Where can I buy a dhoti?

Fort Cochin to Karumady Village: 15th May

On leaving Fort Cochin, David the owner of the Delight hotel, advised me to go and stay with some of his friends who live in the rural backwaters in the village of Karumady Village. I scribbled down the directions and place names.

The first mode of travel today, a high speed autorickshaw, its driver must have been Kerala’s answer to Evil Kenieval, perhaps narrowly beaten by Vijay Amritraj in getting a role in a James Bond film. From the Ernakulum Bus station it was a short ride to Kotayam where, still rubbing a bump at the top of my head, I asked for the jetty terminal – nobody could understand me. Perhaps it was the way I pronounced “Goo Ma Gun Jetty”. That’s what Davod had said I’m sure. Any small change in inflexion or intonation can change a place name beyond recognition

After asking anyone who could remotely understand me, I arrived at the “Kumarkom” jetty for a 2 hour wait - the ferry to Allapuzha had been cancelled so at a canalside restaurant I ate some idiapam and fried okra. Chartered barges full of partying families from the close-by 5 star holiday resorts went past. Soon the ferry arrived and we sailed in to the huge Vembanad Lake which looked more like a sea but betrayed by the green tinsel of coconut trees that edged the horizon that encircled us. The lake is the venue for the annual Nehru Cup for which crews race each other in “snake” boats, each with 80 rowers, 20 drummers and 15 steersmen. The afternoon winds were up and we dipped our way through the waves till we berthed at a tiny village called Mohama. I asked a group of youths how to get a bus to Alappuzha but they appeared keener to ask questions than to give me a straight answer:
“Which country you are from?”
“ India.”
Confused looks, they stare at me up and down.
“OK then, England.”
More confused looks, staring at me up and down once again.
When a man with betel-stained teeth who reeked of early-afternoon whiskey demanded fifty rupees, I realised it was time to stop the explanation of the Indian community in the UK and just slipped away. On the bus I contemplated the advantages of inconspicuousness in foreign travel. I really need that dhoti.

From Alappuzha, it was only one further bus to Ambalapuzha Junction on National Highway 47 to get to my destination of Karumady Village. The realisation I was off the beaten track came to me when I saw that the destination signboards on the buses were all written in the looping, flowing script of Malayalam. I asked people on the bus “Ambalapuzha Junction?”. And this led to a secondary issue – when people in south India shake their heads, they mean “yes”. It’s not quite a shake, but more a gentle wobble of the chin from side to side, hardly discernible in the franticness of a bus station. The conductor shook his head in this manner, I understood it to mean “no” so shook my head in perceived agreement meaning “no” too, and descended the bus. Only afterwards did a fellow passenger come up to me and say that it was indeed going to Ambalapuzha.

After the bus, an auto-rickshaw sped me through narrow red-earth lanes made redder by the light of a mango-flesh sunset, its reflection rippling in the water of a paddy field. At dusk I arrived at Karumady village and walked over a small footbridge to arrive at the home of Jiji and Trisha Mappilassery and their son John, a family of Christians who rent out cottages on the banks of the river Pumba in what they advertise as “a very private backwater residence”.

There was a powercut and the Mappilasserys were seated on the floor of their living room singing Christian hymns in Malayalam in the bluish light of a paraffin lampd. Jiji showed me to my cottage by the waterside, tranquil and silent but for the splashing fisherman working in the full-moon light and the occasional plop from a diving kingfisher. The land was inherited by Jiji, he got last pick after his 3 brothers and 3 sisters, who wondered considered the strip of land on the banks of the backwaters as useless for growing anything. In his time when he’s not working as a Database Administrator, he manages the business of his homestay , Riverside Retreat (riversideret@hotmail.com).