A Northern French Week for a Southern French Indian
Cycling throughout Paris and making elderly friends in the northern countryside
The previous week was unique for me — I left the sunny south for the very first time since I have been here. I spent a week in one of the northernmost places in France, traversing the entirety of the country. My destination was a small town called Péronne in Picardy. I had to change trains in Lille, which was a source of anxiety for me a few days before my trip. That was also largely because I not only had to change trains but stations as well, in a matter of 45 minutes. I boarded my train from Marseille in the wee hours of a particularly cold day for the city at this time of the year. I had asked one of my friends if I could stay at his place the night before, since his place is much closer to the train station (as much as I like living isolated from civilisation, it is difficult to navigate the city from my place, especially when I take the decision to book train tickets at ungodly hours).
I was on the aisle seat, secretly wishing that the person who was assigned the window seat would not show up, so that I could scoot over. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. A middle-aged lady boarded the train at Avignon, kindly woke me up from the already weak slumber I had gone into, and asked me to give way to her for her window seat. Throughout the journey, I had to look over her shoulders to look outside the window, while she played Candy Crush on her iPad (I think it is a universal middle-aged lady thing to play Candy Crush everywhere: I saw three people do that and realised my mother does that too). From the little I saw through the window, I was fascinated by the changing landscapes from Provence to Picardy — dry Mediterranean phrygana, or as they say locally, garrigues, in the south to the oaky forests in the north, people with significantly different accents entering and exiting as I was getting closer to my destination. I asked the lady beside me where she was going, and she said Lille, so, grabbing the opportunity, I asked if she knew how I could change the train stations. Being the kind lady that she was, she said that she would show me the way once we de-board. I didn’t get the chance, evidently, to explore the city of Lille since I was pressed for time, I had to catch my second train to Péronne. That happened quickly, and my journey in the second train was just shy of a half-an-hour, which was convenient.
I waited a few minutes for Perrin, a friend with whom I had been practicing language exchange for 2 years at this point, but had never met — he speaks the best Hindi I have ever seen a French person speak, and I practiced my French with him. I started talking to him on Reddit during the latter half of 2020 when he was looking for a Hindi speaker and I, a French. I saw him turn the corner in about 2 minutes and I waved at him. He did not really need to recognise me since I was the only person outside the train station (something my Indian brain still cannot grasp).
I was in the Somme department of France, which is also the name of the river that flows through the region. I had only ever heard of Somme when I read about the Battle of Somme in the First World War (commonly known as the Great War in the area). On our way to his house, we stopped at an Indian cemetery which was constructed for all the Indian soldiers and labourers who had lost their lives in Somme during that battle. When reading about the First World War, especially the Indian experience, I have to admit, I get a little frustrated, because of how the sheer amount of support India gave to the war efforts is usually completely ignored in the common rhetoric. Entering that cemetery was bittersweet because on the one hand I was happy that these handful of Indians were acknowledged for what they did, but it also was sad thinking about how their families back home, who probably did not understand the War, had no clue as to what was going on at the time, would have no idea about what happened to them. I thought about the moments where I missed home, and I could just pick my phone up and call my mother. They didn't have the privilege to do that. Most of them were also perhaps illiterate and couldn't possibly send letters back home. Who could have imagined that there would be an Indian cemetery in one of the remotest parts of northern France — a place where people were staring at me because I was the only one there with a different skin colour, were kind enough to commemorate the martyrs of my country.
Perrin showed me around the region: different villages surrounding the Somme river, the ducks and the swans quacking as loudly as they could, the fishermen patiently waiting for their catch. I remember thinking, “this is what comes to our minds when we think of European countryside in India.” He made some rice and daal for me that afternoon, which I ate a lot of since I was hungry ever since I had left Marseille. I worked a little because I was officially doing my internship, so I had to somehow justify that. As the sun started setting, I started getting progressively tired: I succumbed to complacency and decided that my work was done for the day. We spent the evening talking about India, Hindi, Odia (my other native language), European colonisation in India and how that affected the linguistic landscape of the country as it is today.
I had to sleep, since I was already deprived of it with all the anxiety that travelling brings, but also because the next day was going to be an eventful one. The next day, I woke up and started catching up with all the work that I had missed, while Perrin went to his work. Later that afternoon, we took a carpool to Paris. This was my first time in Paris, even though I have been in France for about 7 months now. Paris and I have a weird relationship (because I am so self-centred that I have relationships with cities that I have never been to) — I wanted to go to Paris in December of last year during Christmas, I had taken train tickets and planned everything, when at the end of it, our Airbnb host cancelled on us. This time, one of my Parisian friends, Clémence, made sure that it does not happen again. She said that I could stay with her parents in Paris. So I was assured that I had a place to stay this time. And in any case, this was spring in Paris, which is objectively far superior to winter in Paris.
On reaching Paris, Perrin and I cycled through the city for a quick tour for the day. I remember seeing the Eiffel Tower from the rooftop of Galleries Lafayette and telling Perrin that I wasn't overwhelmed looking at it. He assured me that I will be once I go near it. As much as I hate being wrong, he was correct. We cycled through the banks of the Seine river to reach the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower, and it took my breath away. I finally understood the Parisian craze. We stopped at a store to buy red wine for Clémence’s parents, Adeline and Didier, since they were gracious enough to invite us to their home. Perrin chose the wine saying they will appreciate it. On reaching their home, they were very excited to welcome us. Clémence’s father offered me to taste the apple cider that was homemade by his own father. We had dinner at their place that night — they had made a Lebanese recipe of spaghetti with garlic yogurt. They also planned out our entire trip for the next day — Adeline checked online if there were free tickets for us while Didier was drawing out our routes on a map in his Paris tourist guide. After the plans were set, we knew that the next day was going to be long.
We started cycling at 8:30 am the next day, starting our trip from Sainte Chapelle, moving on to the Centre Pompidou in Beaubourg, through the Jewish quarters of Marais, where we got a sandwich for later when we might get hungry, the Place des Vosges, followed by the Royal Palace gardens, Musée d’Orsay and the Garden of Plants. By this time, we were walking zombies and had no energy left. We decided to sit it out finally at the Garden of Plants, where Perrin dosed off in a bench and I called my mother to show her the beautiful gardens. By 4pm, when we had mustered enough energy to get up, we met up with some other Parisian friends, Audrey and Soraya, who are interested in Indian culture and languages; Pablo, a Bolivian-French person who was another one of my language-exchange friends, and Léo, a friend of Perrin’s. That night we went to a shanty “Indian” restaurant for dinner. My already strong polarising opinions on Indian food in France were further strengthened here, when I found out that I wasn’t able to digest the food at all — the fatigue of cycling the entire day would make one think that I would be able to sleep very well, but the nausea cased from the terrible food that I had, meant that I was passing my night trying to puke but couldn’t while also trying to sleep but couldn’t.
This weekend was the Festival of Books in Paris, and this year, India was the visiting country. So of course, we had to go. The next day, we thus woke up, somehow, and gathered the courage to just go. It was also time to say goodbye to Didie and Adeline. We took the metro this time because I don’t think I would physically have been able to pedal, after the atrocities to my stomach from the previous evening and my behind from the previous day. In the Festival, I saw an entire rack that was dedicated to Odia books, which made me really happy. A language that is not really well-known even in India, was being recognised all the way in Paris! We met up with Shashank, a language-partner of Perrin’s who moved to Paris last year, around the same time I move to Marseille. Shashank gave us VIP passes to go to the first floor, with the magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower in front of us. After passing the better half of the morning in the Festival, we decided to go to the Arc de Triomphe, where we climbed to get our one last view of Paris from the top.
It was time to leave the noise of the city and go back to the northern countryside in Picardy. After an hour-long conversation with our carpool mate about the architecture in the north of France (and India), we arrived at Perrin’s place. Now it was time to rest — I had to take a vacation from my vacation in Paris. We made pav-bhaji for dinner, well in theory. Since we had no pav, we had to make do with rice. The remainder of my time in Picardy passed very calmly. Now that I was an experienced old-person befriend-er in the south, it was time to test my skills in the north.
I went to the museum of the War in the Château de Péronne, situated just beside the Cam lake. There was, quite literally, no one, in the museum. It was interesting to see pieces of wartime propaganda that I had seen in my history textbooks, be displayed in front of me. Outside, I sat beside the beautiful Cam lake where I found an old man ogling at me. I could tell he was hesitating to speak to me, since he had an awkward smile as he was staring at me, his mouth moving just enough to let me know he wanted to talk but was a little shy. I normally would never do this, but I wanted to talk to this old man, so I just said, “bonjour”, and words fell right out of his mouth. He asked me where I was from. I was a little wary since this is a very right-wing region of France, but this man seemed to be fine with a foreigner being in his region. He told me about the Indian cemetery that was outside the town and asked me if I had visited it, I said yes, and he seemed satisfied to know that. He asked me if I had come here looking for some ancestor of mine in the cemetery. While I wasn’t, who knows? There might have been someone close to our family who came, who found himself lost in this cold foreign land, where no one spoke his language, no one understood his history and his culture, where he was an “exotic” labourer whose fate ended in the eerie nights of 20th century France.
The next day, continuing with the ritual of booking cheap trains at ungodly hours, we woke up early in the morning, to see the sunrise from the Belvedere of Frise, another small village on the banks of Somme, before I left Perrin for Marseille.
I almost did not want to leave because doing that would mean that I would have no one to talk to at my place. I would have no one to share the old Odia songs that I have recently discovered, ironically, after I moved to France. And, alas, in no time, I was back in Provence where it was sunny and windy, it felt warm and welcoming — after all, I am one of the few people carrying the Provençal heritage by learning the local language. One can’t really complain.