The Last Jews of Kerala Read online

  With her male guardians far from home as she grew up, Sarah turned into a willful young woman. In her twenties she caused a minor scandal when she defied her father by marrying her next door neighbor Dickie Cohen. It was his second marriage and some of the neighbors suggested in hushed tones that their love pre-dated the death of Dickie’s first and much older wife. But Sarah remained unapologetic.

  “I was in love. We lived in the same town, on the same street; we saw each other every day. We fell in love. It was like that. Father didn’t like, so he came and took me to Bombay.”

  Dickie was not the kind of man who gave up. He pursued Sarah to Bombay where she lived the dull life of the dutiful daughter, imprisoned in the confines meted out by her father. He rescued her from her concrete tower-block and the couple escaped into the pulsating thrills of the metropolis where they married in secret and in reckless defiance of her father’s wishes. They returned to Jew Town as man and wife and set up home, their love an open challenge to the elders. Here was a young man, who on paper seemed the perfect suitor. Why had her father been so opposed?

  “This was Dickie’s second marriage. In a way, that was nothing important: he was a Jew, he was a lawyer, and he was a Cohen. There was nothing wrong with him, that I shouldn’t marry him. He was also very good looking. He followed me to Bombay, we got married. Finished.”

  Their love was exclusive and remained so, until Shalom joined their household years later after the death of his father. He never married and so moved in with Sarah and her husband. By then the rest of the family had left, so the three lived happily under the same roof for their remaining years. When Dickie passed away, the bond between brother and sister grew stronger. Shalom and Sarah had become companions, friends and confidantes. So when Shalom suffered his accident a few months earlier and was plunged into a coma from which he never recovered, the impact on Sarah was devastating, bringing her blue sky crashing down upon her head.

  We could hear the bolt straining against her main door. The rain had started to pour down, coming down in gusting sheets that caused rivulets of dark water to swell and overflow from the guttering, rushing down the street. The pungent smell of damp earth rose from outside and entered through the open windows, engulfing the house with a sweet muskiness. The guests at the door were the night watchman and one of the old servants from the town—both Christians. They had come for their regular evening’s viewing of the Malayalam soap opera that began at 7:30 PM. The three, including Sarah, would normally settle down in the living room in front of the TV each night and together they passed time—she sharing her relative wealth with them, regardless of religion and caste. In the past, the White Jews attached great importance to such things as status and their in-bred superiority, but an increased vulnerability had made for greater accommodation.

  The two settled down in the other room: the old woman in a white sari neatly folded her skinny limbs into the windowsill like a rag doll, the watchman perched on a chair in the corner directly opposite the TV, a bag of gram nuts in his lap and legs akimbo, as they absorbed themselves with the latest dramatized epic on the Hindu god Lord Krishna. Sarah and I returned to the back room, with the sound of the ululating Malayalam drama pulsating through the house like a crazy heartbeat.

  The rain drummed relentlessly outside, adding its backbeat to the symphony of theater coming from the television set. Sarah resumed her place at the table and piled more food onto my plate. The simple act of serving me had triggered memories of mealtimes with her brother. In memory of lost loved ones, it is said that the Jews will sometimes set places for the dead at table.

  “I really miss him most now,” she told me, “at the time of my food.” Her voice cracked, as she wiped tears from her eyes and then blew her nose into the tea towel. She looked at the place opposite where he used to sit. “When we used to sit here, when I’d eat especially, I always liked to push the dishes to him. ‘Shalom. Eat,’ I’d tell him.” She pushed imaginary plates in my direction.

  “I liked to watch him taste the dishes I’d prepared, I liked to watch him eat until he become full. I’d tell him when the synagogue services were happening, when there were festival prayers, who was visiting, who was leaving. In the evening, I’d tell him when Johnny and Sammy had gone to the synagogue and say ‘Shalom, dress up and come.’”

  “Did he like the synagogue?”

  “He’d always wear his best suit to go to there. Always, the best suit.” She paused to blow her nose.

  He sounded like a fine man, I said in a hollow voice, feeling with each passing moment like a vulture feasting on the sorrows of strangers.

  “He was a fine man,” she continued, her spaniel eyes lighting up for the first time since we’d met. “A quiet fellow. He never used to fight with anybody. When anybody came he would talk. He got on with anyone. That was Shalom’s way.”

  Without prompting she recounted the night of the accident; words, details, feelings, pieces of a nightmare that cascaded from her memory out into the open, until that evening was laid bare before us as clearly as a series of Polaroid photographs lying scattered on the table: “It was just another night, we had dinner, we talked, we went upstairs. As usual, I went off to bed. After an hour or so I saw Shalom hasn’t come back from the toilet, so I thought maybe he’s purging or he wet his pants. I got up. ‘Shalom is not here, Shalom has not come,’ I tell myself.” Her eyes were now looking beyond me, beyond this room.

  The architecture of the row of Jewish houses on Synagogue Lane is unusual, with a linking corridor or room on the upper floor, allowing families from one house to come into the neighboring home if needed. That night in a panic, Sarah called out to Gamy’s wife, Reema, who lived next door.

  “I thought he must be in the toilet, but the door wasn’t closed. Shalom wasn’t there. Luckily, Reema was awake at 10:30 PM. I called out. She said to go down and open the door and see where he’d gone. I went down the stairs, just two steps and there, at the foot of the stairs, I saw Shalom on the floor in a pool of blood. His head was cut from here to here,” she indicated with her right hand a huge gaping gash across his skull.

  “He had no sickness, nothing to complain of. No asthma, no pressure. Nothing. He was that healthy. Then this! Straight away I took him to the hospital.”

  Shalom was in a deep coma. Two months after the fall his condition deteriorated and he died. It was a stupid accident and a pointless death. As a member of the Paradesi Jews, he was accorded full funeral rites lasting several days and buried in the cemetery reserved for the White Jews. Sammy, the synagogue warden, and his brother Johnny led the duties on the men’s side. Sarah fulfilled her duty to buy the white material that was stitched into a shroud. “I took my machine into the synagogue to stitch it. The men of the synagogue had the duty of giving the last bath to Shalom’s body, a purification rite. In this way, we pulled together.”

  Shalom’s abrupt departure underlined the frailty of those left. Many had died in recent years and many more had migrated. The result was a street where the houses were empty, or with one or two people living where once there had been whole extended families. His death was the final in a series of losses for Sarah, which began decades ago with the breaking up of her community following the creation of Israel.

  “It began thirty, forty years ago. When the Cochini Jews decided to pack up and go, they sold their houses—to pay for the travel to Israel. One by one we watched the houses sell up. As a girl, the noise on this street was incredible. We were such a loud community, too much noise, I’d say. We were never scared. Now we’re scared.”

  It seemed such a strange choice of word. Why scared, I asked.

  “Because we feel lonely. A terrible loneliness, to lose your people, to know the end is coming. Our neighbors, the Muslims, the Kashmiris are good friends to us, but there’s nobody here when they close their shops at night. They close and go home. Nobody among them lives here, not a single person.

  “These last few years have seen too much stress. Too
much is sitting on our heads. It’s we who must bury our last friends, close our synagogue forever one day soon, watch our houses sold to speculators. This is why sometimes Sammy and the others get angry. Angry at outsiders who come to watch us die. Angry at those who abandoned us.”

  “You blame those who left?” I asked, skipping over the fact that I was here for just that—to witness their demise.

  “What can we feel?” she murmured softly, the trace of betrayal in her voice. “They’re determined to go, they’ll go. Let them go. We remain here. Finished.”

  “If life was so good for the Jews, Sarah, why did so many leave? You seemed to have it all.”

  “It’s true, we were happy, very happy,” she agreed, sucking her dentures in contemplation. She used her tongue to push the lower palate out of its socket so that it protruded from her lips before snapping it back into place. “But, see, those who passed out from college, they found no jobs here. Abroad they’ll get a job. Some went to Israel, some went from Israel to America. And the young ones, where were the partners? Husbands, wives? For these reasons, they had to go.”

  There were still a few youngsters left, both Black and White Jews, so why didn’t they come together and marry to allow the old Cochini line to continue? It was a loaded question, as I knew the old resentment still festered. The Paradesi Jews were afraid of how history would judge their treatment of the fellow Jews across the water: outcast from their synagogue because of color, an act that went against the essence of Judaism, the sense of justice that was the source of shalom. Sarah summed up the dirty past succinctly.

  “The Whites stuck to our own. The Blacks, the same. Besides what young people do we have here? We’ve just one or two and they can’t stand one another. If we force the topic of marriage, they go wild. We cannot force them. We’ve given up.”

  “So, this is it,” I said, all of a sudden infected by the pessimism around me, the oppressive drumming of the rain overhead, not to mention the prospect of spending my evening with one Jewish and two Christian pensioners watching a Hindu religious epic in Malayalam. “After all that has happened, millennia of history, from Solomon’s Israel to twenty-first century India, it will end. Just like that.”

  “What are you talking?” she said irritably, as she reached for another pakora, crumbs scattering from her lips like bitter words. “It is ended already. Even now we don’t have enough men to hold Shabbat prayer. Without the people from Ernakulum, there’d be no prayers on festival. We can’t eat meat unless their shohet cuts it first. They only are keeping us alive.”

  The White Jews of Synagogue Lane were on a life support mechanism, alive only because their old rivals were keeping them alive. The Paradesis had gone from living on the same street, eating from the same plate, sharing the same synagogue, in and out of one another’s houses, being part of every development of one another’s lives, from birth to bar mitzvah, from marriage to funeral, to this. Something beyond even death. The end of their history. The end of shalom.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Gentle Executioner

  “A man’s table is like the altar.”

  —THE TALMUD

  History has a habit of biting back. There was a time when the Paradesi Jews refused to eat kosher meat that was killed by a Black Jewish hand. The Paradesis had their own shohet and the Malabaris theirs. The meat cut by one side was not eaten by the other. When Dickie Cohen died, Synagogue Lane lost its shohet and the only kosher slaughterer who remained was Elias “Babu” Joseph, a Black Jew from Ernakulam. If the Paradesis wanted to eat meat then they had to take meat cut by Babu’s hand. The irony was not lost on Babu, a man who felt keenly the injuries of the past.

  Babu was the last shohet for the entire Cochini Jewry and after him there is nobody to take his place. I arranged to meet him at his place of business, Cochin Blossoms, just off Jew Street in Ernakulam, an aquarium and garden center housed in a disused synagogue. Jew Street was once the exclusive enclave of the local Jewish community and all the houses and local businesses were owned by their people. Today it is a religious mix, with just a handful of families remaining amidst Muslim, Hindu and Christian alike. There are two synagogues on this road, one of which is still in rare use for special occasions once or twice a year, when visiting Jews help to make up the quorum for prayers. In contrast, a few doors down, tucked off a narrow alleyway is the local mosque, which is packed at prayer daily. Five times a day the cry of namaaz echoes through the old Jewish quarter.

  Babu’s shop was around the corner from Jew Street and set in the antechamber of Ernakulam’s disused second synagogue. The synagogue was engulfed by the hullabaloo of the local bazaar, a mostly pedestrian zone where one can buy all manner of goods, from electrical items to copper-bottomed cooking pots, bolts of block-printed cotton to fluttering silk kaftans. The stores have names that befit the retailing buzz of a big town: “Kerala Fancy Goods”, “The Lunghi Emporium” and “The Exclusive International Handbag Company” are just some of the hand-painted signs overhanging the dense thoroughfare populated by honking tongas, rickshaws and pitiful mules, bent low beneath their parcels like put-upon husbands.

  Set amidst the chaotic sprawl of stores, stalls and twisting alleys bristling with shoppers was the aquarium in the old Tekkumbagam synagogue. The narrow pathway to the synagogue was lined with potted plants, casting a dappled shadow overhead. The courtyard outside the large stone and timber structured building was neatly filled with row upon row of flowers, palms, creeping vines with white blossoms, seedlings of geranium, bougainvillea and herbs. Each plant was lovingly nourished with water and shielded from the harsh sunlight with a green netting canopy.

  Up the stone steps and through huge wooden doors painted a dark brown, inside one discovered a shady haven filled with banks of fish tanks that had an immediate calming effect. Babu’s desk and chair were positioned exactly opposite the entrance, giving him a clear view of all visitors. The desk was spread with papers, brochures on the latest exotic fish, fish husbandry, lists of local suppliers and so on. On top of his desk shelf he had a row of glass pots filled with tight bundles of Chinese bamboo, bound in red tinsel, for good luck and prosperity.

  His aquarium empire lay behind: scores of tanks filled with bubbling green water and fish: suspended myriads of color. Some were water-borne jewels of bright red and yellow, the size of a finger nail. Others were aquatic birds of paradise, with plume-like fins fanning out in shimmering display. The tanks were clean and well aerated and the fish looked well cared for, loved even.

  For clearly this was more than simply profit and loss. Babu gave his fish life and in turn they bestowed a kind of peace. His prize specimen was the endangered Arowana, the legendary dragon fish of Asia. The fish is highly prized and auspicious, considered to be lucky in some countries. It is a collector’s piece. The full grown Arowana looked like a Supreme Court judge, with its distinguished whiskers and jutting jaw as it paraded majestically up and down its own private super-size tank. In a nearby smaller tank was a younger, green Arowana, a quarter of the size. Despite its best efforts it lacked the majesty of the full grown version, rather like a young man hopelessly trying to emulate his father by sporting a downy moustache.

  Railings were suspended from the ceiling, along with colored glass lanterns. From the rails hung bunches of packets containing plastic toys and plants to landscape the fish tanks. His employees, a bunch of wiry-limbed Muslim boys, were unpacking boxes when I arrived. They removed clear plastic bags filled with water and new stocks of fish. As they unloaded the bags, the shop floor was transformed into a surreal scene: aisles filled with scores of gently bobbling balloons of water, each cradling its own multi-colored shoal of exotic fish. The balloons gently lolled from side to side, bumping one another, like giant soap bubbles. One by one, the boys took the bags, popped them open and decanted the fish into a tank.

  Seeing me arrive, Babu called on one of the many assistants to come and man the phones. He was a tall and st
rong-looking man, with kind brown eyes, dark polished skin and a thick neatly cut head of salt and pepper hair.

  Babu was forty-nine years old and married to a Bene Israel Jewess called Ofra. They had two daughters aged eighteen and fifteen and the family was part of the twenty-two Jews that lived in Ernakulam. The Tekkumbagam Synagogue at the back of his aquarium and now in disuse was built in remembrance of the first synagogue in Cranganore, known as the “southside” synagogue because of its location on the river.

  The synagogue itself could be reached by passing through the aquarium, through another set of doors at the back. The doorway was partially blocked by piles of sacks filled with fish feed and other supplies. But once inside the synagogue chamber, one was struck by its particular beauty, simpler, more austere and yet just as arresting as the synagogue in Mattancherry. The Tekkumbagam Synagogue has ten windows representing the commandments and two pillars which are meant to evoke the pillars at the entrance of the Temple of Solomon.

  The place was in shadow as the shutters remained bolted. Instead of the smell of oil lamps and incense was the aroma of neglect, where there were once garlands of jasmine, cobwebs now dangled in silver tapestries from beams overhead. Only the antechamber lived on.

  When this synagogue was still active, the Jewish children were taught Bible classes here. This particular community did not have rabbis, but scholars known as hamim.The Jewish children learned the Torah, as well as the old Shingly songs, poems and Hebrew. They came not just on Sabbath, but every day after school. The synagogue was the epicenter, the source of knowledge, meaning and life. As the Jewish community diminished over the years and the need for a place of worship became redundant, Babu took over and converted part of the building. In deference to its past, he did not touch the place of worship itself, merely converting the front part into his aquarium. Its Ark remained, but the copies of the Torah were removed and sent to Israel long ago. So, where Jewish children once sat cross-legged on the flag-stone floor to recite the Torah, their curled ringlets bobbing at their ears as they prayed, tanks of tropical fish now reside in desiccated splendor.