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

It is not faster than a speeding bullet.  It cannot leap buildings in a single bound.  It is not stronger than a silent ‘E’.   But it is certainly the coolest, stripey-est, most fuel efficient and just plain fun way to get around in India.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am referring to that compact three-wheeled catastrophe contraption – the Auto- Rickshaw.

Known in Thailand and South -East Asia as the tuk-tuk, India’s motorized miracle is omnipresent in cities, towns, villages and hill stations from Kashmir to Kerala.  Its bumblebee coloring of black and yellow is like some strange vehicle onomatopoeia, the color and the sound and the motion of the thing being so very, very like the buzzing and weaving movements of a bee.   Essentially, it’s a three wheeled motor bike that someone  built a shell around and added a back seat, enabling it to carry the driver and … some number of passengers.  I was going to say two or three passengers, but I’ve seen rickshaws with 10 school children inside, or five sari bedecked wives folded neatly into a space that should barely fit me, my husband and a couple of tomatoes.

With it’s high gas mileage and lightweight frame, it’s flexible and efficient.  The single front wheel rotates nearly 360 degrees, enabling drivers to pull out of spaces with inches in between the front bumper and the bus.  Or oxcart, or motorbike or whatever vehicle has dared to be in front of a rickshaw man with somewhere to be.  I don’t think I would be remiss to say that the rickshaw can outmaneuver a motorbike.  I’ve seen it.

In a place where taxis are for the tourists, the auto rickshaw is everyman’s conveyance.  Taking kids to school or parents to work, driving short distances and long, overflowing with goods for the kitchen/restaurant/guesthouse… all deeds are accomplished with aplomb when a rickshaw is involved.  And while trains are better for long distance, and bikes are more daredevil fun, the auto rickshaw is so very INDIA that it is the standard for transportation in this fine country.

Oooh.  I almost forgot to mention the delightfully kitch interiors of these fine vehicles.  My husband’s has brown and yellow patterned velvet on the walls and roof… and plastic covered pictures of matching pug-nosed fluffy white kittens saying “It’s good to be a friend” on BOTH sides.  I’ve seen interiors that make velvet Elvis paintings look tasteful and demur.  Most have similarly cheezey prints, often depicting disturbingly fat white babies with trite sayings in pink or red lettering about love, or friendship, or Jesus.   It’s like a Scholastic Book Club poster of the month gone horribly, horribly wrong.

But no matter the decor, I feel fantastic when I’m breezing down the street in the back seat, watching the world slide by the open sides of my ride, and I am vicariously quick, agile and alive.  You should try it sometime.

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

Today from my yard I picked pale yellow globes of passion fruit, speckled and firm like space alien eggs.  The saw of my knife skittered and then bit, through the hull and into the soft ocean center.  What a creation!  Hard and soft at the same time, even the gelatinous tender orange of fruit inside is scattered with bites of seed, black and unavoidable, part of the experience.  Tipped the cup of it to my mouth and tingle tart happiness slid onto my tongue, a sensual delight somehow unexpectedly mine.

I only found the passion fruit vine last week, surprised by it wound around a small tree in the back.  Sly, it’s only leaves waited for meters and hid among the tree cover, and the globes tucked into them above my head were invisible from my window.  But my ever clever husband found them, sloping his long feet against tree trunk to climb into canopy and toss down bits of heaven.  How beautiful a moment, his laughing face and shining dark body perched above me, dropping fruits into my hand.

He showed me later how rich our garden is, how the pepper plant winds it’s night green leaves around the trunk of coconut trees, and makes helix strings of hard pepper pods to dry and flavor every food in every land of man.  It comes from here, this miraculous spice that created trading nations and spanned differences among men with it’s particular dance on the tongue;  I am in Malabar, in Travancore, in among the cardamom plantations and downhill from ever rolling hills of tea, embedded in a paradise of plenty.

Last spring I tried counting the mangos in their giant frame of green and could not, overcome with the sheer audacity of their ripe yellow-orange temptation.  Yesterday I picked chillies and okra from the plants and made a spicy strange lunch, green and hot and sweet with coconut oil.  In a few weeks the papaya’s will arrive to hang full and oblong under the ridiculous few leaves of that plant, like some extra dimensional sex organ only understood by gods and locals.  I daily gather the coconut from the ground, shaking it to check it’s water, salivating at the imagined goodness inside the yellow living rock of it.

I feel the warm air around me now, the delight of each day in itself delicious, tactile and seen.   I will with my thoughts cartwheel into a new day in Kerala, my head swimming with all the treats ahead of me.

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

Maybe it doesn’t define us.  Surely it is not the soul of a people.  But the methods by which we travel from one place to another show our character, give a glimpse into how we as a culture practice living, in it’s simplest day to day form.  For instance, in the U.S. the most prevalent form of transport was, is and always will be the personal automobile.  CARS.   And it reflects the American society perfectly. Individual. Consumptive. Technologically savant and totally, totally alone.

By contrast, the most common methods of transport in India are all about the group.  Even a motor scooter is a family vehicle.  Rickshaws and trains make up the other important transportation categories, and are also about the group.  People go from here to there together, with family or co-workers, friends or even strangers.  Of these, the trains are by far my favorite.  So I’ll begin there, rather arbitrarily.

I love the trains in India.  Not in the way that little boys love trains, where it’s all about the engine, about push and pull and power.  I couldn’t even tell you what an engine car looks like on your standard Indian Railways passenger train.  I don’t know how fast they go or even what kind of fuel they use to go with.  ( I think it might be diesel, but don’t quote me on it.)  And I don’t love the trains as a model of efficiency, as I would if I was talking about the European Rail.  I love the trains here in a purely aesthetic, whimsical way that at this moment I’m sure makes sense only to me.  But I’ll try and explain.

I like the chai sellers, shouting their wares inappropriately at three in the morning.  I like the families gathered together on the blue vinyl seats, sharing home packed meals of chapati and chili pickles and curry, passed between them on scraps of magazine paper with grace and laughter.  I like the silence of the tired businessmen returning home. And I like the  smell of pee that comes from the train toilets.  Seriously.  It’s an organic, natural scent which serves to remind me that despite the fact that we are transversing in hours distances that for millenia took weeks or months to travel, despite steelworks and continent spanning organizations, we are still only human, as subject to the cycles of consumption and voiding as any animal.

I also like the trust placed in me personally by the train system.  I feel empowered when I stand leaning against the open doorway, the wind of our passage pressed full against my body, toes sticking over the edge and nothing between me and the speeding tracks but a bit of air and luck.  Or stepping off the train onto the station platform while the cars are still moving, feeling agile and alive.  No one in India is going to tell me what to do with my own safety.  That’s so my business, and certainly everyone assumes I’ve got it covered.  The lack of litigation in this culture is truly liberating, and just increases my pleasure on the rails.

But most of all, beyond anything else, I love the train at night.  Laying down to sleep, my head on my backpack, the steel wheels rolling under me hit the ties to make the best hippy drum circle ever, a never ending, never repeating rhythm that invests my dreams with a kind of dance.  And there in the dark, with only a sheet  between me and a bench worn shiny and smooth with the elbows and hips of multitudes of past passengers, I am truly a part of this place.  I am no different than the middle aged man sleeping across from me, on his way home to Delhi for his brother’s wedding, or from the young girl with her suitcases piled around her supine form heading off to University.  Our breathes match, in syncopation.  Clack clack clack ca-thunk thunk clack.   The only way to travel.  Together.

Love, Kerala

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

A Menu of Wishful Thinking

Looking at a menu like this, you might think you’re in for a treat.  So many options!  Such great selection of tasty local cuisine!

On my first trip to this particular eatery, my favorite by the way, I was jonesing for a masala dosa, also my favorite.  A thin and crispy pancake of rice flour and magic surrounding a warm & chunky savory potato curry, the dosa is served with thick coconut chutney and spicy sambar sauce.   All these flavors, the crust of the pancake and goo of the curry, combine to make it one of the best foods EVER.

Which I soon learned is great… as long as you don’t want it at one in the afternoon.  Though it says nowhere on the menu, or anywhere else for that matter, there is apparently a complicated formula for the availability of food stuffs in your average Indian restaurant.  Even the servers won’t explain it to you.  When asking for the masala dosa, my request was met with the reply of, “Sorry madam, not possible.”  Uttapum?  ”Not possible, madam”.  Iddaly?  ”Sorry, not possible”.  Ok then, how about some chai?  Laughter, “No madam, not possible this time”.

My frustration growing, I finally hit upon the right question, what IS possible?  ”Meals.”  That’s it.  Nothing else on that long menu is available, it turns out, from around 12:30 until after 3 p.m..   Months of experimentation has taught me that this is true in EVERY KERALAN RESTAURANT IN THE STATE.  Why?  No one’s gonna tell you that.  THEY know.

And it’s not as if this issue of random availability is confined to local eateries… visiting an establishment in the Varkala beach area, a huge tourist site with dozens of restaurants catering to Western clientèle,  the dauntingly large 7 page menu can quickly be reduced to around 10 items.  SOMETIMES they have these things, so they put it in the menu.  There is no conception what-so-ever that someone might be unhappy, after much deliberation upon options, to have their choices rebuked, shot down, denied!  Repeatedly.

In the case of local places, it turns out there’s a formula that depends on the time of day… most Kerala people eat only light breakfasts and dinners, lunch  being the big meal of the day.  ’Meals’ is the term for the typical Kerala lunch, an all you can eat gluttons feast of rice, papadam, about 5 small veggie dishes and 4 choices of sauce.  They’ll keep bringing you more, over and over again, until your belly is distended and you have to lay down for a few hours just to digest.  So for lunch, just meals.  Even chai (Indian spiced sweet tea) is apparently a faux pas, as you just can’t get it til, you guessed it, after 3.

The tourist places have other issues, mainly seasonal.  Though they do generally have all or most items during the busy season, they just don’t have the money to maintain all that stock and do so much prep when things are less busy.  So if traveling during a slow part of the year, learn quickly to simply ask what they DO have before getting your heart set on pasta primavera.  It’s on the menu.  They don’t have it.

It’s 9 a.m..  If I hurry and shower, I can get to town in time for masala dosa…..

Love, Kerala

A Menu of Wishful Thinking

Welcome to my first ever, once in a lifetime, super blog!  As those who know me are aware, my life took a turn… well, it didnt’ really ‘take a turn’ so much as just slide unexpectedly about half way around the world, my soul leading my brain in an electric bugaloo of relocation.  And I found myself quite suddenly living in Kerala,  India, arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world, married (!) and running the Skylark Guesthouse.  In the space of one year, my life-long residency in the Washington State was over, and I had given up umbrellas and socks for a life of gauzy skirts and tank tops, traded evergreens for coconut trees, and resigned myself to a life without beef. 

Over the last three years, I’ve learned to love this place in ways that I have only read about.  I have read books where the hero or heroine of the story is so enamored of the place where they live, their very character so informed by the landscape, that as a reader I could not imagine that person in any other place.  I thought it was a literary device, some clever application of words to create a state that must surely be imaginary.  Now, I know differently.

Though I grew up and lived almost all of my life in Washington, and would have said with all honesty that I loved that place, that I still do in some ways, I never knew what love of place really was until I came here.  Even a recent visit to Seattle let me know how real my changes have been.  I found myself tense and disillusioned there, the air too thin, the light somehow wrong.  I couldn’t think properly, breathe right.  After 4 months there, I acclimatized.  But on my return to Kerala, I suffered none of the dislocation brought on by my move to the Pacific Northwest.  Within 10 minutes of disembarking the airplane in Trivandrum, I felt my whole being shake itself loose, my breathe came deep and easy, and I knew that I had returned HOME at last.

There are, of course, many aspects of living here that are challenging, even wit scramblingly aggravating.  I now live in a culture where staring is not considered rude.  There is no waste disposal infrastructure, and garbage litters every street.  The temple regularly blares it’s low-fi speakers with songs of praise right at my house.. at 6 a.m.!  It is impossible to do ANYTHING without filling out a form of some sort… I needed 2 passport photos just to buy a cell phone.  The difficulty of meeting any local women has been mind boggling, and I have in three years made only one friend in this demographic.  And then there are things like driving without any consideration of lane travel, the constant horn honking, the inability to form a LINE anywhere, the pushing, the male dominated hierarchy of every village and neighborhood, and of course, the bathrooms.

All that said, I still wouldn’t trade it for the world.  The people are open and bright, educated and clever.  Laughter is easy and honest and common. There is a way of living that ignores things beyond our control, accepts the Universe as it is, for whatever reason.  It is always, always warm.  The sun rises and sets at almost the same times all year round, situated as we are right at the fat belly of the Earth.  There is a strange whimsical nature in the architecture, a penchant toward really colorful houses, and a capacity for love that is just staggering.

And, I never have to do my own laundry.

So I’ll keep posting things here, my experiences both with Kerala itself and with the pitfalls and joys of being a foriegner living here.  And insights, when I get them…

Love,  Kerala