West Coasts: A story for my sister

Michelle Sindha Thomas

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | THE HOUSE OF TRAVANCORE 1706-1900

I: MARTHANDA VARMA

Prince Marthanda Varma was born in 1706 in the “Place of Prosperity”—Thiruvithamcode, later anglicized to Travancore. By the time he was born, the medieval political structure of Kerala was eroding. The Malabar coast had been fractured into many small dominions, with the southern plains governed by his father, the Rajah of Travancore. The once-powerful, ancient Travancore dynasty was perpetually undermined by threats from neighboring kingdoms and the aristocracy controlled land, temples, and politics, leaving their king powerless; he died when his son was only one year old. Under the care of his mother, the queen, Marthanda Varma grew up full of pride and righteous indignation, early on resolving to restore the House of Travancore.

Marthanda Varma reclaimed royal authority by force, inducing fear in the noble clans who had dominated the landscape for generations. He aimed to end aristocratic interference by any means necessary, bringing in Tamil mercenaries to intimidate and exert violence against the feudal lords. He was unconcerned by tradition—perhaps as one who had lost his father and a nuclear family structure early in life—announcing himself as the enemy of the aristocracy, breaking their precious conventions, slaughtering his own cousins when they failed to align with him, making it clear that he would eliminate those who would not acknowledge his supremacy. He executed those who had sided with his cousins on grounds of conspiracy at court, in one swoop bringing down 42 noble houses, halting any notion of opposition and eradicating feudalism from within his realm. He then initiated a military campaign, taking over branches of the Travancore family dynasty before moving north to dominate every kingdom and principality in his path. By 1752, Marthanda Varma reached the “lords of the sea”—the Zamorin at the port of Cochin.

The Zamorin grew to prominence in ancient times by maintaining trade relations from west Asia to China, presiding over the spice trade in Cochin and the ports of northern Kerala. They were savvy diplomats who made their territories especially hospitable to traveling merchants, easing along trade with strategic appointments. Channels for Arab trade were smoothed by Muslim port commissioners who supervised customs on behalf of the Zamorin, fixing the prices of commodities and collecting fees due to the treasury. Merchant guilds were encouraged in Zamorin territories, including those formed to benefit sailors from southeast Asia, and one organized to support west Asian Jewish, Muslim, and Christian merchants.

Since the 1500s, however, outbound shipping on the Arabian Sea had been devastated by Portuguese patrolling squadrons looking to raid and loot departing fleets. The Zamorin were continuously engaged in battle with Portuguese marauders and, in an effort to destabilize them, sought alliance with the Dutch government—promising trading facilities, storehouses, and a fort at the port of Calicut in exchange for military aid. A Dutch fleet arrived in 1604, marking the start of a Dutch presence in Kerala. A decade passed, during which they proved themselves fully unworthy allies, failing in their promises and focusing instead on their own business interests. The Zamorin appealed next to the British, who arrived in 1615. The British swiftly drafted a treaty of trade, under which they would aid the effort to expel the Portuguese from Fort Kochi and Fort Cranganore—in exchange for a factory at Calicut. They immediately exploited the situation, aggressively staking their own claims on trade; the Zamorin shut down their factory only one year later. By the 1650s, Kerala had become hapless host to a revolving door of Portuguese-Dutch-French-British visitors-turned-colonists vying for dominance in a now 150-year-old tug-o-war. In 1661, the Zamorin joined a coalition led by the Dutch, who were beginning to surface as the dominant foreign presence. Together they embarked on a series of campaigns into the 1700s until, finally, just as the west Asian merchants had been pushed out by the Portuguese, the Portuguese were fully supplanted by the Dutch.

Marthanda Varma realized that Dutch power in Kerala was rooted in their flourishing spice trade at the port of Cochin—so he strategically set out to conquer spice-producing territories supplying goods to Cochin. He moved closer and closer to the heart until 1741, when he defeated Dutch forces at the Battle of Colachel. During this battle, in an intriguing turn of events, a number of Dutch soldiers, including the Franco-Dutch Captain Eustachius De Lannoy, defected to Travancore. Marthanda Varma employed him to modernize the Travancore army, introducing new firearms, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and European war tactics to the effort, fashioning 50,000 men into a war machine. De Lannoy’s strategies aided Marthanda Varma in the expansion of his kingdom north into Zamorin territory to establish the boundaries of what would become the modern state of Kerala.

By 1743, Marthanda Varma had secured the western ports and spice producing districts of Quilon, Kayamkulam, Thekkumkur, Vadakkumkur, and Purakkad. He required a license for trade in Travancore, declaring a royal state monopoly on black pepper and other prized export goods, ensuring native control of resources and ocean trade, delivering a deathblow to Dutch commerce: any merchant participating in trade outside these parameters faced execution. To further limit European interference, Marthanda Varma granted assistance and patronage to the native Christian mercantile community, elevating them to administrators of his new order. The Christians, in turn, actively supported Marthanda Varma’s military campaigns and Travancore soon broke the Dutch stranglehold on the Malabar coast forever.

In a widely publicized ceremony, Marthanda Varma dedicated the kingdom of Travancore to the god Vishnu, declaring that he would rule from this point on only as vice-regent—to God.

This announcement inspired hope and pride in his most pious constituency but also launched a preemptive barb at would-be opposers: Any move against the king would be, effectively, a move against God, calling forth divine wrath. Bold offensive moves on the part of Marthanda Varma or his successors could be framed as efforts to preserve the kingdom of God. Ever since this dramatic dedication, Malayalis declare that they are of “God’s Own Country”—sometimes with great reverence (as in the case of Nani who told us that it would be very difficult for us to learn Malayalam as teenagers; it was the angels’ tongue, she said, originating in God’s Own Country), sometimes tongue-in-cheek, eyes rolled to heaven (in the case of Mama and Papa when lamenting the petty politics of Kerala society, the heat, the wet, the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Trivandrum became a prominent city during the reign of Marthanda Varma, and still serves as the Kerala state capital. As the king expanded his dominion, conquering chiefdoms up the coast, artists and scholars from annexed regions migrated to Trivandrum, cultivating it into a cultural center. Marthanda Varma gave patronage to a variety of art forms and appointed artists including Ramapurathu Warrier and Kunchan Nambiar as court poets. He fortified the kingdom, undertaking irrigational works, building roads and canals to ease travel, encouraging selected foreign trade channels under native management. Even as he modernized the kingdom, however, Marthanda Varma recognized the persistent threat of colonialism, observing British ascent in key cities across the subcontinent. He learned from the example of the Zamorin: they had taken a hostile position against early European colonists and lost not only their kingdom but their entire way of life. Marthanda Varma decided to cooperate with the British to avoid losing all he had built on behalf of his people, or worse, decimation. He instead crafted a collegial relationship with the British, India’s new rulers, and by means of strategic policies and alliances he shielded Kerala from the sharpest impact of the struggle that would overwhelm India for centuries to come.

In 1758, before his quiet death, Marthanda Varma issued seven injunctions for political survival to his heirs, including a mandate that relations with the British East India Company should be maintained at any risk, that transparency and full confidence with them should be maintained, and that full confidence should be placed in support of the alliance. Marthanda Varma's visionary policies protected Kerala and set a precedent continued by his successors, who offered Malayalis the rewards of modernity and a living standard superior to other parts of India—directly reflected in the educational levels, health and wellness, and environmental stewardship of present-day Kerala. The long reign of Marthanda Varma’s immediate successor, Rama Varma, from 1758–1798, is considered a golden age during which he retained territorial gains, encouraged social development, and increased material prosperity in Kerala. New concepts such as communism and radical social reforms were explored, along with an encouragement of religious and ideological variety; while the royal family were devout Hindus, they donated land and material for the construction of Christian churches and Muslim mosques. In the name of progress, however, many of the distinctions that marked Kerala as unique from the rest of India were abandoned by a people who looked to the future and increasingly outward for inspiration. The growing British population of administrators, missionaries, and settlers imposed a Victorian morality upon the traditional Kerala lifestyle. In parallel, revolutionaries forging resistance to British cultural domination urged Indians to set aside regional allegiances in favor of a unified national identity, a key weapon in their common struggle for independence.

West Coasts: A story for my sister

Michelle Sindha Thomas

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | KERALA 1100-1653

There exists a place maybe we should call home. At the tip of a continent, once upon a time and far, far away: Kerala, of rubber trees and coconut palms and ginger and garlic and chili pepper and professors and preachers and nuns and drunkards and aunties and uncles and nun aunties and drunk uncles. When we visit, I feel nearly whole; we drink the water our great-great-great-great grandparents and the dinosaurs drank.

By 1100, the Thekkumkur dynasty governed the Malabar coast, their royal house protected by a fort called Thaliyikotta. Their kingdom was attacked and destroyed only after centuries of dominance, and remnants of 15th century palaces and the fort remain even today in a district now called Kottayam, meaning “sheltered by the fort.” Kottayam—where you were born, where I was born, where both Papa and Mama were born, where our grandparents, and their parents were born—was indeed sheltered, set inland, off the coast, tucked away between mountains and a lake, and this is probably why our ancestors survived relatively unscathed by the European colonialism that ravaged the subcontinent for five hundred years.

Portuguese explorers led by Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498. They came hot off the Crusades, in search not only of spices, but also of the fabled Christians described by Marco Polo. They hoped to convince and enlist these brethren to join forces with them against the Muslims—in a grand scheme to take Jerusalem. Note that these early explorers represented the most hardscrabble of European society; convicts and criminals and those with nothing to lose and everything to gain by setting sail on violent seas for a possible pot of gold at the edge of the world. They landed in Kerala and found a thriving Christian community, just as Marco Polo had reported, and approached them eagerly—expecting wide-open arms.

They were met with general indifference. People from Kerala have long held a reputation for stubbornness and cynicism; the native Christians were business-minded, deeply engaged in trade, and generally integrated with a society that was more tolerant, less polarized, and more cosmopolitan than Europe of the Crusades. Arab and west Asian traders had constant presence in the markets of Kerala and east Asian traders brought huge junks to the ports, even establishing a Chinese-Indian-Malay community in Calicut. The Christians interacted so freely with non-believers that an observer stated, “There is no distinction either in their habits, or in their hair, or in anything else, betwixt the Christians of this diocese and the heathen.” The “heathen”—primarily Hindus—had a relatively liberal lifestyle that scandalized the foreigners. Women had great personal freedom, wrote Duarte Barbosa, ruefully, “the Nair princesses do not marry, nor have fixed husbands, and are very free and at liberty in doing what they please with themselves.” Women ran estates and kingdoms in their own right; they were educated and often trained in the art of warfare. One rajah maintained a palace guard of 300 female archers and commissioned songs in honor of these heroines punishing villains with their prowess. Royal women moved about freely in Kerala, unrestricted by purdah then common in other parts of India, commanding respect, acting with authority, participating in business affairs that were reserved for men in less inclusive societies. The Portuguese colonists anticipated such exotic behavior from the tales of early travelers and Marco Polo, but to find a people so utterly disinterested in them, dismissive of their efforts to negotiate diplomatic dealings, indifferent to the trinkets they peddled at market, rajahs laughing them out of court when they attempted to pave the way forward with gifts: What could Manavikrama, Maharajah of Calicut, have wanted with Vasco de Gama’s offering of “twelve pieces of cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, two of honey”? A vassal advised him that “even the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more, and if he wanted to make a present it should be in gold.”

The Portuguese traders resorted to strong-arming, piracy, and violence, rebuffed on all sides and especially offended by the Christians who refused to support both their efforts in trade and mission. The native Christians proudly claimed a tradition more ancient than the Roman Catholicism of the Portuguese and had never even heard of the Pope, the very father of the Catholic Church. When the Portuguese went so far as to assert that churches of Kerala belonged to the Pope, they scoffed, “Who is the Pope?” At first, the Portuguese were shocked—then they became enraged.

With the same violence the foreign aggressors exerted to insert themselves in trade so far from home, they punished the resistance of the native Christians with focused persecution. They declared them heretics, citing the adoption of Hindu elements in their worship, including the teaching of reincarnation and practice of astrology, their places of worship architecturally modeled on temples and adorned with carvings of elephants and dancing girls. They bristled at the idea that a bare-chested, tropical people could maintain Christian traditions predating the arrival of Christianity in Portugal. When efforts to compel them to accept Catholicism and denounce the rites of their ancestors failed, Portuguese Jesuits began to aggressively impose their dominion and force conversion on threat of death. In the 1500s, they led a campaign to destroy the documentation of the native Christians and a systematic inquisition set fire to their historical records. Until then, the Christian minority had successfully resisted political pressure from Hindu and Muslim rulers; the Portuguese attack intended to strike beyond political alliance—to crush their core spiritual and cultural identity. By 1599, the Synod of Diamper Latinized the East Syriac Rite followed by the native Christians, replacing their tradition with Latin vestments, rituals, and customs and formally bringing all Indian churches under the Roman Catholic Church. 

In the 1600s, the native Christians mobilized and began to write letters appealing to foreign patriarchs for support against the Portuguese Roman Catholic administration. A representative of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Ahatallah, heard their call. He was a dynamic, charismatic figure who had spent time in Italy, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. In 1652, he landed finally in India, announcing himself as the “Patriarch of the Whole of India and China.”

The outraged Portuguese colonial authorities declared him an imposter and swiftly put him in custody of the Jesuits. He had brief opportunity to meet with native Christian leaders who accepted him as their patriarch, desperately embracing him and his connection to Syria to free themselves from Portuguese domination. The Jesuit priests alerted the authorities to Ahatallah’s activities and quietly put him on a ship headed up the coast. 

Thomas, a native Christian named after the apostle, led a militia north to the port of Cochin, demanding to meet with Ahatallah, to discuss his credentials at the very least. The Portuguese authorities deemed his case irrelevant, saying no patriarch could be legally assigned to India without the approval of the Roman Catholic Pope, and that he was already gone from Kerala, en route to the Catholic stronghold of Goa. Ahatallah never reached Goa.

The disappearance of their Syrian savior was the last straw for the native Christians and in 1653, at a meeting in Mattancherry, they swore never to obey the Portuguese again, consecrating Thomas as their leader and bishop. They disowned the Roman Rite, initiating services in their mother tongue of Malayalam, reviving the suppressed tradition. This formal schism added complexity to the increasingly diverse Kerala Christian community. In addition to the Knanaya Christians who traced their roots to Syria, and Nazaranee Christians who traced their worship to the apostle Thomas, Kerala was now home to a Portuguese-Indian population and a large Catholic following. They all now had opportunity to decide whether to remain loyal to the Catholic Church of the Portuguese or to take a stand against it and align with the newly formed Malankara Church of Kerala.

Christians have always been a minority in India, but we have survived waves of persecution that rise again as we speak, in the form of nationalists who, understandably, associate Christianity with colonialism and view it as a threat to Indian culture, forgetting that pure Christianity originated in Asia, forgetting its deep and ancient roots in Kerala. Centuries of active erasure means our history takes the form of legend and oral legacy. The original Hebrew-Christian Kerala lifestyle, remnants of ancient customs, songs, and forms of worship, are preserved in the rural backwaters where early believers must have fled, in areas difficult for oppressors to reach, persisting against all odds.

Further Reading:

• The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, Manu S. Pillai, 2015.

West Coasts: A story for my sister

Michelle Sindha Thomas

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | MALABAR COAST 1-1100 AD

Even in India, we are a minority people.

The state of Kerala takes a tiny space on the Indian map, and the bouncy, bubbling, idiosyncratic language, incongruous tendency towards both Communism and Christianity, and coconut-heavy cuisine are exotic to the rest of the country, let alone the world. Christians make up less than two percent of the Indian population, yet account for 18 percent of the population of Kerala. Of that 18 percent, Jehovah’s Witnesses, our progenitors with their unique principles and belief system within (and often at odds with) Kerala culture, account for a minuscule portion. This is our heritage and our demographic, Cherie baby, my fellow can’t-speak-the-language-stop-asking-me-questions baby: We have never, at any point in our known history, been part of a mainstream. The righteous indignation of the underrepresented is lodged deep in our DNA. Add to that quick temper a taste for sticky sweet and killer heat (and nothing in between), propensity for heart disease and emotional distress, a skeptical nature, big hips, and a head for business—and you have the baseline genetic code for a child of Kerala.

Kerala takes its name from the first-century Chera dynasties who governed the west coast of India, nature-worshiping people who held poets and musicians in high regard. They organized themselves according to clans based on geography and profession—hill people, forest people, farmers, guards, warriors, traders, seafarers. The Cheras engaged in foreign trade, and evidence of long-standing collaboration with west Asian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman merchants is regularly unearthed near the site of an ancient harbor at Muziris. A Tamil poetic text, the Purananuru, describes the Chera trade hub of Muziris as a buzzing metropolis:

With its streets, its houses, its covered fishing boats, where they sell fish, where they pile up rice—with the shifting and mingling crowd of a boisterous river-bank where the sacks of pepper are heaped up—with its gold deliveries, carried by the ocean-going ships and brought to the river bank by local boats, the city of the gold-collared Kuttuvan (Chera governor), the city that bestows wealth to its visitors indiscriminately, and the merchants of the mountains, and the merchants of the sea, the city where liquor abounds, yes, this Muziris, where the rumbling ocean roars, is given to me like a marvel, a treasure.

Muziris since declined, until it was completely destroyed by floods, but during the reign of the Cheras it was a thriving urban center: goods from inland were brought down the Periyar River for distribution and the harbor drew traders from distant parts of the ancient world, including Jewish merchants who first arrived during the reign of the prosperous Hebrew King Solomon, acquiring for him silver, gold, gems, teak, ivory, spices, monkeys, peacocks. They established settlements at Muziris and key points along the Periyar River, engaging in trade over the following centuries while maintaining their unique identity and faith.

In 30 AD, Jesus was impaled in Israel under the Roman empire, and his followers increased efforts to spread his teachings. News of his acts reached India with the traders and persistent legend maintains that the apostle Thomas landed in Muziris in 52 AD in the company of a Jewish merchant. In the first century, contact between Rome and India was regular, even extensive; the Romans had realized the strategy of sailing with the monsoon, reducing travel to only 40 days. By the time of this journey, about 200 Roman trading vessels were visiting India each year—analysis of Roman coin hoards at Muziris shows that the Roman spice trade peaked in the first century AD, building up under Augustus and climaxing under Nero. During this period, Thomas would have had greater ease of access to India than at any other time up until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498. Thomas focused on visiting the Jewish settlements, preaching in Jewish colonies along the Periyar River and tributaries along the coast until his death in 72 AD. The faithful maintain that their ancestors were taught by Thomas and hold fast to oral histories and customs that reflect the particular Hebrew Christianity he would have shared, obeying Jewish food laws, performing circumcision, observing Passover. In remote areas that were insulated from later generations of European missionaries, services to this day are partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Thomas and Jesus.

Early Christian travelers from west Asia and Europe were enthusiastic about the promise of India: a fertile land with generous people relatively tolerant of their faith and ripe for conversion. By the third century, there was a substantial Christian population in India, but an organized presence dates to the arrival of settlers and missionaries from Persia around 200-300 AD. Further growth is attributed to the arrival of Christians from Syria led by Knai Thoma: a formerly Jewish, Christian merchant who brought 72 families to India with him. The colonists received land to settle south of the Periyar River, near the trading hub of Muziris, and strictly maintained their exclusive culture, socializing and marrying within their own group. They had little interest in proselytizing and focused on the reason they came to India: commerce. The native Christians, however, viewed the Syrians as patrons: placing themselves under the bishop who arrived with them, adopting their religious practices and the Syriac language for worship. These two groups of early Christians in Kerala became known as Syrian Christians for their historical and religious connection to the Church of the East. Christians in Kerala are to this day identified by lineage as Knanaya Christians (tracing back to Knai Thoma) or Nazaranee Christians (tracing back to the apostle Thomas and Jesus of Nazareth); those taught by later waves of Catholic and Protestant missionaries are identified as Latin Christians (who observe the Roman Rite) or Puthu (New) Christians.

By 900 AD, the Syrian Christians integrated with Persian Christian migrant merchants to become a powerful trading community, granted privileges to promote revenue generation by the Hindu rulers of the Venad dynasty. In allying with the Christian traders, the Venads aimed to undermine the Buddhist and Jain traders who rivaled them for religious and political power. The Venad kingdom was based in Quilon, described by Marco Polo during his visit in the 1200s:

The people are idolators though there are some Christians and Jews among them…merchants come here from Manzi (south China) and Arabia and the Levant (west Asia) and ply a thriving trade, for they bring various products from their own countries by sea and export others in return.

He moves up the Malabar coast toward Muzris and continues:

In this kingdom there is a great abundance of pepper and also of ginger, besides cinnamon in plenty and other spices, turbit and coconuts. Buckrams are made here of the loveliest and most delicate texture in the world. Many other articles of merchandise are exported. In return when merchants come here from overseas, they load their ships with brass, which they use as ballast, cloth of gold and silk, sendal, gold, silver, spikenard, and other such spices…you must know that ships come here from very many parts, notably from the great province of Manzi, and goods are exported to many parts.

Marco Polo wrote these tales decades after his travels, while imprisoned in Europe with a Romantic writer named Rustichello da Pisa. With such nostalgic distance, and Rustichello’s artful flourish, he most certainly exaggerated his adventures, but he did describe certain elements of life in India with keen observation and accuracy. Take, for example, his description of the coconut:

The Christians who guard the church have many palm-trees that yield wine and also such as bear coconuts. One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink. Their outer husk is matted with fibres, which are employed in various ways and serve many useful purposes. Under this husk is a food that provides a square meal for a man. It is very tasty, as sweet as sugar and as white as milk, and is in the form of a cup like the surrounding husk. Inside this food is enough juice to fill a phial. The juice is clear and cool and admirably flavored. When a man has eaten the kernel, he drinks the juice. And so from one nut a man can have his fill of meat and drink.


Marco Polo’s delicious tales piqued European hunger and soon explorers were looking for a way to reach the waterfalls dripping with diamonds, the dancing temple girls (“their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect”), the exotica flora and fauna (“What more need I say? Everything there is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty.”). Missionaries joined these voyages, hoping to commune with the native Christians and Jews, and of course to save the souls of Muslims (“Saracens”), Hindus, Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists (“idolators”).

Further Reading:

• The Customs of the Kingdoms of India, Marco Polo, translated by Ronald Latham, 1958.

• The Indo-Roman Pepper Trade and the Muziris Papyrus, Frederico De Romanis, 2020.

• Where the Rain is Born: Writings About Kerala, edited by Anita Nair, 2002.

• In Search of Doubting Thomas, William Dalrymple, 2000.

West Coasts: A story for my sister

Michelle Sindha Thomas

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY | SAN FRANCISCO 2021

I never told you because I knew you’d be mad at me for trying to fly during the pandemic, but 547 days into it, I was so lonely I couldn’t bear it anymore:

Papa survived Covid and Mama survived a blood clot that went to her lung. They had taken care of themselves and not given us a chance to help them, not even told us until the danger had passed. I wish I could have gone to India to help them, Cherie, I wish we would have known, but now that we knew, I wanted to see them before a second wave emerged.

Mama told me her friends had started traveling and that Air India had direct flights from SF to India. I was still working from home, pounding away through breakfast, lunch, dinner and into the night with no separation between work and home, time and space. I heard a rumor that we’d return to the office in June and thought this might be the last window of opportunity to work from India. I’m sorry, Cherie, but you just don’t make it easy for me to talk to you. You are the ant and I am the grasshopper, not that we would have it any other way.

I booked the ticket and spent hours on the phone trying to figure out the appropriate tests to take before travel and to identify any other hoops to jump through. I wanted nothing from this trip but to be with Papa and Mama and packed only a carry-on with a new phone for Mama, lots of chocolate, their favorite American vitamins and medicines, and my neck pillow. “Bring a sari,” Mama said, “What if there is an occasion?” Absurd. “We can take a road trip!” Papa said, also absurd; both oldies ready to party and entertain and gloss over the trauma they had just endured. “No,” I said, flatly, “I just want to stay in with you.”

The day of the flight, delay notifications began to trickle in and continued even as I headed to the airport. Still, looking at the sun setting over San Francisco, I felt snug, content, with my single bag and all-black outfit from socks to mask, compact, ready for a long sleep on the flight, thinking of what snacks to buy during the layover in Delhi, longing to reach Cochin and sit on the verandah in the heat with Mama in her polka-dotted housecoat, her legs swinging, Papa swatting at mosquitos and reading a Malayalam paper aloud to us or silently scrutinizing the overhead fan remote, the white noise whir of the fan, the thick blanket of heat imposing such languor I would not be able to do anything more productive than flip through the stack of Vogue India magazines Mama saved for me over the past two years, the chatter of kids having a hula-hooping contest in the neighboring courtyard, of horns and traffic on Seaport-Airport Road.

The Air India check-in counter was deserted. I wandered around looking for help. An airport cleaner told me all flights had been canceled. Another corrected her and said there were still a few departing flights, I just had to wait for the counter to open. I sat still for an hour in the silent terminal. A few Indian people started to drift in and sit nearby, all of them in family groups, and I felt my expectation gather and rise at the thought of seeing Mama and Papa and even Michael Percy and Mamiyamama. Fancy that!

The Air India staff began to appear in their modern-modern retro-futuro outfits, their not-quite-flesh-colored stockings and pumps that made them lean forward a bit, crisp polyester hats and sprayed stiff hair, thick flesh-toned foundation not intended for Indian flesh. They strode past and ignored us gathered travelers, humbly bundled and masked and shielded for the journey ahead, hearts hurt over various losses in India, drawn by attachments so powerful that we were risking our health to close the distance. As soon as the stanchion was put aside, I bounded up to the counter, ahead of the lumbering families. A local girl glanced at my documents. She took my passport, said, “One moment,” without eye contact and went to the back. Another returned, an Indian girl around my age who looked and sounded like our favorite sourpuss cousin. She took one look at me and said:

“Now is not the time for tourism.”

“What?”

“There is a pandemic. You have a tourist visa. This is not the time for tourism.” I don’t know if it was my name or the fact that she couldn’t see much of my Indian face in my Covid travel regalia, but she spoke condescendingly, as if I was a random American who decided now was the right time for an eat-pray-love.

“My parents live in India! I am going to see my parents.”

“No. You can only travel if you have an emergency visa.”

“What? You mean all those people standing in line have emergency visas?”

“Yes, or they are Indian citizens, with Indian visas.”

“I have to go to India,” I nearly shouted. “Why didn’t anyone tell me this earlier? I have been on the phone almost 24 hours over the past two weeks trying to figure out what I needed to do in order to take this trip!”

“It is on our website.”

“It is NOT! You have nothing on your website, that’s why I’ve been calling and calling and sitting on hold forever and now this?!”

She pulled up her phone and tried to find the requirement on the Air India site. Since nothing was there, she went to the Indian consulate website, and buried under many tabs and parentheses on a linked PDF there was an instruction about emergency visas.

“How was I supposed to see this? I registered my passport information early! How did I get this far along in the process? Why did I have to find out this way? My parents almost died, and there were no flights and now there are! I need to see my parents!” A supervisor arrived and repeated the disappointing news. I was sweating under all my travel gear and marched off angry, tears welling.

I flung myself down to call Mama and Papa and tell them I still couldn’t see them. When they picked up, I wept and cursed and ridiculed the modern-modern English of the ticketing agents and retold the whole conversation at top volume within their earshot and cried some more to the point of hiccups. I felt so trapped and so alone, prevented so roughly from seeing the two people I love most and who love us the most.

Of all the stories in the world, one belongs to you and me especially, baby doll. Without this story, there would be no you and me. This is the story of how we came to be.

West Coasts: A story for my sister

Michelle Sindha Thomas

THE FUTURE | LOS ANGELES 2025

For some reason, I imagine I’m telling you this story in LA. We are on Venice Beach, under a huge blue umbrella. My feet are in the sun and I’m lying on my back. You are on your tum-tum and only half listening. I’ve finally found someone good to love and he is out with your husband on an ice run that has turned into a hunt for perfectly-designed snorkels. I don’t know why we are in LA but I think we have made a plan to meet and actually spend time together. We have made no specific plans (so often the source of our fights); we are at that point where we’ve seen it all, done it all, all our fears have manifested and still we’ve survived. You yawn, turn on your elbow and say, as when you were seven years old: “Tell me a rusty red tricycle story.”

Client Communique

Working With My Favorite Artist for My AW17 Collection

by Anna Costello, designer at Paradise Laboratory LA

I was recently able to work with my favorite artist, Michelle Thomas, for my upcoming collection, titled "Something Special". Michelle Thomas was my art teacher my sophomore and junior years at Hazelwood Central High School. Michelle's mother was also my English teacher. I know in fact that if I never took Michelle's courses in high school I wouldn't be where I am creatively today. I, for sure, hated high school until I took Michelle's class in 2009. Michelle introduced me to my creative, artistic self. Michelle made me go outside of the box, pushed me hard, and never let me quit what I started. I received a 112% in Michelle's class. When I left St. Louis my senior year of high school and transferred to Venice High School in Los Angeles, Michelle and I never lost contact, and she became more of a mentor to me. I know I'm not the only student Michelle saved in high school; there are a handful of us. Michelle is truly heaven sent! Michelle eventually left the Midwest and moved to San Francisco in 2012. In November 2016 she quit her corporate job in Silicon Valley to find balance in her life and to focus on art. She moved to India for five months and spent time in Stockholm and Barcelona to find inspiration, get our of her usual surroundings, and to see herself clearly. Michelle is now back in San Fran, focusing on painting and a simplified lifestyle. The image above is a watercolor painting by Michelle Thomas. You will see more of Michelle's work in my aw17 collection which I plan to release in October or early November! I'm so grateful for Michelle's help. She's really helping me make "Something Special" really special.