| From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 21, Dated May 29, 2010 |
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KALPETTA
The Treehouse
Fellowship
Mridula
Koshy
Delhi-based writer and
author of a collection of
short stories called
If It Is Sweet
 |
| Wind in the willows Buena Vista huts
in Kavummannam, Kalpetta |
 THREE YEARS and a
couple dozen short
stories later, I allowed
that I was a
writer. But one impatient
with how little I was producing.
Writers with actual published
books seemed, all of
them, to have just returned
from residencies in Italy.
What a wonderful thing, I
thought to be provided the
space to write. In the concentrated
time of a residency
I would produce.
It was then I found residencies
want nothing to do
with writers who refuse to
leave their m ultiple children
at home. That’s fine, I muttered
to myself. I’ll make my
own residency — one that admits
three children.
I wanted a residency in
Kerala, the setting of the
novel I had begun work on. I
couldn’t stay with relatives.
They, a most industrious
group, whether extracting
teeth or rubber, are the last
people to understand staring
off into space is a legitimate
use of time. so I wrote to
friends and even strangers —
did they know a set-up in
Kerala that would let a
woman stare off into space
while her children were kept
from falling down wells.
some months of whining
elapsed and offers of service
apartments in Kochi (no
wells but huge tariffs) had to
be rejected before a friend
said of a friend that he was
putting together a tree house.
A tree house.
The danger of wells having
been surmounted, we
journeyed to Buena Vista
huts in Kavummannam, Kalpetta. at half the regular
price — I agreed to help
around the property in return
for the discount — my
hosts, anil and Manju,
moved us into a tree and I
spent a busy month there. I
learnt to cook appam with
Manju and when anil left for
the Middle east I took over
the job of welcoming honeymooning
guests, “No, there
are no snakes in these paths.
Well, hardly ever. We do have
wonderful coffee we grow
here. shall I bring you a pot?”
TRIFLES
Kalpetta was the site of a
prehistoric civilisation.
Two caves outside
Kalpetta have on their
walls pictoral writings left
behind since the stone age
Nearest airport: Kozhikode, Kerala |
Manju and anil’s three children played with mine
and I spent long afternoons
combing everyone’s hair for
lice. yes, one of mine brought
a Delhi variety with her. I
met the baby goats in the
area, and all of anil and
Manju’s extended family that
live up and down the hill,
and also the monsoon when
it came obliterating the paths
that wove through the surrounding
jungles. My
youngest ate 15 bananas one
afternoon, while I stared off
into space. We slept at night,
all in one bed, and I read
aloud from akbar and Birbal
and satchidanandan’s Stammer.
We read till the solarpowered
lights switched
themselves off. afterward,
we listened to the dark. We
woke up one morning to a
frog, brick-sized and as still,
staring from across the room.
I wrote a letter to a friend
while I was at Buena Vista. It
was full of the drama of
crossing from Karanataka
into northern Kerala, of the
elephant herd that faced us
down on the road. I wrote
nothing else that month.
The novel I finished two
years later has its share of
baby goats, and Manju’s twoyear-
old runs through its
pages, making the ‘soooo’
sound he imagines a plane
makes, a game he has
probably outgrown since. |
