Where My Roots Run Deepest

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The place of my ancestors

Kerala is where my roots run deepest, and it is the place I have lived the least.

Meet any Syrian Christian from Kerala of my generation and they will usually ask you three questions. Where in Kerala are you from? What is your family name, your kudumbam, as we say in Malayalam? And which church do you belong to? They do not mean the building so much as the particular branch of the Syrian Christian faith.

I was born into an old Syrian Christian family, the kind that can trace its history back through many generations. Some of that history is written down. Some has been passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Our family church is St. Mary’s Orthodox Church in Kalloopara, where my grandfather, great-grandfather, father, his brothers and my mother are buried.

And yet I left when I was three.

In 1949, my family sailed for Kenya, and it was Mombasa, not Kerala, that taught me how to see the world. To complicate things further, I was not even born in Kerala. My birthplace is Madurai, in Tamil Nadu, which is a whole other story.

Kerala is where my ancestral roots are. Kenya is the place that formed me. Both have been an integral part of my life.

The first Kerala: a borrowed one

The first Kerala I knew was not really mine. A three-year-old remembers almost nothing. What I have from those early years are other people’s memories, told and retold until, in some ways, they began to feel like my own.

They came mostly from my parents, in everyday conversations in Mombasa. Who married whom. Which house belonged to which branch of the family. The feast days, the relatives, the rain. My father, a quiet and careful man, was not given to embellishment, so when he spoke of home and our family history, I believed every word.

He would mention with some pride the original ancestral home which is several hundred years old. It was no longer livable but was still standing, and it was the house where one of our female ancestors had kept a pet serpent. Apparently, that is a true story.

I saw that world for myself in 1956, when we went to Kerala on vacation. Even then, the bathroom was outside, in an enclosure made of coconut palm branches for privacy. There was no running water. The servants drew water from the well and filled a bucket, while hot water was heated over an outdoor wood fire to mix with it.

Keep in mind that my father’s family was, at that time, one of the wealthiest in that part of Kerala.

That Kerala lived in the past tense. It was the place we came from, not a place we were going back to. It carried a kind of nostalgia, like an old photograph that brings back fond memories.

The second Kerala: seen through Kenyan eyes

The second Kerala was one I encountered as a young man, and by then my eyes were not Kerala eyes at all.

In 1964, my mother, at 51, fell ill with cancer and left Kenya for India to seek treatment. I was in England by then, studying, and I travelled to Kerala to be with her. I was still in my teens. I had grown up in colonial Mombasa, finished school at Allidina Visram, and then spent two years in a cold, grey England. Kerala was supposed to be home, but at first it felt like somewhere I was visiting.

What struck me most was the hospitality and affection I was shown. Being “England-returned” was a source of pride and admiration among relatives and others. I was halfway through my studies and doing well, and my brother George had completed his degree in England. We were both seen as success stories. In the 1960s, it was still unusual in our part of Kerala for young people to go abroad to study, and the influence of the colonial era was still very much part of everyday life.

My father was proud of us, but he also felt we had become very westernized, with little of Kerala left in us after so many years in Kenya and England. I overheard him tell a close relative that he did not want any more “exotic” sons. My younger brother Peter, then 14, was to be educated in India.

Kenya had already shaped what I noticed and what I took for granted. Kerala did not have to change for me to see it differently. I had changed, and there was no going back to the child who left.

Yet family expectations still had a claim on me. In 1968, having just completed my chartered accountancy, I yielded to pressure from my father and grandmother and agreed to an arranged marriage. I was 22. It was a rash decision, and twenty years later the marriage ended. That is a whole story in itself, for another day.

For a few years after the wedding, India held on to me. I worked for Hindustan Lever in Bombay, while my wife went home to her parents in Kerala to await the birth of our first child. But a restlessness had taken hold, and in 1971 we left, first for England and then for Chicago. I have told that part in How I Ended Up in the US.

What held, and what quietly let go

Distance tests every thread. Some of mine held. Others thinned without my noticing until they were gone.

Language. I speak Malayalam reasonably well, but I cannot read or write it. In Kenya, my parents made a point of speaking to us in Malayalam, though more often than not we answered in English. What fluency I have today, such as it is, I owe largely to my two marriages, both to women from Kerala.

Food. Biriyani and masala dosa have followed me through Kenya, England and every American city since.

Faith. This is the thread people would expect to hold best, and for me it did not. My parents carried the Syrian Christian faith with them to Mombasa, but it did not travel with me in the same way. I have told that story in an earlier post, The Evolution of My Faith.

Family. The family scattered across Kenya, England, India, Australia and the United States, and the old web of duties and visits that binds a Kerala family could not stretch that far. What replaced it was looser and, in its way, just as strong. When my brother Peter left India in 1990, he lived with us in Virginia until he found his feet. That is a Kerala family tradition, kept alive on another continent.

The third Kerala: on my own terms

In 2007, we re-established the connection. We bought a flat in Kochi and spent three months there every year while it was winter in the US. We kept that up for fifteen years, until the sheer strain of an eighteen-hour journey became too much for us in our seventies. For those years, Kerala became part of the rhythm of our lives again.

Those winters gave me something different from the Kerala I had known as a child or teenager. I was no longer looking at it through my father’s memories or through the eyes of a young man who had grown up in Kenya. I could simply experience it as an adult, on my own terms.

Where the roots are

I am eighty now. I have lived in Chicago, Nashville, Northern Virginia, Los Angeles, Tampa and now the Bay Area. Add up my early childhood, the visits and those winters in Kochi, and Kerala has been home for only a handful of years of my life.

Somehow, it has never stopped being home.

I have come to think that roots are not the same as a hometown. A hometown is where you grew up. Roots are what remain connected to you when everything else moves.

Mine run back to stories told in a house in Mombasa, to a language my parents kept speaking to us even when we answered in English, to the family whose history reaches back through generations, and to fifteen winters in Kochi.

I left Kerala at three. It never quite left me.