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.