INDIA, 1998-1999
I, like David, have had a near impossible time trying to make enough sense of our trip to India to write some thoughts down about what it has meant to me. His having been able to write something first is serving as a big defroster to the frozen set of feelings, reactions, etc., that I accumulated but somehow found difficult to share. I would dread the question, “How was your vacation?” since it was not a vacation as one normally conceives of the word, and the “how” part just was unanswerable. David’s “report” is extremely well-written, and reflects, in many essential ways, some of the many elements of what we both experienced – for what I am writing to make any sense at all, David’s notes must be read first. I will generally not even mention many things that he brings up. On the other hand, we did not see everything the same way, so there will be some differences.
One of the unexpected elements that had a small impact on the experience was that we spent two days in Singapore, before arriving in Chennai (Madras), India. This was a result of our taking Singapore Airlines, and deciding, if we were going to have to change and wait for planes in Singapore, why not take advantage and sacrifice a few days? Singapore was fascinating in a perverse sort of way – while I would never willingly spend time there again, it was for us some kind of scary vision of the techno-perfect world gone out of control. While we didn’t feel the kind of big-brother sense of being watched to make sure we did everything by the letter of the law, it was so clean, so well-regulated, and so relentlessly dedicated to economic well-being, and shopping in particular, that any sense of another dimension to life got drowned out. It was taking the mall-ization of the U.S., as dreadful as that is, and exponentially advancing it to a degree I had not imagined. Add to this, that not just major U.S. global chains like McDonald’s were everywhere, but Starbucks, Tower Records, Borders Books & Music, and except for the stifling humidity to remind us (only when we had to go outdoors – everything is completely, perfectly air-conditioned) we were halfway around in the world at Christmastime, and it was hard to believe we had left the U.S. so physically far behind.
We did have one exceptionally nice experience in Singapore – we spent a good part of one day in the Botanical Garden, which is superb. But I came away with the sense of an utterly soulless place, where the Christmas decorations (all the northern clime themes were particularly absurd, given the heavy, hot weather) were almost the work of a kind of “1984” style Big Brother, keeping the masses happy through a phony sort of narcotizing.
In short, to go from Singapore, and a 4-hour later flight, land in Chennai, is the way to begin things with a jolt to one’s mental world. The Singapore airport is modern beyond anything in the U.S. The moment you step off the plane in Chennai, you know you have gone back centuries, so to speak. No lines at immigration, just confusion and line jumping. The air-conditioning, which we later learned does exist, was broken that night, so it was fairly stifling. The baggage came out one slow piece at a time (mind you, this was an Airbus carrying 3- or 400 hundred people, and it was a packed flight). While David kept an eye out for our pieces, I changed money. The $300 I turned into rupees came back in 100-rupee notes, each worth slightly under $2.50, in other words a wad far too thick to stuff into a money-belt. Pitiful negotiation finally got these changes into 500-rupee notes, but perhaps you get the sense already that this was not going to be an easy trip. We did eventually get our bags, including one permanently besmudged one that had been clean looking before (at least it wasn’t slit open, as we heard someone else’s was!). Customs went smoothly, but stepping outside the large, warehouse-like room of what appeared to be a forlorn military base (Chennai, incidentally, is a bigger city than Singapore, though you would never guess it from the airport), and emerging was the “real” taste of things. It was almost midnight, and how do you find a place to spend the night in a city of 5,000,000+? that you’ve never been to before, arriving at that hour?
We stepped out, with screaming, milling crowds, people waiting for their arrivals, and after being fought over by endless auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers, I made one of those insane leaps, negotiated based on no knowledge, a fare to Egmore Station in a central part of the city, simply because the guidebooks had said it had lots of cheap hotels nearby, and decided to hope for the best. The ride in was uneventful, because Indian cities usually shut down pretty well by midnight. We eventually got to Egmore, which was closed for business, deserted looking, except for scattered, almost naked bodies sprawled across its entranceway, and with David, who had never been to India before, already coughing in the polluted air, watching all our stuff (we took too much), I, clueless, went to see what I could find. The scene where I left him had nothing so much as the morbid quality of one of Piranesi’s nightmarish dungeon drawings.
The first thing about India is that there is essentially no privacy. You are watched and observed and your personal space entered into at all times. You can’t just find a streetlight, open your guidebook to figure out what you are going to do, without also having upon you lots of people doing everything from being genuinely helpful to catching you in whatever shtick they are up to. Having been to India before, I was prepared for this, but it had been a while. To make a long story short, we did find a very, very basic hotel nearby, it had a room for us, and for 190 rupees ($3.50) we had a bed for the night, cold shower (fine in a hot climate) and Indian-style toilet. And our trip was underway.
I only spend this much time on the initial experience, because first impressions can be powerful, and there are few things for a traveler that make an impression as getting into a big strange place late at night with no place to stay.
We had numerous very wonderful, absolutely mind-boggling experiences in India, but the matrix was always one of difficulty and complication. One of the approximate rules I came up with towards the end, based on our experience, was the 1-in-3. When you travel on your own, and perhaps most especially, for a short period (and in the context of India, a 5-week trip is very short), figure that one day out of three, at a minimum, is essentially a loss in terms of “doing” touristic things. Of the remaining two days, a minimum of 1/3 of the time is a loss as well. This refers not to simply relaxing at a café (should you be able to locate such) or sitting quietly in a park (if you could do that) but just making things happen the way you want. Much of this had to do with matters relating to transportation – getting lost if on foot, making local bus connections (which includes finding out what is running to/from and where to get it, no easy task, despite what you might think), and then the trip itself, which will be slow by U.S. standards. A trip to an interesting site 40 kms. (25 miles) outside the city we might be staying in, would almost certainly take 2 hours or more, once the bus departed. Working out the logistics of getting it when we could get a seat, confirming it was the right bus, etc., added time into the calculations.
One thing where David and I may differ is that at a point I could see that the traveling would get, if not easier, more into a weird kind of rhythm, had it been a much longer trip. This leads to several interesting observations. First, of the other Westerners we met traveling like us, with only one exception (a Canadian couple from Vancouver Island), they were all 1) much younger – 20s and 30s and 2) exclusively non-Americans. The age factor I could understand, and I’ve always prided myself on not aging in the way most of my peers have, but the fact remains, at our age it is a lot tougher than when 20 or 30 years younger. The lack of Americans was more interesting – I could only think of two leading factors. First, Americans are so increasingly oriented to economic security, focused on work (productivity, long hours, short vacations, the job before everything else) that we have lost something vital that the French, Germans, Australians, and others, have managed to value so as to make room for other dimensions in their lives. Secondly, are we just not adventurous any more? India is not a land of packaged tours – not like other places – and if packaged tours don’t exist, will Americans not come? We never, ever saw young American travelers with backpacks, the way we did Europeans or Australians. They are over there – that was obvious when we were at the Chennai Airport to return home – but it appeared it was “junior year abroad” kind of stuff but not with a dose of independent travel, but rather a need for lots of protection and security while there. One had little sense, in overhearing the conversation, that there was an awareness of a “real” India out there.
In any event, I felt that if I had 4 or 6 months to travel in, as all the non-American Westerners we met had, that the idea of losing valuable time would slip away into virtual non-importance. While everyone we knew back home oohed and ahhed at our taking 5 weeks, against our traveling peers, 5 weeks was clearly a whirlwind tour.
India is a place that raises so many questions that a traveler, without special knowledge, is unable to answer. Although the conditions we experienced or observed were as appalling and at times depressing as what David has so well described, I would hesitate to ever make hard and fast judgments on many aspects. It was the piling up of mysteries for me, unanswered.
Perhaps the most common one is related to the level of development. India is a country where much of what one sees, what goes on, is more akin to medieval Europe than contemporary USA. Manual labor with simple, inefficient tools that haven’t been used for centuries in our part of the Western hemisphere (even before the Industrial Revolution, I suspect). Yet, the fact remains that with a billion people, and the lack of any obvious pollution control, if energy consumption was at the U.S. level, the country might be totally uninhabitable by now. And I developed a certain admiration for India’s careful use of energy, compared to our profligate ways where greedy self-indulgence now seems to be part of the national culture. A few examples. Indian toilet habits and nose blowing habits are such that neither toilet paper or Kleenex is a requirement. It works, in some ways it seems more sanitary, and think of the forests that would have to be consumed to supply toilet paper and Kleenex for a billion people that is not needed right now. Packaging is universally simple. Electricity, when it exists, is carefully doled out – all hotels we stayed in have a master switch outside your room, by the door in the hallway. An attendant regularly makes the rounds, and if you have left your room (somehow, they know!) they make sure the switch is in the off position – it turns off everything you’ve left on in your room. (It took us a couple of days to figure out why, each time we returned to our room, the lights and the fan did not work when we turned them on!). In tourist shops, the 5 or 6 sales personnel (in a room the size of an American bedroom of modest proportions) would sit in the dark until you, Mr. Tourist, entered, and then all the lights would be turned on – a very weird feeling – and as you left, the lights would all be turned out.
I’ve just gotten a hold of a book by Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild, which is about environmental degradation around the world, with some success stories. What appealed to me is that apparently he spends a very substantial portion of the book discussing Kerala, a state that uses, per capita, 1/70th the resources consumed in the U.S. but has managed almost universal literacy and a very high standard of health care. Perhaps some of the mysteries we only dimly sensed will become a bit clearer to us once I have a chance to read it.
While people seemed vastly underemployed – empty restaurants would typically have 20 waiters and busboys milling about, with two occupied tables – we also developed the sense that in India, economic productivity was not the ultimate goal of society, but instead, close to as full employment as possible. In a poor country of so many people to care for, society’s bargain is to give as many people some kind of job with a touch of dignity, rather than, as we do, cut out everyone we don’t need and squeeze the remaining ones to focus on their job to the exclusion of all else. Which, you might ask, is the more “Christian” set of values?
India is a country where to our opaque understanding, everything seemed to be structured (not intentionally, I would suppose) to turn the simple into the complicated. Check into a fleabag hotel, and a monster ledger emerges requesting data from you that would provoke a riot in the U.S. if the Year 2000 Census ever tried something similar. Who will ever comb through the pages of this unautomated information that piles up in every little hotel in every of the hundreds of thousands of small towns and cities of India? But leave one item out, and you get no closer to flopping on your bed, until the error is rectified. Attempting to make reservations for transportation is another classic example, and in general, figuring out your way to where you are going in the local bus station is an introduction to a Kafkesque world, heightened by the masses of milling people everywhere.
As David mentioned, Kerala was indeed a gentler, simpler, easier, more laid-back state than Tamil Nadu, where we began our trip. A bit traumatized by Tamil Nadu, we arrived in Kerala a few days earlier than originally planned, hoping it would turn out as we had heard. Except for the fact that our base in Kerala, the city of Cochin, never seemed to have rooms available at the hotels we inquired -- everywhere else, finding a room was actually pretty simple -- it was easier dealing with things, less aggressive, with lots of beautiful faces and smiles everywhere. (Walking in towns and cities everywhere in India is a nightmare, however. The pedestrian, while multitudinous, gets no consideration, and the thought of a blind person trying to make it on her own, even with a seeing-eye dog, is inconceivable).
Keralans seem to have the sparkling, gentle smiles and the soft, easy features that one has traditionally associated with southeast Asia – there was something so consistently winning about the smile. I still think with pleasure of the deskboy at our hotel in Cochin, Sabu, who always flashed eyes that were the very embodiment of mirthfulness. It was so memorable that we said we will name our next cat Sabu. Keralans managed this kind of infectious pleasantness towards us without in any way losing dignity or seeming to grovel in the slightest.
In fact, India body structure and facial appearance, in general, was so startlingly sculptured and fine, that when you’d sit at a simple bar to have an Indian beer (places serving alcohol are uncommon, especially outside Kerala) and would see another table with some Germans or Dutch, puffy faces, red patches of skin, my immediate reaction would be – “how incomparably ugly next to the finely crafted features of Indians. How did the Europeans conquer the world and lord it over everyone else?” I said to David towards the end of the trip that it was going to be so sad to be away from a world of just beautiful skin colors and facial designs, because Westerners are not all that attractive. Added to this was the fact that perhaps we saw 2 fat Indians in 5 weeks of viewing what must have been millions of people – obesity does not exist, whereas it is now a salient characteristic in our American society.
We in America eat terribly. I have to smile at the effort that goes into formulating bad food to cut down on its unhealthiness, what we spend on food research to come up with weird ways of altering good food, when the only solution is to go back to time-tested standards of eating well. In India it is close to impossible to not eat well since there is virtually no junk food. Even package “biscuits” are pretty plain-Jane. Chips, when you can find them come in expensive, tiny bags, not gigantic packages like something out of genetic control. For five weeks we ate consistently healthy, nourishing food, and unlike almost all Westerners (including those energetic kids 30 years our junior) we never had stomach problems. And we did eat Indian, and we did eat the occasional street food. Perhaps we were just plain lucky.
South India is primarily vegetarian, although there is more meat in Kerala than elsewhere, as well as excellent fish. But the grains (so many varieties of beautiful rices, then the lentils, garbanzos, etc.), vegetables prepared in very tasty sauces, tropical fruits (pineapples were sublime), all led to our losing our standard craving for American junk – ice cream, chips, chocolate. Our one weakness was soft drinks, because the heat made us thirsty, and we needed something bottled and cold.
The most fascinating part of South Indian food was having a “meal.” A “meal” has a different meaning in South India – it is a particular way of eating food, and means a set buffet of traditional food served to you for a fixed price (usually about 50 cents), as much as you wanted. In South India, at a typical restaurant (not for Westerners) a “meal” (always advertised on boards outside as “meals ready”) was served on a banana leaf (in Tamil Nadu) or a very large round steel plate, with compartments, in Kerala, and eaten with the right hand (ONLY the right hand) so deftly that we never stopped staring at our co-diners, hoping that if we stared hard enough, we’d become as good as them, instead of dropping rice all over the place, not getting the sauces up efficiently, etc. Thus, a “meal” has gobs of deliciously cooked fluffy rice, and a variety of hot and cold preparations, usually various kinds of vegetables in differently flavored sauces, and there is a proper progression from the ones you begin with to the ones you end with (in generally going from hot, temperature-wise, and spicy, to cold and sweet.) Customers go with incredible speed through all this, and as they are getting low in something, someone comes around with pitchers containing the preparations and ladles more out on your banana leaf or steel tray. No napkins, no silverware (more resources saved). Most people drink tapwater served in little steel tumblers. When you finish, there is a sink in the back, sometimes with a bar of soap, and you wash your right hand (left hand properly kept behind your back) and that’s that.
These demotic restaurants were the most fun of all, and customers and owners were always, without exception friendly, and did not treat us as freaks that did not belong. People were tolerant of our clumsiness, and solicitous of it all working out for us. These were always pleasant, delightful experiences, and even the most simple place, a hovel, seemed to serve food that was clean and acceptable.
Whatever one’s experience of dismay and overload that is part of almost every traveler’s sense of the place, there is something that came through that brought home to me how much we have lost touch in the U.S. with older, valuable aspects of life. More and more, my sense is that in the U.S. we are letting technology dictate how we live and that its effect is to cut us off from direct contact with others. Partly, we seem in love with what technology can do – anyone watching the development of our cellular phone culture must feel some of this. Partly, it seems because we are afraid of each other, and so we use technology to protect ourselves from excessive contact. India represents a diametrically opposite approach. Life there is totally direct and unmitigated, and 20th century technology, while present, comes nowhere to dominating how daily life functions as it does here. While at times, one might wish that it would be taken advantage of more to make things flow more smoothly, what you do get in India is direct contact with people. The attendant in a gas station is not inside a bullet-proof booth. People noticing you have some kind of problem (looking a bit lost) will gather around you and make an attempt to solve your problem, whether able to or not. All contact is immediate, direct, and undiluted. It is a very, very refreshing alternative to where we seem to be going.
I feel this even more strongly when I read, as I did the other day, of the growth of all kinds of services in our country to take care of the overworked worker. People you can hire to pay your bills, run your errands, do your grocery shopping, cook all your food, and next, I suspect, live your life for you, because you are too busy to live it yourself. India comes, again, as a refreshing change, where, for all its shortcomings, the one thing you could always say about it was that it was REAL, and nothing stood between you and its REALNESS. We, on the other hand, so proud of how busy we are, seem to be losing our way.
India, as I originally said, is not, for most, a vacation, as we understand it, unless you program in some expensive, isolated resort or special experience. We did actually do that – our 4-day stay on Bangaram Island in the Lakshadweep Islands of the Arabian Sea, 200 miles west of the Kerala coast was such. We intentionally set that up for close to the end of our trip, because I knew India would be a demanding experience and we would need something like that. It was fabulously expensive by Indian standards, and even fairly expensive by our own U.S. travel standards, but it was a magnificent interlude. We flew out from Cochin on a dumpy Indian Airlines 12-seater prop plane, and an hour and a half later arrived at Agatti Island, the next island south of Bangaram, set in a turquoise-green-deep blue sea such as I have rarely seen. The island is perhaps 10 miles long and all of 200 yards wide. You get out, walk across the sand, and are on the beach where you wade into a raft which takes you to the launch for your hour and a half trip to Bangaram. Once there, nothing but white sand beach, brilliantly colored waters, coconut palms, and simple huts – very attractive inside, with a view through the palms of the nearby beach. A walking circumnavigation of the island takes under an hour, the far side is totally your own, and the food is plentiful, delicious, and to be eaten at rattan tables and chairs placed on the sand. Except for doing a snorkeling trip out to the “shipwreck” where we saw more colorful tropical fishes than I’d ever seen anywhere before, the days just unfolded with an ease I’ve rarely known. You can find Paradise, but it does come at a price!
Another high point, by any standard, was the houseboat trip. Neither David nor I imagined when we decided to do this, that the houseboat would be as exquisite as it was – a deep dark old rice boat in the form of a gigantic dugout canoe (perhaps 60 feet long) on which has been built an open but covered (palm thatching) open space with fiber chairs, fiber table with glass shelves (when we arrived with fresh asters and a whole pineapple awaiting us), a double mattress on the prow covered with sparkling white sheets and roll-type pillows for stretching out, a bedroom we could close off finished in fine antique woods with a heavy wooden door we could close, but the side remaining open, ensuring all the same total privacy, and a small, modern bathroom including a handheld shower! A crew of two plus a cook – 48 hours of this cruising the Kerala “backwaters” was a sense of imperial luxury such as neither of us had perhaps ever experienced before. The cook stopped several times a day at villages along the way for fresh fish and other provisions, and we tried all kinds of tasty dishes. The coconut-palm lined backwaters (canals), the villages with pastel-color churches (Kerala is 25% Catholic), the broad rice paddies in hallucinogenic green – it all was like a dream that we tried to pinch ourselves out of – we kept looking at each other, breaking out laughing, saying “this is the life” and just not believing it. The whole thing began well. We arrived from Varkala, in the south near Trivandrum, by a crowded train (we had to stand most of the way). When we got to Allapuzzha, the owner of the houseboat company, Mr. Thomas, a courtly gentleman, spotted us in the crowds (we were the only non-Indians on the train, filled with Friday night commuters going all the way up to Cochin), and led us to his comfortable, air-conditioned(!!!! – do you know how rare this is in India/) car and drove us to his home. We had no idea anyone would meet us, and were prepared to deal with the usual chaos and confusion of arriving in a new Indian town (even a small town means the population is about 300,000) and figuring out how to get to his house – we were given a phone number (amazingly, public telephoning in South India works extremely well).
Mr. Thomas’ home was a classic example of all I enjoyed about Indian residential structures. While David is entirely right in finding little formal “design” sense in Indian housing and other building types, I came to like Indian homes, because they fit so well into their environment. Generally it is a compound, set in a sandy enclosure, in which isolated trees and shrubs go, often with plants in pots set about. The sand is always brushed (with a natural twig brush) to remove debris and create a simple, pleasing pattern made with the twig ends. It is surrounded by a low wall (unlike in South America where a high wall keeps passers-by from getting any idea of the pleasures within), so that it has a nice public/private balance. I can’t explain why, but I found the whole exterior view and non-descript style of house structure (rather boxy) extremely pleasing and it felt right for the environment. In Kerala we saw more comfortable homes, particularly in communities with high Catholic percentages (and remember, these are Catholic communities that go back a 1000 years or more) than anywhere else on this trip.
Mr. Thomas’ place was typical, and in being able to stay there the night (there was a charge, mind you) we got to experience a real home. First, as in any residence or religious place in India (including churches, the one functioning synagogue in Cochin – which is famous for an ancient Jewish community) you take off your shoes. The miracle of a comfortable dwelling in India is it marks an Alice through the looking glass transition from the madness and noise of the street to a zone of quiet. We were shown to a comfortable room, a spotless dressing room and bathroom, and once showered and comfortable (even the cheapest fleabag hotel in India had a decent shower!) came down, where it was insisted we have dinner. We hadn’t thought we were hungry, as we’d had a late lunch in Varkala, but Mr. Thomas had a courtly manner, as if an Arab sheik, and we as his guests had to play our role. He had not one, but two cooks, who brought on a panoply of magnificent dishes that was eye-boggling. Needless to say, we ate more than we intended, but it was a terrific experience, and breakfast the next morning, before being taken to the houseboat, was the same.
A very different experience was a three-day trek in the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, a very remote sanctuary at relatively low elevation (1500 feet) in the Western Ghats, right on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border. We saw virtually no tourists except for a few young westerners on the 2nd night who stumbled in. While we didn’t see as much wildlife as we expected to (we did see a small herd of wild elephants (with two babies), several kinds of macaques, many colorful tropical birds, spotted deer, and water buffalo, we were in perhaps the most beautiful mountain scenery I’d seen for some time – very much like those extravagant Chinese landscape paintings of precipitous peaks rising above some little teahouse with a Chinese scholar sitting all alone. Especially in early morning, with the high humidity, a spectral mistiness would settle over the peaks that was sublime. One night we spent high in a watch tower (where we felt like we were freezing and didn’t sleep well) but saw a magnificent dawn. The sanctuary not only protects wild animals (including tigers, which are close to impossible to spot) but “tribals” – native peoples the state governments are obligated to protect. Our guide had permission to lead us to a tribal village about 5 kms in from the sparsely-traveled road we had come in to the sanctuary on. That was an experience. These people did appear very primitive indeed – akin of pictures of New Guinea villages both in appearance of the structures and of the people. We were provided with coconuts to drink the water out of, in a covered but open thatch ramada, with the entire town turning out, surrounding all four sides and just staring at us while big clumsy, pale-faced oafs that we were attempted to gracefully drink out of the coconuts. We were the curious animals in the zoo for them!
Inevitably, even in all the heat and dust and noise, as David says, perhaps all the more because of it, more so than in any other place we’ve traveled, when you stumble on a little special experience, it takes on a sweetness that knows few bounds. A small example. Indian bus trips are always, without exception, uncomfortable, uncertain (we had two breakdowns in our few weeks), jarring, crowded, and by the time they are over, you feel like a wrinkled dress that needs some time to stretch out and return to some idea of acceptability. Arriving in Madurai, the 2nd largest city in Tamil Nadu, after a long ride (and one of the breakdowns when the brakes stopped functioning and were eventually repaired with bailing wire and chewing gum, so to speak), we were let out in probably what was the very apogee of heat, dust, noise, confusion, masses of humanity, filth, India in all its “in your face” overwhelmingness. The usual plan was to leave David and all our excessive gear plopped on the street (he had to deal as best he could with the crowds that might gather), while I, with Lonely Planet South India, the bible of every Western budget traveler, tried to locate (without the help of countless volunteers importuning me) an acceptable hotel. By some miracle, considering what a godawful mess Madurai appeared at night, found our best budget hotel anywhere in India – clean, all the lights worked, spotless bathroom, good shower, TV even (with BBC World! on cable – our first TV of the trip), filtered water supplied in the room, and all for $7/night. David, meanwhile, turned out to be at a corner where it appeared some kind of drug-dealing was going on. We got settled, and then found, down the street, a lovely outdoor restaurant in a pleasant garden, right off the madhouse street we were on – an oasis of quiet and calm, with ice cold Kingfisher beer and good food. Lots of Westerners, all seeking peace and calm. It was 10 at night, the air was as mild as could be, and we just felt in heaven itself.
Another delight was when we got to Varkala, the beach place near Trivandrum. As we got off the train, a young Aussie couple came up to us and said if we were looking for a place to stay, we couldn’t do better than the Kerala Government Guest House, that it was only 52 rupees/night for a double (that’s $1.25!) and was the finest place they stayed. Since Lonely Planet didn’t have much nice to say about it, we hadn’t even thought to consider it. We took a chance and told the taxi driver to take us there – it was a lovely setting, on the cliffs above the ocean (not with a view of the ocean, I must admit) that reeked of the British Raj. When we got there, a uniformed but somewhat broken-down appearing staff met us, and told us it was all full. Our hearts sank. The taxi-driver motioned us to just stand there and do nothing, and through some development, I know not what, in a bit, it turned out, there was a room, if we were staying only one day (our plan was to stay one night but close to two whole days, since we had to be at Alapuzzha the next night for our houseboat trip). This turned into one of the real serendipitous treats of our entire trip.
Instead of having a room in the actual guest house, we were in the main building, which was the former summer palace of the local maharani, and was a hoot – two large “apartments,” one of which we had – an enormous bedroom with superhigh ceilings and a gigantic bathroom. Our bedroom looked out front through the veranda, with a dreamy scene that could have been from Kipling’s time, and all the windows were had peeling wooden shutters that could be pushed back. (This priceless discovery really was 52 rupees per night!). By the time we settled in it was about 11:00 a.m., but we’d left Cochin on a 6:15 a.m. train (and being Ken, we were up at 4:30 to be sure to catch it). Well, not only was the guest house a fabulous old place, but had a cook and valet (Philip, in a white jacket) on the staff, and the cook made us a breakfast fit for a king, in a lovely dining room and that looked out on flowers, with birds singing. Fresh pineapple juice and fresh pineapple, bananas (even I, who hate bananas found some varieties acceptable!), omelet, toast (with the crusts carefully cut off), dark coffee (Kerala grows India’s premium coffee), marmalade. All this for 40 rupees (just under $1) each, for one of the most sublimely welcome and sublimely lovely breakfasts I can ever remember – we were all alone, with Philip serving us, and the cook coming out with a big smile to accept our thanks. We were also offered fresh-squeezed juices during our stay from whatever fruit was on hand – we chose watermelon. And we had a lunch the next day that was equally lavish, and as with that first breakfast, in the British Raj-feeling dining room, all by ourselves. It was really quite wonderful.
Right outside the walls of the guest house compound was the entrance to the Taj Garden Retreat, one of the top-of-the-line Taj chain of hotels. Another high point was wandering over there in late afternoon, discovering the bar, situated with an open (no window) view of endless coconut palms and then the ocean. They were offering a happy hour – 3 beers for the price of 2 (and Indian beer bottles are twice as big as American) so we went ahead, relaxed, with a stunning views, and stayed two hours, slowly drinking our surfeit of beer and watching the sun set and the onset of darkness (in Kerala, in January, it didn’t get fully dark until almost 6:30.) Our happy hour splurge cost six times what a night’s stay at the guest house did!
One thing I noticed in so many places, true of tropical locales throughout the world, but totally delicious is that windows frequently have no glass – they are perpetually exposed to the outdoors, because it simply never gets cold. What an idea for those of us from cold parts of the world. To never think about cold, to always be exposed to the outdoors!
Our base for the trip to Chinnar, and then on to the popular sanctuary, Periyar, was a “hill station” – not terribly well-known by the standards of Darjeeling and others of the north, but really very nice for us – called Munnar, the only one of any repute at all in Kerala. Our trip up there from Cochin and our stay in the region of approximately one week was a delightful return to cooler temperatures. What was a novelty for me was that Munnar is set in the midst of some of India’s most extensive tea plantations. We were told that about 30% of all the tea grown in India is grown in the Munnar District. The way the clipped tea shrubs are planted on the steep mountainside leads to the effect of an intense Irish green jigsaw puzzle, with all the jagged pieces set apart with exactly the same width gap all around the edges of each piece. It is disorderly order, and one of the most pleasing artificial sights I’ve ever seen. The whole mountain setting around Munnar was lovely. We lucked out and met the head of the cardiology department of a large medical research organization in Cochin who was on holiday with his family – they had us join them in their large SUV and through them (and only by such means) did we have the opportunity to get a personal tour through a tea factory of Tata Tea, Ltd., part of the great Tata conglomerate that dominates India’s industrial sector. We got to watch tea leaves processed from the time of picking until their final processing just prior to packeting (as it is called), getting to smell the different grades and cuts along the way.
I did a fair amount of reading about Hindu gods, religious devotion, temples, etc., in an attempt to make greater sense of our visits to some of the great temple cities of Tamil Nadu. Nevertheless, I came away from these visits usually confused and very unclear on Hindu devotion and how people related to their spiritual world. David has well described the sense of being in the great temple complexes such as Madurai, Thanjavur, and near Trichy. These places get upwards of 10,000 pilgrims a day (on an ordinary, non-festival day) – the crowds are overwhelming, as is the sense of devotion that comes through, but in a setting of sweat and grime. At temples, and sometimes separate from them, are “tanks,” large and ancient pools with stone steps leading down, where the devoted bathe. The tanks, as manmade structures, are quite impressive, but the water for cleansing, was inevitably filthy in appearance, and sometimes debris and litter were floating on top. To our eyes, this typified the strange mixture of the deeply spiritual with the all too real, that was so much a part of the intermixture of sacred and profane. I came away only able to tell myself I did not understand and I would no further attempt to figure any of it out.
At one great temple we hired a young “official” guide to show us around. His English was passable enough, and unlike so many of the guides we bumped up against, he seemed genuinely interested in explaining things to us. We came away feeling well informed, and not part of some scam that was the all too inevitable part of so many encounters.
These encounters, in fact, were so predictable in their weirdness that I was left mentally dumbfounded by the whole thing. Someone would approach us or make conversation, and as a rule it would begin fairly low key, and we would treat it as a pleasant encounter with a real Indian, albeit one who clearly had a decent education. There would be a point, and I always knew it when it came, when I realized, there was an agenda, where strange, convoluted story would develop on the part of our new found friend, and at the moment when parting would typically have to take place, an appeal for money to help resolve the rather incredible situation. We always limited our losses, and at a certain point, I decided that as plausible in their weirdness these stories were, they couldn’t happen so often, anywhere in the world, and I just closed up to them like a clam.
At the other end of the spectrum, there were probably three of four occasions when I sat next to a young student (perhaps 9 or 10 or 11 years old), always a boy, who made conversation with me. Small schoolchildren are excellent people to converse with in India, since they are just at the age that they are intensively being taught English in school and very comfortable speaking it. Every one of these encounters was charming – these little kids were so perfectly well-spoken they could have been announcers for the BBC. They were curious, friendly, and had no hidden agendas. Their deep coal black eyes and their neat appearance made them as handsome little boys I have seen anywhere.
In short, how does one put this all together? There is no single, unifying vision I came away with. There were days and moments I absolutely hated the trip, was tired beyond belief with the frustration, the confusion, the waste, the thought that who would be insane enough to use their vacation this way? But there were countless times where we stumbled upon the unexpected and even the purely delightful, and I thought, yes, this is what travel is really about.
While India has bank money machines, cell phones, computers, and the other signs of life in our times, it also had what I think real travelers most enjoy – the sense of being in a real place that hasn’t simply become another poorly-Westernized imitating, sanitized, soulless place. India is all too real, for good and for ill.
I can’t get out of my mind our auto-rickshaw ride from central Chennai out to the airport to begin our long trip home. It took close to an hour, though not due to traffic jams. But the ride was the very embodiment of all the madness that is India. The scale of everything, the sense of chaos all around us, the fumes, the never-ending noise, the absolute certainty that physical disaster was upon us at every moment, but never quite culminated, and most important, all of these sensations continuing without let-up – it was a perfect experience of the kind of sensory overload that India imposes around the clock. The intensity never lets up, and it takes great effort to escape momentarily from it. But at a certain level, the ride was absolutely hilarious. I would look over at David’s terrified face, and it all added up to something that called forth laughter.
Perhaps the formlessness of this report on the experience is part of it – I still can’t really figure out how to sort it out, put it all together, or make a great deal of sense out of it. If you’ve been to India then let us know if any of these sensations relate to anything you experienced.
Kenneth Alan Collins
February 1999