Magic of Kochi backwaters, crocodile hunt & bridge-less existence

Writer N S Madhavan said that water, in the form of rivers and lakes and ocean, has a quality that is as mesmerising as mobile phone images. "It has the hypnotism of movement," Madhavan said.

But there the romance ends. "The thing that my friends who lived in islands (in Kochi) feared the most was the bell that marks the departure of the last boat. After the last bell, what is left is a big fear. What if there is a snake bite, what if someone gets a heart attack, what if there is a sudden need to take a pregnant woman to the hospital," Madhavan said while taking part in the session, 'A Crocodile Hunt: Kochi Map Redrawn by the Novel', held as part of Manorama Hortus in Kochi on Thursday.

Therefore, Madhavan said that islanders do not think of an island the way mainlanders do, as a place surrounded by water. "For them it is a bridge-less condition. An existence without connection. Water thus becomes a factor that keeps communities divided," he said.

In 'Litanies of the Dutch Battery', Madhavan's only novel, he describes the heroine Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita Jessica as a "bridgeless islander, disconnected from the mainland".

Bony Thomas, the author of the popular work 'Kochikkar' and the illustrator of Madhavan's 'Litanies of the Dutch Battery', said that it was not just the last boat that left but the first boat that came also aroused fear in islanders. "If it is not on time, we will be late to offices, schools and hospital," Thomas said, an islander himself.

Journalist and author K C Narayanan who moderated the session said that no author had used the lake as the leitmotif in their works as Madhavan had done in works like 'Litanies of the Dutch Battery', 'Bheemachan' and 'Carmen'. While the first two are about the Kochi lake that Madhavan had grown watching, 'Carmen' is based in the backwaters of Venice.

Despite being 'bridge-less' and cut off from the rest of the world, insular is the last thing that an islander is. There is a reason why they are not. "Their lives are linked to their livelihood of fishing. Since they earn a living by selling fish, they are forever open to the world and people across the water barrier," Madhavan said.

Nonetheless, Kochi by its very nature allowed an astounding intermingling of cultures. "It is perhaps the biggest melting pot of cultures in the world," Narayanan said. He said there were 18 human types in Kochi, including Chinese, Jews and Christians. "It has such a large gene pool," he said.

"Though these 18 human types lived together for over 1000 years, they have never fought with each other," Madhavan said. Diverse but one.

Madhavan said that it was this stunning diversity that prompted sociologist Ashis Nandy to come up with his research work 'Alternate Cosmopolitanism of Cochin'. "Nandy saw such cosmopolitanism in an area that cannot be called a big city," Madhavan said.

Madhavan said there was a reason why he wrote the novella 'Bheemachan', about the hunt for a giant saltwater crocodile in the Kochi backwaters. There was a short story, considered the second one in Malayalam, called 'Oru Muthala Nayattu' by C S Gopalapanicker.  "That hunt took place in an area where people are affected neither by crocodiles nor water. So when I read that story I wondered how would a people terrorised by crocodiles and hemmed in by water would approach such a hunt. That was how I got the seed for 'Bheemachan' five years ago," Madhavan said.

At the core of all great literature is the true human condition. But its outward trappings are not to be taken literally. Bony Thomas said that readers were misled by the map of Dutch Battery that he had created for Madhavan's 'Litanies'. "Dutch Battery comes from the imagination of the writer. It is fictional, not real," he said. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo, Narayanan said.