The best way to understand Fort Kochi is to get lost in it. Not metaphorically — literally. Leave the map in your pocket, turn down the lanes that look too narrow to be interesting, and follow your nose toward the smell of coffee and old wood.
I spent three days in Fort Kochi and walked a different route each morning. The peninsula is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes, but dense enough that you can spend hours in it without repeating yourself. Every street has a different texture — Portuguese tiles on one wall, Dutch gables on the next, a synagogue at the end of a lane that smells of spices.
The Chinese fishing nets are the first thing everyone photographs, and rightly so — they are extraordinary, these enormous cantilevered structures that have been working the same stretch of waterfront for five centuries. But the best time to see them is not at sunset, when the crowds gather, but at dawn, when the fishermen are actually using them and the light is still soft and the catch is still alive in the baskets.
Jew Town is a ten-minute walk from the waterfront, through lanes that narrow as you go. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568, is one of the oldest active synagogues in the Commonwealth. The floor is tiled with hand-painted Chinese porcelain, each tile unique. The Jewish community here has dwindled to almost nothing — most emigrated to Israel decades ago — but the synagogue is still maintained, still used, still beautiful.
On my last evening I watched a Kathakali performance in a small theatre near the waterfront. The dancer arrived two hours before the show to apply his makeup — a process that takes as long as the performance itself. I watched him transform, layer by layer, into a character from the Mahabharata. When he finally danced, his eyes did most of the work. Kathakali is a language, and like all languages, it takes time to learn to hear it.