Skip to main content

Where rocks sing


Some places retain their pristine beauty in spite of human presence. Ezhattumukham is one such place just 12 km from Cochin International Airport. Literally the name of the place means the mouth of seven rivers. Maybe in the heyday of Kerala's monsoon, one could see those seven debouches clearly. What I saw the other day, when I landed there rather by chance along with Maggie, is an elaborate spread of granite boulders and chains of rocks with puddles of water in between. Of course, the river is dammed up keeping all the water on the other side and channeling part of it for irrigation. 

The place has a quaint charm even with all those rocks and boulders. As Alice Walker said, in nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Even the contorted trees with all their bizarre bends and twists have a perfection that arrests your attention. Those contortions can tell you stories. Some of those stories will resonate with your own inner distortions. 


A hanging bridge connects the opposite banks of the river. Like a poem that stretches beneath your feet with an inhuman humility. It struggles to suppress its shakes and tremors as footfalls span its constriction. 


From the bridge you can see the dam across the river. Well, it's not a dam in the sense you are familiar with. A chain of rocks has been converted into a barrage to direct the water into two irrigation canals, one on each side of the river. 


You land from the hanging bridge into an elegant park that has quite many bowers for young lovers. You can see romance blossoming there as you move along the tessellated walkways by the side of one of the irrigation canals. 


Though there were quite many visitors the day I landed in this place, the absence of man-made filth was conspicuous. You won't find plastic bottles and food wraps and aluminum foils and cigarette packs and beer cans and even spittle blotches. Humanity isn't as filthy as you thought!

We are capable of preserving paradises too! The realisation consoled me with a feeling of redemption. Ezhattumukham is infinitely more ennobling than churches and temples with all their gods and divine battalions. 


PS. This post is part of Blogchatter's CauseAChatter




Comments

  1. SuchitaFebruary 3, 2021 at 12:59 PM

    Absolutely! I have found the silence of nature a whole lot more relaxing than any temple.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 3, 2021 at 1:28 PM

      Nowadays places of worship are places of wars! Nature still has some sanctity,mercifully.

      Delete
  2. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 3, 2021 at 6:23 PM

    Welcome to God's own country. God's own Paradise is lost to India anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 4, 2021 at 7:59 PM

    Looks like a lovely serene place to visit.

    ReplyDelete
  4. dee NambiarFebruary 5, 2021 at 11:59 PM

    Nice to know about Ezhattumugham. I love what I see in the first picture. Rocky places have a beauty of their own. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Harshita NandaFebruary 8, 2021 at 1:06 PM

    I was happy to read that there was no garbage left behind, too often our pristine places are defiled by those humans who think the whole wide world is a garbage dump!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2021 at 12:27 PM

      One good thing I notice as I travel in Kerala is precisely this civic sense that is conspicuous here.

      Delete
  6. SatabdiFebruary 14, 2021 at 9:59 PM

    It is rare to find such places of untouched beauty. Lovely pictures!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 15, 2021 at 9:21 AM

      It's indeed a great place. Something out of the way.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

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. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more