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City lights charm rural hearts
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Among the tourists from alien lands was this group from rural Palakkad, come to see the city. PRIYADARSSHINI SHARMA joins the excited women.
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Susanne with Asha, Ajitha, Neethu, Chandrika, Indira, Kurumba and Nili at Mattancherry, with some of their family members.
THEY WERE like Alice in Wonderland. These rural women from a farm in Palakkad had never quite seen or heard anything like this before. And Kochi's sounds and sights, heat and dust, trains and planes, ships and shows left them wide eyed. Living and working on the farm of Susanne and Rafi, somewhere between the blue Nilgiris and the Annamalais to the East, between the sea and the mountains were Asha, Ajitha, Neethu, Chandrika, Indira, Kurumba and Nili on a sightseeing trip to Kochi.
Annual affair
"Once a year we undertake a one-day trip together to any destination we agree upon. This year we decided to come to Kochi. It's a place that my family visits regularly as we have friends here. The girls had heard a lot of stories about Kochi. They are women who have never travelled further than the next town a few times in their life. Their main aim was to see the airport, where we went, but it was disillusioning as there were no planes rushing in and out. So the highlights of the trip was the ferry boat from Ernakulam to Fort Kochi. The big ships from all over the world, the many foreigners and their different dressing. The Dutch Palace was a wonderful experience. To see how the rulers lived, to imagine the world how it was, to remember what were the customs of that time, to see the big murals in which all details of the well-known stories could be found, to see that in old times the moral codes were not so puritanical as they are now (the erotic murals in the basement). They observed and understood," says Susanne who brought her farmhands on a visit to the city.
`Bus on water'
Chandrika and Ajitha couldn't stop giggling, seeing the outfit worn by the foreigners. And for 60-year-old Nili, the ferryboat was like, " a bus on water." "I can spend the whole day moving on this bus on water," she said.
Susanne is a German, married to a Malayali, Rafi, whom she met here in Kerala when she was here for a two years to study Carnatic vocal and to prepare for her thesis in fine arts. That was 18 years ago. "I am an artist (painter) . My husband is a businessman and son Harith goes to a local government school," she says of her family.
For Susanne settling down in Kerala has been more a stroke of destiny than choice but she has no regrets.
"The reason I don't want it differently now is it would be terrible for me to return to Germany. For me it's a dream that came true. To live near to nature, to work with the soil, the plants, the animals. To learn by observance, through literature and guided by my helpers in the farm who still carry the old knowledge within them. I love to follow the seasons of a year, study the patterns of the weather, the behaviour of the plants and animals. We have a lot of animals ourselves, hens and dogs and cats, guinea pigs and a pony and I welcome the wild peacocks, the jackals, the snakes, the porcupines, the kahde kohri, the forest cat. A part of the farm is rubber plantation, but I let things grow and slowly the old forest trees are emerging and taking over. We have bananas, mango, coconut, areca, sapota, vegetables ... whatever grows. We use no chemicals on our plot, make rainwater harvesting and have no more water problems in our otherwise dry proclaimed area."
Staff
And of her staff whom she treated with a visit to Kochi?
" Yes. As I have a farm and a big house. I need help and I recruited some women from the neighbourhood who form a permanent basic staff to run the place. I don't like to see them as my servants. They don't need to serve me, they work for me and with me. They have responsibilities, but also freedom. They work in a team without any hierarchy and we are all happy together. Our house is an open house without locked doors and locked almirahs, always full of the children of the neighbourhood. This is also a dream: To make a house a place of trust, seriousness, happiness, with less envy, arrogance, ignorance, involving all equally. So these women you see are of all ages, the youngest 17, the eldest around 60, and they share the work, the responsibilities, their problems and sorrows, their happiness and they take care that this place is run smoothly. For me they are an unlimited source of knowledge and insight, and I try to give them more knowledge about what I know."
And so for Susanne's big happy family, as they savoured the Kochi humdrum, it was a souvenir on the roadside, a simple wooden bangle ten times the price of what they can get at the local pooram that made these village belles ask in rural simplicity, "How can people here live with these prices around?"
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