We spent our first three days in India in Chennai, the bustling and sprawling capital of Tamil Nadu.
We were nowhere near EM Forster's sound-warping caves, but there were some Forster-worthy miscommunications. Our gracious hosts were so anxious for us to have a good time that we grew anxious that they were over-exerting themselves. Chief among mounting anxieties was the worry (no one will possibly believe this) that we weren't eating enough. They were especially worried (again, we don't expect you to believe this) about Nick.
Believe us, he was eating. For starters, he ate that, in one sitting! And it was amazing. In Chennai, we had the best chana masala, poori, and daal we'd ever tasted. Every day was full of delicious dishes, familiar and unfamiliar. Each and every one of them was rich and incredibly filling.
We had a brief respite from our marathon-like meals over coconut water...
...and while learning to cool hot coffee, Indian style.
On our first full day in Chennai, we wandered through "nearby" Pondicherry, the largest French colony in India. Pondicherry, we discovered is actually pretty distant from Chennai (which was a British trading post for cotton, widely known as Madras).
Pondi, as it's affectionately known, impressed us from the start. Upon getting out of the car, we turned to see an elephant amble down the middle of a street full of parked cars. Unfortunately, we only got pictures of Nick walking down the street. We'll pretend not to be disappointed.
The French quarter is pretty and quaint, with big trees arching over the road, brick-paved streets, and a pretty town square. Street names are all in French, as are the stations of the cross in this lovely Catholic church.
On the way to Pondi, we saw strange things. First example: Oreville, a Utopian town conceived in the 70s, built around meditation inside a golden bean, which apparently holds a large crystal. The town has been slow to spring up (as has the moat promised around the bean), but non-participants can view the bean from afar.
We imagine that more time was spent perfecting the bean than crafting the town's guidelines, which require town citizens to abandon religion, and also to "live freely" under a "single authority." Conduct a few interviews, and we could write the condescending
New Yorker piece ourselves.
We also saw wondrous things. (No, the bean didn't really count.) Also on the way to Pondi was Mamallapuram, sprawling stone temples dating from 7th - 9th century.
The temples testified to the booming trade in the region -- we saw Roman columns and Chinese-style pagodas and lions.
This temple, which is one of the largest bas reliefs in the world, was our favorite -- covered in Hindu stories all carved from a single stone.
That little columned temple on the left shelters some rather darling animals. A bull stands strong, his leg jutting out from the rest of the carving.
A mama cleans her baby.
Krishna's Butterball is nearby. The huge stone worried the British so much that they had seven elephants try to dislodge it before it fell on its own. The elephants couldn't budge it, and it remains perched not-so-precariously on the hill.
We were delighted, after such serious sightseeing so far afield, to spend time in Chennai. The streets are packed -- with cars, with people, with oxen, with food sellers. The bustle was dusty, vibrant, and exhausting. Temples make for a tiny bit of respite at nearly every street corner.
We visited Kapaleeshwarar on a
Story Trails tour of Chennai. We were glad to get guidance. We had no idea, for example, that there is a set path through Hindu temples (we wondered in Nepal why we were the only people wandering back and forth), and we didn't realize that the chatting, back-slapping, and eating going on inside is part of usual temple life.
Mothers hoping to conceive, and girls hoping to get married, hang things from this tree.
Catholicism made it to India early, with St. Thomas, who landed in Kerala and walked across the peninsula to Chennai, spreading the Gospel as he went. He lived in Chennai for some time, and was martyred on a nearby hillside. Today, St. Thomas's Basilica is built around his remains.
The building is a neo-Gothic birthday cake of a church, ruffled and white. Inside and outside, local symbols and traditions blend with Catholicism.
Mary graces the courtyard outside, wearing a sari. She gets a change of outfit (and, we hear, color) every day.
Peacocks, symbols of purity, stand at the foot of the cross; Christ's feet rest on a lotus flower. Outside, flags celebrating the time of year and the religious day are draped on poles like those at Hindu temples.
The Portuguese built the church (they were there ahead of the British), but the British helped rebuild it in the nineteenth century. They already had their own church, inside the fort.
Fort St. George, built to administer the cotton trade and protect the workers of the Dutch East India Company, is now the center of state government. At the heart of the fort is a small Episcopalian chapel. Soldiers, none too experienced at church-building, made it more fortress than church. The ceilings could withstand shelling: they are three meters thick.
Nearby the fort is an even odder remnant of colonial presence: an ice house, built to store
ice shipments from the American east coast in the 1830s.
After three days in Chennai, we hopped on SpiceJet to our next stop...Kerala!
Our trip to Chennai was memorable, but in a peculiar way. We were welcomed so graciously and attentively, and we were fascinated by everything we saw. The bustle, the attention, the various pieces of wildly different history, and the driving (oh, the driving) made Chennai memorable, but also disorienting. We could not imagine navigating the city on our own. As we look at our pictures, we see the disorientation we often felt. And we realize that part of the experience that was meaningful for us was the confusion itself. We will have to keep reading and learning to understand even a tiny piece of what we saw.
