While I was in India, the days were long, and Kuwait seemed to be an eternity away. Two weeks later, I am back, and I look with bewilderment at the few odd souvenirs I managed to acquire. Sometimes travel really can seem like a Narnia experience - you come back and nothing has changed, and you almost question whether time and space may have played a trick on you.
I was in India for the last week in February. That is National Liberation Week in Kuwait. Kuwait was liberated first from the British, and then some decades later from Iraq under Saddam Hussein during that same end-of-February calendar week. Kuwaitis celebrate with flags and banners, and they take the whole week off work. The young people go cruising on the Gulf Road creating gridlock traffic jams during which they get out of their cars and run around spraying each other with water guns and aerosol cans of party foam. I skipped all that and went to Kerala in southern India.
When I was about 15 years old, I saw a notice on a school bulletin board about being an exchange student. When I look back on it, I am not sure whether it was the call of adventure or the desire to escape my life that compelled me to apply. I know I wanted to go to India more than anywhere else. It came from a combination of 1960’s hippie ideas about how cool India was, along with a sense of the exotic from early childhood memories of a slide show from an uncle who had spent time there in the Peace Corps. I was a strange kid, a self-conscious misfit, a bit of a sissy, a bit of a nerd, and I was absolutely ecstatic with the idea of going to India where I might find a totally different world. I was accepted into the program, given my choice of destinations, and was preparing to spend my junior year in India. But things didn’t work out. The summer of 1978 was a miserable one for me, as I waited every day for my Indian visa to arrive. Then August came and went. I actually missed over a month of my junior year of high school waiting for the paperwork, but it never came. Finally my father got a phone call. He broke the news to me. There had been an argument within the organization over numbers and hosting responsibilities. The plans had fallen through. They were very sorry. I had to go back to school. The next year I went to Japan, and my whole life went in a different direction. But every time I encountered anything that had to do with India, my interest was unyielding. I had ample vicarious experience of India by reading, listening to other people’s stories about it, and fantasizing about going there. In fact, I remember once talking to some people at the designated smoking pavilion at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon, where there were some real bohemian types sharing their India stories, and it occurred to me that my mind had really had its fill of India, and I felt like a member of the club without ever having gone there at all. I told my exchange student disappointment story to these people and said, “I think I am so saturated with the idea of going to India, that now I don’t really need to go there anymore.” One of the guys responded, “That’s perfect! Now you are ready to go!”
This is what I wrote while I was waiting for my flight:
Feb. 21, 2008 Kuwait Airport I’m 46 years old, and I’m going to India, 30 years late. I wanted to go when I was 16. I was intoxicated with the idea of it. Now, I’m just going. I’m a fat, middle-aged American tourist, going to India to eat at restaurants and stay in hotels. But actually, I think I have a pretty good week planned for myself.
I wrote a full scenario of visualization based on the itinerary I had planned for this solo trip. Afterwards, I looked to see how accurate I had been, and indeed everything pretty much came out just as I had hoped, only better. If people ask me about India, I don’t think I could really give India an unqualified recommendation, because India travel is a gamble. But in my case, it’s as if some angels who keep tabs on things knew that it just wouldn’t be right for me to have anything but a wonderful time in India, and that is just what I had.
This will be a full retelling from here, so if you’re the kind of person who hates slide shows and prefers to be spared the details, you may scroll through it quickly or go back to your email.
I flew into Cochin on a Saturday morning, the 22nd. Looking out the window of the airplane, I could see green fields and swaying coconut palms all around. I had arranged for a pick-up from the guest house where I was going to stay an hour and a half south of Cochin in the port town of Alleppey. The driver drove as if I were royalty on urgent business, honking for everybody else to get out of the way for us. I had to tell him to stop honking and slow down. Meanwhile I took in my first sights of India. After being in desert climates for so long, I just loved looking at the blessed vegetation. It was also cool to see all the cultural signs of being in India - men in dhotis and women in saris, signs written in Malayalam and Hindi, auto-rickshaws and funky, old-fashioned looking cars of the standard Indian model. The driver pointed out a small elephant being transported in the back of a rainbow-painted truck, and a brilliant turquoise-colored Kingfisher bird perched on a wire. I had not slept much on the red-eye flight from Dubai, but I was still excited just to be there.
Kerala is the southern-most state in India. Christianity has been there even longer than it’s been in Europe, and Indian Christianity is very, well . . . Indian! I saw the first signs of it during that ride to Alleppey. There were stores like “Saint Joseph’s Furniture” with a picture of Joseph holding the baby Jesus. A lot of trucks and taxis were labeled to show their dedication to the Virgin Mary or Christ the King. Normally one would be more interested in seeing the elephant-headed Ganesh and the other Hindu gods in India, but for some reason I was completely fascinated by Indian Christianity. When I got to Alleppey, I started to notice crumbling old churches and roadside shrines to various saints. I walked to the Alleppey beach and saw Catholic nuns walking with schoolchildren under the palms. The beach was beautiful and clean. I talked to some young guys who wanted to practice their English, and then a man who wanted to read my palm for 200 rupees - about $5. He was the first of three individuals who gave me psychic readings during my week in India. He didn’t speak English well, so it was hard to get much from him, but he said that I would live to be 96! He also said that I had two minds--and “enjoy” mind and a “tension” mind. He tried to tell me a lot of other things, but I didn’t speak his language and he only knew a few words of English. But finally he told me that things would get better for me, and don’t worry. That was reassuring. People who disapprove of my taking advice from palmists and astrologers are welcome to contact me, and I will send a long list of more things about me for their additional disapproval.
My guest house room in Alleppey was VERY basic. A cement floor, cement walls, a tiny cot with a pink mosquito net hanging down over it. A skinny white cat came in for a visit. I was delighted to have a feline visitor to welcome me, just like in Dahab. An old man with a bandaged foot was hobbling around the guest house. He came up to me and spoke in English. “Excuse, sir,” he said in a hushed tone, “ may I have 500 rupees please, but don’t tell my son?” He was the elderly father of the proprietor of the guest house. He was a little demented. I thought it was sort of funny that I had come to India where people expect to be hounded by starving beggars, but instead I was getting this different kind of beggar--a perfectly well-fed old guy who panhandled his son’s customers when he could get away with it. “He won’t give me any of my pension!” the man complained. “But you mustn’t tell him I told you. He gets very mad at me!” I told him that 500 was a bit too much, but I would give him 200, and he could count on me to keep it a secret. I saw him a few times after that and each time he said, “You didn’t tell my son, did you?” and I assured him that I did not. That evening I walked through Alleppey town and found a hotel that had a nice restaurant and served cold beer. Ahh, yes! I had a nice bottle of Kingfisher Lager with a dinner of local fish, prepared Kerala style fried spices not unlike New Orleans “blackened” dishes. When I got out of the hotel, a rickshaw driver asked me if I wanted a ride. No, I just had to walk through town back to my hotel. He wanted to talk to me, ask where I was from, etc. And then he asked why couldn’t we get his buddy and all have a beer together? Well… this is the type of thing I love to do -- take foolish chances for the sake of making a friend. So I said, “Yes! Let’s do it!” He ran a short ways down the street and came back in another auto rickshaw which was driven by his friend. The man’s name was Matthew and his buddy’s name was Babu. We went to the government liquor store and bought three bottles of cold beer and then went on our little joy ride. By now it was quite dark. Matthiew went into a small shop and bought three cigarettes for us. We parked by a canal and drank our beer and smoked our cigarettes while Matthew explained to me that in Kerala all religions were friends. He was Christian, Babu was Hindu, and they were best buddies. Babu didn’t speak much English but nodded enthusiastically. Then he started up the auto rickshaw and took me around for a night tour of Alleppey churches. Tipsy though we were, we stopped at some Christian shrines that had candles burning, and Matthiew and I said little prayers while Babu stood respectfully behind us. They dropped me off at the guest house and asked if they might see me again. I said maybe I would go back to that restaurant the next night, but it didn’t work out and I didn’t see them again. It was probably not the most responsible thing to do, going drinking and driving with two strangers in India, but it was fun, and I’m glad I was irresponsible.
The owner of the guest house (the old guy’s son) was home when I got in, and he invited me in for a chat. He had actually grown up in Kuwait -- and had awful memories of it! This guy was an “Anglo-Indian” -- which I think means that he is racially Indian but speaks English as his first language and lives a very western lifestyle. He had lived in a bigger city in India, Bombay maybe, and clearly had once been a part of the “cool” avant-guard intelligentsia there. His walls were covered with his own modern art oil paintings and posters of dance raves that he DJ’ed, probably in the 80‘s. But there seemed to be something a little tired and disappointed about him. He probably opened the guesthouse thinking that he would make friends with a lot of traveling westerners but found that when it really came down to it he was just running a cheap hotel for tourists and it wasn’t that much fun. I would have liked to have engaged him in some clever conversation just to give him a little encouragement, but unfortunately I will a little buzzed from the beer and all I had to talk about was how cool India was, a boring topic for him. I went off to my cement cell and set my alarm for five-thirty, since I had a six o’clock pick-up scheduled for a backwater tour.
It turned out that six-o’clock, early as it felt to me, was not early enough for the backwater canoe guide, Shaji, to give me the tour he wanted to give me. He had in mind to get me out on the lake to watch the sunrise, but we were still quietly moving along the canal when the sun rose. It was beautiful nonetheless. I’m so glad I opted for the private canoe backwater tour. Shajee was wonderful. He spoke just enough English, sang songs in Malayalam, and rowed our canoe so quietly through the canals and rivers that we could hear all the bird songs and all the sounds of the villages like mothers talking to their babies and people coming out to brush their teeth and bathe in the river. The water was clean and had no foul smell whatsoever; later in the day Shaji used my Sony digital camera to take a movie of me swimming around in the middle of one of the lakes. We visited a church and school that was accessible only by boat and footpath. Children saw us coming and called out, “one pen? one pen?” If you ever go to Kerala, take a box of pens as gifts for children. Unfortunately I didn’t have any. We went to a small stone hut that served as a restaurant and ordered a breakfast of porotta bread with a small bit of potato and broth. The bread was a kind of soft, thick crepe that tore into tender shreds. It was really yummy. The soup was spicy, and I made the mistake of eating a hot chili pepper. When I figured out that it was a hot pepper, I made the mistake of thinking that I should just gobble and swallow quickly without letting my taste buds know too much. Don’t ever do that! It would have been much better to spit it out. Suddenly I felt what seemed to be a hiccup coming, but more than a hiccup, it was an tremendous involuntary shriek! I shrieked about 5 times and all the people looked curiously to see what was wrong with me. They eat those hot chili peppers like candy. Shaji pushed more porottas toward me and said, “Just eat bread! No soup!” It was funny.
The whole day was an amazing massage for the soul. Hours were spent doing nothing but slowly traversing the calm backwaters. You hear no traffic noise because no cars go to those places, and there’s very little motorized watercraft. I pray that tourism will not get out of hand there, because one can easily imagine speedboats and jet skis ruining the serene atmosphere. For now, it’s like a hidden treasure in the modern world. I thought in the morning that I might get bored, but I did not. The gentle scenes of rice paddies, villages, banana groves and birdlife were just enough to keep me comfortably engaged, and if I felt a little sleepy, I just leaned back and dozed to the sound of Shaji’s soft paddling. We stopped and had a wonderful dinner of fresh caught prawns served on banana leaves, then stopped again later at a little riverside shop for a snack of fresh coconut which they chop open right in front of you. There were a lot of big, beautiful, elaborate houseboats going back and forth carrying groups of foreigners enjoying their own very different experiences of the backwaters. A couple times Shaji let me try my hand with the paddle, but it was work for me and I didn’t have the knack. He has been rowing the backwaters for 15 years, and he does it effortlessly. Over the course of the afternoon we talk about religion, politics and our families. He called himself a “Mussulman” which is a very old-fashioned word for Muslim. Of course he wanted to know how it could be that I was not married. I just told him that I had had a complicated life, not an easy one. When we didn’t understand each other, we just smiled and let it go. Shaji told jokes and I laughed even though I had no idea what he’d said. I just laughed because he had told a joke and I wanted to laugh. It was night when we got back to Alleppey. I had only intended to go for half a day, but had changed to a full day’s trip. I didn’t have quite enough money, and Shaji was going to just accept what I had and say goodbye, but I insisted that he follow me back to the guest house so I could give him the remainder. He waited with the auto-rickshaw while I ran to get the money, and when I got back he was on his cell phone making arrangements for future customers. He stopped talking to shake my hand and say with great earnest that he was going to pray for my happiness, and pray that I would get married. I told him that I would pray for him as well.
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