Welcome to India

India has a billion souls and a billion ways of greeting you; namaste, vanakkam, salaam, garam chai, a honking horn, ten honking horns, an officious nod from passport control, a polite head wobble from a customs agent, a polite rip-off from a rickshaw wallah, an itinerary interrogation from a concerned mother who sat next to you on the plane and in my case, on October 13, 2008, a golden smile from a lamé spray-painted statue of Gandhi, his dhoti shiny with glitter, his traditional walking stick metallic and sparkly, so the father of the nation looked more like a pimp working the corner than a statesman on hunger strike.

The golden Gandhi shone like a tacky idol over the early morning masses milling about under Christmas lights strewn over a shopping arcade. I wondered what people could be buying at six in the morning, and then why I was awake at six in the morning, and then imagined Gandhi’s outfit on old, Vegas-headliner era Elvis. Anything to chase away the blues.

Did I mention the blues? They crept in on the long flight like turkey buzzards and had been picking at me ever since. They got particularly vicious during long bouts of loneliness: in buses, on planes, in hotel rooms that are dark and you start wondering if there’s a way past the walls. A friend told me before I left: “Live in the moment, not in your mind.” And, “You’re going to a sunny country, so face the sun.”

I pulled my bag off the bus floor, which was getting flooded with rain from the thunderstorm outside. The wet burst in sheets on the highway. Where’s that fucking sun, I thought, as water slopped through a hole in the back of the cab onto my neck. At least the rains hadn’t broke between 3:45 and 5am, when I sat under the concrete awning of Pallavaram bus stand in Chennai, smoking cigarettes and watching a fat cow listlessly chomp on trash with a bovine arrogance that proclaimed It Is Holy and It Is Spoken Of In Capital Letters and Its Shit Is Picked Up By Old Women For Even It Is Religious and most importantly, It Can Never Be A Big Mac.

I was waiting for a bus to Pondicherry, former French colony and one of the nicer seaside towns of Tamil Nadu. I had been torn between starting my research in ‘Pondy’ or Kanchipuram (‘Kanchy’), a pilgrimage town that is closer to Chennai, but decided to opt for a place where I was more likely to meet friendly traveling faces. My mind was in no state for long bouts of isolation, and nothing is more isolating than being the sole non-believer amidst a million devotees who possess a religious fervor foreign to your soul.

In halting Tamil, I asked a chai-wallah (tea-seller), “Eppozhutu atutta varum peruntu Pondicherry?” which is supposed to mean “When is the next bus to Pondicherry,” but comes out like, “When bus next Pondicherry." He gestured towards a block of less trash-strewn concrete. I sat down. Buses passed, slowed down, picked up and dropped off passengers. I approached several large, comfortable looking air-conditioned buses. They were not going to Pondicherry. Then a small, uncomfortable looking, un-air-conditioned bus pulled up. Its front declaimed, “Puducherry,” the new, Tamil-ized name of the city (I’ve heard ‘Pondi’ is Tamil slang for porn, but everyone still calls the city that). I ran up and jumped on and sat in the back.

Chennai whipped by: headlights, street children, mountains and valleys of trash, shit waft, piss scent, and that vaguely fecund, almost pregnant smell of life breathed by a million sweating people that is the tropics. Then Tamil Nadu, itself passed: a good, smooth tarmac for India, power lines and utility stations, some hills, now cloaked by rain and mist, now giving way to a dried out river bed, the red soil going spongy under the cloudburst. A catch of song, the “wheeny-winny-woo” of a Bollywood chorus. Signs in Hindi, English and Tamil, but mainly the latter, the letters curved like the Burmese tattooed into my arm. The black and red banners of Dravidian Pride political parties, those patriots who resent the rule of North India with a passion and length of history that makes American Confederates seem like disaffected mumblers with a recent gripe in comparison. Then Gandhi, Golden Gandhi, smiling his benevolence on the early dawn shoppers, grinning Welcome to India while the bus bumped along. I kept my bag off the ever-wetter floor, wondered why it had to rain on my first day (me, water and the Third World don’t get along; I can’t stand the way rain brings all the refuse of these societies literally bubbling to the surface), sandwiched my pack between myself and the metal seatback in front of me, buried my face in my underwear pocket (so soft!) and tried to sleep.

Comments

[Joe]

adam,
safe travels, dude. keep up the blogging so we can follow along!

[Matt]

Pondi is supposed to have great antique-ing. My friend bought all manners of 100-yo+ wood carvings on the cheap.

Matt 'Fancy-pants' F.

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I'd always wanted to go to India because i want to know a lot of there culture and their religion and also because of the movie "slumdog millionaire" LOL

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