Learning Tamil in 12 weeks: travel writing from our man in Chennai

THE VILLAGE FESTIVAL

After an exhausting couple of weeks locked in my flat trying to learn Tamil, my friend Ishara proposed the perfect cure for my cabin fever.

“Let’s go on a trip”, she said. “My friend Rajesh lives in a tiny village 500 kilometres down south, and he’s invited a big group of us down for the annual village festival. He says you can come.”

“Sounds good”, I said, leaping at the chance to get out of Chennai properly for the first time since my arrival, but more importantly, excited by the idea of “getting off the beaten track”, “having a real Indian experience”, “interacting with the indigenae”, or whatever awful cliché would best describe my eagerness at that point to (temporarily) escape from my cushy ex-pat life in Chennai.

Two days later I was climbing on board the 10 hour sleeper to Madurai, the famous temple town that was the stop-off point for the first leg of our journey. Despite having probably used the same sheets since 1998, the “beds” on the bus were actually rather comfortable, although the fact that they were doubles, and had a curtain you could draw across for privacy, didn’t encourage me to whip out my UV lamp and perform a closer inspection.

There is something undeniably thrilling about being on a sleeper bus. I think films like Some like it hot (you know: the bit where Marilyn Munroe and the rest of the showgirls are horsing about in their nighties on the train) and Chariots of Fire (fry-up on the Flying Scotsman with the morning papers for Eric Liddle) have eternally romanticised sleeper transport to the point where as long as you are vaguely horizontal, and in motion, you could have cockroaches crawling over your face and a couple having loud sex in the bunk above you, and you’d still feel like James Bond on the Orient Express.

With a cool breeze blowing in through the window, I looked out at the stars a’ twinkling in the night sky, and soon fell into a deep slumber.

“Wake up Hugo!”, called my friend Deepika, stretching up on her tip toes to squeeze my foot and try to rouse me into action.

We jumped off the bus, which then promptly sped off, leaving us on the outskirts of Madurai, but happily, right next to the hotel which Deepika had booked us into.

“How did you sleep Deepika?” I asked.

“Very well. Great, thank you”, she said, trying to ignore the fact that I was grinning at her, and looking at a hefty lovebite that had appeared on her neck since our departure from Chennai. The romanticism of the sleeper bus had obviously not been lost on her either. As well as our trip being a bona fide cultural excursion, it had also given Deepika, now 23, a perfect chance to escape her parents’ supervision for a few days, and spend some quality time with Vijay , her secret boyfriend of two years.

“That was much nicer than the last sleeper bus I was on”, said Deepika. “We were all in these big seats that time, and I was sleeping at the back. But then I woke up, because I kept feeling as if something was crawling up my leg. The third time I felt it, I opened my eyes, and saw that the man in front was leaning round and running his hand up and down my leg.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“I screamed and screamed until everyone in the bus was awake, and then the man had to go and sit at the front next to the driver until we got to the next town. Then he was thrown out.”

“God that’s creepy”, I said.

But it was obviously not something that surprised my Indian friends as much as it did me. Apparently, as an Indian girl, you have to be constantly on the lookout for men trying to molest you. My friend Ishara described how only a week earlier, she had got out of a rickshaw on her way to college, and on seeing her approaching, a man had immediately whipped out his old boy and started beating one out in front of her, presumably using her fully clothed figure as inspiration for his self-abuse.

“What were you wearing?”, I asked.

“Jeans and a t-shirt”, she said. I think it’s the fact that if you’re wearing Western clothes, they immediately think you’re a slut and it gets them going.”

(NO) SEX IN THE CITY

These bizarre anecdotes got me thinking about the balance of sexual immorality between the West and India. On the one hand, people in the US and UK go around indulging their every whim, having multiple sexual partners before marriage, and living in a society where taking the morning after pill is seen as more of a post binge anecdote than a moral dilemma.

But then, at least we don’t have people jipping off in the street when they catch the reflection of a woman’s elbow in a car wing mirror.

As Jeff Goldblum says so presciently in Jurassic Park, just before the raptors and T-Rexes start trashing the place and undermining Attenborough’s attempts to domesticate them — “If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained…Life…finds a way”.

Everyone on this earth is here because someone, somewhere, got laid. In fact, two people. But one of them really, really wanted to get laid.

Some countries try and repress people’s natural sexual impulses by attaching social stigma and moral censure to those (especially women) who transgress the strict moral conventions that have been laid down. This approach, as I have discovered in India, has significant drawbacks, and produces huge swathes of unnaturally frustrated young men, stomachs (and loins) rumbling in protest at their unsated sexual appetites. If you doubt this assertion, take a look at the IPL this year, where groups of men would literally scramble over each other and press their noses to the metal fences, just for a chance to ogle the cheerleaders while they sat behind the boundaries in between “cheers”.

Meanwhile the UK, apathetic, immoral vice cauldron that it is, gives the freedom to its citizens to make their own decisions. No social stigma, no tut-tutting. “We’re not going to tell you what to do, but you’re only letting yourself down if you don’t do the right thing”, society seems to tell us. Unsurprisingly, this cunning attempt at reverse psychology, giving people the freedom to do the “wrong” thing in the hope that they won’t do it, is just as ineffectual at curbing our sexual urges.

Everywhere in the world, men are sitting in offices, walking along the street, riding buses, watching tv, tending their garden gnomes, lying in bed, whatever. If there was some way of getting a special thought-capturing device to collectively gather all that information, and then to extract the most important keywords from those thoughts and feed them into a search engine, I guarantee that “have sex with” and “naked beautiful woman” would be among the most popular results. Such is the procreative instinct that we have been saddled with. “Resist temptation and stop having fantasies about every pretty girl I see” would probably be a Googlewhack.

BACK TO THE ROAD TRIP…

After a night’s stay over in Madurai, we hooked up with the rest of our travelling companions, a group of Tamilian boys who I had never met but who were enthusiastic enough to have me on the trip. Having got caught in a rainstorm, I sat drenched on the bus to Kovilpatti (our final destination) for three hours, while the boys talked among themselves, exclusively in Tamil. It was the first time I had really hung out with people who preferred Tamil to English; I sat there very contentedly listening to the strange musical rhythms of their conversation, and taking an almost masochistic enjoyment from the  torture that the potholed road surface was intermittently inflicting on my arse. Of course it was painful; but it was also AUTHENTIC! “That’s what you came here for boyo. None of that Lonely Planet shit; you’ve dropped off the radar”, I thought.

Kovilpatti

Having checked into our hotel in Kovilpatti around midnight, we wandered out to get some dinner nearby.

“Do you know how much the rooms are?” I asked Madhan, one of the Tamil boys, just to check if I’d have to go to a cashpoint in the morning.

“Rajesh’s father is paying for the rooms”, he said.

I murmured some dissent, saying that he couldn’t possibly be paying for all of us, especially me, given that I had only met Rajesh the day before.

“We have come here for the festival in his village”, said Madhan. “So we are his guests. And in India, the guest is God. That’s why we don’t pay anything.”

Not only had Rajesh’s father paid for hotel rooms for 8 people for two nights, but Rajesh also made sure that we had plenty to drink, and we never paid for a taxi. On our excursion the next day, he wouldn’t even let me pay for my own cigarettes, running over and stuffing a hundred rupee note into the shop owner’s hand when he saw that I was reaching for my wallet.

This theme of incredible hospitality was played out many times during the rest of my village trip, but it had also been true in many of the experiences I’d had before and after it. “In India, the guest is God”, and “Please. You are our guest.” were all familiar refrains that I would hear whenever I got confused about, or overly thankful for, the sheer level of undeserved hospitality that I kept receiving. Rajesh’s aunty even gave me a bollocking for thanking her for a mutton breakfast she laid on for us the next morning.

“Why are you thanking me?” she said. “You are my guest”.

“Yeah, fair enough. That mutton was a bit fatty, and the idlies were all soggy and cold. You should be thanking me for eating that shit”, I said, laughing and then giving her a hearty pat on the back”.

NOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!

Hospitable Aunty and the rest of the breakfast club

Walking through Kovilpatti at midnight was a wonderfully eerie experience: streetlights that lined the dusty main road lit up stray dogs and rickshaw drivers with a soft, orange light; shopkeepers and hanger-rounders went about their business, the same as in daytime, just more peacefully; the only thing that broke the silence, apart from the soft crunching of the road under our feet, was some violin music that was playing out from a stall on the opposite side of the street, where four men stood around drinking tea and smoking.

Eventually we came to a restaurant one of the boys had recommended. The ceiling was thatched with dried palm leaves, and there were customers sitting at nearly every table, despite the late hour.

We ordered fried paratha, a delicious Indian bread that acts as a curry sponge, along with some  chicken and vegetable dishes.

A fat man with a heavy beard took our orders, and then returned a few minutes later, his hands laden with all the different dishes. Having placed the curries and meats on the table, he served us each of our parathas separately. By serve, I mean he held a paratha over my plate, looked me long and hard in the eye, and then tore it into tiny pieces by scrunching it in his bare hands. I watched this bizarre performance several times, as he went round each of the boys doing the same thing. Nobody flinched. They knew the score. “At least he probably washes his hands quite a lot”, I thought to myself, before we got up to leave, and I saw him itching the gusset of his kylie with his index serving finger.

The Paratha ripper

WATERFALL

The next day Rajesh organised for us to go on a trip to a waterfall.

“How far is it?” someone asked, just trying to get a loose grip on the timing of the thing.

“No more than an hour and half”, said Rajesh. “Be back by 8 for the beginning of the village festival.”

After three and a half hours driving full pelt, we reached the end of the road, and set off on foot, to climb the last 3 kms up to the waterfall. Despite my growing  suspicion that there was actually a hole in the space-time continuum over India, and that it was the only explanation for people’s advice on how long something would take never bearing even the vaguest correlation to the actual time frame, I could not have been in better spirits.

On the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the photos below show just what a stunning place it was. The only drawback was that the boys used our only bottles of water to dilute their whiskey, and the waterfall that we were looking for had actually dried up because of the lack of rainfall. Still, we managed to find a lagoon that was deep enough for us all to lark about in…..

THE VILLAGE FESTIVAL

Having got back from the waterfall and done a quick turnaround at the hotel, we rushed back to the car to make our way to Rajesh’s village for the beginning of the festivities. This was actually the second day of the festival, but one of the main events, the “Sammam Kodai” (Midnight Festival), was due to start in about an hour.

Halfway to the village, we received a phone call from Rajesh. I listened in to the conversation he was having with one of the boys; as well as his voice, I could hear a lot of shouting in the background.

“What’s happening?” I asked, once Madhan had hung up.

“There is a small fight going on”, he said. “Someone has thrown a brick through Rajesh’s mother’s windscreen on her way to the village. Rajesh and the rest of the villagers are chasing the people who did it. He says we should turn back. He says it’s not safe for the girls.”

Rajesh’s father, despite living in such a small village, was apparently a fairly powerful political figure in the district, so everyone supposed that it was some party infighting that had led to the brick throwing incident.

Still, all sounds a bit like a good old-fashioned village brawl, I thought. Surely it’s not enough to call off the festival trip. After about twenty minutes, Rajesh called and told us that we could turn back again, and come to the village. Crisis averted. Presumably whoever was responsible had been successfully lynched, or had escaped far enough that Rajesh didn’t expect any more trouble.

I asked him the next day if violence among the villagers was particularly common.

“Sometimes, Yes”, he said. He then told me the story of an inter-village conflict twelve years before between two men. A man had had some petty disagreement or other with someone from a neighbouring village. One night, the wife grew worried because her husband was late coming home from work. She asked around the village, but nobody had seen him that day. Eventually, she decided to go to the nextdoor village and ask for him there.

“I think I saw him working by the barn on the other side of the field”, offered one man, after she had spent some time making enquiries around the village.

The wife went along to the barn to see if her husband was in fact there. She thought he might have had an accident. It didn’t take her long to find him: he had been cut into pieces and placed in a cardboard box.

ANYHOW…………..

Walking the last part of the journey, we turned the corner into the village, and were immediately hit by the ear-splitting sound of trumpet music being played out over the tannoys. The heavy beat of drums accompanied our entrance into the festival itself. I tried to look nonchalant, as if I wasn’t some lanky white alien who had just wandered in through the darkness. Luckily I was being flanked by Ishara and Deepika, who were also attracting a good number of stares, far more lusty than the WTF looks that I was getting.

Inside the tent

Once we entered the village, the atmosphere felt charged with an almost overwhelming energy and tension. Next to the “square”, a large makeshift tent had been erected. Inside, several different and equally bewildering scenes were going on. At one end, a great mass of people were crowding round one of the “Ammans”, a member of the community who had become temporarily possessed by the god (on which more below). The Amman was reading people’s palms, dabbing their faces with white ash, and delivering his prophecies. Rajesh jostled me through to the front of the crowd to receive mine.

The Amman took my palm and studied it closely.

“He says you are undergoing a great adventure, but that within a year you will succeed in your goal… But only if you come back here for to receive his blessing at next year’s festival”, said my friend Rajesh, who was acting as translator.

“OK”, I said, doing my best to look humbled by the wisdom of his prophecy.

Given the fact that I was having my palm read by a deity in a tiny village in South India, I didn’t think it was that difficult to guess that I might be on some kind of adventure. I think if he’d come and told me the same thing while I was eating a cheese toasty in front of Countdown, I might not have dismissed him so quickly as a textbook “cold reader”.

However, not everyone was as cynical about the Amman’s powers as I was. My friend Ishara had to go and sit down after her “reading” because she had been so shaken by the accuracy of his insight.

“What did he tell you”, I asked, going over to check if she was OK afterwards.

“He said that I have been experiencing pain inside me, but that soon it will heal.”

“Yup. And what else?”

“No, that was it”, she said, looking up at me with an expression of awe written on her face.

I wasn’t buying it. Ishara had been having some lady troubles since the beginning of our trip, so technically the Amman was onto something; but then he’d probably just spotted her wandering gingerly into the festival ten minutes before, generally looking a bit ratty and miserable.

Show me a man who can tell that a woman might have “pain inside” at a particular moment in the moon’s cycle, and I will show you a whole village of prophets, I thought, wandering back into the tent.

Drummers and trumpeters at the festival. The Amman is on the left in the hat.

Next to the palm-reading, there was another “possessed” deity jumping around, performing a dance as energetic as it was bizarre. Four trumpeters and as many drummers (on traditional village instruments — not like some Jazz session) stood behind him providing the music; the crowd cheered loudly and stamped their feet into the ground in approval.

At one stage, another man bundled into the middle of the dancing area and began performing his own version of the dance, head lolling from side to side and eyes rolling back in his head. There was a commotion, he was shoved onto the ground by another man, and a fight very nearly broke out. It was only stopped when a woman started attacking the man who had pushed the other dancer to the ground.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“It’s only a small fight”, replied Rajesh (that phrase again: it’s like he was pleasantly surprised that the whole event hadn’t already descended into some frenzied Dionysian brawl). “That woman was trying to beat the man who pushed her husband.”

“Why were they angry with the man?” I asked.

“He was pretending to be possessed by the god”, said Rajesh.

Pretending to be possessed by a god. “Sacrilege!” I thought, as I looked across the tent at the Amman giving out another of his crock prophecies.

Snake man

Just around the corner, at the other end of the tent, there was another group of people gathered around in a circle. I walked away from the dancing and the prophecies, past a couple of chickens that were decapitated, still quivering on their spikes, and went to have a look at what was going on.

Accompanied by some deliberately jarring, high-pitched pipe music, there was a man standing in the middle of the crowd, palms pressed together and held high above his head, imitating the movement of a fish swimming, or that’s what it looked like to me.

What is going on? I asked. (My favourite phrase of the night, as I wandered around the village in a state of constant bewilderment).

“That man….is a snake god”, said Rajesh. “You see, he is dancing like a snake with his hands”.

Just as Rajesh finished his explanation, the snake god suddenly lurched towards the section of the crowd we were standing in, flicking his tongue back and forth to complete the impersonation. I almost shat myself with fear, beginning to get a little paranoid and overcome with the noise, costumes and total other-worldliness of the evening thus far.

After another few minutes, the snake man dropped to the floor, where somebody had placed a tray of water at the foot of a couple of steps that led up to a small shrine behind.

Lying face first with his hands behind his back, the man began to gargle the shallow water from the tray and thrash his head around. I never asked what this particular part of the performance was in aid of; I just stood there, transfixed at the sight of the jobbing snake god trying to waterboard himself.

“OK. Now, Come.”, said Rajesh, taking my hand and leading me out of the other side of the tent, where a woman was sitting having her head clean shaved to appease the gods. “It is time for the Midnight Festival.”

MIDNIGHT FESTIVAL

(this part of the blog is taken from my entry to the Daily Telegraph travel writing competition, so it might sound a bit different)

“Make sure you don’t get in their way when they come”, said my friend Rajesh. “Or they might cut your head off”. I threw him an expression of mock fear, but the irony quickly drained from my face when I saw that he wasn’t joking.

I was standing outside at one end of a narrow passageway in a remote South Indian village, awaiting the beginning of “Sammam Kodai” (trans. “midnight festival”), one of the main events of the three-day long annual festivities that my friend had invited me to attend.

Just behind me, at the passage entrance, stood a man and three women decked out in special ceremonial garb. The man’s chest was smeared all over with bright yellow turmeric powder. Round his neck hung three long garlands of jasmine, and on his head sat an extravagant piece of multi-coloured headgear, which resembled the Pope’s mitre, except with two pieces of material shaped like donkey’s ears sown onto each side. The women wore orange dresses and garlands, and the one standing in the centre was holding a clay pot filled with burning coals.

The main "Amman" possessed by the god, avec chapeau

possessed ladies, one of them carrying boiling pot of coal

“How is she holding onto that pot?”, I asked Rajesh. “It must be red-hot by now.”
“She is possessed by the deity”, he explained. “So she cannot be harmed. It’s the same for all of them”.

In the months leading up to the festival, I was told, certain members of the community find themselves being possessed by “Amman”, the village goddess, when they are listening to special tribal music. It is on these lucky few that the honour of being deified during the festival is conferred. They are made into gods, albeit only for three days, and the people of the village worship them and go to them to have their palms read.

“Do you believe the god is in them”, I asked my friend Madhan. He hesitated.
“I should trust it”, he said. “It’s my religion… I have never felt it myself, but my mother was possessed once.”

The time was now two minutes to midnight. The drumbeat which had been pounded out for the past twenty minutes gradually began to gather pace; the squawk from the traditional “nadaswaram” trumpets that were being played grew louder and more intense; the murmuring and chanting of the crowd all mirrored the instruments’ crescendo, and everyone fixed their gaze onto the far end of the passageway, which was still cloaked in darkness.

Another group of temporary “deities” had been busy banishing evil spirits from every house in the village, but now, as the clock struck midnight, they rushed out of the darkness towards us, brandishing torches and small machetes. As they reached the other “gods”, the crowd threw up an almighty, celebratory whoop. The exorcism was complete.

“Now we go for chai”, said Rajeesh. “And then it’s the goats’ sacrifice, ok?”

What an incredibly strange evening, I thought to myself, as we wandered back to his house for our teabreak.

SEX DANCE

After the divine inspiration of the midnight festival, we were taken back to the main square to witness some rather more bawdy entertainment, in the form of a sexy dance called the “karakattam”.

Everyone in the village assembled to watch the dance, which featured two of the village women dressed in unapologetically slutty outfits (think of belly dancers wearing mini skirts). Partnering them was a man who looked like he had stolen most of Abba’s aerobics wardrobe and then had a five-day long drinking competition with himself.

Some of the women’s special moves included, but were not limited to: grinding up and down on the man; goosing him; and then pretending to fellate him, all in front of some confused-looking children who were sitting in the front row.

Click on the video below to see the man engaging in some Evil Kinevil style acrobatics.

DAY 2: BULLOCK RACING AND GOAT SACRIFICES

The next morning we were back at the village by 6am, awaiting the start of the annual bullock race. The bullocks had been reared specially for the race, and there was massive honour at stake for the person who reared and trained the winning bullock.

In order to give them an extra edge, small needles were placed at the end of the sticks which the drivers whipped the bullocks with.

I managed to get a couple of good photos before my camera died…

GOODBYE GOAT(S)

Among all the extraordinary sights that I witnessed in Rajesh’s village during the two days I was there, one event in particular will be forever etched on my mind: the sacrifice of 8 fully grown goats was the most grisly, macabre, yet disturbingly compelling thing I have ever seen.

One by one, the goats, horns wreathed with flowers, were brought into the tent, which everyone in the village had attempted to cram into.

One man, dressed in religious attire, would stand in front of the goat, distracting him. If the goat wasn’t looking straight ahead when the executioner brought down the blade, then its head would probably go flying into the crowd.

The first goat stood there, looking a lot more gormless than afraid. The man behind waited for the right moment, until it was completely still. Then he raised his aruval high above his shoulder, and swung it downwards with one hard swipe. The head dropped to the floor with a sickening thud, the crowd let out a huge roar of approval at the executioner’s handiwork, and the was-goat’s body slumped down, staining the dirt floor with the blood that was spewing from its neck.

This gory display was repeated again and again, the crowd growing more and more excited with each corpse they added to the pile. People laughed and screamed as the dead goats sprayed blood all around, their headless trunks kicking one another on the ground because of the nerves that had yet to fully die.

By the end, it looked like the set from the opening scene of Gladiator. My trainers were covered with blood.

The violence had all been too much for my friend Deepika, who had fled the tent and was sitting on the side, trying to stop herself from being sick.

I went over to check on her, passing a 6 year-old boy who was holding a chicken, its body and head both in different hands.

“It’s so inhuman”, said Deepika, holding back the tears, lamenting the brutality of the whole event.

Her boyfriend Vijay came and put a hand on her shoulder.

Don’t worry”, he said, and then by way of comforting her, gave the following piece of helpful trivia:

“It is much easier to cut off a man’s head than a goat’s. There is no bone in the neck”.

4 hours later, we were sitting in Rajesh’s grandmother’s house having our final lunch before we left for Chennai. No surprises what was on the menu — GOAT CURRY. Just as I was choking down a piece of goat tubing that was the same shape as a piece of macaroni, Rajesh’s granny came bustling in, holding a tray with yet more food on it.

“You must try this”, she said. “It is a great speciality. It’s dried goat’s blood”.

“Oh yes”, I replied, trying not to visibly grimace. “We have this in England also. We called it ‘black pudding’. Mmmmmmmm…. mmmmmmmmmmm. Great!”