The Lightning Round

Finding internet joints in India is not difficult. It's no double-axel-triple-lutz, no Mormon whorehouse. It's finding a reliable connection in a land of unexplained power cuts that has proven to be the challenge. Here's to blogging from the developing world.

That being understood, I've an acre or two of ground to cover to get myself to this present day, and presently the sun's sinking slowly Stateside. So with an economy heretofore unknown in these pages, I will endeavor to play catch-up with the last three weeks of perpetual motion. Here goes:

From Diu and horrible illness to Ahmedabad for the Uttarayan Kite Festival. Met up with D's girl R, who's here with IndiCorps for a year working with a community center in one of the city's thekro (slums). D showed a remarkable facility with kites, cutting the strings of two competitors flying their paper birds from the surrounding corrugated rooftops. I needed help floating anything but swear words, which flowed freely each time my kite sank sewerward.

Took the train from Ahmedabad to Jodhpur, in Rajasthan. The old city's all pastel-blue block houses under the massive, imposing Mehrangarh Fort. Saw a great drumline parade on an amble back from the fort through the narrow lanes of the city before downing a makhania lassi, a local specialty that made me reconsider my disbelief of any god who'd lead a people to put saffron, butter, and yogurt in the same glass. The bomb.

From Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, about which the less said the better. Before we'd even arrived there were touts boarding the bus to extol the virtues of their "brother's" guesthouse in town. We'd heard horror stories about folks taking rooms at dirt cheap rates only to be kicked out in the wee hours for not booking a camel safari (the main racket in town) through their place of lodging. Our eventual home for 100 roops a night, The Peacock, was an oasis from the monkeyshit going down everywhere else. The fort was less impressive than Jodhpur's, but it had the dubious distinction of being the only centuries-old sandstone fortification I've walked through to have private bus schedules painted on its aged rock walls. Such was the tacky, tacky scene.

Six hours by bus to Bikaner, where we caught the local camel festival (above left). Rajasthani guys with the aforementioned bitchin' 'staches rode their mounts in from the dunes to compete in pageants showing off their camel-shaving and -festooning abilities. Some truly amazing work on both counts. Our last morning there we made the short bounce out to the Karni Mata Temple in Deshnok, where thousands of sacred rats have the run of the joint. We brought disposable socks for our circumambulations. It's considered auspicious to have a rat scurry over your feet (check check check in the first five minutes) or to spot the lone albino of the bunch, which is seriously good luck we won't be having. Alack.

Skipped Jaipur, Pushkar, Amber and Udaipur for the hassles said to await us there. We'd had it with Rajasthan, which is a cesspool of harrassment and extortion you have to spend your way above.

So Bikaner to Delhi, where we caught a train to Amritsar in Punjab. Home to the Golden Temple, ground zero of the Sikh religion, Amritsar was a pungasm waiting to happen. To wit: D got Sikh our first day there behind a questionable Punjabi thali. Might be the last time she can ever enjoy daal makhani. After a day of convalescence and bland Western food, we caught the Indo-Pak border closing ceremony at Attari-Wagah. Serious high-stepping pomp and circumstance on both sides, with cheering and dancing and absurdly tall soldiers in fan-topped turbans and this one old lady sitting next to us who kept repeating "I am proud Indian, proud Indian." We rode out with three Aussies who had just arrived in India, two dudes and a chick. Chick got Sikh from the bleachers during the ceremony, walked past us dollargreen and visibly unwell. Then her brother got Sikh on the ride back to Amritsar, had to have our Tata Sumo pull over so's he could scoot off into a field to rock the Technicolor yawn. Soon as he's back in the ride and apologizing for the delay, something stinks. Up go the windows and the stench should have gone with the breeze, but it turns out dude stepped in a big sloshy cow puddle on his way back from the yack and all eleven of us were about to get Sikh from the smell. I laughed so hard I snorted, and the Kashmiri women sitting in front of me turned around to make sure I wasn't going to be Sikh all over them. Good times with Indian food and water. We laugh because we know the feeling.

Amritsar to Chandigarh, a planned city and easily the strangest, least Indian place in India. Le Corbusier laid out perfectly rectangular Sectors with sidewalks (!) and clean parkland ribboning through them, a modernist capital complex, and did it all with enough concrete to pave seven inches over Texas. It took one of the new city's code inspectors, though, to put it on the map. Nek Chand (no relation to the city's root) took a bunch of really vivid childhood dreams and truckloads of disused pottery shards, electrical housings, and stray bangles and built himself a fantasyland he dubbed his Rock Garden. They say it's the second-most-visited site in India, but who's counting? Even if they're fudging the numbers, walking around his Xanadu was some of the most fun we've had for ten rupees.

Back through Delhi to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. It's enormous, it's magnificent, it's a wonder of the world and the headliner of every tourist brochure India prints. But here's something you gotta visit to find out: The whole place smells like foot. You can take that to the bank, put it in your pipe and smoke it, amaze and amuse the next time you're stuck for conversation at a boring dinner party. The Taj Mahal smells like gym class in junior high. Discuss.

A short jump from Agra took us yesterday to the ghost town of Fatehpur Sikri. It's a red sandstone city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar on a site without a water supply. In India. Where it gets, like, hot. Akbar had a 3000-woman harem, something that would tell even the virginal observer he might need a source of hydration late of an evening. Eventually the whole site was abandoned for more hospitable surrounds. The harem went with.

[Whew.]

So now we're in Gwalior. It's dark out. We're seeing another big fort tomorrow, then on to Orchha and the Kama Sutra carvings on the temples of Khajuraho. Moving fast, kids, and now we're working with a deadline. Last week in Delhi we booked an April 1 departure from the capital, arriving in Istanbul for the next leg of this Asian Experiment. Between now and then we've got the Indian Himalayas (east, then west) to catch, with a two-week jaunt through Nepal to link the two sides. It's the lightning round, where the scores can really change. Try to keep up, and I'll do the same.


Oh, and a Call For Submissions:

Given my penchant for rambling digression, you might be left after reading this entry and others with one or more unanswered questions. Plot points hang in the breeze, main characters disappear abruptly and without further mention, "India" might occasionally seem shot through a lens slathered with Vaseline--sorta like reading Shantaram, but without the prison bits.

So I'm interested in what you might want to know. It'll be an exercise in clarification for me, a chance to expound upon the whys and wherefores of our excursion. Ask me (or D) anything, whether you're wondering how long you can wear one pair of boxer-briefs, what's the meter conversion for rickshaws in Pune, or just what the shit a "dhaba-wallah" might be.* Fire away. My email's on the profile page linkable at left. Everything's fair game, and if I don't know the answer I'll make one up. Every question gets a response, and the fun ones I'll compile for a future blog. Until then, cheers. Peace.


*: Three months sixteen days, but they'll change funny colors; meter times six plus two; the wallah who runs the dhaba. Respectively.

Program Music

OVERTURE: In Which Bob And Jane Move North, The Wheels On The Bus Going 'Round And 'Round

It's been some time since last we caught wind of our heroes' mis/adventures as they cruise the Subcontinent. Wending their way through paddy and grove, town and village, hypermetropolis and whistlestop, they went from verdant Kerala into the alternating bustle and rustle of Karnataka. Returning to a state they loved and vowing to see more of it, they found themselves rolling from Kannur to Mangalore to Madikeri, deep in the heart of Kodagu, a region of hills and mountains and earthy bumps of various sizes in between. Kodagu is coffee country, tea country, and Madikeri is its capital. The market smells of fresh ground joe and sings with the alarms of a thousand knockoff Timexes. And this is where our symphony begins, as Bob and Jane disembark their state bus and leave their watch behind in

MOVEMENT I: The Land That Forgot Time (or, The Agony of Da Feet)

We didn't realize we'd forgotten the watch until we'd checked into a room and wondered what time folks might start serving the regional pork specialties. By then it was too late, our watch and its carabiner still holding back the curtain on a semi-deluxe KSRTC bus bound for Mysore. I miss the carabiner. We bought another watch for eighty rupees in one of the score of stalls in the main bazaar and carried it with us, strapped to the outside of our daypack, on the two-day trek we arranged. The first day was brilliant, a long walk along ridges and switchbacks through coffee, tea and spice plantations with S, our guide. S pointed out every different plant and nut and spore along the way while he shared with us his life story and plans for opening his own guide outfit in Kodagu. He was a wonderful storyteller and a very funny cat, openly curious about life in our United States and ready to laugh at a white boy who thinks every hissing irrigation line might be a king cobra. We stopped around two for lunch with a local Tulu-speaking family, four generations under the same roof, where grandma plied us with home cooking (daal and fresh greens with rice and chai) and great-granny ground betel nuts for paan and great-granddaughter showed us her gimme-a-cavity cute litter of puppies. After seventeen long clicks through the misty green mountains we found ourselves at our campsite near the bottom of the valley outside Madikeri. A small assembly of huts collected around a cave shower and a campfire ring, we roughed it in a mudblock structure equipped with one thirty-foot bed of stretched thatch and bamboo. Our meal that night was served in a tiny home down the dirt road from the hut compound, a simple meal of rice and cabbagey daal with hot chapatis eaten by the light of a flask candle. Returning, I lit a hard-won campfire from scavenged paper scraps and half-dry wood and we warmed ourselves before retiring to our cot for the night.

That first day of the trek was the first time we had worn shoes in almost two months, as sandals are the order of every day here. Consequently, I wore holes in both of my heels that I feared might have revealed bone. Also, while ducking to pass beneath one of many fallen trees, I lost the watch that I'd fastened to a strap on our backpack. So we awakened the second morning with pained feet and no idea of the time. Reporting for breakfast down the road, we found that our internal clocks were roughly accurate. Our new guide, however, had no such guiding sense of punctuality. He was more than an hour late, time we killed playing cricket with our hostess' son among the cow pies and strutting chickens on their tiny acreage. Between our wounded soles and our late start and the distance we had to cover to summit Tadayindemol, the tallest peak in Kodagu, the day was shaping up to be a bear. The trail began easily enough on a paved path with paddy on the downhill, coffee on the up. Where the asphalt ended, though, the going got tough. Steep and rocky where it wasn't steep and knotted with tangling roots, the trail wore on our already tender feet, which in turn took its toll on our knees as we adjusted our stride to compensate for four barking dogs. Over the first seven kilometers up the mountain, we smiled through the pain as every turn brought us more sweeping, verdant vistas of the region. With less than a click to go, though, and all of it in one fifty-degree scramble through the swirl and swell of every gust for 100 miles, D and I had hit our limits. It didn't help that our guide, younger and less experienced than S, spent the climb alternately lagging to SMS his peeps and bounding ahead of us, able to provide no guidance or reassurance or even a reasonable, steady pace. Yesterday's monkeys were weighing heavily on our backs, and my feet felt like two fluffy kittens being devoured by scorpions. Looking up into the sun and realizing we'd had it, we abandoned our quest for the summit, gazing wistfully, defeatedly up at what looked for all the world like fucking Everest.

MOVEMENT II: Don't Just Stand There, Bus A Move!

Our trekking finished (for better or worse), we began a series of bus rides that would bring us to Karnataka's far northeast, to the tiny town of Bidar. Getting there from Madikeri, in the southwesternmost corner of the state, would prove to be a challenge. I've written before about the roads in Karnataka, how their peaks and craters rival anything we climbed in Kodagu, but this leg of our sojourn deserves mention. As the crow flies, Madikeri to Bidar is less than 600 kilometers. It's Boston to NYC. This being India, however, we had to break that trip into four legs, the last being the only day shorter than 10 hours. From Madikeri we rode to Shimoga and stayed the night by the bus stand, leaving for Hospet the next morning. We broke up the journey in Hampi (left), a quaint little burg we loved in October, staying two nights before moving as far as Gulbarga, a twelve-hour gauntlet that put us four hours from Bidar--a joyride by comparison. By the time we arrived we had spent nearly 48 hours on buses as we passed through innumerable villages and bus stands big and small.

And that was why we looked at the trip like a blessing, rather than a curse. For a number of reasons, D and I have felt more at home in the sticks than in the cities. And we've enjoyed daytime bus trips more than the marginally faster trains. You can see more of life as it's lived when it's rolling past your open, rattling window at 25 kilometers an hour than you can when it's whizzing by the barred portals of a rail-prison. You have time to spot the elephants in the forest outside Madikeri, lumbering through the undergrowth twenty meters off the road. Getting down from the bus to Gulbarga and badly needing a piss, you can be followed to the open urinals by a pack of boys asking questions of you, perhaps the only white man to pass through those parts in years, as stage fright blocks your impending flow and you answer, stammering with effort, "America...I am fine...my name is Bob...I gotta piss, how are you?" Those are the moments that make the state buses worth the trouble. They're amazingly cheap (and you get what you pay for), but the slice-of-life value is worth its weight in funky gold noserings.

MOVEMENT III: "Nobody Goes To Bidar..."

--"and it's not clear why." This line is our Lonely Planet's introduction to the marvels of that town. It points out the abundance of Muslim architecture in the area and the ruined fort (left) that encircles empty hills and fields of kids playing cricket. But our guidebook is two years old, and when we arrived in Bidar it looked like a rogue, inland tsunami had washed the fronts off of every building in the old town. The front few meters of stores and offices and family homes had been shorn from the back of the structures, so that walking down the street was like looking in the back of a dollhouse. A dollhouse fronted, mind you, by open sewers bridged by planks that led into open rooms still sporting paintings and calendars on their truncated walls. They're widening the streets in Bidar, kids. And not widening them one-by-one, but all at once. And, this being India, all the work is being done by hand. If you pass through Bidar in ten years, they might still be at it.

We came to Bidar for the local damascene metalwork, bidri. The artisan casts silver into a shape, be it a vase or an elephant or a paan box, then covers it with a flat black amalgam of metals and chisels at it to release the glowing metal beneath. It's really neat stuff, and the best work winds up in museums and palaces across India and the world. The street in Bidar that had been the bidri bazaar, though, was in the heart of the widening venture. As a result of the ongoing improvements only a handful of shops were still tapping away, and the selection and prices were limited and high due to the short supply. Amazed by our effort to come all the way to the heart of the venture, so to speak, several locals pointed us in the direction of the working shops and advised us to haggle, and haggle hard. Keeping their words in mind as we strode purposefully down the street and up to the first and largest shop, I got turned around by a couple of girls asking D her name and nation. So did D, apparently, as with her next step she came down hard on my newly-scabbed right heel with the sole of her Teva. I shouted and spun in pain, scaring two poor children senseless as I clenched my fists and felt my face redden in a snarl, adrenaline rushing to the end of every hair on my body. It hurt so bad it gave me goosebumps. Horrified, D tried to console me and I shrugged her off, figuring we'd just get in the shop and get out again so I could sanitize and cover my wound as quickly as possible. Stepping over the shitmoat and into the workshop to climb the stairs to the newly open-air showroom on the first floor, the men assembled before their pieces started yelling and pointing at my foot, which was bleeding into a pool in the back of my sandals. The helpful salesman (the head artist's son) walked across the street with us to find a bandage as I hobbled and dabbed at the running wound with my bandanna.

That unpleasantness behind us, we were in no position to bargain. When it comes to buying items at fluid prices, you have to start negotiations from a point of strength. Never walk in weak, or with blood puddling around your heels. Picking several pieces from the trove upstairs, we named our price and our boy shot it down, suggesting that maybe we take an item or two out to make the order fit our budget. Standing firm as we could, we thanked them for their time and walked out down the rubblestrewn street to talk over our options. Along the way we passed a small store, open in front like every other building in town but still moving crisps and paan and rupee sweets. A young man called to us in English from the storefront and we stopped to chat, as we weren't really going anywhere anyway. R was home visiting Bidar over the holidays on a break from his work with an avionics firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. His mother, the shopmistress, brought us plates of namkeen and sweet chapatis as we sat in the back of the store and made introductions. R told us how strange it was to see foreigners in Bidar, his words echoing our LP verbatim. We talked about our travels and about life in Little Rock, parting as R's friends rolled up to take him for dinner.

The sun was heading towards a set and we would be rolling the following day (25 Dec 2007) for Aurangabad (500 km, 14 hours), so we cruised back by the bidri shop, where our items were still arranged on a low table upstairs. Our boy smiled his paan-stained smile when I took out two of the pieces and asked him for a new total, which we paid without protest as one of his colleagues polished the silver filigree and wrapped our order in newspaper, tied it in twine, handed it over with both hands.

MOVEMENT IV: A'bad, Xmas, Ellora, Et cetera...

So Christmas was spent on a long, long, long bus ride out of Karnataka and back into Maharashtra. We arrived early for the 9 AM bus, and the folks at the station were extra helpful with our functional illiteracy. Our conductor was the closest thing we had to Santa Claus this year; as we were the only kids riding the whole stretch from Bidar on Christmas and the only blanquitos for miles, he was all smiles every time he passed down the aisle to collect fares. He asked us the usual questions, polishing his limited English, and dragged me by the hand off the bus at a roadside dhaba early in the evening to make D and I try the poha the dhaba-wallah was whipping up. I guess he was worried that the gora (foreigners) might starve to death before the bus pulled in, and he showed a joking brand of concern as he ordered for us and showed us two seats off to the side of the stand where we could sip our chai in peace.

Finally arriving in Aurangabad with an hour of Christmas left on the clock, we checked into our overpriced ('tis the season...) hotel and bounced upstairs for some much-needed grub and a cold mug of cheer. Our turkey was butter chicken; our stuffing, paneer kofta. And as we settled our brains for a short winter's snooze, visions of cave temples danced behind our eyes, whirling us through the snows to the top of Mount Kailasa.

I remember seeing photos of the caves at Ellora in a National Geographic when I was a wee tyke. Don't remember how old or anything, but they were the first site I wanted to visit upon our arrival four months ago. We were warned off by the tail-end of the monsoon and the culture shock and headed south from Mumbai to Goa instead of north onto the Deccan plateau, and my expectations for the caves had grown ever greater in the interim. So when our bus arrived at the gates to the caves, set into a ridge a couple of clicks long and housing 32 different Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain temples, and the Kailasa temple loomed ahead of us like something from a dream, I dropped my shades and my jaw and barged straight ahead.

Pictures are great for a lot of things. Blackmail snaps from the office party, naked babies at bathtime, Uncle Walter and his "disappearing teeth" trick--all well and good inside a 3-inch by 5-inch frame. But even the whizkids at NG couldn't get the wonder of the Kailasa temple at Ellora onto their glossy pages. It just wouldn't fit. Seems it took 150 years for like 10,000 laborers to cut this behemoth from solid rock, a monolithic structure that staggers from every angle. We wandered the grounds with our eyes up, jaws down. Every surface of the main temple is covered by carved elephants, lions, and dancing figures from the great Hindu epics. Stairways and hand-hewn passages allow for circumambulations on three different tiers around the temple proper, and paths lead up the hill behind the site for aerial views that show the attention paid every detail on the top of the buildings, every budding lotus, every crouching lion. I can say, secure in my masculinity, that I got a little misty walking around the joint. It was one of those holy-shit-INDIA! moments that we have every once in a while, something to shake us from the complacency of ass-numbing bus rides and the same petty hassles and haggles we encounter almost everywhere. Ellora was an eyeful and a bag of chips.

So when we got to Ajanta the next day, a longer ride out from A'bad, we were a little awed by the difference. Ellora is renowned for the mastery of its sculpture and remarkable for the fact that three religious traditions added temples at different times over the course of a millenium. The caves at Ajanta are all Buddhist, and were forgotten to history after Indian Buddhism moved north to the Himalaya. Astoundingly plain in their architecture, their fame derives from the incredibly well-preserved original murals (not really frescoes, but close) decking the walls. The paintings were cool, the site was dramatic (a horseshoe ravine with temples about midway between a dry riverbed and the crest of 200-meter cliffs), but the approach was a little too Disney. You arrive at the Ajanta T-junction, 4 clicks from the ravine, where the bus lets you down and you pay a 7-rupee "amenities charge." Then you walk through a gamut of hawkers, vendors, shit shops and chai stalls to get to the buses that roll to the caves (another 7 rupees per head). Then it's up the hill from the bus stand through the outstretched arms of postcard and picturebook salesmen and around the dholi-wallahs who carry the feeble, old, and lazy wealthy around the site on sedan chairs. Finally seeing the curve of the ravine before you, it's then a stop at the ticket counter where you pay your Archaeological Survey of India tiered admission charge (25 rupees for Indians, 250 rupees or US$5 for foreign nationals). Then and only then can you pass through the main gate (and nonfunctioning metal detector) and wait in line at cave after cave to be allowed inside in groups not exceeding 40 people for a time not exceeding 15 minutes. I was half expecting "It's A Small World" to be piped in through speakers once inside the temples, a little animatronic Siddhartha om-ing in time to the rhythm under a smiling, tinselstrewn bodhi tree.

MOVEMENT V: The Five-Star Treatment

From Aurangabad we went back to Pune, where A's folks were kind enough to receive us again. We picked up a care package (mosquito repellent, US coins, wetnaps and two fresh pairs of Ex Officio skivvies--more on them another time) from Florida and had a couple of bomb home-cooked meals before rolling into the big city, big ballers in a pimped-out rickshaw, checking into the Taj Blue Diamond for New Year's Eve. The night before we'd spent picking up some fresh threads at the local department store (cover band knocking off Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" on the ground floor, housewares on 3), so we were looking oh-so-very after some room service and a hot bath (!). Stylin' and profilin' and such, we cruised up to the library lounge overlooking Koregaon Road for some complimentary cocktails (always comp the whales, daddy, and give 'em the Rain Man Suite) before slinking back to the room, where our fine Indian (Sula, baby, nothing but the best) sparkling wine was chilling in a proper bucket, flutes alongside. The digs were plush (and we couldn't get reservations for any of the real parties in town) so we stayed in and watched the festivities kicking off 2K8 across India on our 42-inch plasma TV while waiting for room service to deliver our pizza (another perk of membership, boss, and if you don't get it then I won't explain, dig?).

The first morning of the year, heads splitting, we headed downstairs for our (comped, natch) killer breakfast buffet, gorged on fresh fruit and cheese and pastries and other such goodies as one won't find everyday here, before booking the massages that are yet another privilege afforded high-rollers such as ourselves. Kneaded and steamed and showered clean, we luxuriated for the rest of the day and night in the sort of accomodation we find (read: "can afford") only once in the bluest of Indian moons. And when we paid the bill (AmEx, yo, for the mad miles) the softest landing we've had in India set us back a little over two bills a night. Not bad for a couple of kids who spend at least an hour a week dickering over ten rupees with sheisty rickshaw-wallahs.

MOVEMENT VI: Conquering The Summit (or, Here Comes The Hotsteppah)

A long day on trains got us from Pune to Mumbai to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, the first leg of our foray into the north. Finished with the south ("Catch you next time, Orissa! Later on, Andhra Pradesh!") and ready for a different flavor, we spent the night in Ahmedabad (we'd return later, in another installment) before catching a bus to Palitana, little more than a busy, dusty road leading from the bus stand to a hill, Shatrunjaya, topped by 900 Jain temples. We set off for the hilltop after a hearty breakfast around the corner from our hotel, steeling ourselves for the trek ahead.

Among the preparations necessary for such an adventure: Jains revere animals more than most, so no leather. Off with the belt and shoes, thanks. And that wallet, too, mister. Don't make me ask twice. Also, as part of climbing 3572 steps over four clicks of rocky hill is that it's done as a test of austerity, why'n'cha leave that bottled water in the room. We'll sell you cups of water at stops along the two-hour climb. There. So no food in the bag, no water, no leather...no problem, right?

Did I mention the matter of 3572 steps? All the way up the hill we passed ashen Indians raccooned with exhaustion, looking very much the worse for wear. Dholi-wallahs with buns of steel waited along the route to help the fallen, but we shrugged off their advances, determined to master this climb after the shuddering defeat of Tadayindemol. And master it we did. The path wound over foothills, switchbacking and levelling off at times before revealing the templed summit of Shatrunjaya beyond the haze blanketing the Saurashtran plains. I've seen Neuschwanstein, Crazy Ludwig's architectural fairytale in Bavaria that served as the model for the Magic Kingdom's castle. I played back that reveal, coming around the mountain trail and glimpsing it through the Black Forest, as we came upon Shatrunjaya. I'm not sure which was more impressive, but I was dehydrating rapidly by that point and the white marble temples might have seemed more glittery than they really are. We spent a couple of hours scouting the best vistas among the temple complexes and the narrow alleyways separating them, bribing the occasional security guard to let us up the ladders topping many of the twisting, ornately carved spires. Some of the temples are still active sites of worship, and there was a congregation of white-clad Jains wrapping around one of the main temples, waiting for their turn at the inner sanctum. We could only get as far as the marble gate inside, but hearing the chants and seeing the strain of devotion writing lines on the faces of those assembled was something to behold.

CODA: In Which Our Heroes Reprise Past Episodes Of Intestinal Distress

So D fell ill again in Bidar, something I neglected to mention in that passage of this symphony. A little stomach bug, some crampage, a day in bed and all was well. I don't know what felled me in Palitana, but I awoke in the night after Shatrunjaya and before a long bus to Diu with my stomach knotting like two Rajput warriors, their moustaches tied together, trying to lead camel charges in opposite directions.* Eight hours on the bus, sans facilities, only made the situation more desperate. I spent the next five days more or less in bed with the revenge of whatever grabbed me in Cochin, watching bad TV and shitting water until my lips chapped.** It's still following me (thankfully from a slight remove) as I write these words, some three weeks later. D says I should see a doctor, but I'm holding out for the symptoms to fade further or until we hit Delhi, whichever comes first. Whatever happens I'll keep smilin' through the pain, though the strains of my straining might well be the theme music playing behind the rest of our time in India. Until next time, then. Gotta run...


*: It's a stretch, but we're in Rajasthan and these guys have seriously great moustaches and I just thought I'd work that in. The camels are funny, too.
**: You're welcome.

Violent, Tempered.

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.

G-g-g-g-gelato!

So if you're in the mood for a laugh, check out this video of D and I barely able to contain ourselves over cold-stone gelato in Chennai. The backstory: We met up with A our first morning in town at his boy P's place, a restaurant where they're introducing the cold-stone concept to India. You know cold-stone, right? Where they flip your scoop on the marble countertop with Reese's Pieces and Heath bar crumbles and granola and such? Well, as luck would have it the folks from ChennaiLive, a do-see-hear website keeping Madrasers abreast of all the hip happenings in their burg, were in the house to shoot video for a short feature on P's joint. Since cold-stone is as American as microwaveable individually wrapped low-carb apple pie, and we were the only Americans in the building, they figured they could ply us with free gelato in exchange for a few raves about the product ("The banana really tastes like banana! OMGee-lato!"). Luckily they figured right. We're such whores...but sexyfine and camera-ready (no hair and makeup for these two divas) after an overnight bus and less than forty winks. Enjoy, and please post any and all snide comments in the space provided. Peace.

Lost And Foundering

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.

Cluck'n'gobble

If you're reading this back home, we hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving. To everyone else on the planet, happy Thursday. We're here on the shores of the Bay of Bengal dreaming of pumpkin pies and turkey sandwiches, but there's fresh seafood down the street that should make up for what we're missing. So while you're gathering around the table and celebrating everything and everyone you have to be thankful for, know that we're doing the same and including all of you. Best wishes, and may your day be better than your turkey's.

Oh, and one more thing:

I shot my feathered (and de-feathered) friends here at Kodai's Sunday market, where they were on sale for a poultry sum. If you want to see more, we've got chickens and monkeys and holy freakin' cows in glorious full-screen color over there on Webshots. D is arranging the digital shots every week or ten days, so check back often to see what's for dinner. For easy navigating in the future, you'll also find the link on the sidebar menu at left. Peace.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I woke up this morning already sticky from the steam boiling off the teeming streets of Chennai. In the interim between my wristwatch beeping at 6 and my lazy ass rolling out of bed, I had one of those half-sleeping, half-waking dreams that bubbles up fully realized despite its brevity. In the dream I was flying to Paris for breakfast, looking to score nothing more than a chocolate croissant and a demitasse of espresso before my return flight. Knowing my stay would last no longer than it took to secure a morning snack, my dream-self browsed my dream-closet in search of the single shirt that would get me through the trip.* The armchair psychologist in me figures two things: 1) that I'm hungry for something beyond the idli-dosa, and B) that our whirlwind tour of India is less cool breeze than cyclone-force gale.

Here's the post-Bangalore breakdown, with a handy timeline for those of you keeping score:

SAT 3 NOV-TUE 6 NOV: Mysore

We took the afternoon train from Bangles to Mysore, a beautiful route through acres and acres of canefields in full flower, their pink-white tassles rolling in the afternoon breeze. Mysore is a hub for the production of sandalwood and incense, and the Devaraja Market in the town center is a speed-metal concert for the senses. Every other stall features piles of multicolored tikka powder and every other hawker is looking to rub his collection of essential oils on your wrist and forearm. Floral aromas of every olfactory shade perfume the air with such intensity that passing bumblebees explode in midair, unable to process the embarrassment of riches. D left the market after our first trip with ten different scents cloaking her arms, nine of which were so vivid and cloying that she spent twenty minutes at the sink afterward trying to smell like people again. Satisfactorily scrubbed, we ambled toward the Maharaja's Palace for their Sunday night lightshow (pictured). For one hour each week the Palace is illuminated by enough lightbulbs to explain blackouts in Bangladesh. The good folks in charge waive the entrance fee for that one hour, during which a carnival atmosphere and thousands of people descend upon the grounds. Smiles still on our faces and the syrupy scents from the vendors outside the gate firing our appetites, we headed to the nearest sweets shop to sample a half-dozen variations on the four food groups: ghee, gram flour, rosewater and jaggery.**

TUE 6 NOV-WED 7 NOV: Ooty

We'd been flirting with the Western Ghats, the mountain range just inland from the Arabian Sea, for our entire southward crawl from Mumbai. This far south they comprise the Nilgiri (or "Blue Mountain") range, and are dotted with hill stations established by the British Raj. Tea bushes and This White Guy flourish in the cool climate, but the drive (pictured) to Ooty (the universally-preferred alternative to Udaghamandalam) is so much nicer than the reality of the town itself. D said it best, remarking with her characteristic wit that "This place would be cute about twenty years ago, when it was cute." Indeed. Today Ooty is a dusty, smoggy, traffic-choked sprawl that's not even in the same fucking zip code as Cute. In a nutshell, for those who like it nutty: the town's lake, called (I shit you not) Reflections Lake, is a popular pedalboating destination for flocks of Indian tourists. It's also the collection point for like half the town's raw sewage. Cheery, nah? We stayed the night and rolled out on the first bus for

WED 7 NOV-WED 14 NOV: Kodaikanal

After the psychout that was Ooty, we were a little apprehensive on the eight-hour-plus ride to Kodai. As if to allay our fears, the switchbacked road into the mountains, which we ascended in our DVD Coach (playing the original Spiderman in subtitled English), kept climbing and twisting to offer us a better view of the sunset burning over the lakes stretched below the foothills that receded ever further behind us the evening's mist. We pulled into town after dark, tucking into a quick bite before bed and hopeful dreams of a mountain paradise.

Any possibility of disappointment disappeared with the sunrise. Our first daylight glimpse of Kodai revealed a beautiful town tentacled over and between a handful of peaks and valleys around 7000 feet. Gone were the rickshaws of Ooty and their sickening fumes, replaced by the kind of clean, thin, mountain air that induces euphoria rather than chemical lightheadedness. We walked the town, from the Tibetan restaurants and Western-style health-food store on the market road to the long promenade around the town's sewage-free lake to the southern route out of town that seemed perpetually ringed by clouds that stretched out beneath the sun like Shiva's down comforter. Sitting on the balcony of our room and looking out over those milky clouds, we knew that we'd be staying in Kodai for a while.

And good thing, too. We met a handful of people who reinforced our initial impression of the place, people who smiled with an unforced honesty that seemed to radiate from the town's very core, oozing into the groundwater and onto the faces of those lucky enough to call it home. Among them were I, the proprietor of Manna Bake Restaurant, who serves a world-famous apple crumble with custard accompanied by his warm alto and the Indian Christian music playing on the cassette deck. You can read two decades of his guests' handwritten hosannas in the volumes he places before you while you wait for your meal, which he prepares in the open kitchen of his own home, at his four-burner stove, ten paces from your seat at one of two communal tables in his main room. Then there was M (above right, with D), our guide on a grueling trek through the misty mountains (above left). He would stop occasionally to crumble a handful of leaves plucked from a trailside plant before offering them to us to smell and identify, or to point out the place where, only a few months ago, he and a couple of his Canadian charges encountered a ten-foot long king cobra that was none too happy with the uninvited company. All of 4'11" and 80 pounds, he led us for eight hours over rock and mud and along cliff faces dropping off into abyssal cloudcover beneath our feet, wearing his beaten blue flip-flops and a broad smile, never once breaking stride or sweat. As we passed a small, gaudy temple late in the afternoon, he summed up the entirety of Indian spirituality with one remarkably succinct utterance in his broken English:

"See temple? Many temples in India. Many temples, many stories." Then, finishing his thought, pointing at a cast-off chunk of cement beside our path, "You see, looks like stone on ground, but even stone on ground has story in India."

WED 14 NOV-THU 15 NOV: Madurai

M's words still ringing in my ears (and not only for the altitude), we rolled out of Kodai to the temple town of Madurai. Our hotel in the old quarter overlooked the several gopurams marking the massive Meenakshmi temple complex. It was a dizzying view from the roof of the joint (pictured), where we went after nightfall to watch someone a few blocks away set off the remainder of his Diwali fireworks. But the heat and press of the city, naked under the sun that scorches Tamil Nadu's plains even in winter, proved too much for us after idyllic Kodai. So on to

THU 15 NOV-SAT 17 NOV: Trichy

We had heard conflicting reports about Tiruchirappali. The English couple we met along the trail with M recommended it as a fun stop with lots to do, but A in Chennai emailed us that "Trichy is boring." Had A added "crowded around the holidays," we would have known to head straight for the big city. We got off the bus from Madurai and tried to score rooms in at least a dozen hotels and guest houses around the bus stand, exhausting our guidebooks' suggestions and those of every desk clerk insisting that there would be available doubles in the joint next door. We finally threw ourselves at the mercy of Fate, in the form of a rickshaw driver who asked several helpful passersby where there might be a room to be had. We wound up at the front door of the only joint in the area we didn't check about thirty seconds (and thirty rupees) after getting in the rickshaw around the corner. We took the last room in the place, a super-luxe AC room on the top floor with a distant view of the town's puzzlingly famous Rock Fort (pictured), a long climb up a small mountain to two tiny temples. The room was by far the nicest we've stayed in, but with a price tag to match. A single night exceeded our daily budget by almost 50%, but the comfort after so long in questionable digs convinced us to stay two nights in Trichy for no reason other than to enjoy our room.

There followed an overnight bus to Chennai late Saturday, meeting up with A for lunch after a nap Sunday morning, and here we are, typing through a rainy Monday and ready to move on again tomorrow. No wonder I'm dreaming the caviar dreams of the Jet Set. We'll surely stop to smell the jasmine at some point along the road, but the moment-to-moment thrill of seeing new places, faces, and landscapes is too appealing to relent just yet. And just south of here, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, there's a croissant au chocolat that's screaming my name in at least three different languages.

*: I've been in India long enough to absorb some of the local standards of modesty, as I rolled out of bed in this dream already wearing pants.
**: For the uninitiated, that's clarified butter, pulverized chickpea, floral distillate, and raw cane sugar.

Curiouser And Curiouser

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.

--from Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram

From the moment I read this passage, in which Roberts' narrator recounts his first impressions of Bombay, it lodged in my consciousness like a burr in my slippers. That penultimate sentence perfectly encapsulates our experience of India thus far, where the old and the new dance together, whirling and entwining and making love on the bustling sidewalk between the glass high-rise and the open sewer, begetting a child, India, with her feet in the muddy primeval and her eyes ever turned toward the sunrise.

And nowhere has that enduring dichotomy rung more true than in Bangalore, the capital of India's high-tech industry and foster child of our global economy. We arrived early, getting down from a bus that had traveled through the night over dusty, unpaved roads that were jagged mountain ranges, with peaks and valleys shaking bouncing rollicking us from stolen minutes of fitful slumber. Just outside the city the single dirt lane changed to a crowded modern highway, sardined with the morning's commuters honking and jockeying for position in the crawl toward the 9-to-5. A rickshaw found us and accepted our haggled rate to get to MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, the center of town, where we found one of the ubiquitous chain coffeehouses and tucked into large, steaming cups of The Real Thing. We spent an hour or so chatting with an Australian traveler who had arrived in India through Pakistan and China, sharing stories and comparing notes on our experiences thus far. Happily caffeinated and a little jittery after our long night and the shock of brewed black coffee, we parted ways and went in search of food.

We had time to kill, as our Couchsurfing host, P, would not be arriving in Bangles* until late in the afternoon. And we trod the city sidewalks fully laden, as no hotelier could be convinced to keep our packs for a few hours at any price. Strange days, my friends, when not even the baksheesh can get you access to a left-luggage room. South of MG Road, the streets are lined with Western chain stores and restaurants, the signage above your head touting the wares of European and American corporations. You can buy your Levi's next door to the nightclub selling Heineken, get a new pair of Skechers across from the "First International Donut Chain in India." We had read about this proliferation of chain eateries around the MG Road area, and I was in the midst of a full-on Mac Attack by the time we saw the Golden Arches.

Let me explain: We had been restricted to South Indian idli-dosa breakfasts in Gokarna town and the small number of beach shacks dishing out mediocre-to-bad multicuisine fare after the early sunsets made the rocky headlands between the beaches no-travel zones for safety reasons. This had been our enforced diet for a week on Kudle Beach, and while the banoffee pie at Ganga was extraordinary (and dearer by ten rupees than a room for the night), we were roundly unimpressed by the Indian food we had been able to obtain apart from the aforementioned breakfasts. A few nights of lousy curries and strangely palatable pizzas, and I figured we might as well push our tolerances for shite food to the very corners of that greasy envelope.

So I had the Chicken Maharaja Mac** (fries and Coke), and D got the Paneer Salsa Wrap (ditto). And, oddly, they were far from terrible. But we were hungry, so...

A phone check with P gave us an approximate arrival time, so we figured that the best way to kill a couple more hours was to catch a flick. There was a glossy new mega-mall just east of the McDonald's, so we clomped down the road and through the metal detectors in front (the guards laughed when they saw our packs and waved us through with but a cursory pass of their wands). Up the escalators and through the jungle of consumerism, the Inox multiplex had no showtimes that matched our schedule. So, after noting the number of shoe stores (my right Teva blew out in Palolem and was on its last, er, legs?) and the timings of English-language flicks, we set off back toward McD's to another twin-screen cinema and sat down for our first Hindi picture in India.

The typical Bollywood movie is an extravagant affair, its palette every color of a candied kaleidescope, its musical numbers advancing the story as much as (if not more than) the dialogue that marks time between songs. That said, No Smoking is not your typical Bollywood movie. We could make neither heads nor tails of the plot, a dark existential comedy (or was it?) following the travails of a wealthy Mumbaiker who can't seem to kick the habit. It begins with a dream sequence (or was it?) against a snowy backdrop with goosestepping Russian soldiers and a faraway bathtub at the top of a steep hill. Thought balloons emanating from the main character's temples read in English, before switching to Hindi script. This is the sense it made from the first five minutes, and it was all downhill from there. One of P's friends (P2) later told us that it was a really interesting flick examining the courses a life can take following a single decision (or something?), how one's future can change or not, depending upon the choices made or decided against. I'm hip to the idea, and I'd like to check out a subtitled DVD at a later date, but all we got at the time was a really slick light show (with only one musical number) in a dark, air-conditioned room. For that, it was worth the rupees.

After No Smoking, we decided that the coffee from earlier was wearing off to a point that our senses, still not so keen after the long night and the longer morning/afternoon, should be treated to a few glasses of cold draft beer. And then maybe a few more. So we wandered into Guzzler's Inn, which is not nearly as shady as it sounds. In fact, it was refreshing to see an actual bar (gasp!) behind the darkened glass doors, and not the typical dim, dingy, depressing boozing parlour we had learned thus far to avoid. There were even women sitting and drinking and smoking and talking about whatever with their male colleagues and boyfriends. The crowd was young and vital, and guys strolled in with motorcycle helmets in one hand and pool-cue cases in the other, heading for the billiards tables upstairs. We ordered a pitcher of Kingfisher and sat while the surreal scene around us unfolded to the biggest Billboard hits of the 80's and 90's.

A glass or so into our relaxation, it hit me just how fucking foreign Bangalore seemed--for all its familiarity--after our last many weeks in India. The only constant element of our travels has been the fluidity of what it means to be In India. Here we were, sitting across a well-lit table from each other, mixed company among mixed company, listening to American tunes and to our fellow patrons speaking in English***. Hours before, we had eaten American-style fast food and cruised the mall like teenagers in every suburbia anywhere, staring in the windows at the portable advertisements of Western consumer culture**** up for sale at fixed prices, no haggling.

And the kinda sad, embarrassing, pitiable part of it is that it's exactly why we came to Bangalore. The sights and architecture and temples that have been our reasons for other destinations were not in evidence in Bangalore, which boasts a few nice old buildings and a botanical garden amidst the commercialized sprawl that the IT industry and its money have ushered in. I needed a new pair of sandals (which I found the next day after trying on 4400-rupee Nike flip-flops, the new new shit according to the young, punky-haired salesman) and we wanted to catch a flick (we saw one more the next day, this time in English) and eat some really good, expensive food (we had great North Indian and Thai meals at Sikander and Shiok, respectively). In short, we wanted to be American tourists in India's America. We were not disappointed.

So from the Guzzler's Inn to P's home east of the city center. We scarfed street-food dosas over introductions before retiring to some much-needed slumber. The next day was spent wandering the streets and the mall before meeting up with P (pictured left, with D and Me) and Team Yahoo! (pictured above, during pub power outage) at a bar with very mod framed graphic art of Zappa, Bowie, and Clapton. Enjoying the pub culture in the last (read: "only") place we thought we'd find it, we ate spicy Indian pub cuisine and quaffed pitcher upon pitcher until the management signaled that the pumpkin hour was approaching. We whiled away the wee hours after closing time in P2's apartment bitching about the lack of public transpo in Bangles and other notable towns and cities, and P provided the solo guitar accompaniment for a rollicking and horribly off-key round-robin of karaoke. We made dinner plans for the following night, which meant cooking up an Indianized batch of my patented shrimp etouffee after two extended and amazing excursions into the local supermarkets. The cajun drew raves (I'm proud to say) from a crowd of Indian kids making their way in Bangalore's modern marketplace. Sitting and talking with everyone made us feel like the world really is smaller than we let ourselves believe.

For better or worse? I'll leave such speculation to the professionals.

*: An unofficial nickname, one that I like (and will continue to use) as much for its flippancy as for its evoking the favored adornments of Indian women of every caste and class.
**: No beef in the burger joint, natch.
***: Given the 300 languages spoken throughout the country, the young IT set in Bangalore converse in English, a lingua franca more accessible to both North and South Indians than even Hindi.
****: There's a ubiquitous television commercial here for Zeiss spectacle lenses in which a cubicle dweller shows off his name-brand watch and name-brand shoes to his coworkers. Peering over the wall between them, his female colleague sees his generic glasses and exclaims, her nose wrinkled in disgust, "What's on your eyes, man?" Over giggles from the rest of the office, the voiceover intones "Brand nahi toh style nahi," which translates roughly as "Ain't got a brand, it ain't got style." It's one of the most disgusting examples of how pervasive consumer culture is getting over here, and one for which I want to cut the American right out of me. Not that I feel any different about such status-baiting back home.