The Indian Chronicles IV

Greetings from Goa!
A belated merry Christmas, Happy New Year and an advanced 'hip hip hooray' for the Inauguration just around the corner. As you've probably gathered, each Chronicle is emailed a month or so after the experience in which I reflect about. This one is no different. Although, I have covered much ground since we last met, I can not jump the gun--I must remain true to the chronology I've set forth. Below takes you back, just to where we left off. On my way to South India. Enjoy!
In my first descent to South India, the sun rose with fiery promise—beaming a reflection of levity, warm-heartedness and laziness I hadn't seen in the North. However, for all her warmness while I was there, the sunset was not pretty. She sunk unnoticed, amid an unforecasted squall of misfortune.
The largest city on the south-eastern coast, Chenai, once Madras, was not to be handsome or terrifically tropical, but a valuable city nonetheless. Valuable, in its own right, as a sound sanctuary for south Indian culture. Still, undeniably in Bombay's shadow, Chenai breathes without the cosmopolitan fluff and western indulgence. No instead, food grubbing, lungi's* and the Tamil language are the norm—all conventions to be considered animalistic in the upper-crust, old money circles of Delhi.
*Cloth, swathed around the waist of a man, insofar as to call it a skirt.
The same Indian pandemonium and pollution reeks, but here, its scented with the salty air of a forlorn sea. The roads even more clogged and the equatorial heat, which befriends the scalding pavement and sooty exhaust, come together to release unbreathable smoke like that of burning plastic. On the surface, the neighborhoods along the coast appeared unusually egalitarian. However, when I voiced this observation, a local responded, "the poor? They were washed away with the tsunami." A theory, need I say, wrenched my heart.
My being there had much to do with an ultimate Frisbee tournament. Eight teams had journeyed from all across India to take part in a round-robin contest. We, being the most American rooted team thought we would cake walk end-zone to end-zone, leaving the bulk of competition, all of whom, Indian-born, beseeching for our autographs. Hell, we invented the sport! But…the curse of cockiness curled our throws and cramped our muscles; what we anticipated and what took place bred humiliation of nth degree. We were the Soviets, with the ice still in our veins, denied the Gold and by who? Amateurs, a litter of copy-cats that took the American import and ran with it.
Once defeat had been swallowed and digested, and my teammates hurried back to their jobs in Delhi, I, having been invited to my first Indian wedding had to stay on. With a few days to kill before the 'auspicious' morning, I fled the grungy stew of Chennai and headed for fresher air. Pondicherry, another coastal city four hours south draws tourists alike for its French flavor—France's piece of the pie in the colonial free-for-all India once was. I, myself, a closet Francophile was not thoroughly impressed. The Gallic architecture was there, but you could easily tell, as time passed, the Indians had painted a few shabby coats of their own, For the most part, the Indo-French culture was wearing thin, but what thankfully remained were the outdoor-seating cafes. One in particular proved delightful. Sipping a frothy cappuccino, I relaxed and recharged, for little did I know, le bon vie only had a few hours left.
I rarely offer any real travel advice in the Chronicles, but when an incident unfolds so nefariously, yet so easily avoidable, I will with great obligation, bewail an episode of hard-luck, not as a chronicle, but as a precious lesson to you, but more myself: "Richard, the Traveling Clutz."
One afternoon, as I was waltzing northward, switching from one dilapidated bus to another, the thickening fuliginous sky signaled I was near to where I needed (not wanted) to be. I was making great time. Punctual as a priest to Sunday mass, I was sure to make it to Chenai airport for my departing flight. In fact, two hours before take-off, I had enough time to dicker with a rickshaw driver over 200 rupees, but hard-pressed, I pursued a recommended alternative, delivered in broken English, "bus—airport—abi."
Indeed, among the milling crowd of this nameless Chennai suburb, the approaching bus read, for all 137,367,876 eyes to see, AIRPORT.
In India, buses rarely arrive at a stand-still. They simply accelerate and decelerate. A complete stop would be opening the floodgates too wide—the hordes would gush in too quick. So instead, it's roadside Darwinism. Only the fastest and most ferocious can ride.
With some practice, not a lot, darted towards the transient bus. A gladiator as such, I wrestled for space and fought for air—anything it took to repel the cascading flock. Emerging, I regaled. I was king of the mountain…or so I thought.
Somewhere in the stampede, I had been outfoxed, defiled, my invincibility kaput. I was the protagonist in the classic tale of traveling pick-pocketing. Yes, I had made it aboard, but my wallet, passport and camera had not.
"Stop!!" I bellowed and dismounted from the bus. In some South-East Indian hinterland, with a heart racing and a face paling, I gazed over some three-hundred culprits, and wondered what one does now? My wallet, bearing the high-value bulk of my most recent withdraw, both my credit cards and driver's license, my US passport with my Indian visa and a camera, brimming with memories of the trip, yes, withhold judgment, were all concentrated into the same zippered pouch. I was a sailboat that had suddenly capsized, with all hatches open and each fender untied.
No one spoke English. My flight was in an hour and my ability to remain calm, in the hours to come, was acutely going to be tested. Photo-IDless and penniless, I boarded another bus. Weighed by despondency, I stuck out not just as a white-skinned vagrant, but a white-skinned vagrant on the verge of a cosmic melt-down. Six school boys, still clad in proper uniform acted upon their immediate curiosity to my current state of misery and asked what had happened—in intermediate English. Short of breath, I let body language express the vicissitude of the last half hour; fluttering, squealing, but nevertheless, communicating, the young boys understood my desperation. Making my flight, they assumed was of most importance to me—and I suppose at the time it was. Predicament had me cornered, but my departing flight held promise. Promise to escape this sweltering, Dravidian hellhole if not with my personal belongings, at least all limbs intact.
The young boys, together, represented me, expressing to the rest of the bus my current hardship. Before I knew it, lower-class Indians, with little but rags for clothes and dirt on their hands passed around a hat, each contributing to me: the rich, strange, foolhardy American.
I could have used my energy more constructively. The flight, long-gone by the time I had reached the airport proved that fleeing the crime was appallingly counter-productive. Without the police's observance—in document form of the incident, I had not a hope to board a flight in a country recently zonked by terrorism. Here, there and beyond, the school boys would not leave my side. When we first returned to the scene, the policemen on patrol insisted I'd identify the perpetrator. A feat, even by Hardy-Boy standards, would be impossible—especially considering that two hours now had passed and for all I knew, the sneaky crook already had fronted two month's rent, booked a flight to Boston, and had his family holding a still pose, as he searched for the viewfinder of his new Cannon digital camera.
So, squooshed into the back of a cruiser, we diverted to the station. A dusty dungeon of prehistoric office equipment including: rusting type writers, and glossy, see-through paper for tracing—the most pervasive method of photocopying I've seen through India. I sat, of course. Just as I learned in my first experience (see Chronicle 1) in a Delhi police station, one must always remain seated. The school boys converted my English into Tamil out loud and on paper. One grizzly-haired man, perhaps an administrative assistant handed me a boiling cup of tea and with utmost confidence, maintained I had come to India on a Christian mission. "No, I have not sir." Speechless, but more because he was at a loss for more English, he disengaged.
Hours passed, but the same procedural tedium remained the exact same. "Sir, please write the name of your father on this line" and that line or in that space or on this document. Bureaucrats in this country, you will quickly learn, fixate themselves on paternal lineage. The designated box: Father's Name may even precede the box of your own.
By now, my cell phone was receiving the calls of worried mothers, of all whom, were notified much earlier with my number that their sons would not be home in time for dinner. While the police were still disputing the spelling of my father's prename, I had a minute to semi convince the boys I would be okay and that they should run along; my sister had arranged other help on the way. And so they did, against their gentle will. We hugged farewell; my eyes drizzling with tears.
There's nothing that I love more about Indians than their kindness of strangers. The inevitable crack of the smile if eyes lock or their teddy-bear indifference to a pat on the back. These four boys, Raj Kumar, Mohan, Frank and RK were hallmarks of the selflessness anchored into the hearts of so many Indians. And not yet, is it the wily pickpockets, so-called corrupt politicians and inept police force that make the final difference here. It is the four boys' and the millions and millions of Indians like them who know benevolence and nothing else. India is a daring experiment, both in its overpopulation and fragmentation, but it carries on, cautiously, clinging to the age-old promise, Gandhi himself, entrusted—truth and love will always win.
I did in fact return safely to New Delhi the following morning. I went straight to the American Embassy and filled out the proper paperwork for a new passport. I purchased a new camera, and spent the next four days, again, clambering through the muck of Indian Bureaucracy trying to reinstate my stolen visa. In the 11th hour, a day or so before my flight to Sri-Lanka, I located the only woman who was not preset by a clockwork. She was by all accounts more biological than the other bobbling-head androids I dealt with. She spoke and then she listened, and what she possessed, was an imagination. Staggeringly, she unearthed my paperwork among the sky-scraping clutter, and with just an ink-stamp and my trust, she reissued my visa—free of charge.
India, once more, revealed its schizophrenia. Like I found in Chennai, for all the unforgiving, the compassionate will always be on call. And for all the jostling and jolting, you'll always meet gentle embrace. I will continue to regard India, as I've said before, not just as episodic ups and downs, but as an ever-unfolding debacle—and to be frank, one I have really come to appreciate.
Stay tuned, a couple of weeks, for Chronicle # 5: it's sure to be the best so far! Raw with nostalgia from a wonderful and rapturous voyage through Sri Lanka, Goa, Bombay, and back to Goa.