Travel Havoc and a Whacky Christmas

Perhaps every trip has a moment of crisis, a time when the wheels seem to be coming off. We had ours in spades a couple of nights ago when I got a call from our son, Darren, who was traveling to India a few days after us and was to arrive early Christmas morning in Chennai via a stopover in Brussels. He had been grounded at Heathrow due to snow in Brussels and would probably miss his connection to Chennai, a very bad turn of events since we were all to board a train to head south at 8 a.m. It seemed he would miss the train, and I decided to stay back in Chennai to meet him. We would find our own way south to Thanjuvar by ourselves. Our afternoon proceeded, a wonderful walk through the busy markets of the old historic district of Chennai, a place full of food and flower and spices vendors, and streets full of shops selling notebooks. Notebooks by the carload, up and down the street. Later we visited Kapeelashwrar Temple, the biggest Hindu temple in Chennai, then a dance recital, dinner and drinks. By the time Lynn and I got back to our room Darren was still stranded at Heathrow and in the morning the rest of the group departed for Thanjuvar and I soon got a call from Darren. He had arrived in New Delhi but the airline would not issue him a boarding pass for Chennai because the said they could not find a ticket number for him in the system. Someone at American Airlines back at Heathrow had botched something. They insisted he could not board the flight to Chennai, nor could he buy a new ticket because he didn't have enough money on his credit card. No one seemed to care much about his plight, and I was helpless to be able to do anything. Desperate to get him some help I called my friend in Delhi, Tripthi Pillai (a former graduate student at Loyola who is now a professor in South Carolina) and she graciously agreed to drive out to the Delhi airport to bail Darren out. What we would do after that was anyone's guess. She was to call him immediately and I began to think about whether I should proceed on to meet up with our group or fly back to Delhi to meet up with Darren. Then, miraculously, Tripthi called back to say she had called Darren and he was cleared to board his flight to Chennai after all, a tremendous relief. It turned out at the last minute, as people were boarding, the supervisor who earlier had told Darren he couldn't issue him a boarding pass was having trouble retrieving his bag from the plane. Darren looked him in the eye and asked him, really, wouldn't it be easier to just hand him the boarding pass and let him get on the plane instead of persisting in trying to find his bag? The man looked at Darren, let a little smile cross his face, winked at him, and handed him the boarding pass.

   By the time he arrived in Chennai it was 2 o'clock in the afternoon and he was elated and ready to finally see India. After an eye-opening drive to the hotel we set out by auto rickshaw for the Kapeelashwrar Temple. It was teeming with late afternoon worshipers, and Carnatic music was being played in two different areas of the temple. In one area a man was playing a very long, narrow reed instrument, pointing it alternately at the ground and toward the sky and seemingly riffing in his own way like a Hindi John Coltrane. He as accompanied by a drummer and another man keeping the beat with pieces of brass attached to his fingers. Across the way under a long canopy structure where people can lounge in the shade, there was an extraordinary young girl singing Carnatic music. She couldn't have been older than 9 or 10 but she sang with great power and grace, accompanied by drums and a violin. Later we somehow found our way to a wonderful South Indian fish restaurant. One just has to have the courage to get in an auto rickshaw and depend on the driver to find where you want to go. We had three kinds of fish prepared three different ways and it was wonderful. That was our Christmas Day.

   Today Darren and I made our way to the temple town of Thanjuvar (first by air, then by car) to hook up with the rest of our group for a visit to the huge, sprawling 11^th century temple complex of Brihadeeswara Temple (big Shiva temple), one of the most significant temple complexes in all of India. Given that it was Sunday the place was teeming with people but we all found it absolutely extraordinary. I will simply let the pictures on my Brihadeeswara Temple Picasa album speak for themselves. I'm going to bed, having successfully reunited with the group and looking forward to a visit to the temple town of Maduri tomorrow. More later about that before we head off to Kerala.