Mamallapuram and the Long Journey Home

As I write this entry, Charley and I are sitting in the sleeper class of a train bound for Delhi. We are twelve hours in - only one third of the way through. A man is crawling on the floor next to me, sweeping up our crumbs. He seems mute, and he is begging everyone in the compartment for change. I try to ignore him and keep on writing. None of the Indian boys around us are giving him anything, so I look to their example. But he's still here. I hope I have change in my wallet. I give him a meager 2 Rs I find there.

This train car feels like purgatory. Even though I went to a travel agent more than ten days ago and paid him for the express train with an A/C cabin, we landed on the slow train in a 3rd class sleeper. I never imagined before how elite my usual train class was - it's nothing special, you know. But here at every other stop beggars and peddlers are allowed to jump on and ride the train into the next station, which I've never seen before. Also, a man groped me last night. I was sleeping, lying on my back, and woke up to the feeling of a foreign hand squeezing my right breast. I was in shock and blind and surrounded by sleeping people, so I never saw the man's face or chased him down the aisle to reprimand him as he ran away. I hate that. I was once pick-pocketed on another train coming back from Calcutta, but luckily I caught the guy in the act. It's just so frustrating looking back on both those times and knowing that all the guts I had to react with was to shout "Hey!" and then some bastard got away with it. So, we're hot, getting bitten to death by mosquitoes because we have to keep the windows open, and surrounded by deformed beggars and perverts. I'd say purgatory is a pretty good description.

Anyway, when I last wrote I left off with us on that bus ride to Mamallapuram. We arrived in town and got a cheap hotel that backed onto the beach. It even made us promises of 24 hrs electricity and hot water. With a positive outlook, we decided to do nothing that afternoon but swim in the ocean and read our books on the beach. It's really nice and clean in Mamallapuram. On one side it's filled up with little fishing boats but when you walk up a little further there are some nice swimming spots where the water stays shallow until quite far out. Charley pointed out at the sea and said, "Wait, is that the equator I see?" The beach is also lined with cafe restaurants with names like Sea Breeze and Sunshine, but the real gem is the Bob Marley Cafe, which pumps out reggae tunes as you eat fresh seafood and look out at the ocean. Evidently Mamallapuram, even though it doesn't have the fresh salty air or crystal waters of say, the Andaman Islands or the Maldives, is desperate to be known as the next hip beach destination in India.

We were just coming back from an evening walk around the town, deciding where to go for dinner, when the hotel manager caught us at the door, turned to Charley and asked, "Hey, do you wanna be in a movie?" Apparently they were filming a Tamil movie nearby and needed some white men to play background as old English police officers. There was a taxi waiting outside to take us if we wanted to go, AND the production team would pay. Once again, Charley and I, faced with another prospect of minor Indian video stardom, smiled at each other and made a little head bobble of our own as if to say, "Why not?"

It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. We got there and it was already dark because it would be a night shoot (little did we know an all night shoot). Charley immediately changed into costume complete with gun holster, rank ribbons, and a moustache that made him look like Freddy Mercury. The rest of the extras were already decked out in similar dress and hairstyles. We met them - 6 in all and strangely all Eastern Europeans, Poles, and Russians, save for one Argentinian. We got to chatting and found out that they had all been picked up from ashrams and were affiliated with the production team - wherever they travelled to in India they'd get a call on their mobiles asking them if they'd like to make a little money as an extra in the latest colonial drama. One guy, Alex, had been living that way in India for five years. He was interesting - the kind of interesting that five years in India makes of you. He actually told Charley he only leaves the country to take vacations in Serbia where he can finally "clear his head." Hmmm... None of them knew each other going into the shoot. Apparently ashrams just seem to attract a lot of Russians seeking enlightenment through a baba/guru type person. But you could tell that they all got along like old friends now, constantly breaking into Russian (with many interjections of the word "vodka") and probably bonding over their shared difficulty of getting by knowing zero Hindi and not the best English.

We had to wait for the extras' part to be filmed basically all night, and tried to entertain ourselves. I kept trying to get Charley to sing some 'Killer Queen' or 'Bohemian Rhapsody' to me, which made him laugh and also made his moustache fall off, which pissed off the make-up guy. We took lots of silly pictures with the Russians. By 2am we'd been there for about seven hours and things started to get a little weird. The Euros had taken to displaying their somehow common skills in the martial arts and mock-fighting each other, making us wonder if we weren't involved in some kind of KGB-esque conspiracy. One of the guys, Pablo (they all had fabulous names - one was called Valentino) was a very spiritual person who sat meditating half the night. He talked with us in great depth about numerology and each of our respective numbers. I have to admit, he got me down to a tee, not that I hold any store in that kind of stuff. He's from Siberia and hates living in India but has somehow pushed through it for two years. He says Nepal is the real place to be. I wondered why he didn't just go there then.

This entire time the crew had been shooting the same scene for the movie. It was taking forever because the Tamil director needed to get every shot precisely right. The film, "Madhrasputtnam," was about an English girl whose father works for the East India Trading Company and how she falls into forbidden love with an Indian boy. It ends tragically of course, and we were on the second to last night of shooting when the girl's lover is killed and she has to pull his body from the lake up onto her boat. So there was this girl, lying in the boat playing half-dead while the director shouted through a microphone as he sat far off in a van, telling her where exactly to put her head, "A little left, now right, up a bit..." It went on for hours like that while we poor extras and even lowlier extra's affiliates (I was the only one) didn't even have chairs and were being massacred by bugs.

At long last it was 5am and the boys had to be shot before day break. Why they didn't just shoot their one simple part at the beginning of the night I'll never know. So with Charley gone I went off and sat next to the English actress' mother. She was a lovely lady from Liverpool and we talked for a while. Her motherly presence, I have to admit, was a comfort - she kept calling me "love." She said her daughter, Amy, got into the whole project because she won Miss Teen World. After that the Indians caught on because they just love that sort of thing, and they asked her to be in their movie without even a lick of acting experience. I just felt quite sorry for them because all they'd seen of India was Chennai (disgusting) and the lake where the shooting took place, which was no beauty either. I told her about some of the best and worst bits of India, my own little highlight reel, and I think it half blew her mind - she looked really sorry for me, even though that wasn't my intended reaction. The script writer came and sat next to us too - a really grumpy bugger who was English but has lived in India for the past thirty years. He'd never bothered in all that time to learn either Hindi or Tamil, seeming to prefer to just sit around on movie sets complaining about how ugly the language sounded or how much better he could do each crew member's job himself, grumbling, "Stupid, bloody Indians." Actually, he complained about just about everything, including the state of the police officer's dress and the extras' behaviour, right to my face. Well of course they didn't look as perfect as they did at the beginning of the night - you had us all hanging around in the dirt entertaining ourselves with strange calisthenics trying to stay awake! Surely, I hoped, all that bad temper wasn't just from living in India for so long?

The sunrise came and we had to wrap shooting. In the end I think Charley had a good time - he got to live out a boyish fantasy and parade around pretend shooting a rifle. The crew seemed a little intolerant of the extras and annoyed at the end, but I don't know how they could've expected anything better when you're bored, tired, and uncomfortable. We rode back with the Russians and finally saw them in their own clothes - all homespun hippy fabrics. Then we noticed the huge neo-Nazi tattoo on the side of Alex's arm and were really confused. What a strange night. We had to remind the guy who dropped us back off to pay Charley. He made 800 Rs (about $16) - at least it covered more than the cost of our room for two nights! 

We slept in for more than half of the next day. We had been planning on renting another moped ad driving around to the sites of Mamallapuram but ended up being way too tired, grumpy and hot. The power went out so many times that in the end Charley ran out to the reception desk in his boxers and asked the manager, "Where's that 24 hr electricity you promised us now, eh? Oh, and by the way, my girlfriend and I are checking out tomorrow but we're not leaving at noon, we're gonna stay here until 4 O'CLOCK. Got it?" In fact all we managed to do for the day was make the discovery that every restaurant in Mamallapuram serves Nutella crepes for dessert. We walked down the beach at sunset and treated ourselves to great seafood for dinner - calamari, prawns, and an entire fish in garlic butter sauce, yum!

We also made arrangements to treat ourselves to massages the next morning. One more interesting Mamallapuram experience of note! At 7am Charley and I found ourselves lying on massage beds being forcefully undressed by our respective masseur and masseuse. I heard Charley say through the curtain, "Wait, you want me to get naked?" and the masseur responding, "It's okay sir, I give you a string to wear," then Charley again asking, "a STRING? Jess?" At the same time I found it strange that even though I was only getting a facial the lady had to unbutton my bra and lie me down topless on my back. I wouldn't even have been half as uncomfortable if we had been in an actual massage parlour, but we were in somebody's house and even with an eye mask on I just knew there were people passing in and out. At least it was a woman, I consoled myself, but then Charley was finished before I was and went back to our room. When my face mask was removed by who I presumed was the same woman who had been treating me the whole time, imagine my surprise when I looked up and saw Charley's masseur! Ah well. It turns out this guy really got quite the eyeful that morning - Charley's 'string' get-up was really just that, a piece of dental floss around the waist and a strip of toilet paper tucked in the middle! Poor thing.

In our last few hours at Mamallapuram we finally saw the things you're supposed to see when you visit. There was the Tiger Cave, a 1,300 year-old auditorium carved out of stone and decorated with tiger heads. It lay buried unknown in the sand for centuries until the 2004 tsunami hit and washed part of the land out to sea. The same goes for many of Mamallapuram's archaeological sites, and just nearby to the Cave we saw a similar excavation site in progress. We also saw the Panch Rathas, five temples from the same time period as the Tiger Cave that were all carved out of one massive piece of granite. And of course there was also Krishna's Butterball - a precariously balanced round bit of stone on a very steep slope. The British tried to move it once for some reason but even with a team of elephants they couldn't get it to budge. We took the usual silly pictures in front of it that make you look like you're holding it up all by yourself. Then we made our last scooter ride of the trip back to our hotel, each commenting on how badly our mothers would freak out/ have a heart attack if they could have seen us just then, flying down an Indian highway, on an Indian bike, without helmets (sorry Mum!). As for me, I'm quite proud to say I have mastered the act of sitting side-saddle on the back of a motorbike that I previously thought only demure Indian women in sarees possessed.

And then, after a long uncomfortable bus ride to Chennai, we got onto the train for one more long, uncomfortable journey. Charley is in the next compartment over playing cards with a South Indian family, a girl in a sari on either side teaching him how to play. I feel happy, ultimately, when I think of my first trip to South India, despite its ups and downs, because I think of all of the friendly people we met along the way. There were the many bys who came up to us at the beach, just to make conversation, or the French-Moroccan lady we ran into both in Pondicherry and Mamallapuram. I won't forget the weird guy who served us at the New Cafe with the only Indian afro I've ever seen in my life, or the masseur who probably gets off humiliating white tourists with a bit of string and some toilet paper. This is what I think of now, all those happy faces and hopefully the many more to come, as I sit on a train that reminds me of purgatory passing through the middle of India.