I made my way over to Akash, who was now completely engrossed in a game of foosball, and asked if it was obvious that I wasn’t from India. “Yes, Rajiv, it is quite obvious. You are clearly a foreigner. Your stance, your build, even your confident gaze is telling us that you are from far away.” I was momentarily proud, then remembered my goal of becoming more Tamil. I looked around and took cues from the other boys’ posture—I slouched a bit and softened my gaze.
Nosey roped me into a Nintendo game. He was frantically hitting the buttons on the controller, twitching and jerking with every move of his character on the tiny TV screen. “Boys in India are quite rowdy, no?” he shouted through fits of giggles, his bum rising off the chair and then thumping back down as his character hopped over a fence, “. . . not like in America, no?”
I forced out a short, uncomfortable laugh and just raised my eyebrows. Dare I tell him about guys being sent home from school for transactions of weed in the bathroom? Should I mention the cherry bomb firecrackers that exploded in the trash can outside the principal’s office one afternoon? Or maybe I should tell him about our scandalous drama class teaching assistant—a three-hundred-pound, thirty-year-old who was doing the forbidden hokey-pokey in the backside of a waiflike tenth grader. No, I better not. I had visions of returning to Petit Séminaire the next morning, only to be greeted with a scene of sinful earthly delights from an old Dutch painting, one of pure jungle madness, a bunch of brown boys violently beating their teachers with yard sticks and crucifixes while others engaged in various unmentionable acts in the paradisiacal courtyard. A shiver ran down my spine, despite the humidity. My street-crossing incident showed me that tampering with the way things worked could be detrimental.
“No, boys here are very different. That’s for sure!”
My new set of friends, who dubbed themselves “the Dudes of Petit,” made me a part of their gang at school and went out of their way to ensure I didn’t want for anything. Once, I mentioned to them that I didn’t have a clock in my hotel room and had forgotten to bring my watch to India. I returned to my room that night and found a package outside my door—a big, tacky, pink, plastic clock in the shape of a huge watch (with batteries inserted into the back). The following day in class, Karthik turned around and slipped a note to me:
He was practicing his written French, and before I had a chance to respond, he slipped me a translation, either doubting his grammar or my comprehension:
I tried to stifle a laugh and it came out of my nose as a loud, ruffled snort, momentarily interrupting the physics lesson. Karthik whirled around and I gave him a thumbs-up.
Akash began to feel like the brother I never had. At lunch, which I now participated in with my own tiffin container filled with food from my hotel restaurant, Akash helped himself to bits of my meal and offered me morsels of deliciousness that his mother had packed for him. He discreetly fine-tuned my eating habits (we all ate using our fingers), whispering to me that I was never to use my left hand, considered “unclean” in India, where it was used in conjunction with a bowl of water to clean one’s bum after pooping. This explained why locals would stare at me while I ate in the hotel restaurant—I had been ripping apart my dosa with my poo-hand!
At the video game hut, as the other guys flocked to their games, Akash began sitting with me on the stoop outside, and we’d share our dreams of the future—I with my sights set on a career in front of the camera, and he with a passion for either law or medicine; he couldn’t quite decide. He wanted to dedicate his life to a practice that would benefit his “fellow countrymen” in the noblest way possible. Akash was a philosopher, an old soul, and I loved that about him. “I feel as though I had met you long ago,” he once said to me. “Perhaps we were brothers in another life. The universe works in strange ways. I am certain you were brought to India for more than you know.”
My morning walk to school was eventually replaced by a faster mode of transport, when Akash insisted on picking me up at my hotel every morning to take me to school on the back of his motorbike—all the boys had one, and his commute entailed passing by the hotel anyway, he said. The first time he showed up with his bike, I hesitated, hemmed, and hawed, and then sighed deeply and got on the seat behind him, holding on tightly as the motor whirred to life and we whizzed off into the street. No one wore helmets and they all rode their bikes haphazardly, according to the rules of the road here, which were—there were no rules! My view from the back of the bike gave me a different perspective of this town—moving at a faster pace gave me more to look at, kids crammed into the back of rickshaws on their way to school, tightly clutching their brightly colored lunch bags to their chests while other kids walked to school on the sidewalk, without shoes; buses backed up with no warning; cars cut us off within a hair of colliding; and flatbed trucks carted around huge loads of cargo, precariously piled high, with no sign of being securely anchored. At least if I died, it would be in pursuit of my dream. “Killed in a crash in India while doing research for the role he was born to play,” the obituary would read. “A tragic loss of a life full of such potential. We mourn together.”
After-school excursions with the gang became a daily routine when the boys found out about my checklist of places that I wanted to visit in Pondicherry. “We will take you,” Deepak said, putting his arm around my shoulder as we were walking out of class one day. “You must see Pondicherry as a local, not as a tourist.”
That afternoon, I overcame my initial fear of putting my life in the hands of these sixteen-year-olds. The warm wind was blowing through my hair and drying out my sweaty shirt as our four motorbikes snaked their way through town. I saw more of the city on the back of Akash’s bike, narrow lanes and alleys that I had not traversed on foot. I caught fast flashes of new scenes all over town—on the side streets, men pushing their carts of fresh fish and vocally advertising the catch of the day; an old shopkeeper whacking the corrugated tin roof of his stall with his umbrella and shouting at the pack of roguish monkeys that had just stolen big bunches of ripe yellow bananas from him. Two women were adorning a roadside idol of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, with fresh flower garlands. The nondescript location seemed completely random, surrounded by piles of garbage and flanked by mechanic shops, and with all the other temples in town, I wondered why these two women were worshipping here.
We rode through a crowded marketplace full of activity: a woman squatting on the ground, cutting banana leaves into quarters—the same banana leaves that lined the plates at my hotel restaurant (banana leaves are huge, about four feet long by two feet wide, and have lots of uses in South India because they’re food-safe, waterproof, and very flexible). The market was thick with people and as our bikes slowed down, I saw locals haggling with vendors who sold all kinds of things, from mangoes and ginger, to plastic buckets, bars of soap, and twig brooms. Small boys, no older than seven, would be scurrying by in threadbare clothing, carrying huge baskets of pineapples balanced on their heads, while men emptied giant burlap bags of tiny purple onions onto the tarps on the ground.
We left the market and Akash revved the bike up to its full speed; roadside details blended into a blurred ribbon of vibrant colors. It was thrilling, twisting and turning through town with the rustling motor reverberating under us—until he turned to me, taking his eyes off the road, and randomly told me that his palm-reading grandmother foresaw his tragic death at a young age.
I quickly changed the subject; our conversation turned to the movie version of Life of Pi and he suggested that I tell the producers to film in Pondicherry. I tried to relay to him the insignificance of my opinions even if I were to get the part, and that there was only a very small chance of me actually getting the part. He cut me off midsentence, “No, no, Rajiv, you musn’t say that. There’s a very BIG chance,” he yelled over the bike’s motor, “you will get it; I can see it in your bright eyes—your future is bright.” I couldn’t help but smile.
Soon, Akash stopped the bike as he waited to make a turn and I no
ticed three children, mostly naked, filthy, and with matted hair. They were laughing and giggling as they passed a tiny, helpless, newborn puppy back and forth. One of the girls stepped aside, squatted a bit, and just began peeing on the ground, a small cloud of dust rising up as her urine hit the packed dirt. Then she ran back and joined the group. The puppy whimpered and the kids put it down and danced around it. After Akash’s engine started to purr and we rode away, I lingered on what I had witnessed, wondering what would become of that puppy—imagining its future searching the dirty streets for food, sleeping wherever it could, trying to avoid getting killed by the crazy traffic—and then I realized that those kids, now laughing and running around, seemed just as ill-fated as the dog. This was India, and I challenged myself to not look away, to see this country for what it truly was and to accept it as such.
I settled into my hotel room later that night and longed for a Western staple that I had previously taken for granted—a plain old shower, a thing of beauty; you turn on the faucet and water comes gushing out of the tub spout. One quick pull of the diverter and the water is redirected to come sprinkling out of the showerhead like rainfall. My hotel was one of the fanciest in Pondicherry—about nine hundred Indian rupees a night (about fourteen American dollars)! However, there was no shower in the bathroom, but instead, a little faucet jutting out of the tiled wall, about knee-high, and under it was an orange plastic bucket with a thin plastic bowl floating in the water it contained. Bathing consisted of stripping down and pouring bowlfuls of the ice-cold water on myself, which splashed all over the bathroom, soaking the entire floor.
The bucket with the bowl was also intended to be used in conjunction with the toilet, to wash one’s bum. When I was little, I was potty trained with the rule that one’s bum was only clean if it came in contact with water after pooping—and as a toddler, this meant sitting on the toilet seat and calling, “Maaaaa?” or “Daaaaad?” to come and pour a bowl of tap water carefully through the space left between my seated torso and the opening of the back of the toilet seat, a delicate procedure that, if successful, would entail a steady stream of water running between the valley of the butt cheeks, purging one’s behind of all its sins. Ma was always better at it than my dad, who paid little attention to the temperature of the water, and would often end up pouring down a bowlful that was either scalding hot or freakishly cold, resulting in jerky contorting and shrieking in shock. The sacred water decanting, however, was always followed by me finishing it off, so to speak, with toilet paper. When I started elementary school it was extremely disturbing to learn that toilet paper was intended to be used dry—a conclusion I reached while staring at the faucet of the sink, so very far away, through the crack of the bathroom stall.
There was no toilet paper provided at the hotel in Pondicherry—it was a discovery that revealed yet another side to the bum-wiping saga: that the water/toilet-paper combo was a kind of immigrant adaptation, holding on to an older practice while incorporating and welcoming a new one, in a new land. Here in Mother India, no one used toilet paper, as Akash had insinuated. Luckily, Ma had the foresight to know this and had stuffed about ten rolls of quilted, three-ply Cottonelle into my suitcase. I had initially assumed that she was filling the gaps in between my clothes so they wouldn’t shift around—and I sure was glad that I didn’t question what she was doing.
Nights in my hotel were the quiet alone time I used to process the new world I was being exposed to. As I envisioned the boys dutifully making their way through the prescribed homework for the day, I would open my own set of books and continue with my personal Pi homework—literature that I had brought along with me in the hopes it would be relevant to my activities in India. One of my books was The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism. It was an attempt to finally understand what was behind the idol worship and symbolism that I had been so infatuated with as a child. When I finished the book, I was up to date with the ins and outs of the religion I had been born into. These practices were as old as the pyramids in Egypt—and thousands of years later, in both Toronto and Pondicherry, they were still alive and thriving. I was ready to be a groupie again.
The boys continued to help me make my way through the precious list of Pi sites I had assembled. One evening was spent visiting all the holy sites—the beautiful, whitewashed Jamia mosque (a central gathering place for the city’s large Muslim population), the ashram of a famous saint, Sri Aurobindo, and finally, an ancient Hindu temple by the ocean dedicated to the elephant-headed god, Ganesha.
“This is a significant place of worship,” Deepak explained as we got off our bikes and made our way toward the temple’s entrance. “The statue inside is famous throughout all of India.”
Nosey chimed in, bobbling his head. “The French colonists removed it from the temple and threw it into the deep ocean, but it reappeared in its original setting the following morning. Repeated attempts to remove and sink the idol proved in vain . . . it would continue to magically return to the temple.”
My breath was taken away when we turned the corner and came face to face with a spectacularly huge, live elephant festooned with garlands and bells, stationed in front of the main gate. One by one the boys stopped in front of the creature, bowing as the elephant blessed each one of them by touching the top of their heads with its trunk. When it was my turn, I stepped up and felt incredibly small, holding my arms close to my side and waiting for its trunk to make contact with my head. My skin pulled tight around my skull, not knowing how far the elephant’s trunk was or when it would touch me. It was incredible seeing the animal up close—its skin was a slate color and amazingly thick, like the rubber on a car tire, but marked with tiny wrinkles. Its trunk finally touched me with a light tap, tap, tap, almost as if it had been searching for something in my hair. I looked into its eye, like a human’s, yet with an orangish iris, its eyelashes about an inch long, thick and bristly. Making eye contact with this magnificent being left me somewhat unsettled, realizing it was subjected to a life of servitude.
My uncle in Toronto once told me that when he was a student in India, the temple next to his school had a baby elephant that he would give a little candy to every day. He returned to that temple thirty years later, while on vacation. A temple worker confirmed that the fully grown elephant was the same one he had befriended—and when he gave it a candy again, all these years later, tears streamed down the elephant’s face as it caressed my uncle’s head with its trunk.
We removed our shoes at the entrance and the boys and I stepped over the holy threshold into the temple. The cold granite floor felt refreshing against my bare feet. This was true sacred ground. I felt a hush.
Everything was made of carved stone—the walls, the altars, the ceiling. I felt strangely out of place here—I had outgrown my enthusiasm for religion, and hadn’t been in a temple for quite a while. As I grew out of my childhood habit of practicing two religions, I had settled on Christianity by the time I was twelve, fervently going to church with my aunt on Sundays. But the hard and fast rules, the insistence that a person could only be “saved” if he knew Christ, and the notion of “blind faith” without questioning the reasons and motives of these strict codes made me leery of the authenticity of organized faith, and eventually left me bitter about having to adhere to a prescribed form of worship.
It was dark and cool in the temple and the smoke from oil lamps and incense filled the air, which felt intensely charged as we neared the idol at the center of the building. I noticed signs that stated “Hindus only, beyond this point.” The central chamber that housed the idol was dark, save for a few brass lamps hanging from the ceiling, which were fueled with ghee or coconut oil—it was Friday, the holy day, and the room was packed. Three Brahmin priests, shirtless (save for a single holy thread that ran from the shoulder to the waist) and wearing orange loincloths, chanted in Sanskrit as one rang a brass bell he held in his left hand while circling the idol with a small camphor flame on a brass tray in his right hand. The nasal chanting, coupled
with the echoing bell, tugged at something inside me, and my eyes filled with tears. I was embarrassed and turned away from the boys, pretending to inspect some carving in a corner.
As a child, I’d stand with my parents as the Brahmin priests would bathe a seven-foot-tall granite statue of Vishnu with milk, honey, and turmeric water, then shut the doors of the little room that housed the idol, and we’d all wait in silence. A few minutes later, the doors would reopen, and Vishnu would be dressed in fine silks and glittering jewels. I’d look around me as the ladies and men reverently gasped and fluttered their eyelids. The men would fall to the ground and do a few push-up-like moves. I was told that we were looking at God. And God was colorful, flashy, and had a pleasant smile on His stone face. We’d stroll around the temple and visit the other gods and goddesses—Meenakshi, tiny waist, big hips, pretty in a purple sari and wearing a ten-foot-long fresh-flower garland; Murugan, god of the Tamils, young and handsome, riding on a peacock; and beside him were his two wives, Valli and Deyvanai. This was all fodder for my wild imagination as a child, but as I grew older and continued to practice two faiths, the Christian pastors who learned of my ways made it clear that Hinduism was a no-no and, condemning these ancient rituals, insisted that I run far, far away from these stone idols, which were the devil’s means of luring me off the path to the one true God.
I was about ten years old when I began asking Ma questions about what it all meant, in an effort to give her the opportunity to make a case for Vishnu and his posse, so I could make a final, informed decision. When Ma’s repeated response, tinged with an edge of annoyance, continued to be, “That is the way. It is just the tradition; that’s all . . .” my attitude toward the Hindu religion went from enthusiasm to disdain, dismissing it as superstitious paganism and nonsense doll worship, turning my faith fully to Christ . . . before his church, with its rigid exclusions of all other faiths, turned me off religion entirely.
The Elephants in My Backyard Page 6