I scare babies

...Like it's my job.

Babies haven't really taken to me. When I smile at babies and small children on buses, the usually try to burrow as deep into their mothers' chests as they can, or simply look shyly at me and avoid proximity and eye contact. Their mothers, however, find this hilarious, and grin at me, whispering into their children's ears, asking them incredulously why they don't want me to take them away to China. On the bus back from Kochi, Kerala, one particularly bashful boy eventually fell asleep against my side. His mother was oblivious.

It's surprisingly easy to be foreign to Village-South-India. It's as easy to mind my own business as it is to interact with folks, whether it's a conversation about politics and local government or business and environmental policy and science issues, or a simple smile and head wag. My Indian head wag is so smooth, and sometimes I do it without even thinking. Smiles are a language unto themselves.

I walk in India with the ease of experience. After not a few months. I am an old hand at this woonzungu thing now - I no longer shoot glances over my shoulder to see who is talking about the vellai karan this time.

I'm completely comfortable to norms and conventions as I embark on a little project to make charcoal - like so - from waste which would otherwise simply be burned. Yes, I am the white boy (men have moustaches) gathering up all the leftover straw from millet, lentils and sugar cane, lashing it together and carrying it off on my shoulder, or if I want to show off, my head.

I'll talk to the farmer who laid his lentils on the road so that it could be shelled by passing buses and trucks, and ask him with English and hand gestures if I can take his straw. He'll reply to me in Tamil and hand gestures, and we'll seal the deal with smiles. I blow kisses over my shoulder at old men and young women who stare at me from the buses that ply the roads as I walk away with a bundle of straw on my head, this strange boy who works like a coolie or a woman, for reasons nobody understands. Yet.
















The only times I have been (happily) forced to interact with people are when I walk past one of the village schools, and I am immediately swarmed with children, hanging off my arms like bunches of bananas, asking me my name, my village, laughing, shouting, smiling. Sometimes a toddler who can barely walk will spot me all the way down the street and charge over, shouting "vellai karan!" at the top of hisorher lungs. Heorshe will quickly grasp my hand and then run away screaming. Outside the school, some of the older boys are cocky and show off to the others how they remember my name and village, and the younger ones are convinced I'm a kung fu master. The older girls laugh and giggle and whisper amongst themselves when I smile at them, whilst the young ones are content to hold my hands and swing from my arms like little monkeys.

What do these children eat? I don't remember elementary school children being so light. It's strange, I can't find in my mind any recollection of more beautiful human beings than these children. I've seen children so beautiful I wished they would take me home with them, or that I could melt and disappear completely.