This holiday season brought to you by the letter ‘C’ and the number ‘2’: Part II
22-27 December, 2007
There are four points to be made here:
- Details
- Synchronicity
- Cause-effect (ridiculousness of)
- Two answers
1.
We played chess – it was a draw. My little friend taught me a classroom game that involved finding numbers written randomly across a piece of paper. The Men in Black – those going on a pilgrimage to a temple in Kerala – said their evening and morning prayers together, and washed themselves below my window under the open hoses by the side of the train tracks. The Malayali nursing students heading home for the holidays passed up and down the train cars, chatting and visiting and switching seats. I listened to an episode of NPR’s ‘wait wait… don’t tell me’ as the sun set over rice paddies in Tamil Nadu and an Alison Kraus album as it cast thick morning light on the coconut groves of Kerala, and finished Passage to India in between. After 25 hours, each face in the packed sleeper car looked familiar. [When the berths run out, you can buy ‘wait list’ tickets, which means you can board the train but have to find an empty bed to share with all the other wait list passengers. There were over 500 wait list tickets for sleeper class on the Sabari Express that night]
I got down in Ernakulam Town, and caught a black-on-black auto to the ferry dock. I paid my 2.5 rupees, and balanced my backpack on a handrail so that I could stand on the very edge of the boat, with a full view of the massive container ships, five-star hotels, and concrete bridges connecting the endlessly green islands that make up Ernakulam and Kochi. I got down (or rather, stepped up onto a massive, ancient dock) at Fort Cochin, and directed a driver down YMCA Road. The blue metal gates of number 1964 swung open easily, and familiar voices met me on the other side of a wide screen door.
My mother first took me to visit Pat and Don when they were living in Bologna, Italy. I was three months old – Liliana tre meze. The second time we visited them abroad they were living in Penang, Malaysia, and I was seven. I still remember the feeling of bushes slapping my salt-water sandal clad feet as I rode on the back of Pat’s bike to the market where a man slit fluffy white chicken’s necks and dropped them in a massive boiling silver vat so that customers could buy the glistening pink meat minutes later. I remember the Ramadan break-fast meal and the Muslim Malay women in their head-to-toe covering; the Tamil Indians carrying jars of milk on their heads, spears and hooks piercing their lips, tongues, and chests, in a festival procession overseen by a massive image of Hanuman; I remember the Chinese schoolgirls piling onto buses in miniscule skirts and bleached-white collared shirts.
This was my third trip to stay at the Hotel Fels, and it was absolutely wonderful to end an epic train ride across a relatively new country in a familiar living room with familiar faces. I had done my assigned reading – The Moor’s Last Sigh and The God of Small Things – and my non-assigned daydreaming – fresh seafood and universal healthcare schemes – so I felt prepared for the fishing nets and constant green and fresh dried spices and mythical magical tiles of Fort Cochin. It is ‘God’s own country,’ a few different voices had reminded me on the train, reiterating the advertising slogan for Kerala tourism.
And so I searched for tickets on a Thursday, and bought them on a Friday, and left on a Saturday at noon. And that is the story of how I found myself sitting on a floating dock, eating curried prawns from a banana leaf by candlelight, watching a fisherman slip by in a silent wooden canoe to the sounds of a classical music concert and the soft pattering of Seattle voices. [Another Seattle family – whose children I went to elementary school with – were also visiting. It’s a small world] In the morning, I got a tour of the green (everywhere), the massive trees (dripping with ferns), the star-decked homes (that would be the star of Bethlehem), the fish vendors along the boardwalk, the scantily-clad European tourists, and the churches and the mosques and the synagogue.
2.
Jews first came to Kerala as early as 72 AD, and settled in Cranganore (also called Shingly). There are numerous accounts of travelers meeting the Jewish community there, and a pair of copper plates dated around 400 AD declare a series of privileges granted to the Jewish community by the local Hindu rulers. In 1471, the line of Jewish rulers ended, and after a dispute between two noble brothers for the throne, the younger prince escaped to Cochin. According to legend, the prince swam to Cochin with his wife on his shoulders, and was welcomed by the Maharajah, who granted him a piece of land near the royal palace. Soon afterwards, the Cranganore community was sacked by the Portuguese (or the Moors, depending which account you’re reading). In 1568, the Cochin Synagogue was completed, and the area around it came to be known as Jew Town.
In the last few decades, most of the remaining Cochin Jews have relocated to Israel, leaving behind only a handful of elderly family members. They have regular services (sephardi orthodox), and use the small but steady stream of tourists to make a minyan for prayer. The synagogue is open to tourists during the week, and as I stood decoding the Ten Commandments carved into a piece of marble and set in the wall, I listened to Indian tour guides explaining Judaism. They would recite and the age and source of each of the glass chandeliers, and explain that the blue and white floor tiles had been brought from China in 1762. There are only three patterns, but each tile is different – the boat is farther down the river or the flowers have opened just a little more.
A few hours before my flight home, I returned to Jew Town to buy some gifts from Sarah Cohen’s Embroidery shop, and was lucky enough to be introduced to Sarah Cohen herself. With gray-white short curly hair and wrinkled skin, full of a bustling energy and advice or a story for anyone with a moment to listen, and wearing a fancy sari for her lunch out with an English author… she reminded me precisely of the stereotypical Jewish grandmother, but draped in a sari with a heavy Indian accent.
Bibliography: ‘Kerala and Her Jews,’ compiled from a number of research papers, and available at the Cochin synagogue for rps 10. Or try picking up The Moor’s Last Sigh.
[P.S. I was also lucky enough to visit the Palace, near the synagogue, and peruse amazing ancient murals. My favorite was three wives giving birth to four heroes – completely graphic and absolutely graceful.]
3.
On Christmas, I relaxed. And took a short walk, and bought myself jalebi, my favorite Indian sweet. For the Eve, we had a cocktail party with amazing fruit, and for the Day, we had a dinner with nut and herb stuffed chicken and kebabed vegetable compotes. For a Christmas present, the other Visiting Seattlites brought me along on their family trip to the backwaters. [The backwaters are an endless maze of lakes, rivers, and canals that connect and flow through and in and out of Fort Cochin. You can rent a houseboat and float down them for pleasant eternities… or for an afternoon, depending on your schedule.]
A car took us out (over a number of bridges) of Cochin, and pulled off the road at nowhere in particular. By the side of one of the bridges, we climbed into a long canoe made out of dark wood lashed together with rope and sealed with tar. A wiry man in a doti (a simple cloth wrap-skirt) and t-shirt pushed us off the bank and down the river with a long bamboo pole. We took a right down a little canal, just wide enough to let one boat of tourists pass another, and just shallow enough for children to bathe in. The dense green – trees, bushes, flowers, vines, floating plants, moss, long grass (except where the goats have gotten to it) – folded in and over and around us, and we floated happily. Cathy and I talked about feminism and travel, and the rest of the family played cards on the canoe benches.
The guide pulled over and asked us to get out twice. Once, for a demonstration by two old women spinning twine out of coconut fibers, while a third woman turned a crank that twisted the new-formed threads into a coiled rope. The second time for a short spice tour, which ended with the obligatory mid-morning tea break. Both stops were both fascinating and utterly bizarre and gave us the unsettling feeling that we were on an amusement park ride.
Lunch was two boats and one car ride away, on a tiny island just big enough for a kitchen, an open-air cafeteria, and some coconut groves. After our red rice with curries, we got back on the little lunch ferry (plastic chairs arranged on a large raft shaded with woven palm leaves) with about twenty other tourists, and spent the afternoon crossing a series of lakes. It was warm – but not too hot – and the water was sparkling – but not blinding – and the coconut trees looked so packed on to edge of every island that they might be about to topple into the water.
4.
We talked about stories and endings and why you can’t make cause-effect statements backwards in time. They teased me about details, and I thought about why I love them so much. The little birdies have been chirping that there aren’t any new ideas, and the old ideas are all too black-and-white in their patterning. Someone asked me if I write about what I had for breakfast, or silly things like that, and I said – of course not! And then realized that of course I do, because those silly little things seem to be the most real, or maybe not real, but the most accurate way to tell a story or represent some sort of lived experience. And when I think about playing chess with the little boy on the twenty-five hour train ride I remember the feeling of work and friends and obligation slipping off my shoulders and out the open window with the breeze, and when I think about the ten commandments carved in a piece of marble set in the wall of the Cochin synagogue, I think about connections with ancient civilizations and bloodshed and community and the shape of a biblical language and my godfather who supported my religious education and my father who would never visit me in a mythical blue-and-white tile but might just laugh at a little clenched fist making its way all the way to the other side of the world.
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