So it's goodbye India tonight with very mixed feelings (sad to go, full of affection for the places I've been and the people I've spent time with, excited about Thailand and its possibilites). I suppose such a torn heart is appropriate for a place which accommodates such glaring contradictions side by side with no hint of irony. I'm thinking of the juxtaposition of personal cleanliness and public filth (rubbish is endemic here, with no apparently functional centralised system of collection - and public dustbins a rarity), and signs like this outside one of the 1500 temples of the holy city of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu:
I have spent this past week in Chennai being thoroughly spoiled by Irene, her boyfriend, Jayaram, and her parents, Agnes and Cyrilraj. Irene had warned her mum that I'd been going a bit mad in Chavakkad, my last stop in Kerala, with the lack of variety (to put it very mildly) in my diet. So Agnes has kindly ensured I've not eaten the same thing twice since my arrival, with her delicious south Indian home cooking.
It's been a bit of a shock (but a welcome one) to have everything organised for me and to be so spoiled, after months of working out buses, trains and confusing geography. It's been a delightful way to round off these six Indian months - thank you!
I was taken to Mamallapuram early in my stay, a sort of 7th (I think) century laboratory of temples:
Here I am, under Durga's foot (a good place to be in relation to the warrior goddess, I feel):
A few nights ago, Irene and her mum decided I should be arrayed in one of Irene's saris (and we're quite a good match on the blouse sizes, luckily). They wrapped me in six metres of beautiful turquoise Mysore silk and posed me appropriately. I couldn't well leave India without a camp sari shot!
Yesterday we went to Kanchipuram, a sort of Varanassi of the south, a very holy Hindu town of 1500 or so temples. One of my favourite moments was being blessed by fifteen year old Jayanthi (a girl elephant) in the Parvati temple (apparently known as the Kamatchi Ammann temple). Here's Jayaram guiding me through it:
Earlier in the day, we had been through the gorgeous old carvings of the Kailasanadher Temple (a Shiva temple). I say "been through" because this is one of the ones that practises Hindu apartheid (don't get me started) and won't let in heathen like me (or Christian Irene - her boyfriend Jayaram is a Brahmin, so he's ok). Outside, as I was looking at a particular carving of a rather fierce looking Shiva, I realised here was the meditation that started this blog off (the story is in the first entry, if you don't get what I mean). The carving was the exact image I had seen in my meditation, except the trident pointed vertically down at me instead of at this angle. Just picture me walking through the river under it!
I've never seen this image before and was slightly spooked to be presented it on my last day in India. I have no idea what this means, if anything, but I'm taking it as a good omen as I jump prongs onto the next leg of my journey. Wish me luck!
Wishing you joyful pathways,
With love from Lucy xx
Here is what I wrote just over a month ago (I know this as another period has just come and gone with all the weird kalari implications this involves). I don’t know if it’s the heat or if I’ve just gone into hibernation mode, but I’ve found it almost impossible to write anything lately…
This week has been a bit peculiar as I’ve not been allowed in the kalari. Considering entering the kalari is a bit like entering a womb (albeit one with a lot of straight lines in it) and that it’s choc-full of manifestations of the goddess, I find it a bit bemusing that menstruating women aren’t permitted entrance (I can’t believe there’s no blood on Bhadrakali). However, I don’t feel particularly equipped to take on that particular taboo, and seeing as I’ve met with such unstinting generosity from everyone connected to the CVN Kalari here in Trivandrum, I don’t feel much like complaining - quite apart from the fact that two of the four days I’ve had off I felt rotten and had no desire to cover myself in oil, sweat buckets and kick my legs about my head. If it hadn’t been for my Mohinyattam classes though, it would have been a very lonely week.
When I moved into his house, Rajan, who co-ordinates a programme here connected to the University of Wisconsin (his day-job is at an earth-sciences research institute, so my scientist friends can rest assured that the physics connection continues unabated), suggested that, as I’m a dancer, I might like to learn some classical Indian dance while I’m here. The words “classical” and “dance” anywhere near each other in a sentence have struck horror into my heart ever since years of ritual humiliation in ballet classes through my adolescence (a twelve-year old Betty Boo just doesn’t work in a leotard and pointe shoes). Nonetheless, I decided it would be silly to pass up the opportunity and so one morning after Kalari, Rajan popped me on the back of his scooter and took me down the road to Shoba’s house.
Shoba is my Mohinyattam teacher. She is a very pretty lady who makes me look rather tall (I’m five foot two and a bit, about 1.57m, for anyone who hasn’t stood next to me recently). This is where my classes happen, four or five mornings a week after Kalari (and after the breakfast in the house-come-café Rajan drops me off at).
Once we had made the arrangements, Rajan explained to me that he would bring the beetle leaf and nut for me to give to Shoba the next morning, that I should add a coin and touch Shoba’s feet to ask for her blessing as my teacher. I was very touched that he went to the trouble of organising all this for me, and also felt rather bad that I’d never touched his feet when he’d taken me as a student, as no one had told me this was part of the procedure.
To those not specialist in classical Indian dance forms, Mohinyattam uses very similar movement vocabulary to the more widely-known (Tamil) Bharatanatyam. Mohinyattam is from Kerala, is less percussive and exact in its lines than Bharatanatyam. Anyone familiar with my idiosyncratic relationship with rhythm (don’t ever make me play a drum) will realise it’s just as well I’m not attempting Bharatanatyam. The sense I get is that Mohinyattam is more concerned with the pathways to the form whereas Bharatanatyam is concerned with the perfection of the form and its lines.
People refer to it as soft and graceful and fluid. Essentially, the subtext is that Mohinyattam should be VERY sexy.
If I remember correctly, this is how the story goes:
The gods needed to churn up the ocean of milk to get the nectar of immortality from it, but the only way they could do this was to enlist the help of the demons. The demons (reasonably enough, as I think the churning went on for some millennia) would only help if they got to share the nectar of immortality (amrita, I think it’s called). Once the amrita had emerged from the ocean of milk, the gods decided they didn’t want to share it after all (or maybe they’d decided this all along) and so Vishnu took on the female form of Mohini, the enchantress.
Mohini was so fantastically alluring that the demons forgot all about the nectar they’d been churning the ocean for over millennia, and the gods got it all. A side story is that Shiva was also rather taken with Mohini, and the result of this union was another god, who I think might be the hunter god in the kalari (but I could be wrong here – any clarifications welcome). So basically Mohinyattam is the dance of the enchantress.
Now I feel many things when I dance, but enchanting isn’t generally one of them. I have a great kick-back reaction to any suggestion that I have to be pretty or alluring or feminine. So I thought I would find Mohinyattam a bit of a trial. Actually, the first class I did feel a bit stiff and all through the first week, I was under no illusion that Mohini was in any remote danger of competition from me. But after a few days, I was finding it really rather fun. Now I seem to have improved a bit and Shoba even gives me the occasional compliment.
Of course, there are plenty of things that aren’t so good. “You don’t do eye exercises?” Shoba asked in some shock, as I attempted to explain that they’re not a usual part of the training of western contemporary dancers. So my eye-control is poor. And I’m not convinced that my arms and upper body are quite there, but the whole thing is feeling a lot more fluid than when I started.
So there’s a revelation for me: it’s actually possible for me to enjoy a classical dance form! And whilst I won’t be distracting any demons away from nectars of immortality any time soon, they may condescend to look my way and laugh a bit while they glug their amrita down.
And, as I said, this week, with no Kalari, it’s been my only activity – and has probably benefitted from the fact I’ve not been doing it with Kalari-exhausted legs. It’s also been my main social interaction. Shoba and her husband Manuj also teach Ravi Shankara’s Art of Living and classes are peppered with snippets of conversation. The other day I was trying to explain what an olive tree looks like to Manuj, as he was bemoaning the lack of prana in imported foods.
Shoba is organising a performance on Saturday of Keralan performing art-forms for some government types, and I’ve been invited along. She had suggested dressing me in one of her saris if I got myself a blouse made up. Quite apart from my fears of tripping over six metres of cloth in public (or worse, it all falling down), I’ve decided that Shoba has quite enough to organise for this show without dressing a clueless European, so fun as it would be, I think I’ll stick to trousers and tunic.
And here’s backstage at Shoba’s medley of traditional Keralan performance:
I loved Trivandrum and the kalari and Rajan’s care and attention (no more “slowly” by the end of it, just “up!” as my thigh banged gently against my belly on the good leg-kick days). I loved his big airy house that I rented and the quiet walk to it from the bus stop, past the fresh juice shop, through the coconut trees. I loved being able to jump on the bus to Kovalam beach and swim in the Arabian Sea (which occasionally reminded me with a particularly rough wave that she was to be respected). I made some friends at the kalari whom I spent time with, namely a couple of Bharatanatyam dancers from Edinburgh and a French photographer/video artist. Despite this, I had swathes of time to myself, which I sometimes found too much but also valued phone contact with friends in Bangalore.
Having congratulated myself on avoiding the Kumbh Mela when I passed through Haridwar in the north (on my way to Calcutta from Rishikesh) – a gathering of literally millions of sadhus on the banks of the river Ganga (as someone pointed out to me recently, only foreigners call it the “Ganges”. Why do we? No one in India does) – I found myself in Trivandrum in the biggest gathering of women in the world (according to the Guinness Book of Records). Three million women lined the streets of Trivandrum on February 28th to cook in the midday sun for Attakal Pongala. And here are some stoves, lined up in preparation:
It was actually a very low-key affair, cooking pots lining the streets everywhere you looked. Rajan invited me to his house for the day, where many of his family had gathered from far and wide in Kerala. It was lovely to be part of it with them all, to be fed some very lovely food off a banana leaf and then to meander through the streets (the three million women pack up their cooking and head home at 3:30 sharp, after the priests have been round to bless their culinary efforts) through the older part of East Fort to Shoba’s house to chat with her and her family and be eaten by mosquitoes as dusk fell. Then, as I finally managed the walk back home, some neighbours I had not yet met invited me into their home for yet more paesum, the sweet rice dish that had been cooked as part of the offering. So food all round, and all of it blessed.
When I’d visited the local devi temple the week previously, where they were enacting a smaller scale version of what was to be Attakal Pongala the following week, I’d been adopted by its chairman (I’m not quite sure how) and would stop by his house occasionally to chat with the Prem family. His wife made me a very memorable fish curry lunch one day. Here I am, eating it:
And they also took me to the Attakal temple in the week of the build-up to the festival. Once we’d been through the crush to the goddess, it was a bit like a funfair: lights and balloons everywhere, lots of food stands and big Bollypop (or should that be Mollypop, as it’s Malayalam?) stage. I didn’t think “Jai Ho” had religious connotations, but maybe there’s more than I realised to the theme tune of Slumdog Millionaire. Here are some members of the Prem family, my extremely hospitable escorts of the night:
One thing that’s happened since I’ve been in Kerala is that I’ve got much better at eating with my fingers. I can even do the tearing of most breads one-handed now (touching food with your left hand is a big no-no here), which completely eluded me before. In general, I could cope with finger eating for bready foods but wasn’t too keen on it when rice was involved. I knew a corner had been turned when I was sitting in a Trivandrum “hotel” (which is not a hotel at all but a restaurant in India) finishing my porotta and tomato fry. Well, the porotta (bready round thing, very nice) was all gone and without thinking I finished eating the tomato-onion-chilly fry with my fingers, despite the fact a spoon was just in front of me (my fingers were already covered in food, so there didn’t seem much point in picking up the spoon). Usually I don’t have the choice. There just isn’t any cutlery and asking for it when most people barely speak any English and don’t understand mine, and I don’t speak any Malayalam, just feels more trouble than it’s worth. I occasionally wonder, as people stare at me while I eat (I’m now in a much smaller Keralan town and a solo woman is a complete novelty), whether they have any notion how completely alien it is to me to be eating with my fingers. But I suspect they put down any clumsiness to the fact I’ve not been taught proper table manners. After all, what can you expect of an unmarried woman travelling on her own?
Yes, I’m getting very tired of that question. “Are you married?” usually preceded or followed by “How old are you?” And then when I tell them I’m not married, an astonished “Why?!” It seems that a woman my age has no function other than as a wife (and mother, by implication).
Ummmm… because no one ever wanted to? Because I never wanted to? Because marriage in Kerala seems to be endless work (I’d call it drudgery, but maybe they enjoy it) for the women? Time and again I see beautiful sylph-like creatures on buses or the street who look about fifteen. I then discover they’re teaching electronics, which should make them at least twenty-two. But since leaving Bangalore, I haven’t seen many of the vibrant late twenty or thirty somethings. Here in Kerala, the transition from young girl to tired matron is swift. Perhaps they like it, but I don’t see that marriage is very kind to women here. Possibly most jarring to me was when I asked the young (female) championship-winning kalari star of this town if she planned to continue her kalari once she finished university. “That will be for to my husband to decide,” she said, no hint of regret or rebellion. Well, my life may be tricky and unpredictable and occasionally very lonely (and definitely unmarried!) but oh, thank you God that I have choice in it, that my mess-ups as well as my modest successes are my own, that I am responsible for my own destiny! Kerala is beautiful and lovely but I am grateful, grateful, grateful not to be one of her traditional women!
I left Trivandrum in early March, hoping to return soon. A short train journey took me to Varkala, hippy beach resort, where I spent two very pleasant days courtesy of a friend’s birthday. Varkala made me think that I was ready for Thailand and that I could quite happily while the time away there (something I had been slightly worried over after all the activity and focus of India). Here’s a self-portrait on the beach:
I then continued north to Fort Cochin, where I spent a lot of time avoiding the cruise-ship parties and tourist-touts. It’s very graceful and southern European in feel (I kept expecting to see pot-bellied men playing Pétanque, fag-end hanging out of their mouths, in the leafy squares), and surprisingly clean for India, but very expensive when you’re used to the rest of country. I was glad to see it but equally glad not to spend more than a day there. And from there I headed on to a small place near the temple town of Guruvayur. I arrived on the final day of yet another huge festival, in time to see the elephants parading around the temple. I don’t think I’ve ever been so near a creature so huge.
Here I have been experiencing a village kalari, where they train in a different style outside among the coconut trees. It’s been very interesting to see something of this different style and nice to be outside (though I’m constantly kicking sand into my face) but challenging too to be in a place so small that everyone stares at me like the woman with three heads (though I am becoming used even to that). There is a beautiful beach here, but no chance of swimming. I went for a walk on the beach fully-clothed one day, ankles covered, shoulders covered, no hint of décolleté, and even then every fisherman there wanted his picture taken with me (no, it’s not particularly flattering, more of a freak-show).
I’ve been very quiet here: training, endlessly washing sandy, sweaty, oily clothes, sleeping, somehow incubating this time before my next transition, taking stock of these last six months in India and the many unexpected gifts they have brought me. It’s been very hot. We had some rain the other night and the temperature in my room dropped from 38 to 33. I actually got chilly in the night and woke to turn the fan down and cover myself. I’ve had a lesson in the relativity of all things: the joy of rain (not something particularly joyful in London) and the greatest pleasure of my days being my cold showers (I've not particularly missed hot water in Kerala).
Monday I leave Kerala and take the train to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) to stay with my friend Irene, perhaps to do some teaching, definitely to sort out my Thai visa and then, on the night of the 30th, to say my farewell to India and leave for Thailand. I’m looking forward to more variety in my diet, to not having to cover up quite so ruthlessly, to the ease I remember of Thailand after the energy demanded of me by India. But I will be sorry to leave India.
Somehow I feel I have put down a few roots here, which for someone as rootless as me is a strange thing and I don’t know what it means. I feel that I have been woven into the fabric of this land – a rather strange thread that everyone turns and stares at, but an accepted thread nonetheless. I hope I will be back in not too long…
I was hoping that would alliterate and thought of putting in “karuna” for love. But I decided that was being pretentious and it isn’t compassion, it’s love, so the alliterative genie will just have to settle for the next letter in the alphabet.
Speaking of alphabets, I’m now on my fifth one since I’ve been in India, not counting any I may have passed through on the train and failed to notice. (For those keeping track, that’s Devanagari in all the Hindi-speaking places up north, Tibetan in Ladakh and Dharamsala, Bengali in Kolkata, Kannada in Bangalore, now Malayalam in Kerala). I can get my head round the fact that India has so many languages but I find it hard to grasp how a country with a different script for almost each one manages to communicate with itself. In the south, English is a bit of a lingua-franca (apparently preferable to the northern Hindi), though a very particular kind of English. One irate pedestrian in Bangalore told me once, when my rickshaw driver and I asked him for directions, “I don’t understand your English!” (R.P. doesn’t get you very far here.) This leads to some delightful spellings (and of course I never have my camera to hand when I whizz past them). India has the world’s best sign-designers. Here are some of my favourites, not always entirely due to the spelling:
“GREEN COCONUT GOOD FOR ELETH” (Bangalore)
“TAILET” (a gompa in Ladakh)
“BETTER MISTER LATE THAN LATE MISTER” (on a Himalayan Ladakhi road)
“SPEED THRILLS BUT KILLS” (on the road to Kovalam beach)
“MEN DO NOT URINATE AGAINST WALLS. ONLY DOGS URINATE AGAINST WALLS.” (an exasperated householder in Bangalore, my first time round, eight years ago)
But I digress.
My journey, sleeper class to Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram officially, though I’ve yet to hear anyone call it that, even if it is written everywhere) was entirely uneventful and at a mere seventeen hours felt quite short. It was a complete treat having company while I underwent the tortuous procedure of squeezing my belongings into my rucksack on my last night in Bangalore and I was even more grateful to Abhilash and Vibhinna for then seeing me to the station. Having lugged myself and my guff across India solo over the last few months, actually being seen onto my train (by people who speak the language) was sweet beyond words.
My final Bangalore addendum is to direct anyone interested to our very amusing review in the Deccan Herald (click here!) and to say (because I forgot last time and it’s really quite amazing) that we performed La Blanche & The Spaces Between to a full house.
I look at this picture (featuring an attendant desperate for something to do in the kitchen quarters of PadmanabhapuramPalace – more on that in the next entry. Having had similar dull jobs in my chequered career, I sympathised) and realise I have changed colour over these two and a half weeks in Kerala. Contrary to what some people predicted, I don’t think it makes me look any more Indian.
Then again, I’ve long since given up any idea of trying to blend in. People will stare at me no matter what I wear, and at least here in Kerala they usually smile with it (a vast improvement). In any case, I reasoned with myself as I walked down the street today, I’ve spent my life sticking out wherever I am. Perhaps living in London so long – where everyone is from somewhere else and so no one takes much notice – softened me up a bit. Now I’m becoming more used to being the next best thing to the circus coming to town, so I just cover up the requisite bits and sally forth.
I stayed my first couple of nights in Trivandrum in the upstairs room at the CVN Kalari, which made the 6:45 am training a little less jarring to my night-owl-inclined system. Sathyan, the kalari’s gurrukkal, spends most of his time in the attached Ayurvedic clinic (it’s traditional for the martial art and healing system to go hand in hand) and Rajan does most of the teaching. (In fact his name is Rajasekharan, but I think he thought that might be too much for me to cope with.) It turns out that Rajan is also my landlord (and a completely delightful one at that). On day three, I moved into the lovely house he rents out to people associated with the kalari, a few minutes away by bus (three and a half Rupees, please) off the road to Kovalam. Through a typically confusing set of circumstances, I was initially going to share this house but now have it solo. I find it rather ironic that the main theme of my life in London was lack of space and here I am rattling around in a three-bedroom house with as many roof terraces, where it takes me a good five minutes to go round and shut all the windows before I go out. It’s a good job I like my own company, as I have a lot of it here. After all the bustle and sociability of Bangalore, it was a bit of a shock to be so much by myself, but I am used to it again now and feel something of the freedom I experienced when I moved into my Westminster flat in London for that first year to myself (seven years ago now – how scary is that?!).
I completely love the Kalari. It’s quite hard to describe. Kalari is both the name of the training place – come temple – come clinic and the abbreviated name of the martial art practised there, thought to have originated in Kerala in the mists of time. Some people claim it is the father of all martial arts but they are usually Indian and I don’t know enough to take on any Chinese martial artists who might have something to say on the matter. If I remember correctly, “kalari” means “place” and “payatt” means “practice”. So the full (Malayalam) name of the martial art is “kalarippayatt” or “kalarippayattu” and it means very simply “the place of practice”.
The kalari is laid out along compass points according to tradition and has set traditional measurements. I find myself occasionally wishing the elders had envisioned a rather larger training space, as the kalari can sometimes negotiate like a busy Indian road, legs kicking in all directions but everyone emerging miraculously unscathed.
According to tradition, it is set below ground level and is quite dim, so I really have the feeling I’m entering the belly of the earth as I go down to train – something very feminine, almost womb-like about it.
I enter the kalari right foot first and touch the packed-earth floor with my right hand and pay my respects. Then I head to the southwest corner to pay my respects to the presiding deity, Shiva-Shakti. I then work my way clockwise, first to the serpent god (I haven’t worked out whether that’s some reference to kundalini shakti or something quite other - any information very welcome), then Ganesha, remover of obstacles (“Please oh please have compassion on my uselessness and remove those boulders in my way”), then the lineage of gurus, then the mythical founder of both Kalari and Kerala, Parasurama (“Thank you for this beautiful land and this beautiful practice”). Then it’s to the northeast corner and Bhadrakali (“the fierce form of the goddess”, said Rajan gently on about day three, when I asked him to explain who all the gods I was paying my respects to were). Then it’s a hunter god I’m still not totally clear on, and then along the southern wall, Lakshmi, goddess of plenty, Durga, the beautiful warrior goddess, and Saraswati, goddess of learning and the arts. Once I’ve done all that, I can begin (and then do it all again before I leave).
“It is good to pay your respects but if it is a problem for you, you do not have to,” explained Rajan on my first morning, after I had duly presented him my beetle leaf with nut and coin (thankfully fetched for me by one of the kalari regulars as I have no idea where you get such things and would have been hard-pressed to know what a beetle-leaf looked like). “We are very humble here.”
And they are – astonishingly so.
“No, I have no problem,” I said. I think I must be a closet Hindu (even if the local temple won’t let me in – and here it is).
The men wear a sort of loincloth-underwear-thing, which is very practical for then slathering on the gingilly (sesame) oil we’re all supposed to put on before we train, and makes for minimal laundry. While I can think of few things more excruciating than to be kicking my legs about my head in my knickers, I did initially feel rather overdressed in my dance baggies, surrounded by virtually naked men. Now there are a few more women around, and they all wear traditional kurtas and pyjama bottoms, so in my leggings and vest-top, I’m somewhere in the middle.
I do find the clothing a bit of a pain though. The only way to keep on top of the small mountain of laundry it generates is to do it daily, with long periods of soaking (my house is lovely but does not have a washing machine).
First I have to get the sesame oil on, and then there are the rivers of sweat that pour off me (I don’t think Bikram yoga can have anything on Kalari in the tropical humidity of Kerala). I was sweating so much that for the first couple of days I stopped going to the loo entirely. I can’t imagine my pores have ever been so clean. And then there is the packed-earth of the kalari floor. For some reason, it clings to me like a needy neurotic lover (get it where you can, I suppose). Everyone else in the kalari sports an elegant sheen and no mud in sight, whereas my hands and lower legs and belly-clothing are thick with red paste, the delightful combination of earth, sesame oil and sweat. Someone tried to say it shows up more on me because my skin is lighter but on closer inspection, I don’t think that’s true. The dirt just loves me.
So I begin going through the various leg kicks in order, as does everyone else, people filing in any time between 6:30 and about 7:30. (“Take rest when you need” advised Rajan “but you must not let the sweat dry.” Absolutely no danger of that.) Rajan then calls people in twos or threes or fours and leads them through the salutation to the Shiva-Shakti or the sequences or weapons work. While he is working with other people, the rest of us try and negotiate space to continue our kicking practice across the floor. I’ve discovered that it’s best to get there early to get this in, as the kalari gets more congested as the morning progresses.
It’s probably the most leg-intensive thing I’ve ever done – lots of high kicking (which is the warm-up! Keralan heat is very forgiving), lots of deep lunging and keeping hips in low, low, low openness to the ground. The typical (male) Kalari body seems to be long and wiry.
“Slowly slowly higher” said Rajan to me in week 1, to my carefully aligned legs. Well they’re less carefully aligned now but they’re higher.
“Slowly slowly more force” said Rajan to me in week 2. I think that’s coming too, but more gradually (I’m a bit frightened of tearing a hamstring attachment at a slightly sensitive right sitting bone.)
I find it all a bit exhausting but I completely love it. My body seems to bend in the right sort of directions for Kalari (when your Kalari master tells people you’re flexible, really you must be) and as ever I’m working in the mud and the sweat and the sesame oil to find the strength to support it.
I've found some Youtube clips taken in the kalari (so you can see what it looks like), with the goddesses taken down (perhaps they were camera-shy). There also seems to be some additional lighting for the filming, as I've never seen it that bright.
I feel a little as though all those traditional elements I once sought and long gave-up on finding in yoga teachers (though I have some very lovely ones) I have found in the kalari. There’s a great sense of personal investment from Rajan and great care from him “because you are my student now.” He comes by the house to dig out books on classical Indian dance and Kalari for me and enquires most mornings as to how things are at the house. It slightly frightens me that I only came to Kerala as an afterthought, that the Kalari has happened almost by accident. I would hate to have missed it.
Every two or three days I get on the bus to Kovalam beach (the only bus on which I’ve seen any other foreigners). I don’t quite understand why the guide books and certain travellers get so snooty about Kovalam. I was fully expecting the Costa del Sol after some of the descriptions of the tourist nightmare. In fact, Lighthouse beach is a very lovely stretch, and yes there are restaurants and sun loungers and people attempting to earn a living selling stuff (at pretty inflated prices, but business seems to be slow right now), but if you want to go swimming in a bathing suit in India, you need to be on a tourist beach, and I don’t see why Indians aren’t allowed to have a tourist industry too. I also haven’t come across anyone remotely offended by my bikini, from my grandmotherly fruit-lady who pats me on the legs as she chats to me at my sun lounger, to the guys walking up and down the beach in the sun with piles of embroidered bedspreads on their heads.
I’ve enjoyed the sun on my skin and the sea. The waves, much like Kerala, are big and loopy but actually rather gentle. The lifeguards watch like hawks and whistle furiously if anyone ventures out very far (which is actually a bit frustrating for those of us who are pretty confident in the water, though in fairness, most people in it seem to have a limited relationship with swimming).
Here are some obligatory beach shots. Don’t you feel sorry for me?
I feel something melting in me here in Trivandrum, like the butter I cook with as soon as it comes out of the fridge. Or perhaps more like the Wicked Witch of the West, green skin and all. Everything seems to soften into curls here: the loops of the Malayalam script I am beginning to recognise in a way I never did the Kannada in Bangalore, the rounded sounds of the language, the curves of people’s smiles, even people’s hair is curlier and thicker than anywhere else I’ve been. I get off the bus and walk through quiet streets and look up and see coconut trees everywhere, climbing high above the houses. The air is soft and hot and the earth smells sweet and birds sing a new distinct song. Children often come up to me, practising their English. “What is your name? Where are you from?”
I have been ruminating a lot on the meaning of names. It started in Bangalore when I was discovering the meaning of my dancers’ names, all of them so redolent with hidden poetry. One meant “gold”, another “feet of god”, another “beloved”… I had never much liked the meaning of my own name (it comes from the Latin root “lux”, meaning “light”). A rather pompous definition I had read when I was about eleven spoiled it for me: “Lucy: light, she who brings the lamp of learning to the ignorant”. This seemed to me decidedly unsexy at the time. But I am becoming reconciled to having a name that means light. I’m even now seeing it as something rather special.
The other day, two girls walked by me on the road to the house, beautiful, dark-skinned, soft-eyed, black, black curls falling to their brightly-clothed waists. A little later, as I turned a corner, they cycled past me on a bike, one propped behind the other. “What is your name?” one called out as they passed.
“Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,” they chanted to one another as they wheeled away, my name like a strange new mantra falling from their lips to be caught by the breeze and lifted into the trees.
I can’t quite believe I’ve been here nearly two months – quite unplanned too. This evening I leave Bangalore (all going to plan, something I never quite count on in India) for Trivandrum in Kerala, where I plan to stay a month, training in the south Indian martial art of Kalarippayattu and reacquainting myself after too long a gap with the love of my life: the ocean.
Last Sunday’s performance at the Alliance Française really went very well. I’ve decided against posting a load of process materials here as I’d said I would, partly because it’s a bit of a minority interest, and partly because this last week in Bangalore has felt very busy, though I’m not entirely sure why.
The film project got postponed to after my departure and so I’m no longer doing that. I’m vaguely disappointed as I had found the whole thing very amusing, but I’m not surprised at all, the film industry here having the reputation it does. It feels like the important thing was to make and present my two choreographies and that was done, and done quite happily.
I don’t think I’d quite anticipated how much I’d have to split myself: on the one hand, solo improviser and all the terror that entailed, on the other hand, director/choreographer for a group who had had little time for the work in progress. It was definitely a challenge and I don’t understand how l looked so calm just before I went on for the solo, as I was feeling quite sick. I think my warm-up (a good, strengthening, calming yoga one) must have been pretty effective as here I am backstage, a couple of minutes before going on, looking what someone called “serene”, though not sure I was feeling it.
Thanks to Samuel Lawrence Raj for all photos but the last one in this entry.
And here’s a rather more active moment later in La Blanche:
I was reasonably happy with it as a first showing. Feedback I received was that the interplay of media worked well: speech, soundscape, dance, music. The soundscape consisted of sounds of the sea, a story I’d recorded and jigged around a bit of a day at the beach and some dead sting rays, and some Gabonese tribal songs. There were short bits of narrative text spoken live and a bilingual poem (hence garnering me the French reference). I’d like to refine some of the movement tasks a bit further, I think, and work with a visual designer and costume designer and possibly with textures (sand, water) if I carry this solo on, which I have a feeling I might at some point.
I enjoyed the group piece, The Spaces Between. I enjoyed the group of dancers and the journey we made together in our three weeks. I say three weeks, but week one was all workshops and I only had all the dancers who were actually in the final showing for the last week. So very chaotic and Indian, but in true Indian fashion, it somehow worked in the end. It was very much a work-in-progress but at a point I felt it was worth showing. From the feedback we received, many people in the audience agreed.
I read with great amusement last night our review in Metrolife of the Deccan Herald. The two pictures they published were very nice but the poor reviewer was clearly completely bemused (contemporary dance is very much a minority activity in India). We were called “spectacular”, “thought-provoking” and “beautiful” but the reviewer (no name, only initials: DHNS) seemed most struck by my left hand being hurt “very badly” in one of the stories of my solo (this was a rather minor point, actually) and the fact the dancers wore no jewellery (which points to a reviewer with a classical Indian dance bent). Come to think of it, there’s lots there that could be taken out of context to put on future flyers the way posters for plays display snippets of reviews in London that make them sound much more grand than they actually are.
Here are the dancers in a more informal moment on the day we were attempting to work out possible costumes:
So having mastered the rickshaws of Bangalore and finally got a vague sense of its geography, I am off again tonight. Eighteen hours on a train feels very modest after my previous thirty-four hour journeys. I am travelling a class down this time, sleeper instead of third A/C, so we shall see whether enough of my bunk is empty for me actually to get any sleep.
There’s a tug in my heart at saying goodbye to friends here, not knowing when or whether I shall see them again. But it feels time to move on. The busy-ness that was my life in Bangalore has dissolved and this is not a place for me to be with nothing to do. I came to India hoping for calm and space, inner and outer, and in Bangalore I have been overwhelmed by externals and motion. I’m looking forward to things being simpler in Trivandrum: training in the early mornings, getting the bus to the beach in the day, staying at the Kalari, reading, writing, being, worrying about nothing further than myself. Perhaps this is delusional. We shall see.
It feels important that I shall be near the sea finally. There’s a relief at it calling me – home almost.
