The Billionaire’s Sleep

Well. It’s been 5 days of sitting happily writing, reading and eating. Kerala is “god’s own” apparently. A title Aotearoa might also claim, but NZ doesn’t have enough coconut trees. Spent the first day watching a festival at the Sree Krishna Swamy temple in Ambalapuzha watching elephants parade and warriors dance. I made friends with the local drunk and a sahdu who explained what was going on. An interesting combination. The sahdu had the disconcerting habit of referring to the group of warriors as “I” and their opponents as “you”. So lines like “I will kill you now” had me thinking “oh”.

The following day was St Joseph’s Feast. So I walked down to Karumady Church and ate my share of the feast. Apparently they fed 35,000 people during the day. It was a pretty well run kitchen. The rice bowl was a metre and a half across. It was country style Keralan cuisine. If you hadn’t finished your main they just plonked your dessert on top of your rice.

I also got to paddle around in a canoe. Travelling through the myriad of canals and creeks that link the backwaters together. Watching rice being harvested, thousands of ducks being herded (a specialist art that involves lumps of mud being thrown at them until they swim in the right direction) and clothes, dishes and selves being washed.

We visited the ’snake boat’ which is raced every August. It looked just like a waka. When I got excited about this (it even sits in a wharewaka just like Aotearoa) Benny (who did most of the paddling) also got excited and asked me to send him a photo of a waka with full complement of crew.

The canoe before Benny cleaned it.

The view from the back porch.

It’s not often you walk into a protest that looks like this. The government has approved raising the height of the Narmada dam which will flood their homes. They have been forcibly moved once (when the dam was first built) and are not happy about more of their traditional land disappearing under water. It was a pretty powerful protest to watch proceeding down crowded Mumbai roads. Lots of honking and angry shouts from taxi drivers, but there wasn’t going to be trouble. You’ll notice some of the protesters are carrying some pretty mean weapons.

The most touching moment (occuring in a language I don’t understand but there could be no doubt what was being said) was when one of the elders held up two gourds (which are meant to be strapped to the performers crotches) and yelled (my translation) “hey, who’s forgotten their penises!”.