The Dragonriders of Pern

Shlayma’s Birthday Weekend
Arambol, Goa
April 4^th-7^th, 2008

The font was larger than I remembered, the binding cheap, and the type falling off the right-hand side of the page. The cover was burgundy instead of green, but soft and pliable from repeated readings on the beach. I felt distinctly as if I were meeting on old friend, but one I had always been a little reluctant to let other kids see me playing with. This book, I later hypothesized, was a large part of the reason I was able to be happy during the mythically tortuous period known as ‘middle school,’ while my class was divided into social straight-jacket strength cliques, and my own clique routinely kicked out one friend for rotating periods of time. I picked up the novel, turned it over, and slipped it back into the English section of the chest-height bookshelf, paying more attention to the long wooden table than I did to the rows of titles that had to be compressed to re-accommodate their recent neighbor. I slipped my flip-flops back on my feet and sauntered across the restaurant, folded my newly-tanned limbs across the polished wood, and ordered a cheese platter and a green salad with vinaigrette.

We left India before we left Hyderabad. To be precise, we left India when we pulled up to the new airport, over an hour outside our bustling city. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was built with a private-public partnership, completed on its 10-month construction schedule, and – along with a sister project near Bangalore – is the first ‘world class’ airport in India. It is meant to raise profiles, to welcome business, to grease palms for investment and infrastructure. Steel and glass sit in a wave across the recently empty plain, palm trees with branches still bound by string lining the driveways of fresh cement and drying paint. The stiff, warm breeze on the open runway whipped our clothes in circles around our bodies, and gave us a loving hug goodbye. One and a half hours later, we landed in Goa.

Goa is a former Portuguese colony, a tiny state south of the middle of the west coast of India and dwarfed by its neighbors, Maharashtra and Karnataka. It seems to consist mostly of beaches, populated mostly by half-naked Europeans enjoying the sparkling ocean waves, cheap hippie paraphernalia, and easy-access drug culture. In a pseudo-new wave (you know, man, you can just be free here) way, Goa feels very colonial; the local people are treated more like a resource (cheap labor for European-owned restaurants, a ‘friend’ to go home from the night market with) than as human beings, and any concept of a ‘local culture’ is quickly drowned in images of transplanted backpackers who arrived a decade ago and never left. The pizza, however, was superb, and the ‘pancakes’ were actually delicious crepes filled with stunningly fresh fruit.

The ocean waves leapt up to greet us the moment we minced across the hot sand from our dirt-cheap huts made of woven bamboo and draped with pink mosquito netting. The receding tide buried our toes in the wet sand that marked the momentary edge of the Arabian Sea, and the foam flicked into our faces, teasing. The water was warm, and it pulled and pushed at our meandering limbs until we internalized the pattern and floated up or dove beneath with each creaking crest. I didn’t take a shower in the afternoon because I knew that the most precious time with the ocean would be sunset, that swimming out towards eternity would be blissful, and that if I didn’t show up, she might not call back for a second date. The last few moments when the burning ball is still visible seemed to run in high-speed, but the colors – the blue-gray of the water solid steel and woven with thick silk ribbons of orange and pink, a few threads of gold – lingered as I pushed my newly resuscitated Spanish and introduced myself in Hindi to smiles emerging from nearby waves.

We sat on beach chairs, and I read. I read at the lunch table, over pasta with prawns, and on the porch of our huts with the bamboo walls. We walked on meandering paths, and passed whole stretches that didn’t contain clothes made out of recycled Indian cloth that very few Indians would ever wear. We dipped in a fresh-water pond a hundred yards across, but only a few meters deep, and I read on the shore. I re-entered a world that I have rarely articulated but frequently inhabited, and I smiled at the horizon because it was there, cutting a clean line across the back of the page, to share my secrets.

We carried wine and candles and brown bread to the sand and counted the cabaret stars when the curtains pulled back and the sky showed off her new tattoos. We sang with the waves, and sometimes against them, and cupped our hands around the sputtering flames and sanctified a day of rest and a weekend away. We ended the vacation the same way – but instead of weekly candles there were yearly candles for Shlayma’s 25^th, and instead of bread to be blessed there was chocolate cake to be cut. By the time we were crammed into a cab meandering towards the airport we had bathed in pools of relief, washed away hours of air conditioning and plasticized wooden desks, replaced it all with mouthfuls of saltwater and the permeating smell of sunscreen left to melt off reddening thighs and shimmering shoulders.

And as I leaned into a pile of women and let the road whip my hair into a massive knot behind my face, I thought of the last time I dipped into the Indian Ocean. I thought of the white sand beaches of Zanzibar, the Beach Boys we had gone there to talk to (we missed our appointment with the local AIDS activist), the little resort we stopped by and the relief of the water against our skin as I dipped blonde dreadlocks into the salt and stared intently out towards what I imagined, eventually, would take me to India. And on the eastern shore of the same body of water (its always the same body, with water) I had looked back, towards Zanzibar, or maybe towards the San Juans or Pemaquid Point or the Mediterranean (it all goes in a circle, so you’re always looking in the direction of any or everything, I imagine), and I sang (out of tune) and danced (against the water, this time) and smiled.

This post was brought to you by the novel Dragonflight, written by Anne McCaffrey, and first given to me by my cousin Ann.

A Tactile Weekend

Purim, Holi, Milad-un-Nadi, and Good Friday
March 21^st-23^rd, 2008

It was a tactile weekend, but it wasn’t ecstatic because it was full of sensation; it was slow because it was seeped in color.

I. Friday: Purim

I had to change my costume at the last moment, because the flower-sellers were driven inside by the unseasonable rains. Every morning and every evening (except, of course, for that morning and that evening) two women sit on the corner that connects our neighborhood to the major thoroughfare, their wooden cart, dark blue paint peeling, carefully stacked with a coil of jasmine buds strung on cotton thread, a pile of yellow flowers something like an elegant enlarged dandelion, and a small change box. For a few rupees, you can buy a forearm’s length of flowers; for Purim, I had been planning on draping myself in them.

When I got dressed to go shopping for party supplies, I got dressed to get soaked; cotton pants that could be tied up by my knees, a well-dyed kurta that would remain opaque but wouldn’t bleed color all over my skin if wet, and plenty of plastic bags to keep my wallet dry. The looks we got, splashing through overflowing sewer flow and street refuse, bulging bags of groceries in each hand, were precious: women don’t go out in the rain, most men will wait until the downpour passes, and even the poorest people would at least have the decency to cover their hair with a plastic bag! Crazy Americans; we came home with puddle footprints below us and silly songs on our lips, and I loved every moment of it.

The power went off just before the first guests arrived; I almost didn’t recognize them in the half-gloom of the hallway; stumbled around the kitchen table in circles looking for storm candles and a match; thought it was silly to do a full round of introductions in the dark. I slipped backwards into the bedroom, where my beloved Feminazi and Kali were coming into full form, un-twisted the cardboard from two toilet paper rolls to make horns, and simplified my costume from flower queen to holy cow with a large bindi and a lot of brown cotton. And what do you do, on Purim, when a guest walks in without a costume? A guest who hasn’t worn a costume, for any event, in over a decade? You help them to cross-dress, of course. We draped a sari, and exchanged eyelash batting tips. In various rooms, at various times, we burned a bra, cut heads off of cheap plastic dolls, emptied packets of breath fresheners that look like condom packs hanging from vendor’s stalls in the street. We danced to bollywood and TLC and ate biryani and forgot to make hamentashen with the mini pineapple and orange and berry jams I brought home from the grocery store.

II. Saturday: Holi

When I pulled out the white sequined-bib shirt I bought on my first day in Delhi, I knew it wouldn’t make it down the street. As we turned around the corner, our little neighbor, a small Sikh boy with waist-length hair gathered in a bun high on his fine-boned forehead, smiled at me, gesturing with a water gun and mischievous eyes. It was a very direct question.

So I handed off my backpack to a friend, raised my hands in surrender or supplication or mock surprise, and walked into a shower of pink water and green powder and orange hands patting my face. The mother of the Punjabi family that lives downstairs rushed inside to bring me a special drink, and the daughter handed me bags of my own colors and the father sprinkled something blackish-fuchsia in my hair that he mentioned ‘wouldn’t come out for a long time.’ I pinched cheeks (with blue) and patted heads (with red) and let myself be drowned in buckets of brackish water by many-colored midgets squealing with delight.

And then we went to the party. As we headed down the driveway to our friend’s apartment building, I heard the screams and the splashes, and we paid the driver with tinted bills. I walked into a color war, and was greeted with a mouthful of blue and a chest-full of orange and a shower of green. The courtyard was a mud bath, and the pile of little plastic bags grew as we emptied the powder into buckets and pores and white cotton reservoirs quickly dyed puce and scarlet and everything in between.

There was a third event, this one on a roof-top, with more home-made drinks for the holiday, and ayurvedic herbal powder that smelled as if it were probably much healthier for our lungs. I dozed in the sun, on a thick carpet under a patchwork tent, and listened to a human knot untangle itself. Later, I stole a whole half-hour, and sat by myself on a balcony and looked at the clear blue sky, and wondered how it had managed to escape the powder that had been tossed across the city.

The afternoon rains switched off our electricity, and I lay on the couch with a rotating audience and watched Shah Rukh Khan swivel his hips in Om Shanti Om, and cut vegetables for a meandering stir-fry to feed the masses as they scrubbed the colors from their faces, and examined the orange and pink stains in my hair that, three weeks later, still haven’t completely gone away.

III. Sunday: The Aftermath

We collected guests over the weekend. By Sunday morning, there were nine of us piling into three autos, half-trusting the brakes to work in the heavy late-morning (still completely unseasonable and unexpected) rain, heading across the city to a famed restaurant for a brunch of delicious (if overpriced) dosas and chutneys. We split under the weight of differing desires, and the three giants of the crowd waded off through the soaking streets to go in search of the Public Health Museum.

We met up with the bronzes in the AP State Museum instead, and waved to the Egyptian mummy and tried to read the Telugu script picked in black stone. We walked through the puddles that criss-crossed the ‘gardens’ and held hands and talked about our wives. We sat down for tea, and stood up for trains, and walked barefoot on wet white marble to look out over the city from Vanketeshwara’s perch on a hill. As our guests dispersed back to out into the world, I caught a ride to a home filled with the smell of boiling pasta and simmering tomato sauce and feasted on a quiet conversation in between the sound of the rain and the sputtering candles and guitar chords wandering off into the evening.