It’s now 2009 and another year has past and the doors we had built last year are still not finish so back we go to India. Twenty two doors are a lot of work but not a whole year…? Okay so more money is needed and the work progresses. This time it’s Lydia that gets sick and for almost a week she’s laid up in bed at our friend Becky’s who is also sick. Now I’m not very good a hanging around and playing nurse so i’m off every day on my bicycle heading out the ECR (East Coast Road – the main road in this part of India) to wander the junk shops that line either side of the highway. If you’ve ever been in the traffic of India you’ll understand. Now put yourself on bicyle in this heat and chaos, bus horns blasting, cows crossing, it’s all happening. I love it.
First day out I arrive back at our place excited. “I’ve found the most amazing granite basin with Hindu deities carved on it, we gotta get a container to get it all home Lydia wait till you see it!” That same day I also had found a stone carver to make our fireplace surround. Neither of us spoke a common language but with the help of a a piece of chalk I could draw out roughly on the stone what I had in mind. Each day I would ride out and see the progress and with just the most rudimentary tools they would continue carving away the stone. A 20 ft. shipping container is large, 28 cu, ft. to be exact. We will now be needing one to get this all home, but how are we going to fill that much space? Well how about stone tiles for our floors? So it’s off to find a dealer and I end up procuring a whole ‘lorry’ full from the state of Andra Pradesh further north. An amazing deal till I find that they’re neither square or the same sizes but this won’t be known till they’re ready to be installed a year later by me. Lydia now feeling better, the two of us ride out to check on the fireplace and together we finalize the massive mantel to be. Returning we spy a pile of granite pillars stacked up in a field. With friendly fingers pointing us down the road till we arrive at the owners shop (Pradeep and his son Sandeep, soon to be friends). Nine more pillars acquired, I need to calculate how many cu. meters we now have with the container filling up. We’ll also need to arranged somehow to get everything we bought together.
With luck, our good friend Viknes has arranged a lorry with a crew of seven to pick it all up and deliver it to a friends where we can store it all before shipping. The basin’s first, none of us knowing it was to be so heavy. Next, the stone pillars out in the field. With no place to pull over we have to block one lane of traffic of a major two lane highway while ‘we’ attempt to carry the pillars to the truck. In India traffic chaos like this is accepted while in America this would never work. Once again they’re too heavy. With two teak poles and discarded bicycle tires found in the ditch, Indian ingenuity has managed to come up with a couple of slings with which to carry them. With them all aboard off we go, the traffic and excited bus drivers left behind.
Our arranged storage place we’re heading to turns out to be a private 68 acre estate on the Bay of Bengal owned by a Swiss baron. This being India we are rarely surprised but what an unlikely one this turns out to be.
Next day being our anniversary we were invited by the baron to spend a night at his beach house, a traditional wooden Kerala home set within this oasis of tranquility. What could be more romantic, our own private beach and such splendor except for the four servants sleeping outside each of our doors. We were well protected…
Months pass and the export papers, security filings, archeological review and fumigations are complete. The day finally comes to ‘stuff ‘ the container and now the monsoon season has also arrived. With the container stuffed and the lorry on it’s way only to get terribly stuck and close to tipping over with all the weight of the stone within. With his manicured estate a mess I believe we were ‘persona non gratis’ after this event. Or, maybe it was the large crane that had to be brought in to get the lorry unstuck that created even more havoc. We’ll never know as we were long at home by then. Sorry Bruno …
