Part Eleven: Arriving to Asia: "Just try to blend INdia"

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Holy Cow we are in Asia! Our 4th continent! I cannot believe we made it this far. As someone put it, “After this, we are heading back instead of away.” I never thought my stomach would allow me to make it all the way – but I will be grateful forever that I stuck it out.

 My very first encounter with India was not the sight of it as we watched the sun rise. It was the smell, which made it all the way down into the cabins a solid hour before we pulled up. It smelled terrible, but to me it was the smell of life—all human and animal smells. That first day I discovered the auto-rickshaw—by far my most favorite form of transportation yet. These are tiny little yellow glorified golf carts. One girl, who liked them even more than I did and is making a rickshaw documentary, described then as one third motorcycle, one third golf cart, and one third lawnmower. They are made to carry three people, which really means up to five. The drivers of these things are just as strange as the things themselves. India is probably one of the only places in the world where you not only have to negotiate your fare before getting in, but also your destination. You will most likely get where you want to go in the end, but you will probably stop at your driver’s brother’s store and a market or two on the way. The drivers get free stuff from certain shops they have arrangements with in exchange for bringing tourists, so we were often taken for rides, literally. One of the highlights of my trip was getting to drive a rickshaw. We had a really excellent driver one day who took us to a beach path and let us sit up front one at a time and learn to drive. That was also one of the scariest moments of my voyage so far. Jason and I had already had our turns at the wheel and Ilana was next. We got out to let her out and left our bags on our seats. After she was settled up front the driver took off. We didn’t have our passports, our ship IDs, or any money. Not only that, but the driver had Ilana, who is the not physically strongest person I know. We watched the rickshaw disappear and as the realization sunk in that this could possibly be the beginning of a nightmare, we started to laugh. “Just keep laughing” I told Jason as we walked the road in the direction they had headed, “That way it is still a joke.” What felt like 10 minutes later but was probably more like 5, they came back into sight, Ilana at the wheel and the driver laughing.

I was fighting off a nagging feeling that I had made the wrong choice by deciding that I didn’t need to see the Taj Mahal and the Ganges River until my overnight in rural Kanchipuram. Chennai, despite being only the 4th or 5th largest city in the country is nevertheless 13 times more densely populated than New York City. 13 times! The picture of India that I had in my head was of streets so crowded with cars, people and cows that you can’t hardly even move on foot. Chennai was like that at times, but it didn’t match the image I had in my head. From the descriptions of Varanasi I got from friends, that is where the image comes from. My 2 days in Kanchipuram was something else entirely. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had signed up to do an overnight entitled “Child Labor in Rural India” instead of a trip to the big city. After going, I remembered. The Taj will always be there, but it is only through Semester at Sea that I can go visit a Bridge School and spend the day with child laborers and then visit a village so remote that donkeys is their main form of transportation. I had an India experience that very few people who visit ever have and I left with a new image of India in my head, instead of a reinforced one.

Upon arrival to RIDE (Rural Institute for Developmental Education) we dropped off our things and went to a Bridge School which a school for children who are being transitioned out of the labor industry. They warned us before we entered, “These are not normal children, they are aggressive and violent.” Not only were they totally normal children, but they were some of the greatest I’ve ever met. As soon as I walked through the gate a beautiful little girl came running up to me and threw flower petals over my head. “Welcome to India!’ she said, and handed me a flower she had picked to put in my hair. We had brought jump ropes and soccer balls but once the novelty of those wore off, we made up our own games. For two hours we played with them without a single conflict and then we put on shows for each other. Something I’ve noticed about the kids in these Global South countries is their ability to entertain themselves with virtually nothing. They are so much easier to interact with than the kids in the States, even despite the language barrier. A kid brought up on television and video games (or even board games) is not going to be able to a jump rope in nearly as many ways as these kids did. They really valued it and the creative uses they found for it were amazing.

 That night I attained upwards of 50 big bites, which have been keeping me up nights, but it was worth it. For our meals at the volunteer center we got to eat with our hands and I tried and was able to swallow a surprising amount of the food. Nothing as exciting as ostrich, but still—I ate more than Naan. Before we headed back to the ship the second day we did two things. One was visit a silk-weaving shop where we got to watch the workers use the looms, and the other was visit that remote village I mentioned. There were things and people in that village that had I been a less sensitive person, I would have LOVED to photograph. Many of the things I saw there I do not have documentation of because I could not bring myself to take out my camera, or worse, point it a person or their home and make them feel ashamed. It is hard to say what I mean on this subject, I’ll try just one example: I passed a woman who was the oldest and skinniest and most leathery person I have ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off her permanently rounded spine or her toothless smile. I saw her with my photo-taking eyes against the backdrop of her meager flower-making shop, which was really just a woven mat on the ground on the side of the “road” and I saw an opportunity for National Geographic style photo, the kind shot that is all eyes—raw emotion. As much as I was pleading with myself to stop and shoot, all I could permit myself to do was give her the warmest smile I could and try to form a memory of the image of her.  I had to stop myself from taking pictures of the naked albeit perfectly decorated children because I didn’t want their impression of the first white people they were seeing to be from in front of a camera. That village we saw one was one thought-provoking places I have been, but not in an epiphany kind of way. I don’t know how to talk about it yet, and don’t expect to know how to soon, so hopefully the few photos I do have of this town without electricity or running water will do some of the talking.

Fun fact: at the movie theaters in India, you don’t eat popcorn as you enjoy your action/romantic musical comedies, you eat real corn. Cooked. In a cup. With some spices on top. With a fork. There is also a flavor of ice cream here called , “Computer Juice.”

this is me and Jason ZORBING - it is where you pretend you are a hamster and they put you in a giant inflatable ball and then throw you into a pool! I has a video!

On one of my free days I spent 2.5 hours in a rickshaw with Jason and one of the ship’s psychologists going to Mamallapurum, which contains a rare World Heritage Site called Shore Temple. We picked up Anne, the psychologist, in Timmetz Square as we headed out hoping to split costs, but none of us knew just how far we were going. By the end of the day I was so sore from the ride that I went to bed before 9. The city itself was small but filled with extremely old relics including one called “Vishnu’s Butter Ball.” Which is a huge boulder perched precariously on a rock slope. We stopped for lunch at a hotel and had some local beer and I ate some more new and spicy food. Anne turned out to be a master barterer and so we only paid about 1000 rupees for the 10-hour day, just over 20 US dollars.

bats!

dont tell the ship's doctors that i held a goat - major rule breaking on my part

the butter ball!

On another free day I got Henna and watched a performance of Bhrata Natyam, which I found to be the most captivating form of dance I have ever seen live. Non-Western Theatre students, be jealous, it was everything J Mad preached and more. Bhrata Natyam actually comes from Chennai, our port city, and there is a school for it. On the way home Laura gave me the word that I was searching for to sum up and/or describe India, but I’ll get to that later.

My greatest day was our second to last day where I went on a service visit to a disabled children’s home. By certain standards, it was a very nice facility. By US standards it would be shut down instantly. I did observe that the children are outside a lot during the day and are well fed and have a place to sleep if they live there and the staff seemed qualified and friendly. The atmosphere was overwhelming at first. Immediately upon stepping into the building we could see children lying in hallways where they have been left temporarily because they are unwilling or unable to move themselves. You could hear terrible screaming coming from the physical therapy room and there were spider webs everywhere. The first part of the day we took a tour, which I had to leave because I couldn’t stomach being paraded into rooms too small for both us and the children and watching as they were given treatments which were clearly painful. After the tour we did our best to help clean and paint, had a lunch served to us on palm leaves, and then had time to interact with the kids. I spent the afternoon in the deaf classroom, where the kids were extremely charismatic. They have developed a sign language of their own, unique to these students aged 3 to 7 or 8. There was one girl in particular who was able to communicate so well despite her disability that she could have been a performer. Her face was so expressive that it was like watching a talented mime or a silent cartoon. We got to take those students and a few others back to the ship with us for some ice cream. From what I’d gathered about their lives and the looks on their faces was that they had never seen a real ship, or been in an elevator, or had ice cream. I can only imagine how overwhelming it must have been for them, and I tied myself into mental knots trying to wrap my head around what they were thinking, and what they would remember this day to be. My favorite part of the day was back at the center during lunchtime. I went into the lunchroom where the children eat with their hands on the floor and observed a girl, no older than 6 or so, eating her meal while simultaneously hand feeding three other girls less functioning than herself. She did it with such skill that I was sure she does this three times a day every day. The boarding students greatly outnumber the caregivers and so I assume that able-bodied children like this girl have learned to help out. “Look how they take care of each other.” said another student as we watched from a corner.

on the ship!

When we were back in Ghana and our voyage was just beginning I made a prediction. I predicted that we were going to reach a point in our travels where things would seem to be falling apart. Our living situation is such close quarters and the natures of our experience so intense that we were bound to, to put it mildly, get irritable. I predicted that it was going to be in India when this would happen because this is the halfway point and we are now all comfortable enough with each other to let our darker sides come out. We are all exhausted in the kind of way sleep doesn’t really fix and so emotionally over-stimulated that our patience is worn thin. It did happen, for my group of friends at least, but as soon as I remember that we were always on a train headed to this feeling, I felt better. Breakdowns are inevitable once or twice a semester anyway, and now that we’ve had one, we can recover more fully.

It happened on our last day when our driver was not cooperating with us and the sites we wanted to get to we either too far, or not open, or not of interest to half of us. We were already hot and frustrated when we were dropped off at our first sight, which was a temple. We left our shoes with the driver and ran across the scalding hot street. I was instantly annoyed with the temple because it didn’t look like what I was expecting it to or thought it should look like. It was not tall and elegant and there were venders all throughout the entrance. I saw a baby no more than a year old asleep on a tiny blanket laid out on the side of the path. She was alone and in danger of being stepped on. Once we got deeper into the temple it became clear that it was actually quite large. People were walking about everywhere but their movements did not seem to be random. I watched them but could not figure out what paths they were following. Every once in a while the person next to you would drop to their knees in front of a pillar you didn’t even know was an alter or would touch the ground at your feet and you would look down to see that the stone you were standing on was a actually a carving. I kept feeling like I was in the way and someplace I did not belong. I didn’t want to be a tourist and sightsee anymore, I wanted to know a prayer I could offer so that I was not disrespectful. There were a number of places where people were lining up to go deeper into the center of the temple and Jason got in line. I got really angry when he wouldn’t understand what Ilana and I were saying about it not being a place for us to go see. “You go there to pray” Ilana said, “If you get to the front of the line and just look, it would be like observing a Shabbat service but not standing when the Arc is opened because it doesn’t apply to you. We shouldn’t interfere.” Jason didn’t seem to think it was a problem at all to go into the prayer rooms and I was getting more and more upset. Religion in India isn’t separate from life in India. I kept hearing the phrase “mixing of the sacred and the secular” in my head. These people were all moving around this temple quickly because it was just part of their morning routine. Eat – Pray – Work. It was Alec who finally made me realize why I felt like we were doing something wrong. “No one is moving counterclockwise,” he said. I watched and saw that he was right. I had felt so out of place because we had been moving around inside the temple in the wrong direction, literally obstructing people’s way. I could see the scene in my head like a movie. The camera panning up and out of the roofless temple, showing the four of us facing West, while everyone else was moving East. We left immediately. That day we also visited Saint Thomas Basilica, another Heritage Site and one of only three places on Earth that is known to contain the remains of an apostle.

By the end of the day we were so frustrated with our driver who was determined to take us shopping instead of sightseeing that we got out on the side of the road. We were trying to get him to leave us alone when a woman walked over who was not Indian. She knew immediately what was going on and we started talking to her and learned that she was from the States but had lived in India for 5 years now. She sympathized with our situation and called her family’s driver to come pick us up and take us where we wanted to go. It was so refreshing to have someone in India actually understand what you are saying and not try to bleed you for money. The day ended on a high note when 6 of us hilariously squeezed into the front seat of the shuttle to make it back to the ship before the line got long.

The word for India that Laura gave me was “transformative.” I liked that because it can have both positive and negative connotations. Every day in India brought new sights that are impossible to ignore or forget, either because they were so beautiful, so strange, or so upsetting. During our week there I saw an angry mob beating a man with sticks. I saw so many street children all hours of the day and night who’d use any device necessary to get money or food. I saw cows and donkeys so close to our rickshaws that I could have reached out and touched them. I also saw people who have such resilience and creativity that I now understand why people fall in love with India. It is such a physically beautiful and enduring place, yet it is strangely cruel. Complex would be a good word too, but just because a place or culture is complex doesn’t mean that it reaches you. India grabs you and wraps you up in itself and then spits you back out when you and it realize that you are not strong enough to do anything but visit.

A friend of a friend brought toast off the ship to feed to stray dogs. She lay a piece of toast down by the head of sleeping dog who lifted its head, sniffed the toast, and then went back to sleep. She was puzzled, why would this starving stray refuse toast? “They don’t like foreign food” a passerby informed her.

I fell in love with the word In-dee-ahh. A word that means something so similar to what Ghana means, but prettier—less utilitarian. A place where there are no rules of the road, where you want to cry but can’t because you know you are somewhere good. It’s a place that wore out my brain trying to keep track of the rules: don’t use your left hand, step into a house with your right foot, no shoes inside, to touching anyone of the opposite sex, no bare chests of knees, don’t eat the fruit, don’t say “mmh hmm,” it means “no” here. I visited monuments in India that were so old that it didn’t make sense; they might as well have been as old as the earth. I noticed that right along side the stickers of Vishnu and Shiva were images of Jesus. Indians embrace all deities. They don’t proselytize. Live and let live for the most part. I learned that even Gandhi had a darker side—just like India does. The caste system. “Its inhumane” Mark Anthony told me when I told him I felt uncomfortable touring the disabled children’s home, “to observe them like this.” It was strange to observe India period. Visiting the sights is not like it was in any other country on our trip, and totally different from Europe. These are not old relics. They are not museum temples. People still use them everyday, like we use Starbucks or Dunkin Doughnuts. As we observe this place as art, they pray here as a part of their routine. Religion is more alive in India than anywhere else. It is more than a way of life. It IS life.