Climbing Adam’s Peak

“How long will it take to climb?” I asked.

My friends looked at each other. “You aren’t supposed to ask that question,” one of them finally replied. “It’s considered inauspicious.”

Adam’s Peak has been an active pilgrimage site for over a thousand years. It’s revered by Muslims as the first place Adam visited after being cast out of Eden and by Hindus as the site of Shiva’s footprint. Buddhists, who make up most of the pilgrims and for whom the government has erected a sprawling temple at the summit, ascribe the legendary footprint to Lord Buddha.

For me, climbing Adam’s Peak offered an initiation of sorts, a tangible proof of my commitment to Sri Lanka. There comes a point in every expat’s friendship with a Sri Lankan when that Sri Lankan, if he knows the foreigner well enough, will ask him whether he’s climbed the Peak. The answer separates the tourists from the permanent residents, the unserious from the serious. Nothing, it seems, is more authentically Sri Lankan, or provides such instant respect, as successfully making the climb.

Our guides for the ascent were two girls whom Nimanthi met during her research on the Free Trade Zones. Ganga, aged 23, and Dharshini, aged 17, were distant cousins who worked in the Biyagama garment factories. After making friends with Nimanthi, they invited us to spend the New Year with them at their home in Pelmadulla. Since neither Nimanthi nor I had ever spent time in a Sri Lankan village, we readily accepted the offer, curious to see what life was like for the majority of people on the island who live in rural areas.

The first challenge was making the journey from Colombo to the girls’ home high in the tea estates. Last Sunday, we boarded a crowded A/C bus in Fort and joined the massive exodus of people leaving Colombo to celebrate the holiday in their village. Fortunately, we arrived early enough to secure two comfortable seats. The bus quickly swelled to capacity with dozens of sweaty, impatient passengers and one severely overworked conductor. The standing passengers, squeezed together cheek by jowl, loomed over us rather ominously, their bodies pressing insistently against Nimanthi’s shoulder as if to dislodge her from her position.

By the time we entered Pelmadulla town, the traffic had slowed to a crawl. An open-air market was in full swing on both sides of the two-lane road, with swarms of gaily-dressed people milling around stalls filled with clothing, sweets, and chintzy holiday decorations. At the bus stand, we hailed a tuk-tuk to take us up the hill. The first half of the climb went pleasantly enough, as we wound our way through landscaped fields of tea plants and rubber trees. Small baskets attached to the rubber trees brimmed with gooey sap from the stripped trunks.

As the tuk-tuk labored its way up the hill, the ride began getting rougher and rougher. The smooth asphalt that had lined the road thus far grew patchy and then disappeared altogether. The bare road was rocky and uneven, forcing our driver to slow down and gingerly maneuver the tuk-tuk around each gaping pothole. We later learned that there had been no bus service along this road until about ten years ago, forcing the villagers to walk several kilometers to the nearest grocery store. Even today, children have to take the bus an hour and a half each way to the village school.

We finally arrived at the house where we would be staying, a spacious three-bedroom residence with white-washed walls and a tin roof. Greeting us on the house’s front door was the smiling visage of Mahinda Rajapaksa, looking down from a campaign poster for the January election. Everyone in the family voted for the UPFA in the last election because the party’s local candidates had promised to pave the road to their house. The family has good reason to be hopeful; after all, as they told us, it was Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government that finally provided the village with electricity after decades of empty promises by the UNP. In the 1980s, they told us, the UNP made a big show of building utility poles and stringing up wire in the vicinity, but no electricity ever made it to them or their neighbors. Eventually, local scavengers tore down the poles and sold the wire for scrap.

Although the house now has electric lights, the cooking is still done over a wood fire behind the kitchen—gas is too expensive. A plastic tarp served as a ceiling for most of the rooms in the house. This keeps out the rain, which can leak through the tin roof. Plastic was a favoured material inside the house. The cushions for the sofa and armchairs were encased in clear plastic, as was the mattress in the bedroom we were assigned. Many of the plastic Buddha statuettes that made up the family shrine had remained sealed in their original wrapping, and the bookcases luxuriated in a riot of plastic flowers. The walls were hung with posters featuring babies (invariably pale), dogs (usually a golden retriever), and rural landscapes (of the kitschy, Ye Olde England variety). As anyone who’s taken a tuk-tuk knows, these three subjects maintain a powerful hold on the Sri Lankan imagination.

The next day, we set off in a van for Ratnapura, where we would begin the climb to Adam’s Peak. I wore shorts, a t-shirt, and carried a sweater in my bag for when we reached the top; the others in our group of eight were dressed similarly. After paying a visit to the Buddhist stupa, where we prayed for a successful climb, we started up the long, winding path that led out of sight into the distance. Since we began our climb in the afternoon (and since, as I later learned, we had chosen the longer, less popular route to the top), there were hardly any other pilgrims on the route.

Still, most of the shops lining the route were open for business, and we stopped frequently for tea and snacks. Once in a while, pilgrims would pass us on the way down from the summit. Many of them were singing, and I noticed that the girls in our group often sang back to them. “They’re saying that they are completing this climb for a relative,” Nimanthi told me. “The girls are congratulating them, and asking their blessing for our own climb.”

It was only after the first four hours of climbing that I began having doubts about this adventure. Shouldn’t we be close to the top? I wondered. By now it was getting dark, and we had planned on being home in time for bed. I knew better than to ask my climbing companions how far it was to the top, so when they weren’t listening I asked one of the shop owners.

“Well, you’re about half way there,” he said. “There are nine more kilometers to go.”

I had to sit down. Half way there? We’d have to spend the night on the mountain. It was then that Nimanthi remembered that there was another route to Adam’s Peak from the Hatton side, a much shorter and more convenient route.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” I asked her. “I forgot about it,” she said. “Anyway, we’re guests here. We have to go along with what they want to do.”

By the time we finally reached the conical summit it was around midnight. The mountain was shrouded by fog—we were quite literally in the clouds—and we couldn’t see much other than the florescent lights marking the path that we had just climbed. We removed our shoes and paid homage to the Buddhist shrine atop the summit, which marks the site of the sacred footprint. Then, we retreated into a spare building where pilgrims could sleep sheltered from the elements. Here, attracted to the electric lights, were more moths of more varieties than I have ever seen. The moths were everywhere, flying into my face, getting tangled in my hair, landing on my leg while I tried to sleep.

That night our group slept close together to preserve our body heat against the chill night air. Having dressed for warm weather, we had to borrow a thin blanket from another pilgrim, which we stretched over as many of our bodies as we could. In the morning, everyone woke up around 5:30 a.m. and we filed outside to wait for the sunrise. For the first time, we saw non-Sri Lankan tourists, who had climbed up the Hatton route during the night, as their Lonely Planet guidebooks had no doubt recommended. Sri Lankans and non-Sri Lankans alike clustered together on the summit, craning their necks and pointing their cameras to the east.

Gradually, light began to define the edges of the distant clouds. Then, a patch of fog would drift over the summit, temporarily plunging us back into darkness. When the fog disbursed, we received a startling burst of color: pink, aquamarine, turquoise. As the sun lifted itself over the horizon, I witnessed Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” with a clarity and precision I’d never known. No wonder poets have always competed in describing the dawn. Even in a non-religious man, the dawn inspires religious feelings.

All the way down the mountain (this time wisely taking the Hatton route) we were treated to the stunning views we missed during our nighttime ascent. The entire earth, it seemed, was spread out before us. Then we were at the bottom, and Adam’s Peak again loomed above us, lofty and unapproachable. We had made the climb.

Going to the Movies in Sri Lanka

Going to the movies in Sri Lanka is a bit like going bargain-hunting. You never know what you’ll find — maybe a pair of Diesel jeans, maybe a dowdy coat from last season — but you know it will be cheap. And like bargain-hunting you never know how young or old the merchandise will turn out to be. Sometimes Sri Lankan cinemas screen new films only a week or two after they’ve premiered in the US; sometimes you have to wait months. By the time Up In The Air landed in Sri Lanka, it had already come out on DVD in most of the world.

Some movies bypass the island entirely — we missed Invictus, Sherlock Holmes, and five of the ten nominees for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Avatar was a big hit here, even though no theaters were equipped to show it in 3D. Bollywood films arrive more promptly, with mega-hits like Three Idiots and My Name Is Khan recently storming the box office.

Of course, there are other differences in going to a movie in Sri Lanka. The biggest and most welcome of these is the open sale of beer at most concession stands. Unfortunately, you aren’t allowed to carry the beer into the actual theater, so you have to chug it, Animal House-style in the lobby. Perhaps for this reason, every film shown in Sri Lanka is split into two parts, with a five-minute intermission — just enough time to shotgun a Heineken.

One thing you can’t get in a Sri Lankan theater, strangely enough, is popcorn, which you have to smuggle in from outside. When you’re finally inside the theater’s air-conditioned comfort, with your empty beer can and your contraband popcorn, suddenly the Sri Lankan flag appears on the screen and everyone in the audience stands up. It’s time for the National Anthem, which is played before every movie, play, and concert. Patience will come in hand here, since the Sri Lankan anthem is approximately thrice the length of the Star-Spangled Banner.

While you’re waiting for the song to end, you can console yourself that your ticket and refreshments together cost less than the nachos at an American theater. Of course, cheap is relative. To an American accustomed to paying $10 and up for movie tickets, the typical Sri Lankan rate of Rs. 200 to 300 ($1.50 to $ 2.50) seems like a steal. But in a country where the average person earns $12 a day, a ticket to see Avatar or Alice In Wonderland is a rare luxury. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been to a screening that was more than a quarter full. Judging from my own movie-going experience, the principal demographics in these theaters consist of (1) young couples looking for a place to make out, (2) old men trying to escape the tropical heat for a few hours, and (3) students playing hooky from school.

Fortunately, the benevolent government of Sri Lanka ensures that those school children never have to see an exposed breast or the slightest intimation of sexual activity. Since the Public Performances Act of 1912, when Sri Lanka was still a British colony, a censorship board has reviewed every film to comply with “national security, law and order, religious beliefs, sex and vices, and unsavoury subjects.” Although film censorship is lighter than the censorship of television programs — in which cigarettes, alcoholic drinks, and even prolonged kissing are blurred out — sexual content is strictly verboten. (On the other hand, violence, even of the gonzo Inglourious Basterds variety, is perfectly acceptable. This is somewhat strange in a country that just emerged from 25 years of bloody civil war.)

But like many laws and most government departments in Sri Lanka, the Public Performances Act is more symbolic than real. Nudity may be banned from the mainstream theaters, but hidden behind these cinemas, often literally, is a parallel, quasi-legal network of “adults only” theaters. These theaters don’t show true pornographic films, but rather the kind of soft-core porn that HBO sometimes shows after midnight. When I went with a group of friends to investigate one of these theaters (I was researching a forthcoming article for The Boston Globe), the movie currently playing was called The Key and starred someone named “Maxico Dave.” The theater was an old art-deco movie palace, complete with balcony, but it was empty that day except for a few single men scattered about.

As soon as The Key started, we realised that we were in for a surreal experience. The movie looked like it was shot in the late 1990s, and the film stock was so scratched and dirty that it was often difficult to tell what we were watching. The film’s entire soundtrack had been redubbed: the blonde American actors now spoke with thick South Indian accents, and the score was a medley of themes from Star Trek, Superman, and James Bond films. Every time there was a sex scene the score would abruptly switch to an instrumental version of What A Wonderful World, which was soon drowned out by the heavy-breathing sound effects, making the characters sound like they were scuba-diving. As if the scratches and dubbed dialogue didn’t make it difficult enough to follow the plot, the projectionist seemed to have spliced together the movie reels at random. The end credits were in Chinese characters, and appeared to belong to another movie altogether.

After I got home, I searched the internet for information on The Key or “Maxico Dave,” and turned up nothing. It didn’t even show up on IMDB.com, which has an entry for almost every movie ever made. So the mystery continues: What is The Key, and where did it come from? Just another day in the bargain-hunter’s paradise of Sri Lankan cinema.

Provincial

True, I was not fitted for

The counting-room, the trading floor

I never learned to change a tire

Stitch a hem, or build a fire

I never traveled far abroad

Neglected China, and Cape Cod

Preferred the bookstore to Bombay

Found in Livy my Pompeii

I never mastered French or Hindi

But kept my Lonely Planet handy

Read Proust and Dante in translation

Learned in English of all nations

“Small Latin, and less Greek”

Jonson did of Shakespeare speak

Then what of me, who neither knows?

A fate, old Ben, I never chose

No Harvard, Oxford or Sorbonne

No London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome

No Nobel Laureaute was my tutor

I learned of genius by computer

I take my knowledge second-hand

The summed-up wisdom of all lands

And though it takes me years, or ages

I find at last the greatest sages

I sit in place, and streaming to me

Comes all truth, all joy, all beauty

I discover, at my feet

All things needful, world complete

And though my life in circles goes

The center, still, my soul will know

Not born to greatness, or to riches

My heart’s content, wherever it pitches.

Three Days in Trincomalee

Every year the Stri Kamkaru Madyasthanaya Women’s Center, a non-profit organization based in Katunayake, plans a weekend trip for garment factory workers to a different part of the country. For this year’s trip, the first since the end of the war, the Center chose to visit Trincomalee and the surrounding areas. Because Nimanthi is conducting research in the free trade zone, the Center invited both of us to tag along with the 75 or so women as they journeyed by bus across the island. Never having visited Trinco, I gladly accepted the offer. We wouldn’t be taking the shortest or the most comfortable route to the east, but the trip would be free and I would get to meet the subjects of Nimanthi’s research.

Because the garment workers weren’t able to take any days off work, the entire trip had to be compressed into two= days, which meant leaving from Katunayake at 4 in the morning last Saturday and arriving back late on Sunday night. The workers, all women, mostly in their twenties, had worked the night before until ten o’clock, as they had every night that week, The women had been forced to work mandatory overtime—from 7 in the morning to 10 at night—because their previous batch of clothing had been rejected by quality control. Despite this grueling workload, the women chatted excitedly as they boarded the early morning buses. Their anticipation of the trip was obviously stronger than their fatigue.

After our bus departed Katunayake I immediately dozed off. When I woke up it was 11 a.m. and I was covered in dust. As I brushed off my clothes Nimanthi told me that we had driven through a stretch of dirt road that had sent clouds of dust swirling through the bus. “I don’t know how you slept through it,” she said enviously. Soon after I woke up our bus arrived at Serubila Temple, near Muttur, the first stop on our itinerary. The women fished brushes out of their bags and began combing the dirt out of their long hair in preparation for their visit to the repository of Buddha’s brow. “Of course, nobody really knows if the brow is there,” Nimanthi made the mistake of saying to one of the women. “Of course it’s there!” the woman exclaimed. “It’s an historical fact!”

At the temple, Nimanthi and I relaxed in the shade of a bow tree while the women walked around the stupa and explored the temple grounds. “Are you a Christian?” one woman asked me in Sinhalese. Through Nimanthi’s translation I replied that I wasn’t. “Why not?” the woman asked. I’ve been asked the same question before in Sri Lanka, often by complete strangers. As usual, I didn’t feel comfortable answering honestly. “I don’t know,” I said. The woman walked away with a look of disapproval.

We lingered at the temple for about an hour, waiting to rendezvous with a bus from a free trade zone in the south. This bus had left even earlier in the morning than we did, and would be arriving home even later on Sunday night. When it finally arrived we headed off together, convoy-style, towards the coast. Our route took us along uneven dirt roads through villages that had formerly been LTTE strongholds. A temporary bridge had been built across one river since the LTTE had destroyed the original bridge during their retreat. Although there was some evidence of reconstruction (we saw an enormous new school for Sinhalese children that was unoccupied because of the inconvenient fact that there were no Sinhalese people in the area) most of the areas we traveled through seemed like they hadn’t changed in decades.

After a time-consuming wrong turn, we finally ended up at the coast in time to catch the 2:45 ferry to Trinco. It’s possible to drive or take the train directly into town, but the Women’s Center members who organized the trip wanted to go by sea. The harbour and its green islands were a stunning sight as we motored through them in our small vessel. We passed an enormous ocean tanker docked next to the factory that supplies grain to all of Sri Lanka, and we spotted a gleaming white yacht filled with tourists.

By the time we finally made it into Trincomalee town it was too late to visit Nilaveli Beach, so we camped out instead on the city beach. Here, the garment workers were plagued by the same problem faced by all Sri Lankan women on all Sri Lankan beaches (and not just on the beaches): sexual harassment. Aware of this, Nimanthi and a friend chose a deserted section of the beach to go swimming. But no sooner had they entered the water then groups of men began wandering their direction, as if drawn by an invisible magnet. “How are you doing?” they shouted. “Want to hang out with us?” Even after I chased them off, these men simply retreated about fifty feet away and continued to stare at the women. Another garment worker, we learned later, had been accosted by men in a truck while she was walking along the road. “Jump in!” the men urged her. Naturally, she declined this lewd offer.

On Sunday afternoon the garment workers boarded their buses and began the long drive back home. Wanting to stay longer, Nimanthi and I checked into the Nilaveli Beach Hotel for the night. The original hotel was almost entirely destroyed by the 2004 tsunami, but the rebuilt facilities were, according to Nimanthi, an improvement on the original. After two days of travel and stress, we spent a postcard-perfect Monday swimming in the ocean and tanning by the hotel pool. Traveling with the garment workers had been interesting, we both agreed, but we also understood why the Women’s Center only organized one such trip a year. I had learned a lot of things over the course of three days; one of them is that it’s a lot easier traveling with one woman than with 75 of them.

The New New Delhi

I’ve seen extremes of poverty and wealth in my travels around India—unwashed children sleeping in the streets of Calcutta, IT executives chauffered in Mercedes Benzes through the Bangalore traffic—but only in New Delhi have I seen the two worlds in such intimate proximity. Our first night in the city, Nimanthi and I stayed at the international guest house on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s great research centers and Nimanthi’s alma mater. Founded in the 1960s, the sprawling campus is a heavily-wooded natural park set like a green emerald in the middle of a megacity of 13 million people. (It reminded me in more than one way of Rice.)

So one is startled to find, just across the street from this soothing oasis, on the way to the local shopping center, a slum the likes of which this American has never seen. Built on a bare, rocky strip of land between two busy thoroughfares, the slum occupies the space of a medium-sized municipal park. It used to be twice that size, but New Delhi officials have been aggressively clearing slums (“beautification” is what the city calls it) in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, in which they’ll host the other former colonies of the British Empire in a mini-Olympics.

Like slums the world over, this one was haphazardly built by hand out of the available materials: clay or wood or stone walls, asbestos or tin or plastic roofs. To keep them from blowing away in high wind, the roofs are weighted down with large, unwieldy bundles. Narrow alleys traverse the slum in every direction, and most of the streetfront shanties are general stores selling staples like rice, dal, and vegetables. From the street you can see women stooped over at the waist, washing clothes in plastic buckets. To dry the clean clothes they either whack them, one piece of clothing at a time, against the rocks, or lay out the clothing on the ground and beat the water out with a wooden paddle.

Some children play games of cricket—as children from every class and religion can be found doing on every street of every town in India—with banged-up old bats and makeshift wickets, while others help their mothers carry water from the central pump to their homes. In the part of the slum “beautified,” i.e., bulldozed by the city, boys and girls take turns defecating on a mound of rubbish, their backsides exposed to passersby. Nearby, stray dogs and enormous wild hogs with distended bellies dragging the ground root through the trash heaps for scraps of food. The hogs, absorbed in their own business, hardly seem to notice the people passing by only meters away.

Many of those people are heading for the nearby super-luxury hotel, where rooms start at around $200 a night. Protected from their declassé neighbors by a high, fortress-like wall topped with barbed wire, the hotel guests can unwind by the pool or enjoy a lavish buffet dinner in the gaudy, faux-Restoration dining room, blissfully ignorant of the squalor less than a football field away. Beyond the hotel is one of Delhi’s posh new shopping centers, choked with American fast food restaurants, clothing boutiques, and crowded coffee bars. This is life in the neo-liberal New Delhi: the increasingly prosperous middle-classes live in a gated, air-conditioned world of upscale shopping and fine dining while the wretched of the earth pick through their garbage, quite literally. While the city’s good bourgeois eat at gourmet restaurants and sip Italian cappuchino, the city’s ragpickers sort through the city’s rubbish heaps for edible or salable goods.

While walking one especially cold night around Connaught Place—the center of British New Delhi and now perhaps the city’s most exclusive shopping district—the group of friends I was with spotted an unusual sight. Although nearly every person on the street, from the security guards to the autorickshaw drivers to the beggars, had started their own fires to keep warm, we stumbled upon three people warming their hands over a full tree trunk, big enough to wrap your arms around, blazing heat from a hollow in the wood. A young man and woman, who were evidently a couple, grinned at us and said that they had been burning the trunk for two nights already and expected it to last several more.

The third person, an older woman, now spoke up in Hindi. As she related some complicated story, animated by abrupt bouts of laughter and tears, the couple made silent signs to us indicating that the woman was crazy. The Hindu-speaker of our group, Anita, was listening intently, however, and ignored their warnings. After the woman had chattered and chattered and laughed and cried for a good ten minutes, we took our leave and headed towards the bus stop.

As we walked away, Anita related the conversation to the rest of us. All three of the people around the fire were drug dealers, she had said, selling everything from marajuana to heroin (Anita had declined the woman’s offer to take us to a nearby drug stashhouse). The woman herself had been recently arrested for dealing and thrown in jail, where she had been beaten by the guards. She wasn’t worried, though, she informed Anita, because she was shortly going to marry Shah Rukh Khan, a major Bollywood star; in fact, she was planning a trip to Bombay for the wedding.

The conversation seemed to sum up India: poverty, drugs, prisons, people warming themselves by makeshift fires while dreaming Bollywood dreams. Like the woman, everyone in Delhi seems to be on the make; everyone’s looking for an angle, a cut, a piece of the action. From the hustler selling leather wallets on the corner to the business student trying to become a multi-national CEO, Delhi exudes confidence in the future, the belief that its time has come. You can see it in the feverish construction of new subway lines, in the ubiquitous signs promoting conservation and energy saving, and in the obsession with self-improvement shown by the perennial scramble for places in good universities. It seems inevitable that Delhi, if its growth continues at the current pace, will indeed find its place in the sun. Who among the city’s ballooning population the light will shine on, and who will be left in the shade, though, are unresolved contradictions in the transformation of a millenia-old city into a hub of globalization—the capital city of India, and India’s city of capital.

Calcutta

Calcutta is a city of 17 million people — twice the size of New York — without a single skyscraper. Although the second biggest city in India, Calcutta is a perpetual also-ran in the country’s mad scramble for business, tourism, and prestige, long ago surpassed by IT powerhouses like Bangalore and Chennai, the political clout of New Delhi, and the glamour of Mumbai. Once the crown jewel of the British Raj and the epicenter of Indian culture, the metropolis looks like a shadow of its imperial past, an effect heightened during a recent visit by the mixture of mist and smog that had settled across the city, shrouding the buildings in a gray fog.

Unlike Delhi, which has a long history, Calcutta was a purely English invention, created virtually ex nihilo by the East India Company to serve as the capital of their metastasising empire. As the center of administration, all the plundered wealth of India flowed into Calcutta, paving its streets, erecting its neo-classical architecture, and producing a London-on-the-Ganges complete with an imitation Hyde Park and a towering, white-washed cathedral. No sooner had the paint dried on the cathedral, however, when the British, fearful of the nascent Bengali independence movement, shifted their capital (in both senses of the word) to New Delhi.

In consequence, Calcutta today looks like a ghost town surrounded and nearly swallowed by a vast urban landscape spreading out of sight in every direction. Hundreds if not thousands of colonial buildings have survived and are now used as apartment blocks or office buildings, although many are in such disrepair that you can hardly believe they’re inhabited at all. With crumbling masonry, yellowing walls, and plants frequently sprouting through the roofs, the buildings appear to have been abandoned to nature after the British retreat. In a bit of delicious irony, many of these colonial palaces are now rent-controlled flats occupied by working-class families who the British, in their time, would never have allowed past the front door.

Like a city-sized memento mori, these dead relics of a lost empire are inhabited, re-used, and re-cycled by the thronging crowds who push their way through the city’s broad, tree-lined avenues. In what used to be the grand entrance to a stately town house you might find a fruit seller or a motorcycle repair shop or a McDonalds. On the roads, taxis, auto-rickshaws, and human-drawn rickshaws jostle for space with the occasional Tata or Toyota. Almost a third of all cars, and all of the taxis, are 1960s-era Ambassadors — those oversized, underachieving symbols of Indian automotive independence. Like Cuba, Calcutta has become a world leader in auto repair, keeping its ancient fleet of vehicles on the road long after a wealthier city would have sold them for scrap. Many of the taxis survive only as metal hulks, having lost every other human amenity and comfort.

Calcutta’s sidewalks are a world unto themselves. Unlike most Western cities, Calcutta has not criminalised poverty, so it’s impossible to pretend, as you can in New York or Paris, that the poor don’t exist. Indeed, you can hardly walk a block, even in the most fashionable areas of town, without passing the makeshift home of one or another destitute family, who, seemingly oblivious of passersby, continue to bathe, cook, argue, or work in full view of all humanity. Children play hide and seek, men play cards around a small fire, women wash and hang clothes, and life proceeds, on a smaller scale and in more straightened circumstances, much as it does all over the world. Everything these families need is close at hand: food from nearby vendors, water from the free city taps, even haircuts from the local barber, who can be seen at every street corner, lathering up some man’s face for a shave.

Of course, there are still rich people and expensive shops aplenty in Calcutta, although they’re never far enough away from the poor for the city’s plutocrats to be entirely self-satisfied — or at least one hopes so. Young boys and girls beg for change at the entrance to every hotel and restaurant, and the view from all the chic new coffee bars is of the same old sidewalk-dwellers in their same old indigence. Calcutta’s politicians haven’t yet managed the trick of segregating the very wealthy and the very poor, although one suspects they’re working hard on it. As I boarded my train for New Delhi, I gave thanks that there is at least one great city in the world where the poor are not treated like toxic waste, where the civic debate is not over how to dispose of them but how to live with them — and how to allow them to live with us.

The Howrah Express

A few years ago director Wes Anderson made a film called The Darjeeling Limited in which three estranged brothers—played by Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrian Brody—mend their differences and find spiritual enlightenment during a cross-Indian rail journey. Ensconced in a private berth, the brothers engage in fistfights, clandestine affairs with stewardesses, and copious amounts of smoking. They participate in a traditional Indian funeral and even see a tiger.

So when Nimanthi and I booked tickets on the Howrah Express for the 36-hour train journey from Bangalore to Calcutta, I looked forward to all the romance and adventure the Orient had to offer. I would be the new Rudyard Kipling (or at least the new William Dalrymple), boldly reporting from the heart of darkest India.

The journey started promisingly enough at the picturesquely squalid Bangalore train station. As Nimanthi and I wended our way through the crowds, we passed a few hundred Indian soldiers sitting in neat rows, evidently waiting for a train. A small scrum of people was staring at them like exotic animals in a zoo. Finally we made it to our sleeper-class car and hoisted ourselves and our baggage aboard. We were immediately confronted by a swarm of human activity—passengers arguing over seating, conductors answering questions, children running about, hawkers selling chain locks to secure people’s valuables, cups of chai being poured for impatient customers.

Our berth was exactly like the one in The Darjeeling Limited, except with half the space, none of the amenities, no privacy, zero charm, and smoking strictly prohibited. Oh, and the presence of berth-mates: five formidable, middle-aged sisters from, coincidentally enough, Darjeeling. These women were evidently seasoned train passengers, for they had managed to pack 36-hours-worth of meals for five people into a single large plastic bag. This bag must have been designed by a magician, since no matter how many packages of food they took out of it there always seemed to be more food underneath. They hadn’t packed drinks, however, and drank chai steadily throughout the trip. The sister occupying the berth above mine, the youngest of the five, managed to spill her chai twice and her water once, each time narrowly missing my head.

Since Nimanthi and I had not packed as wisely, we were compelled to order our meals from the train staff. Given the general condition of the train, I was skeptical about the cleanliness of these meals, but Nimanthi assured me that it was safer to eat them than the snack foods being sold by passing hawkers. (Later, after arriving in Calcutta, a knowledgeable friend informed us that the case was precisely the reverse. “Railway food is the ultimate test of your stomach,” our friend said. “If you can eat that stuff, you can eat anything.”)

After finishing the first night’s meal of tasteless chicken curry and watery lentils, I collected my trash and stood up to look for the garbage bin. Failing to find one, I asked a fellow passenger. He smiled and pointed to a gap in the floor where the cars connected. “Indian style!” he said. Taking his advice, I discreetly bundled up my trash and stuffed it into the gap, watching it disappear under the train. Trash, of course, isn’t the only thing Indian trains leave behind—a helpful sign in the bathroom asked passengers not to use the facilities while the train is at a station. I imagined how the railway tracks must look, and smell, in between trains.

Our first night aboard the train Nimanthi was woken up at 5 a.m. by the chai- and coffee-wallahs, who were already making their noisy way up and down the narrow aisles. Soon our berth-mates were chatting away, forcing Nimanthi to climb down from her middle berth and start the day. Tucked away on the top berth, however, I managed to slumber through the commotion, only arising at a later, more civilized hour. This prompted no small amount of resentment from Nimanthi, who complained that my sleep habits were made for the Indian railway.

To pass the time we played card games and read books. The afternoon of the second day, Nimanthi was immersed in David Copperfield when a twenty-something man walked up to our berth. “Give me that book,” he said. Perplexed by his strangely insistent tone, Nimanthi handed over the novel. The man took it, sat down across the aisle, and opened the book to the first page. Brows knitted, he read silently and intensely for several minutes. Then he abruptly shut the book and demanded that Nimanthi tell him where she got the book.

“In America,” she said. “But you can get it at any bookstore—it’s quite famous.”

Evidently unsatisfied by this answer, the man continued to cross-examine Nimanthi about why she was reading the book, where she was from, and what she was doing in India. Unexpectedly, he then turned to me and offered to buy the book on the spot. I declined this generous offer, explaining that Nimanthi had brought it along to read. He frowned and returned sullenly to his seat elsewhere on the train. Later in the day, I returned from the bathroom to find this same gentleman deep in conversation with Nimanthi, who quickly managed to excuse herself and retreat with her book to my upper berth. Left alone with me, the man soon lost interest and wandered off. Nimanthi and I later agreed that the entire affair had been an elaborate attempt at flirtation by a lonely passenger on a long journey.

The last night on the train neither of us got much sleep. The temperature had dropped dramatically, forcing us to don an additional layer of clothing and huddle beneath our thick wool blankets. When we arrived at Calcutta’s Howrah Station early the next morning we were both ready to sleep in a real bed, in a room we didn’t have to share with five garrulous sisters. I hadn’t seen a tiger or seduced a stewardess, but I had experienced my first long trip on India’s legendary railway, and that turned out to be adventure enough.

Buying a SIM Card in Bangalore

My Lonely Planet guidebook told me that Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India, a twenty-first century IT hub that inspired Thomas Friedman to declare the world to be flat. Friedman became a flat-earther after visiting the Bangalore campus of Infosys, the wildly-successful Indian software giant. Infosys’s carefully-manicured campus, with its own stores, restaurants, and gyms, reminded Friedman of American corporate headquarters, and he decided that if you could make it in India you could make it anywhere. But one and a half frenetic days in this mega-city have taught me one indisputable lesson: Thomas Friedman never had to buy a SIM card in Bangalore.

Because I am not a wealthy and famous writer like Friedman (who was probably given a phone by Infosys), I did have to buy a SIM card. In “India’s Silicon Valley” this took—I swear I am not making this up—the entire day. Nimanthi and I set off in the morning by taking an auto-rickshaw to the Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road shopping district, which the Lonely Planet folks assured me was a great favourite of tourists. They clearly meant tourists already possessed of a SIM card, however, for a Vodafone or Airtel store was nowhere in sight. Having visited the city before, Nimanthi suggested that we walk towards St. Mark’s Cathedral, so we crossed under a highway overpass and walked along the edge of Cubbon Park, looking for a store.

After half an hour we hadn’t seen anything, and we were beginning to realize that we needed local assistance, so we flagged an auto-rickshaw and asked to be taken to the nearest mobile phone store. And thank God we did—the nearest store turned out to be a fifteen-minute ride across town to a Vodafone outlet. Marveling at the traffic and the absence of pedestrians, I was reminded of Houston, Texas, another city designed with cars rather than people in mind. At the sleek, air-conditioned Vodafone store Nimanthi and I were told by a polite salesman that to buy a SIM card we would have to present two passport photos and proof of local residency. Well, we weren’t local residents, so we didn’t have proof of local residency. As for photos, who carries pictures of themselves around in their wallet? Because the salesman assured us that there were no photo studios in the area, we reluctantly decided to go back to the MG Road area.

Here our luck seemed to improve. We found a studio and purchased passport photographs—they even made me look good. Then we stumbled upon a hole-in-the-wall copy shop that sold Vodafone SIM cards. Reasoning that this joint might have looser standards than the official Vodafone store, we descended a narrow flight of stairs, squeezing past customers queued up to send faxes or make copies. The beleaguered store manager handed us an application to fill out while he began the process of activating our new SIM. This process consisted of the manager having cryptic phone conversations with various people, followed by him punching long codes into his own mobile phone. At the end of this lengthy ritual, however, our phone still read “SIM locked.” Checkmate. The manager asked for two minutes to get it activated, but having already waited half an hour Nimanthi and I decided to cut our losses and go somewhere else, taking our completed application with us.

That somewhere else turned out to be another Vodafone outlet. The salesman at this store didn’t care that we were foreigners, and since we had already filled out an application we were handed a SIM card within minutes. We slid the card into the back of our phone, replaced the battery, and hit the power button. “SIM locked,” the screen read. The salesman told us that the problem wasn’t the card but the phone, which was programmed to work only in Sri Lanka. We could either unlock the phone or buy a new one. Being short of cash, we decided to unlock it. If only it were that easy! We spent the next hour wandering the busy streets of Bangalore searching for somebody to unlock our phone. At every store the manager told us that he couldn’t unlock it, but that his buddy down the street certainly could. The buddy down the street couldn’t unlock it either, it would inevitably turn out, but his buddy around the corner definitely could do the job. Finally we found somebody who promised to unlock it: just give him two minutes. Fifteen minutes later: “SIM locked.” Just to see if our SIM was activated yet, we tried it out in the manager’s phone. You can guess the result.

Now in possession of an unactivated SIM card and a locked phone, we doubled back to the original Vodafone store. There, our salesman assured us he could activate our card—just give him two minutes to make a few calls. As that two minutes stretched into ten (the salesman’s boss was in a meeting, he helpfully informed us), we asked to look at the store’s mobile phones. The salesman called another employee over and gave him instructions. “He will go get the key,” the salesman told us. “Just wait two minutes.” By now we had learned that two minutes in Bangalore time could mean anything between “half an hour” and “next month,” so we told the salesman that maybe we would get a phone somewhere else. Long story short: the salesman managed to activate the SIM card, but we still haven’t bought a phone, so we have 100 rupees of air time we have no way to use. After our experience in Bangalore, we’re beginning to wonder if it’s worth it. So, Tom Friedman: The world may be flat, but that just makes it easier to fall off the edge.

View from Our Balcony, 3 p.m.

Batticaloa

There are two ways into Batticaloa, by road and by rail, and both are heavily guarded. On a recent journey from Colombo my train was stopped by government forces and searched from top to bottom. The police officers went from car to car, checking to make sure that every piece of luggage was claimed, before allowing the train to proceed into town. The next day, army officers stopped the local bus I was riding and forced everyone except old men and mothers to disembark for a body search. The day after that my trishaw was pulled over no less than three times in the course of an hour-long ride.

According to the Batticaloa residents I spoke with, this represents major progress over the city’s condition during the war. When I complained to a friend about how many times my trishaw was pulled over, she said that there used to be seven checkpoints along that same stretch of road. It’s safer to travel at night than it used to be, although the roads are still largely deserted after seven in the evening. By 10 the city is a ghost town—no people on the streets, no lights in the windows, no sounds except the frogs and crickets.

While in town I stayed at a cozy guest house mostly occupied by NGO workers—one Englishwoman and two Germans. The guest house’s manager told me that business fell off when aid workers who came to Batticaloa after the tsunami began to leave a few years ago. Since there is still virtually no tourism in the East, the manager relies on NGOs operating in the area to supply him with guests. He’s optimistic about the future, though, and is putting up a new building to house the tourists he hopes will come back.

Like the manager, the government seems to believe that with the war over tourism will inevitably return to the East. But what I saw on my trip to Batticaloa casts doubt on that assumption. First, Batticaloa’s infrastructure is in near-total disrepair. The narrow two-lane road into town is dark—there are few streetlights—and pockmarked with gaping holes. Workers have begun to widen and improve one stretch of road, but it will take months, if not years, to complete the repairs. At least the main road was paved. When I was in town most of Batticaloa’s dirt streets had been reduced to rust-coloured mud by the monsoon rains.

Because there is only one railway track into town, my inbound train from Colombo had to wait half an hour on an alternate track for the outbound train to pass. The final leg of the train journey was so bumpy that I couldn’t read the book in my lap. Even the infrastructure projects that have already been approved seem to have stalled. Near the city’s lagoon an enormous billboard announces the construction of a replacement for the Kallady bridge. The only evidence of such a project is a dirt berm on one side of the lagoon, now abandoned but apparently intended as a ramp. On a positive note, the government seems to have carried out a badly-needed expansion of the local hospital.

The second factor impeding the tourism industry is the pervasive militarization of the city. Gun-wielding men in uniform are so ubiquitous that a visitor may be excused for mistaking Batticaloa for a giant army barracks. There seems to be a soldier on every corner, a checkpoint at every intersection, and a barbed-wire-enclosed army base at the end of every road. “Where are you from? Where are you going?” I was asked again and again. The soldiers seemed to be asking more out of boredom than concern. Even the local residents at Pasikuda Beach must enjoy themselves under the watchful eye of a nearby army outpost. Will the outpost be removed to make way for the luxury hotels intended to be built on this pristine beach?

The owner of the nearby guest house where I had lunch told me that the land along the Pasikuda Beach had been leased by the state to many private companies. He had been told that 13 new hotels were to be built there, and residents of Batticaloa have heard similar stories. It’s hard to imagine that after decades of warfare and violence Batticaloa can become a tourist destination anytime soon. Ironically, right after the tsunami many of the local fishing communities were made to move inland, supposedly out of concern for their safety. Now this same “unsafe” beach is to be sold to private companies, inevitably creating problems for the fishermen.

Despite stories of disappearances, and continuing military and para-military operations that intimidate the local population, some people seem to believe that large-scale tourism can be quickly developed. Yes, the army’s presence is probably necessary to prevent the renewal of fighting among the TMVP, Karuna’s supporters, and remnants of the LTTE. And I have no doubt that the city has fewer soldiers and checkpoints than before. But as long as the East looks and feels like an occupied territory it’s going to be hard to convince tourists from Sri Lanka or abroad to spend their vacations here. Judging from the stares I received during my visit the city sees few Westerners.

Although first-time visitors are shocked by the poor condition of Batticaloa’s infrastructure, a few days in the city convinced me that roads and bridges are the least of the problems here. With enough money roads can be mended and bridges can be built. But it will take more than “development” to make the people of Batticaloa feel safe again in their own homes. After experiencing decades of murder, rape, disappearances and child recruitment, people here have developed a cynical shell. They find it hard to believe the violence is over. A friend told me that under the current conditions it is only a matter of time before another militant Tamil group rises up to challenge the government, restarting the vicious cycle of bloodshed.

Combating this fatalistic attitude may prove more difficult for the government than defeating the LTTE in battle. It will take more than propaganda and promises to reassure people in the East that the government is on their side, that the long years of violence and poverty are behind them. And in the end the people will judge the government with a simple test: have their lives improved since the war ended? My visit to Batticaloa left me without an answer to that question.