**
A town of salesmen
“You have to go to YMCA? Left and straight – half a km” he said, and paused to add, “Do you need a houseboat for tonight, sir?”
As I park my car 5 minutes hence, another man walks over, looks rather conspicuously at my out-of-town license plate, and comes over, “Houseboat night stay, sir?”
Far, far away, some 15km from town. I’m taking an evening walk in a field off the Quilon-Cochin waterway. There is the vast emptiness of paddy fields around. There are but 2 houses visible in the far distance. A man walks from the village that lies 2km away, and moves away from me.
This man suddenly stops, turns around. There’s nobody else around – just the two of us. He asks, “Houseboat, sir? 6000 rupees only for 1 night”.
Just like Bombay offers sex to newly arrived visitors, Alleppey offers houseboats-by-night.
**
Finding refreshments
“Toddy?”, I ask.
“Bar?” comes the reply.
“No. No. Toddy.” I insist.
“Why toddy? Go to whisky, brandy bar. Next road only”, the man persists.
Finally, I decide to take my friend Samanth’s advice .”Shaaaaap?”, say I.
No avail. Perhaps I had missed the precise intonation that Samanth insisted was the key to success.
I try again , imploring, ”Kallu shaaaap?”
I immediately receive detailed, precise directions to the nearest toddy shop.
I also get dirty stares for being a car-driving, jeans-wearing toddy-shop visitor.
**
Where romantic notions go to die
After I’ve booked a place to stay in, I look up directions for getting there. I find, “We are not reachable by road. We are located on the Quilon-Cochin waterway.”
Wow, I tell myself, a place with enough attitude to stay away from the path of tourists. This, I tell myself, is precisely the sort of thing one writes about.
An hour before reaching, I call the resort to tell them about my arrival. The manager asks ,”What will you have for dinner?”.
“I’ll come there and order.”
“No, we’ll need to cook for you, so tell me now.”
Ah, I tell myself, here’s a place where they cook especially for guests, which doesnt have stocks of what could be leftover dishes. Here’s a place that isnt business-like in taking orders and mass-producing dishes listed on big menus. This really must be a place one could call quaint and nice. This, perhaps, is a place that is a house, but merely calls itself a resort.
I reach the resort, taking a 10 minute boat ride across the waterway to get there.
There are but two men there. One’s in the kitchen, the cook. The other man, who’s driven the motor boat, and also mans the reception, is the manager. There are just 2 other guests in the resort tonight.
See? Quaint is just the word, I tell myself. Very nice and non-commercial. This is the way resorts should be. Owner runs the place, talks to guests, manages everything. No corporate management, no indifferent staff. Owner relaxes and lives happily because he doesn’t have to sweat himself to death about ‘scaling up’.
Romantic notions, alas, die a cruel death.
As I chat with the manager over dinner, he laments, “So many staff are on leave. The boat driver is taking a vacation. The MD wants me to handle all the work.”
At least, I tell myself, the place maintains its peaceful seclusion. It’s not for everyone, just like any place with any notion of pride should be. It’s so far away from the town, only the most intrepid, only the worthy come here. See how un-crowded it is?
That notion, too, dies an ignominious death.
Sometime later, he says, “This is a very busy waterway. Boats pass all day. We pick up guests directly from Alleppey. Sometimes, we have houseboats stop by for parties at our resort. Today somehow we hardly have guests.”
Sigh.
“Sometimes, people book the entire resort and hold parties and bonfires here. They have a great time. Especially software engineers from Bangalore.”
Well, so the place didn’t quite match up to the exalted levels of chastity I demanded. Oh well, at least the place was memorable enough to make me want to stay two extra days. One cant have everything, can one?
I was on a journey that’d let me see all of Kerala in the rain. I wanted to see the South West monsoons at their most bountiful, draping what is perhaps their favourite region in India. I hoped to view India’s most popular tourist state from a vantage point that it’s not been seen from too often – the train footboard.
As the train sped southwards in the darkness and persistent rain, name boards on wayside stations switched from Kannada to Malayalam. Hoardings for Hoorulyn brand burqas and New Age brand dhothies appeared by the trackside. Silhouettes of the first coconut trees surfaced from the shadows, dwarfing and sheltering all other vegetation.
What remained unchanged were the inundated fields and gushing water bodies. Unchanged too was the violence of even the smaller streams that furiously tossed about branches and other remnants of vegetation.
The Parasuram express is named after the man who, according to legend, carved out Kerala by hurling his axe into the sea. Even though it plies a distance of 634km from Mangalore to Trivandrum, it is practically a series of short distance trains. People hopped in and out of it every hour or two – with hardly anyone traveling more than 3 or 4 hours.
Nearly all the somnambulists from Mangalore got off at Kasargode, 46km away. Folks who replaced them would alight in another two hours at Cannanore, 86km further downstream. Purposeful office goers boarding there would go an hour or two till Telicherry or Calicut, only to be replaced by college students and work delegations headed to Trichur. This relay would go on until the last cohort of office returnees alighted in Trivandrum, 14-odd hours from the faraway mists of 4:15am.
Around Bekal, 65km from Mangalore, tearing streams occasionally revealed just a little glimpse of the open sea. Just as the train put on a burst of speed, the green of the coconut groves abruptly gave way to a vast openness. Just a few hundred metres away was the open sea, its greenish-blue stretches merging into the inky twilight sky far, far away. The two or three minutes of this proximity seemed to last forever. Inevitably, the train swerved inland and moved on, ruthlessly pushing back the view until it was a mere memory.
Cannanore, 130km from home, came at 7am. The folks who entered were already the fourth set of people on the train. Calicut, best known because it was Vasco da Gama’s port of call, came by at 8:35am, 221km into the journey. The day was just beginning for the folks coming in freshly bathed and breakfasted. I was already a long way into my day, as I tucked into the thankful warmth of upma and watery tea.
Past Calicut, there was water everywhere. Lakes and water bodies had encroached into flooded fields. Often, there was just a continuum of water punctuated by stubbles of grass within. The rivers swelled, lapping up bridge spans. The Thootha and the Bharathapuzha had water rushing almost right under my feet.
Yet, there was no despair around. In Bihar two monsoons ago, I saw refugees from the rain shivering in shacks by the trackside. There was none of that here. Houses stood steady. Schoolkids waved happily to the train. Women unmindfully waded through water-logged verandahs. Everywhere along the route, groups of men crouched under umbrellas, intent in games of cards.
The railway was never alone. Often, coconut groves cocooned the track tightly on either side. Houses had the railway tracks for their front yards. Hillocks loomed alongside the tracks after Shoranur, 307km into the ride. The infrequent clearings, water bodies and fields felt like an opening up, a relief from being accompanied all the time.
Lunch came by at 1:30pm in Ernakulam, lesser half of the better known Cochin. I had the hobson’s choice of any dish as long as it was badly-cooked biriyani. As Parasuram lurched out of the city limits, the sun came out briefly. Waterlogged rice fields stretched out in the fuzzy light. Their silver surfaces carried imperfect reflections within them.
Pepper and rubber trees surfaced. Town names grew longer. Attempts to register Tripunithura’s name made me nearly miss the sight of the pagoda-like station building that stood in proud isolation in the downpour. At Mulagunnathukavu, I didn’t stand a chance of noticing any detail of the station.
Kottayam came at 3pm, and looked like a forest-town. Passengers, of course, continued their in-and-out-of-the-train medley. Soon, the Parasuram express entered Alleppey district, which has most of the backwaters that Kerala is known for. Most backwaters are canals that branch out from Vembanad and Ashtamudi lakes. I’d see the latter lake shortly, which gets its name from its octopus-shape.
Dirty grey clouds loomed above. The Pampa river was an unassuming, modest stream, but as full and overflowing as the other water bodies. In two weeks it would host the famous boat races at Alleppey.
Thick threads of rainwater sheeted down, forming a near-opaque curtain in front of me. Canals and rivulets surged ahead with vehemence, with none of the languidness suggested by the word ‘backwater’. Metres away from the deluge, I gratefully held the hot tea in my chilly hands at Kayankulam at 4pm. It was 529km into the day by now.
The train skirted the Ashtamudi lake, which, perhaps by its enormity, gave the impression of placidity, even in the furious rain. The contours of the lake curved away tantalisingly. But the train persisted in bestowing its attentions on it. After perhaps two kilometres or so of this futile courtship, the Parasuram express impatiently swung away. It clearly had no intention of following the footsteps of the Island Express, which had plunged into this lake in 1988.
This rejection, of course, wasn’t the end of the world for Parasuram. It cavorted with the Kilimukkam lake, rendered wetter by the pouring rain, and caught a glimpse of the lake dissolving into the immensity of the sea. This lake too, of course, turned out to be unattainable for Parasuram.
After another stroll amid coconut groves, the inevitable happened. The grey that had filled the sky all day turned just a shade deeper – a foreboding of the arrival of evening twilight. Thatched roofs, copses and rivulets gave way to concrete buildings, shops and traffic filled roads. Trivandrum, the end of the journey was nigh. Fourteen odd hours by greenery, in the rain didn’t quite seem enough.
The Parasuram express squeaked into the solemn, majestic stone buildings of Trivandrum Central. The square, clean-cut edifice seemed to have come too soon, as it rounded off a day spent in the abundance of unspoilt, newly washed stretches.
