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I touched down in Madras just as the sun was coming up. My luggage had not reached the baggage claim, and I had little else but my camera, laptop, and the clothes on my back. Just my luck! To make it worse, no one had warned me about driving in Madras. The streets were busy with cars, trucks, bicycles, livestock, people, and an army of three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, with which I’d become familiar over the coming months. We even fashioned a new sport out of it, one that involved us stuffing as many people as we could into a single auto. On that first day, though, I honestly thought my first drive in Madras would be my last. I hadn’t slept for two days, and I wasn’t about to fall asleep any time soon.
I arrived at a humble guest house in the middle of Anna Nagar. That was to be my home for the rest of the summer:
Anna Nagar, Second Avenue, Twelfth Main Road. It was a quiet room on a busy street. The bed was low to the ground, and the bathroom was a combined toilet and shower stall. There was a television on top of my dresser, as well. I turned it on: Tamil and Hindi programming (I spoke neither). The only English programming was BBC and Disney. That morning, I watched Disney as I took off my two-day old clothes, soggy from travel and the sultry Indian summer. I washed my clothes in a basin and hung them all over my room to dry. That’s how I spent my first morning in Chennai: butt-naked and watching
That’s So Raven.
At eight, there was a knock on my door. I found a towel (it was too small). At the door was Marine, a business student from France who was studying microfinance in India. A group of students was leaving for a rural village in a half hour. I grabbed my muggy clothes from the drawers, lamps, antennae, door handles… and suddenly, I was waiting on a busy street with students and doctors. I went to my first rural village. It was a long drive in a van driven by Muttu, an old chap with a predilection for Radio City (“Namma city, namma life!”).
The village was… well, it was a village. Like something out of National Geographic, except nothing like that at all. Considering I had never been to another country until that morning, it was all rather unreal. I mostly observed, and couldn’t do much else at the time.
One
After a week or so, everything started to look familiar to me. I began working with a clinic that provided free health care to different areas of Tamil Nadu. I worked closely with the Uma Clinic (with which I had gotten in touch thanks to a Yale alum I randomly emailed—I didn’t even know she was an alum until she replied with an enthusiastic response!), which helped me distribute disposable cameras (generously donated by Kodak) to our patients, some of whom went from totally blind to near-perfect vision through various simple procedures. The patients would take pictures of what they could now see, capturing on film a newfound capacity for sight. I wanted to do something that combined medicine and art. And everything worked out. In fact, my patients’ photos are scheduled to premier in two gallery openings next semester, at Yale and Stanford!
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The toughest part was the language barrier. Prior to this summer, I had never heard or seen any Tamil. And my Hindi was limited to the few songs I’d performed at South Asian cultural shows, as well as the bulk of the Devdas soundtrack. It impressed only a handful of people, trust me.
In the city, English was here and there, if that. In the villages, though, you were on your own.
I think I started learning Tamil in Hande Hospital, having to tell our patients to do simple things during their post-ops and other procedures. And then in the villages, where we examined hundreds of people, some of whom we were able to bring back to the city for treatment and surgery.
Once I had become a bit more savvy, I started watching Jetix, a Tamil channel that re-dubbed American children’s programming. When we traveled to rural school camps, this came in particularly handy; if I couldn’t talk to the kids about their health, I could at least relate to them on the level of the Mickey Mouse and the Power Rangers.
It was surreal, making friends in a language I barely spoke. Like Thanraj, the young social worker interested in modern Indian philosophy (I bought him a book on his favorite philosopher, Vivekanda, before I left so that he might tell me about it in English). Or Praveen, one of the patients I taught to juggle.
In the villages, there were no foreigners. Thus, people were always eager to teach us their customs, many of which varied from village to village. On one particular day, we were working in a village during some festival. We were taken around the village in a small parade, ending up in the village temple, where I participated in my first pooja. Unfortunately, photography was usually not allowed in most of the temples I visited, but I assure you they were stunning!
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Three
Shore Temple at Sunrise.
I would be misleading you if I let you think I spent every moment of my summer working in the villages of Tamil Nadu. It was quite the opposite, in fact. Because I was working with free patients (in hospitals that needed paying patients to stay open), all of my work started and ended very early. My day would start around 6 am, and it would end in the early evening. This left me plenty of time to explore the city… and beyond.
In Chennai, I would often frequent Spencer Plaza, one of the largest shopping malls in South India. I returned with suits, kurtas, and random Western clothes. Otherwise, there were temples aplenty, the Satyam Theater (where I saw a non-subtitled Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, a Hindi blockbuster filmed party at Yale—some of my friends were even there while they were filming one of the [many] love scenes between Shahrukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee), and Marina Beach, the second longest beach in the world.
This is me teaching Jules how to juggle on Marina Beach. After a brief lesson, I showed her a few tricks I’d learned from YAGS. Before I knew it, I had an audience! Like, a really large one. And then I had to put on a show. Within no time, I had backup music, a pretty large crowd, and vendors selling to people in the crowd!
Also, India was obsessed with Jules’ hair. Whenever we went to the beach, we were always met by a horde of curious Tamilians.
Tamilians: “How do you do that to your hair?” “Is it real?”
Jules’ reply: “What? You’ve never seen a black woman with a weave before?!”
I’m a huge fan of Indian art. For Hannukah, my mom actually found a rare book by some well-known photographer documenting a bunch of really old and famous pieces in India. I’m sure she regretted it when I made her sit down and look at the whole thing with me. “Look, mom! I was there!” It was like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ and a slide show in one.
This temple in particular was built around the 7th century, when there was some sort of Chinese influence. I have so many memories of walking around barefoot on hot stone, touching carvings made during the 600′s. At the end of the summer, though, my feet were basically two giant callouses.
The Five Rathas in Mahalabalipuram, where we encountered an entire stonecutter village. There, I found jewelery boxes and other tchatchkes…
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Gosh, I got to do so much. This is so cliche, but it really was the experience of a lifetime! This photo is from when I rented a houseboat with students I’d met around the city. We floated down the backwaters of Kerala, in Cochin. We even parked the thing and spent the night on the bank.
… until the skies started getting cloudy …
… and monsoon season reared its ugly head!
And suddenly, it was time for me to leave! At the end of my project, once I’d collected all the cameras and said goodbye to all the friends I’d made in Tamil Nadu (which takes a long time when your Tamil is barely passable!), I decided that I couldn’t leave just yet. My birthday was in a week, and I didn’t want to spend it on a friend’s couch waiting for fall semester. So I canceled my flight, gave my mom a heart attack, and flew to New Delhi!
Delhi Gate
The day after I flew up, my three London girls met up with me and we rented out some rooms together.
We explored Delhi. A bunch of little boutiques, stores, malls, theaters… and everything in between. Also, we ate in Delhi. A lot.
Oh, how I missed eating village food off banana leaves…
… but now I was eating in five-star restaurants!
On my birthday, it was off to Aggra to see the Taj Mahal! Actually, I rang in my birthday with Jules at a gay club in New Delhi. Combined, it was honestly the best birthday EVER!
Best… birthday… ever.
I left a lot out (I took over 3000 pictures, some of which are in my Facebook albums, but I only had my camera with me less than 10% of the time), but suffice it to say it was an incredible, incredible summer… The people I met, the things I was able to do, and even the way India made me feel. It’s hard to describe, really. The hardest part was having to leave in the end. I have so many memories from this summer; just thinking about it makes me anxious to go back.
Medically, it was extremely rewarding. The pathologies I was able to see (many conditions that aren’t prevalent in the States), and then watching people explore their restored sight—it was amazing. And then there was the artistic part of the project. The photos that our patients took were arguably better than the bulk of mine! Most of these people had never used a disposable camera before (thank goodness for the diagrams on the back!), and yet they were able to capture these images with a unique perspective, very much in an auto-ethnographic sense. Below is a slideshow of some of their images.
I think about the morning I arrived—jetlagged and soggy—and look back at everything I was exposed to during those months. What a crazy summer.
I was there in Tamil Nadu one year before. It was a great adventure for me. But I never been in Mahabalipuram I was in Madras (Chennai). It was nice read about your project.
Greetings Mathias