entering the land of fried bananas

The apocalyptic fog held up 65 trains touching North India, kept 50 flights out of Indira Gandhi International Airport for three days, hit Jaipur with record-breaking cold temperatures of 3.3ºC.  We spent far too many nights in frigid train stations, waiting for trains that were seven hours late, wrapped in everything we brought and watching the rats squeeze in and out of cracks in the doors, rustle the trash in the bins.  One of them actually jumped on my foot before I realized what was happening.

My two-dollar Walgreen’s sandals finally broke as soon as we got on the train out of Jaipur – which is the last good place to buy shoes on the entire itinerary!  I fixed the strap by sticking a safety pin through the bottom of it, but the pin came undone and impaled my poor foot as soon as I tried to walk up the platform at Kota.  I bid them farewell (not too fondly) and gave them an improper burial in the trash bin, donning in their place my dad’s ancient Velcro sandals which are nearly as old as I am.  (For as long as I remember they complemented his ridiculous vacation outfit of linen tourist hat, Galapagos T-shirt, white shorts, and clip-on sunglasses.  I have always led the efforts to shame him into stylishness, and here I am ripping him off…)

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE LAND OF FRIED BANANAS… in your dad’s seventeen-year-old sandals.

We fell asleep on the train in bone-chilling temperatures and woke up to stifling heat.  Finally the fans came on, but the car was swimming in at least seventy-two different people’s sweat.  I nearly passed out from dehydration and was knocked flat before the fried bananas appeared through the open train windows at station platforms.  I must wait ‘til we reach Goa to taste that most favorite of all exotic delicacies.

Finally we reach the Fort Kochi waterfront strip, where the autorickshaw drivers offer to take us around town, to take us to hotels, advertising “Ferrari, madam?  Autorickshaw?”  I was unaware that Ferrari made put-puts, but I learn something new every day.

Such as the gelatinous quality of a caught, gutted and ready-to-cook octopus in a plastic bucket.

Or that the best way to eat fish is to choose your favorite raw fish (tuna? red-bellied snapper? barracuda? squid? shark?!) right off the waterfront from the fishermen’s stalls and then take it to the roadside shacks to have it cooked to order.  The stalls all have cats hovering around, and sometimes sitting right on the table by the fish, sleeping, prowling and waiting for remnants that fall in the wake of flies at the end of the day.

The Vasco Café and Homestay sits on a corner in the white house where Vasco da Gama lived when he was “viceroy” of Portuguese India.  He died on Christmas Eve in the year 1524, in that very house, of malaria, on his third journey around the Cape of Good Hope to the land of spices.  Before his final journey, he pirated and a privateered, trapped wealthy (heathen) traders inside the hulls of their ships and burned them, impersonated Muslims, took advantage of the rocky politics of the East African coast.  Gama traveled, in the same year, the opposite direction around the world from Christopher Columbus, and changed at least one city forever.

In 1965, sailor and author Robin Lee Graham touched many of the same ports, most of them African coastal towns with names starting with M.  Graham set out from his home in Southern California at the age of 16 in his 24-foot sloop with two kittens as company.  His goal was to circle the globe alone.  Until 2009, he was the youngest person ever to do so.  The trip took five years. Graham returned home a man, in body, in mind, in law.  He had seen the world and struggled with it, and struggled with himself.  And he discovered soon enough that these struggles were not nearly over.  He had been forced to find what he needed to work through them in himself.

In the hottest part of the day, we decided to do some exploring.  We walked from the Christian part of town (the part where signs on every street corner say “God’s Own Country,” the site of the Santa Cruz Basilica and St. Francis Church, where Gama was originally laid to rest) to the Muslim part of town, with temples and mosques towering above the other buildings and the palm trees.  We were blinded by the sweat running in our eyes, the sun so hot it stung our unprotected skin.  Every street crammed full of brightly-colored homes and darkened doorways looked the same.  But we crossed the canal back into the Christian part of town, the touristy part, and made it back to Napier House only 15 minutes late for our scheduled meeting time.  Everything we were looking for was within two blocks of the hotel, but we spent two hours getting lost about town, making our heading toward what we were sure was a shoreline.

After night falls it rains, the bucketing kind that sounds like snare drums on the windows.  My favorite sound to sleep to.  And in the morning when the sun rises, the egg-yolk warmth is very welcome, just like the morning after the longest night of your life.

At breakfast, Thom reads French tabloids over toast with pineapple jelly.  Apparently Hugh Jackman does yoga on vacation…?  Kenyon encourages me to get over my horrible loss of dear Vasco.  Maybe Hugh could be a good rebound man.