Word: cochineal
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...signs of creeping tourism even in my old neighborhood of Fort Cochin, a quiet, leafy enclave with stately mansions and grassy football fields. It's still leafy enough, and local laws have saved the mansions from real-estate developers, but all too many of the old houses have been converted into hotels and tourist lodges. There are also more shops selling antiques than I remember. The area around the Chinese nets has been paved, all the better for tourist photographers to place their tripods...
...After travelers have exhausted their film and are herded onto their air-conditioned buses, they are driven to Cochin's second most famous landmark: the synagogue, set amid the blue-shuttered pepper warehouses in the neighborhood known as Jew Town. There, on the synagogue's floor, may be another clue to Zheng He's visits: Guangzhou-made porcelain tiles, several centuries old. The synagogue is the legacy of a Jewish presence in Kerala dating back to A.D. 70. But it's not much to look at, just an ordinary house on an ordinary street. Built in 1568, it now caters...
...bookshop near my old home, I find an obscure monograph on the history of Cochin that provides more clues to the tiles. The author suggests they were presented to the Cochin Raja by the Chinese traders who were accompanied by Ma Huan, the treasure ship's chronicler, and an unnamed ambassador (probably Zheng He). The tiles, he claims, were meant for the Raja's palace, but some clever Jewish merchants spread the rumor that Chinese use cow's blood to make porcelain and the King, a devout Hindu, had to give them up - to the Jewish merchants...
...Before leaving Cochin, I return again to the Chinese nets. I read that old plaque. The nets were brought to Kerala between 1350 and 1450. I watch eight men lower one of the nets - a giant wood-ribbed umbrella, suspended from a 30-m wooden spine by a complex system of ropes and stone counterweights - into the water, hold it there for a minute, then haul it out by pulling the ropes like some ancient tug-of-war with the backwaters. The men win, but the prize is paltry: a few eels and some nondescript fish, no more than...
...still remember the collective groan that went up in the locker room when coach D'Souza said we would be traveling to Calicut for a football game. That was in 1982, and for us big-city sophisticates in Cochin, Calicut was a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. Even I, who had never been there, knew the place was a crushing bore: no ice-cream parlors (the preferred hangouts of early-80s Indian teens), no good record stores and - this was the killer - no girls' schools famous for beauteous babes. We moaned about it the entire five-hour...