JAISALMER ~ Aug. 28&29 Thur & Fri

When I woke on the train, the noisy, insane village people from the night before were gone. The army men got off all at once at their outpost in Pokaran. They disappeared into the white sand nothingness, and in their absence, a strange wind began whipping through the train.Suddenly I was essentially alone with one local, and a few Europeans who confined themselves to their section of the neighboring car.For some reason, I had expected Jaisalmer to be a huge tourist trap, with all its camel safaris and whatnot. Surprised to have so much space all to myself, I hiked my dress up past my knees, sat around with cooling Noxema on my face, and hung up my still-wet laundry between the railings in the train. Just as my underwear began to flap wildly in the breeze, a man came out of nowhere and approached me with a small orange pamphlet advertising his hotel. He seemed very determined to get me to be a guest at his place, and I accepted immediately, if only just to get him to move on from me. When we arrived to the tiny Jaisalmer station, I was glad that I had already committed to a place. The man appeared at my side and barreled through the gauntlet of shrieking hotel owners who attacked the few other tourists who had stepped off the train. I saw the Europeans close their eyes and press their hands to their temples, while a few Japanese who had materialized from some depth of the train stumbled backwards in meek alarm.

The hotel worker drove me to his establishment. The atmosphere in and around the hotel seemed almost Southwestern or Latin American, though I have never journeyed to Latin America. Skylights lit up the brightly colored hallways, and grates underfoot in the higher floors gave views of the lower levels. Positively no one was around. After putting my stuff down, taking a breath, stretching on the bed, and taking a shower, it was already about 3 p.m., so I made it clear that I was ready to eat something, then go on a one-night camel safari, ASAP.

That's how I ended up in the front office with the manager, Ziroz. He explained the merits and tradeoffs of each desert safari, knowing full well that I would choose the most secluded, hence most expensive package. He gave me a discount, though. When he found out I was Korean, he cried,

"Oh, I thought you were American! I love Asians, they have money...I am sorry I gave you a discount - ha!" We had a hearty laugh, and I remained stunned that he had actually assumed I was American before thinking I was Chinese or Japanese or whatever. "Well, it is your English," he said, matter-of-factly, and I wanted to hug him. This man in this tiny desert town understood more about ethnicity in America than most supposedly cosmopolitan Americans...

Explaning that a group of French people had occupied the only outbound jeep available for desert travel, he asked if I would be willing to go on a motorcycle with an independent driver. Hell yes, I said, and went up to the rooftop restaurant to enjoy some spiced goat meet with fresh roti bread while I waited to meet the driver. A man in a white button-down shirt and a baseball cap on showed up at my table.

"I am Dadu," he said, extending his hand. I scarfed down the rest of the goat bits, then set out. First, we went to Thomas Cook (remember, my ATM card was now mysteriously completely unusable), where the only other customers were two Koreans in urban-influenced graphic tees and tight jeans. When I talked to them in Korean, they merely seemed puzzled, and responded to me in an oddly stilted manner unusual to Koreans (in my experience). We drove by the hotel and hovered in front of it for just long enough for Ziroz to take my money, then we were off on the BRO - that's Border Roads Organization highway headed straight for Pakistan.

The sandy mass of the Jaisalmer Fort receded at a dizzying rate behind us as we sped forth on the thin, hilly road. The heat waves rising from the concrete and the putter of the old-school engine smacked of Easy Rider, minus the Steppenwolf, hallucination, and death of course. After about 30 kilometers, we left the road, and at times, had to walk the motorcycle through a few deep patches of sand. Now and then, we passed villages that looked more like three or so concrete blocks huddled together in the brush. Dadu told me how the Indian Government paid anyone willing to settle in the desert, even building houses and providing water and electricity to any takers. Not a bad deal, or so it seemed to me as the sun began to descend and the blazing heat yielded to pleasant warmth. I entertained some delusional fantasies of picking up a bunch of free acres and building a sweet mansion there with the money I would have saved on the land.

Two camels dragged a heavily loaded wagon. As they passed, I remarked how horrible it was that camels always seemed to be smiling, even when they were clearly overburdened. Dadu laughed at that for a good long while. He was an entertaining guy, Dadu, telling me about how he used to catch deer by using just one other friend, a flashlight, a motor, and a sharp knife. He insisted that all red meat served in India, regardless of advertisement, was mutton and nothing else. It made me wonder about the burgers I'd had in Chennai. At age 35, he was cynical in a way that transcended culture, and illuminated me with stories about the challenges of affording marriage for good Muslim men. He lamented that he was old, but could not bring himself to leave his parents until they were financially secure.

Eventually, we arrived to where the camels were. As if by magic, a man in blue and his son were there, waiting. The little boy was clearly afraid of Dadu, who lunged towards the child in jest and sent the poor kid running. We got onto the camel, which walked while unloading a trail of donut-hole sized droppings and brought us to an expanse of untouched dunes turning pink in the sunset. While we observed the sunset, only the activities of the industrious dung beetles could be heard. Completely absorbed by the task of rolling away the coalish lumps of camel dung, they scurried about in the sand, mediating what might otherwise have been a devastating amount of silence with a slight soundtrack of whisking noises.
As darkness fell, the French crew and two cooks joined us. After dinner by a fire, the French people went off on their own. Not wanting to impose myself upon them and secretly terrified of walking out into the endless sand on my own, I stayed with the cooks and with Dadu, who kept a respectable distance from me while loosening up enough to argue with me over the meaning of constellations with Dadu as translator and mediator. According to Indian legend, the Milky Way is actually an avenue that all single people are condemned to walk for eternity when they leave this Earth. Sounds like heaven to me!

I woke up super early in the morning to a crystalline sunrise. Feeling confident in the light, I traipsed out to a lone sandhill and fell asleep under the sandy blanket. The cooks found me and woke me up for some grainy porridge with way too much salt (even for me) and huge sugar crystals to compensate for the assault on the tastebuds. Calling Coke “Coca,” they offered me a glass bottle of it, which I gladly accepted to chase down the strange breakfast. After some breakfast of their own, the camels became completely amiable and ready for the jaunt back to the BRO road.

The trip back was eerily the reverse of the trip there. Feeling rather disconnected from reality, I sat quietly on the back of the motorcycle, counting down the kilometers back to Jaisalmer. We stopped at a Jain Temple on the way; a place I would not have sought out otherwise, but that offered an experience of incredible calm with its forlorn jingle bells blowing in the breeze.

Back at the hotel, the guys let me use a room to wash up and rest up before my afternoon train. Ziroz, Dadu, and The Recruiter all brought me to the station. Saying a cheerful goodbyes, I boarded my train. As the train pulled away, I watched Ziroz and The Recruiter joining the packs of screaming hotel owners vying for customers, starting the same process all over again. Dadu disappeared around a corner in his poppy red shirt. I had been lucky enough to see these men's quiet, respectful, non-enterprising sides, and I felt terribly depressed to leave Jaisalmer behind in its own fairy dust.

JAIPUR ~ Aug. 27 Wednesday

Wed. 8/27 JAIPUR
Rajasthan at last. The heat outside assaulted me in a whole new way as soon as the train came to a stop. This truly was the desert.

Not ready yet to face what lay before me, I stalled for time by charging my camera battery in the station waiting room. Meanwhile, I indulged in a bit of people-watching. I saw two Asian women traveling on their own. I realized I had Indian vision, and was gawking as if I myself were not a foreigner of Northeast Asian ethnicity!

Outside, I immediately located an auto driver named Ali who charged 250 Rs for all day service. Sounded like a deal to me. I climbed in, and when he said, “Life is like ice cream. Eat it before it melts,” I knew I was in for some kind of adventure.

First, we ventured out to Amber Fort (pronounced AH-mer), located 11 kilometers away in what used to be the capital of Rajasthan. Raja Man Singh, Commander in Chief of Akbar's army, commisioned the red and white sandstone structures in 1592. 1592! And this is what was built on top of the remnants of what was built by the Meena caste in homage to the mother goddess Gatta Rani, Queen of the Pass.

Even at the pigeon infested entrance, I was struck by the architecture, which, with its domes and ornate archways, actually did conform to whatever preconceived images of India were in my head before I actually got here.

And the hills looked timeless...



Now this was all well and good, but bear in mind that it must have been 110 degrees in the shade out there on the sandstone. Now, folks, I have never fainted in my life, but while pondering this gecko's desperation under the hot glass...
...the corners of my vision started turning black and the center started going white, and I had to duck into the shade of a mazelike alley to lean up against a wall while the tremors of quasi-heatstroke worked their way out of my system. I guess I am being a little dramatic about this, since I still did manage to take a picture. But please play along. It was hot, and I really felt like fainting.

After regaining enough strength to grab an overpriced orange Fanta from an oddly placed concession booth in an otherwise graceful courtyard, I doubled my efforts to find the Jai Mandir, palace of Mughal mirrorwork highly recommended by my friend Anand, whose opinions I respect. Something everyone must know about the Jai Mandir...it's pronounced Jai MAHNdeer, dumbass! If you say ANYTHING OTHER THAN THAT - if you say Jai ManDEER or Jai MONdurr or Jai ManDOOR, you can forget finding it in the maze because people will literally not know what you are talking about. It's weird, because if someone came and asked me for a bathROOM or a BATroom or even a BatROO while clutching their crotches, I would probably figure it out...and that's how desperate I was to find this palace of famed mirrorwork. Anyway, I found it, and it was worth it.

While searching for Ali back at the entrance of the fort, I got sidetracked by these men who were bathing elephants in a huge moat below. In no time, they were gesturing madly for me to come down to where they were. It seemed completely inappropriate, and I had to scuttle backwards down a brambly hill to get there, but I did it anyway, and had myself an informal elephant ride. One of the guys took it upon himself to grab my camera and document the whole thing.


It wasn't all fun and games, though. Everyone knows elephants are extremely strong, large, and intelligent. They also have strong wills, and in less than a minute of real-time, I could tell that this particular elephant did NOT want us on top of it. But every time the elephant resisted, the driver shrilled something in Hindi and cruelly swatted its large, fuzzy head with a switch. Only moments after these joyous photos were taken, I begged to be let down because I felt so bad.

When I climbed back up to the main road, Ali was there; he had watched the whole scene unfold from the shade of a tree. He took me to a palace in the middle of a lake. There was a huge avenue running beside it where he let me try driving the autorickshaw. I found the vehicle to be more unweildy than my 1976 Toyota Corona station wagon back home, and I did NOT get the hang of it. Basically, driving the thing felt like trying to start an old lawnmower over and over with one hand.

Claiming that the famous Pink City was closed by now, Ali took the initiative to bring me to the Monkey Temple. I have no idea if this temple was famous or beautiful or significant or not, but didn't have a choice in where we were going, anyway. Ali insisted on staying by his auto, so I proceeded solo up the hill. On the climb up to the temple, wild winds sent spirals of leaves, dried dung, and newspaper into the air. Squeezing my mouth and eyes shut with all my might, I made it all the way to the top without ingesting too much debris.

Up here, the wind was positively howling, and blackness started cloaking the whole city. It began to look like some apocalyptic battle of good and evil was about to take place, and the rain started to fall.These kids suddenly came out of nowhere, and insisted that I crowd in with them in the safety of an altar.

Even an old granny was in there, and we sat quietly until the cold drops of water stopped flying sideways. After that, we said our goodbyes, and I made my descent. At the foot of the hills was a boy named Ganesh, who asked me for sunglasses and Coca-Cola, neither of which was in my possession.

At this point, a "friend" of Ali's joined us in the rickshaw. He looked very poor, and did not seem to have much of a natural camaraderie with Ali, but I didn't make much of it at that point. At this point, the sun was setting, but I insisted on seeing Pahar Ganj, the Muslim district known for its gem production. Ali hadn't been fibbing after all in his reluctance to go there; the businesses were mostly closed by dusk. But I got to go behind the scenes at one particular place and see some jewelers at work.

'Star rubies,' thus named because of the six-point light that they reflect from any given angle
Unexpectedly, the electricity cut out during a demonstration of gem buffing, but the show went on.
After refusing to buy thousands of dollars of jewelry that the men in the front of the store tried to push upon me, Ali said "Jaleh?" ["Let's go?"], and we got back into the rickshaw with the "friend."

At a major intersection, somewhere near an international bank and a glassy fashion boutique, there was a TOTAL DOWNPOUR, and the street became a river in about three minutes flat. I'm talking footage for UNICEF commercials and BBC clips. At last, I was getting a taste of the monsoon season. Ali whipped out his cell phone and started regulating the situation. By the time his friend Ashik pulled up next to us in his sedan, the water was about to come in through the sides of the rickshaw. "Come on!" Ali shrieked, and I watched in a daze as he dove through the open window of his friend's vehicle into the back seat. I followed suit without thinking very much. My wet pants hit the leather interior, and the tinted window rolled up, shutting out the sound of the rushing waters outside. My teeth were chattering because the air conditioner was on.

"What about your friend? What will he do??" I asked.

"He will be fine," said Ali, adding, "I find it hard to believe that you would care about the fate of a poor rickshaw driver." Ashik told me that he would take me anywhere I wanted to go for dinner, but that the rain didn't leave us much of a choice.

"Or, we can go to my office and order something delicious. I just came from work." Stirrings of apprehension began in my gut, but I just went along with everything, as there didn't seem to be much choice. We got into a super-residential area that seemed very well off. We stopped at a small house with a jewelry store attached to the front of it, and I wanted to laugh because suddenly I could see what was going to happen. Worse, what was about to happen was exactly what Lonely Planet had warned me about. These fine gentlemen were about to get me caught up in a jewelry scam. Ashik and Ali led me into the back of the house, where there was a tiny couch, a small square bed, and - most perplexingly – a Harry Potter photo taped up on each gaudy pink wall. He told me to wait there, and as I waited, I began to think that anyone who decorated like this couldn't be a scammer after all. Furthermore, on the way to the bathroom, I saw an old man in a wifebeater, bathed in the blue electric light of a silent television. Anyone who lived with such a grandfatherly figure surely could not be linked to criminal activity.

Of course, I was wrong. The dudes came back to get me, and walked me over to the jewelry section of the house. They and laid out a collection of spicy, flavorful Rajasthani food in front of me and even peeled back the foil on the parcels for my convenience. Then, they began their pitch:

"What would you say if we told you that you could make thousands of dollars by helping us save on taxes when shipping our jewelry across borders..." Feeling numb all over, I simply declined the offers again and again until finally, the head man angrily bagged my half eaten food, fired off some rapid Hindi to the guys, and stalked out of the room. Ashik and Ali muttered amongst themselves, then Ali hopped up with a jingle of keys, and said,

"Well, I'll take you to the station now."

My skin began to crawl. He might as well have been saying, "Let's go for a ride" in a scene from a Scorcese movie. I remember feeling resigned in the silent car ride, knowing that there was nothing I could do now to reverse the foolish choices I had made to land me in such a predicament. I didn't even bother to wish I had just stayed in the flooded streets with the hapless auto driver we had left in the torrents of monsoon water.

Amazingly, though, I was delivered to the front door of the station, which looked like home to my eyes, I was so relieved.

"We would appreciate if you said nothing about this," said Ashik.

I stepped out and walked up to Ali's window. He rolled it down. I handed him a 100 Rupee note and said,

"I owed you this from before." He paused, sneered, and stared as if to detect disrespect in my eyes. Finding none, he snapped the note out of my hand, shook his head a bit regretfully, and drove off into the dank, shady night.

Hoping to neutralize the weirdness of what had just transpired, I headed straight for the women's waiting room, where I knew that things would be well lit and straightforward. I sat there wondering whether Ali had pegged me for a good recruit for his schemes the moment he saw me, or whether he had thought of it while enjoying a Coca-Cola outside the Monkey Temple or merely taken advantage of the crazy rain.

Luckily, I didn't think for long.

"Ah, hallo!" a teenage girl called. She and her companions made up a lucky 13 girls who redeemed the entire day for me. They were business undergraduates from a Christian school in Tamil Nadu! Giggling, shrieking, and jockeying to practice English conversation with me, they also taught me Tamil. They asked me where my favorite state of India was thus far. When I answered "Tamil Nadu" sincerely and without hesitation, they erupted into cheers. Then, the photo-taking began, and a couple young boys darted in from the men's waiting room to jump into a picture with me on their low-resolution cell phones and disposable film cameras. A girl named Sheba said, "Jia! You are so different. I don't know why. You are so jolly and free." This was the best thing I could have heard after being made to feel as if I had endangered myself by traveling freely on my own and giving strangers the benefit of the doubt.

After exchanging my e-mail address for all of theirs, I scrambled for my train. I thought there was some sort of mistake, because it seemed as if the whole Indian Army was taking the car by storm. But no, this was just another part of one crazy day, so I nonchalantly hopped over metal chests full of weapons and jumped up to my sleeping pad just in time for an entire village of people to squeeze in illegally. A baby's foot hit a soldier in the eye, and he sputtered angrily. Soon, the car was half army, half civilian, and then there was me, goggle-eyed on the middle pallet. Below me, a group children and elders sat like sardines against the bottom of my sleeping pad. Above me, children and elders sat with their necks crunched by the ceiling. They would stay that way for the next twelve hours while I passed the hell out.

DANDI BEACH - Tuesday Aug. 26

DANDI BEACH – 8/26 Tuesday

In seventh grade, they made us watch Gandhi. The only detail I truly remember from that film is when Ben Kingsley led a march of people towards the shore. Upon reaching the water, he bent down, trembling towards the sea, and raised a fistful of salt towards the masses behind him. The people cheered. I'm probably remembering it all wrong, but the whole point is that from the moment I touched down in India, I knew that that beach had to be a part of my journey.

Even some of my friends from India asked, "Why?" It's so random. It could have been any beach. But every time I looked on the back of a rupee note and saw the march depicted in fine ink on the cotton blend paper, I only became more determined to get to Dandi.

But as you may recall, my train ride out of Goa was incredibly late, thereby causing me to miss my connection to Navsari. So there I was, stuck in the mean streets of Mumbai, where I was siphoned off to a totally different administrative building where a handful of tourists were standing in line. When it became clear to me that they had been standing there pretty much all morning, I shouted until I had a one way ticket to Navsari in my hand. I walked myself back to the station, asking where the hell I could get on the train. All I got was a bunch of fingerpointing. The kinder people took time to ask if I hadn't made a mistake about going to Navsari – people think I’ve made a mistake. Finally, I found out that I had to go to Bandra station; some place all the way across town.

There were no rickshaws, so I got into a cab with some crazy driver who had the meter on, but then pulled out a faded "payment card" from the glove compartment and tried to rip me off once we pulled up to our destination. Screaming mad, I jumped out of the car and dodged into the crowds. Since I was practically the only female there, however, the man chased me into the station and started harrassing me, even trying to pull at my bag. I faced him with murder in my eyes, and soon, I had all the men in the station chasing him away. I had no desire to return to Mumbai anytime soon, this choked urban sprawl, this decaying echo of London's imperialism.

On the train, I kept missing the snack vendors as they walked by with sandwiches of white bread and curry. But here was something different; a man squeezed down the aisle with a cart of crunchy grains, cilantro, and tomato in a bucket. Upon passengers' orders, scooped the grain into a paper cone, spinkled in some spice and sauce, cut a fresh green chili right off his thumb, squeezed a lemon half over the whole thing, and then gave the mixture a turn with his bare hands. I didn't care about the bare hands. I wanted that. I asked for it, and he skipped the chili. I shouted at him to include the chili. Looking shocked, he did. Game over. If I was going to catch any food borne illness, I knew that I would catch it now. Of course I was fine, and it was the best damn thing I ever ate on the train, staring out at the countryside all the while.

Navsari was a real trip. I was without a doubt the only non-Indian around, and positively no one spoke English (truly rare in India). A driver, teeth red with betel juice, charged me 100 rupees for a ride I knew was only 40 R tops. With my eyes, I told him to go to hell, and asked around until someone pointed to a public bus.

I tossed over two coins and took my place on a metal frame of a seat, fearing disembowelment with every jolt. The stairs of the people were intense, but a smile from the granny sitting next to me assured me that I wasn't doing anything wrong.

The bus turned onto a sand road bordered by marshes on both sides. Abruptly, it stopped where there were no intersections, signs, or landmarks. But I knew what to do now. I could feel where the ocean was. I walked straight, straight, straight until I saw a huge tree with one vending cart in front of it and a few benches at its base. Then, there was a sea wall that led huge steps down to Dandi Beach at last. It was a huge stretch of shore, curious art formations at every step.

I stared at the mercury-colored water shimmering in the white heat of the sun, at the salt-rich waves unfurling over and over black and gold beds of sand.

And I was happy. I was happy because it was worth it to see this place.

Back at the big tree, I took a seat on a bench and gathered myself to think of a way back to Navsari, because there were no vehicles around whatsoever. A guy with dark aviator sunglasses and a polo shirt stretched over his round belly approached me, wondering what I was doing there in his town. Heartened, I purchased some square sweets, a bag of chips, and a Pepsi at the nearby stand. He asked if I had seen Gandhi's monument. I dumbly answered that I hadn't even been aware of a monument, and he pointed down a road where three women in tattered saris were already making their way.

"It's all right. You leave your schoolpack here," he said, reading my mind. "This is a village, not a city." Without hesitation, I left everything there (yes, including my wallet and passport) and trailed off towards the ladies. At this point, a few of the snack cubes and swigs of frosty Pepsi created a maniacal desire for something savory. No matter how hard I tried, though, I just couldn't open the damn bag of chips, and it all got worse as my hands broke out in a primal sweat. Then, I spied a thornbush and pounded the foil over it until it yielded flakes of semi-stale potato, which I combined with the sweets and the soda. When I finally looked up from my unlikely feed bag, I saw this:

Feeling light without my luggage, I skipped back to the tree, secretly wishing that someone would do me a favor and lift all the baggage right out of my life. But of course, the bag was sitting right there where I'd left it, and had a look that made me know that it was untouched.

"An auto will be here in about thirty minutes," sunglass man said, reading my mind again. "Someone from the village. He will take you to station again."

In the time that was left, he led me off the road where there was a startlingly sophisticated courtyard with a sort of gazebo.

"Where Gandhi first spoke," he said, quietly.

The auto rolled up right when he'd siad it would, and I jumped in without asking the price. Sunglass man biked away on a basketed bicycle as the vehicle rolled away. I watched him go and waved out the open back to a couple old men and the snack vendor under the tree as they stared. After we crossed a bridge, the auto stopped next to another one. Words were briefly exchanged, and I was transferred completely free of charge. The first driver grinned cheerfully and putted off before I could even think of giving him money.

In this auto was a beautiful woman. I sat down across from her. The wind whipped at us from the sides as we both pretended not to look at one another, but I noticed her eyes constantly moving towards my chest, where my tunic had flown open, flapping indecently. I held the pieces together and smiled apologetically. She rustled around in the folds of her sari and produced a safety pin. My first instinct was to refuse, but it seemed really important, so I stuck the pin in place and bowed awkwardly.

When it was time to get out, the man asked for five rupees. When I asked him again what I owed him, he held out five fingers. Confused, I gave it to him and dodged into the station, instantly regretting that I hadn't given him 500. Too little too late!

It was another 5 Rs for the train to Gujarat station (no, I never cared to set foot in Mumbai again for the remainder of my time in India). This was my first experience in the second class compartment, a step up from a cattle car. As soon as I stepped inside, I saw people standing, sitting, and crouching amidst all sorts of freight. There were very high and very low metal slats all around, which signified that people must spend the night in these trains. I hoisted myself up to a high slat, and wedged myself in between two dusty boxes. Across from me were two girls who reminded me of my sister and me, twisting each others' pinkies and feigning pain, giggling all the while. Seeing me laugh, their family members below started asking me where I was from, where I was going, and so on. After many repeated phrases, gesticulations, and much lost to the scream of the wheels on the rail, I think they knew I'd been to Dandi beach, and I gathered that they had thirty more hours to go in this wretched boxcar. As we approached Gujarat, my heartbeat quickened with anxiety. I looked down and saw men, babies, and elderly people everywhere. Getting up had been one thing, but I couldn't see where I would put my feet getting down without flashing the good people of India. Stop after stop, I tried to observe people's technique in dismounting the top slat. No matter how I tried, I didn't understand how they all leapt so lightly and decently off the slat and onto a square centimeter of space without exposing themselves or trampling others. But the train stopped in Gujarat, and I got off it without hurting anyone or offending anyone. I don't even know how I did it.

Here, I locked myself in the bathroom station shower and had a bucket bath from the clear water flowing out of a rusty faucet. Avoiding the sketchy walls and eyeing the flimsy door all the while, I scrubbed and scrubbed until I felt like I was in a luxury hotel. Trying not to gag, I scratched away the creepy outer layers of the cake of soap balanced on the hot water knob and gingerly pinched virgin pieces out of its smushy core. I washed my clothes, then triumphantly yanked my bag off the filthy corner of the floor just before the pooling water seeped into it. I threw my Guam dress over my head. It smelled sadly of corn, but I felt like a million bucks knowing I was about to stretch out onto my very own bed slat on the sleeper train to Jaisalmer, high on the fact that I just got naked in a train station and had a proper shower for free.

GOA ~ Friday Aug. 22- Monday Aug. 25

It was strange to be at the Chennai airport again so soon after the Sri Lanka trip. Given the delays and hassles of the earlier experience, my soul rebelled at the sight of the international (which contains my domestic flight) terminal, but I got through in literally five minutes, and soon I wished I didn’t have to carry everything with me for the next three weeks, or I would have bought a toy autorickshaw like one of the many gleaming in the window of the gift store I’d previously snubbed. Dad would have loved it; added it to his collection of real metal muppet carts that Mom detested so.

The female guards at the gate refused to smile. One tapped my chest gingerly with a metal detecting wand several times as if there is some treasure inside my non-boobs. This struck me as hilarious, and I burst into inappropriate guffaws. Finally, Ms. Tappy looked away with an accidental smile cracking her stony face apart.

The last guard in the gauntlet was also stern, motioning for me to show her my handbag tag. When I did a 360 for her, she exclaimed,
“ooOOH, it’s a schoooool pack!” She laughed at me, and I laughed with her.

We landed in Goa too soon. It was too easy to just fly around; too easy to forget what a huge and great country I was traveling. Spurts of fragrance hissed directly overhead as the plane taxied, but I was used to this and no longer worried that I was being gassed.

In the airport, I stared down into the toilet as it flushed, dramatically realizing that this was probably the cleanest facility that I'd be enjoying in a while.

I walked outside, and the sun was already hinting at its daily fall down to the horizon, making the hazy sky the color of orange creme popsicle between rustling palm trees. A horrid flock of taxi drivers at airport consumed me like vultures. They were agressive, they were awful, eyes bulging, teeth red, spitting, cajoling, pleading, some even placing a hand on my arm to persuade me.

"Don't touch me!!" I shrieked, swinging my duffel bag so they dispersed momentarily, but only for a moment. I insisted I'd go with someone who offered the cheapest price. He was seriously creepy looking, but I walked with him towards a small white van, expecting the others to chime in with lower prices at the last minute. There was only a resigned silence, and a younger, less threatening-looking fellow emerged with the keys, and I felt relief tingle my dust-caked feet.

Turns out, this guy was on his way home, anyway, so I was mainly just paying for all the fuel with my 500 rupees. He drove me up what I had incorrectly imagined as an endless crescent of white beach with colorful markets along the shore. We traveled along a large, well-paved road with actual lines drawn on it. Everywhere, miscellaneous trees obstructed the impending sunset until we went over a huge but aesthetically unremarkable bridge over bluish-grayish water. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, afraid that I was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.

He asked me where I wanted to go. I told him that Harambol and northern areas seemed mellow [that's what the Lonely Planet told me, that it was the most free from all the touristic grime].

"No," he said simply, "You do not want to go there. This is monsoon. No one is there, but maybe many...hippies." He kept his eyes on the road, "Hippies and drugs. Let me tell you something. I will bring you by somewhere else. If you do not like, fine. I can take you to Harambol."

He spoke quietly and non-aggressively, and yet I understood with certainty that this man was not going to bring me wherever it is I thought I wanted to go. According to him, I did not want to go there. If this was out of genuine concern for my safety or for his own convenience, I will never know. But when he drove me to Baga & Calangute, past oddly tall shops in a cluttered town center and through sandy backroads, he stayed by me and worked as my interpreter while I ducked into hotel after hotel, only to find windows missing, flies buzzing, and mattresses lying with pools of water in their sagging middles. Go to hell, Lonely Planet. Go straight to hell. Apparently, this was all just an off-season thing, but I could not imagine that all the seediness would be cleaned, that all the dampness in the air would depart, and that all the windows and doors would be fixed in just a few months.

The "MR Hotel" is where I ended up, and I never bothered to find out what MR meant, because I was busy trying not to freak out as I walked past several empty tables and past the manager and three boys and up some stairs at the side of the house to my room.

The room was old and bare, but it was definitely clean. I pried open the squeaking, disintegrating bathroom door and held my breath, expecting roaches, rats, or a dead human body. Instead, I found more cleanliness. The mattress was visibly warped, and I threw the covers back, waiting for the sleeping bugs I had heard so much about. But there were only crispy sheets. I opened a wardrobe, bracing myself for a skeleton or rotting food. Instead, I found a dustless shelf and a few sad hangers. Next to the wardrobe was a stained table, thin as plywood and bowing under the weight of a mini-TV.

The windows were wide open. I reeled them shut and drew the scratchy curtains, just as one of the boys knocked on my door. My skin crawled, because even if it was just one of the boys working there, I couldn't see him. I swung open the door, and there he was, eyes darting around, asking if everything was all right. I pointed to a burnt mosquito coil holder with a few chunks of dust around it. I wiggled my eyebrows, and he understood. He nodded, and disappeared back down the stairs. I showered, then ran down the stairs, and did some more charades to say that I'd be taking a walk to the beach.

There was a sandy road leading past only a few houses towards the ocean, but it felt like an incredible journey. All these empty houses, and I didn't know who the hell they were. A dog barked and scuffled from somewhere, and my blood went cold; but a disheveled owner appeared, gruffly calling the mutt back to its stakeout post.

The beach was huge and there was a cow - a COW sitting right there. There were cheerful groups of people to my left and to my right, and I wondered where in the hell they were all from and where they were sleeping tonight. Then, the sun was setting suddenly, and black clouds were rolling in and it was pouring rain. The people and the cows were gone, everyone was gone and everything was getting darker as I ran, ran, ran, kicking sand up onto my showered legs. I was actually happy to get to the hotel, slam the door behind me, rinse of my feet, and climb gingerly into the center of the dry bed.

I turned on the TV. Metallica music videos. Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. This was too weird. Right in the middle of a whiny monologue by Mira Sorvino, the lights cut off. I was terrified for reasons I cannot explain. And right then, a booming knock at the door. I don't know how I found the courage to open it. The boy again, with a fresh mosquito coil. I thanked him, scuttling back inside with it already lit. I got in the center of the bed again. Stared at the small orange dot burning at the end of the coil. A flicker of lights. Lisa Kudrow's voice, this time. Lisa Kudrow's pouting face.

I watched up until Jeanine Garofalo starts yelling at the cowboy who always throws a smoldering butt at her when she asks for a cig. Then, I couldn't deny it any longer. I had to go down to the eating area outside. I had to eat.

There was a whole section of the menu in Finnish, or at least there were a bunch of Finnish foods. Apparently, they had a Finnish chef, but he was seasonal. In-seasonal. So I had naan and fish masala. The tender cubes of fish were drowned in a tasty sauce that I smothered with every last flake of naan. By now, I had grown used to the fact that the three boys and their manager were going to stand behind the ludicrously giant horseshoe shaped, blacklit bar and watch me eat. I flipped open the menu again. Now there was one Caucasian guy sitting two tables away from me, sipping a beer and staring into the drizzling blackness past the porch. Another dude with a blonde ponytail and no shirt appeared out of the jungle to return a rusty moped to the staff. None of this made me feel any better.

Then, I spied "No. 7 Port" in the beverage list. I asked to see the bottle, and was shown what looked like a stage prop with a pirate-style label peeling off of it. Well, we all know that real Port is only made in Portugal, the way that real Champagne is only made in France. But Port of any kind, made in Goa? Really? Duh, Portuguese influence.

So I shelled out 30 bucks (30 rupees), and sipped on the candy-sweet liquid that sat black in a scratched glass. I rescued a newspaper from the bar and noted vestiges of Catholic missionary influence in the exaggerated obituries, which used phrases such as "sad demise” and “expiration” to record local deaths.

Feeling numb from a second cup of Goan Port, I retired to my room and turned on the little TV. Feeling overwhelmed, I flipped past the O.C. to an entertainment channel that told me that Matt Damon named his baby GIA - so essentially an actor I worshipped during middle school now says my name every single day.

8/23 Saturday – PONDA
As with most things, everything was better in the morning. The rain was gone, and the creepiness of the environs were greatly alleviated by some sunlight. Harboring grand plans to bike myself to the spice plantations in Ponda, I mounted a motorbike and tried my luck. Unable to figure out the trick of balancing myself, I did a few unintentional half donuts in the sand driveway until the men came running, pressing my money back into my hands, saying that they didn't want my death on their hands and that they could find me someone who would drive me around. Of course they could.

The man who arrived was someone I felt that I could instantly trust. He was aged, but had most his teeth, and had grandfatherly eyes. Within the first two minutes of our journey, I was thankful that I'd never made it out of the driveway alone on that moped. We were on a proper highway most of the time, dipping and flying through rolling hills, weaving behind mini water tankers. As we neared the supposed spice farms, we didn't see anything but more ugly, dusty road. Desperate, we asked anyone we could by the side of the road, and eventually saw a small archway that blended right in, like a portal into some secret dimension of lushness.

The Saharaka Spice Farm at the Ponda Spice Gardens was clearly catered to tourists, but there was absolutely no one around but me. Two women approached me with a garland of flowers, and one placed a cool, wet dab of red spice in the middle of my forehead. There was positively no one there but me, and they sat me in a pavilion with numerous tables and told me to drink some cardamon tea and snack on some fresh cashews while reading a filmy, laminated brochure about how different spices can cure all sorts of genital ailments. Thankfully, ,y tour guide arrived and led me down a well-worn path through the outskirts of the real plantation. Still, I saw and learned plenty. For instance, the plantation was 300 years old, and had been owned by seven generations of one family. Also:
* Betel treees form about 3 rings per year, and live 45 years...that's 135 rings!
* Peppercorn grows in white, red, and green!
*Mace comes from the red wormy filaments wrapped around a nutmeg nut inside the flower
* The finest coffee is grown in Jamaica [didn't ask how he figured this]
* Saffron is most expensive spice
* Vanilla must always grow from hand pollinated orchids!
* Banana is the tallest grass in the world, second only to bamboo. First, the plant gives a flower, then a fruit, then plants its own daughter tree before kicking the bucket! One secret reason why Indians place food on banana leaves is because the hot food absorbs the good chlorophyll from the leaves! Here I was thinking that it was all just a matter of convenience.

* Each cashew nut grows on top of a whole apple!

The last stop was the feni distillery. Here is how the cashew liquor is made:
The apples are removed, then juiced on a slab that looks like a concrete ramp. The first distillation is called warac, and rings in with 5% alcohol content. The next distillation only has 4%. Later, while enjoying a bizarrely huge meal all to myself in the gigantic, empty eating area, I had a tumbler of feni all to myself. No one can tell me that stuff was any less than 100-proof! At the gift shop, I bought a packet of assorted spice plants and a plastic bottle suspiciously labeled "MEMORY." Then, it was through the countryside back to the ugly highway.

Casually, I asked to stop at an ATM, accustomed to having my Visa card be recognized basically everywhere. But I kept getting denied, and even walked into bank after bank's odd weekend hours. At one place, they even tried taking the whole machine apart until they realized that the problem really was with my card. The hunt outrageous, and soon I was literally falling asleep in the back of this motorcycle, trying to keep it together. I had no idea what was going on, and no means by which to call the bank. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Thomas Cook becomes my best friend and worst enemy. My best friend because they were able to charge my credit card (which somehow still worked) and then forward me the cash, and my worst enemy because of their cruel 8% cut of the money. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was so ready to leave the whole place behind. Asking no questions, I handed over 1500. Onwards to Palolem!

PALOLEM

As we approached, small shacks with beachy clothing started closing in. Airbrushed t-shirts, faded Bob Marley garb, Tibetan mirrorwork, and neon bikinis hung together in an effort to please whoever might be drifting through. A fluffy little dog flounced in front of us, barely escaping the wheels. I squealed in horror, only to see its beady little eyes blinking at me from the other side. Lucky dog.

We pulled up at the Om Sai Guest House for 300 Rs.

It looked like a frat house from the outside, but had a squeaky clean blue tile floor and balcony inside. I did my laundry right then and there in a bucket, and hung all my stuff outside. This was already heaven.

I shopped my way down the sandy alley to a bay of water so calm that it looked like a lake at times. I walked all down one way, then back up the other, looking at the eclectic crowd. Indian men in polo shirts. Indian boys in impromptu loincloths. Latin-looking couples with reflective sunglasses and nice bodies. A shirtless little girl with bobbles in her hair, busily molding sand into shapes. Three Swedish chicks with hair blonder than their sunburnt white faces. A pregnant woman and her husband holding hands in the water. Oh, and cows.There was a grass-covered fence that beckoned to me. I walked through a little door in it and saw a magnificent green campground with tents and bungalows scattered about. I walked towards one of the houses then walked right in. Dirty bong, hiking socks, coverups, backpacks, travel guides; it was all right there. Even some of the bedroom doors were open. No one cared about anything here. Feeling like a total creep all of a sudden, I walked back out to the beach. Inspired, I left my nondescript plastic bag full of stuff near a point of reference, put my tattered flip-flops on it, and strode straight into the water in a bikini for the first time all summer. I stayed there for hours, somewhere between bored and relaxed, marveling at how monsoon season had made the famous white sands of the place silty and brown. The waves got bigger as the sun started to go down, and I rode some of them until it just felt like time to get out. I picked up my stuff and kept walking, but then saw two girls sitting nearby. I couldn't believe my eyes...it was the girl I met in Kanyakumari!

"SARAH!?" I shouted. It was Sarah, and she'd just met this girl, who at first looked like a California hippie, but was actually a broguish farmer's daughter from Scotland. And so Goa became fun, just like that.

We spent most of our nighttime hours patronizing the Silver Star bar, whose motto was “Cocktails and Dreams.” We got to know the bartenders by name as we drank 'Goan sunsets' and 25-rupee Foster's with dozen after dozen of fat, garlic-buttered prawns on thin sliver platters. The playlist was just what you'd want it to be in a foreign beach bar, including Rod Stewart, obnoxious selectinos from Footloose, Eye of the Tiger, the unplugged live version of Hotel California from Hell Freezes Over, INXS, Don Henley's Boys of Summer, and Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits. After counting the ways that we loved Mark Knopfler (His voice! Those lyrics! That guitar!), we stumbled back to our separate houses, hair whipping our faces in the breeze of motorcycle drag races taking place amongst locals beneath the archway to the beach. I collapsed into bed with the balcony windows wide open. There were no mosquitoes or bugs, and I found out the reason the next morning when I found all my laundry soaking wet. It had rained.

Sunday 8/24 - PALOLEM
I'm never late for anything, but I was late to meet the girls for breakfast, which for me was a bunch of good prawns on top of bad pasta in a place where the floor not really a floor, but just sand between our toes. It felt good to be supremely lazy, treated to a view I didn't necessarily deserve.

I was still early enough to see the fishermen shoving off for the day.

Then, Sarah, Babs and I literally swam and lay on the beach all day...

...right into sunset...

Then in the space of time between sunset and nightlife, we visited the Internet cafe and "Bliss Travels" agency in the beach alley. This is where I faced reality and understood once and for all that I would not be able to quaff bowls of Sikkim Tongba (famed millet ale) or taste the disembodying peppers of Assam or hike to the icy source of the Ganges or take the Darjeeling toy train or glimpse the Kingdom of Bhutan or jaunt over to Bangladesh after all. Feeling a bit cranky after basically finalizing the rest of a trip in a way that I hadn't done before, I dodged into the store next door and bargained a ten-year-old fast-talking shopgirl into giving me an outfit for the equivalent of about 70 cents. A combination of respect and malice glinted in her young, intelligent eyes, and I returned her the same without a hint of pity. We had an understanding.

Back at the Silver Star, we met a bunch of macho Spaniards and an Italian dude wearing bright yellow biking shorts with not a bike to be seen anywhere. We ran out onto the beach. The tide was out so far, and the sand and the water and the sky so equally black that I felt like we were two-dimensional forms standing inside a diorama. Only the sky had layers, and I could not only see the stars, but the stars between the stars and the stars between those, some close, some far away, some twinkling, some steadfast, some faint.

Someone spread out a piece of fabric, and we sat down on it, feeling grains of sand push up through the loose weave anyway. A nasty mutt came out of nowhere and stole one of my sandals right off my foot, galloping soundlessly off into the black infinity. Barbara ran after it, her screaming laughter absorbed almost instantly into the darkness. Leaving the scene, I walked off alone until I was sure that this was one time and place that reminded me of nothing else. When I came back, Sarah and Babs were alone, their British and Scottish accents in full swing. On the way home, Babs screamed,

"Oiiii, oi stood in caiuuw shite!!! Oi dohnt cayah, Oi'm a fahmurs dottir! Oi've got suue much moah compashhsion for annimalls thon oi deuw foh ewemans, oi do."

Monday 8/25 - PALOLEM
I finally checked out this morning. The Om Sai manager called to me from his roost on the porch. He was surprised by lack of luggage and the fact that everything was in a school pack, of course. His parting words were,

"Your friend? Blonde one? Tell her very good!" he gave me a thumbs-up sign. I returned it with a bare minimum of facetiousness, and plodded to the alley to meet Sarah and Babs for a legendary bowl of fruit and honey. We stepped outside, and booked my taxi ride to the train station for later that afternoon. Taking a leap of faith, I put all my luggage in the van ahead of time, knowing I didn't really have anything to steal that I didn't already have clutched in my hand in a tattered plastic bag. Then, we found a guy called Sanjay in skinny bell-bottoms with a '90s mushroom haircut and handed him 200 rupees each (like 5 bucks), signed nothing, and received our golden scooters.

This time, I didn't chicken out. I had no choice to ride the thing, and once that was determined, it was easy as hell. An Indian version of Bill Murray fueled us up at the next streetcorner, so now we'd invested about six dollars in our expedition. What came next can only be approximated in photos, but nothing will convey the rush of stupid wildness that came with tearing helmetless through green hills, past two-colored rivers and drying fish, putting past tiny villages and deserted beaches with woolly dogs standing sentinel amongst the palm trees.Lucky for Sanjay, we made it back alive to the Silver Star for one last meal of prawns & Foster's.

Took a picture with our favorite waiters David and Joey, too.

David pointed at me and said,

"I was saying, you were different. More like Indian, but not really. Asian type." I explained to him my Korean heritage and said that he looked different. He pointed to his chest and said proudly,

"Nepalese," before turning on his heel and disappearing into the din of the kitchen.

In the van, I fell asleep on driver’s shoulder and woke up just in time to see a man lifting railroad crossing with a handcrank! We were now in a section of Goa where the historical Portuguese influence was visible in the architecture.

The Menezes Bragança estate is one of the Houses of Chandor touted by a couple sentences the Lonely Planet. Still, as I entered the cavernous foyer that hid behind imposing black wood doors of the mansion, I wondered how many travelers ever made it here. My guide was a direct descendant of the Menezes Bragança family.She let me take photographs because she liked me. But I could tell she didn't like that I took photographs, so I only allowed myself one.

She knew the origin of each piece of furniture, the story of each floor tile, the material of each collectible. Pointing to an exquisite lace cover stretched over an antique four-post bed, she swelled up and said,

"I made this." We twisted around rosewood and sandalwood chairs that had been carved by hand in-house. We tiptoed around wafer-thin ceramic teapots from Japan. We stood underneath chandeliers from Belgium, looked down at tiles from Italy, and admired a piano from Germany. But what really blew me away were the black and white photos perched here and there atop all the finery. Exceedingly personal, they exuded the history of the place. Staring into the living eyes of the Indians dressed in tailored suits and ruffled dresses of the Portuguese persuasion, I felt that I'd fallen into some alternate universe where old Portugal existed somewhere deep in the Indian countryside. I stared into the lady's blue-rimmed eyes and felt thousands of unexplained secrets hiding inside. Wishing her well, I pressed some bills into her hand and went to meet my waiting van.

Margao station was large and comforting after the oddness of Goa. Unfortunately, engine troubles were making the train from Margao-Bombay very late, so I occupied myself by finding an acceptable patch on the ground from which to sit and swat flies while catching up with my journal. At intervals, I stared with disdain and amusement at a French family that was clearly tired of waiting for a colonial fantasy in the exotic jungle.

Half hungry, I wandered into a giant snack station where I bought a whole spiced fish and onion fritters wrapped in newspaper (my fish & chips fantasy finally comes true in Portuguese India - go figure!). I sat in the locals' waiting room, and two children approached me. They looked just like the poor, starving, dirty kids featured on infomercials, except they weren't just staring. They were aggressive and shameless like hungry rats, pinching me with their tiny hands and leaning their lice-filled heads on me, pulling and begging. Completely overwhelmed, I extended my parcel of fritters towards them. They snapped it up the way a fish snatches bread from the surface of a pond, ripping the bag open on the floor and fighting each other over the contents.

All I felt was a dull anger. I was angry for looking different and being the sole target of these beggar children. I was angry at all the locals just for staring with dead eyes, offering neither empathy nor judgment of my actions. I was angry at the kids for assuming that I had something to spare. I was angry at myself for having not wanted to give them anything, though I did have something to spare, compared to what they had, which was nothing. I was angry at having only given something to get them off my back. I was angry at their parents for procreating. I was angry at humanitarian services for somehow missing out on this part of the world. I was angry for every first-world altruist who ever sent a check in for these because of an infomercial but never felt their hands - those tiny hands - clutching at their bare flesh. I was angry at my own powerlessness. I was angry at the world that made all of this possible.

Ironically, this was the only day that I was to travel in 1st class coach during my whole summer. I bought the ticket because all other seats were taken, and I had to move on. The cabin was dark and claustrophobic. I walked in and saw two men in uniform washing an apple over the tiny sink. In essence, I had paid a shit ton more, only to put myself into the predicament of basically sleeping with two male strangers in a cabin that was itself the size of a full mattress. I found myself rather craving the open sleeper cars with their plain blue sleeping slats.

Goodbye, Chennai

Aug. 20, Wednesday to Aug. 22, Friday

Perhaps by now, you were wondering where work and other mundane activities factored in to my summer. So I'll tell you a bit about it, now that I'm done. Every day over the past two months, I woke up to my digital watch alarm, Melanie’s additional alarm clock, and the dreadfully provocative hoots of the morning birds whose name I still don’t know. I then climbed over Mel and released myself from our shared mosquito net to dress in one of my three sets of clothes in five minutes flat. Grimacing before stepping into the wall of humidity outside, I often glanced longingly at the crystal clear swimming pool (suddenly, horridly green on the last day). Walking down the stairs, I took care to avoid the permanent puddle of air conditioning run-off mixed with pigeon poop and feathers at the bottom. Invariably, I’d trip over the first speedbump in my path. I don’t know why I never got used to it.
It was a short walk down the main avenue, where there was a bit of a sidewalk early in the mornings before sunglass merchants, chai stands, and street tatooists took over. For some reason, the wide, quiet, residential road on which my office was located was the worst part of the walk. Cars, motorbikes, bicycles, and wagons were infrequent, but always drove on whichever side of the road they pleased, then blared their horns no matter how much I indicated that I was aware of their presence and getting out of their way. Finally, I ended up walking this stretch with my hands holding my ears all the way until the gate. This admitted me into the grounds.A few steps farther took me to a large and peaceful dining hall. Breakfasts were best here, often featuring spicy coconut chutney and vadai, which can only be described as savory onion donuts.

Walking through the glass doors into the office, I washed my face in the bathroom while staring at the mothballs rolling in the sink, and didn’t bother to towel off. Lots of times, I was the first there, and turned on the lights and AC only in my cubicle.

I grabbed an orange and a banana from the fruit basket by the water dispenser I never had to use because there was always a giant plastic bottle full on this desk, where I sat and did my thing all day long. I ate my fruit with the coffee and espresso that one girl dispensed on a case by case basis in return for tiny pink tickets of which we had so many I wondered why we had tickets in the first place. At lunch, I ate with all the others vaguely in my age group, grabbing a handful of sugar coated anise seeds from the bowl from the door only when I didn’t’ see ants having a party in it. Lunch was all right, but for some reason, people never stopped bitching about what gruel it was! Ingrates!

As night fell, I blogged my face off, and shared intense emails with a few good friends.
*********
On the 20th of August, my last day, I forced myself up from a combat nap on cushions taken from the conference room. It had been my second all nighter. I walked home in the morning light to find that a stupid girl had bolted the door from the inside. I pounded on the door and hollered for about 30 minutes until five or six neighbors offered me their phone. Mel and another roommate had been inside. Somehow, neither had heard me trying to rip the door off its hinges. There was no time to be pissed off; nowhere to direct my anger. I showered, then scrambled into an auto to get to the office in time for the 10 a.m. staff meeting.

At the meeting, I delivered a presentation that I wasn’t ashamed of. Everyone was late, waiting for the waylaid Executive Director, who was having a car emergency. She never arrived. Jessica Wallack was obviously home with her new child. And my own supervisor forgot to show up. Curiously enough, the people who commented most and seemed the most interested were Melanie, who came to offer moral support, and an employee who had joined up just one day before. Everyone else had a lot to say about their own research and how it overlapped with mine, and I felt exasperated at the grand scope of my project and the ludicrous shortness of my time with my coworkers, who were total clams of knowledge. But one exciting outcome of this was talk of my putting together a template for data collection necessary to assess the likely demand for particular technologies specialized by businesses. If implemented, CDF would finally have the panel data lacking from other sources and otherwise inaccesible because of the secrecy, ignorance, or unwillingness of the possessors.

Everyone clapped, shuffled out with their coffee. Soma handed me a 1000 rupee gift certificate to the Landmark book and music store. Hands were shaken. Then it was over.

This internship was useful because it made me feel deeply, certainly, that I will not become a researcher. Or, perhaps I will, but it’ll be by accident. I’ll fall into it after first doing other tasks for which I am better suited. I feel grounded by revelations like these. As the list of what I don’t like and what I have no talent for increases, there seems less and less than previously imagined to explore. For someone who can never choose, this is almost a mercy.

This fall, I will head into International Politics, which I should have done in the first place. Rather than bend over backwards at this stage in my life to prove to myself that I could have had a quantitive or scientific career, I should get busy with writing, speaking, and relating to people…the few things I can actually do to some extent, and really enjoy.

That afternoon, I finally met the mother of my new awesome One Miramar roommate at UCSD. I had waited until the very last minute to contact her, dreading the awkwardness I was sure to ensue. When I finally did contact her, I realized that she had been living in the apartment complex directly next to mine for the whole summer. But there was no time for regret as I introduced myself to the skeptical door guards, walked to the elevator, and arrived in front of her apartment.

She turned out to be a smiling, warm, kind woman with whom I felt instantly comfortable. Refusing to discuss the matter, she determined that I would eat a huge lunch cooked by her personally, chat with her, then bring all my luggage and leave it at her house while I trounced about the subcontinent.

By now, my all-nighter was catching up to me, and as our conversations continued, I could only hang on and thank god that my head hadn't yet dropped onto her finely covered glass dining room table. I was in a haze when she dropped me off at a Landmark store on her way to a friend’s. There, safe from a rainstorm that had begun hammering away outside, I methodically redeemed every last rupee of my gift certificate on a variety of Indian music (Northern, Southern, cinematic, carnatic, Desi...), Hindi and Tamil cartoons for friends, and a pair of cheapo earrings just so I could stick something other than a warped bit of metal into my cartilage hole, whose original earring had been lost on the shores of Sri Lanka.

On Thursday, I packed and ate about five slices of pizza at the house. Orignally, I had feared I that wouldn’t get even one because of the ravenous, deprived way in which the new occupants of the house attacked the doughy pies. I looked at them with their bottles of Kingfisher , wiping their dirty shoes all over the once clean dining room where Melanie, Vinita, Mary, and I had once had tea, biscuits, and gentle conversation. I was glad to leave, and felt sorry for Melanie, who would have to live with the chaos for at least two more weeks.

On Friday, I did a once-around. My gaze lingered on the laundry-drying porch where I'd once sat helpless in the afternoon sun when the electricity died in the rest of the house, the hideous orange draperies that had hilariously bloomed like gigantic flower petals in a hallucination that occurred when I tried a housemate's sleeping pills but insisted on having tea with the housemates before I conked out, and the steps down to the sitting area where Mel and I had recorded The Vinita Sessions with our guitars. Then, I walked to work to say some proper goodbyes.

On this, the last day that I was to walk down the crumbling median of the road to avoid the urinating men, piles of trash, and stagnant water at the shoulders of the street, I couldn’t help but feel ecstasy in every step. It was the last time, I told myself, as I transfered myself over to the honeycombed tiles of the “sidewalk,” through the dead center which, for some baffling reason, coconut trees are planted in a line, forcing pedestrians to step down onto the street or rustle through between the trunk and a wall just to get by. It was almost the last time, I told myself, as the scream of a horn stabbed straight into my ear, so assaulting that it left the flesh of my face aching like a giant bruise.

My coworkers wished me well. Paul, the office manager, handed me his business card and told me to consider permanent positions. I didn’t know if he meant it or not (After all, he majored in Human Interaction. Scary.), but the gesture made me want to hug him or cry.

On the walk back, the man who always sells coconuts on the corner saw me first, and raised up his hand in a prolonged greeting. I couldn’t see his face because he was bent over his assortment of coconuts, but his hand spoke.

How can it be that I have such sentimentality for people I have seen every day but for two short months? The doorguards in their blue shirts, languidly vigilant and always trading my “Vanakam” for “HELLOOoooo!” The beady-eyed dhobi-wallah who charges the same to launder a single ankle sock as he does to starch the whole 9 yards of a sari. The figure of Ganesh set in the wall at the busy intersection, wreathed in flowers, powder, and a regal necklace of pine needles. The men heaving picks at the unyielding rubble of the roads. The women stooped over every morning, sweeping debris from the path, always with twin brooms. And, of course, the coconut guy.

The three amigos working at the blenders of a juice stall apparently too good to have a name and the patrician who worked alongside them.

The tailors of Fountain Plaza mall (not so much a mall but a network of alley shops…the sari makers whom I was unable to photograph or even show their work. The seemingly grim waiters of the Noodle House on the corner who finally burst into laughter at the sight of my schoolpack. I will miss all these people. I will remember their faces. I will wonder how they are doing in the future. I will.

Afterwards, I took two trips to Auntie N’s (my roommate's mother) house to bring all my stuff there. Though I’d fantasized about fitting a month’s worth of light packing into my schoolpack, I had to accept her offer of an additional duffel bag for my travels. She fed me three dosas stuffed to the max with fragrant potatoes. I had whole scoops of tangy tomato chutney with it.

Then, she secured me an auto, and I was off to see the wizard.

SRI LANKA - Indian Independence Day Weekend

Chennai to Colombo - Thur., Aug. 14 to Fri., Aug. 15
Known as Ceylon during its colonialization, this geographical dollop off the Southeastern subcontinent is sadly living up to its lachrymose nickname “Teardrop” of India - civil unrest between Sri Lankans and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam aka Tamil Tigers is disturbingly high. The conflict can be traced back to 1815, when the British conquered the Kingdom of Kandy and bringing in a Hindu, Tamil-speaking Indians as laborers. These laborers' descendants became a minority that was disenfranchised in Britain's cooptation of the Sinhalese speaking, predominantly Buddhist Sinha people into the ruling government. Ceylon's independence in 1948 never addressed the Tamil population's disenfranchisement. Extremism and violence took root, and rages on today. This is all a euphemism for saying that thousands of women and children have been slain in the crossfire over the past decades, that civilians have been beheaded en masse, and that refugees have run from one corner of the island to another with nowhere to rest their shell-shocked souls.

Originally, I was worried that I wouldn’t even be able to get Mel to come with me on this journey, but she excitedly agreed, and then three more people from my office suddenly decided that they wanted to come. Since we were all eye-deep in our research by now, ludricrously little reading up was done about the country, and soon we found ourselves stuck in an AC van with broken AC headed for the airport. It took about an hour and a half to get there. After wresting free of the mob that obstructed the entrance of the airport, we had to beg, shout, and cry for our tickets from the one guy who was manning the Jet Lite flight counter. After about seven hours of delay, we were admitted to this astroturfed portal......which spit us out in the customs line in the Sri Lankan airport two hours later (nevermind the plan ride). We occupied ourselves by staring at this sign [which apparently wasn’t enough of a deterrent, because Zac later reported that he was offered drugs several times on his quest to find a bathroom]:

Somehow, I got through the checkpoints before everyone else did, and saw a beautiful sight at 4:44 AM - a duty free shop stocked to the ceilings with cheap Western beers. The ladies working there even gave me a chair so I could sit there and gurgle to myself until the others caught up.

Unfortunately, we watched the sun rise while withdrawing Sri Lankan rupees at a pitiable exchange rate and being jocked by scrappy travel agents who had a defensive approach to customer service and aggressively bullied other drivers who tried to court us.

Somehow, we chose a driver, and promptly boarded what I'll henceforth call the Magic Fool Bus because it carried five idiotic tourists who showed up in a whole 'nother country with little to no knowledge of where they were.

I'm ashamed to admit that I slept with my mouth open for most of the ride, but every now and then, I was jolted awake to see women with saris tied with a curious bustle in the back and pleats in the front. Even in my semi-conscious state, I noticed a lot of differences in our surroundings. Two-storied open concrete structures with hanging plants bursting from their frames, wild palm trees growing in the angle of the prevailing winds, the slower pace of everything, the mellow sunlight, and the strange desolation in the air all confirmed that we were on an island. Even the trains were different smaller, cuter, and painted in Crayon colors worn down by the sea breeze.

I was shocked to see the pandanus tree, whose fibrous leaves are popular in the Marshall Islands for handicrafts. I never got to snap up its tasty fruit for old times' sake, because the brightsweet pods lingered in my vision only for as long as it took for the van to whiz by them.

With visions of prawns and lobsters dancing in our heads, we clamored for the driver to help us locate a tasty lunch.

This was a mistake. The venue was beautiful, but the food was expensive even by U.S. standards; we each ended up paying about fifteen dollars a head for mediocre grub in a place where outstanding cheap seafood is the rule.

At least this chubby seacat capitalized on the abundance of weakly marinated shrimptails I flicked off my plate:

I also tried some arak coconut liquor that my Sri Lankan friend Nilesh had urged me to taste. I insisted on drinking it straight. Blegh! It kicked and screamed the whole way down, and tasted like cheap whiskey and a headache. Warding off the puppet and sarong vendors who had noticed us and approached us by shore , we continued along the road, noting the sober vestiges of the 2004 tsunami in the devastating landscape of unfixed buildlings. This immaculate roadside Buddha was contributed by the Japanese to commemorate the disaster.

Unawatuna - Fri., Aug. 15 to Sat., Aug. 16

This is where we ended up - a dream in the midst of the wreckage:The Upal Guesthouse handed us Secret Garden style keys that let us into brick walled rooms containing mushy beds draped by princess mosquito nets. In front of the nearby Hot Rock Café, we sat around, swam, ate, swam, sat around, ate, and swam some more. At one point, a drunk local teenager pulled down a girl's cover-up and tried to rape her in broad daylight in front everybody, and the buxom restaurant owner regulated the situation with a splintery broom. Jaded by such affronts upon the female race, we continued with our vacation. These naturally orange coconuts kind of cheered me up.

Melanie and I rented boards from a lean-to operation run by young, nice boys like this one:

From the three choices leaning up against the trunk of a palm tree, I selected unweildy 8-footer named Freebird; too bad the awesome photo that was taken with the '80s throwback was lost when Sapna lost her camera (I'll get to this tragedy later). Apologizing profusely that the shop was out of wax, the boy scraped at the pancake-sized blotch of wax residue that was on the nose of the board. So here's this photo of me sliding around on the no-wax hunk-of-junk. It was all I could do to stay on, but it was all worth my first warm-water "surfing" experience. The warm waves broke over jagged coral heads, which I luckily detected in the clear water before sustaining any injuries. I know; I'm so hard core.

Pathetically exhausted, I recovered with a super awkward beachside massage during which I felt bad for the massager the the massager asked me if I was Japanese. The sunset was more relaxing. Reflections of pink clouds and, seemingly, golden temples danced on each tiny wave.

Night fell as quickly as a wet blanket on a fire.

The nightlife was beyond surreal, what with open air clubs and bars so close to the water that we sometimes had to wade from place to place. The tide reached aggressively at us from the seemingly tranquil scenery. With our legs drenched and sandy, Melanie and I howled at the full moon, and dogs howled back, appointing themselves as our watchguards and barking at other figures in the dark. Of course, we ended up on some locals’ porch. They whipped out arak, gin, soda, and lemons. Suddenly, a bunch of Russians and a couple Germans appeared, too, and I learned how to say a few unrepeatable things in Russian and Ukrainian, thanks to Melanie, and how to say thank you in Sinhalese (stooti). I taught Mel some Korean, so there we were, speaking in at least four languages with the Sri Lankan shore as our audience. The last place on the sandstrip was a nightclub that housed a whole nation of Europeans who had left their shoreside massage chairs to writhe on the dancefloor to atrocious electronica. Young Sri Lankan boys swung flaming coils from black chains. “If attitude were worth money, I’d be a billionaire,” read the T-shirt on one beach boy. There was a blunted exhibitionist attitude about it all that filled me with sorrow and disgust at the gawking audience.

Inside, rasta-inspired deejays stumbled around to the axelike chords of their favorite techno music and all the men in the room started closing in on the five or so women who were present. As I walked towards the bathroom for a moment of peace, the British bar owner pawed at my face as if I were a part of his stupid drug trip. Worst of all, one of us (I won't name names, but obviously it wasn't me) “indadvertently” went on an acid trip when this whack job (who was taking his pants off in the middle of the dance floor when we first walked in) offered him a drink.

So the wee hours entailed babysitting this individual as he wandered, drooled, and jumped into the ocean. An swim under the full, white moon to prevent this person from drowning only made me feel more bitter about people who travel around the world only to engage in stupid activities that could be found anywhere else on earth. I think even the beach dogs were hung over the next day.

The sour taste that all the spandex, techno, and Western-made sordidity left inmy mouth only went away with the next morning’s mushroom pizza (always the hardest kind of pizza to find outside America – why?).By now, we were already under each others' skins for one reason or another, so half of us slept in the van while the other half walked the thrilling, windy ramparts of Galle Fort, begun by the Portuguese in 1588 and modified by the British and then the Dutch entrepreneurs of the East India Trading Company from the 17th century onwards. The name Galle is said to have come from the word galo, Portuguese for "rooster."

So much beauty and history was only admired for a short while before we continued back around the island for lunch. We stopped at the Sarasa Hotel. Take note of this name, then promise yourself never to go there. The only half-redeeming thing about waiting literally an hour in overstaffed yet underserved place for food that never arrived was hearing Will to Power's 1988 reggae cover of Baby I Love Your Way spliced with and islandized version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird on the radio. I had never heard it before. The remix was lifechanging.

Leaving in a collective huff, we resorted to hole-in-the-wall Sea Lion Chinese Restaurant, which served shirveled prawns, a fish dish that looked pretty but tasted slightly rotten, and some passable seafood fried rice which was eaten too quickly to be photographed.

Kandy-Sat.Aug. 16
Now get this. Our trip coincided with the full moon. And not just any full moon, but the night of Esala Perahera, a festival that happens only once a year in the central Sri Lankan lake city of Kandy. Unable to make a reservation in advance because every single place was booked we were lucky enough to find last minute lodging at the Ivy Banks guest house – all five of us in one room with two beds and one Psycho-esque bathroom with high ceilings and slick, hospital-green walls. The decor in the dining room was equally creepy.

With no time to lose, we fought the graspy crowds down to a fairway where men in baggy white culottes and matching turbans were whipping the cobblestones with lengths of leather sixteen times their height - to scare off evil spirits, I'm told. The V.I.P.s for this televised event sat about a foot away from the madness on a tiny platform, looking remarkably calm as whips literally cracked around their ears. The next events were witnessed from a ladder that I found in an alley behind a shaky iron-wraught fence that I climbed over.

...Men spinning fireballs from their heads!

...Elephants with lights strung onto their bare faces!

...Elephants in velvet masks swaying in synch with a human dance troupe!!

...And finally, BUDDAH'S TOOTH in a fittingly tiny sedan atop an elephant shielded by tasseled satin umbrellas!!!

It was horrifying, it was astounding, it was over. The surrounding area oddly had the aura of the end of a baseball game, as stragglers kicked through the trash and resorted to stale street snacks from vending carts. Energized by dusty glass bottles of grape soda and crumbly samosas, we started up the nearest hill that we thought would lead us to a giant alabaster buddha on the peak. This is all we found.

But all of Kandy lay out before us...
And those of us who weren't catatonic by the time we made it back to the hotel were privy to a bona fide lunar eclipse. O' what a night!

The morning, like mornings in most places, revealed that the Psycho-house was actually a nice, sunny place where one could eat a traditional Sri Lankan breakfast of string hoppers (like buckwheat noodles), sambol (tart and spicy fish mash), and daal (wholesome lentil) while catching the beginning of the Olympics marathon. Those poor runners, gnashing their thirsty jaws at the brown air in Beijing.

At this point, we parted with Melanie so that she could meet up with one of her mother's family friends back in Colombo, where she would rejoin us at the airport. Her other reason for leaving was to have a day at an elephant reserve while we did something else. We had our chance to see an elephant, too, only it was tied up by a chain by tourism. The chain jingled as it did a manic shuffle of oppression. Feeling vaguely ill, we continued on our journey.

Sigiryia - Sat., Aug. 16 to Sun., Aug. 17
Just 50 kilometers shy of the center of the civil war is a giant rock known as the Sigiriya fortress. After much debate, we decided that we had to see it. An intermittent monastery from 5th century BC through the 14th century, it was the only UNESCO World Heritage site that I couldn't sneak into so far - we each shelled out $27 USD, more than enough to pay for my sneaky ways of the past, I say! The cashiers at the entrance viewed us with hatred. This is where Sapna left her camera, and I know it's wrong to accuse people, but I swear to God one of those ticket-takers took it.

The grounds at the foot of the rock featured truly grand tanks of water.

At the beginning of the ascent was a trio of dry baskets for the dry little snakes coiled inside, dreading the return of their enterprising charmer.

And at the gateway to the stairs was a man selling books carved of wood. Nilesh had told me how to open the secret compartments, saying that I could get the item for free if I could solve its puzzles. This was not so, but as I walked away, the man shrieked out decreasing prices at such an alarming rate that I caved in and walked the rest of the hike with a wooden book wedged under my arm.
The climb was rough in the brutal heat; with each step, I recalled a moment that I should have exercised, but didn't. Some nice person caught this photo, which I think proves the difficulty of the trail. At least for me.

Caves of ancient, festive, and possibly lewd frescos helped break up the trip into segments of art appreciation. A zipper-thin zig-zagged staircase brought us up the final stretch to an unforgettable view.
Back on the ground, we returned to the ticket cashiers and demanded the return of Sapna's camera. When someone offered them money, they hesitated, and looked at each other, then collectively denied that they had had anything to do with the disappearance of the camera. Yeah, right. While Sapna and Joanne went on a futile search with officials on mopeds, Zac and I walked around dirt roads that reminded me of an Africa I've never even been to.
Back to Negombo...

The road back to the airport had pineapple shops,

really odd billboards,

funhouse/temples,
lean-to fruit markets all abuzz,
bags of hot pepper that I chewed up on the side of the road and chased with flat Guinness out of the can (this was as close as I ever got to the majestic pepper fields of Assam),
and the only restaurant where we had a real Sri Lankan meal - complete with banana flowers and gigantic leafy greens.
The food was delicious, but may have caused an episode that forced me to beg for the nearest thing resembling a bathroom. I crossed a mosaic-tiled living room with ornate furniture and a large, black dog standing watch over ti, and crept into a dark hallway where I felt certain I'd be murdered. I broke open a rotting wooden door and ran towards a stripped toilet bowl wreathed in flies and other unmentionables. Only the spiders on the wall will ever know what happened next. Later, some of my van-mates started hollering for more food, and we stopped at a highway-side convenience store as people gave us hostile stares that we had not encountered back in India. I sat up in front and talked with the driver. He had recently become an honorary court official. He was a loyal follower of the Buddhist tradition. His family was doing well, working hard to get educatied. When I asked him about the Tamil Tigers, his jaw trembled with sudden malice. "I hate them," he said. "I hate them," he repeated. That in and of itself was the most real experience that I had during all my time in Sri Lanka. As we said our goodbyes in front of the airport, I wondered if he hated us too. I didn't think so, but he has every right. After all, we left streaks of beer on the side of his van from opening the frothing cans out the window to spare the interior. Go figure.

Negombo to Chennai - Sun., Aug. 17 to Mon., Aug. 18

A restlessness came over us as we waited for Melanie at the airport restaurant. Unable to handle the tension, I visited the gift shops downstairs and purchased a coconut-shell elephant that I could have gotten for a tenth of the price near Sigiriya. I named it Chetpet after a town in good old Chennai. I was enchanted by the rainbow-bright cotton saris in baskets, but got over it when the ladies refused to teach me how to tie a Sri Lankan bustle before purchase.

Melanie arrived! She was fine, she said, but her arms ached from hanging onto the outside of a local bus for too long. How were the elephants? Really good. We both knew that there were so many differences in the day we had had apart, and that these differences would never be illuminated.

A few last Sri Lankan rupees burning in my pocket, I passed up the "Hangar" bar where everyone sat passively inhaling secondhand cigarrette smoke and found a music store titled: "Good Vibrations-Everything Is Real." Shrugging, I bought a Boney M CD to remind me of the driver, who'd cycled the song "Daddy Cool" on his van radio throughout our whole tour. It's a really horrible CD and has nothing to do with Sri Lanka. But so it went.

Our flight back to Chennai was like our flight to Sri Lanka, only in reverse. We sat through another colossal delay, that got us onto the plane at about 4 a.m., only to be woken up by the shadiest landing of aircraft I have EVER experienced. Even before sunup, the Chennai airport was a rainy, flooded, cacaphonous mess. But it was something we knew. Climbing into a black sedan, we slapped at invisible mosquitoes and sniffed at the deathlike scent all the way home. The sun was just rising as Melanie and I returned to our apartment. The same guards were there in their wifebeaters, eyeing us in all our disarray and saying nothing. But they smiled, and we felt that we were home.

Would India have felt as Sri Lanka had, if we'd only been here for three days as well? Or rather, would we have felt as empty in India as we had in Sri Lanka? I'm glad I'll never know.

8.13: 우리 어머니 의 생일날!

젊고 아름다운 내 어머니 에게,

생일 축하 합니다!!!

건강 잘 지키고 운전조심하고 고기 다시 잡스시고 재발 오래, 오래 사르세요!

엄마를 많이 피료하고 크개 사랑 하는 네 딸 지아 로부터.

지은이 하고 Prague 에서 나없이 즐긴 모습...짜증나!

കേരള - Kerala, God's Own Country

Aug. 8-10

Whichever god you kneel to, Kerala has earned her nickname well. [By the way, two fine books set here include The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Life of Pi by Yann Martel...thanks for the reminder, Thuba.]

After the wonderful Chennai Summer Celebration hosted at The Great Kabab Factory compliments of our school, Mel, Jeevika, and I trained it into Ailleppy, a watery town on the southern end of the state.

At last, the madness of triple bunking is somewhat captured! Did I say upper was the best? I lied! I'ts all about the middle.
There, we were greeted with a motley throng of young boys carrying Olympics memorabilia. It was 8-8-08, the kickoff to the Beijing Games (I'm rooting for U.S.A. and R.O.K., not necessarily in that order)!

THEY EAT MEAT HERE
After checking into the Marina Rosh Inn, we were rowed out to a traditional houseboat for a spirited ride that debunked Kerala's renown as the "Hawai'i of India" and replaced it in my mind as the Bayou of India.





Crumbling, mossy steps that led straight to the dark water, ghostly boats hovering along the waterways, fishermen balancing like phantoms on their slivers of canoes, men in white holding black umbrellas against the sun,

mysterious birds, and flat faced churches

gave a pleasant spookiness to the day on the water.

All the houses faced the green rice fields and had their backs to the dark waters.

So we were essentially cruising past people's back yards at some points, and the thwacking of laundry resounded in the foggy air as we moved along through the liquid maze.

I was having a bit too much fun at this point, so it became a joke (I think) that Mel or Jeeves would shove me into the water at any given opportunity. I wished they would have made good on it when I saw a man doing a crawl stroke, trilling with refreshment.

Go ahead, Melanie! Make my day!!
Well, we weren't the only ones having fun. There were plenty of other boats to keep us company.

Philo...SOPHY!

Double-deckers, too...

This dinghy was full of guys who were for some reason really, really, really excited to see us and went into an utter frenzy when I took a picture.

When it was time to eat, the crew anchored the boat and brought out two sleeping pads whose use became clear after this meal, which was even tastier than it looks...a crispy/tender fish fried in a tangy rub, jumbo-grained rice, and several curries redolent with coconut and whole kernels of peppercorn.

The chefs...

The food...

The Gluttons!!

At nightfall, we docked at the paddies and had some time on land to watch a sunset that looked like a sunrise.

Sourav, a nine-year-old embodiment of freedom. After taking Melanie for a walk into the fields, she invited him onto the boat. His eyes grew wide as saucers, and he gave us a "don't talk to strangers" speech and backed away smiling nervously. We had good intentions, obviously, but his parents taught him well!

After a late dinner,

we retreated to our floating bedrooms, which were fancy but stifling without AC.

We found ourselves wishing we were out on the cool deck with the crew, but were stuck running the painfully loud and rattling fan for as long as we could stand it. The last thing I remember is Melanie (who is normally always cold) saying,

"Do you think we could die from this?" Unable to respond, I drifted off into the deepest sleep, which if not death itself, was death's kinder cousin.

The next morning, the peace wore off as soon as our feet hit solid ground.

Rubber ducky! I wanted to stuff him into my backpack and flee...

I had stupidly, stupidly forgotten a printout of our tickets to the 56th annual Nehru Trophy Cup Snake Boat Race, and the guys at the Inn all insisted that I couldn't go without them. Whether or not this was true will never be known, because one of the guys threw me on the back of his motorcycle through the backstreets to a barely existing internet cafe where I extracted the papers with excruciating slowness from my email account.

A chaotic speedwalk into town brought us to an office where a man gave us our tickets and escorted us to a car (not before he bought us fresh coconuts - we must have looked thirsty) that delivered us to the Gold Section. There, in the outrageous heat and humidity, we downed our complimentary water and starch-dominant refreshment packs (banana bread, croissant, white-bread & onion sauce sandwich) from where we observed the cacophonous preparation for the event.

The Gold difference...a chair with your name on it. Lucky number 9!

Across the water was a crowd literally hanging from the rafters...and cops doing nothing

This is pixelated. Sorry.

Nuns just wanna have fun...

Then, the announcer shouted, "The heart of each spectator will beat in unison to the beat of the drums!" So began a series of races and ceremonies that gave us chills.

Guy in the yellow shirt: "You want some of this?"

Yow! The arms of champions...

The ladies represented, but didn't actually race. Maybe next year.
Exciting, isn't it? But sheer speed of these watercraft and coordination of these boatmen can only be understood on video (forthcoming).

Interlude: A spectator's foot and the longest toenails I have ever seen in person

After the first heat, I noticed that some of the victors were sitting even lower than usual in the water. Suddenly...disaster!!!

Good thing the Indian Navy's "Underwater Specialists" were on hand...

Why the long face, Wilmer?
It was hard to tear ourselves away from the water parades with its jumping flower bushes

and Keralan "mother gingers" (can anyone in the world tell me what these are called?) who whirled in hypnotizing circles.

But we did so just in time. The sky opened up with a deluge as soon as we got back to the Marina Rosh. The kind souls there let us collect our still-intact luggage - and use the bathroom one last time. They even booked a driver for us, and the poor guy took us in the downpour up through the blah scene of central Cochin (or Kochi, as it used to be called).

Before the first bridge to Cherai Beach on Vypeen island, a tire popped. Well, I never saw someone change a tire so fast, but I guess you get good at it when there's no shoulder on the road and trucks threaten to blindside you from every angle.

We arrived to Amaravathy Resorts in the dank, dark night. It was like The Shining in India...no one was around but a few young men and one ancient security officer who walked straight into an ornately patterened class door (I've seen this happen too many times in India, actually).

A few of the guys cooked us up some 10 o'clock supper, while a couple others quietly accompanied the recovering doorguard at the opposite end of the enormous, empty dining hall and watched a small television placed in front of a huge aquarium with a plastic T-Rex on it.

Sleep came quickly in our little hut, and morning revealed a stretch of beach right in front of our double balcony, where we enjoyed burritos of enriched toast and twig-sized rolls of butter with omlettes and tea.

This isn't even our double balcony. The whole place was ours.

The road to Cherai Beach

Mel and I took a dip in the water and basically freaked out the whole community.

Soon, we had some guy lecturing us about the monsoons and the lifeguard ventured over to shut him up. It's true, though, the lateral current was from some other world, and after a few paddles of bravado, we were ready to dry off.

The whirpool of the Arabian Sea

Plus, the waves were exploding with some brown organic matter (hopefully not the sort that we all fear), and by the end, I'm afraid my shirt made me look like I'd lost a paintball war that had been conducted using clumps of feces.

Blue and Gold. Go, bears!

An auto deposited us at the ferry which took us to Fort Cochin. Now this place was really strange; a total parallel of Savannah, Georgia. Page, you would have liked it. No Paula Deen, though!

While Melanie met up with her surfboard deliveryman (!) in a children's park (!), Jeevika and I ventured off to find a place to lay our bags down. After this, we stumbled upon the Dutch Cemetery where old traders lie under eroded stones. I hopped a jiggly fence that was closed because it was Sunday, and stood in the peace for a while. Hopefully, the traders won't come after me for this violation. I don't think they will; they seemed pretty mellow by the seabreeze.

When we went back to Melanie, she was being interviewed by some camera man. Meanwhile, some fishermen across the street were working at their famous Chinese nets, and beckoned wildly to us. So of course we went!!!

This is how it works: every two minutes, the huge net is lowered into the water, then pulled back up through a network of ropes and rocks. Jeevika and I tried pulling our weight...

And held gasping fish in our hands...

Along the port were all these goodies, from which we chose our lunch.

Our picks were hastily hurled into a bright plastic bag, and placed into the hands of a man who said,

"Cook!?" and trotted towards a stand in the alleyway where we consumed our catfish, prawn, and other unknown species under plastic umbrellas while a sudden rain hammered down just beyond our faces.

When Jeevika took off for her earlier train to Bangalore, and Melanie and I decided to try our luck alone.

I found a good, honest driver who took me on an adventure to the spice port of Jew Town. Since it was Sunday, many of the places were shut down,

but I took a long walk anyway,

and found a delightful shop of perfume oils where Jaishy showed me fragrances ranging from the commercial to the pedestrian to the medicinal to the unique.

After scores of scents had been dripped onto my hands and forearms with glass wands, I of course favored the local specials of the Kerala Flower, Idalys, and Kashmiri Mountain Flower. I even bargained her down, the gentle girl!! I didn't mean to get such a steal, and skipped out of the glassy boutique with three glass vials glowing in a velvet pouch.

The auto driver found me and urged me into a huge furniture and silk emporium. Wasn't really my bag, but a lady led me up five stories of scratchy, burlap-covered stairs to a roof that offered a 360-degree view of the city. Spying empty soda bottles, I asked for one and was told to wait. About 45 minutes later, I hardly cared when she hadn't shown up. Reluctantly, I went back indoors. All the lights were shut off. CREEPY! Swatting visions of evil mannequins, boogeymen, and living furniture, I ran down all five floors and out the the street, where automan was waiting faithfully.

Apparently, that just wasn't creepy enough for me, because I followed him up to some attic where a group of women were sorting all kinds of spices. One girl led me to an inner room, but not before she pointed at my back several times and said earnestly,

"Ma'am! Ma'am! Schoolpack, ma'am...Schoolpack."

Here is my damn school pack (accompanying me in Mysore).

Shut up, I love it. But for some reason, it seems to confuse/entertain the Indian people NO END! I am always getting comments on it, as if I should do something about it, but I'm not sure what.

Anyway, Spice Girl started whipping out blazing cups of tea, and as I sipped merrily, I realized that she could totally drug me if she felt like it. Casting my eyes heavenward at the thought, I saw a shrine to Jesus and decided, Christ, I'd take my chances.

So I drank a repertoire of Kerala-grown herbs and walked out with 700 grams for my mom. That's right, Mom, you're going to get some tea when I come home!

Next was Mattancherry (Dutch Palace). SUNDAY struck again...it was completely closed, so its ancient paintings remained a secret from my eyes. I was semi-placated by a tranquil Hindu temple, but my non-Hindu self wasn't allowed in there, either.

Luckily, it was now approaching time to meet Mel at the train station, so there I went. On the way, a man in another auto shouted jovially in Malayalam to the driver.

"Your friend?" I asked.

"Yes, yes...my neighbor, my friend, my partner!" The driver chirped, and the non-complicated way he said it made me feel warm inside even as the bone-chilling rain started pouring again. I dodged into an internet cafe across the Ernakulum Town railway station and enjoyed a soda while catching up on some personal emails (because I NEVER do that at work!).

Melanie was at the station in the waiting room. She read an abandoned book of mine, and I wrote a letter. I also showered...would you believe that all stations here have showers? They're not lined with marble, but good enough to kiss hotels goodbye for solo travels!!

Our train kept being delayed in five minute intervals, and the final time it was delayed, I asked if I could change the time on this chalkboard.

Laughing, the men yielded and handed me The Chalk - oh, how my soul was filled with a first grader's thrill again as I squeaked out the 5-5 on the slate!

The train came, and we started the long amble to our coach. But a piercing whistle rang out too soon, and immediately, the beast of machinery was MOVING at a good clip...so Melanie with her six foot board in a seven-foot aluminum body bag and me with my SCHOOL PACK and guitar jumped onto a moving train. This feat of desperation is only glamorous in retrospect...at the time, we were pretty scared.

It was an ordeal and a half for Mel to get her board up to the top bunk, what with every single passenger suddenly wanting to walk up and down the corridor to do god-knows-what. But soon, it was done, and we were homeward bound.

In the morning, a black sedan that looked like a hearse brought us back to the Garden City Apartments. Our driver had the rattly cough of someone plagued by consumption. He hawked globs of phlegm out the window, and I felt a little bit weak. We were back in Chennai, all right.

IRPS Summer Celebration in Chennai

The blurb below was sent to IRPS (my school).

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Date: Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 12:30 p.m.

Location:

The Great Kabab Factory
Radisson G.R.T. Hotel
#531 G.S.T. Road
St. Thomas Mount, Chennai 600 016
INDIA
In Attendance:
Tim Fox ‘07
Jeevika Chhatwal ‘09
Jia H. Jung ’09, PIASO President & Schoepflin Fellow
Melanie McCutchan ’09, Dean’s Fellow
Mira Mendoza ‘09
Regretfully Absent:
Professor Jessica Wallack
Anjali Dharan ‘08
Jordan Van Rijn ‘08
Anand Mishra ‘09

The Occasion:
On Thursday, August 7th, five members of the IRPS family dodged the oven-hot Chennai bustle and ducked into The Great Kabab Factory at the Radisson G.R.T. Hotel.

With Mira

The respected venue is located in St. Thomas Mount, a hillock established in the Portuguese influence and named after an apostle of Christ. Today, the radius surrounding the 300 foot mount is a necklace of gleaming hotels and old churches strung along uncharacteristically clean, wide roads. Stately palm trees guard the whole scene and offer their green shade as oasis from the hottest of days.

Must love chandeliers

Here, an intimate crew gathered to share their internship and professional experiences. For the ’09-ers, the afternoon provided a great opportunity just to catch up on Life After First Year:

The "Niners": Me, Jeeves, Mira, Mel

Jeevika was glowing from an internship she had just completed with UNICEF in Delhi. Mira had tales to tell from her recent days of field research in the rural crannies of Madhya Pradesh. Schoepflin Fellow Jia and Dean’s Fellow Melanie were glad for the presence of busy bee Tim Fox, to whom they can thank for their internships at the Centre for Development Finance and the Institute for Financial Management and Research Trust. Tim himself is IFMR Trust’s Entrepreneur in Residence; he is working to expedite low-carbon technology in low-income rural communities through sales of carbon credits.

With Tim Fox

Those we missed were recent graduates Anjali and Jordan, who were waylaid by training sessions for exciting new jobs in India. Former IRPS Professor Jessica Wallack was at home with her newborn son. Anand was joyfully holding down the fort with his work at IGCC on our very own IRPS campus.

As miniature as the meeting may have been, it proved to be a grand affair with food to match.

Mel and her palette of chutneys

Together, this handful of guests put away enough carnivorous cuisine to fill even the bellies of those who could not be with us.

See this: SEAFOOD!

Our digestive tracts were witness to spicy lamb pancakes, tender herb-adorned chicken, crispy drumsticks, defenseless soft-shelled crab, and giant prawns all rolled up in buttery roti and washed down with sweet pineapple juice, almond-rich ghee, and Himalayan water!

The ghee that gave us glee

The grand finale was an overture of decadent desserts, which glistened with nectar and left us sipping coffee to ward off inevitable sleep.

The round things are spheres of sweet CHEESE!

Thank you, Nurit Mandel and IRPS Career Services, for making this union possible! Hopefully, this event will serve as the harbinger of many future meetings in this great, quasi-Pacific subcontinent.

The IRPS family, Chennai

Summer '08