Seasons and Reasons

There is nothing like the choking poison of Delhi traffic or the stifling heat of Rajasthan to make me feel like I am in India. Arriving in Delhi I managed to spend the absolute minimum of five hours in the city before jumping plane to the verdant fields of the Kullu Valley. There was green and mountains misty with monsoon rains, rivers rushing towards the plains of Punjab and the feeling that time had not moved so much as the season since I left only a few months ago.
Life is so soft in the mountains. People work hard and punctuate their labours with local festivals, but there is gentleness about the climate and the Valley that is not evident in the sprawl of Delhi or the villages of Rajasthan.
Anyway, for a long time now I have followed the precept that every pilgrimage of India should begin and end with a visit to Pushkar Lake, until I have done that I don’t feel as if I have officially begun my India time.
So we hurtle down the mountains in a twenty-hour stint to arrive in Rajasthan at sunrise, a detour through Delhi confirmed my suspicions that traffic jams caused by the revamping of Delhi in preparation for the Commonwealth games continue even in the wee hours of the morning. Anyone having to catch a plane out of Delhi would be advised to prepare for delays of up to three hours, even at three in the morning.
But then at dawn, the trail of blue peacock feathers draping the roof of a Shiva temple announces the state of Rajasthan, spread out like an early morning picnic blanket before us.
Here the festival season is in full swing, This is the time for farmers to take leave and make a holy pilgrimage somewhere with the entire family To bathe in a holy lake, to listen to some guru, to sing and chant and dance and buy plastic toys for their children. To cook on fires fuelled by the cow dung fuel they carry with them and to sleep in the open by a busy roadside.
The first time I witnessed this local approach to festivals I used to think why on earth would anyone bother to load up a bus or a bullock cart with just about the entire kitchen, pots and pans and spices and cow dung, the mother in law and assorted children and then walk sometimes for miles to some event so that they could cook and eat and shit and sleep in the open. I mean for gods sakes, wouldn’t they be more comfortable at home? Holidays seemed to me like harder work than the usual round of gruelling farm labour.
I had to admire their commitment to having a good time. Life is hard for rural people in India generally and in particular for the people of Rajasthan and neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. The failure of the monsoon has crippled entire villages, bankrupted farmers and fights over water supply have resulted in a quite a few deaths.
So I don’t begrudge them their four am puja beneath my window every morning, after a few rolls and groans and attempts to force my eyeballs open I get up and watch from my window the magic tapestry of India, her people, their stories all played out on the ghat below.
There is a sadhu washing in the predawn light, Brahmins sweeping their temples, cows rolling through the changing shed, a widow and her son, his shaved head and the basket the carry indicate a close death in the family, a farmer woman from Harayana feeding chickpeas to the black faced monkey, a Brahmin shouting at a pilgrim for wearing shoes close to the holy water, a tourist taking surreptitious photos, a swarm of pigeons circling over, a baby monkey swinging on my window and another grooming it’s mother. A group of villagers line up at the waters edge and repeat word for word the shouted prayer of the pundit; two kids scream and run away when a monkey gets too close, a man grabs a cows tail to lead it out of his way. Saris flutter in the early morning breeze and neon coloured turbans twirl as they dry in the sun, there is the constant ring of the bell at the entrance to the ghat, the shrieks of the baby monkeys and the cries of the kids. The sadhu completes his wash and wobbles away on stick thin legs and now here comes a band! With drums and bells and people singing and clapping just to add a bit more masala to my early morning viewing!

Love in the Time of H1N1

I watched on of those travel shows the night before I left home. In this series, a ‘personality’ is patched into an organised backpacking tour of a foreign country. Basically they get to interact a lot with the local taxi drivers, the odd random teashop dweller and the kind of characters one meets on the road and the result is filmed.
The episode I watched was set in India. A netball star coped with just a small film crew and her own resources.
It made me think about why we travel and how it is that we do so. For myself there is a curiosity about the people that draws me to a place, I want to know what makes them laugh or cry or stir to action, I want to understand the rhythm of their daily lives and find the bridge that exists between us. In the face of The Other I am looking for a mirror. What is it about us that is the same and how are our differences so different anyway?
I felt strangely sad to watch the travel show and realise that while I believe our urge to travel is about our urge to experience brotherhood in fact that simple heart connection between travellers and locals is rare enough these days to become the basis of a television series. Ironically the series is called Intrepid, after the name of the tour company.
To me an intrepid traveller is one of those god like Scandinavian mountain climbers strolling at altitude in the high Himalaya, or a solo yachtsman rolling on a forty-foot swell. These people are pimped and prepared and frighteningly intrepid. I feel more like Forest Gump by comparison.
These days, simply to travel is almost to be considered intrepid. I refuse to believe in Swine Flu or H1N1. First of all, please! Whatever happened to names like Cholera and the Plague and Consumptive Fever all perfectly romantic and tragic diseases. Heroines can die of cholera and its poetic, something to base a novel around, but swine flu just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s something almost to be ashamed of. Or paranoid about especially when you
are jammed inside long queues at New Delhi Airport. Two planeloads of people are crowded in an area under the escalators, queuing and curling in a snakelike formation in order to pass through the temperature testers.
This seems to me to be Indian logic at its best If by chance someone in the teeming crowd of exhausted arrives did have some contagious disease then by the very manner in which the screening was organised, we were all potentially exposed.
In Kuala Lumpur screening of passengers was as subtle and efficient as one would expect in South East Asia. We hardly paused in passing through the temp checkers.
Someone near me started to cough. I notice that this coughing is also noticed by at least six people around me. I wonder if I should take the names of the people around me who cough or splutter or (god forbid) sneeze! I clear my throat nervously and hope like hell that I don’t have a hot flush.
After an hour or snaking and queuing and eyeing each other nervously, we form a single queue and the desk is in sight. I wonder if I can claim menopausal immunity to the test since hot flushes are random and or triggered by small stresses. Two men ahead of me are hauled off for temperature misdemeanours.
I imagine myself being dragged off for the crime of being hot and tired and human.
It hurt my feelings to think that Mother India with her generous visiting and entry rights should do this to her guests. So much for guest is god, I grumble to myself.
Suddenly its my turn, my hormones behave and for the lack of a single hot flush I am granted entry into the country and escape into the night.
Even better, within ten minutes I am arguing with a taxi driver, hot and tired, and totally human again. Intrepid as.

KISSING KUWAIT

Rarely is a traveler met with anything more than a suspicious glare or a robotic nod when passing into a foreign country. In the sleep starved hour of four in the morning, the sight of singing immigration men is a wake up call like no other.
No steely faced officials, these Kuwaiti men. At this impossible hour they are welcoming the planeload of bleary eyed travelers as if we were guests at a celebration.
“Come here Pakistani!” croons a uniformed man, waving his arm towards the queue at his post, his smile as wide as the state of Kuwait.
As he stamps and sings, the immigration man interrupts himself to make side comments to his colleagues, pat a sleepy child on the head and scan the waiting crowd. A smile spreads like an early dawn across the arrival hall. It feels like a grand welcome home except we are a motley group of passengers from Mumbai; immigrant workers, the odd businessman and this sole tourist.
The immigration man, who sees to my visa, flirts in the way of screen star. Handsomely, politely as if we were at a cocktail party.
“Don’t be shy, give her one kiss in welcome!” shouts his singing colleague. Everyone laughs.
Thinking that anyone who can make a woman smile at this hour of the morning probably deserves a kiss, I enter into the State of Kuwait as if into a dream.
It’s a rich mans dream. Oil abundant deserts and a strategic location in the Persian Gulf that sweeps alongside Marine Drive from the airport, has helped to put Kuwait fourth place in the Richest Nation stakes. The wealth is richly understated. Buildings are austere and elegant, monochromatic in the pinky brown shade of desert storms, contrasting simply with the dramatic blue of the sky.
The sweeping curve of the highway is cut with the memory of old news reels. A line of burned out tanks, a sepia image of the desolation of war along this same road that now glistens with the shine of brand new vehicles, huge RV’s and sexy sports cars. Houses, wrapped in the patriotic colours of the national flag, flash by.
The Persian Gulf is as blue as the eyes of a child; walking along the boulevard I meet Habib. He invites me to see his city quickly offering to ring my hosts (which he does) to introduce himself. Also, he advises, the police emergency number here is 666.
“Kuwait is a very safe place,” he says, opening his hands to the heavens, “because we have all that we need and more!” These are a people to whom random acts of generosity and joy come almost as second nature.
As the day deepens into late afternoon, the women of the soil uncurl themselves into an evening of shopping and Kuwait reveals her fresh from the beauty parlour face. Approaching the city, building projects bustle for attention. The Invasion by Iraq is a scar they politely hide behind rebuilding everything exactly as it was before it was destroyed and then some. Flags are big in Kuwait, national pride like Mother Love.
Women, the womb of their future, are totally indulged. It is impossible to stand in a queue, men will usher you to the front as if you were doing them the greatest honour by pushing in. Traffic rules seem not to apply to women who are given the right of way at every intersection regardless of any road code. ......
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