Last Days in India

During my last days in India I wasn't well and was unable to keep my blog current. So, here's an entry of Pondicherry and then Chennai. I remember wandering the streets of Pondi on a steamy, but wonderful Sunday morning. In India Sundays are very atmospheric. You can feel an energy in the air. The temples become active early in the morning with devotional songs playing through loudspeakers. Temple music in the mornings and evenings is such a characteristic element of India's soundscape. On Sundays large numbers of families go to do their puja. The shops get quite busy and restaurants are full of welldressed Indian families. The women in bright, silk saris or long kurtas with scarves thrown over their shoulders and fragrant jasmin threaded into their hair and the children, bright eyed with glowing skins in their Sunday best. It’s great to walk around Indian towns on Sundays and just absorb the vibrancy. In Pondicherry, the main business street – the MG Street – is closed to traffic on Sundays. Vendors line the street selling a whole assortment of goods – like a flea market. I had a lot of fun browsing at the stalls – DVD’s, used books, electrical stuff, clothes - while snacking on papaya slices. I left the MG Street and headed down Nehru Street which has fantastic stores carrying artisanal crafts and beautiful clothes. (Between Pondy and Chennai along the coast are several artists’ colonies). At the bottom of the street I slaked my thirst on a coconut juice. You can find a hill of coconuts and an eager vendor ready with a machete just about everywhere in South India. I rested a bit at a leafy, beautifully landscaped park (where a policeman warned me to throw my empty coconut in a bin!) before going out onto the promenade that runs along the seafront.

Pondi is right on the coast about 150 km south of Chennai. It’s quite an unusual Indian city. It has wide, nicely paved roads arranged in a grid and there are actual sidewalks for pedestrians to walk on. You don’t see mounds of litter everywhere which I’ve come to accept as part of the Indian landscape. In fact, it was the first Indian city where I saw trash cans along the sidewalks which people actually use. Everywhere else I had to keep my trash in my backpack and usually the first trash can I’d find would be in my hotel room.The traffic in Pondy isn’t horrendous and many of the roads are actually very quiet. This city used to be French controlled until the 1950’s. Many of the locals speak French and needless to say most of the tourists are French. There are pretty colonial buildings around the city and lots of French food available at restaurants. You really have to see this city to believe it. It’s undoubtedly Indian with Tamil spoken everywhere and locals going about their usual business of making flower garlands or sipping chai on the street or cooking chapattis on their street griddles, yet the usual chaos and clamor and clutter of India is absent. Pondi is also home to a popular ashram – the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Earlier in my trip I had thought I might sample ashram life when I got to Pondi. But along my journey when I’d spoken to people who’d spent time at ashrams and found out about their days, I came to the conclusion that ashram life would bore me. I guess I’m not the spiritual type!

I went on my last bus ride in India when I left Pondi for Chennai. It’s been quite an adventure traveling around from city to city by train or bus. India is well set up for intercity travel. South India has a great rail network and I found it quite easy to buy tickets and use the trains. The buses are mostly good too. The problem is that most of India’s roads are in such bad condition that bus rides can be very bumpy. The bus from Pondi to Chennai was pretty decent – not old and bettered – and not overcrowded, so the ride up was quite pleasant. We drove through fertile plains and a delta area. There was a lot of farming activity and I found it quite heartbreaking to see people - men and women - laboring in teh fileds. Skinny women in saris were bundling hay and carrying the bundles on their heads. Fields were ploughed by oxen drawn carts. Men in dhotis were digging trenches with pickaxes. TYhe sun shone mercilessly and ebony skinned folks slogged away. The months would only get warmer culminating in monsoon rains in May. In India you are constantly aware of how hard people have t work to keep alive.
On the ride I was a little tense (a usual state for me enroute to a new place) wondering if things would go smoothly once I got off the busin the enormous metropolis of Chennai. But one reassuring thing you learn in India is that as long as there are autorickshaws – those yellow and black three wheelers that buzz about like bees – you can never be lost. Despite this I always gave myself some reason to worry and at that moment my concern was that the autorick driver might not know where the Gandhi Nagar Club would be – that was where I was booked to stay for two nights. However, with the kind of hospitality and warmth I constantly received in Tamil Nadu, my safety was never an issue. The bus driver and the lady seated next to me told me where to get off and just as I stepped onto the pavement, an autorick appeared. I told the driver where I had to go, he nodded, and off we went. I was deposited at the door of the Club in less than ten minutes. The Club was away from the city center, in an upmarket looking southern suburb of Chennai.

On my first day in Chennai, Padmini (cousin of my Santa Barbara friend, Sri) took me to her home in central Chennai where I had an interesting conversation with her grandmother. This woman who looked like she was in her late ‘70’s – maybe older – spoke English like a native speaker and had many interesting opinions. When she found out I was from South Africa she informed me that her grandfather was responsible for the first Indian high school there, Sastri College. She mentioned the many hurdles he had to negotiate in order to get permission and see the whole process through. As other high schools emerged Sastri College developed into a prestigious school, admitting only the best Indian boys. My father happened to be one of those! The grandmother asked me about post apartheid South Africa and how Indians in SA were affected. She was curious about the relationship between Indians and blacks in SA. She knew about the hostility that led to racial riots in the 1950’s and wondered about its cause. She said that everywhere else in the world in her experience blacks have been very warm toward Indians, viewing them as partners in the fight against white supremacy. I told her that I found Indians in SA to be very racist – both in the past and the present – and I believed that this was the cause of the hostility. She considered this and then nodded and said, “Yes, the white government used a divide and conquer strategy so that there will be resentment among all the colored people. Quite a party (Tamil word for granny), that old woman!

My last days in India were somewhat sedate. Largely because of my low energy and diarrhoea.
Now, as I sit at my brother’s home in Darling Harbor in downtown Sydney, so far away from it all, the expressions, the radiant faces of the people I met all over the state of Tamil Nadu are still so fresh in my mind. I’ll never, ever forget the love I felt from the people.