Do you love to breathe smoke and dust? Or listen to honking cars? Do you admire the concrete jungle around you? City life can be exhausting. Your soul aches for a bit of green, for the sounds of nature and fresh air. And while resorts are nice, you are hungry for something more, a new pastoral experience or maybe life at a languid pace.
It’s when this hunger overcame me that I took up a friend’s offer and spent some time in a Kerala homestay.It’s easy enough to find green in tropical Kerala. With the warmth of the luxurious rain, the forest is always hovering and ready to conquer the homestead. We were staying with a family in a rural area of Thrissur – the district known for the 215 year old ‘Thrissur pooram’ festival. We arrived into a nature lover’s paradise. The only sounds we could hear were the swishing of coconut leaves, bird calls, crows cawing and the twittering of palm squirrels fighting over some fruit. The homestead looked over the family’s paddy field and for a while, we just stood there, our eyes drinking in the bright green spread before us. After a nice strong tea served with delicious ‘pazham pori’ (sweet ripe plantain fritters), we headed out with our host to the orchard behind the house.
The small piece of land was packed. All around were coconuts mangoes, bananas jackfruits and cashews. Lovingly entwined on these grew black pepper vines. We walked through the orchard picking coconuts. We even found some cashews that our host’s wife heated for us on a traditional ‘aduppu’ (wood-burning stove). We rubbed the burnt and cracked skin away to eat the delicious nut. The coconuts were dehusked, cracked open and the white meat scraped out and blended in some mouth-watering vegetable curries. Most curry ingredients grew right outside. We both tried jabbing the coconut on to the knife end of the dehusker and levering the husk open. I think we got it right after a couple of tries!
Five monstrous green prickly ripe jackfruits were brought in later and cut open. Our hosts regaled us with stories as we sat in a circle and separated the plump, yellow flesh from the seeds. The flesh was gathered in an enormous flat bronze utensil (‘uruli’) and stirred with an oar-like spoon with melted jaggery over the ‘aduppu’ till it reduced to a yummy jam. The seeds were cooked into curries. Nothing was wasted.
After a scrumptious meal of rice, curries, pickle and crispy papadum on the banana leaves platters, I rested under the mosquito netting, tired but incredibly happy. Listening to the paddy frogs, I felt in complete harmony with nature.