March 8, 2008 – Kerala, India
Trivandrum

There was a lovely woman at our school, named, much like the school, Shanti (Peace). She was known to most, however, as Shanti J., J being short for her rather confusingly long last name. Shanti J. very kindly helped us arrange our stay in the southern state of Kerala, and eventually even organized what turned out to be a 5-star stay at her son Rajeev’s penthouse apartment in the city of Trivandrum, where we would be flying from in two days time to Kolkata. Kindness from others should not beget stupidity, but in this case I think somehow living in this lap of luxury must have dulled some of our senses. I have no other reasonable explanation.

Day 1 – Trivandrum

I was feeling tired, sweaty and gross. We’d just missed getting into the famous art gallery, and then once again had gone through a major bank debacle trying to find a bank that would realize our debit/credit cards are not ‘invalid’. Fortunately for us, the supermarket attendant had remembered that there was an Induslnd (one of the two banks we now know that actually work for us) about 10 blocks away. At the time he’d just gestured down the street however, we didn’t realize it would be quite such a long walk.
Eventually we’d reached the bank, got some money (vast quantities of Rs100 ($3) bills because it was out of Rs500 bills), and crossed the street in order to catch a rickshaw to the restaurant recommended to us by Shanti’s son.
Several minutes into the humidly sticky, impatient rickshaw wait (they’re always there when you don’t need one, never there when you do!) a rickshaw that had driven by us turned around and came back. It already contained a middle-aged Indian woman. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked. ‘Canada’, we replied. ‘Where are you going?’. We told her the name of the restaurant. ‘Hop in’ she said, ‘we’ll drop you off along the way.’ Evy, taking her word for it, got in. I had a mental image of the newspaper article I’d just read about tourists never being supposed to go into rickshaws or taxis containing more than just the driver, but Evy was already in and seemed ok with it so I jumped in as well. Lemming 1 and Lemming 2.
The stranger lady seemed very nice, asking us about where we were from, what we’ve been studying, etc.. Evy was chatting with her – I, on the other hand, had been mentally freaking out from the minute I’d entered the rickshaw. ‘Don’t look so worried’ said the woman, ‘I’m not crazy’. I smiled politely and ran through the various options of extricating ourselves from this mess, if it was indeed a mess, which my flight or fight instinct was telling me, rightly or wrongly, that it was. Meanwhile, the woman was suggesting a restaurant she knew as being much better than the one we’d been planning on going to. ‘I’ll take you out for dinner’ she said, ‘I can drive you back in my van’. At this point, under cover of a particularly bumpy section of road, Ev asks me in German whether I think this is all a little odd. ‘Yes’ is my emphatic answer, as the rickshaw drives into a less and less populated area.
My current ‘brilliant’ plan is to leap from the rickshaw the moment it looks like we’re heading into no-man’s land. Or, if the woman is legit and we actually get brought to a restaurant, then we eat with her and head off on our own, no big deal. We seem to be slowing down though. We pull up next to a very dark, little-populated area with some parked cars. ‘Here’s my van’, says the woman in English (she’d been talking with the rickshaw driver in some language we didn’t understand). Sure enough, we’ve pulled up next to an old style van. The window rolls down, there’s a guy sitting in the driver’s seat. He looks at us and smiles – in another situation perhaps he would’ve seemed young & harmless. In this case Evy and I agree that there’s no way in hell we’re getting into that van. The woman pays off the rickshaw driver. ‘We’ll just go now’ we say. ‘No, no, come into the van, we’ll go for dinner.’ We refuse, insistently. The woman gives in, saying something about meeting us at the ‘canteen’ (a commonly used term here for café/restaurant). We get back into the rickshaw. The rickshaw driver gives the woman some money back. I can’t help but wonder if she gave him extra money to keep quiet about the whole situation, but that now we’re going back with him he’s giving it back. Maybe that’s just paranoid. He takes us to the restaurant we’d originally wanted (involving major backtracking) and completely overcharges us. We’re just relieved to be in familiar territory again. We wait outside the restaurant for 5 minutes, no sign of the lady. Does that prove her innocent or guilty?
Our meal is tasty, especially spiced as it is with the remainders of adrenaline rush.