Still Waters

The lakes, canals, and coves of Kerala, in southwestern India, played a crucial role in the ancient spice trade. On a return visit to his ancestral home, Abraham Verghese finds a place redolent with memory, tradition, and a zest for life.

- Abraham Verghese

Whenever I think of Kerala, the faces of my grandmothers appear before me. These two women, centers of goodness and strength in our family, frame how I see the land of my parents' birth. I close my eyes and I'm once again seated in my maternal grandmother's kitchen, the pampered grandchild back for the holidays, watching clay pots simmer over wood fires and inhaling the aroma of roasted cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, red chilis, and pepper. It is a soothing and quintessentially Kerala daydream, because spices are at the heart of this one state that feels so different from India's other states, almost like another country.

The "Spice Coast," as it has been known since the days of ancient Greece, is a ribbon of territory on the southwestern edge of India. Just 360 miles long and 75 miles at its widest, the state sits sandwiched between the Western Ghats-a mountain range that runs parallel to the coast-and the Arabian Sea. A wonderful alchemy of geography, temperature, rainfall, wind, and soil composition allows pepper, cloves, cardamom, and other spices to grow wild on the mountains' lower slopes. Roman soldiers brought that pepper home from the Spice Coast; later, Arab and Indian sailors made small fortunes selling the seasoning in Venice and Genoa. By the 13th and 14th centuries, the craze for spices-not only pepper but also ginger, cloves, and cinnamon-was sweeping Europe.

Astonishing medical claims fueled the frenzy, including the assertion that ginger smeared on flagging body parts could restore virility. For all that, no one in Europe seemed to consider dry-roasting and powdering the spice, then frying it with mustard seeds, shallots, and perhaps cumin, turmeric, and coriander, to make a masala, the first step in so many Indian dishes.