Advertisement
It was through soccer, as usual, that I made my first connections in India. And, as usual, I had brought a soccer ball with me, this time deflated in my stuffed bag. I pumped it up with the help of a neighborhood bike repairman. He set up shop in the spotty shade of a scraggy bush next to the main road, sitting on a rock until a customer came.
With a newly full ball in tow, I walked through my immediate neighborhood of mud huts and cement houses juggling the ball in the air, hoping to initiate some sort of interaction. No sooner had I gone twenty yards, when a flock of young kids surrounded me, excitedly yammering in Tamil, a language which, at that point, I had yet to learn. There was a miniscule girl with short-cropped hair, who looked so small that I guessed she had just learned to walk, but could nonetheless run and speak. She even knew some English. The rest of the gang were older, though also barefoot, dirty and bright eyed. None of them had ever seen a white person before.
For the next few days I played with the kids on the corner of my lane. We played in between two cadais (small shops about as wide as a one's wingspan), a bangles shop, a trickling, murky creek, a humungous ditch that the government had constructed for drainage but never finished, and a Ganesh Pilaiyar (a small statue at the base of a tree). We were always watched, if not by watchful parents, then by shrunken grandparents lying on cots beside the tidy dirt outside of nearby huts.
The kid's favorite game was for me to keep it away from them, while they swamped me, kicking recklessly at the ball, or the back of my ankles if they were closer. Truth be told, I took more care to avoid running them over than protecting the ball. Sometimes, one of the kids would point to the sky and say, "Maylay." Immediately, the rest of the bunch would be jumping in the street, throwing their hands into the air, saying "Maylay, Maylay." This, I soon learned, meant that they wanted me to kick the ball as high as I possibly could. I always obliged, partly because they enjoyed chasing after the ball, but also because their awe-filled exclamations when the ball went rocketing up made me feel superhuman.
Playing with these energetic kids, little devils every one, was my first conduit into Tamil culture and the lives of those around me. They were the vibrant core of the neighborhood and the test of any outsider's character.
Looking up from doing a trick, I saw the tiny girl's mother leaning back against a shop counter smiling warmly at me. She was cradling a baby in her arms, and talking to another woman out of the side of her mouth. At that point I had no language with which to engage her, but the happy way in which she watched her precious child play with me said enough: I had passed the test.
Although I spoke almost no Tamil, whenever I passed by the corner where the kids ran ramshackle and the parents congregated on the stoops of the shops, I smiled, put my hands together in the traditional greeting and said "Varnecum." They responded excitedly in turn.
Over the next few weeks I didn't play soccer with the kids quite as regularly. Whenever I left my house and took a left down the lane, the kids would surround me and ask me where I was going, and demand that I play soccer with them. Then, seeing that I was doing something else, they would escort me to the main road, the edge of their domain.
Although by the time I returned to my house every night my energy was completely expended, I was largely enjoying being shocked by an Indian culture that in so many ways was unrelated to the American culture within which I was raised. At least once every hour for the first couple of weeks I saw a scene that halteded me in my tracks. I remember seeing all of the traffic stopped on a highway, waiting for a lying cow to stand up. Walking along the road, I saw a family of five squeezed onto one motorcycle and crammed buses forcing cars off of the road. On festival days I was awoken at 5:30 in the morning by cinema music blaring at every corner from eight foot tall speakers. I saw kids no older than five shooting off fireworks under trees being watched approvingly by their parents.
For the first few weeks I would go around buying little food snacks at cadais and make small talk, (small literally because I had about five words at my disposal). I was entertained by the unending questions, I gave money to every beggar, I went all over the city seeking adventure, and I accepted every invitation into people's houses.
Around a month in, however, my passion was wearing off. I was no longer enthused about being approached every time I left my house by kids asking for pens, their parents asking me why I was there, and beggars demanding money. I had not met any Indians my age with whom I wanted to be friends; the males were often childlike, clingy and pestering, and the females were not allowed to talk to men. I knew for sure that any hope of being with a woman while there was pure fantasy. I also knew that though I could talk to, appreciate, and have a mutual understanding with my neighbors and shopkeepers, I was bound to the seven Americans with whom I lived and studied. They were from the same culture as me, they knew the same references, they worked from the same set of understandings.
But I didn't always feel that way. The eight of us had spent the previous summer together in Madison, Wisconsin studying Tamil (unsuccessfully) as a preparation for the trip. This was the first time in my life that I had been away from both friends and family save for a one week sleep away soccer camp. This was also during the 2006 World Cup. After the first day of class, I said that I was going to the Student Union to watch the World Cup game about to begin. To my surprise, they were appalled that I would choose soccer over hanging out with them. To me, it didn't seem as much a question of what I should do, as whether they would want to watch the games with me.
Over the next few weeks, instead of becoming close to the people with whom I was going to be living in close quarters in a foreign country, I found myself, for the first time in my life, disliked. Once the afternoon games had concluded, I would hang out with my classmates, but I remained known as the "weird soccer guy." After trips to all three campus gyms, cycle rides to every location on the campus map shaded in green, and enquiries at every info desk, I finally happened upon a group of Africans who had a thrice-weekly pickup game at a distant field. I immediately fell in with these mostly Ghanaians and Cameroonian grad students. We began playing pickup every day, and they even invited me to join two summer league teams and go with them to Green Bay for a tournament. I began hanging out with them, going out to clubs, and generally feeling appreciated. This marked the end of the loneliest period of my life, lonelier than any period of time in India.
Near the end of the first month in India, when the realization that I was now living in Madurai first shook me, I began missing my friends and family. I could picture my family back in Nyack, going about their daily routine. I could see Shane slaving away at construction and Emiliano wandering around Granada. Lying face up on the stone floor of my apartment, I thought about how far I was away from them, and it made me sad. Although I felt that I was enjoying my experience to the best of my abilities, I still felt disconnected, both from my group and the Indians among whom I lived. More than anything, I just wanted to be a part of a community.
Serendipity struck later that week, however, because walking down the street to a dosai cadai to get some food, I ran into an African guy of about my age who was flying on his motorcycle in my direction. He stopped, dismounted and came over to me. Being African, I assumed that he would like soccer. He did. He was a fan of Liverpool in the premier league, but said that all of his friends were fans of Arsenal, and Thierry Henry in particular. He invited me over to his house to watch a big game that weekend. His house was just around the corner from mine. When I arrived, the entire mud room floor was covered with sandals. I opened the door and found about fifteen Kenyans sitting on the floor watching a soccer game on the television. The room was unlit and undecorated; the lone florescent was cracked in the corner. There was one girl. She was sitting behind a stout guy with dreadlocks, twisting his hair. She introduced herself as Pati. The guys, who each introduced themselves to me in turn, were students at different colleges in Madurai, sent there for their schooling because of the better education and cheaper costs. But since the cost of the airplane ticket was so expensive, none of them had been home to Kenya since they had arrived, between two and six years ago.
I spent the rest of the night there with them in their unlit room. They cooked some delicious Kenyan food, fired up the beer and rap music, and we danced. I drunkenly turned to Ken, the guy who I first met, and effusively thanked him for bringing me around.
In his part British English and part Swahili accent Ken responded, "Yah mon. This is how we do around here. Enjoy."
"But man," I continued, "since I got here I didn't watch any soccer, I didn't drink, and I didn't dance. I'm so glad I met you."
"It's nothing, mon," Ken again replied. He had a large, shiny forehead and a spherical face. "Tomorrow we play some football. It is Kenyans against Sudanese."
I left early in the morning peaceful and tired, happy to have finally found a community who shared the greatest passion of mine, soccer. The next day, I met up with them and we walked to an dusty lot in a nearby neighborhood. High school aged Indian boys were smoking cigarettes and playing cricket on one side, others were sitting back, trying to look tough.
We kicked my ball around as we waited for the others to arrive. This would become a trend; every day we arranged and confirmed that we would meet at five thirty, but there were never more than a couple of people there before six. Two by two, guys began rolling up on their motorcycles, dismounting, and walking across the lot to where we were congregating in the corner.
Eventually, after a seemingly ritualized half hour of one person after another saying, "Come on, let's play" without the group taking action, we began. Some of the guys found immense, cinderblock sized bricks leaned up against the wall, and dragged them across the crusty, dry ground to their positions as goalposts in the middle of the field, awfully close to each other. The game, Kenyans against Sudanese, was one of the most skillful in which I had ever played, and definitely the most physical. It was serious in that everyone played intensely, but more than that it was joyous. These daily games became a routine, a part of the day to which I looked forward, the proper way to utilize the sun's last light. But what made the game so special was that each and every person appreciated the game to the same extent as I did.
These Kenyans, many of whom had not left Madurai for over four years, could speak almost no Tamil. They were ostracized by the majority of the Indians in the neighborhood both fairly (they got drunk and menaced on their motorcycles) and unfairly (the were looked down upon for being African). Many of them went to Tamil medium universities, meaning that they were going to classes being taught in a language which they didn't understand.
It was in this daily congregation that they, and later I, found comfort. I had never appreciated soccer as much as I did then, and I haven't been able to since. Over the course of the six months that I played in that little game, in that little lot, in that little city, different people began coming to play. First, the kids who played cricket whenever we arrived began to play with us. Then, their friends came and stood shyly by the edge, waiting for us to call them over to play. Later, when we moved our game to the center of Tabal Tandi Nagar, across from the bus stand, droves of Indians began watching us play from their position in the shade of the bus stand. Shopkeepers now stood watching outside their shops, elderly women crouched watching on the ground and young kids rode their bicycles through the game. There, in the middle of the town square, the Kenyans were visible to the neighborhood community, and no longer so scary. And I, well I enjoyed looking over and seeing my American friends, people who a year prior I had felt disconnected from, sitting and watching me with proud grins on their faces.
so.. comments?
Advertisement
Tot: 0.224s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0576s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Priscilla
non-member comment
Interesting
Hey Nathan, an interesting account but a bit disjointed with the insert of the introduction to culture at Madura. It could be sharpened by some condensation but all in all interesting. Love ya PBB