Longtime townie Jeff Brunell finally returned to school just before turning thirty. He’s in southern India, completing his graduate field work and taking stock. These are his findings.Follow this link to see all the posts from his journey. The first in the series is titled, Hello Mumbai.
19/6 11pm
We’ve reached the university, where I’m writing from safely inside the unlikely calm of my mosquito net. Braced for the dormitory experience I dodged by living in apartments during undergrad, this room couldn’t please me more. Here: wooden furniture, warm colors, high ceilings, space enough to really unpack for five months, and a private bathroom.
Across campus to reach the computer lab before our lights-out and locked-in ten o’clock hour, everything is leafy and utilitarian but pristine. After my emails, I take the long way back and meet four fellow students quick to engage. Their names surprise me – Theodor, Kurt, Joseph, and William – though perhaps, on a Catholic campus, they shouldn’t. We’re barely introduced when someone indicates the guard walking slowly from his gatepost toward my building. Everyone scrambles to beat the clock.
This is two days, quick and blurry.
Down the coast on the train last night, I gave myself a pass and didn’t write. So much time in one spot, it should have been my best chance to process the week. Only, I couldn’t keep myself sitting up.
Yesterday we were pensive: all weary of Mumbai, living out of suitcases, sharing a room, dining out, lugging our valuables and suspect values everywhere for distrust, and the rain, the rain, the rain. I was buggier daily for hung wet clothes that never dried and for dry clothes hell-bent on dampness even when stored away in my pack.
I must have seemed like an asshole when I woke up disgusted and cheap, minutes late to the vote. The decision to stay another day at the hotel, so we wouldn’t have to tote our stuff while awaiting the 7pm train, had been made without me. The difference in money was negligible, and staying the afternoon made sense. But I felt disregarded, silenced, and resentful. Someone else’s idea of vacation and my simmering discontent: arc of my life.
Chicken tikka we could see hanging on skewers through the kitchen door, one last meal in Mumbai. Under corrugated tin awning across the street, slight terror rose when the first six cabbies drove clear through our request for a ride uptown. An apparent neighborhood staple, who had earlier tried to sell me hash, insisted on brokering our transportation. In declining shades of politeness, I asked repeatedly that he let us handle it ourselves. A willing driver finally stopped, but we’d have to pay off the hustler first. Another cabbie, off duty, approached and insisted, “Please, some coins. This man, I tell you – a very good man.”
The famous Mumbai traffic showed up for our ride to Lokmanya Tilak Terminus and even with the extra hour-plus we’d built in, time would be tight. Rain in wall form, horns in wall form, automobile-as-sauna, breathless tailgating. Lena asked me to please engage the driver: he was falling asleep at the wheel. Engage? I speak no Hindi and he spoke no English, so the best I could do was glance at him, casually as possible, while leaning back to contrive small talk with the backseat. I was concerned with the heavy fluttering of the drivers’ eyelids, and I was concerned that my concern was impolite.
The station smelled as bad as advertised. Lena determined where we were to catch our train while Michele sought out the restroom. I took a couple of pictures on the platform: one, a stray dog climbing on some motorcycles packed in burlap for shipping and another, a train laid up beside the tracks. A little girl laughed and waved, but I caught glares from several grownups. I put my camera away.
Naïve me: months ago, talking in class about the possibility of rail travel, I’d balked at the idea of first class. “What I like,” I would have said cluelessly, “are the smells and the crowd and the immediate experience of a place.” After having seen the other trains at the station with their slat windows open to the rain, 90 degree hard-backed seats, elbowing crowds, and bright lighting, our unwanted luxury liner came as a great relief; our names listed on a printout taped to the car. An ample cabin without company, a range of lighting options, air conditioning, a door with a reliable lock, and a big window. The niceties for which I’d thought I was too authentic: wrong.
Peace of mind delivered thusly, I guess that my body stopped holding back. On came the stomach pain and urgent flight to the bathroom. By chance of a first locked door, I rushed past the Squattie and into the Western facility. The floor rocking laterally as I balanced on my ankles above the grim seat, hands taut between the cell door and senior grab bar, it impressed me that I was now fully in this experience. Opposite me, a mirror and my pallor in the neon bath; I wondered if that jerk still thought all this was such a great idea.
I returned to our cabin, did my nightly reading and exercise routine, and was again in flight to the bathroom within half an hour. When I made it back, a chill had come over me. For the first time in a week, I gathered blankets and curled into my typical cocoon. That’s when I decided to grant myself a pass on writing for the night. I spent my childhood in various postures of illness, so there was an odd comfort in this known quantity among so many unfamiliar ways of making an omelet. Lena was asleep fast. Michele and I talked for a while, mainly about family and early memory, before I fell asleep.
First light and I felt awful: feverish, alternately hot and cold, achy guts twirling, exhausted. I remained horizontal, with the exception of one trip to the bathroom, until mid-afternoon. A couple of times I sat up, wincingly contemplated food or tea, and lay back down.
“One in four Indians goes to bed hungry each night,” said the cooling dish to me.
A train ride down the coast: no aspect of the trip more stirred my imagination in advance, and I missed the bulk of it. What I did see defied my characteristically ill-researched assumptions. This was lowland, punctuated occasionally by mountains none too dramatic, as I suppose I should have expected so near the coast. And we were never far from towns, some quite large and ragged, as is likely the case along railways the world over. Cows wandered little grass ledges between tidy constellations of rice paddies reaching to the horizon. I mistook the vibrant block lettering of Indian politics for graffiti when I saw repetitions of the same brands in town after town.
The rain we’ve come to expect held off throughout the 22 hours on the train; it resumed in earnest with our arrival in Kerala. Michele got in contact with our liaison, Mr. Rahul, while I, ambulatory for the first time in a full day, toddled off in search of a lavatory. I pled clumsily, by force of embarrassing gesture, to gain entry to the pay toilets through I only had one of the two rupees necessary. When I returned to Lena and Michele, perched on the mountain of our baggage, something had changed. Nobody was talking.
Mr. Rahul came with a chartered van, though he could easily have instructed us to take a rickshaw. Our train was late and he’d traveled from his home, where his wife and baby were waiting. Still, he was boundlessly gracious; speaking in earnest about the university, the state of Kerala, our exchange program, the months ahead. We were, in contrast, leaden company. I did my best solicitous grin and struggled to wrest intelligent questions from my reeling sick head, but I must have looked more desperate than engaged. Moving inland from the station, through more smoky air and medium density urban sprawl, I realized that I’d been premature in expecting deliverance to a tropical idyll. We rode on past the mall and the hospital and countless iterations of electronics store, fashion store, cafeteria and at last, through Kalady town to the edge of campus, where my traveling companions disappeared wordlessly to their house beyond the gate. Doubt crept through the drizzle while I stood outside the van, awaiting the return of Mr. Rahul in the flickering light of a malfunctioning university ATM. Here: home, until almost December.
It’s like the weird rash sprung new in the crook of my right arm: what’s to do but see where it leads?
