Rita was born and raised in Quilon
(officially it’s now Kollam but Quilon is still often used) and left at age 20 to
attend graduate school in the US. So our visit to the state of Kerala, where Cochin
(officially Kochi) and Quilon are located, is a visit home for Rita. She still has
relatives here, and much of our time in Kerala was spent visiting with family and extended
family.
We arrived at the Cochin Harbor train station on Monday
morning and took an autorickshaw to the Port House Hotel in Port Cochin. This four-room
hotel is directly on the waterfront with a pier and an excellent view of the shipping
channel. We relaxed and watched fishermen working the Chinese nets, and enjoyed a visit
from Rita’s relative Tony, who offered to take us on a backwaters boat trip the next
day. Tony is an accomplished boatman with many years of experience, and he met us early
Tuesday morning with a speedboat of his own design, manufactured by his boatbuilding
company.
Tony took us on a very pleasurable trip through the
backwaters south of Cochin, where we saw fishermen in homemade canoes, fishing nets
attached to poles fixed upright in the water, and men diving in the backwater channels for
sand that they then put into boats and sold as construction material. We passed modest
homes with outhouses built out over the water on stilts. [Someone
boating by underneath might consider such outhouses as instead a bit immodest.]
We saw men climbing the coconut palms to cut
off a bunch of buds and capture the sap in containers (similar to collecting maple syrup
from the trunks of maple trees, except that the action is near the top of the coconut
palm, and climbing is required). The result is coconut toddy—a drink similar to beer, I am told. [Not much that Allen knows about beer has he gleaned from
first-hand experience.]
Tony’s knowledge of the backwaters and
the activities that take place there made this a very informative trip as well as a great
pleasure, and the hours seemed to fly by. When we returned to Cochin, Tony brought us to
his home, where we met his wife Jansy and daughter Anne, and spent our second night in
Cochin.
On Wednesday, Tony and Jansy drove us to the
Ernakulam train station, where we boarded our train for Quilon. At this point, I was
suffering from my first—and
so far only—case of
Delhi Belly. I still have no idea what caused it. We were very happy to see Rita’s
uncles Peter and Stephen at the Quilon train station with a car, ready to take us to
Rita’s family home, where I spent the next couple of days resting while Rita caught
up on her family’s doings. When I wasn’t feeling better after a couple of days,
Stephan and Rita took me to a doctor, who prescribed medication (and charged 30 rupees for
the office visit). We took the prescription to the local pharmacy and paid about 80 rupees
(less than $2.00) for the antibiotic I needed to fix me up. I was fine in a few hours.
We took a backwaters speedboat ride from
Quilon in a beat-up boat that smelled strongly of spilled gasoline. The contrast to our
backwaters trip with Tony made us even more appreciative of his professionalism.
We visited with Father Ralph D’Cruz at
his home on the campus of Fatima College, where he operates a counseling center for
alcoholics. I know him as "Big Uncle"—the literal translation of the Malayalam (the language of Kerala)
for "great uncle"—and he has visited us several times in California.
We took a four-day trip to Kovalum beach and
to Kanyakumari that is covered in the next report.
We spent one day with Bay Area friends Molly and Varghese,
visiting the ashram of Ma Amritaananda Mayi, popularly know as "Ammachi".
We also made a relaxing 24-hour overnight trip to the beach
resort of Varkala, which sits on a cliff overlooking the beach and the sea. It has a less
commercial, more rural feel than Kovalum, with the hotels, restaurants, and Ayurvedic
health centers on the top of the cliff, and two steep stairways down to the beach. I found
a good paperback book at a local shop and spent most of my time sitting in the shade,
reading. Rita went jewelry shopping.
We spent our time in Quilon at Rita’s mother's house.
Rita’s mother spends most of her time in California, and the laws in India are such
that it is easy to lose a house to a tenant or a squatter, so her brother Stephen
(Rita’s uncle) lives in the house with his family, a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Stephen’s wife Philo, daughter Asha, and his wife’s sister-in-law Molly served
us great meals, provided laundry service, and generally made us feel like honored guests.
The mealtime custom we saw observed in most of the homes
where we ate is that guests and the man of the house eat first, followed by the rest of
the family, so Rita and I ate with Stephen, and everyone else ate after we finished. For
me, they prepared boiled vegetables, chicken, noodles, and lots of other delicious
non-spicy foods. I’m sure they found my food habits strange, but they did their best
to identify the foods I liked. On one particular morning, my breakfast consisted of eggs,
fruit, Coca cola, and ice cream. Strange, but delicious, and not spicy! [Sigh.]
The house, like most Indian houses, is of masonry
construction. It is enclosed by a tall masonry wall with an iron gate for access to the
street. It consists of living room, four bedrooms, kitchen, pantry, dining room and
bathroom. Outbuildings provide a second bathroom and shower, and laundry facilities. Water
is from a well and is pumped to a tank on the roof, from which it is gravity-fed to the
house. There are permanent ventilation openings in the outside walls, and every room has a
ceiling fan.
The street is about eight feet wide and is not paved. Most
families in the neighborhood, including Stephen’s, have a motorscooter or motorcycle.
Although cars do drive into this street, it is a tight fit, and the street becomes too
narrow for cars at one end, so they must turn around in a yard or back out.
The neighborhood is located across the railroad tracks from
the main street, and the railroad crossing gates are often down. According to a sign
posted at the crossing, the gates are normally down, and are raised "only when
necessary and safe to do so." In practice, that means that the gate is lowered about
five minutes before a train arrives and, if a second or third train is expected soon, it
remains down between trains. A wait of fifteen minutes is not uncommon, and one must allow
for this in making plans. We often walked from the house to the other side of the tracks
before getting an autorickshaw to avoid being stuck on the wrong side.
Stephen is in the process of starting a business dressing
chickens; he will buy grown chickens, kill and clean them, and sell them to individual
retail customers, and also sell them wholesale for weddings, birthdays, and other parties.
The business will be housed on Stephen’s brother Peter’s property in a building
that was formerly used for a catering business. During our visit, Stephen was in the
process of building the chicken coop and dressing facility, painting the building,
clearing space for a parking lot, setting up the retail sales counter, and making the
other changes needed to convert the property to its new use.
I asked a lot of questions and was told that no building
permit is required for the building modifications, no business license is required, and
there is no health department permit or inspection. He expects that most of his retail
sales will be to local residents who will just drop in, and he will solicit wholesale
business for parties. His goal was to be open in time to get some of this year’s
Christmas business.
I rode on the back of Stephen’s motorscooter and felt
very exposed; other vehicles regularly came within inches of us, and the things that stuck
out the farthest were my knees!
The job market for young people is not good
in Kerala, I am told. To attend college, one must pay, in addition to tuition, a fee of
tens of thousands of rupees. The fee is used to pay for the acquisition and maintenance of
the school’s physical facilities, as there is not enough money available from the
government. After graduating from college, the job seeker will often be asked to pay a
large fee to an employer in order to get a job, and even then will probably be poorly
paid. It is not surprising that Rita and I were asked by many young people—from relatives to waiters and
rickshaw drivers—if we
could help them get a job in the USA. I understand that the more prosperous families in
the neighborhood are those that have one or more family members working overseas—most likely in the Middle East—and sending money back home.
We visited with Rita’s two older
brothers and their families, and also with her uncle Peter who lives in a new (new since
Rita left India, it is now 30 years old) house on the family land where Rita grew up. We
walked on the nearby beach and visited her father’s grave.
Our time in Quilon passed quickly and, on
Thursday the 14th, we said our good-byes and climbed aboard the train to Madurai, claiming
the non-AC First Class seats/bunks we had reserved two days previously (the train did not
have AC two-tier sleeper—our usual
accommodation for overnight travel). We planned to spend a few days in Kodaikanal (covered
in Installment #15) before meeting our train to Madras (Chennai) on the 19th.
