Giants in the Sky: Passover in Dharamsala

A Tale of Wandering Jews and Exiled Monks
April 18^th-21^st, 2008

This is a story about a journey away. I believe in away, because the view is inevitably different from over there, and because away means that you might have somewhere to return to, a somewhere that will be different when you return because you’ll be different.

In 1960, His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, and sought refuge in India, the ancestral home of Buddhism. The Buddha was a Hindu prince, considered to be one of the seven avatars of Lord Vishnu, and many of the fundamental texts and practices of Tibetan Buddhism were formed in India centuries ago.

The home of the Dalai Lama is the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. It is a monastery built around a beautiful temple and perched on the edge of a mountainside just below the hill town known as McLeod Ganj, ten kilometers uphill from Dharamsala in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. A military base stretches between the two towns, hugging the winding roads and dotting them with small faded billboards glorifying the Indian Army. McLeod Ganj and its surrounding hillsides are home to a large population of Tibetans, and the streets are filled with old women in traditional Tibetan dress, young men in maroon monk’s robes, Kashmiri salesmen, and international tourists. Above McLeod Ganj sit two smaller towns; Baghsu, popular with European hippies chatting in chilled-out cafes and Indians on tour of the local Shiva temples, and Dharamkot, home to Chabad House and an endlessly circulating population of lost Israelis (busy finding themselves, or possibly just happy to be staying lost).

I went to Dharamsala because of a last minute change in plans. Shlayma went to Dharamsala because she knew that there would be a Passover seder there and because, without any specific idea how, she knew that being with a community in exile when she herself was so far from home would bring a new level of meaning to a holiday about escaping slavery for forty years of wandering in the desert. Together, for any number of social-political-spiritual-personal reasons, we bought a train ticket and a plane ticket and a bus ticket. We spent an afternoon in Lodhi gardens, a strangely blissful oasis of quiet green in the middle of the madness we remembered as Delhi, followed the route of the Olympic torch behind busloads of children in corporate sponsored t-shirts, entering ring road just as the barricades were cleared and the danger of the Tiger shaming the Dragon had passed, and slopped a few spoonfuls of semi-edible dal at an impressively dingy diner in the old city train station. We slept, miraculously, on the train to Pathankot, and wandered through the suddenly cooler air to the bus stand that would take us past Dharamsala, straight to McLeod Ganj. On the train, we met an English couple who had been traveling together for nine months, and in the bus station we met a blessed-out Australian named Matthew who estimated that he had spent 100 of the last 300 days in meditation across India.

As the bus wound up the hills, Shlayma handed me a book: The Universe in a Single Atom, by H.H. the Dalai Lama. I read the first seventy pages on the spot, followed by one chapter for each day we spent in the mountains (for proper digestion). We stepped down from the bus with the Aussie, who showed us where to buy fresh steamed Tibetan dumplings by the side of the road and negotiated a cab to take the three of us up and away from the tourist trap. We walked through Dharamkot, and out the other side, in search of the perfect guest house with the perfect view and the perfect degree of isolation... and in the meantime, we settled for garlic-drenched hummus and falafel at Om Café. I introduced myself to some American travelers marked by a Brandeis t-shirt, and we found our seder; a place called Manu House, run by a bunch of Israelis, had invited them for the next night.

Satisfied that we would fall into all the right circumstances, we continued our search uphill and away, and finally, at the end of the path past the end of the stairs that led off the road, we found our new momentary home: Snow White. For 120 rupees ($3 US) a night we got two beds, plenty of blankets, a detached toilet and hot shower, and a picture-perfect window looking out across the valley. Two fifty-something-year-old Greek men showed up shortly after, marked with strange tattoos and an obsession with assisted yoga, and hung a strap from a tree, which we used to stretch out our backs and invert our perspective. That evening, we wandered and gathered supplies and ate wood-oven pizza and celebrated a quiet Shabbat in our room. We blessed the cold mountain air and burrowed deep under the blankets and slept.

The second day, we explored the tourist trap (aka McLeod Ganj) and enjoyed I enjoyed my last chametz before the seder: German chocolate croissants and home-made ravioli. We cleaned out the corners of our minds with steep slopes and the scent of pine and the easy beat of conversation that knows it has endless hours to stretch and wander. We wrapped ourselves for the evening and decorated where we could and arrived early.

Ha’lev Ha’yehudi, The Heart of the Jews, is perched above Baghsu. ‘Manu House’ is painted in large letters across one side, but everyone in town just refers to it as ‘Jewish House’ (very different than Chabad House, in Dharamkot). The house is one of a handful of similar homes scattered across popular Israeli destinations in India – coming to India is a rite of passage for many Israelis, a way to escape the world they know once they have been discharged form the army, a chance to be lost and free and clear their head before going home to get an education and build a life. Ha’lev was started by one of these Israeli wanderers, one who had gathered a small following of fellow Jews who wanted to continue their practice in India, but weren’t interested in the rmissionary and orthodox habits of Chabad. He gathered financial support, purchased a number of houses in key locations, and now sends young spiritual couples out to each house for the duration of that location’s tourist season. The young couple cooks and leads services, provides learning sessions and Jewish resources, creates community events and organizes for Jewish holidays.

We arrived, the first time, by wandering: towards Bhagsu, past a sign in Hebrew, and behind a dotted trail of beautiful Israeli women in yoga tops and flowing cloth pants. We crossed the stone patio of a local farming family, climbed a set of narrow concrete stairs, skirted a room filled with prayer books and mattresses and crepe paper Jewish stars and entered a patio shaded in tones of blue by plastic tarps stretched to keep out the sun. We were welcomed by a film-maker whose kippah was hidden under a stylized tweed hat – he was there to make a documentary about Ha’lev, and was following the journey of the current host couple, Tzippy and Shantiel. When we arrived, Shantiel was leaning over an open book, explaining something with heavy hand gestures and a wide smile to two women sitting attentively on the other side of the low table. Tzippy, when we saw her, was either cooking for guests or feeding her two unbelievably beautiful children, surrounded by a rotating cadre of women draped in scarves, all of whom had mastered the art of balancing constant motion with an appearance of total outward peace.

We arrived the second time to celebrate, to recount, and to experience something both new and familiar. We brought two English-language haggadot and lit candles with the women, and as the mattresses spread around the foot-high tables filled with Hebrew chatter and the hired Hindu boys climbed one another’s shoulders to hang some extra light-bulbs beneath the blue tarps and the sun finished setting and tucked its last light away we found some familiar words, and settled in to the interlocking pattern of backs and elbows near a group of British and Chilean and American and Israeli folks who spoke English and had met in a nearby hostel. At some unspoken signal, the men (those wearing whiter, longer, more flowing clothes) filled the room with the crepe paper Jewish stars and their davening began. There was no beginning, but at one point I dropped ten tiny puddles of wine on to my plate and at another I ate matzah and dipped the parsley and perhaps told a story. Near the beginning that there wasn’t Shantiel and Tzippy’s five-year-old son sang the four questions, and the crowd, fluctuating between one hundred and one hundred twenty as people wandered in and out, responded in perfect off-pitch tone.

When the dinner began it was past midnight, and the appetizers alone were enough to feed the slimming crowd. We met our neighbors, whose parents were Yemenite and Greek and Lithuanian, and I met my backrest, who had long curling hair and a perfect American accent gleaned straight from television. A young woman on her honeymoon, hair wrapped in a white linen cloth and torso tightened by a red silk vest, danced in and out of her freshly minted husband’s arms, looking, except for a cigarette held lightly between her fingers, as if she had stepped straight out of Fiddler. In between large platters of semi-eastern-european-semi-middle-eastern food and prayers and songs and rituals Shantiel spoke, and when he spoke the one word that I recognized was emet – truth – but Shlayma translated the other trails, and they were mostly about sharing and light and sharing the light. Around two am a new American friend, fresh from trekking adventures in Jammu, offered us a ride home, and we climbed down from Baghsu and back up to Dharamkot in the bright white gleam of the almost-full moon.

In the morning, we greeted the mountains. Their peaks followed us everywhere, prickling our senses, and we owed them some thanks. We stretched and read and studied the hazy horizon of the valley below and the impossibly sharp line where the snow touched the sky above.

We walked in to town, down Temple Road. We stopped at the gate, and there was little left to say. To our left was the entrance to the Dalai Lama’s home, the entrance to the monastery and the government and the temple. Below the gate was a sign board covered with print-outs of recent news articles on Tibet, on the Dalai Lama’s travels, on the Olympics and China’s charming history of human rights violations. To the right was a hunger strike, on day 37. The people inside rotate, a woman gathering signatures explained. We took photographs and wondered how watching helps but we smiled and they smiled and we took a postcard that I haven’t yet sent to the Olympic organizing committee. Inside the monastery the road winds by a number of tchotchke shops, past a small bookstore (we had to dodge some French students, and a handmade poster of support they were posing by) and up to a courtyard. At one end, underneath a raised temple, we found a throne draped in deep yellow silk, and backed by paintings of the previous thirteen Dalai Lamas. The room was enclosed in glass panels, but the panels were locked because at the moment we were wandering his house, the Dalai Lama was sleeping somewhere in America.

Two temples and a scattering of tables filled with fluttering candles were interspersed with piles of mattresses on the platform above the little throne room; inside the main temple sat a golden Buddha with electric blue hair. To his right and left were glass-front cabinets filled with scrolls detailing every major teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, and in front of him, meticulously arranged and absolutely symmetrical, were offerings of brand-name cookies, crackers, and boxed sweets, including Oreos and Marie Biscuits. A woman in traditional dress sat fingering prayer bead and a shirtless man meditated with closed eyes, while a young mother performed a series of deep bows and her two young children scampered back and forth in front of the shrine. Shlayma and I entered separately, and sat apart in the silence for a few minutes stitched together. Outside, after spinning the prayer wheels that release ideas from turning letters wrought in bronze on wooden axels, we leaned against a balcony that dropped off the edge of the world and talked about the possibility of finding meaning in someone else’s statue. I thought of the feet that had pattered and the hands that had touched, the added-up thoughts that had been directed at or up or away or been released into the cloud-heavy air… and I added a few more.

We entered a smaller temple, one that was wall-papered with intricate patterns that told a story and listed its characters in intimate detail, but the details were difficult to follow. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I was looking at Shiva and Paravathi, or a Buddhist prince with his consort, or which snarling or grinning face was a demon and which a benevolent animal companion, but the flow of the images was outward and circular and led the eye easily. We left the temples for the courtyard and it was impossible not to acknowledge the massive banners hanging (a collection of images strewn throughout the town in protest), pictures of bullet holes and burns, the bodies and blood of monks killed by Chinese police authorities during protests and crackdowns in March. A photo gallery was advertised to our right, and I entered alone. Inside, posters and sign posts propped on stacked chairs and simple cloth-draped tables repeated and elaborated on the thirty-odd images hung from the temples. There were names and lists of family members now left widowed in the past few months, ages and occupations of those killed. There were surveillance photos of police barricades and timelines marking brutality with increasing pools of blood gathering around the monks’ tired feet.

Outside, we photographed the Tibetan flag, and followed the street back down past the bookshop and up the steps to a small museum. The museum was curated by refugees, filled with their own images and stories, pictures of ruined temples cleansed by the Cultural Revolution and families climbing mountain passes out of their homeland and into Nepal and India and permanent exile. The exhibits closed with the curator’s hopes for Tibet’s future, ten messages of trust that the Dalai Lama would lead their people somewhere better, that the culture could maintained, and that the people of the world would learn from the story and teachings of their country. On our way back into town, we passed a stray dog barking madly at two impassive cows, and the image formed itself an instant political cartoon in my mind, with the word ‘CHINA’ written in comic relief across the flanks of the cows and the dog, running in a circle before attempting one more unnoticed attack, dressed in maroon monk’s robes. We ate a late lunch at the minuscule Yak Café, and supported a Free Tibet (or something like that?), while a monk entered and ate and left and a group of young south-east Asian tourists filled the tiny room with chatter.

As we wandered in and out of McLeod Ganj, I noticed a steadily increasing number of monks carrying candles or flags or both. The trickle easily became a stream, and the stream was chanting, so we followed it. We didn’t have our own candles or our own flag, and we didn’t decide to go. We simply followed the stream down the same roads we had walked that morning and the stream led us back to the courtyard, where we lit a candle and left it below the hanging banners of the bloodied monks’ bodies. The courtyard stood in silence, and listened to a prepared speech, and chanted in unison and in response. On the dais, in front of the glass-encased empty throne, a young monk stood with a photo of the Dalai Lama, smiling and waving. Half an hour later, we followed the same stream out of the courtyard and back into the town, as glowing candles that had lit the gathering were left in stone crevices along the outer walls of the monastery. [We later learned that this happens every day, starting at 6:30 pm in the central square of McLeod Ganj]

After the stream dispersed, we found a Korean restaurant that promised sushi, and as we sat down, a twisted fairy tale walked in. First came the gypsy. She had wide brown eyes that set off cartoonishly beautiful large features, and her hair, like the rest of her body, was wrapped in faded cloth that folded and billowed but hugged just the right curves. She carried a newborn baby. Next came the gothic elf, in black spandex with hip-hugging leather scraps of a skirt and black leather boots cut between her toes and laced up her legs, set off by charcoal-lined ice blue eyes and waist-length white-blond dreads. Next was the earth goddess. She wore only cream linen, decorated with her own mischievous green eyes and splattered freckles and meandering tendrils of reddish brown hair. Last was the skater boy, with a few extra layers of torn clothing, and some strange silver bars connecting and dividing his face. [The food was delicious, divine, heavenly, and the decoration was funky and relieving and the view out of the darkened window was limited but graceful where it shielded us from the abyss below with a bright moon and a few incandescent bulbs]

On the last morning, we visited Shiva (the 5000-year-old version, tiny and stone, and the 10-year-old version, spray-painted in garish colors and surrounded by animated serpents and skull-draped black-skinned Kalis) and traded half an hour of our time with the Chabad Rabbi (and his commentary on the Four Questions) for a bag of matzah and said our thanks to Shantiel and Tzippi and their Israeli film-maker. We said goodbye to the mountains, and they put on their best pinkish golden sunset dressing for our farewell party. We rode in a sleeper bus (we did not sleep on a rider bus) down and out and I traced the swollen moon through bracken I didn’t recognize and breezes I knew that I would miss the moment that they passed.

We met a friend in the capitol, and I marveled at the minimal effect that the usual crowds and pouring sweat of Chandni Chowk had on my senses. I ate mangoes on a marble balcony and kebabs at Kareem’s and a chemically green lime drink at Café Coffee Day at the airport and Hyderabadi biryani on a bus and pouted in the heat of an auto and then I was home, alone. I mourned the easy clarity of the mountains and wondered why I wasn’t wondering what I had learned on my journey away as the heat of the impending summer sunk quickly into my bones and the rice-centric diet of South India made keeping kosher for Passover less intentional and more of an afterthought. The point, I reminded myself, was not a lesson. The point, if anything, was the meal that we had shared and the day that we had spent learning about someone else’s struggle – not a biblical tale of blood and redemption but a series of events ending and twisting and re-routing people’s lives in the current moment. The point was the awareness we had of being away in this year of being far, far from familiar, of greeting other wanderers and inquiring about their journey.

The Book List, Part I

(and part of Part II)
June 2007 - May 2008

Before I left:

Shantaram, by Gregory Roberts

One thousand pages of marauding adventure novel – a slightly silly, slightly bloody, but very thorough introduction to India – appeared under mysterious circumstances on the doorstep of my houseboat, and will be coming soon to a screen near you, with love from Mira Nair, Johnny Depp, and Amitabh Bachchan.

The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri (selected stories)

Stunningly beautiful writing, set on the blurry line between Indian and American culture.

Culture Shock! India: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette, by Gitanjal Kolanand

This was the one book assigned by AJWS. It is clearly written, and somewhat useful… but very snooty, and includes long sections on how to deal with caste conflicts among your servants.

Since taking off on a plane towards Delhi:

The Moore’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie

I was given this book by experts in International Living, and told to read it on the plane. The brilliant (and meandering) story line leads from the backwaters of Kerala (Jews and spices make a delicious combination) to the teeming streets of Mumbai, with a hundred layers of interlocking metaphors (or palimpsests, in this case) in between.

Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett

Because I love Discworld, and because the first Terry Pratchett novel that I read was one that Michael had picked up in an English-language bookstore in Montepulciano, Italy in 1998, and because it is easy to find British mass-market paperbacks in the former Commonwealth, and because I needed my first taste of escapism. Plus, this one is about gender-bending.

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange of Modern India, by Edward Luce

An excellent and somewhat panoramic (if spotty) view of ‘modern’ India. The author is a British reporter for the Financial Times who has been lucky enough to interview most of the major players in Indian culture and politics, and his analysis of everything from the meaning of highway construction to the interplay of Hindu fundamentalism with the many forms of Islam that have come up throughout Asia is insightful. This was also recommended by AJWS, and I think it would be make much better required reading than Culture Shock.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Heartbreakingly beautiful, and many people’s favorite book of all time. A friend once mentioned to me that she felt as if the story line was just a vehicle for Roy’s gorgeous prose…

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

With the aftertaste of Roy’s writing in my mind, this went down perfectly… and helped to organize some of my thoughts and frustrations on the complications of leaving the liberal land of Wes, and stepping into a strictly gendered society.

Passage to India, by E.M. Forster

A painstakingly detailed (and pretty, if slightly dry) portrait of British India – but Forster’s depiction of race relations is in many ways just as relevant now as it was in 1924.

Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins

My holiday present to myself was to begin reading this book, which I had bought months earlier, and let tease me from the shelf. It is quirky and funny and creative and exactly what I needed.

White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple

Set in Hyderabad, and spanning the golden age of the Nizams, when the rulers of the princely state of Hyderabad were the wealthiest men in the world, this historical treatise (lightly disguised as a novel with enticing writing and animated descriptions of key events) gave me a much richer appreciation of the place I’ve been calling home. Recently, a friend and I completed a long-awaited adventure: the search for the dollhouse that British Resident James Kirkpatrick built for his Muslim wife, Khair-un-Nissa (photos are available for your viewing pleasure on my picasa account - just click the photo icon)

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of those books… the ones that other people have said helped them find meaning, and you feel like you should read… but his vision of love, however poetically mapped out, was not one that resonated with either my desires or my experiences…

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Just as beautifully written as her short stories and fun to breeze through (even more fun to pick up on both the Indian and American cultural references), but ultimately lacking something…

Biopiracy, by Vandana Shiva

This was left at our house by a wandering visitor, and although it is more manifesto than explanation, I loved her straightforward eco-feminist critique of intellectual property rights, globalization, and other massive structural forces changing the way that seeds and cells exist on earth.

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

As the bus began to climb the curves of the mountains that would take us to Dharamsala for Passover, Shlayma handed me this book. Both the scientific and the Buddhist explanations are simplified for the layperson, but the Dalai Lama’s simple description of the relationship between science and religion is the most articulate I have ever heard. I recommend this book to anyone who is tired of (or intrigued by) me harping on about the similarities between these two systems of thought.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Absolutely worthy of all the hype that it receives. If you haven’t read it yet, you probably should. Soon.

Supplemented by pieces of:

Pathologies of Power, by Paul Farmer

If you know me at all, you know why I love this book. If you don’t, pick it up and read it. I asked my mother to send it for a Chanukah present because I needed to hear the preface, ‘Bearing Witness.’

The Revolution Will Not be Funded Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

At the closing ceremony of the US Social Forum last August, I heard Andrea Smith speak. She was electrifying, of course, and mentioned a new book that she had helped to edit. I was entranced by the title, and asked for a special round-the-world-delivery birthday present. As I expected, it is very radical, fairly brilliant, and both deeply disturbing and eminently satisfying to read while working in the ‘NPIC’ (with, yes, its love of unnecessary acronyms!)

Malgudi Schooldays, by R.K. Naryan

Classic, but less than gripping if you didn’t spend your childhood in India.

Blink, by Malcom Gladwell

I was bored, it was on our friend’s bookshelf, and it entertained me for an afternoon.

[along with many sections of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides to South India and/or India, of course]

Currently lost (and often found) around page 200/600 of:

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

I promised this book to myself as an end-of-thesis treat in Middletown, Connecticut. One year later, I picked it up at a bookstore in Hyderbad, Andhra Pradesh, and have been entranced ever since. It is about the patterns that people make, in their heads and in the sand, during humanity's varied and desperate attempts to find meaning in the world… quite simply, this book explains why I started reading (and writing and story-telling) in the first place.

From Pujagutta Circle to the Mecca Masjid

Impressions from a Sunday Stroll
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
May 4, 2008

I was told that I couldn’t stay, and the panic that rose in my throat at the thought of going home was enough to raise my chest from the bed, enough to make me aware of each fold in the cool sheets behind my back when I let go, enough to realize where I had landed and how soon I was leaving. So I decide I would start walking. There aren’t many traffic lights here, let alone street corners (the words ‘city block’ usually draw a blank stare), so I couldn’t play the follow-the-green-light-game, but I bought myself an overly-intellectual adventure novel and shoved it in my bag and called a Cascadian friend and asked the clerk to point me and stepped into the shade and started strolling in the right direction, down the wrong side of the street. When I stopped to ask for assistance, for reassurance spaced a few kilometers apart, most people pointed to bus stands or asked the whereabouts of my motorbike – but I’ve found that if you smile broadly enough and walk away with the proper head bobbing and step springing and follow the fingers with the toes they point you in the right direction despite the incredulous tone behind the answer. The songs bubbled up – as they do when I’m happy (not laughing out load but overflowing internally with the giddy thought of my own existence) – and although they started under my breath they were soon swinging in the breeze –

The city’s changing, ‘cause we are changing,

And we’re all in this together…

[changed to, with a shift in the wind]

I open my mouth to the Lord, and I won’t turn back,

I will go! I shall go! To see what the end is going to be!

And as the white skullcaps multiplied the streets grew narrower and I passed a camel and an impossibly small horse pulling a wooden platform bearing darkly wrinkled men in purple plaid lungis (in addition to the normal traffic of autos to minivans and everything manufactured by Tata in between) and at one point the sometime-flagstone sidewalk was dyed red from the minerals seeping out of the green flaking doors of a street-side storage room and two men asked if I wanted a room and three khaki traffic cops waved me forward but only one 12-year-old voice called out as I passed: ‘madam, which country?’ I paused at the center but I didn’t stop because I love to concept ‘to meander’ but I was entranced by my destination, so the first thing that stopped me (after seven or eight or ten kilometers and only two blisters from my precious cracking Chacos) was the clearly palatial dome of the hospital. I turned right and leaned against a waist-high wall and hid behind a bush and covered my hair (or shaded my head) with a white scarf that I purchased in Jew Town in Cochin but baptized in dance class in Secunderabad. This was the beginning of the curlicues.

I wandered past the waiting patients (waiting in the shade, not waiting for a doctor) past the reserved parking spots (for doorways that looked permanently closed but a garden that might have been recently trimmed) past a man reclined along the steps of a podium leading nowhere, a heavy worn book in his hands. I stood on the edge of the nowhere raised platform and looked across a small deserted street and a wide abandoned canal to the smooth succession of domes that I imagined held an ancient house of worship, but which (after going over the ‘river’ and through the stench wearing the mask of an idyllic late afternoon sunlit view) I soon realized topped the home of the high court of Andhra Pradesh. The gates were open on one side but locked on the other for Sunday so a surly young guard had to open the padlock from inside the compound to let me out past a Hanuman statue bearing unusually garish kissable lips.

I retraced to follow the crowd and it snuck up on me: the endless piles of bangles and pastel cotton baby shirts and sequined chiffon saris draped down garage doors, black burqas with bright beading, kitchen utensils pre-aged from the grime of transport and too many touches, pickpockets with wide eyes and autos inching and children running. I walked past the gateway to the city, past piles of books in a long curling letter with pink and gold covers whose proprietors I trusted not to harass me so I followed their directions and found myself in front of a pigeon paradise, followed my bare feet past small raised marble tombs (one decorated and attended), followed the Hindu tourists to the outer edge of the prayer hall where blasts were heard last May because the dissidents from Far Away think that a city born of mixed religions is the perfect canvass on which to have their grievances painted. I curled my fingers through the metal caging that descends down the open façade of the Mosque and leaned my face against the diamond openings, watching the patterns in the bowing, the rows of heels pointed back and away, foreheads forward and above great (glass?) chandeliers wrapped in dirty white cotton quilted dust covers.

So I sent a piece of a prayer in or up or out and as the men filed past the lean security guard with the peaceful pretty face I disengaged my fingers and followed the pricking matt across the piercingly hot smooth flagstones to the water where the setting sun was bathing with the forearms of an elderly worshipper released form his tasks. When the light left, I followed it, and when the fluorescents flickered on to reflect in the tiny mirrored shards next to my head I finished my tea and the tea finished its biscuit and together we squeezed past the glitter and the oncoming army vehicle’s flapping front flags and boarded our own set of wheels home through the back allies past the infinite miniature groceries and the singular Big Bazaar, past the Hussain Sagar and its towering cornstalk Buddha to a bookshelf we’ll be stacking and a wardrobe I’ll be packing in one month’s time. And I thought of the morning’s panic, but I couldn’t find it in my throat (or my stomach, where it might have lodged on another day, or if I had remembered to eat lunch that afternoon), so I closed some curtains and watched the reflection of my face in the black glass behind the water filter, sliced softly by iron curling bars and patterned with beige plastic mosquito screens and realized that the wandering day – as wandering days would – had led me back to the place I should have started from.

The photos that accompany (tell) this story are available on my Picasa account (click on the photo icon on the right) in an album titled ‘Hyderabad: The Old City (vs. new clothes).’ Another recent photo album, ‘The British Residency’ is worth checking out if you are curious about Hyderabad’s history, ancient doll houses, or The White Moghuls.

Telling Stories

As part of the AJWS World Partners Fellowship, we are asked to complete periodic small writing assignments. The last assignment was a series of questions related to Passover -- we could pick one, and post our answer on a group website. Shlayma and I both answered the same question, and I asked her permission to post both answers, because her words resonate with many of the thoughts spinning through my head these days. Myla answered a different question -- which also reflects on many of our shared thoughts and experiences -- and I've added her thoughts below.

Question:

While the Exodus was happening, Moses instructed the Children of Israel in how they would later tell the story of the Exodus to their children and to future generations. This consciousness of the significance of the experience and projection about how, in the future, to tell the story, relates to your experience as a WP fellow. What consciousness do you have about the significance of your experience? How do you imagine this experience will shape your identity and what stories will you tell about it?

My Response:

i. There are stories that people don’t want to hear, and then there are the stories that I don’t want to tell.

Recently, I posted a blog article about a weekend trip we took to Goa for Shlayma’s birthday – and, after months of very little feedback from my (mostly) American audience, received a slew of compliments on my writing, my sharing, my adventuring. At first, I wanted to blame my readers for responding to the peace, the ease of the story when they have commented very little on stories of confusion and conflicting values… but I have also started to realize that I was able to write clearly about Goa for the very same reasons I was taking my readers to task. Goa was nothing if not easy and escapist, which places writing about Goa in precisely that same category. For two weeks, I have been trying to write about the Pesach weekend I spent in Dharamsala with Shlayma, a host of wandering Jews, and a community of exiled Tibetan monks, but the words have refused to come. How do I do justice to the images of monks murdered by Chinese police just last month, images that are hung across every temple and holy site? How do I explain the selfish motives that drove me into the mountains, the peace I found from watching others struggle? The simple answer, of course, is that I can’t, and that I’ll write the story soon despite all that, and shrug at the holes in the narrative and the injustice at the world, and get back to writing grants. And the simple answer, unfortunately, is usually the one that makes it out into the world.

ii. We.

All of my stories about India start with ‘we.’ Never in my life as my story been so completely intertwined with the stories of others. I think of the Passover questions – how is this night different from all other nights? – and I think that this journey is different from all other journeys because it is so completely shared, shared with Myla and Shlayma, and shared with the billion plus souls breathing in the industrializing pollution and breathing out the endless singing syllables that make up the polyglot beauty of India.

iii.

For me, being in India has been very much about story-telling. The moment I began to feel comfortable here was the moment I began to write about my experiences – and by writing, of course, to process them. It has become a way to place a few filters on the unremitting waves of impressions I’ve felt in this country, and to play around with a few details in order to find some more coherent sense of patterns in the morass. I don’t know which stories I will tell at home, and at this point, I’m not interested in guessing. All I ask from the stories that form in my mind is just that – that they continue to form, to be told, to make it out of my head and into the world.

Shlayma's Response:

It is always unsettling to me when people back home say how much I inspire them by being here. From my perspective, my time here has been largely selfish and ultimately useless. I try to demystify the exoticism of doing time in India, but to them my mere presence here is a tremendous sacrifice for a greater cause. I guess I am surrendering to some extent, because I’ve given up a lot—mostly my egotistical pride around doing “selfless” service. Being here, amidst many material discomforts and disturbing realities, has been a very humbling experience. As a result, I’ve questioned the motives that drove me to come in the first place, and whether my presence here has had even the smallest benefit. Nevertheless, however critical I am about the effectiveness of long-term international service work, the struggle to make sense of my global social responsibility has meant something to those that have not chosen to engage with these questions in the same way. For many of my friends and family, my choice to be here challenges them to think about their own choices, and my stories move them to become informed about injustices in the world. While I have no idea how this experience will shape my identity or what value it will have in the future, I know that at this moment in time living in India, working at an HIV/AIDS NGO and celebrating Passover seder in the mountains with Tibetan exiles is a story in the making—one that is inspiring others to think and act in ways that will hopefully shape a better world.

Myla's Question and Response:

Pesach is the holiday of freedom. The haggadah includes the following instruction: In every generation, each person should view him/herself as if s/he personally left Egypt. Since we say this every year at the Seder, the implication is that not only does it happen every generation, but that every year we should experience liberation. Thinking about your experience as a WP fellow, in what ways are you freer than you were last year? In what ways are you less free? What impact will leaving India and this experience have on your level of freedom—will you be more free to have left, or less free because of the memory of the experience?

I think there are some practical and concrete limitations to freedom. If one does not have food, or access to resources or work that can get them food, it is likely they cannot be free – free from starvation, stress, pain. However, on a somewhat abstract philosophical level, I do think that freedom in some ways is a frame of mind, a perception of one's circumstances. Being in India has made me see the multitude of freedoms that I enjoy that I was less, if at all, aware of before coming to a developing country. Many of the freedoms I always had, but didn't recognize as such.

I am free to demand, as a voting citizen, member of the press, or otherwise, that a corrupt government official resign. In India, such a demand may result in a murder. I can vote in America for whoever I want! In Florida people have been turned away for minor offenses, such as being black, but for the most part US citizens can vote. In Pakastan and Nepal's elections, people are afraid to leave their house during voting because of violence and bombings that may occur, something I have never had to worry about when voting. I have always been extremely critical of the American government, but it is perhaps important to keep a perspective of relativity and recognize that the frustration I feel at various things in my government does not measure to much in comparison with the atrocities committed by some governments in other parts of the world.

My worth as a person is not "more" than someone else's worth. I am not better than other people. And yet, I have many people who would give me money or help if I asked for or needed it. There are people who are invested in me and would pay for hospital bills if I got sick, food if I was hungry, or education if I was curious – I am also fortunate to have health insurance. This doesn't make me worth more than the person I see begging for money on the traffic junction corner as the motions towards the sleeper baby in her arms... but it perhaps does make me more free. I can ask for money if I am in need, large sums of money, and receive this. She can't. I am confident that I will be able to provide for my family one day, almost irrespective of the circumstances. She can't. I am free to know that, most probably, I will survive barring some freak accident, and so will my children. She isn't.

I am not rich in my country; but relatively, and by virtue of being able to be able to travel abroad, and even by virtue of having white skin, I am rich. Money aside, I am rich in culture and experience and opportunity. I can go to most countries in the world on my passport. I can volunteer and "help" others just because I want to; because I feel motivated to help others, and see the world while I'm at it. How perfectly selfish.

I am free to dress, be, and love who I want, for the most part. I am free to have sex with who I want, and to have sex at all. I am free to say no to sex, and take action against anyone who tries to violate that right. If I am raped or if my spouse dies, I do not know with almost complete certainty that I can never remarry. Fear of stigma, inability to remarry, or of being murdered are not obstacles for me for leaving a bad relationship/marriage. While statistically and realistically I do naturally fear domestic violence in my country for myself and those I love, I know that I would have support of my family and friends if I ever was in an abusive situation and tried to leave. I wouldn't be forced to move back in with my parents and be shunned from society; I would be allowed and welcome to move back in with my parents, if I needed, and would likely praised and admired for my strength in leaving an abusive partner. My family won't be insulted if they have no say in my chosen life partner, and I don't have to fear that they will disown me if I choose someone they don't approve of. I don't have to fear that I will be unable to marry because my parents cannot provide a significant dowry, and I don't have to fear being murdered for not giving enough dowry. While starting a family may mean I will have obstacles to pursuing higher education, it does not mean that I will be unable to do so, or discouraged from doing so. If I marry I am not voiceless in the decision of where I will live, and with whom (e.g. moving into my in-laws' home, wherever that happens to be).

I would say that the recognition of my own freedom, which I did nothing special to deserve, burdens me, and also makes me grateful for my undeserved circumstances. I still have issues with my country and its government and women's rights in my culture, but in comparison they seem relatively tame to the issues so many women face in India. So, in response to the question, I think I will return to the USA to feel that I am much freer as an individual than I had realized before now, and hopefully this understanding of relative freedom, or freedom in relation to others that I feel undeserving of yet thankful for, will help me to be a better person and do my part to work for equality and towards social justice. If I take literally the assertion that I personally have left slavery in Egypt, then surely I have come a long way. My hope is that this new perspective of freedom, and the memory and somewhat limited understanding of the vast inequality of freedom in the world, will help drive my motivation to effect change.