Pondy

This weekend Mo and I went to the Union Territory of Pondicherry. Said territory was the center of French presence in South India for some hundreds of years, until the French finally pulled out in 1954*. As such it has an odd ambiance that puts it in contrast with the dirty, hectic pace of Chennai. There are still beggars and touts on every corner, but in Pondicherry they beg in French and Hindi rather than English and Tamil. The roads are still dirty, overcrowded, and without a sense of traffic law -- but they are dirty, overcrowded and lawless with class.

The drive out to Pondy was an experience of its own. The countryside of Tamil Nadu is spectacular, full of conconut palms and sudden hills that rise as unexepected as waves upon a calm pond. And everywhere are little villages with their Ravana effigies hung to keep away the evil eye and women in saris as lovely as dawn sitting in the dust at roadside and waiting for a bus.


While in Pondy Mo and I went to Manakula Vinayagar Temple. Unlike many of the temples I've been talking about seeing on this trip, Manakula is a living temple. It is large and bustling and full of people coming to do puja to Lord Ganesh. It is also, despite the golden roof on the holy of holies, something of an ugly temple. Lacking the grace of the northern temples or the cosmological elegance of the classical Dravidian, its strength lies in the fact that it is pulsingly alive. Going into the temple feels like going into the belly of an elephant, hot and churning and overwhelming with the constant motion and heat.

Before going in we were blessed by the temple elephant, a beast with the wisest eyes I have ever seen on an animal. It was an amazing sight, and everyone in our group noted it -- the elephant seemed a bit wise and a lot sad with the kind of distantly beneficent expression you will sometimes see on the faces of holy men when they aren't guarded around their ambivalence about the world. For those that worry at such things, I checked the elephants legs, ears, and mouth and there were no signs of abuse. In fact, he looked well pampered and quite content in the physical plane.

Inside our guide led us through the temple, and got us a special blessing from the priest inside. He asked our names and then chanted mantras before the sacred golden Ganesh at the heart of the temple, marking our foreheads with ash and giving us both a lotus blossom to hold well as a banana to eat. The mantras were in Sanskrit, but other than OM I could not understand it, nor could I follow the Tamil the priest spoke to us after the formal blessing. It gave the whole affair a sense both of the mysterious and the ridiculous, holy and dirty all at once.

By the time we were leaving both Mo and I were dizzy with the heat and the smoke and the press of the people, and we worried that we would sweat the ashes away from our foreheads. We shouldn't have worried, as the ashes stick quite well. And should you happen to get them on your shirt or the face of your watch, your shirt or watch will retain the blessed touch for quite some time. No matter how much you try to wash said blessing away.


The hotel we stayed at was an eco-friendly resort run by locals who wanted to find a way to make a resort that would be friendly to the earth and the local community rather than just exploiting them. Each room was a hut of its own, done in different themes. Mo and I ended up with the Mud Hut, done in a rather eclectic style combining an African tribal home and a North Indian desert hut. It had thick walls of baked mud and brick, a thatched roof, and an old Victorian cast iron bed with mosquito netting to keep us from being eaten in the night. There was no AC, in the 38c/100f night, but the hut was designed to maximize the breeze coming in off the beach from the Bay of Bengal. It worked near dawn, but most of the night was hot and sticky and hard to sleep through.

Mo had an extra adventure with a 6 inch banana spider in the bathroom, but I'll leave her to talk about that.

The second day, rather than going into Pondy proper, Mo and I went to the little villages that were near the resort. There were two, one near the beach and one up near the main road to Pondy. The beach town was new, having been rebuilt in the wake of the tsunami by an Italian charity group. The startling whiteness and extremely non-Indian architecture of the houses made the whole thing pop right out of its surroundings, and drew Mo and I towards it on our way to the beach.



The locals were a bit hesitant about us at first, and several children approached us to ask why we were there. When we responded "Because we want to meet people" one of them told us "People here do not do that" and another said, "The people here are Tamils, you cannot speak to them." Meaning, of course, that they spoke no English.

As it turns out both of the nay-sayers were wrong. Eventually a group of locals involved in charity work approached us, and we had a conversation in broken English and Mo's 10 words of Tamil that ended with the day being spontaneously declared International Friendship day. They then took us and introduced us to the head of the local Indian Youth Federation, who was not at all impressed with us, but seemed to think we were harmless enough. After we finished speaking with him nearly every child in the village came out to ask us who we were and where we were from. Apparently we were dangerous and unknown until an adult approved of us, and then we were fit to be mobbed with questions.

Up the road was a much older, poorer village. The low huts were filled with folk who were cooking over fires made with stacks of manure of some sort or another, giving the whole area a pungent, cloying scent. We made it about half way through the village before a local ran out, showed us his cell phone, and then said, "CAMERA! CAMERA!" with such enthusiasm you'd think we'd brought him a birthday present. As it happened Mo did have a camera, and the moment she took it out half of the village lined up to get their pictures taken.



It was something to experience. Little boys would dare each other to go next. Girls came down from the far side of town, nerved themselves up, and then chickened out at the last moment. The men of the village either hung back or mugged it up for the camera. For everyone the act of having a picture taken was a big deal, and when we would show them their pictures in the camera's display they would laugh and laugh and tease each other. Only once everyone had seen their picture were we allowed to go, with much laughing and patting on the back. We promised to send prints of the pictures back, but I don't think they understood us.

The trip, as a whole, was exactly how I wanted to spend my first weekend in India. There was a balance of things that felt right to me: the fading colonial past, the rich and trendy resort present, and through it all the chanting at the temple and the hard and touching realities of the village life that has been the backbone of India for over 5000 years. High and low, I felt like the lotus opened for just one minute and I was allowed to glimpse its heart.

*Historical Details: It is worth noting that the area around Pondy is actually much older than this. It's first mention is under the name Poduke in a Greek document describing the Roman trading posts of the 1st century AD. Roman pottery and coins have been found in the area, and it was probably one of the ports that caused Pliny to complain that Rome was draining itself dry of gold and silver in order to purchase Indian spices and silks. Since then it has been home and host to trading fleets of all the great South Indian dynasties, the Pallavahs, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Vijayanagar and a Sultan or two. Modern Pondy, however, was set up by the French in 1673 at by the time they were done there was little left of the older towns. So though, as with so much of urban India, there are parts of Pondy that are thousands of years old but the actual structure of it is only from the 1800's on. When you're there you get a faint sense of France, but no sense at all of Rome or Satavahana or even the Sultans.