I walked into Mahabalipuram through the tiny tourist area, up to the temple gate.
Many shops, restaurants, lodges, but few tourists. All peaceful and quiet, no vehicles on the lanes except for an occasional bicycle. The shops have granite carvings, and many things from elsewhere - mirror-work patchwork from Rajasthan. Clothing - cotton kurtas and drawstring pants, which only the foreigners will buy.
(We are always called 'foreigners' in English. Or, in local languages, 'white people.' There aren't many brown-skinned foreigners - I don't know how they're accounted for.) Foreigners in couples, always thin, tanned, with long hair, men and women. People who were called 'hippies' for years after they stopped calling themselves that. (The prosperous tourists come in busloads, stay overnight at a hotel just out of town, are taken around the monuments in an hour or two, and go away again.)
All the restaurants advertise fresh seafood: Windward Restaurant, Tom's Chai Temple (a tiny thatched hut), Sea Star Restaurant. Hot pancake breakfast. Live lobsters, tiger prawns.
Aside from some thatched huts with cement sit-outs, and casuarina poles for columns, I saw exactly one traditional house.
All others were concrete boxes. Perhaps this is good, a sign of prosperity - but the boxes were ugly, and looked hot. Men rolled up nylon fishing nets in the narrow lanes. Almost everyone seemed to be a fisherman, and the rest served the tourists.
Several Ayurvedic massage parlours - I hate to think what the quality would be, here! They have sprung up everywhere, spreading outward from Kerala like spores on the wind.
They're charging admission now, to see the Shore Temple. Indians, Rs. 10. Foreigners, Rs. 250! I hadn't brought any money with me, so I turned back through the same streets, then down to the beach and back to our hotel, walking on the sand. Tiny crabs scuttling up and down.
The romantic (i.e., tightly cropped) view of the beach.
What a working fisherman's beach really looks like -
with the two gopuras of the Shore Temple
in the background, to the right of the trees
The rest of the time we did nothing - gorged on pongal and sambar, and more sambar. Hoped for rain.
Hindi movie fight line (from Kaalia):
Hum tumhe fifty-fifty kar denge.
I'll make you fifty-fifty. (i.e., I'll cut you in half.)
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