Coming and Going

The Southwest monsoon is holding steady this week, having reached the Andaman Islands five days early; it is forecast to reach Kerala on May twenty-ninth, two days before its average arrival on the Southwest coast. We are regretting our imminent departure from central India, for we will miss experiencing the annual arrival of the monsoon. Still, yesterday afternoon pre-monsoon rains drenched the city of Pune-the first soaking rain since we arrived in late December. The skies darkened at about five. Then heavy rain fell for about an hour. The temperature dropped to thirty-six or so, though it was a steamy evening as E and enjoyed a good soak on our walk home from the bookstore.

 

This morning the sky is clear and the air crisp. The trees seem greener, washed clean by yesterday’s rains. In the afternoon we watch the Cheel chicks in the nest at the top of a tree above the Tilak Tank. Every day they grow larger, their feathers darkening. While we watch, the mother takes flight, pumping her broad wings under dark thunderhead clouds building above the hills to the South of the city.

 

Hell Bent for Leather

In Mangalore we pile into a white ambassador for a Mr. Toad’s wild ride: the car careens through the city, its frame swimming loosely on the suspension as we overtake slower rickshaws and autos, horn blaring, weave into the right lane to pass larger trucks and busses, and then jerking back into the left lane. We drop down to the river and village on the other side of the city where it is green, green, green-fields and paddies and palms.

We spend the afternoon at a fancy water park where the kids (and their parents) slip and slide and swim, where a large Muslim family enjoys the water (the women fully clothed), and where a young woman, at the end of the day, runs after a friend and slips and falls and slams her head into the pavement. It becomes apparent that the park employees simply have no idea what to do when someone gets hurt. But thankfully we do. R takes charge of what by all indications is a serious concussion. She clears all the helpless men away and then gets the young woman out of her wet clothes and into a rickshaw for a ride to the hospital.  Then, another late dinner at home, rice noodles and curry, mopping up every drop with our sticky right hands. We spend two days swimming in the river, collecting snail shells with the kids by the pond. One day Babu climbs a coconut tree to harvest green coconuts and we enjoy drinking the sweet milk. In the evening we walk by the old house closer to the river with the chattering of hundreds of huge black bats rousing themselves as the sun dips behind the hills and the valley falls into darkness.

Back on the road-this time our driver, near seventy, piloting a well-loved white ambassador, careening up the coast road overtaking every car and truck and bus in his path. Nathaniel rides in the front and, like many Indians riding in an older car, has no access to a seat belt. While I am grateful when we move him to the back I now find myself in front and realize quickly how tenuous travel is on a road where trucks and cars and buses and two wheelers weave back and forth, narrowly avoiding collisions, speeding up and braking and honking. It is kind of like two running queues moving in opposite directions with everyone trying to get to their destination at the expense of the other person. Except, of course, the stakes are higher out on the open road. Again and again the old car breaks right into the path of an oncoming truck, our driver timing the weave back into the left lane with not a second to spare before we would slam head on into the truck. It is no wonder that every day the newspaper carries stories of traffic deaths on the highways. Drivers in India are willing to take remarkable risks-there is no “lane discipline,” as people say-and out on the open road there is little to no enforcement of traffic. It is not uncommon, in fact, to see charred vehicles in the ditch on the side of the road.

Two days swimming and bodysurfing in the Arabian sea, eating fish curry on the sand under palm trees and the watchful eyes of crows, boating and swimming in the backwaters on the other side of the coast road. Then back in the well-loved white ambassador with the seventy-year old driver whoh is, one might say, “hell bent for leather”-a phrase used in the US but that seems to have actually originated in India to refer to beating on a leather saddle. (The phrase is used by Rudyard Kipling in “The Story of the Gadsbys.”) Our leather seats are for clutching as we motor into the forest on narrow and curvy one-lane roads, overtaking buses on blind curves-at one point slowing to pass a car that has slammed into the side of a bus (no one is hurt).

Winding under stunning peaks of the Western Ghats, we arrive with thousands of other pilgrims at the Kukke Subramanya Temple on the banks of the Kumaradhara river in Kollur. The temple here is dedicated to Mookambika and sits on the lower part of Kodachadri peak. We leave our shoes in the car and walk to the entrance gate where a cow stands peacefully among thousands of chappals. Inside the temple, standing in the courtyard shirtless, we pray and sweat with the crowd, heeding the firm and encouraging waves of the priests charged with keeping everyone moving. The spiritual power and peacefulness alongside the utter human chaos of sweaty bodies pushing and shoving in the courtyard mirrors the world outside the temple walls. Our temple hopping day takes us next to the eight century Hattiangady Vinayaka at Hattiyangadi in Kundapur taluk. We are fortunate to arrive precisely at the beginning of an elaborate puja and we all leave with holy water on our heads and little white bags of sweet prasad.

 

The following day we travel to the Manjunatha Temple, a Shaivaite center in Dharamasthala, where a friend leads us through the pressing crowds. Cars and trucks drive the gate and they are washed with holy water (for a set rupee fee) and an elephant accepts our coins and caresses or heads with a pink speckled trunk. We then curve back to the coast to join the Shetty family at the Sri Mahalingeshwara temple, the oldest temple in Puttur, where we watch an elaborate puja with priests carrying the idol out of its chambers and setting it in a flower festooned chariot that is carried around the temple courtyard by music and the light of a full moon. Exhausted, after a long day, we gather for a typical late night Indian dinner at our hosts’ home in the village of Puttur.

 

Signs of India (5)

 

Let it Flow

Last week I found myself reading Pascal Richet’s A Natural History of Time-a book I’ve been carrying around since December. Richet is interested (I am interested) in how the study of nature has shaped perceptions of time and of durations of time from antiquity to the present. I’ve been thinking about cycles and linear trajectories, eternity and beginnings, chronology and history, hours and days and months and years; Aristotle, the Book of Moses, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo; and the emergence of geological durations, the rise of physics and astrophysics, and the discovery of isotopes and radiometrics.

 

At the same time we are once again complaining about Indians and their sense of time. Of course complaining that Indians are chronically late is merely to express, as many have pointed out, a culturally-determined concept of time. In the US we waste time, buy time, save hours and minutes, invest time, run out of time, put aside time, thank people for their time and, of course, we all live on borrowed time. It is simply rude to waste my time. Every moment matters-or so we like to say.

We schedule our time with calendars and day books. We obsess about having more time. Creatures of modern life, we live the faster pace determined by people living the quick in vibrant city ecologies organized around the economics of efficiency. That is, we consider our time as currency that we have the right to own and to use as we see fit. To be late is a waste. It is antisocial. It is positively un-American. Unabashed individualists, we value individual achievement over interpersonal affiliation. Progress and success predicated on promptness and punctuality. “Push the River,” as the singer Ann Reed puts it.

 

Our complaints about Indians being late may then say more about us-about our individualistic concept of punctuality struggling to find a place in a culture that values relationships over the individual,  a culture where people live multiple lives (why hurry?). Indeed, is it not pernicious to demand that people in a developing country conform to the standards of a post-industrial information economy? How can people be on time when there are no reliable roads or transportation? Why should we demand that our Indian friends focus less on relationships and more on the individual?  And so on.

 

Still, our work in colleges and universities in India has been complicated (and at times compromised) by the laissez-faire approach to time. To take just a few examples: functions at the university and college predictably start late; students arrive for a morning class scheduled at nine between nine fifteen and nine thirty; a lecture scheduled for ten begins at eleven; a multi-day conference schedule is at least one session behind at the end of the first day; public events have more elaborate protocols, including taking tea, recognizing distinguished guests, felicitations on the dais, and so on; and scheduled meetings are regularly put off, delayed, or do not happen at all. Finally, there are multiple layers of actors in any task that needs to be done. Hierarchies of Indian society are magnified in an institutional context, where getting a cup of tea, a photocopy, or change for a five hundred rupee note will often require an extended wait as one person gets another person to get another person to do the job. It is all, as we like to say, terribly inefficient and a regrettable waste of time.

Among the many explanations for Indian stretchable time are dwelling in the present as opposed to looking ahead to the future; valuing social relationships as opposed to individual achievement; cultivating relationships and trust over getting to the start of a meeting on time, for example taking tea and letting all else fall away; maintaining flexible instead of rigid timelines; adhering to a cyclical rather than a linear sense of time; looking at and acting in social interactions more holistically instead of viewing such interactions through separate (and often conflicting) time frames or personal schedules; feeling reluctant to say no, out of politeness, or even to saying yes when in fact a maybe or a no might be called for; or correlating climate and tempo of life. There is the tradition of taking it easy instead of getting stressed, the yogic way, I guess; an emphasis on deliberation and making decisions more slowly as opposed to rushing impatiently to meet what is most often an arbitrary deadline. And there is the expectation, in a society organized vertically around class and caste, that the more important the person is who you are meeting with the longer you may have to wait.

 

Yet when I began thinking about time this morning and listed all the explanations for Indian stretchable time I thought about the dabbawalas in Mumbai who collect and deliver lunches from homes and deliver them to workers. “The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association” is notoriously efficient and always on time. They have been doing their work, on time, for over one hundred years, in one of the most crowded and unpredictable urban spaces in the world. They get you your lunch on time every day using trains, bicycles, and walking, and they get your tiffin back home by early evening. The dabbawalas raise interesting questions about Indian culture, the relative concept of time, and the relationship between tradition and habit. Their reminder might also lead to a deeper consideration how concepts of time differ across Indian sub-cultures such as Sikhs, Parsis, Muslims and Hindus.

 

The Hindi and Urdu word kal provides one indication of the looser notion of time in India. Kal can be used to refer to both past and future, yesterday and tomorrow. Such flexibility has its merits. I’ve heard people say that we might live longer were we to give up rushing about and spending time making excuses for why we’re late. After all, “slow is spelled with four letters-so is life,” reads an Indian saying, and “speed is spelled with five letters-so is death.” In the end, there is something worth having in each concept of time and the cultures that are organized around them. I’m left thinking that perhaps there is a via media-a recognition of one’s own way of thinking about time and a willingness to work toward the better parts of each.

 

Rubbish