I had booked a taxi to take me around today. I met my driver after breakfast. A short man, twenty eight, a small mustache, white silk tied around his waist and a jean jacket on his back. He asked where we'd be going today in a slightly cracked English. I told him Thakazhi. He looked at me with a slightly confused look on his face. "Why?' he asked.
Thakazhy is small town roughly seventeen kilometers (10 miles) outside of Alappuzha where I am staying. I had spotted the town on the train in from Kerala yesterday and was quick to mark it on my map for a visit. Town I suppose is a rather grandiose term for Thakazhy. Village would be more apt. There are about fifteen thousand people living in an area roughly have the size of Manhattan. They are spread out among the backwater channels and raised farms where rice grows. We made it into town about a month before the rice stalks raise out of the water. The way around town is simply either dirt roads wide enough for a motorbike to fit on or simply walking on the lines of piled dirt that are about a foot thick that rise up out of the waters to separate different crop fields. The people of Thakazhy were just as startled to see me as they might have been to see a submarine rise out of the rice paddies it seemed. Every person we ran across would give us an curious look before a beaming smile broke across their face. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and friendly. To get from one side of town to another you had to cross a bridge. By bridge I mean two discarded pipes lashed together and thrown across the canal. My foot was wider than the two pipes put together. I struggled as I crossed, holding my camera in case I fell so I could try and keep it above the murky water as best I could. Once I gingerly crossed a woman who looked to be in her fifties walked across it carrying a large jug of water as if she had never left the road at all.
We took our sandals off and walked into the rice fields. Trying our best to stay on the soil that separated the fields. A man took us to his own rice paddy which was barren for the time being so I stepped down into the water from the bank I had been walking on. He pointed out the layout of the town. There were a few areas reserved for fishing, a few outcrops of people's homes and vast amounts of water divided up into neat squares. As we talked a tractor worked away tilling one of the fields before us. Wheels designed to work through the muck below the water kicked up the mud all around and flocks white egrets flew off so not to get their pristine feathers tarnished by the mud.
The area reserved for fishing was another sight to see. Men worked to pump the water out of one small field into another. While they pumped a square of piled mud was built up in the center of the field and men would toss whatever fish they could see trying to escape the mud to open water into the square enclosure. While fish were dumped into the pen men inside either placed the fish into large metal jugs or shoveled mud out of the enclosure. The combining of the pumping water out and the stirring up of mud left the inside of the field a dark brown mess. My driver decided not to follow me in as I waded into waist deep, thick brown sludge. All around people were coming over to watch me try and navigate with a camera in my hand and the other trying to avoid being put into the mud.
Once we washed off the mud as best we could from our legs at a the house of a kind family who gave us some cold water to cool off we continued on. After some walking we found our way to a small primary school. As we peaked in, the six small girls erupted and soon we were seated on a bench made for people a fourth of my height while the kids performed choreographed song after choreographed song. The teacher joked that once they started they couldn't be stopped. Each girl looked as if she were wearing a princess dress to school. All had wonderful bright fabrics adorned with beads sewn in, earrings dangling from their ears and necklaces and bangles hugging their skin. It was lunch time so I sat on the floor with them and ate their food while they tried to sing and dance as best they could with mouths full of rice and hands full of food.
After a while though it was sadly time to go. We said our goodbyes and went on our way back to Alappuzha. I hadn't mentioned this in past posts because I wanted to find out more, but there are a shocking number of walls adorned with hammers and sickles in Southern India. It seemed like every other wall had the symbol painted on it. I was asking my driver who explained the communist situation in Kerala to me. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) is a Marxist party in India. Within the local government of Kerala they control ninety one of the one hundred and forty electable seats in the Kerala legislature. They are incredibly popular and most people I've met are quite proud and happy to be represented by them. It is strange to come from America where communism in every form is taboo, reviled even. From America I went to Armenia, an old Soviet country where the remnants of the USSR are still everywhere as a nation tries to establish an identity the world can recognize. Finally, Kerala where a democratically elected communist party runs the government and people for the most part seem overjoyed to have it so. My driver explained to me as we pulled up outside the LDF party headquarters in Alappuzha, "Communism in Kerala, good. Much good for the people, for the community." I was hoping to speak to someone in the LDF headquarters but sadly it was closed for the weekend.
If life for most people in Kerala is anything like life for those in Thakazhy I saw today, I can understand why Marxism would be so popular. The people there labor in mud and silty water day in and day out. There is a one room school house that can only cater to the youngest members of the local community. There is no hospital near by and infrastructure is a dubious notion at best. Granted I only saw a small area of Thakazhy, but my driver explained the whole village doesn't differ too much. According to the LDF election manifesto, the party is working to guarantee education, employment, welfare access and modernized infrastructure and economic variety to all people in Kerala. I cannot speak on how much the party has been able to accomplish so far. I believe the party just recently came into power in 2015. But I can say while I was in Thakazhy, walking the dirt banks that served as roads, a team of men were working on the roads there. Solid, concrete walls lined the dirt banks with small steps down into the fields. Secure infrastructure, for those who need it most, seems to be on its way in Kerala.