Kerala Chronicles - Part 1

You know, every once in a while, every human being becomes acutely aware of a void inside him and life suddenly loses all charm. The nomad within oneself, suppressed by millenia of civilization suddenly seeks to assert himself and the desire to wander off to lands hitherto unexplored overwhelms all reason and logic. Add to this the perfectly understandable and widely prevalent desire to be surrounded by coconuts, coconut oil, coconut coir and...more coconut oil, and one finds oneself irresistibly drawn towards...yes you guezzed it gorrectly...to Kerala, God's own Gundry. Fed up with the coconut deprived environs of our otherwise satisfactory lives in Ahmedabad, Pubiii, Cita and I decided to leg it down south and add a bit of communist red colour to our lives.
I don't know how, where and why the idea germinated but one day Cita called me up to ask me if I would be interested in a trip to Kerala during the break. It set me off on a long train of thought, almost as long as the 40 hour journey from Ahmedabad to Thiruvananthapurma itself. I reflected over my childhood, there was a curious lack of Mallu influence in it. I remembered all the long train journeys that I had taken and Kerala didn't figure in it. I had no relatives there and so Kerala as a destination was ruled out. But that didn't suffice, after all I have no relaties in Andhra, Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh either but I had passed through these states at least in transit by rail. Why was Kerala strangely missing from my set of 28 states and 7 Union Territories (and please, Delhi is a Union Territory, it is not a state, its something I have killed people over)? Then the answer struck. There's only water beyond Kerala hence one can't transit through it to anything. Having made peace with the trauma of my childhood, I jauntily said yes to the idea.
And so it happened, that the 2nd of December 2005 saw three young men stand at Platform No.6 of Ahmedabad junction waiting to board the Nagercoil Express that would take them on their southern adventure. Shashu was going to be our trip planner and he was to join us later at the station. At 11:58, with two minutes left for departure and no sign of him, the enormity of what we had gotten ourselves into hit us. What if he doesn't come and we land up in Thiruvananthapuram by ourselves, what if those around us son't speak our language, dislike outsiders and are hostile to us? In other words, what if they are like Tams? (just kidding, no really, Tams are very nice and hospitable and all Tam women are chaste till marriage and Khushboo and Suhasini have outraged the honour and pride of Tamil womanhood with their shameless remarks..happy Mr. Ramdoss? Please don't kill me).
Anyway, while we were still grappling with the dilemma of chucking the whole idea and spending 15 days patronizing the Rann of Kutch instead, Shashu did turn up and we took it be a good 'Oomen' (zenze of humour very nice no? and very political too, just like the state itself). Well the prospect of a 40 hour train journey in sleeper class isn't the most appetizing and to ensure that I wouldn't be awake thorugh most of it, I had put in a night out the previous night, having gone out to dinner with X and Speedo and then completing our Insight report and watching House of Wax (and after watching it, there was no way I was gonna sleep). And now, at 3pm, after we had exhausted our patience and that of others around us playing flash and monopoly, I decided to sleep for an hour. I woke up next day at 8 in the morning, having slept straight through for 17 hours. That's no mean achievement, just to put it into perspective, I slept through the entire length of Maharashtra state, and that's a pretty decent sized federal administrative unit of the Indian republic, not a compact one like Punjab or Haryana. So in geographic terms, I had slept through a third of Gujarat, the whole of Maharashtra and two thirds of Goa. I'm not sure, but it sounds like some kind of Guiness record.
Anyway, after having regained consciousness, I was left with the prospect of looking out of the window and staring at some nice scenery along the Konkan route and boy, was I not disappointed. The lush green landscapes of Goa quickly gave way to the....well, lush, green landscapes of Karnataka (and as I was to later find out, they gave way to the lush green landscapes of Kerala, so the entire stretch of land south of Ratnagiri is one lush, green landscape). It was at one of the stations in Karnataka that I realized that I was perhaps the only person in the whole of South India wearing a jacket at 1 in the afternoon. Somehow, I got the feeling that the locals were laughing...typical North Indian paranoia south of the Vindhyas I guess. Anyway, we made an interesting discovery about the Kannada script, all there letters seem to be shaped like the Greek 'omega'. A line here, a couple of wierd circles there and lo, you have an entire alphabet (a word which itself is derived from two Greek words, alpha and beta). I got excited, here was further proof of the Greek influence on Indian languages, something I had alluded to in my letter to flames of heaven. If only I had known this earlier, the premises made in that cheery epistle would have had better grounding, though it might not have solved her basic telecom troubles.
Well, we sneaked in stealthily from Karnataka to Kerala and had we not stood at the door of our coach, we might have not even realized we were inside Kerala till ages later. We first became suspicious when the script on buildings and walls outside changed from omegas to 'jalebis' (as Pubiii put it). And then slowly, other clues started emerging. The communist flag at each lamp post for instance. And the scenery outside was simply breathtaking. Cita and I had initially intended to stand at the door for a few minutes, but we were so taken in by the backwaters, the seaside and the ...lush, green landscapes that we just stood there looking out for the better part of three hours. Its like looking at a live painting and at that moment, I would have given anything for the train to break down for a couple of hours and to have the chance to go outside and sit in those fields. Evident too were the unique bulwarks of Kerala's economy, the remittances from the gulf, in the form of stylish and obviously expensive houses in the middle of farms and middle of nowhere villages.
However, we knew we had truly arrived in sage Parshuram's kingsdom once we got down at Kozhikode station. The staff notice board at the railway station was full of notices exhorting staff groups to strike, agitate, gherao and do whatever it takes to disrupt work, for whatever reason. The union of General category railway workers was calling for a strike protesting reservations. The SC/ST workers union was calling for a strike protesting the strike protesting reservations. The union of railway drivers was calling a strike to negotiate better pay scales. The signalmen's union was calling a strike because it didn't want to be left out. Kerala might be roughly 50% Hindu, 25% Christian and 25% Muslim, but the presiding deity of the state remains Marx. It was our first experience of the famed agitate culture of Kerala and was thoroughly satisfying. A couple of slogans and a few Molotov cocktails thrown at the bourgeoise oppressors sitting on their cosy cushions enjoying their ill-gotten gains from exploiting workers who toiled ceaselessly for no rewards would have been welcome but I suppose you can't have everything. Workers of the Kerala unite, you have nothing to lose, not even your jobs.
Anyway, as we closed in on out destination, Thiruvananthapuram, we decided to imbibe a bit of the culture of the place. Shashu began by giving us an introduction to the language that is the world's longest palindromic word and we learnt that 'water' in Malayalam is 'vellum', to want something is 'venum' and to not want something is 'venda'. Armed with this knowledge Pubiii, Cita and I embarked on the longest and most capricious spree of three grown men declining sundry vendors that North and Central Kerala have ever known. Anything that was offered to us by hawkers in the train was met with a resolute 'venda'. Even when we were dying of thirst, we could not stop ourselves from saying 'venda' to the vellum vendor. It got to such ridiculous extremes that at Shornur station we got off at the platform and wantonly called hawkers who weren't even looking at us only to tell them 'venda'. May God forgive us our sins.
Well in this flurry of broken Malayalam being bandied around by three guys who would have trouble reading their own mother tongue, we slowly encroached deeper and deeper into the state. At 3 am in the morning, we finally alighted at Thiruvananthapuram station and I felt deep satisfaction that I was one step closer to my childhood dream of visiting all the states of India. Now there was only Orissa left..along with Assam, Meghalaya,Manipur,Mizoram,Nagaland,Arunachal,Tripura...and Sikkim...and what of the newly formed states of Chattisgarh,
Jharkhand and Uttaranchal..and what of the Kashmir valley, would a trip to Jammu entitle me to claim that I had visited J&K? Technicalities, technicalities..and what if Telengana becomes a state...aargh, I give up.
Anyway, there we stood, the three of us, brave souls on the threshold of wild and exciting adventures for the next week. More on our actual time in Kerala later.