On Saturday morning we found ourselves with VIP status again. Vinod came down from the suburbs to pick us up for a day with the Varuns. Varun and his relatives have any number of last names that we can never seem to remember, so our American sensibility finds the need to reduce them to childish simplicity. In this case, Varun represents his entire extended family. Meet the Varuns.
Vinod's family consists of his wife Manjula and daughters Ujjwala and Diya. The youngsters are 15 and 10 years old. The eldest is fiercely intelligent and driven, while Diya is much more of a free spirited rascal. They were both somewhat shy at first, but when I asked Diya to show me her French homework they became invigorated. Ujjwala has taken it upon herself to teach Diya her studies, but she seems to enjoy complaining how hopeless her little sister is. It's somewhat endearing to me, but I can see Ujjwala felt compelled to assert intelligence at every corner. Diya got to correct my poor French pronunciation as I quizzed her on vocabulary and she seemed to enjoy being the teacher for once. Both children seem to be prolific readers, which they share with their mother (who used to be a teacher).
Our day was one of leisure. We drove everywhere we wanted, our first stop being an upscale shopping mall. As you might guess, Western food chains in India are more popular than the Indian restaurants. McDonalds, Taco Bell, and their ilk replace any beef items with vegetarian imitations. McPaneer or McVeg, etc. Nicole confirmed that the Taco Bell nachos do indeed taste the same as nachos back across the pond. Vinod and I ordered Indian food while Varun and Manjula got a stir fry noodle dish. This is all very interesting so I'll skip to the next part.
Vinod asks us if we want to go see the flamingos and we naturally agree to this. During our time in India we've learned to say yes to everything, even if it's a guy in a park offering to clean your ears with a long, sharp metal object.
So we go for a little drive, which roughly translates into meandering for an hour in crazy traffic, navigating through slums and eventually ending up at a jetty which terminates on what I guess to be the east side of the Bombay peninsula. It is windy and dirt continually blasts into our faces as Nicole runs off to befriend a pair of wild puppies. The seashore here looks a bit strange. At low tide the shoreline recedes to expose a beach of mud which extends for miles where the haze eventually cuts it off from sight. (The distance from water to treeline is about a kilometer, so when high tide returns it covers a lot of ground.)
Scattered across this muddy bay is an innumerable amount of flamingos. Gazing out for some time, we can see the pattern of pinkish white dots slowly moving across the mud. They are still quite far away but coming closer at a pace of one flamingo per hour. This is the daily feeding ritual that occurs during the winter season before the flock migrates to cooler weather to avoid the impending monsoons in late May. Vinod eagerly opens the trunk of his car to pull out a bulky backpack full of camera equipment. He assembles a long telephoto lens and begins snapping shots of the flock. Other species blend in with the crowd and he quickly parses out the egrets and herons and other little specks that all look like flamingos to our naked eyes. They could be any bird for all we know, so we just begin to refer to everything we see as penguins.
As the penguins quietly stalk their prey one by one (well, it's quiet from this distance, but it could sound like horrific screaming from up close), our attention is diverted by activity within regular ocular range. Right on the bank of the jetty we see little creatures hopping to and from the puddles littered along the muddy shore. Penguins, perhaps? I know some penguins can swim, but these little ones appear to have arms. No, definitely not penguins. Vinod calls these amphibians mudskippers, named most symbolically after Lord Mudskippington of Wales. If I were to name them they would be called flappers or meatslappers, named onomatopaeiacally for the delightful sound they make when scurrying to and fro. They don't look all that appetizing, but one man's junk is a penguin's feast. There are perhaps millions of them along the shore, probably the primary source of nourishment for the thousands of ravenous penguins.
Wanting a better look at our new fascination, Nicole slides down the jetty bank and carefully finds a stable path leading to a ruined fishing boat. One false step and you might be up to your knees in thick, gray mud. There are a handful of boys playing in this mud a few hundred feet away, searching for treasure, but I don't imagine Vinod would appreciate such adventurous spirits riding in the leather interior of his car. Side note: Although eating beef is a no-no, for some reason street vendors selling leather belts and wallets is okay.
Nicole takes cautious steps inside the boat, which has slowly been splayed open by years of harsh sunlight and tidal activity. It's internal support structure bows outward like a rib cage, and the creaky sounds are not putting us at ease. Nicole doesn't seem to mind, and she takes up a perch at the stern to watch the mudskippers from a better vantage point.
The flabgulchers seem to have more sophisticated eyesight than we thought. Not only do they react to changes in light caused by shadows, but it seems they could determine Nicole's actual position as well. They are also likely sensitive to vibration, but it's hard to determine how much the boat or the mud was dampening it.
We watch Nicole watch them for a while, and then we notice even more minute activity in the muck. Smaller yet than the glubslumpers, we begin to see tiny crabs no bigger than a thumb emerge from small dime-sized burrows equally distributed along the jetty mud bank. We are mesmerized by the waving motion of their big white claws, which we thought was used to attract mates. We read later that these fiddler penguins (or fiddler crabs if you want to be "correct" about it) make this exaggerated gesture when they are feeding on little clumps of sediment,. Vinod stepped down into the firm mud to take some close-up shots, but doing so set off their alarm and they all quickly disappeared. It seems one disturbance kindles the defense mechanism like a cluster of nerve cells. He waits patiently in a squatting position until the crabs come back out of their burrows and start waving again, as if to challenge any penguins: "Bring it."
The jetty offered us several hours of quiet contemplation. It was nice to have a moment to enjoy this scene in Bombay. A lot of the ocean horizon is marked by large industrial factories that seem to be anchored to small islands around the bay. I'm not sure if these are oil refineries but I do notice quite a few pipelines pointing to shore. The factories produce booming mechanical sounds intermittently, and it strikes me as this massively epic yet lonely call. It all seems like it belongs out there, perhaps only because I'm used to seeing it. I wonder how many millions of years it will take for the landscape to reclaim its natural state. Maybe everything will perish and the earth will slowly blanket the factories in dust, compounding the layers and taking them back into its folds.
Snapping out of our respective headspaces, we get back in the car and return to Vinod's.
Before parting ways, Manjula made sure to stuff our faces with delicious food. One dish was comprised of little fried dough balls filled with potatoes and onions. Each ball has a little hole torn out to add a sweet and spicy tamarind juice. These little balls explode in your mouth with the best flavor. She feeds us about 20 each, and then 10 more until we're falling out of our chairs. Then she makes another dessert to really put us into a coma: fruit custard. My first bite induces Nirvana and I am forced to close my eyes in ecstasy. I open them to see Manjula looking at me with a very pleased grin on her face. "It's only just okay," I say to her playfully, breaking up with laughter. I look over at Varun and Nicole to see similarly stupified and sated O-faces. The Varuns know how to eat.
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