A sound pierces the still night. Half-asleep and with a racing heart buried in a soufflé of pillows, I try to match objects with the source. Obvious ones first: thief, dried plantain leaves, wind whooshing in with a ghost-like flamboyance. Latter ones, all an exercise in imagination—a lost beach ball looking for a five-year-old, a boat finding its way through land. In Kuttanad, it’s easy to play Proust and sleeplessly ponder about the fluidity of one’s existence.
Who are these people, I wonder, as I toss and turn in my Airbnb, who can feel at ease in strange hotel rooms under the unfamiliar weight of a new quilt? I give in and switch on the banana fibre lamp. It is then that the most comforting of sounds arrives: September rain, soft as a lullaby, taps on the clay roof tiles of the restored warehouse. Comfort and courage well up again.
The culprit eventually turns out to be a white puppy wrestling a wet umbrella that had been propped against my door. I fish a Sinarest tablet from my pouch. The glass stands half full on the bedside table. In our everyday life, I realise abruptly, water is a utility—tamed and quantified, predictably confined in glasses and measuring cups. Sometimes dripping from taps or tiles.
But here in Kuttanad, where the land is flanked by the Arabian Sea on one side and patrolled by the flowing rivers on the other, life adheres to the whims of water. Its ebb and flow shapes not just the landscape but also the portraits of its inhabitants. This year, the town had to wait for the monsoon. September brings much-needed relief, but ever since the 2018 floods they are not quick to rejoice. Very delicate, this dance with anticipation and anxiety.
Marty, the proprietor of a charming little tea shop in Champakulam, gestures towards the stack of Marie biscuits on the third row of the glass display. “The water rose all the way till here,” he taps twice. “The store was fine but everything in my house, from the sofa settees to appliances like the fridge and television were all submerged,” he says with a theatrical flair that comes from enough time having passed since a life-altering event. “Many folks in town, even my neighbours, have now elevated their houses. The estimate for my house was around ₹20 lakh. I’d rather buy some furniture again than spend that kind of money,” he says before proceeding to give instructions to the Bengali scrap collector in Malayalam.
At Marty’s, a cup of black tea arrives with a local newspaper and a framed view of the paddy field. Page two carries a long-form feature on artificial rain. Up until a few days ago, drought weighed on everyone’s mind. From the wooden bench, I can see the sun trace each square of the field like a patchwork quilt. It is difficult to imagine a time when Kuttanad wasn’t the rice bowl of India, when its low-lying geography and water bodies—including backwaters, rivers and canals—made it unsuitable for farming. This was until Joseph Murickan, during the great Travancore famine of the 1940s, researched and successfully drained the shallow parts of the lakes. It was in Marty’s tea shop that I learnt that the hero also turns villain in this story, and how it then took a land rights struggle and Land Reforms Act to return thousands of acres acquired by the Murickan family to over 1,500 farmers in an astonishing tale of wealth redistribution.
At the very bottom of the backwaters are many such stories, treasured yet forgotten. One paints Kuttanad as an unnavigable dense forest burnt to ashes by a wildfire. Another that I read not long ago in S. Hareesh’s Moustache (2020), resurfaces on the drive past Thanneermukkom Bund. It answers why Tipu Sultan, who marched to Aluva, massacring thousands of people along the way, retreated without waging war on Kuttanad. The answer seems obvious now that I can only see water in each frame. It was the mighty Periyar River that tampered with Tipu’s plans and disrupted his army, horses and cannons.
Drizzle descends like sheets of soft muslin. Even without it, noon in Kuttanad is a lonely affair. Streets and stores are deserted. Eden Thottam, the plant nursery, too, was unattended and unlocked. “In this weather, we usually don’t get any customers,” says Unnikunju, the sixty-something owner who lives across the road and makes me wait for a full fifteen minutes next to lush ixoras. “The flowers have mostly fallen, the buds are waiting for the sun, how will you select the colours of flowers?” he asks. His wife interrupts, now that their nap is broken. “Chaaya idatte?” (Shall I put on some tea?) Here was a couple that wasn’t bored of their paradise. I buy thetti (ixora), arali (oleander), thumba and hibiscus, and secure the plants with coir and sepia newspapers, knowing well that the colours will surprise me when they bloom later.
Almost every family in Kuttanad owns a boat, be it a petite canoe or a stately vessel, and affluence ripples in the hum of engine-powered boats. I cross houses on stilts and take in the sounds: the quick thwack of an oar, the laughter track like a chorus of ducks, the grinding creak of makeshift bridges tightened with ropes where children play made-up games.
Kutty Thankachan, a toddy tapper, goes about his job perfunctorily outside a bustling toddy shop. His days begin and end with a swim, and in between, he climbs each palm thrice. I try to swerve the conversation to learn more about the amphibious life of the town’s inhabitants, but perhaps it is my notepad that makes him vent his grievances instead. Seasons. Hazards. Mechanisation. He covers them all.
Little cormorants, herons and egrets rule the sky and the water. They are near and far, practising elaborate formations in the sky or submerging their heads in water-logged fields in search of a snack. How does one truly take in the beauty of a place as a visitor? Do you drink in the vistas and freeze landscapes in digital timelines? Do you maybe try and envision a life there?
I try to listen. Water in Kuttanad has a distinct voice. It speaks not in gurgles or distant murmurs but in a profound stillness—a rootedness that defies the restlessness of modernity. From the edge of a lotus pond, I am drawn into this conversation that is suspended somewhere between a daydream and soliloquy. “We, too, are made of water.” Ada Limón told us so. “We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.” And then, jarringly, I remember the moral science teacher who turned her head to the girls when she said we should be like water—ready to adjust, take the shape of whatever we are dealt. How badly it had made me want to stick out my tongue. The clouds here feel unusually near, a giant-like presence. They swell, swirl and roll like the sky is in a state of animated laughter.
Read the story in Vogue India’s November-December 2023 issue that is now on stands. Subscribe here
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