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.

Remember Me

India is a country of 1.2 billion souls, crammed into a landmass roughly half the size of the continental United States. Crowds are inevitable, even in a place like Tirur, which is considered a remote backwater by Indian standards.

To put this is in perspective, consider that JM Higher Secondary School enrolls more than 2,500 students. Yet, JM is one of more than a dozen schools—both government-run and private—in the Tirur city limits. All the schools have similar enrollment figures.

Or consider the state of Kerala: with a population over 30 million, it is nearly six times as populace as the state of Missouri, and there are five cities in Kerala (most of them places Americans have never heard of, Kannur ring a bell?) bigger than my hometown of Kansas City.

If you are an Indian, it is hard to stand out in the crowd. Maybe that is why a boy named Hare Krishna has tried so hard to stay in my consciousness.

Hare Krishna attends MES Higher Secondary in Valancherry, the school I teach at twice a week. The third day I taught him, he came up to me after class as I was waiting for the bus to take me back to Tirur.

Like a lot of young Indian men, Hare Krishna is lithe and long-limbed, awkwardly elongated, as if stretched by a taffy-pulling machine. He has shaggy brown hair (light for an Indian), tossed over to the side like a rock star. His teeth are snarled and painfully formed in his mouth, yet he smiles unselfconsciously, in a way that makes you like him immediately.

“Sir,” he said to me as he walked up tentatively, followed by a group of his friends—equally long-limbed and awkward-looking. “Sir, do you know my name?”

It was an impossibly hopeful request, considering I had taught his class for a total of an hour-and-a-half and had yet to even glance the roster of more than 60 student names.

“I’m sorry. No I don’t,” I replied.

“Hare Krishna,” he said. And I thought he was joking, the name bringing to mind for me the image of men with shaved heads wearing saffron-colored robes dancing and banging tambourines in American airports.

“Really?” I said, the men still dancing and chanting in my head.

“Hare Krishna,” he said again proudly. “You know: the prayer?”

And from somewhere deep in my memory, I remembered reading the prayer in a book, Hare Krishna, Hare Ram! Hare Krishna, Hare Ram! It is a Hindu votive to the god Krishna, heroic avatar of the deity Vishnu, who made a memorable appearance in the ancient epic The Mahabharata.

“Yes, I do: Hare Krishna, Hare Ram!”

“Wonderful! Wonderful! My name: Hare Krishna,” Hare said, doing a little dance and clapping me on the arm. He gave off the appearance of Scrooge on Christmas morning at the end of A Christmas Carol, jigging through the streets of London.

“You will remember?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“Of course,” I replied, befuddled. At that moment, my bus came. I waved to Hare Krishna as I got on, and I promptly forgot his name.

A week later, I saw Hare Krishna again. When I saw him, I knew that I recognized him, and I knew that he had told me his name, but I blanched when he strode up to me and asked: “You remember my name?”

My embarrassed shake of the head crushed Hare. “Oh, sir. Please?” He pointed to himself, pleading with the rigidity of his index finger narrowed in on his chest.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember,” I said.

“Hare Krishna,” he said gasping, like those frustrated contestants on the $60,000 Pyramid used to do when their partner could not spit out the correct word.

“Ohhh, Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna, Hare Ram!” I said.

“Remember: Hare…Krishna. Hare…Krishna,” he intoned.

The next week, I saw Hare Krishna, and this time, I was ready. He came up to me, a circle of his friends crowding around me: “What is my name, sir?”

“Ummm…” I said, faking as if I had forgotten again. Hare Krishna leaned forward expectantly, his fingers unconsciously twitching in front of his face. Almost got it, his eyes seemed to say.

I enjoyed extending the moment a bit more. “Well….let’s see…it was…uhhh…”

His friends began to chuckle. Hare Krishna was still all business, “Yes? Yes?” he leaned forward some more.

“Was it…Hare Krishna?” I said finally.

“YES! YES! Wonderful, sir! You are wonderful! You do not forget me!” And then, Hare Krishna hugged me.

Hare Krishna’s indefatigable efforts aside, most of the students’ faces at both MES in Valancherry and JM in Tirur, pass me in a revolving haze, as if they are all stuck on the same carousel and are passing me while I stand on the ground below desperately trying to recall a name before they round out of sight.

It is like those times I crammed for an exam in college. The facts and numbers and statistics and quotes hovered at the edge of my consciousness, vaporous and evanescent. I knew I had to write it out in my blue book before it all escaped me. In Tirur or Valancherry, I see a face and I know I know it, yet I cannot quite get the name. I am doing good if I can remember what class I see that face in each day.

But the likes of Hare Krishna stick out, for their personality and their tenacity at bursting themselves into my life. There is a 9^th standard girl at JM—a Muslim teenager named Resla. I know her name because one day this week she gave me a small golden flower, picked off a withering bush in the school’s courtyard.

“For your wife. From Resla. My name: Resla. Remember,” it was not a question but a demand. Later in the week, when Resla passed me in the halls, she would stop and give me a questioning look.

“Hello, Resla,” I would say. And Resla would continue walking with a giant smile on her face.

In a galaxy of more than a billion cramped stars, one has to be especially bright to stand out.

A New Roommate

A new roommate can be a harrowing thing, especially when you live in a cloistered, concrete box such as our apartment in Tirur. ATI has assigned another American to teach at another school in Tirur and she has taken up residence in the bedroom beside ours. Her name is Jaime, and luckily she is a down-to-earth, personable woman.

She was born in New Jersey and went to Ithaca College in upstate New York. But she has lived the last few years in Los Angeles working various jobs, most recently for a non-profit that delivers food to AIDS and cancer patients. She arrived in Tirur Sunday morning (while Jenna and I were away in Calicut) after spending a month in Kochi training, as we did three months ago in Kolkata.

On Sunday night, after she had spent all day cleaning her room and catching her breath, Jenna and I offered to take her to dinner at one of the local places we frequent every week. Jaime—looking for some company and conversation—agreed right away.

If one white person walking around Tirur garners some quizzical stares, two white people (together with a darker-skinned Indian woman) must be the equivalent of the Pope visiting. As we made our way to the rickshaw stand, people on the street stopped what they were doing and looked up at the three of us as we walked by. Stopped dumb in their tracks, as if they had been told some amazing piece of news.

“Do you get used to this?” Jaime asked, as we passed a group of older men who twittered and giggled as we walked by.

“No. Not really,” Jenna replied simply. “It still bothers me. And I think it will always bother me.”

It was the same story at the restaurant, families gawking and stopping their meals to turn noticeably in their seats to get a better view of us sitting in the corner. “Oh wait, honey, let me just move my chair a bit so I can see. Yeah, that’s great. Can you see over my head? Perfect! Pass the popcorn while you’re at it.”

The analogy to a caged animal sometimes fits, like on Saturday in Calicut when Summer, Colleen, Jenna and I had gone to the beach and a crowd of teenagers and young mothers literally gathered around us and started taking pictures with their cameras.

But at the restaurant Sunday night with Jaime, we felt more like reluctant rock stars being tentatively stalked by a nervous group of our followers. Small children and grown men alike hovered nervously a few feet from us, staring intently as we put food to our mouths. “They eat the same things we do! Amazing!” Yet, none had the conviction to come up and introduce themselves or smile and wave or simply just turn their eyes back to their own business.

I would be lying if this Indian habit did not bother me sometimes. Though it depends on my particular mood in the moment that I am being studied. (For, after all, sometimes you just do not feel like being stared at.) Our ATI trainers in Kolkata warned us about this phenomenon and gave us the somewhat lame-sounding excuse that, “Indians are just curious people.” Their subtle hint was: embrace the staring. Yet, curiosity blends easily into what Americans perceive as rudeness. And getting slack-jawed stares while you try to shovel rice and curry into your mouth falls into the ‘rude’ category with most Westerners.

There is a flip side, though. The same ‘curious’ spirit that drives many people to simply stare at us from afar, drives others to strike up friendly banter and greet us as if we were old friends.

“Hello, sir! Your native place?” is a question I have gotten dozens of times while in India. Indeed, some Indians exhibit an openness and casual hospitality sorely lacking in the US. I have already predicted that that is one thing I will miss the most once we leave India: the sense of kinship and warmth you feel from some people here, even if you do not know them that well or cannot speak more than 10 words to each other.

The attendant at the grocery store, my barber, the manager at our Internet café, the hundreds of students who barely know me: all these people would invite me to dinner and give me a spare bed if I needed it.

So would, I suspect, Muhammed Hafiz, one of the waiters at the restaurant Jaime, Jenna and I ate at Sunday. As we left, he cornered us and extended his hand: “Good to see you again. How are you? Good, good. Please come again. Please, come again. I want to see you again!”

Being a Westerner in Tirur goes both ways, sometimes.

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.