A Passage to India

Our first tuk-tuk driver, Cheebu, welcoming us to Cochin

India.  I have keenly wanted to visit India since 1982, my freshman year of college.  One week that spring term, a caravan of exhibitors turned up on campus, sent, I suppose, by the India tourism agency or some such.  There were food stalls that filled the whole campus with heady spice.  There were dance and music performances.  And there was an exhibit about Indian religion.  It consisted of a tableau of seven or eight figures, all depicting the life cycle of a man, from crawling infant to stooped elder.  I’ve always been susceptible to effigies for some reason (still being a fan of wax museums), and I was drawn to the religion exhibit repeatedly.  Perhaps it was the vision depicted there, an understanding about the full, transitory cycle of the body’s life (an understanding my own culture suppresses), perhaps it was the permeating aromas—but I spent the whole week in a sort of daze, and, tutored, no doubt, by the exhibits, I concluded that my immediate past life must have been spent in the East.  Yes, I have long wanted to visit India.

So my expectations were high.  But a contrary set of dynamics was rising to mitigate my excitement.  We have entered the second half of our voyage—the autumn of our voyage, as I found myself overdramatically referring to it yesterday—and it’s feeling that way.  The days whizz by.  We have made our friends on the ship—especially Noah, who knows all the other kids and loves them very well as they love him.  As a student said to me the other day, Noah is a “celebrity.”  I’m not sure if Noah really gets it that he will have to say goodbye to this amazing community in a month and a half, but boy, we, his parents, do.  It’s a new and different voyage to us.  The cares of the regular world are beginning to encroach (more somatically and spiritually than concretely), and yeah—there’s the growing realization that April 29th is coming fast.  April 29th: the day we step off the MV Explorer for the last time.

Yeah, sounds dramatic.  Some of that’s me. I don’t do well with transitions generally, and this one is going to be one big, rough transition.  As I’ve written all along, we voyagers have bonded—needed to bond—very tightly in order to do what we came to do.  And then of course we all wanted to bond, wanted everything good that could come of really doing this thing, really sinking in and letting it happen to our hearts as well as our minds.  We knew at the outset that our hearts would be broken, and yet we decided willingly to go ahead and open those hearts.  I called that a bargain at the outset and still call it a bargain, but the payment is coming due.

Another factor overarched our India adventure too.  Before I was invited to serve on Semester at Sea (only last September), we all—Susan, Noah, and I plus Susan’s sister Jean, our brother-in-law Rajiv, and mom Merliyn—were slated to make a passage to India as a group, to visit with Raj’s family and do some touring.  The family very kindly agreed to—insisted upon—putting off our India trip for a year so that we three could sail around the world.  We were conscious of the memory of their kindness as the MV Explorer steamed past Sri Lanka towards our encounter with the country.

All that is mere setup.  To India we went.  We spent six nights in India all told, three on board the ship berthed in Cochin, Kerala (in the far southwest of the Indian horn), and three in the tea-plantation country in the mountains near the little city of Munnar (pronounced “moon-ar”).  

Cochin (or Kochi as it is officially known) is an old spice-trading town and therefore a crossing, full of widely varying people and architectures and religious beliefs and religious practices, all displayed in the brilliant colors of Indian clothing, announced in gregarious billboards and voices, and ferried about the town in literal ferries and in tuk-tuks.  On our first day we visited the district known as Fort Cochin, where some of the older Euro influence still rests.  Our tuk-tuk driver, Cheebu, who caught our eye because he was wearing a Semester at Sea T-shirt from the previous year, showed us around.  A highlight was the last day of the celebration known as Holi, where elephants stood sentry in that patient and dignified way that elephants have, over a raucous festival.

First view of Indian shores.  Dolphins were playing in the waters at the mouth of the bay.

Welcoming Committee

Holi

Cheebu took us to a good restaurant for lunch and showed us major sites.  Thank god, he did the driving.  

Then we packed our bags for the misty mountains.  

Misty Mountain Hop

Again, we were very happy that drivers are provided with car rentals.  (If I never ever have to drive in India or Vietnam or China, that will be perfectly OK with me).  Our friendly driver Renjith sped our car through winding canyons and green jungles, on two- and then one-lane roads, five hours or so into the alpine heights.  

Whoa!

There, we stayed at a lovely hotel (the Siena Village) and toured the craggy, emerald landscape of the greatest tea plantations in the world.

Tea: good for you, delicious, and beautiful to boot

Noah lost amid the tea

Noah had a wonderful time, as ever, particularly interacting playfully with the hotel staff and waiters at the very fine hotel restaurant.  He loved the kathakali theatre performance we saw, kathakali being the local stage style that’s been practiced since at least the time of Shakespeare (it involves colorful, ramifying costumes and makeup and entails elaborate movements of the eyes, brows, and mouth that Noah enjoyed trying out).

Our faithful--and VERY skilled--driver, Renjith

Everyone wanted pictures with Noah.  Here's a group of young people (going away on vacay together in a group of pals is apparently a thing in India) at a floral botanical garden we visited.

Susan and Noah at the tea factory we toured

Relaxing in the hotel room--I lie, the hotel suite.  It was as big as many condos.

We and the kathakali performers

A final drive “home” (aka the MV Explorer) left us a final day to do a boat tour through the bay waters, enjoying the sights of dolphins and the picturesque Chinese-style fishing nets dipping into the sea.

Noah with two buddies, May and Summer, on our bay tour boat

The Chinese fishing apparatus.  Very picturesque, but nobody seemed to be catching much.

Our conclusions?  India was beautiful and very, very alive for us and full of friendly, helpful, and, yes, often intense people and experiences.  We loved our time there.  But the more innocent pure wonder that we felt during the first half of the voyage was less easy to access, partly no doubt on account of our new autumnal melancholy and because we missed our family profoundly (I for one desperately missed Raj, for many reasons, but not least to help us interpret the many meanings of the Indian rocking head shake).  But mostly there’s a central fact about India: India is big—in size and population, of course, but also in culture and spirit.  Of all the countries we’ve visited, India, we all felt, being the home of the oldest religion in the world, being home to well over 100 indigenous languages, housing 1.2 billion citizens, is the one that’s the most challenging for a westerner to sink into.  It’s certainly the country I most look forward to visiting again.  Did I pass my immediate past life in India?  There’s utterly no way of knowing.  Another lifetime’s searching might yield more clues, I suppose.

So we touched India, and India touched us, and Noah carried his spark as always.

Magical Hiatus

Smiles: big, wide smiles in beautiful faces.  They met us the moment we drove into the Royal Beach Motel driveway, Ngapali Coast, Myanmar (alternately known as Burma), and they accompanied us throughout our stay.  The Burmese smile a lot.  Even in Yangon (“Rangoon” of old), a sprawling, dirty, half-built, half-falling down city in a jungle, they smile.

Ironies.  Myanmar is by far the most—what’s the word?—“third” of the countries we’ve visited.  The people live under a ridiculous and appalling military government that makes no decisions without consulting astrologers and doles out all the best contracts to cronies.  The repression has yielded a country that has been deliberately and systematically held in the state of a kind of modern medievalia.  Here’s where we finally saw people living side by side in open shacks.  The people go to work in open trucks and crowded buses.  Markets stretch away on either side of dirt roads.  The road between port and Yangon is the worst paved road you’ll ever ride on.  Once visiting here, you will never go to a dentist again with any feeling other than gratitude.  Counter to the government is the church, in this case the Buddhist monastery system.  Monks (in brown robes) and nuns (in pink robes) are everywhere; forests of golden stuppas and pagodas jut toward the sky.  Even the poorest donate food to the clerics.  Where the regular people come into all this is an interesting and fraught question.  Certainly poverty is the baseline.  I’m not going to do the homework on this, but I feel certain that Myanmar has the poorest life expectancy of any country we’ve visited; here is where I worried the most about how people feed their children.  Life can only be very, very challenging for many citizens of this country.

Modern Yangon

The irony is that the Burmese appear to be the happiest people we’ve met.  Everyone on the ship is saying so.  Perhaps they put on a good show for westerners, but I don’t think it’s only that.  It may be cultural; or it may be that freedom really is only another word for nothing left to lose.  I wonder again about affluenza and the anxieties that come with having too much.  Whatever, it’s all summed up in the beautiful, playful word for hello, “mingalaba,” pronounced all in one unaccented stretch (unless musically lengthened for effect: “Miiingalabaaaa!”).

Further painful ironies: the country is inexorably headed toward development.  The government is opening things up.  McDonald’s has a contract here now.  With modernization will come long-needed increases in quality of life and quantity of life for many; dentists will arrive and have a lot to do; roads will be straightened and leveled, and railways will be trued and extended.  Construction is going on everywhere.  In ten years, it may well be that Myanmar will be unrecognizable.  When we return, after modernization has brought its gifts and anxieties, will we still get the smiles?

“Myanmar,” by the way, is not pronounced “My-an-mar” or “Mee-an-mar” but in two syllables: “Mian - ma.”  Gotta catch the dipthong there in the first syllable.

So Noah spent the bulk of his time in Burma at the beach.  Barring some rottenness with a bug or bad allergies, he had a wonderful, wonderful time.  For him it was all about eating delicious food:

Yum, fries

Scrounging for shells:

Playing in the water:

Dancing and leaping on the beach:

Dancing and leaping new friends:

And messing about in boats:

Daddy especially loved the messing about in boats, which included some great snorkeling:

See the fish?

Always there were the beautiful and warm people.  Forgive a distinctively male moment here.  It was just so lovely.  Everywhere in our modest hotel, the young women of the staff glided around with majesterial grace wearing doubtless the most becoming garments ever devised by human hands (figure-hugging skirt and bodice in silk, subtly tricked out in gorgeous embroidery, dark hair held in a florally decorated snood).  Each visit was a variation on a theme of “mingalabas” and shy, fetching smiles.  Watching them sweep the restaurant floor was poetry.  The worst thing you could possibly do at the Royal Beach Motel would be to hurry.  Certainly the wonderful people did not hurry (unless chasing Noah to spank him playfully).  There was no rush and no reason to rush, for either you or the staff.  Between the beautiful sea and the beautiful hotel and the beautiful people, there was plenty to enjoy—a surfeit, a feast.  (And then, finally, the food and drinks did come, and they were marvelous variations on themes of grilled fish, fragrant rice, perfect tropical fruit, and excellent fries and potato chips).

Susu (sp?) with Noah's gift

Nini (sp?)

The people loved Noah, of course, voraciously so.  (Sadly, it was a little overwhelming for Noah, and he went to his shy place most of the time).   They learned his name early and greeted him with teasing and, of course, smiles.  

We loved Burma / Myanmar.  What a beautiful, wonderful, grace-full place, filled with beautiful, wonderful, grace-full people.  We feel honored to have been able to visit.  Too bad Noah was so shy much of the time.  In the end, though, as we were leaving, he danced out the door to “Wake me up before you go go” and applause from his Myanmar family.