The Natural World pt 2

We allowed ourselves a quick holiday-within-a-holiday to Gokarna and arrived back to find that nature had reclaimed the house. Frogs in the mugs, ants nest in the door jamb and a new style of punk lizard which perches at head height looking at once mid-80’s and prehistoric. It’s always the same when you return to your empty house after a period away- things look different, the place smells a little stale, and it often seems, judging by the predeparture detritus, as if burglars might have been. As we potter about, sweeping and unpacking, we both individually pause between rooms to cock our heads at an angle and scowl suspiciously: undoubtedly a very wrong smell haunting the place. From childhood the protocol is always: ignore the smell indefinitely until someone else buckles and deals with it. Kate pretends to be busy, I light five sticks of incense at once, Max creates some masking smells of his own.

“Good to be back!” I declare with what I intend to be a carefree air of domestic satisfaction. “Hmmm, lovely.”

Minutes pass, then… “Can you sm-?” “Yes!”

We stalk into the bedroom and eye the tell-tale bulge in the tarpaulin that is pinned above our bed. I balance twitchily on a cane chair, using one hand to untie one corner of the tarp, the other holding a torch.

The heat at the top of the room is insane, and the unmistakeable morbid stench prompts a little gastric roly-poly. Vigorous and sticky-feeling black flies swarm around my eyes and nostrils as I cast the torch beam about. I consider at this moment whether it’s better to find a huge live rat in the sheeting above your bed, or a dead one.

It’s clear which one smells more offensive, and as I emit an involuntary cough-and-shudder combo, I inadvertently let the tarp drop a little. The cat-sized rat corpse squelches as it slides to the edge. I feel a little trapped: my position on the chair is precarious and requires a handhold to get down without flipping the chair over; I need to keep the tarp level so that the rat and its putrid fluid doesn’t cascade onto our bed; I have to keep the torchlight on the rat so I know that it’s not about to slip off (or pounce at my face, perhaps). My arms are aching and I’m breathing in rapid shallow breaths, covered in sweat. We clearly haven’t thought this through. I bark inarticulate orders through plosive exhalations. “Get-the-thing-! Quick!”

Kate and Max swirl below. Max is bereft of a truck or something and is pulling at the chairleg. Kate asks “What thing?”

“Fuck- euchhh- Just get the thing!!”

The rat is right on the lip of the tarp, and I’m blinking fast to keep flies from resting in my watery eyes. I think I wanted a dustpan, but in the end Kate wisely reappears with a plastic bag. The trikanasana yoga series comes in handy since I have to reach another few inches to grasp the thick tail. There is, sadly, a wet clicking noise as I notice that whilst the tail is moving, the bulky torso remains.

“Hey Ben, Kate!”

To our great surprise, there in the doorway is Sandeep, our landlord, and his son, dressed in what appear to be Elvis impersonator outfits. Sandeep’s suit is white with broad silver stripes. There is audacious crimson filigree about the lapels, and perhaps even sequins. They are iridescent in the afternoon light. The tension and absurdity of the moment are overwhelming. My mind shifts into a fugue state, presumably in self-preservation.

With a lurching effort, I finally bag the rat, hose the place with poison, tumble down from the chair and we spend a moment wondering what to do with the body. Compost? Burial? Bin? Surely not the bin. Too large for the toilet. Sandeep, who as it turns out has just come back from a wedding, says something to his son, who takes the bag and lobs it into the river at the end of the garden. We are too traumatised to object, and merely look on in silence as the bright blue WHSmith bag bobs and drifts out of view.

Manufactioning qality

“I can’t believe it broke already!”

There are times when the wrapper will still be on the product, and yet already it has disintegrated into its constituent parts, so that it resembles a mechano set, or a pre-assembly Ikea purchase. Max will be given a brand new toy (usually in desperate mollification whilst in a hot, public place), and mere picoseconds will elapse before he’s holding the various dissembled pieces, his face a mask of dismay.

It boggles us constantly that anyone would actually manufacture anything so ephemeral. Notwithstanding the cheapness, surely the market demands products that last and perform their stated function. Our house is littered with melted electrical switches, miniature car axles, and can openers that look like they belong in Uri Geller’s house. There are fixers and menders for every conceivable thing in India, so perhaps they’re in cahoots with the factories. The western mantra of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, has its Indian counterpart: Purchase cheaply-Break-Fix-Break-Fix-Break-Litter.

Invariably, after a fork has bent double like a paperclip, or new cellotape has curled dryly backwards in the style of a fortune-telling fish, the packaging resembles a cruel taunt: Number1 Product! First Class Standard! Export Quality! It is impossible to imagine whence it could be exported -to the Neolithic era maybe, where a flimsy pair of blunt, unhinged scissors would be cherished and put to good use.

Maybe it’s the environment itself. We’ve already had problems with our laptop and DVD player, and Kate’s Leatherman is now only useful as a tin opener or paperweight. The heat, humidity, salty air, downpours, legions of insects- all of these conspire to age everything at a rate that makes it look like a time-lapse film of rapid deterioration. Hopefully it’s not affecting the humans, especially since Max is freshly out of his two-year warrantee.

Entrepreneurialism

‘Season’ is a mythical time in Goa, when a king’s ransom can be made in just a few months. It would seem that a tsunami of cash will wash into town and everyone is getting their buckets ready. When we arrived, there was a choice of two places to stay (and really, one of those wasn’t habitable yet). Now, you could stay in a different guest house every night until April. Often, when travelling, you ask yourself whether there is enough local infrastructure to support the tourism. Here, however, we were wondering if there will be enough tourism to support the local infrastructure. It’s now mid-Novemember, and the promised hoards of foreigners are mostly just German pensioners ambling along the main street in beige shorts.

An English family we befriended came round and were asked by our landlord, Sandeep, if they needed laundry doing some time. They assented vaguely. On the basis of this concrete commitment, Sandeep bought a brand new Whirlpool washer-dryer. Our friends then happening to find another house elsewhere and aren’t even coming to Agonda. We now do covert buckets of washing, very quietly, and commit to nothing.

Sandeep seemed a little less present last week, so I asked where he’d been. “Busy, you know. At the restaurant.” What? Eating?

“No, my new restaurant.” There had been no previous mention of starting up a restaurant, but he was confident that it would be up and running in a day or two. “We will call it…Paki Tree!”

“What??”

“No? You don’t like? …Paki House?”

He runs through a few variations- Paki Hut, Paki Place- as Kate and I issue frantic ‘halt’ gestures. It turns out that ‘parki’ is Konkani for ‘bat’, and there is a large tree of bats behind the restaurant site. He has gone for ‘Akansh’. I don’t know what that means, but hopefully nothing too racist.

Getting a bargain here is a bit like trying to get a good price in a ski resort, or in Leicester Square, or on a space station. Everyone shakes their head and agrees that prices have gone up drastically. Our former selves would have been run out of town for having insufficient funds before the words ‘organic latte’ had left our lips. I hope the German silver foxes can shoulder the burden of keeping the Goan economy afloat.

Baba

There is a very nearby ashram on a hill, inhabited by a quite extraordinary ‘baba’ or ascetic holyman. The place is a little rough around the edges, and is frequented by a curious range of visitors, devotees, yogis and westerners. The discourse is wide and esoteric, and often hilarious.

The man is 73 going on 25. At the sight of Max, he immediately sprang into a crouch and rolled out a series of pitch-perfect animal impressions, much to Max’s delight. The baba sits in the middle on a sort of dais, ringed by a thick rope. Max capers about on these ropes, and seems already to be fulfilling the baba’s prediction that, “he will be a famous wrestler, for sure!”

At one point, Kate, whilst pretending to follow Max on some pretext, gleefully sets me up: “Baba, Ben wants you to read his palm!”

I grimace inwardly, and maybe outwardly too. The old man breaks off half a matchstick and traces lines across my palm. All the hallmarks of close scrutiny are there: nods of affirmation, sudden furrowing of the brows, exhalations, and muttered calculations. He would pinch the flesh together, or adjust the hand’s position occasionally, abruptly grab my left hand to examine the two side by side. All in all, it was not an unpleasant experience, and a little ticklish. All the while, I can see Kate in the periphery, sniggering impishly at my awkward captivity.

“Kate says you do not believe in these ideas: palm reading, astrology.”

“Well, not really.” Feeling a little unkind even saying so.

“Yes, I can see. Here it is:” Indicating a small, sickle-shaped line arching down from my ring finger. “…disbelief.”

Checkmate. No arguing against that, then. The neat paradox, and the tickly sensation together made me laugh, and the Baba chuckled in a sparkly sort of way.

“You will write a book!”

“Yes?”

Leaning closer. “Here is the title…” We waited together for a minute or so; me for him, he for divine instruction. “A drop of sand.”

I mulled it over for a bit, thinking perhaps ‘A grain’ is a better modicum of sand, when suddenly:

“Alternative title: Alexander was victorious.” Perhaps I was physically baulking at the specificity, and necessarily historical bent of the project, because next came, “India under the English and under Hindi”

“… um… was that India under the English and under the Hindus?”

The Baba shook his head dismissively, released my hand with a sigh, snatched some remaining crackers from the floor and scattered them to the birds.

“No! India under English and under Hindi.”

Right then.

On the gate outside there are various arcane regulations: no talking; no women or children except on Saturday; ten minutes maximum stay, etc. We ask the baba about these strictures and he laughs heartily. “Rubbish! Now Ben you will do one thing for me next time: bring paint. You will paint over this nonsense writing next time you come!” More laughter.

The visits are predictable only in their unpredictability. Ad hoc lectures take in the gamut of human experience- Queen Victoria, chakras, internet forums, quantum mechanics, Lord Mountbatten.

“Come- you know about this computer business?” He then puts on a pair of reading glasses, whips out a laptop and tries in vain to get the broadband to work.

Last week he declared that the first step in his new plan to spread enlightenment is to take up jogging. At the age of 73. “Where can I find these running shoes? I think I should have muscles- you know: ripped.”

Most of the time, we are lost for words. We nod mutely or employ the ambiguous, noncommittal head wobble.

His diet is fascinating. Last month he announced that we would join him there and then for his final meal before his fasting whereby he would eat only pumpkin until March. The mystery of the decision is impregnable. Why pumpkin? Why March? At any rate, we eat curry and watch in horror as he dabs raw onion into a heap of salt before eating it, chasing it with two whole green chillies. Next time we see him, he’s enjoying a bag of Indian snacks, and then has a few of our crackers. We have tea with him. I ask him how much sugar. “Not much, just two of those spoons.” He’s talking about tablespoons. I gawp as he adds another two tablespoons afterwards.

When we last visited, the Baba announced that we had come just when he was breaking his fast. A bright yellow, spongy cous cous type of stuff is produced, which we eat with mango pickle. It is, clearly, nowhere near March.

I am on the beach one morning when we encounter the baba on brisk stroll. Max and I invite him back for chai, and moments later, there he is, on our porch reading Where the wild things are. Periodically, he lobs fistfuls of Indian snacks for the crows, until there’s a Hitchcockian density of birds in the garden. Then he announces- “I am happy-”. We wait a few seconds for the end of the sentence, but that is it. It’s not clear why, but this sets us off laughing until all four of us and the crows are guffawing loudly.

Local gods

When we moved in, Sandeep, the landlord, ushered me into one of the rooms and pointed to a corner and implored me not to put anything there. The room was quite dark, and, from what I could see, there was a plastic cup with sand in it, studded with small sticks. “Ah. Is it unsafe?” “No, this is our God.” I nodded solemnly, peering a little closer. Behind the cup (used to hold the incense sticks, I now realised) was an elegantly simple square ceramic tile, set into the floor. This was going to be a task: keeping Max from desecrating the household-god-tile. “Don’t worry, Sandeep. It will be respected.” I assured him in what I hoped was a tone suited to a discussion of domestic deities. It was only a matter of minutes before Max had dashed in, grabbed the cup, scattered the floor with its contents and more or less danced on the holy tile. I could only imagine the ill-fated blowback. If Max were to be struck by a falling coconut, we’d all know why. It was several days later, sitting in the toilet, that I happened to notice that the whole bathroom has the same tiling.

We came back from the beach the other evening to find a large group of locals gathering. I always think it best to approach a communal gathering cautiously, just in case it turns out to be a funeral or a lynch mob. Happily, this was a puja centring on launching a wooden Ganesh effigy into the surf. The men banged drums more or less a random, the teenagers were in charge of lighting bangers and lobbing them about whilst affecting a nonchalant air, and everyone else seemed busy mixing prasad and clapping. Max was in heaven, and the prasad of cucumber, coconut and jaggery sugar turned out to be an unexpectedly great combination. The colour of this sort of ceremony couldn’t be more at odds with the local Catholic events. We ran into a procession coming out of the church, and it was all I could do to bind and gag Max, as the austere rows of penitents looked on disapprovingly. From behind my hand, I could almost hear Max's muffled voice asking where the drums, fireworks and cucumber were at.

It’s hard to tell what Max’s theological conception is. He seems to accept that gods can be various animals, and that he will incur the hissing wrath of his parents if he grabs things from temple shrines. We suspect his perspective might be getting confused: last week he saw a statuette of the Virgin Mary and made himself popular by shrieking ‘Monkey God! Monkey God!’

Imperfection

On almost every hotel wall in India, you will find a rather artificial picture of an Austrian- or Swiss-looking building, probably a house or hotel, in a strangely sterile alpine setting. There are never any people in the shot, or animals. Everything is pristine. I’ve often asked where these anodyne mountain scenes are from, and usually I’m told it’s Switzerland, a land held in the Indian collective subconscious as an earthly Eden. Possibly the reason for this lies in the constant juxtaposition in India of the beautiful and the ugly. You’ll be watching a sunset on the beach, when you realise the timeless silhouette of a fisherman at the water’s edge is a man shitting. You’ll see a vivid rainbow arc across the sky, then be distracted by two bulls raping a cow. You’ll chance upon a picturesque riverbank, but have to pick your way through swathes of beer cans and crisp wrappers. You’ll rise in time to see the dawn light, but be assaulted by wafts of burning plastic (possibly smouldering Pampers). And so on. Hence the yearning for the unattainable Swiss chalet vista. No matter where you go in India, the perfect is always inherently imperfect. Who knows, behind the Swiss chalet, two scrawny dogs are probably tearing apart a plastic bag of rotting food, surrounded by a smattering of discarded Kingfisher cans.

Edward Said wrote that what you also never count on, when booking and travelling to a dream destination, is that you will have inevitably brought your own flawed self to the paradisiacal scene. So, whilst the coconut trees and golden sand look just like the postcard, your own neuroses creep in unbidden. Kate spent a whole night kvetching about tsunamis, I passed a good half hour on the beach being anxious about the cost of keeping a helicopter in the air, and Max is, as ever, hyper-vigilant about the whereabouts of his toy car collection. I can almost see us in the Swiss scene, scratching at some fresh insect bites, grousing about the cost of a cup of tea and wondering whether the chalet manager was being unfriendly to us.

A load of rubbish

The refuse system in our house consisted of us handing our rubbish over to the family who we rent off. They would then spirit it away somewhere, possibly burning it in some unseen place. This routine was going perfectly well until we were chasing Max round the corner, behind our adjoining wall, and came across a Emin-style depiction of our recent life, through the medium of rubbish. Horrified, I spotted several familiar Kingfisher cans, a few ear-cleaners, contact lens packets, and, most conspicuously, the tell-tale peppermint green and baby blue colours of Max’s Pampers. Considering that the plastic and metal would probably take another hundred years or so to break down, we decided that our consciences couldn’t bear the weight. As it turns out, with no municipal waste disposal scheme, the nearest ‘bin’ is about 20km away. Starting with the purchase of several pedal bins for the purpose, we have embarked on a meticulous separation plan. What becomes massively obvious when you have to wash, sift and transport your own stinking waste for half an hour, clutching it between your knees on a scooter, is that a family of three produces, literally, shitloads of rubbish. The hardest part is the nappies. I can just see them gagging a dolphin or smothering a rare turtle. They resist compaction, and veritably grow in size and weight when in contact with water. What’s in them? Some sort of weird gel crystals that have a half-life akin to plutonium. Alternatives are a little hard to decide on. Bare-ass is the obvious choice (for Max, that is), and certainly the approach favoured by 300million Indian children. Alas, the potty remains unsullied, but Max has been told there is a rich bounty on offer for every potty-based emission. Max now wears a brand of Huggies that are a denim effect fabric. They seem a comfy fit, but have a disconcerting way of making Max look like he’s sporting DaisyDukes. The other thing is that throwing away four or five of these everyday, with their stretchy seams and realistic beltbuckle, feels even more wasteful. Our other great idea is to insert a sanitary pad into a nappy. Luckily, in Indian shops nappies and maxipads are mixed up together. We’ll see how this plan goes. Otherwise the nappies will continue to be a putrid albatross round my feet.

Morning times

Max will wake us up, without fail, between 6 and 7 a.m. He clambers out of the web-like shroud of the mosquito net, totters into our room and starts banging on about vehicles. There is a heavy price to pay for ignoring his implorations. Last week he tried to get us up, and failing to do so, came back spraying a bag of milk all over the kitchen and living rooms. The tension of the morning was heightened when we gave him the remaining milk in a bottle and sat him on a cushion- next to a scorpion. It was 6.05am and Kate and I were bathed in sweat and aging by the minute.

The only other thing to get us leaping out of bed is the clown’s horn siren song that signals the arrival nearby of the bread man. ‘Bled man!’ Max with holler and I’ll bolt for the door, clutching him in one hand and ten rupees in the other. Many is the time that I’ve lurched forth into the dawn, lungi coming undone, wild of eye and breath, only to hear the comedy claxon disappearing around a corner. There is a ventriloquist’s trickiness to the noise, and Max and I have spent many minutes clambering vainly through people’s backyards, only to have to return dusty and bleeding, unable to put bread on the table.

War without end

On arrival, our approach towards the kitchen sink was greeted with a welcoming cloud of fruit flies. Or perhaps they’re not fruit flies, since they aren’t discerning and delight in absolutely anything that isn’t bone dry. So small are they that you can’t catch or swat them, since the air displaced by your hand’s movement wafts them away. When I bought one of those electrified racquets, I declared it the best money I ever spent. Kate will often come into the kitchen, drawn by the static crackle of the demise of creatures with about four chromosomes, to find me sweating and wild-eyed, thrashing about like McEnroe. I suspect that their life cycle is measured in hours rather than days, and that if I didn’t kill them, they’d be dead by morning anyway.

The mosquitoes are quite low-key when you consider that we are living next to a tidal river. What is odd though is that they are totally silent. I once heard that mosquitoes whine near your ears so that you will become stressed and the blood will throb, thus making their job easier. Not these ones.

Then there are the ants. At first there were only one or two innocent looking ants, strolling around in an unassuming manner, whistling, and asking directions. By now, constant streams of ants meander through the kitchen, putting up fliers and selling ant souvenirs. Indian Tupperware appears not to be airtight, and so now everything we own lives in the fridge. We have put a bell around Max’s ankle in case they try to carry him off.

As each new plague visits us, we look back fondly on the previous ones for being so benign. As we encounter huge jumping spiders, various scorpions and poisonous centipedes, I increasing regard the potentially malarial mossies as rather quaint.

Safeguarding

Keeping one’s first born child alive and well is of course any travelling parent’s primary concern. At every turn, though, our best efforts appear the very height of futility. We carefully wash and rinse Max’s milk bottles in mineral water, and then find that he’s snuck off to drink with gusto from the tap for minutes at a time. We painstakingly enforce helmet wearing on the scooter, and then we’ll find that a friendly Indian man has borrowed Max and is driving around with him rodeo style on a motorbike. We encourage Max to hold our hand in the road, but the next minute he’s chasing a chicken or a piglet into a broken down building site, through a checklist of tropical hazards: snakes, centipedes, rusty nails, broken glass, fetid puddles, men with puppies, mosquitoes, rabid dogs, and high-sugar beverages. What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Or make you ill.

Lifestyle

What is funny is that, having removed ourselves from our domestic existence in London, and travelled to a completely disparate environment, we have hurried into a parallel routine. The key distinction is everything is recreated in a setting that is absurdly tropical.

We still do laundry, but now we hang it between palm trees. We still go jogging and swimming, but now do it on the beach with the sun either rising or setting, dodging the cows and crabs, as fishermen haul in their catch. We still watch boxsets, but do it under a mosquito net with the sound of waves breaking in the background. We still do the dishes, but they are mostly steel plates and have to be done instantly so the insects don’t get too involved. We still take Max out to run around, but here it’s in waterpools where he forages for sea creatures and careers about chasing after a gaggle of Indian kids.

What is also odd, is how little fills a day. We are up from 6am til 10 or 10.30 at a push. It is a bit like retirement, except with constant childcare requirements. We plot and plan mealtimes all day. Everything is more manual- cleaning, laundry, shopping, etc and we are amazed at how two small events can consume our waking hours and leave us slumped in the cane chairs, breathing heavily.

Weather

When we arrived the weather oscillated between ‘hot, humid and sunny’ and ‘hot, humid and rainy’. 'Rainy' doesn’t really encompass the style of rain that the ‘rainy season’ brings. It rained so hard that we couldn’t think. It took our breath away and made us pause to marvel at how this much water could have ever been suspended in the sky at all.

We went on a day trip on the scooter and had to shelter six or seven times from rain so furious that it would sting your skin and make the puddles erupt like they were being pelted with machine gun fire. The uniform in this weather is full body waterproofs with the drawstrings tied up at the chin. We haven’t discovered where everyone buys these, and so we just scuttle and hide.

The sort of downpour that would bring Britain to its soggy knees, clears up and clears off so quickly that you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’d imagined the whole thing. It’s been a whole week since the last daytime rain (and maybe that long since it rained a night), yet no local will commit to the idea that the monsoon is over. ‘Maybe it will come back and stay until November’ mused one guy, whilst generally people just laugh and shake their heads at the very idea. The prospect of it now returning to being rainy seems completely implausible to us.

Something that still catches us off guard is how short the day is. Being used to the hot days being the longest days in England, it’s odd to have the dusk descend like a curtain at just after 6pm. Likewise it’s still more or less dark when Max gets us up at 6.am. With just twelve hours of daylight, it’s no wonder we’re getting nothing done here.

Childcare

We have taken as laid back an approach to Childcare as is possible in a country absolutely brim-full with lethal hazards. One or twice everyday, Kate or I will sound the call: He’s gone. We then scuttle around looking for Max until we locate him caught in some fishing netting on the beachfront or investigating the back of derelict toilet. He has never had such a nice garden, or any garden for that matter, but still he leaves the thousands of toys, hammock, sand pit and parental supervision of the back yard, wriggles through the locked gate, past the psychotic dog and out into the wider world. Over and over again. The other day the scene was one of complete serenity: Max was having a nap in his room, we had finished lunch, and Kate and I sat reading in the garden, until Kate leaps up, exclaiming, ‘Is that MAX??’. Of course it was: in just a nappy, he was making his way through the mud and detritus on the other side of the fence, down to the riverbank.

Luckily, everyone in a square mile radius knows him by now, so as long as he doesn’t find the keys to the scooter we are ok.

Health and Safety

Driving an unregistered, unreliable scooter, heads uncovered, with a not-yet-2-yr-old sandwiched, wriggling, between the two of you, often whilst negotiating a blind turn into the face of a variety of mechanical and animal road-users, would seem in the UK to be the very last word in recklessness. Here, though, I feel that we cut an authentic Indian family model. When texting, or better yet, whilst transporting an unwieldy item (like a shelving unit, or 30litre water container, say) I feel that the look is complete.

The key factor in road safety, notwithstanding the innumerable hazards and road condition, is speed. Cruising at a stately 40kph, all the obstacles are apprehensible; at 60kph, you end up swerving wildly and your spinal column crashes painfully like a falling accordion, usually whilst insects the size and weight of sparrows pelt you in the face.

Kate recalls staying in the Andaman’s and becoming so paranoid of being hit by a falling coconut that she and Chloe took to wearing helmets when walking under the trees. We haven’t yet reached this level of hysteria, but gazing out on our garden as Max capers about, with his soft skull offering something of a perfect target for any of the several weighty coconuts above, does give us pause for thought. We approached Sandeep, the landlord, to ask about the danger. He brushed the risk aside, pointing out that never had anyone been struck by a coconut on his property. We smiled. He then mimed the falling of heavy objects and added ‘Landing this side, that side, very close, but not hit anyone’. We stopped smiling at this, even when Sandeep reassured us, ‘This Ok. Because you know, we have Shiva.’

Belief in Richard Dawkins seems to offer less protection, so we have an agreement that Sandeep will put some netting up for us.