The snake and the dragon

On the second Saturday of August every year, the Punnamada Lake in Alappuzha in Kerala comes alive with the snake boat race. It’s a thrilling sporting event that draws tourists from across the world.

On Tuesday, which marked the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, a similar sporting event was replicated all across China, with one critical difference: the race is between dragon boats. 

In Hong Kong, teams of rowers banded together and paddled away furiously in various neighbourhood beaches, keeping time to the rhythmic beat of drums.

Although it’s a distinctly Chinese festival that celebrates the life of a 4th century BC Chinese court poet and whistleblower against corruption, the festivities are broad enough to include Hong Kong’s large expatriate community.

Even stuffy investment bankers slipped out of their business suits for the day and wore their team colours — as rowers or as cheerleaders. Much wet fun was had by all.

I asked Rakesh, who hails from Kerala and works in a large international bank in Hong Kong, whether there were any plans to rustle up a Keralite dragon boat team for next year’s festival. He’s promised to explore. If that happens, it would make for a test of skills between the snake and the dragon.

On the day of the dragon boat festival, Chinese family meals typically include glutinous rice dumplings, called zongzi. The dumplings come packed in bamboo or reed leaves that are shaped like pyramids.

In recent years, however, there’s been heightened concern over food safety: in mainland China, the government has put out an alert saying that unscrupulous traders were coating the bamboo leaves with toxic, copper-based chemicals to make them appear rather more green. 

My own festivities included another flavour of Kerala: a group of us Indian families got together for a meal at the home of Jagdish Kumar, from Kerala.

I’ll say no more about the authentic flavours that Jagdish’s wife Rekha invoked other than that for a couple of gastronomic hours, I felt like I’d taken a fast snake boat back to Kerala. Burp!

In his Bech series, John Updike makes the point that people who are displaced from their roots tend to cling to their ethnicity. Jews in the US, he argues, are more rigorous in their socio-cultural practice than Jews in Israel.

I’m reminded of that every time I meet an otherwise suave NRI gentleman in Hong Kong who refers to India only as “Bharatvarsha”.

 But then, for every one such, there are countless “global Indians” who have set sail in international waters and are making quite a splash. And not just on dragon boat festival days, either…