God’s Own / Little Flower Farms

Anywhere

I arrive at Kochi’s new paint-whiffed aerodrome. The three-hour drive up to Vagamon in the Western Ghats spills sensory overloads in the dark. Large glowing-red crosses float high in the sky, an elephant rides a truck and a bus-stand with sparkly tinsel signage glitters under shunted streetlight.

Jesus and a different saint appear in every double-consonanted town as names like Kottayam and Erattupatta roll by. They sound like ancient kingdoms. Neon-white halogen light illuminates church facades. It’s the kind of light that pairs well with blinding trans-dimensional divinity. In the car, Bono’s disembodied priestly voice soars and echoes “baby baby baby, light my fire…”.

Snaking uphill, there’s the crisp smell of fallen leaves, flowers, spices and wood on a swift, cool hill breeze — incense for my reveries. Heaven unfolds above into a thousand stars on dark velvet. I arrive at my destined homestay on a hill. A midnight feast miraculously appears on an open terrace. I’m in good company. We’re looking out on the Milky Way. Leaves rustling sound like waves on the ocean and trees sway gently in the moonlight as I remember a fairytale where a ship sails the stars.

Table With a View

Breakfast Appam with Homemade Guava Jam

Its morning now, cool and windy outdoors. A breakfast appam sits on a stainless steel plate on a reclaimed teakwood table. I’ve traced a treacly circle of homemade guava jam in it’s center. It looks like a smiley with a big emoji kiss. A cup of tea steams next to it, adding to the haze over the foothills of the Western Ghats. There are four kittens doing curious-cat things on the rough stone floor and a pot of rice boils on an outdoor wood-fired stove. I can smell bananas caramelizing in ghee in the inside kitchen, where steel jars and porcelain dishes climb adventurously up floating shelves amidst bottles of pickles, spices and dried tapioca chips. Little Flower Farms is an eco-homestay in Vagamon, Kerala. Some names just feel like wanderlust.

There are terraced walking trails through this hillside property. The once carefully pruned shrubs of an old tea estate now grow 9 feet tall on skinny trunks, creating shaded tunnels of flickering sunlight in the everpresent breeze. Magical green pathways walk through a bio-diversity effort. There’s a profusion of multi-toned leaves shaped like swords, hearts and elephant ears amongst varieties of bamboo, ferns and climbers. Flowers explode in vivid clusters, fragrant whites and soft puffy orbs. I spot a horned lizard spiked from head to neck and there are fiddlers and trillers of insectoid and reptilian varieties hidden in the fallen January leaves.

A tea estate across a rough stone wall glints in the sunlight behind a spider’s web. It’s fertilized, manicured, beautiful, functional, but that’s a comparatively one-dimensional world. Looping back, green tomatoes, passionfruit and pineapples appear suddenly between trails in home-gardened patches. There are endemic species of trees here like the christmassy, conical Malabar Ironwood, red-flowered Vaga trees and the dark, towering Rock Plantain, replanted from fast disappearing forests.

Through the rustling and the twittering, I hear a far-off loudspeaker chanting the Gayatri Mantra in an off-key. The sound is a gritty pebble in my wandering brain. If people of faith were truly intent on saving the damned, instead of temples with loud speakers, they might build more forests with quiet whispers.

Home-Made Malyali Lunch

Lunch is coconutty home-grown vegetables, dark roasted garlic sambhar and rice with crispy fish eaten outdoors on sustainably grown teak benches looking out over trees and hills.

A late afternoon walk to Thangalpara leads me to the top of a rocky hill, smoothed round by erosion. Valleys fall away on either side. A medieval Sufi saint rests near a huge boulder that may one day simply roll off the cliff-side. There’s a small shrine to him here and tourists from Tamil Nadu are currently clambering up slopes to pay their respects, take in the sunset and eat chips and ice-cream. Of course there is litter strewn everywhere. This is India. Offerings are always made.

To the west, the hills are cloaked in haze and the late afternoon sun nests cozily in it. To the east, long hill-shadows stretch over beautiful geometric tea gardens backed by meadowy slopes. I’ve seen soccer fanatics with similar haircuts. Sport makes for a good religion. The temple loudspeaker starts up again. Time to leave.

Kerala is called God’s own country. My mind flashes back to when I arrived — I was wondering at the excellent roadway leading out of Kochi. It leads to the controversial Sabarimala Temple. With three prominent faiths in Kerala, I suppose all roads lead to some sort of salvation. “No guarantee,” stated driver Jyotilal, wobbling his head at an over-loaded timber truck we were overtaking — it was held together by ropes of flimsy faith.

What if we didn’t believe in God or that he could save us? Would we try harder to save ourselves? What would you save yourself from?