You can, with complete freedom, pick and choose your passing involvement as if you were plugged into a Virtual Reality experience. Women hang out bright pennants of washing while their husbands, with bare, bronzed, bodies, fish with rod and line, or flared filigrees of nets, or with bows and harpoon arrows, or even with spiked bamboo probes, extracting skulking crabs from water-lapped eaves of the levees. Everything here has a water-bias. A church bell peals the evening angelus and women, with scarves draped over their heads, hurry into a backwaters church. Lights begin to appear in the thatched and tiled houses of the backwaters, a dog barks, a cow moos asking to be milked, the sun sinks in a blaze of golden glory.
Constellations twinkle bright over the palms, thrusting silver starlight into the dark water.
Your houseboat nudges the bank and a boatman leaps ashore, carrying an electric lead. Soon lights and fans come alive in your floating home and crickets and frogs, disturbed by your boat, pluck up courage again and, tentatively at first, and then with increasing confidence, begin to sing their welcome to the approaching night. You fall asleep wrapped in tranquillity and to a little night music from the tiny, green choristers of the backwaters. You must seek out one of Kerala's yoga, massage and Ayurvedic healing centres.