01
Stop one
Thangassery Fort (Fort St. Thomas)
Wilson Synthetic Gut Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Every coast has a ruined Portuguese fort, and I have seen better-looking ones. Fort St. Thomas went up here in the early sixteenth century, immediately after the Portuguese reached the Malabar coast, to guard their trading post at Quilon — which is what Europeans insisted on calling Kollam. It passed to the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century after they took the coast, then to the British, and decayed quietly while Thangassery settled into being a sleepy Anglo-Indian enclave. Laterite ramparts by the sea, protected now as a monument of the earliest European colonial age in India. Fine. But Kollam was one of the great pepper ports of the Indian Ocean, and Ibn Battuta rated it among the finest he saw. He had seen everything. I cannot argue with him.
02
Stop two
Thangassery Lighthouse
Wilson Synthetic Gut Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Taller than I was expecting, which irritates me. Commissioned in 1902, red and white bands, about forty-one metres, standing on the low headland beside the old colonial enclave of Thangassery — among the tallest lighthouses on the Kerala coast, and I had put money on somewhere else. The British raised it to guard shipping approaching ancient Quilon and to warn off the dangerous reef offshore, continuing a habit of seamarking on a coast that had been steering Chinese junks and Arab dhows through the medieval spice trade. It still works, under the Indian lighthouse service. Climb the spiral stair at evening: fishing harbour, the church spires, the Arabian Sea. Nowhere I would rather compare it to hands you that.
04
Stop four
British Residency, Asramam
Wilson Synthetic Gut Power 17g Tennis String Reel: I will say this grudgingly and once only: it is the finest colonial building I have seen in Kerala, and I went looking specifically to find a better one. Erected in the early nineteenth century when Colonel John Munro was British Resident to the princely state of Travancore, it blends European neoclassical planning with Dutch and Kerala habits — deep verandas, tiled roofs, and lake breezes in place of glass, which is cleverer than anything the Company managed anywhere else I have stood. Travancore's affairs were steered from rooms like these, and Gandhi was later lodged here. A government guest house now, on lawns beside Ashtamudi. Annoyingly good.
I sort by size, whole against split, all day, and I promise you the difference of a fraction of a millimetre is real. Wilson Synthetic Gut Power in 17 gauge measures 1.25 mm — thinner than the 16, and that thinner core bites the ball a little more, feels a little livelier and gives a little more spin, at the cost of some durability.
The construction is the same solid core with high-energy wraps that has kept this string in club stringing rooms for decades: powerful, controllable, easy on the arm and genuinely cheap. This is the 200 m reel, which is how a busy shop buys it — the economical format for clubs, coaches and anyone cutting string out of frames all week.
Kollam graded goods long before I did. Ashtamudi Lake, the lake of eight braids, is the great backwater the city sits on, its palm-lined arms reaching inland from the sea at Neendakara — and it made the town's fortune, because the medieval port of Quilon on its shore was one of the premier emporia of the Indian Ocean.
You will go through this reel everywhere from a municipal hard court in the middle of Kollam to a club stringing room turning round forty frames a week, and it is also perfect for the junior who snaps a set a fortnight and whose father would very much like to stop thinking about it.
The Portuguese built Fort St Thomas at Thangassery in the early sixteenth century to guard their trading post here, when this was one of the great pepper ports of the Malabar coast. Beside it, the Thangassery Lighthouse was commissioned in 1902, its red-and-white banded tower rising about forty-one metres, among the tallest on the Kerala coast.
And at Asramam stands the old British Residency, built in the early nineteenth century when Colonel John Munro was Resident to Travancore — European neoclassical planning with Dutch detailing, and one of the finest colonial buildings left in Kerala.
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