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Magazine
Kerala ... back to the roots
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If NICOLA-ROSE O'HARA's ancestors travelled from London to Kerala, so did she. And so began her induction into the subcontinent she had only come across in family folklore, photographs and books.
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NICOLA-ROSE O'HARA
The Chinese fishing nets at Kochi.
I NEVER meant to go travelling, I'm not a traveller. Travelling's over-rated. And whoever said that it's "better to travel hopefully than to arrive" was mistaken. Arriving, staying put, and having a good look round is the best thing to do. But I did want to go to see where my mother and grandmother were born, and where my great-grandparents lived. That was going to entail some travelling from London — via Delhi — to Kerala, but that's not a patch on what my ancestors did. If they could do it, before the days of jumbo jets and air-conditioned railways, then I could. For me it was a nine easy hours to Delhi, then a further four to Cochin. For them it had been more than two weeks on the move.
In fact I didn't go travelling: I stepped off a plane and was met by attentive friends who mollycoddled me deliciously and inducted me into a subcontinent I'd only come across in stories, family folk-lore, photographs and books.
Of course I'd read Kipling (whose fictional Kim he called O'Hara) Forster, Rushdie, Roy, Naipaul, and Tully. But I wanted to take part — in the rites and delights of the 21st Century — a book discussion at the Habitat Centre (Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat), a lecture on wildlife preservation attended by an ex-prime minister, with an impromptu song from India's foremost pop singer, a night out at a fashion show, a night club, and a late night car trip round Lutyens Delhi, finishing with a midnight visit to the awesome India Gate. To learn to risk the auto-rickshaw like potentially fatal dodgems, cheap at 30 pence a ride. To drink first class cappuccinos at Khan Market and sift through bookshops stuffed full of good books a quarter of the price they are in London. Though 21st Century Delhi isn't picture postcard: for the first few days it wasn't possible to see anything much at all through January's smoggy fog. And the cold sucked up by the greedy houses designed to retain the hot summer's cool night, made the January nights so chill I slept in my coat. That wasn't helped by the power cuts.
Ironically it was the lights going out that showed me something. There was a cut one evening as I was in the shower, just at the moment I turned the water off. As I took the towel from my head I couldn't see, but was relieved to realise it was the electricity that was gone, not my eyesight. Swiftly my hostess bore two candles into my room. No problem. She reported to her father that I hadn't been perturbed or put out. "Of course not," he replied. "Her family was here before electricity was."
That remark rather threw me. I didn't want to be seen as returning raj or any thing like it. It just happened that several generations of my family were very happy planting tea in Kerala. I'd like to go down there and see for myself. That was what I was here to do: Kerala.
So I obliged my hosts who counselled me not to take the train, and flew. To divert myself from the fear of altitude I did a crossword, and in one of those funny ways life has of encouraging one (that would seem too strange to be true if they were not true), an answer to one of the clues was "O'Hara". But it got rather a shock to find myself in the Tropics: if I'd been a traveller I would have done the proper thing; studied maps, consulted guide-books, and seen that Cochin is close by the Equator. Sticky and hot and heavy, it's another country from the Delhi I had begun to acclimatise to. I didn't know anybody where I was going, nor the language. It seemed everybody had been right; it was foolish to travel alone. I began to suffer my first bouts of hypochondria.
A kindly man who sat next me on the plane (who was he? An engineer doing Mensa puzzles, a pocketful of biros like skyscrapers along a New York skyline) shooed me in the way of a ticket for a taxi. The air seemed to bend with the weight of the heat. The scorching taxi proclaimed "God is Love" across the windscreen, which seemed comforting, until it became obvious how keen the driver was to meet his maker, driving delirious on sunshine it seemed, waiting for a corner or something large and unwieldy coming the other way, then swinging out like slalom to overtake, or better still, to squeeze between already-passing vehicles. An argument of horns, from the cheeky paboop to the resonant threatening blare — this taxi had both — rent the air. He shouted "coconut?" through the rushing speed and noise several times before I realised it was an invitation to stop and drink at the roadside. But I wasn't sure if coconut were forbidden fruit so I glanced at my watch and said "no, no thank you", and stared out of the window to drink in all the sights instead. And the first thing one thinks, bowling along the racing road from the airport, is that Kerala's not like anything else except The God of Small Things and how could anybody else come after Roy and describe it any differently because that's exactly how it is.
ORANGE and green, beautiful, pandemonium and filthy, and how proud the taxi-driver was of that beauty. And how messed up so much of it is. Just like Ireland.
I went to stay in the only hotel I could afford, which was fine, only a long way out from Cochin. My hypochondria got worse, I grew dizzy with the whizzing traffic. There wasn't anywhere to go to except by taxi. Mr. Choi, a fisherman from Korea I met in the lobby, said I should go to Ernakulam. All the world was there. He was young and assured, the manager of a fishing fleet. He wore a T-shirt and knee-length shorts. He'd never been to Delhi: no fish. His English was good. "Don't go to Fort Cochin, it's boring," he advised, pulling on his slim cigar. "Full of Europeans," he added, exhaling, as if I weren't one. His eyes glittered, and in them I fancied I could see the souks and excitements of downtown Ernakulam ... But I knew I should see a doctor. The near-perpetual screams and sirens of emergency vehicles along the road outside (three accidents in the 24 hours I was there) compounded my anxieties, so I changed to the hotel I could not afford in Fort Cochin, boring or not: the one my grandparents had stayed in when they'd stopped here on their way up to Munnar in the hills. I'd stay there just two nights, get better, then go up into the High Range at an easier price. What's the point of coming half-way round the world to save money and not see what I'm here to see? I persuaded myself. Don't want to come round the world to miss it. The Malabar House Residency faces St. Francis Church over the parade ground in Fort Cochin, where Vasco de Gama was buried for 14 years before the Portuguese removed him.
Built first in 1503, the church has been Portuguese, Dutch, English and is now Indian. Between them sits the Cochin Club, once British, with its one resident relic of the raj still in residence. On the opposite side to that is a tourist boutique. But the British have not left more of a mark than either the Portuguese or the Dutch did. The week I came, the parade ground was home to troupes of blue-uniformed schoolgirls from the Catholic school drilling for some celebration. Noise, spectacle and spectators, and inescapable loudspeakered music, not just Ravi Shankar but the Beatles and "Edelweiss".
Men sat round the edges watching all day, boys in school uniforms dangled from the trees at lunchtimes. One or two girls posed delightedly for tourists. One day a cow came to lie down and watch. Around the edge of the parade ground some trees had signs nailed to them, including a sickly ugly sapling unfortunately nailed with "I think I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree". And in the evenings, in the mango trees, the Kuyils sang songs like squeaky wheels going round and round out of sync. In the courtyard of The Malabar House there was a first-rate restaurant, a plunge pool, and always some sort of spectacle in the form of either other guests, Kathakali or mesmerising music. Mr. Choi had been wrong, there's plenty going on in Fort Cochin.
THE Malabar House Residency isn't in fact where my grandparents had stayed. That's another swankier place over the water with a similar name. I was here by mistake. A happy accident which some call Fate. It was lovely and air-conditioned and really rather glamorous, and the manager summoned a doctor who diagnosed hypochondria the cure for which was sleep and to acclimatise (again).
But I had to pack up and leave after two nights. The woman at reception asked me where I was going. Somewhere cheaper, I did not say. "You look so anxious," she added, motherly. "Mr. Francis the manager, he won't let you go," she said. I blushed. I was on a student budget. She went away and came back, giving another price. Embarrassed, I shook my head. As I zipped up my suitcase Mr. Francis himself arrived. "How much can you pay?" he demanded. Telling him my total budget would surely make him send me away but he did not, and The Malabar House Residency, with one or two notable exceptions, was my home for three weeks. Not that any of us knew it would be that long, then. I explained to him that I was going to Munnar to visit the place my mother was born.
Mr. Francis is smart, fit, and a handsome South Indian. In five years he's made the Malabar House Residency one of the world's "most exotic" hotels (Harpers & Queen). He's canny but kindly, generous and astute. It wasn't just that he'd organised exactly the right kind of doctor for me to see, with what seemed like second sight, but that his shrewdness extends to all things that happen in the intricate organism of a hotel. He sat with me sometimes at dinner outside, as I was alone, so I learnt a lot. Rashly I told him I'd sat for a rather famous German-born artist, not realising that the owner of the hotel was a German art dealer. But me and The Malabar House is another longer story.
So, while I was in the business of acclimatising myself, there was all of Cochin to discover. And Mr. Choi's Ernakulam.
I didn't behave exactly as was expected of a tourist in Fort Cochin. I refused to use the auto-rickshaws that hawked outside the hotel so persistently, preferring to walk. I became friends with the drivers, though that wasn't quite the thing to do in the disdainful eyes of the security guard who stood important in the corner. Because I wouldn't ride in their rickshaws they complained they couldn't get points for T-shirts, so we developed a system where one after the other they would take me — free — to a shop where I'd go in, make a pretence of being interested in the tourist knick-knacks and come out again, by which time the driver had earned a cup of tea and his chit, and take me back to the hotel again, from where I'd walk. The agreement was after that, they'd leave me alone. I wanted to walk ... .
(To be continued)
Nicola-Rose O'Hara is a novelist based in the U.K.
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