To Sera Je – Southern India

To Sera Je
Southern India

I decided on a Thursday in August, with the view from the tube window bouncing back at me from the tunnel walls a foot from the end of my nose. Modern life, I decided, to coin a phrase, was rubbish; euphemistically hectic, complicated, challenging and interesting, in reality a series of small and monotonous ins and outs, comings and goings, to-ings and fro-ings. All my decisions were made and dictated by someone else; my boss, my paranoid line manager, London Transport, the RMT, and whoever it was at Tescos that decided how many different types of pasta is on sale at any one time in the South Tottenham branch. And the net results of those decisions was that for some time, every day had resembled the one before, identical siblings in a freakishly big family, with strict, narrow minded parents and a lousy deal on pocket money. It was all…it was all just too damn predictable.

Stood in Waterstones with the alphabeticised ranks of Lonely Planet, Beidecker, Footprint and Rough Guide in front of me, the world really was my oyster, and I chose…Weston Super Mare. No, no, only kidding. India. I chose India. From the purple framed front cover featuring a heavily made up cow, to the pictures inside of toothsome, raggedly dressed artisans; to the blasé mentions en passant of three day bus rides through nomad strewn deserts; to the descriptions of villages clinging perilously to mountains and antiquity; here was a world where I could make my own decisions. Here was a place where I could live or die, rise or fall, succeed or fail by my own wits, rather than someone else’s. And I had two whole weeks to do it in.

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A wall of heat isn’t like a wall of bricks; you can’t see it coming. You can smell it, a sharp, tangy, acrid hybrid of sweat and petrol and rotting fruit, and you can hear it, an almost perceptible hum, a constant aural backdrop to the loud, excited, jabbering exhortations of the crowd and the chesty, asthmatic drone of a million tuk-tuks. There’s certainly a hint of something as you stand rubbing shoulders in the air conditioned customs hall with business travellers, obligatory hippies and a bunch of lads in shell suits, carrying cardboard boxes branded with the names of electrical retail outlets, who got on at Doha. But it doesn’t really hit you until the electronic glass doors of the main concourse open, and the no-man’s land of Sahar International Airport ejects you unceremoniously, a swift glance at your passport and a visit to the exchange bureau aside, into the depths of the wastelands that surround Mumbai.

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Gertrude Bell, intrepid Victorian explorer, once pondered “Are we the same people, I wonder, when all our surroundings, associations, acquaintances are changed?” I assumed that this had been some time before her desert period, and that the experience of mapping huge swathes of the Middle East solo, with just a camel for company, would have provided Gertrude with an answer, one way or another. I was also certain, as I joined a queue of equally bleary-eyed travellers waiting for taxis, that I knew what the answer had been. Just like Gertrude I had raised the anchor, untied the guy ropes, and was preparing to turn myself upside down and pour myself whole into a brand new shape, to be fashioned by whatever surroundings, associations and acquaintances lay ahead.

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The journey on the Shatabdi Express, from Mumbai to Bangalore. I share a carriage with two middle aged, middle class Indian couples who take pity on my cack handed attempts to first open, and then discard discretely the tin foil container of fluorescent orange chicken something or other that the porter has brought around. Smiling benevolently these frequent train travellers insist on feeding me from the picnics they’ve brought from home. A child of the Live Aid generation, I suffer a momentary pang of guilt about being fed by the third world, but no one else seems to mind, so I tuck in.

As the passing day crowds in at us from the windows, one of the husbands, travelling to the coast to visit his daughter, regales us with stories from his trade, making “suitings” for a large tailoring firm, where he is a manager. His voice, soft and hesitant, but nonetheless measured and considered, offers a balanced counterpoint to the continuous click click click of train against rail, perhaps honed through years of placing carefully judged words in the gaps between the whirrs and clicks of a room full of battered Singer sewing machines.

Soon the husbands start to talk politics, the wives begin to doze, and I’m left to my own devices and the book. The irony of running away to find adventure and excitement but without deviating from the advice given in my mass-produced guide book isn’t lost on me. I remember a conversation with one of my brother’s girlfriends, who claimed that guide books were the root of all evil, encouraging communities to abandon traditional ways of life in order to pander to the whims of hedonistic, western currency dispensing Neanderthals. She never travelled with a book, preferring to simply find her own way around continents with nothing more than a map, a compass and a smile. Consequently she’d been arrested seven times in seven different countries, and was banned from ever visiting Oklahoma again. It had all sounded so glamorous and exciting in Crouch End. This wasn’t Crouch End, however, so the book stayed.

A few hours drive from Mysore, towards the coastal city of Mangalore, are a number of Tibetan settlements. I knew little at that point of Tibet or its people, or the desperate measures that had forced them to flee their homeland to seek refuge in other parts of the world. I had a vague inkling that there was a connection with Buddhism, a strange, mystical religion that with its incense and meditation and general live and let live-ness seemed the complete antithesis of the rather thin lipped, puritanical Christianity I had been brought up with. This, and the fact that, according to the book, one of the main settlements was in the middle of nowhere, whilst still being only 5 kilometers from a major highway, was enough for me, and so I went to Mysore.

After three days of solid travelling, I felt I could have drawn a straight, continuous line from my flat in North London to the back seat of this little yellow taxi, cutting through the acid green and yellow swathes of southern India, in search of the settlements. At one point we passed a trio of brightly dressed women, casually supporting bundles on top of their heads, walking along the side of the road, followed by a small boy and a large, mangy looking dog. There were no buildings in sight, nowhere they could have walked from or be walking to. As we passed, the woman in front was turning to speak to the other two, and suddenly it seemed like the most important thing in the world to know what they were talking about, where they were going, what they were going to do when they got there. Frustrated by the protections of the dusty, battered little taxi, I wanted nothing more than to get out and walk, leave the highway, stop going in a straight line for once. I had a vision of myself as Little Red Riding Hood, leaving the path; it had turned out alright in the end for her, maybe it would for me, too. I’d come all this way but it still felt as though I was dancing to someone else’s tune, even if I had invented my own dance steps. As always, thoughts outlast the moment, and we sped past the women, leaving me to watch as they shrank into little blots on the car’s windscreen mirror.

Going at a fair lick, the draft roared through the half-opened windows of the taxi, carrying with it the metallic odour of sun rotted fruit from the occasional roadside stalls we passed. The smell seemed to permeate every square inch of taxi space, before taking up a malevolent and brooding residence on the back seat, like a cantankerous elderly relative demanding an afternoon’s outing. Although predominantly through open country, the four hour journey to the settlements saw us pass through areas that varied in their levels of suburbanity, from hectic, dusty, diesel choked small towns to a tea shack and a couple of huts on either side of the road. In one stretch of tiny, ramshackle high street, we were forced to pause briefly behind a dusty little truck, bringing my eye line level with what appeared to be a small, al fresco barber’s shop. A man on a stool, under the shade of a large tree, reading a newspaper, with a white towel tucked bib style around his neck, whilst the barber set about his hair with a large pair of scissors. Over the idling of the car engine I could hear the rusty squeak and clip of the scissors, and the barber’s laugh as he stopped momentarily to lean forward and look at something in the paper indicated by his client. I wondered what had made them laugh. I wondered if the man was a regular client, if he often visited this kerbside parlour, perhaps living or working nearby. I wondered if the hairdresser would complete his creation by whipping out a mirror from behind a tree, show his client the back view, before perhaps offering him “a little something for the weekend, sir?” It all seemed so heady and exotic, as the licks of raven black hair fell to the ground, and collected in a little halo around the stool under the tree.

Sera Je is a university close to the Kodagu border, where children as young as four are sent to train to be monks. We arrived at midday, as the sun began its last, full strength assault on the landscape’s palette of greens and yellows, trying to bleach them out with the strength of its white heat. It was a fight the sun was destined to lose, today as it had always done, and probably always would. I had been prepared for this by the four hour journey encased in a small box of metal and glass. What I hadn’t expected was the noise. The bell. Not the languid, sonorous peal of the solitary bell that frames the tranquil foreign landscapes of imagination, but the shrill, continuous peal of a fire alarm. It burrowed deep inside me, raising memories regimented lines in school playgrounds; having my name ticked off in the register; being told off for talking.

The cab driver spoke briefly to an old man leaning against the wall, then turned to me: “lunchtime.” And then, from almost nowhere, we were surrounded. The tranquil, meditative, calming flow I’d been expecting, the result of a life so completely different to mine, was washed away in a jostling, shoving, squealing, squalling mass of schoolboys; schoolboys with marbles; schoolboys with footballs; schoolboys punching other schoolboys; schoolboys chasing other schoolboys. Suddenly, I was at the end of my road, in North London, at 3:30 on a weekday afternoon, and from somewhere the phrase “boys will be boys” sprang to mind. The bloke on the train, going to visit his daughter; the three women, probably just doing their own version of my Victoria Line commute; a guy getting his hair cut. In all probability, weather aside, their surroundings, associations and acquaintances were probably no different to mine. And for a split second it seemed to have been an awfully big journey for such a small discovery.

A little way from the brick and glass of the new-built Sera Je was a cafe. I went and sat and had a cup of tea.