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?”)