The Plan

In which we spend a few days at the beach and talk about struggle

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

The news from home was mostly optimistic on the day we left Hyderabad, almost one week into the trip. My daughter was feeling slightly better, and although not necessarily getting better, she was stable enough and talking to the people she needed to at the school. I decided to continue on with the trip and not cut it short at this point, which I had been thinking I would if things had gotten worse. Gusztáv and I flew out on Wednesday and it felt like we went through a portal into a different world inside the airport. The whole city disappeared behind metal and glass, and suddenly removed from all the real feeling of the city. We cleared security and had a cup of coffee and boarded our plane to Thiravanapuram.

The plan, when Chris had made it in the autumn, was for us to go to the beach for a few days. He wanted to swim and relax as his trip would have been longer, a whole month, and this was a good time to take an interlude. I wanted to just write the way I can write when I close things out and can focus in two-hour blocks on whatever it is in front of me. We landed and quickly got our luggage before checking the map and realising the hotel was an hour from the airport. We booked the Uber and our driver came and wanted to stop twice on the way, once to get LPG for the car and then again for something else near the end of the trip in Varkala, where Gusztáv and I got out and took pictures with a communist sign and a man in tuk-tuk asked us where we were from and what my name was.

Stephen, I said.

Ah, he said, I know another Stephen from England. Stephen Scott, and I had the feeling that this was going to be the moment when everything was revealed to be a dream, that I’d run into a magical bard, who would tell me my future after showing me a picture of him with me, that I had already met him before.

But instead, he said, Stephen Scott is from Kent, and as we walked away after the driver came out of the shop, I said how weird it seemed, but Gusztáv reminded me that Steven Scott was a common name, which of course was right and I agreed and explained how I was about these things, how I wanted to believe, how I was willing to take any placebo that worked.

In the taxi, we passed church after church with gaudy statues of saints in glass cases, St Michael and St Sebastian, lit up in the dark. At firs, I said they must be wedding chapels like in Japan, and told Gusztáv about the time I had gone for an interview for a job that I thought was to teach at a preschool, but it was in fact a job to be a minister, a fake foreign minister, at a wedding chapel, and how I worried that God would judge me mercilessly if I took this job because I had left the mission and now was using my Christianity to make money. I didn't, of course, take the job, and as we passed another church, Gusztáv asked the driver and was told that, indeed, these were churches and there were many Christians here. They looked like Hindu temples in some way, with their saints in dioramas in boxes out front, but the imagery was all Catholic, like if a bunch of Evangelical Christians converted to Hinduism and sang praise and worship songs, but about Ganesha rather than Jesus.

After some confusion, we found our hotel which although it had the word resort in the name, was not really a resort so much as a bedroom and toilet and place to sit outside on the balcony, facing the sea, which seemed perfect for me as I planned to implement some structured writing with breaks, as I do in the UK, but instead of walking around the neighbourhood, I would walk on the beach. We slept and woke to the Indian Ocean under a long cliff packed with a line of hotels, for miles and miles, and foreigners, men and women in dreadlocks. A white British couple who passed through our terrace on the way to their room every day, the woman saying namaste in a British accent, and I stifled a laugh before complaining loudly to Gusztáv about it. There were people from all over the world, and Gusztáv came back from walking and swimming and told me who he met, someone from Kazakhstan and some other people, just from walking and asking questions.

Back in Hyderabad, in the back of the first tuk-tuk, Gusztáv said there are two kinds of people in the world, people who see every day as a gift and people who see every day as a struggle. He told me this after I said something like, Careful with your phone taking videos out of the tuk-tuk, someone might grab it and of course, I was right, but what is the point of worrying about this, he said. The tuk-tuk windscreen was broken, where a rock or something struck it and we talked about why there's no point in worrying, what is there to worry about if every day is just a gift.

I want to feel like life is a gift, but when I asked Gusztáv which kind of person he thought I was, he hesitated before saying of course I am someone who sees life as a struggle, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I know he's right, and I said that I want to be saved from that way of thinking, that it was the curse of my family, of Evangelical Christianity, of Nationalism. That I wanted to accept this gift, but then there are all these reasons that I cannot, all the things I list off: starting my family when I was young, the moving, the visas, it has all been a struggle, hasn't it. How can we say it was not a struggle.

I had a good morning of writing the first day and so we decided to go swim in the ocean, where Gusztáv had already been once or twice and spoken to the lifeguard who was going to take him kayaking the next day, Gusztáv being decidedly freer from the feeling of obligation to always be working and seemingly without the running commentary that I felt in my head, that the trip needed to amount to something I could point to as making it worthwhile. We went down to the water, and a young man, he was 27 he said, followed us around and told us he wanted to speak English and he was here with his friend and could he have a picture with me, and he put his arm around me and Gusztáv took a picture of us.

We left our things on the beach which seemed far safer than I assumed it would be and went into the water, and it was warm, like it was in Malaysia in Port Dickson where we went once and the water was clear and clean. The waves were big and Gusztáv said you can dive under them and they pass over you and we went out trying to get deeper, each time the waves hitting us and pulling us back into shore. I didn't remember this feeling in Malaysia. I remember the ocean being still and peaceful and warm, and smaller for some reason, maybe because of the haze, I don't know. There was less haze here and standing on the cliff you could look out and see the ocean forever, like there was nothing on the other side, just a world of empty space, somewhere a missing Malaysian flight, a ghost still sinking.

We avoided, when we could, the more touristy parts of the resort on the cliff, which was up from a much less touristy village, but it was hard, with everything oriented towards Westerners, although still fewer white people than you would expect. Even when you did see white people, they were mostly from other places, like the woman who saw me swatting away mosquitoes and came to give me some mosquito repellant, she was from Kazakhstan and didn't speak much English she said, but her son was living in the US somewhere, maybe California. She was partly retired, living here and went back to her table after she let me use the repellent.

Gusztáv met a Rajasthani guy, a jewellery dealer named Ali who he asked to make anklets for his kids. Ali called us brother and we hugged him, and he talked to us for about ten minutes outside his shop about the gem business and the politics of gem dealers and how smart the Chinese were. We went inside and he showed us everything that he had, everything made, he said, by hand and designed by him — rows and rows of unique rings and earrings and pendants. We talked about wives and women in general, the way three men talk openly when they are alone, about how we are all afraid of not being the best we can be, of the women we love thinking we aren't good enough or thinking we are selfish. He asked me when I was born and what time of day. He thought for a long time and then, after getting distracted by something else, told me that my gem was the seven-starred ruby and explained something about chakras that I didn't follow. He said he wore rubies because they gave strength, but the strength to step back when you need to step back. He promised to fix my bracelet from Japan I was wearing and I bought jewellery for Yoko and the girls, promising to pick it up the next day.

I walked into town when Gusztáv went on a kayak adventure and I had finished my meetings back in the UK, my ridiculous, sweating body in a t-shirt filling my screen while I talked to visibly cold people in brick buildings in Birmingham. I wandered up to town on the road, worrying less than I should have about the motorbike and tuk-tuks flying past and the blind corners, getting up into the main crossroad in the village and finding masala dosa in a kitchen filled with old men and women living their lives, who seemed to take no notice of the foreigner. I texted my kids and thought about how normal everything is in all of the world. I told Gusztáv that when I saw him later, that we will think this was strange again when we were back in our homes with our families, that when I left Malaysia and drove north to Birmingham the first time, I wrote, And then I woke up like it was all a dream. I paid for my dosa and walked back up the cliff to get ready to leave the next day.