Our vacation south to the states of Goa and Kerala was a
welcome, two week escape from Delhi and the cold. These two weeks included both
Christmas and New Year, so from the first stages of planning we knew we were going
to have to do something awesome for New Year. Christmas is great, but it really
is a family holiday. New Year, however, is an awesome holiday to celebrate the
promise the future holds and that promising future can be enjoyed with friends,
family, strangers, or by yourself if that’s your jam. We had run through a few
different ideas of how we wanted to cross over into 2014, but the idea of
hiking to the highest peak in South India was quickly realized to be an
impossibility with just a quick internet search. Next was the thought that we
could spend the night on a houseboat on the backwaters of Kerala (Houseboat =
boat with a hotel room on it, Backwaters = an elaborate series of canals and
lakes spotted with islands which runs directly into the Ocean making much of it
brackish.) That became unfeasible because traveling south turned out to be more
difficult than we figured it would be so we wouldn’t make it to Alappuzha (one
of the centers for backwater tours) in time. Finally, after much painstaking research
(talking to someone at a tourist center), we decided that we would extend our
stay in the city of Kochin to include the 31st to the 1st.
This would mean returning to Kochin after just one night away in the beautiful,
mountainous region of Munnar. And why, pray tell, did we decide to do that?
Because, gentle reader, we wanted to see Santa burn.
At around 10:00 New Year’s Eve, after dinner, we hit the
street and headed down to the beach front. It was crowded, but not the busiest
I’d seen it even in the short time we had been there. We walked down the beach,
but the crowds of people seemed to be evenly split between walking towards and
away from where we believed the festivities were to be paramount. This seemed
odd as I figured this was really the big celebration in Kochin – the south
Indian Ball-Drop, if you will. Just as I was starting to consider turning us
around or asking directions, assuming I had misunderstood the instructions I
had gotten after our tickle massage (don’t wanna talk about it), Carrick
pointed ahead and off to one side and said “There.” That we had arrived was
evident by the large crowed gathering around a raised concrete area surrounded
by police with “Lathis” which are basically nightsticks only longer. On this
concrete platform, behind the police and busy with officials and drummers
entertaining the masses, was the reason everyone had gathered. In the center of
it all was a nearly thirty foot tall Santa Claus. He wasn’t dressed in the
traditional Red and White that we have come to know but rather a brown hat, a
greenish-brown corduroy jacket, and a cane in his hand.
As the time got closer
to midnight the officials started to stir and he was draped in a garland of
firecrackers. This most combustible of accessories was to be the ear-busting fuse
to start the effigy. Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve done my part to express how loud
and concussive the firecrackers here are, but just in case you’ve missed that
particular PSA, here it is again in summary: “Very.” So with that in mind when
I saw them wrapping Mr. Claus, or Christmas Papa as Wikipedia would have me
believe he is known in this region, in yards and yards of firecrackers, I
became a bit weary of how near we were standing. Which could be described as: “quite.”
The crowd filled in as time brought Santa closer and closer
to immolation. At one point a police (I finally got around to watching the
first season of The Wire) came over and recommended that Saadia, our female
travel cohort, coworker, and friend, move over to a different area. She
declined and the officer moved on. We later figured out that the officer had
been directing her to a women’s only area which had been boxed off with heavy metal barricades. It was
a good idea she didn’t accept this advice as what happened next actually managed
to bend and topple several of these dividers. Knowing Saadia she would have
been pressed right up against them, with her camera held high, only to get
excellent footage of her own tragic death.
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At ten seconds ‘til, someone struck
a flare. The fuse was lit moments after and then, rather unsurprisingly in retrospect,
the Christmas Papa ignited so quickly that it was really less of an effigy and
more of an anthropomorphic bomb. The people in the crowd in front of us pushed
back hard to escape the blast and intense heat. This created a human crush
which knocked Carrick and Saadia and many others lesser than myself down. I managed
to keep my feet, either through concert experience or dumb luck, and I and
everyone else who managed to stay upright began hauling people to their
feet. Once everyone was up I finally had the mind to look up and see what had
become of the old man.
This.
After the initial panic, everyone had started cheering,
yelling, and dancing. The drummers were pounding away and the atmosphere, not
the one filling with cubic kilometers of smoke but the figurative atmosphere,
was one of incredible mirth and camaraderie. The fact that people’s reaction to
the panic and push was to stop and help those who had fallen is really worth
noting. Not every crowd I’ve been in is like that, so when you see it you know
you’re in the right kind of place; a fact quickly juxtaposed by the place we ended
up about an hour later.
The flames and the crowd began to die down, so we decided to
head back towards our hotel but through the back streets so we could see the festivities as we went. Turns out that other than the beach
party there wasn’t a whole lot to see. Many families had created their own
normal sized Christmas Papa effigies to burn at home, but those had long since died out. We
decided on our way back to grab a beer before settling in for the night.
Carrick doesn’t drink, but Saadia and I both do. We swung by a restaurant or
two, but they weren’t serving alcohol for one reason or another. Finally we
found a place that had people in it drinking, but it had closed its gates for
the night. Saadia managed to talk our way in (Carrick and I assisting with what
he calls the “white pass”), assuring them that we would not order food. We got
our drinks and sat happily watching the waiting staff making use of the openness
of the restaurant and the fact that it was closed to dance and throw water on
each other. It was a wonderful scene, but all the while people had begun to
gather around the outside of the fence surrounding the seating area. The
growing crowd would come over and try to bum alcohol or cigarettes. Some just
stood and stared. Slowly the mirth died away as more and more of a mob started
to form outside. The final straw was when a number of drunks on the outside
broke one of the gates, which had been chained shut off, of its hinges. Much of
the outside crowd was run off by the employees, but that somehow led to an
internal conflict. It’s hard to say what happened, but it might have been
because one of the workers stopped another from going after the people who damaged
the gate. From here the tension grew, so Saadia (yet again demonstrating her
impressive abilities of persuasion) managed to convince them to give us a
second round for the road. There was a while before the crowd outside thinned enough and some of the tension subsided so that we could actually leave without (or with less) fear of being mobbed for attention or possibly violently. Finally we left and walked, quickly, across the gravel lot to our hotel.
It took me a few embarrassing minutes to manage to get my beer opened without a
bottle opener (the solution, turns out, was to give it to Saadia AKA the
problem solver), and I had just taking my first sip when more fighting broke
out in a small house next to where we were staying.
At first it just seemed to be a yelling match, which Carrick
and I watched closely, but the second a punch was thrown we ran down the stairs
(four flights) and onto the property of the kerfuffle. The violence of the
fight shocked us both. Two people were curled up on the ground with separate
groups surrounding them being kicked, stomped, and punched. We immediately
split up and each went to a group, pushing people off and dragging the downed
people to their feet. There were others in the group helping us to break it up,
and others still who were fully focused on trying to get Carrick and I to leave.
I went into pacification mode and tried to calmly direct the people who seemed
to be causing the most problem (either as the focus of much abuse or the
primary aggressors) to separate or just leave. It’s hard to do when you don’t
know what has happened or who belongs where. As the yelling continued I
realized that these were the same people from the restaurant. Apparently after
closing down, they had brought the fight to someone’s ridiculously nearby home
and continued it there. I was working with a group of other peace makers trying
to convince some he should just leave and “common dude let’s just get out of
here”, when I turned just in time to see Carrick, surprisingly deftly, sidestep
around someone who was going after a third party and put them in a triangle
choke (that’s a rear-naked choke in some circles (or octagons)). The guy didn’t
let up at Carrick’s restraint, continuing to thrash and swing at no one in
particular, so Carrick put some pressure on and dropped the guy in less than
two seconds. Carrick immediately let up the pressure, pulled the guy to his
feet (he only went limp for a moment) and then turned the figuratively punch
drunk, literally drunk attacker around and just walked him off the property. We
got involved in a few more little dust ups until enough people left or just
gave up that we were pretty sure the violence was over. One rather big guy with
no shirt got right in my face and started trying to scare me off the property. “This is not your business why don’t you just…” knots up his brow
looking for the English “…Fuck off…” there it is “…and go to your home.” I told
him that I just didn’t want anyone getting hurt and that if people started to
get hurt it becomes my business. He didn’t like that but I had already decided
to leave as it appeared to have calmed down. He was clearly challenging me, but
I wasn’t there to start more conflict I was trying to defuse it. He got to feel
like he won and I got to prevent yet another person from being badly beaten
that night. We moved to the sidelines and just kept an eye on the place to make
sure that the fighting was actually over. That was the end of the violence for
the night, unless you count what I was about to do to Michael Jackson.
As we headed back up stairs and were getting settle back
into our beer, a few others who were staying at the hotel came over to chat.
One of them said, rather out of the blue, that he really liked Michael Jackson.
Saadia, being a rather talented communicator, said quicker than I could recover
from the whiplash of the subject change, “can you moon walk?” He immediately
does the most spectacular moon walk I’ve ever seen in person. Turns out he is a
dancer. He then proceeds to show off his moves, then invite Saadia up to dance
with him, who then invites me up to dance with both of them (to take some of
the attention off of her as we had begun to form a crowd) and we end up dancing
for something over an hour (although I wasn’t dancing the whole time) playing
follow along to the guy who actually knows what he’s doing. At one point I
looked up from trying to follow along to see something like a dozen people
standing or sitting around watching (Carrick, standing on the sidelines, got a
count of 18 at its peak). I haven’t a clue where most of them came from. Now, there
are many things which are unsure in life, many things which wax and wane,
things which seem to be in a constant state of flux; I’m a terrible dancer. That’s
my pillar. Fortunately I’m a light-weight and two beers and some homemade wine
is enough to make me ignore that pillar and make an ass of myself in front of,
apparently, 18 strangers and Carrick with my camera. Oh god. Carrick had my camera…
After the dancing and Saadia’s photo shoot, which was every
single guy there wanting a picture with her including some following us back to
our room and knocking on the door, we finally got to bed. We slept hard.
Welcome to 2014. Let’s do this.
-Connor
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