Oneal Sabu Unravels Fort Kochi Through Ghosts, Community Tables, & Storytelling

“When you’ve never been away from home and think of it as the greatest place on the earth, you’re a frog that refuses to leave its familiar pond. But when you’ve been everywhere and nowhere and come back home to discover its inherent beauty? That is a journey of finding rootedness in one's own home," says Oneal Sabu aka FCBoy. Drawing analogies to how even migratory birds find their way back to the comfort of their home, Oneal shared how he started doing storytelling sessions and initiatives around Fort Kochi, to capture its myriad of stories. 

A lawyer by profession, but a self-proclaimed history nerd who still remembers where he lost the last mark on his 10th-grade paper, Oneal is someone I have known for the last decade or so, albeit virtually. He had been passionately opinionated, perhaps a little too much so (his words, not mine). He is still a talker and calls a spade a spade, but now with the nuance that comes with life and experience. Over the years, I’d seen him do food pop-ups (which he continues to this day), start a restaurant and have it dwindle down during the pandemic, host food walks around his home turf, set up commensality events, and of course — lead people on spook trails.

The first time I met Oneal offline was on Friday the 13th, September 2024 — talk about ominous. I had registered to attend his spook trail walk through Fort Kochi titled ‘Colonial Crawlies’ — a part of his ongoing community event series where he takes an interested audience through the town he calls home. In seeking to create an experience that strays away from the usual heritage walks, Oneal started his spook trail, being the first spook trail/storytelling session at night from Kerala in 2022.

He also organises Community Mesa (community table), where he touches upon the indigineous cuisine of Kochi from a regional perspective, from his years of research in culinary anthropology. He particularly talks to cuisine that predates the many colonial powers that had come to Kerala shores and was made palatable for them and put on restaurant menus, which is not reflective of the regional prespective. A classic case for this that he talks about is how the Kerala Biriyani differs from those in North India and how ours came through trade routes and the Arabs that came to our shores, rather than derived from the Persians and Mughals and their various conquests. 

Across our conversation, he talked about how he had written a book titled ‘Soul Fried Monologues (Notion Press, 2016)’ centered on food, and memory in a tone that is his signature today, one seemingly uncouth at first glance, but draws deeply on his research-heavy background as a laywer. Across the book and his work, he zeroes in on the the minority narratives that may have been lost to time with a skill for storytelling that one has to witness in person to truly appreciate. 

As FCBoy (‘Fort Cochin Boy’), Oneal has taken his way with words, both the spoken and the written, and cooks up experiences that offer an intriguing slice of his home, in a way that is only known to those who are from Fort Kochi. He shared how his trip to Edinburgh castle in all its fantastical glory during his days abroad inspired him to offer an experience of a similar kind in Kochi, years later. But as a person, he shared how his personal journey comprising of the food he ate at home, the sandwiches he made during his time working at sandwich shops and fine dining restaurants in the UK while studying Maritime Law, becoming an unfiltered food critic and culinary anthropologist, authoring his book on food and memory, and his stint as a restaurateur - all finally brought him back home. 

The Way Back To Fort Kochi 

During our conversation, between coffee, tea, and buttered croissants he told me of his journey of growing up in Fujairah, UAE and of coming home to Fort Kochi — where his parents hailed from. He spoke about about the unique way he learned about the history of his hometown through his grandmother’s tales; of his ancestors stories and the living history that he witnessed in Kochi as the son of a couple that hailed from different communities across Fort Kochi. Food, of course, was the anchor that kept him hooked. After the typical NRI life in the UAE until he was in the tenth grade, he came back to Fort Kochi. Though he made friends in Fort Kochi — playing cricket at Parade and Veli ground and studying at at the National University of Advanced Legal Studies here and later University of Southhampton— he didn’t feel a real connection to Kochi.

This was a feeling I resonated with, of not appreciating the abundance of history and culture that surrounded his home, and aspiring for a life far away from it. But sometime during the late 2010s, he had life experiences that led him, morsel by morsel, back to Kochi. He shared about a loved one - his auntie jack - who read his Tarot while holidaying in Goa, and said that they saw him needing to find his roots. Even though it might have been brushed away, there was a sense of fascination for a realm beyond. So for Oneal to come back to Kochi, and eventually start hosting a story walk that takes one through the locale he calls home, through a fantasy-like narrative, is strangely befitting. 

Phantasma, Colonial Crawlies, & The Realm Beyond

When I attended Colonial Crawlies, the Fort Kochi spook trail — we started at Feel Home, a beautiful Airbnb in Fort Kochi right near Santa Cruz Basilica. He took us on a journey through the erstwhile ‘Fort’ of Fort Kochi and along the old walls that existed there, bastion to bastion. He seamlessly blended stories of Fort Kochi’s history — the many colonisers that had come to its shores, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the British and the key moments in Fort Kochi’s history like the Great Fire of Cochin 1889 that reshaped the landscape of the locale; all blended in with local lore of monsters, ghosts, and spectral beings. He connected this thread through the work, time, and lives through that of Captain Joseph Ethelbert Winkler, the last to be buried at the historically significant Dutch Cemetery that we had a long stop in front of during our walk.

Whether it was the story of the otta mulachi (translated to the single-breasted woman), who realisitcally was probably someone with a birth defect, or the more recent lore of Radhika whose murder is something that even my mother remembered from the 70s, the plausibility of Fort Kochi’s hauntings were palpable. The spook trail felt a little extra spooky, when some of us (including myself) had a bat defecate on us, the moment he pointed towards the area that has been known for its sightings of Radhika, a young woman whose death continues to be a cold case to this day. While in conversation, Oneal believes that a storyteller is a story's way of finding out more about itself and that just perhaps Radhika is reaching out to have story told."

The Colonial Crawlies trail that I attended is the second variant of his spook trails. Phantasma Jew Town spook trail through Mattancherry is what started him on this journey of taking people through the hauntings and folklore that exist in the bylanes of Kochi. According to Oneal, “Kochi, specifically Fort Cochin has been presented in movies, and reinforcing stereotypes to visitors through the mainstream narratives — of the colonisers and the powerful few — but there are so many stories of the common man and their marginalised narratives that continue to live on around us. But those are not as easy to tell with authenticity. To that end, you need to look beyond academic research, and have conversations that challenge the accepted mainstream narrative.” 

One of the major stops in his story through Mattancherry is of Kappiri Muthappans — African slaves that were brought to Cochin by the Portuguese and left behind to guard their treasures while horrifyingly niched into the walls themselves. They were later honoured and worshipped as spirits and continued to be given offerings of puttu, beedi, ganja, and toddy by those who belong to the lower-end of the caste spectrum. The idea of telling stories that go beyond the majoritarian is what extends to Oneal’s culinary experiences as well. The acceptance that he has found from the people of his home of Fort Kochi is what he holds closest to heart as well.

Community MeSa, History Grazing Leaf, and More

By the time Oneal launched 'Community MeSa', his community initiative celebrating communal dining, the idea was clear: every dish on the leaf is accompanied by a story. At these gatherings - whether around a simple grazing board or a more formal MeSa spread — he curates recipes that resurrect nearly-lost traditions and invite people into the living history of his land. One look at the Breudher, Fort Kochi’s almost-forgotten 'bread of the dead', reveals his approach. This Dutch-origin Bundt-shaped loaf, flavoured with nutmeg and laden with dried fruit, once threaded through Eurasian wake rituals, is now only available in a Pattalam bakery, that is far different from the original version, with weekly batches dwindling to just 10–15 loaves.

Oneal bakes the closest authentic version of the Breudher and offers a taste of it during his fine dining pop-ups and at Community MeSa. He also incorporates evocative dishes like Mus'adth (Portugese Creole mustard sauce from Cochin) — holding up forks to history, community rituals, and the bonds that underlie them. Something interesting to note is that Oneal's recipe for the Mus'adth is what is used at the legendary restaurant Masque. Through MeSa, you don't just eat, you participate in a story rooted in collective memory. Even a beef cutlet or a Tirutha curry (grey mullet) becomes a culinary gateway that teaches you about the people whose tables they once belonged to and the lives they lived.

That late-night Tarot reading that I talked about earlier, the one that told him he needed to dig for his roots? It turns out the cards were only sketching the outline — he filled in the colours. Every ghost-lit street he walks; every Biriyani chembu (cooking vessel) he opens and serves across the Community MeSa table, is a quiet answer to that prophecy. By guiding strangers through Fort Kochi’s shadowed alleys and seating them around his MeSa spreads, Oneal isn’t just tracing his lineage, he’s braiding the past and present into something solid enough to savour.

The cards pointed him home, but it’s the stories — and the people willing to listen — that keep him here. In the end, the journey the Tarot foretold perhaps wasn’t about destination at all; it was about the steady act of revisiting memory through food and stories untold, until a home, like the reading, reveals itself — and you find yourself nourished by both.

You can follow Oneal Sabu (FCBoy) here.

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