Darl's adventures in India, part two.
Although the
summer is allegedly beginning to wane, temperatures are regularly in excess of 35 degrees. The heat wave hasn't really struck here: it's
just
unbearably hot. When rain comes, it alleviates the 70% humidity
for one day at
most, before things revert to normal. Oddanchatram is better situated
than most plains
towns in
Tamil Nadu: there is a ring of hills around the town, which
apparently make it
cooler. In
Chennai, the mercury is regularly over 40 degrees. Small
blessings. Because
the heat does get so extreme, people flee to hill stations in high
summer. The
Western
Ghat mountains, which seem to run right to the middle of India down
here, are
sufficiently high to be cold. Perhaps I might amend that to
bearably
warm.
The weekend before last, I went one such hill station of Tekardi, in
neighboring
Kerala
with many of the other volunteers. It is at somewhere over 1500m in
altitude, and thickly
wooded. It was a relief to feel
cold(er). The other volunteers I met
were all very pleasant,
although I was asked what school I went to. Sigh. Most people are in the
same situation as me,
or taking a post university gap year. Usually medics, I think.
There
are 35 volunteers in
total in Tamil Nadu, of whom about 20 were in Tekardi. Amongst the
more seasoned
volunteers there is the air of
hardened vets, still battling hard
against the natives.
Everyone has the same tale: they love what they’ve seen of India very
dearly, but
loathe
it. Tekardi has a large wildlife reserve with vast lake, in either of
which I entirely failed
to see any wildlife at all. Still, the walk was nice. Two people went
to hospital, one from
gastroenteritis and one from heat stroke. Well, I thought it was cold.
Sometime today my fellow volunteer James Mabey is meant to arrive.
I’m looking
forward to the company, sure, but had begun to rather enjoy being
solitary.
Greener grass,
etc. It seems to me if nothing else a perverse twist of fate that
having fled to an obscure
corner of south
India, I should be followed by someone I know. Being
a Wykehamist
begins to remind me of the
Hotel California. In Edinburgh, I met
them, at university. In
March, one cool night, strolling on the
Ponte Vecchio, I met them.
Now, here in
provincial India, I will meet them. I have checked out, to be sure,
but
I can never leave.
Last weekend I went to
another hill station, that of
Kodaikanal, the
sole
American
founded outpost, with views looking right across the plains of Tamil
Nadu. On a clear
day, you can see about 100km. The joy of creature comforts in tourist
resorts should not
be underestimated. I swear, I had a mushroom omelet. Oh yes. Trying
to describe the
drama of the view from Kodai would be fruitless. It is just very
pretty indeed.
When I got to the Teaching and Projects abroad offices in
Sivakasi, I
first heard of the
volunteers here before me; James and Oliver. ‘They did a very good
job,’ said Dr.
Rajendran, ‘very good indeed.’ It was the same, verbatim, as I was
driven north from
Sivakasi to Oddanchatram. ‘They did a very good job. Very good
indeed,’ I was told.
Again, from Suresh and his family. What on earth they had done to
earn such
accolades, I
could only wonder: I couldn’t help feeling like
Marlow venturing into
the wild, hearing
of
Kurtz at every turn. Though I’d expected to find the school
surrounded by heads on
poles, etc, James and Oliver turned out to have been two nice lads
from
Kent who
shouted ‘
Super, man!’ in Indian accents a lot. Nonetheless, as they
were so very good,
very good indeed at teaching, I’m conscious of being in their shadows
here.
James and Oliver go some way toward explaining Suresh’s English,
which, whilst very
good, has a strange 80s surfer dude lilt.
Hey man, he’ll say,
what’s
going on? You cool?
Cool, man. And so on. Surely this is their doing. The worst thing is
that I’ve begun to
adopt this idiom. I can’t help addressing everyone as ‘man’. It’s
depressing.
Whilst perhaps this is a mildly comic corruption of my English, much
more serious is that
I’m
incapable of forming complex sentences anymore. In fact, I have
taken my language
down to the vary bare bones, the
thundering stripped-down
chassis of
brutal
unambiguous speech, loud and clear, slow and patronising. I don’t
just
do this with Indian people who want to discuss things with me, be it
logistics or
Kashmir.
I do this with native English speakers too. Everyone does it to an
extent. ‘Ok,’ we say to
each other, ‘Where we go now?’ To alleviate this rapid
atrophy of the
language I am
trying to teach, please send me real, live native English
communication. I give big thanks
to you.
The food. It’s one of the most tangible reminders of how far you are
from home, hence
my omelet joy. It’s not bad (quite the contrary), but, but.
Anyway.
For breakfast, you usually have dosa, which are essentially thick
pancakes, or iddli,
which are harder to explain. Iddli are about like fat
flying saucers
an inch in diameter.
They are a mixture of rice and pulses ground up and steamed, with
curd and vinegar to
hold them together. They’re really very good. With your dosa or iddli
you will have
sambar, another
Tamil staple, consisting of pulses and tomatoes made
into a kind of spicy
mush. Finally there’s
coconut curd, which is cooling, pleasant, and
mostly tastes of
coconut milk. With the sambar will be rassam, literally pepper water.
This is water with
coriander,
chilli and, er, pepper.
For lunch, you would have iddli or rice with again sambar and rassam,
with a kind of
mild
vegetable curry made mostly from mangetout beans. There will
also be pure curd.
It’s best not to think about the curd, but just to eat it because
most of the food is hot
enough to make you
sweat, and the curd provides some relief.
These are the absolute staples, the things that you eat like bread or
potatoes. More
luxurious are iddli contents made into
noodles and fried with
mushrooms and ginger,
with
coriander and
tumeric. Also there’s a chance of a mushroom or
chicken korma.
These things make up your dinner or sometimes your lunch. Also there
are poori,
flash
fried discs of
dough that go all puffy and gorgeous, parotta, fried
thick slabs of dough that
are as delicious as they are bad for you, and
chapatti, which are the
same but thinner.
On special occasions, which number holy festivals, pre monsoon
festivals, and taking
western people out to eat, accordingly special things are eaten.
Mostly this is
biryani,
with either vegetables, lamb or chicken. This will be served with
fresh
red onions in curd.
When you want your chicken boneless, you have to impart to the waiter
your fancy
sensibilities, otherwise it will come in chunks,
spine and all.
Since I last wrote, more things, great things, have happened on the
fruit front. The
pineapple.
Oh, the pineapple. Now, I’m not a big guy for pineapple
myself. Most
commonly encountered misplaced on
pizza or in curry, here it is, yes,
a different beast.
The fresh pineapple here tastes of... well. Sort of pineapple, and
sort of coconut
(yes) and something else too. It’s really very, very, good. The
grapes have also followed
closely the trend of small but sweeter and
tangy and altogether more
worthwhile.
Better than all these things, however, is the fruit juice. I can
assure you all now that
nothing like this has ever passed your
lips. There is here, right
here in this town, (yes) a
juice bar like no other. Drinking a juice from this bar is like nothing so much as the old
lemon-wrapped gold brick to
the teeth. It leaves
you sated as though you’d just had a meal. It comes with a
straw, but this is mostly for comedy value as you asses the
structural integrity of your 'drink'. As you watch, they skin
your fruit of choice, be it
mango or
lime or apple or pomegranate or
one of the fruits you
have never heard of and can’t pronounce but try anyway, throw it in a
food
processor with some ice, sieve and serve.
All food (barring juice) is served on a
banana leaf, roughly cut into
a largish rec
tangle,
lengthways. This you sprinkle with water from your mug, shake off,
and then eat from. If
your family is
affluent enough to have plates, they will be banana
leaf patterned. Having
finished, you fold the leaf towards you and then roll it up, a sign
that you have finished
and found the meal to your satisfaction. Should you find the opposite
to be the case, or
are at a
funeral, the fold the leaf the other way, away from you.
Despite
William Faulkner’s injunctions to the contrary, all water is
drunk from metal.
Now, perhaps this sounds like a very small thing, and perhaps it is,
but I am surprised
how much it bothers me.
It is my only regular dissatisfaction. I
can’t understand it. I just
really don’t like drinking water from a metal cup. It’s not as though
it’s something I have
ever done before. Obviously, on the water front, I drink only bottled
or boiled. When you
ask for boiled water in a restaurant, and it comes boiling, you can’t
help but feel that the
people are laughing at you. You want it boiled, you have it boiled,
they say. Nothing but
nothing is less re
freshing from the heat of chilli than boiling water.
If any of this is
repetition, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. Internet cafe staff laughing at me sitting here for so long. Going.