Arjana's India Adventure 2008

Soooo....

I'm home and this is all going to be a little disjointed and probably missing stuff that my feeble memory has already lost. I'm sitting in a cafe in Naples Florida, which aside from the weather has, lets see.....nothing in common with India. I'd written a bit of a draft from Mumbai the day before i left, I'll start with that, and then add on.

This is one of my favorite places in India. Mumbai, a city I knew I would love, a city I've been wanting to go to my whole life. Seeing it so soon after a tragedy is an interesting thing, the city has almost let me in to experience an intimacy that most foreigners would never get to see. We came in 2 days ago, I didn't write for fear of worrying people. It was the day after everything had subsided. We'd met up with Steve and Rob in the kind of bland countryside of Lonavla, apparently business people's town of choice for conferences and so crazily inflated hotel prices for bad quality rooms. But we had fun, it was such a relief to see them an we had our Thanksgiving dinner that night in, amusingly, a vegetarian restaurant.

That night was actually really great and special, though it was a day later than thanksgiving it really felt like thanksgiving. We went around the table saying what we were thankful for, and though its amazing I'd only known these people for a couple of weeks, they were a pretty convincing makeshift family. I was really lucky to have their company.

After seeing the caves the next day, which were pretty great actually, following a long hike up to the top,, (Buddhist caves dating from 200 bc that nobody goes to because they are smaller than the ajanta caves) we took off for Mumbai on Sunday. We were a little nervous, or at least I was, and we insisted on taking a taxi ride into mumbai, no more public transport for me, and as soon as I arrived here I knew it was not a mistake.

We checked into Bentley's hotel in the heart of Colaba, nicely placed though on a side street, a little boutique hotel, and we talked to the owner for a while. He had a perspective that I'm beginning to see as an Indian resiliency. He spoke about how this is something that we will have to live with now as a world, the knowledge of this kind of street terrorism, that it is going to have to feel like how we have to deal with bombings sometimes he said. He said that the situation with India and Pakistan will only escalate through all of this, the pakistani CIA being rumored to be involved in this, and i can see that happening. He thinks India is on the edge, I wonder if its true.

Walking around Colaba for the first time, I saw an area that I would have loved a week ago, and still do, but seeing it for the first time the day after the shock was very, well, special, in a way. I hadn't realized how close Steve and Rob's hotel had been to Leopold's cafe. It was actually next door to it. And they had checked out the day before. WE thought that was as close as we could possibly feel to this whole thing, but we were so wrong. In the course of the past couple of days I have heard more first hand stories than I'd ever dreamed possible.

Perhaps the most unbelievable story I heard out of the whole thing was an australian friend of Rob's that they'd met the week before, at Leopold's Cafe, actually. His name also happens to be Steve. This steve is in his late 40's kind of a stocky type, not someone you'd want as your enemy, but with a wry and sort of jovial sense of humor. The sort of guy you know has a lot of life experience behind his eyes, someone who at the end of it all reminded me of Shantaram (main character in that book I'd mentioned before.) So steve told us what had happened to him in the attacks. He'd been sitting in the cafe with a japanese model, having dinner with her, when the first shots rang out in the cafe down below. They were eating upstairs in the little mezzanine area, and shots shattered the glass windows next to them.

Steve, who'd had some early military training, instinctively grabbed his date by the scruff of her neck and shoved her to the back wall. He remembered that the day before he'd seen a waiter opening up the grain cabinets and that there was nothing inside them. At that moment he threw open the cupboards and literally started grabbing people and shoving them into the cupboard. Then he took one of the tables and threw it down the stairwell to block the doors, to try to keep the terrorists from coming up the stairs. It was a mad bloodbath downstairs, the gunmen killing in cold blood. When Steve threw the table down, unfortunately it was at the moment they were reloading their guns, and it was quiet. They heard the commotion, and bounded towards the door of the stairwell. The table wasn't going to jam the door enough, so steve threw the weight of his entire body up against it, ducking down as they shot right above his head. He told us later that he felt like his kids were going to know how he died; it could either be in a cupboard, or fighting to save others lives. He just did it instinctively.

There have to be two types of people in this world, because I don't see everyone doing what Steve did. I don't know if I would have been like that, probably woudn't have been strong enough anyway but you want to hope that you would be the kind of person who would help people out. When our Rob and Steve heard about this, they felt such a surge of emotions; how close they came to being there with steve, what would they have done? etc. Our Steve even felt a bit guilty he wasn't there to try to help people as a doctor. Anyway this Steve then took 2 german stewardesses and his japanese date down the street to his hotel to hide out, when the gunmen had left, after killing 9 people. he'd called his brother before holding down the door, and waking him in the middle of the night, his bro didn't believe him! thought he was drunk or something, and then upon seeing it on the news guiltily called him immediately, then alerted the news, and within minutes steve as being hounded by the australian version of Good Morning America. who of course he didn't want to talk to.

This guy was just tough as nails, he didn't show much emotion, but I was sure he must have felt some, I can't imagine going through something like that. Rob said that he felt had they been there, they wouldn't have made it. He just had a feeling about it, we all felt eerie. The man who'd measured Steve's suit only days before was shot in the head and killed. The guy who worked at the chemist was shot while closing up his shop at the end of the day, the guy who sold me some earrings spilled his story of seeing ht gunmen running through the streets killing people and hiding out in the alleyway. There were just stories upon stories. The cabdrivers seemed eager to talk about it too. Everyone seemed to want to talk about it, which surprised me a bit. Maybe that was their way of dealing.

Amazingly, Leopold's reopened only 2 days later, the waiters went back to work, and the bullet holes were covered up by paintings. So no workers comp or time off for post traumatic stress disorder there, oh no. Same waiters, back to work, minus the couple who jumped on hand grenades to try to save their fellow man. Amazing. And here was a city, hit by tragedy, just pulling it together, but trying to make a statement to the world, to the government, that they aren't doing enough, that there is too much corruption (I've never seen such a corrupt and virtually ineffective police system) and had it been more organized or the police more trained that it wouldn't have been able to get this out of hand.

The day before my last day, I did something that at first seemed unconventional and maybe unethical, i signed up for a "slum tour" of the biggest slum in Asia. 1.7 km and home to 1 million people. Unbelievable. And it turned out to be a very rewarding experience. When I got in the car with our driver I was expecting to be whisked away into a Christian Children's fund ad, where everyone is crying and a child has a single tear coming down her cheek as she sits on a pile of trash. The pile of trash part and the child was true, but there was a remarkable difference in attitude from what I expected. The reality is, this is their reality. The conditions in where they live, and its a day to day thing. They aren't going to be sitting here crying about their daily life, in fact it was like a colony of worker bees. Ive never seen such a humming factory like society. This slum puts out 660 million dollars worth of products every year, and we took a tour of their plastic recycling department; of course there are no health codes and it is clearly dangerous with all the metal instruments, but people are going about their jobs. We saw people making clay pots, people recycling vegetable oil cans, people sewing clothes in a factory, putting labels on it (labels, our ever important labels), people making bread and cookies. Each part of the slum its own little factory.

And the people were so warm and welcoming, big grins lighting up their faces. WE walked through the residential part, the tiniest little rooms and alleyways, felt like we were underground but we weren't. And little convenience stores set up inside! We visited a nursery school set up by the government, and I actually felt a tangible feeling that I could teach in a place like that someday, It doesn't feel like a far off notion to me anymore, and its something I'll think about for the future.

I'm not saying this place is an ideal living situation, or that things shouldn't be done to help people who are living with terrible health conditions, but I was absolutely floored by, once again, the resiliency. This was an NGO set up tour, and the proceeds go to help the people, I think an organization like that is amazing to open peoples eyes to the reality of these places in a way that you wouldn't imagine, and it was a real highlight of my entire trip to India.

The last night I was in Mumbai, my last night in India, my friends and I were doing some last minute shopping, when we walked out it turned out we were smack in the middle of a march. Thousands and thousands of Indians, fired up, a lot of them young college students, just lining the streets, everyone marching towards the gateway of india, some chanting, the only word I recognized was "pakistan" chanted with disdain. Waving of Indian flags, and everyone in shirts which read "Mumbai Meri Jaan" or "I love Mumbai"... (I noticed the indians wore it written in english and the handful of foreigners we saw had it written in hindi, including us.) The protest/march was one of the memories that I think will be with me always. Never had I been in the company of more people, never had I felt almost carried away by the palpable energy/anger... it felt like it was on the edge of erupting to me, especially the rhythmic chanting about pakistan. I was trying while steve was taking pics to remain on the peripheral, thinking, worst case scenario, if they throw a hand grenade into this crowed I want to be able to run away, not get trampled to death. How easy would it have been for that to happen, for everyone to then join a stampede, you can see how this stuff happens in india, especially in a culture where clamoring for public transportation could result in bruises and broken bones, all to be followed by a cordial attitude the whole ride, by the way, a concept which i find amusing and bizarre.

I reached my limit at last, and almost started to panic as I realized we'd been all but swallowed by the crowd, and it took us a good half hour to get out of it. The noise, the heat, the crowd, it was too much. Something that moved me substantially was a man that came up to us, seeing our shirts, and smiled broadly. He extended his hand and shook ours vigorously, proclaiming with great emotion "you are saving India. People like you. You are not scared. Please still love India. Please come back again and again. Tell your friends not to be scared. India loves YOU!"

After being in a country for almost 4 months and feeling every emotion possible in a human being, sometimes you don't know if you are really liked or loved by a country's people. At that moment, I knew this man was really sincere, and it felt amazing to be there, right then. To keep walking with the people, fearful or not, to be privy to a scene that people would only see on their TV screens for a brief moment on CNN, another troubled story from another "troubled" part of the world. The only other foreigners were journalists, and for a moment I almost felt like one of them. I almost wanted to BE one of them. I felt part of it, I felt unified with Mumbai, and in a way, unified with Indians in a way that didn't happen until that very last night.

Drained, we returned to our hotel rooms covered in sweat, and then did a quick about face getting into our finest clothes to go out on the town one last time. The four of us, Brit, Rob, Steve and I went out for a nice dinner and then to the top of the Intercontinental hotel for a very overpriced beer by the poolside. The next morning Steve and Brit left for the airport, and Rob and I had one day to finish our shopping and for me to get ready to leave. We hit Chor Bazaar, a place I went more than a couple times in my few days there, (oh and I bought an amazing glass lamp there, like huge and amazing and it was a SAGA trying to get that thing as a carry on on the plane, I even ended up in tears begging them not to check it saying "you have no IDEA how important this lamp is to me!" (I am clearly my mothers daughter), but they finally were tired of dealing with me and I was very very very late to the airport cuz of a traffic jam so they just told me to get on with it already and I could take it!)

Anyway, Chor Bazaar is a mostly Muslim market, teeming with Goats we weren't sure what for, don't think they were just for mutton, though the street we were on was called Mutton St! There seemed to be one on a leash in front of every store! The whole bazaar seemed like a step back through time, everything seemed covered in an inch of dust, old relics from a different age. i bought several antiques, and we went into the back of this old mans' store into a veritable treasure trove of old wooden items, boy would I like to run an import/export business sometime! Truly amazing stuff. And right up until that last possible moment we were in that bazaar, and then eating my last indian meal in a restaurant in colaba, and then a 3 hour harrowing taxi ride, where the driver insisted we'd have to pay him 600 more rupees for AC so we just opened the windows and got covered by a thick layer of grime, and coughed up a lung. And I almost didn't make the flight. I cannot think of a more appropriate way to be spit out of India. Crazy, chaotic and wonderful, as always.

So... I am almost ready to bring this thing to a real close. But I have left out a good little story about the International Indian Film Festival held in Goa... that we crashed! A total non-sequitur yes, but it needs to be told.

So Kristin and I knew about the film festival, we wanted to check it out. It is held in Panaji, the capital of Goa. Goa is kind of a big place though so it was a bit of a taxi ride away. I couldn't imagine being there though and not at least trying to see how far in we could get. Being backpackers of course we didn't have quite the right apparel, but I had just bought this simple black linen dress and I had my silver tibetan necklace, so I thought, make yourself look classy and understated. No one knows the price of a simple black dress! (in this case 6 bucks!)...Kristin didn't really have anything to wear, but she did have a cute shirt, so we were on a mission. We found her a perfect pair of black linen pants, and some great jewelry on the street. We bought a little bottle of Fenny (Goan coconut liquor, only sold in goa!) and mixed it with Limca, this lemon lime soda, what a fabulous little drink! And turned on the music as we got ready.

An hour later, we were standing in Panaji in front of the main theater where the festival was held, right next to the red carpet! We had just walked up to the security gate, and they said "passes?" and kristin just said "film festival!" quite confidently, and though a ridiculous thing to say, it seemed to do the trick! They nodded and waved us in. We got a glass of wine at the wine kiosk and started making small talk to the wine guys! After a few minutes, this little man with a huge professional camera and a big press badge started taking photos of us! Kristin looked blaze, and I flashed a big cheesy grin. The man introduced himself as St. Andrew, which is exactly what he turned out to be, he was like a little sprite, an appariton, arriving at the exact time we needed him!

Kristin basically said "do you know where the afterparty is tonight?" and he said "well its on a boat but unfortunately i don't have any invites"... and she was just basically like "oh, we'd really like to go, actually." just totally matter of fact! and after conversing like this for a bit, he told us that he'd give us a call. We never expected what happened next. The phone rang and he said at first he couldn't get us on the boat, but he'd take us somewhere else. "no, we really would like to go on the boat, kristin said. the vip party."

She put me on the phone. and I pulled the acting card out, "im actually an actess in new york city, and I would really like to be a part of this tonight." unbeliveably, it worked. he called us back 5 minutes later, and said "where are you now, we hve to go right now!" and minutes later we were at the entrance of a giant cruise ship, being introduced to Dominick and Vanessa, the technical director and his wife, given beautiful cream colored invites with gold writing, and then there we were, going through a security check, and then we went into these little lifeboats, to the REAL BOAT! A casino boat, where we were greeted by a long line of hosts, and whisked away to a beautiful buffet and casino! We had dinner with the general manager, of the entire film festival! The entire evening was unbelievably surreal. Afterward, St. Andrew took us to all the premier clubs in Goa, where everyone seemed to know him and like him, and waved us in for free in front of the line, stuffed to the gils with people. What an incredible night!

And I know I wrote about Osho ashram already, so I'll leave it at that. An experience in its own. Matching robes, dynamic meditation I can't posibly describe, and an oddly materialistic capitalistic approach to meditation for westerners. Odd, interesting, bothersome, and something I'm happy I did.

And I guess that just about sums it up. I never knew what was coming next, the way you never do in life really, except that in traveling everything is more concentrated and sped up. I'm sitting here in Naples Florida, still recovering, from jetlag and from a different pace of life. I almost miss the sound of the tuck-tucks honking their horns outside, the dirt roads, the music everywhere, the people living every single aspect of their lives in front of your face, expressing themselves, their opinions, selling you things ... "madam, do you want to buy a drum?" echoes still in my head. I close my eyes when I go to sleep at night and I see images, almost like I just got back from some kind of war, clearly not war, but images accost me. I already miss it. I already miss the amazing friends I met there, solid, good, kind loving people. My trip could not have been better, and i know I'll adjust to this all again eventually, though I don't want to lose all of India and settle here without thinking about what I've seen, what I've experienced. India finally became what I'd always hoped it would be, and then some.

One thing I do know.... I"m going back.

Arjana's India Adventure 2008

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