But I’m leapfrogging over my story again.  Back to India.  Our traveling on this voyage is not all about me, and it’s not even all about the many Americans I’m traveling with.  So I need to—as the British always say—just get on with it and tell you my impressions of India from the distance now of four days out.

My impressions are complicated by the fact that I have been to India twice before—once when I was very young to play music with a group raising funds at the Taj Mahal for the establishment of the World Heritage Fund, without which many heritage sites would have long ago suffered, at best, neglect and, at worst, irreparable damage.  With this visit it seems to me that India—or at least the India we see near tourist sites—has become much worse than I remember, an impression at odds with the government’s official claim that poverty has been markedly reduced and that education is now widely available.  The statistics that seem to me most relevant are that only 10% of the entire population of India pays taxes and that 40% of all Indian poor are from the long-suffering “untouchables” caste; that there are nowhere near enough jobs for the existing population, let alone future generations (the labor force is 467 million); that one-third of Indians live below the poverty line and constitute one-third of the world’s poor.  Soon India (now estimated to have a population of 1.16 billion) is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous in a land area one-third the size of the US.  To quote the US State Department: “The huge and growing population is the fundamental social, economic, and environmental problem.”  Per capita GDP is $3,100.  Human trafficking and forced labor is a significant and ongoing problem.

In Chennai, our first port of landing, Warner, Nancy and I consider trying to get down to Pondicherry two-hours away from the port—a town I particularly want to see because one of the students has recommended the Life of Pi to me, I’ve begun reading it, am smitten with it, and it begins there—but we think better of it because we can’t find a reliable car and driver to hire nearby and we’re all due to depart early for trips the next day.  Instead, we join a half-day trip down to Mahabalipuram to see the towering sandstone Shore Temple monuments on the town’s beach; colossal statues carved from boulders surrounding it; and the open-air bas reliefs and intricate friezes of Arjuna’s Penance and the Krishna Mandapa carved on massive rocks, complete with monkeys clambering over them.

Afterwards, we try to walk the crowded city of Chennai but the effort is foolhardy because of the masses of people and markets in the streets and sidewalks, not to mention the fact that there are no street signs to match up with the map we have.  (We’ve been told that most street addresses on postal letters must include landmarks or they have no prayer of arriving at their destination.)  We give up and engage an auto rickshaw—essentially a motor bike with a cab enclosure for passengers—to get to a destination and then another to get back to the port.  Both rides are terrifying.  They’re also very cheap—less than $4 each—giving new meaning to cheap thrills, except that the second driver tries to jack-up the price once we’re on board but Nancy will have none of it and pays him as agreed. He tries to convince us that we need to go to a shop of his family’s for good deals and isn’t happy when we insist we cannot.  It is a genuine relief to arrive at the port’s gate for the long walk in the dark to the pier.

That night I get ready for a four day trip to New Delhi, Agra and Jaipur in northern India with a departure time of 4am.  I am the trip leader for the 65 passengers so there will be no excuse for me to oversleep.  I set three alarms.

All of the photos in this chapter are of Mahabalipuram.  Here is a live monkey in a pose almost exactly like the carved statue.