in the middle of may or was it june last year, when a good friend and his wife invited us to their daughter’s wedding in kerala in december, and i said, yes, would love to come, i was fully prepared for an enchanting time in the deep green southern state which has an even deeper affair with red. today, the only state in the country with a communist government. i would be passing through bengaluru. when i lived there, it…
i don’t think the “god’s own country” campaign had started when i first went to kerala. it was in the summer of ’89, my first trip to south india; first bangalore, then cochin. i had no idea what to expect, but a malayalee friend would always speak of the different green of his state. his voice would definitely reflect a funny kind of pride when he mentioned that. being from bengal, another “green” state, with poets and lyricists devoting many…
by the time they drove up to the plantation it was almost seven in the evening and the sun had set. the journey had been long and sunita was very tired, beside feeling a little cut off from it all, bereft. everybody had spoken a lot at the airport, her mother was the only one who hadn’t come to see them off. she was distraught, and had been breaking into bouts of weeping since the previous evening. this was the…