Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis

Author:Norman Lewis [Lewis, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3334-2
Publisher: Open Road Media

A Goddess Round Every Corner

DAWN SPREADS A GLACIAL calm over the waters of Cochin, and slowly a muted profile of temples, godowns and palms emerges from the mist-bound promontories and islands over which the city is spread. Fishing boats styled in remotest antiquity slide with their patched sails past the Malabar Hotel gardens, as if dragged by ropes across a stage. The thick-leaved trees release their morning crows, and at 7 a.m. on the dot each member of the hotel staff is at his post to greet the passing guest with a sonorous ‘Good morning, sir,’ (or ‘madam’), which sounds like a salutation and blessing combined. The greeting is repeated ad infinitum as often as you pass, until the stroke of midday, when afternoon comes officially into its own.

At eight o’clock a Mr Williams, a guide supplied by a friend, arrives to show me the sights of this most ancient city on India’s south-west coast: a small, dark-skinned man with a beautifully carved face and spiritual expression who, having introduced himself, advises me that he is a Christian, a history graduate, and that he voted for the Congress Party at the recent election. His wife is a Hindu and a supporter of the Communists, who are at present in power in Kerala. ‘She cherishes the belief,’ he says, ‘that Lenin was an incarnation of Vishnu. If such credence is keeping her happy, why should we worry?’

The seeing of sights is unavoidable—a matter of common courtesy as well as of interest. Our tour was to begin with St Francis’s Church, started in 1502, soon after the Portuguese had established a trading station here—the first church to be built in India by Europeans. We set out for it on foot by the road to the Willingdon Island Bridge (which links the island with Mattancheri), and thence to Fort Cochin. In the event it was the experience of this morning walk that counted: the clamour and the colour of the narrow streets; the sight of the morning train from Alleppey shouldering aside the buffaloes and the egrets on the tracks; the field packed with circus elephants; the auto-rickshaws charging through glinting laterite dust; the limbs thrust through the windows of jam-packed buses, the rampaging juggernauts, the suicidal cyclists; the resigned cows locked into the streams of embattled traffic; the crashing outcry from the cinema loudspeakers on every corner. A bus station released a flock of office-bound girls into the street ahead; as they came towards us swathed in their multicoloured saris, their feet, concealed in stirrings of dust, seemed hardly to move. A man hosed down a truck painted all over with tigers. An old election poster depicted the fathers of Marxist socialism sitting garlanded under ceremonial umbrellas. Surely these were the sights I had come to see?

The Church of St Francis came into view in an oasis of space within what must be one of the densest concentrations of humanity on earth. When they took over from the Dutch (who had in

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