Paper Bengal Tiger

India

Before I truly wake up in the morning, in those 5 seconds between cataplexy and cognizance, I feel as if I can change everything about myself and I have everything to look forward to. I still feel like a little girl sleeping in my little girl bed. However, I woke up to India in a strange fashion. I knew I was there before I was awake. It’s as if my third eye had been dialated. My actual whereabouts and mental state were very much closed-circuited that morning.

And speaking of idiosyncrasies, it is very strange to read a news article on an “international” website about a very “foreign” country when you are in—or within proximity to—that very country. No man is an island. The night before, I read about the attack on the Sri Lankan Cricket Team. I looked up from my computer and I could see the island from my ship window.

Last December, SAS changed the itinerary thanks to the thug-pirate pastime of capturing the Gulf of Aden. We were supposed to be in Egypt, in that very marketplace, the day of the mosque bombing. Instead, I was in Cape Town, meeting some friendly people and “talking sh—t about [their] pretty sunset.” When SARS broke out in 2003, SAS was on its way to Vietnam. They bunkered in the sea for 2 weeks, not knowing where their next port would be. We’ve come to expect the unexpected.

For one thing, the smell of India is something one cannot prepare for, nor for this purpose, accurately put into words. I said, “Charcoal baby goat flesh” but no one agreed with me. Martha said it smelt like “sh-t.”

For security purposes, we were advised not to hang out at western establishments such as malls, but we went to one to see an authentic Bollywood movie and we spent the next day exploring the many little shops for authentic trinkets. It just so happens that we caught the red carpet premier of a Tamilnadu original. It’s not too surprising, however, as Bollywood cracks out something like a billion films a day. The drama we watched, or better yet tolerated, is called Naan Kadubul and it is creepiest, seriously most bizarre film I have ever witnessed. Like the smells, I can’t seem the describe it.

Our cabbie, Madu, took us to a beautiful Hindu temple, but he wanted us to know he was a Christian or in his words, “a good Christian.” These days, I find myself missing sacred places of my own: the Metoulious, Laurelhurst Park, and 43rd Ave. Madu took us outside the gates to a fenced pond. We threw cornballs into the murk and watched catfish gather and surface. A crowd gathered too. (Again, the human condition.) A girl outstretched her hand for a snack.

“Why in the hell am I feeding the fish,” I asked myself.

Madu took me to buy a sari. It took twenty minutes for the two women to properly fashion it. They plopped a black bindi in the middle of my forehead as if it were the cherry on top. Madu called me his daughter and friend, but mostly his daughter. Then he called his real daughter on his cell and I talked to her briefly. She is a first year student at the all women’s university and is late for her exam. He claimed I look like her. “Same face. White.” A girl in my art history class complained that she couldn’t find light makeup in India. “Michael Jackson would have a hard time,” my professor jokes.

We went to a hookah bar. I finally had a waffle. We bought Madu a cappuccino. He’s never had Italian style coffee, but he loved it. We all shared a Café Zabaglione and agreed the Italians make the best coffee. I thought of Italy and I thought of home and the people I miss. Some of the people are going to work everyday, some of them aren’t working at all and just killing time; some of them are dead and some of them are doing god knows what in countries very far away from where I am.


On a whim, we decided to take an overnight train to Bangalore. The train was less Darjeeling Limited than anticipated. (No sweet lime or $6,000 belts.) There were bars on the windows, filth, babies crying, and some scary looking dudes—really unromantic. For some time, I was feeling less spiritualized than I had hoped. I didn't sleep, just shivered. I played a game of solitaire in my head and said my mantras. I watched a man watch us. We giggled, what in the hell are we doing here? I felt very ponderous and uncomfortably comfortable. This is a perfect place to have an existential crisis, I thought. A man sat down.

“What do you eat for dinner in your home?”
Colin laughed uncomfortably, “What?”
“Where are you from?” He asks Colin.
“America.”
The guy chuckled. “Black man in White house. I like.”
We smile. He smiles. We were all smiling quite a bit actually.

We got to Bangalore about twenty minutes after the sun arrived. We were fatigued, and decided it was best if we just went back to Chennai, but the station was sold out of tickets. Dang it. So we found a rickshaw driver who jackknifed his way through the chaos to another train station where it took us three hours to find and buy first class tickets. We sat in the waiting room until ten. The sun was hot, we, exhausted, so we went to a hotel bar and drank whiskey cokes until four. We crawled to the train station as if we were walking the plank. I was hot and bothered by my sweat-drenched dress, in a cacophony of people selling flowers and carrots and duffle bags, all gawking at us: the only foreigners in the whole damn city. We were advised not to go to Bangalore because of the threat of terrorism. If anything, I felt like the radical. The whole situation, though sketchy in retrospect, was laughable at the time. I mean, what else were we supposed to do? We only brought a backpack full of goodies and 7 hours worth of loaded questions. We joked the entire ride back.


In a rickshaw ride to buy pirated DVDs, Martha brought up an excellent point: people live lives we will never know. That’s hard for me to accept because I want to know everything. But moreover, I am also very grateful for everything I've worked for and everything I've been given.

From the comfort of the tour bus, I saw women in their day-glo saris climb onto different color buses, separated from their husbands. Bride burning is a problem for India. I saw lots of poverty, which is also a problem. To many, problems present themselves as a scenario with a cause=effect, beginning, middle and end. Despite my crippling imagination, I did not see the projected Gordian knots, and therefore, had a hard time picturing a man setting his wife on fire just to collect a dowry. It’s hard believing in such evils, but then again, it’s hard not to.

My inexperience is also a problem because I was the victim of many little problems. One example involves our rickshaw driver, who refused to drive us to port and demanded more rupees to walk us through the dark tunnel that led us to safety. Like Shiva’s outstretched arms, there were arms of beggar children everywhere, grabbing and clinging to my dress. Startled, I jumped and instinctively grabbed the hand of the driver (the same a-hole who got us into the mess in the first place.)

In my favorite writings, someone goes into the belly of the beast. I wanted to explore. The kids were adorable and laughing and more notably, they asked for pens! Not salvation. Sometimes I want to be the Jonah, or moreover, the Shiva soapboxed on the dwarfed the manifestation of arrested development. But I am no saint. I am still very much an adolescent. And India, the paper Bengal tiger, consumed me but didn’t scratch me out. I enjoyed myself as I played in its belly. It allowed me to look beyond the superficial, and into the substance of world.

Like Jonah, I was vomited out three days later, unharmed but a little bit older.