Paris - City of Light, Love and Lust

The invigorating spring air caressed my sweating face and hands and expedited the cooling off process as I slowed down to a trot, then to a brisk walk. The morning jog  in the Bois de Boulogne had helped to clear the fuzziness in my head, always the result of long distance flights operating out of India at some ungodly hour when sanity screamed, "You should be sleeping!"

Family boating in the Bois de Boulogne

The morning light filtered through the oak, cedar and plane trees, casting nebulous shadows on the leaf litter carpeting the track I was walking on. A couple of pigeons and a finch caused a slight flutter in the otherwise quiet stillness. On an earlier occasion I had glimpsed a pheasant scurrying away at my approach as dusk was falling in the park.

Suddenly, I became aware of another human approaching from the two o'clock direction. He was male, obviously French, and looked to be in his mid fifties. I paused and said hello and we exchanged a few pleasantries, he in halting English. I would have loved to converse in French but my vocabulary was limited to Bonjour Monsieur and Merci. He began to walk with me, changing his original trajectory, and I sensed that he obviously loved to talk. My hopes of discussing art and literature and the works of Rousseau and Jean Paul Sartre were quickly dashed when he asked me what I did for  living. When I told him that I was a flight attendant with Air India, he nodded and wanted to know more about our lifestyle.

"So you have to be away from your wife or your girlfriend for extended periods of time?" he said after some time. I nodded.

He looked at me and then threw me this - "What do you do for sex?"

I had not expected this, so I was taken aback and paused to think of an appropriate response. His gaze was now rather more intense and a shiver ran down my spine which had nothing to do with the morning chill. I had to think quickly on my feet. "Excusez-moi," I said, "even as we speak, I have a nymphomaniac waiting impatiently for me! I gotta go dude, adieu!!" As I jogged away, I could see that he was a little nonplussed. I ran towards the light where the sun was just turning the blossoms on the bushes into a gorgeous turmeric yellow.

Spring blossoms in the Bois de Boulogne

The only other time I had an experience of a similar nature happened in Chicago. At the crack of dawn I went out of the hotel and was heading towards Michigan Avenue when two women, one black and one white, dressed in the skimpy garb of sex trade workers, yelled out to me from across the street : "Hey mister! Stop, we wanna talk to you!" I gave them a friendly wave as I began jogging. "Good morning ladies, have a nice day!" I said.

They giggled. "You've got a nice ass!" one of them shouted, "let's have coffee!" I thanked them for the compliment but politely declined their generous offer; I have never considered myself an Adonis, so I treated it as the good humoured banter that it was....perhaps business had been slack for the girls over the night and they needed comic relief to face the day.....Jogging has its perils!

When Paris became a layover station for the crew, everyone was very excited. It is always with keen anticipation that the crew welcomed new cities on their routes : Amsterdam, Cairo, Tehran, Mauritius, Harare, Montreal - these were names to conjure with, full of possibilities, art, history, adventure.

To be accommodated in a hotel within walking distance of the Eiffel Tower was a bonus; tourists paid huge amounts of money for the same privilege. One evening, while walking towards the tower, I stopped to chat with a man selling tourist souvenirs and Parisian bric a brac on the pavement. He looked of South Asian origin. On probing further, he turned out to be from the Punjab and he was in France without legal papers. He had made his way to Europe through illegal channels, landed in Italy, worked as a farmhand there for some time, before drifting north. I asked him if he ever had any problems with the authorities. "Yes, the police do come around sometimes and harass people like me," he said cheerfully, "but they are always willing to come to an understanding!" and he winked. I got the picture. I could see that he was an optimist and would go far in life. I thanked him for his time and bought a little plastic model of the Eiffel Tower made in China.

The Arc de Triomphe

View from the top of the Arc towards Montmarte and the Sacre Coeur Basilica

Sacre Coeur Basilica on Montmarte hill

Impromptu band plays on the steps of the Sacre Coeur....

.....while a mime artist stands up for Liberty!

The passengers who made up the bulk of the traffic on the Mumbai - Paris - New Jersey sector were an interesting mix of mostly Gujaratis heading out to the USA to manage and grow their businesses there and Tamils from Pondicherry ( an erstwhile French colony ). These fluent French speaking South Indians reminded me of a woman in a sari selling delicious pineapples on the flour - white sands of the beach at Trou-aux-Biches in Mauritius who spoke only French and Bhojpuri. I wondered how the French would go down in the states of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar where her ancestors obviously came from!

A working knowledge of French is decidedly an advantage when going around the City of Light. My friend Jayanti spoke the lingo fluently and this added a whole new level to the Parisian experience. The waiters in the cafes would have willingly jumped into a pit of vipers as she smiled at them with her big bright eyes and flashed her dark eyelashes at them while flattering them in French! Needless to say, we got away with tipping a tad less than the norm!

...and serene flows the Seine....

Wedding photos in a park in the City of Romance

Inside the Palace of Versailles

The splendour of the Palace of Versailles, the gems of art and the much touted Mona Lisa in the Louvre, the animated conversations in the cafes, the history and architecture so blatantly visible on the streets: yes, all this I can instantly recall in my mind's eye after all these years; but what I can never forget is a short layover in the summer of 2003 when France, indeed all of Europe, was engulfed in a heat wave. Walking the short distance from the hotel to a small eatery to buy my lunch, I was struck by how hot it was, the heat reflecting off the cobbled streets: I could have been in Delhi for all the difference the northern latitude made! I saw ambulances evacuating elderly people out of their Not Made for the Tropics apartments. An estimated 15,000 people succumbed to the heat - http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/majorhazards/activites/murcia_26-27oct2009/HeatWave2003_Lagadec2004.pdf

Sculpture on the Pantheon - like facade of the Church of Mary Magdalene

As I walked below the steel lattices of the Eiffel Tower I remembered a story I had read in the Reader's Digest about the con man Victor Lustig who succeeded in selling the structure for scrap twice! (For more info on this audacious hoax, read http://www.uselessinformation.org/lustig/index.html ).

Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde

Divine Transport or mobile art?

Cathedral of Notre Dame

Notwithstanding such bizarre incidents, for me France remains the cradle of democracy, where the fall of the Bastille heralded the French Revolution, ended hundreds of years of rule by monarchs and despots and gave us ordinary mortals a chance for liberty, equality and fraternity! C'est la vie!

Cheers!

....and you say Paris never sleeps?!