Letter from India: Rajah for a Day
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
February 07, 2005

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"The palace?" the excitement in my mother's voice was palpable. "We're going to stay at the palace?"

"I suppose so," I replied. In booking my annual holiday in India, I opted this year for a change from the usual round of visits to friends and relatives. My mother, my sons and I would instead play tourist in our native Kerala--and check into the tony resorts that have recently sprung up around the state. How, I wondered, had the backwater I knew as a kid become India's No. 1 tourist destination, above the Taj Mahal?

My parents were born in villages in Palakkad, Kerala's rice bowl. They moved away as teenagers, which meant they kept having to go back to visit. So when my sisters and I were growing up, whether in Bombay or abroad, we always knew where we'd spend our annual family holidays--not in some exotic locale like London or the Caribbean but back "home" in rural Kerala. There we'd grumble about the privations of village life, the lack of mod cons, the ubiquitous mosquitoes. "This annual migration," I told my father when I was 13, "is for the birds."

And yet as adults we fell into the same pattern. Expats ourselves, my sisters and I each winter round up our British- and American-reared children and head for Kerala, rather self-consciously "renewing our roots" and instilling in the new generation our same sense of obligation.

But this time, as we visited our crumbling 200-year-old ancestral home in a seemingly timeless village, it was Kerala that had changed. Savvy tourism promoters have lately come to appreciate the region's exceptional beauty--lush green fields, temperate winters, golden beaches. And because Kerala is also the spiritual center of the ancient life science of ayurveda, with its aromatic oil massages and yoga, New Age travelers have come flocking.

I worked out our itinerary: five top-class resorts in 15 days--a trip "home" doubling as a real vacation. My mother couldn't believe it when I e-mailed her. "The palace!"

"What's the big deal?" I asked. "Tourists in Rajasthan have been staying in converted palaces for decades. It's the one thing palaces are good for in our democratic age--serving as hotels."

"You don't understand," Mother replied. "This is the Kovilakom in Kollengode."

Then I caught on. Kollengode, a tiny town miles from anyplace, was where she was born. "When I was a little girl, I used to walk along the outer walls of the palace every day on my way to school," she said. "It looked so immense, so forbidding. It was unimaginable that I could even step into it, let alone stay there. The biggest thrill of my life was when your father and I were invited to tea by the rajah nearly 50 years ago. But even then we sat on an open porch. Visitors were not allowed inside. And now we're going to stay there?"

"Four nights," I said. "The ayurvedic spa package."

And so it happened. A few weeks ago I sat with my sons on yoga mats with coconut trees swaying in the gentle breeze around us as an Australian swami in saffron robes took us through our exercises. Mother woke up in a royal bedroom and had her breakfast on the very porch she'd visited when young. And just down the road, our ancestral village slumbered on, as farmers with yoked bullocks plowed the fields as their forebears had done for centuries.

I smiled at my mother when she returned from an hourlong ayurvedic massage meant to ease her arthritis. "Welcome home," I said.