It was the day of excellence during the heavy rain on the part of the dentist who drove through the sheets of rain to attend to my teeth.
Tonight would be the last of the observations of the historic event in the lives of the Jewish people, Pesach or the Passover. I will be at the Tower House Historical Hotel.
After such a wonderful, buoyant evening with my good friend Rockey, I slept soundly . So soundly that the manager called to ask at 10 30 am whether I would be coming down for breakfast!
I quickly dressed and presented myself to the empty dining room.
The manager, Mr Ranjit with whom I had discussed the delicious dinner at Appachi resto in Pondicherry had specially prepared a Mint Chutney from the scratch and it tasted delicious. My brother Eliyahu and I are partial to Idlys and once I leave these shore I have no chance until I return to taste these delicacies. Idlys are unknown to the Bangladeshi chef who manage "Indian" restaurants in Miami.
The day was languorous and the sky threatening a downpour. Walking along an empty Princess street, normally where you could find throngs of tourists, i made a mental note of the various closures, some of them permanent and some of them hurting, remembering the multiple pleasures they had given in the past
Deeply hurting was the closure of Idiom bookstore where my friend Elizabeth used to work and I used to visit the bookstore each and every single day, to peruse and surprise myself with some new book, buying them to give away as presents in Siem Reap or Mexico City.
Gone are also the more aggressive Kashmiri merchants trying to force upon the unsuspecting tourists good imported from elsewhere. I am told that it is a situation common in all parts of India where there are tourists.
My friends living here always wonder, why is India which is the most diverse country on earth, with a variation in culture unseen anywhere else in the world, receive less tourists than Thailand or Malaysia , whose population is a fraction of India and the land mass less varied and smaller?
My own assessment is this. India is not an easy country to travel to and while there to explore easily. It is a young people's country. The travel infrastructure and the roads are not comparable to say, Malaysia. While food quality is excellent in India and omnipresent, it is not easily accessible for the tourist as they are in Thailand and Malaysia. India has the advantage of a large chunk of the population speaking English.
For the European tourist who has a limited amount of time, the value for money is less in India than in other South East Asian countries. India does attract the adventurous young and the sophisticated older crowd.
The bureaucracy of the Indian system is legendary. When I began travelling to India on a regular basis, I was told that i have to wait 5 days to get a visa! Lately e-visas and visa on arrivals are being introduced which would make travel into India easier.
The empty streets of Fort Cochin wont be empty for too long. I am sure that when I return (within 100 days) it would be buzzing with activity once again, with more European languages heard in the streets.
There are two small general stores in the Princess street and I was amazed how welcome I felt as the attendants had not changed and they recognize my face and offered a hospitable welcome. Incense, sandalwood soap, cremes, hair oil , of ayurvedic extraction , these are the gifts i take to my friends in the west.
I felt so content sitting in the Vasco da Gama square.
Life with all its difficulties, challenges and conflicts, seemed approachable and solvable and to be dealt with certain dignity.
