Tuesday, 17 May 2005, 11:51am
hey everyone, it's been a long and hectic week here in In'ja but with plenty of cool happenings and the types of stories only a third world country could ever provide you with, this may become an extensive e-mail...
First off, on Wednesday Ben and I went to a Hindu wedding. It was really strange and seemed completely rushed and almost mechanized. It took about ten minutes for us to be hurried from the meal to the ceremony and then home; chop-chop-chop. It was really colorful though and interesting, especially as Dr John seemed to be the guest of honor and as such we were pretty high on the honor role as well. I suppose it was quite an honor to taken along and fed etc. Oh, also the bride was a total munter. It really outlined the evils of arranged marriages...the poor groom stuck with a hound for the rest of his life- throwing sticks, scratching her behind the ear...countless cans of dog food…trips to the vet. There really should be a “try before you buy” policy, because she’s probably just going to end up either in a dog pound, as a stray on the streets or worse…they might just put her down like so many other unwanted dogs.
On Wednesday afternoon (and I’m rushing through things here) TPA turned up with another volunteer to take Ben and I to the Leprosy clinic. If I had been getting touchy about my height (something I didn't have a problem with until I met 6ft 5 Ben and was dubbed "small Ben" by the hilarious Dr John who, I might add, is a total short-arse) it was nothing compared to how I felt when I met Aurnouldt the Dutchman, who was a circus attraction sized 6ft 7. Seriously; call the Natural History Museum because I’ve found bigfoot and he’s a grumpy gap year student from the Hague. He seems pretty sound though.
The first night at the hospital was incredibly hot and we had nothing to do, no TV and the beginnings of Cabin Fever. I was sure Ben was staring at me when I wasn’t looking, and I knew they’d been talking about me…plotting…skeaming. Either we had to go out, or I’d have to get to them first…get them with my knife…
Luckily, (for them) we eventually decided to head on down to the bright lights of the nearby town- Manumadurai- for a night on the tiles. I was hoping for 18-30s style Brits Abroad debauchery, if only for one night. Unfortunately Manumadurai is a small collection of shaky buildings, some very suspect street lights and very little else. There was no bar, no air conditioning, and pretty much no bright lights. In fact there was nothing much at all; the main attraction seemed to be a big pile of shit, that may or may not have been the actual town itself. After asking a few people for "King Fisher! KIIING-FIIIISHER!" in that wonderfully respectful way us English have when on the hunt for alcohol, we were eventually led down a back alley to a little sand floored court yard behind a wine shop. The court yard had maybe three or four old and rickety metal chairs, a concrete Bench and a man having a shit in the corner. Disclaimer: This is not a joke. There was actually a man, actually defecating in the actual corner of the court yard. What I suppose you may call the “waiter” brought us out three “Zegringer Strong Beers” in large dark brown bottles. The beer was about (and I shit you not) 35oC and hot in our mouths. The err…”waiter” (and I’m really not comfortable calling him this, because it’s being generous beyond merit) then tried to sell us some very boney and under-cooked chicken (and/or rat and/or dog, and/or pigeon), which I was literally terrified of. It didn’t help that he was one of the greasiest people I have ever seen, or that he kept describing the plate of bloody, undercooked mystery meat as “magnifique”. We left pretty quickly and made our way back to the little bungalow on the hospital grounds that we’d been left in charge of.
Back at the oven-hot leper clinic we still had nothing to do, and as we hadn’t managed to dull our boredom with alcohol or murder, we were reduced to plan C: throwing mangos and toilet paper at the ceiling fan and making an incredibly rock and roll mess (although not that rock and/or roll because we cleaned it up in the morning). I cannot recommend doing this enough. It is truly incredible the damage that a ceiling fan on full will do to a ripe mango. Seriously, those things will tear a mango open like a baby’s skull in a lawn mower.
Eventually the fun came to an end though and after about an hour of trying and failing to fall asleep I dragged my mattress up the stairs onto the roof to sleep there. Out in the open I was soon set upon by swarms of bird sized mosquitoes, so was forced to surround myself with enough mosquito coils to give an elephant Alzheimer’s, which kind of ruined the ambiance of sleeping outdoors. Especially when I started to convulse and lost consciousness, though I suppose I did get an awesome night’s sleep.
The next day we were taken round the villages to see some lepers, and as I hoped, maybe even get some autographs! The hospital is basically a privately run charity, and they spend most of their money fighting the stigmas attached to Leprosy; providing education, giving sufferers loans to buy or build their own houses (land lords will often evict lepers because they are bastards like that), send their children to school, and to increase awareness so that people come forward during the early stages when it is easily treatable. A lot of medicine in India is based on education and prevention, as due to limited resources they just can’t treat illnesses in the same way as we can in the west and also because so many easily preventable disease are rife through general ignorance.
After the Lepers (we deserted after less than a day because it was so hot and boring) we went to Kanyakomeri or somewhere with an equally stupid name, for the TPA weekend. It was great. there was a bar in the hotel and the drinking started at about 5 and continued through 'till about 1, before we all went down to the beach for a swim (stopping off to stroke a cow, which was cool). It was nice to have some disrespectful teenage fun and to spend some time with some other volunteers. We swam about in the very calm bay late into the night, and almost managed to blag ourselves into certain death aboard an Indian fishing boat. Luckily they tried to charge 20 quid per person and we decided this was too much to pay for the privilege of a watery and anonymous grave. I was a little annoyed at the time, but looking back it was an incredibly stupid idea, seeing as the boats were barely more than canoes and out at sea we would have been at the mercy of the Indian ocean and some total strangers. I think we were pretty close to becoming a dodgy story in the Reader’s Digest.
On Saturday we did some other shit, including a rubbish temple, a filthy waterfall and a typically defunct Indian bridge. The waterfall had a men’s section and a woman’s section, and it was quite interesting when it was pointed out by one of the female volunteers that the men’s half of the waterfall was far bigger than the woman’s, and had far more water cascading over it. I took her point, but then told her she should be happy just to be out the kitchen...my black eye is pretty much healed now though, so the jokes on her.
Oh, and whilst at the bridge one of the Indian TPA staff climbed up on the side to take a picture of us all, and I hilariously did the old “whoa…saved your life” jerk-towards-the-edge-joke. Except that he didn’t find it hilarious and looked genuinely shocked and quite frightened of me, though that could have been because I was laughing like a maniac. I thought it was a classic zinger and his reaction didn’t dampen my enjoyment at all. Benji 1, Totaly Innocent Stranger 0.
After our rather eventless day out, we once again headed down to the bar. we started later, but still managed to have a fantastic time. Unfortunately the bars here have a nasty habit of being almost punctual and closing at 12. The bastards! How dare they have licensing laws that don’t suite my schedual! Anyway, two of the girls and I decided to go and buy some beer form a wine shop if we could find one and so set off into the night. First we bumped into an Indian on a scooter calling himself Kirin. Kirin said he would happily take us to a wine shop on the back of his motor bike in exchange for one photo of the girls I was with. I was happy to oblige the man, and saw it as an opportunity to start my new career as a sub-continental pimp…I was even going to ask if he knew of anywhere I could buy a leopard print bath robe or a jool studded goblet. However, Kirin was lashed out of his head and was slurring his speech pretty badly which apparently was a deal breaker when accepting lifts from strangers. Even though, or especially because we were also rather drunk, we decided it probably wasn’t the best idea to have four inebriates on one scooter. Especially when two of them were angry with one of the others for trying to pimp them out.
Eventually we found a taxi driver who would take us to a wine shop and get us some beer and who wasn’t drunk. Well, not visibly, which in India is all you can hope for really. We even managed to get him to agree that no beer, no money was the way we'd be doing things. So after some driving around the dark streets, he took us to this place and woke up some guy at what looked suspiciously like a private house and not a shop at all. It was all feeling rather clandestine, and as our new driver/bootlegger talked to his contact for a while in Tamil, I couldn’t help but feel like a total law-breaking badass. Eventually our driver came back to tell us he'd be getting the beer for 50 RP per bottle. I wanted to get out and see the beer before handing over my money though, because you know…that’s what people do in the movies when they’re buying drugs or making switches for hostages. Unfortunately for my fantasy of being Mel Gibson in Ransom, as soon as I got out the car the driver got really panicky and shouted at me to get back in. Needless to say I nearly dived through the window with fear. Apparently this really was an illegal drinking den, and it was long after licensing hours, when the police just love to arrest naïve tourists pretending to be Australian actors. Awesome! Not only this, but just down the road the coppers were sitting in their little van keeping a look out. Luckily though, they’d probably passed out or something (maybe they were drunk) and so we finally got our beer and gave the taxi driver a fat tip for putting our lives in danger so well. Thanks Sanjay!
We went back to the hotel room and carried on drinking until about 2:00am when one of the guys and I decided to go and buy some food. Of course there was nowhere to buy food at 2 in the morning...well once again, nowhere that was strictly “legal” so we just sort of stumbled around a while looking for anywhere with lights on, or trying to sniff out the smell of frying onions. After a while of this aimless meandering we found a house with some guys who had inexplicably made a two foot high pile of parota (a type of Indian flat bread) which was just lying on the floor, next to which was a huge barrel of chopped onion. we hardly had any money but did have a bottle of beer, so after talking the guy into giving us some food, we gave him 20 RP and the beer and left. It was incredibly weird, but once again was the sort of experience you can only have in India. I still have no idea why they had made all this food, or why they were willing to let us eat so much of it, or why they had just dumped it all on the floor, or indeed why we were so keen to eat the floor food. Indeed it was strange...
That’s about it (kind of) and I’m sure you're glad to hear, all I can be arsed to write.
Hope you're all ok and that the UK isn't sucking too much.
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