A Change in Plans

An English teacher told me that if you make yourself write, you make someone else read. Several times while writing the last chapter, I thought about what he or she said. Of course, I also realize that the teacher(s) were the main cause of writing in a student’s life. It was they who assigned work that caused the guilt that brought us down out of the tree house where life was more fun and from where one had a better view. So he or she made us write and we made them read but what does reason or logic have to do with the question?

Up to this point this story has been a travel tale. When you arrive and there’s nowhere on the itinerary, then what? Well, doesn’t one day follow another? Recently I read a quote that went, “Living on Earth is expensive but consider that once a year you get a trip around the sun.” We pay attention to calendars but not our daily space in space. The long and the short of all this is that I will make a change in plans.

Instead of a chronological tale, I’m going to tell you about Kodaikanal and how I live here. We switch to a Tlingit style of history. “It happened a long time ago.” No need for the Western cause and effect. I’m going to hold time down with my fork and cut it into bite-sized chunks with a dull table knife and serve it up to be chewed.

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From off the griddle of the plains of India and up into the “hills” is a jump that makes me wonder if I’m still in India. The country is rough as the Appalachians and people look for a bit of level ground where they clear and farm. I’ve yet to find why the British showed up here over a hundred fifty years ago but they did and the smart ones probably stayed on. These “hills” are in the far south of India. My latitude is somewhere around Puerto Rico or the Yucatan of Mexico. The foothills of the Himalayas in India’s north are about the latitude of Dallas-Fort Worth. Those hills are the sites of the more famous “hill stations.”

When you have failed to invent air conditioning and you are tired of urban dirt, you might look for somewhere else to live at least part of the year. Under the Raj, the first administration center of India was Calcutta. Later they laid out New Delhi and move to a more central location. Both these places are sweltering hot for most of the year. By this time the pukka sahibs had learned that it was not only cool in the mountains but once above a certain altitude, you leave malaria-bearing mosquitoes below. The idea of an annual migration began to hold promise. Therefore for about eight months out of the year they lived in the non-strategic but beautifully pleasant hills. Telecommuting was a century or more in the future but the bureaucrats packed up their files or a copy of them and took the train from New Delhi to Shimla. Like nearly everyplace in India the town has two names. If your atlas doesn’t list Shimla, drop the “h” and see what happens. While I’ve not been there, I’ve read that they’ve built an English village on the up and down. England is plains and rolling hills but one can use one’s imagination.

Someone, more clear-headed than I, would have simply flown from New York to New Delhi and taken the train north. Why fool around? I wanted to fool around because on the journey of forty years back, I knew that I was only seeing to the horizon line, that there was an ocean of India that I was missing. And what must that be like? The other thing that drove me south was that regardless of Global Warming the temperature in Sitka dropped an average of about five degrees Fahrenheit and that allowed snow to lie on the ground unmelted for the duration of the winter. Winter, unless you take advantage of it, that is drive dogs, ski, or skate, is a pain, more so after you’ve seen forty plus of them come and melt. I read and talked to Indian visitors, who came to the park where I worked, and heard that Kerala was about as close to heaven on earth as you can find. They say that God lives there. All this I missed on the first trip.

Goa, only a few miles closer to the pole than Kerala, was a shocker. Why did God keep the thermostat turned so high? I had never thought of Heaven as being hot. In Old Goa lies the bits and pieces of St. Francis Xavier. I’m told that the relic folks have removed his arm and shoulder and a thing or two more but they left most of him on public view at the cathedral. I sincerely felt sorry for somebody who had worked so hard for his faith to be spending eternity in an oven. While walking around the cathedral I seriously wondered if I would faint. This has nothing to do with the Finnish steam bath on Wendell Street, Fairbanks. There is an ice-cold shower you can direct on your head and enjoy the relief. But India heat, whether wet or dry, is enough to make St. Francis Xavier swear. It’s just that he doesn’t do it very often. Probably late at night when all the Christians have gone home. While I didn’t melt, I listened when Dick Wechter, who taught in the Kodai International School in 1971, told me about this place. And so as I made this southern sweep of India, I rode a bus, shepherded by the beetle nut-chewing Joey, up a hill and found himself at home among the ten-foot high poinsettias. Now that that’s explained, I have a hundred things to tell you about this hill station. And I’ll get busy very soon but I’m on my way to the “Kodaikanal Public Library,” (Why the quotes? More on that later.) where I’ve begun reading Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austin wrote this while Alexander Baranof was building Sitka and getting drunk, while George Washington was bled and blistered to death, and while Ioann Veniaminoff at age five or six was learning to read Luke II for the Christmas Program.

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Coaker’s Walk may have been laid out during the mid 19th century by the British but what gave the town a push was an American missionary in the early 20th century, who considered the need that missionary families have to educate their children and preferably where parents and offsprings would not be separated by sending them half way round the world. Kipling and Saki left written records of their experiences of being shipped out to relatives “back home.” A solution would be to build a school in India and preferably above the mosquito line along with escaping contact with a half dozen other deadly fevers. While there would be a regular missionary task of conversion, they could educate as well. And then as now the academic level of the school must be high enough to prepare the young person for entry into any university in the world. Along in the 1950s the number of missionary families dropped and the school changed its charter to becoming a multicultural educational institution but keeping a Christian base, Essentially that was and is the basic reason for the continuation of Kodaikanal International School (KIS.)

Because Dick taught here, once I arrived, KIS was a first stop. The lady’s name was Sylvia, who showed me around. She and her husband had taught here early in their careers but then returned to British Columbia to teach until they retired. Wondering what would be a worthwhile after-retirement job might be, they decided to come back to Kodaikanal.

All the buildings are of stone with red tile roofs. Planning and placement of buildings had been well thought out as had the planting. When a planner considers where a building is to be built in relation to the nearest tree and this plan is followed for a century, you have a place that is not only functional but beautiful as well. I have many more schools to see but while I have seen some attractive places to study, none surpassed Kodaikanal International School.

Math, science, English, history, and languages are at the core of the studies. There are a few electives. The focus is on preparation for the university. There is a sports program. A special problem hindering the excesses of producing sports teams is that the only way you get to another school (or they to you) is to negotiate the swerves, the curves, and the competitive driving between here and a distant playing field. Nevertheless the teams are active and do play against other schools.

The telephone rang while Sylvia and I talked. She answered and explained to the caller that there was a full day of testing for the applying student. She explained to me after hanging up that the primary skill in entering is speaking English. Regardless of the number of languages spoken or understood, the first requirement was mastery of English.

The school has an assisting cadre of volunteers. They are furnished room, board, and a stipend of Rs. 2000 ($50) per month. A volunteer’s knowledge can range through the offered curriculum but again first among equals is reading, writing, and speaking English.

The students are introduced to two other fields beyond the basics. They are expected to work for the betterment of people outside the school. They take time out to possible teach their skills learned in a school, work in a hospital, an orphanage, or an old folks home.

In addition to the noblesse oblige the school emphasizes hiking and camping. One of the longer treks takes three days to cover eighty miles. In this kind of physical education the emphasis is on the individual experience, not the team.

Sylvia showed me a map with pens stuck in the places where the students come from. India, north and south, was well pinned, but then beyond the borders, east and west, the students come from around the world. It is certainly an international school.

I was asked to come back when I said my good byes and I suspect that I will.

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To Climb a Hill

The bus to the hill station was to pick me up in front of my hotel at 7:30. I found the bus a block away and I believe we left town about 8:30 after having driven a pick-up circuit twice or three times. The good news was that I was aboard with pack and briefcase stowed away. I had what I needed except for one thing, I couldn’t find my ticket. The worst that could happen would be my having to buy the ticket again which wouldn’t cost all that much. Actually the worst that could happen would be my having boarded a bus to someplace I didn’t want to go, which could be about anywhere except Kodaikanal. The town lay off to the northwest atop one of the Palani Hills. What was hard to believe was this ridge was said to be cool even at 2 PM.

Being first on the bus, I watched the other passengers board. Much has been written about the passive backseat taken by Indian wives. You want to watch out for the easy generalizations. But in planning a schedule or a seating arrangement on a bus, one should not substitute theory for observation. Not only do the women nominate a seating plan, anyone who is old enough to put a subject with a predicate adds on their ideas. The first family that boarded surveyed the (except for me) empty bus. Mom, Dad, and the kids all had an idea and discussed the main theme of their idea and after that the modifications. The seating arrangement reminds me of jazz. You take an old favorite like a half-length bus or “Tea for Two” and you see how many variations you could get out of it. To play it straight all the sisters should sit by the windows while the brothers sit on the aisle. That protects against daughter defilement by strangers but if the children are small then they need to sit with the parent or aunt or uncle or grandparent and furthermore little Billy and little Susie just don’t get along well so…. And by then the second family arrives in the doorway, surveys the scene, and seats their family members. There may be rethinking from the first family that will lead to a reshuffle and that the second family has to quickly rethink its position because a third family is boarding.

It was the third or fourth family who had a child who could have been a model for a Leonardo. The kid looked like an angel. I asked the mother how old the little girl was and she told me that he was a little boy who was two. I did my French drop vanishing coin trick since the kid was old enough to follow the action. He looked at his mother and she explained the knotting of his hair on top of his head marked him as a Brahman.

The boy, who sat next to me was a nice looking teenager. His dark glasses, clamped on top of his head like earphones, kept his baseball cap from blowing away and identified him as a boy. Women do not wear baseball caps with saris. What fixed him as a teenager was that he took out an envelope and thumbed through two dozen photos, three of which were not of him. No English. I wanted to look out over the countryside. It was a cloudy day and I was hoping that we traveled northwest, which is the general direction of Kodaikanal.

Something I’ve noticed about South India is that the country is rice paddy flat until you get to the hills and they are a jumble. I remembered the “Utah Mountains” on the tip of the country. At the moment we rolled along a paved road as level as a football field but we would be in steep Appalachia before long. I wondered if this was some remnant of an ancient landform. I suppose everyplace is but some had remained undisturbed longer than others. While they talk about the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Alaska Range as being “new,” there are chapters in the historical geology books that predate that period. The sudden change from flat-flat to up and down makes me think that southern India might have a special story to tell. Where’s are the geologists when you need them?

We stopped off at a “Harvey House” for twenty minutes to a half-hour. The passengers took breakfast and I may have bought a bag of potato chips and reboarded. I wasn’t going to be left at the station. I found a young man among one of the families, who spoke good English, and he assured me that the bus was going to Kodaikanal. Out on the road again, we did begin to climb. No gradual foothills, just up and around. This gave the bus driver a chance to demonstrate his skill at passing on curves and on hill crests.

The bus actually had a crew. There was a baggage boy who wouldn’t be old enough to vote in the U.S. He loaded and kept track of luggage. He also kept his mouth shut and maintained a low profile, sitting in the step-down to the open door. Then there was a supernumerary. His name may have been Joey. He may have been a former baggage boy but in his golden years (25 to 35) he learned to operate the stereo so when we got into the hills and began the switchbacks we could keep up with Bollywood’s Top Forty. The songs may have changed since the ride out of Ernakulam to the backwaters. I imagine that Joey would have aspired to being a pool hustler but when he discovered he’d have to practice if he wanted to shoot straight and he wisely looked for less demanding employment. Such a setback did not alter Joey’s sense of fashion. His shirt opened at the neck showing his gold chain. He shook his curls down over his forehead and he had a two day growth of whiskers. He had an easy-going cool with a smile and always something to say above the whang of the stereo. The problem was that his conversation was directed at the driver, who was driving on the right-hand side of the road as much as the left. I would guess that Joey wanted the driver to know how drunk he got during Diwali. It could be that my imagination was in overdrive but when you see a bus as large as ours coming at us and we’ve got a truck full of rock to our left, I get carried away. Joey was probably giving a report as to how much money he raised for his Christian missionary society. The bus had a large dashboard that stood forward of the steering wheel. Joey perched on the dashboard, legs in an informal lotus position. He chewed gum but then when he leaned across in front of the driver, blocking his view and spit out the window, I realized that his jaw held a wad of beetle nut. I should show some sympathy. After all you can’t swallow the stuff.

Once he delivered his missionary society financial report, he stood by the open door on the left side of the bus, crowding the baggage handler, and partially hanging out the door began to chatter the same word over again and again with the staccato of an auctioneer. I asked what it was he said and it turned out like “missing, missing, missing…” which mean we still had several inches before we hit the stone guard wall. He kept up the rattle until the driver pulled away and back on the paved part of the curve. I wondered how long it would take for his wages to provide the price of a closed circuit TV keeping an eye on the distance between wall and bus.

As I write I find that I get back to the same subjects. I am purposefully avoiding the driving except to say that Joey did do his part to add to the problem. Soon the country became rougher the cultivation lessened. The small farms are pretty but the stretches of wild forest are enough to keep your eyes off the road and Joey. At least driving uphill was slow going. I can only guess at the thrill speed adds on the return trip to the plain. But because we growled along at something less than 35 mph, I could see the trees, the vines, and the blossoms, always something in bloom.

I remember fifty years ago when the bus pulled out of the Odessa station and I for Alaska, not far to the west of town a jack rabbit loped across the road. We had Northerners aboard, who rose up out of their seats for a better look. They had never seen the animal. Now it was my time. Not even Joey’s chatter could pull me away from watching a macaque monkey saunter across the road. Unlike most other animals that bolt at the sight of Man or his machines, macaques seem to recognize that we are an off-breed, who for some unknown reason gave up the trees to have one of our species hang out the door of a bus and call out, “missing, missing, missing.” No wonder macaques radiate an aura of arrogance.

At one point we pulled over for a short “Ah!” at a good sized stream that tumbled over rock and under the small bridge over which we crossed. The road was wide here and several busses were parked, gasping for breath. There were stands along the road and passengers grabbed the vendors’ fast foods. I bought a couple of breaded fried peppers. I was very hungry and I could have eaten just about anything. The pepper was reasonably spicy and the second one tasted better than the first and I wondered if I should buy a third. From the falls we could see well down into the valley below. Space was changing. In Madurai it was the distance down the street to the temple. On the road below on the plain, it was the space between the bus and a farm house or a stand of trees. As we got into the forest, space shrunk again to the breadth of the pavement but now I could see a couple of miles (maybe more) down the valley’s slope to the main river or lakes lying on the plain. There was another change. We were well passed midmorning and the air was cool. Jungle, fried peppers, and monkeys, I decided that I must be going in the right direction. So I boarded again and Joey jabbered like a monkey with a fresh thought and we drove on toward Kodaikanal.

Then the forest began to break up again and where it was flat enough, farmers terraced their land and houses appeared. There were a string of settlements that the road fed. I wondered if these were suburbs of the hill station or, if as they proved to be, small towns in their own right. And that kept up until they made a stop and I saw the baggage boy holding my pack and briefcase. Where those items get off, I get off. It seemed that I was the only person on the bus who did not have a hotel reservation and they needed to get rid of me. After lots of finger pointing, I met a young man who speaks clearly and I ask, “I want to go to Kodaikanal.”

He said, “You’re in it.”

I looked around. On one side of the street was a string of small hotels and food vendors; on the other side of the road were a construction site and a “bus stand.” That was a cleared level of dust (unless it’s raining) where people congregate to board and disembark from the buses. A great cloud bank built off beyond the open area and since the temperature had dropped to the upper fifties and the wind behind the clouds drove dust before it, my first impression of this hide-away in the hills was not the best. I needed food, clothing (a set of long johns would have been welcome,) and shelter, which my greeter got for me quickly at twice the price of a night at the Pearls. I asked if there was nothing cheaper and he said, “Oh, no sir, Diwali!”

The hotel was five minutes uphill and on the same road, “Woodville.” After a walk of no further than to the first class car at Kanyakumari, I found Coaker’s Tower, my hotel, to stop the wind but the first thing I looked for was a stove. The room seemed cold. The view out the window was the earlier mentioned cloud bank. I dropped my pack and went looking for the restaurant. They had a stove and refrigerator and pots and pans but nobody seemed to know what to do with them. At the front desk the mystery was solved…somewhat. You have to turn in your order an hour before you expect to eat. So I expected to eat a little sooner and I walked down Woodville to find food. Stopping at the first eatery, which was near the bus stand, I sat down at a communal table and asked for a menu. You ate what Hobson cooked. Fine, I’ll order Hobson’s choice. The place was set up with the prepaid tours in mind. It operated something like slopping hogs but the rice and curry were reasonably good and priced. I walked down the street with a belly full, my pack stowed, and doing something I had not done since leaving New York. I wore a North Face jacket with hood that my daughter bought me. Imagine, I was wearing a coat in south India and it was only early November!

#

Journey to Madurai

For the fun of it, I bought a first class ticket and on account of the first class car being at the forward end of the train, I had a long hike on the platform, which seemed to take me half-way to Madurai. There was no rush. I took a break. The train wouldn’t leave until 10:45 AM but it was still a long walk with pack and briefcase. Of course for Rs.5 (twelve or thirteen cents) I could have hired a bearer. Another idea was to put wheels on luggage. That first occurred to me in 1957, which was a decade or two before the next fellow thought of that improvement. He or she acted on the epiphany; I didn’t. And there went another million dollars I never made. When the car number matched up with the number on the reservation, I found that I had the car to myself…almost.

Looking around the car I found it identical to the second class sleepers with one exception. The toilets were clean. There were two of them. Not His and Her’s but East and West. Except for luxury hotels catering to European and visitors from the Americas, Asians used a squat toilet when I traveled here forty years back. This was a porcelain commode but the facility was set into the floor and the user set one foot on either side of the bowl. At age thirty I found I liked them. I later read articles in the U.S. extolling the health benefits of the pressure of one’s thighs against the belly. What I liked was the simplicity. No moving parts. Nothing to go wrong.

Within easy reach was a water tap along the wall with the bucket beneath the tap. You flushed by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl. Western decadence has not set in but the Asians recognize that when one arrives at a more advanced age (mine for instance,) one’s knees might not have the strength they once had and it could be that the Europeans might have a commendable idea with the raised bowl. Another idea that westerners have is providing toilet paper. Come back and check in another forty years but until then always carry toilet paper where ever you go.

So I had the car to myself until a family joined me. They were from West Bengal and since the son and daughter were on holiday from their respective colleges, the family decided to go to Kanyakumari. The adults kept to themselves but “Rik,” his nickname, and “Song,” a translation of her name, joined me. I’m embarrassed but I do lose addresses and proper names. Both of these young people were charming and both spoke good English. I asked about life in West Bengal and they had a hundred questions about the United States and my life in Alaska. Without looking on the temperature conversion chart you can remember that -40 degrees F and C are the same and since that temperature is reached every winter in Fairbanks, it makes a good story when the listener is a young lady wearing nothing more than a thin sari.

We rolled pass the wind farms, which reached more miles to the north than I had guessed, and the “Utah” mountains. The rice paddies gave way to stands of trees, brush, and shrubs. In time I began to nod off. The day wore on and I dozed. Rik kept watch. Song had joined her parents.

The route led inland, which if that is the shortest way to Madurai (pronounced MA-ju-rai and at two hundred thirty-five words per minute) is fine with me but I was curious about what the coast looked like.

Long ago in a far, far away land that lay along the Arctic Ocean, I encountered my very first Reader’s Digest condensed novel called Coromandel and at that moment the train paralleled India’s eastern coast of that name. The novel was a romance about a beautiful girl and her handsome fellow, which his being handsome really didn’t have much importance to the girl since she was blind. He led her here and there across India. I learned two things from reading that book. One, in abridging a novel, the editors apparently tossed out the romance. When you draw the romance out of a romantic novel, you don’t have much left. And as this was a time I began developing literary sensitivities, I would decided that while the tribe at Reader’s Digest shrunk novels and that a tribe in South America shrunk heads that neither novel nor head worked particularly well after the treatment. Probably the most important lesson learned was that much of the time, what gets into print shouldn’t. I read ever word of that book in hopes that it would draw a breath but from page one to the last, the work was moribund.

Arriving in Madurai on this day would be special. The Hindus have a festival of light called Diwali. Rik said that people all over India would be on the move. As the family and I looked for hotel rooms, I could believe that a good portion of India had taken to the Madurai streets. Imagine two football games ending simultaneously and the crowds merging but moving in diverse directions. Then add trucks, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, bicycles, and compact automobiles, which remember have a bright future on the Asian market. And then try to walk through this, the heaviest traffic I’ve encountered to date. No cows but I did come on to something else I find rarely in India. The wine shops were open and lying on anything that was flat, there were several individuals who would sleep soundly for the rest of the night.

The first port of call was the Hotel Pearls. An elevator, a room on the forth floor with soap, towel, and toilet paper…and on Diwali night for about Rs. 400! I think I shouted above the roar of the crowd when I said, “I’ll take it!” We said goodnight and the family went elsewhere.

A hotel employee knocked at the door asking if I needed anything and in about twenty minutes I had a bottle of water, two parata (a flat griddle bread) and a small canister of gravy for dipping. With the food in me and the celebrants out in the street, life was good. I had no trouble falling asleep with firecrackers returning fire from first this street and then from that.

Rik had told me they would come by for me. I was ready and we walked off looking for the temple. Song looked fresh and pretty in her spotless sari as she picked her way through the trash on the street. It is somewhat unfair to describe Madurai after opening night of Diwali so I won’t. But I will say that a few cows had come through the night better than some of the men. It is one thing to sleep after a few glasses of wine; it’s another to be so far gone as to wet your pants and a good portion of the sidewalk. At least the traffic was lighter.

The father spoke fair English and he led us through a street and then we turned out onto an avenue where at the end we could see a temple façade rising probably one hundred fifty feet. Looking down the street we could see only one of the temples of the complex. The structures are steep pyramids with flat tops. As we drew closer we could see the figures of humans, gods, and animals played among columns supporting the next level. The sculpture covered the entire building. The Lonely Planet Guide says that while the temple complex was designed in 1560 and finished during the first half of the next century, the site goes back two thousand years when Madurai was the capital of the ancient Pandyan empire. We entered through a gate in the wall and checked our shoes. Then following the family I went into the temples. Through the dimly lit passages lined with sculpture, I very quickly lost all sense of direction. Here and there were alters standing before images where the devout stopped, passed their hand over a flame and then after touching the tops of their heads brought their hand down so as to pass over their face.

Between the space of two buildings there stood an adolescent (but with no body piercing that I could see) elephant. You could receive a blessing from him also. I took up a position about three feet from his face, then I placed a rupee in the end of his trunk, the elephant passed the rupee to his trainer, and then the elephant with the tip of his trunk tapped me on the head and passed his trunk down across my face. I’m something of a fan of Ganish, Shiva’s elephant-headed son, and who is said to remove impediments. And how about writer’s block?

We entered another temple and wandered through the darkened labyrinth of representations in stone of a thousand stories. Four hundred years of flames from the palm sized grease lamps added a patina of black to passageways where the sun never shown but now electric lights did. When the first worshipers walked through these temples, they must have carried tapers or candles. The keepers of the temple kept the level of lighting low. I doubt if much of the aura has been lost to modernity.

Turning this way and that, we came to a place where only the faithful were to proceed. The family conferred with me and asked if it would be alright for me to wait at this spot for their return. Of course, I didn’t mind. And they were gone.

What happened was that some of the temple guards did mind and I was asked to move back into another area of the temple. This didn’t sit well with me since if the family couldn’t find me, not only would I be deprived of good company but of my one an only pair of shoes as well. The temple complex pavement was swept clean. Beyond the wall was another world which wasn’t.

In ten minutes or so Rik found me. We saw in the half-light a sign that said non-Hindus were to stop at this limit. Rik wasn’t pleased by any limits on the visitor regardless of his faith. He said that the experience of the sacred sites should be open to all. That had been my understanding from my earlier travels but the world is a different place now. Recently the Hindu, a major newspaper printed in English, published a series of videoed photographs from Sri Lanka, showing a woman approaching an assistant to a minister, who sat behind his desk. He explained that she would have to wait and be frisked before going in to see the minister. The next picture was smudged with smoke and the rest of the series showed other people in the room escaping. The woman lay dead on the floor. The assistant was knocked backward out of his chair and lay dieing. The world has turned and we now hear echoes of what was said but when nobody listened.

We walked out into sunlight, retrieved our shoes, and filed back onto the street. The family was to travel on later in the day, while I needed to find an HDFC Bank. This was the only bank in India that I knew of that recognized my Plus ATM card. So money was on my mind. The parents went back to check out of the hotel while I took Song and Rik to lunch. Had they not picked up this stray, I would not have had half the experience that I did have. The food was pretty good although I was looking for something other than food flavored by curried gravy. Dream on and eat what’s on the plate. It’s good for you!

Then came the good-byes and while I saw the last of the bright yellow shirt Rik wore that I used as a guide-on, I would remember their generosity and how Song’s hand glided over a flame in the temple’s half-light as graceful as a bird’s wing in flight.

= = =

Part One: In bright sunlight and with enough heat to melt an icecap, I rocked along a broken street in an auto rickshaw toward the HDFC Bank and its ATM machine. Once there the machine coughed up Rs. 10,000 but beeped a warning that I paid no attention to as I counted my money. I looked around and the machine had swallowed my card! Exclamation points are symbols, if you can remember to use them, which remove the need to write clearer Anglo-Saxon! The machine told me to contact the bank manager. What the machine had not taken into consideration was Diwali!

The security guard, who I decided I liked because he was sympathetic and possessed an English vocabulary that was adequate to calm rattled customers, told me to come tomorrow, not at ten when the bank opened, but at one o’clock. Apparently bank managers enjoy a little more Diwali than do tellers. I boarded the rickshaw again and counted the CPI (M) posters back to the hotel. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) never wants you to forget that they have brought a higher standard to Madurai or if I’ve got that wrong, want to bring a higher standard of living to Madurai. Lenin and Marx were cover boys on probably a half dozen posters. Engles made it onto two or three. Stalin, only one. But the local and statewide fathers of the party, where well represented. I had asked if there had been improvements made in Tamil-Nadu and Kerala and the subject was dropped with, “They are all corrupt!” The exclamation point again.

The rickshaw driver raised the price of the ride from the Rs. 20 we’d agreed on to 30 and so I suspect he bought in to the idea that we should produce according to our abilities and consume according to our needs. My need was to cool down from a thieving machine and not have a fistfight over ten rupees. I would have given Rs. 30 for a cold lassi, the yogurt drink, right then.

Part Two: I walked back to the bank the next day saving my Rs. 30 for a day when it might rain. Damn those Communist! And I arrived dodging traffic and jumping trash at one o’clock. One good thing about the banks is that they are air conditioned. This helps explain what little calm I was about to exhibit.

I explained as briefly as an English major could, just what my problem was. The young man behind the desk understood perfectly. He was educated, intelligent, and after ten years service to his bank, experienced. And he began like this, “I see. I understand. I will make an inquiry to our head office in Mumbai and they will contact your bank. From what state are you?”

This was not going to happen. I had no plans to lay hands on this man but I could see by his reaction to the way I looked that he understood that this was not going to happen. I could never make a living as a hit man. My face always gives me away. If my victim were to see me coming, he would shoot first and there would go my promising career. It has something to do with my Method training. We negotiated for another couple of minutes with my reminding him that my card was inside his machine, which stood not thirty feet from where we sat looking at each other across his desk.

“Sir, we have our regulations. Please, come back at 3:30.”

My plans included my taking cash hit (about $250 US) this afternoon and another tomorrow before I boarded a bus on the following day to head for a mythical hill station, where the streets were said to always be air conditioned, Kodaikanal. Even with the speed of an electron bouncing off a satellite 22,000 miles above Earth, I was not going to subject myself to the bank’s inefficiency. As I walked out of the lobby, I saw a poster touting a bank loan. The lead line was, “No Hassle!”

Then down the street I went talking to myself, I planned on emailing Flori, my guardian angel at Wells Fargo in Sitka, telling her that my card had been stolen and I would include the name of the thief who sat behind that desk. Money would henceforth have to be wired to me until something with the word “VISA” arrived.

Part Three: Once more I escaped being hit by something bigger and harder than I and walked back into the bank by 3:25.

“Please, take a seat,” and he pointed out the chairs along the wall. I suspect this was his way of showing authority but while he didn’t know it, he could have rented me that chair for about five to ten rupees an hour just to dodge dealing with the delicate environment on the other side of the bank’s door. Air condition is not the same as being in Alaska but it will do until I get back.

I watched him. He looked at everything but me. Then he motioned me over to sign papers and releases etc. We parted politely and in a few minutes I was in the ATM machine room (also air conditioned.) When the machine counted out the money, I yanked on the card. The machine, which was bigger than I was, wouldn’t turn loose! I grabbed the money with my free hand, still holding onto the card and an electric eye in the machine decided that my procedure was in keeping with bank regulations and turned loose of the card!

Part Four: The next day I drained my account in Sitka of another $250 and paid the HDFC Bank damn near a hundred rupees for the favor. Then I went looking for a state ticket agent. With luck I would see what a hill station looked like within 24 hours. Cool? Impossible! But I packed thinking that it might be true. What I put on the backburner of my mind was that it was 123 km. to this Shang-rah-la, and not one cm. of which was by train; all by bus. It could be that God would keep this poor storyteller alive at least until he reached the top of the ridge. I’d board the bus the next morning to find out.

#

The Microcosm

Anil had tucked his wallet between the mattresses. I’m not sure why a man would stick his head out the door without his wallet in his pocket but he had and that coupled with a slippage in memory means that you must borrow bus fare from friends and backtrack. He slept in my room for what was left of the night and then bussed off again in the morning to join the musketeers.

I went for a walk looking for the train station. Walked right passed it. It looked like a grand hotel and even though I had walked out of the building, I couldn’t remember it. I must have been distracted by the boys and the complexity of plans. I considered purchasing a ticket but I was hot and tired and walked on.

Sometime in the early afternoon I visited the Gandhi Memorial. His ashes were taken round the country and the memorial was built around a pedestal on which his remains rested. The room was large enough to have hanging from the walls large poster-sized photos of Gandhi during key periods of his life. The memorial had several stairways, which led up into one of several towers, giving me a view of the surrounding area. If my sense of direction was correct, the official tip of India lay about a hundred yards to my left and of course down at the water’s edge. There is a great temple crossing over the access to that point. If you remember, there was a dark street that the four of us entered and I said that I didn’t want to go there. That was the entrance to the temple. In the daylight it doesn’t look much less forbidding. Of course one removes his shoes when entering a sacred place but the temple was hyper-sacred. Men removed their shirts as well. I’ll read a description of the place some day. As I age, I find myself less curious; probably a bad sign. Comparing the two sites, this temple with the Gandhi Memorial, the latter could be called a clean, well-lighted place.

As I write I wonder why Gandhi’s ashes were not housed in this temple. Both the British and the Indian governments go to great lengths to show their secular side. But Gandhi himself said that his religious beliefs were an amalgam of all religions, eastern as well as western. When I meet someone with an education, I must ask.[1] I was about to meet a person who would qualify but the question hadn’t occurred to me at the time.

I found a cyber café, a one computer, two person operation. The man was monolingual and the young woman could make herself understood but what she wrote on paper worked better. Her speaking through a pencil lead impressed me.

“You write English well.”

Her eyebrows shot up and she wrote, “Of course!”

“Well, many people here in Kanyakumari don’t have that skill.”

“Many haven’t any education,” she wrote. A smile played across her lips.

“Are you in high school?” and then I said something else because they don’t call it ‘high school’ here.

The eyebrows climbed again as she got my meaning and this time she seemed put out with me. Twisting the paper round, she wrote, “I have graduated!”

Still thinking that she was in her teens, I asked, “Are you going on to continue your education?”

This seemed to anger her, “I have graduated!” she repeated as the pencil sailed across the paper and the paper flipped around where I could read, right side up. “I have a Bachelor of Arts.”

I read and since she didn’t seem old enough to have finished college, it was my time to look surprised.

“In what subject?”

“I have a BA in,” the pencil lead broke. She bore down too hard, I suspect. She grabbed a pen and started the sentence over as if to give emphasis. “I have a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature.”

I’ve developed a bad habit over the past ten or so years. I stop breathing. Don’t have any idea why.

She wrote on. “I have graduated from college.”

I remembered to take a breath and asked what writers she studied.

“Shakespeare, Shelly, and other writers.”

I was curious about, “and other writers,” but wondering if you could get a BA in state or would she have to go to Bangalore or New Delhi, I asked her if her college was in Tamil Nadu.

She was really losing patience with me. Even for a tourist, well… She twisted the paper around and underlined where she had written “Of course!” once before. No need in getting writer’s cramp. She decided that it was high time I got on the internet. But now there was another problem. The power failed. The surge protector beeped and I said that I would be back when the power returned.

I walked out into the heat and sunlight but a light wind blew. Ten miles to the north-east turbines turned. It must be another town’s turn to get on the web. The cook stoves operated on gas or coke. I went looking for a cup of coffee.

------------

The day wore down to the nub of late afternoon. Somewhere I picked up a bottle of water to keep the heat at bay. Not wanting go to my room as I had an hour of sunlight to burn and neither being hungry nor tired, I walked back between the buildings where we had watched the sunrise the morning before. I sat on the retaining wall and looked out over the beach and rocks to the sea. The great statue of poet Thiruvalluvar and the Vivekananda Memorial stood on the storm washed stone islands to the right, the jetty was off on my left, but what caught my eye was a boy of about six or seven just inside the lower retaining wall below me where Anthony had rock-hopped to get a better view of the sun. The kid squatted looking down into the tidal pool created by the lower wall. While the boy did wear a blue shirt, I could see no evidence of his wearing pants. His back was turned toward me as he intently watched what was going on in the pool. And his bottom was as bare as the rock he squatted on. Whatever it was that held his attention moved on to another part of the pool. The boy stood, holding his short pants at knee level and taking short steps, followed with interest. The next time he squatted, he dropped a yellow ochre stool. He changed rocks a time or two more anointing each in their turn before he pulled up his pants when a larger than usual wave smacked against the lower wall sending spray and water over the wall and into the tidal pool.

From off to my left, an older boy climbed over the wall on which I sat and carefully lowered himself onto a pile made up for the most part of coconut hulls but there were planks of rotting lumber and household rubbish making up the heap as well. He crossed the sand and stepped on to the rocks, joining the six-year old. They moved from rock to rock looking down in the tidal pools, talking to each other.

The two were joined by two more boys, one of whom gnawed on an apple-sized piece of fruit. The two descended by the same route over the wall and down the rubbish heap. Of course, they discussed what they found in the pools, while one boy stepped to the side and urinated. He seemed to have his mind on what they had seen and not that his shirt tail was out and that he was urinating on it. Another boy squatted on a rock with his pants down while a third trotted down the beach to a place where the lower wall played out and the boy began struggling to pull up some cloth which had been sanded over. He dug with his hands and stood up when a bigger wave washed over where he worked, probably filling in the hole he dug. He was about a hundred feet away; too far away for me to see.

The second boy, who had defecated, pulled up his pants and seemed to have a better idea than the boy who dug at the water’s edge. He remembered seeing some cloth in the heap that lay against the upper retaining wall where I sat. He ran back climbing the rubbish and watching him, I drank from my bottle.

The boy dug into the heap and ripped out a length of fabric about the size of a hand towel. By this time a couple of more boys had join the group and so when the boy with the cloth came back to the tidal pools, the group had grown to about seven children. The kid who worked at the water’s edge retrieved some rag but no enough to find approval among the other children. He dropped his find where he stood. Another boy squatted on a rock, pants down, while the boy who ate the fruit tossed the remains over the wall and into the sea.

One of the bigger boys took the cloth from the boy who found it in the heap (the children worked as a group) and directing the boy, who brought it down; they bent over holding the cloth down in the water using it as a net. They missed what they seined for on the first try but we all had time. It would be a half hour to sundown. The other children offered advice and spotted ahead for the fishermen. I drank the last of my water. A larger than ordinary wave smacked the lower wall sending a good amount of water over, carrying the remnant of the fruit with it.

Within five minutes the boys had caught a pan sized fish. I did not wonder if it were eatable. The biggest boy wrapped the cloth around his hand to keep from being finned. Taking the fish in the protected hand, he climbed on rock rubble that took him beyond the lower wall. Standing above the deeper water he tossed the fish back into the sea.

The fishing continued but one of the boys walked back up to the heap to look for more resources. I tapped the empty bottle against the wall. The boy looked over.

“Would you like to have this?” I asked holding out the bottle.

He climbed down off the heap and walked over to me. I tossed him the bottle and he turned back to the boys wading and walking on the rocks below. The group divided. Part kept up a fish watch while two or three of them found a sharp rock and began sawing the bottle in half. By the time the fishermen made a few more dips of their rag, the bottle cutters had produced two containers of a half-liter each. They gave the bottom half to the fishermen and kept the necked half for themselves. One boy removed the cap, covered the bottle’s mouth with his palm, and held the neck and most of bottle down in the pool. When he slipped his hand from the mouth, the bottle gulped water. Quickly, another boy reached beneath the water and screwed the cap on. Then they raised the bottle, cap down, and looked at what the bottle had sucked up. There were about four boys in this party. And while I couldn’t see the fifty feet or so to where they sat on their heels, I could guess at the tiny invertebrates they caught. All four looked into the watery world of the bottle. I could see them talking and would have given a dollar for their thoughts. The boy, who held the bottle by its cap and neck, swirled the contents and a tiny whirlpool spun the creatures round and round. The kids watched seemingly in wonder.

The upper retaining cast long shadows over the boys and the buildings behind me hid the sun. It was time to move on. My evening would begin by my washing my hands, I would read a menu, and order supper, if I chose to. Back in my room, I’d shower before bed. That was my call. I walked away from that one hundred foot square where the boys ate, fished, relieved themselves, and spun sea water into a whirlpool. In a half liter of water they found questions and have thousands of sunrises to find the answers, if they chose to. That was their call.

#
[1] If a Christian’s opinion on a Hindu custom is to be believed, Sam, my new found friend, thinks that a temple is off limits for the dead. The dead are considered unclean and therefore should only be handled by the Untouchables who operate the crematoriums.

The Memorial, the Wind Farm, and Panic

The line of people down to the ferry was long, considering the distance out to the rock where the memorial/temple stood for Vivekananda was only a few hundred meters. But then in time we were across and climbing up the walkway to the shoe shed. When entering a sacred site, one sheds shoes.

The memorial was well thought out. To make sure that you missed nothing, someone had painted large arrows onto the stone pavement. I wondered if I were the first person to imagine myself as a piece in a board game. The arrows led us up to a level where the smaller of the two shrines stood. Under a canopy of masonry and further protected from the elements (and possibly people) by a thick pane of glass, one could see beneath the pavement level a foot print in the living stone. Its significants escaped me. I think the print was believed to be the track of a god. Then the arrows led over to the larger building, one more elevated. The whole complex of pavement, walls, and structures was finished in 1970. As sacred sites go, these shelters were raised only yesterday. But in doing so, the architect(s) decided to use stylistic elements from all over India and the structures are not only eclectic but tasteful. We climbed the steps and walked into the half-light of the larger building. Light came into the room by side doors or windows. Even with a hundred other pilgrims, the nave was quiet as a silent prayer. At the far end of the nave stood the sculpted likeness of Swami Vivekananda covered from turban to sandaled foot with gold leaf. His stance was that of a man stepping forward, while his head was slightly tipped back as if looking into the lower reaches of Heaven.

During the last half of the 19th century Vivekananda studied the Vedas and wanted to understand the connection between the holy books and life as he experienced it. He meditated and talked to those he felt knew more than he had learned. Finally he made a pilgrimage from the Himalayas in the north to this spot directly below where the statue stood. It was here where the questions he had asked merged with the answers he had learned. This was the spot on which he gained Enlightenment.

After a few minutes we passed out of that hall and around a corner. Anthony told me that where they were going next was a meditation room and would I like to go in. I could go in. Avinash told me that I could go in. There are places to admire for their beauty and there are sacred places. I felt that the meditation hall was a place for the faithful. I told them I’d wait out on the terrace beside the hall. I found a cool shadow cast by a pillar and they left me. When the three of them came back in about five or ten minutes, Avinash asked Anthony if he had noticed the volume of the mantra climbing as they meditated. One of us was a Hindu. Avinash and Anthony, remember, where Roman Catholic and it was Anthony who was first in the bookstore/gift shop on a lower level tucked beneath the meditation hall. There were pictures of the swami for sale but Anthony bought a couple of books, one of which contained the saying of Vivekananda. He was particularly interested in showing me the opening lines of a speech the swami delivered to a congress of world religions held in one of the great halls constructed for the St. Louis World Exposition. According to what I read, Vivekananda was either one of or the only Hindu representative. In about twenty-five words he thanked his audience for giving him the chance to speak but the emphasis of what said was addressed to the idea of the brotherhood of religions. This brought the house to an applause, which kept him from continuing for several minutes. It was the right moment and the right place and since it is now over a century later, this gesture to the West is what enthralled, I assume, a devout Catholic. Both Vivekananda’s words and Anthony’s interpretation impressed me. Ten thirty had come and gone with a bus we never saw leaving town. There were more important things to do.

The painted arrows lead us downhill to the shoe shed. Even before we had boarded the ferry, the next destination had been decided on. We would walk the near mile length of a jetty which left the beach only two or three hundred yards from where we’d watched the sunrise. I think the main purpose for walking out to the end was “because it’s there.”

As we made our way along the sands to the jetty, Avinash warned me against stepping on “landmines.” The residents of the makeshift building above us used the beach as their toilet. The theory was that if you defecated below the high water that a flood tide raises all boats and other things as well. Like many theories in aesthetics and in particular literature, theories make glib arguments but often do not prove out. Forsaking the theory is easy, provided you are not the author. However that may be, I watched my step.

The jetty, while seemingly exposed to whatever the Bay of Bengal could brew up, was in very good condition. You had to watch your step because the cracks between the boulders were wide enough to catch a foot and turn an ankle but if you’ve walked on an urban sidewalk in India, walking the jetty was nothing.

One purpose of the jetty was to provide a fixed point on which to tie a stern line of skiff. The boatmen used a crude raft made of three logs lashed together to pull themselves along the tie-up line to the stern of their boats. Whether the bows were tied off to permanent moorages or the temporary sets of an anchor, I couldn’t tell but while the system worked, were I a boat owner, I would want to find a sandy stretch of beach where I could run my boat aground should a storm rise, landmines or no landmines.

As we walked, the four of us moved at our own pace and I walked alone and alone with my thoughts. The sunrise was still on my mind. While the sun’s opposition to the full moon may provide a sacred moment, the sunrise this morning struck me as a secular affair. The crowd might have just as well been waiting for an eruption of Old Faithful. And if the event were secular and a phenomena of Nature, instead of a miracle of the god(s,) then might not other places in the world where a clear view of both morning and evening horizons provide the same phenomena? The mesas of Texas or anywhere along that ancient transcontinental seabed would not only provide the view but markers could be set up to predict just where the sun would rise or set, month by month – a Stonehenge without the heavy lifting. A landowner could provide the visitor the sunrise/sunset for free; the amenities at the base of the tabletop – the service station, the café, and the motel would charge. I had seen the sea a thousand times. To Anile it was a first. When people live close together, vistas are shortened to something to less than arms’ length, and an occurrence as simple as the rising sun becomes remarkable.

The family, who sunned themselves at the end of the jetty, had thought that they had found privacy from the one point two billion but we didn’t stay long. Anthony looked to the north-east and the planning among the three began again for the next program with the spontaneity and immediacy of a genesis of a crap game. Over five miles but less than ten across the water, we could see the graceful turn of the great windmills. None of us had ever been to the base of such a machine. There was no time to lose. “Let’s go!” and the four of use hopped over the cracks between the rocks, stepping like jaybirds on frozen ground.

On leaving the jetty to find an auto rickshaw, nothing more eventful happened than my stepping on a landmine. As I scraped my foot against the corner of a wall, I said to anyone within earshot, “I WAS WATCHING!” The sands had buried what my shoe had inadvertently exhumed. Count ten, swearing won’t do any good, this is India, and what a marvelous place it is!

Scrunched together the four of us plus a driver dodged down a narrow but straight road. It was mostly paved and I did my best to think of the great gray windmills that rose on the horizon. One day I will plan a tour of India that will exclude any and all road traffic. India by rail! Trains are majestic! They can crush vehicle whose owner decides to get in the way by parking on the track. And in case you didn’t read the paper, Tata, a major producer of just about everything, announced that it sees a great new market in India in compact automobiles! No, you watch the windmills. Don’t think about tens of millions of shiny compacts on roads originally designed for little more than bicycle traffic.

The rickshaw driver had an in. We pulled off the road and walked across an open pasture to a thatch shack. The watchman greeted the driver warmly. We paid our respects and then leaving the driver to visit with the watchman, we walked over to where the windmill stood. Anil bent backwards to get the great prop in his viewfinder. I’ve walked aboard ships, which are much larger than the windmills but nevertheless there was something about the machines that dwarfed us as would the sequoias of California. And furthermore anything that large that can move without a sound is an engineering marvel! I had heard that they were noisy. I walked up to the tower near the closed door to the staircase that led up to the generator atop. I put my ear (my best one) to the tower. I could hear cogwheels turning; they whispered.

My daughter and the idea of using energy produced by means other than oil and coal were both born at the same time. She’s still a bunch of years shy of middle age. I’m the one getting old and here I stand among these giants pulling power from the wind! The wind farm amazed all four of us. After fifteen or twenty minutes we tipped the watchman and again overloaded the auto rickshaw for the ride back in town.

When we got there, it was Katie bar the door! The boys were off to their next destination. I watched as they packed and tried to stay within the conversation but out of the way at the same time. In days to come, I would think more than once of just going to find them in Bangalore to speak English with someone who could answer. They were bright and God knows they were active and when we shook hands good bye, I tried to think of something else. But then they were gone and life got quiet again.

I puttered around my room; straighten up this, putting that away, when there came a knock. I opened the door and the cleaning crew presented me with a wallet. I opened it. It was Anil’s. I knew someone who was going to make an unpleasant discovery soon and I went directly to the front desk. The boys and I had traded addresses for both mail and email and they left me their cell phone numbers. I called on the house phone but had the desk clerk receive the call. Nothing to receive. Cell phones may be as obnoxious as tobacco (beetle nut) spit but they are more useless than spit unless you have them turned on. I would call again later but the results were the same. I went to sleep at a reasonable hour and awoke at about two in the morning. I opened the door. It was wonderful to see Anil again!

#

Sunrise

There are places on Earth where if you can stand beyond the shadows’ reach of tree or building, you can see the sunrise and the set of a full moon simultaneously. At the southern tip of India is such a place. And since it was first noticed thousand of years ago, it was decided that to experience such an event would lead one into an auspicious day.

“The three musketeers” were to leave on the morning bus at ten fifteen. They had a schedule; I did not and planned to stay in Kanyakumari until the urge moved me. I was (and am) behind in writing, the cape would be a good place for me to stop and regroup. Therefore on my first wake-up, I was unpleasantly surprised to be brought out of sleep by the blaring prayer from a public address system. It was like taking a room too near a church with a full complement of bells and an ambitious bell ringer. But at five o’clock?

The boys burned energy like ferrets and should have slept in but having chosen a place to sleep this near electric vocal cords would bring them into consciousness. No coffee, no tea, just dress and go. The four of us followed a crowd shuffling down through the deep shadows of what had been a pitch black street last night. We in turn were followed by others. After a turn here and a twist there and dodging a postcard salesman and a dark-glasses vendor, we passed beyond the buildings and onto a road that ran down paralleling the beach. The only light came from a deep red splinter of cloud just above the horizon. It was still very dark, enough light to see the ground you walked over but not enough to make out what stood on two rock islands to the right of where the sun would in time rise. I lost my bet that I made with myself. The clouds had evaporated and we would have a clear sunrise.

The crowd stopped along the top of a retaining wall that kept the town and the road from slipping into the sea. The earlier people stood to our right and higher up while the arriving crowd along with us found a place along the road the wall held up. The town to our back, the Bay of Bengal before us, we waited and watched. By then I made out what looked like a temple crowned the farther rock but on the nearer one, there looked to be a great stone pillar. As time passed, the coming day showed the pillar to be the shape of a man Then as time went on, I could see a colossus his head probably more than two hundred feet above the sea. Any tourist with a half-well ordered mind would have read the guide book. Sometime it is to one’s advantage just to see, discover, and experience. The light in the east grew.

I looked back at the people along a wall above us, and behind them at the faces framed by windows, and by the figures high atop the hotels and on its balconies and marveled at how people had turned out just to see something as ordinary as a sunrise. The moon was out of sight. I don’t remember the phase but what I had earlier estimated to be hundreds of people now stood, at my guess, near two thousand, all watching, all waiting.

The boys, never still, always moving, had climbed down the wall and stepped along the rocks to get a closer look…at the sun? at the horizon? Strobes flashed all through the crowd. And by now the stratus formation was turning from orange to near gold. The waves lapped against another smaller wall at the water’s edge. Anthony had rock-hopped his way there and was wondering aloud back over his shoulder if they should charter a rowboat for a closer look. Since the horizon bends away from the viewer as he approaches and since the sun stands about ninety-three million miles away, I called to him that this was about as close as he would get.

Then as quietly as the crowd, it happened. The sun’s edge showed above the sea but if you looked quickly you saw that it rose in several parts with the lower part ragged like a crust nibbled by mice. Over the curvature of the Earth and far, far out to sea, possibly over Sri Lanka, cumulus cloud tops blocked part of the red arc. I had not seen them before and within seconds they disappeared into the building glare. They could have stood a hundred fifty miles or more from Cape Comorin. But by now the sun’s edge became one and rose slightly changing from a blood red to a brighter and lighter orange. Cameral clicked. Off to the right I could see both the temple that I would learn was a memorial and on the rock nearer the cape, the massive form, still a work in progress, of the Tamil poet, Thiruvalluvar.

Looking back at the people, I could see the saris take on colors in the brighter light. Then a family here and a person there withdrew from the front rank and walked back toward the passage between the buildings from where we had all come. Anthony and Avinash conferred with each other. The lenses retracted into their cameras. They asked Anil and I what we thought. It was breakfast time. The sun had risen.

#

To Kanyakumari at Cape Comorin

To Kanyakumari at Cape Comorin

During the first five or six weeks on the Subcontinent, there were days in which the temperature was bearable up to about noon. I’d heard of a place up in the Palani Hills called Kodaikanal, which was said to not only be bearable but actually cool. Settling down for a while was of more interest than sightseeing and I considered cutting across country to find the hill station. But then came that nagging question which was, When will you be back? Travel, like living, is cheap in India. One thought was to wait in the mountains until January and then come down and do my touring then. It was during January and February that I had crossed India the first time. I remember sweaters, not sweating. But then Cape Comorin, that is the southern tip of the country, was within a little more than a half-day’s journey so why not go? From what I’d read there was a strange phenomena to experience there, and while the sun and moon were not in sync, I was far enough south that I should take in the geography. Furthermore I’d heard about wind farms.

John Jacobs peddled hand-painted scarves to the hotel guests. He, like Tony, was proficient in English and operated as a small entrepreneur. I had seen him around the hotel several times and chatted with him. Now and then you meet an Indian who would like to take on the U.S. experience and John, who had few family ties and had cared for the elderly, had the American Dream in mind. The first hurdle is speaking English well enough so that the client can understand; the second is for the elderly to have the patience to learn John’s pronunciation.

I made him an offer that I’d give him $5.00 (Rs. 200) if he would transport me to the station and deal with the ticket agent. He was more than pleased.

The hotel clerks found a train leaving for Kanyakumari at 10:15 a.m. which would arrive at the southern tip of India that afternoon late. This suited me as I would have a chance to look over the countryside by daylight. Just to make catching a train more interesting there may be several stations in one town. John got the name of the proper station from the clerk and all was set for a morning departure.

He picked me up and we rode away in an auto rickshaw. At the ticket window, he turned and asked if I wanted an inexpensive second-class coach ticket or a sleeper ticket second class. Since I didn’t plan on sleeping, I bought the cheaper ticket and he helped me board. It was the wrong car but….. Then we shook hands, wished each other well, and I settled down to think over his advice. One mustn’t accept food from strangers. I think Mother told me that or maybe the advice only applied to candy. There had been cases of pranks played causing the recipient to become nauseated and in some cases the story included knock-out drugs and robbery.

I took a single seat on the narrow side of the car, the locomotive honked twice and we rolled along a trash-lined track and out into the farms and countryside. Urban areas are dumps. At this time India and America are dickering over a nuclear deal. Forget what the United States wants from India, if India can’t keep a power plant cleaner than it does a street corner, God help India! But the land, whether cultivated or wild, is as beautiful as anyplace in the world. I’m amazed that the tourist industry (Indian or foreign) hasn’t observed this. The land is Eden. The towns are the new Untouchables.

So the wind felt good coming through the window as we rolled south through Eden.

The first person sitting opposite to me was a man in his thirties, who could knew a few words in English. He wanted me to visit his home in days to come. I thanked him but told him that I would be taking another route. Then he asked me to sponsor him to come to the U.S. I told him that he’d need to go to school of which there were many in any city I’d been in and learn English. He thought that over and went on his way.

The next person to occupy that seat was a lady of about the same age, who had training, spoke well, and if I recall was in the medical field as were her friends sitting across on the wide side the aisle. We chatted and then passed a concrete pad of about thirty-five feet by better than fifty. There was a pole metal roof overhead and a good sized fire burning beneath the roof. I asked the lady what that was about. She said that it was a cremation. Not everybody can get to burning ghats of Varanasi. It could be that the ashes will reach the Ganges later.

The afternoon wore on. I managed to buy a bottle of water and with the help of the lady, I purchased a bag of Lay potato chips. These chips weren’t sliced and fried in Ft. Worth but instead were India’s own well spiced with curry powder. The lady left and three men in their twenties took seats in the car. They all spoke excellent English and I was invited to join them. They were interested in what I thought of India and one story led to another. They particularly liked pointing out this and that using my version of the Goan wrist flip and they though retraining cab drivers to become mercenary fighter pilots was hilarious. Then the conductors, two women, came round. I showed my ticket and they looked at me like my third-grade teacher did when I had committed a venial sin. It seems that John Jacobs had loaded me into the wrong car. I should have been sitting on wooden benches instead the plastic pads of a second-class sleeper. And like the third-grade teacher, they realized that I was utterly ignorant of my mistake and after informing me of my misdeed, they let it pass.

The young men were taking a few days vacation from their banking job in Bangalore. Two of them, Anthony and Avinash had known each other since grade school, the third, Anil, had known the two since college. They looked for the interesting and fun things to do. They had considered paragliding but due to the weather or faulty equipment or for some other reason they changed plans. They were on their way to Kanyakumari to see the sun rise. What ever turns you on. The bunch were live wires and curious, spending as much time as I, looking out the window. We had a discussion as to our location in relation to this west coast train to the Arabian Sea. Now in late afternoon, we agreed that the sun was to the west and if we were to see the sea again, it would be off the starboard since we headed south. To Anil looking over the Indian Ocean was a wonder that made the trip worth the time and effort. With my having lived twenty or thirty years on salt water, hearing the awe in his voice gave me something to think on.

Then the country and trees began to breakaway and beyond the coconut palms stood some of the most rugged mountains any of us had seen. Anil likened the sight to Utah. That took me by surprise that he would know what Utah looked like. Surely there weren’t many Americans who knew what Kerala looked like. I politely agreed although I’d have compared these rocky mountains with the Superstitions of Arizona. I wanted to point out one difference. Anil listened. “You must forget what you see in the foreground.” There were rice paddies stretching from the tracks to the mountains and the latter were five or ten miles away. Anil agreed that Utah wouldn’t have rice paddies.

Then we came to the terminal. This terminal was surely the end of the line. From here you double back; no left, right, or center.

Avinash spoke Tamil and was our chief interpreter. He dickered with the auto rickshaws and soon the four of us and our baggage were overloading a three-wheeler and chugging off to see what the hotels had to offer. Judging by the metabolic rate of these guys, I said that I wanted a room by myself. After a check of the available choice, we settled on rooms on the first floor (by British and Indian standards; second floor U.S.) and moved in. I showered and we met for supper. Indians, like the Chinese, order large quantities of food and then share. In my confusion, I ate most of a fish delicacy that they ordered. I though it was my order. They introduced me to a drink called “lassi.” The spelling varies as does the taste but I found a flavor with an untapped fortune just beneath the bubbles. I could imagine lassi stands popping up like fence posts, growing smaller as they stretched out over an American horizon. I got so many stories as to how it was made that I’ll stick with the one Avinash, who has probably never made the drink, told me. You dump yogurt into cold water and run it through a blender. The proportion should be just thin enough to be drawn through a straw. You add a little salt and a spoonful of sugar, if you like it sweet. Otherwise leave out the sugar and drink it salty to your taste. I wrote a glowing report to my daughter and she reminded me that we ate an Indian meal (complete with lassi) while sitting on some steps in Greenwich Village. I remembered the meal, my wrestling with some kind of dosi (great piece of crisp bread,) lunch time, rivers of people on Crosby Street, cars, all of which pretty well approximated India. I got stressed, daughter took it in stride, and Fred, her dog, which she carried with her, went to sleep. “And so we drank lassi?” I asked. Since she was about seven years old and that was thirty years ago, she puts little trust in my memory but that’s another story.

The Sea View Restaurant was a table cloth place. The young men would be gone by tomorrow night. But during my stay of several days, the waiters in white shirts, black ties and trousers got to know my weakness for lassi.

These three musketeers wiped their mouths on the cloth napkins and it was time to go look at the town. Of course by this time the sun had set over the Arabian Sea and there is nothing quite as dark as a tropical night. We wanted to find the “beach.” Again Avinash talked, took note, and away we went among vendors selling sunglasses, vendors selling strings of jasmine blossoms, vendors selling travel guides, but no vendor sold three foot long railway maps of India, which is about the only thing in the world I needed to purchase for a friend who loves maps so long as they don’t have too many towns shown on them.

We rounded one stand and found a brahma calf about half grown lying before a temple door. He was white but with gray, shading off to near charcoal. There are cows and there are cows but this one was a beautiful creature. Of course my gang was electronically prepared. They had come with I-pods, cell phones, and a digital camera. One by one we all had our picture taken with the calf. Anthony wasn’t too sure what would happen if he touched the calf. I couldn’t imagine an Indian made jittery by a cow but he and Avinash were Roman Catholics. Anil was Brahman. I petted the calf as I would a dog. You can charge my attitude up to my coming from a ranching family or my being Methodist-Heathen. This happened about a month ago and I haven’t seen such a beautiful animal since then.

We turned down the street which led to the “beach.” It also led to the great temple, which was part and parcel of this End of India/rising sun-setting moon thing. It was very dark. I said that I was turning back and the “boys” spun on their heels and came back with me. There manners all the time we were together were exemplary.

The last plan of the day was to get up early tomorrow and watch the sun rise over the Bay of Bengal. One of the last thing I did before I turned off the light in my room, was to go out on the balcony and look up at a starless sky. John Jacobs had told me with a giggle before he left me that morning. Most of the mornings in Kanyakumari are cloudy. Somebody was sure to be disappointed.

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Into the Backwaters for Sure

Into the Backwaters for Sure

When I awoke the morning after the strike, I looked down on the street and could find no more evidence of a protest that the exact site of a sand castle which stood previous to the last high tide. People moved in crowds; vehicle horns chattered back in forth, each, like there operator, more adapt at talking than listening.

As expected, the jeans were still wet so after a drenching with one-temperature-will-serve-all tap water shower, I pulled on my best dress pants with yellow stitching and found breakfast and directions to the government tourist ticket center.

In a number of countries in Asia, especially the ones where it rains and rains, they dig a ditch and line it with concrete to take away the excessive rainwater. Since flow depends on slope, I’ve always wanted to talk this design over with an engineer. In the final result does the depth of the slit carry more water than a gutter with a better slope? The cut is no more than a foot wide and of a depth of over a foot. In Singapore the depth could be more than six feet. Some places cover their gutters; Singapore doesn’t or didn’t. The gutter covers, when you find them, are rectangles of concrete, of course, wider than the gutter, about two and a half feet long and five or six inches thick. This makes them heavy enough so that it takes a concerted effort to move one. There is a keyhole molded through the slab, which serves more than one purpose, I suspect. One, a line with a toggle could be slipped through the hole, the toggle turned crosswise to the keyhole, the other end of the rope could be centered on the middle of a pole, and four men, two on each end of the pole, could lift and set the cover in place over the gutter. Now the slab serves as both a cover for the slit, a filter to keep larger rubbish out of the gutter, and the public can use the slabs as a fairly smooth sidewalk, albeit a narrow one.

As I hurried on, I walked the slabs until I came to one that was missing and then I took a long step over the hole. Before traveling to Asia be sure and get a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. You may wonder as to the present location of the missing slab (or if there ever was one) as you ask directions to the ticket office. And if you again visit the city years from now, remember, a tetanus shot and a Mini-Mag flashlight. The missing link in the walkway may still be missing.

The agent explained as he sold tickets that the beginning point was a cab drive away and that the price of the cab was covered in the ticket. A retired colonel was there with his wife, son, who was a lieutenant colonel, his daughter-in-law, there six-year old son. While the tickets and the money were being sorted, the two colonels studied the wall map talking over routes to be taken in the days to come. They were from the north and had rented a car to make a thorough site-seeing trip of it.

We boarded cabs and began the hour-long journey. There are two generalities I want to make and as you know generalities are not to be trusted. Nobody in India can make change in rupees and no taxi ever has a full tank. We stopped while about half-way to our destination long enough for a purchase of about four liters of gas and for me to launch one prayer from the backseat. It was during this outing that it occurred to me that there is a world supply of mercenary jet pilots among India’s cab drivers just waiting for further training. All they have to learn is how to make a plane go up and go down. With tongue out of cheek, these driver exhibit nerve and coordination that is well beyond that of normal humans. Of course all Indians have the nerve. They exhibit it every time they climb into a cab or onto a bus. But it is the drivers that have the lightning reflexes. And just to give further proof of their ability, they may carry on a conversation with a passenger, listen to Top Forty Mumbai at full volume, and answer a cell phone simultaneously. You remember at times like this that it’s tea, coffee, and beetle nut which is preferred over drinking alcohol. Like the survival of street dogs, in India the institution of road driving is Darwinian. So there I was in the backseat wondering if today is the day I find out who is the fittest to survive. As of late there is a move afoot by the government to train all commercial drivers. How can you argue with statistics? Five died along with two busses in a head-on. I just read the headlines so I don’t know the number hospitalized.

Because we stopped we were late. The others gathered beneath a palm thatched shelter waiting. My appearance upon stepping from the cab was enough to get them laughing and soon there was another hold up and we had time to visit and settle in with each other.

A little old man (probably my age) seemed to be in charge. His English was pretty good but it was Indian English. In my mind I had to pronounce what he said a second time to bring the words into American English. He was dressed like a villager but as you listened to him you knew he had been places and done things. I was to find that he was very knowledgeable and as you will see when dealing with people, carried around five pounds of patience.

He told us that we would see three villages and connecting waterways. We had arrived in the first village and he took us to see the horticulture, literally the things grown in the yard. Bananas and cocoanuts were not surprising but then he showed us black pepper, and a half-dozen other spices, along with coffee, cocoa, sugarcane, and tea. The yards seem to be the owners’ at-home supermarkets. Most of the spices he showed us, I had never heard of. The Phoenicians didn’t sail to this coast for the beaches.

Then we boarded a six-foot wide canoe of about thirty-five feet in length. To get an idea of the space, set two plastic lawn chairs side by side because that’s what we sat in. And before you restack them, check the name of the country of origin molded into the plastic. India is its own best customer. The colonel and I sat with each other, the grandson sat forward with the guide and a fellow who knew so much about what was around us that I was surprised that he came on the tour. I would have foregone the cab ride had I been him. He sat back of me. (And in case you have decided that my take on cab driving is exaggerated, I forgot to tell you that we hit something or somebody on the way out. It, he, or she knocked the outside rearview mirror out of position. I did hear a scream but I think it was mine.) The other family members were scattered along the length of the canoe. Then we shoved off, a man in the bow, and a man in the stern both poling. We moved silently except for the voices of the guide, the kid, and the fellow behind me.

The old man pointed out a water snake winding his way across the canal beneath a wild pineapple. The colonel said the snake was poisonous, the fellow behind me said it wasn’t, the kid talked Hindi to the guide, and the guide said nothing. You don’t eat wild pineapple FYI. It may have to be cultured for several generations before becoming nutritious. Regardless of the character of the water snake, false mangos are poisonous. And down the waterways we glided, doing nothing except listening and watching is a most pleasant way to spend a half-day.

A kingfisher perched on a limb up ahead. Everybody got quiet, even the kid and the man behind me. All wild animals have a danger range - the distance that they will allow you to approach them. Sometime they don’t know that you are there. If it is a kingfisher, you may see a wild flight. If it is a tiger or bear you may see a wild fight…in your lap. The kingfisher saw us coming and allowed us to get within about thirty-five paces and then flew straight down the waterway since there was less vegetation in that direction. Everybody including the kid, the authority, and me said, “Oooh!” at once. The kingfisher flew beneath leafed tree limbs that stopped all sunlight except for a few dapples here and there. Each time the daylight fell on the bird’s back, it fluoresced blue. Once you’ve seen the flash, you don’t get this bird mixed up with any other. He is about the same size as the kingfishers I saw around Sitka. A bottling company in Goa calls itself Kingfisher. When I saw their logo, I thought the company needed the advice of an ornithologist. How would anybody get a kingfisher mixed up with a ruby-throated humming bird? But while the artist may have exaggerated some, the bird is always worth stopping what you are doing to look at.

We poled past a rice paddy, then a stand of rubber trees, and then some bamboo. Everything in sight was lush and tropical – elephant ears, morning glory vines, hibiscus, and all this time we pushed our way through water hyacinths. I asked the guide about the latter, knowing that with a growth rate such as theirs, they can block a waterway quickly. The old guide said that once a year, the government enlists the people into a program to clear the waterway.

On the water or in visiting the villages that day, I noticed another program ongoing. Somebody told somebody that you don’t toss your rubbish the way they do it in town. I did see a small amount to garbage floating in the water, but really the water and landscape were clean. Since visitors drop in almost daily into these people’s midst, I’m sure there must be some financial benefits paid out by the government, possibly an improvement in the school or infirmary. If the local farming families paid any attention to us, it was generally positive. In one village they demonstrated rope making using corded coconut husks for fiber. I was tempted to buy a length but since it goes in the pack and the pack goes on my back, I passed.

At another hamlet, the ladies wove coconut palms into smartly executed mats. The lieutenant colonel bought two or three. He lives somewhere this side of Alaska and won’t need to stow them in the overhead compartment. While the weaving and the buying were going on, I walked off to investigate a whacking noise beyond a hedge of wild plants, which sounded like someone splitting firewood. Through the bushes, I first saw the little girl, probably about five years old. She flashed a smile and then I saw the mother who wheeled a hapless shirt overhead before smacking it hard against a rough rock. She smiled as well and said, “I washing!” I waved and kept the little girl’s attention by making a silver rupee disappear in my palm. The little girl knew that that couldn’t happen and her mother explained that I was doing magic. “Whack!” Mama never missed a beat.

Back in the boat we pushed on. The fellow behind me informed his group as to this or that. Not being able to understand a language is a great disadvantage except when you don’t want to listen. The kid forward questioned the guide, who while looking over the waterway and land around us, answered but with his attention elsewhere. The grandfather chuckled and I asked him why. He said that the boy was asking how many children the guide had and how long he had been a guide. I asked the grandfather if the boy intended offering the old man a job. Grand Dad thought that that was worth passing on in Hindi and he got a laugh. The questions and conversation had split early on. The adults wanted to know about the plants, animals, and the way of life while the boy wanted to know where the guide shopped for his sandals.

The water sent out concentric waves from the bank. I asked what had caused that and the colonel said that an iguana had dived beneath the water. I looked for hibiscus plants but couldn’t see any at the moment. These pocket-sized dinosaurs include in their diet hibiscus blossoms.

Trekking may be exhilarating, but sitting quietly in a canoe while it is being poled silently through the still water has something to be said for it. I had put the taxi ride home out of my mind and as the canoe slid beneath the overhanging branches and the sunlight dappled the waterway ahead of us, I relaxed. And that’s not such a bad thing to do now and then.

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Into the Backwaters

Into the Backwaters

The French couple came to conclusion that the three of us should check out several hotels and decide. It was about two o’clock which meant that I was slowly sweating myself to death. The auto rickshaw stirred the breeze and that certainly felt good.

The first hotel had a great looking lobby, which was enough to convince me and Nicole went in to check rooms. She came back saying that the rooms had either ceiling fans or for another hundred rupees we could get a room with air conditioning. I took a ceiling fan room as they did as well, their room being right down the hall. We decided that we should clean up and meet in the lobby and take the ferry over to Kochi, which is the old port.

By now I was becoming used to the unheated shower water. This being summer by my standards, the shower reminded me of a plunge in an unheated swimming pool. Yes, it’s a shock but only for a few seconds and then the water felt wonderful. I’d turn off the water, soap up, shave, and rinse off. Then I’d knock what water, I could, off with my hands and step out of the bathroom and beneath the ceiling fan. For a few minutes that day, I’d would enjoy being cool.

When we met in the lobby, we all felt better than when we arrived. The state of Kerala (pronounced CARE-a-la,) is famous for “backwater” scenery. There are natural canals and waterways in the countryside and the government and private companies run tours by canoes or rice barges there. The three of us inquired about the tour but just as the hotel clerk was about to call in for reservations, he remembered that tomorrow there would be a one day strike. About what? Why? Apparently it was to show solidarity with something or another and represent a challenge to the sitting government. Would there be demonstrations?

I’ve got a thing about demonstrations, in India as well as anyplace else in the world. One of my Bombay memories from my first trip was a burnt out car with a broken windshield where somebody’s head smashed into it. There was hair on the interior rear view mirror and as I said there was fire damage to seats and overhead upholstery. The fire was out but those in charge had not removed the car, which had been left at the side of the street. We asked what had happened and were told that a family, who were out driving, had encountered a crowd of demonstrators. Whether the family tried to get through the crowd or the crowd enveloped the car wasn’t clear. What was clear was that someone in the crowd dropped a burning match into the gas tank. The crowd leaned against the doors and watched. When the family found that the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside, they butted their heads against the windshield and rear window in a futile attempt to escape. The bodies were gone. Only a few strands of hair remained. I stay clear of demonstrations.

There was to be a march but not in Ernakulam or Kochi. Since my schedule had no limits, the loss of a day was no loss. I could use it for writing and it would give me a chance to wash some clothes. Guy and Nicole did have a schedule so we jumped into a auto rickshaw and off we went to change airline tickets. Humanity and machinery filled the road. If no one works tomorrow, what will happen to all this?

The airline office shared a building that housed the HDFC bank and if there had not been such a line of people, I might have tried to make a withdrawal at the ATM machine but I was riding on another’s shilling and passed up the chance. In only a moment the two of them were back in the rickshaw with plans altered and we drove back at the jetty a block from the hotel. There we caught the ferry across to Kochi.

The sun hung low over Kochi and the sea and the water reflected a sky and sun in the first stages of evening. On the ride over, husband and wife talked over the changes in their schedule, I assume since I don’t speak French. While they talked, I watched the water. The tide was running out and taking with it, islands of water hyacinths. Birds walked on the leaves poking their beaks down among the stems for small fish that seemed to think that they were in safe shelter.

My coming to Kochi had been a “put-the-finger-on-map” decision. I did my reading and reasoning as an afterthought. One, I knew that there would not snow here. I got that wish answered in spades. Two, I’d heard that the country was beautiful and green. Right again. Three, Kerala the state we were in, was famous for its cultural mixture that goes back centuries and was noted for the peace among the cultures. Jews and Moslems live together here as do Christians and Hindus. Four, Kerala, along with Himachal Pradesh, another of my destination, has the lowest crime rate in India. And my feelings may well have been different in mid December or early January but this was October. And had the ferry not have been moving, I would have been uncomfortable. I did wonder at what I was doing. In Mrs. Martin’s geography class, fifth grade, we learned that the closer you get to the equator, the hotter it gets. Well she said that almost sixty years ago and a lot can change in that time...and a lot stays the same.

We turned into the first restaurant we came to in Kochi. I ate more than was wise even with an appetite that had its beginning back in Goa. After supper we started off at a pace set by Guy for the fish market. The man, probably 65, had long legs and a flat belly. In order to keep up, at times I had to dogtrot. Sundown was approaching and we did have things to see that would no be seen in the dark. About a half mile on, we came to the fishing port. There were high ended boats tied up, an open fish market by the jetty, but what would catch most people’s eye were the tripods supporting the great dip nets. None were being “dipped” at the moment, probably because the tide’s running and the size of the floating weed patches driven past like evening clouds before an off-shore breeze. The nets measured 25 or 30 feet square. There was a time to dip and a time to sell and we made our way through the buyers and sellers. Guy found a fellow who knew a little French and was a football fan of some French player. The two of them had a great time kidding each other. I was curious as to the kind of fish they had to offer. One the fish I wanted to see, I’d eaten but had never seen whole and uncovered by gravy. In the western Indian languages, it was called “pom frit.” The fish was considered a delicacy but I don’t know how one could tell since when served up, the fish was bathed in strong sauce. I asked and they pointed out a fish with a disk shape. The meaty part was about the size of the palm. I wondered what he would taste like, washed, rolled in salted and peppered cornmeal and deep fried. I swallowed therefore it would have probably tasted good with or without a squeeze of lemon.

Another fish in the market surprised me. A friend from Wrangell, Alaska, Rod Brown, goes each year to Baja California to catch dorado or what the Hawaiians call mahi-mahi. Rod re ports the fish is a great fighter, an acrobat, and delicious. Apparently dorados circle the world. Either the species or the family has a blunt face, a high forehead, and a dorsal fin that as I remember runs from head to tail.

While Guy and Nicole joked and quizzed the fishermen, I looked out at the horizon. The boats, as I said had very high bows and sterns. While possibly thirty feet in length, the lines created by bow and stern looked to have fairy tale proportions. The sun lay low enough on the sea where a few miles out, I could see the shadows of great standing waves where the out going tide met the incoming swells. Anybody who crossed that zone would have a pitch and a buck before getting safely either out or into the bay. It was from that strip of nature that the boats got their unique design.

By now men, trees, and nets were fast becoming silhouettes against a molten sunset and we hurried back along the way we came, Guy leading out. After a ferry ride back to Ernakulam we bade a good night to each other and it would be a farewell. I looked forward to a catch-up day and they had their plans. Such is the life of the wayfarer. People are with you one day and you listen to them and rely on them and then the next day they are memory.

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The strike was the first thing on my mind when I awoke. What would be different? How could the streets not be jammed with people dodging vehicular traffic, jumping potholes, walking around rubbish? Fortunately the hotel staff came to work and I ate an omelet, drank a bottle of water, and ended it all with a rich cup of coffee with hot milk. But from the moment I awoke and rolled out of bed, the street beyond my window was quiet. I was as excited as a kid after the first snowfall. I wanted to go outside.

The street was nearly empty. Now and then a motorcycle would rip by but looking both ways you could count the people in the street. I began walking. In many cities in India, the streets aren’t much but the blocks are large. So a walk around a block really is a walk. The vehicular exhaust after having drifted out of town during the night, had no been replaced but the streets still smelled of what got tossed, dropped, or left as evidence of relief. Nevertheless you could walk and not have to think of being hit by something with a motor. Of course this strike produced a quiet that was also unnatural. Not only was the sound of engines absent but the honking, announcing the presence of a vehicle, was absent. The walk still had one aspect of yesterday and the days before. While walking through many urban areas in India, one must always watch where one steps. Not because of animal or human waste, the streets and sidewalks resemble a war zone, except fortunately, there’s never been a war in these areas. It as if it is a practice drill against the day when roadways and walkways will be ripped, shelled, and uprooted. If there are not missing parts of the way, someone will stack building materials (gravel, sand, rock) on the way. Lacking that, a vendor will stretch the tie lines for his awning of blue plastic across the walk and secure them to stones the size of your head that he’s set out into the street, which also forms an impediment. Then at “curb side” assuming there is a curb, vehicles are parked. The long and the short is that you walk in the street with moving traffic. You can expect to be missed by bike, scooter, and motorcycle but by the time you reach the auto rickshaw and taxi size, who misses whom is an open question. Anything larger, especially trucks and buses, enjoy a place at the top of the food-chain. Today the streets were empty. The motor vehicles were hidden at home or at company quarters. Nevertheless, you watched that you didn’t turn an ankle or break a leg. This is not a western tourist talking. There seems to be a space in the local papers reserved for pictures and addresses as to some scandalous lack of street and sidewalk maintenance.

The Communist Party of India (CPI) has found a home in West Bengal (Calcutta) and Kerala. I saw posters everywhere. Marx and Engel were the more common icons. Lenin was pictured on many posters and I saw one that showed a likeness of Joseph Stalin. Mao? Not now but if the blue plastic tarps mean anything, the Chinese product is never far from sight. I had read where the CPI had wrought some improvements in health care and education but when I asked I’d hear, “They are all the same (meaning any of the parties.) They are all corrupt.” There then is a dismal statement as to Man’s ability to govern himself.

I got back to the hotel with leg bones in tact and took on the chore for the day. In Goa I had begun a routine where I soaked overnight the shirt and socks I’d worn the day before. Shorts were added in the morning. Because of the weather, wearing a tee shirt was out of the question except on washdays when I had no long-sleeved shirt to wear. So first up was scrubbing a collar and then working the soap down through the shirt. Next come the shorts followed by the socks.

Whether you get a shower head or not is a question to be answered when you inspect your room but you will always have a plastic bucket that holds about five gallons and one or more plastic pitchers of about a quart each, which if there are two, will be different colors. The basic Indian way of ablution is to fill the larger bucket with water and then ladle pitchers of water over one’s head. There are variations on a theme but without soap, towel, or scrub brush the bucket and pitcher make up the necessities. Because of the strike today, I would not travel on tomorrow. That meant that I had a longer time to dry out the cotton frisco jeans I had worn since, since, since New York. I carried a second pair of trousers which were thrift shop dress pants but the earlier owner had outgrown them and I wouldn’t admit the same. This led to some seam rips and I hadn’t found time to sew them up. So while the jeans soaked, I sewed. The bad light and my eyes were a match. I switched from black thread that matched the cloth to a yellow that I could see. That chore done, I turned to the jeans.

A bunch of years ago while scrubbing clothes next to a bore drain (an irrigation ditch that waters sheep rather than irrigates crops) in Queensland. Times were good and I purchased a number three washtub to do my laundry. While on my knees punching the clothes down in the hot soapy water, I had an idea. I dragged the washtub over to a small tree and twisted the tub back and forth allowing the bottom of the tub to rest right on the ground. I took off my boots, rolled up my pant legs, and stepped into the tub and onto the laundry. I held onto the tree for balance while I lit my pipe and had a look around to check out any kangaroos in the neighborhood while I tromped through the sudsy water. In addition to getting the laundry done, it was a great way to wash between the toes. Unfortunately there was only room in this bucket for one foot but soon the water turned dark and I hoped there was nothing alive in that bucket other than my foot. About two more trips through this exercise and I had wet but reasonably clean jeans!

Strike day produced some prose and after supper I fell asleep, and while I’d lost contact with Guy and Nicole, I had seen urban India without the packed streets. There is a question in my mind as to whether the strike was a show of unity of opposition or just an excuse to take a day off during the middle of the week. Looking over this piece I though about retitling it. But then what the heck, I’ll just blame it on the strike.

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