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Hunting for ‘Raj’ roots
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Karen Shaw is looking for the Fort Cochin she knew as a child. Showing Priyadershini S. the sepia tinted photos of the 40s and 50s, she tells her the place has changed little
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Photo: Priyadershini S.
Flashback Karen and Gerry Shaw, above, with photos from the album of JK Hopkins, former Chairman and GM, Aspinwall Co. From top, left, clockwise, a view of the present Princess Street ( juxtaposed with the view from the same angle, in the fifties. St. Francis Church, Aspinwall co. and yard, and the Cochin Club from the sea front
The year India got freedom Karen Taylor, now Shaw, was born to Edward Hugh Taylor (Jimmy) and Mabel Taylor (Joey), at Neyyar. Karen’s father was manager of Bonacad tea estate. Sixty years later, Karen Shaw is back, clutching precious, sepia-ti
nted photographs of Fort Cochin of the 40s and 50s. She is literally walking down memory lane looking for those familiar sights she enjoyed as a young girl. “Fort Cochin is all too memorable to me as we were down here very often at my aunt’s place. My aunt, father’s sister, Bess was married to Jack Kempson Hopkins, chairman and GM of Aspinwall and Co. Limited, Cochin. My uncle and aunt were married at the St. Francis church. We, my husband Gerry and me, went through the marriage register and have taken a copy of the marriage certificate.”
Poring over the old but well preserved photos, in laminated covers, Karen speaks with excitement and emotion. “Here we are in the garden of my aunt’s bungalow. Here’s my ‘ayah’. Look at the doll pram, how old fashioned! But you know life then was very good.” And that was the early fifties.
“It was in 1956, I think, there was the communist movement. There were agitations on the plantations. Our bungalow was surrounded by agitators. It was quite frightening and it was the turning point for my family. We left for England after that.” But the nine years that Karen and her family were in Kerala, Kochi was the hub of activities. “We were down here for Christmas and I remember Father Christmas coming on a decorated elephant. That was either at the Cochin Club or the Malabar Hotel. As my aunt had no children I was like a daughter to them and was mostly here. I remember Princess Street. It is much the same except that Fort Cochin has become very crowded The Cochin Club was then a sailing club and my uncle a good sailor. His boat was called Kittiwake.”
“Look at St Francis church with awnings in the front. There was no wall around the church then,” says Karen showing an old photograph labelled Protestant Church. The ‘Esplanade’ The Cochin club and Aspinwall building, the yard all come alive in their old glory in the photos that recreate a quiet town by the seaside. More than a village, less than a town, Fort Cochin of Karen’s memories was a colonial old world, where life was slow and good.
Ask Karen about the finer details of her reminiscences and she replies with an apology. “I regret not having asked questions to my parents then. You are not interested when you are young. As you grow old it becomes important to find out about your roots.”
And swept by nostalgia Karen is on the road that takes her far back in time . “I am revisiting where I lived, where I went to school, where I went to in Cochin.” She feels there’s something to India. In the course of recovering from breast cancer she was treated by a healer in Cornwall who is a Sai Baba devotee. “That took me to the ashram in Puttuparthy and then to “snooty Ooty”, where I studied at St. Hilda’s, and now to Kochi.” Chips in Gerry who’s a part of the fascinating re-run of the past, “There have been so many coincidences with us in India that I feel there’s something sublime about the place. We have accidentally met people, out of the blues, who are connected to Karen’s past days.”
And her aunt Bess, Mrs Jack Hopkins, who left Cochin in 1962? “In her last days Aunt Bessy was moved to a nursing home. I put all the artefacts that she treasured and that took her back to the days in Cochin, an Indian chest, inlaid tables and paintings by Paul Raj in her room. That made her happy.”
It’s with satisfaction and joy, Karen relishing every moment of her being in God’s Own Country, a line that her town by the sea Cornwall too claims to be, she says, “we were meant to come on this holiday. It has been a strange and happy homecoming .
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