Kanyakumari

Where the Indian Ocean meets the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.  Where yellow sand meets black and red sand.  Where the Indian pilgrims flock, Kanyakamari, the Southern-most tip of India, to watch the sun rise and set over the sea and bathe in the sacred waters.  And no, I have no idea why they are sacred.  And no, I have not bathed in them.  

Kanykamari is much more of what I expected from India.  Touts, beggars, excited children, pilgrims and persistent necklace sellers.  Selling real pearls, of course, a whole string of them, perfectly formed and beautifully iridescent all for a 100 rupees.  They’ll even try and burn them with a lighter to prove to you that they are not plastic, as someone cynical may suspect them to be.  The main bazaar that leads up to the temple, which is positioned right on the tip of India, is lined with ‘fancy’ shops and trashy souvenirs.  Lampshades, mirrors, necklaces, hanging decorations all made from shells are abundant, and are as kitsch as the 1970’s.  Plastic rickshaws, machine guns, boats and dolls can all be bought for 30 rupees.  People throng up and down the busy little street at night and mooch lazily along it during the day, in the beginning of this very hot Indian summer.  There is a good breeze that skips in from the many seas, which makes walking around this disparate little town just tolerable.  There are fishing boats that line the edges of the seas, and brittle reed houses set a little further back that sit in the cool shadow of large expensive hotels.  On the dusty streets, amongst the tat shops, imposing hotels, and grimy lodges, are snippets of the past. 

  Dilapidated temple entrances sneak in between shops, their perverse statues of horse/lion/drangon/elephant hybrids, with huge penises that are fucking small elephants, which in turn are fucking even smaller, surprisingly happy little men at the bottom, sit ignored, whispering tales of times gone by to the covered, conservative, now censored Hindus that wander past wishing to prostrate themselves to the sun.  

Sunrise and sunset are the things to do here.  Although, there is also the candy pink Gandhi memorial which held his ashes before they were immersed, and where I was asked to make extra donations to the pocket of the woman who looked after my shoes.  I pointed out that this was the Gandhi memorial, and opportunistic scrounging was maybe a little incongruous, but I think the subtlety of the point was lost on her, she just scowled and spat when she realised I wasn’t going to ‘donate’ to her.      

I got up at 5.20 am to secure myself a good spot for the sunrise, as did a few thousand other people.  It was far more bustling than I have ever experienced 5.20 am to be before.  Calls of ‘chai, chai, chai’, ‘coffee, coffee, coffee’ punctuated the din of the crowds, the bell of a boy selling bags of pink candy floss tinkled in endless circuits around people, and the relentless whispering on the necklace sellers trying to prove the authenticity of their pearls could be heard with every step.  I made my way down to the Ghats, and managed to find a good spot on a wall, which was clearly the envy of many others, whose closeness and gentle nudging made me suspect they were wishing to make space for themselves, by ousting me.  People swarmed down to the Ghats, into the sea and onto the rocks, and stared excitedly at the large Vivekananda statue that sits benignly on a rock just off shore.  As the skies lightened and the sun struggled its way into the day behind the hazy of cloud, there was a cheer and applause from the gathered crowd.  And eventually, the sun wrestled free from the haze, and presented himself as a large, proud red disc to his followers beyond Vivekananda.   (Vivekananda is the wandering monk who dedicated his life to bringing a sense of social justice to Hinduism.)

Sunset was a little more manageable time wise.  I wandered back down to the same spot I watched sunrise from, but looking in the other direction.  The place was a mass of people who seemed more akin to holiday makers as opposed to pilgrims.  There were fried food sellers lining the edges of the Ghats, offering samosas, battered chilli’s, fried bananas, tough orange coloured sweetcorn (even the beggar children turned that down when I offered it to them) and fruit.  Along the front of those, white horses trotted gleeful children up and down, and on the beach families, giggling girls and boisterous boys teased each other with the sea.   The men swimming with happy exhuberence and the women gently testing the water, laughing at the waves that splashed them while they egged each other on to step in a little deeper.   Laughter and sounds of people enjoying themselves mingled with the horn-like voices of the chai sellers.  There was the occasional genuine pilgrim, spotted as if in a game of where’s wally, identifiable by their orange robes, who entered the sea with their plastic Pepsico bottle to fill it with sacred sea water.

 

I like Kanyakumari.  This is what I had in my expectations of India.  People, noise, bustle.  And the strange thing is, that even though I have come here as a lone female traveller, I have not been hassled or felt under so much scrutiny as I have done in the Western tourist destinations.  Here I am seen as more exotic and a little more unapproachable than a trophy fuck……………And before I even had time to finish that sentence, and Indian man strikes up conversation with me.  After a couple of minutes inane conversation, about his future wife and family, he asks what room number I am and tells me we should go there, to enjoy, presumably.  

I honestly don’t know how women deal with travelling around this country alone.  I don’t want to assume that every man who talks to me is wanting to ‘enjoy’ me, and who then assumes I will thanks to the portrayal of Western women in movies.  I imagine most porn actresses are white.  In a culture where the men and women are separate and have little interaction within groups after childhood, and the women are taught when young to be hostile to men, that a smiling face with a willingness to talk must seem easy, accommodating; available.  It makes the idea of travelling on my own seem a little daunting.  I would have to adopt a hardness I wouldn’t want to just to deal with people.  To have to be incredibly wary of those around me, to not talk to any local, to be hard towards people.  I don’t  want to do that.  I am not sure there is any country where I want to be like that.  

Someone said to me yesterday, ‘As soon as you think you have things figured out here, something will come along to completely contradict what you thought you knew.’