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.

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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.

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