Crossing boundaries
Chasing the fragrance 
Anees Jung

They do not look like fishermen's nets but sculptures of Alexander Calder moving soundlessly.

IT seems as if all that we once lived is for sale. Fort Cochin is one more example. Twenty years ago I was a guest in Tower House, one of the Dutch colonial houses whose windows opened out to the Arabian sea and the Chinese nets. They did not seem to me like fishermen's nets but sculptures of Alexander Calder moving so soundlessly. They still do, forlorn though in the noise of the buyers and the shop keepers whose shacks have begun to line the shore. My friends no longer live in the Tower House. The house now awaits another kind of dream merchant who will turn it into a home for strangers.

What once were proud homes for a few are now open to any who can pay a price for a taste of the good past. I ride past the house and the one next to it on whose lawn-patched courtyard I had watched a white-haired matriarch in a crisp white sari marching up and down with a stick in her hand in the manner of a general. I had marvelled at her gait and presence.

Could she possibly be a descendent of Strirajya, a kingdom of women mentioned in Chinese documents of a thousand years ago? Could this kingdom have been Kerala where existed the matrilineal system with the mother counted as supreme? Nowhere do I see the likes of that matriarch in the old streets of Fort Cochin where every other mansion, once a home, is now a heritage hotel.

I step gingerly into The Old Courtyard, the house of a Jewish family a hundred years ago. No one knows their name, even those who have begun to work in its premises. Breakfast is being served in the courtyard generously shaded by an old mango tree. White couples sit at small tables reverently eating pieces of papaya and sipping Nilgiri tea being served in white tea pots. A touch of old times? The papaya has yet to ripen, the tea has neither color nor bouquet. But the price of a continental breakfast in this heritage house is only fifty rupees! One is not paying for what one eats but for the intimacy of the courtyard, the shade of the old mango tree and the silence broken only by the crows flying free.

More massive is the banyan in Brunton Dockyard. Like a sentinel it stands in the widest of green courtyards oblivious to the wide-eyed gaze of those who stand and stare in the circling windows. Every room looks into the courtyard, the way it did in the traditional tharawad where lived perhaps one family. In the manner of an intruder, I walk around the courtyard nibbling at memories not mine. There is more of the past to taste here—a tea lounge where hang the old punkahs with no one to work them; an impressive billiard table hidden under a green cover,blue-grey views of the sea, ships passing loaded perhaps by things other than spices—pepper, cloves, cardamom from towns with musical names—Quilon, Cranganore, Allepey, Calicut where came merchants and traders from across the sea in days as far back as Marco Polo and King Solomon.

Their names ring with memories that no longer connect with the realities that now glare. A whiff of jasmines floats through the long corridors and stops my step. On a small reed tray I see small garlands strung meticulously with white jasmines, two bright marigolds at the two ends. In a manner of offering I receive one and leave holding the fragrance of a past that I know cannot be held, only briefly sensed.

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