12.21 licence to drive

streets in india are a mess: cars, trucks, motorcycles, autorickshaws, people, cows, goats, dogs, bicycles, and the excrement of all the above. there are lane dividers, but i am the only one who notices. i think the brits painted them when they were here! apart from the directional segregation, there appears to be zero organization to traffic.

sanjeev, our tour operator for the north, said this on our first day in the car. "there are three things you need on the road in india: 1- a good driver, 2- a good set of brakes, and 3- good luck".

nowhere was this more evident than on the night drive back to gandhidham from malia. our daredevil driver, ganga-rama, almost gave me a coronary. and i wasn't even in the front seat with him!

after a long visit with family, we piled into the car and ganga-rama set off for the 2 hour drive back to our hotel. full from a scrumptous dinner, i was nodding off in the back seat.

bad mistake!

i was woke up screaming a handful of times (i'm sure this is bad for my vision improvement, of which relaxation is a key requirement), mainly as ganga-rama swirved violently back into his directional lane - usually averting a head-on collision by an inch or two. the headlights and blaring horns of a couple of massive "tata" trucks barrelling past made my life flash before my eyes. i was grateful to be alive. it was during this drive that i wrote a text message to my sister, digitally declaring my last will and testament, of which she would be the sole beneficiary. i'm sure a text message will is not binding but hey, that's all i had!

12.21 pass the salt

today we visited my mom's family in malia (pronounced 'maariya'), gujarat.

the road here from gandhidham where we are staying is nothing like the road we took yesterday. it's very developed and industrialized, with a multitude of trucks carrying goods across the province.

i ask the driver to stop and back up the car for a photo. when i get out of the car, i am in front of a mountain of white powder (funny enough, there is a sign out front that says: "gujarat coke ltd". no, it's not cocaine. it looks like snow but it's not snow either. it's salt. mounds of refined salt that comes from the salt flats we pass a few kms ahead. this area is a shallow tide region. when the shallow tide comes in, miles and miles of salt water are trapped by manufactured square plots. over a few days, the salt dries in the sun and is scraped away to be refined, finally ending up on the tables people across the southern part of the province.

out from nowhere, we see a tribe of indian bedouins leading their brightly dressed and laden camels down the roadside. they actually construct entire beds on top of the camels, capable of carrying up to six people on a journey! unike other folks who don't like to have their picture shot, they smiled as i insisted we stop to take pictures.

the family visit was pretty cool. i got to meet my mom's cousin, akbar (better known as 'biku'), his sons and their families. the littlest one was his granddaughter, unika (pronounced 'ooneeka'), who i got to spend the day playing with before sitting down to a traditional dinner. funny, there was no salt shaker at the dinner table.

12.20 who's your daddy?

for the first time in india, i am sweaty.

we're driving through the countryside in my grandparents' home land of gujarat. it's a mix of semi-arid, semi-desert, semi-farmland. amid rocks and rolling hillsides of cacti, you suddenly find a tropical 'oasis' of date palms and small village enclaves.

in a moving car, you can always catch glimpses of women in beautiful traditional gujarati saris, carrying large pots of water on their heads . the local dresses are adorned in mirrors and bandhani patterns in the brightest of colours. the women inspired me: i had a couple of bandhani outfits made for myself!

we visited anjar, bhuj, nangalpur, sinongra and mandvi, the places where my dad's family are from. many of the buildings are new, having been rebuilt after the killer earthquake of 2001, in which a million buildings collapsed. about 20,000 people in the region died.

my great-grandmother grew up on a farm in nangalpur, before heading to anjar and catching a train to the sea-side for a boat that would transport her to a new life in africa. today, that farm is a jungle, sold to family friends long ago. in nangalpur, we visited a pristine kindergarten school across the street from the house my father's father built for his wife when they returned to india before he died. painted on the wall of a classrooms: "live as if you will die tomorrow, learn as if you will live forever".

while visiting with leaders of the mosque in nangalpur, my father was very careful not to divulge his identity. they were naturally curious why we would travel from canada to visit this 'remote' village with only 250 people in the community. my dad told them he was orphaned and grew up in a boarding school, not knowing his family. when asked, he said his name was abdul raheman kanji (instantly dubbing me salima abdul kanji!!!). though desperate to correct him and even more desperate to see the house next to the mosque, which i knew belonged to my grandfather, i knew my dad has important reasons for keeping us hush hush. i kept quiet. even though salima abdul kanji has a most terrible ring to it.

the day was topped off with a visit to the sea-side beach town of mandvi. it was here that i woke up a sleeping camel, snapped some shots of kids on the beach and bid the sun good night over it's watery bed. all in all, a good day - can't describe how it feels to know one's homeland. a good feeling, but no words can capture it.