Past the Phantom Tollbooth

Guests (Guess): The Family Visit
February 5-12^th, 2007

There they were. Three bright, exhausted, familiar faces poised on alien bodies, sitting still and smiling amidst the chaos. The bus – which I managed to jump on when it deigned to stop at an intersection a too-long walk from my flat – wouldn’t slow down in front of their hotel, but it did pause long enough for me to hop off a hundred yards past the Krishna Residency. I got a nice long view of them on the approach, as I stumbled over the hardened exposed dirt that was once the lawn of the hotel, and will someday be part of the newly widened Habsiguda road. There was the usual crowd of autos, half of them empty, their respective auto-wallahs crowded around a tea stall around the corner. There were businessmen in ill-fitting suits, children in impeccably matched and pressed uniforms overflowing from school buses, migrant laborers with a trays of rocks balanced on steel necks, their saris hitched high, exposing knurled feet clutching cheap plastic flip-flops.

One of the other Fellows had warned me that the strangest thing about having his family visit was the feeling that, in many ways for the first time, he was the one taking care of them. This seemed like an exciting yet frightening prospect, and I spent a considerable number of hours evaluating the wide variety of emotional responses my mother, step-father, and step-brother might experience upon landing in my little piece of this massive, steaming, teeming country. On their arrival, over idly and milk tea in the humid dining room of their hotel, I presented them with a charged cell phone, a key to my apartment, a hand-drawn map of the neighborhood, and a list of easy things to do while jet-lagged. Then I went to work.

And then one day (three days later), they came to work with me. That was the day I snapped – not because of the shock at the actual meeting of these two worlds, of the respective Hyderabadis and Seattlites with whom I have spent the maximum number of minutes within each of those worlds – but because of the internal pressure to have those worlds enjoy each other’s company (which they did), to get my work done on time (and I did), and to have the traveling family’s needs all taken care of (and they were) in the same few hours and the same few feet. Luckily, I was able to find last minute tickets, and we were in the air on the way to Fort Cochin less than forty-eight hours later. As we stepped out of the airport and into a pre-paid white Ambassador cab, headed towards the thick palms and perfect sunset and closely imagined sparkling dark water, I quickly began to melt back to my normal shape. This part was easy. We saw family friends, and dined on chocolate samosas in mango sauce. We floated by houseboats and stared into tiles and flurried through antique shops.

The night before I turned twenty-three, I was sitting on the thin white sheets of one of the twin beds in the room I was sharing with my step-brother – and it was funny to think of the rooms we had shared, tiny bunks on sailboats and strange motels in Montana and the stable of a castle in northern Italy – when we heard the rain begin. In the thirty seconds it took us to unbolt the dark wood door and patter out onto the warm night, the rain had already started falling in thick sheets. ‘If we weren’t…’ I started, and was quickly overturned. To find privacy in India is precious, especially in a city the size and scope of Hyderabad (only seven million, really). To have a moment out in the world, not watched, not separated, not veiled, not controlled, not careful, is absolutely delightful. I ran past soaked and through drenched glee and eventually back to the shelter and the shower and the cool of the thin white sheets of my left-hand twin bed.

We celebrated my birthday together, and with family friends in Cochin, and with my flat-mates back in Hyderabad. And with one last overpaid taxi, with confusion and happiness tinged green with goodbye I dropped my mother and my step-father and my step-brother back at their hotel and sped off towards home. They flew north to Jaipur and circled around the Golden Triangle in northern India. I caught up on my work and arranged a trip to Chennai and left and launched a website and came back. They arrived in Seattle. And so I asked them what they thought, and if they would like to share pieces of their stories and I suppose I was hoping they would help out with the narrative but instead their impressions reminded me of Milo and his ride past the Phantom Tollbooth. Because the mental tugs and the visceral smells and sounds and shapes that shift the frame of your perspective are the pieces that matter. The impressions that change your future impressions. The story – the sequence – is just that, a tale told to explain the new glint in your eye or the phrases you’ve picked up or the differently exaggerated way you weigh your own way (of life).

‘India Impressions,’ from my mom:
Just being there, sniffing & tasting & hearing...the waves of sensation that accompany the intricate visual feast that India offers up, moment to moment, wash over you in ways that no amount of sedentary immersion in film or literature can provide. And then there is what gets under your skin and opens you up: ways of living, facts of life that move from the abstract, strange, impossible to dawning recognition of how it could be. What a gift, to be able to imagine so much more.

I have a new appreciation for the deep purity of intense color, for the way personal cleanliness can glide over trash and grime, how almost anything can be recycled. When in doubt, decorate! Collage your truck, shave patterns on your camel. I took in the serenity of Persian style tombs and have a feeling for the safely of a burkha in public space. I visited a Jain temple and wondered at the "stations of the gurus" as an ancient template for a church interior. A tapestry style mural of Hindu mythology captured the boundary-less chaos and tumble of the human flow of life: conflict, sex, birth, death, triumph and foolery. All the world's a stage...

And now that this incredible sea of humanity is on wheels and well aware of being straddled by western markets and unequal global power, with so much that is out of reach and simultaneously present, now what? And here my imagination fails and I rehash troubling experiences of competing economies of scale; so many needs I refused to meet, so many transactions that were confusing and felt vaguely exploitative in one direction or the other. This is not a complaint. We were almost always treated with respect and consideration. And no wonder we are seen as walking, talking resources. It gives me a much clearer idea of how anyone of us who intends to make a difference, to deliver a usable resource, to support indigenous development must navigate a dense array of expectations and projections while keeping a grip on the compassion and commitment to a better world that drives us in the first place.

What an enthralling place to make that attempt!

From Robert:
I love India and I miss it. It is intense stimulation for the mind despite being very hard on the body. It is a country, or what I saw of it, of intensity – there are the brilliant colors of the saris, temples and bejeweled sandals of course; the air pollution that is so intense you can taste it that becomes green or orange florescent in the evening light; the traffic sounds are New York’s Canal Street of the 60’s on steroids; the scamming and dealing (“my-brother’s-wife’s-uncle’s-friend-owns-a-shop-
where-you-can-get-a-really-good-deal-on-pashminas-let-me-get-you-an-
auto-rickshaw”) is constant. Oh, and then there is the food – better than any Indian food that I have tasted in the USA; an intense multi-layering of spices resulting in a richness of flavor without being overly spicy-hot. And I loved the birds in the trees: large bright green parakeets with long tails, black and gray eagles, pure white egrets and high flying peacocks and peahens. And the monkeys on the walls and in the trees, and the cows and water buffalo in the streets, sidewalks and especially median strips, and the piles of hand formed cow-patties drying in the sun, and the garbage everywhere, and driving the wrong way without lights at night on a high traffic highway in a three-wheeled sputtering auto-rickshaw taxi with horn constantly beeping with trucks and buses coming directly at us and then passing on both sides of us, let me know that I am not in Seattle, nor could I have imagined it before I left Seattle. But now back in Seattle it is all with me all the time.

It was wonderful to have them, and it was strange. But of the million and one emotional outcomes I had predicted and internally planned for, the least expected one came true. It was a pleasant trip. Almost easy, in the way I had learned to let things go here. And I was proud that they had decided to come, that they had enjoyed my city despite its constant road construction its blaring sounds and constantly overwhelming smells; proud that they had continued their adventure on their own in the north, that I have learned things worth teaching here.

Appendix A: Something I sent a few days before they left.
Some pre-travel thoughts:

1. You will be overwhelmed. Try to enjoy it. Just remember: here, you're one-in-a-billion. The roads are the scariest part -- after driving, you won't worry about those strange tropical diseases that you're relatively unlikely to actually contract.
2. Most people speak at least a little English... to be better understood, enunciate clearly, roll your r's, and over-pronounce your t's.
3. Think about your 'giving policy.’ You will see a lot of poverty. You will be asked for money and over-charged pretty constantly. Who do you give to? How/What? How much? Why? Think about the impact of your actions in terms of expectations for other foreigners. Think about sustainability, rights, and other fun 'simple' things.
4. The head nod, aka the head waggle: shaking of the head does not mean no. Except when it does. But sometimes it means yes. Usually, it means maybe/probably/ok/I'm listening.

Five Photographs

20-27 February 2008
Chennai, Tamil Nadu

In late February, Shlayma and I headed to Chennai for a week of work from the head office of our NGO (we have a third office in Kolkata, a semi-active office in New York, and field offices in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, and Karur, Tamil Nadu). I went to work on an online support center; she went to work on an NGO-wide brochure and library project. We stayed in the boss’s empty apartment, played musical desks in the office, and went out to lunch and dinner with friends and co-workers in between.

I brought my camera, but I didn’t take it out of my bag. So here are five photographs:

1. The walls of the train are steel, and the bunks are blue plastic, a softish fake leather. In Third AC, each compartment as two sets of three bunks to a wall, facing each other, complimented by a set of two, shorter bunks on the side of the train. I was sitting with the thick scarred plastic of the window to my right, tweedish blue curtains pushed into the corner, and the set of two short bunks to my left, across the rolling-suitcase-width hallway. The middle bunks folds down during the day, and six (usually more) people squeeze onto the two benches created by the lowest birth. Dinner is around 7:30; families unpack tiffins (stainless steel tupper-ware) of lemon rice and home-made chutneys, while single men traveling on business and young women going for visas at the American Embassy in Chennai munch on deep-fried anything (wada, samosas, bananas). The young woman sitting across from us wore a tan kurta with black embroidery and black churdidar pants that bunch at the ankles. Her long, perfectly straight her fell down to her elbows as she expertly flipped through games and numbers in her cell. Her mother sat to her right, wrapped in a pinkish red saree decorated with identical, but slightly thicker, versions of her daughter's gold jewelry. We chatted with the young woman about New Jersey (where she will be joining a substantial Telugu IT community in a few months), about adjusting to life in Andhra; about trains, and the difficulty of sleeping on them.

2. The Chennai office is at the back of a driveway in a residential neighborhood. It has lower ceilings than the office I’m accustomed to, and the walls are painted a very Indian light pink. The doorways are wide, and only sometimes hung with white wooden slats. From my desk in the very back room, I could see the documentation team working on a assortment of computers, a print-out from the Mr. Bean cartoon exclaiming something exceptionally British and somewhat entertaining next to a white board scrawled with a schedule in red pen. Just past one more slightly-dusty, somewhat-used gray metal cabinet, I could get one glimpse of the front room of the office, where the administrative assistant rules the roost and a thin segment of real live daylight makes it inside past the porch and the motorbikes parked outside and the decorated threshold and the pink archways and the accountant with her embroidered saree and long perfect braid hung with a string of jasmine that I could smell when the breeze was just right.

3. We invited a friend to Shabbat, and he taped it. On the video, our faces appear in a vague circle of sepia-toned light, tilted and moving just a little with the words. We are sitting on the floor – marble that has been swept clean but could use a loving mop – and leaning against undecorated, high white walls. The candles, storm candles that Shlayma remembered to grab on the way out of our Hyderabad apartment, are precariously balanced, one in a small clay dish meant to be used as an oil lamp and the other in the upturned lid of a beer bottle. Our bread is naan (cooked by throwing a round of thin dough against the inside of a very hot tandoori oven), and a tiny bottle of precious wine (manufactured in Bangalore, Karnataka, for sale only in Tamil Nadu but named after a fort just outside of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh) sits unopened nearby. We decided not to bring a prayer book, but the words came easily, although the longest pauses were saved for a niggun – a wordless melody – that Shlayma has been teaching Myla and I. In the video, our eyes our still and our lips our moving and our bodies are moving just a little with the sound.

4. The dry sand of the beach is dirty, scattered with junk-food wrappers and dead fish, feces and broken pieces of fishing nets. The wet sand is empty, decorated only with the broken shell of a coconut being washed up and down the same two feet by the quiet but insistent waves. In the mid-day heat there are no boats out on the water, and only a few people venture out of the shadows. The peeling paint on the prow of a fishing boat – maybe twenty feet long, and open on top, meant to be propelled only by paddles and the waves – gives me just enough shade to peer out at the intensely blue sea. The sky is two shades lighter, but even without the green undertones and white flecks of the water, the dome above is just as bright as its twin sister. I hold up my hands, the dark brown lines of henna suddenly bright against my light skin, somehow separated from the rest of my body. They look solitary and strong, with the line of the horizon cutting across the back of my palms and so I hold them there and let the sun sink in, thick and penetrating and feel the breeze push back, strong and warm and embracing until it picks up my hair and tosses it in my face so my hands have to go back to work.

5. Anyone from Chennai will tell you that Marina beach is the longest beach in the world. It is long – maybe twelve kilometers – but this is not its defining characteristic. It is almost half a kilometer at its deepest, and the layers of crowds, the lovers and the children and the cops on their beat, the bicycles and the ice-cream vendors and the men at booths selling balloon-toss carnival dart games, the women frying and the kites flying and the cars rumbling along the massive through-way just beyond the sand; these people and objects and sounds and smells are its defining characteristics. The most amazing thing about this morass of humanity is the way that the sea is still capable, after all the pollution and the light and the noise, to swallow it up. When you’ve passed through the last fry-stand light and the man selling whistles has walked away from your ear and you’re standing at the edge of the dark water the rest of the world melts away. The stars twinkle according to their script, and are answered by lights from massive container ships anchored out in the Bay. The scrappy clouds look like cotton swaying in a light breeze against the grandeur and solidity of the steel water and you don’t doubt for a minute that in front of this you are nothing and you are everything and that, of course, is all that matters.

Over the weekend, I wrote a letter to a friend:
... I’m sitting on the tiled floor of my co-worker’s home (concrete but tiny), 1.5 bus-hours south of Chennai, and a few hundred meters away from the polluted sand and sparkling water of the Bay of Bengal. I’m sparkling-ly clean from a warm bucket shower – although I almost accidentally bathed in seawater. The henna is fading from my palms, and my white button-down shirt makes me feel uncomfortably like an actress in some adventure travel film. Kenny Chesney is playing from my friend’s computer – I’m recovering from a strange sort of panic attack, and the smooth voice of emotional country pop rocks sounds just right. It was a wave of emotion, voices shouting and whining in my head, intuition on a loudspeaker, hands shaking as I took off small piles of shackle-bangles so I could curl up on my bed and mindlessly scan the same three headlines on The Hindu, not a tear or a scream or a word in sight – until, instantaneously and indescribably, the wave washed over me and turned the volume down, so that the same sentences scrolled behind my open eyes with without a trace of flashing neon colors. And the world was alright, and I was curled up on a hard mattress with an orange sheet in a un-lived-in apartment in one tiny, insignificantly random corner of it...

And then we went home (a delicious thing to have).

'I' Statements

I don't know where I'll be next year... but when the deadline for extending my stay in India with AJWS for another year came around, I realized that I had no desire rule out the option... and that in fact, gaining some more stable footing in the land of the Intentionally Displaced may be just what I want for next year. Below is my application essay; its a little hyperbolic and megalomaniacal, as these things tend to be, but I thought it might provide a useful summary of my time here so far...

As a World Partners Fellow, I was given the chance to build a life for myself in a city quite literally on the other side of the globe from the place where I grew up. The twin cities of Secunderabad (where I live) and Hyderabad (where I work) have become my home, no question marks or qualifications needed. I have been lucky to travel frequently since my arrival in India, and with each trip away from my placement, I have become more eager to return to it.

At my NGO, I was placed in a small team, with three co-workers and a detailed work plan, all of which has allowed me to work productively in a positive environment. The intensive work ethic that drove me through four years of laboratory research during college (on top of classes, dance, and student activism) was quickly re-kindled in the fast-paced atmosphere at my NGO. Over time, I have built individual relationships with everyone in my office, including the tea attendant, who speaks less English than I do Telugu. There have been frustrations, of course, but through an endless series of small adjustments, I have worked through most of them. I had to be clear, at first, that I was not to be called ‘dear,’ for example, as my male colleagues would never address one another with such an epithet – but after a few months one of them commented that they treat me ‘as any other guy,’ and that I, in return, treat them like ‘any other woman.’

On the monthly WPF reporting form for January, we were asked what we have learned from our experience in India so far. This was my reply: I’ve learned that I can be mean and open-minded. I’ve learned that my laboratory experiences are more transferable than I ever would have imagined (report writing, journal club, office politics, project planning, etc.). I’ve learned that I am my own best housewife and workaholic husband, all rolled in to one. I’ve learned that I should always be dancing.

I would like to stay in India because I’m not ready to halt the learning process that I have begun here; I have adjusted to hierarchy and gender norms, to spice and humidity, to Indian English and hyper-documentation, and as these lessons have incorporated themselves into my daily activities, life here has become easier. A second year spent working in India would allow me to parlay these lessons into more concrete ‘learnings’ as I begin to build a career in social justice and public health work. I would like to continue my lessons in Bharatanatyam (south Indian classical dance), my studies of Indian NGO culture and the overlaps and tensions between social service and social justice, and I believe that AJWS VC would allow me to do just that.