Tell me, what do the words “Mother India” conjure up for you?  Do you see Mother Teresa’s Calcutta everywhere in your minds eye?  Do you envision beggars crowding the streets, with their arms outstretched to you? 

 

I have just returned from my first visit to India. The vision of the beauty that is India is still there when I close my eyes.  Still, I can see the women dressed in richly colored saris walking bare foot down the roads with the grace of Queen Nefertiti.  I see the men wearing their longis, a single piece of cloth tied around their waist.  They are constantly wrapping and unwrapping, tying and untying the cloth that is their everyday garment.

 

I found that going to India is like having a child.  There is nothing that anyone can do to prepare you to be a witness to the beauty and the poverty, the visceral experience that is India.   A friend of mine came closest when he told me that everywhere around me people would want something from me.  Knowing that freed me from the shock of responsibility that I may have felt and allowed me to enjoy the beauty that surrounded me.

 

I was afraid of being overwhelmed by the poverty but I found myself able to simply accept it. I have never before seen myself as so apart, so voyeuristic.  How could I be anything else in a country where I could never blend in and become a part of the masses?   It is the difference between the empathic and the sympathetic, acceptance and the illusion of control. I hired drivers on different parts of the journey and met up with friends most evenings.  As a blonde female walking alone through the streets carrying two cameras, I became the center of attention.  I had to adjust the vision of my photography to reflect the intrusion of my presence that became a part of the tableau. Each time I walked alone there were men around me watching, waiting to see what I would do.  I was very aware of their attention, of them being too close, feeling that they were intentionally intruding into my space, testing my limits.  Though I felt in no way threatened at any time, it was a constant awareness.

 

I don’t know how many times people asked me to take their pictures.  I have countless pictures of families, of mothers holding children, of pilgrims.  Most times I willingly obliged and took the pictures when they were requested.  At the Shree Meenakshi Temple in Madurai I was asked dozens of times to pose with people so that they could take my photo.  I was told that they would hang these pictures of their “American friend” in a place of honor in their houses.  I smiled each time full of the amusement of having the roles reversed and of becoming the subject instead of the creator.

 

I was awestruck on a daily basis by the beauty, the color, the joy in life, and the aesthetic.  I saw pictures everywhere.  There were themes to the days.  Days of small disasters like my sunglasses falling from the neck of my T-shirt into the Turkish Toilet.  Just before they hit the white porcelain, I wondered if I would dare to pick them up out of the urinal.  I looked down and in that instant I heard them hit the porcelain and saw them shoot down the hole.  End of options. One night, a cockroach as big as a mouse was scuttling noisily along the floorboards of my room.  The stone cutters that I photographed the day before asked if I had been there previously.  They didn't recognize me because I had changed clothes.  There was the riptide of the Arabian Sea that I refused to believe.  I am still emptying the sand from my pockets. 

 

Who would think that figuring out how to turn off a light in a hotel room could become a minor miracle?  One night I couldn’t find the switch and called the front office.  They sent two men over to help me.  One took off his shoes, climbed up on a shelf and pushed back some ceiling tiles.  He unscrewed the light bulb and carried it away.  As soon as they left, I began laughing until it hurt so much that I couldn’t stand up.  Welcome to the third world.

 

The cautionary words of my friend helped me frame many replies:

 

When Mani, my driver told me that his wife didn’t understand him and that he needed 50,000 rupees because his house was missing some walls I was able to tell him “These things take time” without missing a beat. 

 

When Rajagopal took me to the Cauvery River and as we looked out at a mass of men and women bathing in the river he told me “I don’t date Indian girls anymore because my girlfriend cheated on me.”  I looked around, palms up in a gesture of supplication and told him “I don’t know what to tell you.”  How subtle these men can be, I may never know.

 

 

 

I love the strangeness of the place.  The Indian phraseology, the circular logic of theirs signs:

 

Hindustani Lubricants

Children's’ Trust Hospital   (Can trust ever be repaired or repaid?)

King A Mong Cements

Central Poultry Training Institute

Provisional Air Flights

Only stop shop for delicious desires

Go slow, accident-prone zone

Kingfisher - a thrilling chill

Vigilance and anti corruption bureau

Wheels aligned by Mamrare, Wheel Master

Oceanic Shrimping Limited

Life is too wonderful to be spent worrying (a billboard in Chennai)

Dress shirts to stir the devil in you.

 

I often was perplexed by the wit and disdain of fellow travelers:

 

“Dead men are not known for paddling snake boats.”

 

 

A woman dressed in virginal white from her pith helmet to her sneakers, dewy with perspiration told me, “Don’t talk to THEM if you can help it.”  Us and them, that eternal struggle that is mans' alone.

 

Intolerance.  I found myself intolerant of intolerance.  Intolerant of fellow travelers who are disrespectful of a culture or people merely because they don't understand it.  Intolerant of people who travel to a country that they seemingly hold in great disdain merely so that they can say that they have been there.

 

India is a sensory experience.  I replay the movie of the vision of sensual beauty she seductively reveals. I don’t know if I have a greater tolerance, understanding, or wisdom.  Can there ever be too much? As I unwound the threads of my trip, as I repacked my clothes and journeyed back home through the airports that had been my passageway to India, I remembered the last weeks as though no time has passed.  The contents of my suitcase are a reminder of weeks spent exploring a new place.  Retracing the steps of my journey and heading back home I was reminded of how exciting it is to see something for the very first time.

 

I love to wander.  To see what is around the next turn in the road.  I often have a difficult time sleeping in new places because of the excitement and wonderment of what discoveries lay ahead.  My first night in Mumbai (Bombay) was one of those typically sleepless nights.  The sensory stimulations that are India were chasing each other through my thoughts:   the hot and humid haze of pollution that hangs about in the air like a broth that a cook has distilled to the very essence of its ingredients.  The smell of hot asphalt and  the pockets of the smell of human and animal excrement are a constant assault on the senses until you become reconciled to them.

 

Arriving in Bombay feels like being dropped into another world.  The honking of the cars is unending.  Throngs of people push against each other and surround the airport. There are beggars wherever there is the hope of finding a tourist.  Some reach out to touch you, others hold their stomachs or beseech you with their gaze as they hold their outstretched palms to you.  Children will call you mama and ask for money.  Cardboard homes line the road from the airport into the city.  Once, I was helped into the airport with my bags by two men who insisted that they had a shortcut through the crowds.  I watched as they began to disappear into the throng of people and only upon my firm insistence did they enter the terminal.

 

After sunset I walked from my room at the Taj Majal Hotel of Mumbai to the Gateway to India, a grand old colonialist archway looking out to the Arabian Sea.  It is a long ago territorial claim by the British of their sovereignty.  This was my first ever view of the Arabian Sea.  Where was Scherazade?  I learned to cross streets very cautiously.  While auto rickshaws make noise the bicycle rickshaws travel in stealth silence.  I looked down while walking in the taxi lane across the street from the Taj Majal Hotel and saw a young child of perhaps two or three asleep on the pavement.  He was wearing only a dirty yellow long sleeved shirt and using a concrete parking barrier as his pillow.  Each day I reminded myself there but for an accident of birth, there but for the grace of the gods go I.

 

I found myself constantly confronted with the deficiency of my knowledge of the complexities of the culture and politics of India.  Each day I was reminded that my impressions were fueled principally by Western media and many volumes of colonial literature. Why for example was I unaware that the Indian Government had changed the British bestowed Anglican names of many of its cities to Indian names?  How could I not know that Bombay was now known as Mumbai?  It often caused me to wonder on a daily basis if they would ever exorcise a colonial power that was so tightly woven into the fabric of their society.  For all of the temples that were desecrated, for all of the rulers who were murderously overthrown and all of the thousands of years of culture that they attempted to eviscerate, there are still so many colonialist footprints that have become a part of India.

 

Very quickly I learned to abandon my western logic.  Why ask why?  At the Taj Majal Hotel of Mumbai you may not order a double Johnny Walker however, you may order a double Indian Scotch.  Imported goods of any sort are prohibitively expense and just as rare.  Please imagine my chagrin when I realized that I had neglected to bring my swimsuit.  The only ones that I found were in "resort" hotels and I soon abandoned any hope of finding something acceptable.

 

It is no exaggeration to say that India is a sea of humanity, a mass of people.  It seemed that everywhere that I went there were throngs of people pressing against me.  There is no such thing as privacy.  Anywhere that you may go seeking solitude, there is another person.  Life is a contact sport.  If you enjoy the hubbub of humanity, of being a part of the pushing and jostling, of being visually assaulted by the brilliance of the color palette, of being subsumed within an ancient culture, you will find a place in your heart for India and her people.

 

From Mumbai I ventured south to Kochi (Cochin), a small seaside town in the state of Kerala.  Kerala is a state that is known for its high literacy rate and its matriarchal society.  It was a pleasant experience to leave the crowds behind and to wander about in a smaller town.  I hired a driver named Mani and explored some of the surrounding neighborhoods.  At the time I wrote of them as "slums of contentment" but later I came to realize that I was still viewing things within the limitations of my own prejudices.  The streets that I wandered, the neighborhoods that I explored were impoverished only by my own view of them.

 

The Taj Malabar Hotel in Kochi is where I had the best auyverdic massage of my life.  It was the first ever symmetrical massage that I have experienced.  I arrived at the pool and sat down at the welcome desk staffed by two women.  They asked "your good name please," filled out some paperwork and showed me into the dimly lit massage room.  One wall had a wooden shelf that was full of brown bottles of many different kinds of auyervedic oils.  In the center of the room was a long and flat wooden table that was a beautiful dark brown.  The patina was no doubt from years of massages given and received here.  I disrobed and lay on the table.  Two women worked in complete tandem massaging my body, generously using their oils for over an hour.

 

Each time that I travel I am always impressed by how similar we all are.  A smile is universal and I have discovered that women from everywhere share the same concerns.  We are all mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends and wives.  We all share the common concerns and bonds that these responsibilities bring.  We talked and laughed as they massaged my body and somehow kept me from slip sliding off of the wooden table.  From the soles of my feet to the top of my scalp, they erased every care that I had brought in with me.  From the massage table they led me to a shower room where I was provided with some handmade sandalwood soap.  I showered and watched as the red oil tinted water swirled down the drain.  I left a generous tip and my unending gratitude.  I remember writing in their guest book words of the most superlative praise.  At every opportunity I got another massage.  Nothing ever measured up to the auyervedic Nirvana that I found in Kochi.

 

I awoke one night in my hotel in Kochi to hear what I feared was the scuttling of a mouse along the baseboards of the room.  I could hear him gnawing on something.  I was certain that he was eating the Edam cheese that I had brought with me from Amsterdam.  What else would a mouse want?  All things considered, there are truly some conflicts that I would prefer to avoid and confronting a mouse in a hotel room while standing in my bare feet is one of them.  I decided that I would just let the mouse go on and scuttle his way out of my room.  The strategy would have worked but for the fact that the mouse kept traveling the baseboards along the wall which my bed was against.  Finally, after a number of round trips I couldn’t stand it any longer.  I turned on the lights to assess the damage.  My beautiful wax encased round of Edam cheese was untouched but the plate of cookies that was covered in saran wrap had been nibbled on.  Very small holes were torn through the saran wrap and tiny bites had been taken from the cookies.  I didn’t know that there were such diminutive mice.  Perplexed, I walked into the bathroom and found the culprit, a cockroach as large as a mouse was lying on his back with his legs flailing in the air.  Unable to squash such a large and potentially messy creature in the middle of the night, I left him there to his own devices.  I am not sure if it was the saran wrap that he ate or spending the night on his back, but come morning all that remained of the cockroach was his lifeless shell of a  body.

 

There is a sensual languor to the beautiful rhythms of life in the south of India. In the south the men wear a longi, a loincloth that is simple piece of homespun cloth that is tied around their waist.  This cloth is of varying lengths, from upper thigh to ankle length.  I often saw men walking down the road tying and untying, wrapping and unwrapping their longis.  A cloth of floor length was often gathered up and wrapped around the waist so that it would balloon out and cover the lower torso and upper thighs.  To my eyes, the sometimes continual fiddling with the longi seemed to be a sort of a meditation, an autoerotic male display.

 

The women of the south are wrapped in sinuous layers of cloth, most time exposing their beautiful midriff.  Softly rounded bellies, bejeweled toes, bangles on their arms, pierced ears and noses entranced me with their sensuality.

 

As a visitor, I try to be very respectful of my host countries customs.  Indian dress is very modest by Western standards.  Women do not show their legs.  At a minimum, shirts should have sleeves and not be low cut.  In the areas that are Muslim it is preferred that women completely cover their legs and arms.   The men's stores were my favorite place to shop for  appropriate shirts.  They have very fine cottons and I learned to keep one of these large and comfortable shirts with me to wear as an additional cover up.

 

As a western woman I am used to traveling alone.  This is certainly not the norm in India.  Most of the time I felt that I was viewed as a curiosity, like a monkey let loose in the zoo.  Only once, in a Muslim enclave outside of Kumarakom, did I feel unwelcome.  It was my sense from the angry glances that I received from the men in the market place that I should not be there, alone.

 

If it's Tuesday it must be Trivandrum.  The road to Trivandrum from Kochi winds along the Malabar Coast that is known around the world for its pepper and other spices.  The hills seem to be carpeted in an impressionist's green with the tea and spices that are cultivated in this region.  There are many shops that sell the fragrant spices that are treasured around the world.  Steps cut into the red earth of the hillsides have been worn down by generations of farmers.

 

 As I headed to Trivandrum I was on my way to visit the last ever Elephant Festival, which I thought was going to be a parade of elephants. Seeing elephants had become fairly commonplace by now.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Often they had chains around their necks and were led around like big dogs.  I saw people bathing their elephants in the ditches along the side of the road, elephants eating bananas in front of teashops.

 

I am still not over the "elephant parade."  I was instantly pulled into the drama of the brightly decorated caparisoned elephants.  It was supposed to be the last ever such spectacle and I can tell you why.  For hours the elephants stand in place while musicians blow horns and beat on drums.  There is a sameness that makes you begin wonder what you are missing in this groove that seems to skip back to its beginning after just a few phrases.  The sultry heat along with the auditory repetition was a classic example of aversion therapy.   It still gives me chills just to remember it.   And I am still grateful to the elephant handler who smacked me with his stick.  While photographing the elephants, I did not realize that I was so close that one of them was ready to step on me.  Even if he had spoken English, I probably wouldn't have heard his warning.

 

Elephants have very intelligent eyes and seem to take in all that goes on around them.  I am certain that one particular elephant had a strong dislike for me.  I could tell by the way that he squinted his eyes when he looked at me.   I made sure to keep my distance from him.  At the end of the event, as the elephants paraded out, two of the handlers riding on top fell off of their elephants and had to be carried out.  It is still puzzling to me, who were these men who seemed to fall so easily off of these great lumbering beasts?    Why would they be astride such an animal if their position was so precarious?

.

 

Sometimes, I had the feeling of never quite knowing where I was.  Could I ever have envisioned a place where people chip away at boulders all day to make gravel for roads? How could I classify this place where I was on a temporary visa, this place called India?  In conversations with my driver Ramesh and other local people I kept hearing about "the black people."  I just didn't get it.  Yes, there were differences in complexion, but I didn't see whoever it was they were talking about.  I kept at it; kept trying to understand  and then one day we were stopped in a insane throng of people and government officials at a border crossing.  There were snaking lines of men, lines held in place by flimsy wooden barriers.  They were standing patiently  as if they were waiting in a line for a ride at an amusement park.  All of these men were dressed in black pants and long sleeved black shirts.  These were "the black people." 

 

Ramesh was one of my windows to India.  As he drove me around the country, he and his wife were expecting their first child.  I had been enticed to India by a friend who was born and raised in Bombay.  She has spent the second part of her life in Houston.  Who better to show me the India that would be unavailable to an outsider?  Very quickly though, I found that my view of India while traveling with her would be limited to her own experience within the culture.    She came from a wealthy Sikh family could not understand my desire to wander to streets and the markets, to meet people, to explore.  Somewhat reluctantly, she assisted me in engaging a driver from a reputable company.  She warned him that I wander off and away we went.

 

I always sat in the front seat with him so that I could see everything that was going on.  He quickly became attuned to my eye.  We were constantly pulling off the road so that I could photograph.  Often, he would anticipate my desires.  We went on detours that I couldn't find on the maps.  It sometimes felt as though he had managed to become my eyes.  He took me to places that brought me to tears of joy with their sublime beauty.

 

Mad, mad, Madurai is a bustling city packed with pilgrims, bullock carts and rickshaw wallahs.  The term "wallah" means that it is your trade.  I for instance am a photographer wallah.  The south of India is full of ancient temples and Madurai was to be my first sighting of them. I had arrived in Madurai late the previous evening at the Taj Garden Retreat, which is perched in the hills above Madurai.  The red tiled veranda looks over the city and the terraced hotel gardens.  It is a wonderful place to have a fresh lime soda (soda water, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup if desired) or a more spirited libation. 

 

I was unprepared for the sights and sounds of the morning. The Pongal Festival was in progress and the exotic sounds of the music drifted up to my hotel. Ramesh picked me up in the morning and we left my perch above the city. As we drove down into the city, we were engulfed in a throng of carts, rickshaws, buses and people.  We all seemed to share a common destination, the Shree Meenakshi Temple.  I had glimpses of the brightly colored temple as we wound our way through the streets. Krishna blue, green, yellow and a rainbow of colors decorated this living place of worship.  Once again, I found myself drawn into a vortex of color.  As I got out of the car Ramesh asked me to leave my shoes there.  I knew that I couldn't wear my shoes into the temple, but I was stubbornly determined to keep them on as long as possible.  There was no way that I would  consider walking the streets in my bare feet.  Ever patient Ramesh took me to the shoe kiosk outside the temple where I left my shoes.  We agreed to meet at the gate and I wandered into another world.

 

My first impressions were competing with each other.  The visual and the tactile: The slippery feel of the black griminess of the temple stones on my feet,  the incense burning in the dark recesses and the invisible insects that kept biting my bare feet.  There were brightly painted deities,  temples rose endlessly into the sky and  temple monkeys that made their home high above human habitation amongst the painted temple deities.  There were  black people everywhere. Temple elephants were blessing the pilgrims with the tip of their trunk in exchange for a few rupees.  Time stood still as I explored something that I could not have conceived in my wildest imaginings.  I was pleasantly agog, a stranger in a strange land.

 

It was at this temple where so many people asked to have their photograph taken with me.  My temple guide Krishnan told me that it was good luck and that the pictures would be framed and put in their living room.  Was I finally famous?

 

When I finally left, some hours later, Ramesh met me at the gate.  We walked to the shoe kiosk and when I didn't have the correct coinage in rupees, to his horror I overpaid.  From that time on, whenever we stopped at a vendor he would insist upon paying or I would have to assure him that I had the correct change.  I found myself in a dilemma at the kiosk.  What to do with these grimy feet and my clean shoes?  I ended up walking back to the car in bare feet and from then on my shoes stayed in the car. 

 

 

Driving through the country is not what you would expect.  Everywhere that you go, there are people.  In the more rural areas most of them are walking.  Many have bullock carts.  Cars often travel at night without their headlights on. They are constantly honking to warn the people and animals along the road of their presence.  Cows, dogs and other livestock lay about on the side of the road.  Often they are in the roadway but amazingly escape any harm.  Once while driving our car became engulfed in gasoline fumes.  Ramesh knew exactly what the problem was.  We pulled off the side of the road and he got out a new seal. While I alternately looked under the car at the leaking gasoline and the impending convergence of young men from the surrounding fields, he replaced the seal.  Before we were surrounded by a mass of curious onlookers, we were back on our way.

 

Rajgopal, my guide at the Srirangam Temple in Trichy spoke excellent English that he says he learned from television and tourists.  He offered to carry my backpack and in so doing transgressed the boundaries of propriety.  There are many layers of what is acceptable.  Jobs are very rigidly defined by caste tradition.  I learned this very quickly when Ramesh very tactfully but firmly returned the bag that I had asked him to carry.  I soon came to realize that when someone was willing to transgress their boundaries for you it was inevitable that they would ask you to transgress yours.  Rajgopal  took me to see the erotic art at the temple.  At the banks of the Cauvery River, the Ganges of the south, told me his sad lament about the "untrustworthiness" of Indian girls and upon parting gave me his "card."  I left with the impression that he may be the one who was unchaste.

 

After Srirangam I felt "temple weary."  We headed on towards Tanjore with a reluctant detour to the Darasuram temple.   All along the roads in the south women had piles of rice grass laying in the path of the cars. I was shocked when we ran over it the first time.  Ramesh explained that this is how the rice is separated from its hull.

 

To me, Darasuram in the most beautiful temple of all.  It is mostly denuded of the brightly colored painting, but that only serves to accentuate the delicate and intricate carvings on the black basalt stone.  The craftsmanship reminded me of pieces of Egyptian carving that I had seen from the tombs of the pharaohs.  The diffuse sunlight filtering through the columns was an epiphany of time arrested.  The day I was there was the celebration of the virgin.  Beautifully dressed young girls were celebrating with an outing to the temple.

 

 

On our drive to Pondicherry I remember the Coca Cola stand that looked as if it was many cardboard boxes pasted together, the whole of the building emblazoned over and over again with the red and white Coca Cola logo.  They had no Coca-Cola.  Apparently because of some disagreement that Coca-Cola and the Indian government had over the secrecy of the ingredients in their recipe.  Pepsi is now sold at the Coca-Cola shops.

 

Bathrooms were always a novelty.  Toilets were to be found in hotels and restaurants in the city and many tourist spots.  Turkish toilets (squatty potties), a hole in the ground with two footrests, were fairly common in homes, airports and other public venues.  In smaller towns and further off the beaten path a bathroom could be a gate that closes while you have privacy to pee in the gutter.   As a certain shoe company is so fond of saying, "just do it." 

 

On our drive to Pondicherry we ran into some of the worst infestations of mosquitoes that I have ever experienced.  At dusk we had stopped for a coconut milk and when we got back into the car the mosquitoes were swarming all around us.  I kept smashing clouds of them against the windshield with a rag.  They were biting me through my shirt, leaving blood stains as I squashed them. We drove very fast and opened the window to clear them out.  This seemed to help, but every time that we stopped we were inundated and had to perform the whole operation again.  I was grateful that I had taken the proscribed malaria pills.

 

Pondicherry has a French history.  To me it seemed like a town that had lost part of its soul.  Perhaps that is because the name is so romantic.  How could mortar and bricks in the unforgiving Indian sun be anything close to my expectations of cobbled streets full of quaint old buildings?  I stayed at the Ananda Inn.  I arrived there in the evening when the night life seemed to just about be entering a full tilt drunken revelry.  I was advised that it would not be safe to leave the hotel until morning due to carousing that seemed to surround the hotel.  I felt that I was in the middle of a drunken tilt a whirl contest.  I loved the carnival like sounds of the people and the sounds of the horns, the beeps, toots, squeaks, and honks of their conveyances.

 

The hotel had two restaurants, a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian.  With an hour wait at the non vegetarian restaurant I chose to have my meal at the vegetarian restaurant.  The food in the south of India is wonderfully aromatic with the spices that they cultivate.  In the south they have many types of bread that are made from rice.  I loved the spiciness of the food.  It wasn't long into the trip before I began to notice that my body had a strongly pungent smell.  I first became aware of it when I would enter my hotel room and smell the scent of another person.  I gradually realized that the foreign smell was not someone who had just left my room but myself.  The spices were coming out of my pores. 

 

I love the South Indian coffee.  It was the closest thing to espresso that I could find.  It is strongly brewed and then heated with milk and sugar.  It is always served in a metal cup.  It has a very rich taste, as though the sugar has almost caramelized.  A friend and I who kept running into each other had a standing joke.  Every time that we would have coffee together, they would remove my large coffee cup and replace it with a smaller version of his cup.  It was a constant amusement for both of us to try to surreptitiously engage the wait staff in making sure that the other person got the smaller cup. 

 

The cuisine there is as involved as any other in the world.  The tastes are  very specific.  Since there is a minimal use of fat and especially animal fats, foods eaten there seem to metabolize more efficiently.  There were days when I felt like I couldn't eat enough.  Climbing into rock forts and wandering through temples could be the dieter's dream vacation.

 

On the road to the Ashram in Pondicherry I noticed many effigies suspended on poles outside of houses that were under construction.  To me they appeared quite ominous but I was assured that they were only there to bring good luck to the new home.  Still, I am not sure.

 

My favorite thing in Pondi was the Sri Aurobindo Handmade Paper Factory.  The factory is owned by the Ashram and open to the public.  There are many buildings in this factory.  They grind up rags and other material to reshape it into large colorful sheets of paper.  I was surprised at how wet the process is.  Each building houses a different part of the process.  There is a sorting room, a grinding room, and a room to press out the paper.  There are drying rooms and clotheslines outdoors where the paper is hung out to dry.  Colorful sheets of paper wave in the breeze until they are dry enough to be stacked in the warehouse.  The clang clang of the presses and the grinding of the extruders and mixers underlies the sounds of the workers talking and has a soothing rhythm.  At the gift shop you can buy hand made stationery with pressed leaves, appointment books with rainbow swirled paper  and many other unimaginable things for just a few dollars.

 

Mahabalipuram.  I dare you to say it fast three times.  I still don't think that I can pronounce it correctly.  How many times did I try?  Another coastal town  that is home to smaller scale stone temples that are just a few stories tall.  Stone carving is a living art in this town and be sure to visit the Mayan Handicrafts store.  These stone cutters use chisels that they make on site in their own furnace.  They make carvings that will fit in the palm of your hand to sculptures that are larger than life.  They will ship all over the world.  If you look closely on the roads outside of Mahabalipuram you may notice people in the marshes harvesting salt.

 

I hate to say goodbye.  To me, it means that I may not pass this way again.   A journey is a lifetime and I will never forget my travels with Ramesh at  the wheel.  I remember my sense of the absurd when we had first begun our travels together.  We were on one of those roads through the country and I told him that I wanted to stop at next bathroom that we passed.  "Bathroom, bathroom?", he said quizzically. I remember wondering what in the world I had done to take off completely alone in a strange land where I was unable to communicate such a simple thing.   How was I going to explain this?  Somehow, we figured it out.  Just like the time I was trying to find out about where all the bulls were.  Cows were very commonplace but I never saw any bulls.  I couldn't help but wonder where they were.  Ramesh didn't understand the word "bull."  Finally, I explained that I wanted to know about the "man cows" and we were once more on common ground.

 

There were times when communication between us seemed effortless and others when it was exhausting.  Until this trip, I thought that I had a good ear for language but so often I found myself feeling completely tongue tied and deaf to the nuances of the sounds.  How frustrating it was to travel on to the next village and find that the words for please and thank you were no longer the same. 

 

I still do not know how to adequately thank Ramesh for being one of my windows to India.  As an eternal outsider, these were the only views possible to me.  Quickly we had established an  evening ritual of discussing our plans for the next day.  I would thank him for the day and we would shake hands before parting.  This was of course a transgression of boundaries on my part.  If there was a doorman at the hotel they wanted to be my intermediary.  It seemed absurd to me that we should not speak after we had spent all day together.  I don't know how many  days to realize that while I slept in comfort in an air-conditioned room, Ramesh was sleeping in the car.   I will always remember the kindness in his smiling face as we parted at Madras and I flew on to Bangalore.  Thank you Ramesh for sharing a part of your India with me.  Until we meet again I will remember your many kindness' and wish you and your family well.

 

Bangalore, the fifth largest city in India.  "One of the seven most high tech cities of the world with direct nonstop flights to and from San Jose, California," my Brahmin driver Prakash proudly told me.  In some ways, I felt that I hadn't left my hometown of Austin, Texas.  As I sat in the lobby of the Taj West End Hotel it looked as though at least half of us were from the states.  I even ran into a couple of high tech entrepreneurs from Austin in a local store.

 

Bangalore is a very westernized city with India pushing up against its outskirts.  Visit Deepam Silks and Sarees from some of the most beautiful scarves and ties to be found.  Navrathan Jewelers has so much beautiful gold jewelry that I found it completely overwhelming.  There is such a tremendous selection to view that it is impossible to spend a brief amount of time there.  Driving just outside of the city you will see bears wearing muzzles being led along on leashes.  Tribes of monkeys run across the roads and play in the dappled shade of the trees.  Cobra mounds are everywhere to be seen.

 

One morning I was wandering about and heard live music being played.  I headed towards it and found a car festooned in garlands of flowers.  I supposed that it was a wedding.  I found someone who spoke enough English to understand me and they took me to the brother of the groom.   In his perfect English he told me that he lived in San Jose California and invited me to stay and photograph the wedding along with the other five photographers who were jostling for position in front of the wedding dais.

 

A Hindu wedding ceremony is very colorful and full of symbolism.  The bride sits on the dais with oil lamps burning and many offerings of food, spices and other precious things.  She is surrounded by a curtain of tinsel and garlands made of yellow marigolds.  The groom's feet are anointed by the priests.  There are many family members up on the dais as a part of the wedding party: women, children and finally the bride and groom.  Towards the end of the ceremony the bride and the groom stand side by side.  The priest takes the small finger of each and delicately joins them together with a piece of straw.  The coattail of the groom and the shawl of the bride's dress are also tied together.  These delicate gestures symbolize the lifelong union of this man and woman.  Anyone who has a camera is invited to join in the photo opportunity.  It is appreciated that all of these people are recording the wedding couple's big day even though there is a constant friendly competition to get the best camera position in front of the newlyweds.

 

Arranged marriages are the norm in India and this was the first time that the bride and groom had met.  Once again, so called western sensibilities must be abandoned.  In the well ordered social hierarchy that is India, this system seems to work for the most part.  My friend from Bombay did not have an arranged marriage because her parents wisely recognized that with her strong will, she would rebel against it completely.  However, all of her other brothers and sisters did have arranged marriages and are contentedly happy.

 

Sadly, my stay in Bangalore was the final stop in my travels in India.  As I boarded the plane from Bangalore to Bombay and prepared for my journey home I made a mental list of the things that I would not miss upon leaving India.  I could think of only three things: To be called "madam" by the cacophony of shop keepers wanting to show me their wares, to be touched by a beggar, to be the center of attention.

 

I wouldn't presume to tell you where to go or what to see in India.  There is an adventure around every corner.  She is full of beautiful beaches, temples, people and life.   She is the enigma of what we so condescendingly call a third world country.  She is an ancient culture steeped in tradition. 

 

The one thing that I will tell you is that everywhere you go someone will want something from you.  We are wealthy by comparison.  You will be treated with great respect and curiosity and as a potential benefactor.  If you can assume the responsibility of the burden of wealth then you too will be able to see the beauty of this place called India.