Tucked Away in Kerala

The polar opposite of Calcutta, languid Kochin takes me back to the colonial comforts of Pondicherry. Darling Dutch guest house, sparsely populated roads, slightly overgrown tropical vegetation - and the hardness I’ve developed to survive the chaotic city centres of India is in for a restful weekend. Kerala, the southern-most state on India’s west coast, is not only foreigner-friendly but also draws well-to-do visitors from all over India.



Eimer and I are delighted that our summer skirts and tank tops draw no unsettling stares, and Andrew points out, quite rightly, that if Cochin were all you saw of India, you’d wonder what all the fuss was about. What’s all this about India being inconceivably crowded? But to those of us who know better, Kerala is a welcome respite.

We leave the office at noon on a Friday – proper expat style – though only because our 5pm Paramount flight is cancelled and we are forced to rebook on the IndiGo 2pm. Luckily, Eimer is notified of the flight’s cancellation with ample time to rebook, as the friendly folk at Paramount deign to ring me just as I am boarding the IndiGo plane and query, rather sheepishly, “Ma’am…did you cancel your flight?”

“Er, no…you did.”

“Sorry ma’am. Goodbye, ma’am”

Little strange…but that’s India for you.

The languorous strolling of the locals and the easy smiles of the foreigners set the mood in Fort Kochin, and we plan to take it easy Friday night. After a quick rick-trip to the pharmacy (all but a street stall), where Eimer purchases some unidentified ‘NoCold’ tablets to pull the plug on her streaming nose, we dine at the Old Courtyard. The food is savoury but the same cannot be said for our dinner conversation, during which Andrew and Eimer enlighten me on the ‘bucket of water in every bathroom’ phenomenon. Apparently, the pervasive absence of toilet paper is no oversight, and the bucket is for a quick post-wipe wash of the left hand. I’m still not sure I believe it…

We’re a touch late for the evening’s entertainment: a traditional Indian music concert at the Kerala Kathakali Centre, which I thoroughly enjoy. The three musicians, barefoot and sitting cross-legged on stage, all have bushy black moustaches and facial expressions that complement the music coming from their instruments. The drummer’s swift fingers are particularly mesmerising; moving like a hummingbird’s wings, they fly across the drums’ taut surface, blurring my vision.

Liquor licenses are few and far between in Fort Kochin, so after the show, we proceed to sneakily drink rather flat, warm ‘Kingfisher’ from kitchen-green mugs at a bare-bones eatery stationed directly adjacent to a sleepy police station. The beer’s rank but the company’s pleasant and by the time we’ve made our way through 3 coffeepots of beer, Eimer, for one, is ready to party.

The word on the street names Le Meridien (across the water in Ernakulam) as THE place to party till the wee hours of the morning. Life may be a never-ending battle between a good night’s sleep and an even better party, but in Kerala, it is circumstance not choice that favours the former. When Eimer, Andrew and I arrive at Le Meridien, it is just past midnight, the club boasts a hopping crowd of seven and the bar has just closed. Having given the good party a fair go, I am actually quite pleased that a good night’s sleep wins out this time.

On Saturday morning, I take a little solo walk to view Fort Kochin’s infamous Chinese fishing nets and on the way back to guest house breakfast, I take a real liking to a Keralan’s green T-shirt that proclaims in gold decal: God is a DJ.



Before leaving Fort Kochin we stop to pick up real, cold beer from the liquor store adjacent to a government official’s house. Following a two-hour, Hindi love-song accompanied drive to Alleppey, Andrew, Eimer and I board our very own houseboat, government approved beer in hand. The houseboat, equipped with bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, a deck/dining room/lounge, and a staff of 4 is our home for the next 24 hours, as we cruise at an indulgent Keralan pace along the backwaters of Alleppey.



The network of inland waterways, despite what connotation its name may impart, is a little green slice of paradise - palm-lined and alive with villager activity. I spend hours engaged in blissful nothingness – watching the palms pass me by, waving back at the smiling Indians on the shore and wondering about all the other small divinities of the world, neatly tucked away as are the backwaters of Kerala.



I do find myself longing for a scrabble set as the afternoon wears on, but when I voice the desire, Andrew parries, “Why you gotta hate nature?” He has a point, and in retrospect, I am glad to have been so ‘ill-prepared’ for a day of floating. I am not as glad that I let my guard down and paid a whopping 900 roops for 4 (albeit jumbo jumbo) freshwater prawns.



Sunday morning, I am on a mission to get to the Fort Kochin synagogue before it shuts its doors at noon. Our driver is on a mission to take a few detours and increase kms (and thus payment), but despite our somewhat competing missions, we do arrive at the synagogue with 15 minutes to spare. It’s small, but lovely and serene. Coloured glass chandeliers hang all around the sanctuary and the floors are tiled with blue and white Asian (Ming style) tiles. With a grand tally of 13 men, the community is dying, but the area of Fort Kochin is still called Jew Town (as per maps and road signs.)


In addition to the synagogue, Jew Town is home to eclectic antique & home shopping. I am quite taken by china doorknobs, silk-embroidered elephant-shaped tea cosies, 5 foot wooden goddess statues, and a 6.5 foot laughing Buddha, but as I have no home to ship them to, I stick to taking photographs of the items I’d much prefer to purchase.

And I find that even in peaceful Kerala, I am conflicted. The beautiful backwaters manage somehow to make me nervous. They are a reminder of all that I have yet to see and discover in the world; they urge me to continue travelling and wandering, experiencing as much as I can of the places and the people and the ways of life that are out there. But in the bazaars of Jew Town, I long to acquire the junk that makes a house a home, all the sorts of weighty, material accoutrements one forsakes when truly devoted to a nomadic, unfettered existence.



It’s a tougher tug of war than the good night’s sleep vs. an even better party one, and I do wonder just how long I am destined to continue feeling/being on the road.

Million Dollar Mumbai

In India, it is a widely known fact that there are more millionaires in Mumbai than there are in New York. And nowhere else in India is the disparity between rich and poor so stark, so gaping. Bombay, with all its glitz and glamour, is also home to some of the largest slums in Asia. Of course, the slums aren’t quite on the tourist beat, but one nevertheless gets a sense of the dire poverty.

Street children trawl the streets day and night asking not for money – but for food and water, sometimes even clothes. Young moms walk about carrying bare-bottomed babies with scaly skin and lifeless limbs asking not for money – but baby formula from the chemist around the corner. We found ourselves distinguishing between varying degrees of desperation – you can’t give to everyone, so give to the ones who really are on the verge of cutting out.

It surprises me that the urge to copulate doesn’t fade in the midst of such abject poverty; that sex isn’t the absolute LAST thing on people’s mind. But Eimer pointed out that babies bring in more money from the tourists. But I wonder, do the babies really pay for themselves and bring in extra still for the parents? Not if mom’s milk dries up; baby formula costs 500 rupees/tin.

On the other end of the spectrum are the designer labels, the plush hotels, the classy cocktail lounges, the heady nightclubs. But on the wide pavement beside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, you will see women with matted hair and torn clothing stretched out beside their children, nothing shielding bony bodies from the hard concrete. And when you stumble out of a nightclub at 2am, the scrawny 6 year old girl with the mischievous grin will be there waiting to see if the drunken wealthy are more generous than their sober counterparts.

I was really looking forward to a weekend in Mumbai, as I’m currently reading the autobiographical Shantaram, a riveting epic written by an Australian who escaped from a maximum security prison and made his way to Bombay, where he lived in a slum for two years, survived an Indian prison, ended up in the Mumbai mafia and effectively became part of the city’s eclectic fabric. The city itself is one of the book’s most prominent characters and I was eager to put a face to its name and check out all its local haunts.


We start Saturday off at the Gateway of India monument, which is perched right on the water by the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Apparently, this is the place to be spotted if you’re interested in being a gora (white) extra in a Bollywood flick, but alas, none of the camera clicking Indians who approach us turn out to be casting agents.

We spend the morning on a 2.5 hour tour of the tourist hot spots. I like our driver – he has a wide, genuine smile and comparatively good English. I think we are overcharged, but I don’t mind because there’s no trickery involved. We settle on a price at the start and that’s that.

At the outdoor laundry, I get to witness the beating that clothes here endure when they are cleaned. When I recently complained that all my laundered clothes come back to me stretched, stained and smelling of charcoal, an expat who’s been out here for 3+ years explained that he intends to ball up and throw away all his clothes when he leaves. It seems that nothing survives the brutality of Indian clothes washing – and now I see why!



After the laundry, we speed along Marine Drive past Chowpatty Beach – water so filthy that even the locals won’t brave a dip – to a bustling Jain temple. The intricately hand-painted walls are rich in colour and seem to tell a thousand tales that are very much beyond my scope of knowledge. The temple is surprisingly tourist-friendly, and we are encouraged rather than expressly forbidden to take photographs. It makes for a strange sensation, snapping pics of people deep in prayer.



Next stop, the hanging gardens of Malabar Hill from which we get a wide if hazy view of the city. I love the topiary animals (check out the humps on these Indian cows!) and the little lady who lived in a shoe’s house.


A little ways down from the garden are the Towers of Silence where reportedly, the Zoroastrian Parsi community hangs out its dead for the vultures to feed on as earth, fire and water are too sacred to allow for the more traditional methods of body disposal (burial/cremation/up the river and out to sea).

In Gandhi’s museum, amidst many interesting posters, photographs, dioramas and documents, I find a letter from Gandhi to Hitler, asking him to stop the war. How many other letters of this nature did Hitler receive (and ignore) from leaders around the world, I wonder?

I really enjoy spending the remainder of the day walking around Bombay’s Fort & Bazaar areas. Lots of distinctive buildings, including one very different Victoria train station. And finally a synagogue! It is a bright blue building with interior to match and the caretaker, a sweet old man, shows us photos of him with all the foreign Jews who’ve come to visit over the years. I find it strange that he tries to sell us kippot and challah covers on Shabbat though…



Saturday night is party time in Mumbai and Eimer and I are more than happy to join the fray of cosmopolitan Mumbaikers out on the town. From cocktails at the swanky Taj Mahal Palace Hotel to drinks at the Indus Bar, to shots and dancing at the Red Light Lounge, we find that in comparison to the hip young Indians, we are rather conservatively & casually dressed!



Slow start on Sunday finds us at the Haji Ali Mosque, which becomes an island when the tide is high, and by the neighbouring Malahaxmi Temple, we hear loud thumping vibrant Indian music and take a turn here and there through winding alleys to investigate. And thus we happen upon a gaggle of children dancing, jumping and play-fighting on a raised concrete platform that is also home to two massive speakers (stolen? or donated by a benevolent film producer/mafia don/nightclub owner?)



The children are poor and evidently live in the tin shacks that line the water behind their concrete dance floor, but they are having a grand old time. The music is loud and full of life, and the laughing children play their creative games with an energy to match the thumping bass of the speakers.

We spend a good 20 minutes enjoying the music and the children’s wellbeing. I am relieved to have found some genuine happiness amidst the poverty. Of course, it all comes back to the varying degrees…these children seem to be well-nourished, and what a set of speakers!



We laze about the rest of the afternoon, lunching and people-watching at Leopold’s, and shopping along Colaba Causeway. Some chai at the Taj Mahal Palace to round out the weekend and we leave Mumbai wondering if those 3 stunning women in burqas at the Taj Mahal were really all married to that one unattractive fellow.