A Strip of Land Called Home

by Ira Mukhoty

In the middle of all this water, there are entire villages and towns, extending along narrow strips of land sometimes no more than a few metres across, where people live out their lives to the pace of the ebb and flow of the tides of the Arabian sea.  

The day starts with a dip in the brackish water while the washing, strung out between two palm trees, gently dries in the balmy breeze. Ladies share some morning gossip standing outside their huts in knee deep water while the children behind them march off along the narrow strips of land to the nearest school, white ribbons glinting off swinging dark plaits.  

All around us, canoes slide off carrying fishermen  going to set their lobster pots or women sloping off to visit a neighbouring village. A longer journey requires waiting under a red communist flag for National Waterway Boat number 3.

And the people are not alone. Nature is all around; there are crabs, mudskippers, turtles in the water and a huge variety of birds in the sky and in the trees. A watery ecosystem, harmonious and whole. At dusk, I see an entire tree taken over by a squatter colony of cormorants, their profile indignant and angry against a glowing sky.

I come away after 2 days, having slowed down to the beguiling pace of the Backwaters.  I have got used to judging time by the passage of the sun through a stormy sky. As I step of my very own Ketuvallam and away from Vembanad lake, it is with a sense of loss that I leave behind a strip of land I could call home.