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Nothing of the great port has survived, not the jetties, not the warehouses, not the palaces. The plaque Zheng He erected to commemorate his visit has disappeared, too. Although da Gama landed here, the Portuguese colonizers quickly realized that Cochin had the better natural harbor. After looting and razing the Zamorin's palace complex, they moved on. The spice traders who accounted for most of the commerce had no choice but to follow. Ever since, Calicut has been a mortally wounded city, waiting for a coup de grace.
It got a brief reprieve in the 1970s and 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Keralites — most of them from the Malabar area surrounding Calicut — found jobs in the booming oil economies of the Persian Gulf. Today, their remittances account for one third of Kerala's GDP — and a far greater portion of Calicut's. Thanks to the petrodollars, Calicut is a compact, tidy and very middle-class town. There are very few slums, and very few grand houses. But in recent years, the remittances have been slowing. The Gulf economies no longer create thousands of jobs for Keralites and, after Hindu nationalists demolished a mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya in 1992, many devout Arab businessmen grew wary of employing Indians. What would happen if the jobs dried up altogether? "I don't even want to think about it," says K.P. Mayan, a tour operator.
In what remains of Calicut's old spice market, I meet Harikant, a pink-faced fortysomething man who operates out of a tiny office-cum-warehouse and sweats profusely in the muggy heat. Over cups of lukewarm masala (spicy) tea, he recounts tales from his 25 years as a spice broker. It's a family business: his ancestors left their native Gujarat state in northwestern India to settle in Calicut to make their name. He's never heard of medieval Chinese spice buyers, but "the Chinese like spicy food, no?"
In a sudden, unexpected gesture of generosity, Harikant inducts me into a secret ritual, practiced by spice traders for over a millennium: the bargaining of prices. Buyer and seller clasp right hands under a towel or handkerchief and, thus hidden, make offers and counteroffers with a system of finger signals. If I grasp all of your fingers under the towel, I'm offering either 5 or 50, depending on the context of the transaction. If I tug at your index finger, it means I'm offering 1 or 10; two fingers indicate 2 or 20, and so on. There are more complex signals, but these are not to be shared with prying journalists. Buyer and seller use combinations of this code at lightning speed — without exchanging a word — to do business worth millions of rupees.
Here, finally, I get a glimpse — or more accurately, a touch — of the Calicut Zheng He knew. This undoubtedly is how the admiral's minions conducted negotiations while they were here. (Ma Huan's account, Triumphant Visions of the Ocean's Shores, cites deals sealed by the clasping of hands.) The finger-code system was devised to allow traders from all over the world to do business here without having to learn Malayalam, the local language. The towel keeps the deal-making under wraps, a useful precaution in an overcrowded bazaar where the next man might try to undercut you. For added secrecy, the codes are commodity-specific: rice traders have different signals from spice traders. In an era of handheld computers that can exchange data by infrared beams, no spice merchant in Calicut would dream of giving up the old way. "It's a perfect system," Harikant beams. "There's no need to change what's perfect."
On the morning of my last day in Calicut, Mayan brings the happy tidings that the Zamorin has agreed to see me. This is the direct descendant of the King who welcomed Zheng He's fleet. The current Zamorin, 92 and a bachelor, lives in a tiny, single-storied whitewashed home with a small garden and well, on the outskirts of the town. His condition, fittingly, mirrors Calicut's: he isn't poor, just comfortably middle class, drawing a small government pension and traveling occasionally in his honorific capacity as chairman of a trust that manages some ancient temples. As Calicut has lost its historic significance, so too has its titular ruler. Few people in Kerala know there still is a Zamorin; many wouldn't know what the title means. "He's a ghost from our past," Mayan says.
He gives audiences — rarely, these days, on account of his advancing years — in a small living room lined with rattan and plastic chairs, faded portraits of his mother and great, great grandmother, two unpolished ceremonial shields, some brass lamps, a cheap wooden model of a sailing ship that sits atop an old TV set and, incongruously, a shiny Japanese boom box. This might be the home of any Calicut family with a father or son in Dubai or Doha. The only sign of his royal antecedents is a painted sign posted on a rusty metal pole at the gate: ZAMORIN RAJA OF CALICUT.
The Zamorin arrives, a small, gaunt man in a cream T shirt and white mundu, or sarong. He walks with some discomfort, helped by a distant relative who also acts as his translator; largely home-schooled in his youth, he once gave private tutorials in ancient Sanskrit, but is uncertain about his English. I try to explain the purpose of my visit, the search for signs that the magnificent treasure ships had passed this way six centuries ago. As the translator takes over, the Zamorin nods and smiles broadly at me, clearly amused by the obscurity of my quest. His eyes are weak, but they twinkle disconcertingly. Did he know his ancestor had met with Zheng He and the Ming Emperor? Did he, perhaps, hear family legends on his grandmother's lap, about Chinese envoys and their exotic gifts? Never breaking his smile, the Zamorin shakes his head. Like other Keralites, he remembers reading about the Portuguese and British colonizers, but is only vaguely aware that Chinese traders once regularly visited Calicut. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he offers a consolation: "We had great clay pots in the palace, and they were called chinna-bharani: they were made in the Chinese style."
Later, posing for photographs at the gate, he makes some small talk in halting, but very correct English. As we head back indoors, I ask if he regrets the fading of Calicut's glory and whether the Zamorins may have a role to play in reviving the town's fortunes. "No, there is no role for me in a democracy," he says, his voice firm for the first time. "I am trying to build some colleges and schools, but nothing more." Still, he says, he has noticed that these days he is invited to public events — cultural awards ceremonies, Rotary Club galas and the like — more frequently than before. "People seem to want to honor me, maybe they want to remember the old days." Maybe. But it will take more than a few public appearances by an elderly Zamorin to restore the missing half of Kerala's history.