Kerala

Fort Kochi does not feel like a town so much as a five-century-old conversation that never quite ended. Along one short stretch of coast: Chinese fishing nets said to have arrived with traders from Kublai Khan's court, a church that held Vasco da Gama's bones, Dutch gables, a British bandstand, and down a lane in Mattancherry, a 1568 synagogue floored with hand-painted Cantonese tiles, no two alike. The spice trade summoned all of them. Walk Bazaar Road today and the summons still hangs in the air: ginger, cardamom, pepper drying in doorways, the smell so dense it feels less like air than like inventory.

The fishing nets themselves, cheena vala, are giant wooden see-saws that dip whole rooms of netting into the harbour. I paid a crew twenty rupees to help work one at sunset, hauling on the ropes as counterweight stones swung skyward. Our catch, after five minutes of collective labour by six men and one wobbling volunteer from Andhra: four small silver fish and one furious crab. The oldest fisherman surveyed it, then me, and delivered the verdict of the evening: 'Good thing you have another job.'

That night I watched Kathakali at a small theatre where they let the audience in an hour early, not for the performance, but for the make-up.