We and the village

We went, my brother and I, cycling on a narrow half-dirt road past the small grouped settlements that I guess you would call villages, here. We'd gotten our bikes at the gate of the resort, a pair of large wooden doors set in concrete walls that generally kept us in and the villages out during our stay, now coming to a close. The resort was something else, and I can't describe it without sounding admiring, which I'm not, or ungrateful, which I hope not to be. But for now it might do to think about countless staff in gleaming white shirts (so white, nothing in India is so white) serving Indians in real-not-knock-off-Gucci and Germans on yoga holiday. And me, of course, and my family.

I'd often wondered what people meant by villages in India. My only reference point was the small rural idyll terrorized by bandits in the movie Sholay, itself based on Sergio Leone's westerns, so that the place looked more Dakotaish than Desi. In Westchester, where I mostly grew up, there are towns and there are villages, though the distinction between the two seems partly size and partly real estate marketing. Mostly the latter.

In India the people I know who come from the villages are drivers and cooks, and I can't say, unfortunately, that I know them well.

We passed through the villages just before noon on a Sunday, when the children were out in their yards and many people were walking on the narrow road with nowhere, it seemed, to be. Some carried things hither and yon, women with large bundles on their heads. Children yelled in English as we passed, "Good morning, what is your name?" and repeated my reply, and told me theirs when I asked. There was washing by a small creek.

The houses were not all of one type, but ran from the ramshackle thin-walled tin-roofed through to sturdy multi-story and solidly middle class. I took no pictures of them. Already the cultural imperialism of the voyeurism of the expedition bothered me.

I did photograph this small place to gather and pray, though. The population of Kerala is about 20% Christian, tracing back to 52AD when Thomas the Apostle is held to have come a-calling. The churches I have seen here are beautifully colored, blue and yellow cropping up in the deep green jungle. This building, not a church, but a strange little site to show and sustain devotion, stands against the lake, which perhaps you can see. To me it seems (and this is strange, go figure) like a ruin-in-waiting, for anthropologists of the future to photograph, study, analyze and puzzle over after we are gone.

The state motto for Kerala, omnipresent as you drive through downtown Kochi, is "God's own country."