Better Than Fiction 2 (7 page)

O
nce, over lunch, I told an editor at a glossy travel magazine that I wanted to write a piece about the experience of not understanding a place, of being intrigued – but bewildered – the whole time I was there and leaving with no clear idea of what that place had been about. I’d said I’d noticed that the essays in his magazine were always written by travelers who seemed to know everything about their destinations long before they got there, or by writers who had a charming local friend who explained the region’s many appealing customs and attractions, preferably over dinner at a villa, and provided introductions to nearby Michelin-starred chefs and gourmet-food providers. Was I the only person who had ever gone somewhere, been confused, and felt that I’d never figured anything out? From across his plate of micro-greens, the editor stared at me as if I’d suggested writing a piece about the nicest places on the planet in which to
catch bubonic plague.

So here is a story about one of those mysteries of travel that has remained in my mind as a succession of somewhat dreamlike events, and a series of questions.

For years I couldn’t remember the name of the village. I’d search for it on maps, but all I knew was that it was somewhere on the coast of the Arabian Sea between Cochin and Trivandrum, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Then one morning, not long ago, I woke up and thought: Varkala! I googled the town, which turns out to have developed (surprise!) dozens of luxury and middle-class resorts along its gorgeous beach. But nothing remotely like that existed when Howie (now my husband, then my boyfriend) and I arrived in the winter of 1978.

Over time I have become the sort of traveler who likes thick towels, flat screen TVs, reservations made long in advance. But this is how we traveled then: We had an open-ended plane ticket back to the United States. We planned to spend four or five months in India and go home when we got tired or homesick or when our money ran out. We took the bus from Cochin to Trivandrum, with the plan of getting off and staying if we found a beautiful place.

Varkala was beautiful. We could see the palm trees and the clean white beach from the narrow road that ran through the peaceful little town. We assumed there would be somewhere to stay the night. After a day at the beach, we would continue on our trip across South India, through which I had traveled a few years before; I’d loved it and longed to return.

The bus left us in beautiful Varkala, where, as it turned out, there were no hotels. But a helpful man at the bus stop told us that a young fellow, very respectable, actually his nephew, was
building some houses on the beach. One of these houses was nearly finished, and for a small fee the landlord-builder would probably let us stay there.

The house was easy to find, and the landlord spoke perfect English. He said we could stay on an air mattress in the mostly finished house, which had working plumbing, and he would bring us breakfast – some yogurt and fruit – and a vegetarian dinner, all included in the price. The fee, in fact, was amazingly small. We decided to stay for two nights.

That first afternoon at the beach we met some fishermen and their wives. The women gave me betel to chew, and tried to teach me how to spit, with something like panache, the red saliva that betel produces and that tourists in India sometimes mistake for blood, on the sidewalk. They laughed delightedly when red slime dribbled off my lower lip. The men tried to persuade Howie to go ocean fishing on what was basically a carved-out log, and when I begged him not to, they thought that was hilarious too. Anyway, they were probably joking. Testing us, I imagine.

For the rest of that day, and all the next, we sat on the beach near our house and watched a
sadhu
– a wandering holy man – perform a ceremony that was in more or less constant progress and consisted of various sorts of work on the beach, not far from where we sat. Because some of that work involved raking the sand and patting and piling it up into ceremonial circles and lingam-like sculptural shapes, Howie and I began referring to him as Swami Sand Castle.

The first thing that needs to be said about Swami Sand Castle is that he was extraordinarily handsome and that all his movements were assured and graceful, and fascinating to watch. He was tall and thin, and though he seemed to be in his early thirties – not all that much older than we were – his long hair
had already turned silver. His eyes were so shockingly blue that we could see them from the polite and comfortable distance at which we sat. He was bare-chested, his skin was golden brown, and he wore the long wrapped white skirt the Indians call a
dhoti
, which gave him a Hindu Jesus effect. I liked the idea of a holy man who could have been a rock star back home.

For a long time he didn’t notice us, or didn’t appear to. And then he did. He nodded once and acknowledged us, and we smiled back. After that his manner changed a little and became, intermittently, a performance. He knew we were there, but he had work to do. Our watching gave the experience an ever so slightly voyeuristic edge, and – given how striking he was, and how young and in love and attractive we were then – an ever so slightly erotic aspect.

In addition to raking and patting the sand, he ministered to a steady trickle of people, men and women, old and young, families and solitary pilgrims, who came to him to receive a blessing, a dab of paint on their foreheads, and a packet wrapped in a leaf. They gave him money, then took the packets down the beach and threw them into the sea. When the stream of people slowed he would kneel and either make things out of sand or prepare more packets, small scoops of rice and spices wrapped in banana leaves.

That evening our landlord explained that it was a
puja
, a ceremony. Pilgrims traveled to buy a packet of food from the
sadhu
, food that the dead were known to like. Then they threw the packet into the sea, where the dead would somehow find it – and be fed.

By the second day we had developed a sort of relationship with the
sadhu
. When we got to the beach – on which, it seemed, he lived – he waved to us, and we waved back. Were
we disturbing him? We didn’t think so. Even if he didn’t speak English, we reasoned, he could make it clear if he wanted us to leave.

Swami Sand Castle didn’t speak English. Late that afternoon, he walked off the job and came over to us, and motioned for us to follow him. He pointed toward the town. He tilted an imaginary tea cup toward his lips. He said,
‘Chai.’

A cup of tea seemed simple enough. We’d go along and see where this went. We trailed Swami Sand Castle up the beach into the center of town and into a little hut. Maybe fifteen men sat on the floor or squatted at tiny tables drinking cups of the sweet milk tea that was boiling in a cauldron watched over by a sweating kid on a high stool up front. Every one of them looked up and stared at us, curious but not unfriendly. In pantomime, the
sadhu
made it clear that we would be buying him tea. He indicated the others: a round for the boys. Sure. This would still cost us next to nothing.

This is where my memory stops. Did we drink our tea in silence? Did we try to communicate in a simple language that involved pointing to ourselves and saying words that neither side understood, and nodding as if we did? Howie remembers that everyone smiled a lot. I remember Swami Sand Castle thanking us, pressing his palms together, and saying goodbye. We went back to our house, and I suppose he went back to the beach, to wherever he came from.

That evening, after dinner, Howie and I both got violently ill, first one of us, then the other; we took turns. When the landlord came to collect the tiffins, the metal containers in which he’d brought us dinner, he heard Howie retching in the bathroom. He asked me what was wrong, and though I felt sick myself, I told him the story of our day, all about the
sadhu
and the tea.

Cluck cluck. Our landlord said we’d made a grave mistake. This
sadhu
was from a very low caste, not a
harijan
, an Untouchable, but almost. The tea house he took us to was patronized by people of the same and similar castes. It was very dirty, very unclean there. No wonder we got sick! I remember feeling the particular embarrassment of travelers who have made a stupid tourist mistake.

Thanks to paregoric, an opium syrup one could get more easily those days, and which has a miraculously calming effect on the worst intestinal illness, we were able to get on the bus the next day and get out of town and go on to Trivandrum.

Do I understand what happened in Varkala? I have more questions than answers. Now that all the resorts have been built, are pilgrims still coming for packets of food to throw into the sea? Who was Swami Sand Castle? Where did he come from and what did he believe? What was he doing with the sand and what did he think about it? Who did he think we were? Was he as curious about us as we were about him? Who were the people who came to him for food to feed their dead? Why did I tell our landlord about the
sadhu
and the tea? Why were we so ready to believe our landlord, that the cup of the tea from the low caste cafe was what made us sick? Couldn’t we just as likely have caught something from the yogurt and fruit the landlord brought or the vegetable curry dinner?

Even if we went back to Varkala, I would never find out. But I don’t mind. I don’t need to know the answer, and indeed I prefer that so much of what happened there remains unclear. For what is travel if not a confrontation with the mysterious, and why should we assume – or desire – that every mystery will be solved?

‘N
ext Friday, for International Women’s Day,’ Team Leader Franklin told me, ‘we would like you to lead the shooting competition.’

‘Shooting?’ I asked him. ‘As in shooting a film?’

‘A gun,’ he told me. ‘AK-47.’

I knew they had a closet full of them. I had heard that the school principal could strip one down in twelve seconds, but only on that day did I learn that the Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Uralsk, Kazakhstan, the school where I was teaching, had a target practice range out in the yard.

I had already gotten used to the early morning aerobics routine where the students would be required to stand in front of the principal in North Korean-esque military lines and goose step to the pop music that the security guard/DJ chose. And now we were going to start shooting off guns? One definition
of insanity is when meaning starts to break down. That was beginning to happen to me.

Before coming to Kazakhstan I had looked up Uralsk on Wikipedia. Located in Western Kazakhstan, on the banks of the Ural River, it was supposed to be an agricultural town that bred horses and camels. Unlike the other industrial towns along the northern border with Russia, which produced aluminum, chemical weapons, and Kazakh tractors, this region was famous for its medicinal herbs, and the town’s biggest factory made licorice. They were even supposed to have a women’s felt-making collective. I had come to Kazakhstan because I believed that they, like Kyrgyzstan where I had previously lived, had an ancient folk-telling tradition. I had read that every mountain, spring, and bush across their vast steppe contained a story and that these stories created a kind of a map that had once helped the nomads to navigate across the land. I actually thought that I was going to be living in a yurt, a nomadic round house, where everything was arranged with spiritual intent, in a land where it was virtuous to become one with your horse!

The Nazarbayev school, funded by and named after the current Kazakh president, claimed to be seeking Western educational reform, and I had fantasized that this could entail creating a digital storytelling curriculum where my students interviewed their grandparents (and the women at the felt-making collective) to learn the stories of the mountains, rivers, and bushes that surrounded them. I had imagined covering the country with story-maps. I believed that remembering these stories was one way to save the world.

On the eve of my departure to Kazakhstan, my aunt had told me that Thoreau, in the end, believed he hadn’t lived his life extravagantly enough, but that unlike Thoreau, she said, I lived a
spiritually extravagant life. Then she gave me some earmuffs and an orange knitted hat with a big flower on the side. I put them both on and said, ‘This could be
our
tribal custom. I’ll tell them that we reverse them when we get married. “You Kazakhs have your tribal traditions. We Californians have ours.”’

Then my cousin gave me a bottle of JLo perfume, the bottle shaped like a sexy lady. And so – armed with JLo’s Love and Light Perfume, my knitted hat, and eight photocopies of my favorite song from the musical score of
Finlandia
, ‘This is my song,’ about how the sky is blue not only in one’s homeland but in every land, which I planned on teaching to my Kazakh students – I had set out to the great Kazakh steppe.

Air Astana, the Kazakh national airline, allows – in addition to the normal carry-on baggage – ‘an umbrella, an overcoat, a cane, and a bunch of flowers.’ They also, according to their webpage, had a dress code. I was charmed before I’d even arrived.

When I got to Germany and sat in the Air Astana waiting lounge, I looked around to see what that dress code might be. No one seemed to adhere to one. Most of the men were already seated and had soft paunches that they weren’t trying to hide. These people were definitely not poseurs. Their black leather jackets and boots seemed to indicate a highly practical uniform: maybe they would have to ride their horses home from the airport. Some had soft, open, wondering expressions and were murmuring a gentle Russian. They all looked, to me, delightfully disheveled. I had half expected warriors, ancestors of Attila the Hun. But maybe the Kazakhs were just really cool, nerdy intellectuals from the ’70s, the science types. Maybe I was about to enter my dream country.

When we flew over Uralsk, the autumn sun was setting
golden over the fields. A horse wandered across the runway. The place felt windswept and forgotten. The brown, frostbitten grass and the Soviet-era red and white striped airport hut gave the whole area a dune town feeling. All this vast space, where the imagination could soar, away from the flurry and urgency of consumer society, both excited and calmed me. When we descended from the plane, an airport worker ushered us through an old gate and we found ourselves in the parking lot.

Team Leader Franklin, long and lanky and from Wales, was waiting for me in front of an old car he had borrowed from one of the Kazakh teachers at the school where I would teach. I had been traveling for three days and frankly wanted to hug someone, but instead of saying ‘Welcome!’ he seemed to be sharing his own private joke with his assistant, a young Kazakh girl who regarded me scornfully. ‘Don’t you have a winter coat?’ she asked.

‘Yes, in my bag,’ I said.

As we drove away from the airport, the horse from the runway crossed the road and a little boy ran after it. ‘Village people,’ the driver snorted.

While we were crossing the Ural River, Team Leader Franklin said, ‘We are now leaving Asia and entering Europe.’

I was okay with that. I imagined tree-lined streets and streetside cafes. But ‘Europe’ consisted of some boxy buildings across a vast field of thigh-deep mud. ‘That’s where we teach,’ Team Leader Franklin pointed out. Then the car ducked into a valley of old Soviet-style crumbling concrete block buildings. We stopped in front of one. ‘Here is your home,’ he said.

I am not an especially high-maintenance person; I have slept on old trains in both India and Siberia for days until my consciousness became part of the train seat. But these
apartments looked like war-torn hovels in Kabul after a bombing. I actually had thought I was going to be living in a yurt! At my – what must have been – freaked-out face, Team Leader Franklin’s assistant said haughtily, ‘This is a very
prestigious
area of town.’

I gazed at her, looking for a crack in her armor, but found none.

Waiting for me on the kitchen table was a housewarming present. They had bought me an iron.

The school principal was my age but the weight of her stern expression gave her a matronly look. On the first day she proceeded to lecture me about how I must make the students love me, and then she gave me a little earring box in the shape of a yurt. I didn’t know that this would be the only yurt I would see in Kazakhstan.

And thus commenced one of the most miserable winters of my life.

I had been expecting to find exalting nature in Uralsk, but the closest thing to a mountain in the whole region was the couch in the Information Center. The chemistry teacher, a Brit (though originally from Nigeria), and I would go there and lean our backs against the green couch mountain. He would complain about how the school had the highest-quality chemistry equipment he had ever seen in any school, but no chemicals. He spent the whole winter waiting for chemicals to arrive from the capital. All the classrooms had smart boards, as the school’s promotional video had stated, but no one dared use them. If they malfunctioned, the teachers were responsible for replacing them.

And I soon discovered that educational reform did not mean developing critical or creative thinking skills. It meant teaching
students technical skills so that they could replace all the foreign oil workers, so that Kazakhstan would become a world leader in 2050. On every holiday, fluttering banners promised this and in the public squares beneath them, people would celebrate with a giant flash mob. Even the traditional holiday, ‘Emerge from Your Yurt and Greet Your Neighbor Day,’ was celebrated with a giant flash mob. ‘This country is going to flash mob its way through the 21st century,’ the chemistry teacher groaned.

The licorice factory had closed down, along with the felt-making cooperative, and I couldn’t find a single camel or horse, except for that one I had remembered seeing at the airport. My students weren’t remotely interested in the stories of their grandparents. They only wanted me to teach them Rihanna songs or go with them to watch
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer
in 6D at the super-hyper-mall downtown. (6D movies allow you to experience wind and blood in your face.)

A few weeks after I arrived, the principal ordered us to give dummy lessons to all the students. We were required to give them all the answers to the questions we would be asking them the next day when the Minister from the Ministry of Education came. We were supposed to make the school look good.

‘What?’ asked the chemistry teacher, incensed.

‘Just do as they say,’ Team Leader Franklin said and shrugged.

The next day, we woke up to find ourselves part of a Kazakh promotional piece, part of a Potemkin village. The water coolers suddenly had water, the bathrooms had toilet paper, and the chemistry labs finally had chemicals. The children ran through the halls straightening each other’s ties, yelling, ‘The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming!’ But then, for some reason, the Minister didn’t come. The water was removed from the coolers; so was the toilet paper. And, much to the dismay of the
chemistry teacher, who was beginning to get so angry that I began to worry about him, the chemicals vanished.

I, too, was indignant. As far as I understood it, we had originally been recruited to bring ideas of educational reform. Our contract stated that we would be mentoring teachers in new teaching methods. Naturally, I had believed that the teachers would be receptive, especially since the Kazakh president was pumping so much money into this school. But then we found out that the Kazakh teachers hadn’t been told why we were here. They saw foreigners entering their classrooms and they asked each other, ‘What are
they
doing here?’

Team Leader Franklin took me aside and warned me not to become too political like the former librarian from Canada who had recently departed. She had ended up shouting at the principal and afterwards everyone had thought she’d gone crazy because she would speak only to the school plants. When I expressed dismay at this story, I was warned that I was being only 80 percent rational.

When the first snow fell it was like manna, like a blessing. The snow covered the ugly construction site across the street (the view out my window), and the strange tube-office that the contractor lived in was rolled away. The windows gleamed against the frosty sun. Sparrows pecked at the garbage. I took a walk and the thin, grey snow crunched beneath my boots.

I wanted to write in my journal. Because my hands were so heavily mittened, I used my teeth to take the cap off my pen, and when I did so, the freezing air caused my tongue to stick to the metal part. I had to hold it in my mouth to free my tongue. ‘Numb knees, numb wrists, numb nose. -17°F and falling,’ I wrote. ‘But this is my main question,’ I added. ‘How long do I stay here waiting for the strange lessons that this land will
inevitably teach me? How long will it take for this country to crack open and show itself? And at what point do I just give up, pack up, and go home?’

It was now the beginning of March, one week away from International Women’s Day, and I still didn’t feel that I had learned anything. In fact, my right arm had become paralyzed from stress. I could no longer use it even to unlock the door to my apartment.

Tonight was yet another enforced pedagogical meeting led by the principal, who had developed the habit of continuously abusing the teachers, calling them zeros. She lately had been telling us that, in nature, the head of a fish never rots, and that since she was the head, she had the superior moral consciousness. I leaned back on the green couch mountain to listen to what the topic would be tonight. She handed out paper and pens and told all the teachers to draw a picture of what they thought a leader was. With my left hand, I drew a flashlight to represent how a leader should shine light on people’s potential, and a path between two cities, representing a leader navigating the way between realities. The chemistry teacher drew a jazz musician and said a leader should know how to improvise.

The Kazakh teachers drew pictures of crowns and microphones, said a leader must be strong, a good orator, and command her people, especially if they are weak. The foreign teachers and the Kazakhs looked at each other. We looked at each other again.

Miss Manners once wrote a column about how one should act when one finds oneself at a dinner party with a dictator. Confronting a dictator was not a skill I had ever developed. One of my team teachers told me that when Kazakhs get power, they become like wild horses and destroy everything in their path. I
had never felt this level of stress – the local teachers called it ‘press’ because, they said, it was a pressure from above pressing down on you.