The Honeymoon is Over

KERALA, INDIA - My wife screamed my name from the other room, repeatedly. It was a shrill, panicked tone I had never heard her use before. To be honest, the sound filled me with a vague sense of righteousness. We got married only two days before and now I was going to be called to defend our corner of the world in an Indian beach town. I ran to our guest bedroom and there she was- dancing up and down on a coffee table in her underwear and pointing at a four inch long flying cockroach. This wasn't one of the scenes we had to go over in pre-marital counseling, I thought as I chased the bug with one of her shoes, but it had a dash of chivalry in it.

"Why India?" they asked. Not our friends. The Indians we met throughout Kerala, a sliver of a state in southernmost India, wanted to know. "Why did you want to come here?"

"Isn't it difficult?"

"Haven't you heard of Europe?"

Even the Indians from other parts of the country, who compose most of Kerala's visiting population, seemed perplexed. The truth is, we came for the waters. Sandwiched between the sharply rising Western Ghats and the Lakshadweep Sea, Kerala, otherwise known as the Malabar Coast, is one of the world's few living swamps. The Southwestern monsoon makes its annual debut here and more than leaves its mark: 41 rivers and thousands of tributaries run through Kerala, condensed in an area never wider than 50 miles.

As a result of the wet, travel tends toward the traditional way: rolling on the river. Thousands of kettu vallum, the local barge that can be sailed or pulled by poles, ply the waters, connecting city to country. For shorter trips, the canoe remains the preferred mode of transportation. Six or more umbrella-clutching old women or small kids riding the commuter canoe are not an uncommon site.

Although road and rail have made inroads on the transportation picture, the number of people who need to get to plantations to harvest rice or coconut pretty much ensures that the slow, watery life won't disappear soon. Modern transportation might even ensure its survival. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the center of Cochin from the railroad station by motorized ferry. A taxi takes nearly an hour.

Our itinerary was fairly simple. We'd start in Trivandrum, the state capital nudging the southern tip of the subcontinent, and zig zag through villages and palm islands to Cochin, the old spice trade harbor, around 250 kilometers north on whatever boat, bus, rickshaw, train, or taxi we found.

History

The Malabar Coast, has served as a meeting point between east and west since the balance sheet was invented. Nutmeg and cardamom from here started showing up in the Middle East in 3,000 BC. When Greek sailors discovered the monsoon winds in 45 AD, trade with Europe boomed. Ships under the Roman flag could henceforth make it from Ethiopia to Muziris (now Kodungallur), just north of Cochin, in 40 days. The Ay and Chera kingdoms suddenly found themselves the middle men in a bustling quadrangular trade between Rome, Arabia, and China.

Ironically, contact with the rest of India was a little more limited. None of the great empires of the north ever penetrated the region. The Asokan empire of 250 BC stopped at Cannore, just as Muhammed Tuglak's conquests in the 1330's did. As a result, the area, while predominantly Hindu developed an ethnic/religious mix that stood out from the rest of India.

Jewish communities formed in 587 BC fleeing the wrath of Nebuchannzer while Christianity gained a foothold before the fall of Rome. Arab Muslim traders, the agents for Rome and middlemen in their own right, became respectable pillars of commerce. The Chinese stayed on too to create the upright fishing nets.

Marco Polo took note of the cultural confluence in the deep south and more: bats as large as vultures; men who threw fresh meat to eagles in the hills, traced their flight, "and recovering the pieces of meat, frequently find diamonds sticking to them."; merchants who will not buy unless their shadow exceeded their own size; a profusion of nakedness; and tigers "entirely black.".

Pirates infested the area, but followed their own genteel code. Wives and families lived aboard ship. Captured crews were spared and sent to shore, mostly so they could be robbed again on the way out. Fisticuffs were beneath them: "When in their cruises, they seize upon a traveling merchant they immediately oblige him to drink a dose of sea-water, which produces violent purging. In this way they discover whether he was swallowed pearls or jewels."

Vasco DeGama landed by boat in 1498. Through diplomatic maneuvers with the Zamorin pirates and local kings, he made Cochin a Portuguese port, a construction job later appreciated by the Dutch and British. A sense of being different from the rest of the country has followed to the day.

Kerala the state was formed from the three kingdoms of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar in 1956. Almost immediately, the country drew the ire of the central government by electing a communist government in 1957. It repeated the trick in 1988. Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India, as well as one of the highest unemployment rates.

Names here can be a bit confusing. The state government recently changed all city names from Hindi to their original Malayalam, the local language. Unfortunately, no one uses the new names so getting around can be a problem. Due to the wild swings of ideologies, political turmoil remains constant, according to the locals.

Street Fighting Men

Which helped explain the fistfight in the street. As we stepped out of the cab into Trivandrum, we walked straight into a small riot. A youngish man started punching a shriveled brown man with a beard. A third joined in and showed both to the ground. Shouts erupted as a crowd formed around them.

The police had invaded Janardhana Swamy Temple the day before in Varkala, about 30 kilometers north, and shot a number of devotees. Janardhana was leader of the lower caste and blamed the incident on police corruption. The India Times declared him a trouble maker. That morning, when we arrived, Janardhana called for a statewide strike. Mass arrests and riots were occurring all over.

All of this, of course, was unknown to us at the time. We just came from a 22 hour plane flight and thought we were going to "an attractive mixture narrow backstreets, red-tiled gabled houses and acres of palm trees and parks" mentioned in guidebooks. "You do not want to be here," said Toby. We met him when we retreated to the bank. "You must follow me. I am going to Kovalum."

"Is it better?," I asked, reasonably suspicious. We met Toby as he was changing a wad $100 U.S. bills into Indian currency. He hadn't just arrived from the States.

"I haven't been there in four years," he said. He was a Tamil who had just come in from his home in Kuala Lumpur. The passport the teller handed back to him came from Pakistan. A man servant accompanied him. Nonetheless, we figured Toby couldn't be all that bad of a leader. He had one of the few rickshaws in town (ours left when the fight broke out). If he was an international crook at least he didn't insist on dressing the part. Further, his sense of direction was better than ours. We had planned to go to Varkala.

The Living Is Easy

The Kuttanad is the name given to the swampy heartland of Kerala. The area circumscribes a parallelogram that starts with Kollam in the south, forms a wide middle with coastal Alley and inland Kottayam and ends somewhere just north of Cochin. In terms of Indian geography, the Kuttanad constitutes a drop in the bucket.

What maps can't show, though, is the internal complexity. The Kuttanad is India's most crowded region, with village after village tucked away in palm groves, lakes and tributaries. If you counted rivers and internal waterways, there is probably more coastline here than in the rest of the entire country.

Still, you're hard pressed as a visitor to notice. Except for the crowd of lateen-rigged ships in Lake Ashtamundi, most of the Kuttanad seems isolated: long, flat, dizzying stretches of calm water broken by peninsulas, islands, houseboats or crows. Giant rivers or plantations appear around corners, only to silently and suddenly disappear as your craft change perspective. Palms grow to the shore and everywhere to a uniform height. Occasionally, the ocean or a railroad comes into view. Mostly, though, it's two men collecting fish or delivering coconuts in boats that haven't changed in ages.

Despite the seaside location, most of the Kuttanad consists of freshwater. The sheer volume of rain- up to 100 inches a year in some spots- ensures it. We were lucky to be traveling by boat that day. Six thousand worshippers had arrived in Kollam and were negotiating for the bus trip to Mata Amritanandamayi, home of Sri Mata Amritanakid Devi, one of India's few woman gurus.

"It's her birthday," said Sally, a middle aged devotee from San Francisco. Mata had just returned from Vatican City, where she had an audience with the Pope; celebrations would continue for a week. Mata was no backwoods mystic, Sally assured me. One of her followers includes Ed McCracken, CEO of multi-billion dollar industrial powerhouse Silicon Graphics.

Another sight on the waters is the Chinese fishing net. Large wooden contraptions, the 'Chinese' nets look like a failed teepee, a World's fair exhibition or a little league backstop gone bad: five large timbers stick out from planks on the water, webbed together by a continuous net. When fisherman release the counterweights in the rear of the planks, the hand like structure sinks into the water. When time comes, the catch gets a surprise lift thirty feet in the air.

It was a sight that made the Frenchmen jump out of their plastic seats. While local ferries and canoes still plied regional or local routes, the only boats that did the distance between Kollam and Allepey belonged to the Indian tourist board (except, of course, unless you wanted to spend five days on a kettu vallum.) To go that far, the captain said, locals mostly used trucks or trains.

Although some disparage tourist travel, it can produce some great moments. Around the next turn, we came across a man taking a bath. Naked and covered in suds, he made a humming noise as 15 people leaned over to take pictures of him. Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the city of Allepey.

Continued...Be sure to read:

Swami River Part II - Michael's Further Adventures in India