Backwaters 2

Since we stayed up against the canal as part of a row of separate cottages at Philipkutty's Farm, it was kind of a surprise to find that this island we inhabited was a) manmade by Anu's grandfather-in-law with special dispensation from the government, and b) contained a huge plantation of fruits, spices, and other treats that you'd hardly know existed from our veranda. Funny thing, though: the plantation was below sea level, and we were, too, though our cottage's mound of earth was built up higher. (The original Philipkutty made a ring of dirt in a relatively shallow canal and filled the rest in to make the island, though they have to pump excess water out of the many channels that flow through it. If that makes sense.) One day after lunch we descended into the world behind our cottage for an afternoon walk through what I've termed The Jungle.

And the wonders we found back there. Besides my mental scenario of snakes slithering out of the green murk that filmed over the canals, there were lots of red ants. The biting kind.

 

Figs!

Cinnamon tree: the strip of peeled bark was done by this slightly angry-looking woman with a huge machete. When she approached us, I backed away instinctively. We were each given a piece of the bark, and lo and behold! it was cinnamon. Really, really nice cinnamon at that. 

Baby pineapple! So cute!

Red chilies!

Nutmeg in its tree form!

 Nutmeg in its nut form!

Bananas, bananas everywhere. A veritable forest. Most mornings began 

with two varieties of banana jam, as well as pineapple and fig preserves.

Discarded cacao shells. Yes, they grow chocolate, too! Cadbury's buys from them.

Janet's plantation souvenirs: a coconut and a cacao pod, which she carefully 

arranged on the veranda until we departed two days later. 

Backwaters I

As our time ticks down in India, there are some places that will stay with me forever. The Keralan backwaters is one of them, a singular location that doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world.

We stayed at a family farm, Philipkutty's Farm, on a manmade island in the district of Kottyam, an hour and a half south of Kochi. Kerala is muggier and warmer right now than Bangalore, and we nearly fried as we were taken to the farm on a canoe-like boat whose captain punted us across the canal with a bamboo pole.

The place feels like a dream, now that I'm back in Bangalore. I slid into a happy listlessness, where nothing really mattered except for my immediate sensory surroundings. It was hypnotic, puncuated by chirps, caws, croaks, trills, barks, laughter, and the rapping of a machete on wood.

The days kind of went like this for our three days at our waterfront cottage: get up. masala chai on the veranda. breakfast under the thatched dining area. read. watch Kingfishers and egrets and other impossible-to-identify birds swoop over invasive clusters of African water hyacinth. read more. watch the villagers on the other side of the water go about their daily tasks (okay, some of that included men taking off their longyis and bathing. ahem.). listen and try to identify insanely beautiful birdsongs. eat lunch, careful to drink large quantities of ginger-lime juice. sit in chair on veranda, pretending to read, but counting rice barges returning from their day cruises instead. read until it's too dark to read any more. apply bug spray. take numerous photographs of the same thing every day because it looks different and even more amazing every day. strain to hear phrases of devotional music coming across the canal. settle into bed with your trusty mosquito net covering you. sink into your mattress. sit up, startled because it's 1) a monsoon-like thunderstorm or 2) a village Easter celebration with endless firecrackers going off....

I could go on. I might, in fact, later in this same post. But time stopped for us here, stagnated completely in the soft, frangiapani-scented air.

We went to church on Easter, at St. Mary's, a parish that dates back to the 16th century when the Portuguese infiltrated south India. We were again ferried across at the ungodly hour of 7am, along with Anu, the farm's owner, and another family of three from Dubai. I felt completely underdressed, and I guess you could say I was: I felt very self-conscious in my wraparound skirt and exposed knees, no scarf or ornament around my neck, and tried to hide my outsider-ness in a sea of slightly disapproving veiled heads and their accompanying rainbow of saris. Instead of pews, we stood up, except when called upon to kneel or sit on the hard marble floor. The men were on the left side of the aisle, mostly dressed in white longyis and button-down shirts, and the women and small babies were on the right. The priest came around to each person to give us the host, and no wine was ever offered. At the end of the mass, which I could barely follow because it was in the local language, Malayam, the congregation rushed a statue of the baby Jesus near the altar and touched his feet. It was like a mosh pit. No eggs or bunnies or chicks, but the somehow fitting symbiosis between India and Catholicism---symbolic and musical and with plenty of icons to worship and touch.

That said, the Easter Bunny did visit: He left malted milk eggs and a small stuffed likeness of himself!

Gaga for Bawa

I'm going to backtrack in this post, to let you see for yourselves the incredible homestead of Sri Lanka's premiere architect, the late Geoffrey Bawa. Trained as a lawyer in the UK, Bawa bought a piece of land by the Lunaganga River, and bit by bit worked on it and ended up with a passion and undeniable talent for architecture.

Andrew and Deepak spent an entire day tracking Bawa's famed and numerous hotels that dot the country of Sri Lanka, and once we were ensconced on the south shores of Bentota Beach, Andrew took me in a tuk-tuk (ha!) to see this unique and gorgeous property, known simply as Lunaganga.

I will let the photos speak for themselves. And they have a lot to say.

As if that didn't whet your appetite for completely remodeling your interiors, we also peeked in at Bawa's Bentota Beach Hotel, his first major hotel project, dated 1967. And while there is an undeniable grooviness in his color palette, the space is clean and timeless. We returned later that day for a wonderful dinner, and walked around on the lawns under the full moon.

Bolly in the 'Hood!

I went to my very first Bollywood movie in India yesterday (not the one in the photo, which was an ad plastered to a wall in Deepak's Bangalore neighborhood). While we have a very nice all-Bollywood theatre near Seattle, it's just not the same. It's much louder here, the seats are like easy chairs, and the previews! Love the previews!

Thank goodness I trained for the last six years, watching god-knows-how-many Indian films via Netflix, because I guess it hadn't occurred to me that there. Would. Be. No. Subtitles. I did recognize certain words from all my research: "Lady," "Crazy," "Wedding," and the obvious "yes" and "no" and "okay-fine".

I thought I was done for. Not to mention Janet, who wouldn't be able to grasp the storyline either, and would have to put up with her mom's obsession.

With Akshay Kumar and Irfan Khan (the cop in "Slumdog Millionaire," the dad in "The Namesake," one of my favorite actors), I could just let the movie wash over me. "Thank You" was a fun, frivolous caper about a detective whose clients are wives done wrong by their philandering husbands. The catch is that his trick is to make the husbands sorry and turn over a new leaf by pretending he's romancing the women. Several song-and-dance numbers (featuring an alarming number of bad non-Indian dancers), some fake blood and punches, and a farcical wedding later, all came to an end. Bonus: Most of the outside shots were done in Vancouver! So I knew exactly where they were standing.

The best pre-movie feature, unique to me, was the message across the screen: "Please stand for the Indian National Anthem." We did, and a group of deaf schoolchildren were filmed signing the song, which was later taken over by orchestral swells and a chorus of dramatic hums. Quite patriotically effective. Instead of those subliminal "buycandypopcornjunkfood" flashes we're used to, how about a good old rendition of "Star Spangled Banner"?

Then, there's the inevitable Interval, the halftime of the movie. People stood in line and ordered everything from chicken tikka sandwiches and samosas to popcorn and cakey-looking things, but we did it best: again with the hot steamed corn, buttered and salted, in a tiny paper cup with tiny plastic spoons. Totally satisfying. You could also get it with lime, masala spice, or chili/lime. Since I was sharing with my daughter, I stuck with the basics. But it is certainly going to change my summer corn-eating! Cobs be gone! Hmmm....I wonder if Seattle is ready for its first Corn Club franchise?

I am mad about the tea here. I don't usually drink black tea at home, just the green stuff, to feel virtuous and healthy, but man, I think I might have a new vice when I return. All it takes is a morning cup, more a demitasse than a mug, of sweet, milky, cardamom-infused tea, and the day holds promise. The best tea, however, is the pre-dinner tea, for staving off the food pangs and perking you up in the early evening. I have my cup to the left of me, drained completely, with nothing but the grains left. It doesn't take a lot, mind you, just a few sips until the sugar hits. I don't see how I can possibly go back to sencha after this....

My stomach continues to stand up to the food. We're lucky in that we have plenty of homemade meals, and Deepak and Rashmi have an excellent cook who prepares breakfast and dinner. Theirs is a strict vegetarian household, whose staples are lentils, rice, idlies (the white things, below), vadai (the deep fried lentil-flour doughnuts, below), and sambar (the soupy stuff, perfect for dunking), potatoes, green beans, and some kind of roti, or bread made from whole wheat flour. We eat with our right hands, licking them clean. There are usually turmeric stains my fingers afterwards, my personal badge of honor. My taste buds aren't going to put up with American blandness so much after this, so I had better make sure I remember what I eat.

The monsoon season has officially begun! We got some whopper rainstorms in Sri Lanka, late afternoon rumblings that gave way to electric downpours so strong you couldn't go near an open-air space (see video, below). Today, in the growing heat of late afternoon, we left a downtown Bangalore store around 5pm and found ourselves in almost total darkness. The lightning flashed on either side of us, the thunder made our taxi vibrate, and the rain came down so hard that it was almost impossible to see a few yards in front of the car. Too bad our cab driver took us into the middle of rush-hour traffic (though when is is NOT rush hour here? good thing there's lots to see from one minute to the next), and his defogger wasn't working. We swiped our windows on either side while his malfunctioning windshield wipers barely pushed the water out of the way. I do give serious props to our driver, however, who managed to get us from one end of town to another in the chaos while simultaneously checking messages and carrying on conversations on not one, but TWO cell phones.

Sometimes you just feel lucky to be alive....

Galle

The south coast of Sri Lanka features the fort city of Galle, the preserved Dutch colonial (and later British) center. This is a fascinating and tourist-ready place. The old town is enclosed by huge ramparts that run along the water and inland, forming an enclosure. The area inside is made up of a grid of tiny streets that are lined with red-tiled roofs and white buildings.

We tried to have lunch here, at the Amangalla Hotel (formerly the New Orient, the Sri Lankan answer to the Strand, in Rangoon, or Raffles, in Singapore), but the kitchen was closed:

So we ended up here, at the Galle Fort Hotel, quite as nice and with food. (A Dutch gem trader's mansion.) So we sat in the inside courtyard above the gorgeous shaded pool, and took in the scent of lotus flowers and frangipani trees. This was the (colonial) life!

Every year they have an international literary festival, which draws lots of bibliophiles and writerly types, but they get some serious writers to turn up, like, for instance, Gore Vidal and Alexander McCall Smith (2007). My friend Deirdre told me Candace Bushnell came this past year, so maybe they've run through their A list already.... In any case, I could have spent a lot more time here, shopping and peering around corners, walking along the path beside the ramparts, or snooping through the grills in the Muslim Quarter. It's made for tourists, and this had to be the most concentrated white-person place I've been in two weeks since I landed in South Asia. Lots of Aussie accents, but still. We all sunburn the same....

The hardest reality of being in Sri Lanka showed itself this afternoon, on the coastal drive between Galle and Beruwala, where we're staying the next two nights. In 2004, the catastrophic tsunami that reached across the Indian Ocean from Thailand devastated the eastern and southern coasts of Sri Lanka. For a country many refer to as the "pearl of South Asia" the other saying showed itself grimly in hundreds of recent grave markers by the side of the road: "the teardrop of South Asia." Concrete houses were broken apart, roofs missing, abandoned. Thick jungle undergrowth has carpeted many beachfront swaths of land, but the recent graves still protrude. Many hotels and houses have gone up since the disaster, but the remnants are visible to anyone who passes by on the A2. Over 40,000 died here. This country has suffered enormously, and when you think that they were embroiled in a brutal civil war simultaneously, it's unthinkable how much they've been through.

Still in Sri Lanka, and still pretty much blissed out.

Remember the foot rub? Well, that evening I walked clumsily off a slight step in my bare feet and wrenched my left foot like an idiot. And wiped out onto the ground in super slo-mo. When I woke up in the middle of that night to get a drink of water, I could hardly put weight on it. I'm fine now, but it's those moments when you second-guess yourself while far, far away from the familiarities of home. No broken foot story to report, thank goodness!

This island is one visual surprise after another. We've been from Colombo, and the Bellands' home, to Udawalawe Nature Reserve, staying at Kalu's Hideaway, a riverfront retreat owned and managed by a former Sri Lankan cricket star, Kalu (Romesh Kaluwitharana). What a stud he is! Totally gorgeous and gregarious, warm and welcoming, but a REALLY BIG DEAL back in his day on the pitch. It was as though, for many Sri Lankans, we walked into a hotel owned by Michael Jordan and he was actually there to greet us and hang out all weekend.

We met Kalu's family, the kids played New Year's Games (yesterday was the Sinhalese New Year, with all the traditional trimmings---fireworks, games of Draw the Eye on the Elephant and Bash a Pot of Water With a Stick--both blindfolded, sweets, and family togetherness). The fireworks popped and boomed into the night, hopefully scaring away the large grey garden snake (not venomous) that slithered into a tree while the kids were playing. No Chinese floral patterns in the sky, but plenty of loud cracks to welcome the Buddhist New Year. (Sri Lanka is made up of 70 percent Buddhist, and otherwise a mix of Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. The violent conflict here was between the Tamils, or Hindus, and the Buddhist majority.)

And then there were the elephants. Lots of them. Babies being rehabilitated in a nearby transitional center, who would then be released into the wild.

And the Udawalawe Nature Park, where we rode in the backs of open Jeeps and tossed and pitched like we were in an ocean, all for the 10 or so minutes where we stood in awe of this scene:

The park itself was lovely, full of elephants that dotted the landscape like large rocks in the distance, or, as was the case a couple of time, that blocked our way for a moment while they lumbered across the dirt road. Every tree looked like some artist's rendering of a tree, by which I mean they were all so strange and exotically beautiful, with leaves like feathers or tendrils or paddles. Peacocks kept their unfolded fan tails facing us, as they dallied in the bushes with their hoped-for mates. Eagles flew out of their nests (Sri Lankan eagles, more patchy brown-and-white, but still quite impressive in size) above us, and water buffalo shuffled in herds toward their watering hole.

The sunset played a pivotal role at the close of our adventure, and layers of mountains came into view that no camera (particularly mine, with its fast-expiring battery) could capture.