Wednesday, February 28, 2007

You're leaving, isn't it?

It was Sunday, February 4th, which meant that the course was over and we could go back to our lives. Twenty of us had chartered a bus to take us the two hours north to Varkala. At the helipad, we all went our seperate ways, planning to meet up later, either in a cafe somewhere or on the beach around midnight. The place I was staying was on the outskirts of town, and after a few wrong turns I was dropped off. As I walked throught the swampy rice fields toward my hotel, I thought that this is where the true training begins, out of the Ashram. For a month, I'd passed my days in long periods of meditation and tough yoga poses. I'd wrapped my head around mind-blowing esoteric concepts. I'd eaten nothing but the healthiest vegetarian foods and had weaned myself off the coffee, beer, and wine that made daily appearances in my life. How long would it be before I returned to old habits?

The next couple days (when I wasn't making up for lost sleep) I spent swimming in the sea, or lurking in the shops and cafes on the town's famous cliffs. From the beach, it all looked somewhat like Santa Barbara, but without the oil rigs. Due to the backpacker bibles, the town was beginning to come into its own, and now the race was on. Will Varkala be ruined first by the foreigners with their imported desires and disposable cash, or by the locals, with their piles of rubbish on the beach and the armies of men strolling the beach ogling the forbidden fruits hidden (though not always) by bikini strings? I'd occasionally run into someone from the course, but despite our initial intent to party together, we all seemed to be keeping a healthy distance. I did hang out quite a bit with Lili, no real surprise since we'd become good friends during the course. I was amazed to see her reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spanish one day, Paulo Coelho in German the next. When it was time to go, we shared a taxi down to Trivandrum airport. I'd carry on to Kovalam. We'd been told that our driver would pick us up at 10:45, but he didn't show up until 11:20. He started out driving the careful, cautious way they do when delivering foreigners, but Lili, seasoned by two years of Dehli-living, asked him to hurry or she'd miss her flight. So began a manic, carnival ride, weaving around everything on wheels and feet. More than a few times, we missed other vehicles by less than a foot . Lili smiled and asked me if I was scared. I just laughed, trying not too look out the windshield too much. I do remember a sign flashing past: "Accident prone area."
The driver dropped Lili at the airport for her flight (which she inevitably missed) and drove me the remaining half-hour to Kovalam. I'd wanted to visit due to the town's fame as a hippie hotspot on the road to Goa. The reality made me sad. I always enjoy the pathos of a beach town in the off season, but I've never seen a town so far past it's prime. I found myself to be the youngest person around by at least a decade. Most of the tourists here were of the moneyed Euro retiree type, flown in for a few days for the "India experience." But the place had long been picked clean and even the bones were a disappointingly dull grey. Sitting in cafes or on the beach, I frequently witnessed those relationships that appear to cut through cultural and generational and economic barriers, but have a lifespan of mere days, culminating in an exchange of some kind. This can take more sinister forms in other parts of Asia, but here in Indian, it's more Nouveau Raj. Disheartened, I stayed away from the beach--away from the sight of drooping white flesh and the sound of pomposity--and sat on the patio of my room, or hid myself away in grubby narrow rooms for my latest Ayurvedic treatment.
Waking early the next day, I decided to take a swim, and was pleased to find the beach empty but for a couple dozen fishermen pulling in two lines of nets. As they pulled, a few of the old timers were singing a song which rang out beautifully in the quiet morning air. Between their lines, a couple of large white fish were swimming. The fishermen yelled to them, but unbelievably, this European couple would not move, choosing to ignore the commotion on the beach, and paddle slowly around. So the fishermen kept pulling, eventually drawing the net around the couple, who at this point began to swim frantically for their lives. Once the nets were on the beach, I looked for what I hoped what would be lunch. Despite at least an hour spent pulling, they'd wound up with only five fish. Immediately an argument broke out, between the old timers who been pulling one line, and the younger men pulling the other. I didn't need subtitles to figure out what they were fighting about.
I walked back up the beach to my hotel to check out. The guy behind the desk had tried to overcharge me for a bunch of services I hadn't used or needed. Using my newfound ashram powers, I didn't fight, but gently refused. He backed down, then changed the subject, telling me how good and tough a man that Bush is. Turds of a feather.
Within the hour, I was again heading south.

I took what would be my last Ambassador ride of the trip. My driver was ancient, but at least he kept the pace sane and slow. I wondered if he'd ever heard Gandhi speak, and if Partition had affected him badly. Then I noticed the cross hanging from the rearview mirror, swinging in slow circles above the everpresent elephant figure mounted on the dash. I suppose the driver made it to his ripe age more to the help of Jesus rather than Ganesha.
My destination was Thapovan, an Ayurvedia retreat run by a friendly German named Andreas. I settled into a paradise of teak-lined rooms and large grassy lawns on which I'd do yoga. Every night, small mushrooms would sprout amidst the grass, to be eaten by either the furry legged Chinese chickens, or the larger, purple African fowl constantly pecking around. The latter, in addition to their duties as landscapers, also acted as security, screeching like banshees anytime a snake would appear. I enjoyed a couple quiet days here, swimming amidst the Arabian Sea's large rocks or getting the best messages of the whole trip. I'd eat incredible Keralan food on the hotel balcony, looking over the palm forests covering the hills. At night a cross would begin to hover above the hills, revealing a church hidden amongst the trees, its Malayalam hymns bursting from the speakers, yet never loud enough to drowned out the voice of the Mullah, rising up from the mosque far beyond. Most of the time, though, I sat in a chair out front of my room, drinking directly from a coconut and working my way to the bottom of a large stack of Indian-related books I'd acquired on my travels. I was even given another day here, after my Singapore-bound flight was cancelled. Rather than freak out, I simply accepted a taxi voucher from the airline and went back to the peace of Thapovan.
On the last afternoon, I went visit the Sikh I'd befriended. He sold Buddhist art in a small shop down the hill. I hadn't thought there were any Sikhs this far south, and it turned out he was from Delhi. On my last day, he asked me why I thought that his shop's logo was of a hollow Buddha. I said that it's because Buddha, or God, or whatever, is a mere form, and that because we all have different concepts of the absolute, it is up to the individual to give this form flesh. He laughed and patted my knee. "No," he said, still laughing, "I tell them that the Buddha on the sign is not real, but the one's inside the shop are." I smiled, and wisecracked, "Well now you have both a spiritual and a commercial reason."

I'd originally planned to spend a couple days in Singapore, but the airline had seen to that. I could've had a long afternoon of wandering the city, but instead decided to change my flight and go straight back to Japan. At the airport, I'd gotten a nice surprise. Since I'd been so understanding about the missed flight, even refusing a free hotel room, I was given a seat in First Class. Nice. Yet since the flight left close to midnight, and flew throughout the night, I chose to sleep in my park bench of a seat, partaking not of the booze or the gourmet food or whatever else is given to the man behind the curtain. As the flight gradually descended, I looked out at the lights splayed below, each of them a potential destination in a part of the world completely untramped by me. And later, I'm nursing an airport coffee at dawn, the weird eighties techno of Mark Mothersbaugh being the perfect soundtrack to the scene of zombies walking bewildered and slow, each lied to by their individual bodyclocks which contradict the 6 am rise of Duty Free shutters. And watching these people of every conceivable shape and size, I smiled to myself at the memory of how, a few hours before, in the irony of my seat in First Class, I'd read about how there is no real distinction between humans at all.

http://www.thapovan.com/

On the turntable: Ghost, "In Stormy Nights"
On the nighttable: Christopher Benfry, "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Openening of Old Japan"

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