Firstly, sincere apologies to anyone who reads this for not getting the lj-cuts in the previous entry right first time. I did try to correct them but the town’s dial-up connection had died, along with my retinae, just as I was about to submit the updated entry.

The lj-cut ‘abdicating my divinity’ hides a long and probably tedious examination of gender roles and treatment of guests here. You have been warned.

yesterday once more (Sunday 25th)
Yesterday contined with a meal at a local restaurant: masala dosa and black tea for Rs12. You can do the maths. I wonder how much the workers make per hour?

Ajeesh then drove us back towards his house. At the place where he parks his car (about 500m from his house but just before the slop gets impossible for the car), we met some of his friends who live about in a nearby ‘suburb’, 100 or so metres vertically above his house and about 1km of jeep-rutted track away. They have a small chai-shop that seems to fulfil the functions of a UK pub – apart from selling alcohol.

One of them is a self-taught electronic engineer. He introduced me to the sound-system he’s cobbled together and we bounced around his house. It’s a shame to see his skills going to waste: he wants to be a fully-fledged hardware engineer – you can guess why it hasn’t yet happened.

happiness?
It may seem that I’m perpetually upset and not enjoying myself here. I think there’s bias in the reporting. On the whole I am very much enjoying my time here. Every now and then I get a bit miserable, especially when I lose things or get too tired to want to be here, but every now and then, something happens to make me say to myself ‘shut up moaning, you pampered so-and-so’ or I see again some of Kerala’s beauty and the enjoyment restarts. I’ve been invited to stay indefinitely and offered, even encouraged to make a life here. It’s tempting but there are too many people and things in the UK I’d miss.

I think the friendships I’ve made here will continue: I hope they can be strengthened by some sort of fair/ethical trade set-up. Anyone out there interested in buying coffee, tea, vanilla, cardomom, jaggery, etc from here. I’ve enjoyed the food immensely here and would like others to have the chance to do so.

yesterday once more (Sunday 25th) continued
Back at the house, another food-gasm courtesy of Jaya:

• fat-grained rice still in its cooking water
• chatni: grated coconut, mango, onion, mustard seed, all mashed together
• part-caramelised onion, steamed with sliced green beans, chilli and slightly fried grated coconut

</lj-cut)

movie mayhem (Saturday 26th)
After finally getting to wash my clothes this morning, Ajeesh drove me, Jaya, his mum and niece into town to watch another movie. This was filmed in Idukki district and appeared to be about a carpenter who shelters a woman from unjust legal penalties by getting her to dress up as a bloke and become his apprentice. The song-and-dance piece where she acts as a bloke trying to dance a “normal woman’s movie dance” were hysterical.

I lost interest when she put her (own) clothes back on and the inevitable matching happened. However my interest perked up again when the woman (by now still female but appearing to have gotten through 2 tragic marriages [I’m sure appearances are deceptive here] then fell in love with the carpenter. During the interval (movies here tend to last over 2 hours), I fell about laughing again to a techno version of Twinkle, twinkle, little star. I’m sure I’m going to have to explain my amusement to Ajeesh and co later.

In another hysterical piece, she pressed her suit towards him while he politely tried to evade her clutches and escape. Eventually he returned her love and they pedalled off into the sunset. The part I enjoyed most was when the projectionist fell asleep and delayed a reel-change for 5 minutes: the audience’s cat-calls have been recorded for posterity.

abdicating my divinity
I don’t care who is looking over my shoulder as I key this. If you have the nerve to pick up my diary or look over my shoulder when I’m keying in my banking password, don’t be upset by what you read here.

There’s a bloody great caveat about my fondness for Kerala. People have been wonderfully friendly and welcoming (if far too nosey) so it may seem unfair to criticise but I think it’s right to record and report my complete impression.

The caveat is that, outside of restaurants and chair-stalls, if a woman is fit and available, she’ll do ALL the domestic work. A man won’t even take his dirty dishes to the sink and will drop (for example) his cigarette-packet wrapper on the floor and expect a wife, sister or mother to sweep up after him.

I don’t know if men living on their own don’t do any (I have no experience of this to report) and I know they’re capable of doing it. However, I’ve been told that domestic work is basically a woman’s role and that it is ‘balanced’ by men’s work in the fields, etc.

I might be able to accept this if I didn’t see evidence of lack of balance: women certainly do work in men’s ‘province’. I’ve not seen a single man return the favour. For example, many women work in fields, carry huge loads of wood barefoot up extreme slopes and labour on roads. I don’t know who does the domestic duties in their houses but I’d be prepared to bet the cost of my next week’s food that it isn’t their husbands.

I know that I’ve seen a statistically insignificant part of Kerala and that by reporting what I’ve seen here, I’m only paying lip-service to this issue. So far I’ve done nothing significant to balance the amount of work that Jaya has done for me and I’m struggling to think how I can. The only route seems to be to find a job for Ajeesh so that he can pay her dowry to her fiance’s family and so Jaya and her fiance can actually marry.

I need to acknowledge that Ajeesh has spent days centred on my wishes and needs too and that I have so far been unable to give back to my satisfaction. However I think there’s more scope for doing so in his case.

As for the many people to whom he’s introduced me, especially all the women who have made tea or prepared delicious food and served me with welcoming smiles until I near explosion, then taken away dirty dishes and refused to let me do anything in return, I have no idea yet how to restore the balance but I’m thinking about it!

I know I’m mixing my experiences as a guest and as a (western) male into this report: this is inevitable because there’s only one of me. (Aren’t you glad?) The attitude here seems to be that ‘a guest is God’. I feel a large need to abdicate from this divinity. Quite apart from the tedious of disappearing in a puff of logic because I won’t allow myself to believe in deities, I don’t want to be worshipped and I don’t work miracles. Nor do I always want to sit in the best chair: standing is nice sometimes.

Again, this fulfillment of my almost every need might be more comfortable if I was currently returning such consideration or there was a chance to do so in the future. However, it’s very unlikely that Ajeesh or Jaya, for example, will ever be my guests in the UK or elsewhere. If you have any suggestions, please, please comment.

OK, it’s 6pm here and the walk up the hill takes 50 minutes. It gets dark in 45 minutes. I’m offski!

OK then, after a blogging break caused by being on the road and in places where even CellOne (India’s rural – but crap – cellphone service) won’t reach, I’m back in Nedumkandam for a few days to do laundry, dry out and arrange the next bit of travel. Meanwhile, here’s an enhanced version of what made it into my diary over the past week or so. Some of this goes over time I’ve already blogged about but I’m sure you can synthesise the two into one coherent account. If not, remember the secret is to keep banging the rocks together.

Yet again, I’m appalled at my prose…

Thursday 15th (Calangute, Goa)
We’d originally come to Calangute so that I could meet up with a former colleague who was visiting India. I hadn’t heard from her after she arrived in India and was beginning to get concerned but this morning she sent me a text: it turns out she got sick and escaped Calangute the day before we arrived. Hope you’re fine now, Ms F!

This was also a very tense day. Ajeesh and I hired a bike from the guest-house owner so we could go further without being at the mercy of Goas’s bus company (Kadamba Road Transport Company). We didn’t sign a hire agreement and Ajeesh (who did the negotiations in Konkani or Tamil) assumed that the 150 rupees per day he was quoted for a 100cc bike would also apply to the 150cc bike he eventually got from the guest-house owner. Both lead to trouble later and not checking the bike immediately led to extra expense. I’m annoyed with myself for not insisting we take the bike half a kilometre or so to check it. If we had checked it, we might have noticed that the fuel gauge wasn’t working and so not have bought a lot of petrol which we didn’t then use. Also, I’m sure I would have seen that the speedometer wasn’t working and insisted on another bike so that I could just tell Ajeesh “keep below 40kpmh and I’ll not leave a brown vapour trail or scream at you to SLOW DOWN!”. Finally, I’d have insisted that the helmet rack be removed from the passenger hand-grip so I could hold on properly!

Ahem. So we went on our merry way to Anjuna and had a look for the famed flea market. H’mm – something wrong here. My diary says Thursday but the market’s on a Wednesday. Perhaps that (and not it being off-season) explains why the market ground was empty. We biked through Anjuna’s back paths and over a grassy and rock headland, then came back via the sea front, passing some paragliders on the wat. We also amazed a California who’se now resident in Anjuna that we arrived where he was from this direction.

He recommended we head up the coast to Arambol. With no other thoughts as to what to do and a whopping three litres of petrol in the tank (ooh!), off we went. The beach was deserted apart from Ajeesh and I and two para-surfers, the sand was scorching hot and the surf was fun and warm. I know this mightn’t amaze you but after 20 years of living in a seaside town but only once braving the sea, it’s brilliant to me.

On the way back (a journey punctuated by Ajeesh’s search for paan), I persuaded him to keep slow but he asked me to hold his shoulders rather than reach back. I’m not sure I felt any safer. However, just outside Baga, our luck ran out. We, along with others, were signalled to stop by a police-person. Their fun for the day was checking that motorists passing this spot weren’t driving stolen vehicles or committing other offences . The papers proving that the bike belonged to the hotel owner were locked in a side compartment we couldn’t open. With hindsight, this was probably a good thing: the papers would have shown for sure that the bike wasn’t ours and we had nothing to prove we hadn’t stolen it! The police-person dealing with us didn’t seem to hear or understand my suggestion that he phone the owner and get him to confirm we’d got the bike from him legally.

As we were struggling with the compartment door, a bloke in an orange shirt came over and asked me what the problem was. Ajeesh and I replied, mentioning that we couldn’t get at the papers we needed and that we didn’t have any hire documents. The bloke replied “you shouldn’t say this: that’s illegal too and you’ll get a bigger fine.” Ajeesh replied to him but I wasn’t sure we should carry on the conversation: who was this bloke. I asked the uniformed officer who beckoned us back to him whether the Orangeman was a police-person. I received a mouthful of abuse for this: apparently I shouldn’t have talked to him if I had doubts. Pointing out that I didn’t start the conversation led to more tongue-lashing. Ajeesh tried to intervene, mentioning his social work in the hope that we’d get off because of his good character. This may have helped – we were fined 100 rupees while a couple of Mumbaikars were fined 500 rupees for exactly the same offences.

The police weren’t very thorough: to start with, the bike wouldn’t have passed a UK MOT. Nor did they check our ID or luggage. I’m sure Indian law says you should wear a helmet and I’m sure I never want a run-in with foreign police ever again.

Later Ajeesh got on the wrong side of my tension from this event and from breaking British (telephonic) social conventions he couldn’t have known about. I’m embarrassed to say I went on about it for some time. I’ve apologised profusely since and I think that what I said was true but I’m still embarrassed by this.

Friday 16th (Calangute, Goa)
I hate being stupid. For about the fourth time, I went swimming in the sea while wearing the ring my father made for me over 20 years ago. The inevitable finally happened. I didn’t notice until we got back to our hotel room – and then I cried and cried. How could I be so careless? I feel like I’ve thrown away parts of me and my father: stupidity almost to the point of being evil. I hate being this stupid. I know logically this ring is just a thing, that I wasn’t born with it and that I can’t take it with me but right now my emotions are over-ruling logic.

Saturday 16th (Calangute, then ‘Old Goa’)
We packed and left Calangute after being gouged for an extra 150 rupees for the bigger bike. We bussed to Panjim and then to Old Goa. This is the former capital city of the Portuguese colony and a few centuries ago was a throbbing metropolis. However now it consists of a few huge Portuguese/Catholic churches, a few chai-stalls, a grotty hotel and a few shops. A hotel tout took us to the hotel and charged us 30 ruppes for a 500-metre drive: The outside of the hotel looks ok but ht eroom we were offered was so filthy we rejected it immediately. We were offered another but this too was too manky even for me. We accepted a third on condition that they brought clean bedclothes, used some disinfectant and swept the floor, especially to get rid of the used condom in the bathroom.

I was in need of some solitude so Ajeesh went for a walk while I stayed in the room for a while and then watched the Portugal/Ivory Coast football match. After Ajeesh returned, we at indifferent curry and chapattis and crashed out.

Sunday 17th (‘Old Goa’, then Panjim)
We looked around the cathedrals and churches. The amount of gold and other riches in these places made me feel slightly nauseated. I must admit I have difficulties with Christianity at the best of times. (It‘s the religion that most informs my atheism), especially with hierarchical and sexist versions. When so much wealth is wasted glorifying a deity that doesn’t exist while all around there is poverty, I tend to get very annoyed. I think I better avoid South America and the southern US for the rest of my days. Ajeesh and I had a long talk about our reactions to people we’d met in Goa. He told me some about some things he’d discussed (in Indian languages) with people there. They didn’t seem to square with the snippets of English that had been in those conversations: I felt depressed and confused because I’d also received other impressions when talking in (admittedly very broken) English with these people. I don’t like being split between people: this feeling continued to dog me for the next few days, on top of my ongoing feelings of loss about my ring.

We bussed to Panjim: there was no need to stay any longer in Old Goa and the room was still unappealing. At the local tourist office, we asked a guide if she could recommend somewhere within our budget. While she was sorting this, we were bothered by a piss-head who used to be PA to the former tourism minister and now comes to the tourist office to mourn his lost job. We went to where the guide had said she’d booked us: this turned out to be piece of dilapidated street with no sign of a guest-house or hotel. A stall-keeper beckoned us and asked me in reasonable English if I spoke English. I’m sorry to say that I replied ‘better than anyone else in India, mate: it’s my mother tongue and my profession demands perfect English’. The stall-keeper replied ‘I doubt this’ and then went on to say that he was a local person and had never heard of the guest-house in which we’d been booked. He beckoned his mate, a motorbike/taxi driver: he took Ajeesh around looking for potential guest-houses. This seemed to work: we got a room for 250 rupees. H’mm: I’m sure the owner was being racist against his own country-folk when he said that he only rented to us when he saw me. Maybe I’m wrong: maybe he could sniff a fellow journalist.* Whatever, the room was clean, had its own mozzie nets, a TV, almost non-flaky electricity supply, a balcony, separate beds and a clean bathroom with a flushing squat toilet.
*yep, I’m a paid-up member of the National Union of Journalists, for whatever that’s worth!

Just in case you’re ever in Panjim, here’s the details of the guest house: Vincent Residency, behind Tourist Residency, Near Secretariat, Panaji-Goa 403001, phone 0091-832-222-3928, email vincent5552004 @ @ yahoo.com, proprietor Vincent De Souza.

We ate at a restaurant that’s apparently run by high-caste/Brahmin folk from Karnataka. It was clean, the service was fast and the frankincense they used frequently was beautiful. Ajeesh is interested in trying to build links between the different states by bringing Keralan children here (and letting them experience trains and boats), so he negotiated with the restaurant owners about packages for feeding his ‘tourists’ and got a good potential deal. Just in case you need to eat in Panjim, it’s the Kamat Restaurant, 1st Floor, Dr. Joao-De-Castro Road, Near Tourist Hostel (Panjim Residency), Panaji-Goa 403001, phone 0091-832-242-2077.

Monday 19th (Panjim, then train to Kerala)
See previous entry for our run-in with baksheesh. One thing I didn’t mention there was that I finally lost my patience with people pushing into the queue ahead of us and pushed someone back behind me. I didn’t manage to dissuade the arse who barged into the middle of my transaction with the ticket vendor and I’m annoyed that he just sold the bloke a ticket, rather than telling him to wait.

Tuesday 20th (train to Kerala, then Nedumkandam)
We arrived in Ernakulam roughly on time, feeling grotty and sleepy (even though I’d slept for 7 hours on the train). Ajeesh had arranged for Shaji and DS (his journalist and social-worker friends) to drive his car to Ernakulam to meet us. They’d been delayed by a puncture: this gave us time to eat at the station’s vegetarian restaurant (Yummy dosas, as I recall).

About an hour into the journey, we stopped in a place called Muvattpuzha and took a kettu valam (old-style boat/taxi) across the local river to a landing stage. DS and Shaji stripped to their underwear and Ajeesh changed into a very short lunghi. (I’d changed into trunks back at the car). We swam and washed in the river – it was brilliant to float and drift in the current, but quite hard work to get back to the landing-stage. However, I felt clean again: hoorah!

We also called in at a Maruti/Suzuki service station where Ajeesh negotiated about a replacement tyre – apparently Shaji hadn’t know he carried a spare wheel and had had a new tyre put onto the afflicted wheel. Also these tyres were still under guarantee and Ajeesh naturally wanted his friend to be reimbursed. We stopped later for lunch at a small restaurant: boiled tapioca with onion, tomato and chilli salad. (The others also had beef[!], chicken and fish dishes.) We arrived at Nedumkandam late in the evening: I don’t recall much else about the day.

Wednesday 21st (Nedumkandam)
I woke at 10 am and read some more of the Mahabharata (I guess I must have started it the previous night). I’m not sure it really taught me anything other than the basic caste system was already in place by the time the book’s events took place (assuming they ever did, of course). A strange sound turned out to be Ajeesh’s mother grading peppercorns by shaking them in a flat-ish tray. The bigger corns don’t move so much as their shaken: this and gravity concentrate them near the shaker. Ajeesh and his father (Gopalakrishna) loaded a sack of home-grown coffee beans and a sack of the graded pepper into an autorickshaw that had brought some visitors, then Gopalakrishna and the produce were taken to town. Jaya (Ajeesh’s youngest sister) had cooked rice noodles and sambal containing jackfruit seeds.

I have to say that the best food I’ve eaten in India has been home-cooked. Small cafes make good masala dosas with sambal and chatni but Suria’s tomato bhaji (amongst other things) is delicious and Jaya has given me at least two food-gasms.

Ajeesh and I took an auto to town: the whole town’s internet connection was down so that bullet point was postponed. I had a severe haircut and beard-trim (please comment if you want to see before and after photos) and was persuaded to buy a dhoti and matching shirt. Apparently it’s socially unacceptable for Brahmins to wear lunghis except when at home or doing manual work: dhotis appear to be the equivalent of a UK white-collar worker’s suit. Also, apparently, I’m nearly a Brahmin because of my dietary choice, although I suspect my educational and (former) professional status may have something to do with it, as (I believe) will Ajeesh’s family being Brahmin.

We met up with Gopalakrishna and Ajeesh’s neighbour and drank yet more khardum chaya. I bought a fine comb and raked my itching scalp: I badly wanted the shower I’d been persuaded to postpone until after my haircut. Meanwhile Radio Bruce was playing Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting. The video to this song has always moved me to tears. I just wish today I could have echoed her feeling that

Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen.
And I don’t know when,
But just saying it could even make it happen

Ajeesh took me to see a Malayalam film at Nedumkandam’s other, posher cinema. It was a police/political intrigue/action movie full of interchangeable fat gits with moustaches hitting each other for good and not-so-good reasons. (Male Malayalam film-stars, despite being slimmer than their Tamil counterparts, appear to all be fat gits who pack punches like mules.)

Thursday 22nd (Munnar)
Shaji had invited Ajeesh and I to lunch. He lives in a tiny house with his wife (Mini), their son and Shaji’s(?) mother. Their house is one of many that’s reached by following fairly perilous tracks up from minor roads and has plastic sheeting instead of glass in the windows: even so, this is better than many I’ve seen. Again, my blog is a victim of my poor memory and not diary habits: I can hardly picture Mini, I know I was told the boy’s name and I’ve completely forgotten what we ate and talked about.

Ajeesh and I then set off towards Munnar: we wanted to show me more of Kerala and the place where he hopes to build a restaurant and toilet block. He has a tiny piece of land on the main road between Idukki’s two main (and much-visited) tourist spots, Kumily/Thekaddi and Munnar. They’re over 100 km apart but there’s no clean restaurant on the way and the road demands you take breaks. He wants to create this so he can find a job for an orphan his parents house and fund some social projects. So if anyone feels like investing in India and has two lakhs of rupees (about 2500 UK pounds) to invest, please let me know! Failing this, can anyone offer him a job?

Ajeesh dearly wants to live up to the financial aspects of his social responsibilities: these include Jaya’s dowry [another 2 lakhs] on top of the dowries for the older two sisters who are already married. I’ve met Rajesh, Jaya’s fiancée, and I can see there’s enough love there for him not to reject her if the dowry doesn’t materialise but the rest of his family apparently would never accept this. Ajeesh is very happy to do anything that will enable him and doesn’t want ‘charity’: he says ‘don’t give me fish: give or lend me a fishing-rod so I can feed myself’.

I think my brain was switched off most of the journey to Munnar. I vaguely recall us trying to get into a nearby national park but finding it closed for the evening. After we’d met up with two of Ajeesh’s friends who are teachers at Munnar, Ajeesh coaxed his car up some impossible-seeming paths to a grotty-looking school and hostel for tribal kids. They put me in front of a classroom full of kids and asked me to give an impromptu spoken English lesson. I thought the best way to start this was to get each of them to tell me their names and hopes for the future and hear their opinions and feelings about Kerala: things they could speak about. I was also given a few addresses and I’m sure I’ll be getting more by email and snail-mail: anyone else want a pen-pal in Kerala?

Back in Munnar, we collected some food froma restarant and ate at the local government school with Ajeesh’s teacher pals and some of their colleagues. By now exhaustion at being bombarded with Malayalam conversation (which no-one stopped to explain) and other tensions had reduced my conversational abilities to monosyllables. One of these tensions was the appearance of a bottle of brandy. I slammed about 10 ml for appearances’ sake and made sure I ate lots.

Again, Ajeesh had conjured us a decent room at a price within our very limited budget in another hotel that in places was a building-site. Rooms in Munnar tend to cost over Rs600 per night and can run to several thousands: this was all of 300! I slept quite well despite the unbroken sound of pouring rain.

Friday 23rd (Kanthaloor)
Munnar’s two ATMs were out of order and both of us were short of cash. We were also very low on petrol but fortunately (it seemed) an Indian Oil garage took mastercard. 10 litres were already in the tank when I got nervous about a UK card being accepted here (I’d had some problems in the US a few years ago). The transaction went through OK so we got another 10 litres. Problem: we’d either have to wait an hour to make another credit-card transaction or pay some other way. I showed the cashier I had traveller’s cheques and so all they needed to do was wait a bit while I cashed one. He seemed to accept this but the manager came out and started giving us abuse. Eventually Ajeesh scrapped up enough cash to pay for this petrol and we escaped.

I can understand a bit of the garage-manager’s annoyance because cashing regular travellers cheques at a national bank in a well-known tourist resort took 30 minutes, interminable-seeming paper-shuffling and at least three staff gabbling at each other. Efficiency appears not to be a priority in this bank (State Bank of Travancore)

We drove to a place called Echo Point, near Mattupetty Dam. I was eventually persuaded to try chewing tobacco – bleurgh. There was also a wonderful ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moment: on the dam, a sign saying ‘Mattupetty Dam: 0 km’. Love it to bits. The way Ajeesh had planned to go had been blocked last night by a landslide so we drove the long way to a tiny village called Kanthaloor (the nearest town is Marayoor/Maraiyur) in the north-east of Idukki district, where one of Ajeesh’s many cousins lives. On the way we passed many tea-plantation workers, working outdoors without waterproofs in absolutely filthy weather. Most of the plantations in this area are owned by the Kanan Devan brand/division of Tata: apparently it’s a relatively good employer: it pays its workers twice the usual rates (90 Rs per day) along with accommodation, sick pay and pension contributions. Others pay Rs50 per day with no such benefits. Bear in mind that 1 UK pound is Rs80 and that a night in hospital here might cost Rs500.

Around Marayoor is India’s best sandalwood growing area: apparently nowhere else has the combination of altitude and rain shadow this area enjoys. It’s under heavy government protection: taking a sandalwood tree could net you 2 lakhs but also entitles you to around 12 years at Mr Gandhi’s boarding house. We stopped briefly at Kovilkadavu to visit a Tamil-style temple (many people here are Tamils – it’s about 12 km from the Kerala/Tamil Nadu border) and look at some ancient structures that are apparently prehistoric houses and graves. (When I get to place that offers broadband, I’ll put up some photos.)

We also stopped at a one of the local jaggery (raw cane-sugar) outfits. Local sugar-cane is pressed to extract the juice. A pan about 10 metres in diameter and 1 meter deep is heated over a fire fuelled with pressed cane for a couple of hours to evaporate most of the water. The residue is then poured into a cooling pan where the still-hot product is shaped by hand into balls. We were given some: it’s bloody delicious!

Ajeesh’s cousin, Suresh, lives with his wife and their young son in a house behind the telephone office he runs in Kanthaloor. Behind this, he grows cardomom, tree-tomatoes, brinjal, peaches, apples and plums: This flabbergasts me: his house is at about 2000 metres above sea-level yet he can grow crops that rival Worcestershire’s and it’s at only 50 to 100 metres. The secret is apparently that this area is in rain-shadow, sheltered by 2500-metre mountains in all directions.

Just as we arrived, the local police commandeered Ajeesh and his car to take away a bloke who’d been caught running an illegal still: spirits are a government monopoly in Kerala. There’s also the fear that the products are cut with meths and other nasties. The police and the arrestee reappeared in a police jeep a few later minutes later. This was a great relief – all my stuff apart from my passport, cash and ticket home were still in the car and I certainly didn’t want the police going through it.

Various locals (apparently village-level politicians) came out to argue with the police. (Ajeesh reckoned they profit from such stills.) I suppose I’m lucky that my camera batteries had just run out – otherwise I might have really pissed off the police, the arrestee or the local politicians. Hmmmm………..

A local bloke took us to a tribal village below Kanthaloor. Most of the houses are made of mud plastered onto wooden frames and have roofs woven from leaves and earthen floors. They’re about 2 or 3 square metres in area with the roofs and very low – it’s just possible to stand under the ridge but everywhere else you have to crawl, sit or crouch. Such houses are homes for families of 5 or 6 people. This is also the first time I’ve been in the presence of royalty: one of these houses, in which I was incredibly warmly greeted and offered local coffee, is home to the ‘village-king’ and his family. It didn’t appear to be any bigger than the others. There are some government-funded cement houses in the village but the locals don’t like these because they’re insufferably hot in summer. Screens of woven leaves alleviate some of this but don’t do anything about the poor quality of the cement. I was told that outsiders (both Indian and European) have bought much of this village’s land very cheaply and now its former owners are poorly-paid labourers on it. It looks a fantastic place to live: 2000 metres up yet surrounded by fertile (but severe) slopes and effectively isolated from much of the modern world but sadly hit by our old enemy, capitalism. Ajeesh wants to set up an eco-development committee here so that the locals can effectively combine to deal with outsiders.

We spent the night at the hotel ‘Mountain Shine’. It’s apparently run by a Scotsman who’s settled here because he likes the local produce: no further comment m’lud. It’s clean and fine apart from the lack of hot water: probably because the electicrity supply had been cut off by the same landslide that had delayed us.

Saturday 24th (back to Nedumkandam)
We walked through a ‘semi-tribal’ area near to the hotel: kids were playing with kites made of paper and old twine or cassette-tape. I stopped to fix one for a young child and got some appreciative laughs from nearby adults and one of the best smiles I’ve ever received. Most houses here are cement but there’s a few traditional ones. However, this area’s more organised or fortunate than the one we visited yesterday: the apparently well-made sewers and water supply are quite recent and should last a decent time and some of the children have been to school for, ooh, 8 years! There’s also a big resort and a large house owned by a European woman: I’m told that inside it’s plush and has all mod cons: outside it looks like a traditional tribal structure apart from having two stories.

On the way back we stopped at Evrakulam park to try to get a glimpse of Nilgiri Tahirs – a very endangered species of deer that lives only here. It was pissing down so all we saw were the insides of umbrellas and sodden hillsides. Not much for Rs300 but they did warn us that seeing the deer was far from guaranteed.

We spent most of the rest of the journey listening to a female singer who makes devotional songs well-worth hearing. I’ll try to buy a copy of the CD.

About 10km from Nedumkandam we stopped at the house where ‘Bhindu 2’ (i.e. not the Bindhu who invited me to her wedding but the Bindhu who Ajeesh took me to visit in hospital. Her mother and Ajeesh’s mother are sisters.) She invited us to stay the night and fed us tapioca, chapattis, chatni and fried bitter gourd: yum. We watched Tamil TV and played with her children: a great way to relax. It rained hard from 6pm this evening until 6.30 the following morning and hasn’t actually stopped. I woke many times in the night due to my own eructations and flatus: Bhindu told me I sounded like a rifle-range! I also had a weird dream involving a bloke who’s intgerned at L&L several times and I being in school together (I was older and a prefect!). His mac was away for repairs so he’d constructed one ENTIRELY from modelling-clay and got it to run a screen-saver!

Sunday 25th (Nedumkandam)
Now back in Nedumkandam, airing out my head, about to do some dhobi and get ready to move on!See you later, space-cats!

MARGAO MEANDERINGS
Last time I blogged I was in Calangute. After hiring a motorbike to go up to Arambol and getting stopped and fined Rs100 by the police for not having the proper documentation and proof it wan’t stolen, then an argument with our guest-house owner because he tried to overcharge us for the bike, Ajeesh and I then moved on to ‘Old Goa’, the former Portugese capital of this region.

This was the first time I’ve looked at a hotel room and said ‘no’. The room we were offered was putrid, the toilet hadn’t been cleaned in about a decade and there was litter everywhere else. Since this was the only accommodation in town, we insisted they show us better rooms. They did, and after working on them to clean the used condom out of the bathroom, use some disinfectant and sweep a bit, we accepted it. Old Goa’s a weird place. Huge, ornate, slightly nauseating (to me, at least) cathedrals and virtually nothing else.

We stayed last night in a faded but still acceptable and friendly guest-house in Panjim. It’s run by a bloke who, were he british, would be a screaming queen. I like! The room and bedding were clean, the shower pumped out enough water, the beds had mozzie nets, the electricity didn’t cut out and the squat toilet could be flushed. I like a lot!

Panjim has many things but it doesn’t have a railway station, despite being a state capital. So we’ve bussed to Margao to then get a train back to Kerala (from where I’ll probably go to Madurai on my own…). It’s going to be another overnight journey in 3rd class unless we can blag/upgrade to sleeper but even so that’s got to be better than a 15-hour bus journey. Last time we did this, the TC asked for Rs100 baksheesh. I asked to look a the tickets and the request halved… No comment on whether we actually paid!

However just getting here from Panjim has been a trial. The bridge over the Zuari river has been found to be cracked, so big vehicles are banned from using it. So we got a bus to it, then were transferred to a minibus and dumped the other side. We then discovered that the Panjim to Margao tickets we’d been sold (from a ticket window for the sale of such tickets) weren’t now enough to take us on to Margao. This annoys me a lot but there was nothing to do but pay up. I’ve found the political fall-out quite interesting too.

Also, Margao bus station is 5 km from the train station and it’s only by luck we got a bus that took us near it. It’s been good travelling with Ajeesh – he speaks tolerable or fluently in Malayalam (Kerala’s language), Tamil (Tamil Nadu), Kannada (Karnaktaka), Telgu (Andra Pradesh), Hindi, English and probably more.

I’ll try to get back into regular blogging but can’t promise I’ll be more than sporadic for the next few days… decent cybercafes are in short supply in the Keralan hills. I’m going to use a lot of the train journey getting my diary up to date… OK, enough rambling!

In Calangute, north Goa, with Ajeesh from Kerala. Surprisingly, it isn’t pissing down.

Will be here for a few days more, then will head north-east…

You scored as The Student Dyke. Your entire life is defined by two things: your intellect and your sexuality; moreover you often merge the two to lure in women. The Student Dyke 80% The Femme Fatale 65% The Pretty-Boi Dyke 55% The Granola Dyke 55% The Stud 50% The Bohemian Dyke 45% The Quasi-Gothic Femme 40% The Hipster Dyke 35% The Vaginal-Reference-Making Dyke 30% The Magic Earring Ken Dyke 30% The Little-Boy Dyke 20% The Surprise! Dyke 20% The Sprightly Elfin Femme 0%

What Type of Lesbian Are You? (Inspired by Curve Mag.)
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Walked through some superb countryside on the border between Keral and Tamil Nadu yesterday. Didn’t get anywhere near the pachyderms but discovered their latrine. Hoorah!

Well, a perfect day yesterday (walking for miles through the hills yet never more than 5 minutes from a chat and ‘kardum chaiya’ [black tea], followed by an absoluted food-gasm).

Today I was taken to yet another wedding: this time Balingram Roman Catholics: they acknowledge the Pope as boss yet use orthodox (possibly even ‘old believer’ style) liturgy and do it all in Malayalam for around three hours.

All I can do is sit and try to prevent my head from exploding. More detail when I can get my head around it.

Still here, having some of the strangest times in my life.

Just been to the fourth wedding in 3-and-a-bit months. My host is a weel-kent man in this area and seems to be friends with everyone. It’s hard to know what to say about this state. I was speaking with my host and his friends over a drink yesterday (at a gathering like that of the usual suspects in the Cellar Bar on Saturday afternoons). This man said ‘Real India is starvation’. There’s a lot to bear this out. Yet in Kerala at least there’s an optimism that it might get better. I hope so, and, so long as Ajeesh and his mates and people like them are around, it WILL.

OK, enough ramblings. I’ll try to write something a bit less turgid some other time.

… seem to be my recurring themes in India. Yet again I’ve been through three days of the Mughal’s other revenge and am feeling almost amused by it. (The original would have been far worse.) Also I have been invited by yet another total stranger to her wedding. I still can’t believe this – it seems a totally genuine invitation (fancy card and all!)

Again, you may ask yourself ‘How did I get here?’. It started, as so many good things in my life did at St Andrews. During my over-extended doctorate, I shared a flat with a bloke who had spent most of the 80s in India, mainly in Kerala. He’s become a long-term friend, as has his wife and their three daughters. I’ve been fascinated by his stories: mad exploits in India and living in the depth of the Sumatran jungle. (His wife is from west Sumatra.) A lot of this journey has been engenedered by my desire to see for myself!

He told me just befor I left of the village in Idukki district he stayed in. I’ve been spiralling down (to this hole in the ground?) ever since I’ve been in India. I had finally had enough of Kumily on MOnday (29th) and wanted to actually visit this village before the rain became unbearable.

I’d been told the nearet place I could stay was a town called Cheruthony, about 7 miles north of Idukki. Despite this district being named after Idukki, Idukki town itself is a blink-and-you-miss-it village. Cheruthony isn’t much bigger – about the size of the medieval part of St Andrews but sat on a relatively important river-crossing. It has two hotels, a post office and the usual range of services and traffic noises. I stayed in the cheaper hotel (the Shikkara) and had a perfectly fine room (en-suite shower/bathroom and balcony [YEEHAH]) but often no water. The hotel staff tried to convince me that this was because their water tank was empty but because it had rained every day for the last week and I could hear folk in the next room showering, I tended to, ahem, disbelieve them.

By the way, the other, far posher, hotel was the Hotel Stonage. Make of that what you will!

I arrived in Cheruthony about mid-day on Monday and, feeling beligerent and energised by being ripped off in Kumily*, I decided to walk to the village my friend had described. I’d also been nauseated by the bus journey to Cheruthony, especially when a bloke sat just ahead of me vomited in his sleep agains the closed window.
*total cost: one pair of undies [and the ripper was welcome to my used grunts], 100 rupees and a half-bottle of local rough brandy. Not a large amount but currently equivalent to a day’s food and accommodation)

The walk took me past the entrance-drive to Idukki dam. This is a fantastic structure, a piece of smoothness that somehow blends well with the jaggedness of the mountains it’s amid. I couldn’t get as close as I wanted – there were no officials to ask at the entrance and police were prowling but not being helpful and I didn’t want to end up wearing a lathi intrnally.

I walked on past a driveway to a new-ish house. (There’s quite a lot of new building in this area, funded by tourism and oil-money). The owner beckoned me and got his sons to put me on a bus to my destination.

The village itself is another Y-junction, a few small shops and chai-stalls and some rather dilapidated houses. One of the shop-owners appears to remember my friend – talking with him and his daughter was all I had time to do this afternoon before the rain and dark set in.

On the way I’d been passed by a guy called Ajeeshkumar and his friend (er, I forget his name!). Ajeeshkumar is a local Red Cross, development and eco-worker and his friend is a journalist for a malayalam newspaper. How I wish I’d brought my NUJ card (oops – just found I did!) They caught up with me again at the chai-stall and Ajeeshkumar invited me to stay with him for a while and see ‘real India’. I arranged to meet him on Wednesday (31st) morning to go to his village – I still wanted to nose around here a bit more.

TUESDAY 30TH
I bussed back to the village and sat in the chai-stall, trying to regather my anatomy from the shaking it had received on the way. Some children beckoned me from a doorway across the road. Assuming an adult was behind them, I crossed over to join them. They took me to the local library/primary school and gathered some of their elder (18-19 year-old friends). We exchanged some songs and stories: I’m hoping for forgiveness for my renditions of the hero’s return and exercising some control. I then made a heart-rending mistake: one of the first children I’d met here was cold and wet so I lent her my jacket to walk her home. She thought I’d given it to her and so asked time and time again to get it back when I insisted to it being returned to me. I can’t yet decide whether I’ve been selfish or sensible. She has a home, friends and relatives here. I don’t. However he situation has been forced upon her while I chose mine. Also, how could she understand that a rich-looking westerner doesn’t currently have money to give away when so many folk who look like me do?

I returned to Cheruthony feeling depressed and ill around 2pm. By now the rain was flooding down, drenching Cheruthony’s main street under half an inch of fast-running water and making anything but staying in my hotel room a fool’s errand. I slept fitfully from 4pm that afternoon to 8am the next morning.

WEDNESDAY 31ST
By about 8am, the sky had brightened and the rain had petered out. I took a bus to Kattappana, a big town south of Cheruthony and north of Kumily from where I could travel on to Nedumkandam (the closest town to Ajeeshkumar’s home village [Nikunjam]). I took a couple of hour’s break to blog, email and steel myself for the rest of the journey. I managed to leave my tourist map of Idukki district in the bus-station toilet. I’m never going back there to look for it. Uurrgghh!

Ajeeshkumar had phoned me to say that his father would meet me at the town’s main temple because his car had just been taken in for servicing/repair. We hadn’t set a time to meet but I had been told his father would collect me and take me to Ajeeshkumar’s home. I don’t quite know what happened but I gave the temple priest a large conumdrum – he hardly spoke English but did his best to try to help me. It seems Ajeeshkumar’s very well-known and liked here. Anyway, after a few calls, Ajeeshkumar’s journo-friend met me and took me to Nikunjam by auto. This involved some terrifying slopes and stops to let the auto drive on without passengers when the slope got more than 40 degrees.

At Nikunjam, I was met by Ajeeshkumar’s parents, youngest sister and neice. We chatted fitfully and atched some Malayalam soap-operas while waiting for Ajeeshkumar to return. He eventually did so about 10pm. Thereafter, presumably, sleep occurred.

THURSDAY 1ST
Ajeeshkumar took me to Nedumkandom school to give an impromptu spoken-english session to some senior students. This was even more terrifying than yesterday’s auto-ride: my spoken English can be patchy at the best of times. I talked a little about my history and situation (answering yet again the usual questions about spouse and children – aarrgghh!) and then tried to get them to speak back to me – after all, I wasn’t the one trying to learn English. I asked them to talk about their career/life-ambitions and their opinions on the ‘reservation’ issue.* That had some effect and helped me learn too.
*Students and doctors are currently striking over the government’s decision to reserve 27% of medical school places for ‘other backward castes’, etc

After this, the teacher took me to lunch and then Ajeeshkumar took me by motorbike to a mountain that overlooks the drop down into Tamil Nadu. It’s breath-taking, purely amazing and on its own has made this trip worthwhile. Ajeeshkumar commeneted unhappily about the plastic litter his country-folk leave about. He and his friends regularly come here to clean up but it seems a thankless task. He’d really appreciate other eco-tourists coming to join this struggle.

The other pollution he finds objectionable is a ridiculously huge sculpture on a nearby hill. It’s pointless and almost obscene to plonk a lump of tacky concrete in the midst of such natural beauty.

(photos of all of this to be uploaded from a cybercafe that doesn’t use 56k dial-up)

We then journeyed in the dark through more scary roads to where Ajeeshkumar’s friend Bhindu lives. She’s getting married tomorrow (the festivities start tonight). She’s invited me along – formal invitation card and everything ! – and yet I’m just a random western bozo. I don’t understand it but am hugely grateful.

Today I’ve been trying to organize, blog and get ready for tomorrow. See you later spacecats!

Kerala is apparently equally split between Muslims, Hindus and (mostly catholic) Christians. The amount of Catholic churches I’ve seen continues to amaze me.

In Kumily there’s quite a large community of Orthodox christians. Now how did that variety take root here?