The 16345 Netravati Express leaves Ernakulam Junction at 11.40 in the morning and arrives in Kannur a little after sunset. There are faster ways to make the journey — a flight from Kochi, a private car up the coastal highway — but the train is the right one. It moves at the speed Kerala wants you to move at, it stops at small stations where vendors sell pineapple slices and banana fritters through the windows, and by the time you arrive in Kannur you are no longer in a hurry about anything.
This is a dispatch from a recent trip — five days up the north coast in the first week of March, just at the tail end of the Theyyam season. If you have already done the classic Kerala route once and you find yourself wanting to come back for something different, the journey below is the one we would recommend.
The journey north
Book a window seat in the AC chair car (the second-class coaches are wonderful in their own right but uncomfortable for the full ten hours). Bring water and a book; the train has a pantry car but the food is forgettable. The route hugs the western coast almost the entire way: paddy fields, coconut palms, the occasional glimpse of the Arabian Sea, small fishing villages, and at every long stop a fresh wave of vendors.
We arrived in Kannur at 8.45 in the evening, took a 200-rupee auto-rickshaw to the Kannur Beach House at Thottada, and ate a late dinner of fresh sardines and appam on the verandah while the waves came in fifteen feet from our table. The Beach House has been run for years by a Mappila family who treat their guests like long-lost cousins. We slept with the windows open.
The Theyyam, four in the morning
Our host knew of a Kathivanoor Veeran ritual at a small kavu near Payyanur, about forty minutes north along the coast. We arranged for a car to collect us at three. The performance had begun at midnight; we arrived for the central possession sequence, which takes place between four and six in the morning.
I will not try to describe it in detail — the form deserves more space than this dispatch can give it, and we will return to it in a longer piece. But what is worth saying is that there is no audience and no stage. There are villagers sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor in the dark, and there is the deity, fifteen feet tall in his red headdress, possessed and dancing. He moves through the crowd. He blesses the children. He speaks. The drums never stop.
It lasted ninety minutes. We sat the entire time without moving. By the time the sun came up over the coconut palms, we understood why people had been making this journey for eight hundred years.
What to eat, where to sleep
Stay either at the Kannur Beach House at Thottada (eight rooms, wooden verandahs, the friendliest hosts we have ever met) or at Costa Malabari further down the coast. Both are intimate, family-run, and in the $50 – 90 range per night including breakfast and dinner.
Eat at Kalavara in Kannur town for the city's best Mappila biryani — order the chicken and the fish, and ask for kuzhi pathiri on the side. For lunch one day, take a drive to Thalassery (twenty-five minutes south), the historical capital of Mappila cuisine, and eat at any of the small unmarked seafood places near the old fort. For an afternoon coffee, the Indian Coffee House on the seafront in Kannur is unchanged from the 1950s and serves the best filter coffee in the north.