Power Cuts, Prayer Books, and Baking Silver: Rosh Hashanah

This is the first in a (potentially) 5-part series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur

Power Cuts, Prayer Books, and Baking Silver: Rosh Hashanah
September 30, 2008

When the power went out and the conversation swirled between English and Hindi and sincere smiles, I blessed the newly lit candles with bumbling words and hands brushing the light towards my face. An hour earlier, I stood on the front porch of my office, leaning against the square grided iron screens and watching the polluted and overcast skies for glimmers that might suggest three stars had announced the beginning of the days of awe, nibbling at a chocolate cookie with a white fudge chunk in the center. Before the meeting and the power cut, I had been frantically downloading recipes, searching through vegetarian instructions for conjuring eastern European food that might create an imagined Jewish feast for my friends.

The streets by my office are effectively still the streets of a village – the caged chickens ready to be butchered for your table and pocket-sized stores selling Haldiram’s snacks and paan are the same as any in Kolkata proper, but some of the buildings behind them are more plaster than concrete, and the tallest tower just two or three stories, interrupted by the occasional five-story apartment building with shiny metal gate and clumsily uniformed watchman. The streets are still being paved, and during the day men sit in dotis and tank-tops, crushing bricks with hand-held hammers so that the red refuse can be scattered across the dirt lanes and topped with tar in an ever expanding network or semi-drivable surfaces. As we walked through the streets, we saw that the power cut had affected the whole area, candles sitting in shop windows and the distant lights of the central and south sections of the city mixing with generator-powered beams and the blinding headlights of auto-rickshaws to illuminate our way. The first evening of the New Year passed in an easily mixed-up combination of dark and light and greasy and fermented and abstract utilitarianism and self-authored scripts.

The first morning began early – the famous stench of the streets made it easy to give away the last chunk of my breakfast bread to a young woman and her tiny daughter begging in front of the chipping white façade of St. Andrew’s church. I turned to see two new friends walking towards me from out of town, interested and intent but reluctant to be up at this hour. We threaded together through an alley, and a man sitting on a ledge in a white kurta pajama and matching skull cap waved us through the heavy wooden doors. Inside, the Beth El synagogue reminded me of others I’d seen in India; a raised pulpit in the middle, a flimsy wooden balcony for the women, dark wood benches holding a strange pile of underused religious materials, a recess and a stage for the torah, and a general feeling of a rectangle filled with light but rimmed in aging blue and white paint.

We ignored the middle-aged white man sitting with a prayer book and a safari hat, grabbed some of our own, and settled on the benches. We dissected a section of a pamphlet retelling a holiday parable, and explained ourselves in barely overlapping stories to the man in the hat, who took more interest in us than we did in him. We were thinking of going, thinking we’d circle and click and soak just a little more, when a venerable man with a walker and a retinue of three came bumbling through the door and stopped by the side of the pulpit to bless a prayer shawl and wrap himself and consider standing for his service before he gathered his tiny following to sit in a circle of the dusty benches under the only circling fan in the room.

We introduced ourselves to the most talkative of the group.
Mordechai Cohen.
Where are you from? From here?
Oh, we’re from Iraq, Iran.
[A glitter pause for effect.]
Well… we came from Baghdad 200 years ago. So yes, we’re from Calcutta.
[A wide smile.]
And… my wife, she is French, born here while her father was on assignment with the English army.
And these men are the caretakers?
[We gestured to the ones who had let us in]
Oh yes, we’ve always had Muslim caretakers for the synagogues. One lives in the basement, the whole neighborhood is Muslim. Always better to give your gold to the thieves for safe keeping, right?
[Again with the glitter pause. We smiled politely, and I privately interpreted this as meaning that they would be safe from extremists in a mono-religious neighborhood.]

The man with the walker was David Nahoum, last resident of a powerful family, proprietor of the famed plum cake sold at a third-generation bakery in New Market, and final holy man of the barely-used synagogues of Kolkata. He led a short service, mumbling through the standings and sittings and turnings, while I flipped back and forth through the all-Hebrew prayer book and picked out familiar phrases. A handful of Americans studying abroad in Kolkata joined us, and pulled a magical packet of apples and honey from a bag to share. After the service, we wandered around the synagogue, snapping photos and murmuring comments. As we left, Mordechai Cohen and his wife Aline offered us rasgullah, a classic local sweet to ensure that we would have a sweet new year.

As the four of the last thirty-five Jews of Kolkata piled in to a taxi cab, we walked with our new friends through the puja-ready roads (it was a market day for market days) to a second synagogue, Magen David. Magen David’s bell tower soars four or five stories above the street, and one or two above its closest neighbors, but we had to squeeze past a stall selling plastic barrettes to get to the lumbering metal gates. When we reached them, we never imagined they’d yield, but the strings of locks and chains were connected only to themselves, and a nearby vendor stepped aside to push his weight against the metal bars. We stepped in to a strangely well-kept courtyard, and were eventually joined by two hurrying, smiling, traditionally dressed Muslim men, who led us in to the synagogue. Magen David was the imagined form of Beth El; the columns supporting the balcony were solid and stone, rather than wood, the balconies themselves lined with wrought metal banisters. Everything about the place was robust, recently repainted and burnished and dusted. We asked who had paid for the restoration of a place so seldom seen (on Fridays a young man lights candles, alone, in Beth El and Magen David while the other three synagogues lie completely dormant), and got a non-answer in return.

After the dim light of the tomb-like sanctuary, the bustle of the streets, even as we passed through the downtown Government sector, seemed to lift us up and carry us along on a stream of tea vendors, bus exhaust, and business chatter. We ate lunch on the sidewalk, gulping grease and fresh-squeezed juice under the sign for the Foreign Tourist Railway Booking Office. I’d been here once before, on a ferry from Howrah – the massive station on the far side of the river – and knew we were near the water. We strolled down to the docks, dodging painted buses and grass-infested railways crossing guards, and scouted for a spot by the water. Like the banks of any good river in an industrial port, the Hooghly is lined with trash heaps, temples, opportunist stalls, laundresses, bathing men, and splashing boys. The water is determinedly brown, without any hint of blue – depending who you ask, either the result of the waste and chemically painted idols dumped routinely into its flow, or a simple matter of heavy silt carried downstream.

The Hooghly feels far from holy, but it’s an offshoot of the Ganges, on her way to meet the Bay of Bengal. We tiptoed down towards the water, edging our sandals against the serrated concrete to keep from joining the tide. We gathered by a trash heap, and read a prayer, and distributed some bread. Then we retreated into our own worlds, and tossed out the breadcrumbs, counting out the habits, the memories, the patterns, and the thoughts of the last year that the coming one could do without. We feasted, for the second time, on apples and honey, and wobbled with sticky fingers back up the bank.

The afternoon was spent in escape – at a bookstore café, gathering vegetables and names, resting in the dim light of another late-afternoon power cut. As the day gathered towards evening, people trickled in and food began to stack up on the counters and soon there was sizzling and scouring and scampering and, a few hours and a dozen guests later, dinner. The table was circled with the semi-agnostic descendents of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, and spread with braided bread (tomato flavor, not round), figs, a beet, wine, two colors of grape juice, and our third round of apples and honey. We blessed the collection of ritual oddities, and replaced them with more substantial food. We ate, and ate again, and finished with Bengali sweets while discussing the nature of the baking silver used to decorate the diamond squares of nuts and ghee and jaggery. As the darkness outside settled, Regina helped with the dishes while cards were dealt and elbows began to lean on the table in pairs. The wine bottles were opened – eventually – without the help of a corkscrew, and we raised our motley assortment of tea cups and glasses to toast beginnings, new and old.

Around the Bend: A Travel Novella (Part II)

June 13th-July 10th, 2008
Leh, Ladakh, and the Nubra Valley, Jammu and Kashmir State

Also featuring: Kolkata, West Bengal; Varanasi, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh; New Delhi

[Note: continued from the previous post – please read Part I first!]

Chapter 5

When the valley floor started drooping in beautiful wrinkled camel-colored folds, like a forgotten wool coat thrown over the back of a chair at a winter dinner party, we were too busy feeding our own stories into the quickening breezes to realize that this was the beginning of the valley. When the floor dropped down – not just by a hundred yards, but by half a mile – we straightened up on the bike and then leaned forward again into the wind, we pulled over between freshly blinded curves and exhaled into the vastness. We felt giddy and alone and perfectly integrated with the undulating road. We laughed at the occasional Jeep blasting its horn at a passing army truck, sorry for the passengers locked in a metal box.

We roamed down the mountainside, and sped along a tiny indented road rushing a little above the valley floor. We watched passing oasis towns – created by glacial runoff in the otherwise spectacularly brown and blue and metallic landscape – grow and shrink. We came to a crossroads bearing a yellow sign that shouted ‘Diskit!’ and we tucked in and sped across a miniature dessert. Sand dunes rolled out to either side, and soon they were swatting our faces, pinching our cheeks and slapping our hands with a thousand immaculate grains of sand. Halfway across our little Sahara the raindrops began – and it seemed a miracle that they didn’t mix with the dirt in the air to splatter us with mud – so that we were being pelted by hot dry hard grains and cold wet soft drops until the mountains reared again and we went up up up and left that silly sandy little flatland down below.

We switchbacked and straigtawayed and honkingly blind curved our way for another twenty kilometers, until, with early afternoon sun melting our memories of a night in North Pullu, we passed the first tilled fields and thin swaying poplars and white gompas and low stone walls of our new home town. There was a closed ‘Peace’ restaurant and a ‘Main’ street and we swung through not-quite-right until we parked by a small stream running downhill from the town prayer wheel. We walked under a gompa, ducking unnecessarily and tracing a tiny path to a beautiful courtyard and a tree house hideaway room with a cloth ceiling and two walls of windows looking out on gardens and hillsides and buckets of hot water and glasses of fresh mint tea. We settled.

Later that afternoon, when Vam and I turned the curve of the main road, bending it in our minds to fit ourselves into this isolated town’s image of itself, we recognized a lanky blonde figure waving from the upstairs window of a restaurant – Mar and Ty had made it safely to town, and soon there was feasting and guest-house touring and tall tale telling. There were adventures the next day – Mar and Ty sampled the next metropolis’s debatable delicacies, and Vam and I popped both wheels on the bike, failed to get them fixed, and ended up in a ‘bar’ set up in the open space of a man’s family farm, eating sliced cucumber and tomato and trading tall tales of 1999.

In the morning, Ty had disappeared, returned early to Leh, and as the three remaining adventurers, Vam, Mar and I decided that the slow spread of roads across the Nubra demanded our company for leaning, singing, speeding, slowing, frolicking, and general criss-crossing. We dined on Ladakhi bread and local apricot jam, we slept under the windows and lapped up the stars, I let the thin sunlight dry my hair and blow through the clothes that would take too long to wash – and soon we were ready to go.

Chapter 6

The Diskit gas station consists of a distinctly unprotected pump, set in a clearing of slightly more regular gravel than the dirt-and-broken-boulder landscaped surrounding it. Off to one side, a low building houses the station attendant – if you need a fill, just knock on the door. We did. Soon we were spinning back across the miniature Sahara, and this time the yellow concrete sign shouted ‘Panamik!’ as I slowed down to turn left and we saluted the armed men guarding the infant desert. The road to Panamik was a pleasant jigsaw puzzle of landscapes – low curving hills and sharp cliffs against unvarying plains, sand spilling across the road in slippery dry sheets and low-land marshes flashing our reflections back at us, malicious thorn bushes and graciously welcoming green trees bending slightly in the breeze to wave us by prayer wheels and low white farmhouses and cows and the odd bus.

All three of us noticed a resemblance to our mental images of life in the Roman Empire.

Stepping down from the bike, I felt like a hero in a Western. I discovered a miraculous macaroon, and Mar pulled us all into the Hot Spring Guest House where a casual old man fussed in a thatched kitchen filled with blackened metal and produced a brilliant dal. We settled in to our rooms, and discussed rebellion on the low rooftop and admired the mountain-stunted view from the northernmost point a tourist can go in India. We ate a dish that approached Chow Mein (too familiar, at this point), but Pakistan and China both stayed stubbornly hidden, for all their physical proximity, behind the rosy peaks.

In the morning, Mar took me to the hot spring to admire the moss, and we skipped around puddles and talked about romance in the travel-sphere – bathing was suspicious, but the guest house had a direct line, and I cleansed my body, if not mind and soul in a soft blue plastic bucket of earth-temperature water. On the way back to Diskit, I soared, and Vam picked me up and carried us both up to a hill-top monastery that left the distance we had just ridden a little line in the palm of our hands. That view of the Nubra valley immediately pre-sunset was the most beautiful doll-house spectacle I have ever seen.

We all turned in early, and snapped our eyes open at five am to retrace our steps past the curves, high roads, low marshes, desert folds, epic snowline, all cut by a fresh serving of unadulterated light and Christmas-morning views ready to be unwrapped and gasped and cooed over. We held close and let go and ate crumbles of crackers, until we arrived back in North Pullu. The bases looked different in the light – smaller, more commercial, less ours – and we posed for photos and turned our wheels upward towards our old friend.

Two or three kilometers later, in the middle of my babbling, Vam slowed the bike. He had an apocalyptic look on his face. A handful of cars passed us by. None of those that stopped had an air pump – until two massive olive green carriers pulled over, and two dozen soldiers poured across the road and swarmed over the bike like so many camouflaged ants. They refilled our front tire and left us with enough air to reach Station 49, and the conclusion that it was a bust, not a small leak. We sat on a half-broken stone wall and kicked our frozen feet into the mortar and looked up. The station soldier disappeared into his half-oil-barrel home to make us tea and Vam announced that we were stuck again, stuck for good and stuck together, and I couldn’t stop smiling at the utterly complex simplicity that this trip had lent to our lives.

Another pair of riders pulled over, and I discussed foot tattoos with a beautiful Brazilian woman in white while an Australian man helped Vam to examine our newest bump. At eleven am, just on time, a volley of empty cargo trucks pulled out of North Pullu and started folding back and forth up the foothills towards us. The first one to pass pulled over at a wave, and offered to carry us and the bike to Leh for about ten dollars. We shoved the bike in the back, jumped in the cab, and waved our new friends into the distance, promising a celebratory dinner that evening. The truck was classic – decorated to the proverbial hilt with small plastic pieces, painted flourishes, dented and buffed aluminum crowns, and hand-painted cursive messages to passers-by: ‘horn ok please,’ ‘permit J&K state,’ and the like. The interior was equally effusive, with a quilted plastic ceiling bearing dangling hearts, a dashboard filled with stickers of important monks, a handful of surprisingly unfaded photos of the driver’s family wedged above the rear-view mirror, and Tibetan pop blasting on the radio.

Chapter 7

At Khardong-La we stepped on to frozen ground and smiled at the captain who had rescued our friends and snapped a few shots and meandered quickly back down to town. On the edge of it all, I sipped a luxurious mango smoothie while Vam wrestled the bike down from the truck and collaborated with half the mechanics on the street to repair the wheel. Soon we were tripping back to town, and eventually stumbling in to a ground-floor room at a miracle hostel that came with a library, an internet café, and a rose garden patio. That night we dined on pizza and lemon meringue pie by a crackling fire and we clashed in the moonlight in argyle and green and woke up entangled in the unreasonably adorable and ever shockingly fictitious tourist scene of Leh.

Leh wrapped us comfortably together, just slightly exposed, and spit us out on two consecutive mornings. After Vam left, while I was still lingering and he was negotiating the youth hostel in the unimaginable morass of Delhi, Mar and I crossed a different valley and climbed a different (small) slope and found a modest palace and a power plant and a series of large high-schools that must serve whole swaths of the valley’s villages.

In Delhi, Vam was standing outside the domestic terminal, and I smiled and we quickly got lost together in the freakish familiarity of Connaught Place. That night, on a shiny new train near a shiny new baby on her way home with her posh young mother, we watched the clouds stack and shuffle themselves to form a hundred different stained glass windows across the plains of northern India. We woke up in Kolkata, West Bengal to join a Rainbow Pride March before stumbling through the thick air towards edibles and restables and after the clarity of the mountains it felt like equal parts mental and physical metropolitan marsh – overflowing with ever-lingering afternoon rains and street side vendors whose homes suspiciously resemble their shops and shirts sticky with emotion clinging in the damp air.

The morning presented the towering remnants of the British Raj – beautiful old buildings and super sleek suburban malls, all mixed with leftist politics and famed Bengali poetry. On the ferry, Vam and I counted the types of transportation we had taken over the last three weeks, and smiled at the total: bus, bike, foot, truck, airplane, train, rickshaw (auto and cycle), taxi, boat. We had stolen a block of time, and twisted it to our liking, and now reality was trying to snap back to the shape it was used to holding. I waved out the back window of my yellow taxi cab as he disappeared, black t-shirt twisted at the shoulders under a heavy backpack, in to the wandering crowds of commuters.

Epilogue

I arrived in Varanasi with a brand-new chest cold from the journey and a pair of German friends picked up at the railway station in an attempt to out-smart the auto rickshaw racket. Sabri and Ann and I tripped up five flights of stairs to the roof-top dorm room, but the mesh walls seemed insufficient protection against the mid-monsoon rains, so we settled for cupboards with miniature windows for fifty rupees each. You make friends quickly when you travel alone.

Varanasi fascinated me for its proximity, its associations with death and water, with recycling and renewal. It presented me with the worst side of tourist-ready India, with heavy monsoons twisting the river and clouds obscuring the bright colors of the city, streets streaming with trash and cow patties (making dodging massive bulls in tiny alleys even more dangerous). My stomach twisted and my fragile sense of belonging balked at the offers of opium and obscene rides. The fourth of July passed on a roof top restaurant with my new friends and a trip down Jack Kerouac’s road, as it was meant to be traveled. On my last night, after viewing and considering and cleaning and preparing, we ate with the monkeys and watched the light fade and I felt better for knowing that I’d been and was ready to say goodbye.

At the station, I saw a head of blond hair far lighter than my own and we locked eyes and giggled and I sidled over and dropped my bag in imitation of hers. She was Finnish, and offered me a made-up name, Anne, when I tripped over her given one. We laughed at the ridiculous spectacle that Shiva’s city had laid at our feet, we laughed at the late train, and laughed at the habit of wandering the globe in circles to come home.

On the train, I was mistaken for a Canadian – always a compliment – and slept above a handsome German couple and across from a set of Bangladeshi Muslim clerics on pilgrimage. In the morning, I was cured – my chest was empty, my head was light, and my feet moved me of their own accord to book a ticket on to Delhi and a hostel for the night. Agra is not a place to stay. Agra is a place to stop through – Anne bought a ticket out for that very same night.

I visited a fort and a tomb and settled into an inner dialogue on the intricacies of carved stone and empire building and life as it had been passing in India. In the morning, I woke up just after sunrise, and entered The Monument with the first dozen visitors. The light was dull, but the white marble glowed like the oversized toy of a young prince, opalescent and immaculate and utterly secure in its own grandeur. I walked slowly, and made friends, and left them to walk in patterns formed on a whim and embedded with meaning after the fact.

Floating on my morning’s visual feast, I wandered on to a flaking teal bus, and followed my elementary school instructions to sit at the back (because other people, at other times, have been forced to sit at the back of the bus, so we who have the choice should sit there and leave the front for those who are older or otherwise require or enjoy the ease of the front). I was joined by a figure I had noticed that morning, watching the inlays glisten in the gloom of the inner tomb – a young Englishman, Ken, on his gap year adventures. We exchanged recent life stories, leaving bits buried in forty kilometers of upturned fields, and when the bus dropped us in Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s imagined capitol, we turned up the trash heap together, and were instantaneously married in the eyes of the hawkers pushing silver necklaces and glass beads and guided tours. We spent the next hour trying to shake off our self-assigned young guide, while looking up and out at the massive mosque we had entered, and the half hour after that climbing the next hill and feeling guilty because for once, this man had not asked for anything from either of us.

The Moghul Emperor Akbar’s court – abandoned after twelve years because the water had not been properly engineered and the new capitol was traded back for Agra and Delhi – spread before us, and for once I matched the squares in the guidebook with the stone blocks rising solidly on all four sides. My favorite pillar – and it’s important, when faced with so many beautiful carvings and so many monuments to pick favorites, otherwise it all blends together into one red stone wall – was the throne pillar, a fifteen-foot high seat connected to surrounding balconies by small passageways, so that Akbar could arrange clerics of every religion around him in a circle, and conduct theological debates with the hope of coming to some consensus. The clerics staged an uprising, and Akbar had them all killed for attempted regicide – but the seed idea was fascinating, and the pillar was decorated with symbols from a dozen faiths.

That night, on the train to Delhi, in my heavily sweat-stained shirt I matched the moon to my music, and the woman sitting next to me asked how many years I had lived in India. I smiled. At a wandering friend’s air conditioned home I unfolded and cleaned and prepared for re-entry. My head was still floating, prepared to look down at the expected marshmallow clouds. My hands were still, my clothes filthy, and my gifts stacked carefully and wrapped in one another to prevent breakage.

At the airport gift shop, I filtered through a pop-up version of the Kama Sutra, and thought about arriving in Delhi and hating the filth and loving the mountains and settling in the south and stretching my legs up and down the country and returning to the one place I felt in place for this extended vacation, and I decided that I don’t like to travel alone so I chatted with a beautiful British-Bangladeshi Nokia rep and we agreed that they’ll try to take you to the newest mall, but there’s so much to see and its all changing so fast that we were lucky to have visited and would be coming back soon for more.