ABROAD

Last few days in India. Tonight we take the Cheran night train to Chennai, where we’ll stay for one day. Then our plane back on Sunday, midday.

I was thinking about what to say here. It’s been seven years since I visited, and of course, as always and (hopefully) forever, there are a million and one things that make coming back surprising, exhilarating, strange. This last week in Coimbatore has been very relaxing, being able to read a lot, take walks, go out to eat. Really tones down the whole exoticism exploration/excavating wild brown men trip. A nice way to end the three weeks. Yesterday we spent half a day on the Nilgiris mountain (Blue Mountain; even the affectionate namesake of a Chennai-Coimbatore daytime express train) walking around the tea plantations, speaking to the once-atavistic (now wholly modern) tribal people that work them and run the tea and coffee industries. The Western Ghat mountain range is a beautiful, untamed place, and for the moment, magnificently well-preserved. For all that’s happening to the wilderness here. I read an article about scientists discovering nine new species of frog in the Ghats just last week.

The final stretch of road between Kochi and Coimbatore on our way back last weekend was a mountain pass through the Western Ghats. An awful road, almost undeserving of the designation as such: mostly just gravel, fallen boulders, tree stumps, and vehicles moving at 5 kilometers per hour. Ten at night in the middle of the forest on narrow crags with no light but the next car. Then the rain began to fall in blind, hard sheets. At one point, our driver pulled over to the right side of the road and took a 5 rupee coin out of his pocket; kissed it, threw it out of the window. “You can’t see it in the rain, but there’s an Ayyappaswamy shrine just past the trees. Drivers, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, whenever they’re on this road, pray to the deity for good luck. This is the only road from Palakkad (last town in Kerala) to Coimbatore (first town in Tamil Nadu). If a boulder rolls off a cliff or a tree falls across the road, we’re stuck on top of this cursed mountain for a week, at least. No way back. No place to stay. Happened to me once ten years ago.” Shut us all up in a sort of numb anxiety for a few hours. But we paid the toll, and so, we made it.

I’ve also been reading a lot of Arundhati Roy’s essays and interviews from books of hers that I picked up at a bookstore in Kochi. As anybody who has read her knows, she’s not at all a defender of India. In fact, she despises some things about the place like nobody else has cared to put to words.

She was asked in an interview to explain one of her metaphors for modern India. David Barsamian: “You use a metaphor of two convoys of trucks, one very large one with many people going off in the darkness, and another, much smaller, going into the digital promise land.” Roy: “Every night outside my house in New Delhi I pass this road gang of emaciated labourers digging a trench to lay fibre optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. They work by the light of candles. This is what is happening in India today… In Delhi, the city I live in, the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are getting posher, the gates higher… Yet everywhere the poor are packed like lice into every crevice in the city. People don’t see that anymore. It’s as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around it. They don’t want to know what’s happening. The people who benefit from this situation can’t imagine that the world is not a better place.” Barsamian: “It’s part of that regular diet of contradictions that Indians live with. You made the decision to identify with, or be part of, that large convoy.” Roy: “I can’t be a part of the large convoy because it’s not a choice you can make. It’s a choice made by your circumstances. The fact that I’m an educated person means that I can’t be on the convoy. I’m too privileged. Besides, I don’t want to be on it. I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to disappear into the darkness.”

I took that page out from her compilation of interviews, The Shape of the Beast, only as a picture of the brutally honest visions of India the woman has. Which a lot of people have seen, like me, but are too afraid or aren’t capable of expressing it so well, like me. One year later, Roy went on a lecture tour in the Southwestern United States. David Barsamian, in 2002, asked her about this. Here, again, she makes appraisals that are entirely spot on, that I underlined, and that for me, capture just as well the essence of America.

Barsamian: “What do you think about the incredible standard of living that Americans enjoy, and the price that is exacted from the developing world to maintain that standard of living?” Roy: “It’s not that I haven’t been to America or to a western country before. But I haven’t lived here, and I can’t seem to get used to it. I haven’t got used to doors that open on their own when you stand in front of them, or looking at these supermarkets stuffed with goods. But when I’m here, I have to say that I don’t necessarily feel, ‘Oh, look how much they have and how little we have.’ Because I think Americans themselves pay such a terrible price.” Barsamian: “In what way?” Roy: “In terms of emotional emptiness… you suddenly get the feeling that here is a country with an economy that thrives on insecurity, on fear, on threats, on protecting what you have—your washing machines, your dishwashers, your vacuum cleaners—from the invasion of killer tomatoes or evil women in saris or whatever other kind of aliens. It’s a culture under siege. Every person who gets ahead gets ahead stepping on his brother, or sister, or mother, or friend. It’s such a sad, lonely, terrible price to pay for creature comforts. I think people here could be much happier if they could let their shoulders drop and say, ‘I don’t really need this. I don’t really have to get ahead’… There are so many happinesses that come from just loving and companionship and even losing…” Later: “When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don’t think all of them are necessarily co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world, other voices, other people.”

David then asks her what it is she admires about India. Roy: “I think the anarchy of Indian civil society is an important example in the world today, even though India has its back against the wall and is being bullied and bludgeoned by the WTO and the IMF and by our own corrupt politicians… In India we are fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it’s gone. Every person that’s walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in its place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists—the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings. It’s threatened, but we’re fighting to retain it. We don’t have to re-conjure it. It’s there. It’s with us. It’s not got signposts all the way. There is that space that hasn’t been completely mapped and taken over and tagged and trademarked. I think that’s important. And it’s important that in India we understand that it’s there and we value it.”

Then, in a later question, when the interviewer overemphasizes her “deep affection” for the country: “I’m not a patriot. I’m not somebody who says, ‘I love India,’ and waves a flag around in my head. It’s my place. I’m used to it… It’s for that reason I cannot see myself living away from India. As a writer, it’s where I mess around. Every day I’m taken by surprise by something… I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. There is just a space for the unpredictable here, which is life as it should be. It’s not always that the unpredictable is wonderful—most of the time it isn’t. Most of the time it’s brutal and it’s terrible… I’m ripped apart here… But it’s the stuff of life.”

There it is. India has never been just a vacation for me. I feel both at home and immediately out of place among these people, walking through these streets. It’s never just-right. Always a permanent, inescapable in-betweenness. Both sides of the ocean. But that’s not so bad. It’s the stuff of life.

Spent this past weekend in Kerala. Night train to Thiruvanandapuram on Friday, and a car ride back from Kochi last night. 

Kerala (just as everyone says): green, green, green, green is the color everywhere, palm and banana leaf chlorophyll green, moss and lichen on rocks green, algae floating in the water green, buildings with crawling vines green. August in Kerala is, too, the height of the monsoon season. Always a just-rained feel, sticky humid breeze blowing hot and lazy. Any hour of the day it’s one second sunny blue skies, the next dark clouds and hard rain. We were told by everyone that this is how it is nine months out of the year, spare March, April, May (lately just April and May since climates have shifted). Floral life has flourished because of the warm, wet weather. So much that it’s hard to spot that reddish-bronze soil so familiar to the Deccan plains (featured especially on the sides of roads). In its place, quick sprouting grass and castor weeds carpet every inch of available soil, imperious, hungry to fill in cracks and forgotten corners.

We came first to Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital, where glamorous jobs in Kerala’s bureaucracy are plentiful and whose pull for tourists is minimal. Why, though? It’s far from the historic colonial port of Kochi, and the rivers and backwaters near Kottayam district, yes, but it is a stunning city, oversmall and densely populated, and ancient, steeped in the dynastic history of the Malayalee people. One of the first places we went (early closing) in Thiruvanandapuram was the Padhmanabaswamy temple, built in the 16th century CE as the jewel of the Travancore kingdom. Of recent headline fame: about $80 billion dollars or so of gold and precious artifacts were unearthed in the temple’s basement coffers by a court order, the result of disputes between the Raja and the government. Making it, as it is estimated, the richest temple in the world, more so than Tirumala. But the (titular, ceremonial) Raja of Travancore still holds property rights to the temple, and still he remains jealous, eager to guard its secret wealth. Which the government is similarly eager to usurp, piece by piece.

The Padhmanabaswamy shrine stands decidedly apart from the other Dravidian temples of South India. Built in Travancore, it is, unlike the sites across Andhra, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, not at all Tamil, but Malayalee. Erected centuries after the split, linguistic and cultural. It doesn’t aspire, like Trichy or Thanjavur, for the sky. Instead: low and wide, golden-capped but easily hidden by waving palm trees. Not all stone sculptures, intricate and intense, but just as much black wood as rock. Hanging oil lamps, spaced three feet apart, lining the long, quiet corridors. No thumping heartbeat, shouting absent, chanting heard only in certain chambers at certain hours. They called it the Raja’s secret, since it takes crossing five rivers to reach the temple, a journey of long treks and rowboats before the bridges came. Somber, monolithic. Let the wood and small flames speak for themselves. Jeering lions and open-mouthed demons replaced by mossy walls, damp corridors, a steady dripping from pores somewhere. Crumbling paintings, scenes from the ancient epics sprawled along some of the inner chamber walls, once galleries for the Travancore court. Now objects of curiosity for visitors anachronistically dressed shirtless in dhotis, women wrapped in the white, Kerala silk saris, Raja’s persistent policy.

Thiruvanandapuram again, after the temple, a tightly-packed maze of lunatic narrow roads. “Kerala specialty, sir,” says our driver. We stare unbelievingly. The main thoroughfare in the capital city: two lanes, one way each way, vehicles madly swerving out of the proper lane in order to pass, hastily veering back into place, missing lorries blaring death knell horns as several motorcyclists run off the road to avoid doom, twenty times a day. Residential areas must be nightmares for local postmen. Truly one-way roads, as in, one compact car can fit and any oncoming traffic requires complex reversing maneuvers on someone’s part. And no street numbers for houses. They have names; you name your house! This, it must be emphasized, is a miserable sadism inflicted by the Keralan citizenry on their longsuffering mail deliverers.

But they do things differently in Kerala, and that’s something to be admired. For example, they do ethnoreligious diversity differently. Kerala has some of the largest Muslim and Christian communities in the country and yet, with a staunchly secular politics, abnormally low rates of communal strife. Keralans regularly elect Communists to power, maybe contributing to the: highest literacy, lowest infant mortality, longest life expectancy rates in the country. Graffiti everywhere carry slogans and iconography for Communists, Congress, the Muslim League. Single parties barely ever win elections here, so coalitions (like the current UDF, the previous Left Front), are necessary. Even coalitions are content to scrape by, since decisive elections happen as often as dry months. Another difference: the liquor stores and bars at every corner. I’ve heard people alternately cite the cloudy, wet climate, the number of drunk Christians, and the fact that the state is one of few to still officially have an 18+ drinking age to explain it, but no theories have yet satisfyingly explained to me Kerala’s immense alcohol consumption, highest in the country. My own theory: Kerala, with toddy, has had alcohol longer than the rest of the country (mostly introduced to the poison by the white man), hence a laxer drinking culture. Who really knows?

After spending most of one day in the capital, we drove out to the backwaters near Kottayam district, where the hundreds of Kerala’s green rivers blur and fade into shallow lakes, onward toward the brackish inlets, onward at last to the Arabian sea. Big cities in Kerala have an altogether separate timbre from the greenery, say of Coimbatore. In the city of my childhood years, trees and plants form loving canopies, dot the roadsides and truly come alive in parks and greenways, always at the edges, tinging the human tenements with a calm life older than roads and feeble buildings. But in cities of comparable size in Kerala, you, man, conqueror of nature, feel still at the periphery. As though the trees, coconuts, mold moss water grass weeds are its proper inhabitants and humanity is the incursor. New buildings are quickly covered in sheets of flowering vines; newly paved roads are regularly smashed to bits by the hard rain that falls every hour; manicured gardens are overrun by what really ought to grow in a square plot of land, which, as it turns out, is ten times the amount of biomass you would suspect sustainable under the usual circumstances. A justification for the narrow roads, I suppose. Wise, maximally minimized usurpation of humanity’s rivals.   

Kottayam is commonly known as the beginning of Kerala’s Christian belt. Syrian Christians and Catholics of all shapes and flavors form the majority here, Hindus and Muslims filling in the available slots. All sorts of fearful murals of bloodied Jesus, shining baby Jesus underneath singing angels, churches with enormous glowing crosses, schools attached to these murals and churches as we drove through Kottayam proper. Then, a few kilometers past Kottayam, the backwaters. We stopped in a place called Kumarakom, where we booked a nice cottage in the midst of several other tourist parasites like us. (So many white people. This is where the white people, mostly Europeans on vacation, began and only multiplied until we reached Kochi, where white people haven’t been out of place since the 1500s.) The place we stayed at required passing several kilometers of (of course) one-way roads, rice paddies stretching far on each side, then bridges over alternating lakes, streams, inlets of seawater. 

On Sunday, we took a boat out into the backwaters, through the small villages of Kerala’s rural, amphibious countryside, where humble lives and quiet poverty see every day visitors floating on boats from other continents, faraway worlds. First were the slow streams snaking between settlements built on the water. Houses a few feet from each side of the river, back doors immediately opening to steps (three or four) down to the bank, women washing clothes; men brushing their teeth, shaving; naked children bathing in the water all around them. Cars and autos on the narrow bridges that crossed the water occasionally, hammers sickles red flags plastered on every available brick and mossy wall. The backwaters are Communist country, a stronghold as old as Indian democracy. The bright lights and high bells of churches, of course, everywhere. Pink churches, children in school uniforms and on bikes, pointing at boats full of tourists, chasing after them. They see foreign visitors often, but still rarely enough to elicit excitement. The smell of cooking fish. Fish smells in the water, fish smells in the smoke and in the air, fish on the breath. Few Malayalees are vegetarians because of the wealth of easy fish. Black umbrellas and slicked, wet hair. Because it always rains. Umbrellas in every armpit even when it isn’t raining. You know it will soon. Arundhati Roy was right about the dragonflies (this is God of Small Things country): throbbing millions of dragonflies skipping about the water, getting too close, breaking the river’s tension and making little radiating circles. Tricking you into thinking it’s raining even when it’s not. And then even the small streams get bigger, the water starts to overtake the land, the towns get smaller and smaller. The smaller villages deep in the backwaters are mostly water. Bits of land floating among water and rice paddies, and even this land is mostly palms, coconuts on trees and on the ground in various states of decay (and bananas) humans meekly holding onto small shacks where they can. Families here use boats like bicycles, rowing to the nearest shop for medicine and booze, to neighbors’ for tea, out to the paddies during the day, to church on Sunday without fail. Crazy, wild, alien existence. Do they know that the waters will rise? That their homes, the little land they know, will be the first to go? Because some people on the other side of the world (and a few miles away at one of several posh tourist resorts) are living The Good Life? And as they live Even Better, the water slowly rises?

…

Kochi, where we only spent half a day (our last) burdening spice and kairali shops with our scourge tourist bodies, is very much The Big City, the biggest in the South by far. And it has been since the 16th century, when first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the English fell in love with then-Cochin and anointed it the flagship harbor of their spice and tea extortion racket. Built the palaces, colonial offices, European street names, and Christian missions that come as part of the package deal, too. Towering skyscrapers, business complexes, and hundred-lane highways in the commercial district, center of the city. The traffic and smoke to match. But being Kerala, even these massive roads have standardized signposts and surprisingly little garbage strewn about, symptoms of an adequately-functioning bureaucracy. Further out from the commercial hub and into the miles of suburb folding into the inland is a setting much like Thiruvanandapuram, again. The green moss and crawling plants not fully tamed by centuries of capitalist growth, roads getting narrower and narrower like a siphon, walls covered with symbols of a politics decidedly more conservative than the rest of Kerala, parties like Congress and the KHP, considered far to the left in other parts of the country but the height of rightism in Kerala. And white tourists, exploring with us Kochi’s colonial-era museums, art and streetside culture sacred to Malayalees long before the arrival of the Occident. What are the words to finish with for Kerala? Brooding, mysterious, here-and-there, all at once? Probably best to leave it to the vacationing Germans and French who came here only with the scantest of material connection with the place. There’s something magnetic and irresistable about Kerala, fully separate and distinct.

Two temple cities in the past two days. Tiruchurapalli (Trichy): 5, 6 hours by car (bad roads); Thanjavur, an hour on top of that.

Navigating the mazes of the old Dravidian temple complexes feels like stumbling into the courts of fallen empires. Priests at the sprawling Srirangam temple in Trichy have performed rites for the Vaishnava deity in an unbroken line stretching back to the 8th century, CE. Substitute: Vaishnava/Shivalingam; 8th century/10th century, for Thanjavur. A thousand years have come and gone, and still bare-chested Brahmins chant and sing through the day, bathing and adorning stone figurines with flowers, ashes, the same pigments ground from the same plants. It’s not difficult to imagine why the pantheon of Hindu gods, their battle epics and moralistic fairytales, formed such a compelling canon in the days of the ancients. Whole new languages (etched on pillars and walls) with which to comprehend the world, entire realities sanctified by a terrifying and wonderful iconography. Lions snarling, cows smiling, deer leaping, demons dancing, armies warring, planets forever in orbit. The bemused gods standing above (and among) them all. All of this, never forgotten, is immortalized on the flying buttresses and jeering storylines of towering stone structures, in the Middle Tamil and Sanskrit of the Brahmins’ incantations. The main sannithi at Srirangam is impossibly massive, made of one stone and stretching across three entire chambers. The dome at Thanjavur, sitting atop the central temple, is a single, mammoth boulder. So large that they had to roll the rock down a mound as tall as the building itself, amassed and later destroyed for that express purpose. Performances of impressive and unbelievable architecture, contained within miles and miles of pathways, walls copiously covered with incomprehensible words; hundreds of chambers, major and minor sannithis, courtyards trickling into cobbled alleys that double back in circles or end abruptly.

All of this, swallowed whole, taken as an entire universe, and you understand the intoxication of it all. Logic, reason, rules, all created here, lovingly sculpted just as the art. Inescapable, just as the art. There I became enveloped by the mythos of the statues and the towers, unbroken history overlapping into the present. Whispers everywhere of a reality come hand-in-hand with fantasy. Heralding itself in the oil lamps that have not stopped burning for a millenium at red Thanjavur, there at white Trichy.

I saw a man sitting beneath a crumbling and abused stone column near the deep center of Srirangam. (Which takes, during the emptier hours, about a half hour to reach. The impossibility of escape.) I remember thinking how absurd it was that a column built in 798 CE is open to the rude hands of 2011. Then chided myself for such thoughts. This is India, where the fiction of a preserved and unchanging history, despite the greatest effort, has never quite taken root. What does it mean, anyway, to call a city “ancient,” where once a temple was erected and thought to be the capital of mankind, if, inside its gates today hawkers sell fake Ray Bans, postcards, popcorn, and Coke in glass bottles? Why pronounce dead that which has never exceeded its youth? … Still, the man at the column. Bald, hunchbacked: an elderly, unkempt man, wearing nothing but a white dhoti around his waist, eyes closed. Sweat pouring. Both hands holding sticks, sticks alternately striking the taut, round drum between his legs. He must be deaf, I thought. I stood on the other side of the hall, several hundred feet away, and I couldn’t bear the terrible noise of the thing: a thumping that pierced through flesh and walls alike. I stuffed my ears with my thumbs and moved further into the center of the maze.

Now in the middle of the temple. Its heartbeat still pounding from somewhere far. A few moments that I will never forget. As of yet still a familiar setting: bodies pressed against bodies, palms adjoined over heads, tiptoes everywhere, perspiration freely flowing, covering every inch of flesh. Anticipation, electric anticipation. Drum still going. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-… We are all behind a golden gate rising to about chest height, waiting for the double doors to open. For a glimpse of God awoken from his evening nap at six. 5:59. Thumping; muffled chanting from behind the thick embossed shining golden doors.

Six now. Gasps. The doors are pulled back in an instant by two slight young Brahmin boys, and there is the Figurine, glistening from oil and milk poured seconds before. A line of priests on each side leading up to the black, reclining statue, hands together, chanting now fully audible. Priests on their knees in front, throwing flowers gently, in synchrony. Oil lamps hanging on chains from the ceiling a hundred feet above, swinging side to side like pendulums dancing to the bounces and dips of hymns. Everyone around me has now opened their palms toward the room, trying to catch wisps of it all, even as fat men blowing on reed instruments stream in from both sides and form a ring around the group and they are all throwing flowers now, yellow rice too, some shouting some things in Sanskrit that I sort of understand, babies being held up told in the newer vulgar tongues to get a good look this means the world, this Godhead, me and you in front of a hominid stone statue performing rites refined through successive sedentary societies, look we are one, history and present, reality again the fiction it never ceased being. Noxious, drunken fumes of oil, camphor, incense, the constant, neverending thud of the temple’s heartbeat, boiling together with the hot mass of humanity, the unbearable drone of reed instruments. Man made here a universe for himself and populated it with gods that he dreamt up in a half-sleep, and here we are falling asleep to the smoke and sounds of those old, old fantastic stories, millenia old.

Our second day in Coimbatore. We entered our place (my grandmother’s apartment) on Sunday morning. All of the furniture was hidden beneath sheets sprinkled with a fine layer of dust, and the floor (without the sheets) was so soot-laden that our footprints remained as we walked around. So commenced a morning of rearranging, excavating, hiring a neighbor’s maid, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Now the place is gleaming, but still, there are no working appliances, no phones (but for one cellphone, borrowed), no internet. All of our meals we’ve eaten out. As of yet, the most disconnected I’ve been during the trip, but’s it’s not a terrible way to live.

Coimbatore, more so now than ever I remember, though, is teeming full of life. The city itself needs surprisingly little dusting. It’s easily the cleanest place we’ve been yet, the roads wide and well-paved; the walkways quaintly tiled and in regular maintenance; palm and neem trees swinging over the roads, casting tall shadows like a giant green blanket over the city, the one that made me fall in love with India in the first place. Coimbatore is where I grew up, from about nine months of age until I left for San Francisco when I was four. Only a few miles from the Kerala border, the region is significantly wetter and cooler than the rest of Tamil Nadu. It barely touched 80 on the warmest day last week. I woke up this morning to temperatures in the low 60s. This is how it is around the year, with the brief exception of the hot/dry spell in April and May. Steady precipitation (unlike, say, near Chennai and Tirupati) allows for a fantastic amount of plantlife. Neems tamarind palm castor marigolds banyans burst from the ground, in ditches, on the sides of roads. Most major streets in Coimbatore are cast in shade because of the sheer density of the plant overgrowth. Long after most of the tamarinds left the sidewalks of Chennai, losing their hard-fought war against big development, Coimbatore’s streets are still lined with waving plants that pepper the ground with dark, ripened fruit at a mild gust of wind. Tree branches hang like tunnels over traffic and wandering pedestrians. Also: cows, feral animals, their shit, human shit, human trash… all largely missing. These conspicuous absences owe in considerable part to the well-functioning municipal government, which rounds up and sequesters strays to best effort, but also to the broad expanses of wetland, farms, and forested areas that encircle the city. Narrow highways trickle out from the city’s peripheries to the tea and banana plantations of Ooty, and carry a few miles further to the trading post at Palakkad, across the border. 

The confluence of good climate and the early establishment of heavy industry (cotton mills), along with entrepeneurial interest as a consequence of these factors, might explain why Coimbatore is the state’s second most populous city and has its highest GDP-per-capita. Which, in turn, accounts for the natural beauty of the place, its wide roads and blooming parks. These things require patient investment, difficult where money is scarce. It’s all an easy spectacle to marvel at, but as with affluence everywhere, it exists only in light of the some of the worst deprivation. A cup of coffee at the Sree Annapoorna mess hall (7 rupees, maybe the best I’ve ever had; my father was fully addicted to these in his college years) means casual negotiation of the harsh have/have not barrier. All sorts of Tamil (broken, with strange accents) hang in the air from simple interactions with the waitstaff. Most of them float toward the allure of job opportunities and loose cash that wafts outward from Coimbatore, finding their way from the oversaturated job markets of Chennai, the drying-up, slowly mummifying ancient temple cities of Madurai and Trichy. And those immediately apparent Oriental faces: high cheekbones, light skin, narrow eyes, all those nonnative features that are normally so rare in these parts. Owned by the Assamese, Mizoramese, those displaced from India’s northeast, where the battle rages between multinationals’ avaricious pursuit of the wealth of forests, rivers, mountaintops, on one side, and the millions of Adivasis, Christians, and low-caste Hindus that comprise their citizenry on the other. Where, displaced, these people, India’s poorest, enter the orbit of India’s booming, beloved growth markets, ending up as the majority ethnic group in Coimbatore’s kitchen staffs. Brutal economic determinism. But on the other hand: Lee, Levi’s, KFC, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Puma, Ford, BMW, some of the new arrivals to DB Road, the main thoroughfare in the city, the milieu for the commercial transactions of the up-and-coming globalized bourgeoisie.

I was walking down DB Road with my cousin, heading to a groovy used book store nearby. I managed to pick up Arundhati Roy’s essay compilation Listening to Grasshoppers for about $2 at this joint. In hindsight, that book has probably retroactively colored my sentiment toward these American and European shops, but still, highly recommended, go read it now or contract tuberculosis, etc.

I am staring at KFC while being buffeted by loud diesel and petrol engines attached with metal to wheels. Humanity running like blood through the veins of the road, trickling into the alleyways. A young couple, laughing, riding on a motorcycle together swerve in front of me, severing my path prematurely, dismount together, and, hand-in-hand, ascend the shining granite steps to KFC, slide inside the glass doors and ooze into the murky mess of youth, ripped blue jeans, and iPhones. iPhones: about 900 USD here. Imported vehicles, like theirs: subject to a 100% tariff. I’m reflexively repulsed by these demons, and I guess my companion notices this (or my wrinkled nose). He tells me, in (Indian) English, “People here go crazy over American brands. KFC is, like, one of the coolest hangout spots. Domino’s pizza, same thing. You probably think that’s funny, huh?” “Nah man, that’s just fucked up. I’m sorry that they’re trying to bring that here.” I get the sense that no matter how far darling Coimbatore, golden child Bombay, all of the sprouting monsters of the East and the Global South advance, they remain ghettoized in the world’s cultural periphery. Partially by act of self-confinement, the eagerness and thirsty aspiration that comes as the subscription fee to unilinear modernization as an ideology. But mostly by violence, the imposition of this ideology and its associated set of cultural inferiority complexes by big money and corporate interests. A violence necessary to establish box stores that create paupers out of business owners and atomized shambles from generations of community. As well as well-dressed, aptly-equipped college-educated youth.

Enough of the venom. I love Coimbatore. It is, as far as I know, the most beautiful, life-brimming city in India. So to all multinationals trying to homogenize this place into the same exact sterile, half-dead spectre of a capitalist soup that you’ve brewed a million times before, sell that elsewhere. (Good thing I wrote this in a hurry and saved the city. Phew.)

…

Today we left Coimbatore to visit Isha, a nearby new-age yoga ashram built by mostly by rehabilitated junkies and reformed alcoholics. The entire road there is idyllic, swinging palm and banana plantations. Even small villages in these parts are lively, full of wealth. Can the ground be so fertile, the climate so kind, as to grow contentment? Even the poor have a little more in them. Tender coconut is chopped with relish and performance on the side of the road by an hairy, stout man with a sharp dagger, who we pay 40 rupees a coconut for his trouble. Their refreshing water, warm and dank with the taste of oil and earth. The occasional, dazed elephant, quietly stepping through dense growth and curiously peeking between crisscrossing leaves, briefly enough for you to doubt you ever saw them. Rows of areca nut trees planted for a December harvest. Areca nut trees: tall sticks like thick bamboo, jutting twenty feet or so into the air, with a few pods hanging far at the top, prizes for the (challenging) picking. Real bamboo, too. 

The spiritual tourists seriously mellowed my well-cultivated pseudo-mystic trip, though. The scene at Isha: squinting at wall etchings of legendary sanyasis and yogis, tuning my inner chakras to the same frequencies as the tinkling streams falling over limestone and water lilies, scents of roses and sandalwood in the air. Is that a sitar I hear someone strumming somewhere far off? Likely a cosmically high ascetic in the surrounding mountains, improvising notes to the oscillations of exploding stars several astronomical lifetimes away. Then, it all goes to shit. Long-haired, bearded hippie men; white women donning headbands and embroidered saffron kurtis. Freshly graduated from some of America’s finest postsecondary liberal arts institutions, no doubt. I try to clear my mind of these thoughts and return to an infantile yogic trance state. Find myself outside the ashram proper, at the banks of an icy stream gushing, melting from the heights of the Western Ghats. I ask a nearby, headshaven ashramite for one of those saffron loincloths he’s hanging up to dry on a clothesline running to his stone shack. Change into one of these thin cloths; tie it around my waist; jump thoughtlessly into the stream; empty my lungs of all air as I nearly freeze for the first few seconds. The old man is cackling off in the distance, somewhere far, so far away. Snatches of death, flashing like sick movie frames. Stop sputtering and blinking long enough to see him giving me a wide, toothless grin through his beard. A thumbs up. 

“Ohe, maharaj!” 

He’s standing on the bank, and I’m chest-deep in the middle of the stream, which is at most thirty feet wide. Slow, shallow, cold as sin. We both laugh at the same time, and all is well.

7/29. Another 6am morning today, for our trip to Sholinghur, a tiny, dusty village two hours across the border. What drew us: the Sholinghur Narasimha temple, sitting astride 16-or so kilometers of pathway and precisely 1,300 steps. No roads this time; no sparkling marble cottages; no immaculate lines-and-chambers; no security, no checkpoints. In inverse proportion to these absences: goats, monkeys, shit & piss (human and animal), crushing poverty. Unlike Tirumala, which attracts donors worldwide from the ranks of both the goodhearted and nefarious, Sholinghur is a barely-known, longstanding tribute to the half-lion, half-man god Narasimha. Who also happens to be our family deity. Who designated these things, anyway? And when? I’ve never gotten answers to these questions, except that someone did, at some point, and as such, we’ve been visiting this place for years, my father as long as he can remember, since he was a young child. I first got my head shaved at the temple-atop-the-hill here. Memories spanning generations fold back across the stone steps at Sholinghur. They’re only owed proper tribute. 

We went with my grandmother, who, after multiple leg surgeries for arthritis, is in no position to ascend 1,300 steep steps. So we hired four wiry old men (muttering, underpaid alcoholics, all), part of a union of forty, whose sole occupation is the carrying of elderly visitors up the steps to the temple in a reed basket held aloft by thick branches. The price for this terrifying expedience: Rs. 1600, both ways. After we saw her off, we began our own ascent to the top.

The first hundred or so steps are all beggars, crippled, blind, one-eyed, maimed, disfigured (many by loving parents, trying to ensure their children a lifetime of steady alms), crying at passersby for change, for grace. A horrible, horrible sight. The desperation of these people is unfathomable, and their unanswered pleas (we gave them some money, but who has enough money for them all?) echo and hound you up the steps, bouncing off the walls and tin roof, installed by demand of the basket carriers’ guild, whose feet in the old days would regularly burn raw and bleed on the sunbaked steps. After the beggars, then came the goats, clumsily wobbling on the stone walls on each side of the path, munching innocently at the mountain brush. After the goats, then came the monkeys. At first a few, then hordes and gangs of monkeys, whole monkey societies and monkey megapolises, monkey mafias dedicated to the harassment and mugging of solitary and stickless climbers. I was warned about the Sholinghur monkeys before I came, but as always, it’s entirely another ordeal in person. Most of the monkeys are harmless, content to piss on steps before you get to them, throw bits of shells and feces as you pass, giggle and chatter to their monkey brethren at their strokes of monkey ingenuity. Then there are the really crazed bastards. Poor things are probably infected with all sorts of tropical diseases. Whatever the cause, the truly unhinged ones run at you, fingers outstretched, claw at legs and pockets, steal water bottles and wallets, hiss and scream like demons. We were lucky to escape relatively unscathed—rattled by a few close calls but physically intact—thanks to our adherence to the two main methods for thwarting Sholinghur monkeydom: (1) carry big sticks, the biggest possible; (2) do as the demons do, and travel in packs. Other fellow travellers were not so fortunate (or, maybe, savvy). On our walk, we happened upon several victims of the hairy, pink-faced pickpockets, as well as one of a particularly nasty, bleeding bite on the leg.

The temple itself seemed like something taken straight from Joseph Conrad’s wet dreams. Underfunded, undermaintained, and unprotected against the steep oscillations in weather at such high altitudes, the place was crumbling. The once-vibrant paint on the temple statues was peeling at the corners, and, without fail, crawling with monkeys. We walked into the temple’s wet, damp inner chamber, unlit but for flickering oil lamps. Silent but for the indistinct whispers of a few other families, the chattering of monkeys in every crevice and corner imaginable, the soft incantations of the lone, emaciated Brahmin priest in front of flame and man-lion idol. Terse words exchanged; rice and flowers thrown at a deity; fire passed about; water and kumkum splashed in our faces. Red, dripping, masks. Truly outlandish, all of it, but this temple seemed so far removed, not on top of a mountain in the middle of a desiccated, desperate Tamil village, but in another world entirely, that it seemed perfectly normal, and nobody thought to ask about the ritual. We thanked him, stepped gingerly around the dark puddles and torn flowers scattered about the place, and made our way out. The way down, as always, was much easier.

Today’s my last full day here. Tomorrow afternoon, we board the eight-hour express train to Coimbatore. The last two days have consisted primarily of visits to temples-atop-hills, sites that with some regularity adorn the mountains encircling this region.

A trip to Tirumala is mandatory for anyone visiting Tirupati. The Sri Venkateswara temple is the sole reason anyone with any inkling of an infant notion of Hinduism in India knows the name of the town that lay at its feet. My grandmother (retired statistics professor) can laughingly recount a thousand-and-one tales of visiting far reaches of the country and informing audiences of her hometown, to be received with unstifled gasps and widened eyes. She recalls one elderly pair from Bombay that, upon hearing the auspicious news, indiscreetly began rubbing their palms on the sides of her arms, as if heavenly auspice is secreted from the body like sweat, piss, and shit.

Tirumala, jewel of the Seven Mountains, happens to be conspicuously absent of the expected amounts of unsolicited piss and shit, in any case. (The unpleasant amount of sweat must be graciously forgiven.) Roads, restaurants, market areas, and parking on the mountain are all immaculate, largely owing to the billions of dollars’ worth of cash treasure that float through the temple’s hundi collections each year. By virtue of its status as one of Hinduism’s holiest pilgrimage sites, the SV Temple atop Tirumala rakes in unimaginable fortunes that only fatten with each passing year. Business contracts drafted by believers and expats scattered across the world, in fact, often contain fantastic clauses spelling out phrases like, “10% of profits ceded to Lord Venkateswara.” Who, as we all know, resides in…

Troublingly, it’s not only old-fashioned superstition and good-natured belief that guides the donations of Indian film stars and business tycoons away from worthier recipients of their crores. For that really superb, pulpish tone, then: the temple was built (significantly) on blood money. That is, one day you’ll pick up a paper in these parts and read about the robbery of a bank. The next, an enormous pile of cash is dumped in the the temple hundi at 4am opening. Common knowledge: all crimes, from murder to larceny, are forgiven if the good Lord can collect a small tax.

Whatever the tributaries that feed into the cash waterfall that blesses Tirumala’s SV Temple, though, the results are magnificently apparent. The temple itself is gleaming gold, resplendent amidst the racket of the 200 to 400 thousand pilgrims that visit on any given day from 4 in the morning until 2 the next. Common knowledge: God needs only two hours of sleep; mortals are chumps. White marble cottages shine on the outer edges of the temple complex, serving as temporary housing for visiting dignitaries and as permanent quarters for rotund temple staff. Free schools, nurseries, hospitals are built in Tirupati (in the SV name) as mere pittances drawn from the temple’s coffers. Recently, a hall serving free meals for the poor was constructed on the mountain. Despite the two hours it supposedly takes to get through the line for food (and the unspecified number of murders and stolen, corrupt money), I count this as a good. I wish I could have gotten pictures of the place, but photography is harshly censured once you pass the second (of what seems like at least twenty) rounds of security on the hill. This second checkpoint, brimming with overinflated men in khaki uniforms brandishing nightsticks, is what greets you as you come off the winding roads that lead up to the temple. We drove, voluntarily subjecting ourselves to a speedy voyage tinges of nausea snaking roads endless circles and breathtaking visions of a town miles beneath us, but substantial amounts of the more devoted slowly trudged on the 20-odd kilometers of walkways to the mountaintop. Pilgrims are (by rule) barefoot, sometimes (by level of devotion) headshaven.

Once at the top: five endless hours of waiting in lines, then sitting-chambers, then lines-in-chambers. (A favorite family tale is the silver medal my grandfather, deceased statistics professor—retired by death—, won for redesigning this system of lines and chambers.) Then, the long-awaited twenty seconds of darshan. Darshan: a glimpse of a black, garlanded stone God from a distance of forty feet; a room full of hard shoving, anxiety, chanting; the smell of incense, jasmine, smoke, and sweat; hot as furnaces, and the rude press of a million nameless asses and backs. Truly, a vision of heaven.

More than the brief glimpse of a haughty, faraway God, I’ll remember the lines at Tirumala. Peering about at ancient Tamil inscriptions etched on the temple complex’s walls, remnants of an old Dravidian language whose letters are all still used but the words incomprehensible. Scrawled over hastily, centuries later, in Telugu, a newer language spoken by newer conquerors. Politics. The names of lovers (drawn with hearts) and local businesses (addresses included) superimposing the whole mess of history with the shimmering trials of small love and money. Poking fun at the rest of my family, squashed together in the midst of groups speaking garbled Tamil, Telugu, English, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, languages I couldn’t recognize. The tall, brown-haired white man I met in the crowd. Who, he and his Indian wife, I learned, were from the Netherlands and spoke English with an amusing Dutch accent. Scraps of something I read about Dutch being the Chinese of Europe, invented during a conversation between a drunk German and a drunk Englishman, written down by a drunk Frenchman. When, after the darshan, we saw them again outside the main temple and told them to redeem their admission tokens for the famed Tirupati laddoos (two free per token). When they thanked us, grimy and a bit vacant after being pushed around with surprising fervor, and floated off into the swarm. Remaining nameless. The Dutchman and his wife.

…

7/27. Some thoughts I jotted today after my shower. Let’s take it as given, in Freudian posture, that any system of ethics consists fundamentally of a civilizational impulse, the perpetuation and non-destruction (perhaps augmentation, but I suppose not strictly positive) of some society or collective. Those members of human society we regularly designate to be the most base and vile (psychopaths, murderers, etc.), happen to have the most confined “ethical target,” i.e., solely themselves. Contrariwise, those we consider the most virtuous are often the most altruistic, essentially meaning that their ethical targets are much more expansive (Gandhi, the Buddha, etc.). As such, would the most extreme altruism, correlating with the most expansive possible ethical target (all things, organic and non-?), identify the greatest possible virtue? And then the notion of virtue itself unravels when it becomes apparent, followed to the extreme, that it is so significantly buttressed on self-negation as a valuative positive.

This is all very confusing, especially when considering that the traditional problematic of Asians in the West is their overpropensity to self-negate. There has also been a shitton of writing on the topic just in the past few years, from that guy who wrote New York Mag’s “Paper Tigers” article, Amy Chua, ad infinitum. 

I was thinking about this after I visited the Reliance Mart (financed by the loving, monopolistic overlords of much of India, Reliance Mobile Corporation) on the outskirts of Tirupati, one of the city’s most glittering multilevel shopping complexes. A perverse place; it juts out from the ground all four floors blue glass steel neon signs near the town’s central busstop (places as bustling as train stations in most Indian cities, but with a decidedly lower socioeconomic tint). It stands in spite of black, billowing plumes of diesel exhaust and cheap transportation, literally a testament to the triumph of affluence against poverty, a fact reproduced throughout history.

Why did I visit the place? My brother and I were getting bored sitting around, and in the midst of yet another rolling power outage, a trip to any generator-powered, air conditioned place sounded good. Moreover, we wanted to buy a board game or something to pass the slower hours of the day. So a 60-rupee round trip and a 600-rupee Scrabble board later, mission accomplished.

To get into the place: greet the moustachioed, rifle-touting security guard outside, walk through the door’s metal detector, and, again, get checked out by another security guard, this one admittedly much older and without firepower.

The whole process reeked of discrimination and filtering, which is commonplace in India, 2011. The first security guard and the metal detector were apparently for “substantial threats,” or the impending Islamic armageddon, symptomized last year for Tirupati’s citizens by a series of robberies and a foiled bomb plot by a group of Muslim university students. Fine. But when I walked through the metal detector and set it off, the guards made no moves at all, likely owing to my clearly upper-caste Hindu appearence, dress, behavior. So, one. Two: the security guard inside (as in many of these opulent stores that dot Indian cities these days, owned by and advertised for by megacorporations) had one express purpose: to make sure I wasn’t an undesirable type. Dirtying up the shiny marble floor with bare feet and filthy clothes. That unwashed smell that accompanies occupations involving physical exertion. Really, like most people milling around the busstop a few hundred feet away; like most people in this city, country, continent. It made me uncomfortable not only that this filter was in place, but that I was passing through it, and at that precise moment, assenting to the whole bullshit philosophy that selects the few opulent, shields and protects them, and violently dissociates and depersonifies all others. Here is a wonderland of Samsung and Sony televisions, of fine imported boardgames, shoes and clothes, chocolates to make your children fat, cosmetics to hide the ugly sham of your privilege in the face of crushing desperation. And to all the others: fuck you. You don’t even exist. 

Of course, this is the trouble of privilege. Living in the Developed World is much the same, but it’s not so apparent on a daily basis. One has to admire the small affluent class in mushrooming neoliberal darlings like India. Unlike the American bourgeoisie, say, who are largely encapsulated in their bubble of comfort (and can fret from afar the plight of wage slaves and those starving blacks and browns), these Indians must negotiate every day the contours and sharp borders of their class. Where the filter for many of us (let’s admit it: me and everyone who will ever read this) was a distant memory of immigration, or a nonexistant memory of birth into a clean Western hospital, the filter at the Reliance Mart is an overweight man with a paunch and a large white moustache, eying your pants and shoes, your hair and face. It takes a lot to stare back into those beady, bloodshot eyes and reply with reluctant or wholehearted validation: “Yes. I am the one you’re looking for.” Maybe it doesn’t take much at all.

Anyway, I left the place feeling like I was run over by a busload of migrant workers, but I got back to find that the power was back. I actually don’t dislike rolling power outages as much as maybe I should. They’re terribly relaxing. Given both that: 1. they are often announced beforehand, especially in towns with somewhat functioning municipal authorities, and 2. uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems ensure that fans stay on with a battery charge, it’s not so bad. With these two conditions, power outages act almost as government- (and poor infrastructure-) mandated periods to unplug, unwind, slow down, contemplate, write, think, spend time with those around you. Things that are difficult with a billion buzzing demons seducing you with a world of excitement at any moment.

…

My father is a real charmer to my grandmother’s illiterate, hobbling, overindustrious servant lady, Lakshmi Amma. Just today he invited her to come back to America with us.

“It rains ice!” She wouldn’t believe it. In her half-unintelligible Telugu drawl: “Oh, go, sir, you’re pulling my old leg. You know I’ve never left Tirupati. You’re making a fool out of old Lakshmi Amma!” And she, wide-eyed, listening to his insistent response that, no, it actually does rain ice in America, that people wear fat, thick woolen sweaters to protect themselves against the cold, but yet, a few months out of the year it’s so hot that trees burn and tires melt. “America, mister! Oh, no place for me, no. Old Lakshmi Amma finds Tirupati hard enough. My soul is too weak for that, sir.” And he laughs his booming laugh and tells her the tickets are already booked; hope she has a fat thick sweater.

I would find it ironic that the poorest person I’ve gotten to personally know here is named after the Hindu goddess of wealth, if it weren’t so goddamn sad. Toothy, wet-eyed Lakshmi Amma. Never knew her parents and cares for her insane sister in the shack they share together. Short, with a buzzed head of hair from her last trip to the Tirumala temple, to which she goes often, giving her hair each time. Longsuffering embodied.

Thanks to the rigid hierarchies of Indian society, anything more than gruff, barked orders, even a hello how are you, thank you Lakshmi Amma, you’re here!, even mere eye contact as she limps into the room, sweeping, is an act of enormous magnanimity. And my dad recognizes this, and he makes every effort to befriend such people. “I’ve been loved by coolies, sweepers, and auto-drivers since I was a kid. They love me.” Because, more than acknowledging them, he appreciates them. Don’t they too deserve the right to exist?

I woke up today (7/26) at 6am, to the smell of boiling milk, the sound of street-pigeons, the faraway calls of flower- and greengrocery-vendors ambling through the inchoate dawn. I went for a walk with my mother, camera in hand, trying to cherish the few cool hours of the day.

A dark, blue-vested woman sweeps the curb, hired by the Tirupati-Tirumala Municipal Authority. The amount of government centralization in Tirupati is impressive. Considerable sums of revenue flow regularly into the municipality as a consequence of the generous donations made to the Tirumala temple by donors from around the world. The lady sweeping the street stands erect for a moment and stares at us: strange-garbed, obvious tourists (nobody besides small children wears shorts). I stare back, not unkindly, remembering what my grandmother told me she paid her house-servant. 800 rupees a month. A generous wage, considering she works in 4 other houses throughout the day.

Some math: 800 x 5 = 4000. Less than a hundred dollars a month, but that’s enough to eke a fairly comfortable working-class living. Supposedly.

Today is the first day, always one that’s half-asleep. Ate a drowsy lunch, followed by a catatonic sleep, followed by the smell of brewing tea (almost unbearably sweet, even for me: something of a crackhead when it comes to sweetened drinks), around 4. We all forceably awoke ourselves (to surprising success) in a valiant effort against jetlag. Still, the napping, midday, in a house without A/C, left us drenched in sweat.

Evening in Tirupati: a humid, cloudy sunset, spotty sprinkles. Auto-rickshaw riding from store to store (the fare here is cheap since it’s such a small town: no ride costs more than Rs. 25), browsing fabrics and stocking up on insect repellant. There aren’t, actually, as many mosquitos as I remember. Thanks, Raleigh.

Most of the merchandise in small stores is coated in the filth that floats in from the streets, each store-front open to the roadside cascade of beggardust autofumes cow-and-dogfarts. Realization: you can’t close yourself sufficiently to anything here. Story: mother, bartering rickshaw fare with a bored driver; a white-bearded old man grows from the dirt, stares at each person’s mouth while neither pay him any attention. My dad, from afar: giggling uncontrollably, pointing me to the scene, slapping his thigh in earnest amusement.

Soggy dosas wrapped in a banana leaf from a streetside stall for dinner. Delicious.

To be a driver in an Indian city requires extraordinary levels of mental presence. Highway amnesia is strictly a first-world phenomenon. As a driver, you are always eagle-eyes, knife-tongued, lightning on the horn. Any lapse, and out from the teeming, dustridden horde emerges a pregnant woman; a cud-chewing, wild-eyed cow; a pack of plotting feral hounds (are they all golden retrievers here?); a chuckling, dreadlocked sadhu (a specific type of vagrant: my father informs me that most of these absent, drug-addled wanderers are former businessmen, or cuckolded men gone off the deep end); another driver blaring the horn of his auto rickshaw tumbling down the road at you, muttering volumes of celestial oaths before veering away.

Morning in Tirupati: sweat, but not as much as I remembered. It’s about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and humid, as it regularly is in the Valley of the Seven Mountains. (Thanks here are owed to the heat waves of this summer in Raleigh for desensitizing me to this madness.) My grandmother’s house: a single floor of a three-story, concrete building, a Soviet army barrack splashed in technicolor and Hindu inscriptions. She rents out the other two floors, but “only to government-job holders, never businesspeople,” since she insists they’re much more reliable and prompt in fulfilling their monthly dues. Government jobs in India are much more glamorous than in the states. Elderly landladies seem to be aroused by nothing more than 6-day-a-week, guaranteed wage-and-pension-earning servants of the Republic of India, all of whom studied to hold an advanced degree specific to bureaucratic service. Or padded the right pockets. Baths in this multiple-family complex consist of a bucket full of cold water and a pail. It musn’t come as a surprise that in such a consistently warm/moist environment such as the Andhra/Tamil Nadu border, such bathing customs are exactly what is needed.