The Journey

The sun began peaking over the horizon as early as 5:45 AM, shedding some light on the previously dark country we were driving through. As we whirred passed palm trees and crumbling homes, interrupted by the occasional mansion, the sun's early light began to illuminate some of what we'd come here to discover: the relationship between people and their land. First light saw the streets already busy, even on the day of a major strike, and locals mulled about along the highway we cruised along. Our taxi driver, perpetually on his cell phone, deftly maneuvered his crossover through the traffic of mopeds and rickshaws, narrowly avoiding a head on collision more than once. The roadside was filled with tiny shops opening for the day, temples, and homes, some of which seemed to be abandoned due to their state of repair. We weren't in Canton anymore.

The taxi ride wasn't even supposed to happen. We'd missed our flight to Trivandrum and had to fly into Cochin instead. The flight from JFK to Abu Dhabi was thirteen wonderful hours crushed in coach-class seating (my knees crammed into the seat in front of me), behind two babies that only communicated through incessant crying. I love flying. The airline, Etihad, had apparently sold our tickets to Trivandrum since we were delayed, and rewarded us with a luxurious business class upgrade for the final leg of our journey. It seemed like our karma had balanced out after all. We'd made a friend, Taj, who was born in Kerala but lived in the United States for the last fifteen years. He suffered the same fate as us and rescued us from the language barrier that now pervaded our every action. Mutual understanding was hard to come by, and Taj acted as our cultural broker. No one from the airline spoke particularly good English, and Taj made sure that we boarded taxis headed in the right direction. Without him would would have been flying blind, completely susceptible to any number of complications.

Compared to the stress of our flights, the taxi ride was a scenic tour. While Trivandrum and Cochin are bustling metropolises, the space in between is filled by small, poor communities that blend in with the lush green environment. Occasionally a gaudy house would interrupt the scenery and we would be reminded that modernisation on its way. When Arundhati Roy described Kerala as an "immodest green," she barely did the landscape justice. Fields of palm trees stretched to the ocean, their slender frames reaching up to the sky where coconuts hid in their frondy tops. Trees and birds that were new to me flew past our taxi as we sped towards Trivandrum. The foliage of the forests was so thick that, until we passed over a picturesque bridge, I had no idea we were a mere kilometer from the ocean. The river we passed over was serenely quiet, covered in the simplest fishing skiffs, powered by hand paddle, that the local villagers use to obtain their daily sustenance. To the west the river opened up into an ocean that stretched for eternity.

The roads were quieted by a nationwide petrol strike and we made the journey in four hours. Kerala, the state of unions and organized labor, was making itself clearer to us on our first day in India. The roads were nearly empty. At first we didn't understand the effect this strike had on the traffic, but in the days that followed it would become clear that the relatively open roads were not the norm. Traffic in India seemed to be a constant pile-up of diesel fumes, buses, and rickshaws, where lanes are merely a suggestion and over-aggressive driving is the norm.

We were lucky. The strike made the drive a painless four hours. Taj had warned us that it could take as long as six, depending on the traffic, and yet our taxi drivers got us there with speed and ease. As the day's heat escalated, we pulled into the Hotel Pankaj's tiny dirt parking lot, said our goodbyes to Taj, and our hellos to the beginning of our journey. The glimpse of Kerala we had been afforded had been enough that we all wanted to dig deeper, and dig we shall.