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.