Two Week Anniversary!

Today was the weirdest day yet in India. It was also the most wonderful day. So this is going to be a long blog entry. For those of you who like me to keep it brief, you might just want to skip this entry!

Realities have started to set in: I have a stomach virus that makes eating anything other than plain bread and the occasional orange wholly unappealing. Chennai proper (we, in all honesty, live in a rather green and relatively cushy southern suburb) is polluted and horribly crowded. But the people here are some of the most helpful I’ve ever met. Every stranger we’ve come across has been more than willing to guide us to the right city bus or to negotiate rickshaw fares for us. Chennai citizens are also notorious for carrying cards finely printed with their personal information. Business cards, without the business. Ari and I were thinking we should get some of these printed – hell, we could have them screen printed by hand for less than Office Depot would charge us back home. And then we could distribute our mobile numbers to the world! Or maybe not.

So today Ari and I had resolved – stomach viruses or not – to venture onto the Chennai buses for the first time. It takes 50-60 rupees to get downtown by auto-rickshaw, and only 4 rupees by bus, so we thought we should master public transit as soon as possible. After a bit of stumbling and confused head turning, we found the crowd of people that signifies the local bus stop. While we knew we were looking for the 23C bus, we got incredibly excited when we saw the M23C bus and jumped aboard. Priding ourselves on our excellent bus boarding skills, we soon realized that we were not going the right way. Never fear! Chennai’s concerned citizens were there! We got off the M23C and, after 20 minutes of waiting in the dusty, hot (32C without the humidity) afternoon, we found a bus that would take us into the central city.

One of Chennai’s major landmarks is Spencer Plaza, a three-story shopping mall in the middle of the city. Around this area are several famous bookstores, hotels, restaurants, and mosques. We wanted to find Spencer Plaza in the hopes that we could then find some of these other important locales. After a nearly two hour bus experience (Ari noted, quite observantly, that all forms of transportation here are really thrill rides. No one’s actually in a hurry to get anywhere, they’re merely driving for the near-death thrill), we fled into the air-conditioned labyrinth known as Spencer Plaza’s. What a sociologist’s wet dream! This “mall” is really a series of halls hastily stuck together filled with a combination of overpriced Kashmiri and South Indian souvenirs and American and European brand stores. Reebok, Wrangler, Levi’s, and Music World abut “Sari Land” and “Sri Lankan Tales.” Most of the shoppers are from India’s middle and upper classes. Chennai’s mall rats look just as smug as bored as those in Boca Raton or Portland, but here the fashion is a strange mix from the past four decades. It is so interesting to see what fads made their way over here, and how they must have been distilled by cultural prejudices, time, distance, and language. Men wear acid-washed, extra-tight bell-bottom jeans. Women wear early nineties t-shirts. Heavy Metal, Nirvana, and Chumbawumba are still big here. Needless to say, Spencers Plaza was a mind-fuck…and I mean that in the most culturally sensitive way possible!

We made our way up to the food court, where our weary digestive systems were met with a Subway! With real bread and honey mustard sauce! Keeping in mind that I’ve been experimenting with South Indian cooking and that I bought a South Indian cookbook today, I think I’m allowed to have a weak moment and indulge in Subway. In any event, Ari and I split a foot-long veggie patty sub. While my fellow intern is naturally reserved and hardly what you would call an expressive individual, he seemed thrilled by his good, nearly old-fashioned sandwich. And I have photos to prove it.

After our bland and thereby enjoyable lunch, we wandered about the shops both in and around the store, finally settling in Giggles, a tiny bookstore attached to a five-star hotel near Spencers. Giggles, usually a corridor filled with books, was bursting with titles today (the boy who usually opens and organizes the books had a tooth infection and the store had temporarily slipped into what I can only suspect was further chaos). The storeowner was a lovely bibliophile who knew of Tara Books and our team, and who sold several of our titles (“I am the hen sparrow!”). She talked books and Chennai and cricket with us for a while, and Ari and I took turns standing in the store (it was only big enough for one person to enter at a time). We invited her to the art show opening we are having tomorrow night for one of our books, and she asked that we not tell her whether India or England was winning tonight’s final cricket match. She even gave us her home phone number in case we ever had a dire need for a particular text. It’s nice to know that somewhere in the world there is a 911-ecquivalent for avid readers.

We were going to a guitar and vina (traditional Indian slide guitar) concert in the hotel in which Giggles was located, but we were over an hour early. So we wandered through the posh locale and found the pool. Sitting under an umbrella beneath palm trees and flowering tropical plants, I could have been in Boca Raton in July. The hotel was really the most ridiculous part of the whole day. Here in the middle of a developing city of 7 million people, in the middle of South India and all that the region connotes, is a luxury hotel (one of many). All of the employees are Indian, all of them address me as “Madam” or “Miss”, and they will not let me open a door or light my own cigarette. Only (white) foreigners stay at such places, giving the hotel an apartheid atmosphere. Several times today, I was very uncomfortable when I was given dramatically different treatment simply because I was not Indian. The residue of the British presence here in Chennai makes me feel dirty; it is a layer of dust the settles on my face and arms whenever I leave the house.

So after a brief sit near the Florida-like pool, we went to the bar and ordered beer! It is really difficult to get beer in Chennai (you must have more than 20 rooms in your establishment in order to serve beer (???) and you cannot buy it anywhere). Domestics – Kingfisher and Blacklabel – and I was so happy to be drinking beer that I didn’t care that Kingfisher tastes like watery MillerLite or that I was spending 225 rupees (over $5) for a beer. Ari and I were the only ones in the bar. We watched the cricket match as the bar staff showered us with various snacks. There was a lot of smiling going on. The bar reminded me of this ritzy skybar I went to in Tokyo with Tesla; while it lacked the gorgeous view of the Tokyo skyline, it was just as absurd and just as welcome in the moment.

We finished off the evening by meeting Nina and attending this guitar/vina concert held by the Alliance Francaise and the French Embassy. A Moroccan guitarist and a local Tamil vina player performed both separately and together, and the music was quite beautiful and often unlike anything I have heard before. After dinner, there was a private party for the guests of this event (we got in for free thanks to the Tara hook-up…I was sorely underdressed…but Dave, now I can say that I’ve worn my Christopher Walken t-shirt to a cultural event in a five-star hotel!). The food and wine were delicious, and while my stomach cramped and moaned all through dinner, I forced myself to ingest meat and bread and a Bailey’s shot. Yum!

A couchsurfing friend drove us home, and now I sit on my cot/bed/irregularly stuffed futon writing this entry. It’s midnight and I’m exhausted. Maybe in the next entry I’ll tell about the never-ending construction going on at the house. Or about my crazy landlady who might take me shopping. Or about her dog who likes to pee on everything, especially people. Or maybe we can discuss my growing concerns about foot fungus. Or my search for a yoga school. Or maybe I’ll just post pictures and let you all sort things out yourselves. XOXO!