Burn

(Friday, April 5^th-Sunday, April 7^th)           

           

            In the spirit of adventure, just one week after our Mumbai/Bombay trip ( I still don’t know) and surviving turbulence, Emily, Anita and I set off for Coorg. To my dismay, there are no corgies in Coorg, though there were plenty of other canines, but we’ll get to that later. What Coorg did have was a lot of rainforest and mountains and fresh air and large insects. So for the weekend I choose Malaria risk and trekking over busy city streets, blaring horns, the acrid smoke of burning trash and the constant fear of being run over. To be honest, I didn’t realize how much I needed a nature escape until I actually had one.

            Coorg weekend also meant my first overnight bus trip in India. I’ve dabbled in the overnight bus lifestyle in Thailand, but in the month I’ve been in India my mother has requested I stay off the buses because during one of her late night iphone news reading sprees she stumbled upon an article about a horrific crash. So naturally she sent me an email with the link and a plea to take the train and naturally when Anita suggested we take the bus, I didn’t hesitate to buy my ticket. We boarded at 11pm and arrived in Coorg at 5:30am. But in between is where is it gets interesting.

            Monsoon season doesn’t start till end of May, and even June in the south. However, the locals will tell you that in mid spring there will be one week of storms, and then it will get so hot you want to be naked all the time/die. Turns out it’s not just something they say. It actually happened. And it happened last week. So we get on the bus and settle down in the reclining seats and stuffy air conditioning. Emily gets motion sickness and swears by Dramamine, which also has the beneficial property of helping you PTFO like there’s no tomorrow/enormous storm happening. I really enjoy PTFO-ing so I partook in the Dramamine dosage and soon found myself sleepy and not in the least bit queasy. Emily went out like a light but for some reason I felt the warm and fuzzy drugged sleepiness, but could not actually achieve the highly sought after PTFO. So I sat awake in my seat as our bus headed steadily towards and increasing violence thunder and lightening storm. It was kinda like seeing it in slow motion. Like panic wrapped in cling film. We arrived in the middle of the storm. Lightening was going off so fast it felt kinda like the whole world was raving. I recall having fuzzy thoughts regarding the metal bus having rubber tires and hoping that would prevent us from being fried. I witnessed for the first time lightening actually making contact with the ground, about 50 yards from the bus. I felt like the bus was gunning down the road, and sometimes it seemed like we weren’t even in contact with solid ground. This could have been my exhausted and drugged state or us hydroplaning across the empty roads. Probably both. Thoughts couldn’t flash across my mind but they kind of have floated and dreamed there way through. I was reviewing in my head a story that Emily and Anita had told me earlier in the day. We were on a government bus, which were supposedly safer than the private companies. A real life example of this discrepancy was the fate of one Swedish medical student who had been studying at St. Johns just like us. She and her friend were taking a private overnight bus to Goa, it was a full sleeper bus, with bunks. She slept on the top and her friend on the bottom. In the middle of the night, the bus slammed into a truck. The suspicion is that the bus driver dozed off behind the wheel. The friend on the bottom bunk was shaken but pretty much unharmed. The Swedish medical student on her way to the beach, who was sleeping on the top bunk of a private bus, was thrown from the bunk in the impact. She broke her back. In hospital in India they told her she’d never walk again, and when she began to cry the doctor asked her why on earth she was crying. She was taken back to Sweden for treatment. She’s walking now and doing physical therapy. And that whole accident happened two weeks before Emily arrived.

            So in the middle of the storm, in a Dramamine haze, I considered how if I broke my back, I would want to air lifted back to the UK and how it wouldn’t be so bad because pretty much all my friends here are doctors or future doctors or just really smart. So we went running through the storm, my panic dragging along after, subdued but real. And then we were airborne, and the bus landed with a huge jolt and I’m pretty sure I yelled “holy shiiiiiiit’ and then smashed my wrist against the window in an attempt to brace myself. The whole bus had a similar reaction, but then it was over and we were still driving and it was still storming and everyone went back to sleep. So I rolled my wrist around and went to bed too. No broken backs here. In the morning I realized just how crazy the storm had been and how glad I was that I was drugged.

            After the first bus, we waited around in the dark, then took a second bus, and then took a jeep up to Honey Valley, our beautiful and secluded guesthouse for the weekend. It wasn’t until arriving in that forest oasis, with birds singing audible and buses nowhere in sight, that I realized how much the trash in the city had started weigh on my soul. I think India is beautiful, a country rich in color and tradition and even just straight history; it’s older than most. But it’s not necessarily rich in organization. The bureaucracy is pretty out of control, and many foreign students and professionals agree that it’s an incredible place to visit but a very difficult place to try and come in and work. So I’m here doing public health and working specifically on projects involving women’s sexual and reproductive rights and domestic violence, but I find myself distracted by the municipal waste problem. And I think when I come back, maybe as a Fulbright or some other type of intern or scholar or fellow, I would really like to work on the environmental health and sustainability here. Because there is trash everywhere. And at home I put my trash in one bin and I compost my food scraps and I recycle glass and plastic and paper, I dispose of batteries properly and the city organizes pick up days for my large household electronic waste and Christmas trees and used car donations. Here it goes into one bin, or it simply gets tossed out the window. And the streets are lined with trash and there are piles of it on the pavement and cows and dogs come through to pick out the edibles. When the piles get too high someone makes a stack of trash against a wall, or a fence or even a tree, and sets it on fire. Open trash fire burn daily, fueled by everything from newspapers to plastic crates to wig hair to fecal matter. And the dark, acrid smoke fills the sky and the lung of pedestrians. And these fires are set in Bangalore, and in Mumbai and in the villages and more rural areas, because there aren’t or aren’t enough landfills and so trash piles up and no one has organized against it and so people are simply doing what they think they should for it. My colleague, a really sweet woman who works as a counselor and champion against violence against women in Bangalore, offered to take a plastic yogurt container from me in the car. I thought she knew where the bin was so I handed it over. And she rolled down the window and threw it out into the street as we were driving. She’s not a socially irresponsible being, she’s invested in public health, its’ her life’s work. But plastic and waste lining the streets is what she knows and no one has ever told her to think differently. The canals that run through Bangalore are black and thick and run slowly due to their consistency and the piles of plastic and styrofoam and other debris that line the banks and move with the water. And I love being here and I love so many things about Bangalore, but sometimes when I’m walking and trying to avoid stepping in animal and human fecal matter, skipping steps so as to not fall into the open sewers that run two meters beneath the cracked the paving blocks, or having to cross the street so I don’t have to walk through a trash pile, sometimes when I have to do these things, it gets to me. And then I have a selfish thought that millions of people have each day that continues to cause the deplorable state of our environment. I think this: “at least it’s not like this in Albany”. And I can’t think that and just put up with burning plastic smoke that makes my eyes burn. Because the black and putrid canals, that burn when they come in contact with fire, all eventually get to the sea. And that sea isn’t just India’s. It’s an ocean, and Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic or whatever else, it’s all the same water in the end, contained on one planet. And my next thought is, if possible, even less helpful. I think sometimes that it’s too late. I worry about whether my children will even have green spaces. But even if it is too late, it’s not too late to try. So something has to be done, because water shouldn’t reach a state so far from water that its surface burns, and trash shouldn’t burn in the streets and people’s lungs and eyes shouldn’t burn from the stink and the stench and even just the rain. Someone has to start, actually a lot of people have to start, not just picking up the mess, but changing the education and information so the mess stays off the street. And hopefully I can join them.

            So Coorg is a green space, one of the few left and still it’s shrinking. And though something needs to be done about the waste, it was really nice to run from it for a weekend, with two good friends and a bottle of red wine. When you go to Coorg, go you to trek. We had a lengthy discussion about the difference between trekking and hiking and concluded that trekking simply sounds cooler and that when you do some nature type walking in a foreign country you’d much rather tell your family you went trekking instead of hiking. So we went trekking, up through Honey Valley’s vast property and coffee plantations and beyond. We made it to the top of the small mountain and looked out across the green space, still covered in trees and rolling hills and haze not so thick that we could still see the mountains that stood at attention across the valley. After trekking Saturday morning we came down the mountain, sweaty and rosy cheeked from fresh air and sun, and had a home cooked meal. I’m a firm believer in the Like Water for Chocolate phenomenon that you can taste the emotions that have gone into food. So when you eat at a restaurant, the food simply tastes like food, it might even taste a little bitter on the account of poor pay, low tips, and dishonest labor that goes on in industrial kitchens. You could also very likely be tasting food poisoning….However, at Honey Valley, which is run by a lovely family and has been for the past 35 years, the food tastes like the love of the land and the grace of the people who live there. So we ate food in which the love had a taste, and come Saturday night brought out our bottle of wine which had made through a storm and into the mountains with us, and full of home cooking and fresh air, sat in a wood paneled dining room, playing cards and drinking wine and being present.

            Sunday saw another trek which involved some off the map exploring and could have resulted in us being stranded in the wild, 127 style, except our combined brilliance ( and perhaps the very evident layout of the land…) let us find our way to the top of world, and then back to our guest house. We skipped the second bus ride this time and simply hired the jeep to take us all the way to our bus stop in the bigger town. It was a thrilling ride down the hill to say the least, I thought I would die about half as many times than on the thunder storm bus, but this time without the soft hand of Dramamine clouding my panic. Aside from Anita having so sit next to a very large and very smelly man and Emily and I nearly being left behind while peeing, our journey went smoothly. I returned to Bangalore late at night, having not been gone long enough to miss it, but with a break sufficient enough to keep me satisfied with being there. I dreamt that night, in my own bed that I returned to Bangalore in 2017 and the metro was running and I came and conquered the municipal waste problem. Who knows what could happen.