Transitions in India by Sky Stewart (epub read online books .TXT) 📕

Transitions in India

1979. It was my first time on an airplane, and not just any airplane. It was a Pan Am 747 and to a seven year-old boy it was the biggest thing ever built. Between the box of games, the frequent trips to the cockpit (and the bathroom), the free soda, the pin-on wings and constant tomfoolery, it’s a miracle my mother didn’t go completely insane. When we landed the whole passenger list let out a collective sigh of relief. Leaving the climate controlled colossus, the Bombay air hit me like bucket of warm Jell-o. My mother and I trudged across the sweltering tarmac towards an unknown fate but a certain sweaty destiny. We were to meet my new step father, brother and sister but when we made it inside the terminal we were faced with a greasy glass wall full of foreign faces. It was my very first experience with absolutely zero personal space. People were crammed in so tight that we looked right past our new ready made family, twice. The smell, like the heat, was heavy and stifling. Once through customs we were harried through the airport toward the waiting taxi by a shuffling mass of mangled, diseased unfortunates, pawing and mumbling a strange lingo of desperation. We loaded the luggage while my stepfather swatted homeless like flies and they were twice as relentless. As the taxi pulled away, they that could, ran along reaching in the windows with hands open, “paisa, paisa!!” they called as they fell away from the cab. “Just a few pennies….?” my Mother suggested. “Hell no! Give them anything and they will never leave you alone!!” Protested my step father. We were to learn later just how true his words were but first we had to survive the Bombay night.
There was some sort of mix-up at the hotel that ended up with our rooms being rented for the week and the rest of the place was full up. After much cursing and several hours of taxi rides we found a hotel with only one room left. Apparently there was some religious festival happening at the time and multitudes of tourists and the devout were thronging to the city. The streets were slow, meandering, rivers of brightly festive colors. Our taxi driver informed us that it was the celebration of the birth of Ganesh, an elephant headed deity who can bestow good fortune on the worthy. I counted twenty three Ganesh statues by the time we made it to the hotel. To my seven year old eyes the hotel room was amazing. Straight out of some old movie, it was huge, there was exposed pipes and wiring, bars and shutters for the windows (no glass), an old ceiling fan wobbled lazily overhead, raw iron beds, rust stained white tile in the bathroom and the last actual toilet I would use for six months. To my Mother, on the other hand, it was a nightmare room. True, there were carpets of giant cockroaches that scurried under the pipes when you turned on the bathroom lights and yeah, there were six inch long millipedes cruising the walls at all times but to me that was all part of the adventure. Mother was placated by a really superb dinner and an expensive bottle of wine. My new siblings advised me to get a nice steak, so I did. The last real beef I would eat for six months, it was delicious. After dinner we went to a market and garbed ourselves in the local fashion. For me it was light cotton pajamas with embroidered leaves on the shirt. It made the hot, sticky air seem downright tolerable. On the way back to the hotel we were stopped on the street by a group of ladies wearing beautiful silk wrappings of orange, purple, green and gold. They were bejeweled and bangled, with chains attached to nose rings and they made music when they moved. The ladies painted our faces with dots and forehead smears, all the while smiling, singing and dancing. I felt welcome. Mom was beat and a little overwhelmed so we made haste to the hotel. After shooing the roaches away and tying our leftovers to the ceiling fan I slept for the first time in another country, in what seemed like another world.
The next two weeks was a whirl wind of holy shrines and famous places. Huge cities hewn from raw stone, massive statues of unfamiliar deities, monkeys in the trees, elephants in the streets, strange bugs and precious stones. I saw the sun rise over the shoulder of Mount Everest and the sunset reflected in the pools in front of the Taj Mahal. I rode a small train into the hills of Darjeeling and met Tenzing Norkey, the first person to climb Mount Everest, in a small café there and got his autograph. I took a boat ride to Sri Lanka and saw my first real shark fin in the Indian Ocean. A blur of beauty and history that I will always cherish.
When we finally settled in one place, it turned out to be a city called Puna. Just east of Bombay, on the other side of the Sayhyadri Mountain Range, Pune is a Jungle city. Lush and humid, it was as though a modern city was struggling to grow out of it’s jungle mother. There were massive spiders hiding in trees thick with vines, flowers of every shape and smell, oxen wandering the streets, giant snakes in the bushes, mongoose running freely through the houses after the snakes and odd little men called snake-wallas, who would perform with the snakes for a few coins. While visiting one of Puna’s massive outdoor Junk Bazaars my mother gave a snake-walla a coin and he did some rather disturbing tricks with his pet cobra, which he kept in a little round basket. The show was a little much for mom and she made a scene, throwing some coins at the man and hurrying us kids away. We decided to call it a day and walked home. Well, either for causing a ruckus at his show or for the opportunity for a few more coins, that snake-walla followed us home. He set up shop outside our gate and gave us a free show for the rest of the day. It was amazing! He ran needles through various body parts, he chanted, he danced with his cobra, he made it do the strangest things, and at one point he made it bite him on the arm over and over again. Once again this was to much to bear for my mother and so she started screaming at the man to stop and go away! The linguistic and cultural roadblock between this Eastern magic man and this wacky American woman mounted to bad craziness in no time. The snake-walla revealed two other snakes from who-knows-where and proceeded to gesture with them as though he was going to release them into our gated yard. Now we were all freaking out. Mom grabbed a handful of Rupees and flung them through the gate while making shooing sounds and crying. We lured him there with a few Paisa and eight Rupees made it all go away. Money, the root of all evil. When my stepfather got home and was appraised of the situation he merely laughed and said, “I told you not to give them any money.”

Publication Date: 01-27-2010

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