Published in the New York Post, January 2005
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Life is but a dream

William Ham Bevan floats through Kerala

THE signs pleading for careful driving popped up every 15 yards or so along the road. Some of them (“Accidents are not accidental”; “Left is right”) had more than a hint of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth about them. My favorite was the charmingly corny: “Better to be late than to be ‘the late.’”

As in the rest of India, no one on the dusty streets of Kerala took a bit of notice. We were glad to swap the tarmac, with its ever-moving sea of traffic, for the region’s rivers and lakes, and a few days of floating around the tranquil backwaters.

Our boat, the MV Vrinda, was a step up from Kerala’s ubiquitous rice boats, known as kettu vallam. In fact, it dwarfed everything else on the water, but managed to fit in with its surroundings by dint of being built from local materials, such as coconut matting and teak. It certainly made for a stylish exit from the busy port town of Cochin (also known as Kochi), where we’d whiled away our time exploring a multicultural past that is convoluted even by Indian standards.

By the time Vasco da Gama landed in the vicinity to “discover” India in 1496, Cochin had absorbed repeated influxes of Muslims, Jews and Syrian Christians — and that was before the Europeans got in on the act. Every culture has left its mark.

On that first day on the water, we cast off into the still and vast Vembanad Lake on the leisured cruise toward Alleppey. Soon, we were leaving the expanse of lake for the canals, and it struck me just how much of a misnomer it was to call these channels backwaters. Granted, the pace of life was slow here, but activity was all around. Men bathed while women washed clothes in the soupy water, children squealed and splashed about. We passed several impromptu cricket games on the bank.

At one kink in the canal, we motored past the set of a Bollywood film, the rows of gaudily dressed extras preparing for another song-and-dance set piece. From our vantage point on the Vrinda’s sun deck, where we sank into comfortable daybeds, everything we passed seemed filmic and unreal, as though we were drifting through someone else’s jumbled dreams.

To all intents, the Vrinda is a floating five-star hotel, with all the expected accoutrements and unobtrusively immaculate service. The eight air-conditioned cabins on the lower deck each boasted a TV and DVD player. Above was the bar and dining room, where the head chef proved herself equally adept at conjuring up Indian and international cuisine.

The Vrinda was too large to explore smaller waterways, so we decamped to a traditional rice boat, one side of which was opened up for better viewing. There was much to see, and our guide proved to be sharp-eyed at spotting bird life. He also drew our attention to the grating call of the drongo —reputed to frighten off elephants.

At Karumadikkuttan, we walked from the boat to a small clearing to see a black granite statue of Buddha that was at least 1,000 years old. Local legend has it that the chunk missing from its side was caused by the kick of a sacrilegious elephant.

That evening, we transferred back to the Vrinda and moored at the jetty as dark clouds gathered over the lake. A troupe of musicians and dancers came on board to present the Mohiniattam, Kerala’s “dance of the enchantress.” There was a final feast of local specialties, including pomfret perch poached in coconut milk and chillies. Two days of inactivity on the sun-deck had induced a shared state of happy lethargy. One by one, my shipmates yawned, made their excuses and headed down to their cabins. After that, nothing was going to break the calm —not even the road trip back to the airport the next morning.

As we honked and swerved our way onward, I noticed another of the ubiquitous road safety signs, proclaiming that “Hurry causes worry”. Having experienced not a hint of either for the past two days, I couldn’t help but agree. If the captain of the Vrinda ever needs a motto for his vessel, he should look no further.