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The Backwaters - Part II January 20, 1999
Pretend you have arrived, for the first time in your
life, in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. You might look at the convergence of the three rivers and
the tremendous smokestacks and think, "Wow, America is cool but it sure is
polluted!" Imagine that you then go to New York City and Washington D.C. and see the
Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. After that, you tour the
Midwest: Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis and Kansas City, stopping in such towns
as Peoria, IL; Eau Claire, WI; Brainerd, MN, and Lawrence, KS. After that your tour brings
you to a small town in Nevada where you get on a horse and ride through the desert to
Arizona. Finally you wind up on a boat in the Florida Keys. By the end of your trip, your
perception of America would likely have changed. Now imagine that in each region you
visited the people were speaking a different language, wearing different clothes and
eating different food - no Super Americas or Cub Foods anywhere. Next picture hundreds and
thousands of camels, cows, pigs, goats and dogs roaming from the back alleys to the main
thoroughfares-especially in the big cities. This is the closest parallel we can draw to
our experiences in India, and it is still not quite descriptive enough. Our trip has taken
us through Varanasi on the Ganga River, Agra with the Taj Mahal, Delhi the capitol city,
the larger cities and smaller towns of Rajastan, The great Thar desert and now the Keralan
backwaters - the Florida Keys of India.
During our back water tour we trolled slowly down the
narrow canals that were lined with coconut palms and lush green rice paddies. We waved to
the Keralan children in the villages as we passed, and listened to their familiar cry of
"Hello, pen!" The humid air and scorching sun warmed our bodies to the boiling
point and when we could take it no more, we jumped from our houseboat into the warm water
that turned from sweet into salty as we traveled from the inland waters towards the ocean.
The people of Kerala would gaze at us placidly and speak
to one another in Malayan; perhaps saying, "Hey, should we get up and do something
today?" They would slightly nod to each another half yes and half no with a sort of
side to side head motion. They have no need for the definite. "Maybe today, but
tomorrow will come soon. We could do this or that tomorrow or perhaps next week. We have
all the time in the world. Let's walk up the canal and see what's happening. I think a
boat may dock and we can watch the crazy white skins rush off and hurry from here to
there."
It is not as easy to switch into the Keralan/India mode
as you may believe. Of course, it's not so hard either. In any case two days of floating,
sunning, singing, eating, and lazing in the near equatorial sun was quite enough easy to
turn the trick. |
