September 3: The Trip to Kumily

I seem to be overly concerned with forms of transportation. Perhaps it's just a less complicated topic then writing about some of the tougher stuff concerning poverty and dirt, though I'm sure I will get to that too. . BUT the bus to Kumily was, in retrospect, pretty much exactly the way an Indian bus should be -- all the noise and contrasts one expects in this country. It was a semi-sleeper, meaning that its seats reclined almost as much as a business class airplane seat, but that the person in front of you pretty much had their head in your lap. There was extremely loud music paying that somehow fit into my India Is Exuberant theme, and so felt quite festive, until it was replaced around midnight with an even louder movie. At which point the shrill noise was a little much, but thankfully, someone realized everyone on the bus was trying to sleep and it was turned off about twenty minutes later. Every time I would just get to sleep, thinking it wasn't so bad, they would turn on the lights in order to let new people on.

The best part, however, was at 6 AM when the ticket taker -- of which there were two on board, in addition to the driver -- roughly shook everyone awake in order to inexplicably remove the seat cover over the top of the headrest. I am not sure why this was necessary at all, much less an hour before we reached our final destination, but clearly he had had enough of a bus full of sleepers.

Regardless, it meant that all of us -- there are ten in our group, five Germans, three Chinese, one Chilean, and me -- sleepily stared out the window trying to parse this. . . this land we were looking at. We had gone to sleep in the traffic and heat of Bangalore, and suddenly there was rain on the windows and the day was dawning over palm trees, kelly green rice fields, and hazy mountains on the horizon.

I think there must be something innate in humans where we try to associate where we are with some schema we have in our brains. This was kind of Florida (the palm trees) and kind of Iowa (it was amazingly flat). But then, well, there were the roaming bands of pigs. And the rich terracotta red earth, the women sweeping of their front (dirt) hearths with straw brushes and then drawing white geometric patterns on the ground to signify the home's purity, the Garden of Wisdom and Research Institute (???), and various tiny huts advertising internet access. Oh, and my favorite, a huge billboard in the middle of a rice field proclaiming: "Theme park coming soon." Nothing particularly Floridian or Iowan about it.

So, the next step was to try to associate it all with things more exotic-- i.e. things I've seen on screen. Next thing I know I am imagining Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Predator. Then to shake that image I suddenly switched to the episode when all of Sesame Street went to Hawaii (Mexico?) and the mountains turn out to be a giant snufulufagus. I ask you. How does this stuff get lodged in a girl's brain? I gave up.

But, damn, is it gorgeous here.