I met Priya Chandan in Nissi’s Chapati centre where a meal costs 50 rupees which the students consider outrageously expensive. For our last meal I take her to the Taj Krishna where the bill will cost 200 times that. I could say that I take her there to impress her but, to be honest, she is not easily impressed. Or I could say that I’m going to check it out for Flavia because after her flight from London it will be a more comfortable re-entry to Hyderabad than the rigours of my apartment where we will spend the last week. But to be honest all Taj hotels are roughly the same and we’ve stayed in lots of them. In fact I go there because I want to drink a good bottle of wine. If the first two months in Hyderabad had convinced me that I could function happily without alcohol, the last three months has removed any doubts that happiness requires good wine. The only way to drink good wine in India is to go to a very expensive hotel and pay astronomical prices ($100 for a bottle that would cost $20 or 30 in the West). I have never engaged in such extravagance in Hyderabad but tonight I have a justification for this time, in taking Priya to dinner, I am returning hospitality.
When we were discussing The Legends of Kazakh , with joint enthusiasm, and musing on contemporary forms of relgion, more Priya’s enthusiasm than mine, I had an ulterior motive for our conversations. From the minute I knew that she was from Kerala, which was more or less, the minute I met her, and particularly when I knew she was from Aleppy, where we would board our houseboat, I had been hoping for an invitation to her house. But I know nothing of the etiquette of such things and hope was all that I could do.
Indeed, I had decided that such a visit was simply outside local norms of hospitality when the night before we left for Kerala, Priya phoned to say we were invited to lunch with her parents in Aleppy. A fellow student, James, who had finished his coursework at EFLU and was writing up his thesis on Malayalam cinema in Aleppy would be our guide.
Kerala was a very welcome change from all our other Indian destinations. It was relatively clean, there were no beggars and there was an air of petit bourgeois well being about it. As a student I had held the petit-bourgeoisie in the traditional Marxist contempt, but then all students are unbelievably ignorant, and I now know that it is a class with a great number of virtues. James had two theories as to why Kerala was different. The first was that the Hinduism is not the dominant religion. With its first Christian churches built in the third century and its first mosque constructed when the Prophet was still alive, Kerala has avoided the fate of being dominated by a Hindu majority. Second it has had Communist governments since 1957. Unlike West Bengal, however, where I had been appalled and ashamed by the fact that thirty years of Communist rule seemed to have bought no benefits whether material or cultural to its people, the Keralan Communists get voted out of office every 5 years and then have to spend 5 years in opposition to a Congress government before they get voted back in again. If only Lenin had realized that this was the true Bolshevik path we would now be living in Communist heaven .
Priya’s parents were not only unbelievable welcoming but Priya’s mother was a wonderful cook. Flavia had been complaining about Indian food with increasing vigour but the fish curries, varied chutneys and vegetables with taste shut her up for a bit – or at least as long as she was eating. Priya’s sister, Praseeda had taken the day off medical school and she and James acted as translators. As a forestry commissioner and a nurse. Priya’s parents had considerable passive English but spoke very little. It was slightly disconcerting that we had to eat our lunch at table while our four hosts stood around and watched us but as my only rule for travel is “When in Rome, do as the Romans”, I coped. After lunch we were shown round a garden in which the vegatbles seemed to grow bigger in front of your eyes, a small paddy field with enough rice in it to feed the five thousand and a tiny factory where Priya’s father whiled away his retirement hours making bricks with a couple of chums. All this in the middle of a town and with similar establishments as far as the eye could see.
We then set out for a Hindu temple. I haven’t taken a photograph since 1984 on the grounds that I want to see where I am not take photographs but James kept snapping away. He was a great guide and I feel bad in saying that he is the only photographer I have encountered who is less talented than me at taking a picture (the other reason I gave up taking photos). Here are our holiday snaps
After we had visited the temple and its impressive elephant we went to see a discarded Buddha. When Hinduism swept back through India in the latter part of the first millennia it drove Buddhism out. In Aleppy some guilt must have attached to this displacement because a desecrated statue of the Buddhs has been placed in its own little stupa outside the town. Here I really was pleased to have my photo taken – unfortunately it came out too dark but I like what Priya did with it:
Priya says that she has never drunk wine so I say that she can have one glass. In fact she has two and finally I summon up the courage to ask her the question that I have been pondering almost since the day I got here. Everyone knows that India has a caste system but it is not so well understood that skin color also serves as a form of discrimination. There are two axes to color - one is geographical – roughly speaking the further south you go the darker the skin becomes and the other is social – roughly speaking the lower the caste the darker the skin. The most evident form of this discrimination is that female beauty is entirely coded as white – all film stars and all advertisements feature women so white they could pass for European. What is so curious about this taste is that it bears no relation to what I recognize as beauty. Many of the dark-skinned worm in this country, perhaps particularly the dark skinned women in this country, are strikingly beautiful. However asking a young woman how she feels about being coded as ugly requires several forms of courage, in this particular instance half a bottle of wine. Of course I don’t put the question quite in that form but I do put the question. Priya is surprisingly unfazed and unbothered. Yes, of course, her mother had told her to drink plenty of milk so that she would become whiter but the man she was most attracted to was coal black and the god Krishna, easily the most attractive of the Hindu gods, is always portrayed as blue, for which read black. We decide to write a film script with a beautiful dark heroine. The desire to become rich and famous while also doing good is the last infirmity of the aging leftist.
I end the evening with my only complaint about Kerala: “Too many Europeans”
