Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water.

We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map.

There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius.

Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kochareekal literally means ‘Small Areekal’]. That was in September 2021 when the monsoon-supplied waters were still running in the hill-brooks. Read about that trip of ours here.

“Areekal has gone dry too,” the old woman said to me with a trace of sadness on her face. She blamed the rubber trees again. Rubber trees had brought a lot of money to Kerala earlier. Now they are quite useless since synthetic rubber is available from China or wherever at far cheaper rates. Rubber trees, the erstwhile cynosure of Kerala, are now the fossils of a bygone era of prosperity.

I’m pretty sure that Areekal and Kochareekal were both forests until a few decades back. Kochareekal doesn’t have proper road-accessibility even now. The last stretch of our drive was over rocks and rugged mud-paths. And then rather abruptly a signboard appears: Pay & Park – Kochareekal Caves. Ours was the first vehicle to enter that parking lot that morning.

As we walked ahead, having parked our car, we saw another parking lot that was free to use. A couple of cars and half a dozen bikes were parked there. As we descended the steps to the caves, we saw a few tourists mostly young pairs of boys and girls. Maggie and I felt like undesirable intruders in their paradise. However, we found a place to sit and enjoy the beauty of the landscape, especially the mammoth trees that towered sky-high.

There was no waterfall. A small puddle of water lay stagnant below the caves. Even the caves weren’t any attraction because you could only see the entrance from below.

The place was a letdown. But the drive was quite interesting. Our Maruti Alto limping over pebbles and rocks. A lot of greenery on both sides should have been a consolation. Will some wild elephant suddenly appear before us on the road? I wondered aloud. It alarmed Maggie a little. These days the Malayalam TV news channels always bring us news about all varieties of wild animals choosing to visit human habitats and carrying away domestic animals. We have encroached their spaces and they are coming back to claim them.

India lost a lot of forests from 2016 to 2023. A lot of forests in North India including Chhattisgarh’s pristine Hasdeo Arand forests were handed over on a platter to Gautam Adani and a few such individuals in these years. But what happened in Kerala? Kerala’s forests were snatched from the wildlife long before 2014. It takes time for the wild animals to come back claiming what belongs to them. Adani and his benefactors in the government will have much to answer for in the due course of time. Maybe, their descendants will be the ones to do the answering. The sourness of metaphorical grapes eaten by parents is the bitter legacy of the offspring.

I don’t know when Areekal and Kochareekal lost their forests. The old woman of the house where Maggie and I now stood said, “Those gigantic trees, they were there as huge as they are now even when I came here as a young girl.” Did she belong to a family of trespassers?

No one other than the two women was visible anywhere. The men of the family might have gone to work in the town. Kerala’s villages are economically unviable now. The truth is that the bottomless Malayali greed ravaged the villages. It is a complex history that implicates the policy makers (politicians and bureaucrats), religious leaders and the ordinary people.

The women of the house wanted to earn a little money from the tourists by selling beverages. Lemon-soda, mineral water, Sprint, tea… The younger woman offered us the options. She went inside the house to prepare the lemon drink that we chose.

“There was a temple here,” the old woman said pointing to the parking space from which she and her daughter-in-law (or daughter, I really don’t know) were collecting Rs 20 each from the vehicles. In the rainy season, the free parking spaces will be full too soon. I thanked her for giving us an entire ground for parking our little car and then asked what had happened to the temple.

“The Pentecost people came and bought up all the lands here and they destroyed the temple. We bought this plot from them recently and converted it into parking space.”

I had parked my car on a piece of holy land, in short, a land on which had stood a temple. The word used by the old woman was ‘kavu.’ Kavu is not a temple in the ordinary sense. Kavu, a feature unique to Kerala, was a verdant patch of land considered sacred and left untouched by humans. It homed all sorts of herbs, plants and trees as well as animals preserving a special gene pool. There would be a shrine too somewhere in it dedicated to a local deity. In short, there would be some patch of forest in many parts of the villages in Kerala.

They disappeared when progress marched in. Development. Vikas.

“The old people used to say that there was a passage from this cave here to Areekal,” the old woman continued while Maggie and I sipped the aerated and salted lemon water. “But it doesn’t exist anymore. Landslide and other natural changes destroyed it. The only attraction that was left was the waterfall. And now that’s gone too.”

“What about Areekal?” I asked. “Is there water there?” I remembered the charming waterfall that Maggie and I had stood before there a little more than two years ago.

“Not now. Only the rains can rejuvenate that waterfall now. The springs are all dead.”

I paid the bill for the drinks and the parking charge which the younger woman received with both hands cupped together, a gesture that had become obsolete in Kerala long ago when the caste system was abolished. A smile beamed on her face. “Come again in the monsoon season,” she said. “Sure,” I answered.

“Will we return in monsoon?” Maggie asked when we were on our way back.

“We made two women happy today,” I said thinking of the dead springs of Kochareekal and the dying springs of Areekal.

Below are a few pics from the place.