After a long day’s work, Tixon Mathew, a young sales executive at a white goods supermarket, and his colleagues gathered at the walkway on Marine Drive in Ernakulam around midnight on September 26. The lights from the buildings that line the shore of the walkway reflected in Vembanad Lake, popularly called the Kochi backwaters in these parts. Boats that offered tourist cruises across the lake and into the sea were moored for the night. The rain that lashed the area in the evening had washed away the dust from the pathway. A moisture-laced wind swept across the lake, creating small ripples on its surface.
As planned, Tixon and his friends — all dressed in black T-shirts with the supermarket’s logo and blue jeans, their work attire — assembled near a huge avenue tree, located near the entrance to the walkway from Shanmugham Road. One of his colleagues took out a birthday cake bought from a cake shop nearby, another brought out two glitter-sheet-wrapped gift packets purchased by pooling money. As the clock struck 12 midnight, they placed the cake on the granite-slab-covered seating platform recently rebuilt around the tree, and invited their colleagues, to cut it. The women cut the cake, while their colleagues cheered them on. The friends hugged each other, wishes were exchanged, and the Black Forest cake devoured.
The Marine Drive area, especially the tile-paved walkway with park benches, has been the most sought-after hangout space for the city’s youth. But the Greater Cochin Development Authority, a Kerala government agency formed to oversee and plan the urban infrastructure development in Kochi city and adjoining areas, recently issued an order restricting the public from accessing the landmark public space between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. – its raison d’etre being that the area was becoming a haunt of ‘anti-social elements’.
