Waves Roll

Water, Water Every where, nor any drop to drink...so laments the albatross-haunted voice of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Sitting on the bank of the Schelde the other day, I noticed an interesting phenomenon while trying to focus on the rolling waves of the river. I have noticed this often while at the ocean, most notably when I was at Kanniyakumari where three different major bodies of water come convene, causing the most amazing currents I have ever seen, but it was very apparent with the river’s coursings as well.

Try to focus on a point in a body of moving water. It is not easy. The natural tendency of our eyes is to follow the water, not remain locked in on the point of interest, especially if there is a piece of flotsam, jetsam, or sundry detritus bobbing along, much less a lazy seagull. The gaze follows the motion.

There was a cautionary buoy of sorts some fifty yards or into the middle of the river. That was a completely different experience then, to focus on a non-moving object surrounded by total movement. Both were hypnotizing to say the least, and I became engrossed and entranced by each over Time, losing myself indefinitely in the inertia and the inertia.

Being abroad, I sometimes wonder, what makes it “abroad,” and for me, the answer is simply, water. I am abroad because I am across the Atlantic Ocean from my native land. I was abroad abroad in India because I was across the Arabian Sea across the Atlantic Ocean or across the Indian Ocean across the Pacific Ocean. Six or one half dozen. I was exactly halfway around the globe in either case.

Yet, I have never made one of these trips per boat, oddly enough. I have always flown, as we live in the jet-age, so why should I? I have many times heard the story of how my mother, when she was eight and her brothers merely 2 and under traveled across the Atlantic in the dead of the deadest of deadliest winters to come join their father, traveling with my grandmother who had like many on the trip, fallen ill. My mom has described this trip, and it made me realize how impressionable that must have been. Huge, dark, ominous, unforgiving waves rolling and smashing against the hull of a transport ship lurching across a nearly frozen ocean, as the English Channel itself did freeze that winter!

That was a journey. That was a passage.

Now, we jump on an airplane and are magically transposed from point A to point B, with no real liminal space in between. Sitting by the river on Sunday, it was hard for me to imagine that just a week and a half before I was sitting in a boat, contemplating the ephemeral nature of life on the Ganges , watching bodies burn in a chain-smoking row of bonfires, and now, here I was, alone along the banks of the Schelde, contemplating...what?

I am content to be back in Antwerp, yet the disjunct between Belgium and India is so great at times, jolting, and the journey back was so sudden. I am confident that the next time I make such a journey, I will find a way to go by boat, or at least by a slower medium than the 747 that carried me from Mumbai’s Chatrapi Shivaji to London’s Heathrow.

I recently read online a list of ways to travel “differently” from the Lonely Planet publications. One of them was to “return slowly.” I believe that that is merely one half of the equation. I would like to next take a journey that I “go slowly” and where the journey itself is the destination. To roll along the waves, surrounded by water, water everywhere, desiring no-thing but the passage itself.

Yet More Tramps Abroad

Back in my hotel after an excellent dinner of grilled paneer sandwiched between slices of onion and green peppers and an amazing dish of baby corn, spinach paneer spiced with some smoking hot capsicum and raw green peppers. I could feel eyes upon me from the waiter to see if the sahib would eat them, which I did and got a nice drip nose to prove it. Topped off with a lassi and a walked along the putrid-smelling back bay of Mumbai Harbor talking with Mayur Dixit, a self-taught tour guide, who gives tours of the enormous slums in Mumbai, and is actually featured in the Wall Street Journal, about Slumdog Tour Guides. He strolls the Colaba promenade near the Taj Palace, which is the site of the bombing a couple years ago, and is trying to build his "tourist business" as the article discusses. Quite affable and knowledgeable about Mumbai specifically, but India in general, I was not able to take advantage of his services today, but perhaps will meet him on the way back through Mumbai in November.

The slums are enormous, mind-blowing, and there really aren't many words for it. You have to pass along them most of the way, as it is hard not too as 54% of Mumbai's population lives in them, making for 8 million people living in squalor. You fly right over them coming in as they literally encroach upon the runway, right up to the tarmac. The rooftops, which is rather elaborate word for rusted out, trash-covered corrugated metal sheets, are often painted blue, or have blue tarps on them, most likely in homage to Krishna's "blue-faced" aspect.

Now, here's the rub, and is one of India's sure to be paradoxes that will be impossible to fully grasp, even after I am here. As I mentioned before in a another blog, when Slumdog Millionaire came out, I was teaching at the pricey Antwerp International School, whose population is comprised of nearly 54% of the richest families in India's kids, namely the diamond traders kids. One of them said about Slumdog, "but, that's not Mumbai,..." which was shocking to some who mentioned the drive from the airport. But, Mukhta's point was that the slums were also incredibly active as a financial entity, and, well they are. It is bustling with businesses and people are out on the streets selling goods to each other, making food, repairing bicycle "tyres" and well, sorry to spoil it for you, but manufacturing all of those fancy woodworks, bronzes, and textiles that us whities are paying high dollar for in so-called boutiques in America and Europe.

Don't get me wrong, when I say squalor, I mean literally the poorest people on the planet, but they are out there "making a living." I have already seen the scenes of women, children, goats, and surprisingly well-fed stray dogs standing on trash heaps the size of Times Square. You can't really miss it. Mayur, whose name means "peacock" from the Sanskrit because of the sound they make, says that now it is particularly bad because of the rains and water rises to knee-deep with no where to go, but, he says, that is not as bad as the "hot season." He has an infant and 4 year-old daughter as well. He used to live with about a dozen people, but now lives with his family in the size of my bed, not bedroom, but bed. I have seen dozens of little girls my daughters age on the streets begging, orphaned, or asleep under plastic bags. Cows pulling carts of burned out air conditioners in the middle of lunch-time rush-hour traffic.

In short, there is no preparation as the saying goes. The is literally, no-thing that can prepare you for what you will see in 24 hours here. Lewis Carroll's Alice muses on thinking about the six impossible things before breakfast. From what I have already seen, that pretty much happens on an hourly basis.

But, there is time. I am tired, having tramped around the better half of downtown Mumbai today, though taking a break under the Regal Cinemas awning during the heaviest part of the rain, and well, saw six more impossible things during those 45 minutes as well.

This is just the beginning...