dance of dawn

Two fish with long sharp snouts swordfight. Moments earlier they had been swimming side by side when—without warning— they about turn and face off. Mouths open and scissor close twice: on guard, touché. Other fish wrestle and frolic, fins almost touching, dancing like butterflies. A giant sea slug moves forward slowly, extending a handful of dark tubes from his mouth to feel his way along. Enormous porcupine fish with spots blend into coral. They are larger than the rocks but nervous, and stare up at me from directly below. A school of zebras zig zags. Shifts in sunlight fractulate their scales into rainbows. As I watch their seamless synchronicity, I am challenged to communicate without words.

The coral glows yellow and green; it actually seems to emit ultraviolet light. I hear something high pitched and constant, a crackle, like static electricity. I don’t know what is making this sound. Perhaps it’s the coral breathing.

Dolphins are near. I cannot see them, but I feel it and it makes me happy. Flying fish scatter beside the wooden boat, like skipping stones with hummingbird wings. Everything on the dhow is made by hand: the body, the sails, the hinges for ropes; the mast is several long pieces of wood strapped together—not one. Does that make it strong or weak? It would be incredible to depend so completely on something you made yourself. Something soft but hard. Something real. This is trust. Struggling for survival is the only and most complete way of being fully present.

My last African sun ripens on the clouds and reflects golden peaches onto surface ripples. Sand and leaves are caught in the cast off color. I rub the light into my emptied eyes and walk towards the ocean, to greet the day. A Masai man merges with my walk. He is missing his bottom front bottom teeth and he smiles often. He has scars on his cheeks, like the others, two overlapping circles.

The beach is empty; only a few fishermen in cut off pants and baseball caps untangle their nets. Some tie rocks to woven cages used to catch fish. The cages form a “V” with a tunnel in the center and look like the wicker of chairs, like the old one with the hole in the middle that still sits my garage back home. The men tie plastic bottles to the tops of the cages for buoys, to find them again. I’ve seen parents tie the same large bottles to the arms and legs of small children to use for floaties. We pass a ball made of rags and a large beehive-like fruit.

The boy touches my hair as it blows and tangles. He asks me why Germans and Swiss and people from England and Europe all have hair like this. I tell him we were born different. The higher up you go in Europe, the farther north, the lighter people’s hair and eyes are. He holds his forearm up to against mine and smiles. I like yours better, I say. I point at black—safi sana, very good—and white—apana, no. It is the best I can do. When I speak he inhales sharply and often, as if surprised by even the simplest things. He is my age but acts like a child, and also like a very old man.

He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I let it rest there for a moment before shifting my scarf. He tries to hold mine but I won’t let him and keep getting distracted by shells. He asks me to come with him to his village, to meet his family, “to see life.” I tell him I cannot. I have to go home.

He sings a Masai song for me, softly. Not words but sounds, noises, whispers and gurgles, like the grass, like the river. At the end he pounces, and his necklaces jingle. He spreads his arms and leans back with his eyes closed to feel the sky upon his chest.

A black bird clutches a white flag blustering in the wind, shuffling his feet, and dips his beak deep into the flag pole to drink fresh rain.

the beaten path

The good god smiles upon us; rain sheets across white sand, black lava rock. Warm water soaks thin cotton, sand climbs up calves. I run past rocks coves and strange abandoned Arabian bungalows rising like a mirage between outstretched palm fronds. A woman beats an octopus into the sand with a stick, over and over again. Another slams heavy cloth into coral. An old man with yellowed teeth hisses tst, tst, as he guts porcupine fish, slitting a steel blade from jaw to tail. He removes the meat with a twist and scrapes it aside into a pile. The spiny skin is spread flat on the rocks like a map of the world, eyes still bulging bright in sockets.

I come around a rock outcrop and the women washing shout Munzungu! and run towards me. They come close then stop and smile and so do I. Only one speaks English. She asks where I’m from, what I’m doing. Walking, I answer. She seems confused.

“Are you washing your body?” She gestures towards the aquamarine ocean. No need--the sky does it for me, I laugh.

The women are jabbering excitedly in Swahili, and Fatima, the largest boldest one in bright yellow, bellows and I know they laugh at me and I wonder what about. They stare at my bare feet and cringe when I walk. It’s okay, sawa sawa. It makes me strong. I flex. Their flat black feet with light underbellies float upon recycled rubber. Shreds of fabric wrap around ankles and arches.

One approaches me with a translucent white and blue squid hanging from hooked fingers. Its tentacles hang down, swaying slightly like dreadlocks. “Photo!” she demands. I have no camera. But I hold out my fingers and replace hers, hooked in the creatures brain. Guts and tubes ooze out, engine parts. It’s heavy and limp. I hold it until I feel awkward and then I rub my finger down its face and pretend to lick it, safi sana!

We all start walking back the way I had come. Moments later an older woman shouts at these young ones who are about my age. I ask if they are in trouble, but they don’t understand.

You give me money, one tells me. I have no shoes, no camera, you think I have money? I explain. But Muzungus mean gold, as the man in the market had warned me, even here when there is no path and all pockets are empty.

The full moon is cause for celebration: fire dancing and eating and breathing, and acrobats dressed in beaded fringe. I join a train of locals, moving with jerky spasmodic motions, like the swell and crash of waves. A boy with a crown of woven palm asks me to dance, and we spin faster and he puts the crown on my head and it slips again and again. I dance in the moonlight in at the water’s edge, my feet feeling the path of trenches left by rain finding its way home. A ghost crab scampers around me, and I let him lead, and I follow. He stops and we stare at each other and I curtsy away, and he burrows down to bed.

The fire burns long and late, even when there is only wet wood left that crackles and smokes. I sit on a long bench to watch it, next to a man I’d met on the shuttle, a Muslim man whose family has lived here always, and I wonder if that means they were slaves and can’t trace their origins beyond this island anymore or if they were born here, free. We speak of God. He tells me, “Everyone is same blood. Same people. Same everything. One God.” Only many ways of seeing, I say. He reminds me of the first man I’d met in this country, a taxi driver you insisted, “We respect each other here, because we don’t know who is right.” I stay on the beach in a hammock into early morning, watching the sky so carefully, trying to detect the movements of the stars and decipher time from bird calls.

mindful consumption

The sky is full of stars, the ocean is full of ways. In the same way your heart is filled with love and care. and don't forget us please remembers in your time. and then we keeps you in our heart with little sweet heart we all wish you. and then this gratitude is towards. with of us your smile looks beautiful.

I open the letters on the train, one by one, hand drawn cards to accompany the dances of dedicated blessings and prayers that the children had planned and performed for my departure. I'd accompanied them on stage and tried to join their routines, ending with a finale cartwheel in which I ripped my new pants from one crotch to the other, flashing 90 children and the sisters and releasing an ovation of laughter. I led morning yoga and embarked on my journey, refusing to say goodbye any more. Two hours on a rick, running late, I tried to flag down a departing cargo train before getting on the right one and setting off on my own.

Now I sit in silence, interrupted only by the occasional refrain of chai, chai, wishing I was still surrounded by love and innocence, wondering if leaving was the right decision. I go to the bathroom to collect myself and watch the tracks fly past through the keyhole toilet, the only window to the outside world, holding back tears and vomit. Twenty hours on the train is followed by a 13 hour picnic with another set of orphans, and the littlest girl pees on my lap in a bus so full I can't move her off me until we arrive home that night. The next morning, my rickshaw stops at a temple on the way to the bus, collecting flowers and powdered dye for the steering wheel, making me two hours early or ten minutes late, and by the time I arrive in Munnar I am in tears, running from a rabid dog and sleeping in a worm infested room next to the local beer shop: cold, filthy, alone. So this is what freedom feels like.

But I am here; I am free. I don't believe in regrets, remember. Every accident, every misstep teaches me the right way to maneuver in this madness. Now, I'm surrounded by green forests and tea plantations, elephant rivers and wide blue skies that layer the mountains unto eternity. at rest. at last. I keep on trekking. I take tea. I breathe in blessings and breathe out peace.

The grassy ridge rises like the backbone of a great beast, and we scale it one vertebrae at a time. As we rise into the atmosphere the horizon grows clearer and mountains give birth to others in their wake, spreading dark waves across the sea of sky. Tea grows over rocky hills in geometric kaleodoscopic patterns that move in the minds' eye from our bird's view. Our guide identifies plants we pass, a flower my children proclaimed "not useful" once treated snake bites, a bud that pops when pressed to the forehead, the silver rock tree with deep roots that shares water with others generously. Workers wrapped in plastic and cloth cut the new growth with a whisper of slicing steel and collect it in giant bags on their heads to be weighed and paid accordingly. They do not pause as we pass. The smell of elephant mingles with earth and herbs. At the rock summit we stop to sit and watch the universe exposed around us. Within minutes the mist rises, sends spiral jetties of light into the cloud layer then swallows everything. The world disappears, and we exist only in a shroud of sky.

Kerala is God's own country, my host declares with pride as we wind our way through the maze of canals that makes up the backwater island chain of Kumyakumaron. This is a tropical paradise is such an exotic and startling contrast to the barren heat of Andhra that it doesn't feel real, it doesn't feel Indian. I try to trace the same path later and wander farther from civilization, running for hours just trying to cross a rice paddy. Women beat tattered clothes on the rocks and rinse pans with gravel; others tear down trees with machetes in a tug of war between roots and hands, and I grab the branch and pull hard, and they laugh and ask me for something to drink with strange gestures and murmurs. Men push dug out canoes under bridges with bamboo rods, a burning beedie clamped between paan rotten teeth. Egrets and herons rise from the fields and return to homes unknown . A mother holds a child--a pure child, I'm told--who clasps a hibiscus and stares at me in awe.

All ask where I'm going. Walking, I tell them. Just walking. Such strange behavior to them, who work so hard for so long and have no reason for unnecessary exertion. I'm losing my barrings, myself, drifting off in the heat daze. Startled back suddenly as a long snake springs in the grass. A frog leaps out of my path moments later, and I shriek. A local man guides me home, and the heaven breaks, and the water surrounds us in sheets. I am taken to a temple for a ceremony of light, but the rain battles the candles and beats them into crescents of smoke. Elephants shift awkwardly under their ornamental headdresses, and the lamps of sandalwood oil are drained of water, and the women lift their saris and shuffle bare feet through red puddles of earth, all waiting for the parade to begin, but still it pours on. Night envelopes the rain and the candles struggle to breathe, and you know the water is still there and taste it in the air. An orchestra of insects and exotic birds fills the blackness, and I wonder who dances in this dark. With the morning light the concert settles, changing pace and tune, and I climb into a dugout canoe to continue my journey. Snakes wriggle through the water, eyes just above the surface scanning our progress. My deaf, mute driver moans from his gut and motions with his mouth at the world awakening and stretching around us, and we make our way back to the beaten path slowly.

Kerala is a land of many rivers and rocks. Before language was born, the people listened only to nature. to water and to stone traveling together. they began to make this noise with their mouths, letting their tongue roll over their teeth like pebbles in the waves, this gurl gurl gurgle. their voices became the words of Malayalum and now we speak with the sounds that surround us. The man who'd cooked my meal stopped talking and smiled at me, a fleck of mischief passing through his expression, an acknowledgement of the beauty in his words and voice. Then it passed, and he scooped another handful of food from the leaf platter into his mouth, still showing his chipped grin.

In this land of water and earth life flourishes. Little jellyfish spiral around my body, invisibly painlessly brushing against me, no more than collections of bubbles, spit sinking and surfacing in rough current. Men cast large nets into the onslaught, drawing them out with finger claws, spiders releasing their webs. The nets comb across the shoreline, connected by thick raw rope to teams of fishermen in branded t-shirts and lungis, chanting, "u lum, ovelum, daj jay, cov e la do vey." After hours of steady movement the only progress is a coil of rope where they began and dicarded folds that snake over the sand. The net is finally brought in and a crowd of spectators gathers around. Dozens of jellyfish are discarded, and half an eel, and a porcipine fish, and the bounty is sorted . Hundreds of little bodies flail for breath and home as life flutters away. The fish are spread on tarps and plastic bags, the stench displayed for passing tourists and stray puppies. Birds circle high overhead, kestrels and hawks, bats in the fruit trees, but all unnoticed unless you're lying on your back.

At India's southernmost tip, three bodies of water converge into two holy rocks upon which temples have been erected. Palm tree forests file the horizon from sunrise to sunset, and we watch the globe move with our feet sunk in the sand. Pilgrims bathe in sacred glimmering ghats, absolved of all sins, then sneak into smokey bars tucked in alleys out of sight. Bright boats with peeling paint crowds the shores, lined for flight, and men untangle strands of net like women knitting. Broken shells and barbed hooks crunch underfoot as turbaned women wander with towels and umbrellas offering fresh fruit patters. Crows and egrets feast on the abandoned guts and pick at the bones, the beach combers.