Jewel in the deep

Kochi: Driving through the countryside in Kerala does make one wonder about the rest of India. There are no borders in the state — one village merges into another, one town into the other. It must have been sheer coincidence that the guy who created the copy for the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation advertisements dubbed Kerala ‘God’s Own Country.’

Cdr Samuel, the brain behind the introduction of adventure tourism in Kerala, through his Kalypso Adventures, was driving me to Alapuzha when the thought crossed my mind. The state, well known for its strikes and communism, has at least embraced tourism with an even yardstick.

The Kochi-Alapuzha highway is broad and directions are well marked. The petrol pumps have women filling in the fuel, and commerce seems to work well. The state is very, very clean — a class lesson for the more prosperous Maharashtra or Karnataka.

At Alapuzha, I got on to a houseboat with my wife for company and spent six hours cruising the backwaters at leisure, even dozing off thinking about how a well thought-out plan has been executed well by the people.

The houseboat belonged to Shaji who started plying it three years ago when the boom started. He switched from traditional farming to become a ferry operator, and now he earns in dollars. What caught my attention after this was the amazing 200-year-old tharavadu that Vinod Job of Emerald Isle at Kuttanad, an island in the backwaters, converted into a retreat for the stressed-out souls.

Job’s folk used to stay in the house and even today the old family cook toils lovingly over the wood fire to serve light-as-a-whisper appams and chicken stew. Five rooms that Job let out after converting them into five-star comforts earned him enough money so that he can now begin scouting for other heritage homes and change them into similar retreats. Maybe one day it will strike Job to replace the plastic buckets in the bathroom with copper and brass ones. Traditional business.

The Job family
I did not know vanilla grew on plants that had fleshy leaves and dried vanilla costs Rs 9,900 per kilogram, else I would have been a vanilla plantation owner instead of being a writer. A few kilometres from Kottayam is the pristine colonial bungalow of the Job family. Job wants to convert the place into another retreat and sought my opinion.

The house is located next to a stream, which merges with the legendary Meenachil River, which features in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. The rubber plantation the family owns is interspersed with pepper and cardamom clusters and finally ends in a jungle lodge a few kilometres away. For the first time in my life, I realised what silence was at this place.

The return walk was rewarding; Chelsea Job and her fine lunch greeted us. If she serves the kind of food she served us to the tourists who would visit this place as houseguests in the future, it would be a major draw — much like the villas in rural France, which are known for their exquisite wine and food.

Chelsea makes fine sauces from red gooseberries. When I suggested branding the sauces and the jams and selling them in Pune, where I live, she smiled; maybe she had something up her sleeve. Rubber prices have taken a beating and more and more families with such lovely houses are opening up their doors to the foreign attithis (guests). Kerala is heading towards another, ahem, revolution.

Joshi of the wilds
Take an abandoned tea garden. Add a dash of tribal labour. Then a pinch of innovation. And you can have a hideout. Saj, the in-flight caterers, has done exactly this at Vagamon and I have to use the word amazing again. The resources available at the local level have been used — if a tree has been cut it has been used to build a log house; if a marsh has been drained the mud has been used to make bricks for the mud houses. No paint. No plastic. No mosquito mats. All they use is lemon grass oil. Only the toilets are imported.

Now, who would try to teach the Europeans how to use the desi ones, asks Joshi, the manager of the property. Yes, a Joshi in Kerala. I jumped with joy thinking I could speak to someone who could speak Marathi, the language of the place I was born in. Sadly, this Joshi is a complete Malayali, but a very efficient one at that. He has great pride about his corner of the world.

Joshi persuaded me to try the ayurvedic oil massage. Whenever I read or heard people speak in glowing terms about the Kerala-style massage, I used to term it as hype; but after my experience here I am willing to eat my words. Unfortunately, my better half could not experience the massage; male masseurs are not allowed to do so, and my cheeky driver Benny said female masseurs for men like me are available at Kovalam.

Simple Simon
Simon one day walked up a hill in search of his lost cow and realised that he had a piece of land that had potential. Like the others in Kerala, he spent money and effort and created a paradise overlooking the Periyar Reserve Forest on the Kumali-Kottayam road. But this is not about Paradise Retreat; it is about Simon’s passion. He is rather simple, runs around in a T-shirt and shorts, but underneath that calm is a personal agenda.

Simon buys old traditional houses from all over Kerala, when people want to demolish them to build new concrete monstrosities. He buys these marvels and rebuilds them piece by piece and puts them up at his home in Tiruvalla and at his resort. These houses and his passion left an indelible mark on me, having lived in pigeonhole flats and concrete jungles. He also has these pillars which are from temples that dot the countryside in Kerala and which are routinely pulled down by the public works department. He collects them for posterity. Here is another example of one individual making a difference in a cynical world.

Devil’s own people
The darker side of Kerala reared its head when my wife and I were strolling along Kochi’s Marine Drive. Two young men kept following us for the entire stretch, passing lewd comments. Ignoring them led them to be bold enough to try to get physical with the lady. Now anyone who knows her will tell you that she takes no nonsense from anyone. Itching to teach the men a lesson she confronted them, raised her voice and got a rag-tag bunch of old men and women to gather around. Even when the men kept up their tirade, I walked across to the police constables across the streets who were watching the scene in amusement.

Repeated requests did not make them budge from their corner and we had to watch the men laugh at us and walk away. This at two in the noon, and one shudders to think about what would happen if the men get a woman alone at, say, eight in the evening. God’s own country is fine, but when the men in the land are scaring away visitors by their ways, the best thing that has happened to Kerala will wither away. Will the men who matter in the state please take note?

Nair, a Pune-based writer, is a regular contributor to The Times of India and The Indian Express. He was an active theatre person and has written several short plays. His first book, Vignettes, a collection of poetry, was published by Crystal Dreams Publishing, US. Nair’s first novel, Chatroom Blues, has just been published. He can be contacted at