There is a different summer that emerges when you are not scrambling for visa appointments, googling ‘a thousand places to visit in a day’ and ticking and crossing packing lists that start a winter earlier!It's a summer where the weather, social calendar, and mood (swings) determine your itinerary.
The spoilt 'bratish' heat of Kerala was as spoilt as spoilt
could be..relentless and sometimes cruel in its onslaught but yet we summered
and vacationed a small trip...a ‘lets go to Fort Kochi’ mumble was heard somewhere
and before we know it, we were on our way to Fort Kochi – agenda-less,
expectation-less and hearts full of abandon – to just let the old town ‘surprise’
us and carry us into the floaty tales of the Arabian sea..
But to get to this ‘queen of Arabian sea’ as it is called, you
have to navigate through the ‘other Kochi’ - the one that tries to boast of IT
parks, multi cuisine restaurants, gigantic malls – trying to be yet another
‘booming metro’ where all the city vices greet you- a choc-a-bloc of upcoming
apartments, traffic snarls, barricades & metro works..But once you cross
the bridge, the streets are narrower, the vehicles limited, the people no
longer ‘hurried’, and that’s when you know you have arrived at Fort Kochi..
I was smitten and scorched by the experience that awaited..a
rainbow of colourful mansions, churches, synagogues, tiny shops that try to
commercialize Kochi’s history into fancy cafes, stay options and a variety of
knick knacks that are priced and catered to the European explorers who still
visit the shores of Kochi for the spices, sun and culture.. Fort Kochi uncorks
an abundance of history, influences - you can witness the streets, churches and architecture
sometimes whispering Dutch conquests and sometimes of Portuguese explorers .. the
old ‘Bazaar’ street buzzing with tiny establishments that stand as a proud
testimony of the spice merchants and the trade routes with Arab and Chinese
lands.. the Pardesi Synagogue a reminiscence of the huge Jewish settlement that
dwindled over the years..
I must say that even as a Keralite I was totally lost in the
vibrant haven.. photo-opps at every corner of the streets, cafés transforming
me into a sloth and what could be better than a ‘water metro’ that you can hop
on/off coupled with dolphin-spotting in the sparkling sea ……And so I learnt my own
history, touristing in my own state and forgetting that I am one amongst them.
And as I sipped my last coffee and slowly wove out of the old town - a few farewell tears of rain slowly tricked down and there she sat..the queen of the Arabian sea.. telling tales of the past, distant from the modern IT park urban jungle that is growing a few metres away, showing us artifacts of the past – the Chinese nets, the Jewish crochet works, the Kippah….like she has nothing to do with the urbanization exploding in the Cochi central district.. but the screaming honks of city traffic brought me back to the urban reality called Kochi that is young, throbbing and waiting to explode into the global scene.
And the summer slowly started slipping through my fingers…
packing, unpacking, buses, trains, drives…a festival here, a wedding there, a burst of people …and then came the lull of
just being home…home to the mangoes, to tulsi teas and chats that dissolve into
the twilight of amma’s porch..
