Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
We visited Bhoothathankettu last week only. It is one of the three places that we keep visiting, Bhoothathankettu, PaniyeliPoru and Ezhattumugham are those three as all three of them are easy to reach and so similar. Bhoothathankettu, due to its proximity, is like the first real tourist place I visited multiple times during childhood.And that tree is quite the one to catch one's attention, so is the cave and the swing, right? Is the fallen tree also there on the way?
ReplyDeleteYes, the tree is still lying on the way though not obstructing the path.
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