The Palmers Take India

Jack and Karol Palmer safely arrived in India in the middle of Wednesday night. Unfortunately, a bag was lost on the flight, so we are still waiting to hear from Continental Airlines. (There is a certain desperation to the search, since the missing luggage contains the peanut butter and toilet paper they brought us.)

Otherwise, they are happy if not overwhelmed. They spent much of Wednesday recovering from the 30-hour journey. Jenna and I arrived Thursday afternoon to an emotional reunion in Kochi. The four of us walked around the historic Fort Cochin area and ate dinner at a place called The Courtyard, a restaurant Jenna and I had sampled on our previous trip to Kochi.

Just as we were when we first arrived, my parents are a bit dazed and overwhelmed, none of us still really believing that we are together again (and on the other side of the world to boot).

We have made plans to visit a famous waterfall in Kerala (the "Niagara of India") and also stop by an elephant training ground. Unfortunately, I forgot the adapter cord that allows me to download pictures onto Jenna's laptop, so no pictures of my parents' visit can be posted until after our return to Tirur. But we will give daily updates of my parents' progress in India.

Cookie Monsters

Santosh enjoying a 'Christmas special' cookie. "Verrry excellent!" he said.

A bit of Christmas came to JM Higher Secondary this week in the form of peanut butter and chocolate cookies, date-filled Pinwheels, Southern Lassies, and stocking-shaped sugar cookies. On the day after Thanksgiving, my mother and grandmother had baked enough Christmas cookies to feed the state of Bihar. My mom then mailed me two sizeable boxes full of the treats, which arrived in Kerala late last week.

Jenna and I took two platefuls of the cookies to school on Monday, wrapped in tinfoil. I took one plate to the upper campus, where I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays. Jenna took her plate to the lower campus. As I walked in, the silvery foil caught the light and garnered the staff’s attention.

“What is this?” a few teachers asked.

“Treats,” I said simply. I waited until morning tea was served after second period to peel off the foil and reveal the platter of goodies. The Southern Lassies stood in the middle, guarded by a circle of the other cookies, leaning against each other. The staff ooohhed and awwwed. They leaned forward to get a better look. They squinted and furrowed their brows. One teacher even poked the cookies with a tentative finger, as if she was testing to see whether the cookies were alive and would jump off the plate if provoked.

The staff at the upper campus has a bit better English, in general, than the one at the lower campus, where

Jenna was at this moment, yet not good enough to intimate to me their first impressions of the cookies with any real clarity. They spoke to each other in Malayalam and then they all sat around at the table, drinking tea. The plate of cookies sat untouched in the center of the table.

I began to worry. Was something wrong? Did the cookies not look appetizing to them? I waited a few awkward moments, the growing silence of the staff room weighing down on me. Then, a woman—who must have seen my growing anxiety plainly written on my face—motioned to me with a wave of her hand.

“Waiting for knife,” she said. She made a motion as if to cut the cookies.

“Oh,” I said. “But you can just eat them whole.”

Vinod, who had the best English of the teachers at JM, interjected: “But we want to cut them up so that everyone can sample each kind of cookie.”

Now it dawned on me. I was used to the fend-for-yourself snack breaks at Hogg Middle School. On Friday mornings at Hogg, teachers would pitch in and bring breakfast treats—donuts, coffee cake, kolaches, homemade egg-and-sausage casserole. At those morning events, staff would filter in whenever there was a free moment and take however much could fit on a small wobbly paper plate. If you waited too long, you ran the danger of not getting anything.

At JM, on this morning, two of the women teachers watchfully guarded the plate of Christmas cookies and shooed

away any male teachers who came along and tried to snatch one. Eventually, a knife did appeared and the women took to slicing up each cookie into halves or even quarters. Another staff member ripped up squares of newspaper, and the women arranged a sampling of each type of cookie on to each square. By the end, a dozen or so squares of newspaper filled the table, each topped with a handful of crumbling, colorful Christmas cookies.

Each staff member dutifully took a square of newspaper and began to eat.

“Mmmmm. Delicious.”

“Superb!”

“Tasty!”

Their limited English vocabulary was accented by the sounds they made as they stuffed the cookies hurriedly into their mouths before the next period began.

Lunch!

A traditional Kerala sadya, or feast. Many of the restaurants in Tirur serve this for lunch. We had some on Sunday at a place called the City Veg Hotel. The meal is served on a banana leaf and you eat it with your hands. If you ever come to Kerala, you must try this. It looks a bit odd to our Western sensibilities, but it is amazingly savory.

Arts and Crafts

On Sunday, Jamie, Jenna, and I took a jostling one-hour bus ride to Malappuram, the seat of Malappuram District in which Tirur lies, for the annual International Crafts Mela. (Mela is the Hindi word for ‘festival’.)

Artisans and vendors from all over India and a few foreign countries had set up bamboo huts on top of a shade-less hilltop overlooking a sprawling green valley. Jewelry from Uttar Pradesh. Leather work from Rajasthan. Water colors from Bihar. Wood carvings and trinkets from Karnataka. Cloth and silk shirts from West Bengal. Pashmina shawls from Kashmir. The booths stretched out in several uneven lanes over a grass field, surrounded by a rough circle of more booths and food stalls. In the late afternoon gloaming, the atmosphere was lively, the crowd inured to the sultry temperature, the air infused with the smell of fried food.

We slowly made our way around the exhibits, careful not to show too much interest when none was warranted, for these vendors were trained and motivated. Some had come from as far as the borderlands near the Himalayas to sell their products, so they would latch on to potential customers with fierce tenacity, especially customers with white faces (of which Jaime and I seemed to be the only two at the entire festival).

“One look, sir? Over here, sir!”

“Yes, yes, y

es. Interest?”

“You like? You like?”

“Very good work. Very fine. You buy? You buy?”

Jenna took advantage and bought several items that we thought would make good gifts for friends and family upon our return to the US. We refreshed ourselves with pineapple juice and later had some fresh-squeezed sugarcane juice (one of the best treats I have yet to have in India), the reedy stalks of the cane squeezed through the rotating teeth of a steel grinder, the seedy juice then poured over ice into glass cups.

We shared a dosa, a particularly beloved Kerala treat. It is essentially a thin, oversized pancake folded in half and stuffed with whatever you like—eggs, potatoes, veggies, chicken. You eat it with your hands and dip the dosa in coconut chutney and a rich, spicy broth called sambar. Jaime bought us all some small sweet puri, too, pleasantly greasy and fatty-tasting.

We ran into a few of our students and their families and also spotted Shyma, a woman in her early 20s who teaches at JM. She ran up to us from across a gap in the milling crowd near the main entrance to the Mela. “Jenna! Jenna!” she said as she jogged over, her family following her.

We are so accustomed to seeing Shyma in a tight-fitting black hijab and blue chalk jacket that we did not, at first, recognize her in a loose-fitting turquoise dupatta and a flowing canary yellow salwar kameez. I think Shyma realized this, for she pointed at her face and said, “Me! Shyma! JM!”

She introduced us to her mother, father, and two sisters (one of whom was a student of mine in the 8^th standard at JM). They all shook our hands. We lifted our bags theatrically: “We bought a lot. Good shopping!” we said. Shyma and her family all smiled and nodded. We were just leaving. They were just getting there, as the sun began to fall below the distant, palm-lined horizon.

“Have a good time!” we said, as we left Shyma and began walking out. Three hours, a few bags of gifts, a couple of glasses of fresh-squeezed juice, and one dosa all complete, we judged the International Crafts Mela to be a success.

Me with our dosa.

Maumuti the Tea Guy and Other Tirur Sightings

Shafik called to me as I was walking home from the Internet café one night earlier this week. “Tea? You want tea?” he yelled to me.

Shafik is the younger of two brothers that run a small grocery store on our street. Their business is nothing more than a low wood hut with a roof of corrugated tin. Crates of vegetables sit out front—tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, okra, beets, and cabbage. Pungent bouquets of bananas hang perpetually from the roof’s rusting eaves. Inside, in a cloistered square of activity, stand shelves of dry goods and overflowing sacks of grain—rice, millet, and lentils. A decaying aroma of old produce perfumes the place.

Shafik’s older brother Anwar runs the store. He’s the one that arrives at dawn to open up, and he’s the one that coordinates the daily deliveries of foodstuffs, dropped of by rushing lorry drivers. Both Shafik and Anwar are in their twenties, but Anwar has the air of someone much older. He is courteous and helpful but always business-minded. Every time I have been in the store, he is busy doing some task like restocking shelves or helping a customer weigh their items on a small scale.

Shafik, on the other hand, is more gregarious, teasing regular customers and shouting out to neighborhood kids as they pass by on their bicycles. He has engaged me in conversation before, asking the typical questions of where I am from and what I am doing in Tirur. At other times, he has suggested certain items to me. Once, with a hankering for something sweet, I had taken out a small cup of ice cream from the store’s lone freezer. Shafik saw me and hurried across the store to where I was standing, shaking his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. He grabbed the ice cream cup from me and put it back in the freezer and withdrew two neon-colored tubes of frozen ice. “These: much better. Only 2 rupees.” The frozen ice was a sugary concoction of sweetened milk and fruit flavoring. One tube was orange and the other strawberry. I ripped off the tips with my teeth, just as Shafik showed me, and enjoyed the sticky, quickly melting treat inside. I now get one of those tubes of frozen ice at least a few times every week.

On this day, though, Shafik was not in the grocery store. He was next door, in another narrow stall, standing languidly with three other young men. I crossed the street when he beckoned. Away from the store—apart from any of his duties—Shafik seemed even more relaxed. He bobbed around, balancing on the balls of his feet, shifting his momentum from one leg to the other. He joked with his friends, slapped them on their chests when he made a joke, and called out to other passers-by. He seemed to be in his element.

“Tea? You need tea. Maumuti!” he cried. An old man across the street, with a crumpled rag spun across his head in a makeshift turban, looked up. “Chai-ah!” Shafik yelled. Maumuti nodded and smiled, two black teeth sticking out from his upper gum.

“Maumuti…our tea guy,” Shafik said, smiling. Shafik’s friends smiled and nodded. We were all standing in a tiny, open-air store that had the appearance of a long-neglected garage. Shelves stacked to the ceiling were piled with dusty, mildewed electronis—blenders, microwaves, old stereos from the tape deck era, internal car parts. It looked like a scene from one of the Terminator movies. Grime and grit covered everything. A distinctive smell of oil and rust filled my nostrils.

Shafik saw me looking around. “This is Anshawd’s shop,” he said, patting the back of one of the young men standing in our little group. Anshawd wore trousers and a plaid shirt, wrinkled and grime-covered. His hands were stained black. He nodded and smiled, a prominent gap between his front two teeth. He turned away and began fiddling with a circular contraption on a rickety wooden table.

“It’s a water pump,” Shafik said, gesturing to the item. Several rubber hoses projected from it and spiraled towards the ground. “Very important he fixes it,” Shafik said with a chuckle.

Maumuti had crossed the street and was now distributing small glasses of milk tea to the group. I reached in my pocket to pay and Shafik intervened: “No, no, no. My treat,” he patted Maumuti’s arm. “You want something to eat?” Shafik said, turning back to me. “Banana? Puri?”

“What’s puri?” I asked. This was some sort of signal to Shafik, a determinant in his mind.

“Ahhh,” he said, eyeing Maumuti. “Get him puri,” he said, and Maumuti nodded, shuffling back across the street.

“You like Kerala?” one of Shafik’s friends asked, as we sipped tea, a cool evening breeze fanning our faces.

“Of course. Everyone: friendly. Weather: nice,” I said. This had become my stock-and-trade when talking to the citizens of Tirur. Single words spaced together by ellipses in fragmented sentences. My point was usually taken, though.

Shafik’s friends nodded. The one who had asked the question was named Rafi, and he had long, gelled hair and stylish jeans. The other friend was named Munir. He seemed a bit more quiet, but the others teased him constantly.

After one such bout of joking, Shafik said: “We call him ‘Elephant’. You know…elephant?” I nodded, unsure how to ask him the origin of the nickname. Maybe I did not want to know. It’s at times like these, though, that I wish I could speak Malayalam.

Maumuti came back and handed me a ball of fried dough wrapped in newspaper. It was slightly bigger than an egg and had the weight and density of an especially heavy doughnut hole.

“Puri!” Shafik said. “Rice flour, banana, sugar. Fried,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

I bit into it. The soft, warm dough inside breathed hot steam onto my nose. Despite it being fried, the puri did not drip grease. It stayed compact and fluffy as I continued to bit into it. A tinge of cardomom mixed with the dominant banana and sugar flavors.

“Excellent!” I said.

“Maumuti…” Shafik said, gesturing with his chin back at the old man who had again crossed the street, “he has had a tea stall here for 30 years.” Shafik’s voice took on a tone of reverence. His friends Rafi and Munir nodded in assent. “Thirty…years,” Shafik repeated.

I wondered now if Shafik—an operator of a small business himself—was not promoting another’s local operation. Maumtui’s tea stall was not even that. It was a bent wooden cart, with chipping red paint, propped up against the wall of a low-slung concrete building. The cart was outfitted with a glass display window where he kept treats like fried bananas and puri. A giant iron pot was kept perpetually boiling on a set of small gas grills at the cart’s center.

Maumuti must have felt pressed for business ever since a new bakery opened up at the end of the block. Jenna and I had been several times to the new store, called Zain, to eat shwerma (meat slow-roasted on a stationary spit) and sample their large stock of pre-prepared treats. Zain was not a corporate enterprise either, but its operation had a Walmart scale compared to Maumuti’s humble cart.

Now, here was Shafik, blithely playing host to me and treating me with Maumuti’s wares.

“How long has your store been here?” I asked.

“More than twenty years. My father started it. Now, he is too sick to run it. So, Anwar and I have taken over,” he said. The street now began to take on a new dimension for me. Maumuti’s tea cart. Anwar and Shafik’s grocery stand. Anshawd’s electronics store. All these guys were in league together. Not just a league of businesses, building off each other’s mutual customer base, but in a league of friendship that led to lazy night’s like this, sipping tea as the night cooled their overworked bodies.

Suddenly, the lights on the block went out—a regular occurrence. The street was plunged into a haunting blankness.

“Ahhh! This is my India!” Rafi barked and the others laughed. I could not see their faces, and the dark outlines of pedestrians passed in ghostly perambulations further up the street.

Anshawd had stopped his tinkering, and the clinks and bangs of Maumuti’s tea stall had momentarily solemnized. A hush went over the street, the honks of distant cars bleated far away.

Then, as soon as they had gone off, the lights went back on and the street quickly stirred back to life. I downed my tea and got up. “I’ll see you around,” I said.

“Of course. We will be here,” Shafik said.

Bieber Mania

The other day, I caught a few of my boys defacing one of the long wooden tables that serve as desks at JM. I was about to get mad and levy some kind of consequence, but when I saw what they had written in chalk on the dark wood, I could not help but laugh.

JUSTIN BIEBER, their graffiti shouted in neat capitalized script, spanning a two-foot length of tabletop. I rolled my eyes and gestured for them to erase it. Since it was in chalk, it was easily wiped away. As I turned around, though, I could still see the faint whitish outline of the name imprinted on the wood: JUSTIN BIEBER, like the dying scroll of some haunted spirit.

Justin Bieber? What the hell? I thought to myself as I tried to get back to teaching.

This was not my first encounter with Bieber Mania in Tirur or in other parts of India, for that matter. Back in September, when Jenna and I were in Darjeeling for a short vacation after our ATI training in Kolkata, we got up before dawn one morning to see the sun rise over Mt. Kanchendzonga. It required a bumpy thirty-minute ride in a jeep to the outskirts of the city. The jeep we hired was driven by a young man who looked to be no older than 20. As we hit Darjeeling’s main road in the pre-dawn gloom, this driver popped in a CD and turned up his jeep’s stereo system. It began blaring Justin Bieber music at a volume I thought sufficient to wake up everyone in the houses we passed.

I had not heard much Justin Bieber before then, only snippets on American radio or briefly on MTV. Either way, I was not prepared to get more acquainted with his music at 4:30 in the morning on a twisting, pothole-filled road in northern India. At the time, I had mistaken this encounter as this one driver’s odd predilection for one particularly odd American musical phenomenon.

Yet, as I have come to discover in Tirur, there is something about Justin Bieber.

On our first day at JM, we did a ‘get-to-know-you’ activity. We asked students to draw several pictures and write some words on one page relating to their families, their interests, their friends, and other things of that nature. One part of the activity asked students to write a name of someone important in their lives. Most students wrote the names of a parent or a brother or sister. Some, in this heavily Muslim school, wrote the name of Allah. Others, boys quite predictably, wrote names of famous international football stars—Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi. A few of the girls wrote the name of famous Indian singers. However, enough boys—and it was exclusively boys who did this—wrote Justin Bieber, that I had to take it as more than just coincidence.

“Justin Bieber?” I said to the first boy I witnessed write his name.

“Yes!” he replied excitedly. “You like…Bieber?”

“Uhhh…not really,” I said confusedly.

He gave me a downcast look, as if I had just told him I did not think puppies were cute. To compound my confusion, this boy was in a 9^th standard class, meaning he was probably 14 or 15 years old. I thought back to the students I had taught at Hogg, most of whom were 13 or 14. If any of those boys had pronounced a liking—or even a cursory knowledge—of Justin Bieber, they would have been beaten up.

I cannot say Indian boys’ fascination with Justin Bieber is wrong-headed though. Catching kids writing his name on their desk, after all, is much more preferable to finding a message like “F@%& Tha Popo!”, which happened quite often at Hogg.

Yet, with only a glancing knowledge of Justin Bieber’s music, I think I have a small grasp on why he is so popular here. Justin Bieber is, of course, innocence defined. He is a boy whose voice has not yet cracked singing about things like stealing kisses underneath the bleachers and holding hands in the hallway on the way to lunch. In other words, kid stuff.

It is this longing for innocence, I think, that has made Justin Bieber such a phenomenon among teenage girls in America. And I think it is a version of the same quality that has made him so popular among teenage boys in India. After all, true adulthood starts much earlier here in India than it does for kids in America. Kids here are asked to start doing adult-like things at a very young age—buy groceries, walk their siblings to school, do household chores. And more life-altering things too: many students begin focusing on a career path when they are 16. And a not-too-insubstantial number of students have arranged marriages very soon after graduation, when they are barely yet 18.

In this context, a liking for Justin Bieber is not so much the superficial preference for a soprano-voiced, doe-eyed pop sensation. It is a yearning, instead, for an adolescence that many of these Indian students will never truly have, a teenage world for their fantasies and dreams. Because, in reality, they will be getting jobs and having their parents arrange their marriages by the time most American teenagers are picking out mini-fridges for their college dorm rooms.

At JM, as at any school in the world, there is graffiti. Above the boys’ restroom, you will find the names of football heroes scrawled quickly and messily. And at other random points, in the most unexpected of places, you will see a name that, at first glance, defies logic. But the sheer frequency with which it appears belies something deeper in the psyche of students at JM, a mania to which many parents of teenage girls in America could relate.

JUSTIN BIEBER.

Gangstas' Paradise

Amir and Abed turn stereotypes on their heads. They are Muslim and they are Indian, but they appear as if they would have been content as background dancers on Soul Train circa 1992.

Jenna, Jaime and I first met the pair walking to JM on Saturday for an ATI conference. Amir and Abed buzzed by us on Amir’s motorbike, Abed tucked neatly on the back seat. They smiled and lifted their eyebrows as they passed in a blur. “HEE-ll-oooo!” Abed shouted, his voice dragged away by the Doppler Effect. We saw them turn a corner up ahead and thought nothing more of it until a few moments later when we saw them come back around the same curve and speed back towards us.

Amir slowed and halted by us on the curb. The pair looked as if they were on their way to an Akon video. Amir, who is broad-shouldered with a muscular frame, wore his hair heavily gelled in a faux-hawk, his button-down shirt opened at the neck to reveal his hairless chest. Amir was much slighter than his friend, wispy and lean. His baggy jeans and stylish hoodie sweatshirt hung off his body. His hair fell down to his eyes in wet-looking Jeri curls, reminiscent of Rick James.

“Hello!” Amir said. “Where are you from?”

This type of encounter happens about four or five times everyday in Tirur, so none of us were put out. We happily told them we were from America. They asked us all the typical questions: “What are doing here? How long have you been here? What do you think of Kerala?”

“We teach at JM Higher Secondary. We have been here since October. We love Kerala,” we responded patiently.

Jaime poked at Abed’s ear. He smiled abashedly. He was wearing a giant stud in his ear the color of the Jamaican flag with a prominent pot leaf in the center. This kind of iconography is surprisingly common among Indian youth—pot leaves, Bob Marley’s visage, a smoking joint. These are the typical trappings of youth in revolt, regardless of location. (Another all-too-common logo displayed on men’s clothing in India, for some reason, is the Playboy bunny.)

“Nice earring,” Jaime said. Abed smiled.

“Nice to meet you,” Amir concluded, revved his bike, and turned around sharply in the middle of the road. He kicked the clutch and sped off in the direction they had been going before they saw us. We half-expected them to pop a wheelie as they did so.

Two days later, Amir and Abed found me again.

I was walking along a busy street near Tirur’s main bus stand, looking for a store to sell me refill on my mobile phone’s SIM card. (In India, you don’t pay on a plan schedule. Once your minutes run out, you simply buy a small coupon for however many number of minutes you want, type in the card’s code number into your phone and you are re-stocked.)

As I was doing this, I saw Amir and Abed running across the street. Abed’s Jeri curls bounced behind him.

“Hey! Remember us? Remember us?” Amir said, as he reached me. He stuck out his hand and grasped mine firmly. His forearm muscles twitched as he did so. Today, he was wearing another stylish button-down, once again open at the neck, form-fitting jeans, and a pair of retro-looking high top sneakers the color of a mango. Abed was wearing another hoodie sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, which was understandable since the temperature must have been in the high 80s.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “The guys on the motorcycle.”

“Yes,” they reintroduced themselves and repeated their names when I did not get them the first time.

“Come…come!” Amir said, grabbing my hand. They led me back across the street from where they had come and took me up a flight of stairs. We entered a sparsely decorated clothing store, polished and new-looking. Stacks of jeans, T-shirts, button-downs, hats, and belts lay on shelves along the walls. Loud club music pumped from the store’s hidden stereo system.

“My store!” Amir said proudly. He lifted his arms and spun around, a latter day Bugsy Segal looking down over his Las Vegas Valley.

Four more young men entered as Amir, Abed, and I talked. The tallest (and most simply dressed one, in nothing more than a blank T-shirt and nondescript jeans) introduced himself as Iqbal.

“Hello! Welcome! We just opened. Would you like to look around? Jeans? Caption shirts?” Iqbal led me to a shelf of T-shirts stacked higher than my head. He began taking some down and spreading them out on the glass countertop. Each shirt had a pithy phrase emblazoned boldly on the chest.

I AM DEFINITELY SURE OF MYSELF!

ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE NOT FREE?

MY NAME IS KHAN…AND I AM NOT A TERRORIST!

Iqbal saw me looking questioningly at this last one. The phrase, in bright red lettering, was captioned on top of an electric blue shirt.

“It is a famous line from a movie,” Iqbal said. “Shah Rukh Khan…famous actor?”

T-shirts with captions, I had noticed, were very popular among boys of a certain age and income level in India. From Kolkata to Kerala, I had noticed teenage males strutting around with these shirts that had odd, funny-sounding English phrases on them, some of them unbelievably vulgar. (A shirt I saw a boy in Kolkata wearing said, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT?) \

I wondered if the boys wearing the shirts knew exactly what they were saying, what message they were sending, or if the fact that they were wearing a shirt with English lettering on it gave them enough social cachet for their liking.

I tried to be polite, as Iqbal laid out shirt after shirt, each one more cringe-worthy than the last. “I think I might be a little old to wear these. Any with no captions?”

“Ah, of course,” Iqbal said, smiling. He went over to another stack of shelves piled high with button-up shirts. They had no writing, but the selection still had me feigning interest. The shirts, placed side by side, gave off the colors of a candy store—bright pink stripes, thick purple swatches, deep hues of maroon and magenta, teal and tope.

“Anything in just…plain white?” I asked hopefully.

“Of course,” Iqbal, ever the salesman, said. He drew out a plain white shirt with pearl snap buttons. But it was a small, about 30 centimeters too small for my upper body.

“Our stock is low right now,” Iqbal said with a sigh. “We had a shipment coming in from Bombay, but it got stolen off the train on the way here.”

“What?” I said. “That’s awful.

He half-smiled. “This is India. Things do not run as smoothly as they may in America.” The other boys grunted and gave sardonic chuckles.

“I have been all over the world,” Iqbal continued. I was beginning to think this was Iqbal’s store, and Amir who had been so proudly presenting it earlier, just worked in it. As did the other boys milling around. Iqbal gave off an air of maturity and savvy to which the others seemed to be striving but had not quite attained. Maybe it was his simple clothing style, not too bombastic, or the quiet, even way he talked, or the way the others huddled around him as he spoke, but Iqbal appeared to be the boss.

“I used to be an accountant,” he said, the clothes on the countertop still laid out but forgotten. “I worked in Djibouti, Lebanon. Those are bad places. India is better, but still not as good as America.”

His store in Tirur had been open a month. I felt keen to help him out.

“Do you have any vests?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“Not at the moment,” he said apologetically. “But maybe later in the week. Will you come back?”

“This weekend?” I said.

“Of course,” Iqbal said and stuck out his hand to shake. After he did so, the other boys—including Amir and Abed—did the same. They pumped my hand and gave me broad smiles.

“Come back. We’ll be waiting,” Iqbal said as I left.

Workers of the World...

An article in The Hindu recently caught my eye. A man named Thomas Isaac was exhorting Kerala’s trade unions to protest the Indian government’s laggard issuance of monthly rice supplements to poor families. The majority of these families, who were slated to receive 2 kilograms of rice per month, earned income from manual labor, farming and fishing. Isaac was quoted in the article as saying, “Agitations and protests should be launched by the working class for their rightful demands including pensions and other pecuniary benefits.”

Nothing would be particular noteworthy about this story, except that Thomas Isaac is Kerala’s state Finance Minister. Imagine a government official in America openly encouraging labor unions and poor people to strike. Instead of authoring the auto bailout (which was controversial enough), imagine if US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had instead called for Ford workers to picket in Detroit.

Yeah, right.

Yet, Isaac’s call for ‘agitation’ passed as page-five news in The Hindu. His comments were presented as rather uncontroversial in the context of the article, which focused primarily on the government’s latest poverty figures.

Though I got a chuckle from the article, I was not necessarily surprised. For India has an entrenched, long-standing acceptance of what may be called—for lack of a better term—socialism. It was Jawaharlal Nehru himself, India’s first and still most revered Prime Minister, who said in 1936, “I am convinced that the key to the solution of the world’s problems and India’s problems lies in socialism.” Nehru became famous after Independence for relying on strictly regimented Five-Year Plans that mapped out in sometimes excruciating detail the goals and mechanisms for India’s economic development and growth. (The Five-Year Plans were eventually dropped in the early 1990s by then-Finance Minister Manhoman Singh, who is now India’s Prime Minister.)

Furthermore, the Communist Party of India has been around in some form or manifestation since the 1920s and has been the dominant political force in the two states in which Jenna and I have spent most of our time in India: West Bengal and Kerala. Hammer-and-sickle graffiti is apparent on nearly every block in Tirur (as it was in some parts of Kolkata), and it is common to see political banners projecting the stern faces of Lenin, Stalin, and Che Guevara.

Americans, in general, have a deep distrust for this type of iconography and understandably so, considering the Cold War’s legacy and the US’s founding ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’—ideals that strike to the core of our very individualistic spirit. Capitalism has always been the name of our game and, except for diversions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, nothing much has changed that mindset

But Indian politics comes from a different place. The long struggle for freedom, which ended in 1947 but began with the founding of the Congress Party in 1885, was always couched as a mass movement of the poor and working classes of India against the ‘benevolent’ autocracy of British rule. Gandhi himself believed all of India’s industry should be indigenous and communal. In a more radical turn late in is life, he even banished the idea of private property. Nehru, of course, espoused socialist ideals from his youth, maturing as he did during a time when the Russian Revolution was still judged a remarkably surprising success.

The great Indian freedom struggle hit its nadir in the late 1930s just before war broke out in Europe. Anti-fascist tendencies easily melded with socialist beliefs as Hitler and Mussolini exerted their will from Dunkirk to Stalingrad. Bipan Chandra says in his book India’s Struggle for Independence, after 1935, there was a “consistent and militant anti-imperialism” among India’s elite political leaders and their followers. “The organization of workers and peasants in trade unions and kisan sabhas (farmers’ councils) led to the acceptance of a socialist vision of independent India.”

For India, the tradition of socialism is not, like it is in America, about the destruction of private enterprise and the dissolution of individual entrepreneurship. Socialism in the Indian tradition is a response to imperial domination and a willful statement of communal rights in the face of oppression.

As uncomfortable, then, as it makes my American sensibilities, I can place the hammer-and-sickle graffiti in context now. And I no longer feel the need to scoff at the Che Guevara imagery. And I no longer chuckle when I read of a government official urging the working class to ‘agitate’. All of it, oddly enough, makes sense in the proper context.

Happy Hour at the Kerala State Liquor Distribution Center

A collective of conservative Muslim organizations in Kerala recently launched a ‘Quit Drinking for the New Year’s’ campaign. In an effort to apparently spread prohibitory cheer to the masses, the organizations said that over the next few weeks they will be ‘recruiting youth’ to go out and ‘educate’ people on the ills of alcohol. That promise sounds vaguely fascistic.

However, I guess the 100 or so men at the Kerala State Liquor Distribution Center on Friday night had not been ‘educated’ by any ‘youths’. Neither had I, for that matter.

I had come to the so-called ‘Beverage Shop’ to by a beer. It was Friday night, after all, and neither Jenna nor I had had a drop of alcohol pass our lips in nearly two weeks. On my way out of our apartment, Jaime had also requested a Kingfisher. “If you can find any,” she said, which was always a reasonable qualifier when searching for alcohol in Tirur.

I told my rickshaw driver, “Beverage shop, please,” and a wicked smile parted his lips. “Liquor!” he replied, chuckling and tipping his head back as he pointed his thumb downwards at his mouth—the universal sign for getting drunk.

“Uh, yeah. Liquor,” I said. I already felt squalid. The feeling only would get worse.

After a five-minute ride past Tirur’s busy central bus stand and through its main market, we came upon a poorly lit road lined with idling rickshaws and haphazardly parked scooters and motorcycles. The driver pulled to the side onto the gravel curb and I alighted upon a scene more reminiscent of a stock exchange than a bar.

More than 100 men—in varying stages of excitement and inebriation—clamored at a storefront of iron gates that had the appearance of Depression-era bank teller windows. Two sinuous lines of men snaked around opposite sides of the storefront while a wild melee of more men pushed and caromed around in the center. Frequently, men would stumble out of the scrum carrying full bottles of amber booze—beer, rum, brandy, and whiskey. They would stuff the bottles in their dhotis under their shirts or simply open the bottles right then and there and begin partaking sans chasers. Muddied pieces of paper littered the ground: receipts, stamped by what must have been the Official Alcohol Distributor of Kerala (or some other curiously named public peon).

Reluctantly, I got in line. My rickshaw driver had already departed, laughing maniacally as he pulled away from the curb. I felt like an explorer who spends his life searching for a long lost tribe of natives and then suddenly one day in the jungle finds himself captive in a pot of boiling cannibal stew. Be careful what you wish for, the words inexplicably kept popping into my head.

Maybe the “Quit Drinking” campaigners were on to something.

Even in selling hooch, India is maddeningly bureaucratic. I was standing in a line to make my order—a process that ended up taking slightly more than half an hour. Once I ordered and received a receipt, then I would have to elbow and gouge my way to another window, somehow scrounge through the mosh pit to give my receipt to another teller, who looked over my receipt, stamped it, and then retrieved the bottles from stacks of cardboard boxes in a back room.

Once I ordered and made my way, pushing and clawing, to the second window, I realized why I had seen so many men with duffle bags. The Kerala State Liquor Distribution Center, either through lack of funds or through the twisted logic of public shaming, did not give out brown paper bags with their alcohol. Customers took to stuffing bottles five-at-a-time into their gym bags or their backpacks, so as to conceal their unhealthy habits from the upright citizenry of Tirur or, more likely, from packs of youths bent on education. Meanwhile, I was stuck with carrying a bottle of Kingfisher and a plastic handle of Old Cask rum in nothing but my sweaty hands.

In a final bureaucratic flourish, a convenience store sold mixers and soda in the stall next to the liquor distributor. I bought a Pepsi and took a clear plastic bag and placed all my purchases inside. Better than nothing, I thought. If I met any ‘educating youth’ on the way home, I would explain that the alcohol was for a friend. A very sick friend, who for some reason, felt he needed a drink on a Friday night.

Visions of America

Razak works in a light bulb store, but he dreams of bigger things. I first met him on one of my regular trips to get our gas cylinder refilled. The store that does the refilling is just north of Tirur’s main bus stand—a seething square of market stalls and one-room restaurants—on a side street that abuts a pungently aromatic drainage ditch.

Razak’s light bulb store is on the other side of the walking path from the store where the gas is refilled. Every two weeks or so I have to take one of our two gas cylinders to this store in order for them to refill it and give it back to us. The process takes a night, so I usually drop it off one day and come back the next to pick it up full and ready for us on our gas-burning stove.

The first time I dropped off our gas cylinder, I also needed light bulbs. Several in our apartment were blinking, warning us their time was near. As I walked in, Razak sat idly at a long Formica counter that took up one wall of the store. Shelves of light bulbs in their delicate, cubical boxes stood from floor to ceiling—40 watts, 60 watts, 100 watts, standard, green efficient, energy saver, spotlights, porch lights, oven lights. You name the light bulb and Razak has it here.

That first meeting was uneventful. We passed the usual pleasantries. He asked me where I was from and what I did in Tirur. I asked him his name, then asked him to repeat his name, then asked him finally to write his name down on a piece of paper. “I say it better when I see it,” I said lamely. Razak simply smiled and wrote his name on a piece of scratch paper and then handed me bag of light bulbs.

“Have a good day. See you around,” he said.

And every time I would come back to the store to pick up a full gas cylinder or drop off one that needed refilled, I would stop off and wave at Razak or simply yell, “Hello! How are you?” as I walked down the path.

One time, I greeted him: “What’s the news?”

He looked puzzled. “The news? What is the meaning of this?” he said.

“You know, what is going on? How are things?”

“Ohhhh, they are good. Good. Things are fine! What is the news…” he said, clearly filing this American phrase in a part of his memory reserved for odd English idioms.

He looked up, apparently taking my question of greeting to heart: “I have been thinking…” and he let the statement hang there for a few seconds.

“Thinking of what?” I asked. I had a full gas cylinder hanging heavily from my hand, so I placed it on the concrete pavement.

“Thinking of future. Thinking of life.” Razak apparently had big news.

“That sounds important,” I said, chuckling.

Razak smiled but remained serious. “You know, I want to go to London. I want to get my MBA there.”

“Really? That sounds great,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. I had noticed advertisements in The Hindu—south India’s biggest English daily newspaper—trumpeting MBA courses in all different locales: London, Paris, Singapore, Thailand, Tokyo, New York. And MBA courses were not all. The ads also promised IT training, cooking classes, secretarial courses, and dozens of other training regimens geared towards the service industry. The prices for these courses were never displayed as prominently as the advertisers’ catchy slogans, but a few had offered packages for as low as Rs. 2.5 lakh (which is equivalent to about $5,600). Quite a chunk of change for the average Indian.

And that was Razak’s main impediment.

“It is so expensive,” he was saying shaking his head of kinky black hair, which stood up firmly form his head in tufted perm. He had the look of a Commodores-era Lionel Ritchie. “So expensive. Out of my range.”

“Do you think you will ever get enough money?”

“I will keep working here,” he jerked his head back towards the light bulb shop. “But I don’t know.” His tone remained calm and even bright despite the resignation of his words. His lips constantly rose with the beginnings of a grin, his white teeth revealing themselves every so often.

“I had a friend who went to London,” he said. “A cousin actually. That is another thing: security at the airport. If you have the money to pay for training, you still may get stopped at the airport and then turned back. My cousin made it though. But he said they questioned him for a long time.”

I tried to be empathetic and I nodded my head, though as a white male I had never once been randomly stopped at a security checkpoint in my life.

“I hear the same things about America,” Razak said playfully. “It is hard to get in there. Visas are hard Security is hard.”

“Yeah, ever since 9/11, we have been very careful who we let in,” I said. Most Indians liked talking politics. A man who just met you on a train might ask you your feelings about America’s new health care law (that happened to me). Or the person sitting next to you on the bus might ask you your name and then follow that nondescript question up with whether you voted for Barack Obama or not (that also happened to me once).

Razak was no different. His whole gripe about the exigencies of studying for an MBA abroad had been an entrée to getting me to talk about America’s border security.

“I am thinking America does not like Indians,” he said.

“Are you kidding? We love Indians. There are so many Indians in America,” I responded, compelled to defend my homeland.

“I know. I know. We are always wanting to go there. Indians always want to go to America,” Razak said with a typical head waggle. “But it is hard. Expensive and hard to get a visa. That is why places like London are so popular, too.”

Razak’s points reminded me of another man I had met in Calicut a few weeks ago—a man named Joy who had dual American and Indian citizenship He had been living in America for nearly two decades but was originally from Kerala and had returned for his father’s funeral. He had said to me in the midst of drinking a few scotches at the hotel we both happened to be staying at: “It is easy for us Indians to leave here,” he said, pointing at the hotel bar’s patio floor. By ‘here’, I assumed, he meant India. “But to go to America and then try to leave and come back to India. Not so easy.”

It was Thornton Wilder’s old trope, “You can never go home,” put on its ear. Indians like Joy and Razak wanted to leave and never come back. They wanted to find contentment and fulfillment beyond India’s borders, beyond the boundaries of a light bulb shop.

If anything, encounters with these types of people have made me realize even in the midst of a historic economic slump and rhetoric that says America is as globally unpopular as its ever been, the USA is still the premier destination for any would-be immigrants who have dreams of boot-strapping their way to the top. Joy proved it. He now lives comfortably in Staten Island. And Razak wants to be next in line, as soon as he saves enough money.

Working In My Head

Vinod came in Monday with hollow-looking eyes and sat down with a sigh.

“Long weekend?” I asked, as I made some final changes to my first lesson of the day. We were in the teacher’s lounge of JM’s upper campus.

“I was working in my head all weekend long,” he said with an empty smile. The odd phrase made me laugh and think back to my years teaching at Hogg Middle School and how teachers there would come in on Mondays with the same tired looks and make the same anxious sighs.

“Working on what?” I asked.

“I’m just worried. About evaluations,” he said lightly patting a plastic sack of booklets he had carried in under his arm.

“What kind of evaluation?” I asked, sensing Vinod was eager to talk about it, despite (or maybe because of) the bags under his eyes.

“Student evaluation. We call them continuous evaluations,” he said and as he talked, Vinod drew out one of the booklets, which was white with a light blue border. He flipped through the book. A student’s meticulous handwriting—in English—filled the first twelve or so pages of the book, line after line, paragraph after paragraph.

“This book is for Chemistry,” Vinod explained. “Every few weeks, we have students work on an assignment in this book. It is their evaluation. Things like tests, little quizzes, group work, projects. It goes in here and it adds up at the end of the year. By the end, this book”—Vinod waved it in the air—“is worth 20 percent of their final mark.”

“What is the other 80 percent?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“State public examination.”

And we both nodded our head knowingly—two teachers a world apart now brought together by a common anxiety.

“In America,” I said, “it’s the same.”

“The same?” Vinod said, his eyebrows rising. He seemed gladdened by this news, in the same way a shipwreck survivor selfishly rejoices when he finds another castaway on his deserted island.

As we had been talking, another teacher named Santosh (different from my friend Santosh at the other JM campus, the one who wanted to learn Spanish) had inched closer listening. Vinod turned to him now and spoke quickly in Malayalm. I picked up the words “Ameriki” and “examen”.

“I told him that students in America also must take tests,” Vinod said, turning back to me. I nodded.

“You get nervous, huh?” I asked.

“Oh yes. Very nervous.”

“What happens if the students fail the state exams? Do they have to repeat their standard?”

“Not usually. They get a chance to take the test again sometime in August after the new school year has started.” (Kerala schools have a long break in March, April, and May). “They get a chance to study more, but it is usually really hard for students to take that exam they should have passed the first time.”

“Embarrassing for them?”

“Oh yes,” Vinod said.

“Do teachers get evaluated?” I asked.

Vinod looked confused for a second. I felt I was pushing him to the limits of his English. After a few more seconds, he said: “Sometimes…students will be asked to write reports about us and our classes. Sometimes. Not always.” He squinted and waggled his head, hoping he had answered my question.

“The state exams…” I continued, trying to break it down. “And the scores the students get on those exams…” Vinod nodded his head, showing me he was still following along. “Are teachers evaluated based on their students’ scores?”

Again, Vinod gave a befuddled look but he had understood my question. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Of course not.” He shook his head and chuckled.

“In America,” I said, “teachers are evaluated on their students’ scores.”

Vinod stopped chuckling and said, “Really?” He turned to Santosh again and spoke in Malayalam. He turned back to me: “I just told him what you told me. That is hard for you and American teachers,” and he chuckled again.

I felt like saying, “Yeah, tell me about it,” but I simple raised my eyebrows and went back to preparing my lesson.

Sunday in Tirur

Yesterday entailed little beyond a stroll around downtown Tirur and dinner at Sabka. Jaime was not feeling too well during the afternoon and laid up in bed most of the day. Jenna and I walked behind JM school and took the back way to the bus stand. We went around the market and took a gander at the open fish market by the train station. It was quite a sight with quite a smell: shimmering, oily fish bodies laid out in profusion on a damp marble floor—carp and mackerel, a long-jawed thing that looked like sturgeon, bluefin and silverfish (I recognized these from the ones I had seen in Fort Cochin). Two vendors had meaty looking prawns and purplish baby squids.

A young boy demonstrated for us how he cleans the fish before selling them. He took one and laid it on a cracked wooden board. He grabbed a blackened blade the shape of a scimitar. He whisked off the scales on either side with a few vigorous swipes. Then, he cleanly chopped the head off with one well-placed cut, and did the same with the tail. He threw the reddened, naked carcass in a pile of others that looked as if they had been given the same treatment.

“You buy?” he said, pointing towards the pile of cleaned fish bodies. “Maybe another day,” I responded, not sure he could understand me.

Other men held up fish by their tails in front of our faces. Another vendor grabbed the snout of a particularly large species and lifted the top half of its body off the bed of ice on which it was laying, so that its mouth and eyes pointed directly at us. “Good!” he said. “Buy?” he asked.

In another nearby stall, men slit the throats of live chickens and dressed them for waiting customers. One man grabbed a squawking bird by its neck and feet and stretched it out like an exercise band. Another man quickly cut the chicken’s throat and the blood ran down into a giant blue plastic bin, which held the bloody secretions of dozens of other previously live chickens. Some red liquid splattered on the stone ground around the stall as the chicken went through its death throes. Then, the man who had been holding the animal took it inside a small hut and began plucking the feathers.

Beyond that was an open-air square filled with dried seafood—scallops, scampi, shrimp, clams, oysters, salted fish—all stacked in rimy, pungent piles on cotton mats and plastic tarps. Red Lobster this was not. The odor overwhelmed the senses and burned the eyes in the afternoon heat. Leathery men with white scarves wrapped loosely around their heads sat by the piles, not really trying to sell anything, just staring at passers-by with a well-earned air of disinterest. Maybe the ordure of the fish had finally gotten to them, seized them somewhere between the nostrils and the brain and said, “Stay where you are! No use fighting it.”

We made our way past a series of fruit vendors and were finally enticed to stop at the end of the lane when Jenna spotted some pink-colored pomegranates. We bought some along with a few oranges, bananas and a soft, wrinkly green fruit that the man said was an ‘orange’ but looked more like Gollum’s head.

We headed back to our apartment along Tirur’s main road, past the bus stand and our favorite bakery Lili’s, past the turnoff to JM School and along a section of road that narrows dangerously to the point that screeching buses pass within inches of your life, past the movie theater that looks more like an abandoned warehouse, past a field of idly chomping goats and over a series of drainage trenches filled with a putrid brackish liquid with an indescribable smell, until we finally reached our neighborhood: an area of town known as Payyanangadi.

A new bakery opened up on the corner of our street on Friday, which qualifies as big news in Tirur and big news for us, in fact. On Friday, we had spotted the new restaurant’s awning bedecked with streamers from the road that leads to JM. We had practically skipped the rest of the way and run up to the counter to gaze at all the fresh sweets in the glass cabinet and smell the sizzling rack of chicken spinning slowly in the corner of the store. We had shwerma—shaved bits of chicken mixed with tomatoes and lettuce in a wrapped pita—along with two 7-Ups. It was magical. (I now understand why people from small towns get so excited when a new restaurant opens.)

On Sunday, though, we merely surveyed the chaos of the bakery from the street as we walked by. It was still as busy as it had been Friday—adolescent boys pushing to get to the front of the counter to place an order, older men sitting lazily in the dining area, moremen and some sedate-looking women in headscarves milling around the patio along the street.

We continued the walk back to our apartment and whiled the rest of the afternoon in our room reading and thinking of Christmas break. Every so often, the smell of shwerma from down the street reached our nostrils and we were happy once again.

Christmastime in Kerala

Two factors make listening to Christmas music in Tirur slightly depressing. First, nobody around here is in the Christmas spirit, which is understandable since most everyone around here is Muslim or Hindu. Secondly, it is hot as hell right now.

Not hot like the Indian summers of the upper Midwest. Not hot like the occasional warm fronts south Texas gets in December. Hot as in tropical. Hot as in sticky, dog-day-in-August humidity. Hot as in: “How can Christmas possibly be three weeks away?” We feel like we should be gearing up for the Fourth of July right now, so reminiscent is Kerala’s heat to the American Midwest’s summer temperatures.

Even our normally stoic co-workers have become affected. “It’s HOT!” Santosh complained one day last week, breezing his face with a handkerchief. Maybe he was truly hot, or maybe he felt compelled to say something once he saw me, with sweat dripping down my nose and dark circles spanning my armpits.

I had noted when we first began working at JM in October that trying the much-used American conversational tactic of discussing the weather was useless. “Wow, it’s hot, huh?” I would say to a co-worker. She would squint in that way that made me think either she did not understand me, or she thought I was an idiot.

“Hoooot!” I repeated, miming the motion of wiping my brow.

“Hot?” the co-worker would say, with a tone that suggested she was thinking, “It’s always hot. So what?”

And indeed, in Kerala I have noticed that it is always hot. Or rainy. But the monsoons have stopped so it is rainy no longer. Just hot.

The early mornings are pleasant enough. I wake at six most days to do the laundry. We have moved our laundry line to the front atrium since Jaime moved in to the spare bedroom, so each morning I take down the laundry that had been hung up the day before and replace them with clothes that had been soaking overnight. At these times, a mild breeze blows in the atrium windows and produces that now-foreign sensation of a chill on my skin. I glance out and see the cobalt sky and the lustrous tops of the palm trees in the distance and think for a second that I truly love the tropics. But by 8:30, a languid humidity has descended and the pleasant breeze has been deadened into the dusty earth. The sky now radiates a white-yellowish glare the color of a hydrogen bomb blast. The frantic movement of rickshaws and buses and pedestrians crowding the street serves to raise the temperature even more.

So, when I listen to Nat King Cole sing, “Chest-nuts roooasting on an open fiiiiirre!”—his masterful elocution drawing out the word ‘fire’—I can think only of the fire occurring on my brow and in my armpits. The line: “Jack Frost nippin’…at your noh-ose,” only breeds in me a sardonic harrumph.

Tony Bennet’s Silver Bells seems impudent with its suggestion of holiday shoppers happy to be out in the cold weather. Kids bunch here in Tirur, but no snow crunches. Likewise, Frank Sinatra’s Jingle Bells has a good swing but its image of a sleigh dashing through a wintry landscape seems impossible at the moment.

More appropriate for my present circumstance is Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas Island—a hit from the 1950s that seems quaint when listened to in America but wholly lacking in irony when heard in southern India.

“How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? How’d you like to hang a stocking from a great big coconut tree? How’d you like to stay up late, like the islanders do? Wait for Santa to sail in with your presents...in a canoe?”

Having myriad coconut trees to choose from around our apartment, I might very well take up Ella’s suggestion. And as for Santa, he can get to our apartment via rickshaw, though the driver might charge him extra for his bag of toys.

Boys' Night Out

Several customs in Kerala make life heaven for an ill-mannered teenager. For instance, it is traditional to eat with your hands, so you can make a mess of dinner and not get scolded. Also, it is considered polite to burp, the louder the better. It is also acceptable to spit in the street and blow your nose by simply plugging up one nostril and letting fly with the other.

On several occasions, I have eagerly sloughed off my own Western notions of propriety and let loose a troublesome wad of phlegm or projected a resoundingly satisfying belch. At these times, Jenna looks at me with the force of a thousand suns. Apparently, I should allow the Keralans to keep their customs to themselves.

However, in the streets of Tirur, a man can go about his business without such nagging female gentility. Because the streets of this mid-sized city are the particular preserve of men—playgrounds with no rules or boundaries and with no intrusions from any yucky girls. Little boys slip in and out of traffic, narrowly avoiding concussions or worse. Old men gather in groups on street corners, telling jokes and scratching their balls. Young men saunter down the lanes in modern dress, their hair coiffed and gelled. (Many times, I have asked myself whom these more cosmopolitan types are trying to impress. Each other? For all the women have gone indoors by dusk.) It is like Pleasure Island with no indication that anyone will be turning into a donkey any time soon.

It was only inevitable, then, that in this atmosphere I would have a Boys’ Night Out.

My chance came when Nahas, the manager of the local Internet café, asked me earlier this week whether I would like to go to the Expo. What is the Expo? I asked. Nahas—who has limited English skills but unlimited stores of confidence—proceeded to search for another word while pantomiming various things: a big circle spinning in the air, two hands held out flat like race cars bumping into each other, a palm cupped as if eating an invisible pile of popcorn.

“You mean, a carnival?” I asked.

“YES! Carnival!” he said, glad to be able to stop his charade. I said I would like to go and when I asked Jenna whether she would like to come with us, her response gave me a tiny insight into why the women of Tirur leave the streets to the boys: “Go to a carnival with you and Nahas and his other male friends? Ride rides and eat fried food? Walk around spitting and burping? No thanks.”

Fair enough.

The Expo was a 20 minute ride from Tirur, on the same road I take twice weekly to Valancherry. I had, in fact, noticed the carnival on these bus trips early in the morning. At 7 am, the Expo looked lonely and abandoned—the rides rusty and motionless, the field strewn with trash, the booths and stalls shuttered and uninviting. The first time I had seen it, I thought it had gone out of business.

At night, though, the Expo transformed itself. Nahas, his friends Mustapha and Rafiq, and I walked in to the carnival grounds and stopped momentarily to take it all in. The grounds were arrayed in a square pattern, with food stalls, game parlors and novelty acts (including a soothsaying donkey and a ‘snake woman’) arrayed along the perimeter. Children’s rides spun and rotated gently in the interior of the square, where the grass was flattened and the ground mushy from thousands of visitors’ treads. A swooping, groaning Tilt-a-Whirl and a pendulous Viking Ship ride stood in the center of the square. And a Ferris wheel dominated the entire scene to our right, spinning at a startlingly quick rate—so quick, the pill-shaped cabs titled with inertia as they rounded the wheel’s frame. Off in the distance, we could hear the sounds of revving engines: a motorbike exhibition.

Despite the smell of oil, the sound of heavy machinery, and the low hum of male voices, a family atmosphere pervaded. Small children sprinted around the complex. Young Muslim mothers strode slowly in hushed groups from stall to stall barely looking up. Fathers led their reluctant (and sometimes screaming) sons and daughters to the next ride.

Rafiq was tugging on Nahas’s arm, leading him towards the Ferris wheel. The Ferris Wheel of Death, I was thinking in my head. Shouts and whoops could be heard from its rotating arms. Like Nahas, I was hesitant. After all, if this Expo was run like most typical enterprises in India, then I could be sure this ride had not been properly inspected in years (if it had ever been). Yet, I followed Nahas, Mustapha and Rafiq onto the ride. We split up and Nahas and I sat in one rusty, creaking cab. There were narrow entranceways on both sides with no safety ropes. I wondered silently whether any one of my American girth had ever stepped foot on this thing.

“First time,” Nahas said.

“No, I’ve been on these before,” I said, trying to retain a tone of nonchalance as the wheel kicked into gear, its metal bowels whining unsettlingly.

“No, this is MY first time,” Nahas said. He gripped the metal grates of the cab and widened his feet, his face puckered into a look of consternation. I was reminded of some old submarine movies I had seen: “Brace for impact!”, the captain shouted as a torpedo neared the hull.

The wheel started slowly enough. I had always been somewhat uncomfortable on Ferris wheels anyway, my stomach doing flips as the ride neared its apex, an odd tingling sensation racing from the heels of my feet up to my thighs. This wheel, though, obliterated that feeling. It went so fast I began to feel weightless.

As we had seen on the ground, once it picked up a certain measure of speed, the wheel’s cabs would begin to sway. As it rounded the bottom curve and came up, we tilted unnervingly to the right, the rope-less entranceway yawning before us. And as we came around the top and spun back down, we jerked and leaned back to the left, the other entranceway presenting its unobstructed view of the ground 80 feet below.

Each time we hit the bottom and started to come up, Nahas would let go with an adolescent shriek: “Yeee-aaaa-AWWWW-AHHHH!” At one point, I felt certain the controls of the contraption had malfunctioned, and Nahas and I would go flying off into the hot, thick Kerala night.

“FUN?” he yelled at me, as if to steel his own nerves. I nodded silently, tightening my grip on the cab’s flaky metal frame.

After a time, the wheel slowed and we were able to catch our breath. Our cab came down to the bottom, and a bored-looking teenager showed us the exit ramp. In a situation such as this, you do not need words to express your emotions. Nahas, Rafiq, Mustapha and I stood in a circle at the base of the wheel, reenacting the wheels motions with our arms, adding sound effects (“Whoosh! Fewsh!”). I grabbed my stomach and made myself look sick and they all laughed. The point was made: it had been one hell of a ride.

Next, we did the Viking Ship ride (which is probably not called the Viking Ship ride in India) but still follows the same principal: cram as many people into an angular boat stuck on the end of dilapidated metal pendulum and swing them back and forth until they almost fall and crack their heads open. This one was made especially thrilling by the absence of lap belts.

Finally, we got to the motorbike exhibition, in the far back corner of the complex. The entry for this was a little extra, for it involved live performers. Rafiq, at first, was hesitant to pay the Rs. 30 but Nahas and Mustapha convinced him, pleading with him once we heard the bikes’ engines kick up and start to snarl and whirr inside the giant wooden funnel that would be the staging area.

We paid and then hustled up a swaying metal staircase that led to a circular gangway that hung precipitously over a rickety wooden funnel. The riders performed their act in this gigantic cauldron made of thin wooden slats nailed and screwed together. The funnel tapered off at the bottom, the wooden slats meeting a dirt floor about 40 feet below the spectators. At the top, the cauldron spanned a good 50 feet across at its diameter. The entire structure had the size and shape of a small grain silo. Young boys and girls along with their doubtful-looking parents peered over the edge.

A group of wiry men, stubble-cheeked with tired eyes, milled around on the floor. A couple loudly revved their bikes’ engines with a teenage pride. The cacophony of the place was overpowering, the noise trapped by the wooden slats and a cloth circus tent top. Two small Honda sedans, beat up with peeling paint, stood idle next to the men gearing up their bikes. I could only imagine what all the vehicles would be used for in such a geometrically rotund space.

Eventually, an invisible signal was giving and four men gave their bikes a final kick and they all careened onto the wooden sides of the funnel. They rode around and through each other in a dizzying frenzy, parallel to the ground, their machines and bodies hanging on impossibly to the sides of the structure. They mocked boredom and slid back in their seats, propping their heels onto their handlebars, their hands resting with laced fingers behind their heads. They crossed their legs and struck meditative yoga poses. Two men sat sidesaddle, staring down at the ground as they whirred around the vertical tunnel at more than 50 miles an hour.

One man rode up to the lip of the funnel, near the audience, and stuck his hand out. A few spectators held out rupee notes and he snatched them blindly from their hands, then stuck the pink bills in his mouth. A few of the girls in the audience giggled and put their hands abashedly in front of their faces.

The power of four motorcycles, I felt, would send this whole place to the ground. The gangway swayed and kicked each time a bike passed. And that was before the cars.

After five minutes of the bikes, two more men hopped in the idle Honda sedans and with a little push from a man on the ground, got up enough speed to begin riding along the sides of the cauldron too. Now, three bikes (one of the bikers had stopped) and two cars were racing around the inside of the funnel, swerving and careering past each other in some insane rush hour race. Unbelievably, one of the car drivers stood up in his car and stuck the upper half of his body out the driver’s side window, his hands still on the wheel and his foot still clearly on the gas pedal, for he did not slow down but accelerated.

As spectacular as it all seemed, an insouciant fatigue radiated from the performers’ faces. They went to their death-defying tasks with a hint of disinterest. As they spun around the circle, they glared up at the audience with a look that seemed almost accusatory, as if our insatiable curiosity was driving them to do this, and they would have no compulsion to risk death otherwise. They accepted our applause at the end with slight shakes of their heads and peremptory waves. Then they exited the funnel through a small trap door and went to smoke cigarettes in the canvas tents that were their makeshift homes behind the carnival.

The motorbike exhibition seemed to both excite us and drain us.

“NOT in America,” I said, pointing down at the funnel, now quiet and empty.

“Yeah. That is India, man!” Nahas said.

We wandered around the fair grounds a bit more. Nahas bought the group pieces of pickled pineapple. We loitered around a tent that hosted some gambling games. A hushed, nervous pack of teenage boys threw money on a table; an irritable dealer with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth accepted bets and spun a primitive roulette wheel; bills were bartered and exchanged like chits at a stock exchange.

After Nahas lost Rs. 20, we decided to leave. Carnivals, after all, are a more time-honored version of the ubiquitous video games I see young men playing in Nahas’s Internet café: pleasingly entertaining at first. By the end, though, you have a headache from the bright lights and loud noises.