Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
Chasing the fragrance
|
Writer ANEES JUNG, on a recent visit to Kochi, gets nostalgic about an era gone by.
|
IT SEEMS as if all that we once lived for is for sale. Fort Kochi 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 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 shopkeepers whose shacks 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. Every other colonial house is now a heritage hotel. What once were proud homes for a few are now open to any who can pay a price for a taste of the past, however distant.
I step gingerly into The Old Courtyard, once the house of a Jewish family whose name no one knows. 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 colour nor bouquet. But the price of a continental breakfast in this heritage house is only Rs 50! 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.
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 an green cover, grey-blue views of the sea beyond the dining room and every room looking 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. A whiff of jasmines stops me at the entrance. On a small reed tray I see small garlands strung with white jasmines, two bright marigolds at the two ends. I receive one and leave.
In my fist I try to clutch the fragrance of a past that I know cannot be held, only briefly sensed.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
|
