Later today we set out for Bangkok, via Addis Ababa and a 19-hour layover in Bombay. We arrive in Thailand 5:30 Friday morning. Joe rates airplane journeys by the number of takeoffs and landings---the more, the better---so he's going to love this one.
Although four days instead of seven would have been enough in Djibouti, we're glad we came. We pottered around Djibouti City, where Joe got some good market and stoner shots and I soaked up local color for my alleged novel.
We never made it out of town. We wanted to see Lake Assal, which Lonely Planet recommends and the local Tourist Authority brochure calls "an extremely beautiful natural curiosity, in a setting of volcanoes and black lava 153 meters below sea level, bordering with dazzling white floes made of salt and gypsum." But the guide books and authorities don't say how to get there. The taxi drivers, we were told, are (a) swindlers and (b) stoned by early afternoon. And hiring a car and driver through a travel agent to visit the salt pit would have cost $250. Mon dieu! (The Tourist Authority brochure also says of Djibouti, "We invite you to come and discover this country unique at many regards.")
The French influence here extends beyond the language and cuisine. Yesterday we both got haircuts in the same barbershop. The Rudy-style comb-overs were administered by Indians from Gujerat. They knew we weren't French, but we still came out looking like the people who started World War I.
A Djibouti moment of Zen: lying in our room at the Ali Sabieh watching Jon Stewart on Larry King while the call to prayer reverberated across this scorched neighborhood from the mosque down the street.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Djibouti
It's true that the tiny nation of Djibouti, the former French Somaliland, is sometimes considered a joke. The Ethiopians, in particular, like sitting up on their cool plateau and snickering about their eastern neighbor (and outlet to the sea), where summer temperatures routinely hit 125 degrees. These winter days, the coastal heat doesn't rise much above 90, though, and as torpid backwaters go, I've seen worse. Port Sudan comes to mind.
Djibouti will never be the Riviera of the Horn of Africa, as the local boosters would like to believe. The land and climate are just too harsh. But its strategic location has ensured a certain level of prosperity, and the easy-going Somalis, Afars and a few left-over French go along and get along, and Joe and I are enjoying our one-week visit here. (Joe wants to come back sometime and ride the decrepit train down from Ethiopia; most freight is now hauled by truck.)
We're here to research a spy thriller I plan to write about an intelligence officer at Camp Lemonier, the U.S. military "anti-terrorism" base established in 2002. The 500-acre base is run by the Navy and houses a multi-service task force of 1,500 military and civilian personnel. They gather intelligence and coordinate anti-radical-Islamist operations in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. We could see the base, next to the airport, when our Ethiopian Airlines flight landed on Wednesday.
We have observed that few Americans ever venture off the self-contained base, and that figures in my plot. In my story, one U.S. intelligence officer, a linguist, connects with some local people, off-base, and his life gets interesting. (We've seen plenty of French Foreign Legionaires in bars and restaurants in Djibouti City---they train near here---but only a handful of Americans.)
It's a good thing that Joe speaks French. English is of limited use here, and my Somali and Afar are poor. It's the French who pretty much keep Djibouti and its 700,000 inhabitants afloat, donating over half the national budget. NATO needs a stable friend to ensure open shipping lanes on the Suez-Red Sea route. And the U.S., which pays an undisclosed amount (thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars) for leasing Camp Lemonier, is now a major underwriter, too.
(Today the request I made last week to the U.S. Embassy for an interview with the political or public affairs officer was politely turned down. I have not been accredited as a journalist with the Djibutian government, and that could take time. Yeah yeah.)
Except during the midday heat, Djibouti City has a pleasant feel to it. The "French Quarter" has a shaded central square with hotels and cafes around it. The buildings are mostly Moorish arcaded structures with louvered windows up above, many of the windows sealed since the (merciful) advent of air-conditioning. On Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath, we walked around the nearly deserted streets and looked at the fall of the sunlight on the whitewashed houses. It was quite beautiful, a kind of Saracenic-Edward Hopper scene. (Hopper:" All I ever wanted in life was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.")
Our hotel, the Ali Sabieh, is a cool and comfortable oasis ($80 a night) a few blocks from the square, with a friendly staff---the night clerk addresses us as "bro"---and a good Italian restaurant on the ground floor. Since nearly everything is imported, Djibouti is a bit expensive. The butter we spread on our morning baguette comes from Normandy. There's a Sheraton out by the city's murky beach on the Arabian Sea where rooms go for $180. We hiked out there to spot Americans and of course to arch a supercilious eyebrow. But the people baking (on astroturf!) around the hotel pool all looked and sounded French. Also, Djibouti City's one "upscale" hotel looked disconcertingly like a $39.95 Days Inn in Orlando.
Djibouti City's productivity index is not what it might be (if the French ever cut them off, these people would be in trouble), chiefly on account of "chat." Or, as it's sometimes spelled, "qat," or "khat," and pronounced with an Arabic guttural. Nearly every Djiboutian male is addicted to this mild narcotic leaf, as are a few women. Every afternoon around one, the chat plane lands from Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Distribution is swift to hundreds of stalls throughout the city, and male Djibutians settle in for their three or four hours of "grazing" and getting stoned. They are stunningly unselfconscious about it all. Workers do it, taxi drivers do it, cops do it. Walk through the "African Quarter" of the city, and nearly every man's cheek bulges with chat as they chomp and chew and squeeze away, washing it all down with water or Coca Cola.
Many are soon glassy-eyed and then stay that way. Around the main market, by Hamoudi Mosque, men lounge on sheets of cardboard among the dust and flies, and as you pass they look up and grin and say, "Bonjour," or "Heeeyyy!" Joe says "bonjour" or "heeeyyy" back and asks if he can take a picture. Some guys say sure, some waggle a finger nuh-uh. He's got some great, appalling shots, and they will show up on the blog after we get to Bangkok February 29.
Although we always like to sample the local cuisine, we've left chat alone---partly because we've heard that the first time you try it it can give you the trots. Why invite that when inadvertence is just around the corner? Anyway, the chat phenomenon here---as well as in Eastern Ethiopia---is no endless Summer of Love. Men here spend an estimated 20 percent of their incomes on chat, and wives and children sometimes go hungry. It's a terrible social problem, yet any government that tried to do anything about it would face revolt.
Nor have we spent much time visiting what Lonely Planet rather sweetly calls Djibouti's "disheveled nightlife." For reasons of scholarship, we did make a quick Saturday-night tour of two clubs, the Golden and the Marais. My perhaps clouded recollection of after-dark dishevelment up on the plateau in the early sixties is that it was somewhat more elegant than this, more Cole Porter-like---"love that's only slightly spoiled." These Djibouti gals seem to have been coached by Donald Trump. It could be the lower altitude, or maybe we just live in a crasser time. Joe and I did not linger among the blue lights, perfumed air, disco-beat thwump, and six-dollar bottles of beer. Doing so could only have led to disappointment on multiple levels.
Djibouti will never be the Riviera of the Horn of Africa, as the local boosters would like to believe. The land and climate are just too harsh. But its strategic location has ensured a certain level of prosperity, and the easy-going Somalis, Afars and a few left-over French go along and get along, and Joe and I are enjoying our one-week visit here. (Joe wants to come back sometime and ride the decrepit train down from Ethiopia; most freight is now hauled by truck.)
We're here to research a spy thriller I plan to write about an intelligence officer at Camp Lemonier, the U.S. military "anti-terrorism" base established in 2002. The 500-acre base is run by the Navy and houses a multi-service task force of 1,500 military and civilian personnel. They gather intelligence and coordinate anti-radical-Islamist operations in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. We could see the base, next to the airport, when our Ethiopian Airlines flight landed on Wednesday.
We have observed that few Americans ever venture off the self-contained base, and that figures in my plot. In my story, one U.S. intelligence officer, a linguist, connects with some local people, off-base, and his life gets interesting. (We've seen plenty of French Foreign Legionaires in bars and restaurants in Djibouti City---they train near here---but only a handful of Americans.)
It's a good thing that Joe speaks French. English is of limited use here, and my Somali and Afar are poor. It's the French who pretty much keep Djibouti and its 700,000 inhabitants afloat, donating over half the national budget. NATO needs a stable friend to ensure open shipping lanes on the Suez-Red Sea route. And the U.S., which pays an undisclosed amount (thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars) for leasing Camp Lemonier, is now a major underwriter, too.
(Today the request I made last week to the U.S. Embassy for an interview with the political or public affairs officer was politely turned down. I have not been accredited as a journalist with the Djibutian government, and that could take time. Yeah yeah.)
Except during the midday heat, Djibouti City has a pleasant feel to it. The "French Quarter" has a shaded central square with hotels and cafes around it. The buildings are mostly Moorish arcaded structures with louvered windows up above, many of the windows sealed since the (merciful) advent of air-conditioning. On Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath, we walked around the nearly deserted streets and looked at the fall of the sunlight on the whitewashed houses. It was quite beautiful, a kind of Saracenic-Edward Hopper scene. (Hopper:" All I ever wanted in life was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.")
Our hotel, the Ali Sabieh, is a cool and comfortable oasis ($80 a night) a few blocks from the square, with a friendly staff---the night clerk addresses us as "bro"---and a good Italian restaurant on the ground floor. Since nearly everything is imported, Djibouti is a bit expensive. The butter we spread on our morning baguette comes from Normandy. There's a Sheraton out by the city's murky beach on the Arabian Sea where rooms go for $180. We hiked out there to spot Americans and of course to arch a supercilious eyebrow. But the people baking (on astroturf!) around the hotel pool all looked and sounded French. Also, Djibouti City's one "upscale" hotel looked disconcertingly like a $39.95 Days Inn in Orlando.
Djibouti City's productivity index is not what it might be (if the French ever cut them off, these people would be in trouble), chiefly on account of "chat." Or, as it's sometimes spelled, "qat," or "khat," and pronounced with an Arabic guttural. Nearly every Djiboutian male is addicted to this mild narcotic leaf, as are a few women. Every afternoon around one, the chat plane lands from Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Distribution is swift to hundreds of stalls throughout the city, and male Djibutians settle in for their three or four hours of "grazing" and getting stoned. They are stunningly unselfconscious about it all. Workers do it, taxi drivers do it, cops do it. Walk through the "African Quarter" of the city, and nearly every man's cheek bulges with chat as they chomp and chew and squeeze away, washing it all down with water or Coca Cola.
Many are soon glassy-eyed and then stay that way. Around the main market, by Hamoudi Mosque, men lounge on sheets of cardboard among the dust and flies, and as you pass they look up and grin and say, "Bonjour," or "Heeeyyy!" Joe says "bonjour" or "heeeyyy" back and asks if he can take a picture. Some guys say sure, some waggle a finger nuh-uh. He's got some great, appalling shots, and they will show up on the blog after we get to Bangkok February 29.
Although we always like to sample the local cuisine, we've left chat alone---partly because we've heard that the first time you try it it can give you the trots. Why invite that when inadvertence is just around the corner? Anyway, the chat phenomenon here---as well as in Eastern Ethiopia---is no endless Summer of Love. Men here spend an estimated 20 percent of their incomes on chat, and wives and children sometimes go hungry. It's a terrible social problem, yet any government that tried to do anything about it would face revolt.
Nor have we spent much time visiting what Lonely Planet rather sweetly calls Djibouti's "disheveled nightlife." For reasons of scholarship, we did make a quick Saturday-night tour of two clubs, the Golden and the Marais. My perhaps clouded recollection of after-dark dishevelment up on the plateau in the early sixties is that it was somewhat more elegant than this, more Cole Porter-like---"love that's only slightly spoiled." These Djibouti gals seem to have been coached by Donald Trump. It could be the lower altitude, or maybe we just live in a crasser time. Joe and I did not linger among the blue lights, perfumed air, disco-beat thwump, and six-dollar bottles of beer. Doing so could only have led to disappointment on multiple levels.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Ethiopia
In May, 1991, Worku Sharew, a pacifist, went looking for a gun. The final battle of Addis Ababa was underway, with the unravelling forces of the Marxist lunatic Mengistu Hailemariam more crazed than ever as they dug in in an attempt to hold the city. Addis was encircled by Tigrayan, Oromo and other rebel forces. Worku told Joe and me that everyone expected "a bloodbath" as the communists went down fighting and many scores would be settled of a non-ideological nature.
Worku headed a household of 16 in his compound in the Ambo Road section, a residential neighborhood near the city's main market. In his house were his new wife Abeba (their two daughters were born later) and 14 siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. As a free-lance guide and interpreter for the top writers and photographers who visited Ethiopia, including a National Geographic team, Worku was both chief breadwinner and repairer of bad situations---of which there had been many over the 17 years since Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow and murder. (In Addis, people believe, perhaps correctly, that the emperor was buried under Mengistu's toilet.)
Unable to locate a gun with which to protect his family, Worku supervised the building of barricades. Everyone hunkered down for the weeklong siege. While thousands died in those horrifying days, the worst fighting bypassed Worku's neighborhood and he and his family survived. Worku's friend, the artist Worku Goshu (Worku is a common name in Ethiopia), has a painting in his gallery well-known in Addis, called "To the Light." Semi-abstract, in oil, the painting shows Ethiopian faces, eyes open, floating in darkness toward a bright center, the fall of Mengistu. (Mengistu lives in Zimbabwe now, a guest of fellow-tyrant Robert Mugabe. When Joe and I were in Harare ten years ago, we heard that the crews who haul Mengistu's garbage report that it consists mainly of empty liquor bottles.)
A few days ago, in that same house near the Ambo Road, Joe and I were Worku and Abeba's guests for a traditional Ethiopian feast. The meal included rich and pungent keye (red, spicy) wots (stews) and superb injera (sour, spongy bread to asorb the wot). The meal concluded with the ritual of the coffee: the roasting of the beans over a ceramic brazier; the passing around of the beans to take in their aroma; the grinding of the beans with a mortar and pestle; the placing of the grounds in a black ceramic pot, which was then filled with hot water; the cooking of the pot's contents over the brazier. The Addis power failed during the ritual, so we contentedly drank our coffee by candlelight.
The coffee ritual had to compete for our attention with Betamariam, 9, and Misgana, 6, who attend English-language schools. Worku and Abeba, a lovely and gently self-possessed teacher's assistant, joked that their children spoke better English than they did. Betamariam said she wasn't sure whether she wanted to attend college at Oxford or in America. Worku (a former student of mine whose American education I helped arrange in 1964) bemoans the abandonment of Ethiopian educational institutions by the country's privileged classes. However, my guess is his formidable children will follow his example and not his words.
I recalled another former student, Getachew Birhanu, as being a skinny little kid who was bright but shy, and a little sad. Now he is a portly, jolly, confident wheeler-dealer who seems to steer his Toyota with his knees and shift gears with his teeth as he plunges up and down the Addis hills, a cell phone in each hand, doing petroleum deals and planning a dairy farm. Getachew and his wife Kelmwa also over-fed Joe and me wonderfully. And they, too, recalled the bad years, when Getachew, then a TV journalist, was denounced by somebody for having a casual conversation with an American official, and he had to give up his career in order to save himself and his family.
(Worku Goshu got in hot water with a painting of the Blue Nile falls on exhibit in Germany. A Mengistu official accused him of disclosing the location and configuration of the falls to "the enemy." Worku Sharew, then the Ethiopian Tourist Organization's chief English-language editor, was instructed to tell visiting Israelis who wished to visit the Falashas, Ethiopia's ancient Jewish tribe, that he knew nothing of any such people. He disobeyed---leading the Israelis to the northern Falasha villages, the first intelligence-gathering step of Operation Moses, the mass removal of the Falashas to Israel---and then quit his job.)
Worku and Getachew took turns showing Joe and me around Addis, a city I once knew well but now barely recognize. The post-Mengistu economic expansion has been impressive, even though "these guys"---as the Tigray-dominated government is often referred to in mostly-Amhara Addis---are what Getachew called "communists in camouflage." Anyway, some Ethiopian Robert Moses has gone to work on the city---which when I arrived in 1962 was just a gigantic African village---and it's got a "ring road" and avenues and boulevards going every which way, and a skyline that looks like San Diego's. Someone insisted to us that a rich Arab was planning a 120-story office tower in the Piazza area at the top of Churchill Road. I said that was going to require an awful lot of eucalyptus scaffolding.
Joe and I stayed at the Ras Hotel, a $30 a night Mussolini-era relic. Peace Corps/Ethiopia types may think of this as carrying sentimentality too far. It's good we stayed there, though, for on our first day we walked into the bar and spotted---Peace Corps! They are back, after a ten-year absence. About 40 volunteers are spread around the country doing AIDS education and prevention work in conjunction with established NGOs. The program, as the five young men and women we met described it, sounded a bit vague and wobbly at some of the sites. But the volunteers have been on the job for under two months, and they seemed to us clever and game and, with backgrounds in public health, qualified. So they might end up being useful.
Health note: the Peace Corps Volunteers we met were in Addis on short medical leave, dealing with stomach and breathing problems. Addis is at 8,000 feet, and Joe and I both felt the effects. I'm posting this from Djibouti, at the lower end of the Red Sea. (I'm researching a spy thriller to be set here.) There are no altitude problems here in the former French Somaliland, but breathing in this heat and humidy is like breathing through a wet sock. More on Djibouti later. Joe, of course, finds it enchanting and can't wait to hurry back---despite his opinion that many of the Somalis here and all of the foreigners "look like killers." The small Djibouti section in the Lonely Planet "Africa on a Shoestring" guide refers to the train that runs between Djibouti and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, as now being "dilapidated and unreliable." That of course piqued Joe's interest, too.
Worku headed a household of 16 in his compound in the Ambo Road section, a residential neighborhood near the city's main market. In his house were his new wife Abeba (their two daughters were born later) and 14 siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. As a free-lance guide and interpreter for the top writers and photographers who visited Ethiopia, including a National Geographic team, Worku was both chief breadwinner and repairer of bad situations---of which there had been many over the 17 years since Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow and murder. (In Addis, people believe, perhaps correctly, that the emperor was buried under Mengistu's toilet.)
Unable to locate a gun with which to protect his family, Worku supervised the building of barricades. Everyone hunkered down for the weeklong siege. While thousands died in those horrifying days, the worst fighting bypassed Worku's neighborhood and he and his family survived. Worku's friend, the artist Worku Goshu (Worku is a common name in Ethiopia), has a painting in his gallery well-known in Addis, called "To the Light." Semi-abstract, in oil, the painting shows Ethiopian faces, eyes open, floating in darkness toward a bright center, the fall of Mengistu. (Mengistu lives in Zimbabwe now, a guest of fellow-tyrant Robert Mugabe. When Joe and I were in Harare ten years ago, we heard that the crews who haul Mengistu's garbage report that it consists mainly of empty liquor bottles.)
A few days ago, in that same house near the Ambo Road, Joe and I were Worku and Abeba's guests for a traditional Ethiopian feast. The meal included rich and pungent keye (red, spicy) wots (stews) and superb injera (sour, spongy bread to asorb the wot). The meal concluded with the ritual of the coffee: the roasting of the beans over a ceramic brazier; the passing around of the beans to take in their aroma; the grinding of the beans with a mortar and pestle; the placing of the grounds in a black ceramic pot, which was then filled with hot water; the cooking of the pot's contents over the brazier. The Addis power failed during the ritual, so we contentedly drank our coffee by candlelight.
The coffee ritual had to compete for our attention with Betamariam, 9, and Misgana, 6, who attend English-language schools. Worku and Abeba, a lovely and gently self-possessed teacher's assistant, joked that their children spoke better English than they did. Betamariam said she wasn't sure whether she wanted to attend college at Oxford or in America. Worku (a former student of mine whose American education I helped arrange in 1964) bemoans the abandonment of Ethiopian educational institutions by the country's privileged classes. However, my guess is his formidable children will follow his example and not his words.
I recalled another former student, Getachew Birhanu, as being a skinny little kid who was bright but shy, and a little sad. Now he is a portly, jolly, confident wheeler-dealer who seems to steer his Toyota with his knees and shift gears with his teeth as he plunges up and down the Addis hills, a cell phone in each hand, doing petroleum deals and planning a dairy farm. Getachew and his wife Kelmwa also over-fed Joe and me wonderfully. And they, too, recalled the bad years, when Getachew, then a TV journalist, was denounced by somebody for having a casual conversation with an American official, and he had to give up his career in order to save himself and his family.
(Worku Goshu got in hot water with a painting of the Blue Nile falls on exhibit in Germany. A Mengistu official accused him of disclosing the location and configuration of the falls to "the enemy." Worku Sharew, then the Ethiopian Tourist Organization's chief English-language editor, was instructed to tell visiting Israelis who wished to visit the Falashas, Ethiopia's ancient Jewish tribe, that he knew nothing of any such people. He disobeyed---leading the Israelis to the northern Falasha villages, the first intelligence-gathering step of Operation Moses, the mass removal of the Falashas to Israel---and then quit his job.)
Worku and Getachew took turns showing Joe and me around Addis, a city I once knew well but now barely recognize. The post-Mengistu economic expansion has been impressive, even though "these guys"---as the Tigray-dominated government is often referred to in mostly-Amhara Addis---are what Getachew called "communists in camouflage." Anyway, some Ethiopian Robert Moses has gone to work on the city---which when I arrived in 1962 was just a gigantic African village---and it's got a "ring road" and avenues and boulevards going every which way, and a skyline that looks like San Diego's. Someone insisted to us that a rich Arab was planning a 120-story office tower in the Piazza area at the top of Churchill Road. I said that was going to require an awful lot of eucalyptus scaffolding.
Joe and I stayed at the Ras Hotel, a $30 a night Mussolini-era relic. Peace Corps/Ethiopia types may think of this as carrying sentimentality too far. It's good we stayed there, though, for on our first day we walked into the bar and spotted---Peace Corps! They are back, after a ten-year absence. About 40 volunteers are spread around the country doing AIDS education and prevention work in conjunction with established NGOs. The program, as the five young men and women we met described it, sounded a bit vague and wobbly at some of the sites. But the volunteers have been on the job for under two months, and they seemed to us clever and game and, with backgrounds in public health, qualified. So they might end up being useful.
Health note: the Peace Corps Volunteers we met were in Addis on short medical leave, dealing with stomach and breathing problems. Addis is at 8,000 feet, and Joe and I both felt the effects. I'm posting this from Djibouti, at the lower end of the Red Sea. (I'm researching a spy thriller to be set here.) There are no altitude problems here in the former French Somaliland, but breathing in this heat and humidy is like breathing through a wet sock. More on Djibouti later. Joe, of course, finds it enchanting and can't wait to hurry back---despite his opinion that many of the Somalis here and all of the foreigners "look like killers." The small Djibouti section in the Lonely Planet "Africa on a Shoestring" guide refers to the train that runs between Djibouti and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, as now being "dilapidated and unreliable." That of course piqued Joe's interest, too.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Corrections---Part Deux
In the Mumbai posting, I described a rat-feeding station. Joe passed it in the daytime and reports that it is in fact a pidgeon-feeding station. But there is a shift-change at sunset, when the rats take over.
The Tata vehicle is a Nano, not Nana.
About Jehangir Patel's great-grandfather: I may have confused two statues near each other in a park. We're checking on this. His great-grandfather may not have been Mahadev Govind Ranade. It may have been Sir Jamshedjee Jejeebhoy.
In an early blog, we said we were in Varanasi. We have since discovered that we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The Tata vehicle is a Nano, not Nana.
About Jehangir Patel's great-grandfather: I may have confused two statues near each other in a park. We're checking on this. His great-grandfather may not have been Mahadev Govind Ranade. It may have been Sir Jamshedjee Jejeebhoy.
In an early blog, we said we were in Varanasi. We have since discovered that we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Travel note
Saturday night, late, we fly to Addis Ababa, then on to Djibouti on Wednesday. The Internet situation in both places is iffy. So blog readers may not hear from us for a while. We're not sure. But we arrive in Bangkok February 29, and there Internet is good. If this routing---west to Africa, then back east to Southeast Asia---seems screwy, yep, we know. But there are reasons for this that are too boring to explain. Accept that we are not exactly crazy.
Mumbai
Actually, let's call it Bombay. Everyone we've spoken with here does. It's true that the Hindu fundamentalists and Marathi supremecists who officially changed the name to "pre-colonial" Mumbai in the 1990s still have enough followers to make trouble. On the day we arrived, Wednesday, small riots broke out in a few neighborhoods when the police arrested a small-bore local pol named Raj Thackeray for "promoting enmity between communities and inciting violence." At yesterday's arraignment of this anti-North-Indian-immigrant gasbag----imagine Tom Tancredo with cadres of thugs---Thackeray's own defense attorney amused spectators by repeatedly referring to "the people of Bombay." And nobody calls the spectacular Victorian gothic railway station near our hotel Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. It is Victoria Terminus, or more often just V.T.
While the city has its zealots, it's still one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere. When Larry Brown, the ex-Peace Corps guy we met in Munnar, worked in family-planning near here in the '60s, he spoke Marathi, the main language (India has 17 major ones) of Maharashtra state. Our taxi driver the other day was Ali, a Muslim. Last night we shared a cab with Istvan Keul, a German profesor of Eastern religions, who spoke Hindi with the driver. Joe, Istvan and I were on a way to the home of Jehangir and Veera Patel for dinner. They are Parsis---Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century and eventually found a safe haven in Bombay. The lingua franca of the Patels and other educated Indians is not Hindi but English. English is part of the glue that holds multifarious India together. We hear it everywhere here in India's largest---at 18 million---and most worldly city.
Much about Bombay is not enchanting. Days are oppressively hot and humid. The city's horrendous air and traffic jams are worse then Bangkok's. As you walk around, an occasional whiff of raw sewage reminds you that you're not in Wurzburg anymore. The vast slums we passed on the way in from the airport looked as soul-crushing as any I have ever laid eyes on. Even here in stable, prosperous South Bombay, some people live on the sidewalks. Estimates put Bombay's homeless in the several millions.
Last night we saw what looked like a rat zoo. Behind a decrepit structure that resembled the old Broadway and 72nd Street IRT station, a small fenced yard had been set up apparently as a feeding station for rats, so they would not gnaw at the people sleeping on the sidewalks. A few dozen were hippity-hopping around and helping themselves to pellets that had been scattered for them.
Some of the city's homeless build lean-to's out of sheets of plastic or corrugated metal barriers they filch from roadway construction sites. When you see the squalor India's urban poor must endure, you have to wonder what conditions were like in the rural villages most of these people felt they had to abandon.
That's the harsh Bombay. The Bombay of the non-disposessed can be captivating. The old, planned British part of the city, with its tree-lined avenues, parks, museums, monuments, Victorian-era stone office blocks, high-rise apartment buildings and hotels, restaurants and art deco cinemas is a visual delight to amble around in, especially at night when the temperature drops to 75 or 80. with water on both sides of the city---the Arabian Sea to the west, the harbor on the east---there are glittering long vistas. This is the Bombay its middle and upper classes love. They come out in the evening to shop, hang out, eat samosas and ice creams by the sea wall. It feels like a Latin city then---Barcelona, Palma de Majorca, Rio, South Miami Beach. When they are not underfoot, literally, the city's desperate poor can seem far away.
Bombay is also a city rich in history and culture, and we were lucky to have a first-hand encounter with that Bombay through Veera and Jehangir Patel. We met them thanks to our good friends at home, Don and Ingrid MacGillis. Jehangir and Don were clasmates at Yale in the late '60s, and both became journalists. Don was my editor at The Berkshire Eagle for several years and is now an editorial writer and editor at The Boston Globe. Jehangir puts out a monthly magazine called Parsiana, for and about Bombay's 60,000 or so remaining Parsis. He is the editor-publisher, Veera the marketing director. "I make the money, he spends it," she says.
The magazine is an elegant, literate compendium of Parsi news and opinion. The issues Joe and I read included a piece on the Tata family, India's mightiest industrialists, who are Parsi. They have just introduced the Nana, a $2,500 family car. Charity is central to Zoroastrianism, and the Tatas have set a standard of giving not always observed by other wealthy Indian families.
Jehangir's great-grandfather, Mahadev Govind Ranade, made a fortune in shipping and other businesses in Aden before returning to India. There's a bronze statue of him in a Bombay park and a plaque praising his "services as a scholar, judge, citizen, patriot and social reformer." Veera and Jehangir live in one section of the old family mansion---relatives occupy other apartments---inside a private park, a leafy oasis in raucus central Bombay.
For all their illustrious history, the Patels are a warm and easy-going pair, and like most Parsis, modern and liberal. (Parsi liberalism, in fact, may be its undoing. More Parsis then other Indian religious groups marry outside the faith. ) The Patels' reading and other tastes are small-c catholic. Dinner conversation ranged from U.S. and Indian politics, and from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy to Betty Smith. The Patels aren't so crazy about Bollywood extravaganzas, but they saw and liked both Truman Capote movies. Their daughter is in London doing post-graduate studies in English literature, plainly a source of pride and satisfaction for them.
Jehangir told a funny story about Roy, whose "The God of Small Things" paints a bleak and unforgiving picture of her Kerala hometown, Kovalam. When the book won the 1997 Booker Prize, Kovalam feted Roy. But then some residents actually read the book. (Joe and I are reading it now. Our other best reading in India has been Chitrita Banarji's meaty and flavorsome "Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine." Because of it, everywhere we went we actually knew what we were eating and why people there ate it.)
Dinner at the Patel's, prepared by their cook, was a luscious spread that included pork vindaloo, chicken curry, several tasty hot vegetable concoctions (Istvan is vegetarian), biryani rice, a vegetable salad, chapatis and some wonderful Parsi spicey chicken patties.
Jehangir generously drove us back to our hotel at 11 o'clock, discoursing in his smart and often witty way about Bombay, as it unfolded and came to life through his eyes all around us.
While the city has its zealots, it's still one of the most cosmopolitan places anywhere. When Larry Brown, the ex-Peace Corps guy we met in Munnar, worked in family-planning near here in the '60s, he spoke Marathi, the main language (India has 17 major ones) of Maharashtra state. Our taxi driver the other day was Ali, a Muslim. Last night we shared a cab with Istvan Keul, a German profesor of Eastern religions, who spoke Hindi with the driver. Joe, Istvan and I were on a way to the home of Jehangir and Veera Patel for dinner. They are Parsis---Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century and eventually found a safe haven in Bombay. The lingua franca of the Patels and other educated Indians is not Hindi but English. English is part of the glue that holds multifarious India together. We hear it everywhere here in India's largest---at 18 million---and most worldly city.
Much about Bombay is not enchanting. Days are oppressively hot and humid. The city's horrendous air and traffic jams are worse then Bangkok's. As you walk around, an occasional whiff of raw sewage reminds you that you're not in Wurzburg anymore. The vast slums we passed on the way in from the airport looked as soul-crushing as any I have ever laid eyes on. Even here in stable, prosperous South Bombay, some people live on the sidewalks. Estimates put Bombay's homeless in the several millions.
Last night we saw what looked like a rat zoo. Behind a decrepit structure that resembled the old Broadway and 72nd Street IRT station, a small fenced yard had been set up apparently as a feeding station for rats, so they would not gnaw at the people sleeping on the sidewalks. A few dozen were hippity-hopping around and helping themselves to pellets that had been scattered for them.
Some of the city's homeless build lean-to's out of sheets of plastic or corrugated metal barriers they filch from roadway construction sites. When you see the squalor India's urban poor must endure, you have to wonder what conditions were like in the rural villages most of these people felt they had to abandon.
That's the harsh Bombay. The Bombay of the non-disposessed can be captivating. The old, planned British part of the city, with its tree-lined avenues, parks, museums, monuments, Victorian-era stone office blocks, high-rise apartment buildings and hotels, restaurants and art deco cinemas is a visual delight to amble around in, especially at night when the temperature drops to 75 or 80. with water on both sides of the city---the Arabian Sea to the west, the harbor on the east---there are glittering long vistas. This is the Bombay its middle and upper classes love. They come out in the evening to shop, hang out, eat samosas and ice creams by the sea wall. It feels like a Latin city then---Barcelona, Palma de Majorca, Rio, South Miami Beach. When they are not underfoot, literally, the city's desperate poor can seem far away.
Bombay is also a city rich in history and culture, and we were lucky to have a first-hand encounter with that Bombay through Veera and Jehangir Patel. We met them thanks to our good friends at home, Don and Ingrid MacGillis. Jehangir and Don were clasmates at Yale in the late '60s, and both became journalists. Don was my editor at The Berkshire Eagle for several years and is now an editorial writer and editor at The Boston Globe. Jehangir puts out a monthly magazine called Parsiana, for and about Bombay's 60,000 or so remaining Parsis. He is the editor-publisher, Veera the marketing director. "I make the money, he spends it," she says.
The magazine is an elegant, literate compendium of Parsi news and opinion. The issues Joe and I read included a piece on the Tata family, India's mightiest industrialists, who are Parsi. They have just introduced the Nana, a $2,500 family car. Charity is central to Zoroastrianism, and the Tatas have set a standard of giving not always observed by other wealthy Indian families.
Jehangir's great-grandfather, Mahadev Govind Ranade, made a fortune in shipping and other businesses in Aden before returning to India. There's a bronze statue of him in a Bombay park and a plaque praising his "services as a scholar, judge, citizen, patriot and social reformer." Veera and Jehangir live in one section of the old family mansion---relatives occupy other apartments---inside a private park, a leafy oasis in raucus central Bombay.
For all their illustrious history, the Patels are a warm and easy-going pair, and like most Parsis, modern and liberal. (Parsi liberalism, in fact, may be its undoing. More Parsis then other Indian religious groups marry outside the faith. ) The Patels' reading and other tastes are small-c catholic. Dinner conversation ranged from U.S. and Indian politics, and from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy to Betty Smith. The Patels aren't so crazy about Bollywood extravaganzas, but they saw and liked both Truman Capote movies. Their daughter is in London doing post-graduate studies in English literature, plainly a source of pride and satisfaction for them.
Jehangir told a funny story about Roy, whose "The God of Small Things" paints a bleak and unforgiving picture of her Kerala hometown, Kovalam. When the book won the 1997 Booker Prize, Kovalam feted Roy. But then some residents actually read the book. (Joe and I are reading it now. Our other best reading in India has been Chitrita Banarji's meaty and flavorsome "Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine." Because of it, everywhere we went we actually knew what we were eating and why people there ate it.)
Dinner at the Patel's, prepared by their cook, was a luscious spread that included pork vindaloo, chicken curry, several tasty hot vegetable concoctions (Istvan is vegetarian), biryani rice, a vegetable salad, chapatis and some wonderful Parsi spicey chicken patties.
Jehangir generously drove us back to our hotel at 11 o'clock, discoursing in his smart and often witty way about Bombay, as it unfolded and came to life through his eyes all around us.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Yogi
Ruban A., 25, is from Chennai, over on the east coast. He studied accounting but wants to make a living teaching yoga, which he loves. He is a slight, wiry man with southern Indian angular cheekbones and immense dark eyes. It is those eyes that help make Indians seem so fully "present" when you engage them. Intelligence is also part of that presence, often, and Ruban's comes out in his way of seeking harmony between traditional India---the world of Aryuvedic yoga, meditation and healing---and a modern existence that will include, he hopes, a succesful yoga center to support him and his family comfortably.
Ruban is also modern in the way he relates to his wife of four months, Maraya, who is 24. While theirs was a family-arranged marriage, in the half hour we spent with them together they seemed wonderfully fond of each other. Nor has she taken his family name, as is the old custom. They have combined their names, like the up-to-date youngsters on The New York Times weddings-and-unions page. Maraya's father is an Aryuvedic practitioner in Chennai, Ruban told us, with a "gift from God" for both healing and locating underground water. Members of Ruban's family are all Roman Catholic, which they appear to fold into traditional Indian spirituality with no apparent hitches.
Maraya teaches chemistry in Chennai. Yesterday she was visiting her new husband in his windowless rented room, a five-minute walk from Sevas. A small, genial woman in a sari of many shades of purple and blue, Maraya served Joe and me sliced "chick-oo," a fruit that seemed to be a cross between a date and an overripe plum. While Ruban hopped on his bicycle and checked on a client he was seeing later in the day, Maraya told us about the charms of Chennai (formerly Madras) and invited us for a visit the next time we're in India. Ruban's elderly landlord and landlady poked their heads in, perhaps to see who Maraya's foreign male visitors might be.
The hour-and-fifteen-minute yoga session, our first ever, took place outside on the canopied patio. Cows stood just beyond the palm-frond fencing. Chickens clucked. A grey cat sleeping on a stone opened its eyes from time to time, as the three of us lowered ourselves onto straw mats, Joe and I facing Ruban, obediently and expectantly.
We both liked it. A number of our friends at home do yoga, and now we know why. It's a way of both slowing down and stretching out. It's calming, and yet it heightens awarenes of one's physical self and its best functioning. It also heightens awareness of one's physical limitations. Joe, 49, was much more limber than I was at 69. During one exercise, Joe could wrap his legs around his head four times, just like Ruban. I could only do it once. Also, I don't think you're supposed to get winded doing yoga---not a good sign. I should have quit smoking in 1965 instead of 1985.
We liked Ruban's pleasing manner---the sing-song-y low chant (in Tamil, we think) with which he opened and closed the session, and the long, soothing OMMMMMMMMM we all crooned together.
The yoga sesion cost $13 for the two of us, a good deal. Joe photographed Ruban afterwards; when Ruban saw Joe's camera he asked him for pictures to be used in brochures and on "banners" he is planning, and Joe was happy to help.
Tomorrow we leave sweet Palolem for Mumbai. We're flying up on something called Spice Airways. I have sometimes wondered where I was supposed to place my long legs on these cramped, no-frills airlines. Now I know.
Ruban is also modern in the way he relates to his wife of four months, Maraya, who is 24. While theirs was a family-arranged marriage, in the half hour we spent with them together they seemed wonderfully fond of each other. Nor has she taken his family name, as is the old custom. They have combined their names, like the up-to-date youngsters on The New York Times weddings-and-unions page. Maraya's father is an Aryuvedic practitioner in Chennai, Ruban told us, with a "gift from God" for both healing and locating underground water. Members of Ruban's family are all Roman Catholic, which they appear to fold into traditional Indian spirituality with no apparent hitches.
Maraya teaches chemistry in Chennai. Yesterday she was visiting her new husband in his windowless rented room, a five-minute walk from Sevas. A small, genial woman in a sari of many shades of purple and blue, Maraya served Joe and me sliced "chick-oo," a fruit that seemed to be a cross between a date and an overripe plum. While Ruban hopped on his bicycle and checked on a client he was seeing later in the day, Maraya told us about the charms of Chennai (formerly Madras) and invited us for a visit the next time we're in India. Ruban's elderly landlord and landlady poked their heads in, perhaps to see who Maraya's foreign male visitors might be.
The hour-and-fifteen-minute yoga session, our first ever, took place outside on the canopied patio. Cows stood just beyond the palm-frond fencing. Chickens clucked. A grey cat sleeping on a stone opened its eyes from time to time, as the three of us lowered ourselves onto straw mats, Joe and I facing Ruban, obediently and expectantly.
We both liked it. A number of our friends at home do yoga, and now we know why. It's a way of both slowing down and stretching out. It's calming, and yet it heightens awarenes of one's physical self and its best functioning. It also heightens awareness of one's physical limitations. Joe, 49, was much more limber than I was at 69. During one exercise, Joe could wrap his legs around his head four times, just like Ruban. I could only do it once. Also, I don't think you're supposed to get winded doing yoga---not a good sign. I should have quit smoking in 1965 instead of 1985.
We liked Ruban's pleasing manner---the sing-song-y low chant (in Tamil, we think) with which he opened and closed the session, and the long, soothing OMMMMMMMMM we all crooned together.
The yoga sesion cost $13 for the two of us, a good deal. Joe photographed Ruban afterwards; when Ruban saw Joe's camera he asked him for pictures to be used in brochures and on "banners" he is planning, and Joe was happy to help.
Tomorrow we leave sweet Palolem for Mumbai. We're flying up on something called Spice Airways. I have sometimes wondered where I was supposed to place my long legs on these cramped, no-frills airlines. Now I know.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Notes on fauna
Yesterday Joe posted new photos in the Goa section. Some of them are of wandering cows. A viewer of these pictures asked, what about all the manure? In towns, a lot of it is stepped on or driven over, squashed unattractively and left in the roads and lanes. This situation is one of a number of ways in which India could use some sprucing up. However, large numbers of cow pies are collected (by lower-caste women), dried, stored and used for fuel for cooking during the summer monsoons. Also, rural people in some regions---mostly in the North---use cow manure in home construction.
The same reader asked about bugs. We sleep under mosquito netting (and take anti-malaria pills weekly), but generally the insects are not bad this time of year.
I wrote that a bird we hear sounds like the warbling whistler on the late-forties pop hit "Heartaches," by Ted Weems and his orchestra. The blog's head copy editor, Bill Ullman, tracked this down and actually listened to it. He identifies the whistler as Elmo Tanner. Now Bill knows what we hear in the jungles of South India. If you are as clever as Bill is with your PC, you can, too.
I said another "bird" sounds like a squeaky wheel. Last night, Joe heard it. He explained to me that this was someone's cell phone.
The same reader asked about bugs. We sleep under mosquito netting (and take anti-malaria pills weekly), but generally the insects are not bad this time of year.
I wrote that a bird we hear sounds like the warbling whistler on the late-forties pop hit "Heartaches," by Ted Weems and his orchestra. The blog's head copy editor, Bill Ullman, tracked this down and actually listened to it. He identifies the whistler as Elmo Tanner. Now Bill knows what we hear in the jungles of South India. If you are as clever as Bill is with your PC, you can, too.
I said another "bird" sounds like a squeaky wheel. Last night, Joe heard it. He explained to me that this was someone's cell phone.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Hello to the Queen
When we were checking out Sevas, our "eco-friendly habitat" on Tuesday, an Australian woman we met assured us the place was wonderfully peaceful---it has been---except for the racket made by the birds. It's true that the birdsong of southern India competes effectively with the roadway hornsong. It's loud, ongoing, sometimes pretty, sometimes not.
Crows squawk all day long. In Periyar National Park, we heard birds that sounded like percussionists in a bassa nova band, and here on the coast there's one that seems to be playing castanets. Another bird sounds like a squeaky wheel in need of grease. One of the more agreeable ones is the bird that sounds like the guy who whistled "Heartaches" with Ted Weems and his orchestra in the late 1940s. It's a pleasant warble. Joe said in Kerala he ran across a crane that snorted like a pig, though I can't confirm this independently. I can report that when I wake up in the morning in our grass hut at Sevas I sometimes hear a bird that sounds like Elaine Stritch clearing her throat.
An Elaine Stritch joke---we must still be gay! You would hardly know it otherwise. The rainbow banner does not fly over India, and we are not about to hoist it. During our houseboat trip, I overheard Joe tell a rural villager who asked him if he had a wife, "Yes, I do."
"And do you have children?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Three."
This was not the old shame of a bygone era. It was a small social lie to spare the villager embarrassment or perplexity, and to ease our way through a country where homosexuality is illegal---an unaltered legacy of the British---and is widely considered bizarre and off-putting. Hinduism doesn't seem to be the source of the homophobia. It's more the colonials, the Muslims and the Christians. Homosexuality is also a threat in a place where marriage and family are so central to the entire social structure.
Which is not to say that homosexuality doesn't exist here. Nature goes its merry way in India, as elsewhere. But our impression from limited reading and observation is that lesbianism is largely repressed here, while gay men marry and then sneak around. More liberal attitudes are breaking out, too, in the cities. Mumbai (Bombay) has gay organizations, even an annual Queer Film Festival. Twice we have met Indian men (in social situations where we were unable to learn more) who described themselves as "not the marrying kind." We hope to find out more when we get to Mumbai in a week or so.
India, in this regard, is in disappointing contrast to Buddhist Southeast Asia. Thai gay life is pretty open and easy. We found discreet but lively gay scenes in Cambodia and Vietnam. And even politically repressive Myanmar is tolerant and accepting of its gays. India is chugging into the 21st century economically, but has a long way to go on some basic human rights.
Here in limpid Palolem we've been hiking around---to the little town of Canacona, 3 km south, where Joe can photograph the cows hanging out with the parked motorcycles, and over to the InterContinentalHyattMarriottRegencyFiveStarGrandResort, where we strolled among the topiary, golf course (with sprinklers spraying trucked-in water), manicured lawns, and across the gleaming terrazzo lobby, and then out the back door before we were gunned down or told to return when we were wearing long pants or at least had booked a room for US $375 a night.
We are eating well in Palolem and still not vomiting at all. The best food is always Indian, though we had a superb four-cheese pizza last night at a restaurant up the beach called Magical Italy. Another beachside place called Boom Shankar had a sign outside listing Thai specialties. They turned out to be okay, although Joe pronounced them inauthentic, and recited the ingrediants that were missing: galangal root, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves. Boom Shankar did serve a luscious dessert made of ice cream, biscuits, chocolate sauce, and a warm banana cooked in a buttery liquid. The menu called this item Hello to the Queen. We bowed gratefully and may well return for another audience.
Crows squawk all day long. In Periyar National Park, we heard birds that sounded like percussionists in a bassa nova band, and here on the coast there's one that seems to be playing castanets. Another bird sounds like a squeaky wheel in need of grease. One of the more agreeable ones is the bird that sounds like the guy who whistled "Heartaches" with Ted Weems and his orchestra in the late 1940s. It's a pleasant warble. Joe said in Kerala he ran across a crane that snorted like a pig, though I can't confirm this independently. I can report that when I wake up in the morning in our grass hut at Sevas I sometimes hear a bird that sounds like Elaine Stritch clearing her throat.
An Elaine Stritch joke---we must still be gay! You would hardly know it otherwise. The rainbow banner does not fly over India, and we are not about to hoist it. During our houseboat trip, I overheard Joe tell a rural villager who asked him if he had a wife, "Yes, I do."
"And do you have children?"
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Three."
This was not the old shame of a bygone era. It was a small social lie to spare the villager embarrassment or perplexity, and to ease our way through a country where homosexuality is illegal---an unaltered legacy of the British---and is widely considered bizarre and off-putting. Hinduism doesn't seem to be the source of the homophobia. It's more the colonials, the Muslims and the Christians. Homosexuality is also a threat in a place where marriage and family are so central to the entire social structure.
Which is not to say that homosexuality doesn't exist here. Nature goes its merry way in India, as elsewhere. But our impression from limited reading and observation is that lesbianism is largely repressed here, while gay men marry and then sneak around. More liberal attitudes are breaking out, too, in the cities. Mumbai (Bombay) has gay organizations, even an annual Queer Film Festival. Twice we have met Indian men (in social situations where we were unable to learn more) who described themselves as "not the marrying kind." We hope to find out more when we get to Mumbai in a week or so.
India, in this regard, is in disappointing contrast to Buddhist Southeast Asia. Thai gay life is pretty open and easy. We found discreet but lively gay scenes in Cambodia and Vietnam. And even politically repressive Myanmar is tolerant and accepting of its gays. India is chugging into the 21st century economically, but has a long way to go on some basic human rights.
Here in limpid Palolem we've been hiking around---to the little town of Canacona, 3 km south, where Joe can photograph the cows hanging out with the parked motorcycles, and over to the InterContinentalHyattMarriottRegencyFiveStarGrandResort, where we strolled among the topiary, golf course (with sprinklers spraying trucked-in water), manicured lawns, and across the gleaming terrazzo lobby, and then out the back door before we were gunned down or told to return when we were wearing long pants or at least had booked a room for US $375 a night.
We are eating well in Palolem and still not vomiting at all. The best food is always Indian, though we had a superb four-cheese pizza last night at a restaurant up the beach called Magical Italy. Another beachside place called Boom Shankar had a sign outside listing Thai specialties. They turned out to be okay, although Joe pronounced them inauthentic, and recited the ingrediants that were missing: galangal root, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves. Boom Shankar did serve a luscious dessert made of ice cream, biscuits, chocolate sauce, and a warm banana cooked in a buttery liquid. The menu called this item Hello to the Queen. We bowed gratefully and may well return for another audience.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Goa
In-road cozy B&B
Who could resist ?
Waterbuffalo strolling through town
Our WC
The much inproved quarters, Sevas at $17 a night
Eating garbage
Not a bad lifeOur casual and often unfair disdain for Westerners who come to turbulent, raucus and sometimes crassly materialistic India for spiritual fulfillment is being put to a test. On the south coast of Goa, we're staying at a yoga and meditation center called "Sevas---an eco-friendly habitat." There's lots of spun cotton over pale skin walking around here. But unless these people discover who we are and turn on us, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers---"Get them! They are cheeseburger people! Get the cheeseburger people!"---we plan on spending eight relaxed days in this tranquil garden spot with its cozy palapa huts that are a short walk through the palm groves from a pretty beach.
We turned up at Sevas after a first-night-in-Goa fiasco. A Lonely Planet-listed hotel we had phoned from Cochin was fully booked, and the manager recommended another up the road. But Ojas was not so much up the road as in the road. The motorcycles hurtling by several feet from our beds made for a sleepless night, as did the neighbors' dogs snarling and whining, and the night manager outside our all-too-well-ventilated room har-de-haring on his cell phone. In the morning, when we checked out after one night instead of nine, Raj, the previously cheery manager, tried and failed to extort a "deposit" fee from us. Although, we did overpay for the room---$50 instead of the $30 we thought we had agreed to---just to be able to move on. Mai pen rai, said we, Thai-style. The lovely Sevas is setting us back just $17 a night.
If it sounds as if the spoiled brats are taking a vacation from their vacation, it's true. You don't come to Goa, the former Portuguese enclave between Cochin and Mumbai, for India's cultural riches. It's largely a winter vacationland now for Europeans. Northern Goa has its rave, chug-beer and package-tour scene. Palolem, down here in the South, is uncrowded and mostly tranquil. At lunch yesterday, we sat under thatch by the sea, chatting with the Nepalis---one of them married to a Swiss woman---who run a little open air restaurant, and enjoyed the speciality of the house, yak-cheese sandwiches. The cheese was ripe and flavorsome, like a good aged Parmesan, and not at all woolly.
We flew up to Goa from Cochin on IndiGo, one of the well-run new airlines that have started up since India's economic liberalization of the early '90s. They compete with Indian Airlines, the abysmal state-owned carrier. Here's a story about Indian Airlines. (Some of you have heard it more than once.) In 1966, on a Peace Corps program-evaluation trip, I was to fly from Trivandrum up to Bangalore on the only domestic airline then operating. At the scheduled stop in Cochin, all the passengers were politely instructed to get off the plane. Inside the terminal, we milled about confusedly---and then watched as another group of passengers was led out and up the stairs onto our plane. Which then flew off. We were told to come back the next day. Some of our group of 40 or so were apoplectic. I just thought of it as a day off from work, checked into a pleasant seaside hotel, and sat on the terrace eating Kerala fish curry and smoking Rothman's as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea.
While Indian Airlines may treat people like cattle, it would never treat cattle like people. Cows really are sacred here, as are, to a lesser extent, snakes and monkeys. Cattle and water buffalo are put out each day to roam freely, even in towns and cities. Their owners locate and milk them twice a day and then fetch them home in the evening. These animals forage for vegetation in rural areas and eat garbage in towns. (Garbage is plentiful. Government garbage collectors require bribes, and apparently many people refuse to pay. The trash all over the place is ugly---and smelly, as some people burn garbage in the streets.)
About 40 percent of Indians are vegetarians, but the rest eat chicken, goat, lamb, pork and even beef. When it gained control of the federal government for a few years in the late '90s, the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, tried unsuccessfully to ban cow slaughter. That and other theocratic and radically nationalistic policies---notably nuclear sabre-rattling with Pakistan---scared the bejesus out of most of multi-cultural, religiously diverse India, and the BJP has been on the wane since then.
Indians are used to sharing the nation's roads and lanes with cows, and by now so are we. Though as we walked to the beach yesterday, a testy water buffalo took a swipe at me, the tip of one horn grazing me as I passed. Joe said the bull may have been provoked by the red stripe on my bathing suit, and he described the incident as "Hemingway-esque." Palolem does sound something like Pamplona.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Deep South
A fresh panther track on the trek. The only hint of wildlife 
These elephants swam in front of our boat across the stream
Tumeric left as an offering inside Periyar National Park 
Cutting the tea
Dinner the first night with the Dutch and French families
My hike along the ridge overlooking the tea plantations.
Soon we are overtaken by clouds
A tea picker hikes along the road
It all (the tea plantations) looked like a Japanese garden
Cooking demonstration before dinner with Larry (blue) andJudi (purple)
While Dick napped, these birds made quick work of his bananaIt's true, what we heard. Southern India is easier than northern India. It's warm and green and fragrantly ripe. The roads are generally better and the driving a little less lunatic than in the North. The people are more easy-going. That's probably because tropical people in most places tend not to push themselves or others too hard. The region is also better governed than in the North---state governments in India have a lot of autonomy. And better schools, health services and working conditions mean that even the poor aren't living quite so close to the edge.
Delhi Airport was a tumultuous mess when we left---far worse than Newark even---but Kochi (formerly Cochin) International Airport was capacious and efficient. It was like landing in a kind of tropical Amsterdam. Nearly all Indian-government-owned and -run institutions are essentially instruments of political patronage and graft. So they work poorly, when at all. Kochi Airport's exception is explained in Edward Luce's masterly overview of today's India, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (Doubleday, 2007).
When V.J. Kurian, the highway chief of Kerala state, was offered a $200,000 bribe to award the construction contract for a new Kochi airport to the second-lowest bidder, he refused and was swiftly reassigned to an obscure post. (Nobody in the Indian administrative services is ever fired.) Kurian was brought back, however, when his successor botched everything and the airport atrophied into a dysfunctional ruin. Under the "eccentric" Kurian, the Kochi Airport has been well run since 1992 and even turns a profit.
One of the services Luce performs with his book, a best-seller in India, is highlighting the good efforts of Kurian and other honest politicians and public servants across the country. With its 7 percent growth rate, India may, in fact, succeed in spite of itself. A colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Luce, "I think we should all be studying the history of how corrupt American politics was in the early twentieth century. It proves you can still rise to become a great power."
Long-ago history is another reason Kerala and its neighboring state to the east, Tamil Nadu, are in relatively good shape. The spice trade---manna for the deprived European palate---regularly exposed southern India to outside ideas from the late 15th century on, and there was occasional contact much earlier. Keralans were visited by Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British trader and missionaries. Vasco da Gama died in Cochin in 1524. We peered down at his former crypt in the Fort Cochin Franciscan church (da Gama's remains were later moved to Lisbon).
Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India, 90 percent, and the most Christians. It aso has the oldest synagogue, established in 1555, and rebuilt in 1664. Only 16 Jews remain in "Jew Town." The rest have drifted away to Mumbai, Europe and Israel.
The local maharajahs were mostly tolerant, perhaps because stability increased their spice-trade wealth. They spread the riches around, too---a trend accelerated by the communist party, which was elected to run the state for a period in the 1950s and still has clout here. Kumily, where I'm posting this, may be the last town on earth with a big billboard on the main street heroically picturing Marx, Engels and Lenin. Be assured tht capitalism is under no threat in Kerala. The privately owned hotels, restaurants and shops catering to visitors to nearby Periyar National Park appear to be thriving, and revolution does not loom, just decent public services.
Our own pleasure in Kerala has been great. In Fort Cochin, a serene enclave on a peninsula by the Arabian Sea, we ambled by the waterfront and watched fishermen operate their clever cantilevered "Chinese" fishing nets, ate dosas (pancakes with spicy stuffing), enjoyed an evening of Kathakali theater (see photos), rode tuk-tuks over to Jew Town, and looked in at a nearby 16th-century palace that had a mural of a multi-limbed Krishna pleasuring six milkmaids simultaneously. Best of all, on each aromatic night we strolled along lanes sheltered by rain trees and under a big friendly moon that was sometimes buttery and other nights almost papaya-colored.
Our best look at Kerala fruits and spices came on a thee-day, two-night houseboat trip---just us and our crew of four!---through the rivers, canals and lakes that make up the Kerala "backwaters." We had a little mat-and-rattan cabin with a tiny bathroom. Mostly we stayed on deck and watched the villages, coconut palms and banana groves glide by. Men on boats made of wild jackfruit, coconut fiber and fish oil raked mussels or dredged sand to sell, pan by pan. Women on shore wshed clothes and cooked. Some spun rope out of coir---coconut fiber. Kids played and yelled "hullo!" When we yelled hello back, they laughed and hopped around.
Our cook, Sambin, was a middle-aged, good-natured man who spoke incomprehensible English with great elan. The food, prepared in a tiny galley behind the cabin, was superb. The snack on our first day out was tapioca root cooked in coconut oil with tumeric, small onion, curry leaves, mustard seed, garlic, green chilis (not native---chilis arrived in India from the Caribbean), shredded coconut and fresh ginger. Lunch consisted of three chutneys (the one with pineapple and cashews was the best), banana-flower salad, mixed-vegatable curry, grilled fish, rice and chapatis. All this was served atop a banana leaf. Sambin urged us to eat with our hands, Indian-style. We did, and looked like a couple of one-year-olds in high chairs. (more often we have eaten daintily with utensils, which are available to foreign tourists in most venues.)
The first night we tied up at Sambin's village. He and Ragesh, an earnest young electrical engineering student who was our guide, led us to the Hindu temple, where a holiday service was underway. As a loudspeaker blasted what sounded to us like a bugle, a kazoo and a set of bongo drums in fervent search for a path to God, worshippers moved from altar to altar in the open-air concrete and metal structure. They prayed to an image of Ganesh, then to Lakshmi, and then to another god whose name we didn't catch, with each image lit by many candles. Others villagers stood aside in the shadows, like us, and perhaps considered their lives, past present and future.
At noon the next day we stopped at the former spice plantation of N.M. Thaha, a retired planter and official of the Congress Party in Kerala. He greeted us carrying a young grandchild and showed us around in the genial manner that has been typical of the (non-tout) Indians we have met. We saw nutmeg, an apricot-like fruit that grows on a small tree. Clove blossoms were scattered on the ground nearby, still green. Sprigs of black pepper grew on vines climbing up another tree. A tamarind tree was heavy with pods. We peeled some bark---the flavorsome part---off a cinnamon tree. We picked a bay leaf. Mr. Thaha also showed us jackfruit, bananas, teak and rosewood. It was a culinary-cultural-economic history of Kerala in one acre.
Up in Munnar, in the Western Ghats, we spent three days on a cardamom plantation. The Olive Brook Guest House served excellent food---some of the best we've had---and a cooking demonstration preceded dinner each night. Joe asked the young chef which cookbooks he used, and he seemed puzzled. He said he had about 200 recipes of Kerala dishes---all in his head.
In Munnar, we visited a tea museum and hiked around the hills above the town. Joe went on a guided trek and watched the tea-leaf collectors in the valley far below flee when an alarm went up. Wild elephants were reported to be on the rampage, though they never materialized. (We're now near Periyar National Park. Joe is off on an all-day trek. Yesterday, riding a tour boat on Periyar Lake, we watched six elephants swim across the lake in front of us. Thrilling.)
Part of the fun of Munnar was meeting Larry Brown and Judi Garfinkel, who were also staying at Olive Brook. They lived near Boston for many years and now have a farm in northern New Hampshire. As soon as I spotted them, I thought Peace Corps. He was---India, 1966-68---and she was honorary Peace Corps, like Joe. He was also assistant director of the Peace Corps in the late '70s, under Carter, and has worked for Oxfam and taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. Judi has done fabric marketing for Chinese woman and PR for a variety of good causes.
With Judi, Larry had gone back to visit his village in Maharashtra for the first time in 40 years. Back then he worked in family planning, and he joked that "apparently it didn't work." Larry was pleased that some villagers remembered him. Last week, he said, "Word spread all around---the guy who wiped his ass with paper is back!"
That's a great Peace Corps story. My son Zack likes to refer to "Dad's twelve stories." Now there's another one.
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