Backwater cruise 3Sunset on the backwaters

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

It is beginning to grow dark. We have been on the water now for almost eight hours. The sky is still blue but the water has turned a bluish-black, Davy's grey in the shadows.

Birds are looking for their last feed of the day: kingfishers on low branches; brahminy kites wheeling overhead; bitterns skulking in the marshy shallows. Piles of hay are being forked through by women at the waterside. Two more women sit outside their houses threshing coir fibre, readying it for use in rope and coir matting, both produced locally. A kettu vallam makes its languorous way past, laden with copra - koppara in Malayalam, the origin of the English word - the sun-dried flesh of coconut from which oil will be extracted, an important local product.

We come to a series of locks that have to be negotiated. They are tough to get through, clogged by an alien invader, African moss, which looks pretty but plays havoc with the propeller. It is another sign of Kerala's high population density: over the past century or more, some two thirds of the Kuttanad region, from Kollam up to Kochi, has disappeared, swallowed up by largely illegal land reclamation; there is an increasing reliance on crop fertilizers, which are washed into the water, polluting them; the African moss thrives in the fertilizer-rich water.

We approach Alappuzha just as the sun is setting. It is a wonderful sight, marred only by the other passengers and their photographic gadgetry. The Japanese lady leans out of the window in front of me and spoils my view. Just as at the start, the effects of the light inspire me to set my pretty thoughts down in my notebook: a nacreous shimmer, carnelian-red splashes. I move to the other side of the boat, where the view, though duller, is more pleasurable - nobody is trying to photograph it.

Over the course of half an hour the sky and the water darken from a rich blue to an oily black. It is fully dark when the boat pulls in at the jetty. There is a fierce energy to the activity at the dockside and the glare from lighted godowns that, after the languor of the day, is invigorating, revitalizing. I grab my luggage and bound from the boat.

"You have enjoyed the cruise?" one of the crewmen asks, helping me off.

I take a few moments. He has asked the question so earnestly that I don't want to disappoint him with a cold, dismissive answer. "Kerala," I tell him, truthfully, "is a very beautiful place."

He takes that for a yes. He seems pleased. I set off into the blazing darkness in search of accommodation.