and a tail whipping back and forth.  After a few minutes, our guides motioned to us.  They were looking for openings in the brush to creep into, and one of them, the man with the rifle, Anu Kumar, said to us, “we go in, behind them.”  Through this shortened sentence, I assumed this meant that Anu Kumar was going to circle behind the elephants and flush them out so we could get a better look.  This seemed somewhat risky, but feeling grateful for our gutsy guide, I said, “okay, good luck!”  But then he beckoned for us to follow. 

Looking back at me, Matt said, “there’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle,” and we plunged into the brush.  The guide cut a quiet path with his machete, leading us through a swampy area and around the backside of the elephants.  We emerged on raised ground covered by trees and shrubs, and looked across a small stream to a herd of four wild elephants.  They hadn’t noticed us at all, or maybe they simply weren’t concerned.  There was one huge male, with long white tusks and two massive humps on the top of his head.  Three smaller females, not three quarters his size, stood around him.  All four chewed slowly at the pile of bamboo they had pulled down, first shaving off the bark and then sucking out the fiber within.  They waved their giant ears, and curled their wiry tails back and forth along their bodies, and it was a perfect display of elephantine calm.

Shortly, Anu Kumar started pulling on our sleeves, beckoning that it was time to go.  He was worried that a jeep would drive along the road and spook the small herd our way.  It was a valid concern, but after a minute of entrancement in the company of such calm wildness, I didn’t want to go.  He continued to coax us out, and we turned to backtrack along the makeshift path only two or three minutes after finding our view.

That was only the beginning of our trek through the jungle, but a description of each and every moment would hardly be blog-friendly.  We spotted dozens of tiger prints and even a pair of leopard prints, and encountered a half-dozen malabar giant squirrels.  These creatures, perhaps the most beautiful to be seen in this stretch of rainforest, are reddish-orange and nearly as big as a German Shepherd.  They run along the rainforest canopy like the most adept monkeys, and when they turn to look at you from their treetop lookout, their faces are circled like a raccoon in whites and browns and blacks.  Their bushy red tails follow them like a final flash of brilliance as they disappear into the forest.

Thankfully, Anu Kumar did not need to use his rifle even once during the trek, although we did get attacked by a hoard of wild beasts.  The leeches, my personal bain of the rainforest, finally got the better of me, devouring both Matt’s and my feet during one particularly moist stretch of trail.  Their ferocity would leave their mark for the rest of our week-long trip to Kerala, as their nasty little bites swelled up and had me itching for the next six days.  But it was worth it – for the elephants, and the squirrels, and all the other creatures we encountered, and for the experience of walking absolutely vulnerable into a wholly wild place, except for the presence of a guide with a gun. 

Photos: 1- Entrance to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary; 2- Luna Moth; 3- Entering the jungle with our guides; 4- Elephants!; 5- Sweet relief from the leech bites