Shortly before we left our jobs to travel, D took a funny phone call at the Indian gig. Given the likelihood that answering the phone there would mean listening to someone start rattling away in a tongue other than English, just hearing the phone ring made my skin crawl in apprehension. Too many years spent working in loud music clubs have damaged my hearing in certain situations, and I'd always have to ask the caller to repeat himself six or seven times. It didn't help, either, that so many South Asians have telephone voices that register about three decibels quieter than a sparrow fart. But D, she's got young ears and excellent phone etiquette, she answers with the name of the joint and her name, then "How may I help you?""Hello, Doobie," responds the thick Indian accent on the other end of the line, "walla walla dinnah boo-fay?"
Not even fazed by the misunderstood name or the utter incomprehensibility of the entire exchange, she sussed that the guy's wondering if our lunch buffet might also be available in the evenings. No, she tells him, the dinner menu is a la carte. Thank yous are traded and the call is over. By the time I arrive for my shift later that evening, D and K have adopted the man's strange query as a punchline, infectious as much for the mysteries contained in its nonsense syllables as for the lilting, musical, heavily accented soprano required of its delivery. I still smile when I hear it, and sometimes we bust it out just to crack each other up, lighten a mood. It's become a shorthand for our experience of walking around a foreign land in which we speak but one of the 300 languages in daily use, that of the erstwhile colonizers.
And many times that's not a problem. English is the lingua franca for so many exchanges over here, a common language more common than Hindi in South India, where Tamil, Telugu, Cannada, and Malayalam speakers have resisted efforts at uniting under a common tongue. Team Yahoo!, bright young minds from all over India, spoke English at work and play, and I'd need all the fingers on Shiva's dozen arms to count the times we've watched a beach-cafe table populated by Israelis, Germans, Russians, French kids, and the odd Japanese traveler communicate with their Indian waiter in 31 luscious flavors of English.
This week, however, our functional illiteracy and ignorance of the local tongue have combined to make Sisyphean tasks of even the most mundane interactions. In Chennai, the cosmopolitan burg where we met up with our old boss from Cambridge, A, we were offered numerous suggestions for meals and sights around town. There was this one American-style diner where A recommended the cheeseburger, a hankering I didn't know existed in me until I heard the word ("Mmmmmm, cheeeeeseburger..."). We knew the neighborhood and we knew the name of the joint, we even knew the street it was on, and it still took us two rickshaws, forty-five minutes, and several stops while our drivers asked for directions. The problem, you see, is that many streets in Chennai are known by two names: one given by the English, one reflecting the postcolonial efforts to re-Tamil-ize Tamil Nadu. We've run into this all over India, where the trains stop in Mumbai (Marathi name), not Bombay (English corruption), at VT (Victoria Terminus, as in Queen) and not Chatrapati Shivaji (Marathi king and popular tongue-twister) Terminus. What you call your hometown depends on when you were born there, before or after the new names came in. Most people older than twenty will eschew their native tongues and the current maps and the larger political overtones of reclaiming a land from centuries of colonial rule, referring out of habit to the Anglicized names of cities and streets.
So confusion reigned supreme as we searched out a burger and fries in the land of the Holy Cow. We kept telling the second driver "Spurtank Road," to which he would respond "You wan' go what bank?" And I'd name the road again, slower and louder, all too conscious that I was in danger of being that guy who shouts words from a foreign tongue in the futile, idiotic hope that increased volume might spark recognition in the eyes of a person who does not understand them. We've all seen that guy, whether he's talking to hired help in the States or a tuk-tuk driver in Chennai. He ain't pretty. I didn't want to be him, but I also didn't want to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary sucking blue fumes while being driven in circles. Our progress literally described a squared circle as we left Egmore station, turning south east north west in a diminishing spiral, stopping for directions at a handful of roadside stores until bang in front of us was the diner, checkerboard wall tiles and all. We were three blocks due south of the station, to the best of my reckoning. Alas, that was one tasty hamburger.
The next day we found ourselves on a similar fool's errand. The Theosophical Society has a large park in Adyar, southeast of the city center, where there's a library with arcane religious texts on display and a 400-year-old banyan tree on the grounds that can shade upwards of 3000 people. Sounds impressive, right? We agreed. We set out from Anna Salai, the center's main drag, on one of the buses our books said would take us to the gates of the park. Just spitballing the issue while waiting for the bus, I tried to get a rate for a rickshaw to the Theosophical Society. Those nine syllables were getting me nowhere, no matter how loud or how slow, so I tried "Adyar Library," an alternate name in our LP. "Adyar?" came the response. "Which hotel you going?"
So close, and yet...
The bus put us out a click and a half from Elliots Beach, which abuts the park on the latter's eastern border. That much we knew. We found the wall surrounding the grounds, but no gate. The gate's address was listed as Blavatsky Avenue, and every road sign (surprisingly there they were, and even in English!) only named numbered cross streets. First Main Road's Second Cross Street, and suchlike. We asked at the sidewalk bubble tea spot that didn't serve bubble tea, and they didn't know what we were asking. We asked the guy at the smokes'n'paan stall outside the no-bubble-tea spot, and he didn't know either. We asked a rickshaw driver who was waiting while his fare conducted business inside one of the homes or shops on one of the cross streets, and our smiling faces were met with the next in a long line of blank stares. Here we were, within sight of the wall surrounding 240 acres of private park containing a tree big enough to toilet paper half of India, and nobody knows how to get inside. Not only did nobody know how to get where we were going, they didn't even seem to know that such a place existed. We may as well have been asking for the directions to the Octopus's Garden, the Black Gate of Mordor, some acid fantasy inhabited by the irretrievably bent. They stared at us like we had frogs in our hair. By the time our last hope extinguished in the unknowing eyes of those we'd asked for help, the park's gates were set to close in minutes. Par for the course, we decided, packing it in and heading back to A's place, heads hanging and brains aching from the effort, leaving Chennai the next morning without having seen anything to justify our trouble.
But some days it's like that. Central Mumbai is a very walkable city, easy to navigate and fun besides. Chennai, not so much. Our maps were not granular enough to be of any assistance beyond figuring which part of town we might be in. Even then, Chennai's a booming city and our maps, granular or not, were at least two years old. Them's the breaks. They can't all be winners, kid.
From the disappointment of Chennai we headed south to Mamallapuram, a stone-carving beachside town that was tiny and easily navigable and presented a perfect chance to clean the frogshit out of our hair. We're now in Pondicherry, a city independent of Tamil Nadu that was held by France until the late 1950's. Here we have encountered the pleasant surprise that is hearing the Parisian tongue spoken by Indian mouths. Yet another curiousity in this land of contradictions, our guesthouse is owned by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the main draw for foreigners in Pondy. There's a utopian village on the outskirts of town, funded by the ashram and home to almost 2000 "citizens of the world." D and I are a little creeped out by the whole issue, which is a bit too Heaven's Gate for our tastes. Get this: there's a picture over our bed of the movement's late matriarch, known simply as "The Mother." I've had to fight the impulse to turn it facing the wall, but I think they might be watching and we like the room.
So Mom will watch over our restful slumber for another two nights, we'll rise for croissants in the morning and sip espresso in the afternoon, and Thursday we hop a 13-hour train to Trivandrum, in Kerala. They call it "God's Own Country" in all the Tourism Department literature. Given the Babel trip we've been on these last ten days, it won't surprise me to arrive and find a big grey-haired Jerry-Garcia-lookin' dude smiling down from the sky, shouting in God's Own Language, speaking louder when we don't understand.
