chartandwaters

Pico Iyer is a well-known travel writer who writes, sort of in the same breath, about the places he visits and about why people travel--about both the interior and exterior experience of travel. For instance, he writes in Sun After Dark, "You go into the dark to get away from what you know," as if to say, as much as you travel to see something foreign, you travel in order to see nothing familiar. You could say you're travelling for the sake of a negative image. Sometimes you may travel simply to feel confused, to have your mind bend with illogic simply because you can't decipher what's going on. I hear a few of you saying, Gabi, you were already confused. Nevermind it's not my point; stay focused. At times, when we start out mystified, often, when we finally find out what's going on, it's not nearly as satisfying. We're seeking, in essence, to feel in the dark, rather than to be sated with knowledge. Why do we need this when things baffle every day? says the non-traveller. I think the traveller knows why, even if she can't express it.

Now I'm in Chennai, and ooo do I have stories for you. Or maybe they're just for myself, but until I tell you about them, they don't seem to be stories. And they have no beginning or end or climax, so what are they precisely? One is shooting down the street last night on the back of Kristin's scooter. Sitting on a scooter, looking out on the crazy traffic, often makes me smile goofily, and I'm especially happy to know this Tamil-speaking white girl who has taught herself the ways of Indian traffic. Sitting sideways on the seat, knees together, in the Indian woman's way, I saw a group of women selling fish by candlelight on tiny, makeshift tables, laid with whole, shimmering fish. The tables were knee-high, maybe 2 feet square, and on every table, from what I could make out, two lit candles had been melted at their base to either side of the displayed fish. "Oh my god", I said, and Kristin said from the front, "I know, amazing." A few seconds later the smell caught up with me and I said, "PHEW!" "I know," Kristin said, "That's amazing too."

This a.m. I watched two men find space in a busy intersection to drag a tape measure across the street and quickly mark something like a compass rose in chalk in the center of the street. In a few moments they were gone, and the compass rose remained, doomed to rain and tires.

My second to last day in Bangalore, I visited a school for children with disabilities living in a slum area. Michele had recommended I visit as she had gotten to know some of the teachers very well. It was run by a savvy, caring man named G. Manivannan--"savvy" and "caring" are shorthand for the many stories he related of the good deeds he seems to have done very effectively. After the tour he invited me to a Karnatak (South Indian) music concert, and I was delighted. But first he showed me a new beautiful theater that had been built in Bangalore, and gave me tips on how to explore the cultural scene in Bangalore, which is happily bursting side-by-side (though, oh, never as fast) as the tech scene. And then I needed to switch hotels, so from his home, as he tried to wake his children to come to the concert, I called hotels. Though I was using my trusty NEW model Lonely Planet (published in September), and working with only a short list of hotels, he grew impatient watching me, apparently feeling responsible to take on this burden of mine. Finally, the next place I called didn't speak such good English, so I hung up and passed the book to Manivannan, and he identified the place as owned by a childhood friend he hadn't seen in 20 years. He redialed the reservation desk and got his old friend's number in order to make a personal reservation.

At first, I don't know why, he said that he would tell the friend later who he was, but first he wanted to make a reservation. I find booking a room generally straightforward, but I suppose he was trying to bypass any possible nonsense and ensure a booked room for me. But his friend wanted to know, was impatient, understandably, who was calling. "Mannivanan," he said, and then, after the pause, tenderly, "How are you Neeraj. Such a lifetime no we've not met." They began to make my reservation and Manivannan carefully spelled my name: "G for Gujarat..."
Gujarat is a state in India that for foreigners has become synonymous with devastating anti-Muslim riots--generally understood to be state-sponsored--in 2002, and a huge earthquake in 2001. Neeraj also invited us to his sister's wedding reception, happening that evening.

"Would you like to go to an Indian wedding?" Manivannan asked me quite kindly--and generously; how much less a thrill such a thing would be for him. So after the incredible! thrilling! dazzling! Karnatak music, we went to the wedding reception, which was mostly an awkward mingling among strangers, though with great hors d'ouevres and something called a "welcome juice" that tasted just like an orange creamsicle but with floating bits of mango. While we were there, Neeraj repeatedly insisted on leaving the wedding reception to check me into my (very low-cost) room, and it was only after much, much persuasion--as we were all standing outside Manivannan's car--that we convinced him not to.

My new hotel was walking distance from my old one (which had a bad paint smell), in the incredibly bustling, wild, always awake, potholed, gridlocked, extremely crowded center of Bangalore called City Market. So I just needed to be dropped off at the old hotel to pick up my luggage. Driving there, Manivannan and I gossipped about whether Neeraj's hospitality was more extreme--in a strange way--than standard Indian hospitality, which Manivannan said is represented in a Kannada phrase that means "treat every guest as a God". Arguing that perhaps it was not strange, I listed examples of the very extreme hospitality I had experienced in India. For example, there was the couple who insisted on driving me around to look for a trolley (luggage cart), an item that I was soon to learn does not exist in India because of the treacherous roads.

At least twenty minutes into the search, the couple explained that they were just on their way home from the hospital, where their five-year-old son, who was sitting very quietly in the back seat, had been overnight with a 105 degree fever. I protested heavily against further searching; no, no, it had to go on, it was part of their caste and in their blood to take care of foreigners. While the mother waited in the car the father took me from store to store; every store had a suggestion, no one had a trolley.

Once I managed to persuade them it was time to give up the search, they wondered aloud whether I should come for dinner. I said, please, your son, and they said, well, no, it's just that because of our religion we're fasting right now. I agreed that that meant it probably was a bad night for dinner, so we made it for the next day.

Still, Manivannan argued that Neeraj's hospitality was bizarrely extreme, what with inviting us to the wedding reception and then nearly leaving it. To show what more normal Indian hospitality looks like, Manivannan gave me examples of the decisions he had made about what HE had invited me to throughout the day. For example, he reminded me, he had admitted to me when I first called him that he wasn't free, rather than setting everything aside for a foreign guest (I don't think this is normal, I think it's just the behavior of someone more sophisticated). And later, he had invited me to something--the music--that was in HIS plans, not making new ones for me. (Same.) At this point I began to feel a bit less excited by our day, as if he were dissecting the extent to which he had successfully fulfilled his duty of treating me as a god. But at the end, Manivannan, his two restless children in the back seat, insisted on driving over City Market's bumpy roads and through the absurd traffic (neither of which, I realize, feel as extreme to him) from my old hotel to my new one to see that the room had been effectively booked--since he worried that Neeraj, in his excitement, hadn't booked it after all. Many a time had I found a hotel myself, and there were many in the area. I finally buckled and looked oppressed, as people often feel in the heat of Indian hospitality, and, nearing the hotel, he pulled over sensitively and let me out.

When I went to the hotel, not only was my room not booked, but they didn't know who Neeraj was. They had a room for me though, at the same price, and I went up to sleep.