Fruit Against The Machine

I fell asleep on a bus today as we reached the crest of the Western Ghat mountains in southern Karnakata. The scenery was gorgeous: tall, steep-sided mountains covered in lush tropical forests, with blookimng purple flowers lining the road on the edge of sheer drops into trickling streams at the bottom of rather precipitous slopes. It was with some consternation that I woke up to find everything a vaguely yellowish color and my nostrils filled with the familiar scent of dust seeping through every possible opening in the bus's fuselage. I had completed the five-hour ascent from the coast, passed out of the rain shadow, and re-entered the southern tip of that scorching dustpan they call the Deccan Plateau, where I alighted from the bus blinking, sweating, and generally cursing myself for having cultural interests that take me away from the beach. If I were a dishonest writer I would say that the town of Hassan which I find myself in is a hot, dust-ridden shithole where one can find no more fulfilling activity than fatal self-asphyxiation. I will instead limit myself to saying that Hassan is merely a hot, dust-ridden shithole so lacking for entertainment that I almost don't mind that this cybercafe is playing "In The End" by Linkin Park on repeat.

This is all a far cry from where I found myself just yesterday, rousing myself from beachy indolence to hobble into town and hit police officers with bananas. But before we get to the part where I narrate how I came to pelt the corrupt pig-dogs of an illegitimate social order with unripened fruit there are a few things to get out of the way.

I have received notice from the bosses (corrupt pig-dogs of my own little social order) that the website launch has been pushed back from April to June. I won't bore you all with the various to-and-fro's that have plagued the professional relationship between your noble correspondent wandering India and the money men in Ohio, except to say that Midwestern venture capital has apparently been infiltrated by offspring of Jabba the Hutt. Since I completed my articles on Mumbai I have fulfilled the minimum obligations of my contract and I am essentially free to not do an ounce more of work for these people if I don't feel like I particularly desire expending my energies wrenching my joke of a payment from them like a hyena ripping a pungent carcass away from a flock of vultures. In short, for several weeks I have been seriously contemplating quitting the job and becoming a proper no-good Indophile loafer. I'll keep you posted.

On the subject of being a no-good Indophile loafer, I just spent a whole week doing fuck-all on a gorgeous tropical beach, and I've got to say, it was pretty great.

From Goa I crossed the state border and the magical line that separates it from Karnataka and entraps all the package-tour crowds and muttering, bearskin-Speedo'd Russians in the jet-ski, mixed drink paradise that is 21st century Goa. Not far from this heaven-sent political boundary, which is possibly the only good thing to come out of the Portuguese Empire besides Brazilian swimsuit models, is the quaint little Hindu pilgrimage town of Gokarna. I immediately got off the bus on the edge of town, shuffled past a handful of little temples and their cloth-shaded streets abuzz with staggeringly ancient vegetable sellers, and walked right on through to the other side. Gokarna is nice and all, but I had some serious beach-lounging to take care of, so I set off on a hike across the hot, almost barren lump of stone that separates the town from the first of its several chilled-out beaches. I quickly wearied of this adventure, as my luggage contains quite a few very thick books and at least one grapefruit-sized lump of stone. After I descended the treacherously rock-strewn slope to Kudlee beach, I began to look for somewhere to stay. Almost immediately I was waved into an unpromising cafe by a very happy-looking Indian man with no shirt. Behind the cafe he offered me my choice of several bamboo beach huts. I poked my head inside to see that they offered a bed, a mosquito net, no floor besides the sand, a thatch roof, and four surfaces which could charitably be called walls. I looked at him quite skeptically. "How much a night?" I asked. "100 rupees" he said. The price of two cheese sandwiches. The deal was made.

I wiled away a great deal of time doing absolutely nothing besides sitting in the cafe, eating pancakes, and listening to a Spanish guest's collection of underground reggae. Eventually I resolved that I should see more than the first 60 meters of the beach, so I popped out for a stroll. I learned a great deal. Both the north and south ends of the beach were comprised of sand, and it was apparently a popular place to learn the several hippie variants of juggling. I turned to walk back to my shack, resolving never to act so rashly in Gokarna again, when I ran into a pair of familiar faces: the two exuberant Brits who led me to such thorough incapacitation in Hampi.

"Oh hey! How are you?" they asked. "It's quite nice here on Kudlee Beach", they continued, "much nicer than Paradise Beach. We just came from over the hills. It's a pretty chill spot, if you like to brush your teeth in the morning to the accompaniment of last night's techno/trance music and a circle of twitching hippies." At that point I ticked Paradise Beach off my list, but felt compelled to put a good word in for trance music. The Brits conceded "Yeah it's not bad for a party, but fuck mate, I don't want a doped-up babu waving his hands in my face and going ooom*tis*oom*tis*oom*tis* while I'm trying to brush my fucking teeth at 9am."

We discussed the other beaches as well. "Have you been to Om Beach?" they asked me.
"Well, no, I'm going to visit but I don't want to stay there. I just imagine it's a little...well, it's called Om Beach."
"Yeah, it's very...om" they confirmed, "very...shambalaa".
"Shambalaa?"
"You know, like, shaam baaa laaaaaa."
"Ahhh."

It was thus resolved that we would all reside upon Kudlee Beach for the remainder of our stays. We played with the litter of puppies that lived in the bushes by the cafe and watched as Gokarna's much-loved cows (overly loved, in my opinion) ambled up and down the beach just as aimlessly as everybody else.

After this encounter I left Kudlee Beach all of three times. Once I walked into Gokarna to take pictures for work, and another time I walked over Om Beach to confirm that, yes, it is very, very om, except on the weekend when it's deluged by Indian day-trippers and banana boats. The third time I left I purchased a bundle of curvaceous, fruity projectiles and....no, still to early.

Kudlee Beach became a place where I accomplished absolutely nothing besides sleeping until mid-afternoon and losing badly in a series of hung-over chess matches. Gokarna's a place where all of us had intended to take it easy, and then we discovered that there were three of us and the ingredients necessary to produce three strongish rum-and-cokes costed less than a bowl of curry. More than once I awoke in the wee hours to question myself "How the fuck did my bed get so sandy?", only to realize that I was lying in a randomly chosen patch of sand. Many, many bowls of curry were left hypothetically unconsumed.

A typical night on Kudlee Beach would begin innocently enough with pizza and a beer or two, then the realization that the beers were about double-beer in size, then the fuck it let's 'ave us a round of Old Monk and some cokes. There would be a fire on the beach or in the back of a hut-camp, and shadowy hippies could be seen swaying about to the sounds of tabla drums and tambourines. "Oh, why don't we check out the jam?" we would say. Somehow, the jam always seemed to break up shortly after our arrival, particularly since one of the Brits, who was a saxophonist, would invite himself to play the drums. Meanwhile, I would be complaining louder than I imagined I was that I didn't much care for this flute-y Jethro Tull bullshit. It was the drums that really did it though, and they would be politely confiscated from my erstwhile bongo-playing companion, followed by a series of quiet congratulations like "oh that was nice" and "good jam, really good jam" directed at everybody except us. Those whom we had annoyed would then invite us to the next gathering up the beach, presumably because they couldn't plausibly conceal where a pack of people with bells on their ankles were heading. We would let them get a little ahead of us and then hold a conference. "Do we want to go over there?" "It might be pretty shambalaa." "Oh it's at that place by the rocks? That place is really om shambalaa. You go there to meditate until like....you die."

So the next morning, when the family types would be reading airport romances while watching their children build sandcastles, and the hippies would be hard at work on their auras and/or juggling, we would typically be miserable lumps on cafe chairs, groaning every time we forgot that in chess the queen actually can just take any piece you 'cleverly' move adjacent to it. Some girls we knew were chatting at a table halfway across the cafe. We heard them whispering "Do they have that much sand in their hair, like, all the time?"

One night I was shuffling home through the darkness, having forgotten my flashlight, when I suddenly stumbled over a large object and fell face-first into the sand. As I tried to pick myself up off my elbows and spit sand from my mouth I heard a very protesting muuOOOOOOO. I had tripped over a fucking cow lying on the beach. The bastards don't know when to give up the struggle. It shall be their own ruin.

I could narrate many more such stories, but I will desist for fear of somehow making time in your life appear as motionless as it did in mine. After about a week of idle sunshine and ill-considered social excursions, I realized I should finally leave. But not before the festival. The festival was our convenient excuse for lingering all along. "Well, shit, there's a festival coming up, we'd better stay a few more days." And indeed there was a festival in Gokarna. Nobody could have missed noticing the two massive wooden carts sitting in the main street. Each was a tower about three stories tall with white and red paper canopies and some massive wheels. We knew that these were going to be pulled up and down the street, and it was widely reported in our tourist circles that thousands of people were coming from all across South India to Gokarna for the occasion, and that furthermore they would all be throwing bananas at some eminent figure, whom rumor had to be the chief of police. Clearly not an opportunity to be missed. I loaded all my things into my pack and lugged them back into town, hoping to catch a bus out and escape before those same thousands of Indians decided to return home on the public bus network. As I passed through the streets they were completely choked with pilgrims lining up to offer prayers at the town's important temples. There were sassy rural women in tropical open-backed dresses selling bananas to sari-clad mainstream Indians like there was no tomorrow. Oh hell yes. I bought as many bananas as I could carry at the same time as my luggage, wiggled my way to an advantageous position, and waited.

In the early afternoon a team of a hundred men began pulling the mighty tower-carts. The towers were swarmed with rebounding fruit as the thousands of onlookers tossed their bananas with gusto. I noticed that the Indian men kind of threw like girls, while the Indian women got really into it, shouting praises as they cocked back surprisingly potent fruit-lobs. I like to imagine this is some sort of rural skill that women pick up, pummeling their husbands with an impenetrable barrage of fruit when they return home from a late night of drinking. As for my own throws, they were quite pathetic. I found myself much hindered by my luggage, and the inability to do much with my shoulders didn't really permit good tower-bananaing form. So while bananas were bouncing this way and that, splattering against walls and getting trampled underfoot, mine limply slid off the sides of the tower at point-blank range and kind of just sat there waiting to get run over. I was also a bit dissapointed to have been misinformed about the bananas' target. I had after all been expecting to grasp my half-ripe curved weapon and splatter my squishy goodness all over the police chief's face, or at least hit him with a banana.

I had listened to Rage Against The Machine in the morning to put myself in the right frame of mind, and I was not going to back down from my stance of vaguely directed anti-authoritarian produce-hurling. Fortunately, there was such a rain of rebounding bananas that from time to time I saw one of the hundreds of police officers standing guard shake off a banana-blow to the noggin, and I felt secure enough in the general chaos to get a little cheeky. Since my throws were a bit limp anyways, I just softly arced them at the heads of nearby cops, usually missing but occasionally tapping one on the cap. The police would feel a bump on their head, turn around, and look up at the wall from which the banana had presumably bounced, before brushing it off and continuing with their business as if nothing had happened.

THE ONLY REVOLUTION IS REVOLUTION NOW