Author: <span>Patrick Cumby</span>
Patrick Cumby is a science fiction writer who also blogs about exploring the real world. He's sharing his thoughts at PatrickCumby.com.
He’s a young guy in a red Ferrari jacket with close-cropped hair, knockoff Italian shoes and a neatly manicured Tony Stark beard. If he speaks English, he doesn’t admit it. He just bobs his head and smiles warily at my cheery “Good Morning” and insists on carrying my heavy backpack to the car. He’ll be my driver for the next three weeks as I explore the isolated Brahmaputra floodplain, an area sandwiched between Bhutan, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar and connected to mainland India by a narrow sliver of land known as the “chicken-neck.”
Image-wise, Priyom is the exact opposite of Kal, my driver in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Where Kal had been conservative and staid, Priyom is sleek and stylish in a Fast-n-Furious kind of way. I quickly discover that this image also applies to his driving style. If riding with Kal was nail-biting, riding with Priyom is downright heart-stopping. Kal rarely exceeded 50KPH. Priyom rarely goes less than 100 unless a collision is imminent, at which point he jams the brakes and somehow slides between the careening bus and the fully-loaded lorry (with a couple of centimeters to spare), honking furiously and also dodging the inevitable bicycle or scooter. At the time of this writing I’ve been with Priyom for fifteen days, during which not one single vehicle of any kind has passed us. Not one. As far as I can tell, Priyom is the fastest driver in all of India.
Starting with the rushing throngs of Mumbai and moving into the slightly less hectic but still as dense southern states of Goa and Kerala, there hasn’t been a moment of silence since I stepped off the airplane. Not even in the countryside of Munnar, a supposedly relaxed rural area of tea plantations and high mountains have I escaped the sometimes annoying, occasionally mystifying, often beautiful but always present sounds of the Indian civilization.
On the inside back cover of the very first international travel book I ever bought (Peru), there was a list of supposedly common Spanish phrases and their English translations. Tucked between Where is the bathroom, please and How much does this cost was a phrase that, at the time, I found quite funny:
I prefer to have my surgery in the United States.
I can’t remember why I thought it was so funny, but the phrase stuck with me and now my wife and I use it often in jest in our travels, when we are about to do something we know to be risky. Before we try the raw-egg-and-fish in Sao Paulo, or before we accept a ride from a shady cab driver at midnight in Morocco, we look at each other and laugh and whisper:
I prefer to have my surgery in the United States!
It’s become a light-hearted mantra for us, a verbal talisman that hopefully protects us from ever having to say it for real. Today, though, for the first time ever, the humor is completely missing as I head to a government hospital in rural India as a patient.
My driver Kal is tired. I can tell by the way he’s rubbing his face. This makes me nervous. Driving in India takes intense concentration at all moments, and even a momentary lapse can mean that you either 1) run over a slow tuktuk or pedestrian, or 2) get squashed by one of the careening buses or heavy trucks which slow down for absolutely nothing.
Driving on any Indian road is dangerous enough, but the curvy, narrow roads of Thekkady are particularly deadly, as the occasionally skull-and-crossbones roadsigns continually remind me. Problem is, not only is he tired, he is also in a hurry, and I’m not sure why.
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
My driver’s name is Kal, and he will be taking me everywhere I want to go over the next eight days while I tour the southern Indian state of Kerala. Sounds cool, right, to have a private driver to chauffer you around, leaving you stress-free to enjoy the trip? A driver that is also a local guide who can point out interesting sights and activities along the route and explain the background to what you are seeing? A driver who is at your total disposal 24 hours a day?
Yes, but… this is India, where nothing is ever as simple or as easy as it first seems.
I’m in a taxi in the western Indian state of Goa, a sun-drenched surfer’s paradise known for good seafood, wild parties and easy access to illicit drugs. Like most of India, to my western eyes it’s a hard-to-grasp mishmash of poverty and prosperity, of vitality and dreariness, of incredible beauty and unbelievable filth. It’s also the only place I’ve ever visited where all of the world’s major religions seem to coexist in at least some level of harmony. There are lots of huge Christian churches (courtesy of the Portuguese colonial rulers), but there are also impressive collections of Islamic mosques, Hindu temples, and other religious structures I can’t even identify. Given this obvious attitude of religious tolerance, I guess the shrine on my taxi driver’s dashboard shouldn’t surprise me.
The moving map with the little airplane icon doesn’t show political borders, just a low-resolution image of satellite terrain. Where am I? I check the route map in the back of the airline magazine. Are we flying over Armenia or Turkey? I’m beginning to realize that my high-school geography is totally inadequate when confronted by the real world. Maybe that’s the Republic of Georgia in the distance to the north? Could it be Russia?
The ride is smooth; the roars, rumbles and hisses of an airliner in flight have merged into an acoustic lullaby. Everyone else is asleep, but I find myself glued to the window, trying not to smudge the cold plastic with my noseprint. It’s after midnight and the full moon is behind us, revealing a soft, snow-covered landscape of wrinkles and folds. Above, the stars are harsh blue perforations in a cold steel sky, arranged in strange patterns like an indecipherable blueprint of creation.
We’re flying over some of the most beautiful and exotic lands on Earth. How can it be that nobody else is enthralled by the view? Why isn’t every nose stuck to the glass, watching the wonders of the planet scroll slowly below us in the ethereal moonlight? How is it that nobody cares?
This post is part of a series of micro-travelogues called Seven Weeks in India. To see all the posts in this series, click here.
I first noticed it on my wall-map of the world, a small, oddly-shaped blob of Indian territory disconnected from the rest of country linked by a long, thin tether of land I could cover with my pinkie finger. This strange little geographic extrusion was unlabeled; it looked oddly vulnerable stuck between Nepal and Bhutan and Burma and Tibet and Bangladesh and China.
You can read history from a simple map. The fact that this region was a part of India even though it was so remote and disconnected suggested a geopolitical struggle at some point in the past. Its location at the base of the Himalayas and at the center of a cluster of other nations suggested strategic importance. Curious, I looked at the area in Google Maps. Odd and compelling place names filled the screen: Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh. When I switched to satellite view in Google Maps I was confronted by a bizarre landscape of a truly gigantic river basin draining the world’s highest mountains. It was obvious from the map image that this was a land of tremendous geological scale. The biggest rivers, the biggest mountains. I was instantly hooked. I’d stumbled across a strange and exotic land, the most undeveloped region of India, a sheltered cocoon filled with tiny remote villages and traditional tribal cultures and a vast alien landscape unlike anyplace else in the world. We would definitely be visiting this place on our trip to India.
But how?
Admittedly, this is a bit heavy-handed and iconoclastic, but I offer no apologies; it’s the way I felt after reading the news today.
She was born in the heart of the first man, and she has stalked us since. It was she who elevated the kings to their thrones and the gods to their high realms, and through the millennia her tyranny has grown boundless.
To some she seems a noble warrior: tall and terrible; to others she is a virtuous goddess: beautiful and compelling. Yet all men know the crushing power of her weapons: in her right hand is Patriotism, in her left Religion, and spanning her brow is the crown of Righteousness. She is glory and misery, passion and cruelty. She is the sword and the flag, the hymn and the verse. She is the army marching to defend the homeland from the enemy, the preacher condemning the unbelievers. She knows that the hollow cavity of our soul can be filled by love or fear, but not both, and that fear is the more energizing passion.
Here’s a flash-fiction story inspired by an evening I spent at Canyon de Chelley, surely one of the most magical places on the North American continent.
The old man stood at the rim of a canyon in Navajo country, his toes just three inches from the raw edge. Sunset had come and gone, and now the thousand-foot-drop at his feet could only be perceived as a black emptiness as huge and compelling as eternity itself. It was visceral, existential; instead of a canyon, he felt as if he was leaning over the farthest end of the earth, staring down into cosmic infinity. Death was three inches away, but he’d never felt more alive.
