Rasika Mathur
NILAM Auntie breaks into any conversation with desi comic Rasika Mathur. Sometimes it’s in the form of a mischievous cackle; sometimes it’s in the ‘dearie’ tacked onto the end of a sentence; and sometimes it’s a facial expression that so transforms Mathur’s face that the watcher doesn’t even see the 30-year-old petite Indian-American in a T-shirt and khaki capris on the edge of her seat.
Belize is a land smooth and green, like a bedsheet tugged flat, with an embroidery of palm trees that only wrinkle and bump the landscape.
When confronted by great white sharks a few feet away from our boat, jaws dropped open and a collective “wow” swept the onlookers. We forgot everything we had seen in scary movies and on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and just stared.
One of the seven wonders of the modern world, the limestone structure that is the Kukulcán pyramid looms at the centre of the vast public ground in Chichén Itzá, the ancient Mayan city in the heartland of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Most rapids seemed to be named after people who had died or were rescued at the last minute from a terrible fate. Maybe someone long ago had thought that it would add to the thrill of rafting down the river, but to me it seemed rather depressing. I shivered in the sunlight.
“Cookies for the survivors!” yelled Nelson cheerfully as we climbed up a muddy slope made slippery by the driving tropical rain. It was not the right sentiment to warm the hearts of the dozen or so tourists about to voluntarily zip from treetop to treetop 400ft above the ground.
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