Hair apparent

Fort Cochin – outside tourist season – offers a much-needed break from the chaos and cacophony. It’s the kind of place you can wander around aimlessly, avoiding the goats and the puddles from the intermittent drizzle, the only hassles coming from the ageing hippies in colourful trousers and the small children whose English vernacular consists entirely of ‘One Photo!’.

A couple of miles from the legendary Chinese nets and the stallholders merrily pointing out thirty different types of fresh fish lies Jew Town, the gaggle of shops and cafes that surrounds the Paradesi Synagogue, the oldest in the Commonwealth. The synagogue’s got an excellent blue and white tiled floor, where the tiles appear only to feature three different basic pictures, until you realise that all several hundred of them are unique thanks to tiny, subtle differences: a different tree shading here, a full moon on the horizon rather than a crescent there.

There’s a little display with the history of the Cochin Jews, some of whom came to India about two thousand years ago, not long after another Jew was causing all manner of discombobulation elsewhere. It occurs to me that all my stereotypes and perceptions of Jewishness are just the Europeans, the Yiddish, the Ashkenazim, my grandparents. Surely these guys – who, while everyone else was meandering all over Europe for centuries, were just pottering around in Kerala all the time – are completely different?

We wander into a few of the shops, but as the Rough Guide points out, in spite of the stars of David and menorahs everywhere they’re all run by Kashmiris now. Being Kashmiri they also try to sell a lot of pashminas, which seems strange in a place where it never falls below 25°C. Anyway, there’s one that’s clearly a bit different: a quiet, poky little embroidery shop with entirely different patterns and styles. And just inside, sitting in a tatty wicker chair by the front door, there’s a little old light-skinned lady with my Booba’s hair.

Encouragingly, what she lacks in youth and mobility she makes up for in her sharp tongue and Jewish granny wit. “You’ll have to speak Malayalam!” she barks, before I’ve said a word. The newspaper cuttings on the wall tell us she’s called Sarah Cohen and she’s run the embroidery shop here for decades: suddenly I feel like I’m not in India at all but in Golders Green in the 1950s. But it is India, of course, and it’s as Indian as anything else in this ultimate collage country. Gandhiji would definitely have approved.

I keep looking at her hair, the wispy grey curls bringing all manner of memories from the old house in Muswell Hill flooding back. It almost tempts me to start growing back my jewfro, until I’m reminded that my hair is receding so I’d just look like a weird geography teacher. She tells me this is the last Jewish shop in Jew Town: everyone else left for Israel long ago, and there are only a handful of very elderly people even left living here. Before too long the synagogue will be kept open just for tourists at five rupees a pop, and a little part of the embroidery on India’s patchwork quilt will be no more.