Frozen in time Kottayam

The recollection of a childhood holiday is sometimes like viewing a film on a 70mm screen viewed through a magnifying glass. Watching the video of a cousin&rsquos wedding in Kottayam in my parents&rsquo living room in Calcutta some 12 years ago brought back such a flood of memories of summer holidays at my grandmother&rsquos home that I instantly decided we should all go to Kerala that winter.

On the morning we arrived, I recall having been transfixed by the scenery from the station of Palakkad, and spent all of the last few hours of the journey to Kottayam standing at the door of the train. The windows of our air-conditioned coach had been tinted to keep the sun out but in Kerala they dulled the rainbow of colours outside.

Like a distracted sentry, I could not take my eyes off the preening paddy fields that flashed by, at the little schoolgirls who had hibiscus in their gleaming oiled hair, at the trees heaving with golden coconuts, at, at...

I would abandon the diary I had intended to keep on the second day of the trip there was too much to record. I couldn&rsquot help wonder, as Michael Ondaatje did on a similar homecoming to Sri Lanka as an adult, whether it was necessary on tropical homecomings to choose senses (sight, sound or smell) for the day rather than try to take it all in at once.

When my parents and I arrived at my great aunt&rsquos home just minutes away from where my grandmother&rsquos house used to be, everything was as it had been some 20 years earlier. The car whined as it made its way up the steep driveway to reveal the Eden I remembered as a child. It was as if we had just returned after a morning&rsquos excursion the lotus pond glistened in the centre of the garden, vines of pink bougainvillea hurled themselves off the front porch in the manner reminiscent of a waterfall and everywhere as far as the eye could see were trees, plants and flowers. The two handsome Alsatians crowded around the car. (When a Great Dane joined their ranks a couple of years later, a visitor would describe the experience of coming up that driveway as akin to being in the midst of a safari.)

My great aunt was a PhD in botany and her particular genius was to resist the impulse to try to bring too much order to the natural fecundity of Kerala. Sensing that children would be enchanted by this setting, she hid large terracotta elves amid the shrubbery. Every so often you would look up and an elf would be laughing at you from a perch amid the bougainvillea. I had never forgotten them and to encounter these gnomes two decades after my last visit as a child was to believe that Rip Van Winkle wasn&rsquot a fairy tale at all.

On my first afternoon, I walked out to the back of the house to find the pantry and storage room at the edge of a cliff. In the distance, I could see the paddy fields below glistening like beaten metal and the cream-coloured church spires of Kottayam. My childhood memories of this place had not done it justice, I realised I hadn&rsquot remembered hard enough. Impulsively, I told my aunt that she must never sell that land at the back without allowing me right of first refusal. I half imagined myself retiring there.

We had journeyed to this idyll in central Kerala about three kilometres out of Kottayam every summer till my paternal grandmother died in 1975. Left a young widow by my grandfather&rsquos untimely death at 50, my grandmother had lived in relatively straitened circumstances in a small cottage. Looking back through the pampered prism of adulthood, I marvel at how we regarded the lack of indoor plumbing a luxury. My brothers and I eagerly took turns to pull water from the well. I loved bathing from the enormous copper vats in the bathrooms. Best of all, however, was dashing out into monsoonal downpours and bathing in the rain.

My mother named the house Mount Pleasant and that is how it always seemed to us. One of my favourite photographs was taken outside this house before I was born my mother, looking beautiful in her twenties, is holding my eldest brother aloft, laughing at him while he, thereafter unfailingly statesmanlike, is gurgling with delight. My grandmother and great grandmother look on with amusement.

As with all visits to an Indian grandmother&rsquos home, perhaps, the food was like something out of an epic &mdash bread from the baker&rsquos down the road so fresh that we often could not cut it and appams so light that I have craved them ever since. At night we often devoured enormous quantities of the dry coconut beef dish typically served in Syrian Christian homes. In this house, the dish had been aptly nicknamed Khushi Ghosh by my father as a child. I have been cooking a bastardised version of it years on with more or less the same effect that was its fate when we were children no matter how much of it you make, there is none left over at the end of the meal. The only thing we baulked at was the jackfruit brought in from the garden especially for my mother we looked on in horror that anyone could relish something that, as a wit said of durian, smells like &ldquocustard eaten in the toilet&rdquo.

The childhood holiday is such a large part of the emotional baggage we carry with us for years that it is not surprising that it is the subject of so much fiction. Arundhati Roy&rsquos The God of Small Things, as it happens, is set in Aymanam, the very same village in Kerala that I returned to year after year. Virginia Woolf&rsquos To the Lighthouse was a spectacular attempt at total recall of the holidays in Cornwall that her family enjoyed every summer. Salman Rushdie&rsquos return to his childhood home on Warden Road in Bombay after half his life away, famously prompted him to write Midnight&rsquos Children.

My obsession &mdash and no other word will do &mdash with Aymanam was much more commonplace. I just wanted part of my childhood back and found it in my great aunt&rsquos home. She told me stories of how she had supervised the building of the 7,000-square-foot house in the 1940s. Its extra-wide verandas that we sat out on for hours at a time were her idea the verandas made the house dark but also cool and resembled the ramparts of a fort from which to marvel at the garden outside. She was in her eighties by the time of my frequent revisits to Kottayam began and I enjoyed listening to her reminisce. She was so fascinated by her classes that a teacher complained about her &ldquostaring&rdquo at her all the time. As a PhD student in London during World War II, bus conductors routinely gave her children&rsquos tickets because she was so small. Yet from that tiny, mostly bed-ridden figure would radiate wonderful barrel laughs if her daughter made a wisecrack or I read her something amusing it was as wondrous as hearing a sparrow roar. &ldquoWhen is Rahul arriving&rdquo she would ask my aunt in the days before I arrived and she would tear up when I left, which always upset me as well.

My aunt Raffia, meanwhile, was just the raconteur I remembered as a child. Although she is my father&rsquos cousin, my aunt and my mother got on like sisters, each seamlessly adding an anecdote or witticism in an uninterrupted flow of stories that could go on all afternoon. One afternoon, after my father&rsquos tale was marooned by this tidal wave of storytelling, he tried to resume 45 minutes later with a plaintive, &ldquoAnyhow, as I was saying...&rdquo We laughed till we had tears running down our cheeks. And if anyone asked how we were related, my aunt delighted in telling them that when she was finishing college and I was a six-year-old, I had solemnly instructed her not to marry anyone till I was old enough to marry her.

The recreation of the childhood holiday is usually the ultimate castle in the sky, but in this house all the pieces fell into place. My great aunt took the place of my grandmother whom I had not been old enough to fully appreciate. My aunt hadn&rsquot changed at all. And every family home inevitably has a family retainer who fusses over you and scolds you in equal measure. My aunt&rsquos cook Sarojini had come to work in the house when she was in her late teens and had never left my aunt thereafter. Every time I said goodbye, she would hug and kiss me and make me promise to learn Malayalam before I returned. Ten minutes after I arrived I would be in the kitchen mapping out what I wanted to eat for the following three days.

On my second or third visit in my thirties she came out with a bowl of rambutan and said something incomprehensible. Roused from the book I was reading, I looked up baffled. My aunt came out to translate &ldquoTell him not to swallow the seeds. I can&rsquot even speak to him,&rdquo Sarojini said impatiently. On another occasion, she complained bitterly to my father about my inability to learn Malayalam. But he lives in Hong Kong, my father said in my defence. If she had withheld her appams &mdash with a perfect fringe of brown lace on every one of them, so good I now cannot eat appams elsewhere without regret &mdash or her mango curry, I would have learned Sanskrit if necessary.

But just as Kerala pole-vaulted onto every list of &lsquo50 places to see before you die&rsquo, my increasing familiarity with the place was leading to disenchantment. On an early visit for a reporting assignment for Time magazine, I had marvelled at its superb government-run healthcare system. Where else in the world do healthcare workers visit the homes of pregnant women to advise them on prenatal care in the months leading to child birth The primary education system should be a model for the rest of India but we are a country destined not to learn from our own diverse experience.

On subsequent visits, however, it was hard to miss the signs of unemployment and underemployment &mdash the ubiquitous huddle of young and middle aged men unable or unwilling to find work hanging around near the cigarette shops and the movie theatres. The migration of so many of the state&rsquos best and brightest sometimes gives much of rural Kerala the turgid feel of an endless summer afternoon that is perhaps part of its charm if you are a tourist but disquieting if you are also a journalist. Small-town Kerala inevitably is not immune to the pettiness and strictures of the small town. For a state famously so well educated, ugly Indian male chauvinism is far more widespread than you would expect. I remember being at the Alleppey boat race a few years ago with a childhood friend dressed in a spaghetti top and a sarong and watching with horror as men nearby directed lewd comments at her as the afternoon progressed.

Even the stubborn Peter Pans among us must one day awaken from the dream of childhood nostalgia. My sepia-coloured recollections of holidays at my grandmother&rsquos home that resumed miraculously 21 years later at my great aunt&rsquos mansion in full technicoloured splendour have faded back into sepia. My great aunt passed away in 2001, and my mother died a few years later. The loss of a parent, it has been said, is the cruel beginning of true adulthood. It certainly makes reclaiming a childhood sanctuary an impossible feat.

Now when I return I see this tropical idyll quite differently. Sarojini the cook has retired. The Alsatians are no longer around to act as a guard of honour when I surface from the guest room at dawn to pay homage to the world revealed anew every morning there. The elves are more or less where they have always been, but sometimes I imagine they are chortling at the myths I built up about this place. &ldquoTime,&rdquo I hear them whispering, &ldquomarches on.&rdquo