PONDICHERRY

Colourful markets and scavenging cows, ladies in motorbikes with free-floating saris behind, all interspersed with Western cafes and book shops. From the forest we would cycle, the caffeine craving pumping our legs on the 10 KM route through traffic crazed. It was our source of escape, cheap internet, a new book ,perusing pretty fabrics in the market, coffee, coffee, coffee. But also a good re-engagement with Indian life we had forgotten in the foreigner filled forest. We came to wander in the old graveyard, still full of life with women washing and children playing cricket. We came to wander through the streets, alongside the roaming cows eternally munching, rickshaws overflowing with children on their way home from school. We came to wander through the market, embracing the smells of heavy incense mingled with fresh flowers and rotten vegetables. We came to wander through the alladin's cave of material shops, touching longingly the beautiful intricate sari's we could not afford.

We were invited to the 'Maturation Ceremony' of a friends daughter. This event marks the passage of a girl into womanhood and is celebrated at the time of her first period. The new woman, dressed in a sari and decorated with jewels and flowers stood on a stage before the audience to be photographed and admired. Musicians played while people filed up to present her with gifts and shower her with rice. Later everyone was invited to a feast of traditional South Indian food, sitting in rows and eating from banana leaves, before leaving and being given the gift of a coconut.

According to some, the event seems to be a way for the family to formally announce the girls womanhood and put her on display for proposals of marriage. The stage was filled with mysterious symbols; a coconut, broken in two to display its pristine interior, flowers strewn amidst grains of rice and coloured powder, small bells and bowls of liquid. Someone explained to me that the coconut symbolised the girls future as a wife; two parts of a whole. It seemed potent to me as a symbol associated with the loss of virginity, its incredibly white flesh opened and on display, soon to begin to decay...


The Indian photographer...has the power to command all. I have seen him bully his way around auspicious moments, stopping time, forcing his subjects into unnatural positions only to blind them with his merciless, never-ending flash in a preserved moment of rabbit-in-headlights terror. He is not the artist my mind evokes with that sacred word I aspire to- ''photographer". Yet in the desperate climb to modernity, he is bestowed with a power and authority, above even the priest in a wedding ceremony. For he, unlike the simple priest, can stop time, he can make magic-preserving the stalked and stunned image of Granny forever more.

He came limping along, bare foot, body hunched, a look of desperate pleading on his young face. He signalled his hands to his mouth, begging for food. In an India where the population struggles to communicate over the myriad of different languages and cultures, the language of the street beggars is surprisingly uniform. I couldn't say no. At times I have walked past shrunken girls forcing themselves through circus hoops, their brother a painted clown drumming tiredly with his face a mask of childhood lost no make-up can hide. And I have given money to old ladies, tiredness etched into their deep wrinkles. And I have refused money and offered only food to people with limbs lost, limbs deformed trailing behind them....

But today I felt I would offer him any food he wanted... dinner, fruit, water-anything his tiny body craved.....

'Ice-Cream!'came the delighted response to my surprised ears. Are you sure you don't want something more healthy? Some rice? A substantial meal?

Íce-cream! Ice-cream!'

The promise of sugar already pumping through his body-gone was the decrepit stance and burdened shuffle. Instead, I found before me a boy, a child as all children should be, a look of excited glee spread wide across his cheeky face, his legs already skipping him ahead to the ice-cream parlour.

And as we talked (with the helpful translation of the ice-cream vendor) over the tutti-frutti colours fast disappearing, he told me how he slept with his mother outside the church on the street by the open gutters. His father had died long ago. His brother, a rickshaw driver, slept in the back of his auto. He says he went to school, but I don't know if he knew that is what I wanted to hear. His arms were covered with old scars....tales and tears I would never hear. As quickly as the melting ice-cream in the hot night, he was up and out of the parlour with sugar happy smile and a ''thank-you madam''. I gave him some money for his mother. I watched him half-skip, half-run back out into the dark, hot night, running back to find his friends and boast of his luxury. And my wallet, a little lighter now, felt useless, my money worthless. What good is this paper? Will it really change anything for him? For the countless myriad of nameless faces that I walk by every day? And I try to console myself that maybe treating him as human being was worth something. I try to reassure my troubled conscience that taking the time to make him feel special, giving him the chance to enjoy a childhood pleasure, had some meaning for him too....and not just me....