Halfway There, Whoaaooah-oh

Yesterday I was at the southernmost point in all of India, and it felt good. Well, it felt good if you discount having to peel my sweaty clothing off at night with pliers and a chisel. The place is called Kanniyakumari, and like India itself it is beautiful and ogre-fucking-ugly. There's a lighthouse here where the Indian Ocean meets the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, to prevent sailors from any of these waters from wrecking themselves upon Cape Comorin. Like the lighthouse, the dilapidated concrete piles of the town itself serves as a warning to those arriving by sea. "DANGER", Kanniyakumari warns, "Here lieth a strange land, and it doth look like shit".

Aside from its geographical location,Kanniyakumari has some actual attractions to boast. For instance, you can see the sunrise on one horizon and the sunset on the other. This is fun, I suppose. I guess you could lock someone in a dark cell for a few months, then bring them out and play "pin the tail on the donkey", except make them guess whether they are facing the direction in which the sun is going into or out of a homogeneous expanse of water. Once a year in April you can actually see the sunset (or sunrise?) at the exact same moment the full moon is rising. Let's see...it's March. Never mind.

The real heart of Kanniyakumari is actually about 400 meters out to sea...because it got hit by the tsunami. OK, no actually it's because there are two sacred rocks just offshore and these have developed into full-fledged religious sites. One rock holds the Vivekananda Memorial, a shrine to a 19th-century Hindu saint who did many important things such as...well, I haven't done my research for my Kanniyakumari article yet, but he's important. The other rock is now the base of a colossal Statue of Liberty-esque sculpture of the Tamil saint and poet Thiruvalluvar, who is best known for his masterpiece...I'm not even going to look that up.

You get to the rocks via boat, which is a nuisance, but the short ride ultimately proved supremely enjoyable. The ferry operators insist that every passenger wear a crusty old lifejacket. The sight of some two hundred Indians from all walks of life -jowly businessmen, bearded Saddhus, Gujarati nomads, bored housewives, Catholic nuns, hip muscular dudes with their hair shaved off for Shiva, turbaned Rajasthani farmers, and a veritable gallery of frumpy mustachioed men- all awkwardly fumbling with their stupid orange lifejackets is a memory I will carry to my deathbed. It was my greatest wish to go on a photographic frenzy.

I envisioned taking this ferry for weeks and publishing a renowned coffee-table book and winning prizes for my captivating art. But the ferrymen wouldn't let me. They have a very strict no photography rule on the boat. For security. To prevent terrorists from gleaning useful information about the design of ferryboats. Oh, how right they are. We all know every terrorist hails from a sandy Ayrab country that hasn't seen a drop of any fluid besides camel spit since the Prophet fled to Medina, so not a single member of Al-Qaeda has ever seen the general scheme of a damn boat in his entire life. It's this type of vigilance that keeps the forces of terror from ever striking in Ind...shit.

The ride was worth it. The Vivekananda memorial is a pretty good place to just hang out, get a little bit of culture and watch other people look at the ocean. You also get great views of the colossus in profile, and can sit about enjoying the breezes until you return to the shore.

On the mainland there's also a temple (which you can't visit) and a Gandhi memorial, commemorating the place from where his ashes were scattered into the three seas. The outside is a rather bizarre modern attempt at blending Hindu, Muslim, and Christian architecture, though I must say it is much more pleasing to the eye than most of the British "Indo-Saracenic" cack that attempted the same feat. Inside it is rather bare. It was explained to me that this was because the seaside memorial got utterly walloped by the tsunami. This part of the country took a beating that day, and over 8000 people in Kanniyakumari district alone lost their lives. The caretaker of the memorial told me he was there when it happened, and that the sea twice receded out beyond the statue rocks, both times returning to wreck utter devastation. He was in the memorial itself, and climbed to the upper level before the second wave hit, probably saving his life but leaving him blind in one eye from where the sea battered him with currents of sand. The town is pretty much rebuilt, and has that look of neglectful decay common to other Indian communities, but every now and then you see a suspiciously empty building and you just have to wonder if its decrepitude can be traced to the fateful day Kanniyakumari paid the price for being on the tip of a continent.

Kanniyakumari is in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is full of Tamil-speaking Tamil people. I just purchased a book called Learn Tamil In 30 Days. We'll see about that. I bought it because the Tamils are so fond of their ancient tongue that they are even more obstinate than other South Indians about not learning or writing in Hindi, except they take it so far that there is a notable dropoff in English signage. In short, I'm learning the basics of Tamil as fast as I can so I know which unidentifiable cow-infested crater to jump off the bus in.

Even for South India, Tamil has some pretty crazy writing. Here's a sample for those of you who are fly enough to have web browsers with Dravidian language unicode enabled:

தமிழ் நாடு கன்னியாகுமரி மதுரை திருசாப்பள்ளி கோயம்புத்தூர் 

I must admit that as much as I look forward to leaving my General Ghostface Sherman swathe of destruction through the heart of India's deep south, I sort of miss Kerala a bit, so I came to a compromise. I did a little day trip to the palace at Padmanabhapuram, the capital of the Travancore kings of yore, a little dot of exquisite Keralan culture just inside Tamil Nadu. It's a huge wooden palace, the largest in Asia, and I found it very charming. All the interiors are made of finely carved dark wood, with screen-like walls that keep the breezes blowing through the dim chambers. It's ornate and exotic, but it exudes that familiar charm of going into a well-off relative's dark wood study to poke about at his collection of musty old encyclopedias and prewar commentaries on Roman history.

Just outside the palace gates there is a typical South Indian canteen, albeit a little grubbier than those I usually frequent for my midday rice-and-slop combo. I asked for the thali, fully expecting a pile of rice and a series of spicy and direly overcooked vegetables of indeterminate origin, but was delighted to hear that the thali here comes with fried fish. I sat down and merrily waited in anticipation. When the plate arrived it consisted of rice, two incredibly insipid soups, and a small portion of hot chili paste that looked like it could fell a moose. Where the fish should be was what I will call "a little taste of history", because it was three horrific piscine forms that appeared to predate the palace itself. I stared in disgust at the near-fossilized carcasses and wondered how it was possible to safely fry something that was only a week or so away from becoming a form of coal. I took my fill of the rice and sauces, but when the proprietor came to take my plate he looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and whimpered "No feeeshes?". I went to settle the bill, and saw that the "special fish thali" was 80 damn rupees. "50 is for the fish", the owner said. I gave him a look which he must have understood immediately because before I could open my mouth to insinuate that he would have better luck getting 50 rupees for those fish from the state archaeological society, he sheepishly said sorry. Let that be a lesson. Never trust a man with a fish.

I returned to Kanniyakumari and took care of some business, namely resting on my laurels. I've made it down the entire west coast of India, from the barren beaches of Kutch in the north to Kanniyakumari in the south, and now I'm going up the east.

I also had one other piece of business, being at the undeniable end of India and all. I walked up to some hawkers on the cape and asked them curtly "Where is the nearest cow?" I found the beast a few hundred yards away in a side-alley off the market. It must have known it was the Last Cow in India and what that meant, because before I could get within ten yards, it let out a loud MUUUUOOOOOOOOOOO and turned in flight, trotting up a lane of wonky stairs in complete rout. As I stood there smirking in the market, a woman offered to sell me a flower garland. I think that's what they call "being greeted as a liberator."

But getting to the end of India isn't what was most special for me. It just so happened that my arrival in Kanniyakumari coincides almost exactly with the halfway point of this journey. By the time I reached the tip of India, I covered over 16,300 kilometers of this country, mile by plodding mile. I look back at everything I've done so far, and my first reaction was "WHAT? That was only HALF the trip?" And that was supposed to be the easy half. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

Anyways, I'm alive and kicking and I'm halfway there...and no, I am not about to quote that Bon Jovi song. I haven't a need for any prayer. Though there be a thousand faiths and a million gods in this country, all I need to know is that I shake my fist at the sky in defiance of them all. If a prayer must be, let it be this prayer, made timeless when uttered by Conan the Barbarian

Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important! Valor pleases you, Crom... so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!