Kerala

On Sunday, we fled Bombay for Kerala.

Everyone here always talks about Kerala as another planet: “So nice,” they say, “the people are so nice. And it is so easy, so slow.”

I’ve always dismissed that as part of this regional essentialism that permeates conversation in India: Gujaratis make money and Bengalis are intellectuals—smart, spare, austere livers—and in the UP, they’re very poor and very hard. I’m not sure what it is that Marathis do in this model; we talked about this with Carol Alter the other night; certainly, they are politically organized. The most powerful political groups in this country right now are the conservative offspring of the Shiv Sena; sometimes I think that this is the state that will bring the secular experiment of India to its knees. Or maybe that's Gujarat too. I don't know.

But back to regional essentialism and Kerala as the lovely, easy, slow state:

Now I believe it.

Fort Cochin is a tiny bump at the top of a peninsula, an enclave of little winding lanes, open courtyards and marshy playing fields in front of old, yellowing churches, all shouldering the grand, universal names of 17th century globe-trotting Catholicism: St. Francis, St. Xavier. Everything is canopied by huge, melting trees, spreading wet branches across the roads and against balconies, alive with crows and cicadas and chirps and screams. The bungalows in the town’s residential sections are set back behind little gates, topped by creeping yellow-flowered vines; it is impossibly old world and the closest thing to a European colony that I have actually seen in this country of European colonies.

…And then, abruptly, the bungalow roads cringe into little paved paths no wider than a Maruti, connecting the two coastal edges of town. Narrow drains run alongside the road and the open entrances to most of the one-story white-washed businesses are reached over a cement block spanning this fetid little canal. Banana stands and welding operations are jumbled together, side by side, in groups of five or six, sharing one tin roof.

(This crowding of businesses in the same industry is one of the weirdest things about India, I think, almost as though a different model of competition exists here; we open bicycle shops purposefully far away from other bicycle shops in Brooklyn, bakeries far from other bakeries. In Bombay, there is a mall-like mentality to the way that individual sectors seem to organize themselves – “one iron-piping shop on the street? Why not two? Or six? Or 14?”)

Water class - 9/10/08

I go to my hilarious old-lady water aerobics class in Nariman Point at 9 am, rattling down Marine Drive in a black and yellow taxi with holes in the floor. They are large enough so that I can see the pavement blurring by between my feet.

The water class! Behind a huge construction site just beyond the government buildings, there is a raised pool and 50 ladies unenthusiastically but dutifully going through gentle exercises under the watchful eye of Deepali, our deep-voiced general of an instructor.

Are gym teachers—female ones anyway—the same the world over? Deepali is a tall, padded 30 year old with long red fingernails, lots of jewelry, wrap-around sunglasses and an oversized polo shirt. She yells and yells and is all booming enthusiasm and good humor.

The ladies wear double layers of swimsuits with little shorts or full-body wetsuits and swim caps even though they never, ever submerge. Most of them can’t swim. They’re incredibly friendly, this slow-moving, huffing mass of curiosity: They have daughters, brothers, cousins in New Jersey, San Francisco, Nevada. What am I doing here? How do I find the food? Am I going to the Soonawalla clinic? Spice is not good for pregnancies.

Of course I am, everyone goes to the Soonawalla clinic, of course I like the food, but yes, I am careful about spicy food, now in my seventh month.

My conversations are the same, the same, always, but lately, they have been comforting rather than frustrating, this passing, casual concern for mothers in a strange country.