Monsoon weddings

Greetings from Thiruvananthapuram, where we attended a Hindu wedding yesterday, and will leave tomorrow morning early to attend a Jain wedding in Indore.

I almost (but not quite) have the video program figured out on my new laptop.  Soon, I hope, I'll start posting snippets of video for all to see -- including some wedding scenes.  Your patience will be rewarded.  Eventually.

This is the time of the Northeast Monsoon in Kerala, with sudden, dramatic evening thunderstorms and heavy, freight-train-roaring downpours.  I love the flashes of light and the loud, sharp cracks and booms, and the fragrance of rain scrubbing and freshening the heavy, sticky air.  We've been lucky (so far) that we've not been caught outdoors during a cloudburst, although we've missed it by just minutes a couple of times.

Sunday evening, we were about to leave for another friend's house for an informal pre-wedding gathering of relatives, when the biggest gully-washer hit.  We watched the gutter below our window grow into a moat and swell into a river.  Soon after the rain let up, the flow subsided and our host offered us a lift in his car.

Or, should I say, his boat.  Midway in the normally 5-minute drive, we encountered a lake.  The water had so overwhelmed the storm drains that the resulting back-up had flooded the street, from doorstep to doorstep.  The Indian drivers and motorcyclists, unfazed, dove on in, taking care not to slosh excessively.  It was dusk, and the reflections were lovely and serene -- until I remembered the backed-up water no doubt included sewage.

-- The Obama buzz in the local news media has started to abate, replaced by the latest cricket scores and the excitement over the about-to-happen moon landing by a 21st-century Indian spacecraft.  It's sad that so much of the infrastructure on the ground here, including drainage, is still so 19th-century.

-- Too many drivers here seem to think they're aboard rockets.  The worst are buses and private cars.  Saturday, for example, we were picked up by an acquaintance's driver for a trip across town in his car.  We blasted off, up the street, in a flurry of aggression, honking, swerving, accelerating, braking, passing, and more honking.  It can't have been good for his employer's car to be driven that way, and it certainly wasn't good for our stomachs.  I think the driver intended to impress us with his driving skills.  Which he did.  In the worst possible way.  Next time, we'll take an auto-rickshaw.

-- Or a motorcycle.  Last night, Arjun, a tall, dark and handsome biker dude -- a 21-year-old we've known since he was a puny 4th-grader -- took me shopping, astraddle behind him, through rush hour traffic.  We wove adroitly, gently and quickly through the moving maze of cars, rickshaws and other two-wheelers, occasionally feeling the hot breath of bus exhaust on our arms.  After a successful purchase of my needed computer part, we got back on the bike for a cooling ride through an after-dark drizzle.

     We stopped, at his suggestion, at a Roman Catholic church en route back.  Although Hindu, he wanted to light some candles at the outdoor shrine there, a thank offering for the speedy return of a missing wallet.  He suggested I light some, too, as a prayer for a safe journey.

     We bought 2 boxes of candles and lighted all 12 of them, visiting the two little shrines, which looked to me exactly like tiny Hindu temples, but housing Catholic saints instead of Krishna or Ganesha.  Then we hopped back onto the bike just as a most starling blast and strike illuminated the large, pink mosque across the street, momentarily revealing it as gigantic and white against the black  sky -- and completing the evening's three-faith experience.

     Now, I'm off to finish the last packing before dinner and an early bedtime.  We'll be heading to the railway station dark-and-early at 4:30 a.m.

Sara