At Leisure in Kochi

Under Lee's expert direction – or so the picture makes it appear – five of our group strained to raise the nets out of the Arabian Sea. The fishermen who do this for a living raise and lower these immense nets – called “Chinese Nets” locally because of their origin in that far off land centuries ago – some 450 times a day!

We performed the joint operation involved only once and netted only a single fish, not much to show for the amount o human effort involved.

Our stop here along the shore of the harbor in Kochi (also known as “Cochin”) was the first of four for the day, a relatively relaxing one compared to our usual schedule.

The others were at an Anglican church, St. Francis, the original burial site of Vasco De Gama; a Catholic basilica, Santa Cruz Cathedral; the Jewish Paradesi Synagogue; and Mattancherry Palace, also known as the “Dutch Palace”, a gift to the local maharaja originally by the Portuguese and later (following an extensive renovation) by the Dutch. All this is indicative of the multiplicity of cultures contributing to local life in Kerala.

There followed some actual free time, devoted to lunch and to some rewarding shopping in the local Jewtown shops (not a politically correct appellation but historically correct and preferred by the fourteen remaining Jewish residents of the area).

Lee was especially pleased to find a copy of Manu Joseph's Serious Men in a local bookstore; the author had just today been announced as the recipient of The Hindu (“India's National Newspaper Since 1878”) Best Fiction Award for 2010 for this, his first novel. That find took some doing since he didn't remember either the author's name nor that of the book's title and had to look through lots of possibilities before hitting on the correct one, all with the help of the bookstore clerk anxious to make a sale!

This evening Heidi's off to see a Kathakali performance. Lee's staying behind, totally caught up in Joseph's novel – and, of course, in keeping this blog up to date.