On our next-to-last day in Pondicherry, D and I scored some of the bomb local cheese (made by the space-cadet ashramites of Auroville), a fresh baguette, and a bottle of local vino. We made our way to the botanical gardens, where we planned on reveling in our shared Francophilia and enjoying a little picnic among les belles fleurs. We poured the wine into a Nalgene for discreet public consumption and dumped the bottle, wrapped in the plastic bag from the wine shop, in one of the dustbins at the gardens' entrance. We headed off into the gardens, which were surprisingly overgrown and ill-maintained, in search of a bench we could use for our brief repast. Within thirty seconds of sitting down, we're approached by a gang of young boys who ask us if we're enjoying our wine. We feign ignorance of their broken English in the hopes that they'll leave us alone to enjoy our food, and it works...almost. They move off to congregate around and upon a small boulder maybe fifty feet away, chattering amongst themselves and staring at us. Our first bites of gorgonzola curdling in our stomachs under the scrutiny of the pack, we decide to decamp for the beachside promenade to try again. On our way out of the gardens we pass the same dustbin where we'd dumped the bottle, and there's the empty bag blowing along the path. D is putting this scene together in her head, and I see the realization dawn on her that the boys had plucked the bottle (for a deposit?) and discarded the bag mindlessly at their feet, nevermind the trash can right there. The fire behind her eyes making her ears smoke visibly, she starts sputtering with righteous indignation as I re-trash the bag, put my arm around her, say "Nevermind, nevermind, nevermind..."Across town and on the sand, we find an available bench shaded by a thatched roof, one of a dozen or so bamboo structures dotting the elevated promenade. Taking in the salty air and the sunshine, we set about preparing our feast for the second time. Because Fate laughs at picnickers and French cheese, within seconds we're being harassed by a staggeringly drunk, disheveled Indian man with an empty large Kingfisher in his hand. He's asking for food or a rupee or who-knows-what, and I've had it. I'm all for sharing with the needy, but this dude stank of beer and had the nerve to ask me to fund his next? Fuck that noise. The teat of human kindness had run dry. I stood up and started waving my hands like Get out of here, go bother someone else, move it along, bro but no dice. I then remember I'm waving my open pocketknife in my hand, and realize I must look like I'm brandishing a weapon at an essentially harmless, drunken beggar. Pissed off even more by the tableau we're staging as I'm telling him to bugger off, I put my knife back with the bread and cheese and return to push the man forcefully on down the beach. I lost my cool, no doubt, but I didn't (and don't) regret shoving a hundred-pound Indian drunk away from my hut.
What got me after the fact was how fast I snapped, how quickly I forgot manners and decorum and went for broke on some poor schmuck. These last few weeks had been wearing on D and I, and it was beginning to show. We were tired of paying too much for rickshaws with "broken" meters and shite food in backpacker haunts and occasionally grimy accommodation. We were tired of the haggle and the hassle and the thousands of propositions we received each day, the conditioned responses of locals seeing white skin, the offers of pot and hash and "sightseeing" tuk-tuk rides and the constant barrage that had followed us in every destination since Kodai. And somehow I couldn't even get Zen about the whole issue with my usual bad-day mantra: "Some people work in coal mines...some people work in coal mines..." Before we knew it we were deep in a sticky funk and checking flights anywhere less Indian. A change of scenery was long overdue.
Ah, Kerala!
We arrived in Trivandrum after the longest haul of our journey thus far, a thirteen-hour monster trek southwest from Pondy that put us in the station near midnight. Having booked a room in advance and caring only about a soft place to crash, we hit the room with high hopes for what daylight would reveal around us.
No disappointments there. Trivandrum, Kerala's capital, manages to bustle without the shoulder-checking press of other Indian cities. It's a laid-back, walkable town with a couple of cool museums and a fascinating palace that once housed the local Maharajas. Besides all that, it was the first place we had seen in too long in which our budget realistically reflected What Things Cost. We stayed in a nice room for under 300 roops, had big cheap breakfasts in the surreal brick spiral of the Indian Coffee House around the corner, managed to enjoy a beer together in a welcoming bar down the street. Nobody hassled us as we walked down the street, and more than a few people (the first in a while) struck up conversations as we passed on the sidewalks. The most contentious exchange we had (trying to trade books we had finished reading for black-market reprints at the local book bazaar) was transacted with smiles and laughter. When one seller's friend came between us and offered to settle our genial dispute at a price fifty rupees lower than the one I named, the whole crowd started in on him at once, mock-strangling him as the word "idiot" broke through the swirl of Malayalam curses. We got a good vibe from the place and stayed longer than we initially planned, as much to heal our wounded spirits as our broken budget.
We moved on to Kollam, where we planned to check out Kerala's world-famous backwaters. These navigable waterways wind through innumerable tiny islands, some small enough to hold no more than a single coconut palm, whose lode, when overripe, splashes into the canals like a fat kid cannonballing. We had planned on renting a houseboat and floating a day and night through these wetlands, but the toll taken on our budget and our sanity by Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry precluded any such idylls. Instead, we settled for a half-day canoe tour of Monroe Island and Ashtamudi Lake. The price was right and the day was perfect, and we saw the two-hut villages and the spice gardens and the coconut-fiber ropes being made--in short, all the stuff we came for without any of the congested, petrol-slicked aquatic lanes surrounding the outboard-houseboat traffic jams out of Alleppey. We shared our canoe with two brothers from Hyderabad, A and S, who joked about our limited knowledge of Hindi during the few moments when their eyes were not glued to their Nikons. When S asked us why we weren't taking many snaps, A chided him on our behalf that we were traveling for a long time and couldn't be bothered to capture every curious calf chasing us along the canals. We had a long talk about our travels on the tempo ride back into Kollam, and A was one of the first Indians we've met who really seemed to understand the point of our trip, which is as basic as it is complicated: To experience life as it is lived beyond our homeland. We wished each other well and retired to our hotels, and the next afternoon we headed up the coast to Cochin.
Now, we should have taken our arrival in Cochin as a sign of things to come. We wound up taking the train to avoid a four-and-a-half hour state bus ride. The promised three hours, though, got us only a fraction of the distance we needed to cover, and the train would stop for forty-five minutes at a stretch for no discernible reason. Add that to the fact that we were sitting on our backpacks in the end of a packed carriage, by the very popular toilets, and our state of general frazzle by the time we arrived can be accurately estimated. Cochin was Godzilla, we were Japan. Off the ferry from the mainland it was a twenty-minute stroll through dark streets to our homestay. The proprietors seemed nice enough, a tiny old man and his wife, but the room was expensive (400 rupees for a bed down the hall from the cramped, shared bathroom). After the train ride and given how deserted the town seemed, we opted to take it and maybe look for a better value the next day.
We never found that better value. The problem with Fort Cochin is geographical: Ernakulam, on the mainland, is a big Indian city of a few million with all the accoutrements (traffic, crowds, air and noise pollution) that entails. The Fort area lies at the end of a narrow peninsula across the water and a world away, a scenic twenty-minute, five-rupee ferry ride or a long, expensive taxi or rick from Ernakulam. It's a retreat from the screaming city with trees lining its quiet streets and a relaxed atmosphere that the guidebooks describe, a bit too generously, as "romantic." As such, it is the destination of choice for Western tourists. And again, as such, the local hospitality industry has taken the fact that they're the only game in town and run with it, charging exorbitant rates for basic, no-frills accommodation and terrible food. Sure, you can find nice rooms and meals around, but you're gonna pay for it. That might be A-okay for short-stay tourists spending pounds and Euros, but for two budget travelers moving for eight months on a tanking dollar, it inspired flashbacks to what we'd come to Kerala in the hopes of escaping.
So we knew we wouldn't stay long, and made our short time in Cochin as cheap as we could. We bought tickets to a performance of kathakali, a stylized Keralan dramatic art form that tells the stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana using an elaborate system of eye rolls, hand movements, and posturing. There's a codified system of gestures that express "lust," "anger," "passion," "jealousy," and even "how the bee drinks the nectar from the lotus flower." I think the last one might be a sexual innuendo, but it wasn't entirely clear from the short course given before the performance. The show itself is a little bit pantomime, a little bit interpretive dance, and a whole lot weird. These guys spend hours painting themselves into costume, then spend even longer prancing about the stage without uttering any sound other than the occasional grunt. Bells attached to their legs and ankles highlight their movements while a team of drummers and a wailing singer accompany them and "tell" the story of what's going on before them. It's something to behold, and seeing the show was enough to inspire us to check out more of the local art forms.
The next morning, our last in Cochin, we were rudely awakened at eight AM by the owners of our lodge knocking to inform us that their girl had arrived to clean our room. Groggy and not sure if they were telling me what I thought they were, I said we didn't need our room cleaned and we'd be checking out that morning by the appointed time of noon. Thirty minutes later, there's another knock, and this time I'm less groggy and more angry. It's the owner's wife, again telling me that her girl is here to clean our room, adding that she has another reservation for our room and that the party has arrived. I point to the sign above the desk outside our room, which clearly states "CHECKOUT TIME 12 NOON," telling her that we were getting up anyway and would be ready after taking a shower and packing our bags, but letting her know that we would not be hurried out the door because of their poor planning. We had sketched out a lazy morning exit and a late seafood lunch to get the most time out of our budget before seeing an exhibition of kalarippayat, the local martial art, at four that afternoon. So we get cleaned up and we're half-naked and half-packed when another knock comes. I scream "WHAT?!" as I head to the door, belt undone and hair still wet, and this time it's owner and wife, telling me again that they need us out to clean the room. I point again to the sign by the desk, tell him again that it's not my problem, and shut the door. We finish what we're doing and store our bags in the spare room under the stairs, and I tell the owner I'll pay him when we collect our bags later that afternoon.
After a walk through town, we head out to the local fishmongers to haggle for Indian salmon and huge, gorgeous tiger prawns, and take our fish to a seafront shack where they butter and garlic it to perfection for a nominal fee. We luxuriate in the fresh seafood (we bought the fish still breathing) and go for French-press coffee and cake at this chic little art gallery-cum-cafe on one of the nearby backstreets. Having splurged on our meal for the day we go for the kalarippayat exhibition, which was sadly truncated due to the stitches and splints required of half the troupe after the previous night's show. Such injuries are pretty common, apparently, as--besides the flying kicks and swinging staffs and swords--one of the weapons demonstrated is the urumi, a weapon with a handle at the base of four flexible five-meter blades, worn as a belt by women and whirled through the air fast enough to make ribbons of any number of potential attackers on dark country lanes. Fearsome stuff, and the finale of the show.All smiles after salvaging a great afternoon from the shambles of our morning, we walk back to the guesthouse to secure our packs and set off for the mainland, where we would stay the night before an early train to Kannur. Upon arriving, I go upstairs to find the owner and pay our balance. He asks me why we're leaving, if we don't want to stay another night, and I can't believe my ears. This, after waking us from blissful morning slumber to shuffle us out the door to make way for the next suckers! I tell him there's no way I'd stay there another night, that I don't like the way he does business, and try to pay the 300-rupee balance with a 500-rupee note. Of course, as is so common in every business of any kind in this country, he doesn't have change. He tells me I should go back out, get change, and come back to pay him. I tell him he can go out for the change himself, that I'm ready to leave and I've had enough of his shit for one lifetime, and he insists again that I can get change down the road, in the opposite direction of our ferry. I give up and go downstairs to find D, tell her to shoulder her pack, that we're leaving. We're out the door when the owner calls down from his balcony, obviously concerned, asking where we're going. "To get change," I tell him. "Put your pants on and come with us if you want it." He does just that, comes down the side stairway pulling a face and tells me again we need to go the wrong way for the ferry to get change. I tell him he can come with us to the ferry and get change along the way, but that we won't be walking the other direction. He accuses us of trying to skip out on the bill, and I assent to the walk because now I want to beat a discount out of him for the early wake-up call and the shitshow that our dealings with him have been. We're raising our voices at each other on the walk, I'm telling him again that I don't appreciate being expected to pay the full amount for being kicked out early, and now he's telling me that he's already giving me a discount for not charging me 100 rupees extra to stash our packs for the day. "Is after five o'clock!" he says repeatedly, like our bags were occupying prime real estate in his closet and should be charged by the hour. Of course I know that any reputable lodging will allow for left luggage at no charge for paying customers, and I say as much as colorfully as I know how. "You're the fool," he tells me, at which point we've already cursed each other up and down the empty street after getting the change. I tell him to go to hell and go fuck himself, and regret not giving him specifics on the order in which he might go about such. As it was, I turned on my heel to avoid hitting the son of a bitch, and we walked down the way to the ferry steaming, steaming.
That night in Ernakulam was a relief, as we booked into a proper hotel with posted rates, no haggling, no bullshit, with attached bath and in close proximity to the train station. Having done a load of wash and strung it out to dry, D and I sat under our mosquito net reading for a bit, neither of us saying what we were both thinking, each of us trying again to make lemonade of the day's shitty citrus. We wound up talking through the day, focusing on a bomb plate of seafood and a cool knife show and not the circus of bad business that was the Ham Dale Inn. Agreeing to agree on what we'd take from the day, and knowing what we were going for on the next leg of our journey, we decided to go for a drink at a hotel bar that was reportedly alright for mixed company.
The joint was weird to say the least, with full-wall action portraits of sports heroes like some white skier chick and that Walton kid that played b-ball for Arizona. And the service was what it needed to be, a smile and a plate of roasted chickpeas with every round. I had whisky, D had Kingfisher, and--because I've been brushing my teeth with it and showering in it and occasionally even washing down a Mefloc with it--I put two cubes of the local ice into each of my whisky sevens. We talked over the day again, rehashed our reservations and applause about South India as a whole, and walked back to our room through the silent, dusty backroads of the city.
It only took three hours before I woke in a cold sweat, burning up and freezing all at once, mentally preparing myself for what I knew would be coming: the puking, the shitting, the general and I-need-not-specify-further unpleasantness of dysentery. D woke up a couple of hours later to find me burning up and shaking, asked me what was wrong. I told her and she was up most of the rest of the night holding me when I was cold, soothing me when I was hot, and when the first light shone through the paneless windows she asked me if I was fit to travel. I said roll out, we packed and caught a rick to the station, and I put on a brave (if pallid) face for the six-hour train to Kannur. We were sitting second class seated with a benchful of sari-clad women, none of whom batted an eye at the sick white boy trying to focus on his bootleg copy of Snow while simultaneously fighting off the urge to bumrush the line at the rolling latrine. Kind people, them.
But I digress: After all the trash we'd dealt with in Cochin, we decided to go off the trail in Kannur to find the local ritual of theyyam. Rumor has it this particular Keralan art/ceremony predates Hinduism and owes more to the animist cults that worshipped in the coconut groves before Sri Shiva took hold of the subcontinent some three thousand years ago. Our first taste of Kannur was tinged with the green filter of my discomfort, as we walked for close to two hours before finding a suitable place to hole up for a day or so before testing our (read: "my") mettle for the journey that would be a theyyam hunt. J at the train station's tourist info desk was unusually helpful, pointing us in the direction of one accessible rite being conducted that afternoon (my bowels nixed it) and giving us the name of a temple twenty clicks out of town where they performed it daily at sixish in the PM. He also tipped us off to a kalarippayat show going down at the town square that evening (late enough to be okay), which wound up being the highlight of our Indian Excursion thus far.
We showed up to the Square at the prescribed hour, which was 5:30 PM Indian Stretchable Time. Just like at a good show in New Orleans, they were still setting up the lights and mikes when we arrived. Nevertheless, we decided to sit for a minute and give it thirty more to get moving as the sun set over the western side of the amphitheater. Sitting and wondering what would happen next, we were besieged by a gaggle of highschoolers on a camping conference with the local tourism agency, the DTPC, among whom was J, the helpful gent from the tourist desk at the railway station. S was the first to talk to us, asking us the usual Whatisyourgoodname and Whichisyourcountry? We answered, using our Indian aliases for simplicity, and from there it was a constant backchatter behind the opening act, three women from the paddy fields in Cannanore district singing the local equivalent of Negro spirituals. While S explained the significance of what our foreign ears were hearing, I explained that people in my part of the world would do the same thing, singing to make their hearts smile while performing backbreaking labor for little or no remuneration. S found this corrolary interesting and asked me to sing a verse from one of our tunes. I blanked and looked at D, and the best we could come up with was "Swing low, sweet chariuh-hut, comin' for to carry me hoooome..." The kids ate it up, this off-key rendition of a sad, sad tune, and I listened to their laughter and the keening of the women onstage and hoped that we had struck a common chord and that I hadn't merely been the latest white man to appropriate black music in the name of plying a global audience.But for these kids, singing a line from a song from our homeland was an important thing. They asked D and I if we'd seen any Malayalam movies, who our favorite heroes and heroines (read: "movie stars") were, whether we might sing another line from another tune for their rolling digital voice recorders. Answering in the negative and drawing blanks and staring into the open, speckled maw of a recording device (in order), I was struck by the soulful strains of "Camptown Races," a song my grandmother used to sing to me when I'd stay at her place in Lexington and needed to go to sleep, all of five years old, thrilled to be in the company of that glorious, mysterious old woman with the mellifluous voice and perfect recall of her youth's songbook.
Doo-dah, doo-dah.
We continued talking with S and his friends, the girls eventually drawing D to their side of the scrum, and J eventually came back with a friend of his televising the cultural festival for a big local network. He asked me if I'd be willing to say a few words about the women singing and the boys swinging flaming coconut husks from steel chains (an altogether enlightening side of kalarippayat we hadn't seen in Cochin). One of S's girls asked me to point them out during the interview to make sure that they'd be famous TV stars, too. I did as they asked and was relieved when the cameraman panned left on my mention of "my friends here telling me about the singing women of the paddy fields..." We sat after the TV crew left and discussed politics ("I hate Bush!" "That's okay, S, we hate him, too.") and religion ("What is your religion?" "I have no religion." "That is good. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, we are all human beings.") and interpersonal relations ("Do you marry for love in USA?" "We marry for whatever reason we like in the States, and not always for the right one."). As the kalarippayat show drew to a close, through the big, fiery finale, S turned to me and said some of the most heartrendingly beautiful things I've ever heard from a 17-year-old Indian boy:
"I am sad, Bob."
"Why're you sad?"
"I am sad because in a short time you will leave, and I will leave, and we will say goodbye, and you will never see me again."
"Sure, but we'll always have Kannur," I said with a grin, visions of Bogart and Bergman making me smile for their sheer incongruity.
"But we will return to our homes in our villages, and you will return to your home in Am'rica, and I have very much liked speaking with you about life."
And I was at a loss. There were no words to express my lack of words for S's surplus. I'm sure I said something trite, something to put him at ease, to assure him that he needn't have asked D and I repeatedly if his conversation "brought distress" to our enjoyment of the performances. I know I don't remember those words, the same as I remember his, but we parted with a handshake and a hug and with best wishes for the future.
The next day we found a theyyam at the temple J pointed us to, and it was a loud, strange display of yellow-painted men with elaborate paunches running around in circles with swords in their hands. The theyyam festival we found the day after was in a lull when we arrived, and we spent the better part of two hours smiling and joking and answering the simple, belabored questions of the young girls who came to greet us while the painted, headdressed men in the temple forecourt were fanned and mobbed, alternately, by their devotees. All told, our stay in Kannur cost us less per day than a seafood smorgasbord in Cochi. And it was worth a thousand times that for the spiritual rejuvenation granted us by a handful of boisterous, inquisitive, beautiful children who expressed so openly and honestly an innocent curiousity about (and concern for) another's ways of life.
And that quickly, in just a few hours of a few days, between bouts of anger and sickness and confusion, we found ourselves rid of the albatross we had been cursing intermittently for the past month. I'd be a schmuck if I pulled out the Whitney Houston, said "I believe that children are the future," but I don't know if I can put it any better right now. It's late, and there are too many words before these. All I know is that we came through a dark time and arrived on the other side smiling, cheerful, and full of hope--not only for ourselves, but for every one of us.
Teach them well and let them lead the way.
