Missing India

Greetings from back home in the U.S.A.

     As most of you already know, Rob and I got back yesterday after a 25-hour journey from Singapore, where we had enjoyed a few days of R&R after about 4 months in India.  It's always good to be home, of course, but there's a lot about India that I'm already missing!

     Life seems very quiet here.  Too quiet, in fact.  Rob and I both miss the always unpredictable hubbub and hurly-burly of Indian streets.  We miss the surprising little oddities that make us live our lives there with perpetually raised eyebrows.  

     We miss the challenge of communicating with people who think our accents are inscrutable and funny -- if they speak any English at all.  

     We miss the train journeys, and the whole world of behind-the-scenes India that those trips reveal to us.  

    We miss how CHEAP everything is over there -- especially those pleasant $8-a-night rooms that are clean, in hotels with excellent, friendly service.

     I miss that reassuring and eloquent head bobble, jiggle, wobble -- the loose-necked head gestures that accompany South Indian speech, and sometimes replace it.

     And we miss the sound of Malayalam, the language of Kerala -- that musical, headlong, racing gallop of syllables, inflecting up & down & up & down, in a rollicking, roiling rush -- a sing-songy, triple-tongued lilt.  And we can understand scarcely a word of it.

    Rob puts it more simply: Malayalam sounds like an audio tape run backwards. At high speed.

     And because we're back in the land of American-accented English, I miss the peace and quiet that Malayalam offered me -- the inability to eavesdrop, even unintentionally.  It's so restful, not having other people's banal conversations intrude into one's mindspace, unbidden, unwanted, and definitely unappreciated.

     In a nutshell (that would be cashew, in Kerala), we miss scenes like the following -- fodder for our Postcards blog:

     -- It's a quiet Sunday evening in a small town.  We're buying a few bananas at a little shop on the sidewalk.  On the adjacent main road, there's hardly any traffic -- an occasional motorcycle or scooter, and little else.  I can hear a faint, busy peeping off to the left, growing closer and louder.  With a turn of my head, I investigate.

     A man wearing a sarong is pedaling a bicycle in our direction.  He passes by.  On the bike's back rack are two stacks of shallow wicker baskets, topped by a larger, lidded basket with wire mesh sides.  

     The top one contains a confused milling of baby chicks, most of them yellow but a few bright red.  All, apparently, are cheeping.  Only tonight would they be audible above the traffic.

     -- Everywhere we go in rural India, we see cattle or dairy buffaloes grazing -- one here, one there, seldom in actual herds.  But they never look lonely.  It seems they're always accompanied by at least one large crane-like bird, long-necked, svelte, and bright white -- the ubiquitous cattle egret.

     Sometimes the birds form a circle around a cow, like a security cordon.  Sometimes one stands on the cow's back, like the winner in a game of King of the Mountain.

     But what I see most of all is the lone egret, strutting along behind the sauntering buffalo like an adoring little brother. 

     The birds make their living by eating the bugs stirred up by the cow's hooves.  There seems to be nothing in it for the cattle -- except, perhaps, adulation.

     -- In hotel elevators, we've long since gotten used to pushing "1" for what we know as the second floor.  In some cases, we have to push "3" to get to room numbers in the 200s.  It's become normal to us.  But even now, there are puzzles.  

      In a small-town hotel where a palatial room costs us $7, there's no guessing what one button is for.  In the ranks of square, pressable buttons -- the floor numbers plus the usual one to open the doors and another to close them -- is an unsolved mystery:  At the end of the column, another square button with the simple instruction: "Push."  

     (I did, and nothing happened.)

     -- Another hotel, another mystery:  

     From the rules listing, posted on the back of the room's door, is a series of clearly written statements in well-worded English.  

     Except for one.  

     It's in what I can only call "Mangle-ish."  

     And I quote, word for word:

     "The guests shall not keep any goods with them and in their belonging along a shall any contra band goods be liable to all such consequences thereto."

       That's one rule we didn't break.  As far as I know.

       More posts to come, in a couple more days.  You can look forward to more photos -- and, hope upon hope, some video clips, now that I'm back home to video editing software I can actually use.  

     Stay tuned.

Sara