Change In Plans

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

Greetings from Delhi!  We flew here this evening after spending a terrific final day down in Kochi.  Tomorrow morning we say goodbye to India (the place), and board a plane for Kathmandu, Nepal.  This post, however, is about Kochi.

We spent the morning swimming in the pool at the Brunton Boatyard Hotel, and waiting for the second-place competitor in the Volvo Ocean Race to sail past us.  The leaders (Team Ericsson) went right past our hotel room windows at 5:30 this morning, but we were all asleep. In the 10,000 nautical miles since the boats left Cape Town, they have gotten so dispersed that we didn’t actually see anyone come through.  It was fun, though, watching for them and talking about the race.

In the afternoon, we had a terrific local guide named Anuja Skaria take us around old Kochi. Anuja showed us a lot in a few short hours, and had thoughtful answers to all of my amateurish “Kerala Paradox” questions.   

Our first stop was the St. Francis of Assissi Church, which has a history that parallels the involvement of the European powers in Kochi.  A wooden Catholic church was first built by the Portuguese in 1502.  After Vasco da Gama died in Kochi, his body was buried at the church for several years, before being taken to Portugal.  The Dutch took over the church, along with the rest of Kochi, in the 1660s.  They burned the Portuguese church, built a more permanent multi-gabled structure, and repurposed it for the Dutch Reformed Church. The British took over the colony and the church in the 1790s, and converted the parish to Anglicanism.  When the Communist Party of India (Marxist) took control of Kerala in the late 1950s, they decided that the Anglicans could stay.

From the church, we walked along the beach and the sea wall to the row of Chinese fishing nets.  We had been admiring these structures from afar, but with Anuja’s encouragement we walked out onto one of the rigs and offered to help out for a while.

The fishing technique was introduced to Kochi by Chinese traders 400 years ago.  It is pretty simple: submerge the massive net, wait for the tide to bring some fish past, lift the net out of the water and take the fish.  We helped raise and lower the net three times; Zola, Tallulah and me pulling on the ropes alongside the real fishermen.  As we all pulled, they chanted “Ahj … Ahjella! Ahj … Ahjella!,” which may be the Malayalam expression for “Thank you, silly foreigners!” 

Both kids were very excited to see what we caught with each raising of the net.  Cycle #2 yielded about 30 silver mullet fish, each about 5 inches long.  Cycles #1 and 3 each produced only a single, very small mullet.  (Tallulah is holding one of the unfortunates in the picture at the top of the post).  They all got thrown into a water bucket, to be sold at an open-air auction later in the afternoon. 

Anuja took us to the inaccurately named Dutch Palace, which was built originally by the Portuguese as a gift to the local maharajah. The Kochi palace is relatively small and modestly decorated, compared with the massive and elaborate palaces of the Rajasthani kings.  The highlight is a huge (300 meters long, 2 meters high) detailed fresco of the 2,500-year-old Ramayana

epic, the story at the the core of Indian culture.  The fresco is badly preserved (must be tough in the Kerala heat and humidity), but must have been spectacular when it was new. 

Finally, we went to the Kochi synagogue, built in the early 1500s, and still in use today.  As we found out, it is the oldest synagogue in the British Commonwealth, and one of only four known synagogues in the world to have two pulpits.  The history of Jews in Kochi dates back to the first century AD, when a group from Jerusalem found refuge after the Romans sacked and occupied the holy city.  The population was increased dramatically in the 15th century, as Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled the Inquisition.  Most of the community emigrated (back?) to Israel in the last 60 years, so the population has dwindled to 11 elderly survivors, and only 7 men.  In order to read from the Torah (needing at least 10 men), the congregation has to be supplemented by visitors.  Kerala has a complicated history, but it’s interesting.

After Anuja left us, we sat on the balcony of the Malabar House hotel, and drank a milkshake and Diet Pepsi toast to Kochi, to Kerala, and to India itself.  Our afternoon exploring old Kochi was a great way to cap our four weeks in India.