Serendip in maps

Lazing in the shade on a searing stretch of beach on the south coast of Sri Lanka, enjoying the first pages of Michael Ondaatje’s “Running In the Family,” memories of his return here to his ancestral place, memories especially of his father.

Something makes me pause. I look up, south, out to sea, and start wondering (the heat perhaps) how near Antarctica might be, its icy fiords and bergs, which in fact, even at six degrees above the Equator, are still half a hemisphere of open sea away. I return to the page, then read with such pleasure this passage – touching my fascination with old maps, their romance, their promises, their stories of power, the excuse they can give to imagine the world differently – called “Tabula Asiae.”

“On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt – growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and seahorse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naïve mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar that leap without perspective across imagined ‘desertum’ and plains.

“At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west corner of some charts are satyrs, hoof deep in foam, listening to the sound of the island, their tails writhing in the waves.

“The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape, -- Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems””), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.

“This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and inter-married – my own ancestors arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.” 

A few twigs and a piece of mountain

Can a few twigs carefully placed keep a many-ton slab of mountain from falling to earth? So far, yes.

The granite slab hangs precariously just behind the Isurumuniya Vihara, a Buddhist temple at Anuradhapura where, alongside a pool, stone-carved elephants spray water over themselves with great delight. The whole creation – elephants, temple, carvings of a royal lord and horse head – is cut from a massive stone outcrop.

The path to the temple’s summit leads directly beneath the many-ton block of mountain, its gross weight balanced precisely, delicately it feels, between parts of the main outcrop. Reasoned hindsight says that the boulder could hang there for millennia. But at the moment I passed underneath and felt the rock’s immense weight overhead, I hurried along through to the open sky. Why shouldn’t the last moment of the last day of that hypothetical final millennia be right now? 

Only when I turned back did I see the row of twigs, some smaller than match sticks, placed along the crease of the hanging boulder and the shoulder of the outcrop – as if holding up those many tons of granite against the pull of gravity.

They held me up us as well, making me wonder who might have placed those sticks there, and why? No one I asked was able to say and I am still wondering. (A few days later I saw twigs and sticks similarly placed between boulders at the foot of Sigiriya.)

I imagined another passerby, someone who also felt the rock’s imminent crushing power, a power not unleashed this time, at this very moment of his passing beneath. Are those twigs his thanks to some god of delayed death? 

Or are they placed there to ward off the certainty of a future catastrophe, to protect others like myself who will pass under the boulder?

Looking closer I hear laughter in each twig, the ludicrousness of the human wish to defy weight, matter, time.

Perhaps they are the remains of a child’s play. A cave house? Toothpicks for the elephants?

And yet having passed under that slab of suspended mountain and now standing here under the sunlight, alive, I kept returning to the idea that those few small sticks are somehow implicated in the rock’s destiny – and the fate of those who pass beneath. This must have been why I added my own several twigs to the work of others. A gesture of thanks perhaps. A little insurance on behalf of those to come. I don’t know.

What’s more certain is how a few flimsy twigs, and the act of their being placed here, are transforming this stony passageway, in itself a mere heap of broken mountain, into a place of unseen powers – powers, like the rocks themselves, so precisely, delicately balanced between protection and destruction.

Standing here looking back, I think I see the beginnings of something that seems elemental in human experience: how a mere tree or cave or heap of rocks can become extraordinarily potent, a thing of auspicious or ominous energies or both, revered, the home of those who have come and gone before, a place to bring one’s greatest longings, unease and fears.

“What are you thinking of India?”

Many Indian’s ask us “How are you liking India?” The question usually feels prompted by genuine interest, but the manner of asking suggests the questioner really wants to hear India praised. Some put the question differently. “How are you finding India?” “What are you thinking of India?” Now this one, no built-in bias, more room for the mix of our experiences, is easier to begin answering. 

So, after fourteen weeks in the country, what do I think of when I think about India?  

The throngs of people. On the streets, at bus and rail stations, in temples. The invariably long, haphazard, meandering queues. It is as if pretty well everything and every place is undersized, shrunken, relative to the number of people who must move about.

The constant noise. Honking, beeping vehicles. Roaring, sputtering, put-put-putting engines. Loud, often shrill voices. The clamour of temples bells and music. Full-volume videos running through unfathomable concoctions of bloody fists, fairylands and bombast. So few quiet places to be. 

The memorable individuals we have met along our way, people who respond genuinely out of their own character, experiences, memories to each of us as other individuals, not as “tourists,” not as abstractions. The guesthouse hosts (father, mother, daughter) who discussed from their three different perspectives the effort of “finding a good husband” for daughter. Gopi, the  kindly, gentleman “clerk” on the Kerala train who had read Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem and, with dogged struggling English, so wanted me to read it. The gentleman guide at the Dr Ramnath A Poddar Haveli who, late one day, so generously, so intelligently showed us the painted walls of the grand old house, patiently sketched out the key Hindu gods, then invited us to return the next morning (which we did) because “The house has so many more stories.” The puppeteer who entertained me with the dancing girl and trickster. Narendra Mehta, the painter of miniatures. Zaveri the Jain pilgrim. Our host Gilbert (and his family) at the Alliance Guesthouse, with his open welcome and great walking advice up into the nearby hills and villages. The nameless ones who helped us find a bus station or post office or eating place, to get off a train at the right stop, to better understand where we were, prepared and served us delicious meals.

Traffic frenzy – which we feel whenever we walk, in any vehicle we ride (including those several near-death rides), in the town streets thick with exhaust and churning dust, in engine noise, in the surrounding whirl of movement.

The impossibility of experiencing the pleasures of strolling, at least in urban India. Sidewalks have been rare and are often clogged with stalls, scatterings of repair set-ups, vehicles and garbage. Walking must be done on the street, dodging vehicles from every direction, searching one’s way through more parked vehicles, watching for cow shit and scattered garbage, squeezing through throngs of others also finding their way, walking amidst the stench of urine and rotting waste. So much of one’s attention becomes narrowed to the next step and the beeps at one’s shoulder. Forget conversation. Forget the wider view. Forget any reflective lingering.

Other more critical kinds of turmoil – of ‘new India’. The preposterously concentrated and quick wealth of “new India,” its privatized world of gleaming (conspicuous but blinding) towers and its gated houses, its surrounding sewer-soaked servant shanties, its overwhelming Westernized ethos and culture, its need for ever-expanding ‘security’, its aura of ‘progress’, its promise of ‘success’, its work culture of old coolieism. The many suicides among small land-holding farmers. The continuing, habituated patterns of police/state violence: torture in police stations, the phenomenon of police-orchestrated ‘fake encounters’ (called ‘extrajudicial executions’ under international law).The hopeful-desperate journeys through the Emirates and indenturism. What Ashis Nandy called in 2000 “the growing criminalization of politics in the country” – and today its normalization.

Fondly remembered places and times. Walks in mountain villages above Naggar and in the Sangla-Kinnaur mountain area. Dewali in Delhi with Prem and Santosh and their neighbours. Sitting over cold beer at the Costa Malabari Guesthouse talking about the theyyem rituals; experiencing the intimate processes of applying the dance make-up and costumes.  Moving by boat and train through the green and watery world of the Kerala and Malabar coast, conversations with strangers along the way. The conversational English class with Tibetan refugees in MacLeod Ganj and talking with other refugees there. Rocking back and forth slow-motion atop those camels, then night fall and moonlight and sunrise with chair on the Rajasthan dunes. The many colourful, frenzied, magical, incomprehensible and exhausting temple worlds we witnessed.

What appears to me Indians’ very precise – remarkable to me – sense of space. Vehicle collisions seem so often imminent and yet surprisingly infrequent, especially given the numbers on any road. Passing drivers are able to negotiate the narrowest laneway and cliffside roads with millimetres to spare. Crowded passing pedestrians behave similarly, so often just slipping by each other at the last second. Bumps and knocks feel rare, except in some queues, and are seen as true accidents: met by surprise and politeness. The message? This is unusual. Considering the times my backpack has jostled and bumped others, or made them dodge in crowded spaces, I’ve come to believe that these unnatural protuberances of the body disturb a finely-tuned Indian sense of the space a natural body takes.

Such diversity, such extremes: India’s many “Indias.” Its many landscapes, languages, expressions of spirituality and faith, foods, body colourings and characteristics and expressive habits. The extremes of poverty and wealth. The impossible to fathom spectrum that runs from a world of the high tech, high fashion and industrial-corporate (mimicking selected aspects of 200 years of Western “progress”) through to feudal working and living conditions, pre-modern villages and beliefs, vast urban slums and human uprootedness, and a lively ancient spiritualism. Diversity, yes, but also these extremes. Oil, water, fire.

The fascinating incomprehensible worlds of expressed faith – especially at the many and varied temples and shrines, in the prolific world of Hindu and other gods, goddesses, spirits, venerated humans, creatures, flora, places. The fantastical shapes and colours taken by (or used to represent) the gods, their presences not only on temples but on house roof-tops, pillars, porticos, twisting, glowering, embracing, exhibitionists, guardians, energies. This is a land of the live spiritual imagination like no other I know.

Public filth: waste casually dropped or tossed anywhere, rare garbage bins usually hidden under a heap of waste, streets lined with scattered rotting garbage, increasing amounts of plastic waste, street sides rank with sun-baked urine, walking places littered with smeared cow shit, so many public spaces filled with the stench of filth. The filth kept astonishing us, but no less did so many Indian’s contribution to and seeming shrugs in the face of it. Those towns and states where there is an effort to reduce public filth (thus demonstrating that this is possible), set the scale of the issue in sharper relief in the rest of the country.

The handsomeness of so many of the sari-clad women and white-shirted men – all the more extraordinary against the ground of their often dusty, filthy and shabby surroundings. Just down a laneway strewn with days of garbage stand two straight-back, white-bearded men, white dhotis brilliant in the desert sun, one in saffron pagari (turban), the other in red, a hand on one another’s shoulder, eye-to-eye, smiling, coupled in conversation. Those saris: the women’s eye for such pleasing, often gorgeous, combinations of colour, pattern and design. How the sari itself can swirl along the female form, feet to forehead, the sparkle of tinselly threads or miniature mirrors, the fabric rippling in the slightest breeze, flame-like.

Especially tasty foods such as the stuffed bhel puris of north India; raj kahori, a sweet and spicy concoction in a puri or thin pastry shell; cham chams, sweet wrapped in an edible silver coating; crisp samosas straight out of streetside dhaba cookers; those never quite the same dals; prawns and roasted cashews along the Malabar coast; Jasailmer’s laapsi desert, ingredients too numerous to list; Kerala coffee, from a coffee press, especially after weeks of north India ‘instant”; Kashmiri pulao, a rice pilaf with pomegranate seeds, cashews, peppers, pineapple and papaya pieces …; drinking chai, stretched out on our charpoy on the crest of a Rajasthan sand dune, the sun just now rising on the horizon.

The chronic squeezing out of another 10 or 50 or 100 rupees from travelers, something not peculiar to India, but at least as relentless as anywhere we have been.  The aggravation and stress of this squeezing. The small-time cheating, attempted overcharging, the “friendliness” that sooner or later morphs into some “deal.”

Dysfunctional bathrooms. In 16 weeks we might have had two or three bathrooms where everything worked, more or less. Otherwise: sinks that drained onto floors, toilets without handles, showers without heads, heads without showers, cold from “Hot Water” taps, hot water from “Cold” taps, sinks the size of cereal bowls ….

Those behaviours that strike us, as strangers, as curious and particularly Indian. We ask a man a question in public (Is there an ATM nearby? Is this the bus to …?) and immediately three, five, six, eight more men are at your shoulders and in your face, simultaneously offering advice, opinions, interpretations and misinterpretations, advice on the misinterpretations, disputes over misinterpretations, special deals … until you scream something about none of this being helpful, at which point you realize everyone is giving you a concentrated “Wow, is this guy inconsiderate or what” look, and you wonder – stressed, culpable, your question still unanswered – what to do next.

A land “full of surprises.” We were told this in the first days and it has proved to be so very true, day after day. – “Yes, the bus you need leaves from this stall,” but it doesn’t and you almost miss the last of the day.  – “No, there are no seats on the train you want,” says the man at the India Rail wicket, who then gets up and walks away, perhaps for chai? for lunch? for a pee? for a chat? although another man soon arrives, sits in his place and you begin again, with a look of 67-year-old desperation, with your train reservation question (not yet quite accepting the answer you have), in response to which the new fellow scans his computer screen, stares some more, and longer still, men and women poking through your ribs and kidneys into the wicket itself, and then you hear the voice: “Two seats available. 473 rupees. Do you want them?” – A passing woman says the museum is 10 minutes walk, but it turns out to be 60.  – You spend 15 hopeful minutes studying the six page menu of a restaurant that has, it turns out, only four items “today.” – “Yes, we have hot showers” – until you hear the verbal small print the next day: “Between 5 and 6:30 a.m. on some days.” – Or “Yes, the museum is open. Yes, I am certain. I just telephoned.” – but when you reach the gates, a half hour across the city in another life-threatening auto rickshaw ride, it is Gandhi’s birthday and the museum is closed. In India, have a back-up plan.

Water worlds: south long the Malabar

We have been traveling south by train along the south-west Malabar coast of India, first through Karnataka, then into Kerala State, ending the day in a delightfully secluded, palm- circled guesthouse on a hilltop overlooking a small crescent of equally secluded beach. The owner is of Greek-Indian heritage, a Greek Orthodox Christian. Greek traders, along with the Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish Arabs, Muslim Arabs and others have long carried out an ancient sea-based trade – spices, precious jewels, perfumes and silks from the far east – following the Arabian Sea trade winds, bringing great wealth to themselves and traders along the Malabar coast. The ancient Romans traded here as well, and likely the ancient Chinese.

(Malabar. Malacca. The Moluccas. Evocative, fantasy-laden words for me from long ago. Were there stories or poems read to me in early childhood that referred to these places – or later seemed to refer there? The child hears the quiet rains, smells the cinnamon winds, hears the far-off ships in the soft Indian Ocean night, safe in his mother’s arms. Malabar. One of those deep old personal places of the exotic, smelling of nutmeg and cloves, where handsome naked brown-skinned women and men lived, where I would one day build and live in a tree house, where familiar but mostly unfamiliar wondrous beasts roamed the earth and rose from the sea … one of those many-branched Orinocos of memory that one day I might explore more deeply and which I find, now as I think about it, has been one of those guiding stars in my reading for many years, taking me circling through histories of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, of early maps of the region, paintings, travelers’ reports and tales, the sloshing to and fro of so many peoples, the times of slaving, revolt, prison building … into our own times.)

To the west the Arabian Sea, seen now, today, across palm-covered estuaries. To the east, at a distance, rise the western ghats, hills running down the spine of the Indian peninsula. On both sides, the further south we move, the many greens of rice paddies , coconut palms (a source of oil and coir rope), and market gardens. This is a green world and a water world too; some 50 or so river flow off the western ghats into the sea. The sea itself flows back into the coastal flatlands, creating serpentine “backwaters,” the roads and paths of villagers and townspeople. Today, many pole canoes along the shorelines, fishing, transporting produce, visiting family.

After the north, it is surprising to see so many freshly painted and newly-built houses. People talk of the money coming in from Keralites who have worked in the Gulf. There are many such stories, but also other reports of abusive labour recruiters, disillusion. We talk with four men in their twenties, tradesmen from a village far in the north east of India, several days train ride away. They have signed three-year contracts to work in Dubai. This is their first time from home. One was married several weeks ago, another last year. Like us they are wide-eyed at the passing Malabar landscape, so lush, wet and green, the strange Malayalam script, the soaring coconut palms. Two are homesick already, all are apprehensive about flying, all are looking forward to the new experience. In faltering English, one speaks so optimistically of the “opportunity” ahead.

People are always shuffling around on the trains, facing one another, exchanging food; there are many opportunities for conversation compared to the buses. Today in a crowded ‘unreserved coach’ we meet Gopi, a “clerk” in “the service.” We share an interest in the theyyem shaman-dancers in this area. As it happens, he has read William Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem in “Nine Lives,” given to him by a friend, and is eager for me to read it. I have – although I am not certain I have communicated this to him. Gopi is a gentle man and a gentleman – and is also able to be of practical help to us. We have mistakenly got onboard a train that will eventually turn east across the peninsula to the far eastern coast, and we want to continue south. It is Gopi who guides us through the transfer, which he is also making, and which luckily allows us to pick up our conversation down the line.

Sitting near Gopi is a chef, returned early from a Middle East contract because of even better paying work here. Across the carriage, a family – with three young girls – describes travelling from Assam state, a gruelling four-day train journey, to visit a brother and have a holiday. Remarkably, they are in good spirits. They are also watching their rupees. The man, a Christian, a rarity where he lives, has started his own small private and secular primary school: “I could have gone into government service. But that would be just for me. I want to give something to others, like I was given by my own schooling. Here in Kerala almost all are literate. Where I come from almost no one is literate. What chance do we have?  My girls know English. I want children in our village to understand the world. It is important to me – sharing what I know with others.”

Farther south through Kerala, we move by boat along the “backwaters,” inland channels, rivers and lakes between the rainforest hills still to the east (Western Ghats) and the Arabian Sea to the west. This is a flat, expansive green, gold and watery world. Gold palm fringes, multi-hued ripe green rice paddies, mud wet paddies being prepared for planting.  

Here pathways and roadways are waterways; the boat is bus and auto rickshaw. Our own bus-boat carries children to and from school, workers to rice paddies and market gardens, others home from market. Men in wide-brimmed straw hats (the direct sun scorches) pole passengers back and forth across the wider waters in dugout canoes. Along the canal proper there are walkway draw bridges, raised by men on watch as we honk our approach. Onboard are slung sacks of rice, bales of banana leaves, bamboo poles, garden produce. Dugout canoes pass by laden with small timbers, cattle feed, building mud, even one piled high with tins and plastic bottles headed for recycling. We motor past dense flocks of paddling ducks that are being raised for meat and eggs, sometimes bearing down into their midst, their tenders smacking the water with poles, herding the creatures to safety on shore. 

Farther south through Kerala, we move by boat along the backwaters, inland channels, rivers and lakes between the rainforest hills (Western Ghats) to the east and the Arabian Sea to the west. This is a flat, expansive green, gold and watery world. Gold palm fringes, multi-hued ripe green rice paddies, mud wet paddies being prepared for planting. 

The main channel waters – in which people who live along their edge bathe and brush their teeth, and tourists, Indian and foreign both, pay considerable sums to ride converted “rice boats,’ often with all the very latest urban-techno amenities – are a sluggish grey-green, awash in garbage, mainly plastics, which floats and tosses about amidst small islands of choking water weeds in which more garbage is entangled. We pass people heaving garbage bags and other waste into the water. Many householders and villagers clearly use the backwaters, their back or front yard, as a garbage dump. Short ramps lead from shore to small outhouses, half-enclosed in plastic or vinyl sheeting, standing on poles over the waterway. Hundreds of rice boats are tied to shore, marooned by the glut of such boats, by over-pricing and fewer moneyed tourists, and perhaps by reports of the wretched state of the backwaters themselves.

As we move south, just hidden from the ocean behind dykes and sandbars, larger ocean-going fishing boats – many, as along the Malayan coast, with glaring eyes painted on the prow, the tips wrapped in colourful fabric – are harboured in the inland channels. Groups of men unload crates of fish, repair and hang nets, manoeuvre vans and pickups to take the catch to market, take baths in the putrid waters. Other fishermen paddle or pole dugout canoes, fish from shore, or use the cantilevered spider-legged ‘Chinese’ fishing nets we first saw up the coast in Cochin. Fish, rice, coconut and water and more water … yet another India.