Chai: Travel Poems, by Marc Nair feat. Neon & Wonder

Chai: Travel Poems

by Marc Nair feat. Neon & Wonder

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1.	Chai 01:52	lyrics	buy track
Chai I am drinking chai in the land of my fathers, steeped in the aroma of time and place. In this ritual of taste and thought I am stirred to the greater history of my own clan, frayed like a seam, split along the migrant edge of my heritage. Each sip of chai is a history of familiarity, a little nudge of rumor, a strain of beating music, a symbol of what I have never truly left behind. Returning home, armed with bags of tea distilled into promise, the chai never quite tastes the same. Maybe I never knew how much masala was needed, maybe I have forgotten it is not chai, but teh, here, maybe, this is simply where I stand, treading the lines between flight and longing. I am drinking chai in the land of my fathers, I am drinking chai in this land.
2.	Notions Of A Lone Backpacker 01:35	lyrics	buy track
Notions of a Lone Backpacker I wanted to find a postcard Bali, with untainted acres of padi, children chasing ducks across narrow mud banks. I saw myself stepping into light that lifted me through rice terraces twirling with parasols of saffron. Instead, I’m brought to a field framing villas of the Viceroy Hotel, where tourists wake on water-borne beds, having dreamt of rice stalks peeking between pillows. Outside, women with oiled hair pulled tight balance their baskets, winding through narrow streets with shops that pledge their future in culottes and tank tops. Once bare-breasted, they worked the fields, hip-slinging babies. Now, they haggle on sidewalks over factory-made bags. I never imagined I would be counting out the hours in bottles of Bintang, while the locals shade their eyes from the glare of sunsets, as children race after the old ice-cream truck when it clatters past the padi fields into the Viceroy, although it never once slows down for them.
3.	Buddha Next To 01:04	lyrics	buy track
Buddha Next to The gods of Gianyar line the road to Denpasar - Buddha next to Ganesh next to Rama next to Sita. Eyes downcast, motorbikes muddy their peace. Slowly crumbling in the sun, pollution and inflation fades the finer details of holiness. Often, the gods of Gianyar contemplate bar-codes hidden on the small of their backs. Could they desire to live, beyond the sun, rain, and bargain travellers? All things come through faith. Some gods will be taken and others will remain.
4.	Sapa & Dong Xuan Market 02:30	lyrics	buy track
Sapa Why is there so much beauty in the broken? One girl’s purity is another tourist token. Some men take the prettier as brides; the plainer ones, never to be married, are the hour-long stops on sex tours. Tradition opens like a purple orchid, keeps her tribal costume on and smiles, even when it hurts down there. In Hmong villages dogs are raised as pets, then are sold to be slaughtered. Dong Xuan Market Women weave baskets around themselves, spilling bamboo shoots into the narrow passage. They make me sit for a cup of tea, far too sweet. I smile at one who looks like my grandmother. A jack-knife, turned the wrong way, springs blood into the lines of my hand. It is good for opening letters, the peddler mimes, also skin, veins and boys dressed in black and leather anger. From the upper floors, fabric roars like a waterfall struck by rainbows, rivers of silk and linen spool from shrieks of children. I drape a cascade of purple around myself, pretend I am king of these colours. The opium pipe still tells a true story. Turning its ivory, I see ships crossing spice- laden oceans. But the ends are blocked. Dead - a weapon put to sleep.
5.	Phu Quoc Island 01:58	lyrics	buy track
Phu Quoc Island On the isle of fish sauce, motorbikes churn the roads. The sun brings a smile and sand-flies leave their calling cards. I climb a rocky outcrop and watch islanders strung together like Roman galleons, urging a beached boat off a sandbar. Behind me a monk plays on bells and flutes, a saffron soundtrack of clouds against the crowd billowing below, strewn like confetti. At dusk, the beach colours with locals surging into water fully clothed; falling up and down with the breaking waves. They wash away the dust of the day, needing the strength of an ocean to return to. They yell for me to join them, and it is difficult to say no. But my camera, my clothes, my heart are not waterproof. Too easy to drift with the tide, much more difficult to clamber back to the dying light on shore. Today, the electricity will be cut for 14 hours to save on the power bill. I eat dragonfruit and durian by candlelight, shower to the drone of insects and the sharp fish smell of the river, then take a walk in darkness for wanton soup. This may be the night when the stars are clear, skies are deep and God is close. The pavement is broken to gravel, but the children are still smiling as they shout from darkened doors.
6.	Love Graffiti at Catba Cave 01:05	lyrics	buy track
Love Graffiti in Catba Cave (Halong Bay) Only silence here, marked by trickling thoughts from stalactite and stalagmite, like a couple reaching for each other across the years. Outside, fishermen often return, empty, from casting their nets, at this World Heritage site. Fish do not pay admission charges, and locals don’t eat well from selling small kitchen magnets Inside, the guide rambles down dim passages, the walls scraped by lovers carving their presence; dates, hearts and arrows. Suddenly I wonder what would you say if I left our names behind, only an epitaph of this holiday, something permanent. Would you remember this moment with me, or forget the scratching, loveless cities of my hands?
7.	Night Bus 01:35	lyrics	buy track
Night Bus (Saigon to Rach Gia) Large trucks force us onto embankments. This road is too narrow for comfort. For a while, the Mekong runs alongside, another lane of quiet traffic. We pass ships moving silently upstream, pilot lights winking in assurance. Suddenly, the sky above clears, stars swing free, away from the blanket that is Saigon, that is every city, where too many lights stifle the cool breath of night. Sometimes I feel safer in darkness; perhaps this is the raw tension of faith. Then the bus rounds a bend, illuminating for a second a farmer cycling through the dark. We have blinded him - from everything he once saw so clearly.
8.	The Face of Mountains 03:10	lyrics	buy track
The Face of Mountains (Batad rice terraces) Old man, tamp your mud and cement into stone walls and pine for sons left for the city. Your forefathers carved a thousand years of crumbling steps. Now you are a few acres left behind on the face of this mountain. Sons come every six months in city shoes with wailing kids who skin their knees. The wives prefer the town’s one hotel. At night, the family listens to music drifting from the roof-top bar as older men ache in country and western for their lost village. Your sons will stop coming here when you die. Already, they have spoken of going to Boracay for a change. Rains wash away more terraces each year, for the land keeps its own season, and makes strangers of men who will never call it home.
9.	Carla Estella 02:11	lyrics	buy track
Carla Estella (YMCA, Baguio City) Carla Estella sits in Jorap’s laundry shop, piled with bricks of newly-pressed clothes. She writes a receipt for my muddy jeans and rankled socks and, as I leave, asks me quickly, where I am from, if I have time. My day waits patiently, so I sit, and we talk. Carla Estella from Zambales, a little nowhere further south, works twelve hours, seven days a week to save for college, dropping the dirty and picking up the clean. And in between is Carla, only seventeen, always ready with a smile, ‘But Sir, sometimes I just get so tired.’ I look around at these stacks of laundry that are her walls, wanting to find a way out for her; but I, who have been given everything, cannot even tell Carla that her heart is clean, washed with a simple wish. How honest am I to even think these thoughts? Carla Estella wants to be a teacher, and go back to Zambales to help her people with new ways forward. “All my life people tell me, ‘You’re so good, so kind, Carla Estella.’ Sir, please tell me, what is truly important – the tiredness of now or a hope for the future?” Night falls. Carla Estella rattles down the blinds. A van waits to take her back to a house, the one that she shares with strangers.
10.	Frenchman on the Road 02:08	lyrics	buy track
The Frenchman on the Road to Sagada Miguel leans across from me to photograph the woman with chickens in wire-mesh frames, grinning in the happiness that only comes from a man who lives outside of his cages. He has been travelling for seventeen months, having done what needed to be done in Paris: leaving houses for rent, a wife divorced, a daughter who feeds off her absent papa. While waiting at Bontoc for a jeepney, we talk in fractured English. He twists off the end of a long baguette, spreading pate with a penknife. “Look at me,” he says, “all my life is in my bag. If I stay, I stay; if I go, I go wherever the road calls, wherever I find a hot meal and a bed. This is enough, to make me happy. And you? What can you do, just for one day in Sagada?”
11.	Municipal Hall 01:47	lyrics	buy track
Municipal Hall After dinner, I trudge in darkness up the only road in Sagada. My dim-lit hostel is shuttered and locked. No one answers. The Baguio bus I’m booked on will leave at first light. And now the cold begins to whisper thoughts of rebel soldiers wandering through hills, looking for locked-out tourists to trap as trophies of their revolution. The only game in town is the Sagada Municipal Hall, where the door is a crack of light opening to wooden benches. Could I nap here, where tourists wait for day guides to lead them through the caves? Inside, low voices rumble. The police post is a hub of warmth and open faces. I explain myself. An officer follows me to the hotel. It’s a lost cause. Heaven recalled their angels early tonight. The wry policeman, who reminds me of a weathered gunslinger, offers his blanket and the meeting table in the middle of the municipal hall. It is all we have, he says. So I lie on this creaking table of heavy decisions where roads, houses and committees forged a village upon these hard mountains of the Cordillera. All around me, policemen fart and groan in their sleep, lying with no blankets on the floor, the cold a familial ache that has long settled in their bones. Morning. I sip hot tea with the chief. He hopes his children, sent to university in Baguio, have learned enough not to come back to Sagada, where only one road comes and goes.
12.	Jenny from Pagasinan 01:44	lyrics	buy track
Jenny at the KTV Lounge She works nights, off Del Pilar Street, dolling up songs and silk slit-dresses in the champagne room with its back-lit desires, where all the foreigners come. Two months. Manila is her stifling dress worn tight, cut too close to the skin. She hungers for the hallelujahs of wide fields and grandmother’s smile. On the farm in Pangasinan, Jenny the early bird once trudged to milk cows and collect eggs before school. Afterwards, in ballet class, she’d twirl away from her backwater barangay onto a larger stage. Her parents think she’s a salesgirl in Robinson’s, not leaning forward into the grasping hands of foreigners who squeeze their dollars between her thighs.
13.	During the Mid-Autumn Festival 02:27	lyrics	buy track
During the Mid-Autumn Festival The storm swept in from the ocean; no one raised a lantern high in warning. She can’t reach her sister, her daughter’s three. Enough rain fell in a half a day for a month flooding Manila, from rich suburbs to the walk-up apartment where she was raised, torrents sweeping the streets of ragged beggars. Watching this news in Puerto Princessa the calm stars hang on the trees of her city, but she feels a chill in her hands: her roofless family won’t sleep tonight. Here in the park, long lines of lanterns make light of the dark, children running under the new moon. Her youngest asks, “Mummy, why are there so little stars in the sky?” “Because we have put them inside our lanterns, dear.” “But Mummy, why is the sky turning red?” “ Because God is angry with someone tonight.” “Mummy, if I light my lantern with the stars, can all the drowning people swim to us?”
14.	Light, From Another Land 02:02	lyrics	buy track
Light, From Another Land I’m in the back of a cab on a Sunday morning. “Are you Indian?” the driver asks, ‘Punjabi? Tamil?’ It’s the same question I’ve been asked, over and over. Why do they always feel the need to name and place me? “Yes, I’m Indian; Malayalee,” and even though questions flood behind his eyes, he is silent. Then the music stops, and I see him slipping a CD labeled ‘Malayalee Songs’ into the player. I want to laugh and tell him, “I’m off to church,” but slowly, a raga builds, a veena road leading to my unvisited motherland. Kerala, why have I hidden from your rhythms beating songs into my bones? How could I deny your epics, unrolling swollen rivers through me, strange tongues speaking through the string and quiver that all this too is glory.
15.	Salt 'n' Pepper 02:12	lyrics	buy track
The Salt ‘n’ Pepper Restaurant (Fort Kochi, Kerala) Yessica sips masala chai at an outdoor table, trying not to smile at a Frenchman strumming Bob Marley for her. She just wants peace tonight, after travelling from Tamil Nadu. There, she slept on mats, shaping vowels for cleft-lip children, forming the sounds essential for them to live, in a country where disability can mean death. Rarely do these bright- eyed kids meet a foreigner, one who had to learn torrents of Tamil double-quick, often miming through conversations. It was salt and pepper for a while, a strangeness in the soul, but Yessica came to love the people, and the way they insisted she join them on Sundays singing hymns she has forgotten, their songs of redemption.
16.	Silver Bridges 01:57	lyrics	buy track
Silver Bridges 1 Tanvir, our guide to silver, slams bangles on the floor to show disparities in purity, the alloys ringing harsh and unmalleable. Father handworks catalogues of European silver motifs then fuses the West with sacred Eastern elephants wrapped in Sanskrit. Tanvir, a gemologist by training, bridges the raw sweat of stones and metals slaved from the earth under the loupe of his gaze. He lives a clean life with soft, musical sounds that ring frankly when thrown against the tea money underbelly of India. 2 During the summer, he will head to Kashmir. There, the border crossing guard posts are sold for lakhs to the highest bidder. Winning officers need no MBA to extort. The silver rupee alone is enough to graduate them from avarice to ambition. Tanvir will travel by train, crossing his home-town bridge engineered in 1865, when Englishmen first alloyed themselves to this land. Thousands still walk daily over the eroding bricks, singing out their faith with silver voices. In India, they believe, only God upholds the bridges.
17.	So, You Think You Can Be a Kathakali Dancer? 02:27	lyrics	buy track
So, You Think You Can Be a Kathakali Dancer? (Fort Kochi, Kerala) The original mimes, they drop worlds of meaning with each arched eyebrow; mudras of body rhyme with royal stories of devas and demons from the epics. If I stand against the hero, I must become Kathi, drawn like a knife, a chundappoo herb laid in the lower eye lid to turn it red, like how we leave a little hate in our spleen to sharpen anger. To win the princess, I must answer to Pacha, and paint my face green to proclaim nobility. My jealousy will be left in the courtyard of those suitors who can never crush the bearded rakshasas. Each emotion must be studied, syncopated to the slap and curl of each desiring arrow that speeds my dance, stamping on the shadows of demons, the chengila belling a constant worship call. Kathakali, you have no words at all; for words are faithful only to fallible makers. Your tales are told instead with the navarasas, the expressions, the nine – that make us human, that makes us dance.
18.	Punctum 00:25	lyrics	buy track
Punctum (Krishna’s temple, Hampi) The inner sanctum of Krishna’s temple, empty of his doe-eyed presence, has become a darkroom of belief; a place to change rolls of film and wait for faith to develop against the briefest exposure.
19.	Anjuna Market 02:33	lyrics	buy track
Anjuna Market I wait for Wednesdays, the carnival of a thousand beach stalls, strung up like uncountable lanterns on parade. Silk sarees and sun-print blankets become the backdrop for coin conjurers, as the mango-wood drummers beat down the pelts of their prices. Two Western girls, half-moon hippies, slip shiny pieces of Goa up each arm, snakes encircling their pale skins. Close by, a thin-voiced woman, trying to feed seven bare-bottomed children, sells me sandals a size too small. Sipping lassi at mid-day, I watch a prey of backpackers drift towards Tibetans who have spread bronze bodhisattvas on canvas. I too carry an amulet for my journey. The market kaleidoscope turns the colors in us. We are like those artisans under the palm trees who chisel elephants within elephants – infinity from a single block of sandstone.
20.	Inside The Chapel 01:15	lyrics	buy track
Inside the Chapel (Old Goa) On the threshold of St Catherine’s, a nun’s silhouette beckons me over a stone floor to the empty wooden cross. Here, in this unadorned life, no candles are lit in place of prayer, no frankincense can cloud a miracle. Sun spills through the open doorway, under the weathered eaves where I stand, lighting my feet before the way to the Maker. It is just enough to see, to find a place where I can kneel in thanks.
21.	Remains of a Kingdom 02:31	lyrics	buy track
Remains of the Kingdom In Hampi today, a record of names, travelers into time is left at the old tavern, now a police station. The bazaar is a languid warren of cafes. Bhang-soaked trance and mango lassi are sipped in equal parts by shaggy Israelis. The queen’s bathtub is vast as a field; outside is a picnic ground where children pick flowers and crows hide away their treasures. Across Tunghabadra River, the hard-eyed junkies trespass the tide, crossing in coracles to smoke their reasons away among the temples. The chai man squats besides the temple, high on Matanga Hill, waiting for breathless pilgrims who look for answers closer to the clouds Should I climb the rubble to the sunrise? A priest enters a ruined temple to pray, alone. Time is a broken bangle on a girl’s hand.
22.	Sonia Gandhi's Motorcade 01:45	lyrics	buy track
Sonia Gandhi’s Motorcade (Ernakulam, Kerala) Backwaters seem peaceful with splashes of children, yet bargemen pole hard against the murky bottom. Things are never on the surface, not like in the old tales. Kingdoms in peril were rescued by honourable acts of courage, swords and tricky warrior monkeys. The hammer and sickle now rule cottage industries, yet women spin coconut fibres like Mahabharata stories, twisting adventure and morals together. Across two rivers, the party line forms a barricade, arms raised to honour Sonia Gandhi’s waving hand. On one dollar a day, women trade strands of rope for rice and dahl to feed their families, caught in the spinning web of these backwaters.
23.	The Woodcutter 02:57	lyrics	buy track
The Woodcutter Moktar Hossan Mokhul Hassan Farazze. There is thunder in that name, rumbling down unpaved roads. When he failed provincial exams for college at 18, it rained all night in the village of his father, who left him an early inheritance: a plane ticket to Singapore. Moktar wears his safety helmet to pose for a picture, afraid the camera would betray his carelessness. He hefts the chainsaw like a gun. Bits of wood curl and spit from the screaming teeth, set on edge like an argument. Far away from the mountains of his village, he stands in a lesser forest, with no two hour naps after rice and dahl. The sun is distant, like everyone outside his rented room of dusky brothers. There is little here of home; no reed mat to sleep on, woken by an arthritic rooster at 4 a.m. He shudders with the saw’s recoil, as it bites the stump with something less than respect. Moktar believes this is the anger of cities, that machines are the colder face of our hearts. Back home, he used circular saws, two men pushing and pulling for hours with honest sweat. And after, he counts the age of each felled tree, each ring a mark of the years upon this eroding earth, waiting for death. His wife is heavy with their fourth, but money from one tree here is worth a hundred or more in Bangladesh. Strange how trees suffer the same fate as human labour. Moktar Hossan Mokhul Hassan Farazze lays his head on the still, warm road in the evening, dreams of cups of chai brought by houris with the faces of his God before the pick up truck from Soon Huat Landscaping Pte. Ltd returns, and he lays his saw to rest for the day.