The Old Woman and the Sea.

We are slowly moving into the "Winter" season here in South India. This means that our security guards have started wearing adorable sweater vests and wool caps at nighttime, and I'm not soaked in a sheen of sweat until at least 20 minutes after leaving an air-conditioned room, rather than the usual 5 minutes. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually fantasizing about wearing polar fleece and long underwear.

My friends Kate, Cecilia and I traveled to the small fishing village of Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu this weekend, for one of our last weekend trips. The town had an awkward vibe...partially devastated by the 2004 tsunami, it seemed to be stuck between becoming a complete tourist resort town, a sculptor's colony, or a tiny fishing village. The result was a confusing but pleasant mix of all three. The beach was a perfect example of this confusion: groups of fisherman cleaning out their nets and shoving brightly painted fishing boats into the ocean, poor women clutching emaciated babies to their hips while attempting to sell cheap necklaces and blankets to whoever will look their way, and Western tourists stripped down to bikinis, sunbathing happily on beach towels, ambivalent to the chaos around them.

Kate, Cecilia and I spent out time on our rented bicycles, exploring the phenomenal stone carvings and ancient temples left over from the Pallava Empire. We did some bouldering too, scrambling up and down precariously balanced rocks admist herds of goats, Indian tourists, and the occasional monkey.

On Saturday night, we had henna done on our hands by a sweet young woman. Her mother looked on, trying every few minutes to sell us some random trinket from her tiny shop. They were particularly fascinated by Cecilia's foot tattoo, and kept asking all kinds of questions about it, like whether it was done by a machine or hand. Then she got all excited and called the grandmother in, an elderly, toothless, wrinkled, but entirely gorgeous woman who had been sitting outside. The old woman was all smiles when she saw us, and showed us her arms, which were completely covered in the weaving dark lines of tattoos that looked about as old as she was. Using her daughter and granddaughter as translators, she described to us how she got the tattoos when she was 16, how they were done by hand (which I don't even want to imagine), and how she had a fever for a week afterward. The old woman's daughter pointed at her tattoos and the enormous gold rings dangling from both nostrils, and said, "these are the things the older generations did," chuckling to herself. They all seemed pretty fascinated by the thought of machine-made tattoos. It seems that their are infinite ways to express ourselves through cultural practices, and those ways will always seem strange to people separated by a whole world of languages, societies, environment and history.