A sting in the fairytale

You think there’s no room for magic anymore. You’ve grown up and the time for child-like wonder has passed. Some try to re-capture it with drugs or even Harry Potter books – but these are more exercises in escapism. The land where fairytales might exist has been submerged under weightier issues such as mortgages, careers, mistakes and possibly a few regrets.

Then one day you find yourself in Kerala, slowly drifting down the backwaters with a boatman and his long bamboo stick the only mechanism to get you anywhere. The people, their superstitions and the land itself has conspired with your imagination to suggest that maybe there is more to this place than meets the eye.

You round a bend in the river and see before you an island bathed in sunshine. As you approach, music seems to draw you in - a siren song. You gesture to the boatman that you would like to alight and explore the island and with an almost imperceptible head wobble, he changes the direction of the boat. As you alight, music emits from the forest like an echo from heaven. Sunlight dances on the leaves and the palm trees dip and sway in the breeze as if in time to the music.

As you negotiate the narrow paths in to the interior, you have step aside for the fairies – little girls moving to and fro wearing brightly coloured princess dresses. There are thatched houses with vegetable patches, enchanted gardens and swings garlanded with flowers. You move on through into a forest dense with columns of Coconut Palm trunks. The forest floor is carpeted in soft grass and decorated with ferns as another swarm of giggling fairies pass you by – the music still filling your ears.

In the middle of the island is its heart. You stumble across it in a clearing, a church whitewashed in sun-faded pastels. It is from here that the girls come running from, where the wires that feed the speakers in the tree tops throughout the island are powered at their source.

Though the curtain has been pulled on the great Oz pulling his levers, the island still maintains its fairytale quality. Inside the church, through the open walls, you see the matriarchs praying as a girl with the voice of a cherub coos her hymn into a taped-up microphone – piping her blessings out into the trees. Behind her is an altar festooned with flowers and disco lights and a kitsch portrait of Jesus Christ at its centre. The sight seems out of place until you remember that in India, there are many paths to God.

You move past the church where the sun (now low in the sky) warms your face and silhouettes the palm trees and boys playing cricket on the beach – the breakers behind them all thunderous and kicking up mist. Hidden by the glare are the fishermen at your feet, dressed in Lungis and Sunday-best shirts, staring at you with lines etched in to their faces as deep as the wells of their eyes.

Having walked the breadth of the island, it is here that you realize the precariousness of their existence, of this unique and enchanting paradise. It is no more than 1km long and a few hundred metres across. On one side the temperamental Arabian Sea, on the other the monsoon-prone backwaters. It is a thin green line between two powerful ecosystems that wax and wane at will and (at times) without warning. On this knife edge a community exists in a bubble, a haven of tranquility between the wilderness of the ocean and the chaos of mainland India.

The island cannot be higher than ten feet at its highest point - one storm surge, one monsoon deluge or even one melted iceberg away from obliteration. Only recently, a fishing community (just a few kilometers to the south) was decimated by the encroachment of large seas. Like anything of beauty, the island is fragile and possibly fleeting.

You slowly make your way back, leaving the same way you came. You try and etch it all in to your mind and don't even dare to take a memory tainting photo. As you leave the island and step back on to your boat you hope - for the sake of the girls in princess dresses, the praying matriarchs, the girl with the taped up microphone, the boys playing cricket and the fishermen in their Sunday bests - that this fairytale doesn’t have an ending any time soon.