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.

Indian Information Ministry promises punitive action against blind beliefs

The annual feast mass of St Francis Xavier took place last Sunday across Goa. The Herald newspaper reports that the faithful in Panjim and Old Goa turned out in the many thousands in and outside the Bom Jesus Basilica, standing near the same ground where, starting in the 16thC and continuing for several hundred years, the Fathers of the Church’s Inquisition publicly tortured and killed ‘heretics’ while the Church demolished Hindu temples. Yesterday, the faithful were urged to emulate the missionary spirit of St Xavier whose shrivelled and only partially-remaining corpse is paraded through Old Goa streets every ten years.

(Xavier, a zealous evangelizer-missionary, died off the China coast, then soon began a second earthly life. Malaccan Christians exhumed his body and buried it in Malacca. Other Catholics had the body removed and brought to Old Goa where it has remained – in part. Over the years, relic hunters have taken away chunks: the right arm to the Pope in Rome, (where it was seen to write its name on paper), a hand to Japan and parts of the intestine to southeast Asia. One Portuguese woman reportedly bit off the little toe in 1534. There are no reliable reports of what the remaining Xavier thought of all this attention. ) 

In the small Goan parish where stands Bhatpal Church, hundreds gathered this Sunday to venerate Xavier’s sacred nail relic (whether toe or finger nail is not reported). The nail was carried around the church in the morning, and by afternoon people were bringing other body parts, “replicas” it is reported – the sore and broken and diseased – in hopes of gaining a hoped-for blessing from the saint’s nail.

Meanwhile – and surely by coincidence or fate or the approach of the full moon – the Herald reports that India’s “Information and Broadcasting Ministry has issued a stern advisory to all TV channels against telecasting programs promoting superstitions, occult practices and blind belief, warning that punitive action will be taken for any violation.”

Turning a few pages, I arrive at the Classifieds, the “Astro, Fengsui, Vaastu” column in particular. The ads are placed by the likes of Prof Vishal, World Renowned Astrologer, or M.B. Shastri, to be found in the Hotel Poonam , or M.B. Joshi of the Lourdes Apartments. One has the usual “insight into your future on the basis of scientifically calculated astrology [will this pass the Ministry test?] with solution to the dire problems.” Another offers to deliver New India aspirations:  “Education, Employment Promotion, Profit in Business,” plus “Love In Marriage, Financial Problems and all Personal Problems Solved.”   Yet another adds “Foreign Tour. Sudden Luck. Enemies. Court Case. Mental Peace.” A fourth promises to solve “mother-in-law, daughter-in-law problems, relief from co-wife and enemy, stock market, lottery.” “Got done everything, solve problems 100% guarantee in 11 hours,” says Baba Kamal Bengali.

A few days later and we are in northern Karnataka State, on another beach and back in Hindu India. Nearby is Gokarna town where, according to Hindu stories, Rudra (Shiva) was reborn through the ear of a cow from the underworld after a period of penance. Gokarna is also home to one of India’s most powerful shivalinga  (a phallic symbol, usually a phallic-shaped stone) – pranalingam – which is said to have come to rest here after being carried off by Ravana, the evil king of Lanka, from Shiva’s home on Mount Kailash in the Himalayas.

The pranalingam resides in Gokarna to this day in the medieval Shri Mahabaleshwar temple where it is said that a mere glimpse will absolve one hundred sins. Not surprisingly it attracts a good number of pilgrims, the men shaving their heads, dressing in white, and (joining us and other travelers) taking a dip in the ocean before asking for favours.

Pilgrim buses, tourist vans and SUVs line the small town’s laneways. Clotheslines run along the bus sides and out to nearby trees. A great wheeled chariot, whose temple-like tower is covered in red and blue streamers, stands ready to parade the lingam or some associated object. Shops in the temple area do a brisk trade in gifts for the gods (marigold garlands, brass figurines and vases, sweets) and knick-knacks for the pilgrim tourists.

Blind beliefs? Maybe there’s a Ministry “Lingam Advisory” in the works.

'Not really India' - briefly in Goa

“Gokarna? That’s in Karnataka isn’t it? South of here. In India. This is Goa – it’s not really India.”

I had asked a Swede who had been coming to Agonda Beach in Goa for eight years about the beaches to the south in the state of Karnataka. He preferred Agonda. “Gokarna? More young people. More crowded. It’s Indian you know.”

Curious – because Goa is also an Indian state. But then I too have a sense that somehow Goa feels unlike any of the India we have visited, yet another of the many Indias.

The evidence is in the everyday. In downtown Panjim, the capital, we walked our first real Indian sidewalks: tiled, wide, mostly intact, clean by India standards and more or less unobstructed by the usual clutter of parked cars, motorbikes and shop goods.

Street signs (we have rarely seen street signs elsewhere in India) carry names like Avnda Pe Angelo and Avda Dom Joao Castro. The Panjim obituary columns mourn the deaths of Minguel Filipe Pereira, Violeta Bernardeta Roriguesa and Maria Conceicao Mascarenhas.

Although Panjim is little more than a large town, there is also little of the usual traffic frenzy and pollution. Some drivers actually slow down as we stand at street crosswalks, one or two actually stopped, unprecedented in the India we’ve travelled.

There is also far less of the usual garbage tossing (wrappers, plastic chai cups, water bottles), at least in the central downtown. Piles of garbage there were, but we also saw signs of it being swept in piles and taken away in garbage trucks. When we unwrapped packaged ice creams in a small shop on Agonda beach, the shop owner pointed to his small refuse bin – a first in two months.

People somehow look different here as well, the result in part of 450 years of Portuguese occupation and its slave-running. Amid these faces and voices, hearing the swooshing palms and surf, passing under flame tree blossoms and among pink, red and white bougainvillea, I recollect walks and conversations in the West Indies or along the northeast coast of South America. It is easy to feel that you are seeing Africans, Indians, Portuguese, Arabs, Malaccans, Indonesians and peoples from other lands mingled for centuries in every possibility in these Arabian Sea port towns.

Voices are noticeably softer and quieter here, the smiles seemingly quicker, easier, somehow more trusting. It is a small place, as a state, in its villages and even in its modest-sized capital. There is little of what so often feels like the aggressive manner of so many Indian shop keepers, tuk-tuk drivers and touts. Life on the street feels more patient, confident.

Of course the cuisine is also different – pork, mutton, and plenty of fish, including prawns, cooked with coconut , palm vinegar, peanuts and cashews in a local mélange of hot, sweet and sour sauces.

About half the population is Catholic Christian. Large glistening white churches tower over the towns, crosses are everywhere. On a Sunday bus ride we pass several of these churches, the congregations overflowing into outer courtyards under the scorching sun, their singing voices – the unIndian sound of Christian hymns – passing into our bus windows.  

Goa – like the Mexican Yucatan or the north Cuba beaches – is also home to fly-in tourists arriving for a couple weeks from Europe and East Asia. This means restaurants with Indian pizzas and India German apple pie, which we also enjoy along the way. 

Of course there are also reminders of the surrounding Indian world. Well-dressed tourists from nearby Mumbai piling out of tour buses and private SUVS with bulldozer bumpers. Small herds of cows plodding up and down the beach looking lost, shitting along the way, along with wandering dogs and pigs.

But overall? Yes, I can see why a person might say that Goa isn’t really India.

Queue jumping and other rough pursuits in India

Queue jumping and jostling are as common as long queues in India. Perhaps it is true, as we are told time and again, that the former is a result of the latter. But I still wonder: why all this jostling, manoeuvring, scheming to get ahead of others, especially where there is also so much evidence, even in the same queues, of superhuman patience, perhaps resignation, usually an outward blindness toward the man or woman who sneaks in ahead?

It is one of the Himalayas of unknowns that confront the stranger here. And perhaps I have it all wrong.

Apparently not all Indians tolerate queue jumping, however, as was demonstrated to us a few days ago.

We had jumped off a bus into a row of waiting moto-rickshaws (three wheeled taxis), all eight or so drivers asking us, simultaneously, as is the case here, where we want to go. I speak to one of the quieter ones, arrange a price, and we are about to jump in when the driver is verbally set upon by his mates. Apparently he is jumping from the last in queue to the first, and they are not pleased. We stay out of it, the harangue continues, they agree on another driver, the fellow with the cab at the other end of the row, and off we go.

It was the first time in our experience that Indians have openly objected to queue jumping, then took steps to gain their rightful place in a queue. Something similar occurred a few days ago in another rail station. I watched a man step from nowhere to the head of a queue, but then immediately get singled out and heatedly berated by other men. When he refused to move, the others persisted until a uniformed woman appeared, whereupon increasing numbers of men joined the fracas. The woman eventually pulled the queue-jumper aside and seemed to lecture him at length, then sent him packing to the end of the line.

 

A more typical example of all this took place a day earlier at a branch of the India Post Office. We had joined what appeared to be a queue: two men lined up for the wicket, us behind. It wasn’t long before a kind of scattered ‘queue’ began to form behind and around us. Then the man immediately behind me began to push with such force into my back (perhaps he was being pushed in turn) that I leaned back and shuffled my feet, landing accidently on his toes, whereupon I heard a moan, then a voice in Hindi, perhaps saying something like “Sir, you are bloody well standing on my bloody toes.” I lifted my foot ever so slowly, then turned and told him, rather absurdly and presumptuously in English, that he needn’t push me, we’ll all get to the wicket eventually. His slight smile said he got my meaning.

But moments later – I have just reached the wicket – here he is again, elbowing in along the counter towards the wicket from my left. I lean forward, spread-elbowed along the counter, absurdly, like a Packers’ lineman. The guy has already jumped ahead of two women who are now pressing in on my right. Betty is guarding my rear! Further back is a lengthening slapdash Indian queue spreading like the Indus delta across the room.

When our business is done, I turn my back to Mr Sore Toes and wave the two women to the wicket (their rightful place after all), then hear behind me a disgruntled something in Hindi, perhaps appealing to the other men in the by now pressing multitude – “What!!? Did you see that? Those women first? They just arrived! I was next!  I was standing right here! I’m first! ….” – as we walk away.

Perhaps he said nothing like this. Perhaps no one else cared but us. We also see astonishing patience with long queues: railway station queues, their length, the hours people stand passively especially defy description. 

At the same time, however, we experience so many people in India seeming to need to get ahead at all cost and often at risk to themselves and others.

Take drivers of anything on wheels, for example. They seem to share one rule of the road: an utter disregard for driving lanes. Moto rickshaws can move, eight or so abreast in an ever-shifting staggered mass down a two-lane road. Cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, pedal bikes, and push-cart drivers squeeze a centimetre ahead of the next tire or bumper at each stop or moment of gridlock, which is never a “stop” at all but rather a constant, restless manoeuvring, then a burst ahead, all at once, pell-mell, into the traffic sludge ahead. Every vehicle a few months old is often covered in scrapes and dents. Vehicles regularly clip one another, although astonishingly (considering the 1.3 billion) collisions seem rare … although we have heard a cart, driver and mule thrown into the ditch by our passing bus, a motorcyclist knocked flat and a few upturned hulks of buses and lorries along the roadside. But most everyone just keeps driving on, rushing to the next moment of gridlock.

It makes we wonder whether the same approach applies to the New India of commerce, politics, technology and schooling? All those “special tutoring” and exam-honing shops and “campuses.”  The daily reports of bribes demanded by examiners and potential employers, “public servants” with a contract in their pocket, the mix of thuggish and fantastic schemes to get to the top in business and/or politics. In such a world, the self-regulation of that small group of auto rickshaw drivers seems all the more notable, even admirable.

When we ask Indians about this rush to get ahead, to get to the wicket first, we mostly hear one response – given as a complete explanation: “India has so many people. So many.” “Do you know how many people live in India?” “There’s more than a billion Indians….”

At first the response seemed glib, a kind of shared packet of an answer. But the element of truth in it has started to feel more real with each passing day. India, with its 1.3 billion people, especially in its thronging cities and towns (and except for those who can buy space around them), feels like a place, a space, that has become nightmarishly shrunken. It begins, most immediately for us, with the scarcity of space: to drive, to walk, to travel by bus and train. All that mobbing around bus doors, scrambling for a seat. Then there’s the queue-jostling and scheming. But do many Indians feel something of this same scarcity in the quest for work, for liveable incomes, for places up the social-economic ladder in an India that urges everyone forward and upward?  

Perhaps there is also sense in India that, without something extra – an elbow, the clip of a bumper, a bribe, a cheat sheet, sneakiness, thuggery, brazenness – one can never move ahead in the queue and perhaps never reach the wicket at all … never get those grades or that job or that important signed slip of paper, never get that ticket home, never get ahead under New India standards. Or never get far enough ahead or above to satisfy that singular ego in the multitude.

In our experience, queue jumpers are variously surprised or indignant when challenged. We never know how conscious any of this is. Yet others in the queue seem (with such hesitation, or is that reserve?) to cheer us on with the slightest smiles or nods. More often, though, people appear puzzled or uninterested at our resistance. What’s the fuss about? 

It could well be that what we see as queue jumping – abnormal, impolite, aggravating behaviour – is here not recognized by many people as anything unusual. The man, emerging from well back in the queue, who suddenly sticks his 100 rupee note through the wicket grate and demands a bus ticket as the person at the head of the queue is in the middle of arranging their own, seems never to have been challenged for doing this. For him we are the abnormal ones.

The scramble ahead, the scramble upwards. And the dents and scrapes and bruises? Maybe bad karma. Maybe an accident borne within. Maybe I’ll make my revenge next time. Maybe “just India.” So far not enough people are asking.

A thank-you in pictures

Our thanks to the craftspeople and their families who welcomed us into their work spaces and homes in villages near Bhuj, in Gujarat State, southwestern India. 

This sacred land

V.S. Naipaul, in his India: a Million Mutinies Now, reminds me that this is the second place I’ve traveled where the land – it’s mountains, rivers, pools, rocks, trees – has for millennia been alive and sacred.  “The land was sacred …. Religious myths touched every part of the land …. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.”

The other similar land I’ve walked, sometimes with aboriginal, first peoples, guides, is Australia. But then, the memory of that returns me to our own First Nations’ experience of the land and its elements, then further afield to a globally-shared “primitive” experience of living inside a meaningful, responsive, providing land – actually where earth, flora, fauna, stars, sun, moon, the elements are all alive, significant, surrounding, embodying, pulsing like a moment of conception or like being afloat inside a great mother. 

Just consider all the flying, floating beings we have seen depicted here in India’s old myth-, legend- and chronicle-based paintings, moving through and between such solid, fantastic skyscapes and landscapes.

During this our brief, glancing encounter with India, we have seen so many signs of a land experienced as so deeply meaningful, life-significant …

… the sacred trees in the villages above Naggar, incense sticks, candles and scraps of red and saffron cloth tucked into their hollows

… a prayer-flag-sprayed rocky outcrop over Dharamsala

…  the Jains’ sacred Mount Shatrunjaya, now covered with a preposterous fairyland concoction of temples, but where the faithful still make offerings of a few rice grains and flowers

… the holy Yamuna, Saraswati, Brahmaputra, Indus, Narmada, Godavari, and Ganges and many other lesser-known rivers, each spiritually alive today, even if now dammed and filthy (the Ganges is among the most polluted major rivers of the world with, I read, fecal coliform levels near Varanasi more than hundred times the official Indian government limits)

… those countless yakshas and yakshis – guardian, protecting beings – associated with lakes and wells and tree roots across India, indeed across so much of southern Asia; yakshas benevolent and fearsome; yakshis voluptuous, wide-hipped, fertile; both members of an extended family of creaturely earth stewards, like the serpent-nagas seen curling up temple pillars along the Himalayas, peering towards the mountains as if daring all comers

… and  Mount Kailash on the India-Tibet border, its profile suggesting the glowing aura around Shiva’s head, a sacred place in the Bon, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain faiths, variously understood as Precious Snow Mountain, Water's Flower, Mountain of Sea Water, Nine Stacked Swastika Mountain, Shiva’s home and a symbol of om, the place where the Jain’s first leader experienced enlightenment, the navel of the universe for Buddhists, a place of eternal bliss, for Bons the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen.