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!

Well it’s started – over eight hours of solid, torrential rain yesterday. The main street of Cheruthony (my residence for the last two nights) was under half an inch of fast-running water in many places. Considering that this street, in many of those places, has a 30-degree slope, that’s a lot of water.

I’ve broken the habit of a lifetime and bought an umbrella.

I’m taking a break in a bus-journey to Nedumkandam in a big town called Kattappana. My back is currently very sore from sleeping on hard beds so an hour on rattling is all I can take.

Time for chai and lunch…

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?

Yesterday I dived out of the rain into a little chai stall made of wood and plastic sheeting. A tourist taxi driver sat next to me and we began talking. To get the conversation away from my personal life, I started mentioning that I was intereswted in some of the colourful posters I’d seen around. This led us to talk about politics and I mentioned that I approved of a left-wing government being in power here. The taxi-driver told me he was a communist but that he was no threat to me: he saw tourists as a people to treat well in the hope of repeat business and maybe friendship.

When the rain stopped, he invited me to just sit in his car and chat: I was a little apprehensive but agreed. He told me that he had worked at a tea factory until eight years ago. Then a ‘political’ issue had arisen and the factory had closed. So now he drive for a living and made he ‘cultivated’ his ‘crop’ well.

He began inviting me to visit and eat at his house, saying it would cost me nothing (in reaction to my obvious reluctance). He also repeatedly grasped my hand and said that we weren’t friends but brothers and therefore I was in no danger. Despite this presumably being intended to reassure me, it didn’t – it made me feel even more uncomfortable and determined not to go with him.

So I refused hospitality from someone who was keen to give it to me and, at least apparently, had the financial resources.

Contrast this with my acceptance of hospitality from some lads with whom I later paid cricket in the street. After watching for a while, I was invited to join in and had a fantastic time until the rain became really strong. I was given shelter, coffee and jackfruit pieces by a few lads in a a family house: two sisters came into the front room to eat jackfruit and giggled at my presence. (They eat small pieces of the seeds’ inner coating while extracting more coated seeds for later use.) The lads and I chatted on about school, education, their jobs, personal jokes and and were really, really genial hosts.

However, in a way, I feel I forced or obliged people who may have had far less income to give me hospitality by choosing to go out without waterproofs on a day it was bound to rain. I think I only took inconsequential amounts of their resources and repaid by taking some photographs of them which I hope I can print and send to them.

Today I’ve been meandering through, sheltering in and trying to photograph more of Kumily. I was taken by a bloke I met in another chai-shop to his office: a branch of a company that deals in organic fertiliser about a mile out of town in the appropriately named suburb/hamlet of ‘First Mile’.

Again, India has been fantastically welcoming and again I can’t put it into written words. I can put into words that I’m fairly pissed off with almost certainly losing 200 rupees and some clothing to Mr laundry-bloke, who was also my guide to Tirali, on my wee forest walk and to Kumily dam. (He said the 200 rupees would be a loan to get a cut on his head treated.)

His wound was real and so his request for money was reasonable in a country where free healthcare is far from automatic. I don’t care about 200 rupees: it’s under three pounds. I do care that I’ve been apparently lied to and I’m really annoyed that I’ve been a mug.

A smorgasbord of the last two days:

• communication
• coffee and card-games with the Gurjurati family in the hotel-room next to mine.
• potato curry and paratta at a wee food-godown
• cricket, jackfruit and sheltering from the rain with almost total (but totally friendly) strangers
• the beauty of India’s flora
• wry amusement that it’s taken me until my fifth decade to begin to appreciate flowers
• semi-directed meandering
• the effort India puts into decorating her goods-trucks
• the contrast of this with the lack of kerbstones on her new road surfaces
• cardomom-flavoured chai and conversations about commodity prices and agriculture
• rain, Malayalam(?) films and chai-stalls
• 5 separate offers of cannabis in under two hours
• frequent questions about my personal life (groan!)
• above all, the smiles and laughter of folk at the results when I take the photographs they request.

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… include samosas, banana bhajis and parapuwadai (not sure of the spelling but they’re patties of gram flour and sweetcorn, fried to a light brown crisp) and black tea from a wee stall just across the border in the Tamil Nadu part of Kumily.

CHOLESTEROL AHOY

	parapuwadai
	chai and deep-fried-delights stall

Amongst the intangibles, a fairly high one is being given the address of the beedi stall next to the food stall and the owner’s name. I have no idea why she gave me this: we’d hardly spoken. Yet again I wish I had taken the time to learn some Tamil!

‘Ms Beedi’ and her mum

Among the low spots, a significant one is this morning’s (Friday 26th May) disagreement with my hotel over the number of items of laundry they are due to return, partly because I was implicitly accused of not being able to count past 4. It got more insulting when the laundry bloke discounted the list he’d watched me write and agreed with as I put the items into a bag for him to take away.

Oh well, nice things yesterday included

• walking around Kumily, drawing a sketchmap of the streets and trying to photograph as much of the town as possible so a friend who was here over ten years ago can see how it’s changed since then
• encountering an elephant in my peregrinations
  

  It still seems sick to me that this poor beastie is chained up and has to endure carrying humans.

   

• sheltering from heavy rain under the eaves of a house and being joined a few children who wanted to talk
• being met by a bloke called Osaka who had an umbrella which kept us reasonably dry on the way to the warmth and dryness of a local chai shop*. He also sheltered us under it on the way back to the town centre – bless you sir!

*This is where I first encountered parapuwadai. I was also introduced to Osaka’s mate who was smoking what appeared at first to be a regular beedi. However it looked a little fatter than normal and didn’t have the tiny piece of thread that is a feature of regular beedis. This man showed me that he uses the wrapper leaves to construct joints, presumably because beedis are dirt cheap (1 rupee for 10: 1 rupee will only buy 1 filterless ‘Scissors’-brand cigarette) and cigarette papers are rare and expensive here.

Osaka’s mate told me about prices for cannabis here:

• ‘Marijuana’ (dried leaves and flowers) costs 25 rupees per gram if you buy only a few tolas* but 10 rupees per gram if you buy a kilogram or more.
• ‘Charas’ (resin) costs 100 rupees per gram if you buy small amounts. (I couldn’t understand his many quotes for the price of large amounts.)
• Cannabis oil** is also available but it’s even more expensive.

*the weight of a silver rupee: near enough 10 grams
**I have no idea how to use this: perhaps you’re meant to get your vehicle stoned and have a really wild trip to the nearest casualty department.

Osaka’s mate wasn’t at all upset when I told him I didn’t want to buy anything after this discussion: other vendors have tried much harder, claiming that they’re offering me good prices. It takes a while to get them to understand that I don’t want what they’re offering at any price.

Today I’m going to carry on mapping and photographing Kumily. It’s very interesting to see what lies behind the ‘tourist facade’ – I’m always curious about what is ‘really going on’.