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MOST FIRST-TIMERS to India make a beeline for the Taj Mahal and Delhi’s Red Fort, both beautiful and historic—and invariably mobbed with tourists. I prefer to consume exoticism in smaller, less predictable doses, which is how, one fine October day, I wound up in a thatch-roof cottage fronting the Arabian Sea along a 14-mile stretch of unspoiled beach in the country’s far south. The cottage was one of 18 scattered around the gardens at the Neeleshwar Hermitage resort in Kerala, among the country’s most scenic states.
A…