India

Louise with Sara and Dana, two students.

Thirty of us went right from the ship to Mother Theresa’s home for “unadoptable girls” in Chennai. Going right to Mother Theresa’s might have made for a fairly rough landing in India. Other students had left for the airport, to see the Taj Mahal, or the ghats of Varanasi, but the kids who sign up for the service projects at Semester at Sea are quite remarkable, and sturdy. The truth is you need to be sturdy to go into Mother Theresa’s.

Traffic in Chennai.

The first floor housed about 20 profoundly retarded girls (and a few boys) who were curled up in their metal cribs, blind, deaf; limbs locked, many of them not in any kind of recognizable human form. To me they seemed to be in a profound dream state. All had been abandoned on the streets of Chennai. The nuns had picked them up and now care for them with great love and affection. The second floor had about thirty girls and young women with varying degrees of retardation, but they were conscious, curious and ready to play. They sang. We sang. We taught them clapping games, tossed balloons and blew bubbles, played Duck Duck, Goose Goose, a game I will never understand. I sat in a plastic chair and watched it all from the corner. A little girl with a sloping head sidled up her chair next to me, and fell asleep on my lap while I petted her back like a kitten. We also met two individuals who were not retarded, but who were severely disabled, one a ten year old boy with a cleff palate and no arms and legs, but with a devilish sense of humor, and the other a 36 year old woman, also missing limbs. But she had a fine mind, was conversant in English, although she told me that she preferred to read in Tamil. She slept on a small mat on the concrete floor among the profoundly retarded. She was safe, clean, and had made a life for herself among the sisters. It was a day to count one’s fingers and toes, one’s blessings, and to have the utmost respect for those nuns.

The next day, I took Jo and her friend Erin to Pondicherry, a city about two hours south of Chennai on the coast. Pondicherry is an interesting amalgam of French colonialism, southern Indian culture, and an overlay of western hippies and utopian idealists. Pondicherry was one of the few French forays into colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, and if you judge the success of a colony by longevity, it failed. On the other hand, if you judge it by influence, it did not. The French are still a vital force in Pondicherry. I’m not sure why, but a substantial number of French still live there, and there is an active Alliance Francais for those on the subcontinent who want to learn French language and culture. We stayed on the third floor of a heritage hotel in a room with twenty foot ceilings, its own balcony, marble floors, and carved wooden platform beds that stood waist high. The building itself looked like it belonged in the French quarter of New Orleans.

Our street in Pondicherry.

Pondicherry has a big university, and hosts a lot of foreign exchange students, so it feels very much like a college town, with bookstores, cheap eateries and coffee shops, and young people buzzing around recklessly on small motor bikes. It’s on the sea, and there’s a glorious Promenade that you can stroll up and down, watching India at play---there was surf, kites, kids, cotton candy, music, weird whirly things that glow in the dark. I could easily live in Pondicherry. Jo kept spotting aging hippies on the streets of Pondicherry, saying, “Look, Mom, there’s a friend for you.” One of the things I hate about getting older: I am not going to have the time to lead all the lives I want to lead. It’s a good thing I believe in reincarnation. It takes some of the pressure off.

Selling scarves at the sea.

Election propaganda.

The food in Pondicherry was outstanding. Every meal had three or four orders of buttered nan and Indian yoghurt, and the main meals were often curries, usually very spicy. One night the food was so hot we simply could not consume our main dishes. I have a Flip Video of poor Erin weeping over dinner, complete with nose running and steam coming out of her ears. We went twice to a place called the Rise Inn, a small family owned restaurant, and for dessert, we feasted on crepes with butter and honey and lemon. Fresh, hot crescents were part of every breakfast.

Jo and Erin at the Rise Inn.

On our way out of Pondicherry, we stopped at Auroville, the utopian community begun in 1968 by the “Mother,” one of the disciples of the famous Sri Aurobondo who founded the ashram in Pondicherry. It remains a thriving, sustainable, international community of several thousand people, and while we didn’t have time to do the tour of the remarkable looking temple, we spent a hour or so, just walking around, and sitting under the trees. Auroville was green, beautifully landscaped, spotlessly clean, and apparently thriving. I wished we could have stayed longer.

Auroville.

On our last day, we went to Kanchipuram and Mamalapuram. In Kanchipuram we went to a 16th century Hindu temple and were lucky enough to have visited on an auspicious day yielding great celebrations of music, with horns blowing, drums beating, incense swinging, chanting of priests, and transportation of large, wooden painted gods and goddesses throughout the dark temple chambers. It was electrifying. In Mamalapuram, we saw the amazing rock carvings and Shiva temples of the Pallava dynasty, including one huge rock carving called Arjuna’s Penance that had families of elephants, and flying goddesses, and snakes, and flowing rivers and tricky cats and---you name it. The rock carvings were so beautiful, all from the sixth century, some Buddhist imagery, some Hindu, but so different from later Indian temple art that tends to be repetitive, and stylized. The animals in these carvings were so naturalistic, so individualized, and the subjects were all captured in quiet moments of intimacy, young girls fixing their hair in a mirror, cows being milked, baby elephants hiding shyly under their mother’s massive weight. I had a lot of fun in Pondicherry, but if you asked me: what was the most remarkable thing you saw in India? It would be the temples and rock sculptures in Mamalapuram. I would travel far to see such a thing. Indeed, I did. LH

Kanchipuram.

Arjuna's Penance.

Shiva Temple, Pallava Dynasty.