COOCHIE COCHI AND MATANCHERRY PIE

So here I am two days in to Kerala and Cochi. What has it been like?

Well, arriving at BIJU's didn't look promising. As the rickshaw pootered down street after street and then suddenly turned down an unlit alleyway my worst memories of Mumbai came back and my heart sank. It as very late and the staff were asleep. Didn't look great. I got into my room which was quite spartan and switched on the fan on the ceiling. Then I went to bed, sweating buckets and dreading what I thought was going to be the Mumbai dawn chorus of hooting car horns and shouting and screaming...

And it never happened! Waking up and looking out of the window the view was far from horrendous and the street was relatively quiet. And it went uphill from there.

I guess now with hindsight Mumbai's shock attack was a blessing in disguise, a kind of inoculation as it were. So far everywhere else has been more than manageable - Mangalore, Cochi - likeable even. Maybe if I went back to Mumbai now it wouldn't freak me out so much. And its true - once you start to get used to the 'divine chaos' of Indian towns they are fine. 'Divine chaos' was a term one of the teachers at the school used to describe them. We were talking about the traffic and driving in India and she pointed out how somehow everyone in India knows where they are going and how to avoid crashing - 'divine chaos'. We joked about the famous Siva dancing in the Wheel of Fire as a metaphor for it and its true. We Westerners need order. In India everyone seems telepathically enfolded into how things are. Now I am out of the beautiful bubble/oasis of the school and newly in India I can see it more and more. No matter how delapidated or smelly everything might get, the Indians themselves seem to negotiate it perfectly. I think I mentioned before how elegant all the women look even when walking through shit-filled streets, or how relaxed everyone is on the public transport. When I think of how red-faced and angry we get in the UK if a bus is ten minutes late it is amazing. Getting a bus or a train or a ferry here is an object lesson in democratic humanity. Everyone is in there together and it is wonderful. If you are a misanthrope, if you don't like your personal space invaded on a bus, if you don't like mucking in with the crowd, then don't come to India. Its not the place for you! It really struck me while I was on the ferry coming back from Fort Cochi last night, packed to the rafters with people all laughing and chatting. Somehow, for all the reality of teh caste system, everyone becomes equal when getting around the country. Its wonderful. I've never felt so much a part of all humanity before.

Which is not to say, once again, that its all perfect, but you start to develop some of the detachment and sense of humour the Indians have. An example - the ferry back from Fort Cochin took us past some breathtaking night scenes of hotels and buildings and boats on the waters, but when the ferry approached the jetty, the water was so polluted with sewage it smelled as if a rugby team of giants had all taken a massive group turd in it and forgotten to pull the flush. In the UK, though, you would have written to your MP. Here you just took it in your stride - along with the heaving crowd trying to get on the boat.

Keralans seem like very different people to the Karnatakans I met in Koorg. Perhaps it is just the bonuses of living in a prosperous city or the fact that Kerala is one of the best run and best educated states in India (its administration has been Communist since the 50s and has a strong sense of municipal responsibility) but they seem like a wonderfully relaxed and friendly people. The hawkers and scam-merchants do their stuff with such good humour and such a lack of malice (not the same in Mysore, where they expressed their dissatisfaction when you didn't buy their flute/postcards/strange wooden thing) that you almost want to buy them a drink rather than move on angrily. The staff at the hotel have been terrific and I can heartily recommend BIJU'S TOURIST HOUSE to anyone. Its perfectly situated to get to the ferries and everyone is great, first impressions aside.

I should explain about these ferries. Cochi is, strictly speaking, an amalgam of cities/towns. I am staying on the mainland in Ernakulam, which is a modern, upwardly mobile Indian city like Mangalore. The famous part of Cochi are the two cities on a single island known as Fort Cochin and Mattanchery. To get to them you have to use the ferries which go from the rugby team shit-stinking jetty two minutes walk from the hotel.

Actually its a great walk. The streets around the hotel are very vibrant. As I walked out on Thursday morning to get to the ferry my heart leaped. I was in India!

Thursday I spent in the Fort Cochin end of the island. Its an amazing place, haunted by the ghosts of the past. It was the colonial centre of Cochi proper, a major port which had been in the hands of the Portuguese, Dutch and the British over the years. Its a very strange, mind-expanding place which works its magic on you subtly. It and Mattanchery are completely different to Ernakulam. It feels like you are stepping out of one world and into another. How can I convey it?

The wierd thing about Fort Cochin is that having been a colonial centre it has been colonised by India. The population live and walk through a city scape of rotting old Western buildings, all of which have a strange charm. By the main park you find the famous Chinese fishing nets which are so associated with Kerala. THese are extraordinary and hard to describe. The fishermen don't go out in boats but use these huge hydraulic wooden constructions to lift and drop fishing nets into the water. As I walked along the promenade watching them go about their business with the smell of fresh fish in the air, I could feel the presence of all those colonials around me. I wondered what they had thought of Fort Cochin and India? Did they love it? Did they hate it? Did they think they were exiles or did they feel they were at home there? You couldn't help thinking about vanished Empires and how the world had changed. The old Collector's house stood rotting and locked up by a main road. Children played on the grounds of what was once a parade ground and was now part of a school. Goats and crows were everywhere. Once again you had this extraordinary contrast between rubble and muck and then spanking new buildings in odd places. A hugely colourful market was in motion selling beautiful things (Indian clothes are amazingly vibrant, as if in contrast to the buildings around them). I found myself wandering into a centuries-old Church to St Francis built by the Dutch (or was it the Portuguese?) beautiful and wonderfully cool, where I listened to an Indian guide give a description of the history of the building in flawless French to a group of Gallic visitors.

Another interesting sidenote here for you religion buffs out there. As I wandered through the church, a copy of the Bible was open in a glass box. It was open on Psalms 21, 22 & 23.The two pages were dominated by a Psalm I had never read before which begins 'My Lord, my Lord, why hast though forsaken me?' (number 22 I think), the very words Christ speaks when about to die on the Cross. Have a read of it. Its astonishing. And it sheds some light on what that moment is probably supposed to be about in the Gospels. Whoever the scribe was who decided to reference it in his description of the Crucifixion clearly had it going on!

That is what is so strange about Fort Cochin. There is nothing Hindu about it. The holy sites are all churches - the St Francis church, a small Syrian Christian Church (where three little schoolboys ran up to me and asked to have their photograph taken) and a wonderfully gaudy and eccentric, though open-hearted Basilica - and the architecture is all old-style European, covered in creepers and falling down. A wonderful Narnia-like moment occured when I suddenly foudn myself standing by a Victorian street-lamp in a moss-encrusted corner of a street with an enormous Indian tree sprawling around it. Nothing Hindu about it as I said, and yet now it is an exclusively Indian town, the only Westerners being sweaty, pasty ones like me!

It was wonderful. The rythmn of the place was quiet and relaxed and I found myself ambling around in a dream, feeling myself slipping in and out of the present and the past. Everywhere seemed filled with lazy ghosts, or ghosts who couldn't leave the place after 60 years of independence having loved it so much. FAbulous. I even found Mystical graffiti! On a wall by the sea was an extraordinary piece of writing quoting from the Koran and Christian thinkers about tolerance and spirituality, ending with a description of the Three Ages of the Trinity envisaged by obscure (but massively influential) Christian Mystic Joachim de Flora, who believed we were approaching teh Age of the Holy Spirit when all Empires will cease and Man and God will become One... Only in India would one find such graffiti!

THe ferry back was a wonderful experience. Hot and crowded and involving a conversation with a guy from Delhi who had recognised me from earlier when I had given him my water bottle... I was grateful to be back in Ernakulam at the end of the day though as Fort Cochi had left such an impression on me - all those ghosts! - that I needed the distance to cool off...

And then the next day - Mattenchery... Home of the oldest Jewish community outside Israel... But this has already been a long post! Better wait until tomorrow for the treasures THAT experience held!