Wayand, Western Ghats, Kerala. Fern. House. Cowboy guide. Fresh blood - tiger attack? Cardamom.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A weekend trip
Begin in an airplane.
Familiar enough, but the plane in question has no air-conditioning. We have eaten sandwiches, quickly in a dark car, because the plane is an hour and a half late which means we are late and hungry. Dinner time has come and gone, just as the time for sleep will come and go and still we will not have slept. Because this is travel.
A decision is taken to fly the plane without air-conditioning. Repairing the air-conditioning would take another three and a half hours _ though it is said to be only a minor mechanical problem _ and who wants to wait three and a half hours? It’s not like you can just up and get another plane. Airplanes have commitments. They have schedules. There are not extra ones lying around. The captain doesn’t say the air-conditioning is broken. He says it is “degraded.”
Degraded is OK, though, because we will get water and icky lemon drinks and, soon enough, rise high into the stratosphere, where there air is thin and the molecules move slowly and there is no need for air-conditioning. We can just press our hands to the cold black windows and the world will give us exactly what we want.
What do we want?
We want to get lost.
We want peace.
We want tigers and leeches and stars and strange animal cries in the night. We want fires. We want to stand naked under waterfalls. We want phantasmagoric butterflies. We want to come upon a wounded guar. We want to find fresh blood, bright and bubbling on a dry leaf. We want to see what tiger scat looks like (thoroughly unimpressive). We want to hear the suffering call of the brain fever bird, so pained by his desire for love that he cries and cries and cries. We want to rub the shiny green pods of fresh cardamom between our fingers. We want to taste a bitter wild orange. We want to smell fresh crushed lemongrass and eat berries whose name we will never know. We want someone else to cook for us.
We want to go to the jungle.
For all of this we are willing to suffer some.
Not much, but a little. We will drive behind belching trucks and wait on clogged roads. We will turn into strange villages and ask one two three people which way we must go to find Mananithwadi and they will tell us left, you must go left, all the while waving their certain hands to the right.
Thus we will proceed, fearless and full of wrong confidence. We will drive for hours through dull landscapes, passing dense little towns and rubble and forgettable trees. We will ford ditches to piss in hot fields. Then we will return to our red Suzuki Swift and continue our slow battle with the universe. Time will stack up like plates, higher and higher until we are sure they will all come crashing down: five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours.
And then we will find the man we are looking for. He is skinny. He wears a jacket even though the temperature is above 100 degrees. He wears a floppy hat that seems to tell us that even though he was born in these far hills he is not of them. He is not knit into the stern, protective fabric of fathers and mothers and wives and babies. He is a cowboy. He will get us liquor and grass and we will follow him around a sharp right turn from a small road to a smaller road cut into the red dirt of a mountain. And then he will vanish on his motorbike, jacket billowing, around tight corners. The trees will grow dense and tight around us.
We will pause at the fork in the road, and convince ourselves that we should go to the right, though we could just as easily turn left. And then we will crest a hill and we will find our cowboy, straddling his bike next to three other men, also straddling motorbikes, as they look out across the valley and point to a patch of trees where five wild elephants have just been feeding.
It will be so quiet.
Then we will proceed, pressing on past a gate where a dead tiger was recently found, poisoned by some wronged farmer. And we will soon enough reach a clearing where there is a stone bungalow with a red tile roof and purple hyacinths and fresh lemonade. There will be lanterns and candles for the night and silk pillowcases with brown embroidered flowers.
Someone will cook for us. And then we will sleep.
In the morning, we will wake in darkness and drink sweet milky tea and eat oily cashew biscuits and follow our cowboy down a track through the woods, where it is quiet except for the insect hum. There should be no cell phone reception here and no cell phones, but there are two people so swell they have both cell phones and reception. So they walk along, scaring away the animals in the early light, saying to some important person somewhere else: “Yes, yes, I am on a jungle walk.”
We will find pools of white petals fallen around our feet but we will see no flowers. We will look up and follow the huge trees all the way to the sky. We must presume that in the soaring canopy of this place there are secret white flowers which having grown tired, sigh and let go. We will hear whistling thrushes. We will walk along the flat ground with our smooth walking sticks and think how many people in how many epochs have held smooth walking sticks and strode silently down this path. There was at least one Englishman, whose bungalow we are now staying in and whose name has been temporarily misplaced, who used to manage a cardamom plantation in the area. This used to be his road, which we are now borrowing and which people in the years to come will borrow too. We are part of a great long walk, which began before us and will continue after us. We are the least important entity in this place. The jungle is buzzing with its own industry. All the animals and plants are calling out to each other in love and death, and we have no idea how to listen. We are deaf and dumb and blind because we have not learned to see the important things and we cannot speak any of these small, miraculous languages. But, even crippled in this way, we know beauty.
Then the cell phones will stop and we will come to a waterfall. All the other animals gather here, but we have risen too late and arrived with the sun, and so have missed them all. The water comes down fast and hard over the rocks and we stand under it on slippery stones and drink if we must.
Then we will run home through the jungle, because this is the best way to lose ourselves, the closest we can come to animal calculation.
Soon enough, after naps and books and dinner and drinks, the direction of things will shift. One Sunday, we will get up early, slam the trunk shut and take a different, even more terrible road home.
We will keep asking for animals: “Are there animals?” we will say. “Have you seen any animals this way?” We have nothing to do but look for animals, but none will come. So we begin to fancy ourselves animals _ why not? we must do something to fill our time _ and we become snails crawling along over rocks and holes and ruts that we were not built to handle.
Similarly imperiled cars will come inching along in the other direction and we will stop shoulder to shoulder, with windows rolled down and ask: “How is the road?”
And they will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
Then they will ask us: “How is the road?”
And we will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
And then we will inch off in opposite directions, laughing at each other, laughing at ourselves, laughing at our great and mutual folly. We say to ourselves: “We are living the Hindu rate of growth.” And then we laugh some more. We are sure the monkeys are laughing at us too. And the birds. And the mosquitoes in the car, they are getting fat and laughing at the same time. The elephants hidden in the deep grasses are laughing but they won’t let us see. The tigers would laugh if they cared. God is laughing. Time is laughing hardest of all.
This eventually makes us sad and cranky. We are tired of laughter. We are tired of listening and tired of talking. We are tired of each other. We are tired of our brains. We are tired of all the songs on our iPods. All the snacks are gone. We are tired of being hungry and tired of eating. We are tired of being not-a-wife and not-a-mother, even though we sometimes hate our mothers. We are tired of being just a self. We are tired of our apartments, tired of our clothes, tired of throwing ourselves at this weary world. We are tired of being tired. We are trapped. We begin to wonder: Which is home and which is the jungle?
But we keep going in the direction we have set out in because at some point we must stop asking questions and simply proceed. Also, we must catch our plane.
We must go home. And we know in our hearts that home lies before us. We will ask people which is the way home and they will tell us that home is to the right, while urging us on with pointed fingers to the left. And the next person will say home is straight or home is just around that corner there. And thus we will proceed forward _ brave, dumb and hopeful.
Familiar enough, but the plane in question has no air-conditioning. We have eaten sandwiches, quickly in a dark car, because the plane is an hour and a half late which means we are late and hungry. Dinner time has come and gone, just as the time for sleep will come and go and still we will not have slept. Because this is travel.
A decision is taken to fly the plane without air-conditioning. Repairing the air-conditioning would take another three and a half hours _ though it is said to be only a minor mechanical problem _ and who wants to wait three and a half hours? It’s not like you can just up and get another plane. Airplanes have commitments. They have schedules. There are not extra ones lying around. The captain doesn’t say the air-conditioning is broken. He says it is “degraded.”
Degraded is OK, though, because we will get water and icky lemon drinks and, soon enough, rise high into the stratosphere, where there air is thin and the molecules move slowly and there is no need for air-conditioning. We can just press our hands to the cold black windows and the world will give us exactly what we want.
What do we want?
We want to get lost.
We want peace.
We want tigers and leeches and stars and strange animal cries in the night. We want fires. We want to stand naked under waterfalls. We want phantasmagoric butterflies. We want to come upon a wounded guar. We want to find fresh blood, bright and bubbling on a dry leaf. We want to see what tiger scat looks like (thoroughly unimpressive). We want to hear the suffering call of the brain fever bird, so pained by his desire for love that he cries and cries and cries. We want to rub the shiny green pods of fresh cardamom between our fingers. We want to taste a bitter wild orange. We want to smell fresh crushed lemongrass and eat berries whose name we will never know. We want someone else to cook for us.
We want to go to the jungle.
For all of this we are willing to suffer some.
Not much, but a little. We will drive behind belching trucks and wait on clogged roads. We will turn into strange villages and ask one two three people which way we must go to find Mananithwadi and they will tell us left, you must go left, all the while waving their certain hands to the right.
Thus we will proceed, fearless and full of wrong confidence. We will drive for hours through dull landscapes, passing dense little towns and rubble and forgettable trees. We will ford ditches to piss in hot fields. Then we will return to our red Suzuki Swift and continue our slow battle with the universe. Time will stack up like plates, higher and higher until we are sure they will all come crashing down: five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours.
And then we will find the man we are looking for. He is skinny. He wears a jacket even though the temperature is above 100 degrees. He wears a floppy hat that seems to tell us that even though he was born in these far hills he is not of them. He is not knit into the stern, protective fabric of fathers and mothers and wives and babies. He is a cowboy. He will get us liquor and grass and we will follow him around a sharp right turn from a small road to a smaller road cut into the red dirt of a mountain. And then he will vanish on his motorbike, jacket billowing, around tight corners. The trees will grow dense and tight around us.
We will pause at the fork in the road, and convince ourselves that we should go to the right, though we could just as easily turn left. And then we will crest a hill and we will find our cowboy, straddling his bike next to three other men, also straddling motorbikes, as they look out across the valley and point to a patch of trees where five wild elephants have just been feeding.
It will be so quiet.
Then we will proceed, pressing on past a gate where a dead tiger was recently found, poisoned by some wronged farmer. And we will soon enough reach a clearing where there is a stone bungalow with a red tile roof and purple hyacinths and fresh lemonade. There will be lanterns and candles for the night and silk pillowcases with brown embroidered flowers.
Someone will cook for us. And then we will sleep.
In the morning, we will wake in darkness and drink sweet milky tea and eat oily cashew biscuits and follow our cowboy down a track through the woods, where it is quiet except for the insect hum. There should be no cell phone reception here and no cell phones, but there are two people so swell they have both cell phones and reception. So they walk along, scaring away the animals in the early light, saying to some important person somewhere else: “Yes, yes, I am on a jungle walk.”
We will find pools of white petals fallen around our feet but we will see no flowers. We will look up and follow the huge trees all the way to the sky. We must presume that in the soaring canopy of this place there are secret white flowers which having grown tired, sigh and let go. We will hear whistling thrushes. We will walk along the flat ground with our smooth walking sticks and think how many people in how many epochs have held smooth walking sticks and strode silently down this path. There was at least one Englishman, whose bungalow we are now staying in and whose name has been temporarily misplaced, who used to manage a cardamom plantation in the area. This used to be his road, which we are now borrowing and which people in the years to come will borrow too. We are part of a great long walk, which began before us and will continue after us. We are the least important entity in this place. The jungle is buzzing with its own industry. All the animals and plants are calling out to each other in love and death, and we have no idea how to listen. We are deaf and dumb and blind because we have not learned to see the important things and we cannot speak any of these small, miraculous languages. But, even crippled in this way, we know beauty.
Then the cell phones will stop and we will come to a waterfall. All the other animals gather here, but we have risen too late and arrived with the sun, and so have missed them all. The water comes down fast and hard over the rocks and we stand under it on slippery stones and drink if we must.
Then we will run home through the jungle, because this is the best way to lose ourselves, the closest we can come to animal calculation.
Soon enough, after naps and books and dinner and drinks, the direction of things will shift. One Sunday, we will get up early, slam the trunk shut and take a different, even more terrible road home.
We will keep asking for animals: “Are there animals?” we will say. “Have you seen any animals this way?” We have nothing to do but look for animals, but none will come. So we begin to fancy ourselves animals _ why not? we must do something to fill our time _ and we become snails crawling along over rocks and holes and ruts that we were not built to handle.
Similarly imperiled cars will come inching along in the other direction and we will stop shoulder to shoulder, with windows rolled down and ask: “How is the road?”
And they will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
Then they will ask us: “How is the road?”
And we will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
And then we will inch off in opposite directions, laughing at each other, laughing at ourselves, laughing at our great and mutual folly. We say to ourselves: “We are living the Hindu rate of growth.” And then we laugh some more. We are sure the monkeys are laughing at us too. And the birds. And the mosquitoes in the car, they are getting fat and laughing at the same time. The elephants hidden in the deep grasses are laughing but they won’t let us see. The tigers would laugh if they cared. God is laughing. Time is laughing hardest of all.
This eventually makes us sad and cranky. We are tired of laughter. We are tired of listening and tired of talking. We are tired of each other. We are tired of our brains. We are tired of all the songs on our iPods. All the snacks are gone. We are tired of being hungry and tired of eating. We are tired of being not-a-wife and not-a-mother, even though we sometimes hate our mothers. We are tired of being just a self. We are tired of our apartments, tired of our clothes, tired of throwing ourselves at this weary world. We are tired of being tired. We are trapped. We begin to wonder: Which is home and which is the jungle?
But we keep going in the direction we have set out in because at some point we must stop asking questions and simply proceed. Also, we must catch our plane.
We must go home. And we know in our hearts that home lies before us. We will ask people which is the way home and they will tell us that home is to the right, while urging us on with pointed fingers to the left. And the next person will say home is straight or home is just around that corner there. And thus we will proceed forward _ brave, dumb and hopeful.
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