Kerala…sketches from coconut country
The big orange sun is rising slowly, illuminating the hazy morning as the plane begins a series of long, slow, gentle swoops downwards to Cochin airport in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Endless coconut plantations shimmer grey-silver, slate and green as the sun washes through whisps of cloud and beams on endless meandering waterways, alternately gold and silver, stretching far away. On the slopes there are coffee and tea plantations. Whitewashed colonial Portuguese or Dutch churches are scattered in clearings. Neat villas and verandahed farmhouses pop up in shafts of bright sunlight. Cows, bullocks and goats wander across extinct dried-up deltas that criss-cross the verdant landscape. The twisting waterways and lagoons give way to huge wide rivers and estuaries. Big rusting ships glide lazily along, while all manner of brightly coloured ferries, fishing boats and traditional craft, lanteen-rigged, double-ended, high prows and sterns sweeping up like a cobra poised to strike, sail serenely, outrageously overladen with mountains of hay or sculpted pyramids of coconuts, precariously but precisely stacked, edging steadily into harbour.
As the plane sweeps low over the water for its final approach, I can see loincloth-clad, sinewy men throwing big circular nets from the tiny narrow canoes under the long concrete bridge that the spans the mainland and Willingdon Island. The bridge is teeming with pedestrians, turmeric-coloured tuktuks and brightly painted, overladen trucks piled high with hessian sacks of rice and pepper, coconuts or bananas. On top of their cargo, their backs to the oncoming traffic, sit the workers, huddled against the morning smog and dust, their mouths wrapped in bright bandannas.
Images from Kerala.
Even at this early hour, the air is hot and slightly choking as we walk across the tarmac of the neat yellow airport. The runways are fringed with coconut palms and, although quite new, the airport buildings have the quaint, unhurried air of a genteel colonial outpost.
You present papers, tickets, passport and boarding cards several times to officials, soldiers and policemen. They are polite, insistent and bewildering. Behind the barrier in the baggage hall, hotel touts, porters, relatives, more soldiers, taxi drivers, nuns, hippies and beggars jostle. In the confusion I am met by two, but rival, chauffeurs, each sent by a different company to pick up Tess, my wife, and me and our 12 pieces of luggage. A polite man in a safari shirt and pressed chinos, carrying a clipboard and briefcase, settles the dispute, I think! But do I pay him too?
One driver will take Tess and me, and the other our luggage, but not before our trolleys have been hijacked by about six itinerant porters. Lesson one: carry bundles of small denomination notes or hold on to your luggage like hell and, more importantly, make sure the man who says he is here to escort you is genuine! They all want to take you somewhere, so don’t arrive drunk or you may end up anywhere!
The aerial view I had enjoyed as we came into land appears. But soon we are bouncing along the centre left or right of the road, charging at oncoming window-less, garish buses like a wounded buffalo or swerving past on the inside of fume-belching trucks and weaving crazily between the streams of tuktuks, scooters and motorbikes, wildly and narrowly missing the oxen, buffaloes, cows and goats (goats, aka mutton, not lamb, on menus). Huge elephants, carrying their breakfast under their trunks–they eat about 300 kilograms of fodder per day–pad morosely towards their daily toil.
And all the while our driver, Johnny P.J. (as I came to know him in the course of our visit), has his hand firmly pressed on his five-tone horn.
I light up a fag, my first for hours, shut my eyes and hope for the best.
The tossing, turning, jolting, stomach-churning jeep slows down. After nearly an hour of relatively rapid progress, we are entering the morning rush in Cochin. The din, mayhem and confusion is infernal, yet strangely peaceful. There is a gentle feeling. Brightly clad women and neatly uniformed school kids walk steadily along the dusty streets. The stalls and shops are sleepily opening. Mud forecourts are being swept with short-handled stick brushes. The traffic is, in fact, not aggressive, it is just the noise from their horns, not the drivers themselves. It seems to be a case of let live, let die, but without malice of any kind. I ask Johnny P.J. if he knows somewhere good where we can stop for breakfast.
He shakes his head sideways, and a few moments later pulls up in front of a single-storey building on the corner of a very crowded junction.
‘Why are we stopping?’ I ask.
‘You said breakfast.’
Now that’s a curried egg!!
‘But, you said No’, I reply.
He shakes his head sideways again. I am beginning to understand. He opens the door and we duck into the low doorway of the Hotel Unikrishna.
Above faded red formica tables on spindly and teetery metal legs, three-winged fans spin lazily from stretched wires to stir the fetid air, while chattering loinclothed men squat, right-handedly eating their breakfast.
Waiters, barefoot or in sandals, carry steaming tin plates. In a corner behind a ramshackle barthe car (tea) boys juggle with long-spouted tin teapots, a huge urn of boiling milk and a cauldron of boiling water, pouring both milk and tea from a great height simultaneously into glasses and tin mugs with the panache of a New York city cocktail barman.
I have not been able to take curried eggs seriously as a dish because of the Goon Show catch phrase, ‘No more curried eggs for me’, but hard-boiled eggs masala — i.e. with a curry sauce–served with uppama (a cake of steamed semolina stuffed with curry leaves, mustard seeds and chillies) and coconut and coriander chutney is a terrific way to start the day. (In fact, I was so taken with spicy vegetarian Indian breakfasts that I did not eat a European-style breakfast for the entire two and a half months of my visit.)
There are other good dishes too, such as idli, a steamed rice sponge cake served with vegetable masala, chickpeas, lentils and potatoes in a rich onion and tomato-based gravy; appam, a rice flour pancake with spicy potatoes simmered in coconut milk and chillies; and idiappam, thin rice noodles garnished with grated fresh coconut, served with black bean masala. These and many, many other dishes are available for an average cost of a few pennies.
I drink fresh lime juice with soda and salt (if you like sweet drinks, thin honey can be substituted for the salt). The tea, made strong and with hot boiled milk, is too rich for me. There are a dozen cooks in the lean-to shack that is the kitchen. It is fiercely hot and gloomy, with just a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Before a long low stone, through which blazes a fire fuelled by wood and coconut husks, the cooks squat, sweating over huge brass or aluminium pots, stirring the contents. They wear only a small piece of grubby sheet tied around their waist. In another corner a boy sits cross-legged, peeling and chopping a mountain of tiny, tangy red shallots. On makeshift griddles over wood fires, cooks are rolling out pancakes, cauldrons bubble and gurgle, and steam rises chokingly into the ceiling with the acrid taste of eye-watering wood smoke. The tin plates, once empty, are rinsed under a cold water tap mounted on the wall above an open drain. A veritable black culinary hole of Cochin and not a place for the weak-stomached or the faint-hearted.
After breakfast we visit the banana market