Auroville - 3
January 1st 1996
About ten o'clock on Monday morning, the first of January 1996, i jumped on my bicycle and rode along the bumpy, sandy, red-dirt track to Aurogreen. A german man called Georg was also working on pruning the trees and i joined him in the lime orchard. The trees were fairly old and had grown into quite a tangled mess of branches, which all had long, sharp thorns on them. This made it quite hard work and a tricky job avoiding getting spiked every time you moved. Basically all we were doing was cutting off the dead wood.
It was good to be working with my hands and the rest of my body again and it was good to be working with trees again too. It had been far too long since i'd done either of them. In the summer, working on the boat, i'd done a bit of physical work, but that was all i'd done for over a year - that's not counting the physical exertion involved in travelling of course. And going such a long period without working was very unusual for me.
In return for doing this work we were given lunch each day we worked and this was some of the best food i'd had for a long time. It was simple, but probably mainly organic, and there was brown rice too, which was great as it was virtually impossible to get in India.
That day i worked from a bit after ten until about four in the afternoon, with half an hour or an hour for lunch. It wasn't all that long, but i was quite tired by the time i got back to the Palms Beach. This was partly due to the unaccustomed exertion and partly due to the additional hard work of cycling to and from Aurogreen, which was a good half an hour's ride over difficult roads. I'd hardly done any cycling at all for years before that. But it was good to feel like i'd done something more strenuous than sitting on my arse for a change. And it was also good to feel like i'd done something constructive and useful too.
The next day i worked the same hours, but i was beginning to get back into the swing of working by then and it wasn't very difficult.
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As soon as i got back to the guest house after the second day working, i had to go straight out again. I had time for a quick shower and then i was due for a Tamil lesson with a teacher who lived in the village near the guest house. His name was Pougahl and i'd met him the previous Sunday in the little, hut-like cafe next door to the Palms Beach. I'd asked him if there was anyone around there who could give me Tamil lessons and he'd said he would. We agreed to start on Tuesday evening.
He arrived back from work at exactly the same time i went round to his house and after his mother had given me a cup of coffee we started the lesson. It lasted about forty minutes and he taught me a few of the very basics like hello, how are you?, where do you live - in fact all the questions that Indians know in English and ask me all the time. Now i could do it back to them in Tamil! It wasn't very much really, but it was enough to give me an exciting feeling of beginning to come to grips with the language.
Although i could speak Spanish fairly well, French not very well, Dutch a little bit and Malay hardly at all, as well as being able to understand a fair amount of Italian and Portuguese, i'd never had a one-to-one language lesson before. With the exception of French, which i learnt at school, i'd always mainly taught myself. I'd been to Spanish and Dutch classes, but standard language classes were almost totally useless, in my experience, as environments to learn a foreign language in. But after that first one-to-one Tamil lesson, i realised that was the only way to learn a language quickly. I could see that given a couple of months - which i wouldn't be - i could develop a good working knowledge of even a language as unfamiliar as Tamil with two or three lessons like that a week.
This was an interesting discovery - and one that would maybe change the way i learnt languages. The advantage of speaking English is that everywhere in the world there are people who want to learn that language and even if i couldn't afford to pay a teacher, i'd always be able to exchange lessons.
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On the Wednesday i was due to meet up with Bobby again at three in the afternoon, so i told Georg i might be in in the morning, although i possibly wouldn't be, and that i wouldn't be working all day. There were other things i wanted to do and, rather than taking my computer to the farm in the morning, or going back to the guest house and picking it up in the afternoon, it seemed like a sensible plan to do other things that day. But in the morning i phoned Bobby and he'd forgotten about it and was doing something else. He said to come at nine o'clock on Thursday instead. This was a bit of a drag as it was late morning by the time i knew this and i would have gone and done some pruning if i'd known, because i'd been really enjoying it and i was keen to do a bit more. Anyway, i eventually went along to Aurogreen after lunch and worked for the afternoon.
The following day i got up early and got to CSR by about nine, but Bobby hadn't arrived yet. That was alright, i didn't expect him to be there at nine, i reckoned about half past was more likely. And i was about right. Anyway, we spent a couple of hours chatting about geeky computer stuff and i showed him a few things and gave him some files off my computer and then i left him to get on with his other work.
On the way back to the guest house, i stopped at the bank to change a travellers cheque, but the clerk just said "no". I stood there for a while trying to get some kind of explanation of this and they eventually told me they didn't have any money. This was because of the bandh that had been on in Pondicherry for a couple of days.
"Bandh" is an indian term that refers to something which doesn't really exist in european politics. It's a kind of combination of a strike, a blockade and a general disruption of normal business. This time the people holding the bandh were the local fishers and they'd managed to completely bring Pondy to a halt the day before. They were protesting about something to do with the discharge of waste into the ocean, which would seriously damage their livelihood. I'm afraid i didn't know any details about it, which was pretty slack of me, seeing as it was going on so close to where i was!
Anyway, it would probably only have lasted one day if it hadn't been for the usual heavy-handed tactics of the police. As they seem to do everywhere in the world, they'd turned the protest into a riot by violently attacking the protesters. This produced a situation that took several days to calm down in the end.
Not being able to change money was a bit of a blow, as i'd just begun to think about moving on again. But unless i could get enough money to pay my bill at the guest house i couldn't go anywhere. However there wasn't anything i could do about it, so i just had to wait till the next day and see what the situation was then.
I was thinking about going back to Madras to start trying to sort out the next stage of my journey. I didn't want to have to go all the way to Trivandrum to fly out, so i wanted to investigate possibilities of leaving from Madras instead. I was also feeling like i should try and go earlier than i'd planned, as it would be good to have more time to try and sort out a visa for Laos and all that stuff, which could possibly take a while. I didn't want to end up with hardly any time left to actually spend in Laos by the time i finally got there.
I had been planning on going to Aurogreen to do more pruning, but in the end i couldn't be bothered - partly because i was feeling a bit unsettled by the prospect of leaving the next day. And in the end i just sat around the guest house all afternoon and got a beer at five o'clock when the bloody temple started screeching.
Five o'clock was also the time when i should have been going to Pougahl's house for another Tamil lesson, like i'd arranged with him on Tuesday. However, i wasn't feeling like that either. I felt a bit bad about not showing, but then Indians don't seem to be as neurotic about doing what they've said they will as Europeans are, so i wasn't quite as bothered as i probably should have been.