Surprise! I'm not in Rajasthan anymore. This might seem abrupt but in my mind it's been a long time comin'. There are a lot of stories, reflections, and thoughts I'd love to put up here from the past two weeks of finishing up my internship and then my entire academic program, but for the sake of catching up to the present I'm just going to have to skip over those for now. Or else I fear I'll be forever stuck in the past!
April 29 at 4:35 AM marked the beginning of phase three, my 20 or so days of exploring the rest of India. We arrived at the Delhi airport at an ungodly hour, charmed our liquid bottle-filled luggage through security using our Hindi as a lubricant and by 9 AM found ourselves staring at nuns in habits under palm trees outside the Ernakulam airport, our sweat glands working over time from the sudden humidity.
We've spent the past two days exploring Fort Kochi, a small, relaxed city on a peninsula jutting out into a bay opening out into the Arabian sea. Like most port cities, Kochi is a smorgasbord of cultures, left behind by the various people that have come before (Dutch, Portuguese, Jewish, Chinese, Chola, and other ancient Indian dynasties names and dates of which I can't keep straight).
I spend most my time here thinking about the ways in which Kerala is different from Rajasthan. Examples abound! Food: a preference for rice over roti, fish, idli and sumbar, coconut in the curries, poori, porrotta. Language: English and Malayalam, the script of which looks like curly-cue doodles you'd write in the corner on your notebook for a boring class. Needless to say, Hindi doesn't do us much good here and the phrase "Ham Hindi sikh rahi hai" ("We are learning Hindi") doesn't have quite the currency it did back in the airport. Weather: we got soaking wet in a thunderstorm today, the first rain I've seen or felt in three months. It was wonderful. Religion: a strong Christian influence from the Portuguese and the Dutch. People have names like Thomas, churches and Christian iconography prosper. We attended an evening mass today and realized that worship has a distinctively Hindu flavor. Politics: the Communist Party is a stronghold here, even though Congress just won the recent election...The people even look physically different, hair curly from the humidity, skin darker, features softer, and men stockier. Women wear flowers in their hair; I wore a hibiscus behind my ear today and was soon warned that that broadcasted to the Keralan world that I was angry. I quickly tucked into the braid behind my head.
All this difference makes me wonder how the hell this country stays together. The only source of similarity I can think of (one India has over America) is the uniform time difference.
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