Lovely Life Raft
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
On a thin strip of mud piled up in the Kuttanad backwaters of Kerala, India, lie thousand-year-old settlements that show no sign of moving. Locals call them islands, but they looked more like earthen life saving rings to me when we visited over New Year’s on one island called Chennamkary. It forms a thin circle above water, surrounded on the outside by lakes and canals and the inside by sub-sea level rice paddies. Everyday the mud-diggers — once Untouchables now simply the bottom of the economic food chain — scoop out molten sludge from the bottom of the canals and heap it onto the land. And every day, three meters below the houses and schools and churches perched on the island, the bottom layer of earth dissolves little by little back into the water table.
“You can’t avoid a lean in any house,” said Phillip Antony, one of a group of brothers and in-laws who run the Green Palm homestay on Chennamkerry. He pointed out disappeared steps on the homestay houses. “After 30 years, you have to start again.”
Phillip was matter of fact about it. Life floats here, and always has.
The island got its first Roman Catholic church in 977 (St. Thomas the Apostle first prostelitized in the area just after the Resurrection). Phillip’s family and other landowners who cleared the rice paddies for commercial agriculture some 350 years ago were forced to give up their land to laborers as part of communist reforms in 1964. Since then, islanders educated in English and Malayalam, the local tongue, have flocked to the Gulf states and further abroad for wage work and white collar jobs. Phillip became a financial advisor in Manchester, England. Still he seemed most at home in his white munga sarong, strolling along Chennamkary paths and canals, showing us the freshly-painted pastel stucco homes built as much with Gulf gold as Kuttanad mud these days. He pointed out the avocado-shaped suicide fruit, it’s seeds notoriously used to commit harikari; the jugs set high in the yellow coconut palms, to collect the local tipple known as todi; the church sitting on its own island in the paddies, where the slaves used to worship. “Nothing is kept secret here,” he said, “The place is too small.” To end a walk one night he and his brother-in-law Mathew led us in soaring, guttural slave tunes and boat race ballads as we floated home in a 15-meter teak canoe similar to one locals race every August.
The next morning, on our walk through the paddies, we passed bunches of school kids hurrying to class, the girls with their pigtails tied in pink ribbons. Some asked in English for money or a photo. Most wanted “one pen, one pen!” a worthy request, from these future world-beaters. Their mothers, meanwhile, headed off to town wrapped in regal, gold-edged saris, fit for a reception with a 16th century Raj.
The languid, textured life of the backwaters has been discovered. Travel pubs list it as one of those places to see before you die. Eight hundred houseboats prowl the canals and lakes, carrying foreigners like us. Green Palms’ eight houses were full over New Year’s. That strains the 500 square kilometers of swampland already bearing the weight of 1.8 million residents. Every other year as the monsoon rains descend from the Ghat mountains to the east, the government opens a levee gate at the coast so the backwaters flush out. Meanwhile, monsoons fill the first floor of houses on the islands. Mama Kallakadambil, who kept our palettes singing last week with coconut infused curries and buttery flat breads to soak them up, cooks in thigh deep water during the rains. “We fish in the living room — I’m not kidding,” Phillip says.
One doesn’t have to use much imagination to see that if seas rise by a meter, the levee opening, combined with monsoons, will make life close to impossible on Chennamkary and throughout the Kuttanad. This scenario was on the tip of my tongue several times as we walked the island with Phillip and others last week. But something kept me quiet. If we drown it eventually, best to let them enjoy the earthy life and liquid sunsets atop the Kuttanad now, and accept a bit of its sweetness — a New Year’s gift — ourselves. Somehow, they may even find a way to ride out the coming deluge as well.
