It’s hard to imagine the orchards of Heathrow,
Abundant as the orchards of Herefordshire,
Down there, by John Betjeman’s hated Slough:
‘Come friendly bombs’;
Hard to imagine windfalls in these
William Blake ‘chartered streets’:
‘One World: One Account’,
‘The future is exciting!
Get ready!’
But I shall be flying over gramp’s
Great War battlefields,
Towards dad’s Chindit warfare,
Via dystopian Dubai airport:
‘Dubai has transformed from a humble fishing village
to one of the most cosmopolitan and innovative cities in the world …
Jump on the metro, catch an amazing view from the world’s tallest building …
shop within The Dubai Mall Metropolis,
take a selfie in front of the famous Dubai Fountain …
All you have to do is get off a plane.’
But what of Kerala?
In the words of Stroud’s Rick Vick:
‘Apparently, a functioning, flourishing and fully communist state’,
Well obvs, the flora and crowds and traffic hit you right in the face
As soon as you leave the airport,
But so do the plethora of hammer and sickle flags,
Flying along the streets and bridges,
Not the tattered pennants of some marginal group,
But official flags guiding the way
Through the skyscraper trumpery of high finance,
King Midas commodity fetishisation,
Rats’ playgrounds of waste on the verges,
And the occasional shanty shack
Cheek by jowl with the serried tuk tucked jams,
And with highest literacy rate in India,
And a landscape of land reform,
With women’s spice cooperatives
(Easy India Company on the door),
The grave of Vasco da Gama
In the Church of St Francis,
The devout OCD and ODC –
Obsessively Devoted Christian –
Touching every icon three times with each finger,
The occasional imploring mendicant,
The huge open-air laundry,
Bare chested men hammering sheets against stone,
The lines of washing stretching across the wide field,
Tended by the women, line by line,
Huge steam cast iron irons ploughing through the haze,
Every worker on piece rates,
An honesty box for donations for photographs,
A shadowed, mildewed red flag hanging out the front.
There was something quite Dickensian about all this,
All that manual labour, long hours and low wages,
All that damp air, vapour and miasma,
All that shouting, pounding and cacophony,
It made me quite at home in time and space:
My great-great grandmother was a laundress in London in 1850 –
And today we have the gig economy:
All those long hours, low wages and queuing for a job:
Same old, same old, really.
And there, the toothless old laundry man,
Quizzing me about my job,
‘Ah! History. No. Legends. You mean legends.
Let me tell you about legends.’
This was more Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone,
Rather than David Copperfield –
All was quite bewitching at the laundry,
And at the joss stick shop:
‘Do you know Milton Keynes?
My friend lives there.
Too much concrete, he says.’
Outside, goats chewed tufts of grass on street corners,
Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus
All milled together by the various
Churches, temples, mosques and synagogue,
And we all read together in the museum:
‘The history of Europe particularly Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England from the 15th to 18th century indicate that there was a lust for dominant power over rival states, and fighting for supremacy at sea etc.’
The diagram down the road,
Outlining the techniques of the handloom weaver,
Could have said the same about Stroud,
The East India Company and Lancashire,
I suppose,
For as the museum reminded us,
Once upon a time,
‘The sun never sets on the British Empire.’
It certainly shone on me when I was
Invited up to the podium in the park,
At the hammer and sickle spangled
Meeting of the Communist Party of Kerala,
For official photographs and fraternal
Exchange of greetings and cards
Later, I apologised for British imperialism
And the depredations of Stroud Scarlet:
‘The British did some good things too.
Education, for example.’
We were just by the park where kids play cricket all day long,
It once was the parade ground where the British army
Marched all day long in their red coats,
The sun beating down on them and Tommy Atkins,
The sun never setting on duty and discipline,
But now setting on the giant fishing nets,
The families playing together by the darkening sea,
And the giant skyscrapers on the other side of the harbour,
Young men and women learning English
(‘Fresh Up! Toilets! Ice cream!’),
Dreaming of a job and emigration,
Older men dancing the traditions of
Kathakali:
‘The most wonderful art form in the world’,
While we went on the next day to tea plantations,
Up past the picks and shovels by the roadside,
The relentless swinging of arms,
The tuk tucks climbing steadily past the stalls,
‘Tiffin Corner’, ‘Homely Food’,
‘Ample parking for your vehicles’
To that Scottish-Victorian innovation:
Tea plantations in the Kerala highlands,
And there we wandered at 5,000 feet,
Near the old colonial hill station,
Walking past the women working their methodical way,
Through the tea hedges, clipping their way
Through every second of their eight hour shift,
The male supervisors ensuring no tourist
Breaks the relentless rhythm of work with a request
For a photograph,
Some even run with their bags, when full,
Stuffed with eighty kilograms of tea,
Partly because they are on piece rates,
And partly because the supervisor has tied up the branches of the tripod,
Mustn’t keep him waiting for weighing,
And ticking and recording and eventual paying,
As the sun makes its way across the mountains,
And the tied cottages in the valley,
But always burning a path for the women
In their vibrant clothes and headscarves,
Moving steadily along the hedges,
Their arms and fingers clip clipping
For eight, unremitting, hours,
The serpent-eagle circling high overhead,
Beyond the verandahs and bungalows of pink gin history,
Beyond the hydrangea memories of home
And the dragonfly dreamland
Of the hallucinogenic angel’s trumpet,
Down in the lush grassland by the village stream.
But it was time to say goodbye to our guide,
And to Munnar,
And to this Home and Colonial cigarette card landscape,
To take the winding road and hairpin bends to Thekaddy,
But with Abraham for our driver,
All was fun and carefree and mesmeric in the car:
The perfumed garden of a spice plantation,
A fragrant arbour-synecdoche of history,
Of renaissance Europe
(Astrolabes, curiosity, money, war and colonialism),
The explosions of colour in the villages and towns:
The buckets and brooms and mops and bananas hanging from the hooks,
The shopkeepers squatting on the pavement in front of their door,
The lines of scooters and tuk tucks and women in saris,
Some with umbrellas and parasols,
Some on mobile phones,
Some breaking stones,
Some down on the river banks washing the sheets,
Some cleaning pots by the roadside or marching,
With all the dignity and decorum of labour,
With pots carried on their heads, all, shining in the sun.
But we,
We were here to trek and explore:
A bamboo ferry to take us to read the tracks of tiger,
Wild dogs, bison, deer, porcupines,
To spot what had gone before,
Proustian moments where past events
Cast their after-shadows,
Until our guide tracking up ahead,
Returned with finger to his lips,
With an instruction to hurry,
And there witness a baby elephant suckling,
And all around, the polyphonic, rainbow
World of woodland and waters:
Kingfishers flashing their iridescence,
Stork and egrets and cormorants and eagles,
Tribal people walking in their steady file,
Called, like all the teeming life here,
Here in the woods, and grass and air,
Called to the water’s edge.
Just like us the next day:
We gathered together by the water,
A cosmopolitan cast and crew
Of fourteen, together with our guides
(One armed with a rifle slung across his camouflage),
To row our bamboo rafts across the lake,
Sometimes running aground on hidden branches,
Or boughs and boles and trunks of trees,
One guide diving to retrieve a camera,
Held aloft like a pearl from the depths,
Past cormorants and egrets and storks and black eagles,
And monkeys scattering over our heads in the bending branches,
Once more in the shadow of William Blake:
‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’
A herd of boar made their ambling progress through the grasslands,
An ostracised straggler easy meat for the tiger,
As an elephant stood with sagacious and solemn dignity,
Over by the woodland clearing’s dust and rock.
(Appetites whetted – would there be more?
Be careful of what you wish for.)
Later,
The sun high,
We rested in the shade,
Like strolling actors in a masque,
Playing roles we only half understood,
A polyglot wind whispering through the leaves,
Until we all fell asleep,
Dreaming of our dragonfly Eden
(Where God rested after Creation,
And where Charles Darwin tracked the truth,
Through The Origin of Species),
Dreaming, as unseen eyes studied us,
Of our homes from the varied continents of the world,
Until alarm bells sounded for our guides:
A herd of bison up above the stream,
And there a herd of elephants
Suddenly appearing out of the green,
Obstructing our path, mother with young,
An obvious and urgent danger,
And only two hundred metres ahead.
Fingers to lips, our guides urgent and peremptory,
Anxiety etched across their faces,
We were ordered to take an unknown path,
There, into the shadowed woodland,
No photography allowed,
No staring into the eyes of an elephant,
No matter what the distance,
The rifle ready to fire if felt necessary
To deter a trumpeting herd;
Deer rustled to our right,
Snakes to our left,
And in this, our refuge of the forest,
Somewhere deep, the black cobra and green mamba,
As we made our chequered way back to the ferry,
An elongated snake line of walkers,
Chastened but elated by danger,
A walk into the heart of darkness and light conjoined,
A harmony and symmetry of fear and beauty –
‘What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ –
And later that night, in town,
As we walked past the poster of Che Guevara,
After a couple of kingfishers,
A young man shouted us this benison,
‘Enjoy your day in Paradise’.
How did he know we had been there?
The next day, Abraham took us to the backwaters,
Past icing sugar churches,
Then, surprisingly, a Lutheran one,
Lines of quiet, disciplined schoolchildren,
Waiting patiently in every village for the bus:
‘Holy Mary – Give Praise to God’
‘St. Jude’s’,
Past rubber tree plantations,
‘Build Strong and Secure with our Cement’,
‘Save Oil, Save India’,
‘Save Rainwater’,
‘Complete your family.
Kerala’s Number One Fertility Clinic’,
Past the old woman with her broom
And Indian Larkin Afternoons:
Each day she rises with the sun,
And, with the call to prayer and broom,
She brushes the leaves from her doorstep.
Each day the cars rush right past her doorway,
Blowing yesterday’s leaves
Back, onto her doorstep.
Each day the trees shed more leaves,
Dropping slowly in Larkin ones and twos,
In the long, hot, afternoon.
While she sleeps,
The moon silvers the silent road,
And the leaves gather in mounds.
The wind wakes up at midnight,
Performs its customary duty,
And deposits the leaves on the doorstep.
Each day she rises with the sun,
And, with the call to prayer and broom,
She brushes the leaves from her doorstep.
We passed a picture of Karl Marx,
In his customary magisterial pose,
But there, on the bridge,
Flags and bunting and a hammer and sickle,
Fashioned from polystyrene,
Waved high in the air,
As the crowd chanted in joyful unity.
In the paddy fields of rice,
Awaiting harvest just before the monsoons,
Arms swayed in pendulum rhythms,
Cleaning and clearing in the vast vista of green,
Palm fronds a fringe to the rivers, canals and lagoons,
The endless miles of lily pads and water hyacinths,
The lines of egrets and cormorants on the endless mudflats,
The lines of washing draped along the canal banks,
The chained elephant swaying at the Hindu temple,
To the rhythms of the sitars and cymbals and chanting,
Marigolds and candles lighting the path to the new year,
And like Orwell’s prisoner in Burmese Days,
We made our way barefoot,
Avoiding the puddles amongst the crowds
Of families praying at the shrines,
Or shopping at the temple market arcades,
Or the rusty bicycles propped against divine walls,
And the aged man with his lottery tickets at the temple gates,
A kaleidoscope of acid synesthesia for us,
The only white faces in this teeming heart of the orient,
Where Sergeant Pepper meets Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone.
We went back by tuk tuk,
The sun set,
The palm leaves became silhouettes,
The rhythm of Vishnu drifted high across the paddy fields.
The next day women beat their washing,
Women fished while men watched,
Boatmen herded flocks of ducks across the waters,
Like swathes of purposeful lily pads,
While swallows gathered on the wires
Which stretched across the wide navigations,
Schoolchildren with their bikes waiting for the ferryman,
Hare Krishna pulsating out from the river banks,
Well wishers waving their greetings,
A flock of cormorants gathered in the tree,
Wings outstretched, like so many pterodactyls,
But we watched the engagement procession train
At the St Thomas Basilica,
Wife and husband to be in white,
The procession, however, a riot of colour,
‘What is your name?
And your husband’s?’
But in the market,
‘My brother is a psychologist in Newcastle.
This is his house. He loves Newcastle United.’
We had lunch in a private house by the river,
And wished the Kerala Blasters well
In tomorrow’s match against Goa,
To make our way past the hammer and sickle flags,
And under the low slung bridges,
Where men washed themselves,
Women washed the clothes,
And men repaired the canal walls close by the red flag:
‘Workers of the world unite,
You have nothing to lose but your chains’,
Just like the elephant in the temple.
I awoke in the half light of dawn mists,
Pulled back the curtains and there right in front of my nose,
Two diminutive sun birds,
Dancing on the railings of the stern,
Bright yellow breasts catching the sunrise,
Then a corvid breakfasting on a fallen coconut,
Egrets busy on the bank,
A man, barefoot, climbing the coconut tree,
His rustling ascent quickly followed
By his steady tapping of his harvest,
Then, the shimmering pink lotus fields,
Air, earth and water in a harmony of tranquility,
A rainbow of butterflies fluttering,
While the doctors write to the matrimonial pages
Of the Hindu on Sunday:
‘Doctor seeks doctor –
Good family background preferred’;
While for another,
‘Caste not an issue’,
While another seeks a bride,
Who must have ‘clean habits’,
But, alas, the elusive butterfly of love
Wings its own way through the world,
Past the elephant trudging down the highway,
And all the Kerala brushstroke broom clean habits,
While the monsoon waits in the ocean wings,
And the aged woman brushes her leaves.
Shashi Tharoor Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
Stroud Scarlet cloth,
A symbol of local and national pride,
All those red army uniforms,
But also a onetime cloth of contention
Betwixt spinner, weaver, and master clothier,
And a contemporary cloth of contention, too,
For being caught red handed
And being on tenterhooks
Have different connotations,
When we link the local and the global:
Stroud Scarlet:
Symbol of war and Empire,
Of imperial annexation
And colonial exploitation:
This tweet from today harks back to 1857 and the ‘first major Indian revolt, called the Sepoy Mutiny or Great Indian Mutiny by the British’.
I do have memory triggers.
And one of those triggers is red uniform coats.
Those are linked to the mass killings in the mango orchard.
My grandmother used to sing old folk songs about
the horrors inflicted by the ‘red coats’.
The horror referred to involves a series of hangings in the mango orchard.
By the red coats.