Just as the stallholder has recovered from this bizarre intrusion into his daily business, Kim, our stills photographer, manifests himself from behind the bewildered crowd of onlookers and asks him to repeat the process. ‘Please, just for me, if you don’t mind. Thank you.’ He clicks the shutter. The man relaxes.
‘Just one more, please. No, please don’t look at the camera. Just look at Mr. Floyd.’
I can sense him thinking, ‘Who the is Mr. Floyd’.
‘Thanks, lovely. I’m just going to change the lens.’
I can hear the man thinking ‘Change the lens. For a bunch of curry leaves? Why the?!’
‘Terrific, thank you. Now I’ll just do a wide angle. No, don’t look at the camera. Just explain to Mr. Floyd the joy of um…’ (aside to me, ‘What are those things?’)
‘Curry leaves.’
‘Oh, yes, curry leaves.’
Click, click.
‘Thank you.’
Throughout the hot, hazy afternoon we tramp round to the pepper exchange, take tuktuk rides and shoot emotive pictures of this bustling city. As the sun begins to sink, even Big Mike, the camerman, is wilting under the weight of his camera and the oppressive heat. Gratefully, we clamber into our vehicles and head, albeit slowly, through dense cacophonous traffic and the streaming pedestrians back to the tranquillity of our hotel, a bath, change of clothes, a stiff drink and dinner. We have been travelling and working since 3.00am. and by 9.00pm everyone in the crew has gone to bed. Tomorrow we start at 4.00am.
From the balcony of our room, I overlook the outlet of the Vembanad Lake, which flows into the Arabian Sea. Across the sound, the lighthouse flashes its pale light, occasionally illuminating a ghostly container ship slipping out on the night tide to the Middle East, Africa and beyond. The rooks that chattered so harshly in the red-flowered Mayflower trees are asleep and silent, and a security guard in a neatly pressed uniform is leaning against a tree having a smoke as he stares across the black water. I finish my drink and climb happily into a cool, firm bed.
Situated along India’s southwest coast, Kerala is a lush, green tropical paradise. From the fabled Malabar Spice Coast, it stretches east to the mountain peaks of the Western Ghats. Kerala is 603 kilometres long but only 75 kilometres wide at its broadest point. The interior is riddled with inland waterways known as the backwaters, extending from the coast far inland and, as in Venice, these act as roads. Houses and schools are built on the banks and people travel by boat and bursting water buses. These areas are full of coconut palms and paddy fields — rice is Kerala’s main grain and is eaten at every meal. Indeed, Kerala means ‘Land of the Coconuts’, and coconut is a common flavouring in the local food. Another widespread tree is the curry leaf tree, whose sweet and spicy leaves give the local dishes a distinctive aromatic flavour. The local flavourings of coconut and spices are combined with meat, fish and vegetables in dishes such as prawn ularthiyathu (prawns in coconut milk), beef ularthiyathu (a dry beef curry), or vegetable stew (called avial), traditionally garnished with quickly fried fresh curry leaves (see pages 114, 134 and 155).
The contrast between the little communities and villages clustered along the water’s edge, or in cleared compounds under the coconut palms and cashew trees, and the city is strikingly vivid. The shallow waterways are covered in lilies and, as you glide past the little settlements with their neat gardens of vegetables and the black pigs, chickens, ducks and goats munching in the undergrowth, kids are playing cricket with homemade bats and bamboo sticks for stumps. Women, waist-deep in water, beat and rinse the washing. Men throw nets from narrow canoes. Huge, brilliant kingfishers swoop like Mirage jets just above the tranquil water and nilgiri birds — known as the laughing thrush–screech hysterically in the rich, tangled bamboo. School children, immaculate in blue shorts or skirts, white shirts and blue ties, clamber on to the little ferries that cross the river to take them home from school.
Hard work – but the coconut is essential in the Indian kitchen
While rice and coconuts are the main crops, on the higher ground grow the more valuable coffee, tea, cocoa, rubber, pepper and cardamom. Kerala is the home of many spices and these have attracted merchants from all over the world. It is the natural habitat of black pepper and cardamom, and ginger and turmeric are also grown. India produces one third of the world’s pepper and much of it comes from Kerala. Before the Portuguese introduced chillies into India in the 16th century, the Indians only had pepper to heat up their dishes. There is a interesting wholesale spice market in Cochin and the city also has the distinction of having the first church built by Europeans in India, St Francis Church, which was started in 1503. Tropical fruits are also abundant in Kerala, in particular pineapples and bananas, including the rare red-skinned variety that is supposed to be good for your health.
All the while, almost in a dream, I am sitting on the shaded deck of a highly polished and varnished rice barge, sipping a cool beer under a lazy fan, waiting for my meal of cabbage and mustard seeds cooked in coconut milk, beetroot with chillies, fresh coconut bread and chicken. This long, elegant craft once transported rice and fruits, nuts, bananas, hay or building materials the length and breadth of the area. In former times the hulls were fastened with coconut twine. Not a rivet or a metal fastening was used and, on the open stretches, a single, huge, pregnant sail drew them gracefully along. Today, we drift gently along with a 25hp outboard motor fixed on the side, and where once the rice was stored, there are now quaint, charming, wooden bedrooms and a plant potted in a brass urn. This is paradise.
Or, rather, it would be if I did not have to do pieces to camera and pose, cheerfully, thoughtfully, happily or excitedly as I deliver what are supposed to be words rich in information, with wit and enthusiasm, and describe my food without speaking with my mouth full, or having a fag! OK, it’s one hell of a job. But, as they say, someone has to do it.
Looming suddenly round the bend is a huge floating hay rick 6 or 7 metres high, amazingly piled on to a narrow-beamed, 12-metre rice boat. The hay overhangs the bulwarks either side. It has been loaded on to the boat with incredible precision and it passes us without the slightest wobble or even the remotest chance that it could topple over. One man is sitting smoking on the long-necked prow, another sits in the stern, his feet trailing in the water as he steers the tiny outboard engine that propels the vessel.
Apart from some birds laughing in the jungle and the lap of the water rushing under the hull, all is peaceful. Bugger the director. I think I’ll have a fag and a slurp.
The deck hand places a bottle of Indian whisky, a bottle of mineral water and a bucket of ice on the mahogany table. The sun is going down fast over the Chinese fishing nets, their cadaverous cantilever limbs loom in a sinister way like huge praying mantises in the fast-falling dusk. The coastline is dotted with these vast fishing nets that were introduced to the area by merchants in the time of Kublai Khan. Consisting of five teak poles rising up to 30 metres in the air, they scoop up fish as they swim by at high tide. The nets are considered so valuable that brides’ families even offer them as dowries in marriage.
Fish is the speciality here and makes up a large part of the Keralan diet. Munambam Harbour is the location of one of the many local fish auctions. Fishing boats that left in the middle of the night return in the late afternoon as the sun casts its golden evening hue over the Arabian Sea. Boats crowd the docks, five or six deep, and as soon as the day’s catch hits the land the auction starts. The noise is terrific as buyers shout out prices