Excerpted from India (Second)
Dated: January 12, 2009 6:30AM
Mamallapuram didn’t prepare us for this one; Madurai is a different order of intensity. We are not nearly as expected of a sight and the staring is far more harsh. Our first morning after the comfortable overnight train we walked around the streets, which were mostly quiet so early in the day. Ducking into alleyways, we spotted many dusty households going through morning errands; painting their entryways with the rice powders and getting water from the street taps. We landed at a bustling chai stand after strolling through a marketplace with explosive colors and smelly animal heads/meat.
The onlookers were excited, but after exchanging the usual background and marital information, the fun seemed to be at our expense. One of the gentleman, a lock salesman from Delhi gave Becca a scratchy handshake (touching the palm with your index finger inside the hand embrace). I wasn’t able to connect the small crowd’s laughter to anything until Rebecca told me what happened as we walked away.
In other areas, the attention was especially strong. Children playing in groups on the street waved and practiced their English greetings. The more precocious boys of a given group would jump out in front of us with open arms and say, “welcome to India, friends!”
Finding the temple was an ordeal. Many of the road signs are in Tamil, so my quickly-jotted relative directions were rendered useless by all the unmarked streets. We started to trek back to the hotel to regroup. Rebecca had fallen down and scraped her hand and gotten dirty, and I wanted fresh instructions on getting to the temple, which by the way, I had repeatedly read was tall and grand enough to see frmo any direction.
Down an alley a man whose name I forget began giving us too much help. He asked about us and gave us brief directions to the temple. When we began to ignore them and continue back in the direction of the hotel, he came back around the corner and insisted that we let him lead us to the temple, because, as he said repeatedly, the best parts with a view would close very soon and entry would not be possible.
To explain the views we might be able to see and photograph, this self-described book salesman kept pulling out a faded tower-eye-view of the temple’s four gopuras and pointing to the tallest one. Here, what exactly he would be able to give us access to became fuzzy. I was weary, having read several guides warning against taking the help of anyone who might offer ‘advantageous’ viewpoints because of hard sells afterward, but Becca persisted.
Ultimately we were lead to the brick-road plaza that encircles the temple but the book salesman with two kids yea-high who love writing opened the door to the aptly-named “Viewpoint Gallery” and gestured for us to come inside. He had helped us enough. We were at the temple.
(to be continued)
