India/Thailand 2004

Final [Deep] Thoughts

2004-08-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

a la Jack Handy, perhaps, on travel:

When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
--William Least Heat Moon

Each instant is a place we've never been.
--Mark Strand

Traveling is a fool's paradise. . . . I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
--Edward Abbey

What you have to say -- though ultimately all-important -- in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.
--Charles Wright

[and for good measure, this is the one I aspire to]

We borrow the light of an observant and imaginative traveler and see the foreign land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines.
--H.M. Tomlinson

Home Again

2004-08-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

Well, it's all over. I left Chiang Mai on Saturday, flew to Bangkok in the morning (excess luggage fee...ouch!), and saw less of Bangkok than I would have liked, but not by much. It took a good two hours to get from the airport about 20km to the city center. Horrendous traffic.

But I checked into a decent guest house (You May Not Bring Thai Girl to Room) and took off to see a few things before the day was over. I made it to the National Museum and Gallery, National Theatre ( no performance tonight), Wat Po, Grand Palace, and the riverfront before things started closing for the day. Then I just sort of strolled along aimlessly. I ran into a nice little royal park with all Thais walking, jogging (gasp!), playing takraw (sp?) -- a sort of hackey-sack with a bigger rattan ball kind of game, and even an aerobics workout right in front of me. It was also really cool to see everyone stand and stop what they were doing at exactly 6pm while the national anthem played over loudspeakers. This is a common practice in Thailand it seems. But it felt sincere, and not like some Hollywood version of Patriotism.

Then I walked along the central canal in the royal district and was lucky enough to hit two major monuments (the Mae Statue and Democracy Monument) right at sunset, when the light was really incredible. I made myself walk down Khao San road, the infamous Bourbon-street-esque farang traveler's ghetto, did some last shopping and a last walk in the rain to get back to my hotel and pack up.

It felt like the end of the adventure. But of course, I wasn't home yet. I had an 11am flight, which meant I needed to be at the airport around 9 the next morning. But I really didn't want to spend 2 hours in traffic again, so I figured I would just leave for the airport as early as I got up, which turned out to be about 6:30. I was in the cab by 7 and to the airport just before 8.

Lucky thing, too. The flight I was on was delayed because of the mandatory number of hours a plane has to be on the ground (some silly rule about pilots having to have had some sleep before flying you around at 700 miles per hour), and I was going to miss my connection in Hong Kong. But they saw my distressed look and told me they had one standby seat remaining on the 8:20 flight to Hong Kong, so I could just have a longer layover there. I took it. Luggage. Departure Tax. Passport. Boarding Pass. Plane.

Worked fine, really, except for the earlier plane hadn't requested a veggie meal for me, so I just had my allotted 3 square inches of papaya (and the nice Keralan gentleman's next to me). This also meant I had 4 hours in Hong Kong, so once we arrived, I set out in search of food, breakfast or lunch, however you put it.

Chinese restaurant after Chinese restaurant, all of them serving exotic looking dishes, all of which involved meat of some kind or another. Usually a whole-animal kind, which was hanging in the window. A whole duck. A whole squid. And so on.

I can do this. I took it as a challenge to find food that was vegetarian, not deep-fried, and while I was at it, I thought I should be able to eat on the remainder currency I was carrying from India and Thailand (total, the equivalent of about 4 US dollars). I just didn't want to change any US currency.

There has to be a non-Chinese restaurant around here someplace. Aha! Oh....

Burger King.
Starbucks.
Popeye's Chicken.

And even if I had eaten meat, a sandwich was about $6.50. No good.

I was firm, though, and resolute. On my third try, I talked a guy into selling me plain steamed white rice (particularly impressive, I thought, since it's not on the menu, I don't speak Cantonese and he doesn't speak English). I concocted a rather surprisingly tasty mix of soy sauce, salt, chili paste, pepper, a pinch of sugar, a tiny bit of ketchup, and a few green onions I stole from over the counter when the woman wasn't looking. Plus, I am very proud to say, I ordered 3 cups (total=almost exactly what I had available) of rice and ate it all with only chopsticks, and without putting the bowl to my lips. I was quite pleased with my dexterity. Or luck, or whatever. But I avoided some stares that way.

The second flight was uneventful, save for the 250-lb 12 year old sitting next to me, who seriously ordered a "snack" (candy bar, huge huge huge bowl of ramen noodles, etc) every hour for the entire 13 hour flight, in addition to two rather filling meals. I watched a few movies (and managed to make it all the way through "Eternal Sunshine" without crying [much]; this on only my 4th attempt) and got home safely. After the usual baggage waiting and customs frustrations, I am back.

Temples and Bloodsports

2004-08-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

The last of my time in Chiang Mai has been spent visiting more temples, shopping, and generally just hanging out. On Thursdsay after the cooking class I saw Wat Bupparam and Wat Jet Yot, and on Friday morning I caught a shared taxi thing (bizarre system -- totally ad hoc as to when and where you go anywhere; they should just have a bus system) up to Doi Suthep, the mountain that houses northern Thailand's most famous and ornate temple. It was pretty impressive. Lots of gold and incense and all that, but interestingly it didn't feel at all like the Hindu temples did. Even with lots of ornament, these temples felt quiet and more like places of worship to me. I wish I could bring a copy of one of these Buddhas back home, but you actually need a license to take any image of the Buddha out of the country.

In the afternoon I did some shopping, and then joined the Irish guys and Bon for an evening of Muay Thai, the kickboxing that we hear a lot about but I've never seen. Pretty raw-meat kind of experience. (But not as much as the whole day was for the rest of the guys -- they went bunjee jumping, target shooting, and had an all-you-can-eat steak buffet, all for about the equivalent of $10). They start off with kids about 12 years old, and as the fights go on, they get up to their early 20s. But they don't appear to stick around much longer than that. All told there were 9 fights, each lasting maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It's highly ritualized, with elaborate dances and praying before and after each fight, and the fighters obviously respect each other quite a lot and treat each other very deferentially. When they're not trying to kick the other guy's head off his shoulders, that is. Brutal as anything. But not uncontrolled. Very Hemingway.

Now I'm at the airport in Chiang Mai, catching my flight to Bangkok (again, snacks and free internet, thank you Bangkok Airways), where I'll have a few hours to see a bit of the city and sleep tonight before heading home tomorrow.

Anyone hear the fat lady getting ready? Tear.

Gastronomie

2004-08-19T02:42:00.000-07:00

Last night, I had a thai massage, which might be both the most relaxing and the most painful thing I've ever willingly let a stranger do to my body. Certainly interesting though. After one beer, I passed out early.

This morning I went for a run and saw a schoolgirl donate all the skin on the outer half of her right calf (what innervates this area? quick!, quick!) to the road after taking a tumble off of her motorbike. I think I won't follow most of the tourists here and rent one of those things to get around.

Then, I showed up for the day's activity, a private Thai cooking course at my lodge, run by this animated middle-aged (I think -- so hard to tell) Thai man (but like lots of them, he's ethnically Chinese), Wasoot.

All I can say is, Wow. Some of the best food I've ever put in my mouth. And it was made by me, following step by step directions (so I don't really take any credit -- wait until I get back, and we'll see if I can reproduce any of it).

We started the morning with introductions (I was joined by Rachel, from Dublin, and Dana, from Tel Aviv) and then looked through our cookbooks, which were included, along with the food and 8 hours of instruction, in the $15 fee. We picked out the meals we wanted to cook -- and each one had vegetarian options or substitutions printed right there. Then, we took off for the market about 50m down the street, where we bought everything fresh and only the amount we needed for each dish. This is how it works here. You shop at least once, maybe 2 or 3 times a day, so it's all as fresh as it gets.

We started with a tour of fresh herbs, vegetables, and chillies, then got our cocounut milk and cream squeezed right in front of us. Ditto for the fresh-pressed tofu and cut-to-order rice noodles (have you ever seen a knife move that fast?), and eggs. I watched the selection of chicken and fish -- tilapia, which were swimming in a tank until you asked for one to be killed and cleaned especially for you. We passed on the whole hearts for sale (I didn't ask). And then got fresh fruit and red and green curry paste, which are sold to order by weight, a few grams at a time, off of rather threatening 5-kilo mounds.

Then, back to the covered open-air kitchen at the lodge. First we made a hot and sour soup with lemongrass, ginger, kafir lime, spring onions, coriander, tofu, cherry tomatoes, baby corn, shallots, and so on. This was my favorite of the whole day. Maybe the most compact and intense flavor of any dish I've ever had. Each mouthful just exploded in my mouth. Pretty incredible.

We also did red and green curry, sweet and sour chicken (tofu), ginger cashew stir-fry, regular rice, sticky rice, pad thai, spring rolls, coconut mango sticky rice, and coconut cream bananas for dessert.

I'm not that full, in terms of the size of the portions -- they were all very manageable. But flavor-wise, I'm in total sensory overload. A funny combination, really. Particularly for me, coming from a country that serves large portions of pretty mild and bland food. Just the opposite -- small portions of flavor bombs. Which I suppose is why you don't see any obese Thais, really, even though coconut cream (100 percent saturated fat) is a staple, and they eat quite a bit of meat. I could definitely live like this.

10 Small Twigs (Day 3)

2004-08-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Or 10 large pieces of bamboo, depending on your perspective. Either way, that's what was carrying us down the rapids of the river today. Each bamboo raft (constructed for every group anew using nothing that doesn't come out of the ground) had 10 or so long bamboo trunks lashed together with grasses and steered by two people (with 2 additional passengers) holding another long bamboo pole.

Somehow, I got handed such a pole and told to stand on the back of the boat. OK, cool. I'll hold this until the driver gets here, sure. Wait, wait. We only have one driver per boat. So who is the second one?

Uh-oh.

Yup, that's me. So the good news is that I picked it up quickly and did fine (our boat was the only one that didn't have any minor crashes -- or major ones, for that matter...thank you very much). But it was a bit freaky. Especially since I was taking direction from a guy who speaks only Karen, so my instructions sounded a little like "Leeh" and "Reeh." I think that's "Left" and "Right," respectively, but I'm still not sure.

But seriously, it was a ton of fun. We went through a bunch of rapids, none of which were higher than waist-high (though that's a bit of a fuzzy definition when you're on a bamboo raft that draws variable but considerable amounts of water at all times). I felt like I was in a movie, going down a river in Southeast Asia on a bamboo raft. And driving. Other than getting whacked by a few low branches and getting knocked down by one of them, nothing bad happened at all.

We got to the bottom of the river, got out and changed into some dry clothes, and then hiked out to the truck. We stopped just after that for another awesome lunch, and then drove to the bottom edge of the national park we had been in to see some dramatic mountain overlooks and then a pretty impressive set of waterfalls. Which, I must confess, were especially exciting because at the bottom there was a real swimming hole with actual all-natural vine rope-swing things into the water. I've always wanted to do that somewhere that had it without an artificial rope tied onto a steel beam. A perfectly refreshing end to the trip.

Got back to Chiang Mai just before sundown to clean up (we walked up the hotel and they met us with ice cold water, clean towels, and keys for the rooms they'd held for us), get some food, catch up on communicating with the real world, and have a beer tonight before people start going their separate ways tomorrow. Awesome.

MudFest '04 (Day 2)

2004-08-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

We got up fairly early, had another really good meal (and packed lunch, a noodle dish wrapped in banana leaves), and started walking. Today shall be known as the Day of Mud. Before we left I got a cheap pair of (white -- yeah, good call) deck shoes to ruin in the jungle. And I did.

I only fell down once, but at times the mud was knee-high, and if you didn't step exactly in the previous person's footsteps, you would have a pretty good chance of losing the shoe in the SUCK-GLOP sound that would follow. So it was slow going, but the countryside was fantastic. I should note for the studio audience that, if you're anyone on this trip other than me, that's pronounced "fen-TAST-ic." (OK, and except the Germans, for whom it's probably something more like Wunderbarkindernachtundschrpellerbar)

We stopped for lunch, and to give poor Will a rest -- he was having major GI uncooperativity (Troubles, you might say). Bon is a damn good cook. This food is ridiculous.

After lunch, we walked a couple of more hours through some equally impressive mud and a bit of rain, and then made our way last one final steep set of switchbacks to a bamboo bridge across a rather major river. There was our camp for the night, another nice little bamboo shelter, several guys preparing our dinner and icing the beer and constructing the bamboo rafts we would use the next day to float down the rapids on the river.

We went for a blissfully cool swim in the river and jumped off the bridge into the water a few times, soaped down right in the stream, and then got out and ate some kick-ass yellow curry (again, special vegetarian version for me...this guy rocks) and drank beer while passing around a guitar and everyone singing really bad karaoke renditions of 70s folk ballads. I went to bed fairly early, but after we had exhausted the song repertoire of just about everyone, the Irish and British guys stayed up and finished about 3 cases of beer between them. [That would explain the loud footsteps followed by the retching sound I heard a couple of times during the night. Ugh.]

What a great day.

Welcome to the Jungle (Day 1)

2004-08-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

The 13 of us (12 plus a guide) left from the lodge about 8 in the morning, stopped at a market to buy flashlights (torches to everyone but me) and some fruit, and then hit our first stop, a Buddhist cave on the way into the national park. Spiders, cool rock formations, and lots and lots of bats.

After a good lunch of noodle stir-fry, we drove to our trailhead and started off into the hills, which are a lot like south India -- coconut and banana trees and really lush green everywhere. It's the rainy season here too, but it's not as heavy as much of India is. The rain started just after we started walking, and made it nice and muddy for us but wasn't hard enough that me not having a poncho was too drenching.

The first leg of the walk took us about 5 kilometers into the jungle to a river bank where we met up with our elephants. Yes, our elephants. The next 3 kilometers or so was on elephant-back. Pretty interesting experience, even if it was kind of, no really, contrived. [By the way, seeing an elephant's penis -- only a couple of inches off the ground, in case you were curious -- is one of the more shocking things I've seen on this trip. And that's saying a lot.]

We rode for a while, trying to keep the elephants from ripping too many trees down in fits of hunger (really), dismounted, and then walked the last 2 or 3 kilometers through rice paddies and streams to the village where we stayed the night.

Seeing this countryside and getting to actually spend some time in the villages has got to be the coolest part of being in Thailand. Pretty beaches and prostitutes, sure. But this was so pretty, and the people were amazingly warm to us, even though we are really an oddity (and surely not a completely benign one at that) to them.

This village was that of the Karen people (but we also passed through some that were Hmong). They've lived in this part of the world for God-knows how many years, and they've been mistreated by nearly every government they've ever been told they had to answer to. They're simple people, in one sense of the word. They live off their land, grow food, make clothes, and seem to live pretty content and uncomplicated (or at least un-self-complicated) lives. But the mistake would be to think of them as living in poverty or needing help or something. They do fine, even if they don't really use currency or have any wealth to speak of (other than their land, which gets appropriated by state authorities quite freely). Mostly, I get the sense that they'd just like to be able to keep doing what they've been doing for a long time. If the world would let them.

All the same, they seem mostly happy. They laugh and smile a lot, even in front of us, but not at us. We didn't exchange a single word, but I felt like we'd connected more than lots of the people I've met in the last few months.

Bon cooked us an amazing dinner (sweet and sour stir-fry and green curry, with a special vegetarian version for me), and then we spent the evening sitting around a fire in one of the family's huts and just talking. Three Karen women sat with us, working on some clothes and not bothered by not speaking our language or the reverse. Just OK sitting with us, showing us their home and passing around a small bottle of their homemade rice liquor, giving us a chance to chat.

[I know they almost certainly do this because the fees we pay for trekking include something that goes to them. But unlike a lot of the transactions I've been involved, or potentially involved, in this summer, this didn't feel like one.]

The Irish fellows (Paul, Bernard, Joe, and Elearon) are all students, and are really pleasant to talk with. One of the Brits (originally from the North of Ireland, but in school in England) is in med school, so we got to compare some notes about things and talk about getting out of our respective bubbles. Will is from London, and is working towards being a screenwriter. Stuart and Dylan are from Wolfhampton, but I didn't get to chat as much with them. Then there are three German women, who are a bit older and only speak enough English to get by. And Bon is hilarious. Incredibly friendly and charismatic and quite smart (he speaks English, Thai, Karen, Hmong, Mandarin, some Japanese, and I think Burmese). And he retired from competitive thai boxing (muay thai) a few years ago but is still really really fit, a tiny little ball of muscle. He has a funny habit of saying things twice, in a playful way. (Hungry Hungry? he'll ask.) So we've started calling him Bon Bon.

We went to bed after a couple of hours, sleeping in rows in a large bamboo but under mosquito nets. The bamboo floor was hard but I slept really well.

Chiang Mai

2004-08-15T04:52:00.000-07:00

So I realize that I have a very skewed perception of Thailand having come from India, but you could easily convince me that I'm not in a foreign country at all, but a slightly alternate version of Florida. Where they speak Thai.

But in all the ways that the past 2 months have taught me to consider important (or forced me to wonder how important they are), this doesn't strike me as a developing country. The edge that remained sharp on most things I ran into in India isn't here, or at least not where I can see it. People are nice, and while they'd no doubt very much like to relieve me of some of my dollars, there isn't the harsh aggressiveness to the interaction. I feel as though I can trust nearly everyone I interact with. Sane streets, paved sidewalks, relatively safe food and water, no people shitting in the streets or grabbing my arm, desparate for a few cents, and so on. There are surely less than perfect aspects of being here, but it's still orders of magnitude more like the US compared to India.

I arrived in Bangkok at 4am, having slept even less than was theoretically possible because I've gone without any non-Hindi music for so long that I couldn't stop listening to the airplane music selections (which weren't great, but still better than anything my ears have heard in a while) throughout my 4 hour flight. I got off the plane, went through customs and immigration with no problems, and got to the domestic terminal (along with some really insanely pretty Italian women...too bad I wasn't going down to the beaches in the south) to catch my flight to Chiang Mai.

The airline folks helped me with my bags, waived the baggage limit to let me carry a second bag onto the plane so I wouldn't have to leave on in the Left Luggage (at $2 a day), served me fresh juice, croissants, a sticky-rice-and-coconut-milk-thing, and real, non-instant espresso drinks while I waited for my 8am flight. Quite nice, really.

The flight was really pretty and, though it involved a stopover at a tiny private airport in the middle of nowhere (I still haven't figured this one out...I'm guessing it has to do with taxes or something because we all got off the plane, went through security, got back on the plane 5 minutes later, and didn't pick up or drop off anyone, but I'm fine with it because it meant we got fed twice instead of once during the 2 hour total trip) we got to Chiang Mai just after 10. My hotel picked me up at the airport (for free), and I arrived at this place with everything straightforward and no hassle.

Eagle House is the name of the joint, and they're extremely friendly and organized. They fed me lunch (vegetarian green curry...yum), helped me get oriented around town, do laundry, put my valuables in a well-run and legit safe, etc.

Eagle House is geared for trekking, which I wanted to do, so I immediately got hooked up with the next group going out tomorrow morning. We're gone for three days in the jungle -- should be a blast.

After getting all set up, I had time to see a few of the Wats (Buddhist temples) in town and spent quite a while walking around the Contemporary Art Museum, which was suprisingly good. (And I have some photos -- yay!) Then the trek meeting, where we met our adorable guide -- Bon is his name, and he's about 5 feet tall but extremely fit. A former competitive Thai boxer. And I have 4 Irish lads, 4 Brits, and 3 German women on the trip. Dinner and the night market to buy some ruinable shoes, and then early to bed after the no sleep and early trekking start.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2004-08-14T06:04:00.000-07:00

Well I hope it's a jet plane. But maybe it'll be a Deluxe Bus. Or even Super Deluxe.

I'm at the Mumbai International Airport, killing time on a massive scale. My careful plans to make my unavoidable time in Mumbai short and pleasant went all to hell. I checked the train schedules and maps and everything, tried to figure out what to do with myself for the 8 hours I had to kill in Mumbai, and with the advice of Nagendra and his family, decided I would get off north of the city center on the inbound train, find a hotel, then take a local train into the city, see some stuff, come back to the hotel, clean up and then take a taxi to the airport. Which would all be easier than being in the city (from which the airport is a 2-hour taxi ride at rush hour) with baggage and no hotel, etc.

So much for that. I tried to get off at the right stop, and a guy getting fined for not having a ticket was making a big scene and I didn't even make it to the door until the train was already moving pretty fast. Add the well-intentioned but really rather annoying guy trying to avoid ending the conversation he was having with me about did I and other Americans really Do Sex Before Marriage? [I had already had a 30-minute conversation, no, more like one-way interrogational session with this guy, and had tried to take the shortcut by saying I was married. But it wasn't that much shorter.]

Anyways, long story short. Olympic spirit nonwithstanding, I didn't really feel up to a flying dismount from the train with two big bags, so I just figured I'd go ahead into the city and figure it out.

Mmmm hmmm.

So we were 2 hours late, and then finding a hotel was difficult, as everywhere wanted to put me in a shared room (not good, the main point of getting a room being to lock my crap up and have a shower by myself). I hauled my bags about a mile to a place a guy led me, with his personal assurance and Government Credentials ( No Problem Sir Don't Worry) supposedly backing up the price quote he gave me. Oh, sorry, sir. That Room Is Full. (That room does not exist.) But would You Like Nice Room (for 8 times as much)?

To get to the point, I walked out, Not Pleased. This situation more or less repeated itself three more times.

So I hired a taxi to drive me around and see a few sights -- million-dollar (yes, dollar) condos overlooking the Arabian Sea, really poor kids playing in a torrential rain storm, etc. -- and then went to the airport really really early, to clean the mud and some of the sweat from my hotel search off in the bathroom here (Stare, Stare, StareStareStare) and then do some Industrial Strength Sitting.

But really, I'm whining way more than necessary. I'm safe, healthy, and have managed not to scream or get too cranky, and by all predictions I'll be getting on a rather nice plane in a few hours to be served food and drink and fly to another beautiful country. In the scheme of places and situations to be in in the world, that ain't Half Bad.

More from Thailand.

The End, For Now Anyway

2004-08-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

well, things are coming to a close. for now. i'll be back.

i'm in hyderabad, and saw a magnificent fort (from the muslim rulers of the 16th century) here today, at golconda. some really pretty stone structures, and they were also filming some music video there, which was a bit entertaining to watch, though hearing the same damn synthesized tune over and over the whole time i was at the fort was a bit annoying.

i even splurged on a guide, which i didn't really want to do, but it at least kept a lot of the touts off my back for the duration of the tour.

although, after we were done, a couple of kids came up and started the usual You Want...? game. but i was caught off guard. You Want Pen, You Want Postcard, etc were followed by You Want Fight? the guy points to his younger and shrimpier friend. i guess the offer was i could beat the guy up for a fee. there was no animosity, just a seemingly benign offer.

that's a new one.

anyways, i take a train tonight from hyderabad to mumbai, and then fly out of mumbai tomorrow night. here comes thailand...yay!

Chennai

2004-08-11T00:24:00.000-07:00

I'll leave Chennai later this afternoon, but it's been a blissfully relaxing time. I met Phil and a huge group from the U.S. here, and Anirudh, his friend,'s family was incredibly gracious and threw open their (gorgeous) flat to all of us. We filled an entire room with cushions and made a gigantic bed out of it, where 4 or 5 of us slept each night.

Yesterday we drove down to Mamallapuram, one of the more famous beaches in India and a center for stone carving (of temples and smaller things, all by hand.) Along the way, we stopped and saw a rather impressive crocodile and alligator (and snake, turtle, etc.) ecological park. Touristy, but still quite a sight. One of the guys paid the extra fee to have them feed the crocs in front of us -- raw meat tossed into the ring. Seeing that many reptiles all rise from their stillness and spring into action towards you is quite a feeling, even if there is a 3-foot stone wall between you and them. (Not much.)

Then we continued on to the beach, saw lots of stone carving and several of the one-piece temples, carved several thousand years ago out of single massive pieces of granite. We hung out in a cafe and then crashed the beach at one of the Taj resorts. Really similar to the Atlantic, actually. Warm water and good sand, small waves, and then a couple of hours of good beach volleyball before dark.

We came back to Chennai with the intentions of going out for the evening, but half of the crew was horizontal by soon after our return, and we never made it. They just left this afternoon for Kerala, and I'll leave in a couple of hours for Hyderabad.

The trip is winding up, but while I'm missing specific things about home, and my usual summer-is-way-too-long-get-me-back-to-school feeling, I'm not missing the States in a broad sense or feeling out of place here. I think I've gotten to at least one plateau of comfort with India, somewhat stable. Living here would be a different level, but I could stay for a while longer and not be restless with it. Good to know I can swing this (I think) if I work out of the US for some time after I actually have some medical skills.

The Last of Madurai

2004-08-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

After the temple in Madurai, I had a late lunch and went back to my hotel for an afternoon of being a lazy bum. I hung out on the rooftop, took a nap in the shade (pulled my bed out on the patio for a breeze), and then sat there reading for a couple of hours with two German girls who were also staying at the hotel. (Lots of Germans. Their guidebooks must really have recommended the place.)

Then I cleaned up and went for dinner to one of the tallest hotels in the city, which had a huge, sprawling rooftop restaurant, 8 or 9 stories above the street. This is the direction that India is still mostly missing. Up. People figured this out in Europe and the US a long time ago, and I guess it's starting here too. Such a luxury, to be in the city but not really in it. Above it. (An condescending luxury, at that. Which I guess a lot of luxuries are.) A distance that both lets you see it and lets you feel like you've survived it.

The skyline is something else, with the temple and then all of the flat-topped apartments and houses, the kinds of roofs that one pictures in a desert country, with a climate conducive to napping face down on the cool marble floors by day (as the hotel porters all do, slung haphazardly across the hallway) and pulling a bed out onto the roof by night. At the same time, there is the call to prayer from the mosque and the music from one of the various loud Hindu rituals near the temple. The honking and clanging of traffic. But also, a breeze. And sundown, as it begins to rain.

What a sunset! The rain sends us all dashing for cover, but it pounds hard for just a minute or two and then lets up, to give the most magnificent flat stormclouds for the last of the sun, all laid out in rows so that the light comes over the mountains and then under them, bouncing off them as if they were upside-down metal hillsides, terraced in orange flame.

Quite an end to the day. The rest was just packing and getting ready for bed.

Today, I got up early at caught a 6am train to Chennai, where I'm going to meet Phil, a friend from Stanford who's traveling with 8 (8!) friends from the states.

A Really Big Temple

2004-08-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

After the museum, I went back to my hotel, where I had splurged on a gorgeous rooftop room (the penthouse, with a personal servant devoted to me and a rooftop patio, all for $9 a night -- eek!). Right next to the huge Sri Meenakshi-Sandeshwarar temple, South India's biggest and most elaborate incarnation of the big and elaborate temples that Tamil Nadu is famous for having all over the state. They take their Hinduism very seriously here, and they go all out.

The first night, I just got to see the temple lit up at night (4 of the 12 towers are about 50 meters tall and stay lit until 10 pm; really impressive sight) while I chatted with a German family on the patio. The next morning, I awoke to morning prayers and headed over to the temple for the morning.

After removing my shoes (and that pavement was HOT without them), I walked into the temple compound, which was sprawling and labyrinthine. Confusing, but in a good way. I ended up spending about 5 or 6 hours inside, wandering around, writing, reading, just sitting and people-watching.

This is Hinduism at (as far as I can tell) its most extravagant. The ornate gopuras (12 in all, 4 main ones and lots more medium-sized ones) are visible for miles. Each has thousands of sculptures on it, brightly painted figures in a sort of blunted pyramid design. A bathing pool, a solid gold (apparently) lotus flower as big as a small car, a gold-topped tower. A statue hall, lots of ceiling paintings. Thousands and thousands of people.

Several temple elephants, which are painted with religious markings and get paraded around. Music blares from all corners. The scent of incense is heavy. People themselves paint their foreheads with various combinations of pastes, powers, paints in all sorts of markings, none of which I fully comprehend. Brahmins wear a string around their torso (across the right shoulder). You walk three times around a deity before praying to it. And there are so many of them, in stone, in gold (how much gold this country must consume!). Some of the statues you throw balls of butter at, 'to cool the gods off.' Many others you bring offerings to, of coconuts, fruit, flowers, glittery things, money, prepared food, and so on. And there is a vast section of shops and vendors selling all of these things to the devotees to bring in and offer up to the gods.

The commercialism is staggeringly overt and unabashed for a holy place. All Major Credit Cards Accepted. It's an interesting way to, in essence, tithe. Except the money goes directly into the retail economy, not to the church to spend with discretion (though I imagine this happens too -- no one really to ask). Capitalism could learn a lesson here in openness. Buy something (crap, essentially) to throw away 5 minutes later.

I'm being a bit cynical, and I know it. Why? There is tremendous power in these rituals, this much energy and expense and, well, stuff. All dedicated to the gods. But it depressed me, this business. Excessive.

I still feel a great deal of comfort at being here, at the elaborate maximalist hubbub and all the people milling about. I think it's because this seems like a rich cultural place but a spiritually impoverished one. I realize that I'm bringing in the baggage of a pretty biased conception of what's spiritual and what's cultural (and didn't even realize I felt they were so split, until now).

But viscerally, this place doesn't feel spiritual to me at all. By which I guess I'm injecting the meanings "solemn" or "quiet" or "peaceful." Why, I'm not really sure. I'm pretty far from coming from a specific religious tradition. I feel lucky to not really have a lot of brainwashed bias. (Though surely I have some, just from walking around in a mostly Christian country all my life.)

It resonates with the part of me that feels like God (or whatever; this is as good a name for it/he/she/them as any) is most present in the quiet moments of our lives, when we are with ourselves. And maybe also with others, it's not necessarily solitary. But present. Not busy or preoccupied, but connected to something larger than ourselves. Something larger than the daily world literally in front of our eyes, the world in our fingers and under our feet. The maximalism of this face of Hindiusm feels so incredibly artificial to me -- how holy can a banana bought from a guy on the street really be?

Which, culturally, is fine with me. I really like the elaborateness of culture. When you think about the things that make us particular, the things that give us (and allow us to maintain) cultural meaning and identity, they're all more elaborate than they need to be. Functionally anyway, they're almost too complex for their own good. Take food. It's essentially the provision of calories to fuel our metabolic processes and our movement. Yet nearly every culture in the world has come up with a different way of preparing it, most of them just about the most complex way you could possibly devise. Clothing, too. Color, shape, pattern, ornament -- all extra, in terms of protecting our bodies. Architecture, same. No "roof over our head" for us. Even people who live in a tiny hut decorate it, modify it, do something. In all these things, there's some aesthetic drive in us that pushes us towards complexity (overcomplicating things, really) in order to turn the basic building blocks of culture (our daily existences) into something meaningful. Shared.

But here what bugs me is this same sort of overcomplicating something. Which I realize is a bias, and not a real criticism of Hinduism (just one for me). Spiritually, I think I want something less complex, less busy. I don't feel like I'm in a holy place right now. Something about the "spiritual" to me (why, I have no idea) necessitates space, quietude, stillness. Subtlety. There's absolutely no room for that here. It's as if everyone is so frantically trying to heap meaning onto their lives through these rituals that they never stop to listen, to breathe, to connect. Going through all these motions. (And who am I to say that these are just motions? I know.)

Gandhi

2004-08-07T06:05:00.000-07:00

Now I'm in Madurai, the city in the plains that was my stopover from Kodai back to Chennai.

First off was the big Gandhi Museum. Not sure exactly why it's in Madurai (there are other museums, but this one was pretty big), except for the fact that the city was where Gandhi first swore off modern clothes for the traditional cotton dhoti (the diaper-looking thing). But in any event, it's here, and was quite the experience. I had some difficulty getting to the place -- my auto driver decided he'd drop me off a couple hundred meters short of the museum, at a walled compound that turned out to contain a huge manufacturer's expo of new Western consumer products (washers, dryers, blenders, water filters, and so on), all arranged in a one-way snake-like walkthrough that didn't let you step back out of the river of people moving forward once you started. Why I got dropped off here I have no idea. I can't imagine they pay the drivers a commission for dropping a tourist off here by mistake (which they do in lots of the tourist shops, even if you specifically say no). Am I really going to buy a washer/dryer combo and toss it in my backpack?

Anyway, I got to the museum and was a bit surprised at what I found. The exhibit was quite interesting, and involved a lot of work on someone's part. But it was framed in a really strange way. Instead of focusing on Gandhi's life, or even more broadly on the period of time he was struggling for independence, it retold all of Indian history from the late 1400s onward.

They started with Vasco de Gama's arrival in Kerala in 1498 and went all the way forward to Independence (1947) seeing all the major events in history through the lens of the apparent inevitability of freedom. Starting point picked as the first arrival of "Whiteman." End point the legal explusion of Whiteman.

It gives the whole 450-year period an odd and innaccurate tone, the sort of historical hindsight tunnel vision that you get in grade-school history texts. ("And events in the 1840s marched even further towards the Civil War.")

You learn so much about the minor revolts and resistance figures that existed throughout India's history of being occupied (to varying degrees) that you lose all context. To read the story told by the museum exhibits, nothing happened in India from 1498 to 1947 except the bulk of the population working single-mindedly for Freedom.

It's a noble tribute to a lot of figures who might otherwise be largely forgotten, but you end up with claims like this:

"A network of railways and metalled roads sprang up connecting the remote parts of the country. The newly introduced postal and telegraph services made possible quick exchange of ideas. Printing presses and newspapers came into existence, serving to diffuse knowledge and political consciousness, facilitating the resistance."

Well, ok. But maybe railroads, post, telegraph, and print were a bit helpful to the English, too? Or even accomplished some things that weren't directly either pro- or anti-Raj?

Nonetheless, there were some interesting tidbits. I learned the word Satyagrahi -- Gandhi essentially lived it, or tried to. "One who will always try to overcome evil by good, anger by love, untruth by truth, violence by non-violence...He will remain peaceful under all provocations and accept suffering himself." It was also curious to see a (claimed) list of Gandhi's four biggest literary influences: the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, and Tolstoy. (Hmmm...which one sticks out here?)

And there was a strange echo of Bush's Evil/Evildoer hate-the-sinner-not-the-sin rhetoric going on, albeit more eloquently. (OK, the echo's the other way around. And bungled and turned on its head.) "Our quarrel is not with the British people. We fight their imperialism. The proposal for the withdrawal of British power did not come out of anger."

Anyways, that was the sort of thing that the exhibit had going on. And some statues, lots of letters and photos, his shoes, his bloody clothes from the day he died, and so on. I don't know exactly what to make of his legacy. As a figure in World History, I think I admire him a lot. As a model of nonviolent resistance. But as a figure in Indian History, it gets a lot more complicated. It's not clear that Partition was a good thing, even though it brought freedom. And Gandhi has a strange sort of maternal aura to his philosophy that's not necessarily preferable to Nehru or anyone else's more paternalistic nationalism. I don't know enough to really judge it.

More Walking, More Rain

2004-08-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went the same direction as the day before, into the forest (and allegedly toward a lake), but went deeper in. I would have seen the lake if not for the ranger (well, I think he was a ranger). I went to the district forest office, to get permission to go past the restricted line, to the lake, but the guy who I talked to insisted that I could only have permission to go by jeep, not on foot. The opposite of what I had been told the day before and by the guys at the checkpoint. After a several minute conversation, it seemed that what was really going on was that he wanted me to 1)hire a guide, recommended by him, and 2) pay him a “fee” for the permission form. Nope.

So I walked by myself, bypassing the lake road, and continued onwards on what are basically logging roads into the forest. When I say “logging” though, I don’t mean logging like in North America, with lots of big trucks, machines, and hippies at the tops of pine trees in protest. I mean something more like wood gathering, though it does involve chopping stuff down with a really dull hatchet. This is all done by women, who then load the wood into huge long bundles about 15 or 20 feet long, which they carry home on their heads for firewood. No kidding. I felt a little silly stopping to have a drink of water in their presence, me with my skimpy little day pack.

But the walk was beautiful, and it rained softly all day, with plenty more mist. I stopped for lunch and saw some of the only vehicles of the whole day. I was reading the paper and eating a sandwich, and two motorcycles came by, each carrying one passenger holding a 25 foot or so long piece of metal, which looked like a new gutter for a house. That’s how things get moved here, I think. There is no U-Haul. Just you.

I came back about dark, cleaned up (with a refreshing, ice-cold shower in the dark, thanks to the power cuts that happen here, as all over India, all the time), had dinner, and went to bed early.

This morning, I woke up to sun and clear skies. I went for a 10K run through town, had breakfast, bought some more bread for lunch, and took off walking to a waterfall northwest of town, Bear Shola Falls.

Even around town, there is a peacefulness to the place that I like. I can make eye contact with the people I pass, and most of them just say hi back. [Which, I should note, involves the side-to-side head wobble that is sort of the universal greeting/acknowledgment/refusal/thankyou etc here. I’ve picked it up, and people are going to think I have a tic when I get home and haven’t broken the habit yet.] There was even one older guy who I passed this morning, and it went like this:

Him: [Head Wobble]
Me: [Head Wobble] Hello. (This is usually as far as it goes.)
Him: Good morning. How are you?
Me: [pause] Um, fine, fine. And you?
Him: Very well. Beautiful day, first sun in a while. Beautiful day for walking.
Me: Yes it is, I’m just walking out to the falls.
Him: Well you enjoy the walk. Take care now.
Me: Thank you, you too. Bye.

Sounds stupid and boring right? I was floored. Simple, and genuine, but I haven’t had it for weeks. Yay for small towns.

But the hike was nice, the first real nature seclusion I’ve had for a while. I had to scamper up a set of rocks next to the falls, which are pretty pitiful right now, since the real rain doesn’t come until October. On all fours, but then on top of this huge smooth rock where I sat for a long time, reading, getting a little sun, and eating lunch.

Right before I left, this younger guy came up and started the usual conversation (Which Country, and so on). But this guy really covered all his bases. He wanted to be my trekking guide, then he offered me a place to stay in town. Cigarette, lunch, tea. And having met no success with any of this, he finally offered to show me up to a hut in the woods where Nice Tamil Women were. 50 Rupees You Fuck. (Direct quote. In case you couldn’t tell.)

I didn’t know exactly how to respond. This clearly wasn’t the right place for me to launch a diatribe on the wrongs of prostitution, misogyny, and the sexism of Indian society. Or for me to ask exactly how it was that this guy was in a position to offer me the services of any women. He was about my age. There isn’t anything close to the volume for this to be a full-time gig, so was this his wife? His sister? Who knows.

I took the easy way out, pointed to the cheap silver ring I have had on since Dharamsala, and told the guy I was married. Which prompted another, different sales pitch, but one more easily refused.

Phew. I thought that was about enough of that place, pretty though it was, so I took off walking the long way back to town, in a loop around the lake. And, for the first time since I’ve been here, it really started raining. Hard.

Felt damn good though. I was pretty soaked, but my camera, books, and wallet were all in plastic bags in my pack, so it didn’t matter. Got quite a few strange looks, but then what’s new.

So I think that concludes my walking time in Kodai. Tonight I’m taking care of a last few errands in town, and tomorrow I’ll run in the morning and the take a bus to Madurai. Back to the hot weather, but not too many days of it, so it’ll be easy to enjoy.

The Lesser Sex

2004-08-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how to write this one, really. It’s way too big. Start with that, I guess. Like trying to write a course description.

WomStd 344, Gender and India: this seminar will examine the gender dynamics and politics of Indian society, sociologically, historically, literarily, and culturally.

Meaningless, really, this way of attacking a mammoth topic. And boring. But here, it isn’t. There are women everywhere. (Well, sort of. They’re kept indoors a lot, but enough of them make it out from time to time that in a country of a billion people, you still see a lot.) Some very not-small percentage of the world’s women live in India, amidst a culture that is at once both changing a lot and not changing at all. All of this stuff is incredibly in-your-face.

India’s contradictions are probably seen most harshly when looked at through a feminist lens. I’m not here long enough, or familiar enough with what I’m seeing, to do that. I won't really see anything close to the full picture, partially because of time, partially because of who I am as an observer, partially because there's so much I couldn't comprehend even if I spoke every one of these languages fluently and knew all of the cultural practices and idioms. But I’ve been reading nonfiction stuff on feminism in India and watching and getting tiny little snippets of what that kind of looking would resemble. Here are a few.

Dowry is still alive and well in India, even though it’s been illegal for decades. And no small thing, either. One tour guide told me that he is saving, now, for his daughter’s dowry. (Isn’t that sentence supposed to end with “daughter’s education” ?) She is 4. Her dowry will be something around Rs 400,000 (4 lakh, or about $10,000).

The message this sends, at least to me, is that a daughter is a burden, and you pay someone else’s family to take her off your hands. Like in baseball, where there’s a trade, and one team throws in some cash to even out the deal. Except there, it’s to make up the difference that another player would have made. With dowry, it’s the opposite – the receiving family gets the bride AND the money.

There have been continued reports of bride burning, or dowry murders. If the dowry amount isn’t deemed sufficient, a husband may threaten the bride. If this doesn’t work, from time to time there are cases in which he will pour gasoline over her and light it. Kitchen accident, the official report reads, though I suspect everyone really knows. Men have no problem remarrying. Women, in many cases, are shamed for life. Ridiculed and ostracized.

This message seems consistent with some other practices, too. Several newspapers have done features while I’ve been here on the dwindling female:male ratio of children in India. In some districts, it’s as low as 7 or 8 girls for every 10 boys. This comes from at least two practices that are different in nature but share some similar impulses.

Among India’s poor, female infanticide is not uncommon. Husbands want a son, an heir or a successor to the farm. Girls are a burden, and dowry is a crushing financial commitment. From time to time, word will arise of a woman (most recently, these reports have been coming from here in Tamil Nadu) killing a daughter in the first weeks or months of life.

Among the middle and upper classes in the big cities, it doesn’t get this far, thanks to medicine and technology. Ultrasonography has hit the big time in India, and you can guess why. Sex-selective abortion of female fetuses is rampant, even though it’s illegal to do an ultrasound for the purposes of sex determination (because of this practice). Doctors continue to do it. For these families, it may not be about dowry. But with the push for family planning in India, a general two-children-is-enough sentiment, female fetuses don’t fare well. It may not even be that the family would be upset at having a girl, or wouldn’t want one. (One. Not two.) But if you are committed to having two children, and the first is a girl, then the second one may take several pregnancies, if you know what I mean. (All those miscarriages! Imagine!) Tada! A boy. Two-boy families are considerably more desired than two-girl families, it seems. Even though the government is pushing research that children in two-girl families do comparatively well in life. On average, girls still lose out.

Misogyny is in many ways covert, but it’s palpable. The streets of India feel oppressively male in numbers. Women, for the most part, stay inside. This is especially true of Muslim women, even when they aren’t physically in a house. Even in 43-degree heat, they would be out in full black. Most have only their eyes visible. (But my, my, how expressive eyes become when they’re all you have. I can’t describe the looks I got from those women. What a range of emotions, all in about 4 square inches.) Some even cover their eyes, walking down the street with a solid black sheet over their head. I assume they could sort of see through the cloth, so they didn’t trip on a cow or cart or what have you.

In homes, women are still in charge. Well, nominally anyway. So long as they don’t screw up. I passed a yard yesterday with a woman washing dishes. She stood, and right as I was passing by (she wasn’t looking at me, though), she happened to drop the stack of dishes. Her husband was in the doorway, and I could feel her tense and look to him. He looked at me, looked at her, and she went to pick up the dishes. He lit a cigarette and went inside. I can only wonder what would have happened if I wasn’t watching, or after I left.

On TV and in movies, Indian women are still some hybrid of the Damsel in Distress + Sex Kitten + Mother Figure that comes in pieces in Hollywood’s history of exploitation.

Letters to the editor here come in the form of “Dear Sir –" (even, I assume, if there happened to be a female editor).

There are tons more of these kinds of things, most of which I probably haven't noticed. The problem, of course, is that everything I’ve said (and everything I haven't) is probably both right on target and completely false. The stereotype and the opposite. India is rushing into the future, changing rapidly, and at the same time not changing at all. It’s one of the country’s most endearing traits, and also one of its most disturbing.

Trickle-Down Crap

2004-08-05T05:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been noticing, throughout the trip, how much stuff here arrives by who-knows-what-means as the extras, castoffs, or scraps from the developed world. And not in an international-humanitarian-aid kind of way. In an accidental, leftover junk kind of way.

Today, I saw a man walking in the rain, wearing a shower cap with the Marriott logo on it. No doubt someone got their hands on a box of them and sold them as rain gear. I resisted the urge to compliment him on his nice hat.

There are jackets and shirts that say Green Bay Packers, Kentucky Wildcats, Virginia Tech. Even South Springfield High Voleyball. (No, I didn’t get that spelling wrong. I’m guessing the absence of the other “l” is why the sweatshirt was on a 75-year-old Tamil man instead of an adolescent blond girl.) And Stompers, West End Soccer Club. (Did the Stompers go belly-up? Or refuse to pay for their shirts? Or did they just change their minds about yellow as their team color?)

Such a random assortment. But interestingly, I haven’t seen anything with NASCAR written on it. I wonder – does that mean that the demand is so high for it in the US that no one can afford to let any of it slip through to these cheaper, tertiary markets?

You also see the more expected kinds of trickle-down detritus from all the Made In China (or wherever) junk that gets produced for the West. The extras, or the junk caught in between shipments, or whatever the case, ends up getting sent to places like India, to be unloaded for whatever it can bring.

Bootleg DVDs, knockoffs of major labels in watches, purses, suitcases, jackets, jewelry, and so on. Clothing made to look like Members Only jackets, Old Navy sweatshirts, Gap jeans. Visors made to look like a cartoon character’s face. Wooden snakes. Toy helicopters. Nail clippers. (Is that where the airport security guards send those things?)

It’s cold here, and there are dozens of kids selling fleece hats for Rs 10 each (that’s about 23 cents). Which means they got them for free. If they paid anything for them, they’d be charging more.

There’s no way I could try to explain to one of these kids why this strikes me as a demeaning circumstance. To the old woman why the Stone Cold Steve Austin sweatshirt she’s wearing might actually be embarrassing. (But then, what is embarrassment, really?)

There’s also stuff that may or may not be handed down, but is certainly inherited, in a not-exactly-informed kind of way. Motorcycles and cars here, when backing up, play music (instead of beeping like a garbage truck). For a reason that escapes my imagination, 90 percent of them seem to play “It’s A Small World.” You know, from Disneyworld. (Now there’s a socioeconomically and culturally biased reference for you. Put in on the SAT. Probably already there.)

Cell phone rings tones are similar. I don’t know whether to think they’re brought here in imitation of the West, a sort of half-knowing infatuation with American glitz. Or whether they too are the leftover junk, the models that didn’t sell in the US. I kid not, in Delhi I saw a woman old enough to be my grandmother answer her cell phone, ringing to the tune of “Back That Ass Up.” Surely she had no idea (right? please, please, tell me she didn’t know). I wasn’t about to explain it.

In the Mist

2004-08-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

One thing I can say that I am unequivocally in love with about India is the way it does fog. In the mountains, anyways. In Himachal Pradesh and in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the fog and mist have done things I’ve never seen before. There is a weight, and a dynamism to them, that catches my breath over and over..

Today, after getting home from a walk, I tried to take a picture of the trees right off my balcony hovering in the mist from the afternoon rain. I put my bag down, got out my camera, and . . . the trees were gone. White rug out from under them, covering them up.

It gets dense enough at times that it’s not even much use to call it fog or mist. It’s a cloud, and you’re in it. I put my feet up on the rail of the balcony as I started writing just now, and already there is a fuzziness to my feet. Okay, my legs are long, but they’re not that long. Half of me is in the chair, and half seems like it’s out there, starting to float away on a flimsy tether that, for the moment, still looks like my leg.

Kodai is a charming and pleasant little mountain town, centered around a sprawling lake with a footpath (imagine – a footpath!) where people walk and ride bikes while drinking chai and watching the boaters, rowing or cycle-paddling to nowhere much. There are lots of little narrow lanes and tidy gardens (even if there is a huge pile of trash and a goat just outside them).

I spent my first day mostly just walking around the town, enjoying the low season that has meant that I can do this without getting honked at or run off the road more than once per minute. I stopped inside a church – St. Thomas’s. Anglican, which here is C.S.I., or Church of South India. The British seem to have left a “Church of” clone everywhere they went. Mostly I was just taking a break from the rain. Though in a sense I could have defended it by calling it prayer if pushed (people seem strangely interested in knowing whether I am Christian or not; most of the time I just say yes, for simplicity). And it’s not far off, I guess. Though the right word is probably think. Or sit.

I ate fresh brown bread in the morning from a little health-food store, read the paper while watching the mountains, walked a lot, and stopped to look through a little art gallery in one of the back streets of town. I appear to be one of a very few Westerners in this place right now. [I think I got lucky, as the guidebook says don’t come in August, as it’s too hot, nearly as hot as the plains 2000 meters lower than us. Today the high was 15, low 10; in Madurai, the city I can see from my porch, it was about 38. Ugh.] But, there are evidently quite a few American, British, and Italian expats living here, many as full-time artists. Most of the work in the gallery (all local artists, the very friendly Indian employee told me) was labeled with a Caucasian-sounding surname. Though Christianity seems big here, so you never know.

In all, the town has a very British flavor to it, though not in the same way that most of the Raj hill stations do – namely, architecturally. Here, you don’t see it in the buildings as much as you do the tone and mood. Which, I’m sure, is partly due to the fact that I’ve hit Kodai at a time when it rains softly all day and the place is quiet and green. Cows and walking through rainy hedge-lined streets makes me almost feel like I am in fact in England. Except, of course, without the white people and the cuisine that stems from some historical equivalent of a frathouse dare. (Blood Sausage? Why Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?)

In fact, I had a real conversation with the owner of the little diner who made me dinner last night (yummy, and only $0.60 !). Minimal, to be sure, but he asked about Bush and Clinton and Saddam, and he was quite keen on telling me he is Muslim. Lovely, how touching the smallest things can be when you go without them for awhile.

Today, I walked about 30 kilometers to the edge of the restricted part of the forest and back. Rain all the way, but soft and pleasant, and at times, sunny at the same time. The incongruities were comforting, in a way. Sunglasses, bug spray, sunscreen, umbrella. Soaked through a thin cotton shirt, thoroughly chilled, and walking past coconut trees. And thick, thick fog, moving in and out the whole day. At times, I could see it coming, rolling towards me before it actually took me in. Wow.

It is not high season here, so everywhere I go, no matter if it looks like I’m actually headed someplace more than a few meters away or not, dozens of men ask me if I want a taxi. None of the vehicles are marked as such, some Ambassadors, vans, little Italian-looking econo-tincans. I suspect some of them aren’t really taxi drivers at all, but something else, for which business is also slow. I just shake my head and they move on.

But today, one of them was either a bit more patient or a bit more persistent than the others. It went a little something like this:

Him: Taxi, Sir?
Me: No, No.
Him: Sir, You Want Taxi?
Me: No, No, Thank You. [wave]
Him: Sir, You Want Taxi? Where You Going?
Me: Just walking, thank you. No Taxi.
Him: But, Sir, Where You Going?
Me: I’m not going anywhere, I’m just walking. Thank you, but no.

He wasn’t understanding that I wanted to just walk. He thought he wasn’t making his question clear enough. One last try.

“Sir, Where You Trying to Be?”

It took me a minute. What a wonderful way to put it. Broken English gets lucky sometimes.

“Right here,” I said. Right here.

Welcome to Tamil Nadu

2004-08-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

I'm now in Kodaikkanal (or Kodai), in the eastern half of the same general set of mountains I was in already. But now I'm in Tamil Nadu, which has involved an interesting set of (mis)communications already. All for the best, but they made the day interesting.

After watching India's incredibly shoddy performance last night in cricket against Sri Lanka, I got to bed and got on a bus this morning to head to Kodai. It started out like all bus rides I've had -- bumpy, slow (in terms of kilometers per hour, but still treacherous), and ass-numbing. (Seat cushions? What?) But fine. I was reading.

The only thing to make me uneasy was the fact that the bus I boarded was headed for a destination that wasn't on any of my maps, but that the conductor (and several other people I asked in town before leaving) told me was the place to get a connecting bus to Kodai. Fine, I thought. My map says I change in Teni, but this will work if it's where the bus is going.

The name is something like Bhatalakundu. I'm probably butchering it, but I still haven't seen it written anywhere, so who knows. It may, in fact, turn out to mean something like "Small Crossroads" in Tamil.

Because I'm riding along, waiting for some indication that the town I'm headed for is coming up.

At some point during this, the conductor came up to me and tried, I think, to have a conversation with me. But I can't really tell. He didn't speak much English, but was very strange and forward nonetheless. He kept moving closer and closer, and at one point, starting touching my face. I didn't know what to do. It wasn't like he was trying to come on to me, exactly. (That wouldn't really fly here anyway.) More like a petting zoo. The only words I could make out were "Kodai" and "Jesus."

I don't know. Normally I would either slap the guy's hand away or just move somewhere else. But on a crowded bus, you don't really get to do either to the guy in uniform. Weird.

Anyways, he went away. Riding along, riding along. No signs as far as I can tell, but only some of them are in English, so maybe we're almost there. No problem -- if it's the major changing point for Kodai, it will involve at least a 5 minute stop, like all the other medium-sized towns we hit.

Nope.

Suddenly I see a sign that says Kodai, Left. And the driver looks over at me, to see if I'm going. He acknowledges me. Kodai, I ask? He nods. He does not, however, pause.

I jump up, grab my bag, and start trying to force my way through the jumble of people to the door, before the bus takes off. Which it does.

My first real exit from a moving bus, action-movie-style. (The driver saw me. Maybe it was for fun. Who knows.)

But I'm ok. (Thank you, thank you.) And I actually managed something of a fluid motion onto the next bus, which was pulling away as I hit the ground. I jumped on that one, too. Not graceful, exactly, but it worked. With the only exception of the fact that this bus was completely full, and the ceilings are about 5'9" tall, it was a fine ride.

After lots more switchbacks over more staggeringly pretty mountain valleys (tropical, still, and drier this time), we got to Kodai. I have a really pretty place to stay, for fairly cheap, with a balcony overlooking a gorgeous valley. I think I'll stay for a few days and get some hiking in.

If I can ever figure out how to do that, anyway. I went asking about hiking maps, and got sent in a loop of three places (Tourist Office, Forest Office, Bookstore), all of which kept referring me to the other. So maybe I'll just start walking. In any event, it's pleasant, there's a nice little health food store selling homemade peanut butter, jam, and bread (and tofu! tofu! if only I had a stove), and I can wake up every morning and read while looking 3000 feet down and 60 miles straight southeast. Can't beat that.

Tigers & Elephants

2004-08-01T04:57:00.000-07:00

Saturday the bus brought me to Kumily, near the eastern edge of Kerala, home of the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. After a brief adventure with the hotel that I had booked (4 times more expensive than they said over the phone and completely empty, so they were using it as an opportunity to do some very noisy renovations – bailing on it wasn’t a problem except that it was 4 kilometers deep into the sanctuary, with no autos for the return trip), I walked myself back to town and found a nice little place to stay. A bamboo cottage all to myself overlooking the preserve, for about $5 a night. Yippee. Plus it would be my first night under mosquito netting. How exotic.

I walked around town a bit, did some birdwatching from the bamboo watchtower that came as part of my cottage deal at dusk, had some dinner, and then read before bed. Nice and relaxing.

Sunday, I embarked on into the sanctuary on what I thought would be a day of wilderness and wildlife. Little did I know.

In the morning, after being charged 3 times what the guidebook said the park entrance fee was (it’s harder to haggle with a guy in a uniform, holding a weapon) I went on an illegal hike through the sanctuary. Which, as a result, was shorter than I would have liked. But so it is. Evidently trekking here is illegal except for the Government Approved Treks, which come in two flavors. Group walks (you can choose from Nature Walk, Jungle Tour, or Bamboo Forest Protection Walk), in groups of 10-15 plus guides. Or hiring your own guides, which work for up to 5 people. But since I am by myself, it would be me paying two guides (one for narration, one for geographical guidance) to walk around with me for the day. Hiking with paid servants isn’t really my idea of a good time.

So I went for a shorter walk and managed not to get caught. And I got away with not paying the extra Rs. 100 for the privilege of bringing a camera into the park (only applicable to foreign tourists, who pay 500 percent more for their entrance fee already. Ridiculous.) Pretty walk, but basically just a nice walk in the woods. A few birds, some mosquitoes, and me.

In the afternoon, I gave in and signed up for the tourist boat tour of the lake, which is supposedly the best way to actually see wildlife. The boat does a 90-minute path through the 8 or 9 major fingers of the man-made lake, providing the best access to the shoreline (where lots of the animals can often be found) that you can get in a short time.

It turned out, though, to be more interesting as a cultural experience than a zoological one. Largely because it was Sunday, the only consistent non-working day in India (some people take Saturday off, but many don’t). So it was me and several busloads of Indian tourists for the trip. Good job, Bryan.

To start off the day, I actually scraped my elbow on the “Please Q Here” sign next to the boat, during the stampede to board. No kidding. A tiny little gate, and this sign (in English only, I noted), and about 150 men, women, and children, all shoving and elbowing like mad to get on the boat.

Once loaded, the group of us (yes, once again, the only white face) took off on a double-decker boat and chugged really, really slowly through the water. Talking and laughing (and eating, oh, the eating) made more noise than the diesel engine. The whole experience resembled a poorly organized third grade field trip to the zoo. Only most of us were older than 9, and the concentration of wildlife was considerably lower.

What animals we saw, though, created quite a fuss. Before now, I’ve never experienced anything quite like the feeling of having a large number of people speaking in another language all jump to their feet and start, literally, Screaming. I look, and there is a bird, or maybe two. A little, black, not very interesting one, 200 feet off one side of the boat.

This pattern of sound happened over and over, and the rhythm started to become familiar. It changed only twice, when the roar of the crowd, as if it was starting an attempt at The Wave at a ballgame, was preceded by a soft thud on the left side of my face, when the fellow sitting next to me was the first one to spot the animal in question. Right arm shoots out (yes, silly me, my face was in the way).

“Look!” [I’m translating from a language I don’t speak, so I might be a bit off here, but it’s close.] “Ohmygoditsabird!”

No elephants or tigers. Big shock. If I was an elephant or a tiger, I think I’d arrange to be somewhere else, too.

But Wait. Up there. On the hillside.

Ohmygoditsanelephant!

NOITSAWHOLEHERD! Of wild elephants!

Well, in whatever sense of the word elephants in a government sanctuary around a man-made lake can be considered “wild,” at least more so than those in a zoo.

To think, the risk of getting trampled may actually be greater down here.

OK, OK. Enough sarcasm. It really is a beautiful place, and seeing elephants on a hillside, in a sort of Green Hills of Africa kind of picture, without a saddle for “rides” on their backs, is something of a majestic sight, no matter how controlled.

But, I think this will do for now. We’ve also seen lots of antelope, otter, wild boar, birds, and some fish jumping. No tigers, but oh well.

I think it’s time to head onwards to Tamil Nadu.

Good & Bad

2004-07-31T03:29:00.000-07:00

Once you're in the mountains, without the slow but relatively steady and comfortable transport of trains, travel involves a lot of time on buses that lurch back and forth too much to really allow for reading. Not to mention the fact that the book would usually need to be in a position already occupied by some appendage (or even core body part) of a person standing, sitting, or perched-somewhere-in-between Somewhere Very Near You.

So, that time ends up involving a combination of trying really hard not to have to use the bathroom (what bathroom?) and thinking. Some of which is -- thinking, that is -- neither interesting enough nor public enough to put on a website. But maybe some of it is. If not, at least I haven't killed any trees in the process.

This was early this morning, catching a 6 am bus to Kumily, where the wildlife sanctuary is.

I waffle a lot between feeling upbeat and feeling frustrated by this place. India, I mean. (Few people here probably think of place this way. That large.)

At times, I feel like the interactions here are incredibly demeaning and crude. That to these people, I am basically either a curiosity, to be oogled at, or a dollar sign, and all encounters, especially if they start off congenially enough, are all destined for either ridicule or the Bottom Line. At others, I think I want to see things differently, in more human and judgmentally generous terms.

Probably a large part of that is me wanting to fall back on a set of assumptions (nearly all of which were born and raised in the cushiness of the upper-middle-class U.S.) that give people the benefit of the doubt, that attribute ill-will and rudeness on the part of people (at least on average) to some structural or social problem and not to personal malice. Surely the dynamics of poverty and the gaps between haves (or Have More-s, to use our esteemed president's phrase) and have-nots could be responsible for a lot of what I'm seeing.

There's also the staggering contrast between how I'm treated on the street, particuarly in tourist towns, and how I'm treated when I'm the guest of someone's family. The family is such a powerful social unit here that it seems, at times, like anyone within it is royalty and anyone outside it can go fuck themselves. (Pardon my language, but it's what I mean.)

I am aware, too, that the U.S-developing country dynamics are such that my presence certainly has the potential to bring out the worst in people. The glimpses I'm getting into people's lives are not representative. My guess is that when I'm not around, many of the ones who rub me the wrong way are quite wonderful people.

I went for a run in a park in Bangalore, and a fairly well-dressed guy (expensive athletic gear) stopped me next to the running track. (A running track! I know, I know.) Only at the end of a several-minute conversation about running, and avoiding the pounds often added by middle age, and so on, did the guy mention that he had a shop in town with Very Nice Handicrafts and wouldn't I like to come by and visit. I was polite and ended the conversation, but I was pissed. I felt duped.

Same with the kids playing cricket in Munnar. Were they just having fun, generously wanting to welcome a visitor into the game? Or were they just after something?

But I doubt the guy goes running in the morning to drum up business for his store. I was the only tourist there, so it wouldn't be a very good use of his time. Rather, I suspect that it was an opportunism thing. Which he didn't think of as rude, just good business when you are lucky enough to stumble upon a visitor from a wealthy land while you're out trying to burn off the morning ghee-load.

Other exchanges don't turn out to be about money, but they are no less humiliating. The only two phrases people here with less than fluent English (and I'm not, as a monolinguist, knocking them) know to initiate conversation is, "You Are Coming From?" or "You Are From Which Country?" Variations on this include:

a. Hello Friend, You Are From Which Country?
b. Hello. Hello. HELLO. HELLO! HELLO!!! [continue ad infinitum until you respond, then followed by the above]
c. [Whistle or Grunt, followed by the above]

At first, this seems nice enough. But after several hundred repetitions of this opening line, I've learned a couple of things. One, this is often the prelude to a sales pitch. Which I've already said. Two, if it isn't, then another familiar pattern usually follows. This is particularly common if the person speaking is part of a group, especially a group of young people (young men, I mean. young women don't really seem to get out much, and they certainly don't talk to foreign white guys, if they do).

These people usually exchange a couple of phrases with me, and then, within a few seconds of the exchange ending, burst into laughter, smirks, or whatever. I, of course, don't know what they're saying, but they're obviously making fun of me and having a good time at it. Which is all well and good, I suppose. But really, really immature and condescending. (A criticism I guess, as an American, I should be careful slinging around.)

The phrase basically implies (and again, this seems really trivial until you go through several hundred repetitions of it) that the conversation isn't driven by any genuine interest, any real desire to have a dialogue, even a language-barrier-limited one. Instead it is, I've come to think, a prompt. Password, please. Fill in the blank. If I don't respond, often they will start throwing multiple choice answers at me. (The U.S. is never the first guess, I assume because so few Americans come here. Or anywhere, really, compared to Europeans and Israelis.)

If I do answer, there may be one or two follow up questions, but no deeper, and no reciprocation, even if I pull after it. It seems like they've gotten what they want -- the stamp for the collection, the license plate. "I got USA today!" I can imagine the literal translation going.

This, or something like it, is how I make sense of the snickering, the laughing after I turn away. I'm not a person they've met, I'm an ad, a pair of Nikes and some sunglasses, a walking embodiment of this shimmering commercial they saw on TV. It doesn't seem to go any further than that, so they don't think it at all rude to react that way. Once or twice, I've shown myself to be visibly bothered when they start laughing and pointing at me, and they freeze. They are totally taken aback. I can't explain my criticism, but it's clearly not a normal scene of teasing, where the receiver getting flustered is part of the fun.

Before and after these kinds of moments, there is staring, lots of staring. When I go for a run, it's worse. Stare, stare, stare.

Stare.

I have learned to run and walk through people without looking at anyone. Without meeting anyone's eyes. Which I hate. I ran right past two Aussies that were staying near me yesterday, and they were kind of offended. We tried to say hi, they said. Sorry, I tried to explain. I have learned not to respond to anything when I'm trying to get from one place to another.

All of these kinds of exchanges take so much out of me. I don't want to hold anything against any of these individual people, because it's too common to ascribe to them not being nice. It's a product, I must think, of complex dynamics between our countries that I don't understand, but that stand in the way of an honest dialogue without an agenda.

But other times, the times when I'm closest to being a fly on the wall, I am touched by what I see. How human it is, how fundamentally the same, in such a foreign place.

Why is it that laughter looks and sounds the same in any language? And kids, at the age where they just look at you, don't wave back or turn away, just look. Completely open. (And so different from staring.)

I walked to the bus station before dawn this morning, in the cold, wet air of the Munnar hills at 5:30 am. I smiled at a few people just barely awake, at their tea stalls along the side of the road. Those shared shivers in the morning dimness, the "Cold, isn't it?" that passes between people at that hour, even if they don't speak. This small-town kind of communication that, here, goes unsaid (at least with me), but that has a connection all the same.

Watching 4 men push a broken down auto together, even though there are way too many drivers here for the business, and they compete for the few tourists who are here right now. The bus driver putting my bag, carefully, in a corner of the bus where it won't get wet, then taking time to dust off his dashboard with a crumpled up newspaper before starting his 12-hour day of driving.

I like this time of day. It limits people to a more straightforward version of who they are. The vulnerable, bleary, tired but unadorned look on people's faces as they get going, doing whatever it is they do or don't do.

At times like this, I am aware that I am trying, hard, not to judge these people poorly, but I think of music (which I am missing, terribly). In an Indian raga, as in jazz, you can only hear the departures once you realize, appreciate, internalize the fundamental core, the structure that goes unchanged. Only then can you see the otherness, the differences, the variations, for what they are. Before that, it just seems incomprehensible, chaotic.

I don't speak any of those languages (American jazz, Indian classical music, cross-cultural humanity) well enough to do that yet, but it is at times like this that I feel most hopeful about those ways of speaking.

Munnar

2004-07-30T03:29:00.000-07:00

Nagendra and I finished up our time in Kochi and woke Thursday morning to another downpour. It was still dark, and we got on the 6:00 am bus to Munnar, in the hills of eastern Kerala. The bus ride was another laughable You-Call-This-A-Bus? kind of experience (no windows, for instance, just accordion-fold faux-leather flaps to sort of keep out the rain), but we got to Munnar by midday. The ride up the mountain switchbacks was incredible, but very different from the mountains up north. There's something kind of odd to my American brain about seeing mountains covered in coconut and banana trees.

And boy, is it wet here. We asked about this. On several occasions, the conversation went something like this:

Us: Does it rain like this all day?
Local Person: Tssk, it is rainy season, no?
Us: Yes, but does it rain all day, or morning only?
Local: It is rainy season. We call monsoon.
Us: Yes, but....nevermind.

You might say that exchanges like this have caused us to question, at least a little bit, our previous tour guide's contention that 99 percent of Keralans get trilingual education through 12th grade. The English part anyway. Usually, there are a few words at adequate command, but past that, it may be pushing it. In retrospect, one conversation was a bit more revealing than it seemed at the time.

Nagendra: [after several back and forth exchanges of small talk with a small restaurant owner] Yes, well nice chatting with you. Your English is quite good. We have met lots of people who speak well.
Guy: [blank look]
Nagendra: People speak English very well here.
Guy: [blank look, pause] Yes, OK. No problem. [walks away]

So much for that.

But on the whole, these people are incredibly friendly. Anyways, it turns out that it rains like this, that is, steadily but not that hard, much of the time but not without respite. We checked into a hotel (the only guests in the place, it turns out -- evidently monsoon is not when most visitors, typically honeymooners, rarely foreign tourists, come), and then took off for a walk across the river and the town's main dam, past some truly incredible viewpoints and overlooks of the mountains, and through a region of luxury getaway resort type places, with cottages for the honeymooning type.

The mountains are lush, lush, lush, and sopping wet. Tea is the main crop up at this kind of altitude (about 1600 m), almost all of which belongs to TATA, one of India's largest, one-hand-in-every-industry conglomerates. The tea hills are a brilliant green of rolling rows of tea plants, which cut a pattern into the landscape something like honeycomb that has been straightened out into a grid (not the hexagonal angles) such that the hillside looks terraced, even though it isn't. We climbed up one tea hill, only to find two women tea-pickers (why they are all women, we can't tell, but enquiring into this phenomenon produced a similarly Abbott-and-Costello-like exchange, given our lack of proficiency in Malayalam) calling up to us while holding machetes. Gulp. No trespassing.

Nothing to fear, though. They were bubbly and sociable, and just wanted to have their pictures taken with us. One was quite eager to show off, even pulling her gold chains from beneath her sweater and plastic bag (the tea-pickers work with heavy-duty plastic bags tied around their heads and torsos) and putting a red bindhi on her head even though she volunteered the information that she was 43 and unmarried.

More walking, through dense mist and coconut trees on steep hillsides. Gorgeous, gorgeous. After a couple hours of walking through this kind of terrain, and trying our best to take a picture or two that would do it even a little justice, we stopped at one of the resorts to have tea. We ended up staying for several hours, playing ping-pong and carrom board (a finger-powered game somewhat like billiards) until the worst of the rain subsided.

We got back to town just at dark, managed to find something for dinner amidst the deserted shops (this is REALLY not high season here), and cleaned up via the hot water that the porter brought up to our room in a bucket. The power started cycling on and off in about 30-second intervals at around 9pm, so we took the hint and got to sleep early.

Today we woke to more rain, had breakfast, and then walked into the main part of town -- less sleepy, dirtier, and less scenic. On the way, a group of 7- or 8-year old boys stopped us, enthusiastically pulling us towards a field to join their cricket game. We each had a whack or two at the ball, joked around for a few minutes, and then took off, having been talked out of a hat, some photos, and a bottle of water. The water ended up getting spit at us as we walked away, which left us unsure of whether we had just been part of a good-natured encounter with well-meaning kids or scammed by a bunch of pretty slick youngsters eager to make fun of the white guy.

After getting to town, we arranged to be taken to Eravikulam National Park, home to the world's last remaining significant population of Nildiri Tahr mountain goats. It was raining fairly hard, and we took a steep, potholed road up the switchbacks to get to the park. The mist was incredibly dense, and while we could see some beautiful waterfalls and the ledge of the trails that looked like you really could step off the edge of the world, no goats were to be seen. It is rainy season, no? Guess so. This appears to be an answer to quite a few seemingly legitimate questions.

We wandered around town in the afternoon and I went for a nice run at sunset, followed by the best lady finger curry (okra) I've ever had. Tonight we'll get ready to part ways, Nagendra going back to Hyderabad to spend some time with his
family, me going on to a couple more spots in the hills. I'll meet back up
with him in Hyderabad to stay for a day or two on my way to Mumbai to fly
away.

God's Own Country

2004-07-28T06:13:00.000-07:00

We left Bangalore and arrived the next morning (Tuesday) in Cochin, a.k.a. Kochi, in Kerala, the state in which The God of Small Things is set, on the western side of India's southernmost tip. It was pouring rain and quiet.

After getting our things situated in a hotel in Ernakulam, the "modernized" center of the city, we walked to the main jetty to catch a ferry over to the peninsula where Fort Cochin and Mattancherry are, the older and more interesting parts of the city. After a short ferry ride across gray water surrounded by the hallmark coconut trees and lush greenery, we arrived in the old city. Turned out to be quite small -- very walkable, end to end.

Kerala has one of the more interesting histories of any state in India. Numerous Europeans made their mark here, and as a result, many of the state's people have been Christians for several hundred years. Hence some beautiful churches, women in nun's habits, and lots of crosses hanging around the necks of lean, stringy men otherwise wearing only lunghis, the standard-wear male clothing, essentially a skirt.

The state is also, arguably, the country's most politically aware, active, and radical. The communist party has been active here for decades, and is responsible for some of the major differences in social structures that are here. We passed a socialist demonstration within our first hour in the city, involving something involving feminist activism, and though I would have loved to know what the deal was, alas, not in English. But we gradually heard about some of the effects that the socialist elements here have had on the state. Land reforms mean that nearly everyone owns land, instead of answering to a landlord, and the population is suprisingly educated. At one point, we were told that 99 percent of people finish 12th grade. That's a little high, but you get the idea. Almost everyone we ran into speaks at least some English.

The waterfront is lined with Chinese fishing nets, these large contraptions of long wooden poles at triangular posts to each other that lower into the water, counterbalanced by rocks tied to the back end of the pole (across a fulcrum point). The men walk out on the beams, lowering them and the fishing nets attached to them into the water. Then they reverse the process after some time to harvest their catch. If you want, you can buy a fish fresh out of the water and have it fried up on the spot. [This is hard to describe, I know. I have pictures.]

We walked through the town for the rest of the afternoon, stopping at churches, a bookstore, several art galleries, brushed off a really annoyingly pushy and fat guy from Long Island, whose idea of conversation evidently stems from watching criminal cross-examinations, and saw the beginnings of the sunset before heading to a Kathakali performance, the best-known traditional form of Keralan dance theatre. (Katha = story, Kali = play ; I'm not being didactic here, the host explained this in a tone of voice that nearly had me rolling in the aisle...sorry, had to be there.) Real recitals take place from about 10 pm to dawn outside, on temple holidays. We just got a 90 minute sample of the art.

The performers get into elaborate costume with full face paint and go through an incredibly demanding series of body movements and positions, all of which have both storytelling significance and visual coherence just as elements of dance. Everything is quite precise, with the facial and eye movements comprising a large portion of the draining routine.

[CONFESSION: at one point during the routine, the thought flashed through my head, before I could squash it, that, without a doubt, Cranial Nerves III, IV, VI, VII, XI, and XII were in tact. Sick, I know. Forgive me.]

I know I'm missing 90 percent of the meaning, but it's still really impressive. I'd love to actually study this sometime and get more out of it. They tell us that there are 101 stories, each of which takes a full night to enact, so something like 800 hours of performance in the tradition. That'd keep me busy for a while.

We came home to see the end of the India-Sri Lanka cricket match, which came down to the last ball. India won by only 4 runs. Very exciting. Now, even with 2 prior losses, they get into the finals of the Asia Cup to play Sri Lanka again. There is drama even in 8-hour matches.

Today we got up early to go on a tour of the Keralan backwaters, the brackish series of canals and river-like inlets of water that run up and down much of the coastline, behind a strip of land that meets the Arabian Sea. We booked ourselves for a 7-hour trip -- very touristy, unfortunatley, but still much fun.

The morning was on a large, covered houseboat of heavy wood (from the jackfruit tree, we were told), powered by a tiny little outboard motor. We rode about an hour through coconut and banana trees, past men in similar (uncovered) boats loading them down with sand. Sand harvesting, it seems, is a widespread though illegal industry here, for the river-bottom sand works better than other sources for making building materials. These guys moor their boats, dive down about 10 meters with a wicker basket, and bring up a load of sand. Throw it in the boat, and back down again. Over and over. When the boat is so loaded down that its rim is right at the water line, they pole it home, unload the sand (in the water near their house, so the police don't see a big mound), and go again. Then somehow they sell it off. Not an ounce of fat on most of them, and even the ones with solid gray hair had tight muscles and tendons everywhere. They could be anatomy models, even while alive.

We stopped at a family's house where we saw vanilla, rubber, nutmeg, cinnamon, cashew, mango, coconut, tamarind, cocoa, and coffee plants/trees. They cook some of the best food in the world with plants that grow within 10 meters of their porch. Life in this whole area seems simple but comfortable, humid, and relaxed. Everyone we encountered was extremely friendly, and they didn't have the edge in their eyes that a lot of people I've seen (and been stared at by) have had. Over and over, small kids ran, yelling and smiling to the water's edge to wave at us and say hello. Genuine. Not, Come Here and Look at My Goods For Sale. Just, Hello. Nice to See You.

[OK, maybe this isn't quite right. Maybe it was more like, Look At the Funny Looking White People, Ha Ha Ha Ha. But let me believe.]

We rode back on the boat to our starting point, had a good lunch on the boat, and then drove to a put-in point for the afternoon ride, on smaller, uncovered, hand-poled canoe type things through much narrower canals. We stopped to see a man shimmy up a coconut tree to drop us down fresh fruit to drink from, women weaving coconut husks into tough, durable rope, and lots of small landowners living in close proximity to each other, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Nearly every house has running water, electricity, and a television (most have cable), even if they don't have road access. Good education is the standard, in Malayalam, English, and Hindi. People seem happy, and more relaxed than anywhere else I've been.

We got back to the city this evening, and I went for a good, really tiring run to a stadium to do stair-sprints. Proof of how little real exercise I've gotten here. (Boy, did they think I was crazy for doing that one. What is that loony foreigner doing?)

Tomorrow, Nagendra and I go to Munnar, in the hills of Kerala, east of where we are now.

153 for 4 with 25.3 overs...huh?

2004-07-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

So yesterday marked my true initiation into the somewhat baffling and very patient world of international cricket -- my first full, beginning-to-end match. Well, my first one-day match (ODI); some are 5 days long.

India lost pretty handily to Pakistan (shame, shame), and Nagendra was quite patient explaining all of the rules to me. Which I won't embarass myself by trying to repeat or explain here. But it's similar to baseball in a lot of ways, not only in the rules and the objectives, but also the pace, the complexity of the rules and terminology, the necessity of drinking beer and/or having someone interesting to talk to while watching, else you suffocate from boredom.

More than anything, it strikes me as a very mental game, much more in your head than in your bat or throwing arm. American football is almost at the opposite end of the spectrum for a team sport. Everyone has a very specific and well-defined job to do, and they don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Just do it. The coach, and sometimes the quarterback, are exceptions -- for them, it's largely a mind game. But for the most part, who wins is about who has better talent and who executes.

Cricket, like baseball, puts the mind game in each player's head. With such a long game, it's seems incredibly easy to psyche yourself out, to start trying to Not Lose instead of trying to Win. Four hours (one inning, or half a match), is a long time to try and pace yourself, to think too much or too hard about what you're doing, how you're using your balls, etc. [Unlike the 5-day matches, the 1-day format involves what amounts to a clock -- a limited number of balls, or pitches, thrown. No penalty for not hitting a ball hard, or even hitting it at all. But the ball count ratchets up, and if you're behind, aiming for a certain number of runs, it loads up on the pressure.] India was batting second ("chasing"), and they didn't handle that pressure well at all. But they got beat because they lost the mental game, not because they were outmatched physically.

At any rate, a lot of fun. Should do it again.

Bangalore and Mysore

2004-07-24T02:42:00.000-07:00

Bangalore is India's high-tech center, a Silicon Valley of sorts. Lots of Western stores with the fashionable labels of New York and Paris, at pretty much the same prices.

Here they generally speak Kannada (which, Nagendra corrects me, sounds very different from the word Canada -- I'm bungling this terribly when I try to repeat after him), but also Hindi, Telagu, Tamil, and English. Mind-boggling.

Thursday we went to the ISKCON temple, a huge, new temple built by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, which I didn't realize until we arrived meant the Hare Krishnas of airport-flower-gifts fame. It's something like a theme park, with security at the entry (no shoes or cameras allowed), a long sequence of gates and roped-off walkways to guide you through the temple complex, and lots and lots of official vendors of books, religious paintings, handicrafts, and so on, all to benefit Krishna. And/or his followers, depending on how you look at it. All Major Credit Cards Accepted.

The entry involves a series of 108 tiles, weaving back and forth in switchbacks and then up a series of stairs. On each tile, you stop and chant one repetition of this:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

whih is something like an homage to the name of the deity. Evidently, 108 is considered an auspicious number, which is interesting and everthing, but a bit high. But I'm entertained by the older gentleman in front of me, who can't seem to get the timing right of moving from one step to another. Every few tiles, he is so far off that he has to wait it out through whatever remains of the repetition before he moves on. [For once, it wasn't the white guy fucking up the rhythm.] Until he moved, I couldn't. So I guess I actually said the chant more than 108 times. I hope that's OK.

Inside the temple is amazingly ornate and elaborate. Gold everywhere, gorgeous marble and granite stone, through a series of smaller shrines and statues until we get to the main temple, where a large crowd sits in front of a series of three gleaming gold deities. It turns out that as we are making our way through the room, the evening prayer service starts, so we find ourselves staying. An intricate ceremony with the priests (shaved heads except for a "tail" of hair at the top-back, and all men) blowing conch shells, waving incense in detailed patterns in the air in front of the altars, music and chanting.

It's largely baffling, but still quite fascinating. As the crowd joins in with the chanting and clapping, accelerating towards a climax, I think to myself how, in a way, this is like a sporting event. Come to the temple in the evening, with your family. Buy some food and souvenirs, and engage in a collective activity that is loaded with internal meaning but, to someone who doesn't understand the beliefs, the rules of the game, just looks like a popular social event. An exercise in cohesion and energy, without knowing what the larger meanings are supposed to be. Not a bad way to spend the evening, I suppose.

Lots of the time in Bangalore has been laid back. Shopping, chatting with Nagendra's extended family (some of whom he's meeting for the first time), walking around downtown.

Today, I am in Mysore, a city 160 km to the southwest that is known for its sandalwood, jasmine, incense, and silk. Wonderful, all of it. But lots of other people have heard this, too. This might be the most tourist-centered city I've been in so far. The Maharaja's Palace is staggeringly ostentatious, in high-British palatial fashion, with formal gardens, stained glass windows, and gold on everything. God knows how many people it took to build this place, with so much detail. I can't quite get into it, though, as I'm elbowing for standing room with the busloads of Indian tourists throughout the walk-through of the palace. Walking around afterwards in the palace grounds is much more rewarding, and almost as pretty.

I'll go back to Bangalore tonight, and tomorrow we're supposed to watch India play Pakistan in cricket. I'm still learning the rules, but it's starting to make some sense. Then on Monday night Nagendra and I head to Kerala.

The South

2004-07-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

After a few days, I'm starting to get used to being in the southern part of India, which often gets referred to as The South. This phrase has so much preexisting baggage for me, good and bad, as a result of growing up in the American South. Which, until recently, was, at least to me, unambiguously The South. As in The South Will Rise Again (quite a few of my high school classmates, some of whom backed this prophetic pearl with the flags and gun racks in their trucks -- really). Or as in The South is a State of Mind (my high school Southern Studies teacher -- again, really).

Here, The South is much older and quite a bit more complex, home to at least 5 different states and at least that many official languages, all from a different linguistic tradition from Hindi -- Dravidian, not Sanskrit. The food is different, and surprisingly, the heat has largely subsided.

I've come to Hyderabad, where Nagendra, my roommate last year at Stanford, has come to see his parents. I've been with them for a few days, staying in their flat in the heavily Muslim part of the city, where women rarely show more than their eyes to the world. And that's only if they have to venture out of doors, which entails the heavy black cloth that, I imagine, makes them be quick about their errands, with the sun watching.

Being around a family, is, as always, wonderfully endearing. Such warm, polite, and generous people. Couldn't be further from the experience I have on the street. Nagendra doesn't believe me when I talk about how people stare, stare, stare, and how rude I find it, until we walk around town together. And even then, it's not anywhere near as bad as when I'm by myself.

These days have been relaxing, and full of lots and lots of home-cooked food. We went to a mosque and to see architecture in the old part of the city. Once, yesterday, I tried to go for a run, through this Muslim neighborhood as the schoolchildren were leaving in the morning. It didn't work very well. But perhaps it was entertaining.

Six Inches to the Ceiling

2004-07-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

i am in hyderabad with nagendra and his family. we're going to hang out here for a few days, then head farther south.

some random thoughts after spending about 41 of the last 48 hours on the train...

even as i padlock my bags to the bottom of this seat, with a bulky metal chain and a padlock brought from home (much sturdier than anything available here), i think there's something quite comforting about traveling with everything that's really important to me in the world, possession-wise, physically part of me. my body, my airline ticket home, my passport. everything else, really, is negotiable. clothes, soap, gifts, books. all nice, but i can sleep all right, and if someone wants to cut through that chain, go ahead, as long as they leave me up here in my bunk, nose-nudging the ceiling. i'll be ok.

---

what i wouldn't give for a clean, crisp salad right about now.....that's about the only thing i can't find a safe version of here (has to be peeled or soaked in iodine/potassium permangenate. not happening).

---

i am still uncomfortable with the whole idea of servants in this culture. i'm not used to, nor can i seem to get used to, grown men and women acting, essentially, as my slaves. getting to the train carrying your own bags is a huge hassle if you don't employ one of the porters to carry them for you. normally i wouldn't think of paying someone to do that -- it seems so condescending. but it's almost the reverse if i buck the system.

but then, what really gets me uneasy is when he tries to rip me off. they are unionized and i know the set rates for porters, they're posted everywhere. so when i try to give the guy double what i owe him, cause it's really f-ing hot and this 50-year old guy, who i still can't stop addressing as "sir" is carrying my two, heavy bags. and he tries to tell me that the rates are 10 times what they are. so now i feel doubly awful when i stand up for myself.

(i know. whine whine, boo hoo, it's a cruel damn world, poor poor me. i know.)

----

i hear the businessmen in the next compartment talking about me, but they're doing it in hindi, and i catch only the english phrases sprinkled in. "Belongs to....Australia?" one says. "Belongs to...Germany." says another.

i am speechless. i'm not sure i want to be owned by any place in that sort of way. yes, of course i want to belong, but to another person or a few people or maybe even a small place, like a home or a town. not to a country.

i don't say anything. they don't initiate conversation. (and they don't guess the U.S. either.)

-----

there is so much about this culture that i won't see or understand by being here. it's sort of a Uncertainty Principle of Tourism -- you ruin the chance of observing something simply by being there, being a visible, and hyper-conspicuous, observer.

-------

Male Seat? (June 18)

2004-07-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

The transportation adventures continue. I left Dharamsala/Mcleodganj yesterday afternoon, heading towards Pathankot (just over the border in Punjab) to catch a train back to Delhi, on my way south.

I asked several days in advance if I could buy a ticket, and they told me, several times, No Problem Sir Don't Worry. Not many people go to Pathankot, no need to buy ticket now.

Right.

This trip made the ride up from Shimla look like a luxury cruise. I still bought two seats (KB, good advice, by the way), which is enough, at least after the 8th or 9th request, to get the porters off my back about putting my bags on the roof. Which wouldn't be that different from saying, Yes, please, throw my stuff into that ravine. I don't want it. It was too heavy anyway.

But of course, according to the Official Indian Conception of Personal Space (read: personal what?), purchasing a seat on a bus, or anywher else for that matter, does not actually entitle you to any physical space, on or off the bus. It simply puts you in better jostling position. This means that any space occupied by your body at any point in time should only be considerd provisionally occupied. If anyone else wants to place any part of their body (or their bag, umbrella, ear of roasted corn on the cob, etc.) in that same space, they are entitled to do so, without any advance warning or post-facto apology.

(You know, with all customs and ideas that the British forced on the Indian population, couldn't they have managed to import the practice of queuing? It would have been far more helpful than most of their colonial oppressions turned out to be.)

Our bus had 44 seats on it, all bench style with no padding, just some vinyl coverings. As soon as we got on the bus, I could tell that the "Not many people go to Pathankot" line was a bit off, but it didn't look too crowded. I started to sit down, when an assembly line of guys holding burlap bags threw a few of them on my lap and said "Male Seat." Hmm, I've heard of Ladies Carriages on trains, but that's so they don't get stared at or groped when they're traveling by themselves. (By the way, sexual harassment is called "eve-teasing" here. I have no idea.) But never heard of a Male Seat. Oh well, lucky me.

No, the bags kept coming, and they kept yelling at me. Mail Seat, I soon figured out. 12 of the 44 seats on the bus were reserved for the mail parcels, piled high to the ceiling and necessitating a guarding push every time we went around a sharp curve. Which left whatever, 32 seats for the 75 or so passengers. Bully.

Well, we were full. I braced myself, and thought, well, at least no one's going anywhere. I can settle down for the ride. Wrong again. The conductor walked (crowd-surfed?) up and down the aisle at every stop, invariably clocking me in the back of the head with his elbow every time. But that's not rude here. My head just happened to be where his elbow needed to go. No worries.

And, every third stop or so, vendors would board the bus and walk (again, they didn't really touch the ground) up and down the aisles, hawking whatever until they had sold what they were carrying and got off. Sometimes, as when the guy was selling really disgusting looking prune-like fruit, covered with flies, it took a really long time to sell his whole load. I think some people bought some just to get rid of him.

So, most of the time, I had two bags on my lap, and several people sort of half splayed across my shoulder/side. I don't think anyone on the bus had ever heard of Dial, but I'm not sure how much of a dent it would have made.

At any rate, we got to Pathankot, and I unfolded my legs from beneath the bags and people and disembarked. The doctors are quite optimistic -- they say I should regain feeling in at least one of my feet by tomorrow.

I hung out in the Pathankot rail station until my train came at 11:0opm, and got on my first sleeper train. An experience, but on the whole pretty nice. I did sleep some, and we got back here to Delhi this morning. This evening, I catch a marathon train (27 hours, I think. Hey, some are as long as 60 hours) to the south to meet Nagendra and his family in Hyderabad.

Spread Thin

2004-07-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

What if this is where it goes. When the fog
gets tired of San Francisco, or just restless,
and moves on, maybe it comes here to lounge
in the Dhauladhar mountains of northern India.
Yes, I know that it cannot hope to be
the exact same fog, the very water
and pressure that, not too long ago,
cradled the edge of the park
just outside your window. At least
according to you, over that faint,
papery phone line. But there is just enough
light sleeking through the caked
late morning that I want to believe
the fog is working the same sort of trade
as the sun, alternating itself reliably
between here and home, never both
at the same time. That as I stand here,
tempted by the thickness that seems to offer
a chance to step sideways off the steep pitch
of this turn of the trail into nothing
but the dim radiance of heavy air,
the vastness of what must be a gorgeous
mountain vista distilled into not much more
than an arm's reach in every direction,
there is at least the comfort
that this water, this pressure, this taste
of sun are here. That at home,
there is no fog. Just a clear, empty night.

A Thousand Words, or None

2004-07-15T23:38:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't matter. I can't hope to describe what my hike today, above Mcleodganj, was like. One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

The trail to Triund, the first part of the 3-4 day trek over a pass at 4400 m, takes off from a steep mountain road, but it's hard to see where the road stops and the trail starts, because the road is pretty beat up, and it doesn't appear to lead to anything, really. There are a few cafes scattered up the trail, but that's true all the way to the top -- these guys just live in a little lean-to, and every few days haul a bunch of supplies up to their little shack, then cook over a propane stove for hikers who pass by. Fresh chapatis and chai in the middle of nowhere. For about 25 cents. Pretty cool.

Anways, I hiked all day in the rain, but most of it was soft and warm (I sat out the bad spell at the cafe at the top, talking with two Irish engineers who quit their jobs and are taking a year to travel on an around-the-world ticket.) The mountains are incredible -- something like what you would get if you took the greenery of Ireland and spread it out over a steep granite Rocky Mountain range, cut out a few terraces, added some trees that I don't know the name of, but look sort of like bonsai (sp? they grow almost horizontally out from the side of the hill), and rolled in the fog from Pacifica.

Every so often, a cow (or a goat, or a monkey, or a group of guys carrying 10-foot long double-handled manual tree saws, to work on who knows what -- take your pick) would emerge from behind a bush, and I would look up and realize that I had no idea how long I'd been standing there, gaping at the view. Or how long the cow (or whatever) had been doing the same at me.

The fog changed so much during the day -- at times, you couldn't see more than a few feet in any direction. At others, it was just a fine mist that made everything seem like a hallucination of a gorgeous mountain view, instead of the real thing. The sun came in and out, even in the middle of the rain, and played with all of that fog and lush green like it just wanted to taunt me for having to leave town the next day.

I was incredibly sad that I hadn't brought a lot of people with me and budgeted time to do a real trek (not a good idea to try it by yourself, and it takes a few days).

Oh well. Another trip. (Who wants to come with me?)

Chance of Rain, Dharamsala

2004-07-14T21:04:00.000-07:00

[disclaimer: anything posted here that has an uneven right edge is a rough draft, something i normally wouldn't put up on a wall anywhere, but so long as no one thinks less of me for it, i'll go ahead and post them.]

Chance of Rain, Dharamsala

While the clouds slide into place,
docking just above the top step
of the terraced hillside
in these, the smallest of the Himalayas,
I wait for the first drops of rain
to spread themselves into shiny,
rounded petals on the checkered marble
of my balcony. Which has just, moments ago,
been swept clean by a woman
in a sari of yellow cotton
that hung down from her hunched spine
in the shape of an ill-formed cloud.
As she whipped the bundle of branches,
tied together to make what passes here
for a broom, back and forth, a tail,
she turned towards me in a slow, clockwise
circle, making visible the raised scar
the reaches from the bridge of her nose
down, perpendicular to the jawline,
where it dives beneath fabric. Altogether an arc
that does not resemble a character
in any language that I read,
but that may, to her or someone else,
spell out some explanation.
Now, she has finished, and I can only wonder
what she would say if I could ask her
how it is that, from here, as the thunder
warms up and the rain readies itself,
the violence that is about to come,
for maybe the trillionth time,
can be so beautiful, so calm.

Dharamsala, July 14

2004-07-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've been in Dharamsala (well, actually Mcleodganj, which is essentially "Upper Dharamsala") for a few days now, and it has been blissful. The town is predominantly made up of the 20,000 or so Tibetan refugees who have come here both to be near their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama (who came here temporarily 40-some years ago and hasn't left), and to live somewhere outside of China where they do not face persecution for speaking their language, practicing their religion, refusing to conform to Chinese culture, dress, etc.

The mountains are, of course, incredible. I've done some short hikes, and will probably do a long one tomorrow, up the first section of the trail to the first major pass (about 4200 m) on the way into the bigger mountains.

The town has also become quite a tourist locale, but not in the same way as any of the other places I've seen so far. People come here to stay for long, extended periods. To work with the Tibetan children refugees (many of whom come here alone), teach or study Tibetan language or Buddhism, Ayurvedic or Tibetan medicine, or yoga and massage.

So, I've committed something of a faux pas in only arranging to be here for a few days. I'm still getting to take walks in the hills, take some Tibetan cooking classes, compare different massage therapists, and mostly, sit and read while the mountains change through the day in the varying light and clouds.

But I know I'm missing out on one of the strongest parts of this place -- the fact that it is a community, in the real sense of the word. People know each other and greet one another on the street. There is a project to reduce littering (everywhere else I've been, trash cans are few and far between, as there's little point). They also have major cooperative efforts to provide filtered and boiled drinking water for tourists, which helps mitigate the problem that tourists have in the rest of this country -- drinking 4-6 plastic liter bottles of drinking water each day and throwing every one of them away, generating a huge amount of trash (which goes, mostly, on the ground).

What's more, people seem to be able to be themselves and relax. For the first time, I see Western couples who are traveling together holding hands in the street, being at least minimally affectionate. Even same-sex couples. (A rather flamboyantly gay guy approached me the other day and tried to pick me up, which was hilariously awkward, especially because his first line was "Sorry, I've got to run back to my hotel -- this food is giving me the shits -- but you're hot. You should call me sometime." Hey, at least he wasn't going to get his face smashed in for saying it. Most of India still isn't really OK with homosexuality.)

My first night here, I bought some water from a vendor, and he didn't have change for the note I gave him. This happens all the time (even banks don't want to give you change), and usually it precipitates a search for someone who will give you change. Which they will almost never do unless you're buying something. But he just gave me what he had, which was too much, and said, "You give me the difference some other time." Amazing.

AIIMS debriefing

2004-07-14T20:11:00.000-07:00

this was a short blurb i wrote about my experience at AIIMS to send to the global health people at stanford. the beginnings of the process of digesting what i saw...

Bryan Maxwell
Clinical Observership
All-India Institute of Medical Sciences
New Delhi, India

I have been spending a few weeks here at AIIMS, which is by most accounts India's most prestigious medical school and public teaching hospital. In the world of Indian health care delivery, this puts AIIMS in a strange position, as it combines the intellectual and technical resources of Indian medicine at its best and most exclusive, the care available only to the elite, with the poverty, overcrowding, and run-down facilities of a public hospital. In much of the rest of the country, hospitals reflect the huge gap between the rich and the not-rich that typifies so much of Indian society. Private hospitals, run mostly on a cash-for-service model, with a few insurance companies (for employees of the biggest, wealthiest companies) cropping up here or there, offer top-notch everything. I got to visit one for a day (Apollo Indraprastha, also in Delhi), and I could have easily been back at Stanford. Many public hospitals see a massive patient volume and are run without adequate facilities or resources. These look something like the mental image of a developing-world hospital I imagine many people in the West have.

Above all, this is what strikes me about medicine in India, and really, about India in general: the range that exists here, and the gap between the extremes of that range. Stereotypes are at once reproduced and smashed to bits.

My time here has been informal and unpaid (not through Med Scholars or any other Stanford or AIIMS programs). Through contacts at Stanford, I connected with an attending physician at AIIMS, a pediatric nephrologist, who agreed to host me. He has been an extremely generous and enganging host. Most days, I sit with him in general peds clinic or go on rounds with him and his residents in the morning, then sit in either his peds nephrology clinic or another pediatric subspecialty clinic (a sample:
Genetics, Tuberculosis, Hepatology, GI, Rheumatology/Immunology). On other days, I've gone to a private hospital, a rural community health center (every day AIIMS sends faculty and residents out by bus to a rural clinic; most come back the same night). I've also gotten to sit in on Surgery clinic and rounds and go on rounds in the PICU and NICU.

Physicians all speak English, but patients by and large do not, so much of my day is spent listening to exchanges in Hindi. I've been surprised at how much I can follow, not by listening to the words, but just by watching the exchanges, the body language, and the children's faces. My physical exam skills have gotten much better (since I can't really take a history; there's no time for me to use an interpreter here, as each patient in a general clinic gets only about 5-10 minutes), and I've seen a huge volume
of patients, including quite a few diseases I wouldn't get to see very much at home (especially malaria and TB).

But most of my experience has been remarkable not in terms of how different things are in an Indian hospital, but really, how much they are the same. Of course, everything looks quite different: lizards on the wall, bugs everywhere, lots and lots of sweat.
But substantively, the level of care available for most things is nearly identical to what I've seen in the US.

Most of all, the experience has taught me how much of medicine isn't scientific, isn't even verbal. So much of it is about being in a room with someone who is ill, about listening, observing, and witnessing. In a strictly medical sense, I've done very little for these patients. Most of the time, I haven't understood, literally speaking, a word they've said. But in a less technical sense, I hope I'm right that just being interested and present has been for them, at least, something. It certainly has been for me.

Monkeys (July 10)

2004-07-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

i'm now in shimla, in himachal pradesh, a state north of delhi that is home to most of india's himalayan territory. it's a gorgeous mountain town, built by the british as a summer retreat from the heat of the plains, that is perched, literally, on the side of the mountain. and they don't allow cars in most of the town. yay!

these mountains are just the babies of the himalayas (no snow this time of year), but they are breathtaking. to get here, you take a 6 hour train journey that only takes you about 100 km through increasingly steep valleys and passes, all shrouded in heavy fog. when i woke up this morning, the light cut through all the gray and green in these beautifully slivered angles. mmmmm.

oh, and yes, they have monkeys, lots of monkeys. there are also a few dogs and cats, but monkeys seem to be the dominant local animal. they are known to steal food out of your pocket or eyeglasses off of your face, and they make quite a racket jumping around on the tin roofs that most of the houses here have, but other than that, they seem to just sort of hang out. cute little buggers.

i'm staying with the in-laws of dr. hari, the fellow i was shadowing in delhi. i finished up in delhi on friday, and had a lovely evening with him and his family. then i came up here yesterday and arrived last night, then had dinner with his wife's sister and brother-in-law, both of whom are constitutional lawyers in the high court here in shimla. they took me out to this lavish bankers' club type place for drinks. i had to use a borrowed tie and make a funky cravat kind of scarf out of it in order to get in, because i gave away all my dress clothes before leaving delhi. never thought there'd be a dress code in the mountains. at least not places i'd go. let's just say that i looked absolutely ridiculous.

but no reason to discontinue the trend of providing lots of entertainment for the locals. (i can only imagine what some of the people are saying about me in delhi, in the areas i passed through when i'd run in the evenings, with just shorts on. never been stared at that much in my life. but they'd stare no matter what i was wearing, and it was still over 100 degrees outside at 7pm, so what the hell.)

anyways, after trying to match this guy scotch for scotch (which, after having zero alcohol since leaving home, was a bit of a stretch), we went back to his home and then started a huge dinner at about 11 pm. stuffed beyond belief. but it was great fun to talk to them about india and their jobs and the us and so on. very talk-happy lawyers.

staying with people i have some connection to, however tenuous, is such a treat -- i get to have real conversations with them, ones that i know don't have a submerged profit motive in them. i nearly stopped talking in delhi altogether, because every conversation i had with anyone, even hotel or restaurant people, spiraled into, what else can i sell you or get you to buy from my brother, cousin, etc.? even when i thought i was safe, and someone was just asking about what i do at home, what do i do for fun, then it would turn on me. "oh, you like to hike in the US? well you should really do some hiking and my brother he has a travel agency and we would be most happy to arrange a very nice trip for you to hike and see the sites and please my friend you must trust me this is very good Indian price with real quality." that has to be the phrase that amuses me the most so far. "friend, this is good Indian price." which means, roughly, a price that no Indian with an IQ over about 65 would even consider paying.

(the sign "SEX SKIN VD," which seems to denote some sort of a medical clinic, is a close second though.)

but i digress.

today i'm going to see the temple here, which is mostly inhabited by the monkeys, and the museum and such. i also have a few more social engagements with this family (lunch, tea, dinner. and watching cricket. which still baffles me.)

tomorrow morning i leave for dharamsala, north of here and closer to the real mountains, where the dalai lama resides. should be nice and quiet, with a chance to hike a bit and at least get a glimpse of tibetan buddhism.

the only rub is that getting there [Dad, don't read this paragraph] involves a 9 hour (read: anywhere between 9 and 15 hour) bus ride along switchback roads approximately 20 feet wide in a "deluxe" bus, which i think refers to the fact that it has all four wheels, a gas pedal, and a horn. always a horn. they recommend that you sit at the front and eat a big, bland breakfast before starting out. you can guess why. there is no option below "deluxe."

the only way to be on a nicer bus ("luxury," which i think provides seat cushions, and perhaps shocks and brakes, in addition to the aforementioned amenities), is to take an overnight bus. i think not. on the upside, bus transport is incredibly, incredibly cheap. my ticket cost a little less than $5 for the 9-hour trip. but even the very educated people i'm staying with tell me that this is perfectly safe. just not very comfortable. should be an adventure.

Traffic-ing (July 5)

2004-07-05T01:34:00.000-07:00

So far, I have been in three traffic collisions. None of them serious, which is somewhat amazing, considering how traffic works (sort of) here.

The first was autorickshaw vs. pedestrian, getting off a bus. (In case I haven't described this already, an autorickshaw is a kind of glorified motor scooter with a roof. Three wheeles, a pull-start motor that runs on compressed natural gas, which helps the pollution a bit, and maybe 6-inch tires. Takes some getting used to.)

Anyway, the guy got bonked on his right hip, got rather angry, threatened to fight, and then figured he'd better get out of the road before getting hit again. The second was autorickshaw vs. motorcycle at a roundabout. The driver ignored it, but the motorcycle caught up with us and stopped in front of us, forcing my driver to stop and deal with him. They started getting into it on the side of the road, and I wanted none of it, so I got out and started walking away to catch another ride. This overshadowed all pride or machoism or whatever was fueling this argument, and the driver raced to catch back up with me so he wouldn't lose his fare. I gave him half of it and said no thanks. The third was bus vs. bus, but was just trading paint along a tight turn. These mountain roads are barely big enough for one bus, much less two.

Really, though, the remarkable thing is that there haven't been more bad collisions. I'm sure there are crashes here, quite often, but one some level at least, the system does work. Pollution is horrible (they say that spending a day in Delhi is like smoking a pack of cigarrettes, so I'm doing some damage to the lungs), traffic is horrendously noisy -- a horn has so many functions her -- crowded and chaotic. But it keeps moving and people get where they're going, usually.

There are no rules of the road, and only a few have bothered to decorate themselves with lines, which everyone completly ignores, crossing the center line freely. The average distance between any two vehicles is in the range of inches to a foot or two, not more. Yet, something of a rhythm emerges that seems more or less sustainable, once you get the baseline down. It is madness, but a pretty smooth variety.

It's impressive, in a way. If you challenged an American civil engineer and a DOT bureaucrat to redesign the American system such that it would accomodate this many cars on narrow roads, and within which everyone has to know how to weave in and out, merge and turn left off of roundabouts, pass, and so on, without straying more than 3 feet from the nearest vehicle or (most of the time at least) hitting anything, I dare say it would be hard to do.

Of course, it isn't a top-down organization that drives it. It has evolved, somehow. A product of millions of people moving themselves from one place to another amidst a society and culture that is used to the crush of throngs of others around them.

The signal for turning or merging left across another driver's path? Extend your hand out the left side of the open-air autorickshaw. It must extend at least 3 cm out of the door. They will see you. Really.

The hospital is also like this, in a way. The waiting room is a jumble, not a spare square meter anywhere and it's 43 degrees outside. I'm dripping, even under a noisy fan. But out of this mass, each patient emerges, each in turn, usually clutching all of their medical records in a plastic bag from some long-ago-visited merchant.

Many of these kidney patients produce a soiled, crumpled pocket notebook. Inside, there is a clear and meticulously accurate diary of urine examinations, done every day for months to years at at time, to check for proteinuria, the hallmark of Idiopathic Nephrotic Syndrome (Dr. Hari's bread and butter). On one patient, he orders a 24-hour total urine examination -- which, here, is done as an outpatient, at home. The patient, it seems, takes home some sort of large, sterile jar, and somewher in the slums or dingy flats of this city, makes sure to collect every drop of their 4-year old's urine for a day and night, writing down dipstick results in a language they don't speak. I cannot help but think that this would never work at home, even in suburbia.

A lizard walks up the wall wher I am sitting, and flies surround my head. To think, asthma is less common here. They drink water I cannot touch. They survive it. Collectively at least.

How resilient the body is. And these people, who have learned how to create something so lasting and stable out of so much jumbling movement, lurching flux. Stasis and movement, cooperating over thousands of years.

Lost (July 4)

2004-07-04T00:57:00.000-07:00

I'm missing simplicity a lot these days. Not having it is still a good exercise to go through, but something about the 'going alone to a country of 1.1 billion people where I don't speak the language' thing hasn't been as conducive to getting deliberately lost as I thought. I'm a bit tired of being stared at all the time.

I think I just have to reassess what this is giving me. Not the sort of quietude that being anonymous amidst millions of people who look and sound like you, and therefore couldn't care less about you, like walking around New York City can do. But instead a quietude of walking through chaos when people are staring and harassing me, and learning to train my eyes to look slightly down and slightly off in the distance, at nothing. Or at something more diffuse. To keep walking. To see the bus cutting in front of me, the naked street children trying to block my path, without looking at them.

Sir, would you like to buy...

2004-07-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

i was in jaipur (in Rajasthan, desert territory southwest of delhi) over the weekend, in my first full-fledged tourist role, and it certainly exhausted me. the barrage of people trying to sell me something, do something for me, whatever, was incredibly intense. walking around the city, or even within a monument or museum, involved a nonstop stream of children and adults trying to get my attention by whatever means available to get me to open my wallet. i found myself frustrated by it, spending most of my energy keeping from losing my temper.

it was such a contrast from the incredibly human and encouraging interactions i've been getting to have with children and their families -- even though the kids are sick or hurt. even without speaking a word of any language in common, all of those interactions have been incredibly rich (for me at least. though i am able to get the kids to smile or at least stop crying most of the time. i think it's that i'm something quite strange to them, and they at least quiet down in awe...), and have done much for me to affirm how much we have in common with every other human being, no matter how different our backgrounds or circumstances.

i find all of the tourist-seller/beggar exchanges quite demoralizing by comparison, and i ended each day feeling drained and completely powerless in the face of such aggressive hunger. i know, of course, that's i'm not really frustrated with these people. i'm frustrated with their desparation, their poverty and the fact that it reduces all interactions between me and them to money. i become a walking dollar sign. i also realize that i am more affected by these dynamics than others around me are, partly because i'm in general more contemptuous of capitalism and a transaction-based set of personal relationships than many Westerners are, and also partly because i'm by myself and have no other conversation to return to when i attempt to wave off the touts.

it's a curiously reversed feeling of frustration from the one that i think i will return to, again and again, in medicine -- that of feeling overwhelmed by trying to help people one at a time. but in many ways i feel much more capable of facing that frustration, simply because it is grounded in a tradeoff that has a tremendous upside. one-on-one contact means you can't ever really fix a large problem, but it also means that you at least have the chance to have real and meaningful contact with people.

Roaches on Rounds (June 30)

2004-06-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

Today I think I bonded with the residents here. they mostly don't really talk to me, because they're busy running around (they really are the workforce of the medical system, because there aren't really any nurses to speak of, so they do the work that residents, medical students (I haven't seen any yet, although supposedly they do clinical rotations like we do), and nurses/RNPs/PAs do in the US. But today on rounds, I got the opportunity to brush a roach off of one of them while they were presenting to the attending, and I think I earned my keep.

For the most part, though, the superficial and visual differences between medicine here and in the US are the biggest ones. The hospitals look run-down and there is lots of dirt, bugs, and sweat everywhere, but content-wise, at least as far as my still pretty uneducated eye can tell, the medical care is nearly every bit as good. everything I read about in the textbooks I brought and have access to here is mentioned and, at least to some degree, available here. The medical arguments, puzzling through diagnoses and the complexities of altering electrolytes and drug regimens, are every bit as fierce and capable as I've seen in the US. (which is to say, they're just as far over my head.)

I'm learning quite a lot. some of it is medical knowledge -- my mentor is a pediatric nephrologist, so I'm learning more about the use of steroids in nephrotic syndrome than I probably ever wanted to know. But English isn't as widely used, even among the doctors, as I thought it would be (all written records are in english, but the oral goings-on are about 50-50, often within the same sentence), and even the English is extremely fast medico-speak with an Indian accent, so I'm lost much of the time.

Really, what I'm learning is more about the culture of medicine than about its content. which is probably good, since I still have a lot of time before I've had the science education that all of these people have. and, that's more what I came for, because I can get the science part, or most of it, at home. Except for the fact that I will have seen some diseases that would be quite rare in the US (lots of cerebral malaria and typhoid) and lots of things that are further along in their progression because people take a while to seek care here.

The fascinating part is to find how much I can understand even when no English is involved -- how much of the bustle of medical interactions between patients and doctors and families are more or less language- and culture-nonspecific. I was in clinic today with a hepatologist who wasn't really interested in stopping to explain everything to me, and couldn't if he wanted to (clinic was in a 10 x 10 room that had, at most times, 12-15 people in it, plus me in the corner, and that room had two doctors each seeing a patient simultaneously, sharing one examining bed.) so I went about 5 hours without hearing a word of English.

But while I couldn't tell you the diagnosis of each patient or exactly what facts were collected, I followed along reasonably well. this patient has a gigantic, distended abdomen, and when you put your hand on it, you can tell it's a spleen, plus he looks really ill, febrile, and came close to vomiting a couple of times. So I don't know what he had, but the interaction, as a picture of the rhythm and texture of illness, medicine, a failing body, a family, a doctor, etc was quite clear.

Enough rambling for now. But I feel better having written some of it down. People here take so much in stride, or seem to anyway, that I feel a little odd gushing at things.

Sweat by the Gallon

2004-06-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

This is my first entry after almost 3 days in Delhi. (That sounds a bit too much like a confession.) There has been much to say, but too little distance has come between it and me, I think, too little room to talk about it. But that won't come, really, until much later, so I might as well start to try to put some of this down.

I arrived in the city late Saturday night and had to negotiate the predictable tourist scams ("Which hotel? Oh no, that one burned down. Let me take you to a place I know.") I chose a spare guest house for the first night, which was adequate but not comfortable. The bed was plywood covered by a blanket, plus bedbugs, and only a wall-mounted table fan cooled the 6x8 cement cell. But mostly I was frustrated by the heat, the taxi driver trying to cheat me, the strong smell of Scotch in everything I have with me (note to self: never try to pack a glass bottle of liquor in your checked luggage, no matter how carefully you pack), and wondering if I can really do this. At some point, 2 months will feel like nothing, I know. But now, it feels like a very long time to be on guard, on edge.

My first night was also good for being initiated into the ways of the Indian-style toilet. A hole, two footrests -- as if it really mattered where you put your feet -- and a cup of water. Which is not to be confused with the other cup of water, which, along with a bucket, is an Indian shower.

Those days of traveling had a rhythm to them that was kind of nice. So much change. It has a funny weight to it, both tremendously heavy, at times nearly more than one can bear, and blissfully light. The thinness of leaving anything behind, of taking so much of daily existence from scratch.

I did manage some sleep the first night, though, and woke early on Sunday to walk around through the muggy streets in relative quiet, with only the occasional interruption from someone saying I am crazy for walking. (Of course, these people all, curiously enough, drive taxis or auto-rickshaws for a living). I walked around Connaught Place, the tourist center of the city, and found a better hotel (the YMCA, which even at 10 times the price of the first place, is still only 20-something dollars a night).

I stopped in the afternoon to read and relax a bit in a cafe, and I ran into two student-age guys who struck up a conversation and ended up driving me around for the rest of the day. They remind me a lot of the guys from Colombia I used to go to summer camp with -- oozing a cool that is both enamored of all things American and wrought with its own textures and rhythms that cast much of American culture into rather unflattering relief. But ultimately, there is a restlessness about them that is disconcerting. I am still trying to settle, and they are trying for the opposite.

All over this city, people are fascinated with seeing my strange form walk down their streets. At times, it is rude -- they don't turn away when you meet their gaze, and many of them are staring, trying to figure out how to approach you to sell you something. But other times, it's quite earnest. Many just want to meet someone from the U.S., practice their English, and so on.

I find it hard to convey my ambivalences about the U.S. when someone gasps, "Oh, America, what a Wonderful Country!" To give them any sufficiently complex sense that America produces its own fair share of indignities and horrors, just ones that are harder to see when you come from a place in which streets are lines with the disfigured, hungry, filthy poor (and with immaculate, towering high rise hotels, all in the same block), where you see so often that visage of those who have not been on the upswing of "development." It is harder to see the poverties of America. So many of them are internal, figurative.

I try to say someting negative about my President to a Seikh man who confesses himself "mad for America." I find I have misunderstood. He means, I'm crazy for it, I would give anything to be there. Not, I am mad at your country, what it's doing to the world. "He is a good man, this Mr. Bush. He understands what one needs to do to Muslims." From what I can tell, this is an uncommon sentiment, but nonetheless a striking one. I don't know what to say. We are standing in front of a McDonalds.

Yesterday was my first day at the hospital, AIIMS. And strangely, it was the most comforting thing I've done so far. It was jarring, of course, to walk in amidst well over a thousand people, lining up since dawn to be seen in clinic. I create quite a scene walking in, a foot taller than most, and a white coat on. I found Dr. Pankaj Hari, my mentor and host, a pediatrician, and we chat for a few minutes before the onslaught of his 3-hour outpatient clinic begins. Here, too, there is much at which to be taken aback. He sees 30-40 patients in 3 hours, and many of these diseases I don't know. Many others I would never see this far along or this severe.

I see my first myelomeningocoele, a huge protrusion out of the spine of an 18 month old (imagine, NOTHING done for 18 months), several cases of typhoid and malaria and TB. All of the patients speak with the doctor in Hindi.

But mostly, these exchanges are familiar, just in the rhythms of human interaction. Pain and illness and worry, an urgent push to be seen by someone who can help, someone who trades in the body and its failures. Dr. Hari has to have each diagnosis down in about 90 seconds. Patterns, over and over. If he is wrong, they will come back. There isn't much of an alternative way.

For all that is so different here, so much is so much the same.

Armani in Bangkok, June 26

2004-06-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

Only a day, and already my eyes are learning to look for foreigners. With so few around, it's easy to fall for that flash of recognition, that comfort that, even though we do not speak, or query each other in passing, we could.

But it's not so much being one of only a few white people around that bugs me. It's more the combination of that, of being here as a Westerner, with the saturation of all that has marked the initial scenes of this place with all that smacks of Western dominance: ads, duty free shops (with prices higher than in the U.S.), and foodsellers (the only Thai restaurant in the airport sells pizza, burgers, and fillet mignon, along with a few Thai dishes).

But on this trip, my longest stretch outside of the U.S., I will have to learn over and over that turning away from the aspects of the West's excesses that piss me off will do little to simplify the polarity for me. Much of these repulsive aspects are not so much Western as they are modern. I have to remember that, in total, I doubt I will find an all-inclusive "better way" here. Even if certain things throw certain American practices or ideas into sharp contrast, they will complicate the picture, not simplify it. Ecclecticism is much messier than substitution.

The Morning After (Leaving) - June 25

2004-06-25T03:32:00.000-07:00

Despite our best efforts, the sun is in fact coming up, over the Taiwan Straight. We left California in the middle of the night and have been fleeing dawn at 600 mph ever since. It's catching up with us. And in the process, a day is gone. Well, not so much gone as it is stored -- to be picked up, like an extra bag, in two months on the way home, when I will arrive in San Francisco before leaving Hong Kong. Or so my watch will say. Unless of course I never come back. In which case, the day really is gone.

(To think, if you lived somewhere in Asia and knew the day you were going to die, I suppose you could actually get an extra day by spending it flying east across the International Date Line.)

You can see so little of the Pacific in darkness. But how familiar the sight of Taipei at dawn is, to one who has never seen it. Lights, streets, and somewhere, people.

This is an odd way to get to India, for there are very few Indians on this plane. I haven't thought much about China in gearing up for this trip. But now, with the US some 6000 miles behind us, I'm still half a day from seeing or hearing anything Indian. Surely China wouldn't like being thought of this way, as a footnote, a middleman. But for now, that's all it will be.