Dispatch from Kochi

There are no doors. Or, none that are closed.

It is evening when we make our way to Fort Kochi, the oldest European settlement in India, as the guidebooks say. Our hotel, just at the curve of Napier Road, is a stately colonial building that’s crumbling around the edges. It has suspect plumbing and perhaps, a spirit or two lurking in its cavernous hold. I never see anyone. Guests magically appear for breakfast, and then disappear without a trace, melting into its corridors.

That afternoon, I lean out of the first floor window. Its white slats sit in an orderly row, one after another, stretching across the façade of the building. The windows are always open. Right in front of our hotel is a sea food restaurant that’s rated extremely high on a food portal, but has a lingering odour of a disinfectant. The district has many, many boarding houses, some flophouses, others gentrified auberges, with a fresh coat of whitewash slapped on their thick walls, just in time for the tourist season.

Tourism has stemmed Fort Kochi’s decay. Many colonial structures have been converted into home stays and boutique hotels. There are around 300 lodgings, says Nawaz, our transporter-cum-guide-cum-gps, a figure he tosses carelessly. I swallow this figure with a pinch of pepper.

We are lurching towards Aspinwall, the onetime business premise of English trader John H Aspinwall, who traded in all sorts of produce that excite me: coconut oil, pepper, timber, lemon grass oil, ginger, turmeric, spices, hides and later, coir, coffee, tea and rubber. Aspinwall is the beating heart of the contemporary art-focused Kochi Muziris Biennale.

The Biennale has single-handedly nudged the city into global prominence. Since its inception, the platform has initiated a deep conversation among the artists, curators and the public. Art, which for long has confuddled us mercilessly since eons is stripped of its self-importance here. “It’s a conversation,” as Bose Krishnamachari, the Co-Founder and President of the Foundation says, addressing a gaggle of wide-eyed architecture students at the venue.

It is my first visit there. I go without expectations and a mandatory Google search.

This edition’s curator, Sudarshan Shetty’s theme “Forming in the Pupil of an eye” has been inspired from the Rig Veda. When a sage opens his eyes to the world, he assimilates all its multiplicities—a two way simulation—both internal and external.

I am not disappointed. There is a tacit understanding between the art works and the space they occupy. Each venue is a raw, untouched shell, in which the works of art have been retro-fitted. Each exposed brick, each decaying wall and each fading doorway stands proud. ‘In-situ” as the Latin phrase goes; a coherent melange if you will.

Scale lies at the center of this Biennale. There are nearly 100 artists on display, 12 venues and nearly two dozen collateral venues. It is hard to keep up. I wander from one installation to another. I miss some entirely; I linger around others far longer than I should. Even this is not enough.

It seems that the Europeans never left Fort Kochi. At breakfast we have a companion, from further ashore. She’s left her home in the East Village to spend a month at an obscure hospital she Googled off the internet, in Varkala, for Panchakarma. She has the bluest eyes I have ever seen, and a deeper love for cotton clothes. On her last visit, she couriered a coffin-sized container of clothes back home.

Everyone at the table is discussing politics. I am bored. Our guest says she’s lucky she received a six-month long visa. Would I leave Gramercy Park to deal with dodgy colonial plumbing for weeks at a stretch? The topic of discussion has shifted to dysfunctional geysers and cold water baths on humid spring days. I watch a bee buzz around a lush hibiscus bush. I can already feel the mugginess squeezing my lungs. The waiter is nowhere to be seen. Nothing moves. For the first time in months, I can feel my heartbeat. Perhaps Varkala isn’t such a bad idea.

Apart from the art and food, there is little else to do.

I could spend the rest of my days around Parade Ground, a four acre stretch of land off the lane behind our hotel. I could live in an imagined tree house in one of the 200-year-old rain trees that smudge Fort Kochi. They soar skywards with much fierceness, as if each branch carries secret little notes to the heavens.

Everything that my heart desires lies around this park.

Over the centuries, Parade Ground became accustomed to much posturing. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British colonists conducted their military parades and drills on these stomping maidans. Now children play with wild abandon, their wanton screams filling the sky—such unbecoming and undecorous behaviour that I just smile.

At night, every lane framing Parade Square looks the same. Without a torch, the park is a four-sided riddle to navigate through. On the first night I see a couple gasping directions into the phone to a ghostly clunker on the other side whose GPS was unable to decipher this four-sided labyrinth. On the second night, we bumped into a lady wandering on the road, who claimed her hotel had vanished from the map.

I don’t blame them.

Standing at one of the square’s esteemed resident, David Hall that was built in 1695 by the Dutch East India Company, I looked across the park, straight at its architectural doppelganger that was staring right back at me.

David Hall has been most notably associated with a Dutch Commander with a delicious name, Hendrik Adriaan van Reed tot Drakeston. This gentleman penned an enviable tome on Kerala’s flora, Hortus Malabaricus. David Hall is my favourite building on the square, followed by its colonial neighbour, the genteel Cochin Club. The Hall now is run as a gallery and a cafe by environmentally sensitive hospitality brand CGH Earth and the venue serves as a collateral venue for the Biennale.

The cafe, much to the delight of its former Dutch inhabitant, has a wall of herbs—aromatic oregano and sage and more, a swing and a Nicobar pop-up store. Getting up after a meal of wood-fired, freshly rolled out pizza and nutella pancakes was a feat of artistry in itself.

The first night we wander past the shops and a few galleries, halting for dinner at the stunning Malabar House. Without a reservation, we managed to get a table right next to the speakers in the open courtyard. A musical ensemble started to play at 8pm. We have a forgettable meal on an unforgettable night. Bottles of wine float around as does the heavy perfume of soot from the stone diyas.

The next day we go to the promenade curling around the beach and walk on the promontory jutting into the sea for a mandatory selfie. The sea spray splutters on my face. Families jostle buying tempting sticks of Lazza icecream from colourful pushcarts. The sun beats down mercilessly on this port city. It has blackened my limbs and arms to a deep nut brown. It then sighs and sinks like a yolk in the blue water.

There is openness in Fort Kochi that I am unaccustomed to. There are no doors. Or none that are shut. There is no phone in our room. The manager shrugs when I ask. Each time I need something I have to go one floor down. Then I discover my voice. I go to the landing and call out loudly instead. I holler at my companions dawdling on the road from the open white-slatted windows. I sing on the beach. I even forget that I am carrying a phone.

Everyone smiles here. Big toothy grins showing big white teeth. There are no strangers.

I don’t walk with eyes focused straight ahead in a death stare, trying to avoid eye contact. I don’t drape my bosom with my arms or swaddle myself in a confounded stole. I discard the pants for shorts. I slather on odomos and slap on some mosquito patches.

It is liberating, walking down the street, fearless.

It is time to leave. The mother has been investigating Muziris over the past few days. The fabled port city lay at the heart of the spice route, but fell off the grid nearly 3,000 years ago. She asks a lady managing a bookstore what Muziris is. “It’s the court building,” she replies vaguely. Nawaz is better informed. “It is an old port city,” he says, and elaborates no further.

What is this wondrous mythical land with churches and synagogues, decrepit warehouses and shuddering Chinese nets? Where art is splayed on the walls, on the ceilings and even in the soil, hollowed out and refilled?

If this is not a storied seaport of one’s dreams, then, nothing is.