No complainings

Mid January 2011

I am working hard to resist opening with “Greetings and salutations to my beloved friends and hoping that your good selves are in fine health and fettle”. Indian verbal extravagance is infectious and as one prone to verbal infections of all sorts, I will doubtless fall prey to its gravitational pull during the course of this current missive and I humbly beg your good selves to be patient. 

The Gama Residency in Cochin (Kochi) is very pleasant. It has air conditioning, hot water (mostly) and is spotlessly clean all for around $44 a night with breakfast included. Kochi is very cruisy after Mumbai. Its main focus has always been fishing. The Portugese arrrived here in the 1600’s and then had a bit of an all in brawl with the Dutch about who was in control before the British put their stamp on it in the 18th century. The two other main influences are the Chinese and believe it or not, the Jews who supposedly arrived here in 1AD. I went to Jew Town, as it is called, yesterday. There is a synagogue with a couple of cranky guys in skull caps but apart from that and the Jewish cemetery there is not much obvious palpable evidence of their presence. I don’t know what I expecting - an Indian George Castanza in a turban? Near the synagogue in Jew Town are some great antique shops - quite classy - a step above the usual trinket emporiums. I suspect that the Jews and the Indians found that they shared a facility for trade and commerce, got along rather well and ended up blending in every way. From what I  can gather the Jews never inflicted themselves on India in the way that the Europeans did from the 17th century onwards. Architecturally Kochi is a melange of boxy Mediterranean, ornate Portugese churches and the crumbling British Raj. 

I have always thought that the ruins of the Raj, particularly in the bigger cities, give you a direct conduit to the feel of Dickens’ London. He is one of my all time favourites and his descriptions of stinking but fascinating alley ways, grinding poverty, oblivious extravagant wealth, loud chaotic markets, spivs and con men, self important officials and the wonderful meandering theatre of life in the streets all still ring through loud and clear in India. The theatre of life here, is a lot less harsh and probably less dramatic than in Mumbai but is easier to slip into. The soundscape is different. I am woken to the sound of birds and the slow moving intermittent stirrings of the city coming to life. In the last ten or so minutes as I have been writing this, outside my window the sound of a street vendor fades out as some bells fade in from some music in the block of flats next door then somebody chopping a tree and now, just now, in these few seconds, the Muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer from the Mosque down the road dominates. But unlike the soundtrack of Mumbai, there isn’t the sense of four different orchestras, a couple of jazz bands, three techno night clubs and four rappers all competing for attention by increasing the volume in leaping increments. The sounds here seem to blend, fade in and out and around. 

On the beachfront  about fifteen minutes walk from the hotel, the fishermen work with their giant fulcrums. They consist of giant fishing nets on one end and weights on the other end that facilitate the nets being pulled up. The Kerala fishermen apparently learned this from visiting Chinese and have been doing it for the last couple of hundred years. I read though, that the method is dying out because of new fishing technologies. The beachfront is a very pleasant place to sit with a cup of chai and read. I have been working my way through Hilary Mantel’s giant novel “A Place of Greater Safety” about the French Revolution. It’s always great to read a book through the prism of an experience outside of your normal workaday life. The book so far (p.200) seems to be about class and power. The first part hones in on well intentioned bourgeois and nobles, people who wanted to help those with less but the reader knows that these very same well intentioned bourgeois will be victims of the tsunami of events. 

There is a strong streak of Catholic genuine good intention here in Kerala. When I bought my ticket from the Fort Cochin Tourist Office (private) for a boat backwater tour (lunch provided) of some of the villages in the archipelago I encountered Mr Thomas who sported a large crucifix and a Madonna and Child statue on his counter . He was so full of good intention that I was a little suspicious. He described the tour in great detail “You will be picked up from your hotel with other tourists you will be getting onto our best boat...if you have any complainings - tour complainings, lunch complainings, complainings about the drivers, complainings about the villagers, complainings about anything, I, my good self Mr Thomas, Manager of the Seven Hour Backwater Tour is personally responsible and may be addressed and telephoned on number 9998776659. See it is written on all tickets etc etc.”.  After meeting Mr Thomas yesterday I was a little suspicious. What had happened recently to provoke this frenzy of self justification?  I asked people at the hotel and I called the Government Tourist Office. Everyone said the same thing. Mr Thomas’s tour is fantastic. Really good value, particularly with lunch. As a well intentioned bourgeois, I felt a bit ashamed of doubting him and hurried back to the Fort Cochin Tourist Office (private) to buy my ticket. He was delighted to see me. 

The tour as expected, was really good. The opportunity to hook up with other tourists was also really enjoyable. I befriended a Swedish couple around my age with whom I have subsequently met up with, a young couple from Germany, a rowdy group of 7 or 8 Spanish thirty somethings, a woman who lives on alone on a houseboat in Oxford, a young refreshingly quiet American woman from California,  and a group of five young women from New Zealand who have just completed their university studies and have been volunteering at a school in Nepal. There was also a woman about my age from America who was at odds with everybody else, including Mr Thomas’s acolytes who were running the show. She complained about everything - we weren’t going fast enough (this as we glided gently through the beautiful tropic backwaters), we weren’t seeing enough, there wasn’t enough explanation, the rowdy Spanish group were speaking too loudly in Spanish. I don’t know how that she wasn’t aware that the rowdy Spaniards were obviously talking about her. They’d laugh uproariously at her every complaint. On the way back it got it a borderline when they started physically mimicking her. 

Every day I walk and walk and walk. I try to talk to as many people as possible. I often don’t get much except a few perfunctory phrase exchanges because not too many people outside of hotels and restaurants have very good English. Yesterday I encountered some boys playing cricket and joined in briefly as the butt of jokes about my bowling and Ricky Ponting.  Most of the tourists here at the moment seem to be German or Swedish for some reason or other. With the exception of my new Swedish friends, Karin and John, they tend to be reserved and respond with only frozen courtesy to conversational gestures. I had quite a long conversation with a New Zealand man traveling with his family about India in general but apart from that I’ve been on my own. I don’t mind too much - it’s quite interesting to observe people, particularly couples, in restaurants and out walking. Besides it’ll be quite good training for next week in the ashram where silence is observed for four hours a day.  

I am so glad that I came to India again. As always it’s changed the channel in my head. 

Namaste Mumbai

January 2011

The West End End Hotel in Mumbai is pretty schmick by Indian standards: air conditioning,   spotlessly clean, very comfortable, cable TV (only ESPN in English the rest Indian in Hindi), large rooms with a desk and lounge, and perhaps best of all a digital safe that removes the worry of leaving computers and money in the room or at the desk. Outside, a lot of people sleep on the street. I suspect this has something to do with the hospital across the road. 

I love India, always have, ever since I was a kid. The experience of being here, even now on my third trip, is so rich. Nothing is as it seems when you first see it. In fact it’s very difficult to nail down a thought or opinion about anything. Ironies like Russian dolls, reveal further ironies. In streets and railways stations worlds exist within worlds. Every sense is amplified - lurid colours, the riotous honking din and shouting of the street , the stink of shit and overpowering perfume of incense. In the space of a few steps smooth marble becomes crunching road or a suspicious looking puddle and the huge catalogue of tastes always surprises - sometimes gorgeous, sometimes overpowering, and sometimes kind of grotesque. 

I’ve always thought that the best way to experience being somewhere is to walk it. And walk it I have. I think that I’ve covered most of the inner suburbs. Yesterday I made a point of choosing a central location and to stroll without purpose in each direction for 40 minutes to an hour in a return trip to where I started. After I did this I went down to Colaba - the Gate of India area where the Taj Mahal Hotel imperiously dominates the shoreline. It was the scene of the terrible terrorist events a couple of years back. The whole area is now cordoned off in a two hundred perimeter of the hotel in which anybody wearing a backpack is searched. The usual stark juxtapositions of poverty and wealth are still as apparent as ever. Touts, trinket sellers and beggars still carry on business as usual in the fifty story shadow of the great TMH.  

Just up the road is the Cafe Leopold, renown from Shantaram. These days about half of the customers are like me - Western tourists in search of a kind of literary Benetton experience. I didn’t realise it but the terrorists attacked Leopold’s first and killed eight people. There are still bullet holes in the wall. It was in Leopold’s that I met Christopher, a Vodaphone engineer who grew up in Colaba. Christopher, as his name suggests, is not a Hindu but a Catholic and a man of considerable appetites. We got talking and drinking and then more talking and more drinking and he took me to a bar with a much better ambience up the road,  Cafe Mondegar, where we were joined for more talking and drinking with Eddy, one of Chrisopher’s Vodaphone cronies. Chris and Eddy play in a band with other members of their section. From what I can gather the band does mainly Dire Straits and Jackson Browne covers. Chris plays the drums and Eddy is the vocalist. Chris kept ordering jugs of beer and meals - whole meals. I ended up having about one and a half lunches and about seven schooner size beers while Chris and Eddy by my reckoning each had three lunches and nine beers. 

We talked a lot about the music on the juke box that Chris hogged for the entire time jumping up every couple of minutes in fits of enthusiasm. “Here...here is something different - ‘Men at Work’ - ‘I Come From A Land Down Under’!” High five. Then more jugs of beer and more fits of enthusiasm then singing and standing air guitar tributes to Mark Knopfler and more high fives. I was getting a little wary by this stage because I was well out of my drinking comfort zone. Chris suggested we repair to another bar down the road for the hard stuff - whisky and bourbon. We could grab some hash on the way. Boys selling hash approach you every ten metres or so in Colaba. I declined without considering it. I didn’t need to get that trashed, get ripped off with the cab fare back to the hotel and wake up feeling like death on toast. I’ve done more than my share of that sort of thing in my life. Besides, the truth was, that for me, Chris was wearing a little thin. Maybe I’m getting old but he felt like too much of a good thing - great energy and amusing but kind of tiring. With some hash in his bloodstream he was likely to eat even more. I’d end up feeling like an extra in that old (but wonderfully bizarre) French film La Grande Bouffe in which a group of guys make a pact to eat themselves to death. I begged off promising to call Chris before I leave. I doubt that I will. 

Today I resolved to have a quieter day. I walked down to Colaba again and went to the Indian Museum of Modern Art which was, except for three or four works, a bit of a disappointment - a lot of fairly dated looking Modigliani and Matisse modernist rip offs mostly done about thirty years ago. Strolling in the vicinity of the nearby Gate of India /Taj Mahal Hotel area I was approached by a couple of barefoot young girls dressed in rags giving out wrist garlands. I knew that they were going to ask me for money but I was in the mood to go along with their pitch to see where it went. The main talking girl had a cheeky face and told me that me that she was twenty one. I kept walking and the girls, in typical style walked in lock step with me, until we got to the perimeter of the TMH security area. We’d been chatting about India in general and them moving to Mumbai from Goa and wanting to go back. The main girl who by this time I knew as Neelima, stopped and said that she wanted to ask me something. Fair enough I thought and I reached for my wallet. She told me that she didn’t want any money. The police who were watching us, would make her give it back anyway.  She wanted something to eat. They both did. They wanted food that was going to last. I agreed, that sounded good. I followed her to a stall run by a young guy just outside the perimeter. She obviously had some kind of relationship with him. She told him that I was going to buy her some rice and ghee. He produced a packet of rice and a tin. The rice, two kilos worth, was nine dollars and the ghee about seven dollars. I said that I wasn’t going to pay that much for those things which anybody could get for half the price in Australia where everything is more expensive. I figured he had some kind of hold over her and that he’d get the cut of the action. He said “Fuck you man” and I walked away. Neelima ran after me begging, really upset. I told her that she lied to me. She replied that she really was hungry. I’m sure she was. I told her that if she really wanted food, I’d buy it from the supermarket across the road. I bought a ten kilo bag of rice for about fourteen dollars and two tins of ghee for about six dollars. We got outside and she couldn’t stop smiling. Weighed down with the (for her) huge bag, she was nonetheless beaming. I told her to look after herself. She burst into tears and said this food would last her for about two months. I left. Maybe she went straight back and gave the bag to the boyfriend or whoever he was or maybe she didn’t. Either way I figured that she’d get something out of it. I didn’t give anybody anything for the rest of the day.  

Every tourist in India who doesn’t confine their traveling to an air conditioned bus experiences this kind of thing. India has a way of imposing itself on you. You feel like a Maharaja. Your clothes, your money, your whole life, an implied insult to people in rags. You even wonder if you should be here at all.  I’ve seen some things this time, particularly involving sick children that have been particularly distressing.  What’s the right thing to do, given you can’t give money to everybody who asks? Ration how much you’re going to give on a daily basis - say five or ten dollars? Give to the people whose plight affects you the most? (I saw a man today sitting on the footpath with a pair of bathroom scales and a cardboard box - nobody was even looking at him. He looked wretched, totally defeated by life staring vacantly into the middle distance.) Not give anybody anything and give to a charity once a year?  I have no idea of the answer to any of this and the older I get the more certain I am that I have no idea. This kind of conundrum, so full of emotion and so full of self contradiction is for me, totally compelling - drunk with life. Poverty is only one facet of India. The country has so many other equally compelling puzzles and fascinations:  

the positives and negatives of religion, the acceptance of personal difference, the capacity to throw caution to the winds and celebrate every day. Probably most overwhelming is the way it holds up a warts and all mirror to who you are, or who you think you are.