Two days ago, the trip from Madras to Rameswaram was on a small gauge track, which never goes fast, and rocks back and forth like a boat in the ocean. Between one cabin and the next, a door, blue on the inside, dull red on the outside, opened to a stream of rice paddies dotted with palm trees. It left rust on our hands. When we bent along a curve, the hot air mixed with soot. Under the bridge I saw sand the color of the sun.
There is a way to begin a ritual. You first talk to a guide, who introduces you to a pujari, who then approaches the superintendent of the temple services. We skipped these steps, because Ravi’s boss knows the superintendent. He says we have to be discreet. Everyone takes their share. Signs, posted on the stone blocks of the passageway inside, are in Tamil and English: ‘No non-Hindus allowed inside the temple’. They are very strict here in Rameswaram; even Sonia Gandhi had to request permission to enter though she was the wife of the prime minister at the time- she was born in Italy and had later converted to Hinduism. The superintendent, whose office is next door, assigned me a head priest and took 10,000 rupees.
At night, I returned to the hotel, where Chris was recovering from a cold. I told him about my interaction with the superintendent and he said the spectre of your uncle follows us wherever we go in India. He is a financial consultant for power projects, mostly hydroelectric, and has a developed network of contacts, like Ravi’s boss. In the third bed, next to Chris’, Ravi silently read the paper. Before I entered his life he spent the day at the plant. At home, he sat down to eat idlis covered in sambar, his son lost in the folds of his mother’s sari. At the hotel, the amount of pickle he used reflected how much he hated the food.
Earlier that summer, I had debated the fundamentals of Arundhati Roy’s analysis of big Dam projects with my uncle. Her book, The Greater Common Good, had influenced me; I wondered what he thought. He told me that without harnessing a reusable energy resource, like water, India would have never become an industrialized nation. He felt Roy’s activism, like her recent protest outside the parliament building and subsequent jailing, was fueled by an impossible desire to attain reparations for the millions of people dispossessed by the Narmada Valley Project. The government didn’t have the resources. A weak argument, I thought, considering the billions spent to displace them in the first place. My uncle suspected the motives of others. But he could not discount the horrors of big dam projects and believed in smaller hydroelectric projects that harnessed the flow of water in rivers with small turbines instead of using dams and levees to turn them into lakes. His recent project was in Sikkim, a protected area of the western Himalayas, where the earth reaches into the sky and pulls out a river, drop by drop.
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Feb 24, 11:42 PM