News That Stays News

National Travels January 3, 2013

On Thursday evening, I walked out of my B&B into industrial and relatively affluent surroundings, got lost in the dark, and was for the first time here, a little bit afraid.  It made me think that travelling alone is a little bit of a rite of passage: to find courage when, occasionally, you realize your utter inability to control your surroundings or your fate, resourcefulness before a myriad small puzzles and inner warmth to not just smile at but occasionally befriend strangers  (You can guess which one of those is hardest for me).  At any rate, there’s nothing for fear but to walk away or do what you came to do, so I paid an auto driver 40 rupees to drive what turned out to be a kilometer north (maybe he ripped me off), then turn left onto an unpaved, unmarked road (fair), drive down its bumpy and unlit extent for a hundred meters (very fair), and deliver me to the very last door of the barely lit and seemingly empty last section of the flying train station, with a suggestion that the ticket office would be out of sight in the gloom on the left (maybe I ripped him off).  Mind, by empty I don’t mean deserted, I mean absolutely nothing in view but cement walls.  To whom it may concern: sir, thank you for the flashlight, you’re a good friend, and I owe you one, for the Taramani flying train station stairwells just don’t have any lights.

A few hours and several mistakes later, I was standing around Koyambedu bus station, watching the paratha makers take little balls of dough, sling them at the hot iron, roll them out, flip them over, and then when they’re browned, pick the lot of them up and, to get just the right airy flakiness, literally punch them into submission.  The reporter talking to them, on his way to write yet another fluff piece about temples and festivals for the Times of India, told me they make two thousand in a day.  He also asked me if, in America, we have sex with our girlfriend’s mothers like he sees in the videos he watches.  And then I hopped onto a bus to a different mode of existence.

If you ever hop such a bus in India, and it’s a sleeper, keep in mind that there are double-wide beds on one side of the bus (I slept on the other), and the two spaces therein appear to be independently sold to two riders of the same gender.  This has confused me more than once here – I can’t really explain why american men touch each other so much less than american women.  I’m not proposing we curl up with each other when we sleep, or hold hands on the street, but I can’t really justify why we don’t do it and women do.  My friend suggests that maybe we’d be the same if we didn’t spend all of middle school randomly accusing each other of being impardonably gay.

At any rate, I arrived in Madurai at 9 in the morning, walked past a dozen auto drivers, picked up three fresh idly wrapped in a palm leaf, drank my first chai masala tea – cooled back and forth between two containers, and took off wandering in what turned out to be the precisely wrong direction.

Along the way, I passed a couple of weddings, saw the “bell jumbo restaurant” with a jovial little elephant (

a familiar elephant – someone else’s photo from online

) whom anyone who’s been in Chile will immediately recognize, failed to get directions from a woman who didn’t speak English – but was using it to read a trigonometry textbook, and failed to ask them from a woman in a head scarf who was reading about the way “changes in global communications have change the way meetings are planned and conducted”.   Somewhere in there, my dependence on chai masala tea from the street began, along with that first beautiful palm leaf-wrapped dosa.

Eventually I found a road “70 ft to Periyar”, which turned out to mean that this was “70 ft road”, and that it would, in a few kilometers, lead me to Periyar.  Just off 70 ft road lies the nearly finished giant three-dimensional Mondrian of an apartment building that shook me twice over: mildly because they painted some of the rectangles green, and severly because the scaffolding there, and almost everywhere I’ve been since, was built out of sticks, not metal or even two-by-fours.  A little past this Swarnabhoomi tower (“not for rich people, only for famous people”), I watched a cow cross 70 ft road, too impressed to realize that I myself needed to cross, too, and that I’d squandered an unexpectedly safe opportunity to do so.  I’ve gotten a lot better at this, both crossing the street safely an accepting that it’s never going to be safe, but it was still a little peculiar to stand on an onramp and feel a profound sense of relief because, at long last, I knew for damned sure I need only watch for traffic in one direction.

Eventually, I caught up with my friends, and we visited the Meenakshi temple, and it was big, and there were young men wearing black and orange dhotis running about everywhere, cutting queues and generally acting superior, which apparently as pilgrims they’re entitled to.  Anyhow, it was big, and there was a hall of a thousand (actually 985) columns, and there were lots of statues.  I cannot evaluate a Hindu temple as a believer, only as a traveler and perhaps a poor architecture critic, and as such I was wildly unmoved.  I was surprised by this, an wondered a lot about cultural relativism, until I saw the temple in Tanjore.  And then I realized that I just don’t like the Meenakshi temple, that I find its sculpture bland, its towers gaudy and its jam-packed atmosphere off-putting.  But Tanjore!  If you have ever seen Chola sculpture, and can imagine a two-hundred foot tower covered in it, then you have begun to understand.  Every vertical element of the tower has a slightly different style, as does each horizontal each layer, so that in any given region, the columns and their capitals are slightly different from those to the left, right, above or below.  I tried to sketch one such column: a strange, ridged, fluidly composed wonder that would have been right at home in the Sagrada Familia.

from my notebook, such as it is

It is, moreover, the case that many of these columns have smaller low relief images of temples inscribed on their bases, and that these temples themselves have columns.  At this point, my dirty glasses, straining eyes, and the darkness conspire to limit my vision.  I can only assume that after a thousand years, that must be as far as it goes.  I should say though, that the style of these innermost columns was itself unfamiliar to me.

Now, of course, imagine that all the interstices are filled with Chola sculpture.  I don’t know why it is so expressive, or so human.  My best efforts to draw one such scene of Shiva and Parvati from the nearby museum (see above) does no justice to the richness of the human expression, or to the wonderful composition of the figures.  Incidentally, I find myself absolutely innocent in the matter of my standing there, drawing these figures after the museum was closed.  It could hardly be my fault if the person who went up into the tower to tell everyone to leave came down a different stairwell than I was climbing!  Or if no one else told me to leave.  Or if I was entranced with the tower, each floor of which has a progressively larger flower painted on the ceiling, except that it is actually the floors which are somehow imperceptibly shrinking, and not the flower that grows.  Or if no one asked me to leave as I stood in the shade of the second floor, wondering quite why I might be sharing that shade with the skeleton of a whale.

In fact, I liked the Chidambaram temple better than Meenakshi, too.  Even though I’ve somehow inherited my ancestral prohibitions against idolatry, and the gasp and the shoving of the crowd as the silver doors are draw aside to reveal Ganesh in the shadowy firelight somehow irritates me.  I cannot understand the idea that it is not our experience of the divine that is heightened by this ritual, but that the god is in fact more present in this place than in others, and that this is because we have told him to be so.  It seems presumptuous, somehow.  I suppose communion is no less strange, and indeed rather more, and this sort of thing is just a matter of revelation, can only be accepted through faith.  Maybe it’s just annoyance from being excluded from the symbolic power of an event, like when I watch American football, and try to care.

The lower stories of the temple Chidambaram are Chola, and the dusty sculptures, if washed off, are jet black.  Somewhere near the entrance, there is a dancing Shiva (hence the Nataraja temple), his limbs covered in the orange and red powders I’ve come to associate with all things holy here.  There is the impression of a flame in motion, which is very, very cool.  The upper stories are still painted many colors, but not in such extravagance as Madurai.  Somehow, it makes more sense to me.

What does not make sense are the chariots parked outside the gates.  I tried to draw one (see above), but I can’t really convey the sense of a three story radio-flyer, for use on sparing occasion, as a conveyance for the God.