'And he growed and growed and growed'

     After nearly two months of half trying, I finally got my ivy creepers.

     I found them at some nursery we had discovered Sunday on the unintended ride back from a desolate Morjim Beach, via the crowded Mapusa. It's not like we knew every nursery in town. But then with the scooter our tiny neighbourhood only got tinier as we pushed out further and further from its epicentre. It seemed to defy the laws of physics. With every passing day, our own little universe seemed to be both expanding and contracting at the same time. 

     I've had more than enough time to digest the feeling of being back home. Back in Goa, my home away from home. The night Chandrakant came to collect me at the airport following one frustrating plane delay after another, I felt my chest loosen up as his rickshaw rumbled and snarled through the deserted streets of Saligao. Rajasthan and all its tourist-savvy foot soldiers were already fading into a comfortable distance, where they could be scrutinized, laughed at, accepted and bundled into entertaining stories for friends and family at my own leisure. Goodbye self-righteous Brahman priests and your pay-as-you-go Hinduism. Goodbye clever street musicians who insisted they were interested in nothing more than good conversation but then clawed and scratched for everything but. And goodbye clueless hordes of Indian clothes-wearing foreigners. Everyone so desperate to find their trinkets, spirituality and good times in this colourful jungle. Scrawling their two-day old impressions in daily planners for tourist handlers to use as testimonials for the next batch. You could all go on feeding on each other without me. I was done having to figure anyone out. And getting figured out, for that matter. 

     There was none of this nonsense at home. Whatever personal discoveries Puji and I made we made together. Whatever prayers we offered we offered privately, free of hassle. And it didn't cost anything more than the price of the stick of incense. You didn't have to smudge Vermillion on your forehead or wear any bracelet to prove your spiritual papers were in order. There were no special chants and no clever hymns. Whatever insight and wisdom we gained from each other was always on the house. Maybe this was not the grand adventure everyone would be expecting me to be having. It didn't always make for the flashiest story or the most dazzling pictures. But it's exactly what felt right in the moment. For me, there was nothing more spiritual.  

     And so I sat in my little balcony garden this morning and planted those ivy creepers. I let my brain go blank. I dug with my hands and carefully dropped in several shoots that had been abandoned to root for way too long. I sipped the rest of my coffee. I watered all the plants, rinsed my hands and then rinsed the entire terrace clean. Finally, I would be able to watch the vines grow. Especially now that the sun was starting to shine. The clouds were still there in the background. But even they were slowly receding. 

Different world, same problems

Dear Customer,

Thank you for using My Services on http://myservices.relianceada.com/.

We would like to inform you that your payment of Rs.1,099 on 18/07/2013 11:56:25 is Failed (or) Cancelled.

Please try after Sometime.

Thank you for choosing Reliance, India's No.1 Network.

Regards,

Customer Care
Reliance Communications

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


Yes, I know. I tried at least ten times to pay online. I had to end up traveling to Mapusa to recharge my data card in person.

Why don't you guys try figuring out why your online payment system is so unreliable to begin with? After all, your company is called RELIANCE, right? And when you figure it out, please let your staff know. They seem to be as useless as this email.

Thanks for wasting my time.

Rob

the ass behind all those assumptions

We hadn't noticed the security guard coming our way. And then even if we had, it would have been hard to understand what made us so interesting.  

Maybe I had already become immune to all the glares we attracted from the second we left the house. Maybe I was more concerned about looking down to avoid dog shit. Maybe I couldn't care less. It's not like I didn't know what people were thinking. Puji had provided the inner monologue to all those stares: she a woman of loose morals at best, a white man's prostitute at worst. Everything from holding hands to kissing in public attracted such thoughts. We joked about such things. Neither of us cared too much anyhow. Her stepping out of the house in shorts or a summer dress or smoking a cigarette would be met with equally silent disapproval. Even in a modern city like Bombay, this was something she faced daily on the train, on the street and wherever else prying eyes would roam. There was no pleasing ignorance. 

But on this otherwise perfect day Ignorance was hovering right over us and urging us to kindly get the fuck out. We had crossed some invisible line. I must have been absentmindedly snapping pictures of vultures in the sky when he got word from the incensed park members. Apparently there was a problem with me tanning without a shirt. The conversation took place in Hindi so I was not privy to detail, tone or reasoning. We were asked to leave. End of story.

I wasn't mad at first. It was bound to happen. I would have preferred it not have happened at one of the few spots I could call my own in the city. Some decent runs under the scorching Bombay sun had ended nicely in this same little park by the water. The one with the nice breeze. And no one had complained when I was going through some Yoga poses quietly to myself, topless, facing the sun. No security guard had visited. Then I was just a silly white boy at best. People anyway expected such things from foreigners. It's the same reason the Bollywood industry hired Eastern European girls to do the really sexy dirty work in those elaborate dance sequences. Put an Indian girl in that same dance and eyebrows would be raised. In the same way I became something else with her next to me. What exactly that was I wasn't sure. 

As we gathered up our stuff I scanned the park for any guilty faces. Who had made the complaint? A couple of young girls who had been smiling and pointing at us every now and then continued to do so. Probably not them. Maybe it was the man who had been hungrily and shamelessly staring Puji down from the second we arrived. Or was it the group of older ladies sitting around chatting. The security guard was obviously not going to reveal his sources. Still, I wanted a better explanation as to what exactly I had done wrong. So Puji asked him when we reached the gate. Sitting back lazily in his chair, the headphones firmly back in his ears. He was apparently in no mood for debate and only raring for a fight. Forget it, she told me. The conversation was going nowhere.

I have been told Indians are amongst the least confrontational people around. Disapproval, annoyance and anger were rarely if ever voiced loudly or directly. These feelings lived mostly in silent sighs and dirty stares and whispered from one ear to another. And in this case handed off to some security guarded, a young man who very likely stared down women he saw on the street and then went home and watched those same highly suggestive Bollywood films and toothpaste commercials he apparently had such moral issue with. And suddenly it bothered me that our little Saturday picnic in the park had somehow become everybody's business. And we would never really know who that 'everyone' was. Whoever disapproved would never have had the guts to come tell us themselves. So I was forced to assume. Chances are it had been a woman. Most men would have been more than happy to put their own moral outrage aside and stare at Puji for some time. Like that. So then it must have been those women. And what was the probability that any to all of these women lived under repressive husbands? Fairly high. And what were the chances that any of those husbands had raised their hands on them. Fairly high. And maybe each had their own daughters who would someday be innocently sitting in a park with their boyfriends and come under the hateful glance of disapproving men and their wives. 

And maybe those glances would become something much, much worse. 

It seemed to happen every day in India. Rape. Acid attacks. Murders. The evening news was full of acts of violence against women. Even the aayahs could tell you a couple of personal stories that would make you want to take a drive and strangle their husbands.  Funny how religion, cast and patriarchal norms all served to make watchmen of their female subjects; allowing them to decide not only what is best for their own children but what is best for everyone else's children as well. And that thought made me a little sick. Because I would never want to think that any of these women deserved what they had coming to them. Because it was ultimately women like Puji and Smita that had to bear the brunt of such intrusive ignorance. 

I thought everyone should be allowed to live their life the way they saw fit. What a simple and naive thought that was. Just like a simple day at the park.

old shoebox, you can't help me now

i feel like there is no clear past to fall back on. everything i have ever done is framed on yellowed newspapers, burned onto hundreds of scattered blank CDs with fading titles and even stored on external hard drives that are now corrupted and only retrievable with obscene amounts of money. i'm so frustrated. i'm not even sure what i'm looking for anymore. maybe some magical piece of work that is going to remind me what i should have been doing all along. instead, everything i come across is strangely forbidding. no, you don't want to play that one. you don't want to read that note. you don't want to be disappointed, do you? 

now i understand why people burn all their most intimate belongings. 

one timers, one liners

There are manholes in downtown Panama with no covers. One unlucky text message or one too many drinks and you`re a goner for sure.
Not every large hotel deserves its own dedicated TV channel. Really now.
Chicken Kitchen. Chicken Kitchen. Chicken Kitchen.
Just because some park advertises monkeys, doesn`t mean you`ll get monkeys.
If the road to some poorly marked hiking trail gets so steep and rocky your 4X4 can no longer handle it, you`re probably on the wrong road. Off the beaten path isn`t that literal.
Young local boys who hike behind you half way up a mountain just to prove themselves worthy guides will give you right directions regardless of if you actually cave in or not.
Men with machetes slung over their shoulders are intimidating.
One-sided signs are not very helpful on two-sided roads.
Some Panamanian worker ants are just freeloaders.
And there really is an old man called Don Pepe.
He`s got a parrot name Ricky.

is this what sucking a lemon actually feels like???

Today sucks. Is it okay to write that?

I will asume so. I mean, future Rob should know that not every day gets punctuated by a beautiful moment or the perfect song or the strangest coincidence or the most mindblowing realization. Some days just blow. Some days you wake up expecting to be super productive at home, only to realize you didn't really achieve anything past scratching a couple of lines off your to-do list.

This day has left me in somewhat of a sour mood. But not quite sour enough that I can sit here right now and come up with some interesting rant about it.

I'm currently in neutral and there ain't much to be done about it.

please, just one more chance to soak it all in

I'm not sure what most guys find so special about the bowl. When i want to relax, I head for the tub.

Tonight's bath was a thing of beauty. Even if I could still hear Chuck Hughes seeping under the bathroom door. it was fairly easy to ignore the iron chef and sink into One Hundred Years of Solitude. I can't believe how good this book has been to me this past month. Perhaps good books always feel that way. Let's just say that between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Leonard Cohen, I am definitely not lacking in role models.

But what was actually most inspiring tonight was not so much sweating through the final moments of Colonel Aureliano Buendia but the actual bath itself. Something about watching the steam rise and coat the walls of the washroom is therapeutic beyond simply warming my bones. Strange, ever since Davey Cleinfeld and I took that last-minute trip to Spa le Finlandais just before Christmas, I have been counting the weeks until it's fairly reasonable to go back. I have been craving the saunas and steam room the way i crave Sushi or Rolo Ice Cream. Except I think what I'm really craving is something much more specific. I want to jump into one of those natural Volcanic hot springs that you find in Iceland or Argentina- or the ones Amy and I visited when we went to Costa Rica several years back.

It's funny because I remember not really being all that interested in visiting those springs when we were actually there four years back. The traveller in me thought it would be a waste of good nature-seeking time. The judgmental bastard in me was obviously was proven wrong. Still, as relaxing and beautiful as it was to be lying in those steaming pools of dark water and staring at the Mountains, I remember getting fed up and being anxious to leave. Always so anxious to leave, to move on to the next thing.

So naturally I had to ask Amy if said hot springs exist in Panama, the current topic of travel. Yes, there is one but it is rather difficult to get to. In other words, a challenge with a defined reward. If I do ever make it there, i'm going to soak myself to spiritual bliss or prune up trying.