The road into Vadackal hasn't changed in the way I expected it to. It's changed in every way I didn't.
New houses have gone up where paddy fields used to run. Someone has widened the lane past the church. And yet the light does the same thing it always did in the late afternoon, falling flat and gold across the water, and for a moment none of the intervening years feel real.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about a place holding you, rather than the other way around. I have lived in enough countries now to know that you can build a competent, even happy, life almost anywhere. What you can't do is manufacture the particular quality of recognition that happens when you're standing somewhere that knew you before you knew yourself — a bend in a canal, the step of a house, the smell of rain on a particular kind of dust.
Every book I write ends up going back there, one way or another, whether the story is set in Kerala or not. I used to think of this as a limitation — surely a writer should range further, invent more freely. I don't think that anymore. Vadackal isn't a subject I keep returning to because I've run out of others. It's closer to a instrument I keep tuning against — a way of checking whether what I've written still rings true.
I don't know if that ever stops being useful. I hope it doesn't.