Easy Rider

A typical scene from the beach at Calicut.

Calicut, frankly, had little to offer except cable TV and hot water in the hotel. It is a perfectly ordinary city with a glut of small shops and markets and a local university to provide some intellectual capital. There is a respectable beach nearby. In all these aspects, then, Calicut could be the Wilmington, NC, of Kerala.

Still, it was nice to get away from Tirur for the weekend. It will be the last trip Jenna and I plan to take before meeting my parents in Kochi for Christmas weekend. We savored our showers and watched a little too much TV.

We walked around with Summer and Colleen for a few hours Saturday. Though Calicut is bigger than Tirur and possibly a little more cosmopolitan, its citizens still like to gawk at four Americans walking down the street. We drew crowds at the beach by simply staring out at the ocean. Schoolchildren waved and yelled, ‘Hello!’ to us from across large intersections.

Most strange, though, was an older man with leathery skin, a wild mop of gray hair and a scraggly beard. He came up to me on the city’s busiest street—an avenue of small shops and the city’s honking, fuming bus stand. He was wearing a torn button-up shirt and a stained cotton dhoti rolled up to above his knees. He had no shoes and his forehead was adorned with a white swatch of sandalwood paste, a sign that he was a Hindu and had been to temple that morning.

“Pee-ta Fawn-da!” he yelled at me without so much as a cursory introduction. I looked at him and smiled and continued walking. “Pee-ta Fawn-da!” he yelled again, keeping pace with me, grinning maniacally. I slowed down and looked at him questioningly.

“Your place?” he said, waggling his head. “Your place? Country?”

“America,” I said hesitatingly. The man talked so loudly that even on this chaotic street, our conversation was drawing attention from passers-by.

“Ahh, Am-ay-ree-kah! Yes, Pee-ta-Fawnda!” he said again. I was still unable to break his code.

I squinted. Summer, Colleen, and Jenna had stopped a few paces in front of me and were looking back. I looked to them for help, but they could not translate either.

The man was unperturbed. “Pee-tar Faaawn-da!” he said more slowly, still grinning.

“Peter Fonda? The actor?” I said. Surely that was not what he was saying.

The man nodded vigorously, breaking out into an even wider smile. “Yes, yes, yes! Pee-tah Fawn-dah! Hen-ree Fawn-da! You know? Jane Fawn-dah!”

“Uh, yeah. I know. My parents would know more,” but the man did not get my joke. His dress and his fixation with the Fondas gave me the impression he was some wayward hippie who had somehow been stranded in Kerala. And I was Dr. Stanley, finally come to rescue him.

“Jane Fonda!” he continued to yell, pleased with himself. “Cal-ee-for-nee-ah! EEE-agles! The EEE-gles! Hotel Cal-ee-for-nee-ah!” This sadhu was stuck in the Sixties, but this encounter would have fit perfectly in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. His catalog of outdated bands continued unabated: “Grand FUNK! Jeff-uh-sahn AIR-plane! Hall and OATS!” Spittle flew out of his mouth with each syllable; tendons in his neck stood out as he expectorated the words.

I nodded and smiled. “Yeah. I know them,” I said. "Old bands. Long time ago," I motioned with my hands, as if I was a shortstop calling for a popup.

The conversation took an inevitable turn. “You want marry-ju-wanna!” he yelled. Now it all suddenly came together. “Marry-ju-wanna! You want?”

I shook my head a definitive ‘no’. “I’ll pass,” I said, starting to walk away. The man still seemed pleased with himself.

“Am-ay-ree-kah, man! Cal-ee-for-nee-ah!” he yelled a final time after us, putting his thumbs up and smiling. He could have been Dennis Hopper reincarnated. He smiled one last broad, cracked smile then continued walking on his way.

India Just Happened

Jenna and I on the beach in Calicut. What is not in this picture are the small crowd of Indians snapping pictures of us with their cellphones.



Jenna and I have created a shorthand expression for the unpredictability of this country. We say, “India just happened.” Like the time a random stranger introduced himself to us on the streets of Kolkata and then proceeded to take us on a guided tour of the Mullik Ghat Flower Market underneath the famed Howrah Bridge. “India just happened,” we said at the time.

Or the time we bumped into some Germans on the train from Kurseong to Darjeeling and ended up spending the next four days with them, eating, touring, and having beers. “India just happened,” we said.

Or Friday night in Calicut: a man named Joy who lives in Staten Island but is originally from Kerala bought us dinner and drinks worth more than Rs. 2000.

Jenna and I had come to Calicut to get away for the weekend and also to see Summer and Colleen, two Americans we had met while training in Kolkata. They had found jobs at a Montessori school in Kannur, a town in the far north of Kerala. Calicut—a mid-sized city of a little less than one million people—lies just about halfway between Kannur and Tirur, so that is where we decided to meet.

Summer and Colleen had booked two rooms at a hotel that had a vague resemblance to a Best Western from the 1970s. It stood on a quiet back road a couple of kilometers from the city’s bustling center. Jenna and I checked in around nine in the evening after a short train ride from Tirur then we met Summer and Colleen in the hotel bar.

We hugged, ordered some beers, and began exchanging stories about our two schools. Then, India happened.

“I know you are Americans,” a voice said over my right shoulder. We turned to see a portly man with a thick black mustache, dressed in the typical Keralan man’s uniform: a button-up shirt and dhoti. “I could tell by your accents,” the man continued, four sets of American eyes now staring at him.

“I am an American too.” And to prove it he whipped out a small billfold from his shirt’s chest pocket, opened it up and slapped it proudly on the table. He pointed to a New York state driver’s license.

“You are from America,” Summer said, conceding the point. With that, the man pulled up a chair.

Nearly three months in India have made me lose my American surliness towards unwanted intrusions. It is a fact of life here that, as an outsider, you will get probed and questioned and pulled aside and eagerly interrogated by pretty much anybody. And if they do not have the chutzpah to actually come over and talk to you, they will simply stare at you.

Our new guest certainly did not lack chutzpah. As soon as he sat down, he ordered us another beer and a scotch for himself. He explained that his name was Joy (“I know I know. In America they tease me: people think it is my wife’s name.”) He was originally from a small town outside Kochi, where his father operated a rubber plantation. He had gone to America 18 years ago with his wife and two young children. They had settled on Staten Island, and he now worked as a contractor for the New York City Port Authority doing electrical repairs on docked ships.

The scotch came. Joy poured a bit of carbonated soda water into the glass and downed the mixture in two quick gulps. “We should have dinner, nahn? You are American. I am American. We meet in Kerala. Fate, nahn? It will be on me,” he said with a gusto that revealed his evident pride. Joy had found natives of his adopted land in his native land. He was not going away until he had shown us a good time.

We entered the hotel’s restaurant, an interior room adjacent to the patio bar. The restaurant was overly air-conditioned and its décor reminded me of a cheap Chinese buffet in America—complete with a backlit fish tank.

They did not serve alcohol in the restaurant, so Joy ordered another scotch and downed it before leaving the bar. “It is a family restaurant,” he said, a little derisively.

We sat down—and like a regal maharajah setting out a luxurious repast for a group of foreign dignitaries—Joy proceeded to order half the menu. Beef curry. Fish masala. Fish curry. Chicken curry. Paneer masala. Naan. Parathas. Rice. “What do you want?” he asked each of us in turn. We would say what we were thinking of ordering, then Joy would order that and then another dish. The food came in three waves of trays carried by bowtie-clad orderlies straining under the weight of the dishes.

“Look at my elephant,” Joy said during dinner, as we all passed around the dishes and began to get full—our once-expandable American stomachs shrunken by our Indian eating habits. Joy passed around his iPhone. The phone displayed a picture of an Indian elephant standing anachronistically next to a small car in the cobblestoned driveway of a modern house.

“His name is Ganesh, of course. My family has owned him for years,” Joy said.

“Why does your family have an elephant?” I asked.

“He helps on the rubber plantation,” he scanned to another picture, this one of Ganesh in what appeared to be a more natural setting for him: a forest clearing dappled in sunlight. In the picture, Ganesh was pulling a felled rubber tree with his trunk.

“My father bought him a long time ago. You know, almost everyone in our town used to have an elephant. It was the only way you could get work done back then—carrying heavy things, riding through the forest, helping on the plantation. Now, machines can do all these things. Having an elephant now is actually quite a burden,” Joy said.

I asked what the going rate for an elephant was these days.

“A cheap one costs about 15 lakh (or about Rs. 150,000, which is a little more than $3,200). But then maintenance, oh my gosh…” Joy trailed off, putting his hand on his forehead in a sign of exasperation. “I spend Rs. 1,500 per day feeding him.” He shook his head.

“Will your father sell it?” I asked innocently.

Joy looked down. “My father just passed last month. That is why I am here. I came back to see him before he passed. And now I am dealing with the estate.”

The four of us looked at Joy sympathetically, but he promptly snapped back into host mode. “He was eighty. A good life.” He gestured to the beef curry. “Spicy, huh?”

Joy then talked of his family in America. His daughter was a doctor and had just been married the previous year. His son was an electrical engineer. “My son went to Rutgers. My daughter went to St. John’s in New York. The American Dream, nahn? That is why I went so long ago when they were young. I wanted them to have a better life.”

As the dinner wound on, Joy definitely gave the impression of a man caught in two worlds. He spoke brazenly of American society and politics. (“This Obama…I am disappointed.”) He grumbled in the American tradition (“New York City is terrible now. You know, when Giuliani was mayor…no crime.”) But he also had firm roots in Kerala, a connection that would never be severed.

“I want to move back here with my wife when we retire. She is a nurse in the States now. But we both want to come back. It is quiet here. The people are friendly. And, of course, this is home,” he shrugged.

He studied the clothes he was wearing. “In America, I wear jeans. But when I come back: always a dhoti. You know what they say, ‘When in Rome…’ Well, I say, ‘When in Kerala, wear a dhoti!’”

With only half the food eaten, Summer, Colleen, Jenna and I sat back in our chairs languidly.

“This was our Thanksgiving,” Summer said. We all chuckled, but Joy laughed heartily, a habit of his I had noticed whenever one of us made a joke. He was playing the good host to the end.

We exchanged phone numbers and emails with Joy and then hugged to say goodbye. “Have a good time in Kerala. I hope you remember me,” he said, somewhat sadly, as we walked out of the restaurant. It was after eleven: the latest I had been up in weeks.

Jenna and I began walking towards our room, Summer and Colleen behind us. We all looked at each other and shook our heads. The look said it all: India just happened.

Thanksgiving Dinner

This was certainly the first (and probably last) Thanksgiving meal I ate with my hands. And I certainly hope it is the last time I pass Thanksgiving without tasting pecan pie. Yet, on the flip side, I enjoyed not feeling like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade once the meal was finished.

Jenna and I partook of ‘Thanksgiving dinner’ at a local restaurant in Tirur, where the other patrons had probably never heard of the holiday and would balk at eating anything resembling cranberry sauce.

We had tried to explain the meaning behind Thanksgiving to several coworkers a few days ago, to little effect. When you think about it, it is one of the more odd American celebrations. And it is utterly impossible to describe to people who speak little English.

“Uhh…it is when we give thanks. You know….uhhh…family…friends…food. Uhhh…long ago…white people came to America. The Indians—not you, Indians—uhhh…native Indians…American Indians…gave white people food. And now…uhhh…we eat a lot to celebrate that. And we watch football.”

It sounds even less convincing in person.

Anyway, our Thanksgiving meal consisted of ‘Chicken 65’, a popular fired chicken dish; Goby Manjoory, fried cauliflower bathed in a tangy broth (reminiscent of Chinese Sweet and Sour sauce); rice and bottled water. It sounds simple but it turned out to be the biggest meal Jenna and I had had in weeks. We were both nearly bursting when we finished.

We have come to appreciate the dexterity and energy of a life lived with small portion sizes—the absence of a desire to pass out after every gargantuan meal. But the feeling we had tonight hit the spot. It is a taste of that lassitude we would be feeling on Thanksgiving in America—minus the pecan pie, of course.

The Little General

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Jenna and I will not be having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The best we can hope for is chicken masala and rice idly. Still, giving thanks will be in order.

We are thankful for our experiences in India, and thankful we have been able to remain safe and healthy while here. We are thankful for all the loved ones who check this blog and are concerned and interested in our travels. We are thankful for living in a place where it is currently 90 degrees instead of 9. We are thankful for the wonderful memories of this past summer when we got married and the blessed times that the big day brought. We are thankful for our families who are tolerating our absence this holiday season and loving us all the more for not being there. And mostly, we are thankful for each other: we have could not have gotten this far without each other’s constant presence and support. To everyone: Happy Thanksgiving!

Today's post:

The clapping started yesterday. The rhythmic staccato bursts of delicate hands thwapping together in unison accompanied by high-pitched female voices singing a lilting cadence. First, I heard it come from JM’s music room, which did not seem that out of the ordinary. Then, later yesterday I heard the ruckus on the third floor landing, which overlooked the teachers’ lounge on the second floor. The same day, I saw a group of boys in a corner of the school’s large rectangular courtyard doing a synchronized dance and beating silver discs against their palms.

“What’s going on?” I asked the headmistress Ms. Rama, as she stood outside the music room today peering in at a group of 9th standard girls clapping, singing, and twisting around in a circular group. In the center, one girl sat serenely on a plastic chair, her face a smiling mask of contentment.

“Competition,” Ms. Rama said in broken English. “Big competition. Many schools. Practice,” she said, jerking her head towards the girls in the room.

Six girls danced in a loose circle, twirling and ululating, shuffling their feet in intricate patterns that moved their bodies left, right, forwards and backwards—all in unison. The girl in the middle inclined her head every so often towards one girl in the dancing circle. Otherwise, she sat calmly, tapping her toe. All the girls were singing, their mouths barely moving as they danced but issuing forth a dizzying slide of Malayalam syllables.

“Looks impressive,” I said and Ms. Rama nodded smiling.

Later, during 4th period, a different group of girls (these from 6th standard) set up camp on the third floor landing outside the classroom I was teaching in and began the clapping and singing anew. After class, I lingered in the hallway near the landing and watched.

Again, a group of six girls pirouetted and gyrated in a meandering circle around another girl who sat stoically in a chair. Another three girls stood to the side, two of them singing another intricate song. They barely seemed to take in breath as they sung out the words in seemingly endless phrasing.

The third girl stood between the singers with a red bamboo switch. She tapped it against her leg and looked intently at the group of dancers. If she saw something not to her liking, she would step forward and yell a command. The dancers would stop in their places. The little girl with the switch—who I imagined to be some kind of Napoleon, or a miniature Cleopatra—would shout something in Malayalam and then whap, deliver a blow with the switch to the back of a girls’ leg. Clearly there had been a misstep.

The singers would clear their throats, the dancers would take their places, and the girl with the switch would say, “One…two…three…set!” And the dancers would begin twisting and gliding again.

A few minutes later, the Little General would yell again and the dancers would freeze, their faces registering the anticipation of pain. The General would mutter something, gesture wildly, and then run around the circle—whap! whap! whap! whap! whap! whap! All six dancers got it in the leg.

The singers would clear their throats, the dancers would take their places, and off they went again, the Little General tapping the switch against her leg like a riding crop.

After she stepped back from the circle having delivered her latest reprisals she looked over at me and smiled broadly, her face framed perfectly by her headscarf. A cheerleading captain crossed with a Dickensian headmistress, with the temperament of miniature Doberman pincher and the smile of an angel. She was the cutest autocrat I had ever come across.

Taking a whipping...

On Monday and Tuesday mornings, I teach Plus-1 students at JM’s upper campus—called so because it sits on top of a hill in central Tirur; whereas, the “lower campus” sits at the bottom of the hill.

The Indian school system only goes from 1st to 10th standards. (Tenth standard students being equivalent in age to American high school freshmen.) After 10th standard, Indian students have an option to matriculate to the “Plus” standards—Plus-1 and Plus-2—which are equivalent to American high school sophomores and juniors. After the “Plus” standards, they can then move on to university. Typically, students who are in a “Plus” standard have plans to go to higher education.

On this Tuesday, I entered the upper campus and climbed four flights of stone steps to the teachers’ lounge on the third floor. There, I found six Plus-1 students—all boys—standing in a line outside the lounge door looking stone-faced and rather sheepish. My teacher instincts told me they were in some kind of trouble.

I walked into the lounge and found Vinod sitting at the long table that takes up most of the space in this narrow, crowded room. Vinod teaches Computer Science and has the best English of any teacher I have met at JM.

“Trouble?” I ask, pointing beyond my shoulder at the students, who could be seen through the lounge’s glass windows.

“Punishment,” Vinod said. “Latecomers.”

“What is there punishment?” I asked.

Vinod gave a quick nod of his head. I turned around. At that moment, another teacher walked up to the boys from the other end of the hall. He had a thin bamboo switch in his hand. He curtly inclined is head to the boys, and they all dutifully stretched out their right arms (as if they knew what was coming). The teacher then whapped each boy three times on the wrist. Fwip! Fwip! Fwip!

The boys flinched in pain and then withdrew their arms, rubbing their wrists. A couple of the boys smiled with false bravado. (I knew the look well from teaching at Hogg.)

“Happen often?” I asked Vinod.

“Sometimes,” he said, engrossed in going over his lesson for the day. Vinod is slight and light-skinned with a rakish flop of wavy hair parted to the side that makes him look oddly like an aristocrat from Stuart England.

“What do kids get punished for?” the boys outside were still rubbing their wrists but now quietly commiserating with each other about their collective fate, chuckling and playfully punching each other on the shoulders.

“Being late. Not turning in assignments. Being disrespectful. Causing a distraction,” Vinod said, then he squinted his eyes thoughtfully.

“You know,” he said. “It is necessary.”

My raised eyebrows must have given Vinod the impression that I wanted more of an explanation, which I did.

“Necessary because a lot of these kids—most of these kids here in the Plus-1 and Plus-2 standards—have come to us from government schools,” he said. “They did not have the structure at the government schools that they have here. We have rules and regulations that they are not used to.”

“For instance?”

“Well, at the government schools, for example, kids can just get up whenever they want and leave the class,” Vinod said with a resigned waggle of his head. “It is unfortunate because a lot of times teachers do not even show up to these government schools.”

I had heard that complaint before—in the newspaper, from my ATI supervisors, on Indian TV, in books. Teachers at Indian government schools had a notorious reputation for profligacy and apathy. Though, I had to take all this evidence at face value. The only schools I had ever taught in India (both in Kolkata and in Tirur) were private schools.

“Why do these students come here? To JM?” I asked.

“A law was passed just recently, that limits class size in Plus-1 standards to 60 students per class. The government schools in Tirur are all filled up,” Vinod explained.

“SIXTY students in a class?” I asked, clearly alarmed.

Vinod smiled slightly. “Sixty students. And every government school classroom in Tirur is full.”

“So these are the students who were leftover?”

“Some. Well, most: yes. Others made the choice to come here. Maybe their families did not like the government school and thought they would get a better education here. Others have been at JM since 1st standard.”

I could not help but ask my next question, owing to a rough class period I had had the previous day. “Is that why these students are…a little more…wild?”

Vinod smiled again. “They are a challenge. Their English is not as good and, like I said, they are not used to our rules here. So, yes, it is harder to teach them”

I thought it propitious how my discussion with Vinod had dovetailed neatly with an email I received the othe day from my mother, who still teaches in public schools in America though she is semi-retired. The email contained a link to an article from The New York Times Review of Books critical of the recently released documentary Waiting for Superman. The film—though I have not seen it—levies much criticism at American public education while promoting charter schools as a viable alternative.

I cannot comment on the film, but it is interesting to note India’s gargantuan education bureaucracy is also dealing with matters of “school choice” and accountability. Maybe just on a much, much bigger scale.

The bell rang, and I readied my materials to go meet my class of nearly 50 students.

Bullseye (sort of)

I noticed one of my students coming down the hill with a banana leaf in his hand. The leaves are commonly used in Kerala as plates, even at restaurants, so I figured he had picked up some breakfast on the way to school.

It was a little past nine in the morning—before the opening bell—and the day’s humidity was already palpable. I was making my way to JM’s “upper campus” where I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays. The student I saw is one I teach at the “lower campus” later in the week.

I slowed down as we neared each other and he opened the leaf, cupped as it was in his hand. What peered back at me from the leaf were two translucent balls vaguely familiar in their form and shape. The student was quietly laughing. And I realized that what was on the banana leaf literally was peering at me. The student was carrying two eyes, as big as golf balls, shiny and slick looking with a luminescent indigo hue.

“Eyes!?” I asked hoarsely.

The student nodded, then made a motion as if to eat one. He laughed more loudly as he walked away and I confusedly continuted on to school.

After my first two periods, I found myself with some free time in the teachers’ lounge. I tried my best to explain what I had seen to the other teachers, to see if I could piece together what the purpose of the eyes had been. If he really was going to eat them? After all, I reasoned, I just seen two dozen cattle ritually slaughtered the week before.

“A student…had…eyes,” I pointed to my own eyes as the teacher looked back at me, as if I had a giant booger stuck on my face. “On…banana leaf,” I mimicked how he had been carrying the eyes. “What are…eyes…for?” I said, knowing I must have sounded rather ridiculous. (What are eyes for? Uhhh….well, you see there are these five senses that all humans have…)

The other teachers looked as confused as I sounded. “Eyes?” one said. And he pointed at his own eyes. “Eyes?” another said, with a rising tone of apprehension.

I compounded the confusion by making the same motion the student had made as if to pop one of the eyes in his mouth like a fried jalapeno. The teachers squinted visibly with disgust.

“Human eyes!” one teacher gasped astonished. I think they now thought that I had come across some sick cannibal. And I was starting to feel their anxiety myself.

“Eating? Eyes?”

“You saw this? Here!”

I gave up and shrugged innocently, trying to allay their growing revulsion. Aww, come on. He was only eating eyes! No big deal, my facile expression hoped to say. The teachers did not look convinced, but they dropped the matter.

Later, at the “lower campus”, I brought up the matter again with my friend Santosh. This time, I thought it would be better if I made a drawing. I quickly sketched the banana leaf complete with eyes. Then drew a crude representation of a man and an arrow pointing at his gaping mouth.

Santosh’s reaction was the same as the other teachers'. “Eyes? We do not eat eyes here,” he said emphatically. I thought Santosh was probalby wondering what Americans ate. I had just told him the previous week about Thanksgiving. Maybe he was envisioning banquet tables filled with platters of eyes and shrunken monkey heads and fried caterpillars.

“What animal? The eyes come from?” I asked. I wrote, Cow? and Goat? on my paper. This seemed to spark something inside Santosh. He slowly smiled and put up his index finger, the universal sign for Eureka!

“Ahhhh…bull’s eyes!” he said excitedly. “Demonstration. In class,” he said pointing down the hall.

I began to understand the total futility of this entire investigation, from the moment I set eye on the...well, eyes.

“Science demonstration. Biology. Today,” Santosh said. He pointed at his own eyes. “Bulls’ eyes…veerrry human like. Bulls' eyes good for demonstrations. Bulls' eyes. You watch, maybe?” he said helpfully. Santosh could not possibly grasp the irony of his continued use of the term Bulls' eye.

“Where did the student get them?” I asked, feeling rather foolish.

“The butcher!” Santosh said with a "Duh" expression.

It all clicked into place. The student had been retrieving a set of bull’s eyes to be used as part of a biology demonstration later that day. Rather inncouous and harmless, still he had made the eating gesture as a joke and had fully exploited my cultural insensibilities.

All I could think of in the wake of this whole ordeal was the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is set in India (though its depiction of India is about as accurate as Kenny G’s version of jazz). In one particular moment from the movie, a maharajah serves his guest bowls of steaming eye soup, which in the movie looks like a fairly delicious tomato bisque until the guests poke around and bloody eyeballs bob to the surface.

After more than three months in India, I realized I am still relying on Hollywood to give me some assumptive answers about the Subcontinent. Today’s guess was not a bullseye in the slightest. Unless, of course, you are being literal.

Rini of Tirur

The Rini of Tirur in the middle. Her uncle Ashraf on the left and Jenna.


"There is much discrimination in America, nahn?" Rini asked us, her round eyes fixed on our faces, which, at this moment, must have looked as if a doctor had just told Jenna she was pregnant.



Rini—a boarding school student and future civil engineer—had the disconcertingly adolescent habit of getting to the point.



Jenna and I were sitting in the living room of Rini’s home. We had dropped by on the holiday of Eid-al-Adha; the owner of the house—Rini’s father—was a good friend of our ATI minder Shareef. Several people including Rini and her mother Bina watched us eat sweet rice dumplings and drink chai. We got the distinct impression this was the first time two Americans had sat in this room.



"I mean, discrimination against Muslims," Rini continued, as I tried to discreetly shove the other half of a rice dumpling in my mouth.



"Well…" I started, my words muffled by sugar and rice flour.



"I mean, Americans all think we are terrorists," she continued. At this point, Bina—her mother—looked over her shoulder and quietly shushed her. Yet, when she turned back to look at use, her face appeared pleased. I was beginning to realize where Rini got her independence.



"There is just a lot of misunderstanding," I stammered. "A lot of Americans do not understand Islam. There was 9/11 and for some Americans, that is there only exposure ever to Muslims. So, yeah, some Americans think all Muslims are terrorists."



Rini was nodding in a way that I recognized from the students I had taught in Houston—they heard you but they did not agree with you. For her part, Rini would turn out to be the most articulate, astute person I had met in Tirur. And she was barely seventeen.



Like most people her age, she switched topics with a scatological rapidity. "Men around here," she said, shaking her head as if she was an old maid. "Men: they just look at you. Very uncomfortable." It seemed Rini disliked injustice, no matter who was perpetrating it.
As she talked, the others in the room stared at us as we finished our chai: Bina and Rini’s aunt Shakeela, Shakeela’s husband Ashraf, Rini’s younger brother Basil and two neighbor children whose names I had not caught. Various other women and children shuffled in and out. A baby wailed from another room. Pots and pans clinked from the kitchen.



The others remained resolutely silent and grinning as Rini interrogated us. I felt I was on a weird version of The Newlyweds’ Game, my responses being surreptitiously judged by people who had the correct answers on cards in front of them.



"You must find it hard here?" Rini gestured towards Jenna. "I mean, I had this one teacher one time. She taught English but she was from Italy," her eyes widened. "She had this beautiful blonde hair. And she dressed like she was still in Italy. She had a hard time. She left to go back to Italy crying. It was bad."



Rini sounded sympathetic and triumphant at the same time. Jenna instinctively clutched her kameez closer to her throat. "Well," Jenna began, "it helps that I look Indian. And that I have him," she threw her thumb at me.



Rini nodded in understanding. "Yes, your husband probably helps a lot. When a woman walks around alone here, it is dangerous. I hate it." I was beginning to like Rini, her constant expressions of belief so certainly articulated, her sense of right and wrong apparent and uncontrived.



For example, she knew for sure that once she finished boarding school in the nearby town of Thrissur—an hour’s train ride from Tirur—that she would go to university and become a civil engineer. "I want to build bridges," she said, I think being literal and not metaphorical. She spoke English with an uncommon clarity for someone from this part of Kerala. It revealed not only her fortune to have had good English teachers but also a drive to work on her own. I knew from experience the kids here did not pick up the language that well in less they pushed themselves to it.



A week after meeting Rini I read about another Indian woman with a similar name: Rani Lakshmibai, known by all Indian schoolchildren as the Rani of Jhansi. Rani led a group of rebels in the unsuccessful revolt of 1857 (known as the Sepoy Mutiny because it started as a rebellion of Indian soldiers, called sepoys). Rani and her rebels fought against the British fiercely but were eventually defeated a little more than a year after the rebellion began. The Rani of Jhansi died in the final battle defending her garrison. The British general who defeated the Rani’s forces came across her body and said, "Here lay the woman who was the only man among the rebels".



A high compliment for the Victorian age, but I have a feeling Rini would scoff at such a sexist judgment now. "Men can be truly terrible here. Everywhere really," she said, concluding her remarks about the state of gender relations in Tirur and the world.



The Rani of Jhansi. The Rini of Tirur. India—still a bastion of sexist values and gender discrimination in some regions—continues to surprise outsiders in producing such fiercely independent women.



But I know this: when I ever have to cross a bridge in the future, I want that bridge to have been built by someone like Rini.

Acting Out

A strategy I encountered often during my time as an English teacher in Houston was called Reader’s Theater. The basic idea behind the strategy was simple: students act out things they read, whether it be a scene from a novel, a short story, a poem, or even a rather dull passage from a science or social studies textbook. The strategy was said to be particularly effective for English Language Learners for obvious reasons. The kinesthetic motion of Reader’s Theater got them to connect physicality to vocabulary. For adolescents, when Johnny stabs Bob in The Outsiders, performing that literary moment is much more engaging than answering questions about it.

Of course, I never actually did Reader’s Theater in my class. I endorsed its transformative powers and encouraged other teachers to try it, but I never got around to appropriating the class time, dividing my students into heterogeneous groups, divvying up the different roles, allowing more time for rehearsal, and creating rubrics on which to grade their performances. Sometimes, when rubber meats the road in education, the rubber melts.

However, it seems in Tirur, Reader’s Theater has been resurrected. Not with my new Indian students, but with me. I have found in some circumstances, the best way to get my point across is to act it out. And not just some subtle hand motions. We’re talking about full body motion with sound effects and facial gestures.

For instance, the other day I needed to take a rickshaw to the train station in order to book tickets for our Christmas trip to Kochi, where we will meet my parents. In the past, saying, “Train station” to the rickshaw drivers has proved sufficient. Not for the driver I came upon this day. He stared at me blankly as I said, “Train station. Train. Station. Train….station. TRAIN… STATION.”

I resorted to Reader’s Theater, mindful that I was standing in the middle of a bustling intersection: I laid my left arm out flat and pushed it along as if slowing punching a boxing bag as I made the universally recognized sound for train: “Chugga chugga chugga chugga…whoop, whoop!” The driver smiled and his eyes lit up. “Ahhh…” he said. I got in the rickshaw glancing around to see if anyone else had noticed my performance. Luckily, no passing pedestrians had thought it strange for a big white guy to be making Thomas the Train noises in the middle of the road.

In another instance, I asked the manager of a local Internet café where I could get a beer. (There are limited options in Tirur, a town of mostly pious Muslims.) The manager did not understand my question, so I made a motion as if picking up a big bottle and drinking it slowly, making sure to imitate the, “Glug glug” sound with my throat. “Water?” he asked unsurely. I shook my head. I repeated the gesture and then stumbled around a bit afterwards. “Ahh…” he said with eagerness, as if a charades answer was on the tip of his tongue.

Yet another time, I wanted to order a fried banana at a local restaurant. But I will spare the details of that ordeal.

Of course most of the gestures that get me through a typical day are more innocuous. Nothing is big unless I splay my arms out wide like DaVinci’s anatomical man. Nothing is small unless I hold my fingers an inch apart and squint. Too expensive is always accompanied by me rubbing my thumb and first two fingers together. Too hot is always accompanied by me feigning to wipe my brow. If a meal was delicious I pat my stomach and smile when the waiter comes with the bill. If food is too spicy I open my mouth wide and wave my palm rapidly in front of my face.

Sometimes, I can parse together complete sentences with a series of gestures that could quite possibly win me a spot on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Twice a week I make a short bus trip to a nearby town called Valancherry to teach a morning English lesson. If my co-workers in Valancherry spoke English, I might have simply said the other day, “I was in a hurry to catch the bus, so I had to eat breakfast quickly and down a cup of tea at the local chai stand.”

Instead, I pointed at my watch with a scared face, mimed shoveling food into my mouth, then I ran in place (again glancing at my watch), raised my arm as if hailing an invisible taxi, then I topped off the performance by throwing back a shot of what could have been make-believe whiskey.

I think the point was made, though some of it might have been lost in translation.

Eid Mubarak

Eid dinner at a friend's house in Tirur. We were served fried chicken, biryani, and payaasaim, which is sweet drink made of sugar, milk, and crushed cashews.

***
“After prayers, then we will go see the slaughter,” Shareef said. “You do want to see the slaughter, right?”

I nodded my head. Of course. It did not seem like an opportunity one passed up too readily.

We were standing on a muddy soccer field on the south side of Tirur on the morning of the Muslim celebration of Eid-al-Adha. Hundreds of Muslims from the area had convened for a special public prayer session. Tarps were laid out in a large square for the devoted to kneel on while keeping their white dishdashas immaculate. A burgundy colored cloth sheet propped up by bamboo poles demarcated the men’s praying area from the women’s.

Shareef—our Tirur-based boss from the American TESOL Institute—had invited us the previous night to come watch the morning prayers and then accompany him to a nearby field where men would ritually slaughter two dozen head of cattle. The offer left a decidedly Biblical impression, which turned out to be right in keeping with the spirit of Eid-al-Adha.

For Muslims, the holiday commemorates the ancient event when Allah asked Ibrahim to sacrifice Ishmael, found in the Qu’ran’s second chapter (or surya). For Christians and Jews, this story appears in the Old Testament and Torah as Abraham stepping forward to heed God’s order to sacrifice Isaac. At the last moment, as Abraham is about to kill his son, God intervenes and praises Abraham’s devotion, then asks him to sacrifice a goat instead.

In recognition of the ancient story, Muslims repeat the ritualized sacrifice of animals on this day. Around Tirur hundreds of cows would be publicly slaughtered in open fields and in the yards of private homes. The meat, then, would be given to family members and friends and donated to the poor.

“The story (of Abraham) is common for us,” Shareef said as we entered the field from a makeshift parking lot at the back. He grasped his young son’s hand as he walked. With us were Ashraf and Shakeela, married friends of Shareef’s. “Ibrahim showed a great will,” Shareef continued, daintily stepping over patches of runny mud. “Impossible to imagine that devotion. But we celebrate his dedication to God and God’s mercy on this day.”

Shakeela took Jenna to the women’s side and Shareef proceeded to introduce me to a string of friends and acquaintances milling about in the growing crowd of worshippers. He seemed to recognize everyone at the event. “Salaam alaikum. Eid Mubarak! Eid Mubarak! Eid Greetings!”

As I began to look around, I spotted several of my students from JM Higher Secondary School. They saw me and waved back excitedly, some walking purposefully up to me and shaking my hand: “Hello, sir, how are you? Eid Mubarak, sir!”

The field was filling up quickly. More tarps and straw mats were brought in to extend the prayer area back towards the parking lot. Dozens of men milled about as they waited for space to be made. All the while, a calming chant of four harmonized voices lifted over the crowd, projected by loudspeakers: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

The older men at the gathering wore more traditional clothes—flowing white dishdashas and knitted skullcaps, dhotis and collared shirts. The younger men and the boys wore modern dress: tight jeans, brightly patterned button-up shirts, sneakers, their hair gelled and coiffed to perfection. Across the way, I could see the colorful, abstracted milieu of the women’s section—saris, cloth abayas and silky dupattas of every color, creating a variegated tapestry of bobbing heads and waving arms.

A signal was given, and soon all the participants had placed themselves seated on a mat or tarp. The imam (or prayer leader) stood up and faced west towards Mecca. He began: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” He sung the lines in a lilting melody, not unlike a Gregorian chant. The audience repeated the prayer in unison. The crowd did a series of bows and full prostrations on their knees, arms extended out over their heads stretching towards the horizon. Brief interludes of silence punctuated the prayer, filling the field with a reflective calm that is only attainable in moments of worship.

After the prayer, the audience settled into a sitting position and the imam began his sermon, speaking in Malayalam. I noticed younger members of the crowd get up and move towards the back, where they congregated in hushed groups, talking and laughing quietly. As the sermon ground on, more people rose and moved back, greeting each other and roving about the field looking for friends. Small children chased each other and young boys (several of whom I recognized as my students) wandered around aimlessly, glancing surreptitiously over at the women’s section every now and then.

Two things struck me about this event. First, the friendliness of the crowd. I was greeted and salaamed repeatedly throughout the morning. Men I did not know came up to me and shook my hand, asked me where I was from, snapped a photo of me with their cell phones. I quickly learned that “Eid Mubarak” basically means “Happy Eid”, and I began saying it back to those who greeted me with it.

Secondly, any images I had of a monolithic Islamic religion were cleanly removed from my mind. At this one small ceremony in Tirur, I noticed a spectrum of devotion. I saw worshipers who were prayerfully fixated on every move and nuance of the service and hung on every word of the imam during his sermon. I noticed families who skipped in to the service late, with harried looks on their faces (the Muslim version of families who go to church only on Christmas and Easter). I observed worshipers leave the second the opening prayer ended, getting in their cars and on their motorbikes to beat traffic. It was obvious that a wide cross-section of belief was present. Essentially, the same range of religiosity you would find at any church in America.

Shareef and his friends were the types of worshipers who stayed until the very end of the sermon. As the imam closed, and the crowd dispersed, Shareef, Ashraf, Shakeela Jenna and I all congregated back at Ashraf’s car.

“Now, let us see the slaughter,” Shareef said, clapping my back.

***

The men had gathered in a small field, surrounded on three sides by low-slung apartments. On the fourth side lay a small winding road that—a few hundreds yards up—ran past JM Higher Secondary School. On most days, the field is an unremarkable patch of tall grass and bent trees. On Eid-al-Adha, though, it had quite literally turned into a killing field.

Ashraf drove up and let us out and said he would park the car further down the road. Cars, motor bikes and scooters clogged the narrow lane and men stood hesitantly on the edge of the field on the road’s curb, looking out towards the field where more men were huddled around an inert form on the ground. A line of Brahmin cows stood laconically tied to a rope tether by a small tent held up by bamboo poles. A few men under the tent were ecstatically waving their hands, asking us to come into the field.

“There are no women here,” Jenna said, pausing at the grass’s edge. The smell of cow manure permeated the air.

“Come on,” I said. “Just watch out for the cow patties.”

We wound our way through the maze of dung and weeds and finally reached the tent, where the men who had been waving shook our hands vigorously. Then, one man—who had a spot of blood on his white T-shirt—pointed further into the field, where the crowd of men we had seen from the road was standing in a loose circle.

From our new vantage, we could see what the inert form had been: a slaughtered cow, it’s neck severed nearly all the way through, a red coiling mass of muscles and tendons bulging out of the gaping wound. This cow, which lay dead at the center of the circle of gawping men was only the latest sacrifice. A dozen other cow carcasses lay around the field, all with the same slash at the neck, the boils of blood spilling onto the green-brown grass around their heads.

Jenna and I both reserved judgment. No thoughts of humanitarian angst or meat-eaters’ guilt ran through our heads. After all, we love a good steak. And we have talked longingly of hamburgers ever since we got to India. Here, we were presented with about 20 fresh tons of T-bones and Big Macs. We couldn’t complain.

But the plain fact of the matter is: neither one of us had ever seen an animal slaughtered. We had never witnessed the last moments of life and had never watched an animal struggle for its very existence before succumbing to death. In this manner, the scene before was rather discomfiting.

The men given the task of sacrificing took the cows one by one from the tether. They led the next beast to an open spot in the field. The crowd of watchers gingerly followed, small boys and teenagers pushing to get the best view. Three men pushed the cow to the ground so it was lying on its side. Two men tied its legs together. Another man twisted the cow’s head so that the soft underside of its neck was exposed . The whole while the beast struggled, baying and groaning against the combined efforts of the sacrificial team. At last, the man with the knife came in, bent down, and with a vigorous sawing motion cut into the cow’s neck. As the cut was made and blood spurted from the wound, the men in the circle whispered, “Allahu Akbar.” The neck made an astonishing hissing sound as the blood was released. The nearly severed head jerked and twisted and the cow’s tongue reflexively lolled out of its mouth.

I had read stories of the French Revolution, when traitors to the state were beheaded, how their bodies continued to twitch after the guillotine’s blade had come down. I had always remembered that detail both because it was patently gruesome and anatomically fascinating. Now, in the wake of the cow being slaughtered, I watched as its whole bulky frame twitched and shuttered, its legs kicked out spasmodically and the muscles in its face unbelievably continued to flicker with life. The cow, whose throat had been cut, still convulsed out a moo before choking on blood.

I describe all this not to be prurient or sensational. The whole ritual was played off within a context of respect and duty. I learned from an elderly man surveying the sacrifices that the cows had been purchased by teams of buyers, of which each member donated Rs. 2,500. “For each share, the person can take home part of the cow. Many donate the meat to the poor,” he said. “It is God’s will.”

In this world of industrial meat-packing plants and giant corporate cattle farms, what we were witnessing on this field in Tirur must actually be a rather dignified way for cows to go—prayed over as they die, stripped of their meat by hand knives, their meat parceled out in a spirit of charity and communalism. It all struck me as very ancient. I imagined similar rituals happening centuries even millennia ago.

Shareef had come and he was still walking with his young son. “You like?” he asked with a big grin. “It is wonderful, nahn? So much meat. You want some?”

I demurred, but Shareef would have not of it. “Of course, you should have some.” He gestured to new teams of men, who had begun skinning the carcasses and flaying off gigantic shanks of fresh meat that still seemed to pulse with life. One grunted under the strain of an entire leg as he carried it back to the tent.

“You will have beef tonight!” Shareef said proudly. There was certainly plenty to go around, I thought, as I looked over the field of sacrifices.

When Elephants Roamed the Streets

I wrote this entry a few weeks ago and never published it. Jenna and I are on holiday for the next three days for the Muslim celebration of Eid-al-Adha, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmael (Isaac to Christians). The holidy coincides with the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

***

“Kyle, some guys are riding an elephant down the street!” Jenna said breathlessly, running in from our front atrium, which overlooks Thangal’s Road. I was inside reading.

Now, let me say that a comment like this made in America would hardly raise an eyebrow. After all, if someone tells you some guys are riding an elephant down Noland Rd. in Independence you laugh and say, “Yeah, right. And I bet the flying monkeys are following right behind.”

But in India, this comment is cause for excitement because when someone tells you some guys are riding an elephant down the street in India, you know it very well is probably true. After all, Jenna and I pass a meandering herd of Brahmin cattle clip-clopping their way down the street each morning on our way to work. And Jenna and I were nearly mauled by a family of territorial monkeys in Darjeeling. Not at the Darjeeling Zoo, just in the city Darjeeling.

As it turns out, on this night in Tirur, Jenna was right on the money: three guys were, in fact, riding an elephant down the street right in front of our apartment. It was nearly eight o’clock at night. The trio was balanced precariously on top of a large male pachyderm, which looked as if he was on loan from the Periyar Wildlife Refuge in eastern Kerala. He was the size of our kitchen, taller than a basketball goal and had swooping white tusks that could spear a Volvo.

The men sat splay-legged on top with no saddle or reins, just a clinking strand of heavy iron chains wrapped through the elephant’s mouth. Another set of chains clinked around the beast’s four legs, limiting its range of motion to a few feet forward and backward. I imagine these were in place to guard against death and dismemberment if the large fellow got the idea to escape.

The elephant trundled at the back of a noisy procession of men beating drums, waving flaming torches and chanting. A few political banners bobbed above the heads of the marchers, all of whom were men and boys. Every once and a while, the procession was punctuated by the cacophonic blast of a firecracker.

At Jenna’s entreaty, I quickly put on my sandals and ran out of the apartment after the march. Unfortunately, in my haste, I forgot to grab our camera. On the street, a parade atmosphere pervaded. Children jumped excitedly on the curb. A tiny voice yelled, “Elephant!” repeatedly, as if she could not believe it either. The march had slowed a few paces down from our driveway so I caught up with the elephant quickly, sidled up to it within a few feet. It reeked of offal and grass, just like the elephants I have smelled from a distance at the zoo. I paid attention to the darkened street, mistaking piles of asphalt and broken stone for elephant dung. Other young boys and middle-aged men jogged from down the street towards the group, having heard the same rumor that I had about an elephant walking down the street.

Political rallies are common in Tirur, at least they have been since we have gotten here. The municipal elections just occurred less than a week ago and the party that had long been in power summarily lost. The victorious party has been holding victory rallies every since. I recognized the colors—green and yellow—of the winning party, in the banners up ahead of the elephant. I wondered if the elephant was just another campaign tool meant to attract attention. If it was, it was certainly working. Other political rallies we had seen in the previous week had been met with disinterest and annoyance from pedestrians. However, this rally was garnering attention and genuine enthusiasm, most of it centered on the elephant.

Yet, by the looks of the heavy chains and the forlorn fluffing of his big ears, I don’t know if the elephant approved of this message.

As with all campaign gimmicks, after a few moments, I lost interest. The march had slowed to a crawl and the sound of bleating horns and incessant drumming was getting old. I turned back towards our apartment. As I turned a corner, I spotted a 9th standard student from JM Higher Secondary. I had taught him the previous day.

“Hello,” I said, in the labored self-conscious way I greet all my students, sure to enunciate every syllable.

“Hello,” he replied with a smile. “Home?” he gestured along the street.

I nodded. “My flat,” I pointed towards our complex. He nodded and grinned again. He was carrying a bag of groceries.

“Elephant. Down there,” I pointed excitedly, grinning widely. “There is an elephant.”

He looked down, confused at first. “Elephant? Here?” he asked.

I nodded emphatically, sure he would start running as I had earlier. But he simply shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “Okay,” he said. “Goodbye. See you tomorrow.” And he began walking casually down the street, towards the noise of horns and drums.

I guess there are more interesting things to do in Tirur than watch an elephant walk down the street.

Teaching to the Test

After watching students at JM Higher Secondary take the Kerala state mid-year exams for the past two weeks, I have begun to think either Indian students are exceedingly overworked or American students are phenomenally pampered. Or, it may just be the case that a small amount of truth rests in both conclusions.

Either way, I invite both the designers and critics of America’s public school testing regime to come to Kerala during exam season to observe the South Indian definition of ‘standardized test’. A few things will immediately stand out for any American educator used to the No Child Left Behind way.

First, the students in Kerala take a lot of tests. I observed students as young as 13 taking exams for three different sciences—Biology, Chemistry, and Physics; for four different languages—English, Hindi, Arabic, and Malayalam (the local language); not to mention, tests for such standard subjects as Social Studies, Math, and Computer Technology. All these tests were timed, the longest lasting two-and-a-half hours, the shortest just 45 minutes.

Contrast that with my experience in Texas, where in some years in secondary school, students take only two untimed tests—English and Math—for which they get an entire school day to finish. The most students will be tested is in 4th, 8th and 12th grades, when they are required to take English, Math, Social Studies, and Science (and sometimes Writing). In those years, testing is typically finished in one week. Even then, the staff at Hogg Middle School constantly stressed about ways to buttress the students’ stamina and alleviate their tiredness. I cannot imagine if the students had been asked to test for an additional week.

Secondly, the only supplies students were given during testing was the actual test and sheets of paper on which to write their answers. They brought their own pencils and pens, erasers, rulers, protractors, and math compasses. And they used them all. For the math and science tests, many times, I saw students drawing intricate geometric designs, labeling self-drawn circles and pentagons, mapping out entire charts and bar graphs by hand on their answer papers. For the language and social studies tests, students would write paragraphs and (sometimes) entire pages worth of responses to questions that apparently required thoughtful, essay-style answers. (In multiple languages, no less.)

I hardly need to go into detail about how the system in Texas is different. It is summed up in one word: bubbles. Students at Hogg fretted, complained, and sometimes slept their way through tests that required them to answer 50 multiple-choice questions and color in a sheet of bubbles. As far as I could tell, not a single question on any test I saw in Kerala was multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or short answer. In addition, during testing week, Hogg provided the students with every single they would need for the test—pencils, erasers, sharpeners, rulers, snacks, bottles of water, pre-packaged lunches. The students simply had to show up—which many of them would do, proudly walking into school mere seconds before the exam started with nothing but their school uniform.

Finally, a difference that may not be as glaringly apparent as a lack of bubbled-in answer sheets: attitude. At JM, over the course of eight straight days of testing, I never saw a student complain, never witnessed a student put their head down, and never noticed anything but commensurate effort. Does this mean every student passed every test with flying colors? Of course not. Students sometimes looked confused or perplexed. They erased and re-erased answers with a vigorous desperation. They pleaded to continue working after testing time had ended, showing their answer sheets that proved they were only halfway through the exam. A few even made fairly naïve attempts at cheating—whispering to classmates and taking comically long glances at their neighbors’ exams. Yet, my point is, the desire to achieve was apparent at all times. Never did it appear as if students were flagging or becoming upset or quitting.

Not every student I had in Texas regarded testing time as a boring, weeklong mini-vacation. But enough did to make it exceedingly stressful for teachers worried about students’ effort and ‘mindset’ on the day of an exam. I remember in my final year at Hogg, encountering one of my students in the afternoon after school on the day of the state Reading test. I asked him how things had gone. I was worried about him because he had shown much apathy and contempt throughout the year. He looked at me and shrugged: “I slept most of the time. Then I filled in the answers at the end.”

Of course, most students at Hogg did not have such jaded views of testing. Most tried their hardest and most wanted to succeed just as much as the students at JM. I guess it just shocked me during the past two weeks the complete lack of such attitudes in Kerala, so accustomed had I become to trying to motivate students and build up their self-confidence and willpower, convince them that these tests were worth their valuable time and effort. In Tirur, even the students Jenna and I have deemed ‘troublemakers’ appeared wholly invested in doing their best on the exams and doing it on tests that frankly asked a lot more of them cognitively then simply filling in a series of bubbles.

There are some disadvantages, of course, to the testing systems I saw in Kerala. What is to say these tests are truly valid when students must spend a large chunk of their testing time hand-drawing charts and diagrams? And how are essay answers reliably scored and enhanced with constructive, timely feedback? And I really have no idea how well prepared the students were by their teachers. What is not to say the students were being asked to perform tasks and functions that they had not been taught? These are questions that bear more scrutiny.

I just know that American students have shown a marked decline in reading and math levels as measured by standardized international tests administered around the world. India is one nation that long ago surpassed the US in such measures. For my two weeks watching exams in Tirur, I saw ample proof why.

On the Bus

One’s foreignness in India has the advantage sometimes of instantaneously bridging divides. Take my experience during a bus trip the other day, traveling between Valancherry and Tirur—a journey of about 45 minutes.

I had taken a window seat at the Valancherry bus stand several minutes before the bus left and moments before the entire carriage filled with passengers. Following known Western protocol on public transportation, I promptly buried my face in a magazine, shutting out the other riders. I caught a few curious glances over my shoulder from the man sitting next to me, a middle-aged Muslim with a knitted skullcap who was methodically running a string of prayer beads through his fingers.

Other passengers, I noticed, gave me smiles and short nods whenever I looked up from my reading. I nodded back as politely as possible.

Midway through the journey, the bus stopped at a rather nondescript intersection to let a few women off and allow a few more on the bus. As we waited, I looked up once again and peered out my window, which was open and letting in a refreshing breeze that broke up the staleness of the bus interior.

Across the road, a family of young girls and small children trudged along the curb, picking up trash. The girls—who had the bearings of overworked mothers—looked to be no more than 18. The small kids I took to be their children numbered five—two boys and three girls, one of whom was a toddler tightly grasping the hand of one of the mothers. The other mother carried a wailing baby who had on no clothes save a ragged, stained T-shirt. One of the boys, with an ineffable grin, lit a scrap of paper afire with a match. He showed off the burning paper to the girls and one of the mothers noticed. I thought the boy would get in the rear, but the mother grinned and made the other mother take notice. She also chuckled and continued walking with the crying baby on her hip.

I noticed all this, of course, in a mater of seconds. As the family passed by the bus, the boy who was burning paper (which was now a flimsy charred mess of wilted black ash in his hands) noticed me on the bus. He stopped dead in his tracks. He tapped one of the young girls and pointed at me, smiling slightly as he did so. The girl stopped to, struck motionless with an odd mix of what looked like wonderment and anxiety.

The boy raised his hand slightly, working up courage to interact with me. The other kids had by now all noticed and were stopped, huddled around each other, whispering to each other and glancing tentatively my way.

His nerve steeled, apparently, the boy began shouting: “What your name? What your name? What your name?” The phrase had a clipped, strident cadence. The mothers noticed and stopped, looked up and saw me, registering my presences with the same bewildered faces.

The bus driver thrust the vehicle into gear and it began to roll forward, in the opposite direction of where the family was walking. The boy continued to shout: “What your name? What your name?”

I leaned my head out the window as the bus picked up speed. “KYLE! KY-LE!” I yelled into the wind. I am sure the boy did not pick it up clearly, yet he smiled all the same. I saw him playfully push his sister, wanting her to recognize a great accomplishment. And the family continued walking up the road.

I leaned back into the bus and was about to begin reading my magazine again, when I noticed the other passengers around me. They were all staring me and grinning gleefully. The Muslim man next to me, in particular, wore an especially benevolent smile—his prayer beads momentarily suspended in his hand. I do not think anyone on that bus spoke much English. At least, they did not use the opportunity to ask me any questions in English. They simply smiled knowingly.

From there, I put the magazine back in my bag and enjoyed their silent company for the remainder of the journey.

A Little Off the Top

Getting your hair cut by someone who does not speak your same language can be nerve-wracking. That is why it is best to bring pictures.

That is how I found myself in a Tirur barbershop: a small, plastic-covered photo album in my lap, pointing to a picture taken last Christmas at Jenna’s mother’s house. I am surrounded by Jenna and her family—her sister Priya, her cousins Mark and Kathleen, her Auntie Lisa and Uncle Mike. In the photo, I have short hair, close-cropped along the sides with a pointy inch-long tuft rising from the top.

I point at my hair in the photo. “Like this. Short,” I say, looking imploringly at the barber. He looks from the photo to my head. Back to the photo. Back to the head. He squints. Pulls at my long hair. Molds it like clay as he looks back yet another time at the photo—like an artist judging a subject before he begins his work.

He nods an affirmative and gets out the shearers.

For the past decade or so of my life, I have said the same thing in every barbershop or hair salon I have happened to walk into: “About an inch off the top. Number two on the sides. Keep the fade.” Regardless of the cutters credentials, they have understood and made quick work of my hair.

No such simple procedure is enacted in Tirur. The barber is a genial man in his mid-fifties. He wears a stained white button-up shirt and a loose dhoti (or ankle-length loincloth), which is the style of many working-class men in Kerala. He hobbles around his small shop painfully on legs that appear crippled from some problem at birth—his hips are splayed out at an odd angle, his knees bent inwards towards each other. He must balance himself on the inner edges of his feet.

He kicks the chair I am sitting in unceremoniously and gets it to drop a few inches so he can get a better view of the top of my head. He roughly directs my head towards the angles it needs to go in order to begin shaving and pruning.

Two men—the type who strike me as regulars to this barbershop—come in off the street and sit in plastic chairs behind me. They talk to the barber animatedly, sometimes chuckling and pointing at my head. I surmise they are not here for their haircuts; they are here to watch me get mine.

With his shearers, the barber shaves it a little shorter than I would have preferred. But I cannot protest. I already feel a nice breeze fanning the back of my head. He starts in dexterously with the scissors and snips away the longer stands at the crown of my head. He cuts away the bangs with a clickety-clacking flourish. Then, he takes an old-fashioned long razor and shaves off my sideburns and cleans up the edges around the hairline. The razor makes a satisfyingly rough sound against my skin.

After it is all done—like barbers the world over—he slaps some ointment on the back of my neck and stands back with his hands upon his hips, his jaw thrust forward proudly. He gives the thumbs-up sign. I give it to him back.

I get out some rupees and he looks at them and then back at me. “Change?” he says (every business owner in Tirur knows that word).

I tell him to wait a moment and, leaving my photo album as collateral, run over to a market across the street. I buy some vegetables and a loaf of bread and come back to the barber with some smaller bills.

When I return, the barber is now alone, sitting in the chair I had just occupied, flipping through my photo album. He sees me enter and smiles, pointing at the album. He flips back the first page, obviously intending for me to fill him in on who all these people are.

The first picture is of Jenna and I two summers ago. He points to Jenna. “Wife,” I say. He repeats with a broad smile: “Wife.”

He quickly goes through a series of Jenna’s family. I say, “Wife’s sisters.” He repeats: “Sisters.”

“Wife’s mother.”

“Mother.”

“Cousins,” I say. “Cousin,” he repeats, still smiling.

He gets to pictures of my family. I point out my mother and father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, my friends and old roommates. Each time, the barber patiently and proudly repeats the words: “Father…Mother…Grandfather…Grandmother…Uncle.”

When he has flipped through the entire album, he takes my payment and offers his hand. I shake it, in a silent reassurance that I will be back when my hair once again needs a little off the top.

Can I get that in an XXL?

India is a big country but apparently not big enough for me. I have had this affirmed repeatedly by shopping for men’s clothes across the Subcontinent, from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea.

I have been laughed out of shoe stores in Kolkata when I asked for a size 12. I have gained quizzical looks at malls in Bangalore when I requested size 42 dress shirts. And after the first few attempts, I gave up on finding pants that would accommodate one of my legs let alone both.

It happened again in Tirur. I was in need of some ‘vests’. That is: sleeveless undershirts. (What Americans call ‘vests’, the Indians—by way of the British—call ‘waistcoats’. But I was definitely not looking for waistcoats.) I only needed some vests (or undershirts) because I had accidently put one of mine in the wash with Jenna’s bright pink kameez, and it came out looking like a scoop of Ben and Jerry’s ‘Cherry Garcia’ ice cream.

I walked into a clothing store in Tirur called Pooma’s (which promised an “All-Male Experience”, whatever that was), and found eight or nine youngish men loitering around the counter waiting for a customer. They all jumped into gear when I stepped across the threshold. Yes, sir? Pants, sir? Shirts, sir? What you like, sir? Need shoes today, sir? Handkerchiefs, many handkerchiefs sir?

“I need vests,” I said simply, splaying my arms out like a basketball referee trying to break up a fight.

Vests! Vests, sir! Yes, sir, vests! This way, sir. Right this way, sir. Come, sir! Vests! Vests!

I followed a troupe of helpers to another room at the back, piled high with cardboard boxes out of which spilled cotton shirts all manner of gaudy shape, stripe, and design. Glass cases of more shirts, dress pants, and jeans every shade of blue towered from floor to ceiling behind a Formica counter.

One of the helpers pulled out various plastic wrapped packages with vests. I put my hands wide as if I was telling a fish story and said, “BIG! The biggest you have.” The man’s eyes twinkled as if he understood; he reached behind the counter once more and brought out another package, slapped it proudly and nodded as if to say, “I found you the best vest in Tirur!”

I took the package without looking any closer, dodged back through the troupe of helpers and went home. When I got back to the apartment, I quickly understood my folly. I tried on the vest the helper had so proudly handed me: it barely fit across my chest and came down hardly past my navel. Tight as a corset, it looked like a shirt Lady Gaga might wear on the red carpet.

Jenna laughed and then decided it would perfect for her to wear as a nightshirt. I checked the size: 90 cm. This meant nothing to me, considering I have lived my life in the Standard system. I checked my other vests—ones I had bought in Bangalore—and they said 110 cm. Despite the metrics, I recognized a sizeable gap when I saw one.

The next day, I went back to Pooma’s. The troupe of helpers perked up again, recognizing a repeat customer. Yes, sir? More vests, sir?

“I need bigger vests,” I did the fish-story thing again with my hands. “One-hundred and ten centimeters.”

The troupe stared at me blankly, helplessly. I repeated my request, in a louder, slower voice (which is the habit I have unwittingly gotten into in Tirur when a person does not understand me.) “One…hundred…and…ten…cent…i…meters.”

They continued to stare. And then one of them—the same one who had helped me the other day—began shaking his head sadly. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Too big. No have here.”

I walked out, resigned to my vest-less fate. A giant among Indians, I began plodding slowly home.

The Weekend in Kochi

Our trip to Kochi over this past weekend turned out to be quite a well-timed respite. Jenna commented on the first day we got there (Friday), that this was “the first time we were able to really relax in India.”

Truly, Kochi offered to us our first genuine “vacation” atmosphere since arriving in the Subcontinent more than two months ago. It is a popular spot for Western tourists, and we saw gaggles of French, German, and English sightseers throughout the weekend. In fact, at dinner on Friday night in a full restaurant in Fort Cochin, Jenna was the only Indian in the place besides the waiters. (Whether that is a good or bad thing for a place's repute is another matter.)

Colonized by the Portuguese in the 1500s, Kochi still retains visible European influences in its architecture—red-tiled roofs, stucco houses, gothic cathedrals, narrow twisting residential streets. The area is heavily Catholic, owing to the twin impacts of European traders and Christian missionaries throughout the past few centuries. The town also remains home to India’s only notable Jewish enclave, complete with a synagogue dating back to the 16th Century. (It is quite an arresting sight seeing a man of South Asian complexion walking around with a yarmulke and forelocks, as we did several times walking around the alleyways of Kochi’s Jew Town Saturday.)

Kochi itself is an agglomeration of several different municipalities—the largest and most commercial being Ernauklam, which sits on the Indian mainland. This is home to many corporate offices, business districts, and the city’s two main train junctions. In feel and atmosphere, it is little different from the other cities we have been in during our travels. Across a brief causeway, one drives to Willingdon Island—another municipality—home to some upscale waterfront homes and a giant naval base. Hopping along another causeway, you reach further out into the Arabian Sea and come to Forth Cochin (on its own island), the historical and cultural heart of the Kochi district and the place Jenna and I stayed during our weekend. This place again charms visitors with its quaint European atmosphere and, above all, its superb and utterly remarkable quietness. Save the occasional sound of a revving auto-rickshaw, all Jenna and I heard over two days were the cawing of ravens and the brief patter of a intermittent rain showers.

Our guesthouse is the same place we will be staying at again in December when my parents visit. In fact, Jenna and I considered this weekend a kind of fact-finding mission. What we found, left us excited to come back. The guesthouse—a place called Ann’s Residency—is a mere five-minute walk from the famous Fort Cochin shoreline, dotted as it is with fish stalls, Chinese fishing nets, and banked wooden fishing boats. Ann’s Residency sits within the stucco, whitewashed walls of a quaint villa, and the rooms (on two levels) surround a quiet cobble-stoned courtyard complete with a miniature garden of palm trees and a fish tank. The rooms have AC and small cable TVs, mosquito nets around the beds, and rather graphic woodcarvings of the kama sutra on the walls.

Jenna and I surmised that all of these elements—the mosquito net, the kama sutra—were intentionally combined to give visiting Westerners an exotic feel for India. Yet, we jokingly concluded at the end of our weekend that Kochi was “India for beginners”. Or, more pointedly, “India for White People”.

This is not a bad thing. Having spent several weeks now exposed to all the raw life and abundance that India has to offer, it was frankly good (and necessary) for us to get away. Kochi provided that opportunity in spades. Yet, if you come to Kochi on vacation and go nowhere else in India, and it is impossible for you to go home and tell people you have ‘seen India’. It reminds me of my conceit in high school, telling people I had been to California when, in fact, I had only stopped briefly in LAX on my way to Hawaii.

Visiting Kochi and enjoying its tropical quietude is about as close to entering the heart of India as eating at the LAX food court is to seeing the Redwood Forest or the Golden Gate Bridge. Yet, Kochi is indelibly a part of India. A part, in fact, that is talked about surprisingly little in travel literature. Its uniqueness—the vary fact that you do not feel a part of India when you are there—is what makes it and the rest of this country so special.

India is a rather unpredictable country. The Jews of Kochi would agree.

My First Foreign Friend

Picture: A view of our train car on the way to Kochi. Vinu--my 'new foreign friend'--can be seen in the foreground on the left.

Jenna and I jogged down the train platform, hurriedly looking for our car number. We had one chance to get out of Tirur for this three-day weekend. We desperately did not want to miss it.

We dodged through milling crowds of waiting people and juked past other commuters disembarking from the Allepey Express which had just pulled into the Tirur station and would start up again any second, chugging south towards Kochi.

Then, just as the train whistle blasted to warn passengers of its imminent departure, I spotted what we were looking for: D1. The number of our car. We reached the car and hopped on board as the whistle blasted a second time. A few seconds later, the train jerked forward and began its huffing journey down the tracks.

We got Friday off from school due to the national Diwali holiday (India’s ‘festival of lights’), and we had made plans to spend the weekend in Kochi (formerly Cochin), Kerala’s largest city and its biggest tourist draw. Though we appreciated the simple comforts of Tirur, we had been looking forward to getting away all week. Hence, the jogging and the desperate search for car D1.

It would take four hours to get to Kochi. We settled into our seats in the middle of the packed second-class car and began to watch the tropical scenery roll by outside the grated windows. Keralites proudly call their native state ‘God’s Own Country’, a conceit borne of the lush countryside and natural beauty of the land. As if God would want to live anywhere else.

The train ride made me appreciate the Keralites’ pride a little more: swaying palm trees overhanging plush carpets of green jungle grass and rice paddies; meandering streams and lazy rivers cutting through idyllic farmland; bamboo huts around a bend; stucco houses with red-tile roofs stuck purposefully in the midst of jungle glades; an emerald hue cast to everything. The rain that began to fall an hour into the journey did not diminish this atmosphere but only added to its richness.

The train itself was packed. Many of the passengers were on their way to Thrissur—between Tirur and Kochi—a big festival center in Kerala that hosts many different celebrations between November and May. All the seats were filled and people stood in the aisles and at either end of the long car, milling near the doorways.

As inevitably happens in any public space in India, I got into a conversation. The young man sitting across from us leaned forward mid-way through the journey and asked where I was from. This led to a discussion that lasted us the next two hours. His name was Vinu, and he was a college student studying computer engineering in Calicut, a city north of Tirur. He was making his way back home for Diwali to visit his family near the Kochi airport, north of the main city.

“I was nervous to talk to you,” Vinu admitted after a while, with a smile. I gave him a questioning look. “I have never talked to an American before. I am afraid my English not so good. Maybe you would laugh at me.”

I patted him on the back, “I can understand you just fine. You’re doing great.” He nodded his head appreciatively. This reassurance seemed to prod him into deeper topics, which we discussed up to the limits of Vinu’s more-than-adequate English.

He talked of his family and how he was the oldest of three children. He was studying computer engineering in the hopes of getting a well-paying job after graduation. “My father is a tailor and my mother helps him. As the oldest child, it is my responsibility to help them when they retire. I will work for a while. Then, I come back here and live with them when they are old.”

Vinu said there were not very many good jobs in the technology field in Kerala. “I will have to go to Bangalore most likely. But for any good job, you have to know English well. That is the first thing they do in interviews: ask you about your English and test your skills.”

I told him that must put him under a lot of pressure—the twin responsibilities he feels to take care of his parents and learn English. He wanly smiled: “Yes, but I can manage. There is a lot of opportunity.”

Our talk digressed into politics (“Obama is coming here, nahn?” Vinu said brightly) and movies (“I hated Slumdog Millionaire. It showed only the worst of India.”). Vinu asked about America—where I was from, what I did before coming to India, when Jenna and I got married.

“America is a dream place,” he said. “That is how we think of it. Any Indian who goes there…never comes back,” he said laughing. “You can come here to India and leave easily. But you go to America: you can’t leave.”

He said he would like to go to America someday just to visit, and I asked him wouldn’t that tempt him to leave his parents? He smiled: “No way. Can’t leave them. Even for America.”

After what seemed like only ten minutes but what had actually been more than two hours, Vinu’s stop came. “I must leave, but I wanted to ask you something…” he said, as he rose to retrieve his backpack from the overhead bin. “Would you like to come to my brother’s wedding?”

I was shocked. “Sure,” I said. He handed us an invitation in a cream-colored envelope with cursive read writing. “It will be in Calicut. It would be great if you could come,” he said simply.

Then he waved as the train slowed down. “Goodbye. You are my first foreign friend,” he said shaking my hand. “But hopefully not my last.”