Five Photographs

20-27 February 2008
Chennai, Tamil Nadu

In late February, Shlayma and I headed to Chennai for a week of work from the head office of our NGO (we have a third office in Kolkata, a semi-active office in New York, and field offices in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, and Karur, Tamil Nadu). I went to work on an online support center; she went to work on an NGO-wide brochure and library project. We stayed in the boss’s empty apartment, played musical desks in the office, and went out to lunch and dinner with friends and co-workers in between.

I brought my camera, but I didn’t take it out of my bag. So here are five photographs:

1. The walls of the train are steel, and the bunks are blue plastic, a softish fake leather. In Third AC, each compartment as two sets of three bunks to a wall, facing each other, complimented by a set of two, shorter bunks on the side of the train. I was sitting with the thick scarred plastic of the window to my right, tweedish blue curtains pushed into the corner, and the set of two short bunks to my left, across the rolling-suitcase-width hallway. The middle bunks folds down during the day, and six (usually more) people squeeze onto the two benches created by the lowest birth. Dinner is around 7:30; families unpack tiffins (stainless steel tupper-ware) of lemon rice and home-made chutneys, while single men traveling on business and young women going for visas at the American Embassy in Chennai munch on deep-fried anything (wada, samosas, bananas). The young woman sitting across from us wore a tan kurta with black embroidery and black churdidar pants that bunch at the ankles. Her long, perfectly straight her fell down to her elbows as she expertly flipped through games and numbers in her cell. Her mother sat to her right, wrapped in a pinkish red saree decorated with identical, but slightly thicker, versions of her daughter's gold jewelry. We chatted with the young woman about New Jersey (where she will be joining a substantial Telugu IT community in a few months), about adjusting to life in Andhra; about trains, and the difficulty of sleeping on them.

2. The Chennai office is at the back of a driveway in a residential neighborhood. It has lower ceilings than the office I’m accustomed to, and the walls are painted a very Indian light pink. The doorways are wide, and only sometimes hung with white wooden slats. From my desk in the very back room, I could see the documentation team working on a assortment of computers, a print-out from the Mr. Bean cartoon exclaiming something exceptionally British and somewhat entertaining next to a white board scrawled with a schedule in red pen. Just past one more slightly-dusty, somewhat-used gray metal cabinet, I could get one glimpse of the front room of the office, where the administrative assistant rules the roost and a thin segment of real live daylight makes it inside past the porch and the motorbikes parked outside and the decorated threshold and the pink archways and the accountant with her embroidered saree and long perfect braid hung with a string of jasmine that I could smell when the breeze was just right.

3. We invited a friend to Shabbat, and he taped it. On the video, our faces appear in a vague circle of sepia-toned light, tilted and moving just a little with the words. We are sitting on the floor – marble that has been swept clean but could use a loving mop – and leaning against undecorated, high white walls. The candles, storm candles that Shlayma remembered to grab on the way out of our Hyderabad apartment, are precariously balanced, one in a small clay dish meant to be used as an oil lamp and the other in the upturned lid of a beer bottle. Our bread is naan (cooked by throwing a round of thin dough against the inside of a very hot tandoori oven), and a tiny bottle of precious wine (manufactured in Bangalore, Karnataka, for sale only in Tamil Nadu but named after a fort just outside of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh) sits unopened nearby. We decided not to bring a prayer book, but the words came easily, although the longest pauses were saved for a niggun – a wordless melody – that Shlayma has been teaching Myla and I. In the video, our eyes our still and our lips our moving and our bodies are moving just a little with the sound.

4. The dry sand of the beach is dirty, scattered with junk-food wrappers and dead fish, feces and broken pieces of fishing nets. The wet sand is empty, decorated only with the broken shell of a coconut being washed up and down the same two feet by the quiet but insistent waves. In the mid-day heat there are no boats out on the water, and only a few people venture out of the shadows. The peeling paint on the prow of a fishing boat – maybe twenty feet long, and open on top, meant to be propelled only by paddles and the waves – gives me just enough shade to peer out at the intensely blue sea. The sky is two shades lighter, but even without the green undertones and white flecks of the water, the dome above is just as bright as its twin sister. I hold up my hands, the dark brown lines of henna suddenly bright against my light skin, somehow separated from the rest of my body. They look solitary and strong, with the line of the horizon cutting across the back of my palms and so I hold them there and let the sun sink in, thick and penetrating and feel the breeze push back, strong and warm and embracing until it picks up my hair and tosses it in my face so my hands have to go back to work.

5. Anyone from Chennai will tell you that Marina beach is the longest beach in the world. It is long – maybe twelve kilometers – but this is not its defining characteristic. It is almost half a kilometer at its deepest, and the layers of crowds, the lovers and the children and the cops on their beat, the bicycles and the ice-cream vendors and the men at booths selling balloon-toss carnival dart games, the women frying and the kites flying and the cars rumbling along the massive through-way just beyond the sand; these people and objects and sounds and smells are its defining characteristics. The most amazing thing about this morass of humanity is the way that the sea is still capable, after all the pollution and the light and the noise, to swallow it up. When you’ve passed through the last fry-stand light and the man selling whistles has walked away from your ear and you’re standing at the edge of the dark water the rest of the world melts away. The stars twinkle according to their script, and are answered by lights from massive container ships anchored out in the Bay. The scrappy clouds look like cotton swaying in a light breeze against the grandeur and solidity of the steel water and you don’t doubt for a minute that in front of this you are nothing and you are everything and that, of course, is all that matters.

Over the weekend, I wrote a letter to a friend:
... I’m sitting on the tiled floor of my co-worker’s home (concrete but tiny), 1.5 bus-hours south of Chennai, and a few hundred meters away from the polluted sand and sparkling water of the Bay of Bengal. I’m sparkling-ly clean from a warm bucket shower – although I almost accidentally bathed in seawater. The henna is fading from my palms, and my white button-down shirt makes me feel uncomfortably like an actress in some adventure travel film. Kenny Chesney is playing from my friend’s computer – I’m recovering from a strange sort of panic attack, and the smooth voice of emotional country pop rocks sounds just right. It was a wave of emotion, voices shouting and whining in my head, intuition on a loudspeaker, hands shaking as I took off small piles of shackle-bangles so I could curl up on my bed and mindlessly scan the same three headlines on The Hindu, not a tear or a scream or a word in sight – until, instantaneously and indescribably, the wave washed over me and turned the volume down, so that the same sentences scrolled behind my open eyes with without a trace of flashing neon colors. And the world was alright, and I was curled up on a hard mattress with an orange sheet in a un-lived-in apartment in one tiny, insignificantly random corner of it...

And then we went home (a delicious thing to have).