VIET NAM 2009. HO CHI MINH CITY [SAIGON]

VIET NAM 2009. HO CHI MINH CITY [SAIGON]

All dressed up and going nowhere?

It’s understandable why Honda is the ubiquitous name for motorcycle. With a population of over 80 million, more than ten percent of the people ride the two-wheel transportation vehicle. There are 500,000 motorcycles in Hanoi alone, with double in Saigon and motorcycle usage is increasing annually, along with casualties at the rate of 300%.

I took these pictures from a bus and we were also going nowhere fast. I didn’t have to worry –we were on vacation. But what about the people who have to work for a living and rely on transportation to get there? Chaos can sometimes result, along with insane driving habits: riding on the wrong side of the road, making left turns from the right side of a lane, weaving, speeding, using high beams, inconsiderate passing and overloading. And the effect is a cacophonous, mind boggling, ear splitting medley of sounds that defy imagination.

Only 3% of riders use helmets, even though they are mandatory. Result? The most common accident fatality is due to a broken skull!

The Shoplifter

THE SHOPLIFTER

“I saw you,” the man shouted, and it seemed as if he didn’t care if the entire store or the whole world heard him. “You put the lipstick in your purse. I saw you.”

 “Not true,” the woman said.

She was blonde, perhaps forty, well dressed in a grey business suit, her five feet eight frame held erect, as if the man’s words were having no effect whatsoever on her.

“Yes,” he shouted again, “you did so, I saw you. And when you saw me, you put it back.”

“Not true,” she said, as the clerk placed her groceries in her recycled green bag.

The man seemed to be a far cry from what a store security guard should look like: he was dressed in a faded, tight fitting t-shirt, blue jeans, a cap pulled over his forehead, both the cap and the shirt with the insignia of the Toronto Blue Jays. His thick, black kinky hair showed through the side of the cap. No uniform for him: he was undercover.

“You are not welcomed back here in this store again,” he said.

His voice was raised even higher than before, as if he were an actor trying to project his speech on stage to the back of the theatre. He looked around, as if to ensure that his entire audience was paying attention. He seemed to be familiar with crescendos and diminutions.  

“Not true,” she said, continuing to avoid his gaze, focussing instead on the clerk packing her groceries in the second bag.

 “If you come back here, you will not be served,” the security man said, his voice now increasing evermore in intensity. “And if you’re caught shoplifting, you will be turned over to the police.”

“Not true,” she said.

The clerk had remained aloof to goings on and now she completed the transaction, pulled out the cash register slip and turned it over to the woman. The woman placed her two shopping bags in her cart and walked away.

The man watched her as she made her exit, then he turned away and headed to the office in the mezzanine.

“Not true,” the woman continued to mutter all the way to the exit.

The woman proceeded to the parking lot, opened the trunk with her remote control and placed her two bags inside. She reached into the trunk and pulled out a bag, taking it to the driver’s side of the car.

Inside the car, she pulled out a laptop from the bag and powered it. In a few seconds her computer screen came alive with icons. She clicked on a program and waited for it to populate. When it did, she started to enter information. Later she would transmit it to head office.

Under the field for Resolution, she entered: Test successfully completed. Store meets all requirements for security validation.

She pulled out her Blackberry, found the address for the next store and started her car.

Cambodia 2009: The Genocide Memorial

CAMBODIA: 2009. THE GENOCIDE MEMORIAL

Bizarre. Chilling. Macabre.

These are a few of the words to describe the Genocide Memorial in Cambodia. But as I stood there looking at it, I couldn’t help thinking that there are no words adequate enough to define one of the most horrendous and tragic events of the 20^th century.

1975 marked two momentous events for Cambodia.

The first was the end of their civil war.

The second was the coming to power of the victorious Khmer Rouge [Red Khmer]. Their leader was Pol Pot, an admirer of Maoist and Chinese communism and he set about to “reconstruct” Cambodia into an agrarian classless peasant society.

The Khmer Rouge forced the inhabitants of towns and cities into collective farms. They abolished civil and political rights, shut down factories, closed schools and universities, and banned music. Religion was forbidden; all leading Buddhist monks were killed and their temples destroyed. Children were taken from parents and placed in forced labour camps. It was possible to be executed simply for knowing a foreign language, wearing glasses, laughing or crying.

By the time the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by Vietnam and a peace agreement signed in 1991, nearly two million Cambodians had died from execution, disease, exhaustion or starvation. This amounted to about twenty percent of the entire population of Cambodia!

Mass graves discovered since 1995 reveal the extent of the genocide. Reconstructed bones and skulls have been preserved as a memorial of the dead in the Killing Fields where people were slaughtered mercilessly.

The exercise of power simply to prove that it exists or Man’s inhumanity to Man?

PS: In case you’re not impressed enough, there is a close up view of the memorial.


POSTSCRIPT 27 June 2011:
Having waited for three decades to see architects of the Genocide brought to justice, the people of Cambodia will finally see four surviving leaders go on trial in a UN backed court in Phnom Penh. 
One of the four is Khmer Rouge security chief Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch who ran the notorious S-21 prison where more than 14,000 adults and children were tortured and killed. Another is 84 year Nuon Chea, deputy to Pol Pot and known as Brother Number Two.
And the reason why it's taken so long to bring them to trial? Is it because the current Prime Minister is a former Khmer member? Or could it be that the country has acquired a case of collective amnesia?

, 

Georgetown Guyana -A Lovers' Tryst

GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

FEBRUARY 1992

I was on my way to the Airport to catch my plane, passing through Kitty, a suburb on the east end of Georgetown when my cousin, Rex pulled over to the side of the road. The entire trip had been like that: one long journey punctuated by frequent stops to refill the radiator that was leaking.

Rex pulled out the now familiar yellow plastic pail from the trunk and set off to fill it with water, but when I saw him duck into the Offtrack Betting Shop across the street I knew that it would be sometime before I saw him again.

I didn’t mind the wait. I was in no hurry –there were another twelve hours for the flight and my body clock had long since adjusted to the easy rhythm of the lifestyle in Guyana. I looked around and couldn’t help thinking that while I would be back in Toronto the next day, life in Guyana would go on as usual, the same as it had over the last two decades when I was away. The fat pig: his enormous pink bulk taking over half the width of the trench across from me would still be siphoning his way through the muck; the women standing on the parapet gossiping would find something else to talk about; the men sitting around the table on the shop-bridge playing dominoes would be back to finish the bottle of rum, or start another.

Suddenly, I noticed people running up the street, past the car. It was if they had just received a news flash that looters were emptying stores in the shopping area and they wanted part of the action. It alarmed me.

I turned to see where they were going. They were crowded around a woman outside a shack two house lots from where my car was parked and they all seemed to be caught up in the excitement as she repeatedly slammed a piece of lumber on the door of the shack. The piece of lumber was so large and unmanageable that she had to take hold of it several times to avoid it slipping from her grasp. But what really stood out was a red blotch at the back of her head: she was bleeding from a wound on the right side, the blood trickling down through her short, curly, black hair, settling on her shoulder. But she took no notice of it.

“Come out,” the woman shouted as she hit the door repeatedly. “T’ink yuh can bust mah head and get away wid it, nuh?”

At last, after several bangs on the door, it gave way. A man emerged from the shack. She went up to him, pushed him with a sharp slap to his chest, and then, started to dance around him, sparring like a boxer in a prizefight. She kept him at bay while she took shots at his face. Meanwhile, the crowd milled around, laughing and clapping: the females encouraging the woman to stand up for her rights and the males teasing the man, asking whether he was a man or a mouse to tekh all that beating from a woman.

I though the incident would work itself out and dismissed it. But, a roar from the crowd a few minutes later drew my attention back again. I turned just in time to see the man running towards my car. He was moving fast, his head tilted as he took huge gulps of air, like a long distance runner coming up to the home stretch and calling on all his reserves of energy. He was shirtless and his baggy pants flapped like sails on a boat hopelessly out of control as he passed by my window. Behind him came the woman, brandishing a small kitchen knife in her right hand.

The man was glancing behind him as he ran. When the woman’s pursuit stalled a few yards behind the car he stopped just in front of the hood and stood there, pacing back and forth, ready to take off in case she started again.

“T’ink yuh can bust mah head an get away wid it, nuh? I goin’ fix you up today, just wait and see,” she said. “I don’ mind going to jail for yuh, you know.” As she spoke, she waved the knife in the air and made upward stabbing motions, like a conductor waving a baton.

The man was standing there, his head twisted to the left, looking over his shoulder. He seemed to be trying to gauge the extent of a wound on his back –I could see blood trickling from a cut. He kept checking his wound and alternately taking glances at the woman, like a dog on the lookout for his owner who was seeking to punish him for some transgression.

The woman made several attempts to pursue the man but every time she did, he ran off. Then, she would stop and walk back to her position and he would return to his. They were like two prize boxers returning to their neutral corner after every round. Eventually, pride and the constant jeering from the crowd seemed to get the better of him and he picked up two small pieces of concrete from some construction debris at the side of the road. As he walked closer to her, she retreated and disappeared into the shack.

The man was now standing no more than two feet from me and was using the car as a shield. His face was pockmarked all over: on the cheeks, on his broad nose, as if he had never fully recovered from the pox when he was a child. And, he had one of those brutally short haircuts, the type given to inmates of a prison.

When the woman returned a few minutes later she still had the knife but she was now carrying a small saucepan in her right hand. The saucepan was black with soot and in the haze of the afternoon, vapor rose slowly from the inside.

They both approached my car from opposite directions.

“I gan cut yuh rass,” she said, waving both the saucepan and the knife at the same time. “Yuh t’ink I scare to go to jail for yuh, nuh? Wait an’ see.”

In the meantime, the man said nothing, had said nothing through the entire confrontation. Now, he merely weighed the missiles, tossing them up and down in his hands, sending a warning to her. He still took an occasional glance over his shoulder at his wound, as if he had to remind himself of the reason behind the standoff. But most of the time, he flipped those pieces of concrete around and sucked his thick bottom lip into his toothless mouth.

And there I was, sitting in the car, watching Toothless, watching the woman, watching them watch each other, and wondering what I should do. At any moment the action could begin but I couldn’t leave the car from the left door since I would be directly in his line of fire, and leaving from the right side would make me vulnerable to a steaming pot of the woman’s home-made brew.

Then, suddenly, the woman emptied the steaming broth into the gutter and made a hasty dash towards the shack. I wondered what had startled her, or was she going for more weapons?

In a few seconds, I saw the reason for her precipitous action.

As she ran away from the car, a man on a bicycle came up behind her, peddling furiously to catch her before she made it to the shack. The Cyclist caught up with her just outside the shack, jumped off and grabbed her around the waist. He was a big guy, with massive shoulders and long arms that reached out to wrestle the knife and the pot away from her.

“Come on wid me to the station,” the Cyclist said. “You people disturb the peace too many times. Dis nonsense mus’ stop.” And, he led her away, taking the evidence with him: the knife, which was now protruding from his back pocket, the pot in his right hand as he pushed the cycle by the handle.

The Cyclist and the woman passed Toothless. His missiles had been discarded. Now, he stood around, his hands swinging loosely as if he was just casually standing by the roadside, the way so many men in the tropics do in the middle of the afternoon.

The crowd followed closely behind the Cyclist, pleading with him to give the woman another chance, that they would keep an eye on her to ensure it did not happen again. After he’d travelled a hundred yards or so, the Cyclist relented, gave the knife and pot to someone in the crowd and rode off. The crowd clapped and cheered as the cop went on his way and then Toothless went up to the woman, held her around the waist and steered her towards the shack.

The crowd applauded as Toothless opened the door of the shack for the woman. It was as if the crowd had just witnessed yet another episode in an ongoing drama. And, the last thing I saw before the Toothless and the woman disappeared, was the great smack he placed on her lips and the wide smile of pleasure it brought to her face.

Rex finally returned to the car with his pail of water.

“What was all de commotion about? He said.

I sighed and said: “Nothing, just another lovers tryst.”

My Writing People Places Perspectives: QUEUES

My Writing People Places Perspectives: QUEUES: "As if there is not enough of a problem caused by British Rail on-again, off-again strike that has resulted in an unexpected crush of peop..."

London, England: QUEUES

As if there is not enough of a problem caused by British Rail on-again, off-again strike that has resulted in an unexpected crush of people in the Victoria terminus in London, I discover that the overnight coach to Penzance is two and a half hours late –something to do with battery trouble I’ve been told.

Somewhere deep down in my stomach, I can feel anxiety trying to raise its ugly head. What if, when they eventually get the coach going, it breaks down in the middle of nowhere. What if my contact at the other end did not receive my letter? I seek consolation by telling myself I am not the only one in this predicament and that tomorrow is the start of a weekend, so there’s no need to rush.  But first I have to go to the ticketing area, an enclosed room to the left where everyone seems to be heading. As I enter and see the enormous huddle of people, I take a few seconds to decide which queue to join. There are about ten lines, most of them stretched out of the building, losing semblance to a straight line somewhere beyond the rope guide that is about ten feet long. At the back of my mind is a notion of something I have read, about people’s propensity to gravitate towards the right whenever they join a queue. With this in mind, I join the one to the extreme left, the one furthest from the entrance to the terminus and I am pleased with myself, since this seems to be shortest one.

It’s a strange thing I have noticed about queues over the years; they can never quite retain the shape intended for them. Try as hard as they will, the people who contrive to keep control, whether by containing people in-between artificial barriers or by posting signs, can never manage to succeed, and before long order breaks down. Chaos can even result sometimes.  Perhaps it’s the natural inclination of the people far from the head of the line who lean to the right or left to see ahead, to determine why it is taking them so long to move up, and before long everyone has to lean further and further, breaking the natural rhythm of the line.

I am one of those people leaning to the left now, wondering why the only moving sensation I have experienced in the last five minutes is a shuffling over the same fifteen square inches or so of floor-space that my feet occupy. The guy ahead of me keeps looking at his watch, perhaps anxious that he might not make his coach; the lady behind is trying to calm her child who is fretting. I suspect, from the concerned looks on everyone’s face that they are all wondering, like me, why it is that the other queues are moving and ours is not. I am starting to doubt the wisdom of joining the shortest queue. I realize, too late, that it’s another strange thing about queues: the shortest one inevitably ends up taking the longest time; there’s simply a valid reason why people have been avoiding it in the first place.

There’s a commotion ahead, close to the wicket. A woman is demanding to see the supervisor who finally arrives only after she raises her voice several more octaves. She appears to have missed her coach and is trying to convert her ticket to another one which is now sold out. It means a three-hour wait for her. She is insistent that the supervisor do something about it and she is indignant that no one considers she is handicapped with a broken leg; and why is it that someone told me over the phone that there would be plenty of seats...and is it any wonder why this company is losing business to British Rail...

The supervisor has to be aware of the grumbling coming from our queue. Perhaps afraid of open revolt, he asks the lady to step aside and he leads her into the office to resolve the matter. The queue finally begins to move. I notice that the woman who joined the one to my right three minutes earlier, has already purchased her ticket.

Now that I have secured my ticket my fear of the unknown surfaces again and is about to reach paranoid proportions. Something tells me that I might end up boarding the wrong coach and find myself being let off in the middle of nowhere, or, if I am lucky enough to find the correct coach in all of the dozens departing for destinations all over the country, I might discover that there are not enough seats for all of the tickets sold. I check and recheck my ticket to confirm it’s the right time and correct destination, find my coach and decide to join my queue ahead of time. I discover I’m not alone in my obsession; the line is already twenty deep. Panic, it seems, is infectious.

From my position at the rear I can see what’s going on around me.

The people in my queue are all stationery: a man slumped over on his duffel bag on the ground; a woman’s face buried in an open magazine; a couple bracing each other for support. Not ten feet away from me, braced against the wall, is a Black man looking much older and worn for his number of years. A few minutes earlier, I had seen him rummaging through the garbage can where he had retrieved a foam cup and a cigarette butt. He sipped from the cup, tilting his head far back to drain its contents, and when he was satisfied that it was truly empty, he tossed it aside. He stood there, in white shoes now covered with a layer of grime and grease, his hair hanging in knotted curls right down to his long black coat, his beard disheveled and flecked with fluff. His entire body was suddenly wracked by an awful spasm, as if he had been bracing against a power line and had suddenly come into contact with it. And his eyes, I could not see his eyes –the eyeballs were both rolled back into their sockets, to the point where only the whites of his eyes showed.

In the other queues to the right and left of me there’s the usual shuffling of baggage as passengers move slowly to the coaches that are ready for boarding. To my right I notice a soldier with a large canvas bag on his back and he is three-passengers away from the head of the queue.  There is something incongruous about him. Not just the fact that he is East Indian, wearing a turban and standing out from the rest of the Anglo crowd; or that he has no ticket in hand like the rest of the people in the queue; or the way he is dressed: in ragged army fatigues, long sleeves shirt; a jacket with zippered pockets along the arms and chest; pants with folds frazzled and torn, heavy boots showing through the strips at the bottom. It is that as the line moves up closer and his turn comes up to board, he drops out and joins another queue a few feet away, as if someone had just whispered in his ear that he’s about to board the wrong coach. His posture is that of a soldier on parade, his shoulders held back, erect and stiff.  My curiosity intensifies when I notice that, as he reaches at the head of the next queue he again drops out and joins another.

By the time I finally start to move I have noticed that the Black man is rummaging through another garbage can and the Indian with the turban has repeated his exercise several times. It is my first experience with someone who joins queues for the love of it, and I marvel about how some habits seem to die hard in old military people.

At last I am aboard. I look at my watch and experience the impatience of those who are late, and having caught their train or coach, wonder why it’s taking so long to get going, blissfully ignorant or uncaring of those last minute passengers rushing to board. But it’s still fifteen minutes to go. Although I am entrenched in my seat, my baggage stowed safely on the rack on top, I am conscious that I am still clutching my ticket in my left hand, just in case. My breathing comes in quick gasps; I think that nothing is certain until the coach actually moves off.

There is a queue in the aisle and when it finally dwindles the coach fills up quickly. Couples pass me in my aisle seat, heading to the rear. A man comes in with his wife and small child dressed in a pink coat and they prepare to occupy the seats three rows up front. The child sees me looking at her and moves to snuggle next to her father while he is about to shove the baggage on the top, so he pushes the child aside roughly. She starts to cry. The mother has seen what he has done and calls the girl over to comfort her. The man and woman engage in a low-key conversation, the wife now looking irate, the man impassive, the child distraught. In the row across from me two teenage boys take up occupancy. They are carrying large backpacks. One of them pulls out a canister from his pack, takes off his shoes and proceeds to spray his dirty white socks, but not before the odour has wafted across to me. It is as if he has suddenly released a toxic fume that he’d been carrying around with him for a long time. I tell myself: it looks as if it is going to be that kind of a night.

And then an altercation breaks out up front.

The conductor refuses to allow the coach to depart. He appears to be invoking all the powers invested in him by the authorities, to deny passage to someone who is seated near the window in the fifth row, just where the shadow cast by the overhead light on the luggage rack, has left a pool of impenetrable darkness.

“You must leave the coach madam,” the conductor says firmly to the person.

“But why? I have a ticket, here is my ticket,” a female voice responds.

The conductor towers over the woman where she sits buried in her seat and he is silhouetted against the glare of the overhead light. Because of this she has to lean forward and tilt her head at an angle to look directly at him. This then creates a chain reaction since she wears glasses with an obvious bi-focal prescription, so now a hand and a head emerge from the shadow, the hand moving the glasses up and down.  It creates an eerie sensation, of seeing someone without a torso carry on a conversation.

“The coach will not depart until you get off, madam.”

I am amused he still address her in this fashion, but it seems so English: to keep it civil, perhaps right down to the end.

“But I am a passenger. I have my ticket like everyone else. I have a right to ride the coach.”

“I must insist that you leave madam.” This time he pronounces each word slowly, deliberately, with a slight trace of contempt creeping into his tone. “Or I will have to forcefully take you off.”

All the other passengers are looking on, some of them no doubt wondering, like me, whether this might prove yet another stumbling block and for heaven’s sake, what’s the big deal; why doesn’t he give the old lady a break?

The lady grows indignant over his attitude. “You can’t treat me like that. I have rights too. Why, you wouldn’t treat your dog the way you are handling me,” she cries out.

“My dog wouldn’t mess on the seat, madam.”

She ignores the remark. “How am I going to get home without the coach? Surely you can let me ride home, just this once?”

“The police said you cannot ride on National’s coaches madam. Leave or I’ll call the police.” The contempt in his voice has dissipated now; he is almost apologetic, but the damage has already been done. She says nothing, simply stands up, collects her several plastic bags, proceeds towards the exit up front, the ticket still protruding from the fingers of her left hand.

I don’t sit back until the coach pulls out and we’re several blocks away.

On The Streets Of Mumbai

ON THE STREETS OF MUMBAI

MUMBAI, INDIA: OCT 2010

Mumbai, India’s largest city, has a population of sixteen million people crowded into a 603 Square Kilometer area, making it the second most densely populated city in the world. Twenty three thousand people occupy a square kilometer. Compare it to Toronto with a population of two and a half million and a density of 793 people!

Mumbai, India’s richest city, called the City Of Dreams, also has close to one million homeless people. Thirty-five thousand of these are street children. This little girl in the picture is one of them.

I came across her early one morning as we were heading out to the airport and our car was stopped at an intersection. Families have lived for generations on the streets, establishing and colonizing their own section of the pavement where children are born and raised. With just the barest necessities of life most of them know no other existence. Pedophiles prey on the weaker ones and gangsters offer drugs to lure children to a life of begging. For them there is no Slum Dog Millionaire ending!

Time and again, I have revisited this picture and can’t help but wonder about the little girl’s circumstances. Is she doomed to the same less than marginal existence that her parents have survived on for years –a life of misery and deprivation? And yet, despite the missing front teeth, the dirty pants and shirt, I marvel at the quiet dignity that seems to pervade her features: She seems to be taking great pleasure from the simple act of washing her face that morning.