Swimmers

In which Bala leaves and I feel white, liberal guilt

The full series of posts from my India trip can be read here.

The drive from the village to Kovilpatti to drop off Bala was fast and intense again. After we left a member of staff from the charity in one village, we tore past the same menagerie of animals and people and machines we had passed on the way in, coming through small villages were suddenly there were people everywhere, pouring out into the streets and horns honking until it tapered off into the emptiness of the land. I needed to pee again, having always managed to drink a litre of water immediately after I peed once and not learning my lesson to take it slowly. We arrived in Kovilpatti with plans to have tea, but had trouble finding a place to park and ended up stopping at a service station first so everyone could pile out and use the toilet.

We did end up having tea, pulling into a small strip of stores, my side of the car stopped over an enormous puddle. I did my best to get across it and navigated the traffic to catch up with Bala who had weaved his way through the stalls to the tea maker, where he already had tea with milk, and black tea for me. Bala said he would be taking the sleeper car on the train, and be able to work for a few hours before the lights went out and we asked if he could sleep on the train and he said, of course he could, but maybe the other people in the car would struggle because of his snoring. He laughed from his belly without holding anything back and completely pleased, like earlier that week when he took leaves from a tree and handed them to us and told us to blow into them, it would be like a kazoo, and we all blew into the leaves until we all burst into laughter like little boys.

We drove a few more minutes to get to the train station and jumped out again, and Bala and one of the guys from the charity who would be driving us back took another picture. We went inside and hugged Bala the way you hug an uncle, and I wanted to cry suddenly, to say thank you, but in a way that really meant something, and Bala said of course we will be back and we will come to Chennai and he will have us in his house and he will take us around, okay, bye for now, and he was gone.

The man from the charity then took over the driving, with another guy, Ramki, also from the charity riding in the front with him, and as we pulled out of the town back on to the long, straight road to Vembar, the windscreen became almost completely fogged over, but we didn't slow down. Gusztáv and I talked, but interspersed the conversation with disbelief that we hadn't hit anything, overtaking a variety of road users in the night, things that we couldn't see, but the driver was able to see. I wondered out loud about the safety of walking at night, in dark clothes, down the middle of a lane, as cars flew past and Gusztáv remained adamant that people were generally safe on the road here. He still hadn't seen any accidents in the whole time we were there, while I just assumed that people got hit all the time and it was accepted as a danger of life in the modern world, the way we accept other inconveniences.

We came into one of the small towns we had driven through on the way in and stopped to eat at a place filled with older men. It had no English writing on the walls, and banana leaves for plates and I asked where the toilet was. A key was procured and I was taken to the back, to a little stall with a door which opened into a room just barely big enough to stand in, and no toilet. I called out to Ramki, There's no toilet, and he came in with me and pointed to a drain hole in the corner: this is the toilet.

When I went back inside, they already had a table and asked what we wanted, another round of all the best foods, dosa and medu vada and medu masala, and men standing around with sambar, watching diligently as you ate to make sure you had everything you wanted or needed. I felt awkward, as a now American-British person who wanted us all to be equals. I didn't want to feel like someone was waiting on me, some stupid white liberal story which I don’t think I can actually articulate. The man stood smiling the whole time we ate, and the guys from charity spoke back and forth with the men from the restaurant about us a little, we thought. The driver didn't eat with us, but he took a package of food afterwards and Gusztáv and I, like academics, discussed why this might have been the case, why he hadn’t eaten with us, without any success.

We finished and washed our hands in the sinks in the back of the restaurant, which were in the back of every restaurant and I noticed again that there were no women in this place. Chris had said to eat in restaurants where there were women because those restaurants were generally cleaner, but it seemed that every place we went, there were mostly men, and I wondered if this was just a function of us being men, that we ended up mostly in places with men, or if something else was happening. As we were leaving, we asked to take a picture with the man who had served us, and the rest of the staff watched, smiling and we walked out waving and raising our two hands together in the symbol of thanks that seemed to follow these events as well.

The car was parked in the street, everything still wet and muddy and we sped the final part of the journey back to the village. I finally felt safe again when we turned off the main road into the side street where the charity was, next to a large Pentecostal compound with bible verses painted in Hindi on the sides of the wall in bright colours.

The next morning it was raining hard and the roof sounded like a machine was running loudly. When we arrived home the evening before, there was some discussion of how the next day would go because the rain would keep everyone in the villages in their homes, they said, and Rajen could not come out with us in the morning. Instead, Nimmy would come, if something could be arranged and she would translate for us and this would happen around nine if it were to happen.

I hadn’t been able to sleep well and woke before my watch alarm and opened the door to see whether I could run, but decided against it because it would be unlikely that my shoes would dry in time for when we were leaving the next day. I instead set up my watch to do a few rounds of my prison workout, something I had done in the second hotel in Hyderabad when I couldn't go out to run, where I did body weight callisthenics, but as I set up my watch to record the workout and began a round of engine drivers, where I locked my fingers behind my head and lifted each knee to the opposite elbow, I almost immediately lost my will to continue and stopped the watch and put on my shoes and shirt and set out running in the rain, everything be damned.

Little happened on the run except that I got very wet. I turned around in a village where several people were staring at me. On the way back, a bus overtook me and then stopped immediately and I had to wait behind it until it started again. It stopped again and I undertook it, and then it passed me again. The pavement was dry, but in the village on a dirt road, I stepped in a puddle and was completely soaked. When I peeled off my clothes in the guesthouse and showered and rinsed them and hung them on the line that Gusztáv had strung up under the fan, he came out and said in a matter-of-fact way, Everything is wet.

We had another breakfast of medu vada and curries and the staff again watched diligently. Nimmy said they were able to find some fishermen to meet us, although she didn't know how many would come. We piled into the car with the same driver as the night before and Ramki in the back to document the events for the charity and Nimmy in the front. We set out and got less than a kilometre when the driver’s phone rang and he talked to someone briefly and then hung up and Nimmy said something to him in Tamil and then in English, You should go back, before saying to us, His uncle has died we need to go back. He protested a bit in Tamil and English and she said, No we will go back we have another driver, and then to us in the back, He has tears in his eyes we should go back. Gusztáv first and then I reached up to grab his shoulder and tell him we were sorry for what had happened, and we hoped he was okay.

We drove back and another man took us only a little further than we had gotten with the first driver, to the front porch of a house where a man and his wife met us and offered us tea and we sat down and one by one five or six fishermen came to meet us, a similar pattern in our focus groups emerging of two or three core voices and then two or three people who shared a little at times, but mostly nodded and voiced agreement and then one on two older men who would sit with us and say nothing. This group had two brothers, the older one looking deceptively younger than his brother, and then the first man we had met in his twenties in a pink hoodie and looking decidedly more modern. He was a chemical engineer who had come back to the village and to work in the industry with his father, who was a much rougher man in a lungi with a kind smile sat next to him, and it came out that he actually did not fish, but was a middleman and bought fish and did the books for his father whom he said struggled with the electronic part of the business.

They were able to meet us because there was a cyclone warning and they couldn't go out to fish. They normally went out in the afternoon and very early morning to catch different fishes, arriving back before dawn to give their fish to middlemen to sell to the next step in the chain. The middlemen who came to buy the fish had trucks and coolers and dictated the prices depending on how much they were able to buy in the larger village down the coast. Their catch totals would vary wildly in size and they would have eight men on a boat with them to help and the helpers would bring their own nets. We pressed again on how many fish it could be, what the average was, and they finally said it could be as few as two hundred and as many as several thousand. It depended.

They were all Catholic, the whole village was Catholic. They would go to mass on Sundays and their wives went to church every day to pray for them and their safety. The older brother, the leader it seemed, said he had sent his child away to study and I asked if they wanted their children to fish, and with the exception of the young man, they said none of their children wanted to fish and they didn't want them to. Even the young man with them was not really fishing.

Across the street there was another house painted in bright colours, like it was in the Barbie movie and I caught myself staring at it, at the features and the trim, wondering if it meant something or if this was just the colours they wanted.

The fishing industry was under threat from larger boats, they said, owned by businessmen, not fishermen, who trawled the water using banned nets that the businessmen used with impunity because they had paid off the government officials. There were other issues and they said they would organise protests and miss days of work to go out to them. One man stood up to proudly show us a video of them seizing a banned net from a larger boat and pulling it to the shore. They had taken matters into their own hands. Who decides how much to fish, Gusztáv asked them. We do, they said. We know how much to fish and when to stop. These other boats and nets took everything away, even the smaller fish that weren't ready to be caught. It was hard, they said, because no one has any claim to the sea, it's not like land. No one can own it.

The group started to break up as the others had, with one of the members standing up to stretch. They said they would take us down to the beach to show us the boats. We got in the car and they all got on motorbikes that had been parked on the street and we drove the short way to the marina. It was lightly raining, but bright and I walked up with Nimmy and the man who had been talking the most and said to him, You must all be very good swimmers, and he responded through Nimmy, You can swim for five hours, maybe six, but if it is longer than that, you die.

Some teenagers were pulling in nets from the shore, just passing the time Nimmy said, it was a holiday because of the storm. They brought the net in with a mix of different small fish, and what looked like a squid. We walked up to where the market was and groups of men were playing cards and Gusztáv commented that these men must be very close given how they had to trust each other with their lives. You could gather from the way they stood next to each other, completely at ease, they'd seen some shit together.

We started to leave and could see the domes of the churches nearby, and the saint dioramas from the night before and I could imagine their wives praying and waiting for them, the way my grandmothers waited for their husbands to come back from the mine, praying to saints and taking their clothes to wash when they came into the house in the morning, to sleep and to go out again, because if they don't go out again, they don't eat.

On the way back from the interview, Nimmy promised we would try to find a raincoat for Gusztáv and then asked me why I hadn't gotten sandals, and I made some excuses about it — yes, Chris had told me to get closed-toe sandals, but I couldn't find anything good in the UK at this time of the year and hadn't shopped in India, because I assumed my feet were too big and I didn't want any leather. She listened and we stopped in the village and she went into a small shoe shop and waved me in, she'd gotten a pair of sandals: did they fit, and yes, they did and I peeled off 250 rupees of bills and left with my shoes and socks in my hands, thanking her, and looking down at my yellowing toenails, I said, I just don't like the way my feet look. Nimmy smiled and said, Just let it go, and she made some motion like she was pushing something off her, I do that, I like them, no matter what I look like, and I realised I had been missing a key part of the experience, wearing socks in the village when no one was wearing socks. My feet suddenly felt much better, liberated, and we all piled back in the car to go home for lunch.