There's a place in India where time stopped.
It's a bunch of small villages surrounded by palm tree forests. It's somewhere in the south, two-three hours by car from Madurai's airport.
Crowded India shifts to a peaceful empty place.
No horns honking, no vendors screaming, no dusty streets, nothing, just the past witnessing a slow and dormant life.
What one century ago was a crawling place with hundreds of rich mansions, is now left at its fate, crumbling.
This area is called Chettinad or Chettinadu, it's in the Tamil Nadu state. The name means land (nadu) of the Chettiars, a caste of rich merchants and bankers.
In the 19th century there were almost 100 villages, now 70, populated by thousands of luxurious mansions.
Once, they used to accommodate big families and each of them had its own space in the rooms around a common open-air atrium. There, the vivid community life was taking place: working, cleaning, resting, playing, eating, praying.
The number of heirs that today own a tiny piece of the property, makes it difficult to sell and restore the mansions. That's why most of them are still empty and in ruin. The ones that have been recovered are unbelievably beautiful and charming. I have been so lucky to spend a couple of nights in one of them.
Entering a mansion gives the idea of the magnificence and richness of the families living there. Large and deep covered spaces welcome the visitor hiding the private atrium behind the entrance door.
Few steps up, after opening the heavy wooden gate and you are surrounded by the soft light coming from the open roof, in contrast with the shadow of the cloister's porches. Metal oval vases full of water and floating flowers, incense fragrances burning, chiaroscuro on any wooden surface masterfully carved.
Any wood piece is a masterpiece, glorified by light ad time.
Wandering in the mansions is like retracing the history of the place and its people.
Traveling with Indian friends always makes the locals less frighten but still curious. Walking the desert streets, after many questions, a woman welcomed us at her mansion with a smile. We visited the whole building and she instructed us with her proud explanation about the history of the place. It was really surreal.
A litany of music coming from the village makes the time slow, instilling peace and calm. After sunset, when the sky is blurring from turquois to night blue, the palms in the green and lush gardens are lighted up by the moon.
Having dinner outside, surrounded by this spectacle, is speechless.
Only the food is bringing you back to reality. The Chettinad area has one of the best cuisines of the whole country: tasty, soft spicy, rich in greens and obviously served on a banana leaf.
The silence of the night mixed with the soft chats with friends, smoking hukka in the entrance porch, laying on wood benches from another era, stars shining in the black sky with no other light interfering with their beauty. We don't really know when we went to sleep that night, we were living in a dream.
The richness of history, the astonishing handcraft skills, the sublime food tastes, the contrast of silence and music, the extraordinary ruins, colours and textures. Those and many more are the discoveries I could witness during my incredible trip in the Chettinad area.
This place is unbelievable and suspended in a dimension that, hopefully, will last forever.
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