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When our ship docked in the port of Cochin on the Malabar coast of south India I went ashore to visit the world-famous spice market. The heat was stifling and the streets crowded with people, motor bikes, rickshaws and overloaded lorries. As I made my way along the thronged footpaths it was a pleasant experience to be greeted and waved at by passers-by.
It was my first experience of the instinctive friendliness of the people of the state of Kerala. I never thought that, many years later, nurses from the region would be a very visible feature of the Irish healthcare scene.
The spice market was in a narrow street crowded with small shops and with a webwork of telegraph and telephone wires strung overhead. Then I saw the big sign and a row of gunny sacks holding spices of various colours.
In the shade of the large indoor marketplace the smell of spices was all-pervading. Bowls of finely-ground spices were displayed on long tables. Their colours ranged from a radiant orange to shades of green, yellow, brown and black.
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Against the walls were sacks full of the raw materials in the form of dried berries, beans, kernels, pods.
A friendly man dressed in white calico obviously saw my wonderment because he came over to me and began to name the spices in their raw and ground states – pepper, cardamom, coriander, ginger, chillies and many others.
“Kerala has been the land of spices for many centuries,” he said, telling me that seasonings became greatly valued in Europe for flavouring food at a time when meats and vegetables were cooked and served in a very basic condition.
He presented me with a leaflet on the subject. For centuries such flavourings were expensive in western Europe. They had to be taken by sailing vessels across the Arabian sea, then by hazardous journeys up the Red Sea and across territories dominated by Arab rulers who exacted tolls from traders.
Driven by the prospect of playing a dominant role in the lucrative spice trade, Portuguese explorers set out from Lisbon and sailed south.
They eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the African continent and found the Indian Ocean open to them.
Vasco da Gama, a man of exceptional navigational and leadership skills, sailed up the coast of East Africa and then crossed the Indian Ocean until he reached Kerala in 1489.
The Portuguese were allowed to build a fort named Manuel after the king of Portugal; and I saw its weather-stained remains near the sea. They effectively took command of the region. During their 150 years of domination, Portuguese missionaries established Roman Catholicism alongside the Orthodox Christianity that had been in the region since the first century.
For all that, Hinduism was then, and remains, the majority religion in the state, with followers of Islam comprising a quarter of the population and Christians some 18 per cent.
Da Gama died in Cochin in 1524 and was first buried in the church of St Francis until, 14 years later, his remains were taken back to Lisbon.
The church, originally built by Franciscan friars in the Portuguese style, was closed when I visited the area. Its use for worship reflected the changing colonial power struggle for domination of the Malabar coast.
The Dutch, with superior marine fire-power and resolve, ousted the Portuguese in 1663. Advocates of the Reformation, they took the church under their religious jurisdiction.
Then, after the British took control in1789, the rites in the church followed the Anglican tradition.
I picked up a few phrases of ‘hello” and “thanks” in Malayalam, the state’s language. Many years later, just last year, I tried to remember them when I found that several nurses and some carers from Kerala were part of an excellent team looking after my wife Bernie in St Columkille’s hospital in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin. I was told by an administrator that nurses from Kerala were renowned for their warmth, kindness and efficiency, and for years have been tending the sick with great care in hospitals all over India. In the 1950s they were recruited by hospitals in the Middle East, Europe and the US. In the year 2000 their reputation for proficiency and gentleness prompted healthcare managements here to offer them posts.
In her recent excellent articles on the subject, Sorcha Pollak of The Irish Times reported that of the 6,300 registered Indian nurses here most come from Kerala ("The Keralites who move to Ireland", Life, December 8th, 2018). This represents some 9 per cent of all nurses here.
Those I met and chatted to in Loughlinstown radiated a friendliness that reminded me of walking the streets of Cochin long ago.
The first time I went down to the hospital restaurant I took the pepper cellar, shook out some grains on the palm of my hand , smelt them and remembered the spice market in that city on the Malabar coast of India.