The train, with us riding in Second Class/Air Conditioned, piloted us for three days and two nights through continuous change. We flowed from duns to greens, then even greener greens until green became hallucinatory. Dry rivers transformed to those with bulging banks, Brahma cows to black water buffalos, whites and grays to shocking green and red saris, pines to lazy palms! We went from paces fast to slow, as if someone had pulled a switch, from noisy to quiet, from crowded to accommodating, and from the depressing (stench and filth of the north) to a relative Paradise in Kerala at the ancient spice port of Cochin.
The joy of traveling by rail in a chaotic, vast country such as India, where people somehow find time to venerate a million gods, speak hundreds of dialects and languages, eat as many cuisines and live in climates that run the whole earthly gamut–the joy of this travel mode is dictated by the pace. With India Rail, “express” is just a term. It’s all chug-along chug-chug at the speed of steam with the pull of diesel. For long sunny stretches of the roadbed the kids and I and Charlie perched in the open doors, with our legs over the sides, watching the country pass in front of our eyes. The food they served us was awful (though Charlie was polite about it and ate what she could). The gentle rocking of our beds at night comforted us like babies in their cribs.
I arrived at our terminus somewhere in Lord Jim. I don’t know what happened to me but that’s the short of it. We pulled into Cochin Station. With our coolies carrying our duffels on their heads, we crossed a bridge to an unexpected Paradise at the old Malabar Hotel, the one Lowell Thomas described in Black Pagota in the thirties. It’s been all newly redone by the luxury Taj Hotel Group (e-mail: mlbrgm.coc@tajhotels.com), and these days sports an “Infinity Pool” in which Charlie and Molly looked shockingly natural.
The first sunset we saw by boat in Cochin Harbor. At the sight of the old Chinese fishing nets dipping in and out of the sea, I was seeing Lord Jim–Jim, after the sinking of the Patna, entering the port of his court trial that would make him an outcaste and a Lord. Water taxis chugged past us, naked-to-the-waist dark fishermen pointed to the silvery piles of sardines on their stern decks, Indian navy patrol boats came and went, oar-powered and dugout boats bobbed in our wake, a huge coastal tanker then caught us in its wake. Off in the haze, a shoreline of godowns beckoned me. I did not know why. This was Fort Cochin on Mattancherry Island, the point of origin of the Spice Route. I couldn’t wait to get over there.
The next day we set out, over the bridge, and ground to a halt in Jew Town, along its very narrow streets. We ducked our heads inside the oldest synagogue outside Israel, built 450 years ago by Jews who came to Malabar to trade (Jewish traders traveled to Port Cochin long ago to buy spices, peacock feathers, and teak for King Solomon), and cooled our bare feet on the temple’s faded blue Chinese tiles that lead up to a moth-eaten crimson cloth over the Torahs. Around the corner and down the lane of Dutch traders’ houses 200 years old, past faded shop fronts selling old coins and aromatic oils, we stood at the early gravesite of a great explorer (maybe the greatest after Marco Polo), Vasco da Gama, in the oldest Christian church in India, St. Francis. Looking at the skull and crossbones etched in stone on Vasco’s grave, I was reminded that St. Thomas the Apostle lived and died nearby. We wandered off, me thinking of Lord Jim in Singapore, to lunch near the Chinese nets at a “you-buy-we-cook” fish stall where the catch comes right out of the sea.
There is such romance here in Kerala, the sights and sounds and smells animate every book by Conrad or Kipling that I ever read. This is as good as foreign travel gets for me. I expect no better. Cochin is a place of and about that British Colonial era, but is priceless for being real, living and utterly indifferent to the likes of me watching with my mouth open as it flows past. Through two millennia Cochin remains the central port for the export to the world of spices today that are grown in the Western Ghats, where we traveled to next. Without Kerala, you realize with a shock, there would be no black (or white or green) pepper on your steak, no cinnamon for your toast, no allspice for Thanksgiving stuffing, no cloves, nutmeg, turmeric, cardamom. You’d be up the flavor creek with a single piquancy, and everything would taste pretty much the same, like mush.
Up in the Ghats around Munnar we found on steep-sided vales carpets of tea bushes. Tata Tea Ltd. gave us permission to visit its Madupatty Estate Factory, which the bright green plants surround like an island in a sea. The grind of machinery revealed the laughably simple process of producing tea from the leaves that 22,000 men and women pick and snip from the bonsai-like camellia bushes. (Question asked of our Tata Ltd. guide: “Have you mechanized the picking of tea leaves?” Answer: “Oh yes, our workers use scissors.”) We buried our noses in the drying pekoe leaves, and then sifted mounds of orange pekoe through our fingers and bought kilos from the factory store to send home.
Kerala is noted for its variety. It has everything from beaches to mountains, from rivers and waterways, to jungles with tigers and leopards and wild elephants. It offers India to the visitor in a nutshell, without the confusions and indecisions of this strange, vast and different place in a short time. Few of us can ever know India. That would require a whole lifetime. But Kerala serves as a sampler. We wish we knew this before we started out, but we are thrilled that we caught the magic when we did.
