Kerala Diary: A Red Sunset at Calicut

A Red Sunset

Dog bites man is not news, they say. Man bites dog is. Flights taking off late isn’t news anymore. But flights taking off on time should hit the headlines because it happens as rarely as man bites dog. My flight from Delhi to Calicut, with a short layover at Hyderabad, was three hours late. It was drizzling in Delhi that morning. The airline, let’s just call it XYZ, informed us passengers that the plane, which was supposed to whisk us away to Hyderabad—the new promised land for India’s IT brigade—would take off in a while. God-fearing passengers were spotted praying in the aisles. Begging for divine intervention to speed things up. Raindrops slid down the windowpanes like tears. I watched the drizzle turn into a deluge.

Hyderabad was grey and rain-soaked too, but the airport was less crowded than Delhi’s. Lines were shorter. People, less harried. I headed to the boarding gate, and my phone beeped. ‘It’s pouring in Calicut, ’ texted one of my cousins. No surprises there! You can be sure about three things in life: death, taxes, and Kerala rains. The woman seated on my right in the boarding area sighed—the trademark sigh of an exasperated passenger. The pony-tailed boy seated on my left—dressed in a Lost T-shirt and baggy pants—looked like he was planning revenge on someone, probably the airline.

The woman on my right sighed again.

“Do you live in Hyderabad?” I asked.

She nodded, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“You like it here?”

“Yes,” she cracked a smiled and told me her name. “We have clean air, clean water. Good roads”

Being a Delhi resident, my mind boggles when I hear about cities with breathable air and motorable roads. I let Asha talk more.

“I moved to Hyderabad two years ago after my marriage,” she said. “My husband works in an IT company here.” She was off to Calicut to visit her parents. In a week’s time, she would fly back to Hyderabad, which she calls home now.

While Asha was talking, news alerts about Communist stalwart and former Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s death flashed on my phone. Obituaries flooded the internet. Loyal friends and followers (of which he had plenty) and foes (of which he had plenty, too) shared their reminiscences.

“V.S. died?” Asha asked, leaning closer to peer at my phone. Both of us fell silent. We mourned him quietly as though a common friend had exited the world. I imagine that regardless of political leanings, regardless of which city they had migrated to or what airport they were stranded at, Malayalees everywhere made a note of his absence that day. V.S. was a legend in Kerala’s political landscape, a mass leader whose aura even death can’t dim.

City of Spices

Calicut, the city of spices, is sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats. Vasco da Gama landed at Kappad Beach, about a forty-minute drive from Calicut, in May 1498. That, as is well-known, opened a brand-new sea route from Europe to India, setting the European trade and colonisation machine in motion. Kappad is a popular tourist haunt. A pillar erected to mark Vasco’s arrival stands there like history’s sentinel. Hotels and Airbnbs, clustered around the beach, cater to the tourist crowd. There is a Vasco da Gama Resort and Spa, perched on a hillock which overlooks the glistening sea. It serves an OK seafood buffet and endless varieties of booze.

Speaking of booze, my uncle, who has lived all his life in Calicut and shares a bittersweet bond with the place, complains that jobs are scarce in Kerala. “But you’ll be sure to find a liquor store at every corner,” he says. Alcoholics rejoice. But job-hunters, for apparent reasons, migrate to other cities, other continents. My uncle’s son-in-law, a Malayalee banker brought up in Chennai, works in the UK. Hearing him and his wife, my cousin, speak in English to their school-going kids, my mother rolls her eyes. The kids talk to Queen’s English, and maintain a stiff upper lip when my mother suggests they try talking in Malayalam. The language feels foreign to them. The words were too unwieldy for their immigrant tongues.

The local newspapers are crammed with remembrances of V.S. Even right-wing mouthpieces devote their front pages to the departed leader. ‘Farewell, Revolution’s Glorious Son’, says a headline. Television channels broadcast visuals of his funeral procession, the streets overflowing with mourners, the streets turning into a sea of red.

My flight back to Delhi from Calicut, with a layover at Mumbai, is an hour late. Mumbai shimmers like a mirage when the plane touches down. The rain keeps falling, its cadence the same as at Calicut.

Vineetha Mokkil is associate editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories