When the drummer, whose name was Raj, swapped with me the camel-skin drum in exchange for a pair of jeans, shoes, and hat, he also threw in a wooden toy cobra made of loose carved sections that allow it to wiggle like a snake. He told me that his wife made it out of an apple tree root back up north. If it weren’t for that lie, I probably would be looking for an April flight to go back to Varkala and spend a few days getting drum lessons from him. But the toy looked like the sort of thing I think I’ve seen sold by Chinese vendors at flea markets, and I saw another guy selling toy snakes just like them down on the beach. That doesn’t mean that there is no daughter in school pouting for an MP3 player, or that the drum head isn’t real camel skin. But one lie is sometimes enough to cool a person’s enthusiasm. I actually tried to tell myself that maybe his wife really did make that snake out of an apple root. It was possible. I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t true. Anyhow, I don’t mind that he lied. The toy snake was a gift, and he just wanted to make it more interesting. In fact, it is more interesting now when I look at it, because there’s the ticklish silly idea that maybe his wife made it out of an apple root, sort of like when you blow out your birthday candles and think “Well, maybe people really are granted a wish by blowing out birthday candles.”Early the next morning I took an auto rickshaw through the quiet streets to the train station to meet the Ernakulam Express headed back up to north Kerala. The final stop of my India trip was in a village outside Cochin. Homestays are a lot like bed and breakfast inns that you find in the west, but instead of just breakfast you get all three meals, and the family takes a little bit of interest in you. I was going to the home of a Brahmin family who promised a very traditional experience. On the way I sat opposite an Israeli couple who sprawled out on the seat, one napping while the other guarded luggage. Indians all around us were packed 4 and 5 to seating area, and they looked perplexed about how foreigners could be so clueless about space sharing etiquette on the crowded trains. The couple didn’t follow the Indian custom of squeezing in to allow others to sit, but they did quickly pick up on the practice of throwing trash out the train window. At one point in the morning’s journey I heard the loud clicking of two stones being clapped together and turned to see a young woman with a baby under one arm and some kind of stone castinets in her other hand working her way forward. She was a singer. She stopped in front of us and sang. I didn’t have anything but large bills. The Israelis clapped and gave her money.
Once arrived at the station, I quickly spotted the driver holding a sign with the name of my homestay, and we were off. The place was in a quiet area near the Pariyar river. We arrived at the elaborate gate, and the family all came out to greet me along with a British lady who had a red dot painted on her forehead and was wearing a sari. For fun, they had dressed her up as an Indian lady. It turned out we had a few things in common. She was also an English teacher working abroad, in her case in Granada, and she was traveling alone. She assured me that I had come to a wonderful place.
The house was an old Indian villa with a detached kitchen and a variety of medicinal plants and fruit trees growing around it. I was shown my room which was upstairs in an ancient ornate wooden structure overlooking the road. The interior was dark, varnished wood with framed prints of the paintings of a Indian artist from the early colonial period. They told me to settle in and then come down for lunch.
The food served at the Brahmin house was all vegetarian, made from scratch using all fresh ingredients, and prepared by the matron of the house and her daughter-in-law. They didn’t have servants or cooks. At every meal there three or four fresh dishes served with condiments and rice on stainless steel pans and eaten by hand. The food was very good. It was interesting to have meals which surrounded items not usually thought of as a main entrée. Once the main course was warm pineapple with a mustard sauce - surprisingly satisfying. During my three days there, they let me sample all the local specialties including upuma, a rice dish, iddli lentel dumplings, and dosha pancakes. They were eager to show visitors that healthy vegetarian food could be easy and delicious.
The afternoon was taken up with a little tour of the area. The father of the house, a man I’ll refer to as T., accompanied the other guest and myself and we all went together in an auto-rickshaw. It didn’t take long to get a sense of T’s colorful and endearing personality. He’s a youthful sixty-something man with a booming voice and a face that registers bold emotion and exaggerated surprise about everything.
We went to a shrine at the birthplace of Adi Shankara, the great Hindu philosopher-saint who taught non-dualism. It’s built as a tower with colorfully painted relief sculpture illustrating the saint’s life as you follow the spiraling rampway to the top. Between each episode you can see the graffiti scribbled on the walls by local school kids in Mayalayam language. In the spirit of non-dualism it is fitting to consider that the graffiti is of equal importance to the depiction of Adi Shankara’s holy life. We went from there to visit a yoga school. A group of Italian visitors happened to have stopped there at the same time, and the teacher gave us all a long-winded account of his personal career becoming a yoga teacher and setting up the school there. Unfortunately talk was all we were going to get from him, because he told us he was sorry but he did not plan to offer any instruction until a reconstruction project was completed since the roof had been damaged in a storm. Unfortunately a good part of the afternoon was lost in finding that out. We moved on to a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Durga. It was one of the more mysterious places I visited in India. There were monks stationed here and there around the temple doing their pujas and meditations. Non-Hindus are usually not allowed to enter temples, and T. really took us in there to show us a temple grounds view of the Periyar River and a place where people go to do ablutions. I would have like to have spent a little time soaking up the atmosphere of the place. It definitely felt very spiritual and mystical. But we had to hurry off to a dance school. T. wanted to take us to watch a practice session of girls training in Indian classical dance. When we got to the dance school, the class was over, but the owner called his wife to get one of their highest achieving students to come and dance for us. Where other classical dance forms are graceful and feminine, Indian classical dance is dynamic and energetic. It was really very impressive to watch. B., (the English lady) was leaving the next morning and wanted to get some gifts. We stopped at a spice market and she made a few purchases, but then T got a phone call from home and learned that some relatives had dropped in to say hello and they were all waiting for him, so she never got to do her shopping. The house was busy when we got back. The children were running around playing, and the adults were eating and talking noisily in Malayalam.
B. and I sat in the front porch area and talked for a bit. I told her that one of my reasons for coming to this particular homestay was that they offered to make appointments for their guests to see an astrologer. She was very encouraging. She had gone to see the family astrologer and had had a very good experience. She also told me about a place about half and hour’s walk away where I could go in the morning and see elephants getting bathed in the river. We had both had very good traveling experiences and were in agreement about how wonderful it was to have had the chance to come to India.
We all got up early the next morning to have breakfast and say goodbye to B. I was given a hand-drawn map and headed out to find the elephant bath. It was an adventure just finding it. A narrow road turned into a small footpath that led through tapioca fields, banana groves, and rubber tree plantations. There were two little bridges to cross and a school full of adorable uniformed children who wanted to say hello and ask for a pen. “One pen?” “One pen?”
I made a couple wrong turns and almost turned back at one point, but somehow I found the spot. I knew I was in the right place when I saw some other westerners waiting with cameras. I learned that there was a training center for elephants not far from there. It was operated by the Indian National Forest Service to provide employment and care for injured or orphaned elephants from a population of wild elephants living in a nature preserve up river. The young elephants were trained to take part in ceremonies and parades according to Kerala tradition. When the elephants arrived, it felt like the arrival of royalty. The trainers handled them with a bit more roughness than we wanted to see, using prods and sticks to direct them, but one had to consider that these animals were going to be attending festivals and weddings and needed to learn to take directions for their own good. Anyhow, it really felt like a privilege to see elephants in that kind of setting. They are so grand and beautiful. I walked back to the house in a daze of gratitude.
That afternoon I rode along with the daughter-in-law who had some errands to do. I remembered my early experiences when I was an exchange student in Japan, and how I was happy to tag along to the supermarket or the hardward store. In any other situation I would not enjoy sitting and waiting while someone went around to pay their utility bills and whatever, but I was happy as a clam to watch the busy Kerala street scenes while she took care of mundane necessities. Before we went back I bought a set of metal drinking cups and some of the wrap-around garments that the men wear, called kaavi, dhoti, lungi . . . I’m not sure which is which, nor how to tie them, and I’ll probably use them as tablecloths, but who cares!
Later, T. and his granddaughter were going to have a bath in the river. They asked me to join them. This was a wonderful, earthy experience. We went to a bathing area behind a temple dedicated to one of the gods of medicine. It was a beautiful, golden evening, and no one was there but us. The water was warm, and perfectly clean from what I could tell. We had a regular bath with soap and everything. It was like something you might associate with camping, but a regular practice for this family. T. sent his granddaughter into the temple to get some sandalwood paste to make dots on our foreheads, thought to have a cooling and calming effect.
I found out when we got back that the astrologer woman had been ill, and we would have to call her in the morning to see if she was willing to give me an appointment. The family could tell I was very eager to see her. “Do you have some problem that you need to ask her about?” they cautiously inquired. I told them I just felt very unsure about my life and had no real goals or direction for my future. This is the truth, albeit an understated version. I had a strong intuition that I could get some help from an astrologer. I told them that when I was in college, there was an Indian guy living in my dorm who was getting his masters in electrical engineering. He was very smart and scientific-minded, and yet he had come from a long line of palmists and astrologers. Somehow he shrugged off the incongruity of being a scientist and knowing how to read palms. The first time I heard he knew how to read palms, I eagerly asked him to take a look at mine. He peered at my palm for about 2 seconds, and then said, “Not right now . . . another day.” The next time I say him he said, “Maybe Thursday.” Then when Thursday came, he said, “Saturday would be better.” Of course he never did give me the reading he had promised, and I always suspected that he had seen something he didn’t want to tell me about. Anyhow, I know I could have had a palm reading or an astrological chart done any time, but it had never felt like the right time until I started planning my trip and saw that they could make appointments for guests. Knowing all this, T.’s wife told me that she would call the astrologer herself and explain it in the morning. T. also told me that he had some training in palmistry, and when I was done he would like to have a look at my hand if I was willing to let him. That night I lay awake wondering what exactly it was that I wanted to hear or not hear about my life.
The next morning I was up early to the sound of a flute being played at the temple. This was my last day in India. My hosts could easily see how anxious I was about the appointment. Mrs. T. had made the phone call the previous evening, and told me that I could go at 9:30 that morning. Mr. T. chose three fresh betel leaves to which I added a coin, and we wrapped these up as a symbolic token of humility and appreciation. The astrologer was a lady teacher who lived in a neighborhood not far from the elephant bath. They suggested that since I had extra time I should take the ferry across the Periyar to see the ancient church of St. Thomas. That seemed like a perfect idea to me. I found the place near the second bridge where the ferryman took passengers in a long, narrow canoe across the shallow river to the Christian village surrounding St. Thomas’s church. I easily found the old church. Keralan Christians believe that many of their churches were established by Saint Thomas the Apostle himself. There was a statue above the altar of Saint Thomas kneeling as Jesus takes his hand to show him the wound in his side. I felt no conflict about praying in a Christian church before going to see a Hindu astrologist. A nun came in with some school girls who knelt down on the hard floor. When they were whispered amongst themselves I thought maybe they were mischievously distracting one another the way one might expect Catholic schoolgirls to do in a western country, but I think they were agreeing on a hymn to sing, because as I smiled at their girlish behavior they started singing. I left the church feeling consoled and ready to hear anything that the astrologer might have to say.
I took the ferry back, found the house, and entered at exactly the appointed time. Now I will tell you something strange. You are welcome to take this as an indication of how much I am an eccentric fellow with a wild imagination. Six years ago, I was teaching in Tacoma, and I had a major decision to make about whether to leave my job there and go to attempt a job as translator at a Japanese Buddhist Center. I felt paralyzed with indecision. One night I had a dream that I was in a busy airport and I made eye contact with a white-haired Indian lady. She looked at me and said, “It’s not for you.” I did end up leaving my teaching job, but in the end I didn’t take the job and ultimately moved to Pennsylvania to live closer to my family. When I saw the astrologer, I immediately made the connection. You could probably find in India a million white-haired ladies with the same serious gaze, but in my mind this was the same person from my dream. However, after a brief discussion, she told me that she couldn’t tell me anything because I didn’t have the precise time of birth; I would need to make a call home and find out what I could, then come back in the afternoon. As I started walking back toward my homestay, the built-up anxiety was so intense that I could hardly concentrate on where I was going and almost got lost. There was a small shop near the homestay that had a pay phone. I somehow managed to place the international call and woke my mother to ask her to go find her notes that had my birth time that she had copied from my hospital baby bracelette. She gave me the time, and also went onto the internet look up the latitude and longitude of Greenville where I was born. Mom was excited for me, and I promised to let her know whatever I found out. I couldn’t eat lunch that day, and waited on pins and needles for the afternoon to go back. This time I borrowed a bicycle.
When I saw the lady that afternoon, I decided to tell her outright that I believed I had once seen her in a dream. I told her about it, and she smiled.
“You didn’t take that job?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I was too fragile to do that work,” I tried to explain. I told her about how the meditation regimen had been very intense, and while there I’d felt myself becoming more and more emotionally vulnerable. It was a place of Buddhist practice, but during certain times of the day I could hear church bells from distant convent. The sound of the bells had had a powerful effect on me, and in the end maybe I had realized that I could never detach from my Christian roots to really dedicate myself to the practice of the zen center.
She shook her head and said something like, “There is just one God, and all the forms are just different manifestations.” I do believe this to be true.
She spent quite a bit of time consulting books and calculating on paper. Finally she shook her head. “This is very bad.” The first words out of my mouth were “I knew it!” Then she said, “Your birth time is very, very, very, very, very bad.” (Oh my God, she said ‘very’ FIVE TIMES!) She explained to me that I had been born at a time that resulted in my having the influence of what she called “a dragon’s head,” and to make matters worse, I also had “a dragon’s tail”! I was joined to Jupiter, she said, with Saturn in the 5th position. Because of this, what should have been my primary source of strength was denied to me. After this bad news, she asked, “So what do you want to know?” There were only a few things I really wanted to know. What was behind my sexuality and its associated problems, and how could I begin to discern my life’s direction having no plans or ideas for the future even at this stage of middle age? She had little to offer me. She told me to pray, and trust God. I guess it wouldn't have taken an astrologer to suggest that. The good news was that the dragon influence was on a 16 year rotation cycle, and I would have some kind of liberation at the age of 47 years and 7 months. She said that anger was somehow at the source of all my problems, and that it would do me good to practice some kind of centering exercise such as yoga. She also said that I should make spiritual reading a part of my daily life. “Read your Bible,” said this Hindu astologer. “Your Bible is very good for you.” I thanked her and left.
I have heard people talk about astrologers and fortune-tellers who “knew things that they had no way of knowing.” This woman didn’t spell out anything about my life that proved psychic knowledge. It was all very general and could be easily dismissed by a skeptic. But was I quite floored. When I reached the homestay, the daughter-in-law came out to ask me how it had gone. I couldn’t pretend that it was good. She told me to be strong. Later, T. took me up to my room and lit a candle to look at my palm. He was not as cut and dry as the astrologer, but he confirmed that I was bound to endure a period of strife. “Don’t blame yourself when your mind makes you fight with yourself,” he said, “Just look at it like so much grass, it’s just going to be there.” He added some happy things for me to look forward to. “Even at your age, and even with your problems, marriage is still in your future,” he said. “And you will have two children, a son and a daughter.” He asked me if I had any interest in artistic things. He said that no matter what I had done, that success was denied to me because of all the conflict and negativity, but that in the next few years I would have a breakthrough. “Your goal will become clear to you, and all you will have to do is kick the ball into the net!” God, how I loved that man when he said that. I didn’t care whether he was making up some sugar coating to make me feel better.
I had been through a bit too much emotional turmoil that day and had no appetite for dinner that night. But I sat at the dinner table with them. They were waiting for some new guests to arrive. I mentioned that I had been advised to read the Bible, and how I’d found that very interesting coming from a Hindu. T. asked me, “Are you familiar with Saint George?” It just so happens that I took an iconography class in Pennsylvania a couple years ago, and the one icon I completed was of Saint George. “We think that Saint George is the equivalent of Shiva,” he said. “Saint George will help you.”
That night I packed my bags and said goodbye to this family that I had grown to love in a mere three days. The taxi arrived and we started for the airport. The taxi driver had a rosary hanging from his rear-view window. It was about a 45 minute drive. As we were passing through a little town on the way, I saw a church and thought I saw the word “George” out of the corner of my eye. “Please stop!” I said. “I want to say a prayer at that church.” The driver stopped and backed up without batting an eye. I was correct. It was a church called Saint George’s. An image of Saint George on a horse was painted above a small shrine that bore a statue of the early missionary who founded the church. Candles were burning in front of it. I said a brief prayer thanking God and giving myself to His mercy. This marked the end of my adventure in India.
[Post Script] When I was at the Buddhist center where my life had taken one of its many inexplicable twists, I made friends with a Catholic/Buddhist university professor who talked about some of his experiences with bipolar disorder and spirituality. He said that he thought it was very important not to tell just anyone about ones personal spiritual experiences. “Scripture tells us ‘don’t caste your pearls before swine,’” he said. I don’t know where the words came from, but I responded to him that I couldn’t agree. “I think we must begin to think differently,” I said. "Those who we think are swine may not be swine at all. Who’s to say that those people who we think will never understand or appreciate our stories might not have had similar experiences, or at least be able to learn from something we have to say. Maybe there is more universality to our experiences than we imagine. I think we must throw our pearls -- throw them to the swine!” And so I post these notes into cyberspace for anyone to judge, ridicule, or ponder as they will.
