Finally in India.
We worked our way to the baggage claim and found some kind of official event going on. Some famous dignitary or something was arriving. Alas it was not for us. It was for the better anyway. We looked like we had ridden motorcycles to Chennai from the US. You will see the picture eventually, but I was sporting quite the neck beard. Andy was wearing this long sleeve undershirt thing with paint stains all over it. We smelled like a donkey. And Matt? I recall he looked quite put together. Go figure.

We got our bags. None lost! We put them on carts and headed for the door. Then Matt realized that he left his fleece jacket on the plane. We waited at the baggage desk while they called up. I felt like a kid on the last day of school, five minutes before the end of the day, when the teacher says, “Oh, look at that, the clock is ten minutes fast. Let me get on up there and move those hands back.”

These things happen. It afforded us the opportunity to people watch a little. And it also gave us our first interaction with the much feared mosquito. You have heard of them, right? Picture three grown men (fully immunized against malaria, mind you) running away from the one mosquito in the airport. We eventually got the coat and we were good to go.

Walking out of that airport into the throngs (and I mean throngs) of people holding signs with names on them was awesome. And there was our man, in full white livery, stripes (two) on the epaulets and all, holding a sign that actually addressed us as “Mr. Benjamin Armbruster, Mr. Matthew Erskine, and Mr. Andrew Stefanovich”. I, personally, will cherish that moment because God knows no one will probably ever pick me up calling me “Mister” for a long time.

In a matter of nanoseconds, as with any foreign travel, you are immediately struck by the difference in the standard visual environment of a new human society. Weird faces. Weird clothes. Weird cars. Weird signs. Then the sounds and smells. Thick air. Rapid foreign tongues. And then you feel it. The heat. The sun.

Oh dear god, I thought that I might just burst into flames. After 32 hours of climate controlled torture, I felt like a tulip under a broiler. Sweat was immediately pouring out of me.

We brought our bags to the car and set off to the hotel.

Kannon (pronounced like the gun), just took off. Weaving through an endless sea of motorcycles, buses, bikes, and pedestrians. The road from the airport is a major one, so traffic was moving at a pretty good clip. Thanks to the British, they drive on the left here, but that was the least disorienting thing about it. Hmmm….maybe it was the family of four on one motorcycle that was a little more disturbing. No helmets. Baby up front. Dad driving. Little boy behind Dad. Mom on the back, in a sari, riding sidesaddle. Going about 45 miles per hour. Crazy. And they weren’t the only family on a motorcycle.

There are cows just wandering around, eating out of the gutter on the side of the road. Advertisements everywhere. Some intelligible, some not. Awesome street signs. Many are sponsored by corporations: “Indian Oil – Speed Limit 50 kph”. Many with fantastic warnings: “Drive slowly unless you have an appointment with God” or “Think and Drive. Don’t drink and drive.”

Kannon was kind enough to give us a very proud introduction to the city with “sir” being every other word. He tells us how safe it was, how feared the Tamil Nadu (the state Chennai is in) police are, and how he has been driving for 12 years. Man, you could tell. A ball of mercury rolling and squeezing, separating and reforming, shooting through the other vehicles. He pointed out the sights and the institutions. Nothing looks new. Everything has this it-was-painted-twenty-years-ago feeling. There are hordes of people walking. All the women in colorful saris, walking and smiling. The men wear pants and dress shirts always. Andy asks what we are all thinking as we sweat. Do men wear shorts? Kannon laughs. Shorts are for little boys.

A stroll.
We are two hours late to the opening of the conference (not our slot), so we check into the hotel and agree to meet in 30 minutes.

Best shower of my life. Hands down. The water pressure could peel a pumpkin. I hope never to have another shower as great because the cost of getting to the state where a shower is a religious experience is too dear.

We caught the end of the opening lecture. We only missed about 4000 years of history, so I think we will be OK.

Before we know it we are on our own again. Kannon wasn’t ready to take us around yet, so we decided to kill twenty minutes with a walk on the street outside the hotel. I am sorry, but there is only one word to describe it: mindfuck. There are no sidewalks to speak of. If there are, there is trash and motorcycles and light poles and dumpsters all over them so you have to step into the street. The cars drive on the left, so we are constantly looking the wrong way, pulling each other back from the brink of death, sweating as children run up and want to shake your hand. “What is your name?” They ask over and over again as they follow you for a few paces. There is a desperation in their seemingly innocent request. Their clothes are dirty. They wear no shoes. Little children run off into alleys with putrid looking discharge flowing in the gutters. The storefronts are dark and mysterious. The people are staring. Suspicious? Interested? Predatory? You don’t know. We are the only westerners walking in the street, but we are somehow determined to keep going. We are intrepid explorers, are we not? No we are damned, suicidal fools.

We decide to cross the street. Every manner of murderous vehicle is tearing down the street. There are no lanes. There are no cross walks. There are stoplights, but they are not heeded by any driver. The honking, honking, honking like a harpie swarm come to punish us for doing something as idiotic as walking down the street outside our five star hotel. Wait, there’s a break in the traffic, let’s go. No. Wait. No. We should have gone. Shit. Wait. Go! Go!

The other side of the street was no better. Either you walk through a bunch of strange men having a conversation or you walk in the street. Most Indians seem to walk in the street. Little children run right through traffic without even looking before they disappear back into the dark, four foot wide spaces between the dilapidated tenements. It was thoroughly frightening and depressing.

Getting back into the hotel wasn’t necessarily better. You have to remember that we have been traveling so far and so long at this point that we aren’t the best judge of culture or safety, but the hotel lobby didn’t have any traffic that would kill you or any children that wanted money from you. Instead the lobby has a Mont Blanc, a Tag Heuer, an Omega, and a few other really high end stores that sell things that cost more than the people outside make in their entire lives. For context, 97% of Indians make less than $20,000 per year. 67% make less than $2,000 per year. The hotel was kind of unreal. So was outside.

Eventually Kannon picked us up and we headed of in a much smaller car (he picked us up in a van) and took us to see some sights. We were exhausted, but the general wisdom says that you need to stay up, keep moving, and get some sun to reset your clock.

Toto, where the hell is Kansas?
Our first stop was a very old church in Chennai from the 1400s, dedicated to St. Thomas, who came to the area shortly after Christ’s death. The road there was probably one of the most disturbing routes that I have ever seen. Complete and abject squalor. You hear about it. You read about it. You see Sally Struthers basting kids before she eats them. But until you are driving through it with your driver in uniform and the kids lock eyes with you and the adults look away from you….well, then you really don’t have a handle on it. Garbage everywhere. Naked kids playing with rocks in the dirt. Mangy dogs. Cows eating plastic food containers. Roads that are so unattended that they look like they have been bombed. People just sitting around staring. People lying in the street and in the gutter. And then every now and then you see someone smiling, laughing. A child playing with a homemade kite. You realize the adaptability of humans. It might be our greatest skill, but it is also our greatest weakness.

We finally made it all the way to the top of the tallest hill in the city where the Church for Saint Thomas is. We was martyred on the spot and it is said that on December 18th between 1551 and 1704 a stone cross here shed real blood. It is set up on this hill with a great view of the whole city. Once you got up there, you realize how stale the air is down below. You take off your shoes here to enter any holy place or a home. And this was truly a holy place. The people inside the church were praying SO HARD. Whole families huddled together. Some just sitting quietly in the corner, deep in thought.

You wind up and up through all this misery to the sanctuary on top of the hill and eventually you have to go back down. Very sad.

So we left…and on the way we find out that Kannon’s name means “boy who likes play”. Coincidence? I think not.

So we headed back down the hill for a repeat performance of the poverty horror show. I keep telling myself that this is all normal to them, not to us. It doesn’t mean it is good, but they are probably grown used to it. I don’t like these thoughts.

Kannon.
Kannon is a tall man with kind eyes a full mustache. He smiles a lot and he protects us from unseemly characters that approach in rapid succession, dispensing some firm words we will never understand. He loves his city. He is 28 and tells us of his recent marriage. They have been married a year and they still do not have children. He is upset by this and tells us that his wife, Sumati, is sick, but he doesn’t or won’t tell us what ails her. She takes “tonics” and things.

Driving through a herd of sick looking animals and people I ask Kannon if he has ever traveled to other parts of India. No, he says. Would you want to, I ask? “No, sir, this is my dream.”

He refers to himself as middle class and he calls the people above him “big people”.

I ask about garbage service and he tells me that there is garbage service everyday. I ask why there is garbage everywhere and he says, “Oh these are local streets.”

I asked him how he met his wife and he tells me that the marriage was prearranged. We are all stunned by this and want to know all of the details. He said that his mother picked her out and he never saw her until the moment that she walked down the aisle. He was so anxious before hand and he thought he knew what neighborhood she was from so he would canvas the neighborhood, trying to catch a glimpse of who she might be. He got in trouble for that. We asked if he was happy and he slyly responded, “I am happy and she is happy with everything about me.” After a pregnant (pun intended) pause he said, “I don’t know if she is ugly or beautiful, but she warms my heart and my mommy chose her.”

They say “mommy” here.

We went to a pretty boring old museum with an old British fort and old British paintings and an unintelligible man that mumbled at me and Matt. At first I thought he was some kind of docent and then we realized that he was just some dude that gave us a tour we never requested and he now expected payment. Matt, always quick with the bills, peeled off some rupees. Damn, he’s smooth.

Cricket.
Our next random experience was awesome. Cricket. Cricket. Cricket. Ever since we landed Andy had been talking about seeing some cricket. Luckily there were more than a dozen pick up games going on right across from the museum. We went over and tried to discern what the hell was going on. These kids were of the poorest in the city, but they were having a blast. I still don’t understand how the game works and the set up that we were watching would never help.

There were about 100 kids playing on a large patch of dirt. The game is kind of like baseball, but linear, I think. You don’t run in a diamond, but back and forth between two bases. The ball is pitched and hit with a bat. It can be caught. You can be tagged out or someone can throw the ball at the posts that mark the bases to get you out. (Forgive me, dear reader, if you know all about cricket.) On this day though there are all these kids playing games that all criss-cross each other. There are balls whipping every which way. Into the street. Over the fences. Out into the parking lot. Some kids are fielding for multiple games at once. All ages. All in this little field. It would be like playing ten games of baseball on one field. For one team first base is home plate. For another team third base is first base. It would make no sense whatsoever to an outside observer, but, to these kids it was crystal clear. It was everything. They were so into it. Running on asphalt and dirt in bare feet. One kid made an all out full slide on the pavement! Watching all this had on Andy, who kept getting closer and closer to the game, hoping that maybe an errant ball would signal his inclusion into a game with kids 30 years his junior. I don’t know….maybe from far away he just looked like an albino Indian kid with a glandular disorder. I on the other hand was having a Prayer for Owen Meany moment, waiting to have my life snuffed out by a cricket ball. I kind of backed up against a tree to defend at least one side and I am convinced that the necessity of the moment increased my peripheral vision about 20 degrees or so. Matt, ever the diplomat, was using the power of his digital camera to make friends with a little boy who was convinced that he wasn’t old enough to play cricket with the big kids. These kids are very poor and have probably never seen a digital camera up close, let alone, their images on the little screen. This became our major currency with the children of India going forward.

All the games rolled into one another and the kids didn’t seem to care. There were no hard feelings when one game interrupted the other or when one kid bumped into another trying to make a play.

It was quite the rejuvenating sight and it set the tone for a lot of what we would later understand about the Indian people – especially the poor.

Beach.
He then took us to the beach where we wandered all the way out to the surf. There were a bunch of fishing boats and lots of people sitting in the sand. Not a single person swimming. We asked about it and Kannon informed us that no one in India swims in the sea. We never really got a clear answer, but it amounted to something about the cost associated with learning to swim and the fact that the recent tsunami killed tens of thousands in Chennai alone. Never got a clear answer. Beautiful beach. Second largest in the world in length and width. Tons of people hanging out. Fishermen. Young lovers. Families. Crying shame that no one swims.

The kids were playing cricket here again, but not in the sand. The ball couldn’t bounce. Instead, they played in the middle of the road. One game after another along the center line, stopping each time that a car came by. Crazy dedication.