South Asian Heritage Month 2024: Reflections by Dr. Ajoy Thachil
During South Asian Heritage Month, Dr. Ajoy Thachil reflects on his connection to water in Kerala and how it shaped his experiences.
Unusually, I associate my South Asian heritage with water. Born in a hospital by the beach on the coast of Kerala and growing up less than a kilometre away, in a town criss-crossed with canals, settled solidly between the sea and the backwaters, which themselves took many forms; lakes, lagoons, streams, canals, water was everywhere.
We played cricket on the beach in summer, stripped to our waists and oblivious to sunburn. We shifted to badminton indoors when the monsoons brought a welcome end to the heat. Both monsoons, the southwest monsoon with its magnificent weeklong downpours and the later northwest monsoon with its evening rains, could bring both cyclones and floods, turning relief into fear and sometimes catastrophe. And yet if the rains failed, so did the crops, and everyone suffered. The canals would become empty; the rice boats that came up them into town, carrying farmer, family, lantern, cooking stove and harvest to market would vanish for the rest of the year.
The fields would turn fallow and many of our classmates gaunt. Lunchtimes became less about food and more about queues at the school taps, where water provided respite to hungry stomachs, at least until evening. The minority of us privileged by society and economics learnt to notice such things early. Climate change has rendered this cycle frighteningly erratic, and with deeply worrying consequences. However, the last century was far better at reliably coming up with that eagerly anticipated bi annual dance - of summer and monsoons.
As an old trading port and planned municipality laid down in a grid along its canals, the town was remarkably cosmopolitan. History was inescapable, as was a sense of faiths and cultures coexisting in harmony. Despite or perhaps because of its long, alternating socialist and (moderately) communist politics, temples, churches and mosquesst and cheek by jowl on the same streets in Kerala.
We woke in the morning to the call of the muezzin at daybreak, followed by a piercing (and definitely agnostic) siren delivered promptly at 6.00 am from the municipal tower. A morning ride on a BSA SLR bicycle took one past temples, ringing with bells, the aroma of camphor and ghee wafting in the still cool morning air. By the time the church bells rang at 9.00 am, the day was warm and well on its way, with school assemblies gathering across town. A whitewashed cemetery in the seaside quarter was home to Dutch and British tombs, mostly of soldiers who had served in the port during successive waves of trade and colonization. Further inland stood a monument painted red; to those martyred in a labour revolt against the local Maharajah in 1946.
I left in my teens to study in another cosmopolitan part of India, Bangalore - a city that was at the vanguard of the Indian experiment in economic liberalization. Bangalore , as a tech hub, had decided to open itself up to ideas, innovation and creativity at the time- primarily from the West, thus leading to a milieu that was a melting pot of ideas and cultures from East and West. My peers came from far flung and exotic places- Manipur, Tibet , Bihar, Tanzania, Germany, Tamil Nadu, Guyana, Singapore, Australia. It was heady. Having to learn a new language and adapt to a new culture in one’s teens felt exciting, rather than daunting, because that’s what it took for us to communicate with our patients and their families.
I met my wife there, and because we didn’t share a language that lent itself to both of us with equal fluency, we have defaulted to English ever since. A further stint training in psychiatry took me to a scenic part of the Konkan coast, home to an international University in South Canara on a hillside near the sea. The monsoons were even more dramatic here, with sheets of driving rain and gales that w ould last for days. A warming world has again wrought havoc to this humid, tropical and beautifully green part of South Asia; a recent visit gave me two heatstrokes, and the formerly lush hillsides had turned brown. And yet on a clear night , you could still see passing ships in the Arabian sea from your window. However, what has stayed with me the most, as it had from Kerala and Bangalore, was the easy, laidback diversity of the place, something that lent itself to an instinctive openness and curiosity about new ideas, values and cultures.
And in that sense, what my South Asian heritage has taught me the most is perhaps to cultivate a comfortable relationship with uncertainty, embrace new ideas and change with equanimity , seek creative solutions for problems (rather than the other way round) and value everyone’s views equally, be it a domestic worker or a CEO, a manager or a doctor, an administrator or a nurse, believer or atheist, black or white. All human beings - looking out for other human beings, whilst working shoulder to shoulder in a publicly funded universal healthcare system. In a troubled and increasingly fragmented world, that feels like a good place to inhabit.
