Sovereign Nations

Something about Varkala stunted my ability to write. James is writing an epic piece on what is wrong with Varkala. He’s right on. And I am pretty sad that I stumbled - I was feeling so creative, planning the edits on my book, thinking through ideas for my next one.

But not everything in Varkala was a drag. Here’s what I liked:

Swimming. The Arabian Sea is big, though not like the Pacific (nothing is). It is a real body of water with real waves and wave-like reactions to the shallowing as land is approached. We swam on 3 of the 5 days we were in Varkala, and the experience was stunning each time. Black Beach is at the north end of the cliff, and we were very close to it - maybe 5 minutes from door to water. The beach is not broad, and there is very little sand that doesn’t get wet at some point during the day. We left our clothes and shoes on the rocks piled along the top edge of the beach and tiptoed down the dark sands to the cooled wet portions. The sea itself was chilly compared to the hot, muggy air, but I never felt chilled while swimming. Maybe that was because I was exercising so hard!

See, the ground underwater had several ledges within a couple hundred yards of the beach. The first made the big waves - the crashing, almost surfable waves. The second was bowed, and it created a new line of peaking, tipping waves, smaller than the first batch but with great power. This is the farthest out we went. These waves actually pressed into each other because of the bow of the ledge, like a V the crashed into itself, creating an I. But of course, since the whole shebang was moving at varying speeds with varying amounts of water and varying levels of power, it was never an even crash. The third ledge was strange - it shallowed abruptly very close to the previous shallowing, which took the breaking waves and frothed them. Again strange, the next level was actually deeper, a five foot trench in the sand that took me from thigh-level water to chest-level water in one step - and then back again in another couple steps. I’m not sure how that really played into the waves’ behavior - anyone else know what that would do?

The combined effect of these forces was an ever-moving, greater or lesser, exhilarating and frightening meeting of waters. The clap of the V meeting its other half was only at its most exciting when it was met by returning waves from the rocky areas to each side of the beach. Yep - these were waves so powerful that they ran the water up the beach, onto the rocks, and then still had so much power that they became real waves again going back out. When you get this kind of action, rip-tide isn’t the word. It’s not pulling you under - it’s breaking backwards.

And often, the waves would meet. When two waves met, there would be a bang and some spray. When three waves met, a boom and a fountain. But when four waves met, north and south coming in and north and south going out, the center of that X was a roar and a watery explosion. Sometimes the forces were evenly matched enough that the waters would mingle there under the salty rain for a moment before being caught in the next waves. Usually, though, it wasn’t so still, rushing the beaten waters along one direction or another.

Swimming here is labeled “dangerous” and is certainly to be done with eyes open. James and I exultantly got the shit beat out of us in that water. I hunted the meeting points of the waves, getting good at predicting where the fountain would occur, but not really good enough to be there when it happened. A few times each, one of us was pounded from several directions, caught up in a bursting world of refracted light and salt-burned eyes, sinuses clensed without consent, losing touch with the ground. For the very first time in my life, I had a moment in which I didn’t know which way was up. I’ve always been proud of my swimming, and I just rested underwater until it became obvious (probably 1/10th of a second, but a very long moment). I was back on my feet, laughing and blowing my nose, shoving my hair back from my face and clearing my eyes. I was in love.

Oh, if I could only take Black Beach away from Varkala! If I could transplant it somewhere I’ve enjoyed, like Trivandrum or Kollam. I’ll just have to try the beaches in those places - maybe I’ll find one just as exciting and beautiful.

So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. My method up to this point has been to keep daily notes in my notebook (the paper kind) and then to write a blog entry using the notes and date it for the day the events actually happened. But I haven’t written anything at all in my book since coming to Varkala, and there are some things that don’t involve any specific day’s thoughts or actions, so…today is the 12th, and that’ll be the date on the blog entry.

We’ve had so many amazing conversations since moving here. One of the things I’d read more than once was that Indian people think nothing of coming up to you and starting up political, religious, and social-issue type conversations. James and I have had a few stunning examples of this, but it’s so incredibly common that I could call it typical of our Indian experience so far. The first question is where are you from, and that one comes in a myriad of formats. After that, all bets are off.

Two of the more in-depth conversations we’ve had occurred with small groups of young men. Exactly the people I feel like I have the least in common with, but these guys seem so much more idealistic, idea-oriented, passionate but non-judgemental, etc, etc than the bored kids who make me more uncomfortable than bad neighborhoods.

There were the chai boys - students of the Axis College for Economics and Commerce. I’ve mentioned them before. We talked while drinking Hasim’s chai on the corner opposite the small campus. The first day, we just got the basics - where are you from, what’s your name, do you like Bush.

Ugh. I’m really tired of that question. But I knew I was in for it when I left the US..

The second day we went to Hasim for chai, the boys were there again. The most voluble of them started pelting us with questions. He seemed to have put some thought into this, some version of “I wish I had said…” that was mostly about nuclear power (there’s a deal going on) and the economical repercussions of India getting in deep with the US for such a thing. He was way into nuclear power.

(Most parts of India have “power shedding” - a half hour every single day where there is no power available in the grid. If you don’t have alternative power systems set up, you hang out in the dark or with a candle. And that’s on a good day. We spent one night in Varkala without power all night, which means that it gets muggy without the fan and the mosquitoes act up. Besides, we had washed some laundry in the shower bucket and that stuff did not want to get dry without the fan…)

Anyway, so nuclear power is popular. There are some concerned people, but it seems to be mostly people with alternative power systems. Ha. I wish everyone had solar panels and batteries! (At least batteries can be recycled - whatcha gonna do with the waste from the plants?)

But we had a rockin’ conversation on a subject that would have been avoided at most family gatherings, let alone with strangers at a roadside stand. Have I lived in a boring United States? Is there a US where these things happen?

Then in Varkala, we were sitting on the beach, desultorily shooting gorgeous pictures, relaxing in the presence of a slice of India. (Varkala didn’t feel like India for the most part. It felt like a carnival, with barkers and cutpurses everywhere. I didn’t really fear for my wallet any more there than in Delhi, nor did I have a harder time with the autorickshaw drivers. It just wasn’t, you know, Indian. Um. I guess I mean that it was overwhelmingly white. And that was during the off season.)

Off topic, anyone?

Okay, so we were sitting on the beach. And James took a great picture of four teenaged boys sitting just past the next wrinkle in the sands. And then they got up and started moving down the beach. When they saw us, they came right over, saying hello and trying out various English-language greetings on us. All laughing, we handed each other our lines. Once that game got old, we got the grilling. Country of Origin. How do you like Kerala? (I think I forgot to mention that Keralan people don’t ask what we think of India - they’re only concerned with Kerala.) Nuclear power. Bush. Iraq.

Wow. That got big and serious fast. This young, pleasant-faced boy really just did that. He just asked us point-blank, if we disagreed so much with Bush and the killing in Iraq, why weren’t we fighting it?

Wow.

I’ve never been asked that point-blank. I’ve had people hint at it, dance around it, suggest the thought. But never just ask the question. While planning our travels, we were not secretive about the fact that we wanted to travel partly because of the way we felt about the US: discomfort, disaffection, even despair for future (if the US doesn’t riot if Obama loses, I’m never going back). But that’s not the only reason, and people (including me) more or less avoided the stickier parts.

Wow.

So, here we were, on the beach, chillin’. And suddenly we were being called out for being quitters, unpatriotic, etc, etc, etc. Nicely. Beautifully.

My response was fast. “I was arrested fighting the Iraq war!” (During the big protest in San Francisco, I was penned but not caged, written an “arrest” ticket, but they “lost” the records of it and I never had to go to court.) It felt inadequate.

James, being so much more skillful than I, was better able to explain simply that there isn’t enough change, that the change that happens is planned, coopted by the needs of the powerful and made to serve power rather than spread it. How Obama might be better than Bush, but a two party system is a handshake, not a change. Being in Kerala helped. We tried to explain why we so admired the Communist government of Kerala and oh - did that ever turn us again!

Wow.

So now we (James and me and four passionate young men, all but one reticent to speak but fire-eyed) debated the contrasting benefits of Keralan-style democratically elected Communist leaders verses the (geographically next door) Chinese Communism that was self-determined. James and I argued for Kerala’s version while the boys argued for China’s. Now when I say argued, you have to remember that we only sort of speak a common language. We were debating world-leader level issues with third grade vocabularies. Strange thing is that it worked. You really can discuss important, worldwide, human nature kinds of thing in simple words. What a lesson!

We all brought up good points, shook hands finally, and handed each other all the goodbye lines.

In my Varkala experience, only this felt real. Only this meant Kerala to me. And they were just visiting; they were tourists too.

I’ve talked about morning and noon – chai and thali. Can you tell I’m all about food?Well, it’s not completely true. The rhythm that we’ve gotten into this week also includes a rest, perhaps a nap, in the heat of the day. Our room is nice and cool, with a fan to create the breeze and shaded windows to let in fresh air. Usually, I write or edit photos or organize our old photo archives; James sleeps.

After the rest time, getting on towards dark, we walk.

This place is happening after dark!

This is an exciting time in general because the whole place is gearing up for Onam. The short version of the story is that the gods and demons fought for control of Kerala and the demons won. The mother of the gods was totally upset and talked Krishna (?) into interceding, which he did through a trick. He came disguised and humbly asked the demon king for three strides worth of land. The king agreed. With two strides, he crossed the entire land, then asked the king where he might put the third footstep. The demon king fatalistically suggested his head, and Krishna shoved the king deep underground with the last step.

People were pretty bummed out (I guess demons make good kings) and Krishna felt bad, so he agreed to let the demon king come back one day a year. The people of Kerala spend 10 days preparing for this – and the preparations I’ve seen look suspiciously like partying to me – before they have a more-or-less private celebration in their homes where they eat like mad and celebrate the free day of a demon.

It’s a nifty reason for a 10-day party, eh?

So on these walks of ours, there’s music, light, and people. There is a temple right beside the train station that was hopping – decorated with flowers, loud music, and lines of people waiting to get in to bow and kneel and such.

We stop into random eateries. (Yep, back to food.) On the 3rd, we ordered a masala dosa (big ol’ flat pancake wrapped around a spiced potato mixture). Except that the potato mixture was almost all onion. No go! We ate the dosa and tossed the rest. At 18 rupees, we didn’t cry too hard. The fish and chips we paid 100 for was more of a drag, if more edible, because we’d ordered paneer pakora to go along with it (another 40 rupees) and they brought us, yes, onion pakora! Argh! Haunted by onions!

Today, we went into another random place and it didn’t seem promising. They had no menu and offered us “chicken fry.” After someone’s kid helped, we were more or less on the same veggie page. Unhopeful, we waited. What came was great – sambar, a channa masala, rice, chapattis, and a plate of chutneys and pickles. Yum! We would’ve been full even before they brought refills on the channa masala and pickles. When we washed our hands and got ready to leave, we got the punchline – 35 rupees. Wow. We could have stayed and eaten all night, and they’re charging us 35 rupees. I would’ve paid anything up to a couple hundred (though I would’ve felt like a target at the upper end).

And they’re nice people, too!

So food and partying. It’s a good nightlife.

So, I’m well enough to walk. With my boots on, my foot and ankle hardly even get fatigued during the course of a day. (I’m also taking morning and night doses of something called Lyser-D, a painkiller consisting of diclofenac sodium and serratiopeptidase. All I can find about it is that it’s a painkiller - duh.) I put myself to the test today. We laughed off a couple of cabbies before finding one who would take us to Valiathura Beach for 50 rupees. The first guy started at 200 - one way! - but as we walked away, he came down to 300 both ways with an hour of waiting. Mmmhmm. We’re not as easy to target now as when we first got here, though I still feel like we overpay for such things more often than not.

Anyway, back to the walking. The driver dropped us off at the beach, asking if he should wait for us and suggesting that we should go to the “Important” beach up the road instead. James was already out of the rickshaw and taking photos of the fishing boats, so I politely told him to bug off and gave him an extra 10 rupees. Why did I argue so hard for a lesser price if I was just going to give him more? Well, I don’t really know. It’s a habit of tipping and I’m really afloat on the whole thing here in India. I’m constantly getting huge smiles or slight frowns - hardly ever the regular old “yep, it’s a tip” response. Perhaps all the frowns are faked and I overtip all the time. I don’t know. Sigh.

Was this about walking? Okay, back to that…

It took James and I about five minutes to get from the road to the waterline. This wasn’t because of distance - it was because of beauty.

First there were the women selling fish. A couple of them made the hand to mouth gesture that I have come to associate with begging children (by whom I’ve been approached about a half-dozen times, less than I’d expected). This confused me, since they were obviously in business, selling fish. I thought maybe they wanted money for having their pictures taken, like the ladies who walk around with water jugs on their heads at Elephanta Island. Finally, I realized that they wanted to sell me fish. Fancy that!

Next were the fishing boats, pulled up on shore and covered with thatch. Some were faded but originally bright colors; all were cool looking. The pier got some attentions and the boats on the other side. Finally, we reached the water.

Oh, the feeling of standing on a shore, looking out to sea. I can’t imagine a more energizing, comforting, exalting, perfectly right sight. The last time we’d been on the water was in the Mumbai Harbor on the way to Elephanta Island. That water was churned up, muddy, crude-oil infested. Oceans and seas have a different character from bays, inlets, straits, sounds, and such like bodies of water, even salt water. They are smarter, wilder, less capricious - monumental.

I have metaphorical thoughts on and near the water. For example: Singing should be surfing the emotion and tension and notes and dynamic, constantly on the edge between sinking into the music and crashing over into dissonance. My vocals have tended to be treading water, allowing (depending on) the motion of the music, the rise and fall of tones for (e)motion. Ending a surfed-on song could be a fade into the beach calm or a tumble under the wave of the music, or letting it surge past.

As we walked up the shore, the sun lighted the water and sand beautifully, and I could see that the clouds were strewn through the vaulted sky in ways that would be variably darker, lighter, more and less colorful, as the earth turned me away from the sun and allowed the light to shine obliquely above me, on the bottomsides of the clouds. James and I walked and paused, shot photos, walked some more. We started to realized that we had come a long way, and that the solid line of fisherfolk neighborhood was probably not a good place to catch a cab back into the city.

The sun was not yet down, and we couldn’t bear to miss it, so we kept walking. Once again, a group of people waved us closer, a strange beckoning with the palm down and fingers pulling under rather than the palm up “come here” I’m used to. I once again misunderstood the situation, and the shame of it has lingered. What is to be done in a place where I’m learning to avoid being a target for touts and shyster? They made the food gesture and again, I thought they wanted money for the photos James had taken of them. No - they wanted to share their dinner with us. I truly regret missing that opportunity to dine with the fishers of Kerala.

Very soon, we saw a break in the trees and buildings, and what looked to be a gathering of people on the beach ahead of us. We ambled ever closer to it, figuring that we’d probably be able to get a cab (or at least some directions) somewhere with so many people. Sure enough, right as the sun set, we reached the populated stretch of beach. I imagine it was the “Important” beach that the cabbie tried to take us to, and I was excited that we had done that whole walk (2 1/2, 3 km?) and ended up, right at sunset, in a perfect spot for great photos and an easy ride back to the hotel.

And good photos - wow. Well, check them out…

For several days, we’ve gone from the chai-wallah to my favorite diner/restaurant in Trivandrum…Anandalakshmy: Veg Tables. Yep, that’s the name. Don’t you just love it?This place caught my eye because of the large sign out front. There is a picture of some great food and, smaller, toward the bottom, it says “Wifi.” This being a magic word, I stopped. This word means internet access from my own laptop. Skipping the crazy round of camera -> laptop -> Photoshop -> folder -> external hard drive -> internet access place -> usb -> Flickr. Instead, we can just upload the photos once they’re ready. Also, I just feel better about using my own computer for anything private. Certainly for banking.

At first, we ordered small. After spending hours on the free wifi, though, we ponied up our 60 rupees each and ordered the Kerala Thali. Wow! What an experience. There are about 8 or 10 dishes (varying widely from restaurant to restaurant – some serve only a few) of mysterious names, a range of spiciness (ranging from spicy to yow!), and universal deliciousness.

I’m glad that we waited before ordering this thali, because that gave me the opportunity to more-or-less discreetly watch a few other tables at the process of eating this food. You’d think that I’d been eating my whole life, surely I could figure it out. And yeah – if it’d had to guess, only my childhood traumas would have kept me from the correct method.

Here it is.

The meal is served in a large round metal dish. It looks like a very large cake pan (but shinier). Move the 8-10 small bowls to the outside of the main dish. On the bottom of that main dish is chappathi (or chapatti) and a puri, under that is a round cutout from a palm leaf. The waiter will come back with rice, which he piles with wild abandon (I mean, with great dignity, in great quantities) on the palm leaf.

Now it is your turn for wild abandon. Abandoning rules of a lifetime, abandoning embarrassment, abandoning fear of the “dirty” and “contagious.” (Easier to do if you wash your hands first, as is the custom.) Now that you’re free of childhood baggage, reach your fingers into a small bowl of food you don’t recognize (more or less soft, saucy, sticky, chunky, depending on the dish) and scoop some of the contents up. Now ferry those contents to a frontier of rice. Feel free to miscegenate dishes.

Still using your fingers, mix rice and curry until a fun consistency is reached. Now for the tricky part: form a ball (or pile) of the mixture, push into the shallow bowl of your four cupped fingers with your thumb, raise your hand to mouth, and with the back of your thumb, scoop the ball/pile/stuff from your fingers to your mouth.

Chew, swallow, smile and hum. Repeat.

Oh, and beware – there’s a dish that is mixed pickles. It is delicious, like everything else, but it will strip a year from the seven that your taste buds are supposed to live. It’s the James Dean of food – live short, live glorious.

We get up (lazily, slowly, and only after spending exactly as much time as we want waking up and messing around), get dressed, and walk to the chai-wallah. He works on a street corner next to a vada stand. The chai world is the size of a child’s computer desk, but every bit of surface is used. This is a man who makes chai exactly how you like it (whoever you may be).

The chai-wallah nods knowingly and smiles small but with great intensity. He pulls two small glasses from a wash bin and to each glass he adds a little scalding hot water from a bulky pot with a spigot. As far as I can tell, this is to warm the glass and perhaps to clean out any dust and such that might have flown in since it was washed. He then picks up the metal cup of magic and adds a very exact amount of (sugar?) powder, two heaping spoonfuls plus one just-this-much-more dash. He pushes back the cover of the hot milk tureen and dippers up a couple of sloshes worth. The cover is replaced.

Now the beautiful part begins, and it is more varied. Sometimes the tea is old and has no more power. Sometimes it is fresh and lively. He lifts the cup with the flexible mesh (cheesecloth?) basket resting in it, rim over rim, handle lying over the side of the cup. If the brew is not good, flick go the contents into the bin under the tiny table. The mixture of tea leaves and spices is replenished from a large plastic container. He places the fresh masala (spiced) chai (tea) basket into its cup and puts the whole works under the hot water spigot. He adds enough to get things brewing.

Sometimes the chai is not old. Sometimes it just needs a bit more water. He will add only a little more than he needs for your chai. If there is already enough because of the last customer, he moves directly to my favorite part of this lovely set of actions.

The metal cup of magic (holding perhaps-sugar and milk, remember?) is sitting on the table. The cup-and-basket of tea is being held, considered, brewed. When it is close (and this takes no more than a couple of seconds), the chai-wallah lifts the basket of tea out of its cup and, with an art too quick for me to anticipate, pours the already-steeped tea from the cup back over the basket and into your cup of magic.

I say that this is art, and yes – I believe it is so. I have over-steeped too many cups of tea not to recognize the bitterness. And a businessman cannot afford to under-utilize his tea leaves. So there is an art there – enough water to create enough tea at the right speed and in the right moment poured into enough milk and sugar to fill two small glasses with the perfect (for that person) cup of chai.

The next part is just fun. Back and forth goes the mixture – tea, spices, milk, and sugar pouring in one foot, two foot streams between two large metal cups (the metal cup of magic {remember?} and another cup, the metal fun-streaming-mixing-cup). The distance is important, as this is how the drink is aerated, fluffed, frothed…given extra life. The small glasses get their hot water swirled and dumped, and the chai is served.

This process takes less time than the series of greetings you exchange with the vada vendor, the young students of the college for “economics and commerce”, and the odd storekeeper out for their morning leg-stretching.

Only the mocha mornings at Gravity Feed could ever compare to this process. Sleepy-eyed James making liquid daytime on an old pull-type espresso machine for droopy Dena – that’s impossible to beat. But don’t tell the chai-wallah…I told him I liked him best.

Here’s a link to Hasim doing his thing…

We’ve mentioned the traffic, inserting little “local interest” bits and pieces into other stories. I’m not sure that I’ve sufficiently expressed, however, my true admiration for the art form which is motion in India. It’s not just the cabs. In New York, people say that those cabbies are crazy – they’ll kill you rather than stop for you! But those cabbies are probably Indian, Pakistani, Bangledeshi…someone from around here.

Here, it is your job to be careful. It is your job to get across the street. It is also your job to put your vehicle in the way of harm, knowing that it is also the other guy’s job to be careful.

Careful means a different thing here. Rather like the way you will be leaned into by the person behind you in line, you might – really, honestly might, with no ill will or rancor – be gently pushed by the bumper of the person behind you if you don’t take advantage of an opening in traffic that any ant would see as tiny.

Each driver assesses the traffic. There is no zoning out while driving. You just can’t get away with it. Driving is active, participatory. It is not rude, exactly. It is matter of fact. If the fact is that I can fit between you and the bus and therefore get to the next road before you – I will. Even if “fitting” consists of pulling in my sideview mirror and slowing so that I don’t bounce in the pothole.

And really, I like it. This is traffic in a country not run by insurance companies. This is traffic in a place where people have places to go, single car lanes to drive down, and cars small enough to allow it all to work. I love being driven through small streets, warrens of lanes full of walkers, motorcycles, scooters, autorickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, taxis, assorted small autos, and assorted small (but big in comparison to the rest) delivery vans and stakebeds. It is non-stop fun, watching the reactions. Not mindless action, not stop-then-go, not rule-bound boring turn-taking. Real reactions to the real knowledge that the motorcyclist ahead will swerve into your lane to pass the delivery van, knowing that you will slow enough for him to duck back onto his side.

Only a few times have I witnessed a real annoyed driver – one who thought that the other person had done something reckless. And okay, maybe my driver didn’t need the extra two feet that he got by driving up the side of a building and tipping us close enough to rub rickshaw-tops with the other guy as he passed. But you had to admire him for trying…and it’s the only time I’ve seen two travelers actually touch at all.

Yep – with all this lawless abandon, I have yet to see an accident. In the Bay Area, I saw accidents all the time. Or the broken glass that attested to the near-past happenstance. Or the headlines about a death a day in the Great Oakland Maze.

As strict numbers, India has twice as many traffic fatalities as the US, but percentage-wise, you’re less likely to die by traffic here in India. Twice as many traffic fatalities and more than three times as many people…

What does that prove? That realistic driving is good driving. Bored rule following is not. I was a careful driver in the US, but I was careful in stupid ways because I was more concerned with avoiding expensive tickets than accidents. I think I’d be a better driver here. Not that I plan to get back into a car - oh no.

Well, maybe a scooter. Or a motorcycle.

Grin.

I had no idea it was a holiday!  Forgot all about Labor Day until I saw Mykkah’s status on gmail chat - something about loving long weekends.

There have been several holidays in the three weeks since we arrived.  India knows how to celebrate!  Loud (great) music, mandalas of flowers, small lamps in the middle of ornate gatherings of offerings.  Lovely.  And even though you might expect frequent holidays to become mundane, people dress up, act happy, get even more friendly and likely to reach out.  It really is lovely how celebratory people are here.  And that doesn’t even begin to account for the private special days - birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, new jobs, all the various achievements and markers of a life lived for celebrating.

I lived at Pelican Place in Moses Lake for five months and I can honestly say that I never saw a celebration.  A bbq or two, but people actively, carefully avoid making a celebration of such events.  Why are U.S.ers so dedicated to avoiding meaning, weight, emotion, connection, import, significance?  Reality.

And why is “facing reality” an act wherein you look at the downsides, problems, can’ts?  I think that reality is bigger and better than that.  But it’s really a matter of attitude.

So there it is.  Go celebrate something!

My impatience is great.  I think, I really do think, that if you asked past coworkers, friends, even acquaintances, you would hear the opposite.  I am a woman of much patience, the ability to answer the same question many times, the willingness to step through an argument as much as necessary until (I get my way) you understand where I’m coming from…

But with myself, for myself – I am very, very impatient.

Today, I walked.  Yesterday, I walked less.  The day before, I was on the train and took maybe 100 steps total, all to and from the toilet.  For days before that, I husbanded my steps carefully, knowing that each step I took made me less likely to be comfortable later.  This stupid foot and ankle thing – which my dad has diagnosed from my descriptions (and so any errors are born from my inability to communicate) as what was called in olden times as “stone bruise”.

The symptoms are simple – starting with a golf ball swelling under the skin on top of my foot, flattening out to an overall swelling of the foot’s top.  Now I have heavy bruising at the end of my foot, right behind my three middle toes.  Also in the bottoms of the curves of my instep and along the outside of my foot where the tender parts meet the sole.  And in my foot, on the top but inside, there is pain.  It is a coming-and-going sort of pain.  Pushing off with my toes when I step makes it worse, so I limp a little, coming down harder on my left foot so that my right foot doesn’t have to push.  Keeping my foot up, reducing the pressure and swelling – these are the things that make it better.

So that, plus a little twinge in my ankle that means a slight sprain.  Not too bad, not much to deal with, really.  But it is a sprain in the very middle of my foot, and it is hard to avoid aggravating.  I have done a stellar job of healing it up to this point.  By missing out on Varanasi (and what a self-pitying statement that is!), I gave myself three solid days of healing, plus another three on trains.  I kept my foot up most of the time on the trains, though the environment isn’t as conducive to relaxation and healing thoughts as the very comfortable Hotel Surya Varanasi.

But now James is sick.  He is coughing and blowing his nose; his ears feel clogged up and his chest hurts.  He feels, in short, somewhat like I did in Agra, but worse.  He doesn’t want to leave the room, because just walking up and down the stairs exhausts him.

Suddenly, I’m trekking.  This sickness of James’ has made me less willing to loll about somehow.  We have things to do, and I need to do them!

What are these things?  Well, medicine for James, a cell phone so that we can communicate with rental agents, some fruit to suit his delicate stomach, a more congenial (i.e. cheaper) place to stay while we look for a long-term living arrangement…

So there I went, strong of purpose.  I spent a lot of time on the internet, contacting rental agents.  I looked into a hotel to see if the pricing was better…what else did I do?

Then I went back to the hotel and had dinner with James.  And then I got wanderlust again.  I walked up the road, looking for the place we’d stumbled on accidentally that had cellular internet advertised.  I bought bananas, found a cheaper hotel, took a bunch of photos.  I tried to get a cell phone, but didn’t have enough money on me (startup is going to cost about rs.1300, or 40-some dollars).

What I didn’t do was get medicine for James.  Ouch!  See how I suck?  Because really, though it sounds like I got some things done, I really just wandered around.  I walked uphill for a while, then took what seemed to be a likely left and found myself on a wholly new road, or lane since it was too narrow for more than one narrow car at a time.  As a matter of fact, I sheltered once with two young ladies between a couple of scooters while a small bus and a small car negotiated the tricky act of passing.  They used a driveway opening on one side and a shop entrance on the other…

I made it back to the hotel almost miraculously.  I say that because I came out only a few stores down from the hotel, on the right road, though I hadn’t even realized there was a lane there while walking on the main road!  The side lanes hide themselves when you are busy with the storefronts and people.  The small openings that are little roads can’t compare for sheer attention-grabbing when men rearrange their dhotis, women resettle their saris, autorickshaws dodge motorcycles, and busses create little pockets in which to travel…

Back in the room, guilty for abandoning James without medicine (twice), I read for a while, with my foot up.  Oh, yeah – my foot!  Well, it was fat and achy, but I wasn’t admitting that while I edited the photos I’d taken.  It took a couple of hours for the throbbing to fade, and then restlessness hit again.

A couple of doors down was a restaurant that advertised free wifi internet.  They had the wifi, but not the internet.  Unable to check on the emails I sent to rental agents, I am simply writing.  And eating.  It is a restaurant, after all.

Without being able to post these writings, it seems rather silly.  I am sitting here and my sandal gets tighter and tighter on my swelling foot, but I can’t bring myself to go back to the hotel room.  I’ve been confined too long, and out-and-about is what I’m after.  I would even go to a club or bar right now, sit on the sidelines and watch people signal their desires across a loud room.  But instead, I will go back to the room.

Even the little delay I’ve allowed (created, nurtured, stretched) is a guilty indulgence, because this time (third time’s the charm) I finally got medicine for James!  Okay lover – here I come to save the day!