Falling
In which I realise the purpose of the trip and encounter prostitutes.
The full series of posts from my India trip can be read here.
We left the guesthouse at three to visit another village and our final group, this time the tappers who climbed palm trees and gathered sap that could be turned into sugar. On the way, we stopped at the side of the road to take the seed balls we had been given earlier in the week and throw them into some abandoned land, something I had wanted to do with Bala, but we never got the chance.
This meeting took place in a small community library which had books mostly in Hindi, but wedged in between them was Dale Carnegie's How to Worry Less. The palm tappers were outside and slowly filtered in one at a time, markedly in rougher shape than the others we had met, with missing teeth and well-worn lungis and one older man without a shirt. I sat down and felt a drip from the ceiling and looked up to see a large wet spot above me, but also wet spots across the ceiling. We started, or rather Rajen started and it became clear that a short man sitting next to me, with white dotting his black hair and moustache, had the most to say and wanted to tell us how bad things were. Gusztáv began to ask questions, much more basic ones, about what they did and how they worked. The season was only six months, but they had to tap each tree three times a day and were paid by the yield. Unlike the other groups we met, they did not own anything but instead were hired laboures, all except one man who was slightly better dressed and held himself in a slightly different way who said he owned several trees. They would tap any number of trees a day, sometimes thirty or forty, and they pointed to the oldest guy with a long moustache and said when he was young he climbed 60.
At some point, discussing the dangers of the work they talked with each other and with Rajen and made a motion with their hands to indicate something in their ribs, which I understood to mean they had broken their ribs falling, but Rajen translated it and told us that they climbed with knives and sometimes when they fell, they would fall on the knife, cutting open the side of the stomach and causing their intestines to spill out. If they survived this, they would be very limited in their ability to continue working. They said during the off-season, they would do construction work, hard labour, which paid about 400 rupees a day but was easier than tapping. When we asked how this money compared to the tapping work, there was laughter and loud crosstalk before Rajen finally said that it was sometimes about the same, but palm tapping was the work that they did and their fathers did. They were palm tappers, not construction workers.
The palm tappers group ended after extensive demonstrations of how they climbed the trees and used tools to tap them. They showed us the callouses on their hand and encouraged us to touch them, something I did with the talkative man next to me and he looked up to see if I was impressed, which I was. We walked out to the front of the building and took pictures, with music blaring from the nearby temple and Rajen urging us across the street, where another group of young girls was waiting to meet us.
This group of young girls in a class facilitated by the charity was slightly smaller than the day before, but the girls were more energetic and talkative, and I easily slipped back into teaching mode with the simplicity of talking about my family and my kids and our pet rats. A group of boys gathered at the doorway of the club, watching us, the music from the temple blaring behind them. Gusztáv sang again and Rajen taught them to sing 'We Shall Overcome' in Tamil and then in English, and as we ended and started to disperse, the palm tapper from the earlier group, the man with his own trees, appeared, a different man almost, beaming and pointing out his daughter who had been in the class. A father now, he was almost completely different, like who he was and why he did what he did was suddenly obvious. We took pictures and waved goodbye and left.
We talked to Rajen and Lucy both nights and I finally asked if they were Christians. Nimmy had told us the night before that she was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and that I needed to ask Lucy about the church's history because she was the real expert. When we had dinner, we talked about why they had converted, but it was something their ancestors had done a hundred years ago. Rajen told us that his family had come from a lower caste and their situation was intolerably bad. The women were not allowed to cover their breasts without paying a tax. Wives were thrown on their husband’s funeral pyres. Anything was better than this.
That night, Gusztáv and I set out again to see the beach, the one where you could swim. In the city, as we walked through the streets, goats were standing on tables under a roof of banana leaves and trying to eat them. We wandered out into the water and then back to the docks where the big boats were moored and three boys on a motorbike drove up, curious about us, asking for an Instagram handle. We walked further back to the city, and another person stopped us in front of the church, St Thomas's, who wanted to talk to us about what we were doing and where we were going.
On the way back, Gusztáv said, I need to shit, and we picked up the pace a bit, coming to the gate of the guesthouse, but it was 11:30 now, and the gate had been locked. Gusztáv said, No problem, and gave me his bag and in one movement, climbed over the gate through a small gap in the spikes and was immediately on the other side and walking deliberately towards the toilet. I watched what he did, and was absolutely sure I couldn't make the same movement: Gusztáv had done conscripted military service in the nineties, I wasn't even 10 then. I hung the bag on the fence and placed my hands on the top like Gusztáv had and brought my feet up, to the foot holds, but immediately slipped in my new sandals, desperately trying to get at least the majority of my body over the fence without catching on a spike, and as I lowered myself, my shorts did get caught and I thought how stupid it would be to have this be the disaster that befalls us, me landing on my face in the middle of the night, trying to climb a fence.
On Thursday morning, we woke early to pack the bags, take all of our wet clothes down, stuff them into the bags, and try to sort out what we had. I took my bag downstairs and there were two cars now, Rajen and Lucy's car that we were taking to Madurai for a servicing and second car with another driver which would come behind us. Rajen drove far more cautiously than the others, much more like we were in the UK, overtaking carefully and not speeding past people. At some point, we stopped, and I needed to pee badly and asked if I could just go at the side of the road, which Bala had assured me was fine, and here too, it was fine, they said, so I climbed down the embankment to relieve myself.
Madurai felt like a shock again having spent the week in villages and having forgotten the first days in Hyderabad with the choking traffic and the noise. We left the first car with the dealership and took the second car further into the city like we were wending our way in a circle, a spiral closer and closer to the centre where the temple was. Lucy and Rajen dropped us off, promising to pick us up later to shop and then take us to the airport. We thanked them and headed to the centre.
The temple site sprawled over the whole of the middle of the city, and we left our shoes and mobile phones at a counter before the officer at the metal detector sent us back to check Gusztáv's bag too, the signs like in Hyderabad warning us not to tip with the attendants expecting tips. We got through and saw an enormous queue of people waiting to get into the actual temple, where one needed to be Hindu, something I wondered how they knew or would check. We found instead the outer corridors and towers, the many armed gods smiling mischievously while others struggled around them and Gusztáv bought two candles for us to light and we prayed before one of the gods that looked the most welcoming.
Rajen and Lucy and the other staff member from the charity were waiting for us and we went to tick through the list of things we needed and wanted, first at a clothing shop and then in the car, they dropped me and the staff member in another part of town to try to find some non-metal necklace for the pendant I had bought for Yoko in Kerala, without any luck, everyone trying to sell me beads, more and more beads. We walked up a street and turned to another and another, finally finding ourselves at a department store with the rest of the group via a tuk-tuk that took us like magic through the chaos. Gusztáv was shopping and I looked halfheartedly for a necklace, before giving up. Instead, I found a shirt for myself in the men's section which appeared to have at least forty attendants working, all waiting and watching you, ready to help at any moment for anything no matter how trivial.
Gusztáv continued shopping and I stood with Rajen and Lucy who suggested that we needed to make a move and I shouted out for Gusztáv to hurry up and said to Lucy, This is our relationship, Gusztáv is the creative one and I'm keeping the time as his assistant, and we laughed and were finally in the car headed to the airport, talking about the future and what we could do to help them and how we would be back soon. I joked about how they would live another thirty years at least so there was plenty of time and Lucy said thank you for blessing us by saying that. I joked, Please say something nice at my funeral, and when they understood, were serious, Don't say that, you should live longer than us. At the airport, we hugged and said goodbye again, another set of friends that suddenly were there, all these people that Chris knew, Swedish Chris, yes, I remembered suddenly that this was all his doing, that he was supposed to be here with us and even still was, the electricity that had animated the trip and the people in it and we promised again to come back, we will be back with partners or other friends or children. And with Chris, of course.
The Madurai Airport was regional in the worst sense of the word, with over-zealous staff everywhere enforcing what seemed like arbitrary rules. Gusztáv got caught at an x-ray machine outside, having to unpack and repack both of his bags and then at security having the spices he was given taken off him. He came through upset, saying that they told him maybe he could go back and try to get them into his checked baggage, he wanted to do this, and I didn't think there was time. We went back and forth and he finally gave up, and did the thing we had now learned to do on this trip again and again, to let it go and say it couldn't be helped. We decided to get a beer instead, but in the one bar, there was no place to sit and the Kingfisher was 800 rupees, so we resigned to just sit at the gate and wait for the flight to board and escape this part of the trip.
I fell asleep on the plane and then woke suddenly with the idea I had been waiting for the whole trip to come to me, the reason I had decided to make this trip appearing like a fully formed plan in my head, taking all of the ideas and questions Gusztáv had been cultivating in the focus groups and applying them to the charity sector, how to shorten and create a supply chain of donors and when I got off the plane there were three problems I wanted to solve about my research that were suddenly gone and I wanted to sit down there and then and free myself from my failed ideas I had been pursuing the last two years and start with this now, something fresh and different.
We landed again in Hyderabad and took another Uber back to the city, to the same hotel with the slim manager with the moustache, feeling like we were becoming familiar with the city almost, that we almost knew where to go. We decided to walk back to a restaurant we ate in earlier in the trip, a little food court near the hotel where, when they cooked the tandoori, the spice was so heavy in the air that both of us coughed, but when we arrived, it had been torn down it looked like, in just a week the roof and kiosk to pay gone and no tables and chairs. We found another place and ate and argued briefly with the man and his card machine when he told us an international card wouldn't work and I insisted he put it in the machine anyway until it was finally obvious that I didn't know what I was talking about and he accepted the cash, and said, Where from sir?
I joked about being my father, about how my dad would have been unable to deal with most of this and how I had the same underlying vibration of annoyance when things didn't go my way, how it had gotten better as I got older, but I'd burnt out my marriage on it, and I could still feel it in me, but in India, the farce of it, how little anything really matters, felt like the true state of things. Someone said I would soon be back in reality when I said I was coming home, and I said, No, I think this is reality, where the rubbish doesn't go anywhere, it just piles up and things don't work without reason and sometimes people die on motorbikes. Sometimes there is no toilet paper, sometimes you have to pay more than the sign says you have to pay. That's just it, isn't it, it just happens. You can get angry, but why would you be angry, what problem will this solve. It's okay, it happens, all of it just happens.
Gusztáv wanted to get his hair cut for the second time and I needed to go to the mall so we separated and I headed out by myself, thinking the walk to the mall couldn't be much worse than when Gusztáv and I had walked to the hotel the first time. The road seemed much quieter and had far fewer lights and I suddenly felt very alone in the dark and realised how much being with Gusztáv had been giving me a kind of supernatural strength walking around. I had much less fear when I was with him, but now, I felt the need to take my phone out and turn the torch on and tell if the person in front of me was just standing, loitering, or, as it turned out, had pulled their bike over to take a piss on the side of the road.
I thought about going to the other side of the road, but pressed on and soon was in sight of the mall and started to relax as things opened up a bit, with a pavement to walk on and a place where cars could come off the road into the complex where the mall was or turn up onto the bypass. I saw in front of me what looked like a group of women headed out for a party, dressed like they were going to the club, and I felt suddenly safer, given that these women were out by themselves. I was looking up at the three women about twenty feet ahead of me when suddenly I sensed a person come up from the left and say, Do you want sex? startling me, as I went in a moment from being scared of being knifed to suddenly, realising that I was walking past prostitutes and there were at least another five in front of me. I veered right, not seeing a pile of construction materials on the ground, including some metal webbing which my feet got caught in, as I heard myself saying to the woman who had come out of the dark, Jesus — fuck! No! She started laughing and said, Which country? and the other women who were now closer than she was were also laughing and repeating, Jesus, fuck, and I was now almost fully running.
I got to the mall and wandered to the top where there was a faux bazaar of smaller sellers. I looked for a necklace again coming to a shop with a man and his son, and I explained what I wanted and he said he could help me, praising everything about the jewellery I had bought in Kerala and my own necklaces and my taste overall. I realised about three minutes into this conversation that he and Ali in the first shop back in Kerala were the same prototype of a jewellery dealer, even down to calling me bro. His son worked on assembling the necklace for me, and he showed me different rings and bracelets, pulling out thing after thing and telling me about himself and his business, he was from Kashmir and did I like rubies, had I said I liked rubies, here was a ruby sir very beautiful for wife, but then his son was done with my necklace and I paid and headed back to the hotel on the other side of the street to avoid the prostitutes.
As I walked back, I looked for the liquor store Gusztáv had bought beer in the first time we were there, but couldn't find it. I recognised some shops, but not everything and Gusztáv shared his location with me. I realised I had gone past him and turned around, walking back and forth in front of a line of shops. Gusztáv called me and said he was outside but I couldn’t see him. He hung up and I walked down the end of the shops again, and saw him, checking out, surrounded by a group of young men, like he was some celebrity. One of the young men outside saw me and said, Closing, and I said, It's okay, I'm waiting for him, gesturing up to the other white man in the shop and the lad suddenly understood and said, Okay, okay and smiled and bobbled his head and Gusztáv saw me and smiled and waved and I realised just then that the end of the dream was coming.