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.