Chapter
SIX
I HAVE SO MANY PHOTOS OF IT. BOUGAINVILLEA DRAPING over walls next to cobbled streets, bougainvillea running wild over the iron railings of restaurants, bougainvillea bonsai in a rock garden. They are hardy, flowering even in near-droughts. They come in an array of lollipop colors, from golden yellow to magenta. They fit into any context, somehow managing to look as if they have always belonged here. Cobbled street in Rome? Sure. Beachside balcony in Miami? Why not. Dusty Delhi road? No problem.
I remember my mental muscles twitching the first time I learned that the papery petals of the bougainvillea are actually not flowers; they are leaves. We lived then in a small house, rented from a family friend. The neighbors on both sides were wealthy and their houses had gardens, and the households had stay-at-home mothers and servants to water the plants. As a result, a luxuriant bough of bougainvillea clambered over one tall wall and spilled over into the yard between our house and their wall. I thought of it as our bougainvillea and felt even then the grace of this plant, climbing over walls, bridging social chasms, bringing its beauty to people who had done nothing to deserve it.
It was my aunt, an agricultural scientist, who told me that the bougainvillea flowers were not flowers. The scientific term is bract—a modified leaf. Bougainvillea bracts come in extraordinary colors, from shades of pink that go from the lightest of blushes to extravagant fuchsias. There are crinkly yellows that remind me of crumpled first drafts and oranges and saffrons and whites, often brilliant against the lush green leafery that surrounds them. “These bracts are actually protecting the real flowers, by pretending to be flowers,” my aunt told me, teasing out the tiny white flower hiding inside a cluster of magenta bracts.
My parents eventually built a house of their own. By the time they finished the house, we children had left home. After years of living in a house that was too small, my parents now live alone in a house that is too big for them. My mother, whose bank-clerk salary was the only source of income for most of our childhood, started gardening, turning her practical maternal attention to green peppers and curry leaves and aloe vera. “I am not interested in flowers,” she would say, frugally choosing “useful plants” to make the most of her small yard. But then the bougainvillea bug bit her. One year when I came home from Brooklyn, there was a row of pots on the wall, with bougainvilleas in different colors spilling out of them. It was my job that summer to water them carefully. Bougainvillea roots are weak—they are climbers, so they have no idea how to support their own weight. What they have instead is a strong grip—using their thorns, they wind their way up or down, finding a home for themselves on hedges, walls, other trees, making themselves both ordinary and spectacular at the same time. They reminded me of the way I, too, was clawing my way up the walls of another country, while my roots shallowed in the ground.
And so I started reading about them. Bougainvilleas are named after the eighteenth-century French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who led a voyage of circumnavigation around the world. His expedition was part of the race between the British and the French to make new discoveries in the South Pacific. Bougainville’s expedition was the first one to include a government-sponsored naturalist on board, Philibert Commerçon.
The expedition arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1767, where Commerçon noticed trees with bright mauve and magenta bracts. He named this new genus Bougainvillea, in honor of the expedition leader. Commerçon is said to have collected at least five specimens of this then-unusual plant in Rio de Janeiro—today these specimens can be seen in various herbariums in France.
But was it really Commerçon who noticed these plants first? Commerçon was not a man in robust health; he would go on to die in Madagascar during the same expedition. On board, he was accompanied by an assistant who also happened to be an expert botanist. There is some speculation that this assistant was his lover, a woman who had disguised herself as a man to fit into the masculine atmosphere of the ship. According to Glynis Ridley’s The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, it was Baret who first noticed and described this plant—and perhaps most of the 6,000-odd natural specimens that the expedition collected, many of these named for Commerçon or Bougainville. In Ridley’s telling, Baret went looking for medicinal plants in the forests of Rio de Janeiro because Commerçon was sick, and she was drawn to the red bracts of the bougainvillea because of the doctrine of signatures, according to which the shapes and colors of plants can reveal their uses.
The very next year, Captain Cook and his Endeavour expedition would arrive in Rio de Janeiro. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on board, and his team were not allowed to disembark by the Portuguese rulers, but according to their diaries, they managed to outwit the sentinels and sneak out at night by boat. The Endeavour returned to London with various plant specimens and the first recorded sketch of a bougainvillea—a finished watercolor that is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum of London.
And thus the bougainvillea was discovered and described and identified. But of course, it was neither Commerçon nor Baret who discovered the bougainvillea. The flower is native to the places we now know as Brazil, Argentina, and Peru.
People of color often use air quotes when we talk of explorers who “discovered” the Americas or India or various Pacific islands. Alas, it is hard to translate air quotes to text. Even when retranslated back as quote marks (see “discovered”), something is missing. My fingers often itch to include the eye-rolling and smirking that we use to accompany air quotes. I propose instead a new word: pseudiscovery. The silent p, I hope, will convey the silence of our air quotes, the people and places who were rendered invisible when Europeans pseudiscovered them.
Today the bougainvillea is the cliché flower you expect to see in cute colonial towns. It is known as Santa Rita in Uruguay, trinitaria in Mexico, jahanamiya in some Arab countries, bunga kertas in Indonesia. I love also all the vernacular variations of bougainvillea, the pronunciations catching the local accents—from bowgainvilla in my own Malayalam to bumbagilia in Spanish. But before the bougainvillea was pseudiscovered and grown in the herbariums of France and propagated in the gardens of England, before it was transplanted into tropical colonies around the world by the British, French, and Portuguese, before it acquired all these different names, it must have had a name. What was the bougainvillea called in Tupi or Guarani or any of the three thousand Indigenous languages that were spoken in Brazil before the colonizers arrived? It must have been called something else. Or rather, it was something else. In other words, the bougainvillea is not a bougainvillea just as its flower is not a flower.
•
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about coming across the word puhpowee, the Anishinabe word for the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. “As a biologist I was stunned that such a word existed,” Kimmerer writes, adding that Western natural science has no such term, no words to hold the mystery of invisible energies. While she admires botany for its “intimate vocabulary that names each little part” of a plant, she is conscious that something is missing when you reduce a creature to its working parts. Kimmerer calls this “a grave loss in translation from the native languages.”
When those seafaring French naturalists aboard the Étoile decided to call this delicate pink flower a bougainvillea and when the “Buginvillea spectabilis” was finally entered into the second volume of the fourth edition of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum in 1799, what was lost was not just the local name of a bract. It was one of countless missed opportunities to counterpoint the Enlightenment view of the world, which European explorers carried around the world as the foundation of knowledge. Perhaps there was a brief moment there when we could have charted a different relationship to nature that might have saved our planet from the environmental blunders that were set in motion with the Industrial Revolution.
It is also worth remembering that the male European dominance over natural history in this particular moment represented a break in another tradition: herbalism. Traditionally, across many cultures, women were the mistresses of the world of herbs and plants. Natural history was mostly a domestic science, used in medicine and cooking. Jeanne Baret’s biographer, Glynis Ridley, speculates that Baret was an herb woman who came into contact with the naturalist Commerçon because she was a source of information for him. But as flora and fauna specimens from Asia and Africa and South America started flowing into Europe through explorations, investors and governments started realizing the extractive potential of these lands. Botany started emerging as a science in the eighteenth century. Men of science began claiming for themselves the role of taxonomers and natural history experts, especially after Carl Linnaeus’s system of classifying plants according to their sexual and reproductive qualities threw the shadow of immodesty over the study of botany. The stakes were suddenly higher, and naturalists, botanists, and illustrators found it much easier to get sponsored by their governments to travel on colonial expeditions.
At the same time, these expeditions were shifting their focus inland. With James Cook mapping the shores of Australia, there were no more new shores to plant the flag on. But there were entire continents, whose hinterlands were rich with natural resources, whose ecosystems needed to be mapped and surveyed and appropriated. The delicate specimens of the bougainvillea that Bougainville’s expedition brought back, which can still be seen today in French herbariums, were part of this effort. Much like the journalists who were embedded with U.S. soldiers during the invasion of Iraq, natural history scholars and scientists who accompanied the explorers disguised their sympathies under the cloak of seeking and classifying and disseminating information.
In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt traces the history of modern travel writing to this particular moment. Unlike the fabulist tales of Marco Polo or the aimless adventures of Ibn Battuta, the travel writing produced in this era by natural historians is very much a surveillance project. Pratt breaks down how this travel writing comes out of a European knowledge-building project that in turn was both tool and disguise for colonial expansion. Natural history asserted the European male’s authority over the planet and his rationalist, extractive understanding of people and places. It deposed a more experiential, community-oriented understanding of nature. It anointed the white male authority figure as the narrator of travel writing. Through its supposedly neutral pursuit of scientific knowledge, natural history managed to reinforce the authority of European surveillance and appropriation of resources.
The insidiousness by which natural history explorations continued the colonial project while setting themselves apart from it reminds me of how in our own times, tourists will often set themselves apart from other tourists by calling themselves travelers. While tourists are derided for their all-too-obvious desires, their kitschy souvenirs and their group tours, travelers are somehow deeper, seekers of more profound experiences. They may take the shape of voluntourists, who are convinced they are making the Third World a better place, or spiritual seekers looking to discover who they are amid the squalor. Increasingly, plain old tourism is being whitewashed and greenwashed into “travel” in the same way that mercantile exploring was reframed as natural history explorations. But these reinventions are still operating within the same voyeuristic paradigms that their predecessors set in place.
We often think of the Grand Tour as the predecessor of modern tourism. Traveling abroad taught young aristocrats how to comport themselves among other aristocrats, how to be rich and noble. For quite a few of those travelers, it was an opportunity to let their eighteenth-century hair down, far away from the stringencies and obligations of home, and perhaps pick up the latest trending venereal disease. Together, these high and low experiences broadened the cultural capital and worldliness of the Grand Tourist. The aspirations of the modern tourist—education and recreation—would seem to be pretty similar, except updated for our more democratic era.
But just as Edward Gibbon, fresh from his own Grand Tour, was sitting down to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Bougainville and Cook were setting out on their circumnavigations with natural historians on board. Two very different kinds of travels: both left their DNA in the tourism that we practice today in the twenty-first century and in how we talk about that tourism. While travel writing about the First World, from New York to Rome, has the same aspirational quality as the Grand Tour, travel writing about the Third World often follows the same paradigms as the natural history explorations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both kinds of travel objectify the places being traveled to, but in predictably different patterns. One is about acquiring cultural education, whether via monuments or slow food; the other is about adventure and pseudiscovery. These are extreme binaries, and of course there are plenty of exceptions that prove the rule. New Orleans is usually written about as an exotic Third World city while Buenos Aires gets patted on the back for being the most European city in Latin America. Istanbul straddles the middle of these binaries, much the same way that it sits geographically.
Taking travel writing to task for the many ways in which it supported the Orientalist project, Edward Said wrote in Orientalism how the genre used its seeming objectivity to create distinctions between the Orient and the Occident, which, in turn, reinforced the logic of imperialist expansion. This is not just the politics of travel writing; it is also its mechanics. Analyzing how white explorers of the eighteenth century created the paradigms of modern travel writing about the Third World, Pratt breaks down what she calls the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” scene. Consider, for instance, the scenes written by British explorers who went looking for the origins of the Nile in the 1860s. The point of such a scene, Pratt writes, was to produce for the home audience the peak moments at which geographical “discoveries” were “won” for England. Here’s Richard Burton pseudiscovering Lake Tanganyika as published in his The Lake Regions of Central Africa:
Nothing, in sooth, could be more picturesque than this first view of the Tanganyika Lake, as it lay in the lap of the mountains, basking in the gorgeous tropical sunshine. Below and beyond a short foreground of rugged and precipitous hill-fold, down which the foot-path zigzags painfully, a narrow strip of emerald green, never sere and marvelously fertile, shelves toward a ribbon of glistening yellow sand, here bordered by sedgy rushes, there cleanly and clearly cut by the breaking wavelets.
And on he goes, in painful, precipitous, glistening detail.
The pseudiscovery of sites such as this involved making one’s way to the region and asking the local inhabitants if they knew of any big lakes, etc., in the area, then hiring them to take you there, whereupon with their guidance and support, you proceeded to pseudiscover what they already knew. In other words, discovery equaled converting local knowledge into European discourse.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European readers had an inexhaustible appetite for travel writing; perhaps they subconsciously understood the political uses of pseudiscovery. To claim by seeing was to claim by owning. What this meant was that the writer often needed to make an event out of a nonevent. The rhetoric of Burton’s writing, inching slowly over the non-scene, glazing it with overwrought emotion, is ideologically astute, making a completely passive encounter into a significant national event (British explorer discovers the source of the Nile!). In order to do this effectively, the landscape must be aestheticized and the explorer positioned as the objective master of this landscape, the monarch of all he surveys.
It may seem from our vantage in the twenty-first century that the travel writer has no other choice than to be a monarch of all they survey. But once we recognize this as a culturally and temporally subjective framing that emerged in the eighteenth century, as a handmaiden to colonial plunder, it becomes possible to see that there are other kinds of travel writing. What if, instead of pretending to be an objective describer of foreign landscapes and peoples, the writer accepted the limitations of their subjectivity? What if the travel writer, instead of aiming for mastery and confidence, acknowledged that travel is a terribly disorienting experience?
This was in fact the narrative stance of many medieval rihlas. Arab travelers of the Middle Ages frequently used the title Book of Wonders for their travelogues, Amitav Ghosh writes in his preface to Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing. This book is a marvelous compendium of place-based stories from the two continents that have been the sites of so many pseudiscoveries. Ghosh writes of how ancient and medieval non-Western travel writers demonstrate a kind of meticulousness in documenting what they see and hear. He credits this to the recognition that as a foreigner in a foreign land, the writer is working beyond the borders of their common sense. Wonder is possible when the witness is willing to acknowledge the limits of their knowingness. Ghosh points out that it is this willingness to be wonderstruck that sets these accounts apart from travel writing of the kind that is guided by notions of “discovery” and “exploration.” Medieval Arab travel writers “do not assume a universal ordering of reality; nor do they arrange their narratives to correspond to teleologies of racial or civilizational progress,” he writes. Where the pseudiscovery tradition of travel writing appropriates travel as a tool for claiming the world imaginatively and politically, in the wonder tradition, travel is a way to test out the limitations of one’s homemade knowledge and selfhood.
Unfortunately, for the most part, contemporary travel writing did not inherit the legacy of wonder. Mary Louise Pratt draws a direct line connecting the cultural script of modern travel writing with the triumphalist narratives of eighteenth-century European natural science writing. The contemporary travel writer is still painting the pseudiscovery scene except “from the balconies of hotels in third world cities,” she says, citing Alberto Moravia standing on a hotel balcony in Accra describing the city as “a huge pan of thick, dark cabbage soup” in which pieces of white pasta are boiling away. Or Paul Theroux, on a hotel balcony in Guatemala City, who sees the city lying on its back, its ugliness ugliest on those streets where its blue volcanoes bulge. The difference from Burton is that both writers are aestheticizing the ugliness of the Third World city while positioning themselves as the authoritative neutral vision.
The writer Michelle Dizon and the artist Việt Lê collaborated on a marvelous photobook, White Gaze, which takes on the ways in which National Geographic magazine uses this objectifying perspective. Parodying the forms and formulas of the magazine—the yellow picture frame cover, the glossy photos, the dehumanizing captions—they lay out how it has consistently used photojournalism to reinforce a colonial vision of dark-skinned people as objects to be identified and exoticized for the benefit of a white audience. National Geographic has made performative attempts to reform its white gaze. In 2015, they published a photo essay on Haiti, lavishly praising themselves for using young Haitian photographers. The 2018 Race issue apologized for decades of racist coverage. Yet, like so many travel publications, it simply does not know how to let go of this cultural script. More than 75 percent of National Geographic’s cover stories since the apology have been assigned to white male photographers, according to an analysis conducted by Vox magazine. A little acknowledgement here, a little representation there only serves to fortify the white gaze. In fact, what is being pseudiscovered now is the performance of antiracism.
In a brilliant example of how pseudiscovery rewrites history, Ghosh writes of the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, which was said to have been abandoned until it was pseudiscovered by a Frenchman in the nineteenth century. But during his own visit to the monument, Ghosh spoke to a Buddhist monk and later a Cambodian archaeologist who informed him that monks had been living and worshipping in Angkor Wat for centuries before it was thus pseudiscovered. In fact after the French pseudiscovery, the monks had to resist being evicted from the complex. “It was only to Europeans then that Angkor was a discovery,” Ghosh writes, but as the colonial masters of the country they were able to not only rewrite the story of the temple complex but also project themselves as the heroes of a triumphalist narrative. Sadly the myth of an abandoned temple claimed by the forest until it was discovered is much more romantic and much more salable, Ghosh writes. So the tourist industry in Cambodia has collaborated in keeping this version alive, much like the Turkish government repackaging whirling dervishes as a performance for tourists.
While visiting Angkor in 2009, the way the forest grew around and into the temples reminded me so much of the sacred groves of India. In Kerala, these are often called kaavus, and they usually contain shrines to mother goddesses. The forest runs wild around the shrines; there is no careful landscaping to ease the worshipper’s path. The deep brooding silence of a kaavu, punctuated by hisses and growls, is a thing of fierce beauty and awe. Sacred groves exist all over India and in many Asian countries such as Japan and Bhutan. While the Angkor temples are part of an elegantly planned urban complex as opposed to a sacred grove, it would not have occurred to a traveler from these countries to consider a temple complex to be abandoned simply because it is surrounded by a forest. Whereas for a nineteenth-century Frenchman, steeped in the culture of urban modernity that was reshaping the West, the forest laying claim to the elegant streets of Angkor could only mean abandonment and decay. This is not just an innocent misunderstanding. Layered on top of the hasty conclusion was the paradigm of pseudiscovery, which assumes that the best thing that can happen to this strange place is pseudiscovery by a European.
•
In 1993, a manuscript was found in the Vatican Library—The Book of Travels was a memoir of the travels of Antun Yusuf Hanna Diyab, the Syrian man who introduced the story of Aladdin to Europe in the early eighteenth century. Diyab was the translator and a servant to the French naturalist and explorer Paul Lucas, who had been commissioned to travel around the Mediterranean collecting trinkets for the French king.
Though Lucas left multiple books about his travels, he never mentioned Diyab, and for a long time, Diyab remained a mystery. But this newly found manuscript is an autobiographical narrative penned by Diyab decades after he returned to Aleppo, disillusioned by Lucas’s unwillingness to help him find a job in the French royal library. In the foreword to the English translation of Diyab’s Book of Travels, Yasmine Seale writes of how Diyab’s writing “probes the strangeness of the world.” His accounts of Paris are full of miracles jostling with daily phenomena, blurring the lines between fiction and truth. “The Book of Travels smudges such distinctions by showing how fantasy is woven into life, how enchantment is neighbor to inquiry,” Seale writes. Reading this, I am reminded of how distinctly this paradigm of wonder—of recognizing the unknowability of the world—distinguishes itself from the paradigm of pseudiscovery. Wonder emerges from a willingness to see the other not as something to be explained but as something that cannot be fully understood within the limitations of the traveler’s subjectivity.
Such self-awareness and humility would be dismissed as naivete and lack of sophistication in the kind of travel writing that inherited the mantle of the eighteenth-century exploring narrator-savant. In a tongue-in-cheek essay upbraiding the Indian male for various bad habits, Mukul Kesavan writes:
Travel writing, as invented by English and then American writers, is a form of amused knowingness. Reading Robert Byron or Paul Theroux is a bit like tuning into Radio Supercilious: the funny bits, such as they are, are generated by the discomfort of travelling to out-of-the-way places or via encounters with amusing aboriginals. This form of knowingness isn’t easily replicated: you have to be first world and better off than the natives.
It is the abandonment of this knowingness, an embrace of the subaltern perspective, that makes for insightful travel writing that moves beyond the narrative superciliousness. Kesavan points to Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, alongside Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake and Allan Sealy’s From Yukon to Yucatan, as works that redefine the travel-writing genre because “these writers treat the landscapes they move through as dense, real places, not as props and cues that help the sophisticated traveller rehearse his world-weary routines.”
I find it hard to take seriously travel writing that does not question its own assumptions. I am drawn to travel narrators who parse their place in the world thoughtfully, whose marginalities give them offbeat insights into a changing world. I do not take seriously the distinction between traveler and expat and migrant, which is yet another way in which racial and economic privilege is hammered into place. Some of my favorite travel narratives are from what Aminatta Forna refers to as the “been-to” genre: books written by African writers who went abroad and returned to tell the tale. Others are journalistic deep dives that parse the interconnections between culture and economy, food and politics, leisure and climate, luxury and inequality. More and more I find the travel stories I love best are not on the bookshelf labeled TRAVEL. They are, perhaps, in a finely detailed detective novel where the writer pays attention to how a neighborhood is laid out, its invisible social logics and rituals. Or in poetry, where contradiction and confusion have always found a safe refuge.
But as a child, and like many children who are obsessed with geography and world capitals and maps, I too fattened my imagination on the corpus of travel writing that was easily available to me. I read book after book in which the standard-issue pale male set out on a journey. This was, after all, the majority of travel books. I inserted myself into the adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sailors and Swiss Family Robinson, a gateway toward the suaveness of Patrick Leigh Fermor and the flamboyance of Bruce Chatwin. As a grown-up, I used to feel ashamed that despite the narrative injustices by which people who look like me were always Calibans and Man Fridays, I had somehow managed to identify with the narrators of these white travel stories.
But now I realize I was simply being a bougainvillea. A bract pretending to be a flower, while secretly keeping its soft heart safe, waiting to read Jamaica Kincaid’s letter to Robinson Crusoe: “Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home.”
In 2019, three hundred years after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, Jamaica Kincaid wrote an introduction to a new edition of the book that launched a thousand ships. How bracing to read Kincaid’s sharp-witted epistle to Crusoe. “There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which more often than not the goods you are trading are people like me,” she writes. Like many of us whose small-town libraries were full of dog-eared copies of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kincaid, too, grew up reading colonial tales of swagger and danger set amid the noble and not-so-noble savages.
In fact, there’s a place Robinson Crusoe didn’t come to. Ernakulam, where I grew up. He came to Fort Kochi, just a few miles away, and it shows. The Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British have left their marks on Fort Kochi. Today it is a charming town full of colonial architecture and pretty bougainvillea-lined streets and trellised balconies, where vendors line the streets and beaches, selling you wooden beads, caftans, sun hats, brass lamps, seashell toys. Ernakulam is the rain-shadow zone of all this cuteness. It is all business. Cell phone repair shops and sari emporiums and discount malls and steel wholesalers and parking lots and flyovers and billboards featuring larger-than-life celebrities. Instead of bougainvillea climbing the walls, electric wiring is everywhere, draped around telephone poles and festooned over hospitals.
When I was a teenager, I loved sneaking away to Fort Kochi. Its artsy cafés and air-conditioned hotels and beaches and seafood shacks were a refuge from the grimness and busyness of Ernakulam. I loved skipping classes to take the dangerously overloaded commuter ferry to Fort Kochi. Friends who lived there seemed to have much more glamorous lives, walking casually back to their homes on streets shaded by the canopies of massive rain trees, brought from Brazil by the Portuguese. When they ran out to buy soap or milk, they passed Vasco da Gama’s tomb! Chinese fishing nets! The basilica and the synagogue! Tourists wandered around with eyes dazed from the surfeit of history and beauty.
Fort Kochi is one of the great successes of Kerala’s tourism makeover. While Ernakulam played catch-up with India’s über-cities, Kerala’s long and narrow coast was getting a makeover as part of a tourism policy that kicked into gear in the early 1980s and was in full throttle in the 1990s. Within what seemed like a handful of years, long stretches of the Arabian Sea coast in Kerala transformed from the natural habitat of Kerala’s fishing communities into Western-style beaches where mostly white foreigners came to get tans and drink fruity cocktails. Kerala had taken a long hard look at Goa up the coast and thought, If them, why not us? Until then, the beaches were usually evening destinations for local families and vaynokkis: they were where you went to feel the breeze, as the day cooled down. Maybe get some peanuts or ice cream. Fishing boats would bob in the water as the sun set. But for the foreign tourists, many of them desperately escaping the freeze and slush of their home countries, the beach was where you spent the day. One by one, the beaches of Kerala fell to them, like tiny kingdoms getting annexed: Kovalam, Kochi, Varkala.
We enjoyed the tourists very much. They were so different from us, and their strange complexions and their behaviors made them fun to watch. Some of them were snobs and some of them were kind and some of them were clueless. In other words, they were human, like us. But there was one way in which they were not like us: they had money. Not all of us were poor, but in the 1980s and ’90s, even those of us who had money did not spend it quite as freely as the tourists did. And their money slowly changed livelihoods on the beaches. Fishing families turned to tourist trades, running small guesthouses and thatched-roof restaurants. Young men put gel in their hair and became tourist guides. Some of them started finding jobs in the big hotels and resorts that then started coming up. Real estate prices started going up near beaches, and many beaches, until then public property, somehow became private.
Like many Malayalis, I felt proud of Kerala’s reputation as a tourist paradise while also rolling my eyes at the tag line invented by the Tourism Development Corporation: “Kerala: God’s Own Country.” Malayalis joked that there should be an addendum to this: “Devil’s Own People.” We became “locals”—sometimes kindly locals, sometimes rapacious locals. “Don’t give me tourist prices,” we said when bargaining in markets or shops near hotels. I felt embarrassed then when I saw vendors openly squeezing money out of hapless white people. There is a conspiracy between service providers in little tourist towns. With the straightest of faces, a vendor will charge two hundred rupees for a bag of stale spices that has been sitting out in the sun for months, while right behind her, the auto-rickshaw driver will sincerely offer a bargain fare of five hundred rupees for a ride around town that is mostly the same loop of three or four 500-year-old this and 300-year-old that. Sometimes they would catch each other’s eyes and they would exchange one-tenth of a smile and a head shake. I learned quickly never to take an auto-rickshaw from the yellow-brick roads of Fort Kochi.
Now, when I visit Fort Kochi, I feel proud of these shenanigans. When I see the teenagers who hang out on beaches asking tourists whether they want a sunset cruise without mentioning that it is on the local commuter ferry or the woman at the beach shack pretending that the fish in her shop has been just freshly caught in the Chinese fishing nets and did not come out of an icebox, I think, Yes, take their money. The hypnotic rhythms of the Chinese fishing nets moving up and down are mostly for show anyway. The waters around Fort Kochi are depleted of fish thanks to overfishing and pollution, caused, in part, by tourism gone wild. One could think of the price gouging as a form of reparation, but it has also resulted in inflation and gentrification that then makes places like Fort Kochi unaffordable for its own people.
Which is why I now appreciate Ernakulam. Far-better food awaits you in the charmless food courts of Ernakulam’s malls and its linoleum-lined restaurants and the roadside stands where commuters catch a rushed bite leaning out of cars and scooters. Ernakulam is dusty and jumbled, with zero cobbled streets. Ernakulam is the stepsister whose job is to clean and cook and fetch. Robinson Crusoe is not interested in Ernakulam. This is why Ernakulam feels like a refuge now, a place that does not have to pretend to be stuck in a historic time period.
As a child, I would often hear some families described as “old families.” The bride or groom is from an “old family,” someone would say at a wedding. This was said in a hushed tone of awe and respect, to convey prestige and lineage. If a family could trace its lineage back many generations, then it must be very respectable. My extremely literal brain would wonder: Isn’t every family old, since we all have ancestors? Slowly I understood that the old families were the ones who had managed to keep records of themselves and their exploits. Historic districts such as Fort Kochi now strike me as “old families.” Surely places like Ernakulam are also historic, since there must have been some kind of life taking place in Ernakulam at the same time that colonial buildings were going up in Fort Kochi. But of course, “historic,” like “old family,” is a testament to whether a place or a family was important enough to be documented. Which should leave us wondering, by what measures are some places and some people not important?
Yet not bearing the burden of history has certainly been a boon for Ernakulam. Its very banality has saved it from being a simulacrum of its past self. It has other problems, of course. It is a marvelously ugly city, with its flyovers and skyscrapers and huge billboards. But what a relief it is to be in a place where the marigold garlands go on idols in temples and not around tourists’ necks. The tailors are all booked for months; no one is going to sew you a colorful Indian tunic while you wait. When the bus stops at the traffic jam just before Jos Junction and the conductor calls out “half Jos, half Jos” in case someone wants to get off there, it doesn’t matter if no one gets the joke; he did it for himself, not for a Tripadvisor review.
Elsewhere I am the tourist. And when I am elsewhere, I, too, appreciate the convenient way in which the ecosystem of a tourist district will wrap itself conveniently around my needs. I buy overpriced souvenirs and I follow the bright arrows on tourist maps and I read Tripadvisor reviews. But I also have a newfound respect for the Ernakulams of the world. The unhistoric districts. Sometimes a town, sometimes a suburb, sometimes something in between. You catch sight of them from the window of a train perhaps, while moving from one famous town to the other, or maybe you were out on a walk and got a bit lost and went farther afield than the map told you to. Nothing there to see, someone will tell you back at the hotel. Just . . . schools and houses and hospitals and the other boring stuff of life.
So, dear Mr. Crusoe, don’t come to Ernakulam. There is nothing to see here. Don’t bother with the waterfront at Marine Drive, where young couples with nowhere else to go carve out slivers of privacy under umbrellas. Avoid the fish-and-vegetable market that sits astride the dirty canal that feeds into the backwater. Do not walk down Broadway, which is actually so narrow a couple of auto-rickshaws could cause a traffic jam. Ignore completely Mather Street, which is about two feet wide, with its cluster of craft and sewing shops. A few years ago, I went with my mother one day to her favorite shop for restocking on embroidery doodads, and as I was sitting on a rickety plastic stool, I heard the vaanku and looked on Google Maps to see which mosque it was coming from, and I saw on my screen, tucked amid the tiny alleys in this part of the town, among hosiery shops and hardware stores, surrounded by the stench of the nearby fish market, three places of worship: Kadavumbagam Synagogue, Central Juma Masjid, and Saint Antony’s Church, all within half a mile of one another. A tiny Jerusalem, for quick prayers stolen from daily working lives. “One minute, auntie; keep an eye on this for me,” our vendor said as he threw a skullcap on his head and joined the row of young men who had risen from the sewing shops to make their way to the mosque for prayers. We waited, my mother and I, keeping an eye on the rainbow and steel arrays of threads and bobbins and embroidery kits and scissors, and I thought of how sewing shops and fish markets rarely make it into history. What a loss that is, and also—how fortunate for them.