I(n)diosynchronicities

Ducking into the bookshop for a quickie ‘midst household chores, it struck me that India would be the perfect place to go mad. Either because, in the Indian determination to flow, through, past and around all obstacles, your own confusion would go completely unnoticed amidst the efficient malaise of quietly moving humanoids, or the opposite: someone would notice your armload of books and bring you a basket. Depending on how you wobble your head and smile, of course.
Just fleetingly, flicking through a characteristically miscatalogued shelf of books, I did not feel unlike Billy Hayes in Midnight Express. Though I probably behaved more like the prisoner who believed the only way to buck the system was to take charge of it as professor-head of asylum bureaucracy, I had an enormous urge to revolt and bolt for it. Instead, I filled my big, beautiful, shiny blue plastic basket with hippie literature and offered a subliminal wave of support to the dudes who believe in democracy. (Kerouac, Didion, Jong, Zorba, Plath, Lee, I shall read you with the new eyes lent me by the Bangalorean passenger who told me as I landed in the city for the first time four months ago, “In order to see, you must look…”)
And another one of thanks for having the opportunity to start at the beginning and not take survival for granted.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.

Just this morning, while developing a flower-centred spiritual principle by which to live and review my journey regularly, a bomb was exploding a few blocks away in Madivala.
“Not anything specific or strategically placed; just a general ploy to create a state of panic,” the BBC commentator informed his worldwide audience.
Which was pertinent timing, considering that I had just realized that the synthetic blue kumkum flower I found to commemorate my mom’s death (I always buy real blue irises on her death day, but Bang yielded nought) was eternal because it was not alive.* Well, certainly as dynamic as any religion, and just as liberating a meditative focus as an Om.
That it was not really an iris, but a kumkum (flower of saffron, the spice used to make bindis) worried me as much as the fact that it was man-made at first, but then I didn’t enjoy the Punjabi curry at Serengeti, complete with plastic jungle and diminutive Indian waiters in khaki hunting gear, any less than I would have if I had been eating at the Maharaj.
Authenticity? She just another suburb in Global Village.
As real as her copycat sister, Syntheticity, and as trustworthy as her unpredictable brother, Synchronicity.

* This has worried me ever since I wrote it, because there seemed to be something incongruous in calling a synthetic flower eternal. Indian spiritual guru Osho, who both enlightens, abets and disturbs me, must’ve gone through a similar process at some stage: a plastic flower may be permanent, but it is not eternal. A plastic flower is like the ego: dead. 

“The ego is a plastic flower – dead. It just looks like a flower, it is not a flower. You cannot really call it a flower. Even linguistically to call it a flower is wrong, because a flower is something which flowers. And this plastic thing is just a thing, not a flowering. It is dead. There is no life in it.  You have a flowering center within. That’s why Hindus call it a lotus – it is a flowering. They call it the one-thousand-petaled-lotus. One thousand means infinite petals. And it goes on flowering, it never stops, it never dies. There are some reasons why you are satisfied. With a dead thing, there are many conveniences. One is that a dead thing never dies. It cannot – it was never alive. So you can have plastic flowers, they are good in a way. They are permanent; they are not eternal, but they are permanent. The real flower outside in the garden is eternal, but not permanent. And the eternal has its own way of being eternal. The way of the eternal is to be born again and again and to die. Through death it refreshes itself, rejuvenates itself.”

And therein lay a new arrival: every year my perspective on my mom and her death’s effect on me changes, matures, but, having done an intense 10-day vipassana course (which Osho recommends) in which I surrendered, partly out of exhaustion, my attachment to her and the grief associated with it, I am not sure that meditation doesn’t anaesthetise and disable the emotional centre necessary to flower, die and be eternal.

The doctor at Ayurvedagram, a rustic Kerala-inspired spa in Whitefield, has it sussed. It’s all in Sanskrit scriptures written in 1500 BC. The absurdity, or simplicity, of life, depending how you look at it.
Like Mad John, in the far left-brained west Doc would be labelled a bit odd for his cosmic view of things. Schizophrenic, possibly, without conscience or persona. Not that labels worry him. Quite the opposite; he’s completely comfortable with them.
Ayurveda (‘the science of life’) is, quite logically, bipolar, and better for it, he says, because once you’ve discovered what it is that tips your scales, it’s easy enough to restore balance. Once you know what dosha or set of doshas dominate your personality (there are three, based on the elements, which make up seven combinations), you have all the information you need.
To prove his point, he studied 100 IT executives all doing the same job in the same place with the same technological equipment. Placed under stress, they displayed three predominant reactions which correlated with the three main doshas. Solution? If, say, your dosha is pitta (fire) you’ll get emotionally hysterical and need to, amongst other practical rituals, eat less spicy food to balance your manic depressive scales.
On a grander scale, the cosmos is a big recycling unit full of evolving particles. When you die, your body disintegrates into the earth and your soul joins the pool of universal consciousness. What lands up in the womb is a new permutation of particles fished out of the omniscient pool. Simple.
And explained, metaphysically, why the sewerage I (a Vatta/Pitta – a restless combination of air, space and fire) was sloshing through in 80 Foot Road was secondary to the conversation between me and Boy (a Kapha – a solid body of earth bound together by water), who circumnavigated adeptly.
And why we seem to inhabit different planets.
“Impermanence is at the heart of things,” I say, clutching at Buddhist straws to make sense of our precarious state in this frenetic, flowing foreign land.
Comes the reply, sans tongue or cheek: “Oh, it’ll all stabilise when I get my motorbike.”

So much for fantasies of sailing a tuk tuk through the streets of Bangalore in the warm, July monsoon. While Observatory’s River Club and the Cape of Storms is living up to its name, Karnataka is on the verge of a drought, and the city’s 7000 new tuk tuks are unlikely to sprout sails should the present temperateness change its disposition. Which is probably a good thing, since every spare minute is spent indoors in wait of electricians and back-up technicians who never arrive, or, when they do, provide little protection from the odd storm there is. Eskom looks efficient in comparison.
But, after a braai with fellow South Africans, I have made a sound decision not to veer into whingeing ex-pathood. All those beer bottles precariously balanced on the garden fence, while we tucked into fatty chunks of sacred cow, was enough to remind me of how much more we have to be embarrassed about.
If Durbanites, Eastern Capers and Capetonians can vie for provincial superiority (“our roads are worse than yours, we have more hijacking, therefore we are tougher and better able to deal with India”) 8000km away from birth base, there’s scant chance we’ll be peaceful anywhere.
Though I suspect our fighting talk is really just a peculiar sense of humour developed to deal with centuries of insecurity and quest for identity, gentle veggie eaters could be forgiven for changing the national head wobble to a vigorous, uncomprehending shake.
And might go some way to explaining why Indian businessman reckon they’ve got to count their fingers after shaking hands with a South African. Or maybe just proves the local contention that northern meat-eaters fight while southern rice-eaters play.

When I left South Africa, I idly mentioned to a friend that India was just what I needed – and possibly a good dumping ground for excess baggage. That was before I had seen all the litter. Going back ‘home’ again, for my grandma’s funeral and coincidentally tying in with the xenophobic attacks by local township dwellers on their African brethren, I realized that any baggage I have originated there and should stay there. If it hadn’t been stolen by the SAA staff, that is. Or passers-by in the quiet, familiar streets of sleepy Observatory which I so longed for while adapting to the frenetic buzz of Bangalore.
Two days after arriving, and a short visit out to Soetwater near Kommetjie, where 400 refugees were holed up, my handbag was snatched through a house window left open in a newly acquired Indian state of trust. Though the Xhosa passport controller at Cape Town International did assure me, when I commented on the trouble in the land, that there was nothing to worry about – “South Africa always overcomes” – I do rather wonder whether his stoicism was something to fear or rejoice about. That people are vowing to kill each other, proudly in the name of power, makes me kind of grateful for the lacksadaisical progress and kaleidoscopic traffic jams of mushrooming Bangalore and I almost, almost called it home.
Which is a sad indictment on my perception of the place where the umbilical cord is supposed to be. But probably has a lot to do with one’s reception. When the Eastern Cape domestic worker I hired in Cape Town told me, after much preparation (I could tell she had something to blurt), “I like you. You’re kind. You’re not rude like all the others”, I was on the verge of bursting. Into tears and explosions of mixed, irrational emotions.
Manifold though the reasons are, I don’t think it can be discounted that India, where my head-wobbling domestic happily does her nimble thing (barefoot and wide-smiled in a Sunday bestish sari) while I do mine, had mellowed me into a less defensive version of myself. That our driver was there to greet us and negotiate the two-hour bumper to bumper traffic with a welcoming smile was as good as arriving at the spanking new and organized airport with emptier suitcases.