Our Slovenly Descent

So we have been here now for what, 6, 7 weeks now.  Our bookshelf is laden, our mornings are short and our descent into slovenly abandon is almost complete.   After an initial, what now seems like a lively, landing into Fort Kochi, we are now languishing and lolling around the days, idly lumbering through the hours with very little intention.  Our days are defined by patterns of sleep and food.   This used to start with us ignoring the optimistically set alarm that both vowed to obey each morning, followed by the more realistic waking time of around 11.  Both of us were usually a little irked by our inability to rise and do nice functional things like take a stroll by the beach before breakfasting on a masala dosa and strong coffee.  So now we have decided to just accept that we are not morning people, we hated getting in the morning when we had to, now we don’t have to, it is insanity to try and force ourselves to.  And in accepting our penchant for sleeping long and waking late I have actually found a few more hours to my day.  Instead of going to bed at 12, and trying to sleep, tossing and turning in bed because I have risen late, I go to bed at 2.  My evenings have been transformed!

On waking and gently tugging ourselves from bed, a pan of water is set on the stove, and we offer persuasive discourse to each other about who has to leave the house to get the eggs for brunch omelettes.  Sometimes we just sack off the cooking, pull some not too smelly clothes (because we keep forgetting to get the washing sorted too) from the heap in the spare room, hide our eyes behind sunglasses and nip down to the City Light Hotel for an egg roast and parotha.  This, we have discovered, is the perfect hangover food.  Rich, greasy, eggy, spicy slop, served with greasy, floppy, delicious breads cooked on a very hot plate.  To be honest, I haven’t yet found a time when the egg roast is inappropriate.  

After breakfast we stare contentedly at each other and run through the same conversation about what we might do that day.  The conversation, really, just serves as a platitude to the little voice of Christian conditioning that tells us it is a sin to be idle.  We pay the little voice the necessary homages and then happily abandon our day to the whim of its will.  Shall we go for a walk?  No, it’s midday, it’s too hot.  Shall we get a bus to the beach?  But there is no shade at the beach, and it takes two hours to get there.  Shall we do just something?  But what something, we’re all out of ideas.  Let’s just mooch around again.

We then mentally disengage ourselves from each other, I go to the balcony and write, watch the exotic birds flit around through the trees surrounding me, listen to the excited whooping of the chipmonks and try not to play the irritatingly addictive spider solitaire that taunts me from my laptop.  I think I am addicted.  I can’t help myself, and as with all addictions I am filled with disgust for my weakness, and the blatant waste of life it provides.  It’s a stupid game, I know that, but it makes you think that you can get good at it, but it is just luck.  Luck of the flicker of pixelated cards.  Sometimes I have spent hours playing it.  In those times I think I hate myself a little bit.  

While I involve myself in imaginary world within my head, trying to find ever more eloquent ways of presenting my ideas, and not succumbing to the bad, bad, thing, Alex reads.  Sometimes, he ventures down to the book shop that buys in newspapers for him and picks up the newspapers that have been stacking up over the previous few days.  It is only a 15 minute walk, but sometimes, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day! 

At some point we will connect to the internet, scan through Facebook and Hotmail, look at the contact people have made, and figure I can’t be bothered to reply now, I’ll sort it out later.  Here lies Alex’s needy tick.  Facebook and the BBC website.  If he doesn’t check them at least 5 times a day he begins to get agitated.  I know when he’s checking.  I can see his little face fall slightly when he realises that no one has made any contact with him for the past 2 hours since he last checked, and he re-reads the inane drip-feed of peoples streams of consciousness posted up.   

About the most arduous thing in our day is keeping the vague notion of a social life going, and there is always at least one person we adopt and use as a safety net to prevent total insularity from occurring.  (To be honest, we probably go out much more than at home as every night is a potential weekend, but where we don’t do as much during the day, it doesn’t feel like we go out so much.)  And when they go, which they invariably do, we head to the Magic Tree Bar to pluck off a replacement.  It is quite easy to pick up a new friend there, the place seems to attract those who are similar in our lethargic approach to travelling.  We even managed to capture and convince one to stay on for a couple of weeks.  The place also comes alive with the local lads after closing time and as we are well known with them now, and they genuinely consider us friends, we can join in their party, which is pretty boisterous, energetic and fun.  Despite our complete ignorance of Malayalam, and their decent, but certainly not fluent, English, their sense of humour shines through.  They are a wild bunch, full of naughty antics and they often regale us with stories of their mischief, from losing all their possessions (and all their clothes other than a pair of Bermuda shorts) at Goan beach parties, to trying to escape the police in rickshaws.  They have quite a wicked idea of humour, which generally circulates around piss taking and pushing personal boundaries, where nobody and nothing is off limits. 

We are staying on in Kochi until the 10^th of February.  I don’t know what is going to happen to us.  Maybe we will withdraw further and further into luxurious laziness that we can indulge with no reason not to.  No cleaning, washing, cooking, working, daily commute, supermarket shopping, bills, tax, shit TV, unwanted obligations, MOT’s, services, petrol prices, rent, depressing talk of credit crunches, caring about our appearances, soggy cereal, grey skies, or expensive booze.  We are not completely static, yet.  We did manage to leave Kochi the other day.  We took a holiday within a holiday and caught a bus to Alleppy to see the backwaters for a little mini-break.  The food was better in Alleppy.   We wandered aimlessly for a day, mooching along the side of the lake, resting under the palm fringes, listening to the sound of the water gently lap at the edges of the bank when a boat glided by on its mirror calm surface.  The following day we got paddled around in a wooden canoe by an eager to please old man, who insisted on pointing out every trivial object his cataract bleary eyes made out.

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, cat.’

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, bamboo.’

‘Madam, madam, mr, mr, look, mango.’

The day drifted by with the gentle currents of the waterways, while we sat on decrepit plastic seats that buckled awkwardly when we leaned back on them, and as the roof to the canoe wasn’t long enough, we took turns to brave sunstroke wearing a little umbrella hat, donated by our captain.

I have to confess, even though I have Christian inklings of guilt at our very sumptuous laziness, it is pretty easy to ignore and, ultimately, I am loving it.  I believe Alex is to.  Every morning I wake, I am pleased, so pleased that I don’t have to work.  I don’t have to spend my day worrying about what someone else is expecting me to do.  I feel a little freer than I was at home.  Occasionally I think of our return and a little serpent of panic writhes through my body.  I already know that even though we have only been away 3 months, our return is going to be a challenge.  We are even trying to spend less and less money so we can spend, longer and longer away.  

Life, as it is at the moment, is beyond idyllic.  We are a King and Queen of beautiful inertia, and we love it.   

We have been knocking around Fort Kochi for around a month now and have started to get to know the people, the place and the bars a little better.  Well, I say bars, I mean the Kochi version of a speak easy.  The liquor licencing laws are insane.   The local government has plans for Fort Kochi to be the next carnival town, and get a reputation like Goa as a tourist destination, however, they seem to have neglected to understand that if you are going to attract Western tourists to any type of carnival atmosphere, you need freely available booze.  At present it costs a restaurant 2.5 million rupees which is a little over £30,000 for a licence.  Now bearing in mind the rent on a small restaurant is 6000 rupees, £85 a month, which is not an inconsiderable sum, it puts the licence in perspective.  This means that the places you can legally buy alcohol can charge at least as much as at home for a beer, which is about a 3^rd of our daily budget.  However, the capitalising Indian’s, that understand the lure of booze to a whities gullet, are not going to miss out on the opportunity to make some serious money by selling booze illegally.  They vastly undercut the posh hotels that do have a licence, and have come up with ingenious ways of getting beer and spirits to a thirsty tourist.  The best delivery of beer we have come across so far is in a teapot.  If you go and order a ‘special tea’ they bring out a teapot and mug for you to drink your Kingfisher from.  It doesn’t look at all suspicious with four people on a table, each with their own large pot of tea, although I must say, that drinking lager from ceramic cups is nicer than drinking from glass for some reason.  We have been frequenting a place, where they keep a bottle of rum behind a secret door in one of the walls for us, and it seems loyalty pays when it comes to choosing your drinking establishment as we now get a healthy rum and coke for half the price it was when we first went there, which at 100 rupees, £1.30 isn’t too bad, but is still a little pricey for our budget.  But there is one other option, the government alcohol shop.  

A seedy establishment if ever there was one.  It is a room which the purveyors of the chemically processed alcohol sit behind a large caged front window which has two holes in it.  The rooms are invariably tatty, worn, mildewed and miserable looking.  The people who work there are also invariably tatty, worn, mildewed and miserable looking.  The buyer has to queue in a grubby narrow corridor between a brick wall and an artificial one made of metal until he gets to the cage, where he orders his choice of headache inducing spirits.  He then has to shuffle along the front of the cage to the first hole where he passes his money over, and then onto the second hole where his bottle is passed out wrapped in newspaper.  The locals are very quick to hide their bottles about their person before walking off, and the rickshaw drivers refuse to take us anyway unless the alcohol is completely obscured from view.  They can get a 5000 rupee (£70) fine for carrying alcohol in their rickshaws. 

Luckily for Fort Kochi and its party seeking visitors there are the fun police who rigorously patrol the streets looking for anyone enjoying themselves and stopping it immediately.  We love the fun police.  And what’s really clever of them is that they sneak around in plain clothes so you don’t know who wants to ruin your fun.  One night in our local we were having a few rums and a bit of a dance, I must confess it was around 10.30 so I guess it was getting pretty late, for Fort Kochi, and some men walked up the stairs, stopped and watched what was going on looking very dour.  C, our friend that works there, told us he suspected they were police, who on hearing the music went to make sure no one was actually enjoying it.  But they found that we were, so we stopped the music and made a hasty exit.  The fun police then began to follow us.  As we passed another bar (also shut at 10.30 pm) Bron, our new Australian friend, called out hello to the guy clearing up who she had met previously.  At that point we lost our tail.  It wasn’t until the next day that we learnt that the man Bron said hello to was almost arrested for speaking to us.  Not only do the fun police definitely not like fun, but they also don’t like Indians and Whities conversing, and will threaten Indians with arrest if they are caught talking to a white person, regardless of whether the white person likes it or not.  

On Chirstmas eve the fun police really came into their own.  We went back to a homestay (guest house) with a few of our new Indian and Australian friends for a bit of a party, a few drinks, and bit of dancing on the rooftop.  Alex thought he would introduce the Indians to a bit of DubStep, which for the record, they loved, and got the whole party moving.  It also got the fun police interested too, who stalked around outside of the homestay for a while, even after we turned the music off, and everyone had to leave the roof to avoid being seen.  That meant going into one of the rooms.  All 10 of us, and hope the police didn’t come in or the owner would have been in trouble for cavorting with Westerners.  So there we were on Chirstmas eve, three people under the bed, two sat on top, two in the wardrobe and two hiding behind the bathroom door, in the dark, listening intently to the crackle of a police radio and the voices of our friends and the police having a heated discussion in Malayalam (the local language in Kerala).  Eventually we got let out the room, once the police had gone, and were asked to leave.  However, it turned out the guy running the homestay was arrested, had to spend the night in the cells and now has to pay a 3000 rupee (£45) fine.  Luckily the police didn’t find their alcohol or us.  Having alcohol on unlicensed premises is apparently up to 42 days in jail.

Despite the best efforts of the fun police, we have been having a good time here.  We have experienced the bizarre, life threatening and genuine kindness since being here.  The bizarre has come in a couple of forms, the first being a week old kitten stood pertrified in the middle of the road with buses, rickshaws and motorbikes tearing past it.  It was only a matter of time before the little thing was hit, so I went and rescued it from its peril.  Which then somehow managed to burden me with its life seeing as I had saved it.  The mother was nowhere to be seen and the poor little thing was all bones, so I concluded that it had been abandoned.   What does one do with a blue eyed kitten that has just been rescued from certain death?  Well I knew exactly what to do with it, and I am not sure if I had been in the same situation anywhere else on the planet this solution would have presented itself.  I took it to the BM café.  I am sure there are many BM cafés around the world, but this one is home to a number of very stoned, but very sweet natured young lads, who take in stray animals.  I had been there a few days previously and P, one of the most stoned and happy of the bunch, showed me four kittens they had rescued from a Chinese fishing net.  He gathered them all up and then chucked them at a lazing dog.   

Then to my amazement the little kittens started suckling on the dog, the dog was their new mother!  The dog was incredibly obliging, even lifting its leg to let them have better access to her nipples.  So my rescued kitten had a safe home with food.  I have been back and they said that it took her a day before she would suckle from the dog, but is now happily feeding. 

The second bizarre incident was being asked by an eyebrow-less, effeminate, manicured, wavy haired, massive Indian if we wanted to be in a Chicken Chicken commercial.  I tried to explain that I was a vegetarian, so wasn’t that up for it.  They kindly told me that I could pretend to eat the chicken and they would make it look right digitally.  Even after I told them that being a vegetarian I didn’t really want to endorse the practise of eating meat, but this was something that they understood as words, but not as a concept, which was strange.   They kept trying to find ways around me not eating chicken.

The life threatening came in the form of a swinging pirate ship at a fair ground.  After being sworn at, and irritated by a group of grubby looking urchins who kept pushing each other into us and then demanding 10 rupees, a forceful little angel stormed through them all and told them what for, taking my hand and leading us away from the oiks.   

They followed, but the 12 year old Evie kept them at bay with a presence so commanding I completely surrendered to her will.  Her will was that I go on the swinging pirate ship with her.  So I did.  Alex, very sensibly, did not.  He stayed to get hassled on the ground by the youths, while I went and risked my life for a 12 year old girl.  She insisted on sitting right at the end of the ship, the bit that goes the highest, and passes through the vertical.  Without any bars to hold you in.  The only thing to hold you in your seat, was yourself.  As the pirate ship swung further and further up, and I held onto the rusty handrail a foot in front of me, I realised the foolhardiness of my folly.  It was genuinely petrifying to know that if I let go of the bar, my body would tumble out of this faded rust bucket and I would plummet, most probably to my death.  I loved it!  There is nothing like a bit of real life or death fear to enliven the heart.  It was exhilarating!

As for the kindness, that came from our lovely landlords over Christmas.  Greena, the wife of the landlord, offered to cook us breakfast and lunch for Christmas day.  All we had to do was awake at 9am with our hangovers, and she brought us a delicious breakfast with a little glass of sweet wine and cake.  Then at lunch her and her daughters came up again with pans full of spicy treats for us.  It was wonderful. 

On a side note, I feel I must mention the Christmas Santa masks that were everywhere, they were the scariest things I have ever seen used to celebrate the season of goodwill.  

New Year is coming up, and no doubt the fun police will make sure that things remain sober, but Fort Kochi is really gearing up for it.  There is to be a huge carnival, and the preparations have been slowly presenting themselves over the past week or so.  Sparkly fluttering bunting has been put up all along the KB Jacob Road and stretches as far as the eye can see, playgrounds have been decked out in blue fairy lights, which looks so magical at night, the roundabouts have been adorned with more bunting emanating from poles placed in the centre, and people have put lights and decorations outside their houses.   It looks truly wonderful, and to walk though is a journey into childhood wonder.

All in all we are enjoying our time here, and are even wondering if we should stay a second month……

NEW YEAR IN KOCHI

Well that was fun!  A night of new friends, fireworks, burning Santa’s and the occasional grope!  To which I returned death threats – which really freaks them out.  Which isn’t surprising given the nature of the police.  They would be pummelled for groping a tourist, but still they try.  We watched a man get set on by two police with sticks for not moving out of an area quickly enough for their liking.  Kochi, it seems, is a police state.  There were hundreds of them around over the past couple of days.  One couple we met got cordoned off from a crowd of a few thousand people so that the Indians weren’t too close to them.  I don’t know what they think is going to happen.  As a female you do get your arse pinched every now and again, but that is maybe one in every hundred people, and for the most part the Indians are excitable, friendly and just want to wish you a well.  No one has tried to take anything from us or have been violent towards us, and I am just as likely to get groped in a pub along Southampton high street.  And to be honest it is no wonder the men try it, men and women are so segregated here.  There is no physical contact between wives and husbands in public, there is certainly no sex before marriage, most marriages are arranged, and the women are taught not to look men in the eye, in fact the only women to look men in the eye are traditionally assumed to be prostitutes, who also smile as well.  So essentially all white women appear to be prostitutes to Indian men, because we look them in the eye and smile.  There are no frames of reference for men to go on, as the women they have sex with are either their wives or prostitutes.  There is no casual dating, or taking the time to figure out who you are and what it is you want from a partner, you just get married, by the age of 18 for a girl and 21 for a boy, usually to someone who your parents have chosen.  These attitudes are slowly changing, but when it comes to interactions between Indian men and Western women there are many cultural differences that mean that a lot of behaviours are misconstrued.  And oh my life do the Indian men sulk when a white girl spurns their advances, life is nothing without a healthy dose of melodrama out here.  And they seem to have a few problems understanding that white girls can make their own choices, and decisions, and don’t need a man to tell them what to do.  Luckily I have been only an observer to these antics, as they have a great deal of respect for the fact that I am with a man, even though he isn’t my husband.  On the flip side of this the Indian men are fiercely protective of the women and incredibly proud of where they come from.  They have kindly offered to stab anyone who gropes me, and when people say crude things in Malayalam about the white girls in their presence, if the antagonist sticks around too long, will find their mouths filled with another’s fist.  They say that even if we don’t mind, and people can say whatever, they feel that it is shame on them that their fellow countryman can be so offensive and see it as just as much an insult on themselves as us.

Anyhow New Years Eve.  We found some cute animals, got better aquainted with new friends, got groped in the crowds, watched Santa burn, were awed by fireworks, watched the police set upon a young man, went back to our second home, partied with some teenagers in a bus shelter, and for New Years day, went to watch the Kochi carnival, saw a LOT of men in drag, danced along with the music trucks, found a huge tree completely decked in fairy light, then wandered home for a well deserved rest.  I guess the photos will show better than my words, so here you are:

Kochi

More specifically Fort Kochi.  Kochi, an ancient port town, encompasses quite a diverse spread of towns and cities sprawling for miles across islands and peninsulas, within that there is Fort Kochi and Mattancherry.  Initially, when arriving in the quaint streets, the old Portuguese houses bowing out onto the quiet roads, immaculately presented offering arts, crafts, pots of tea and homestays, I felt a little irritated by the contrived nature of it all.  It is clean, quiet, pretty, and extremely un-Indian, so un-indian in fact that the only Indians that can be seen are the ones ferrying Whities around in their blinged up rickshaws, and behind shop counters.  I haven’t seen such a high ratio Westerners to Indians since I left the UK, even in Goa, there were as many Indians as there were Whites.  I could be in Portugal.  This is a destination for a two week, chilled out, holiday from work.  A place to kick back and relax, take in the heat, a bit of colonial history, and peruse endless arts and crafts shops sifting through little bits of Indian history, rounding the day off with a freshly scented cup of green mango tea and a slice of chocolate cake.  Along the sea front (which, with its dockland horizon, reminds me a little of a sweaty Southampton) there are timber framed Chinese fishing nets that bow gracefully into the sea to capture fish and seafood.  When the sun goes down, their silhouettes jut benignly from the shoreline in front of a sinking pink sphere.  Walking around the streets, into the richer neighbourhoods, there is a feeling of space and peace.  There are lots of green spaces and parks, with huge hairy trees and banyan trees lining the roadsides.  The colours are greens and yellows.  The horns are silenced.  The people move slower, and smile more.  And as contrived it initially appears, I would recommend this place for a two week holiday without any hesitation. 

On walking around a little outside the main tourist streets, the real feel of the place becomes apparent.  It is a little moment of calm in this vast frenetic country.  The tourist streets only take up a small area, and exploring beyond them the roads weave into little centres of commerce where spices, plastics, cooking pots, and many other wares are traded in bulk through secretive looking doors, Arabic in their design.  A stroll through the outskirts of Fort Kochi, shows the huge influence the traders of past eras have had on the area.  Its architecture is truly multicultural, with buildings boasting Chinese style roofs, atop colonial walls, to be entered through solid looking Persian doors, built next door to synagogues.  These streets make history present, the past is crystallised in the day to day trading.  Even in the more modern streets, there are less cars, less people, less bustle and less noise.  The old sits happily with the new, rather than being obscured by it as it seems to be in the other places we have visited (aside from Panaji).  All the buildings are low rise, so the sun streams onto the streets unhindered making the place seem bright and lively.  And the white people disappear.  It is incredible, one only has to walk 500m away from the few roads that have been put on show for the tourists and they completely disappear.  I wonder if there is a large invisible Chinese fishing net just over these roads that hold all the whites in one place, and it is only a few stray wigglers that manage to free themselves to go and look around the place where the Indians live.  And we like where the Indians live, hence we have decided to stay for a while.  I have even bought myself some Indian clothes, which are currently at the tailors being assembled.  And no, it is not a sari.  All the women in India, apart from in the really big cities, wear the same style clothes, either the sari, or a tunic, trousers and scarf combination (which I have opted for).  The lack of styling variety sounds a little dull, but the immense array of colours and patterns, mean that no two women are dressed the same and their fashion means that wherever there are women, the place is vibrant and sparkly.

We have found an apartment to rent on the outskirts of Fort Kochi, just far enough away from all the tourism to not even know it is there if we like.  It has two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen, living area, balcony and roof terrace.  Amazing!  So anyone who wants to come and visit, we have somewhere for you to stay.  We are moving in this weekend, and are employing a rickshaw driver, Edwin, to show us where we can buy good local produce to cook for ourselves and some popular local restaurants.  That is the only really bad thing about the tourist places here, the food is terrible, really terrible.  We have had to search really hard to find something good, and hopefully our local guide will be able to help us find where the Indians hang out.

Another wonderful thing about staying here is its location (another reason for you to come and stay with us!).  We are no longer than 4 hours away from some beautiful places.  There are the hill stations, wildlife sanctuaries, waterfalls, beaches and the backwaters, all just a few hours away to go and explore.  I have already taken a bus to the backwaters, which, a newly made friend described very aptly as a ‘hot Norfolk Broads’.  It is a series of tranquil waterways fringed by stumpy palm trees and the surfaces laced with beautiful, but suffocating African water lilies.  There is a constant stream of large wicker clad houseboats cruising along with chunky air conditioning units and generators hanging off their rear side, and little canoes with a crouched down man meditatively lapping the water either side with his paddle, propelling himself serenely.  Some of the waterways have been artificially manipulated to incorporate paddy fields, and there are little muddy islands accommodating a few homes, the owners washing themselves in their “outer-underwear” in their natural bathtub.  It is one of those places so beautiful that the rush of people to go and see it has taken away its essence a little.  We are slowly inching into the tourist season now, and already the waterways are busy with traffic, give it a couple of weeks and I think it will be gridlocked (would that be waterlogged?).  

All in all, Kerala seems to be a pretty relaxed place, with a pace of life that Alex and I can keep up with.  I am looking forward to the next month here and want to start absorbing more of the way of life, maybe learn a little Malayalam, enjoy the markets, and make some local friends.  I am hoping that things go well enough that we want to stay for 2-3 months……so all the more reason for you to come and stay, we can be your local guides! 

p.s. all the cows seem to have been replaced with goats…?