Genisis

As I’ve often mentioned before, a jobbing actor always needs the companionship of a good book, a crossword or a Suduko puzzle to pass away the time he is hurrying up and waiting.

The choice of book rests with the individual.

I have always tended to towards Sci-Fi or a fast moving spy-thriller. Occasionally I have plunged into something deeper, like when I was in India. This was to get my mind completely away from the scenes of dismal poverty or sickening wealth that walked hand in hand from the marble polished hotel forecourts into the sewerage filled gutters, so I had a re-read of Milan Kundera’s “Imagination”.

His deep and memorable prose certainly made me think twice as I watched a woman squatting in a Mumbai tree on the main road from the airport doing her daily morning ablutions. This spectacular display occurred approximately one hour after our arrival in the sub-continent, and while we were engulfed by the oppressive humid heat of pre-monsoon India in a taxi.

At the very moment the woman’s falling faeces cascaded to the street below, I was reading what I thought was a very apt quote of Kunderas’;  “There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside time.” I wanted the sickening sight to be removed from my time zone!

Taken literally, modern physicists like Stephen Hawkins would say that this was an impossibility, or rather highly improbable, unless of course we plunged into his parallel and multiple universe theories.
This I’m not prepared or capable of doing so I’ll take you along the mundane route of my enlightened memories that caught fire in the depths of my cerebrum.

New sights of a gold-plated lift taking us to a penthouse abode quickly erased the image of the tree squatting woman and the roof top swimming pool surrounded by imitation grass made me realize that the local Indian film producer we were visiting would have a flushing loo.

However, Kundera’s  quote resurfaced in my grey matter about a week later as I stood up and hoisted up my trousers after I had deposited the contents of my Dehli-Belly in the Nilgri Hills’ tea plantation.

It was probably the very act of defecation and relieving my bursting bowels that brought back the memory of the lady in the Mumbai tree and hence Kundera’s quote; but this time the quote brought the word Genesis to the fore front of my brain, as the scenic surroundings reminded me of the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho and the riddle which Chief Mojaje had given me on the last evening of my five day trek.

“The answer’s in Genesis”, he had said and then continued, “Give me the name of the man who was born before his father, died before his father and was laid on his grandmother’s chest?”

We were almost half way through our drive through India and were in Mysore. At supper in the half-a-star hotel , Anthony, the director outlined our movements for the following day. He had to cash some his US dollar traveler’s cheques and then we would take a look at the Holi festival, before travelling onto Trivandrum. I’ve already described this in the story “Dehli Belly in the Nilgri Hills”, so I won’t repeat myself.

This meant that we would not be going to Goa, which I been told by a friend was the most beautiful area of India. The fused culture of the catholic Portuguese colonialists and the locals was apparently a fascinating combination.

Dr Hromik said we would see some evidence of this as we travelled through the southern Nilgris as the Portuguese influence had moved quite a distance into the interior.

So the day after witnessing the harrowing scene of the blood-letting at the Holi festival we climbed aboard our 4x4 and set off.

I take this opportunity to give a brief description of the state of the Indian roads.

You have to immediately understand that it is not only combustion engine vehicles that travel on these thoroughfares. Elephants, mules, donkeys, a few horse & traps, cattle, and pedestrians make use of the roads. It seems as if no particular vehicle or even pedestrian has primary use of the road and everything that is on the road takes its own time to get from A to B. This you can imagine results in slow moving traffic.

Not so.

The average maximum speed throughout the whole road system is approximately 45 to 50 miles per hour when you are on an open road. In towns and cities this slows down to a snail’s pace, and as none of the traffic lights are in working condition all junctions assume the status of a 4 way stop, with it seems the elephant always having the prime right-of-way, unless it is out-ranked by a cow.

As a first timer to India I was often shocked by how close a small car comes to hitting a huge truck head on. The cars like to weave around the slow moving rickshaws and trucks but this means they have to go on the wrong side of the road. After a while you get used to this insanity. If it’s too much for you don’t watch or close your eyes.

Never mind elephants, because of their massive bulk, commanding the right of way at intersections. Beware of cows! They are holy animals and it seems that the bovines are aware of this fact, and so they happily sit in the middle of the road forcing vehicles to drive around them. This can be alarming at times because around a blind corner you can stumble upon a gigantic bull without warning.

So, as tempting as it might be for those of you, who like the Hindu locals who believe in reincarnation, I advise you to never, drive in India yourself. The road rules and ways of the land are so different than the west that it is a recipe for disaster.

Our trip down the mountain range was filled with all of the above encounters.  Elephants laden with cotton bales with a youth the size of Tom-Thumb perched on the animal’s neck weaved its way past trucks, cars, and rickshaws.

We had almost completed our descent when Dr Hromik suggested that we stop in the tiny town of Tenkasi and see as he described it, “A combination of cultures”.

On the main street next to a tyre-changing establishment where eight and nine year old boys removed punctured tryes off their rims with the use of crowbars and their own body weight was a Catholic church. Right next to it was a Hindu shrine and, believe it or not, a Buddhist meeting hall.

While Dr Hromik, our director and his wife decided to enjoy the facilities on offer at the “Yard-of-Tea” establishment, which was next to the youngsters jumping up and down on their punctured tryes, I sauntered across the road to the Catholic Church.

Nothing about Catholicism is small or insignificant; usually their places of worship are huge, towering Cathedrals with bells that summon their congregations from the surrounding countryside, so this church was unique. It was minute.

A small chapel I think would be an adequate description. Neatly aligned fold up chairs for the congregation and a tiled aisle leading to the small altar. I wandered down the aisle and was suddenly aware of nother presence in the church; I turned around and saw what can only be described as Humpty-Dumpty sitting in a chair next to the front entrance.

“Can I be helping you?” enquired Humpty.

“Perhaps, I was just looking.” I replied wandering back to the robed entity.

As I approached I saw that he was not robed in the normal Catholic attire but a wrap around toga, all in white with a crimson band round his large waist. He was completely bald.

“I’m a Bhikkhu”, he said as he rose to greet me.

“A Bikku?”

He explained, “A Buddhist monk.”

“In a Catholic Church?”

He smiled, “Each to his own.” He replied. “I often sit in here to mediate.”

“Instead of your place next door?”

He smiled again, “It helps me understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Being.”

My God I thought. This is going to be deep. “You are delving into your confusion, right?”

Damm right I was!

He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You like a cup of tea?”

We exited the church and crossed the road to my companions who were watching their “Yard-of-tea” being made.

To describe this process is tedious so I think a picture should suffice. The “yard” is the distance which the tea is poured from its brewing chamber to its receiving cup. This movement is said to make the tea smoother, mixes in the milk and sugar, and creates the exact temperature at which it should be consumed. It is a theatrical event and it was fascinating to watch the brewer make each cup individually for his now five customers.

I introduced my new companion to Dr Hromik, Anthony and his wife. Our ensuing conversation was remarkable as it seemed to touch and encompass every thread of enquiry known to man. Politics and religion were the leaders, closely followed by cricket, and then we entered into Dr Hromik’s realm of travelling Dravidian Indians way back in 8000BC and the reason for our visit to India.

The monk, was very interested in this and said, “The paths are wide and the roads are dusty.”

It took a while for this to sink in and it was only at the end of our tea drinking sojourn that I gave him the reason I’d visited the Catholic Church, Chief Mojae’s riddle, “Give me the name of the man who was born before his father, died before his father and was buried in his grandmother’s chest.”

He smiled and said, “It’s an understanding of being born. That will give you the answer, it’s in Genesis.”

That night in my Trivandrum hostel room I sat in bed reading the bible, a reader’s digest condensed version that was in my bedside locker and it suddenly hit me.

The answer was Abel. He was born before his father, as his father wasn’t born BUT created from the earth by God. And he was slain by Cain his brother before his farther’s death and he was buried in the earth, his grandmother.

 

God bless Buddhist monks!

Dehli Belly in The Nilgri Hills

The Nilgri Hills

During my illustrious career I have been involved in the making of several documentaries as a presenter, a writer, a voice over artist and even at one time a producer.

This involvement has taken me to several foreign climes, in including Australia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Malaysia and India. The latter is the country which is home to the Nilgri Hills, a mountain range that crosses the centre of the sub continent. The range of mountains form a
part of the Western Ghats situated in the western part of Tamil Nadu state.

It is on this range of hills that the Jack fruit grows. This is a remarkable fruit as it is the only fruit that grows directly from the trunk of the tree and not from the branches. It grows to a great size,
some a long as four feet with a girth almost as large.

In the Hindu religion it is held to be food for the Gods.

The reasons for this are threefold. To start with it is not easily accessible; secondly it is covered by very small spikes that are poisonous to touch. Although not fatal they give a nasty prick that
causes a rash on the finger.

It is for this reason that the collectors of this gigantic fruit and those that dissect it to get to the very tasty edible part, coat their hands in cooking oil. This coating gives protection from the spikes also from the gelatinous substance that surrounds the absolutely delicious inner kernel. The flavor is comparable to a combination of apple, pineapple, mango, and banana.

The Jack Fruit

Tea Pickers in The Nilgri Hills

The third reason for the protective oil coating is the gelatinous substance is like super glue when you touch it, and a visit to a local clinic is necessary to part your glued together fingers.

I mention this exotic fruit to give you an idea of the unusual fodder that crossed my lips while on this particular assignment.

I was in India travelling by road from Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now called, filming a doccie called “Behind the African Mask”. We travelled from Mumbai to the southern most tip of the sub-continent ending at the town of Trivandrum.

The premise of this documentary was exploring the theory of a Dr Cyril Hromnik who believes that Dravidian Indians crossed over the Indian Ocean as far back as 8000 BC to mine gold in Southern Africa.

This Cape Town based historian Dr Cyril Hromnik has produced a vast body of research. He paints a compelling picture of an ancient settlement of gold miners in the Eastern Transvaal and Swaziland with roots that go back to the early Dravidian seafarers who had expert navigation skills and a lust for African gold.

So the documentary attempted to answer the question; did ancient Dravidian Seafarers establish the first gold mines in Southern Africa?

Also grown of the lower slope of the Nilgri Hills is tea. Nilgiri tea is generally described as being a dark, intensely aromatic, fragrant and flavoured tea and is grown in the district of Tamil Nadu.

It was whilst I was trekking up the slopes amongst this aromatic tea that I had my first rear end explosion.

It was a low-budget production. The producer stroke writer, director and camera operator, his wife as coordinator and general dogs-body, Dr Hromnik and myself as the on screen presenter and  carrier of what else was needed, made up our full crew.

We had a hired a driver four our four wheel drive jeep as driving in India is a nightmare for anybody brought up in the western world. The driver Habba was also our interpreter and our go-between when any bribes had to be negotiated for entrance to certain historical sites.

We were on a climb through the terraced tea plantation to see an ancient dolmen, also known as a cromlech, a portal tomb or a quoit. I suppose it’s a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb.

All these strange words entered my vocabulary while I was on this shoot. I had already been made familiar with the Yoni stone and the Shivaling or Lingam, which are representations of the male phallus and the female vulva.

In Hindu philosophy the Yoni is the origin of life and an abstract creative force that moves through the entire universe, so during the climb Dr Hromnik had said we were going to see the most enormous Yoni very close to the Dolmen.

To this day I still do not know that the thought of seeing a giant Vulva or Vagina set my bowels in motion, or if it was the curried paste of the Jack fruit I had eaten the previous evening, but set in motion they were.

I quickly had to remember all the advice I’d read in Kathleen Meyer ‘s humourous , environmentally sound and explicit book entitled “How to shit in the woods”.

I borrowed a small trowel from our director, which he’d brought along for leveling the ground for his camera, and dug Kathleen’s suggested six inch hole while I squatted, hidden from the tea picking ladies, between two lines of tea bushes.

The relief was gratifying and as I strode effortlessly on an empty fuel tank up the hill to catch up with the rest of the crew, I wondered how my six inch buried semi-liquid donation would affect the aroma of the Nilgri Tea picked from the nearby bushes.

The Yoni was enormous and the dolmen was as it should be, two vertical stones with a large slab stone lain across the top. Dr Hromnik had dragged us all the way on this four hour climb to see something that we had already seen many times on our travels in the Eastern Transvaal of
Southern Africa, in Zimbawe, and in Swaziland.

His point was that he wanted to show us how the construction of this particular Dolmen and it’s orientation toward the setting sun was very similar to the ones we’d seen in Africa.

Down the hill we trekked back to our waiting vehicle and driver, who told us we had still another four hours drive till we reached our overnight stop-over in the city of Mysore.

We were visiting this city for two reasons.

Firstly our director had to cash in some dollar traveler’s cheques and we were going to see the Holi festivities in the city.

In Hinduism, Holi also called Holaka or Phagwa is an annual festival celebrated on the day after the full moon in the Hindu month of March or Phalguna, as it is known in the local tongue. It celebrates spring, commemorates various events in Hindu mythology and is a time of disregarding social norms and indulging in general merrymaking.

The central ritual of Holi is the throwing and applying of coloured water and powders on friends and family, which gives the holiday its common name "Festival of Colors."

The ritual is said to be based on a story of Krishna and Radha, when Krishna playfully splashes maids with water, but most of all it celebrates the coming of spring with all its beautiful colours and vibrant life.

Dr Hromnik said that similar festivities were also conducted by the Nguni tribes of Southern Africa, thus adding more credence to his theory that The Dravidian Indians had crossed to Africa and left some of their culture.

The following morning after spending over four hours exchanging dockets for wooden discs and then pieces of paper with hand-written instructions and signatures on them, our director finally got his hands on almost a small suitcase of Indian Rupees.

The Indian banking system is archaic and adheres to Nehru’s political doctrine of every man
having a job no mater how menial it may be.

In our hotel too this was highly evident. If I lit up a cigarette, immediately a man would appear with an ashtray. I’d drop my ash into it. Again immediately a boy would rush up and scoop the ash into a bucket. Then another boy would appear from nowhere and take the bucket across the room and empty the contents into a dust bin. Then suddenly I’d be surrounded by two boys and a man with their hands open expecting payment of a few Rupees for disposing of my tobacco ash.

Back in the bustling city, we then weaved and threaded our way through the throngs of people who were in the city for the festival. We were heading for the river where most of the “splashing” would take place.

It is estimated that over 4.5 million people come to Mysore for the Holi festival that lasts for four days. It is amazing to think that we Westerners believe we’re in a crowd at a Rolling Stone’s concert that has sixty thousand people crammed into a stadium and here we were watching close on one hundred and twenty thousand people splash around in the Kabani River.

Negotiating our way through the crowded streets was like moving through a tin of sardines, sweat, splashing water and coloured powders engulfed us and only once or twice would the crowds thin out. This was usually when a “Bloodletting” ceremony was in progress. To my eyes this event was horrific.

In a small clearing we came across a mother, son and father. The young boy was being held by his mother who was deep in a self induced trance. 

The father slowly circled the boy whose right arm was out stretched and tied tightly with a coloured silk scarf above his elbow. The father increased the rhythm of the mantra and moved in closer to his son, suddenly with a downward movement of his hand the cut-throat-razor he carried sliced into the boy’s lower arm. The mother broke her trance and held an enamel cup below the gushing blood.

We could watch no more and squeezed our way back into the thronging mass of people.

We later learnt from Habba that this practice still occurs throughout the country, particularly amongst the Shi’a Muslim community, the practitioners believing that they are ridding the victim of impure blood.

It’s called “Ashura” and is one of several ceremonies marking the death of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein at the 7th century battle of Kerbala.

That night we stayed in a hotel, the one and only hotel apart from our first night in Mumbai. The budget was restrictive and most of our stops where at hostels that catered for the trade representatives that roamed the country trying to sell their merchandise, These hostels certainly
would not rate a semi-colon let alone a star.

Washing facilities were an enamel bowl and a rather unclean looking face cloth. Latrines were long drops outside, few were a little up-market as they were pig-cleaned. That means a ravenous pig quickly consumed your droppings.

Early the next morning we set of on the final leg of our journey, a drive through the rest of the Western Ghats mountain range and onto the town of Trivandrum.

My bowels were still not in a stable mood although I’d taken some Imodium tablets so I had to request several stops at what I was told were public toilets.

Fortunately we’d learnt to keep several rolls of loo paper in the vehicle as there was never any at these latrines.

All were of the “Stand or Squat” variety and all had a supply of tap water. I was told that this was for the washing of one’s hands, particularly your left hand, as this was the one you should wipe your arse with.
 

I only believed this when I noticed that all the locals, left or right handed, ate their food with the fingers of their right hand.

When I landed back at what was called Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg the first thing I did was rush to the ablution facility and give the attendant a twenty Rand tip after I’d finished using the first flushing Thomas Crapper I’d used for three weeks.

I wish you continued happy bowel movements & use of the loo.

 A Google search will tell you more about the ducmentary "Behind an African Mask"

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