This piece was written by Shashi Tharoor on his book "Kerala - God's own country" for "The Hindu"THE only time I properly met the incomparable M.F. Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the then Indian Ambassador, Hamid Ansari. Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the Ambassador's Park Avenue living-room, I recounted to the Master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: "draw me a horse". Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari's collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment; watching the artist's long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses' heads rearing, their manes flying, hooves and tails in the air, as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius. So to collaborate on a book with Husain, as I have just done, was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain has just completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well. For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain's extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of "God's Own Country". Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals; there is nothing in the world like the Thrissur Pooram, when hundreds emerge, bedecked with ornaments and flowers, to receive the homage of the Malayali people. Elephants infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the State's literature, dance, music, films and art. It is said that the true Keralite can tell one elephant apart from another just by looking at it. In their myriad shapes, sizes and colours, Husain's elephants embody the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the State, its lagoons, its forests, its beaches and, above all, the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers its secrets across the land. And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian stereotype, its resolute determination to progress, and above all, its empowerment of women. What can one say about this remarkable work and its remarkable subject, in this curious collaboration between a great artist who has signed his name in Malayalam, a language he cannot speak, and a writer who traces his roots to Kerala, a homeland he has only visited on his holidays? The "Marunaadan Malayali" — the expatriate Keralite — is so widespread, and so common, a phenomenon that the phrase has entered the Malayalam language. And here I am, one of the tribe, inspired by the paintings of a man who is the most "inside" of outsiders, seeking to capture in far too many words the insights into Kerala that he has illuminated with the dazzling fluency of his brush. Though I am a Malayali and a writer, I have no claims to be considered a Malayali writer: indeed, despite setting some of my fictional sequences in Kerala and scattering several Menons through my stories, I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I cannot write my own mother-tongue. And yet I am not inclined to be defensive about my Kerala heritage, despite the obvious incongruities of an expatriate praising Kerala from abroad and lauding the Malayali heritage in the English language. As a child of the city, growing up in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, my only experience of village Kerala had been as an initially reluctant vacationer during my parents' annual trips home. For many non-Keralite Malayali children travelling like this, there was often little joy in the compulsory rediscovery of their roots, and many saw it more as an obligation than a pleasure. For city-dwellers, rural Kerala (and Kerala is essentially rural, since the countryside envelops the towns in a seamless web) was a world of rustic simplicities and private inconveniences. When I was 10, I told my father that this annual migration to the south was strictly for the birds. But as I grew older, I came to appreciate the magic of Kerala - its beauty, which Husain so exquisitely evokes, and also its ethos, which animates his images. What does it mean, then, for Keralites like me, now living outside Kerala, to lay claim now to our Malayali heritage? What is i