Friday, February 4: Dinner with a Botanist

Varkala, Kerala Province, South India

The waiter told me that he had a degree in botany. I don't know why he told me, or how he got around to it.

"Why are you here in Varkala then?" I asked. It's the land of hustling clothes and jewelery, Ayruvedic massages, and cheap rooms.

"There are too many degrees in India now," he said. "Too much literacy." Too much literacy.

I looked at him more closely in the half light of candles and gas lamps on the cliffside overlooking the sea. He was really quite a beautiful man, with round features, sensual lips, dark eyes and thick black lashes. But then I find most of these Keralan men handsome. Handsome and ageless. Perhaps he was 25. Perhaps 35.

"What is your ambition?" I asked him.

"Ambition?" he repeated, as if I was silly for not knowing the answer. "It's business."

"Then why did you take a degree in botany and not a degree in business?"

"Because I have confidence."

"Confidence?"

"Confidence that I can do business."

"But now you are not doing business."

"No." He smiled faintly.

The particularly large wave crashed on the beach a hundred meters below.

"But last year I was in commerce, you know... materials, fabrics. It is a very good business you know. Except this year I am here." He waved his brown hand in the general direction of the kitchen.

"You really don't want to be a scientist?" He shrugged and looked around, as if he were seeing for the first time this restaurant, the red cloths on the tables pulled outside under the stars, the cliff, the white lines of the waves rolling in to shore.

"You don't want to be an Ayruvedic, perhaps? He shrugged again.

"The degrees here, they mean nothing." Is that what he wanted to tell me? Miles out to sea a lightening storm lit up the sky like a large drive-in movie screen flashing white and blue clouds.

"And next year?" I asked. "Next year what will you do?"

"Commerce," he said, looking off into the distance, and then he looked at me. "Where are you coming from? You are coming from England?"

"America."

"Not many people are coming from America. Where do Americans go?"

"Mexico, I think. Central America."

"It is cheaper?"

"Yes, cheaper. Or the same. And the air fare is cheaper."

"There are some Canadians. But here mostly there are Europeans. Isralis."

"Yes." He was standing, fingering the 120 rupees I'd given him for my dinner bill. Most of it was for my illicit beer, the bottle discretely tucked away under the table. We'd had a conversation about the beer before, when I ordered it and it took so long to come.

"It is not legal here, you know?" he had said, slightly scolding. It was still a little light out then.

"No. I don't know.. why is it illegal?"

"I don't know. It is illegal, but not serious, because there is an understanding with the police."

"So then, the police are quite rich in Varkala."

"Yes." He hesitated. "You can get anything in Varkala." Hmmm. Was he going to try to sell me something?

"Grass?" I said.

"It is criminal, you know. Grass."

"I see lots of people smoking grass here."

"Yes, but that is tourists, not local people. For local people it is, you know, like a criminal."

"But for tourists it is not criminal?"

"No. Tourists can do anything," he said, completely without animosity.

Tourists. Always trouble. White people. Here the trouble is with beer, grass and fake Ayruvedic masseurs. The waiter was still standing there, perhaps waiting for me to say something. I don't know. I am past the age for him to be making a pass at me, aren't I? Maybe not in the dark. Or maybe he wants to tell me something, and doesn't know how.

A French couple at a nearby table lit their after-dinner cigarettes and looked around. The botanist-waiter-businessman nodded his head at them.

"Can I take?" he said, setting his fingers on the money I'd put down for the bill.

"Please."

I walked alone on the trail along the cliff, protected from falling the hundred meters to the beach by a rusty barbed wire fence with tilting wooden stakes. A yellow dog passed quickly, like a dream, and the night sky still flashed with the far away lightening storm. I walked a stretch in the dark where the day-vendors set up their displays. Then there were lights again. This was the busy side of the cliff. Candles. Laughter. The smell of warm salt from the sea. Smoke from charcoal grills sizzling with steaks of Blue Marlin. Tandori spice. Pepper. The movement of my body cut through the air as if it were water. Ten o'clock, and many tourists lounged at the restaurant tables, finishing clandestine beers and passing around a last thin joint before the dark walk to the shelter of their mosquito nets.

Now the ceiling fan whirs and the occasional clang of pots being cleaned by the family who runs the guesthouse where I am sleeping cuts sharply through the wooden shutters of my ground floor room. The hooks on the sky-blue walls hold my clothes, some of them still wet from the sea. My books and papers sit stacked in a corner, and the other single bed is scatterd with odds and ends from my duffel bag. I would like to leave tomorrow morning, but I know I won't. I feel a strange draw to this place. Healing? Or inertia? The day after, perhaps.

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