Framing

Kolkata, India and San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, USA

This blog was intended to be a holding place for a collection of writings about two years spent living and working in Hyderabad and Kolkata (and Delhi and…), India. It skips over most of the daily details, although some overview of those can be found in these types of posts – the pieces I posted here allowed me to hang some glittering words around an assortment of experiences that stretched my mind in every possible direction. As I tried to sum up my ‘learnings’ for a closing presentation to a community that raised me, these are the bullet points I came up with (and the details? those are in the blog posts):

• The mutability of language and the vagaries of communication
• Patience: total capacity vs. current reserve
• Resources and the impact of American consumption
• Comfort as a choice
• Experiencing otherness

Both years were spent with the same NGO, and with support from AJWS, but everything from the type of work to the type of office, from my room-mates to my dance classes, from the cuisine to the root of the language was radically different, in wonderful ways. I don’t have a review article for the whole experience, but below is a volunteer report, a short piece I was asked to write up by the office I worked with in Kolkata. Considering that I left from Kolkata, I think it’s an appropriate place to leave this archive – for now.

Volunteer Report for Sep 2008 – May 2009

I first met members of the NGO’s Kolkata office at the all-office Program Management Retreat, which was held at a small beach-side resort south of Chennai, Tamil Nadu in December 2007 – and I felt an instant companionship. There was something excitable, something subtly deviant, about the group that caught my attention, and from the World AIDS Day shirt to the gender-bending I knew that these were people I should get to know. As we discussed the inter-related but often competitive strategies of empowering women versus breaking down the idea of gender entirely in between sessions on grant writing and program management, my first impressions were confirmed: the Kolkata office had a lot to teach me.

Effective social change work requires a dynamic and inclusive ideas of community, and that is exactly what I found when I arrived in Kolkata, a city dedicated to the goddess in all her forms, and exported as the poverty-ridden once-shining center of the painstakingly dismantled British Raj. I came looking for intellectuals, artists, communists, queers – and found all that and more, in abundance (if there is anything that India does not lack, it is abundance). As I started moving around Kolkata, meeting different circles of people, both through work and through friends, I was amazed at the strength of the influence that the office, and especially it’s director, have had on the queer and AIDS activist communities – everyone linked in to those circles knew of the director and the office’s work, and felt that it had been influential in encouraging them to pursue their interests and to seek answers to difficult questions.

My main work in the Kolkata office was technically based outside of it – helping to organize and expand the NGO’s national and regional advocacy work with a focus on women’s empowerment and access to resources – but this work fused naturally with learning about and assisting with the office’s emerging advocacy projects, as well as the community events and resources that it has become known for in Kolkata, from the Pride march to the film festival to the resource library. I got to know other projects within the office as I helped individuals with project planning and document preparation, and was lucky enough to visit a major partner in Orissa while assisting them with grant writing. Although I traveled frequently, especially during the second half of the year, Kolkata remained my home.

One of the highlights of my year was the Jewish festival of lights, Chanukah; with another volunteer, I was able to host a gathering for the office in my home, and after many months of learning about Bengali culture, food, and traditions, had the opportunity to share some of the traditions that I had grown up with (not to mention fried potatoes, which seem to be a fairly universal dish). From sharing lunches to late-night abstract editing to celebrating holidays, marches, and successful events together, my time in the Kolkata office was both a precious opportunity to learn and to give, and great reminder of the power of community in the face of adversity.

The Book List, Part III

December 2008 – May 2009

Recreational:

Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins is my favorite source of absurdity in a country – not to mention a world – that has a sometimes surprisingly deep and abiding love for boxes. I was skeptical when I was given this book as an apology, and I waited a long time to read it – until the American thanksgiving crossed over the end of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. It became my first auto-rickshaw reading, balanced on the edge of the bench next to the driver and immediately behind the exhaust pipe of a bus, against the edge of a bag pressed against my chest – which is, in a sense, exactly where Robbins belongs. This was not my favorite of his, but it was magical and familiar and twisted and enlightened, and that was enough.

A Backward Place, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
It is stunning, and humbling, and in the end not at all surprising, how little the expat experience, let alone ‘scene,’ has changed in India over the last fifty years – an insightful sliver of individual ambitions and reformed identities in a world where everyone seems to be living out of context.

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
A classic, which I have very little right to review here. I found it contained a lot of wisdom, many forms of which had passed through my mind at various points, but rarely with Hesse’s elegant poise.

The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh
This made an excellent commuting book, as large sections of it took place in and around Gol Park, which I passed every day on the way to and from work. Although it is not considered one of Ghosh’s best books, it provides a quietly powerful analysis of fantasy and of lives built between worlds.

The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple
Somewhere between feeling guilty of being an escapist reader and wanting to both judge and improve my own writing about India, I decided it was imperative that I read this book. Written as Dalrymple was converting from a travel writer to a historian, these brief and brightly colored essays on travels through India are at turns disgusted, amorous, and incredulous – but my favorite thing about them is that they lay out contrasts, and rather than spelling out the difference, allow you to make your own judgments about the serious spectacle of life in and around the country.

The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen (second half)
As carefully written, and as equally dry and brilliant, as the first half – very academic, but definitively worth reading.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
The winner of the 2008 Booker prize, I read a very Indian counterfeit copy of this book (probably wrapped in cellophane and sold by a boy at a traffic light or an illiterate man in stack of books on the sidewalk – but I borrowed it from a friend, so I wouldn’t know the details), and enjoyed the rush of the story and the knowing details. I’m far from convinced of its enduring brilliance, but I do think that it provides a valuable portrait of one more mustachioed entrepreneur.

Theoretical:

Same-Sex Love in India, Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai
This revered book presents a thorough review of the depiction of various forms of same-sex love in Indian writing from ancient to modern times, accompanied by detailed and insightful essays on the patterns, pressures, and paradigms that the authors have identified in the texts.

Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Geetanjali Misra and Radhika Chandiramani
The title says it all.

Current:

Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond, Pankaj Mishra
The introductory essay is tantalizing, and although the main sections of the book seem to be less personal (I got about halfway through the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, for the umpteenth but still relevant time), Mishra seems to be an author to keep an eye out for.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Around page 130, I realized that this book was about (among other, both larger and smaller, things) World War II, and was ready to start reading it. I’ll report back in another seven hundred pages.

Aila

May 25, 2009
A slum in Howrah, and an upscale neighborhood in south Kolkata, West Bengal

I was holding her and the world was revving up, bare bottom against impending rain, tiny legs and withered feet nearby, upset trees pushing walls and pulling concrete sidewalks, fast enough to pass easily to the other side, bright orange sindoor streaked through oiled black hair and false pairings so that at nineteen or maybe at sixteen with some years tacked on she looked like a painting of the immaculate conception – because some days you don’t want to think about the other way – soft cloth draped around wide eyes and quietly pursed lips, a smooth forehead given over to lack of choice catching the pot before it boils over and bending easily so that wading through plastic bags locked through sandal straps and half-submerged dogs seem like small annoyances, a privileged taste of daily discomfort to chastise human adaptability.

We talked about automatic car washes the sound of rotating whipping strands hitting heavy glass with a soapy thud in monstrous rollers slapping up and down and around the perfectly sealed bubble so that even the slightest leak would cause a gasp of surprise but the whittled bits of water flying sideways through the mostly-rolled up windows and gathering on the rotting rubber door seals caused only enough worry to move the electronics to a different lap while the wheels bumped up the curb and carried us down the sidewalk, around the improvised road black through patches of eye-induced sunshine bright enough to illuminate the slowly changing scenery of endless traffic jams, buses stuck near the top of horizontal trees and small white sedans pulling back branches to slap the next kid in line with a wet green surprise.

Under an easy stream of hot water, through yellowed glass and maybe a metal grate or over a low concrete wall, I could see the palms bending backwards over the railway tracks, silently swirling wide skirts, just on time for their date with the nearest edges of the city – it was a flying ceramic roof tile that had sent us scampering in the first place, umbrellas bending into angry upside-down spiders and black tarps snapping against twine leashes as we scurried between doorways and submerged drains, down six-inch alleyways, towards infrastructure less prone to unintentional scattering so that now, roof tiles three floors above me and walls thick enough to block electric signals, windows double-barred, beds made with space to spare, where generations are three decades apart and babies given five times their weight in antibacterial plastic playthings, the storm seemed safely tucked away in bed long before I set out through freshly swept streets in search of dinner.

At the end of the story – weeks later, ensconced in heat rashes and air conditioning – the communists drove up, white hammers crossing nicely curved sickles on red flags flapping a low flat-bed truck draped in donated clothes forward, an old man seated like a sometime king in the center, looking nonplussed and oddly out of place as younger men scurried to doors and stores with canisters and requests for change – anything to help the victims, baby food for the little ones in the sunderbands, stacks of mismatched scarves flowing over strong city worker arms so I scurried off down the street, calling for the bill, bag of bulging chiffon and cotton on the way back, momentarily not minding the sweat pouring easily through every pore in a single-minded mini-quest to feel less guilty about the piles I was leaving, to align some abstract goal with the current exit plan in the hope of being a responsible guest ready to slip out the side door through one more massive city-side traffic jam, one more dinner, two more lunches plus a handful of airport meals, through re-immersion movies and back to the far side of the storm.

[This was written on June 14, a day and a half before leaving Kolkata, and posted from the US]

The Great American-Bengali Passover Seder

April 8-16, 2009
A Journey

1: At large
I had only eaten rice-based foods that day – idly for breakfast, and an extensive south Indian thali (rice, rice, dal, vegetables, and curd rice) for lunch – so I decided to put off Passover by one sundown in order to mark it better. My last supper was kebabs, parathas, and curries served aboard an imaginary train on the top floor of a freakishly slick Hyderabadi mall.

This was my second Passover in the City of the Nizams, and it passed as easily as the year before – the restriction on eating leavened bread hardly noticeable save a few moments in airports, where I had to walk a few steps past the coffee shop to find a masala dosa for breakfast.

2: In miniature
I arrived in Chennai on what was officially the second night of the holiday, and celebrated on what was unofficially my second night of observation.

Two of my co-workers insisted, almost, on helping me, sharing something. I heard myself warning them, repeatedly, of the length of even a shortened version of the Passover seder, saw the three of us, home-brewed wine drops spilled to the count of ten and the sweet and the bitter combined, sleepily searching for dinner in the last canteen left open. But the re-telling – that I did first, coherently for a deconstructed fable of imagining a homeland, followed by an incantation to equality in freedom.

3: Just right
I landed in a headlong rush home, slouching in the back bench of the flaking yellow taxi, calling and texting, arranging food contributions and personal absences. Once inside, I gleefully flung off the rubble I’d collected through the past two weeks of travel, throwing sweaty salwars, a slightly mildewed toothbrush, emptied bottles of shampoo and lotion off to their respective corners, flipping switches and re-arranging until I had completely arrived. It is important, when preparing to celebrate a holiday about exile from slavery towards freedom, when in the fourth quarter of a life built in a foreign land, and just returning from an excursion to sites marked with first footsteps and bloodied knees and dance floor histrionics, to have arrived before getting ready to leave again.

I gathered the recipe and washed the lentils and turned on the stove. I begged the gardener to find me a new can of gas, and waited on the doorstep for as long as it took me to realize it would not be long enough. I rinsed off the remaining airport grime, and, large metal pots bulging from a creaking woven bag, threw my arrival to the dirty, humid Kolkata wind, and caught an auto-rickshaw to a friend’s house.

We cooked, and listened to good bad music (this is required for long spells of cooking), and vaguely discussed what we were going to do with fifteen people who had no idea what was going on. The fifteen people – five less than we had guessed, but just the right number to fit in a circle of chairs and bed and floor, mostly Christian, Hindu, and various identifies between there and determinedly atheist – arrived, with wine, and sweets, and quiet chatter. We followed an order – which is, after all, what seder means – and interrupted it consistently with our own deviations.

There were four Jews, and thus four opinions – but we agreed on ‘Go-down Moses,’ and although we started on the far side of off-key, and the rising chorus lit up the evening. By the time the meal had finished, the room was half asleep, and the weight of travel, the release of the determined burst of energy that had taken me through the holiday caught me up and carried me home. The next day was the Bengali New Year, and I spent the day inside, cradling my queen-size two-inch foam mattress and meditating on the dirty but elegant lace curtains that separated my known and daily re-created world from the adventures on the other side.

Five Photos, Take Two

March 30th - April 14th, 2009
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and Chennai, Tamil Nadu

In February 2008, I spent a week working from the Chennai office of my NGO, and wrote about the trip in the form of five ‘photographs’ – below are five moments captured in the same spirit, from a trip I took to work in the southern offices of the same NGO during April 2009.

1. Home, again.
‘My girlfriend says that I can be a chauvinist pig sometimes.’ This was the first thing I heard about Deepthi. A year and a half later, after a plane flight and a twelve-hour work day, I stumbled in to the home she was building with her new fiancé. The basic structure is classic upper middle class Indian – smooth plaster walls, stone floor, high ceilings, windows leading to balconies, built-in bedroom cabinets, a two-burner gas stove and industrial sized bottles of filtered water in the kitchen. Wicker furniture – holding books, ashtrays, wine bottles filled with filtered water – was spread around the room, accented with beds-as-couches and bright, thickly woven cotton drapes. The place felt like a canvas, one that had been stretched and prepped, where the sketches had been drawn but the colors were just being added.

2. Excess
I was giddy all the way home from work, lifted automatically to my toes as I poured a bucket of cool water over my head, giggled and fidgeted my way in to make-up and tight black clothes with a friend. I ignored the empty expanses we passed on the way to the club, and tried to let the grotesque concrete skeletons of half-completed office parks and walled apartment complexes flick quickly by on the edge of my vision. Excess, the momentary hotspot of the mercurial and yet numbingly consistent Hyderabadi nightlife, was inside a hotel that I’d heard about from wealthy friends who used to brunch there, swim there – past the edge of the city, where even a hint of metropolitan poverty, of congestion or the unmet needs of millions, could not disturb the full first-world fantasy. The club itself came in two layers, with stylized dens for lounging, and a porch from which to view the miles of surrounding construction while leaning on glass tables with white podiums lit from below.

3. Planes
I’ve always felt at home on an airplane, suspended in between, scanned for intentions, packaged for delivery – I pick up when I walk through the door, tugging or shouldering my pile of clothes a little closer, standing up, stepping briskly ahead. I enjoy flying in India for the air-conditioned luxury it affords, and for the higher standards of customer service, in that sickeningly entitled American sense of expecting to be seen as an individual and valuable consumer. I read somewhere that the Indian skies are filled with more private than commercial jets – I’m not sure if that is still true, but the culture of the skies is both elite and quickly changing. The air hostess on my first flight to India wore a saree; every air hostess I’ve encountered since has worn a tight, short skirt or hip-hugging pants, with matching eye shadow and lipstick. The airports – which mostly seem to have been built in the seventies, all square concrete and fluorescents, with some strange angles serving as decoration – are quickly being renovated into glass-wave-topped steel-gridded shimmering temples set outside the cities they service. At the Hyderabad airport, I had a dosa and a giant cup of steamed chai, both at easily ten times the street price, and at the other end, in Chennai, the steamy air of the waterfront city hit me as soon as I stepped out of the cabin and on to the royal rolling steps descending from the side of the plane.

4. Konchipuram: Blessings from Ganesha
His skin was soft and warm against my hand, fuzzy and wrinkled. I set the coin on top of the previous child’s donation, and ducked down; he dutifully lifted his trunk, and placed it lightly on the crown of my head. It was over quickly, and as he dropped the two coins in a waiting priest’s lap, we stepped out and back into the milling crowds of temple goers. The architecture, now familiar, of layers of gods and demons scrambling in extensive detail up semi-pyramidal roofs, of compounds and sanctums and footpaths for clockwise circumambulation, was augmented with hundreds of offerings, crimson threads and soft pink lotus flowers, strings of jasmine and votive candles flickering in the heat of summer. The colors were peeling, and we all agreed that we liked the plain stone better, in any case, that it communicated something calmer, internal, familiar.

5. Amethyst
We were arguing with the auto driver – a common occupation in Chennai, and one of my least favorite things about this particularly flat, humid, and centerless city – when we finally pulled off the right road, and in to paradise. Stone basins of water lilies linked the curving path to our right, and white lights, small strings of them and sweet muslin-shaded living room lamps glinted from the trees and railings ahead. The entrance to Amethyst is the portico of a mansion, and the room immediately inside is tiled in black and white, with ceilings at least twenty feet high and a sweeping staircase leading away. The room is open, with grass screens rolled at the top of doorways and sweeping fans hanging with comforting regularity from the ceiling; tables spill from it into the garden, and diners lean in, over western delicacies, flaky pastries, fresh salads. There are days when the famed food of south India – fermented rice and lentil flour steamed, pan-fried, deep-fried, half-fried, stewed (idly, dosa, vada, uttapam, upma) – seems heaven-sent… and then there are days when I dream of returning to Amethyst.

To Be Rendered Invisible

Poverty, Dance, and Private/Public Space
Kolkata, West Bengal, India

I.
The first thing you see in Calcutta is all the extra people. The metropolitan area is saturated, and our neighborhood has the same population as my flat-mate’s native country.* Poverty in Calcutta is not relegated solely to some overflowing, putrid slum, where life is lived in super-saturated color and overwhelming stench and the chickens waddle in open sewers, past the pattering feet of kids (the goat variety as well as the human). Poverty is camped out on the sidewalk – street children, encased in a permanent grease-paint smear and oversized cotton shifts, sleep in front of the glass-case windows of the cafes, and whole semi-permanent colonies are erected, tents with wooden poles and sleeping mats and charcoal stoves boiling with sambar in the permanently thick, dusky evening light.

The first thing you learn to do in Calcutta is to render the extra people invisible. To see every detail – to acknowledge the sludge you are breathing and the sleeping family you’re stepping around on the way home from dinner, the young men gathered on corners in loose white tanks and acid-stained jeans chattering and staring, the old men in lungis lounging, the women sweeping the gutters as you step out of the auto on the way to work – is to live in a constant state of complete overwhelm. To see the details behind the sidewalk melee – the colonial buildings, the balustrades, the peeling walls in a million colors (some mold, some paint), the cross-legged vendor in his shop and the marble dais separating a department store from the street – you have to see past an initial, incredibly personal level, past private lives being lived in a public space; you have to see through people’s lives and out the other side, as if the people living them weren’t there.

This is an incredibly disturbing exercise. It is dehumanizing – an act of erasing – and in the process you often learn how to erase yourself, how to fade to the background as much as your own appearance will allow (and, admittedly, my appearance doesn’t allow much).

II.
Staring is accorded a different status in India. It may be a reflection of the high value placed on separation between public and private combined with the utter lack of just that, or it may come from a basic difference in the concept of an individual… but people stare, unabashedly and calmly, and often without comment, with a similar quizzical-less look at things both familiar and strange. As the world around me stares, I’ve started to stare back, mirroring the blankly curious looks in a profoundly unconscious and disturbing way.

III.
There’s a moment when the angle of your shoulder blades align, a moment when you’re lifted unexpectedly and smoothly, when the weight of your entire body is transferred in an instant – and you trade. There’s a moment when I can speak easily, despite a lack of common languages, when hands will follow mine on the floor, when we can color one another in. After all the erasing, the disappearing, the fading – the honest attempts to render myself invisible to escape the wondrous stares and to render the others invisible to escape the horror of comparing the resources used to create my comforts with their concrete mattresses – that moment of recognition, a moment on a roof-top dance studio under metal and thatch and hanging Rajasthani lanterns, under a moon and a breeze and beside tree-tops, re-creates the recently transparent surfaces, outlines bodies and then promptly colors outside the lines.

In a country where public touch is strictly of the same-sex variety, watching a pile of black spandex move feels radical in and of itself. To be part of the pile, exposed and entirely protected from the eyes that come later on the bus and in the flood-lit late-night streets, is sublimely liberating – liberating enough to create an internal peace which, mixed with equal parts exhaustion and hunger, floats me through those empty roads, rocking wildly against muted strangers in a steel auto-rickshaw, back-bone pattering against the wooden rails of an ancient bus bench, feet stumbling over the sleeping children on the corner outside my house. It is enough to float me home to the calm sea-green light of my porch, to the high ceilings and rocking fans of my own museum, where invisibility and want can be left at the doorstep, where outlines can be created and colored outside of and details can be put on display for discussion over dinner.

*The approximate population of both Ballygunge and Panama is 3 million.

13 things to do while visiting ancient ruins

March 1-5, 2009
Aurangabad, Ellora, & Ajanta, Maharashtra

I’ve been visiting a lot of gorgeous, ancient pieces of stone lately, and decided to compile a list of things to do while visiting ruins.

1. Imagine what you would look like carved in stone.
2. Listen in on other people’s guided tours (look casually in another direction).
3. Pretend you’re not dehumanizing the vendors by completely ignoring their existence. Ignore their existence (or be followed, it’s a personal choice).
4. Accept requests to be in photographs with women, small children, and families. If, in the process, a woman hands you her baby / baby sister, take the child, coo, pose, and return. Politely decline requests to be in photos with young men, especially those trying to take your photo with a camera phone while you’re not looking.
5. Experiment with ways to use a scarf / dupatta / handkerchief / spare map to keep the sun out of your eyes. Alternatively, experiment with the speed with which your eyes can adjust to sudden darkness by counting the seconds before you can pick out details on the back wall of the cave/palace/temple.
6. Design your ideal lunch menu. Adjust for local options. Procure, consume, enjoy.
7. Process all those situations in which you never quite figured out what happened / what she meant / where he went / why you reacted that way. Process whether the person(s) in question really need to know your new analysis of the situation.
8. Re-create the life story of the worker who created a particular detail (the mason who carved that cornerstone, the artist who designed that frieze, the ancient chaiwallah who brought the workers refreshment), and imagine what they were thinking about when they painted/carved/etc. the detail in question.
9. Take artsy photos involving late afternoon light, and let yourself believe that a hundred thousand tourists haven’t taken exactly the same shots.
10. Imagine how a future archeologist would interpret the patterns and meaning of your life based on different objects that might be preserved. Repeat for your city, country, and/or civilization.
11. Have your hair braided by the female attendants guarding the ruins. Nod curtly but politely at the male attendants. If you are being followed by any overly eager tour guide style attendants, explain that you need peace to enjoy the beautiful objects that they guard, and back away quickly.
12. Learn, preferably from visiting monks, how to honor/pay your respects/genuflect to and circumambulate the deities/prophets/kings depicted.
13. Enjoy the art (or what’s left of it – and recreate the rest in your mind’s eye)!

Please see the (forthcoming) photos albums for actual descriptions of the stunning Ellora and Ajanta caves, and to hear the tale of the family adventures we took there…