My, Twain's and India's Indias

[Bengaluru, 12/8/22]

An Indian friend sent me a nice message, “I'm amazed that you caught on to the enduring popularity of Appu Anna in Karnataka while on so short a visit.”

The late actor, singer and dancer is everywhere, so he’s hard to miss, but you have to walk around rather tirelessly, measure each pavement with your own body, so to speak, to notice this phenomenon.

Oh my, self-praise! Now, I’ll rot in hell for sure. Better duck into the nearest church to beg anyone who looks like a priest for a half earnest confession.

There are churches all over this city, including a dozen Saint Anthony’s. As for shrines to the Virgin Mary, often with a baby Jesus poking his head out of her sari, there must be hundreds. Yesterday, I saw cemented onto a green wall small ceramic tiles displaying colorful Ganesha, Hanuman, a mosque and Jesus.

In Pulikeshi Nagar, there’s a Saint Anthony’s right next to a Hindu temple, with some Hindus also praying in the church. Don’t think, though, there’s some sort of groovy omnism going on. At best, a Hindu thinks of Jesus as just another god, of which he has more than a few. Christ can’t possibly be ranked higher than Appu Anna!

Outside one Hindu temple, there are three images of Appu, with one twice life-sized. Striding forward, he’s in a navy suit and purple shirt, looking ultra-cool. This near merging of the secular and sacred is nothing when you think that in Vietnam, photos of Ho Chi Minh are routinely inserted, by the Communist Party, into Buddhist temples.

When Appu died of a heart attack at age 46, I immediately suspected the Jewjab, you know me, but Pfizer and Moderna weren’t even available in India when he got “vaccinated.” Though he could still pull off pretty slick moves, Appu did get damn thick in the middle. Even chunkier, Elvis left this building at 42.

For four days, it’s been raining almost nonstop, and though I’ve often walked through the rain, there’s not much street life to observe or photograph. Even the dogs are suffering. Just after 7AM today, I strolled by a sleeping yellow dog that was shivering. Yesterday at Bangalore Cant, a colonial era train station, I noticed a black and brown mutt that was trying his best to curl up.

Oh, the romance of train stations! On a wall, there was a large sign, “BEWARE OF THIEVES,” with 40 mug shots of men and women of all ages up to 40 or so. Past that, you won’t be fast enough to outrun your victims or fight them off. Since Indians don’t travel light, there’s a lot to lift, so keep that in mind if your PhD in intersectional studies doesn’t pan out.

Sun bleaches colors. Rain deepens them. Wet garbage stinks worse, however, and downpours prevent street sweepers from their work. In sap green and Naples yellow uniforms, these determined warriors against chaos, ugliness and putrefaction often sweep with both hands, weather allowed.

This morning, I only walked half a mile before, already drenched, I had to duck into some dim chai joint. Yesterday, I had seen three squatting men warming their hands over a tiny mound of burning trash, just outside it.

There were four customers, with two munching on plain rolls for breakfast. Slouched against one corner, a man of about 40 was mesmerized by some cheerful program on his phone, his dark belly and darker belly button exposed through an unbuttoned gap in his white shirt.

Passing through any city, you can learn a lot just by reading its shop signs, billboards, flyers and graffiti. In South Africa and Namibia, I kept running into ads for penis elongation and longer copulation. There are no such promises here. Consider this, though:

AJMIR SHAADI BUREAU

Are you worried about your Children’s Marriage?

You need not worry about any kind of matrimonial alliances like:

BUSINESSMEN. ENGINEERS. NRIs. DOCTORS. PILOTS. WIDOWS and DIVORCEES.

DON’T DELAY IT, DO IT TODAY. CONTACT US IMMEDIATELY.

It’s interesting the list of desirable spouses includes widows and divorcees, so your child’s husband or wife will most likely be older, but also more established, with a house, let’s say, and savings. If he’s really ancient, he’ll expire soon, so months or even a few years of sharing a bed with a near corpse is worth it, at least for the bride’s parents.

NRI is an overseas Indian, so he’s still reasonably compatible, but living in a nicer environment, with a much heftier income, presumably. Though your child’s wishes are not mentioned, they should dovetail with your own. If, Vishnu forbid, she falls in love with some dashing tuk-tuk driver or rag picker, you can just slap senses into the fool, or strangle her if she doesn’t listen. Hundreds of honor killings occur in India each year.

In 1896, Mark Twain spent two months in India. In Bombay, he was invited to a betrothal, where both groom and bride were just 12-years-old. Twain:

As I understood it, he and the bride were to entertain company every night and nearly all night for a week or more, then get married, if alive. Both of the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms go, in India—twelve; they ought to have been married a year or two sooner; still to a stranger twelve seems quite young enough.

“If alive” is a classic Twain touch. After visiting a village, Twain explains why a rural midwife was only paid half her fee if a girl was delivered:

The girl was not desired, because she would be a disastrous expense by and by. As soon as she should be old enough to begin to wear clothes for propriety’s sake, it would be a disgrace to the family if she were not married; and to marry her meant financial ruin; for by custom the father must spend upon feasting and wedding-display everything he had and all he could borrow—in fact, reduce himself to a condition of poverty which he might never more recover from.

Much more hideous is the practice of bride burning, which has not only persisted, like honor killing, but increased since the 1980’s. Around 2,500 incidents occur each year in this nation of 1.4 billion. Unable to extort more dowry from his in-laws, a man may decide to torch his wife, usually with kerosene or gasoline.

My first 3 1/2 days in Bengaluru, I was mostly at Alliance University for a literary festival. There, I was surrounded by confident and cheerful young men and women. Most wore Western clothing, with some men in tight fitting black suits and white dress shirts. T-shirts were common, and jeans even more so.

[Alliance University in Bengaluru, 11/30/22]

At a student rock concert, the singer wore a sweat shirt that said, “PERFECT.” Among their songs was Nirvana’s “Smell Like Teen Spirit.” In a black party dress with a low enough collar, a long haired girl rocked and even jumped up and down, her face beaming.

Like the spacious and leafy campus itself, they belonged to a new India, one of cappuccinos, KFC’s, trendy bars and desi rap, where honor killing and bride burning don’t exist, though some overlaps must occur, I suspect, for it’s hard to extinguish entirely centuries-old attitudes.

When India’s first KFC opened in mid-1995, right here in Bengaluru, there was so much hostility towards it, cops had to be permanently installed. Six months later, they were overwhelmed by nearly a hundred protesters who smashed the KFC’s plate glass window and destroyed its furniture. Now, there are 699 KFCs in India, so progress, uh, has been made!

Twain speaks of the “grace and dignity” of Indian women with brass jars on their heads. Today, they balance plastic jars, so that, too, is progress. On Vietnamese mountains, many tribal women now favor nylon backpacks over traditional woven bamboo baskets. Why make anything when you can just buy?

Twain describes going to the betrothal:

We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives—hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death.

At least in Bengaluru, I don’t see “hundreds and hundreds” sleeping outside “everywhere,” not anything like, say, in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. India’s homeless are also never bums in the American sense, with their obvious drug or alcohol addictions, general filthiness and often aggressive panhandling. It is appalling, though, to see entire families with small kids sleeping outside, but that, too, is coming to progressive America.

In the name of progress, we’ve had gulags, carpet bombing, Agent Orange, climate engineering, lawless endless war to spread democracy and the rule of laws, gender dysphoria not just normalized but celebrated, children confused then castrated, cancel culture and now, even as I type this, the destruction of yet another nation to make war profiteers billions and pursue a geopolitical agenda, among other motives.

In the name of “science,” the world is being depopulated, with its architects thinking of places like India as a present and future to avoid!

Twain famously declares India to be the “cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition,” and so it is. As confused and confusing as it seems, it will outlast one upstart, at least.

Just 246-years-old, that genocidal brat has already produced its own Age of Kali, but an accelerated, super condensed version. We must hope it won’t blow up the stage as it flames out.

On a panel at Alliance, I said each society should determine its own values, and not strive for global norms. For too long, those have been determined by the Satanic, sadistic and shamelessly hypocritical West. It’s nauseating.

I don’t mean we should hang on to witch burning, bride burning or death by a thousand cuts, even if our forefathers thought they were kosher. All I mean is no nation should be defined or bullied by outsiders.

At Alliance, I spoke of the transsexual who stripped naked on the BBC, then played the piano with his penis. This was a clear nod to a similar performance by Zelensky, I pointed out.

“Before becoming the president of Ukraine, that was his most famous act,” I said. “The guy’s an actor, a comic. They’re laughing at us.”

Then, “If people in the UK are fine with that, it’s their business, but would you accept that on Indian television?”

Some students grinned, others were consternated, as if such an episode could not have happened, but the West has much more crazy shit to smear on everyone’s face.

Toughing it out in Cleveland, my friend Elizabeth Hayes writes, “You were lucky to get kicked out of the West, Linh. The US has gone full-throttle Satanic. The criminals no longer even attempt to hide their crimes.”

Though I wasn’t officially kicked out, to be canceled as an author meant I had no ground to stand on. I lost two publishers plus all reading or teaching opportunities. Friends fled. But Elizabeth is right. I am lucky.

It’s 10PM. Outside, the honking never ceases. Now, I’ll go across the street for one or two glasses of chai before bed. The guy who sells it has a weird bump on his brown face.

Decades ago, he probably knocked his head against stone, cement or just fate, and it never healed, so his misfortune, and a freakish one, at that, became his identity.

His English is not good, but my Kannada is even worse.

[mural of Appu Anna in Bengaluru on 12/8/22]

[Bengaluru, 12/8/22]

[Bengaluru, 12/5/22]