COIMBATORE - Patricia & Didier’s House

Five of us are living in the house: besides me, a young French couple: Dooms (his ((Belgian)) family name) and Stephanie, P & D’s friends from France who’ve come for a month to help with the care of Didier, who is in a wheelchair, and to be in India, for the experience. They’re in the first throws of love. My hosts, Patricia & Didier, super-friends from Perpignan whom I met here in the Ayurvedic Clinic a few years ago who’ve dwelled in my heart ever since, have a large comfortable house on a residential street in the city. Didier gets regular Ayurvedic treatments from the clinic, which is just up the road.

Coimbatore is the real India. It’s an industrial city producing textiles, silks & saris. There are no beggars around here because there are no tourists. Unlike Goa, which is relatively clean, un-crowded, relatively sanitary and quiet, the air in Coimbatore is milky-white from the smoke produced by burning trillions of plastic bottles & bags, and everything else that’s combustible, except for the rest of the garbage that lies strewn all over the streets & vacant lots. The air is polluted with noxious fumes and filled with a fine suspension of dust; dust covers everything and everyone. Like everywhere in this great (nuclear power) country, the water and air are poison. The noise is incessant, car horns, motorcycles, motors, machines, goats, dogs… everything howling & growling at once, and powerful stink from animals, garbage, humans... Right now, as I write, a large truck with a motorized pump that sounds like a jet plane about to take off is pumping shit out of a hole in the road in front of the house, sucking it into its large yellow tank decorated with flowers. Welcome to “the turd world.”

Things move slow; it’s hard to get anything done; people don’t keep appointments, time means nothing, and honesty is not to be expected.

Neighbors keep showing up to see the American. They come by invited or not. Bagya, who keeps cows across the street, and is raising her children by selling milk, made a colorful mandala in front of the house in honor of my arrival. First, she spread a watery mixture of cow dung on the ground so the colors will stick. The stench fills the garden.

A family of 4 shows up just as we were about to eat dinner. They stare at me like I was Obama himself. Their curiosity outweighed any sensitivity to the fact that we were just about to eat dinner. Patricia & Didier are too polite to do anything but wait until they’re ready to leave. We’re invited to a neighbor’s daughter’s first menstruation celebration.

One night another neighbor came & played his tabla; his daughter danced & his wife sang. We 5 with white skin returned the favor with a boisterous aria from Bizet’s Carmen. Another visitor, a Pentecostal pastor, was so moved by our familial bonhomie, he stood up & said, “Shall we pray?” None of the westerners agreed, so he and his wife had to do it alone.

We sit in the garden and drink coffee in the morning. Stephanie rides the bike up the road to pick up dosas with three different sauces for breakfast. Take-out shops line the street near the house and it’s easier to bring prepared food home than to cook; we get grilled sardines, tandoori roasted chicken, stewed goat, fried fish, cooked vegetables, everything swimming in sauce so hot my mouth is on fire, but there is rice to calm it down a notch. My French companions smoke beedees all day, one after another. They think it’s healthy in spite of what I tell them.

Patricia & Didier have bought a new gleaming white Ambassador sedan, the Rolls Royce of India. We go for outings in the country, to the mountains, & to visit friends & look around. Behind the wheel, Dooms has taken on the insane Indian traffic. Like Arjuna on the battlefield, he is a hero.

Patricia tends her garden (and everything else); she’s put in flowers & some vegetables, but aphids have attacked all growing things in the region and she must apply special potions so her plants can live. “Everybody needs to eat,” says Didier. The weather is mild; we sit in the shade in the garden most of the day and talk and sing, discuss & relate (no TV). Didier sings Bob Dylan songs for me. He & Dooms chant in Tamil, the language of Tamil Nadu where we live.

Tomorrow I fly to Hyderabad to spend a little time with one of my oldest friends, M.R. Gautam, who was, when I met him in 1973, the greatest singer in all India – on the magnitude of a rock star—the Elvis of the raga, adored by kings & women of all ages. Because he’s ill now he’s moved back into the spacious home of his estranged wife, a princess, the daughter of a Raja, with whom he doesn’t get along, and 2 of their 4 children, a daughter-in-law, 2 grandchildren, and dozens of servants.

But this missive has been going on too long already, sorry, and that’s a story for another time.