Kerala: An Anthropologist's Dream

Whatever you do, don't step on it. Also, pray for a windless day.

BP's doppelganger left this morning so it was just the four of us for the first half of the day. We made our way back to Kashi Art Cafe for brunch again. It turns out today in Onam, a holiday celebrated in Kerala and the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Onam is a 10-day Hindu festival that has to do with the god Vishnu and some other details I don't fully understand. I can tell you that they make these beautiful floral carpets called an "onapookkalam."

OLD...

After brunch we walked around town for a while. I finally made my way to a church on this trip, the  It was beautiful on the inside, and like... 5,000 years old (historically inaccurately blasphemous? perhaps). Maybe 500 years old.

...REALLY, REALLY OLD.

*Actual motorbike does not
come attached to a car

After the church, as we turned down some random street we saw a huge crowd gathering, and it turns out they were filming a commercial for a motorbike! The dude in the commercial was some famous Bollywood actor I've never heard of and the girl was a runner up in some beauty pageant who is now trying to parlay her good looks and moderate success into an acting career, as one is wont to do when one is that attractive and that moderately successful. People seemed to be really excited about the dude, but to be honest, I felt like the woman was really getting shortchanged in the proportion of attention she was receiving from the crowd. ROR tried to sweet talk one of the crew assistants into telling him where they were getting drinks later in the day, but he got shot down. Womp womp.

These were lined up all along the waterfront

When we want to walk by the waterfront, we saw these HUGE net contraptions they use for fishing. The entire apparatus tilts over to submerge the net, and then they pull it up to catch all the fish.

After our walk, one of the guys and his gf also had to head back home, so it was just ROR and me for the rest of the day. ROR was going to be there another few days, as was I, so it worked out well.

Backwater fish, yum!

Later that day, we went to get Ayurvedic massages. I'd been hearing about these all throughout India. It's supposed to be some ancient massage technique native to Kerala that's just now gaining popularity as an alternative medicine treatment (I'll spare you my rant on alternative medicine), but I figure I'm here, so I might as well try one out. So we walk into the place the Rastafarian-looking dude at the hostel recommended. We're greeted by an old woman who puts a menu of massage options in front of us. We choose the standard 1-hour massage. I've got a show to catch later in the day and there's only one masseur available at the moment [side note: all massages (...legitimate, non-sketchy massages) are same-sex in India] so ROR let's me go first. So I walk into the room. It's hot. There's no ventilation. There's a kind of gross, oily massage table in the middle of a dimly-lit room full of lots of other crap. He hands me what looks like a rolled-up napkin and I'm not really sure why until I unravel it and it vaguely resembles a paper thong because... it is in fact essentially a paper thong. I'm apparently supposed to wear this after I strip off all of my other clothes. So I don the napkin I've been provided and lay down on the table. He then proceeds to douse me in what feels like a gallon of oil. I mean, I am COVERED in a layer oil. The massage itself is painful. Not painful in the "oh man, that was a great massage!" kind of way, but the, "I walked down the wrong alley in Compton and got brutally mugged" kind of way. Afterward, I took a shower and try as I might, I think I only managed to get about 75% of the oil off of me.

Right now my own face is showing a combination
of fear, horror, and morbid curiousity

After my massage, I went to the Cochin Cultural Centre to go see a performance of a traditional art form in Kerala called Kathakali. You may recall that back at the Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon a few weeks ago, I took a picture with a woman (turns out it was probably a man) dressed in this ridiculous costume and attached the caption "...WHAT?!". It turns out I have discovered what "WHAT" is. It's Kathakali. I didn't know anything about this show beside that I've seen signs for it everywhere and ROR has seen one of these shows already and recommended I check it out. So I did. I arrived to an empty theater. On the wall are huge pictures of a woman (...turns out it was probably a man) with various facial expressions, each titled with a different emotion that I assume the face is supposed to be emoting. I sat down, and over the course of the next 15 minutes, another six or so people also come in. Then these two guys come out onto the stage. One is a big, fat dude, and the other a tall, fit guy. I came an hour early because you can watch the actors put on their makeup, which as it turned out was (though painstakingly long) pretty interesting to see. After about 40 minutes of them putting on makeup, their two characters emerged, the fat guy painted with a green face and the skinny guy made up to be a woman with a yellow face. They left the stage and about 20 minutes later the show began.

Before

After

This show is apparently geared toward tourists so it wasn't a traditional Kathakali show. Instead, it began with a short lesson on what Kathakali is. Turns out this was an art form that was developed in the 1600s in Kerala and still survives (barely) through today. The all-male actors don't speak, but rather communicate via incredibly hyperbolic facial expressions and movements. For example, to express a romantic interest in another character, an actor would very rapidly raise and lower his eyebrows. The dude dressed as a woman gave an impressive demonstration. If you tried to raise and lower your eyebrows are fast as you could, you wouldn't even come close to what this guy could do. Human facial muscles shouldn't be able to move this fast. He must be an alien. Another way the actors communicate with the audience is with the help of a drummer, who sets the emotional tone via music throughout the performance.

After the introduction, we were told the storyline of what we were about to see. Something to do with a king falling in love with a demon who was pretending not to be a demon but then the king finds out she's a demon so (spoiler alert!) he kills her. And even though they went through the whole story with us at the beginning, I still had NO CLUE what was going on throughout the 30-minute performance. It's kind of like that first time you went to the opera, but were too lazy to look at the program before the show started and then you realized all too late that everything was being sung... in Italian, and at the end of the show everyone else is like, "wow, that was amazing" and you were like, "what just happened?" ...No, just me?

Not really sure why there are a bunch of faces
of creepy old men lording over these performers

After the show, I went back to the hostel, which was conveniently a five-minute walk away. I didn't see ROR around and I was starving, so I left the hostel to go find some food. On my way out, there were these two Asian girls who definitely assumed I worked for the hostel (which is fair, I'm brown and I'm in a hostel in India) and asked me a question to which I said I don't know but then I asked them about their dinner plans and invited them to have dinner with me. We ate at the restaurant next to the hostel. The girls, HA and JI, were both from South Korea and as it turns out didn't actually know each other until they met a few days ago. They were both pretty shy, but we had a great conversation and out of nowhere about 20 minutes later ROR found us in the restaurant, so he joined us for dinner. Afterward we showed the girls around the waterfront area and happened upon a dance performance that I imagine is Onam-related.

A classy dinner, obviously

We went to one last bar (nautical-themed! and super fancy) for the night before heading back to the hostel. HA and I went for another walk for about an hour before rejoining the other two and calling it a night.

CONTINUE ON to Fort Kochi Part 4: Are You My Ancestor?