Day 18: Buddha, Eating with Hands, and Coffee

Day 18

We woke before dawn as has become our routine and headed out before the traffic made the transition from dangerous to lethal.

There is a large statue of Buddha in the middle of a large lake on the north side of town. The lake, Hussain Sagar, is actually manmade and divides Hyderabad from Secunderbad. The statue was built and floated out to a small island by ferry. The boat and statue sank and it was nearly decade before they brought it back up, in the late 90's. It seemed like a great thing to capture in the golden, smog-induced, first light of the day.

The statue, while huge, is in the middle of a large lake and wasn't going to be big enough for our purposes. As typical in all our photo scenarios, the real photo only becomes apparant once we get somewhere and find out we can't do what we'd planned on. This was no different.

We set up the gear and go a fun shot of Michael doing his morning excercise in a park setting. It should be good.

From there we headed out west to a small town called Pataneherv. There was a roadside food shack that Michael thought would be a good scene to get a "eating with hands" shot.

Our restauranteurs may not have understood completely what we were doing, but went along with it anyway. Michael set up one of the plastic, dirty tables outside of the restaurant and we got to getting the gear up.

This drew a crowd, as usual, but they were an amicable bunch and we had more then enough extras for the scene.

The shot was excellent and Michael claims the food was too. The place looked even sketchy to me, so we took his word on it.

Adam tipped the owners of the Hotel New Manjira 100 Rs. and they laughed. Seems like it wasn't enough. They weren't really taking into consideration that the meal was 7 Rs. and their vacant restaurant now had 60 gawkers in it. We'd done them no small service.

On the way back through town we gassed up and got bad gas. Our rickshaw was acting funny and we kept stalling. Poking around everywhere narrowed the problem down to the gas we'd just purchased. We pushed the auto into another station and somehow managed to convinced them to take out the full-tank's worth of petrol we had. They looked really skeptical but got to sucking on a long tube pushed into our tank. The attendant got a mouth full of the bad gas and oil mixture we'd just put in, but we got the gas out. While he was off spitting in the street, we filled a 5 liter plastic jug.

There was still more left, so I had to start another bottle and got a case of gas mouth too.

Unpleasant.

The station folks were incredulous when we asked them to fill the auto back up again with different petrol. They thought we were either insane or supersitious and thought our fuel was possessed by evil spirits. In truth it was a little of both.

We had some breakfast when we got back to the hotel. Our hotel restaurant is really uninspired when it comes to breakfast. It's vegetarian so no eggs. Just vidli, some grits like stuff and white bread. They were even reluctant to toast the bread. Forget about coffee. We thought we'd walk over to the fancy, Quality Inn nextdoor and have breakfast there. It was the same as ours.

We relaxed in the afternoon and I went out for a long session at an internet cafe. The blog needed to be updated and I wanted to check my email. It took 3 hours. Dial-up is your only option in India. Atleast this cafe was only charging 15 rupees an hour and not the 200 like the hotel.

At the end of my long session I met a Punjabi teacher who wanted Team Good Korma to come to his school and talk to the kids. He showed me some photos of some people from Greece in a classroom full of students and said they were some tourists he's met last week. He stressed how great it was for the kids. I thought it was a cool idea but didn't want to promise anything. We had full agenda planned the next day with getting some last minute photography done and then turning over the auto rickshaws.

Unswayed my Punjab friend asked me to get some coffee nearby and tell him about the charity. I told him that I had to meet my friends for dinner in 15 minutes and needed to go. He was graciously forceful and told me coffee would take 5.

The potential for actual coffee won me over and I said yes. Instead of being "nearby" and walkable, it was nearby and scooterable. I didn't want to be rude but I was not really happy about riding double on a strange man's scooter. Sure you see it all day and night here, but...

He started it up and said get on. I did and got a firm grip on the handle in the back. We sped off and he shouted for me not to be shy and get in close.

I didn't.

This wasn't going well and I didn't like the conclusions I was coming to about the situation.

We arrived at the plush, Taj Mahal restaurant and hotel not far away. I reiterated that I could only have a quick coffee and then would have to go.

I immediately started the conversation around his school and found out he "taught" all over town. When asked what he wanted people to talk about to the kids, he said we could talk about whatever we wanted. He was seeming more and more dodgy.

He switched the conversation over and said he was an amatuer filmmaker and he'd love to show me some of his work. I said it was too bad we were leaving in the morning.

He offered to take me on a late night tour, after my dinner with my friends, of a local bazaar. He had some friends in the Kasmiri Fabrics business there that would just love to meet me.

I told him that I'd been to that bazaar, oddly enough, to look at fabric for MY WIFE.

He looked like kid outside a closed candy store. Looking away for the first time he casually asked if I had children. I told him that I had one on the way and he mumbled a blessing.

I asked if he had children himself and he said maybe in a couple years. He was presently single and didn't have much time these days because he was busy. Taking up his time was working on social issues like, (eye contact made) lesbian and gay issues in India and also poverty and stuff.

Confirmation.

The coffee ended quickly.

He insisted that I call him about coming to the school the next day. Even if I couldn't come, he'd like a call so he could arrange sending me some of his movies.

The boys got a nice laugh out of my story.

We decided we'd earned some beer and went out for some drinks.