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Made up of over 900 km
of inter-connected waterways, rivers, lakes and inlets, the backwaters
of Kerala offer a perfect blend of beauty and tranquillity,
Drifting on the backwaters is a very special experience. So are the backwaters: slow, flowing, jade-green, webs of rivers and canals`85 most of them winding between banks of overhanging, whispering palms `85 lakes and estuaries. They have given us some of the most effortless, leisurely holidays we have ever experienced. All this in our own houseboats, with our personal, on-board chefs, guides and boatmen, to cosset us as we cruised through a water-world which is unique to God’s Own Country. These backwater-floating homes have been built on rice boats that once carried huge cargoes of golden paddy from the fields to the ports. Most of these floating homes have a bedroom with an attached shower and loo, a kitchen at the back, and a private deck in front where we can dine, relax, and watch life on the backwaters magically unreel past. Unexpectedly, a skiff materialises out of the banks, paddled alongside, offers us fish: hopping fresh. "Karimeen" says the fisherman, "Pearl-spot. Caught just now only, by using toes!" We had seen his wife, immersed in the canal up to her neck, a terracotta-pot floating beside her a little while ago. When her toes located a Pearl-spot, hiding in the mud, she bobbed under the surface, grabbed it, emerged, and popped it wriggling into the pot. Our chef served it fried, with onion rings and tomatoes, along with parboiled rice with all nutrients locked in; and olen which is a coconut-milk curry with ash-gourd and beans; also avial, a dry-vegetable delicacy with diced jack-fruit seeds, banana, drumstick, green mango, grated coconut and yoghurt; and assorted other delectable viands, including a juicy pineapple. The best houseboat meals are seafood-based with the tangy taste of coconuts, but Kerala does have a strong vegetarian tradition with its pancake-like uttapams, its steamed idlis, its lacy appams with vegetable stew, and its substantial dosas. As the post-lunch drowsiness sets in, we glimpse the original mat-roofed rice boats being poled past. Before backwater houseboats were created, affluent old families often left their mansions in summer to take extended cruises in such rice boats, opting for daylong picnics on the cool backwaters. Like them, we unwind and drowse the afternoon away. When we awake, the low sun gentles on one of the great backwater lakes. Three patch-sailed boats stream past in a brisk wind that backcombs the heads of the palms on the far bank. The boats carries white piles of shells harvested from the bottom of the lake, destined to be baked and converted into lime for the building boom of Kerala. White egrets fly past on gold-tinted wings, heading for their roosting trees after a day on the flooded fields. A church bell tolls the angelus, from a temple comes the repetitive gongs of an early aarti, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, a mellifluous Marxist anthem flows over the backwaters. The four faiths of Kerala orchestrate in apolitical harmony. We stop, tie up to a coconut tree, step onto the banks, and visit one of the small riverine communities. They are building a boat, using techniques that were honed long before St Thomas brought Christianity to these lands: more than 14 centuries before the Portuguese, Dutch, British and French established their trading forts in India. And then fled in the evening of their empires. Sunset is a dramatically unwinding time on the backwaters. Kerala has the most spectacular sunsets we have seen anywhere. Sometimes the whole sky seems plated with gold, at other times it is as livid as the oleographs that barber shops once carried. Then, if clouds have built up in the dusk-softened sky, it seems as if one is sailing in a great armada of white galleons across a high ocean smeared with vermilion dust. And when a flight of ducks wings across such a sky we recall the legend of a seer, who had an ecstatic seizure when he saw a similar vision. Twilight is a hiccough between sunset and night. At one moment the sky is ablaze with light; at the next, bright stars have thrust silver lances into the black waters; frogs have begun to sing their grating, clacking, croaking chorus; and the put-put of our outboard motor has slowed to a gentle throb as the boatman tries to find a suitable landing to berth and rest. The boat nudges into the soft mud of the banks, squelches contentedly, and settles down. Our air-conditioner hums to itself. Fireflies dance through the dark, somewhere a man plays a lonely flute, golden lamps in the huts flicker out, jasmine-scented darkness cushions the houseboat. And, all through the night, the houseboat rocks, creaking softly, like a cradle in the deep. There is nothing more refreshing than sleep in your own, private, floating home, on the backwaters.
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