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Narrative Mulch March 14, 2013

We arrived at the resort.  Alonso and Sandy vanished.  Sansón announced that he had given us all the gift of Sansón-songs, and we should be grateful.  That there was an indian-style remix of the backstreet boys, and we had just seen it live and in concert.

“The stage is set.” He announced, ” The lights are on.  Go ahead.”

I was told that we’d be singing next.  I begged off that I could not sing.  This would, as anyone who’s heard me try could attest, be ill described as a convenient fabrication.  Still, my excuses were met with amused if politely indifferent rejection, and the threat of hearing more Sansón-songs.  This would have been the honorable point to give in and sing something.  I bickered a bit with my stranger, unable to agree on a song we both knew as I did not with at that moment recall a song at all.  In the end, she sang a Disney song, and I was unable to recall the verses of that either

“The stage is set.  The lights are on.  Go ahead.”

I tried again to demure.  Failing that, I sang ‘Ojala’, rather nervous about my notorious incapacity to hit notes.  And, ironically, as I’ve heard that song perhaps two hundred times, I did fine with the notes, but sang with a rhythmless, emotionless drone that made nokia ringtones look like the rite of spring.  As Reinhold Niebuhr would point out, a situation can only be ironic until you realize the irony.  After that, it is either overcome, or it becomes tragic.

“The stage is set.  The lights are on.  Go ahead.”

We heard a nepalese song about the impossible injunction that a man cannot cry, however his heart should break.

“The stage is set.  The lights are on.  Go ahead.”

After more attempts to wriggle out, and with some assistance, we heard Dil Se Re, which I confess has somehow grown on me.

“The stage is set.  The lights are on.  Go ahead.”

Eugenio did not acquit himself well.  He needed lyrics, so a smart phone was brought.  He needed the right version, so a new one was found, and then another.  He needed accompaniment so the beginning of the song was sung for him.  He needed melodious music, so his own voice grated on him and then ceased.

“The stage is set.  The lights are off.  It’s time for dinner”

Building a good bonfire is not a skill that develops naturally in the tropics.  It was striking that the meter-long pieces of wood were actually stood up against each other on end, as though to burn someone at the stake.  This turns out to be a poor way to get a big fire going, so someone walked by with an aquafina bottle full of gasoline from time to time and poured it onto the fire.  Eventually someone came by to suggest a game of musical chairs, but I was pretty

8 am found me paddling a canoe with a few guys even more clueless than I.  We spun in circles a lot.  I was a little frustrated, though it would have been hard to be too frustrated (see heron pictured below).  I did not convince them to paddle more reasonably.  Which is to say, I did not try.  I broke fast with Sansón and a few others.  They asked what my favorite Indian food was (rajasthani/gujarati thali, described in excessive detail somewhere below), and I asked theirs.  This struck them as ridiculous, but produced solid if sadly theoretical answers.

I took to a hammock, thence to a boat, a bus, and the slavish ingestion of musical selections from Tamil movies.  Once again, I thought that what passed for romantic courtship in times past really is called stalking now.  I wondered how American movies would be worse if they didn’t have sex scenes, decided that “The Master” would not have been as good, gave up looking for a second example.

Eventually, to a 400 year old synagogue, grown decrepit before it had ever grown dignified, now tending to the few dozen local Jews not to have left for the Negev.  Alonso made tracks for the comfort of a 5 star hotel.  We for a maharajah’s portuguese palace turned maharajah’s dutch palace turned maharajah’s english palace turned archeological survey’s museum, which is about par for the course.  I learned that I can’t read an illustrated Ramayana to save my life, that Sansón’s grandmother had managed to live into this decade without ever once wearing a blouse with her sari, that traditional keralan power had been held by men but inherited through women, and that in Kerala, timber is in ready enough supply to be used for construction.  Somewhere not so far away, on a bright red string hung from the low clay roof tiles of the kitchen of a restaurant to the beautiful ochre beams of its iberian second-floor verandah, a crow swung back and forth like a child, while below the busload of us feasted.