The backwaters are a maze of water ways- some narrow and choked by purple water hyancinth vines, some swollen and still and wide, reflecting the sky. Islands of colour and activity are being gradually eroded by the watery wakes of the house boats that chug up and down bearing tourists who lounge on deck chairs with binoculars.
A moonlit canoe ride, the distorted moon laps at my fingers trailing in the waters. They sing songs from their watery history. The repeated pounds of oar on boat drives the rhythm into my body. Voices sing and repeat in simple cadences to keep the rowers in time. But time has faded like the lights by the shore and we are floating through a formless void, no bodies, no place, no where, only the rhythm of this eternal sound and the darkness of waters and stars .
We stop at a tin shack full of sweating men-their smell mingling with the pungent odour of home brewed coconut 'Toddy'. Eyes rove hungrily up and down our white flesh....we don't stay long.
We went for a cycle ride and found ourselves following tiny paths at the edges of the most narrow channels. Everywhere, washing laid out on blankets by the riverside and women soaping clothes on stone steps. A child swimming with a float of empty water bottles tied together. An abandoned house, a tree growing through its roof, strangely boat like with its swollen timbers flaking one by one from its walls. Bridges- simple planks laid between banks or grand arching, sometimes crumbling concrete structures. Paddy fields florescent in the mid day sunlight, women working in rows, bent and turbanned against the sun. A pump screeching on one bank and an old boat on the shore, long and thin, planks connected with coconut fibre ropes.
Men clearing water hyacinth that grows in furious, intamable swathes, making the rivers look like fields of purple flowers.
A row of white blossom trees, a newly painted church
The distant wail of a temple through the trees, a stall with snacks and vegetables piled onto blankets on the ground. Women squatting in groups at the waters edge washing bowls of tiny silver fish. A man punting a boat full of barrels chants his way up the river, 'Buy fish? Fish? Fish?'
Life at the River- Arup Doss
We came to a field where thirty women were up to their knees in mud planting rice seedlings. They invited us to help them, to the great amusement of a gradually increasing crowd of onlookers! We jumped in, mud up to the thighs and squelching, oozing between slippery toes, warm and strangely sensual. A wadge of green rice stalks are shoved into our hands and the laughing, but kind, womanly face animatedly points at the lines of green already planted. They are filling the gaps left behind by previous planting. Drop it in place and squish it in gently. Drop and squish, drop and squish. Wading and squelching through the muddy waters. This is highly unfeminine work, yet the only men in sight are the onlookers, or the field control man who is somewhere far off in the distance. No matter what the crop of where the field, it is always women I have seen crouched for hours in back breaking positions under the relentless sun. Always woman at work, and always men 'overseeing'. I have never seen such a patriarchal society in all my travels and I know under the surface hilarity of this situation, under the green laughter in the sun, there lies a muddy field of patriarchy these women must squelch a survival through...
Like most beautiful places, there are the shadows of a mottled history beneath the florescence of the rice fields and the bright arrays of washing strung out over the waterways. On an island rising from the mud of a paddy field the roof of a chapel has fallen in. It was once a church for 'Untouchable' Christians. There is a paragraph about the conversion of untouchable Hindus to Christianity in 'The God of Small Things':
"When the British came to Malabar, a number of Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican church to escape the scourge of Untouchability. They were known as the Rice- Christians. It didn't take them long to realise that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests...After Independence they found they were not entitled to any Government benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all."
This is a 'suicide fruit', an image which rather scared me; looking innocent and tasty growing freely beside the road. But one of the local residents told us that just a small peice of fruit would kill a human being quickly- its vrey poisonous.
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