Love Kerala Blog

Acceptance is one of those things that people talk about in relation to grief, or aspirations of enlightenment.  Acceptance is when a person agrees to experience a situation, to follow a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change it, protest, or exit. (Thanks, Wikipedia)  Acceptance is the most valuable attitude possible in India, and one that can if fact be learned here.  Must be learned here. It goes further than the obvious need to breathe through the chaos of most Indian experience.  Your train will be late.  You accept that.  You will have no fewer than 3 people attempt to cut in front of you at the grocery store, market, rail station, bus queue, or taxi stand.  Breathe.  People will stare at you openly, talk about you in front of your face, fail to show up on time for anything, lie to you, cheat you, and… it’s all in good fun, for them.  And since it is their country, you just have to laugh along, and accept .  Especially since allowing yourself be goaded into a wrathful display of temper will elicit only blank stares and some scooting away from you in whichever public space you happen to be inhabiting.

It’s great practice.  In the West, we always feel that  if we don’t like something we can change it.  We’re taught at an early age to be creative and problem solving people,  and to view nearly any uncomfortable or disappointing situation as a problem.  I don’t think we practice acceptance at all.  We are entrepreneurs , world makers, making everything ‘better’ for ourselves, our children.  At least that’s how it’s taught at school.

But is anything really ‘better’ when we change it all the time?  Sure, it’s cleaner, faster, shinier, more efficient, safer and more advanced.  But it’s not more fun, more stimulating, more intimate, more evolved or more conscientious.  And it’s certainly way less messy.  Glorious fabulous colorful loud MESS… kindergarten kids and Indians know all about the joys of messes.   I find that a certain degree of compatibility with messiness goes a long way toward establishing an attitude of acceptance.

On a slightly, um, ironic note, I began writing this post nearly a year ago.  Sometime in late February my Indian world began to fall apart when I was informed that my visa would no longer allow me to stay with my husband, that I must in fact leave India in less than two weeks.  I was…. not awfully accepting of this.   My tears, my shouting, my pushy attempts to talk to the ‘right’ person, my daily impotent rage availed me nothing.  India was unmoved by my plight.  I think perhaps I was not learning this accepting attitude deeply enough, fast enough for Mother India…. I was prescribed a crash course.

And I still haven’t really learned.  But I’m back, and I’ll try again to breathe and learn to relent,  for as long as I can.

Love, Kerala

Part of the allure of living in a country where you were not born and raised is that, well, you were not born and raised there.  You are not OF it.  You have no one around who remembers you as a child, watched you grow up through all the foibles of youth and become an adult part of your community.  You are separate, outside, an observer.  This position is fantastic for anyone inclined toward people watching in general, and those who yearn for personal freedom in particular.  Someone like me.  Because while I can live in Kerala, marry in Kerala, work in Kerala and lay my head down here every night for the rest of my life, I will never, ever BE Keralan.

Make no mistake- I love it here.  I love the trees, bendy coconut trunks and rambling jackfruit giants, fantasy leaved papayas and ponderous tumeric trees leaning over roads and rivers.  I love the skies, the thunder storms and astounding sunsets.  I love the heat, the sea winds, the food, the colors and the smell of it.  I love it as much or more than the locals do, partly because it is new to me but also because I chose it rather than simply inheriting it.

Sometimes I have friends or guests ask me why I don’t wear the sari or the churidar like local women do.  They ask if I don’t want to fit in, if I’m trying to keep myself apart.  They ask why I don’t learn the language. (Too many answers for that one.)  My general response is to simply laugh.  And then I point out that even if I spoke the language, even if I wore the traditional clothing, acted according to all customs and was more properly Indian than any Indian in behavior, they would all still know me as an outsider.  Not just because of the color of my skin- any North Indian can tell you they are equally apart in Kerala.  It is because they did not see me grow up.  I don’t share history with them in a place where a village usually only has 4 or 5 families as total population.  They are large families, with cousins and second cousins and great aunts and all of that, but families none the less.  And they do not know me.

In a way it’s great.  I come to realize that in many ways a person can never truly be free in a society to which they belong.  We are hedged in by understood and accepted social rules, behavioral habits and an unconscious knowledge of the way things work, what is expected.   We live in set tracks, and moving between them or outside of them is nearly impossible.  Not because anyone would stop us necessarily, but because we ourselves do not see the tracks, so ingrained is our perception of the possible actions of our lives.  Here, outside, I am free in a way I can never be in the U.S….  no one has any expectations of me.  No understanding or desire for understanding.  I am a kook, free to dance in the supermarket, make funny faces at people in the street, wear bright and inappropriate clothing, talk nonsense.  Because the people here all think I’m just a crazy Westerner no matter what I do, I can if fact do anything at all with total immunity.

There is some loneliness on the flip side of all of this.  I have no family here, no lasting friendships.  It is easy to gather acquaintances, but nearly impossible to make real friends within the Keralan community.  Language is a barrier, but also this ‘otherness’.  My husband is obviously an exception to all of this – he is himself a strange man in his community, always has been different from others.  But they love him and he belongs because everyone knows him.  Neither of us has ever felt completely comfortable in any community until we found each other, and now within the walls of our home we are a country of 2, perfectly together and also free.

Although I live here, and thus make deeper the experience of differentness, I think that all of those who travel will recognize some of the symptoms.  It is one of the blessings of travel, that we leave what we know and move physically and, if we travel well, mentally & emotionally into what is known by someone we have never before met.  And there find ourselves again, a stranger in a strange land, perfectly ourselves for perhaps the first time.

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

Love, Kerala

For years I thought I would write a book someday.  Before that I thought I would become a famous poet… someday.  Both of these plans failed, mostly because they were never really plans.  I cannot ‘plan’ my way out of a paper bag.  I can smash through just fine, but given time to think about it I will inevitably think myself out and right back in again.  I thought perhaps this blog format would be just the answer for me… short, informal and without a mandatory achievement level.  Perfect.  Right?

Fatal error.  I started working out of a basic form… 500 words or so about me & Kerala, or some such.  But after just four posts, the form started to chafe and I found myself unwilling to sit down at the computer to write, even though I have two full pages of brainstormed subject lines to expound upon at my leisure.  It doesn’t help of course that I’ve been back in Kerala for more than a month now, and all the motivation and fire I brought with me from the U.S. is now only a tattered remnant, rendered impotent by a wealth of easy days.  Warmth and contentment are not motivators of achievement.

Comfort is no inhibitor of creativity though.  I feel alive, vibrant;  my breath is full and my mind swirls itself around in it’s mortal shell in great crazy loops of color, giggling like a child.  I dance around the house for no reason at all.  I draw pictures and make up stories for each day, my time a flexible construct of imagination and moment.  The birds sing, the sun comes up and inevitably goes again around the bend of evening, singing to another hemisphere while I again lay down my head on pillow, again release wakefulness, again leap along the causeway of dream.  And then the birds sing, the sun comes up….

Days go by one after the other with little alterity and sitting down to write a concise and witty examination of anthropological worth and measure is beyond me.  My friend Fiana (fianananda.wordpress.com)  said to me this morning, “Just write, the first thing that comes into your head.  It doesn’t matter what it is.”  So this I have done, and find that I have written about my life in India after all.  This life is as much about perception as observation, a fine and ticklish distinction  to be sure, but true.  So in the future I will perhaps constrain myself less with form, allow the breakdown of edges that characterizes my days here to infuse my word making with a more hazy story of days.

And perhaps this is the very highest accolade of Kerala, it’s ability to seep in and dissolve construct, to change us into something easier, with more laughter and less design.  As they say here, don’t dream darling, God is living today…

Love, Kerala

Ok, ok.  So I haven’t dropped a blog in a few days.  Sorry, but it’s been raining.  Not light Seattle showers either, but cascading drenching  torrential tropical rain.  My front yard is a puddle.  My dogs are no longer light brown, but a chunky red brown that drips off of them and on to every nearby surface.   I find I am sighing into myself with a lack of motivation that comes too easy on these gray days, when it seems quite fine to do absolutely nothing but lay in bed, and listen to the water falling to earth all day long.

And in India, nobody seems to have a problem with that.   In a place where it takes 7 guys to check in one person at a hotel (5 of whom are smoking cigarettes outside at any given time) and two weeks to get 4 days of work done, super motivated is not really the norm.  I’ve seen buildings under construction where the first floor is already starting to fall apart by the time the top floor is finished.  How many years does that take anyway?

When I first moved here I used to get so frustrated, irate even, at the lack of  ’professionalism’.  I expected persons working on a job to be quick, efficient, and motivated toward success and perfection in whatever business endeavor was at hand.  I mean, isn’t that the point?  Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?  In the West, certainly.

Not here.  It took me a long time to figure it out, but I think I’ve finally squirreled my way into the thought process. (… wait.  That’s wrong.  I don’t think people’s thoughts ‘process’ here at all.  They kind of tumble their way towards… something.  Anyway.)  What’s the point in getting it done today?  Or even tomorrow?  Why the hurry – after all, if you don’t get it done in this life, you can try again in the next.  Yup, you’ve got it.  In a country where nobody really believes in an ultimate death, the need to immortalize oneself through achievement just isn’t there.   There is instead a kind of vague issuance of direction, a tendency toward some goal that might not be too important.  And lots of time for tea.

This is a nation where the most treasured pastime is Cricket… a game that can last five days, and everyone stops for tea at 4 in the afternoon.  They NEED all those guys on the job at the hotel, so that everyone will have time to smoke cigarettes and take naps and perhaps even go out and play street cricket with the guys from the next shop over.  They don’t really need that building this year, or even next year maybe.  It will get done when it gets done.

Not unlike my writing.  So I’ll categorize my lethargy as a step toward fitting into my new home.  It’s not bad.  The rain is a delicious and tender song of growth outside my window.  It’s 78 degrees and green green green.  I have some chai in the kitchen.  And nothing I absolutely have to do today.  I’ve got time.  We all have time.

Love, Kerala