Calypso's Oyster

Of all the Sundays that have been and are yet to be, this was Easter Sunday in 2007 and 8am at GMT+5.5. A wide angle lens from my then whereabouts would have captured the glittering runway cast by the watery morning sunlight onto the calm blue waters of the Bay of Bengal as they gently licked the shallow sands of Pondicherry beach. Wshhh. Wshhh.

I was on a mission to locate more palatable water however, having spent the previous night in the company of new friends and rum sourced by a rickshaw driver – the self-declared “Mr. Tee of Pon-dee, yes madam” – his boom box, and the tunes of that ever popular Euro-disco group, Boney M.

The haze of that April morning threatened another day of the sort of Indian heat that seems to melt time itself like a Dali clock. Discovering a petit magasin that was open for "business us usually", then, came as a great relief and I bought as much liquid as I could carry and some interesting edibles in shiny rainbowed wrappers. It was Easter after all.

My accommodation was a brisk twenty minute walk from the seaside promenade of Goubert Avenue and its French colonial chic to where the streets stopped having names, ground: concrete, structures: bricks. The briskness in the return journey wasn't accidental; nothing shakes Western confidence quite like a walk through a shantytown.

To my right, a local toddler called out "gora, gori”. He was puttering fat footedly under a tin canopy where his mother was also squatting in the unmapped dust, flaking carrots into a fire-blackened pan. Hissing ghee fragranced with turmeric and chili buzzed in my nostrils. A macro lens would have captured the smoke-faded acid green of a well-worn sari wrapped tightly around creased coffee skin. A gaunt face was framed by elbow length ebony hair that matched its owner’s gaze.

I smiled politely, nervous of the now beckoning woman on the ground. Unsure of the appropriate reaction, I took the Easter sweets from my sandy pockets and offered them and the water to her, wondering then if she believed in stories of resurrection, reincarnation, rules from a prophet? Her head shook slowly as she declined my offer and instead spooned curried rice into a tin cup and gave it to her son to hand to me in exchange for a single sweet…

Then life went on, business us usually, if but a little better off for sharing sweets with strangers.