Reading Woolf in a Cyclone

October 28-31, 2007
Advocacy Follow-up Workshops
Nellore, Nellore, and Eluru, West Godavari
(with a lot of soggy travel in between)

“Now the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as the nurses call it) – and the tears still stood in Orlando’s eyes – the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean liners…

‘A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,’ she repeated, thus enforcing upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; its something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is – a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy – it’s ecstasy that matters.”

~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I got on the same train, happy to have a Same Train to get on. I climbed up to the top bunk – the safe bunk, the bunk which is least likely to attract random bed-mates or sandal thieves – laid out my scratchy yellow blanket and starched white Simhadpuri Express sheets, curled up around my precious laptop-heavy backpack, and quickly fell asleep. I slept well – too well – and was just beginning to allow the fact that the train had not been moving for some time to seep into my groggy thoughts when K tapped my bunk and said the tracks were flooded. The train had been still for over three hours. Some passengers were shuffling out the door and picking up other transport from the small station across the tracks. Others shook their heads and wondered why any sane person would leave the secure shelter of a train during a cyclone.

A cyclone is caused by a dent in the ocean, they explained, and a dent in the Bay of Bengal had been flooding the southern coast of Andhra Pradesh for the last twenty-four hours. Being far from the ranks of Sane People, K, M, and I joined the sleepy but jumpy brigade of Track Crossers through the rain, and met two of our field workers on the other side. One of the workers was in her second trimester of pregnancy, and despite the size of her belly and the fact that she too had slept on the train, there wasn’t a single wrinkle in her beautifully embroidered silk sari. I was impressed. The five of us crossed a second set of tracks, and entered the small open-air building that serves as the Singarayakonda train station (konda means hill or mountain in Telugu). It contained one ticket window, two simple wooden benches, and a handful of resigned, damp looking men in white linen shirts, their dirty black duffle bags (filled with other white shirts for the next work day) resting by their feet on the concrete floor.

My half-dissolved dreams from the train sat down on the bench with me, and we waited together to see what would happen next. A big white Jeep pulled up outside the station, and with an awkward passing of umbrellas and bags and a careful lifting of saris and slamming of doors, we were inside a new metal box. And unlike the train, this metal box could move in the rain. ‘You saved us!’ K shouted happily to the man in the front seat. Our Saviour, the head of a NGO partner from Parakasm district, turned and said, hands folded and smile beaming, ‘No, Jesus saves you.’ As his driver backed out of the parking lot and into the wet streets, my eyes went to the plastic crucifix sitting on just that spot where Indian taxis tend to have a small statue of Ganesha, Lakshmi, or one of the other pantheon favorites. ‘Oh,’ my almost-awake conscious noted, ‘they must be one of our faith-based NGO partners.’

Satisfied with my brief analysis, and happy to be in a moving vehicle, I settled against the cold glass. Soon we were passing fields of water. Some had been rice patties, some had been sugar cane fields, some had been raised fish ponds, but each side of the highway now formed its own lake. Small islands of palm-thatch roofed huts, a few protected with blue tarps, stood on slightly raised mounds of mud, and the palm trees standing up to their knees in water shook obstinately green heads in the passing gusts of wind and rain. ‘This is important for you to see,’ someone told me. They said it a few times. ‘To see how hard it is.’ They were smiling the nervous smile of someone driving down a very wet road very early in the morning. We passed one car with its nose smashed in and pushed up against the jersey barrier, a bus with its back end firmly in the mud, and a crowd of women with umbrellas who forced us onto the wrong side of the road to get past. They were standing around a woman’s body lying in a strange still pose between the second and third set of wheels of a massive truck. Her blood, if it had been spilled, had been washed away in the rain, but the distance that her mourners kept made it clear that she was dead. One of the field workers from the faith-based NGO (there were nine of us now in the car) folded her hands and began to pray. The driver pulled back onto the left side, and forty minutes later we drove up to our Same Hotel in downtown Nellore.

We were more than a few hours late, and after a brief ‘washing up’ we gathered in a conference room provided by the hotel: field workers and a few directors from our NGO partners in the southern coastal districts of Nellore and Prakasm, the program manager, one program officer, and myself. Switching consistently between English and Telugu, we spent a very Logical afternoon talking about Advocacy, Children, AIDS, Stigma, and Discrimination while the illogical rain filled the city streets outside. There was a heated discussion on whether ‘resource mobilization’ counts as ‘advocacy,’ and therefore whether most of the partners had been doing much advocacy work at all. I presented, with Telugu translation by M and additional Indian adaptations of my ideas by K, on advocacy tactics. The partners made plans and formed committees. There was tea in small ceramic cups and crackers on flimsy paper plates and a beautiful thali lunch where I was taught to mash banana up with my curd rice for dessert. We took a group photo under the fluorescent lights and quickly dissolved at the edges as everyone contemplated the efforts required to get home through the water waiting outside.

None of the trains were running because of the flooding, and the local buses were all filled with displaced train passengers. In the half hour I had to get ready for a second night-time journey, I slipped in the puddle that had mysteriously formed near the door to my room, smacking smartly into the white marble floor. Whimpering to my unsympathetic audience -- a pair of twin beds -- I watched the beginning of Jurassic Park on cable TV while my tailbone got over its initial anger with my clumsy feet. On the way out the door of the hotel, I reprimanded the hotel manager – through M’s Telugu – for not having someone properly mop up the water, feeling both completely childish and utterly justified.

We climbed back into the white savior jeep. I remembered driving through some deep puddles, each a few car-lengths in size, earlier that morning, and tried not to contemplate the condition of the roads we were about to enter. We backed up across the stream that lined the main roads, and trundled out of Nellore. Some roads were closed; on others we passed young men pushing motorbikes, an old man and peddling a cycle rickshaw, its wheels half submerged, water washing softly across the women passengers feet resting on the floor of the little vehicle. It was dark, and the streetlights storelights houselights reflected brightly in the light brown water. Beautiful, in an entirely bizarre way.

As Nellore city faded in the distance the roads changed. They were nice. Recently, the BJP (Hindu nationalist party) had secured a World Bank loan (two of my favorite organizations?) to improve the roads, and even out by small villages the Nellore highways are beautifully paved. Nice, but, unfortunately, significantly underwater. Water lapped at the bottom of our doors. Each time we slowed or stopped the car, a wave washed over the windshield, blinding us completely. We passed a few cars with the passengers pushing them through the waves, or trudging along the side of the road, clothes plastered to their bodies and shining in our headlights. Jeeps had never felt like such a great idea. I felt impervious in our Big White Box. The rain came and went, and each time we entered a grossly overgrown puddle at least one person folded their hands and shut their eyes to pray. We listened to Christian gospel in Telugu and tried to stay away from the ‘horn please’ tails of trucks. I sang my own favorite gospel songs under my breath and smiled down at the waves and wondered at the small crowds of empty vehicles around every roadside building, but we never stopped to join what must have been very crowded cozy damp living rooms.

Somewhere between the waves and the rain and the crinkling of shifting business clothes I pulled out Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, and opened to my precious goodbye-card bookmark. I was almost finished reading it, and this seemed like a suitably dramatic circumstance in which to say goodbye to the young nobleman turned noblewoman extraordinaire. My cell phone has a small flashlight on the end, and I traced it along the glorious sentences. They sounded prophetic against the sound of a million raindrops on metal and glass and more water. Ecstasy. ‘Do you have to sit for an exam tomorrow?’ K asked me teasingly. ‘No,’ I smiled, and read a few more pages.

We passed a handful of tollbooths staffed by plasticized policemen who insisted on taking our receipts back and forth through the torrent. After the third or fourth tollbooth, we passed to dry land. The rain slowed, and stopped completely. The cement with its World Bank Bright White Lines was slick, then damp, then dry. The bushes planted along the middle of the road sat quietly in the still night air. Suddenly, our Telugu gospel sounded even more joyful. We picked up speed, and pulled into a restaurant in Ongole, Prakasm just before closing time. The restaurant was disgusting, and lit with baby blue bulbs, but marginally clean and sufficiently stocked with cold bottled mineral water. We stuffed a few minutes worth of stale biryani into our mouths while staring, exhausted, at the stucco walls, and quickly climbed into a hired taxi.

I slept, cradling my still sore tailbone against the soft edges of the seat as I tried to curve by back to become as horizontal as possible. The driver reached Eluru, West Godavari, in record time, and soon we were rising up a comfortably packaged hotel elevator shaft to air-conditioned rooms on the fourth floor. There was a bed! And it was mine! This was my chance to sleep, horizontal and not in motion. I tried, and when I realized it was hopeless, I watched ‘You, Me, and Dupree’ on HBO. I tried again, and failed, and tried to cry, and failed. I tossed and turned, and succeeded quite satisfactorily at that. A text message lit up my phone: one of our first friends was leaving Hyderabad to go home to Mumbai. Funny he’s just waking up, I thought, and finally fell asleep. While I slept, an English-language edition of Thu Hindu was slipped under the door: the front page story showed a bus floating away, a handful of passengers marooned on its roof. An hour or two later, I woke and showered and dressed and held my head cautiously in my hands while I stared out at the low but solidly real buildings of Eluru. I sipped the orange-flavored Oral Rehydration Salts that I’d brought just for mornings like this and enjoyed the slightly sour squish of fresh idly against the roof of my mouth.

We conducted our second Advocacy Follow-up Workshop in M and K’s hotel room, with partner NGO staff from East and West Godavari districts. The schedule was the same, although the digressions into the relationship between resource mobilization and advocacy were significantly more heated. We visited two District Officials in order to practice Advocating; I sat in the front row and smiled and understood nothing except that we got a few empty promises and a little more rain. When the Telugu stretched on, I wrote a letter to a friend, and after our partners disappeared down the elevator shaft, I started piecing together the words to describe driving through the cyclone for my AJWS telephone check-in.

I put on my traveling-over-night salwar kameez for the third night in a row, and after another blue-lit dinner, I found myself sleepily slapping bugs on platform three at the Eluru train station. Our train pulled in at eleven, and I laid out my top-bunk train bedding as my mind shut off the light in the attic to fall quickly into a rumbling sleep. We stepped down at the Secunderabad train station amidst a light drizzle, and paid a scab cab driver to take us to work at seven in the morning. There was an auto strike on, which was technically annoying, but seemed a small inconvenience after the weather we had recently survived. I let myself into the office, splashed water on my face and daytime clothes across my body, and ate children’s milk biscuits while catching up on email. The work day passed in a pleasant blur, and I walked into my apartment in time for a Telugu lesson and a glorious Halloween dinner.

This adventure was made possible by: the NGO that Saved Us; Myla, who lent me Orlando; Adrienne, who gave me a beautiful little card which I keep as a bookmark; Eleanor, who donated the north Indian cell phone that happens to have a flashlight, and Pastor Monts, who taught me the words to so many gospel songs.