Tigers.

Day One:

Oh India. I must admit I’d remembered many more your faults than quirky delights. Such fun little moments like blowing my nose at the end of the day and realizing the inside of my nose is coated in thick black tar-like snot from the overload of fumes. So much so that it gets in my contacts every five seconds and makes my eyes feel dirty and gritty constantly. Such wonders as the INANE, STUPID, FUCKING RIDICULOUS, BEUROCRATIC NONSENSE RULES. Leftover from British rule, India is annoyingly full of it – like when we were exhausted and trying to come home tonight and they told us that we couldn’t go to gate 5, the gate directly in front of the ship because that was the guarded gate for Indian nationals. Instead we had to go to the exceedingly sketchy gate 2.5 km down the road (p.s. remember sidewalks do not exist in India) and walk through there. In the dark. Just Allie and I. Completely unprotected. And then the two and 1/2 km BACK to the ship because gate seven is the only gate foreigners are allowed to walk through. Honestly, for all their talk about protection for Americans (India is second only to Iraq in the highest number of terrorist attacks in the world) and how we need this very important, completely irreplaceable, piece of printed computer paper as a pseudo-passport to get around. They said if we loose it we would be able to get on the ship but not back off, even if we were willing to use our passport (that makes zero sense!!!) and we never even showed that paper to anyone today. Not once!

 

Anyways. There are some really awesome redeeming qualities about India. I’d forgotten just how incredibly friendly and sweet the people are at times. For instance when we were trying to get from the fifth gate to the seventh we were freaking out and wandering around trying to find it and it seemed no one care or spoke enough English or knew. Finally I just asked a random guy who told me he’d only just moved to Chennai and didn’t know his way around – I was about to cry and Allie was furious. But then this guy and his friend asked around for us. Then he hailed us a cab and paid for it to take us to the right gate and paid a beggar who’d been trying to get our attention throughout all this! I could have kissed that man I loved him so much. Then after we get to the port gate we still have that 2km walk back and a taxi driver allowed to go within the gate pulls over and offers us a free ride! Just because. So, so, sweet.

 

Anyways. It was a pretty good day.

 

Firstly I’d completely underestimated how hot it would be. 95 degrees isn’t that bad I guess but it’s a conservative place so I wore jeans and a tee-shirt. Add to that 8 billion people in a city ¼ the size of Atlanta and I wanted to die. We hailed a tuk tuk driver once we got to the port gate after having a delicious ship breakfast, picking up our stupid ids, and exchanging some money. The driver said we could have him all day (after some confusion because his English wasn’t great and our Tamil was even worse) for 1,000 rupees (20 dollars.) He took us to Parry st. to buy some pirated DVDs and then to the Vandaloo zoo, about a 30 km drive outside the city. The zoo was pretty cool. I saw a white tiger. The best part though were all the kids on trips from school – they went crazy when either Allie or I pulled out a camera and demanded we take photos of them all. They also screamed “HI! WHERE FROM?! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?!” everywhere we went and wanted to shake hands. I seriously think I shook hands with 1,000 children today, all in various stages of dirty, sticky, handedness (this is worth noting considering what we did after the zoo.)

 

When we saw the tigers around 2 though we realized we’d spent a good part of the day focused on the zoo since we left at 10 and it was our only real unscheduled day in Chennai for both of us so we headed back toward the entrance. That zoo is freaking enormous! We walked a couple miles and didn’t even see half of it. It was kind of sad too at times because the level of care for the animals there is nothing like the US’. In the nocturnal cat room they had one animal in a very smelly empty concrete room with a bowl of sliced white bread and a fly infested banana amidst shrieking children. Anyways, so we’re heading out and I’m realizing I’m in India in the hottest part of the day, walking around all morning, and I haven’t worn any sunscreen or drank any water at all. I start feeling incredibly sick and faint and once we finally get back to the entrance it’s getting really bad. I’m still sick so I’m not really able to breathe well under ideal circumstances, and as things are I’m so dehydrated that the edges of my vision are black, my heart is racing ridiculously fast, and I feel like I’m really about to throw up. I sit down in the sweltering little entrance café there and Allie bought me a bottle of water and it was terrible. I hadn’t really been sweating before but all of a sudden I’m melting. I had to close my eyes because my vision was shaking and the edges of everything I saw were turning black. I’ve seriously never felt that awful before. I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. Dehydration is kind of horrible.

 

Anyways, I drank lots and lots, very slowly because I remember reading somewhere if you’re dehydrated and drink too much water too quickly it’ll make you throw up (delightful!) and after like 30 minutes I was okay. We got into the taxi to make our way back to Chennai and asked our driver to take us to a good restaurant on the way. I can’t remember the name of it – I’ll have to ask Allie since I know she snagged a printed napkin – but it was delicious. Very, very, spicy, and all served on a traditional banana leaf. They bring you water (in this case bottled for us) and a leaf and you have to pour out some of the water on the leaf and coat it with your hand. You then get ladled some white rice and brought naan and a cute little set of dishes with all different condiments of varying degrees of spiciness. One was brown and tasted a little like a sweet soy sauce, one was green chilies – I didn’t try that one because Allie did first and nearly cried it was so spicy, and ketchup, and one with a sweet red chili paste. Oh and yoghurt. Then we mixed our foods (allie had fried rice and a Indian spring roll thing and I had some supposedly mild [lies, it was ridiculously spicy, even for me!] chicken masala thing) with the naan/rice and eat it all with your hand. The right hand of course since the left is used as toilet paper.

 

It was so good! However there was no place to wash your hands so Allie and I just used some antibacterial gel and are praying by some miracle we don’t get one of the disgusting parasites they talked and showed slides of in the preport. Mmmm.

 

Then we went back to the city and checked out a sari store one of the interport lecturers suggested. It was very cool but very overwhelming and since I know myself enough to say I would never actually wear it, I didn’t buy anything even though some of them were outstandingly gorgeous. We paid our driver and let him off early with a generous tip (I’m trying to keep up my good taxi driver karma. After Charlie in South Africa we’ve been spoiled) and wandered around T Nagar st. It’s huge. Really huge. And it had started to get dark but that only meant it was getting more crowded, which is cool thing to see. When you’re in a city full of 8 million people it means one glorious thing; the odds of you running into another SAS hos and bros group are slim to none. Kind of awesome. We walked around and tried some sweets and talked to some people. I bought all kinds of bangles and crazy fake gold earrings, a secret gift for you Mom, henna to use for mendhi later, and a pirated twilight book since I’ve run out of things to read on the ship (don’t judge.) It was really fun and really crowded. People everywhere all up and down this offshoot of T Nagar, and everything was so loud and lit-up.

 

We decided we were only slightly hungry and when our tuk tuk driver ignored our request for a food place and instead prematurely dropped us off at gate five we figured it wasn’t that big a deal. The only problem with that though is that I’ve only just remembered from the last trip to India that taking my malaria pills without food is painful later on. Oh well.

 

Days 2-4:

The next day I woke up around 9 to pack and shower and eat before we all left to meet our homestay families around 11. I had no real idea of what to pack so I threw some stuff together and hoped that we’d get the chance to do some shopping since I brought no shorts, capris, or skirts, and India was averaging 95 degrees each day with humidity and the body heat of a billion people all around you. So we finally get to the stadium where our families were to meet us and I’m paired up with a girl named Julia who lived down the hall from Cass. She was really nice and we got along well but we had no idea what to expect from our family – we’d been told the week before to send an email to the programs coordinator with any allergies (Julia is lactose intolerant) and what we like to do for fun so they could pair us up with families with the same kind of interests. I wrote them back and said that I’d love to be paired with any religious household, and that I loved painting.

 

We got off the bus and met our Dad who’d taken off work for the day to hang out with us while mom was at some kind of parent-teacher conference kind of thing from four. So dad takes us out for coffee (delish – I had a chilly snowflake or something that was basically frozen ice cream and coconut.) And Dad and us chit-chatted about the things we wanted to do while in India, differences in the educational system and just general get-to-know-one-another kind of conversation. P.s. Mom and Angie, Dad asked me what I paid for some bangles I was wearing and pirated dvds I told him I’d bought and he said I bargained like an Indian and might have paid less than he would have, haha. We went to Mary’s cathedral where Elihu Yale’s (founder of Yale) marriage certificate was still on display. We went to an old fort where the brits first set up governmental offices in Chennai, and then to the local gymkhana club our family are members of. It was really cute and we had cricket drinks (think like a light, bubbly, citrus-y drink that was very refreshing in the heat) and assorted lunch stuffs like some kind of paneer that looked like scrambled eggs and paneer butter masala and lots of naan and chicken tikka masala. It was all very, very good.

Dad suggested we check out the Theosophical Society which I really wanted to see, but we decided to stop home first and meet the rest of the fam. first.

 

Mom was there and looking thoroughly western in jeans and a tee shirt while daughter Sadhu (5) and Siddhu (8 – these are just pet-names by the way) met us with all kinds of energy and excitement. I guess they’d hosted some other kids before and Siddhu mentioned a Brazilian named Julio who’d stayed there right before us. Sadhu was teeny tiny – she didn’t eat much and had tiny long legs that were constantly moving. They were both adorable and incredibly sweet. Siddhu kept calling Julia and I auntie because he said he wasn’t comfortable calling us by our first names as we felt it was a little disrespectful. Adorable huh? The kids went off to drawing and cricket classes while Julia and I chatted with mom about all kinds of things: American celebrity gossip, east coast vs. west coast stereotypes, and even arranged marriage; something Julia seemed particularly interested in. Mom told us her marriage had been arranged but that she didn’t regret anything, she said she believed marriage was a risk whether you thought you knew the person or not and that she’d known people in love matches who got along great and were fine until they got married and became too comfortable with one another and would say things that were hurtful because they thought they were comfortable enough to talk to one another like that. I never would have brought it up but it was interesting to hear.

 

We picked up Sadhu from her drawing class and mom brought us back a gorgeous wood bracelet with red and green stones imbedded in gold leaf – she said it reflected a traditional kind of painting done with stones and gold leaf that was uniquely made into jewelry by her sister – very cool. We went shopping in the end because I figured I could do the theosophical society on my own sometime (I never did make it there though; next time) and went off to a store called fabindia. Fabindia is expensive by Indian standards (and still cheap by u.s. ones) and is an all organic materials store with traditional block printing and fair trade standards for their workers. I bought a light, white, cotton shirt with orange tulips printed all over it. We then went home for a bit where mom made us pasta – it’s so cute, mom was so insistent that I eat all the time – before we had to go to a rotary club meeting with all the sas kids and their families. There was traditional dancing and lots of boring speeches, tasty food (including some kind of ice cream served in baby clay pots made out of condensed sweetened milk and crushed pistachios) and all kinds of crazy shenanigans.

 

We then drove by Marina Beach (the second longest beach in the world) on the way home and passed out once we were there we were so exhausted. The next morning we knew we’d have a long day touring the temples of Mahallabapurim (I’m sure I’ve spelt that wrong but I’ll correct it later.) So Mom made us some special Madras coffee that’s like cappuccino. I guess they let it drip all night and then in the morning add crème and sugar; it was really very good even though I don’t particularly like coffee. It was a long, very hot day, full of strange touristy stuff and heartbreakingly persistent kids begging with babies on their backs. We went to a “farm” on the coast to have beer and lunch and that was pretty strange too. There were a group of like 5-10 guys our age playing techno and drinking beer – the sons and friends of the owner of the “farm” I think – all listening to Indian techno and chatting up some of the SAS girls. They said that the “farm” was their weekend house – it wasn’t a weekend house though it was like a legitimate huge vacation home with a fake little river and a huge patio and terrace built in. They told us to check out the local Chennai d.j. Psychovski – the son of a Russian composer and a local Chennai woman - but I later couldn’t find any of his c.d.s anywhere. Mental note to download from home later.

 

We then went to a crocodile farm were not much happened except –shockingly – I saw crocodiles. There were two girls who obviously were snorting coke or doing whatever it is over priviledged slutty white-girls do instead of listening to the diplomatic briefings when they told everyone to dress conservatively, because one girl was wearing a halter style dress like the kind they wear in Florida with the side of her breasts all hanging out. It was nauseating. And the worst part is that a bunch of local guys from a visiting technical college were all taking photos with them and draping their arms around them all. And then they’d giggle and shriek “It’s like we’re celebrities!”

 

By the time we got back to our host families there was only time to change out of our sweaty clothes and eat dinner. Mom made dosas with all different kinds of sauces – one was a brown soupy spicy lentil thing, another a green coconut sauce one, and a ground red kind of spicy thing. All very delicious. Dosas, if I’m remembering this right, are like thin crepes/pancakes – there were also little squiggly cold rice noodles in pancake shape (Siddhu noted we thought everything was like a pancake which he didn’t understand because he thought it was all vastly different.) Dinner was really, really, good.

 

Then Julia and I went out for drinks with Mom and some of her friends, one was a friend whose daughter went to school with Sadhu, the other, whose name I’m sure I’m spelling wrong or mispronouncing, I thought was named Kala. Kala was awesome. Really, really awesome. She said things like, “Good. Damn good!” Like some British woman who was on safari. I loved her. We headed towards an English pub called 10 Downing that was filled with only locals. They’d switch every-other song from some popular American song to a local bollywood one; we had lots of girly drinks and beer and danced lots. In India it seems most people go out around 8 or 9 because last call is anywhere from 11-12. So we left at 12 and while Julia and I were so exhausted we were hoping to go straight home, Dad met up with us towards the end of the night and we all went to some friend’s house party.

 

That’s right. A house party of 40 and 50 year olds. In India. My life is pretty crazy this semester, but it gets far, far stranger. Kala, Mom, Julia, and I all start doing shots of tequila. We dance to terrible music from the 80’s. Kala spins me around the room and screams to “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.” Then Mom passes out in a backroom and Dad, a bunch of other party-goers, Julia and I, all sit down at the table and talk politics: namely US foreign policy. Apparently one said party goers is some governmental minister of something too – and he and Dad get into a very heated discussion about America's role as the global police – Iraq and genocide, as well as the holocaust. Food materializes on the table and I find myself drunkenly a part of a feast with loud arguing going on all the while. I eat some kind of spicy chicken, rice and curd, biriyani, naan, and Julia even had curried goat’s brain.

 

Eventually we get home – mom is way gone and passes out immediately and dad wants to talk to us in the living room over some glasses of Bailey’s. We’re goofing around but he looked like he had something he wanted to tell us – he says something like, “I have something I want to tell you, but I don’t think it’s a secret I should tell you…”

 

He told Julia and I that he and Mom separated 10 days before we arrived; that he tried to get out of the homestay but it was too late notice and he was stuck with us. The kids didn’t know, but that it was awful and he still loved her. He cried. We listened to John Denver. It might sound awkward the way I’m telling you now, but the truth is: whether he told us or not there were problems between them whether we were there or not. The fact that he told us showed that he trusted us and considered us friends. It came from a really good place that he’d talk to us like that, and I was so glad I’d done the homestay and that I’d had such a wonderful family that so readily opened their home and their hearts to us.

 

We gave them a tour of the ship and they seemed impressed. I really hope they get to be on the MV Explorer one day – if not as full time students then as part-time Rotarian interport lecturers. God knows they’re smart enough, and so adorable.

 

The last day I was supposed to go to a service visit to a disabled children’s home but at the last minute I skipped it. I’d talked to some girls who did it the day before and said that it was good but that the kids had sas students in and out of there all the time and almost all of the day was spent not with the students or faculty, but instead alone painting or cleaning up the grounds. I figured I didn’t see nearly as much of India as I wanted so instead I went out with Amy and Cassie. I really wanted to check out Higginbotham's book shop on Anna Salai st. but when we got there at 9am the guys outside the store told our rickshaw driver it wouldn’t be open for another hour and a half. We’d already paid 100 rupees to get from the port onto Anna Salai st. and he seemed pretty sweet and his English was alright so we headed to st. Thomas’ Cathedral since none of us had been there yet.

 

St. Thomas’ basilica is only one of three in the world built over the remains of an apostle and it was pretty cool. A gorgeous cathedral with Hindu influences amongst all this really Christian atmosphere – like a huge statue of Jesus standing upon a lotus with peacocks flanking both sides of him. Or Mary “Our Lady of Mylapore” portraits, Mother Mary swathed in hot pink sari fabric, or baby Jesus figurines with florescent lights in his hands. It was awesome. And we went into the bottom of the church and saw where st. Thomas was buried, as well as a fragment of bone from his chest that had been enshrined in a shiny silver relic.

 

Then the driver took us to a big Hindu temple that I never got the name of. We had a really cool guide who’d lost his toe because he said it had to be amputated because he had cancer in it from smoking. I have no idea if that’s even possible – Allie doesn’t seem to think so, but he seemed pretty sure of it at the time. Anyways, he showed us all around, even to a wedding that was taking place while we were there touring. Our guide tried to get us to get right up in their faces – all while it was being video taped, and in their faces but we didn’t want to bother them. They make lots of noise and play loud music – Cassie said she was told they do this so if someone sneezes or talks shit about the bride or something, they can’t be heard. I don’t know about that but it sounds funny.

 

Then he showed us a tree where people place little notes with wishes on and hang wooden cradles if they’re trying to have babies. He told us the original reason for all this is because one of the Gods and his consort (I can’t remember now which one; I need to start journaling as soon as I get back each day…) used to lie down beneath it and canoodle. He smeared white ashes on our foreheads (then later told us it was the ash of cow dung) and put a red dot to represent the third eye on our heads. He also told me it enhanced my beauty – awkward. Then we headed back towards the entrance where he demanded 5 us dollars each. He said it was partially going to the temple as a donation – who knows if that’s true, we picked up our shoes from the shoe man and got back in the tuk tuk.

 

We headed back to Higginbotham's and spent lots of time there getting books. For $20 I bought:

 

4 postcards

A fiction book about a young boy from India who becomes agnostic

A big children's book on tradition moral stories for Aiden

3 comic books in English of religious stories like the Ramayana and soordas.

The Ramayana for me

Learn Tamil in 30 days

Indian GQ

A crazy book called “weight loss” here’s the description: By Upamanu Chatterjee: Innocent and unremarkable, but for his near crippling obsessions with sex and running, Bhola goes through life falling for all the wrong people. At school he lusts indiscriminately after his teachers, both male and female, and is equally attracted to eunuchs. While in college, he has a vaguely demeaning affair with his landlady, and a vegetable vendor-cum-nurse and her husband. Later he marries a woman (with a voice like liquid gold), fathers a daughter, and suspects he is close to balance and beauty. Then his past catches up with him.”

 

I feel like India, more than any other country, was far too short an amount of time in country. Sure, the heat and pollution has made my cough so bad I am honestly afraid one of my ribs is going to break soon, it’s so incredibly painful to just breathe at this point. But the people are amazing and beautiful and courageous – the country has an amazing history, and the religious diversity and intensity of India is unlike anywhere else; a theologian’s paradise. It is here, more than anywhere else, I felt like I could have lived. Not forever, but for a while to be sure. It’s a world away in every sense, but where I originally thought I was going to fall in love with India and was incredibly disappointed  when I didn’t. Now I feel like I’ve grown into India. Like I can respect it and love it for what it is, not for what I’d imagined it to be. It’s hard to explain, but thank God I have a ten year visa; I’ll definitely be back.

 

Also, an update on the gate thing I was so pissed about earlier: I heard from a bunch of people that the rickshaw drivers had paid the police to shut down gate 5 and make us go to gate 7 because they could all park there and there wasn’t enough room at 5. I believe it.