Tea

On Friday, November 6th, we went on a lengthy excursion with Father George and his colleague, Father Michael. We started, around 10:00, by tracing backwards the route our tour took on the way down from the Western Ghats to the backwaters. We stopped at Valanjankanam Falls,

which we had passed but not visited on the tour. We turned off the route to Tamil Nadu at Kuttikanam, heading northwest, through tea plantations.

After asking directions in various places, we picked up a man in one village who guided us along a rugged dirt road back through the tea to a tea factory. We saw the process by which the leaves a mechanically sorted, dried, powdered, roasted, graded and bagged in large sacks. It was very dusty in there.

The tea would then be auctioned online to the big tea companies, which would blend and flavor it and double the price. When visiting the tea-pickers the week before, we had learned that they had just finished a successful strike for higher wages. This factory was just getting back into production after that strike, but there was some question as to whether they could make any money at it, since pricing was more in favor of the retail tea companies than of the producers.

Next we gradually climbed, climbed, climbed to the village of Vagamon, where we stopped for lunch (chicken biriyani) at a restaurant-hotel. The restroom was the bathroom of one of the hotel rooms.

We started down, stopping at an overlook where there was a clutch of motorized ice cream carts (a sort of ice cream tuk-tuk), catering to people, like us, there for the view--but we didn't buy any ice cream. We could see clouds creeping down the mountains. Father George had hoped to start back before 2 p.m., to avoid getting fogged in--this was a normal daily occurrence here. We were running a little late, but stayed ahead of the fog, though the rain caught us. That, however, stopped chasing us when we reached the lowlands.

Now, it was time for more churches. First, we visited the tomb of St. Alphonsa (1910-1946) at a church (I forget its name) in Bharananganam.

Then we crossed denominational lines to see the Jacobite Syrian Church's Cathedral of St. Mary, in Manarcad. This was a group of former Syrian Rite Catholics who had, at some point, abjured the Pope. This cathedral is a major pilgrimage site, and crowds of people were there--some being blessed by a priest, some walking a number of times around a cross out back, some lighting oil lamps, some even listening to the vespers service going on.

Kottayam and Three Churches

On Thursday, November 5th, we had a Keralan breakfast (rice flatbread with, I think, dal (curried lentils with potato, as well as toast and jam. Then we packed, checked out and met our driver.

The ride down to the Kottayam area took two hours and twenty minutes. Traffic wasn't heavy because it was local Election Day, a holiday, On my Kindle I had been reading Ramesh Menon's (much abridged!) version of the Ramayana, but for an epic, Rama is too perfect a hero. Of course, Ramayana is not only an epic, but sacred scripture, and Rama is not your standard epic hero: he is God incarnate, as if Jesus were the hero of the Song of Roland. So for this drive I switched to Menon's (much, much, much abridged!!) Mahabharata, which, so far, is a lot of fun.

We arrived at a retreat house near Kottayam, where we met Mary Joy's former boss, Father George. Our room was fairly spartan: while there was air conditioning and a ceiling fan, there was no hot water, so Mary Joy learned how to take a cold shower.

After lunch, Father George took us to visit his brother and sister-in-law at his nearby family home,

then, since Mary Joy had expressed an interest in seeing churches, he took us to three of them in the area.

Kerala has many more Christians than any other state in India: in central Kerala they are the majority of the population, mostly Roman Catholic. There are Christian shrines at many street intersections and there are many large and elaborately decorated churches.

The first church we saw was the seven-year-old Church of St. Joseph, I don't remember whereaA. It is situated, like many Kerala churches, at the top of a hill, with a broad staircase climbing from the bottom. Alongside the stairs is a very large statue of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Near the altar there is another statue of her, for veneration. Below the church there is a museum relating to her, including some relics. Around the grounds are trash containers in the shape of white rabbits.

Keralans are very proud that in recent years two of them were canonized as saints of the Church by Pope Francis. Our next stop was the tomb of one of them, St. Kyriakose Elias Chavara (1807-1871) at another Church of St. Joseph, in Mannanam. The new tomb-church was built on the hill above the old church, in front of the monastery where the saint spent much of his life (we visited the room where he lived). Down the hill a little from the tomb is a large, gilded statue of Kyriakose appearing to the bedridden St. Alphonsa (the other Keralan canonized by Pope Francis). Nearby is the first school he founded, with the press on which he printed the first Malayalam-language magazine.

It was starting to get dark when we approached our last church, St. Mary, in Athirampuzha. Parking was difficult, because there was a service going on--vespers, I think. It was a very large church, filled with worshippers. As we walked to the church, some small children came up to Mary Joy, practicing their English. We didn't go inside, but listened to the singing--which was wonderful, from outside

End of the Tour and Back to Kerala

On Wednesday, November 4th, we headed back to Bangalore, passing through Srirangapatnam, where Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan ruled a chunk of southern India, in alliance with the French, until the British defeated and killed Tipu in 1799, consolidating their power in the south.

After a four-and-a-half-hour drive, as we approached the restaurant where we were to have our last lunch together as a group, Stalin told us a joke and a story. The joke: a new M.B.A. at a job interview was asked to differentiate "pollution" and "solution." Pollution, he replied, is one politician being drowned in a river. Solution, he continued, is all the politicians being drowned in a river. The story was about his young daughter, who asked him why he had some gray hairs. He replied that every time you're naughty, one of your father's hairs turns gray. "So that's why all of Grandpa's hair is gray!" she said, turning the tables on him.

After lunch, we said goodbye to those who weren't going immediately to the airport, then to one we dropped off at a hotel on the way, then to the remaining two and Stalin at the airport. Indian domestic airlines have a weight limit of 15 kilograms per person for checked bags. We hadn't made it on our flight to Bangalore, but that had been offset by others in our group. We had left some surplus stuff (clothing, sunscreen, insect repellent, snacks) in our room in Mysore, but were holding our breaths when our bags were weighed: they came in just under the limit.

We had a lengthy wait in the new, spotless Bangalore airport, during which I read part of the Ramayana. Our flight back to Kochi was uneventful. The young Indian woman in front of Mary Joy bought a selfie stick for 500 rupees (about $7.50) from the in-flight catalogue and was trying it out with her phone as the plane was descending. Our hotel, the Villa Romantica, sent a car to pick us up. We had chosen this hotel because it was near the airport, had very good reviews in Tripadvisor and seemed less generic than the Marriott. It is a little worn around the edges, the staff's English language skills aren't top-of-the-line and the WiFi reached Mary Joy's phone only at one end of the room and my finicky iPad not at all, but they gave us a good chicken soup and dal with rice, and their hearts seem in the right place. There was a gecko on the bathroom wall, but there are geckos on the walls of my brother's house in Florida. So it was a good enough one-night transition space between the tour and our week more or less on our own in exotic India.

Pigs, Temples, Silkworms, Bullock Carts, Palaces and Farewells

On Tuesday, November 3rd, we went to the temple town of Somanathpur. Along the way we saw our first Indian pig, being chased by a little girl. Sudha turned the bus around and we stopped at the house to meet the pigs and the people who raise them, along with some chickens.

This is very fertile land, with diversified crops: mostly rice, but also a wide variety of vegetables, corn, peanuts, etc.

We also stopped in one village where a group of wandering Rajasthani gypsies was camped by the side of the road, making iron agricultural implements. Women were turning cranks to send air down pipes to heat up small charcoal fires on the ground, in which men were heating iron red-hot, then hammering it into shape. We saw them hammering dies through the iron in order to create holes for handles.

In Somanathpur we visited the small but elaborately decorated Keshava Temple. Sudha pointed out many details that we wouldn't have noticed, but, as he said, you could wander around it for a week and not see everything. Delicately carved soapstone statues and friezes covered the outside of the many-faceted, towered, star-shaped building. Beautiful. Afterwards, more damage was done to the U.S. balance of payments, in the village shops.

On the way back, we stopped at a farm where they were raising silkworms on beds of mulberry leaves. After a certain number of days, they would transfer the worms (actually, a kind of caterpillar) to an upright wicker panel, where they would spin their yellow cocoons. Once the cocoons were finished, they would be collected and sold, as we had seen the day before. There was a drunk there, who kept trying to interact with us, but he was mostly kept away by our assistant bus driver.

When we were finished looking at the silkworms, one of the farmers hitched a pair of bullocks to his large cart and the women on our tour were helped up and taken for a short ride.

Next, we went back to Mysore to have lunch at the Lalitha Mahal Palace Hotel, a gorgeous 1920s palace built as a guest house for the Maharajah's VIP visitors. It is now a hotel, with restaurant, both getting stars from Lonely Planet, though the grandeur has become somewhat ragged around the edges in the forty years since the place became a hotel. Still, the lunch was very good. We went up to look at some of the rooms, including the one used when one of Mysore's natives comes to town, the Tamil Nadu prime minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram, a former movie star whose large portraits are seen wherever you go in that state, continuing the personality cult of her late predecessor, onetime lover and movie co-star, M.G. Ramachandran, whose statue is also everywhere, including one at the very border with Kerala.

Then we drove up the Chamundi Hill, stopping at a turnout for pictures over the city. Near the top is a 16-foot-high black statue of Shiva's transport, the bull Nandi, carved in the seventeenth century. We visited him, and there talked about to a young couple who had been married for one week.

Mysore is a beautiful, green and stately city. A century ago, the Maharajah did his best to turn it into a mini-London. An important part of that was spending 42 million rupees on a new palace to replace the wooden one that had burned down in 1897. It is huge, opulent and beautiful, a magnificent example of the mixture of British, Mughal and Hindu architecture prevalent in British India. As when visiting temples and people's homes, we were required to take our shoes off to go in, and for that there is a shoe-check. We put all our shoes in a plastic bin and Sudha handed it in and got a ticket for it.

Then we went back to the hotel and at 6:45 reconvened in Sudha's room for drinks and a summing up by Sudha, to the effect that while OAT's northern India tour, "Heart of India," has individual sights, like the Taj Mahal, that you can snip out of the whole, as organ like the heart can be separated from the body. However, one can't grab hold of the soul and excise it from the body: just so, our "Soul of India" tour was more a matter of getting to know the southern Indians in many different ways, than seeing particular sights. Well, that's more or less what he said, but not exactly, and he put it much more eloquently. We, in return, said how wonderful he had made this tour, with his unforewarned "barging in" on the lives of ordinary people.

We also indicated our appreciation of Stalin's help.

Then we went downstairs to the hotel cafe, for our Farewell Dinner, and Sudha said goodbye: he is going tomorrow morning to Sri Lanka to immediately start a tour with 24 Germans.

To Mysore

Monday, November 2nd, was a major travel day. We got a 4:30 wake-up call, 5:00 bags out and breakfast, on the bus at 5:30.

We drove about an hour out to the airport, where things went pretty smoothly. We flew a Jet Airways turboprop to Bangalore in a little over an hour, got on an unfamiliar bus with a new driver and driver's assistant and headed for Mysore, a long drive.

Along the way, Sudha stopped us at a government silk cocoon market,

where we saw a man put a 200-pound cocoon sacks on the back of his bicycle (a normal pedal bike), then pick up another 200-pound sack, steady it on top of his head and ride off as fast as he could.

Where was he going? We went to a silk factory, where cocoons were boiled, to kill the larvae inside, then the silk thread was spun out by women operating spinning machines.

Once a silkworm finishes its cocoon, you have 24-36 hours to collect, weigh, sell, deliver and boil it, or else the butterfly inside will mature and break out of the cocoon, spoiling it. If one cocoon opens, the others around it will sense that fact and start to break out as well. Thus, it is a race against time, with every party along the way on the hook for the loss, until the point where the cocoon is boiled.

We finally arrived in Mysore and, after settling into our hotel, went for a walk in the old town. The market there was the most colorful yet on this trip. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera. We stopped at a pharmacy, since several people on the tour have colds (I'm afraid I'll probably be next). Then Sudha got us into three white Morris Ambassador taxis. The Ambassador was the first car made in India, and for a while was a status symbol. The one we were in was made in 1988 and the driver had been driving it for 24 years. We stopped for evening pictures of the Maharajah's Palace, then went back to the hotel.

A Birthday in Kochi

On Sunday, November 1st, a free-time walk was scheduled for 6:30, but Sudha cancelled it, so we slept in. After breakfast, I caught a current play-by-play description of the last few minutes of the Notre Dame-Temple football game on the iPad. The Irish came from behind to defeat the previously undefeated Owls, 24-20.

The interior of the bus was decorated with balloons and streamers and at the front was "HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARY JOY." A large, elaborate and beautiful lei of white and yellow flowers was put around her neck and she was presented with a very nice red and white bouquet.

Then we went to the Jewish Quarter and visited the synagogue. In 1947, it had 400 members, but now there are only six. It's a beautiful place: oddly, the floor is covered with blue and white tiles showing Chinese scenes. Two or three hundred years ago, a merchant with a shipload of such tiles bought in China had stopped in Kochi on his way to Europe to sell them, and had been so impressed by the congregation there that he had donated these tiles.

The Jewish Quarter is now full of shops, mostly operated by Kashmiris. Again, our group did its best to improve the economy of an underdeveloped country. In fact, shopping was so intense that Sudha had to extend our time there from an hour to seventy-five minutes.

After lunch at our hotel, where Mary Joy was presented with a birthday cake and, of course, a rendition of "Happy Birthday to You," Sudha came up with an impromptu free-time activity. We caught a public bus to Ernikulam, the modern, mainland, commercial and most populous part of Kochi. Like in Mexico, these buses have a human ticket seller, who at each stop yells out the destination to those waiting on the street. Generally, women sit on the right side of the bus and men sit on the left, but in Kochi, at least, this isn't a hard and fast rule (a digression: in this morning's The Hindu newspaper, the column answering questions on English usage discussed the origin of the phrase "hard and fast"--it's a nautical term relating to a ship going aground). On this sort of bus there is no glass in the windows. When it started raining heavily, the ticket man quickly went around the bus, unhooking the loops that held up the khaki cloth (canvas?) window covering. When the rain stopped, passengers started hooking the loops up again, pulling the window cover up like a reefed sail. I did those loops by my window. When we arrived, we took the little auto-taxis to the beginning of Ernakulam's pretty waterfront promenade, where Sudha had hoped to catch the ferry back to Fort Cochin, but that ferry wasn't running, so after a short stroll on the promenade,

and some peanuts from a vendor who roasted his nuts not in oil, but in sand, which he sifted out when they were done,

we took tuk-tuks to another jetty, where at 3:40 p.m. Sudha got into the ticket line for the 4:00 ferry. We waited in front of the ferry terminal, where there was a breeze. Nearly ten minutes later, we were alarmed to discover that Sudha was still standing in the same place: the line hadn't moved at all.

But he explained waterthat the ticket booth was only now opening, ten minutes before the boat was scheduled to leave. He told us to stand at the gate to the ferry, and soon he was there with our tickets. We reached our ferry by boarding and crossing a different ferry. Not long afterwards, we were out on the water, and after some minutes we landed at Fort Cochin's main ferry landing, where we got onto tuk-tuks and went back to our hotel.

Since the optional sunset cruise with Kathakali dance performance had fallen through due to lack of interest (which ticked Mary Joy off,because she had been looking forward to it), we decided to go to the 5:30 English-language mass at Santa Cruz Cathedral, as shown on a sign outside the church. However, since this was All Saints Day, the schedule was changed. Instead, we joined a procession to the cemetery chapel (a couple of men told us that it was one kilometer away, but we later figured from the street signs that it was actually two kilometers. We marched along,double-file, umbrellas out against a light rain, behind a group of women (nuns?) in salmon-colored saris. Ahead, they were praying the rosary in Malayalam (the local language). Some women next to us were saying it in accented English (it wasn't clear where in Asia they were from, but they didn't appear to be local). When Mary Joy joined in, they had her lead their prayer for one decade (not ten years, but one unit of the rosary: an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be to the Father).

After about half an hour of walking on the edge of the street, against the traffic, which was still hurtling by, as fast as it could go, we arrived at the cemetery chapel. It was full, so we stood out on the porch in front. Unlike masses for Indians in Minnesota, this was not a Syro-Malabar Rite mass, which tends to run for two hours, this was a Latin-Rite mass, exactly like ours, only in Malayalam. Mary Joy liked the music, though it was heavily miked and, along with
the violins, snare drum and one male and one female singer, the ensemble included a synthesizer. The homily was impassioned, and I figured that the priest was a good speaker, though I couldn't understand a word. The Kiss of Peace, which in the U.S. Is a Handshake of Peace, in Kochi is a Bow of Peace, with your hands folded as if in prayer--in other words, the standard Indian greeting pose that in the North is associated with saying "Namaste," but with a deeper bow. Communion is in the mouth, not in the hand.

Immediately after mass, there were prayers associated with a list of names, presumably the parishioners who had died during the past year. After that, things continued, but we decided to leave. We started walking the way we had come, but after a lengthy walk we saw a tuk-tuk stop across the street from us, so we went over and asked him to take us to the Malabar House hotel. I asked him what that would cost, in reply, he asked what I would offer. "Fifty rupees?" I asked--that was the cost of most short tuk-tuk rides we had taken (about 75 cents). He agreed, and we drove off to the Malabar House. The driver asked if he should wait, but we weren't sure when we'd be done eating, so we said no.

But the Malabar Junction restaurant was full and we didn't want to wait 45 minutes for a table, so we looked in Lonely Planet. That guide had two starred restaurants, Malabar Junction and Dal Roti. I had read that the latter was closed on Sundays, so we settled on Casa Linda and went outside. The same tuk-tuk was there, and when I asked the driver what it would cost to go to Casa Linda, he gave me the same answer as before, so I gave him the same reply, and we were off. While driving, he said that there was a very good restaurant nearby, Dal Roti. I replied that our guidebook said that it was closed on Sunday's, but he said that our guidebook was wrong. So we drove to Dal Roti and, sure enough, it was open,and had a two-person table available right out front, in a sort of enclosed entryway. The driver said that he could be back an hour later, and gave us his card, in case we finished earlier and wanted to call him.

It was a North Indian restaurant, with a very different vibe from the very elegant Malabar Junction--sort of backpacker-meets-the-Middle-East. At first, Mary Joy was disappointed. This was not the style or type of restaurant that she had wanted for her birthday dinner. At first we were going to order a chicken biryani apiece, but the woman who took our order--she may have been the owner's wife--said that that would probably be too much, and that it might be better to order one, split it and add something else. Mary Joy was considering dal (a lentil dish), but the woman said that that wouldn't work with the biryani, and suggested splitting a chicken kati roll instead. We were very pleased with the results,and could see how the restaurant was so highly praised by both Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor. The total price, including a mango lassi and a bottle of water, was 350 rupees (about $5.25), to which we added a 40 rupee tip. When we finished, the tuk-tuk was waiting. As we rode back to the hotel, the driver told us odds and ends about Kochi, hoping, I think, to be employed to tour the town, but Mary Joy had to tell him that we would be leaving Kochi at 5:30 the next morning. I paid him a hundred rupees, instead of our usual fifty, but I have trouble feeling particularly virtuous about paying someone $1.50 instead of 75 cents.