This post represents the third part in a 4-5 part series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur
The Importance of Getting Out to Getting Back In: Navratri in Ahmedabad
October 5-7, 2008
On Saturday, I disintegrated; the pillows wouldn’t hold me properly, and the voices on the phone disappeared into static. When I finally met an open set of arms all I could keep down was a chemically flavored mango smoothie and when they called to book me a plane ticket for the next day I doubted my well-tested ability to get to and from airports and hotels on short notice.
I love to fly – but it’s the familiarity of the ritual as much as the expansive views of clouds, the chance to sit in a controlled space and put life on pause for a few hours as much as the chance to land somewhere new, that fills me with softly buzzing energy as I step out of the car and set my bags on the sidewalk in front of the glass doors leading to the ticket counter. In the airport, I stood up straight, unloaded a hastily packed hiking pack on to conveyer belts, and paid exorbitant prices for a donut that I munched through while waiting in a snaking security line. I imagined there was a soft, self-contained smile on my face, but it was probably just a smug grin at the ironies of the world and an Indian businessman’s ongoing outrage at the price of airport tea (ten to twenty times street price).
At the gate, I read quickly through the Ahmedabad entry in my friend’s copy of an India guidebook, determined to get the embarrassment of being seen with it over as quickly as possible. On the other side, I parked myself just past baggage claim and made a series of phone calls, arranging the yellow brick road for trekking, traipsing, and the possibility of tripping.
The afternoon air was warm, but drier than it had been in Kolkata, and I tried to relish the difference. I was meeting a co-worker for a regional meeting the following day, and he picked out an ashram from the six Bible-thin pages of the guidebook I was now doing my best to keep buried deep inside a shoulder bag. A green and yellow auto decorated with Aishwarya dropped us off, and we wandered into a winding, low-ceilinged series of quotes and photos retelling the adventures of a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. His letter to Hitler – a copy of the original, printed on plain A1 paper – mixed with a calm river view and a man quietly demonstrating how to spin cotton thread outside simple living quarters to pass on a sense of a deeply held philosophy, a syndicated definition of justice, and an effective set of social action tools.
I left with the strange sensation of having eaten a nutritious, filling meal, and when we returned to the hotel, I knew it was time to set out on my own. Still referring to the guidebook, I surreptitiously set it on the counter, and asked the hotel clerk to point out the way to a nearby mosque. He pointed me across a bridge, and the thick pink sunset air wrapped around my ankles as I looked out at the lines of yellow lights marking industrial cranes downstream, at the polluted water glistening in the new moon, and over at the bustling market spilling down the far bank and almost into the water. I felt calm and separate threading between stacks of freshly carved end-tables and carts of locally made ice-cream, stepping over trash heaps ready for pickers and squeezing just past a crowd of bargains in the making. As the headlights of a hundred commuting rickshaws rushed around me, an old woman grabbed my arm – or maybe I grabbed hers – and together, her unfairly beautiful daughter a few steps ahead, we made it safely across. We smiled, and smiled again, and I picked up my pace to avoid a conversation in a language I was embarrassed to still not speak.
On the left, as I was looking for a right turn, I saw it. An ancient stone façade, one elegant story high, glowing with sanctuary lights, and bordered by a dark courtyard. When I stopped just past the gate to ask an old man in a skull cap if it was ok for me to go in, he suggested I ask an anonymous caregiver who seemed to have disappeared by the time I stepped around the ablution pool and into the halo glow of Ahmed Shah’s Mosque. A dozen men were scattered inside, concentrated near the center, but spread between a small forest of carved pillars and ancient domes. The guidebook had mentioned that this mosque, reputedly one of the oldest in Ahmedabad and built in 1414 as the personal prayer place of the founding king, showed a rare blend of Hindi and Jain architecture, mixed with the traditional Islamic vines and geometries. I stood on the edge of the prayer space and traced the hybrid stone patterns holding the ceiling above bent backs wrapped in soft white kurtas and felt, for the first time since the Days of Awe had begun, that I was praying in my own way, pausing and reflecting and asking and telling softly.
I stepped backwards and skirted the pool, admiring the glint of the streetlights on the shallow dark water, and slipped back to the street. I pulled a scarf over my head, as much to deflect stares as for any sense of modesty, and followed the thoroughfare through another market, past strange fences and empty corners, to the Sidi Sayed Mosque, the one I had left to find. It was dark now, and the sunset prayer was just ending. I asked a woman sitting on a bench near the pool whether I could go inside, and she smiled back and nodded vigorously, so I left my shoes tucked near her seat and treaded across the flagstones. This mosque was less ornately carved, but I followed the guidebook’s recommendation to inspect the finely carved stone jali screens – each one centered around a depiction of the tree of life, and I thought about a carpet that my mother happened to give me when I was just the height of the roots to the branches and a song we used to sing in Hebrew school on Sundays.
On the far side of the street stood a twice-recommended restaurant, and, holding a precious image of sitting alone at a table with a rose and a book and a candle in my mind, I followed a uniformed boy up the clattering elevator shaft. On the roof, a warm evening breeze played with the loose cloth of my linen pants and the bits of blonde fuzz that always escape my ponytail to tickle the back of my neck and the edges of my face, tourism advertisement-style. The lights of the city were flashing, but not invasive, and the sounds drifting up were entertaining but not distracting – the world was carefully insulted and heightened, and I folded my legs beneath me on a low wooden bench to begin an epic thali.
The meal seemed to fill in bits of my mind that had been sitting empty, servers drifting in and out of the dark, my thoughts following the flavors up and down the mountain roads that had been preventing any sense of stability. An hour later, the wind picked me up and carried me off to bed, where a smiling woman with orange hennaed hair and cotton saris met me on the neighboring cot. We watched a television awards ceremony and spoke in clips and drifted easily to sleep underneath the accommodating grumble of the air-conditioner.
The second day was for the meeting, and it passed quickly in power-point presentations and planning and government procedures. After the cards had been traded and smiles worn down for the day, we were invited to join in a Garba, a traditional dance gathering to celebrate Navratri. Navratri is celebrated most thoroughly in northwestern India, and I was variously told that it was Diwali, that it ended with Diwali, that it is a dance festival, a pooja, or a preparation. The meeting had been held at one of many offices of the world’s largest union, in a building overflowing with brilliant, empowered women, and as I came down the five flights of stairs, I realized that most of them were dancing in a shaded concrete courtyard.
As I reached the edge of the crowd it opened timidly and engulfed me immediately. The spinning women relieved me of my bag, and of my reluctance to join, and pulled me quickly into a snaking line. I stepped in and out, picked out the other white-blonde face I was supposed to meet, and soon she was pulled into the swirl as well. We imitated steps and swished our wrists, we was spun out and in circles and back in to the morass until we were drenched with sweat and my muscles were twitching with a strange combination of exhaustion and the pounding music.
By the time we had arrived at my host’s home, an hour before dinner, women all over the city were still dancing. Her apartment stood in a strange brand-new development wasteland, shiny gaping half-finished infrastructure stretching out towards the darkening horizon, and the courtyard was full of women in chiffon and sequins, polyester blend silks and shimmering threads, taking turns at a fenced-in rectangular grass dance floor.
I hardly slept that night, but a voice came through the static of the phone to smile and in the pre-dawn light at four thirty the next morning I ventured through the deserted streets of Ahmedabad to wait at the gate and board a series of three flights and hold a little boy on my lap whose mother was traveling alone and enjoy the food service that they’ve abandoned in the US. And I knew that it was ok, that something had been sown up, some flapping window shades had been pulled tight by the glow of old stone and the ever-mystic roof-top breeze of the night before and that even if I began to disintegrate the way I had the day before I left these closures would keep the sand from slipping and I’d have a chance to build a driftwood fort on the beach and stand up to see the reassuring line of the horizon. I stepped out of the easy air-conditioning of the airport into moist air, taxi slip in hand, securing in the knowledge that this was my third landing in Kolkata and that this time, I was home.
The Importance of Getting Out to Getting Back In: Navratri in Ahmedabad
October 5-7, 2008
On Saturday, I disintegrated; the pillows wouldn’t hold me properly, and the voices on the phone disappeared into static. When I finally met an open set of arms all I could keep down was a chemically flavored mango smoothie and when they called to book me a plane ticket for the next day I doubted my well-tested ability to get to and from airports and hotels on short notice.
I love to fly – but it’s the familiarity of the ritual as much as the expansive views of clouds, the chance to sit in a controlled space and put life on pause for a few hours as much as the chance to land somewhere new, that fills me with softly buzzing energy as I step out of the car and set my bags on the sidewalk in front of the glass doors leading to the ticket counter. In the airport, I stood up straight, unloaded a hastily packed hiking pack on to conveyer belts, and paid exorbitant prices for a donut that I munched through while waiting in a snaking security line. I imagined there was a soft, self-contained smile on my face, but it was probably just a smug grin at the ironies of the world and an Indian businessman’s ongoing outrage at the price of airport tea (ten to twenty times street price).
At the gate, I read quickly through the Ahmedabad entry in my friend’s copy of an India guidebook, determined to get the embarrassment of being seen with it over as quickly as possible. On the other side, I parked myself just past baggage claim and made a series of phone calls, arranging the yellow brick road for trekking, traipsing, and the possibility of tripping.
The afternoon air was warm, but drier than it had been in Kolkata, and I tried to relish the difference. I was meeting a co-worker for a regional meeting the following day, and he picked out an ashram from the six Bible-thin pages of the guidebook I was now doing my best to keep buried deep inside a shoulder bag. A green and yellow auto decorated with Aishwarya dropped us off, and we wandered into a winding, low-ceilinged series of quotes and photos retelling the adventures of a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. His letter to Hitler – a copy of the original, printed on plain A1 paper – mixed with a calm river view and a man quietly demonstrating how to spin cotton thread outside simple living quarters to pass on a sense of a deeply held philosophy, a syndicated definition of justice, and an effective set of social action tools.
I left with the strange sensation of having eaten a nutritious, filling meal, and when we returned to the hotel, I knew it was time to set out on my own. Still referring to the guidebook, I surreptitiously set it on the counter, and asked the hotel clerk to point out the way to a nearby mosque. He pointed me across a bridge, and the thick pink sunset air wrapped around my ankles as I looked out at the lines of yellow lights marking industrial cranes downstream, at the polluted water glistening in the new moon, and over at the bustling market spilling down the far bank and almost into the water. I felt calm and separate threading between stacks of freshly carved end-tables and carts of locally made ice-cream, stepping over trash heaps ready for pickers and squeezing just past a crowd of bargains in the making. As the headlights of a hundred commuting rickshaws rushed around me, an old woman grabbed my arm – or maybe I grabbed hers – and together, her unfairly beautiful daughter a few steps ahead, we made it safely across. We smiled, and smiled again, and I picked up my pace to avoid a conversation in a language I was embarrassed to still not speak.
On the left, as I was looking for a right turn, I saw it. An ancient stone façade, one elegant story high, glowing with sanctuary lights, and bordered by a dark courtyard. When I stopped just past the gate to ask an old man in a skull cap if it was ok for me to go in, he suggested I ask an anonymous caregiver who seemed to have disappeared by the time I stepped around the ablution pool and into the halo glow of Ahmed Shah’s Mosque. A dozen men were scattered inside, concentrated near the center, but spread between a small forest of carved pillars and ancient domes. The guidebook had mentioned that this mosque, reputedly one of the oldest in Ahmedabad and built in 1414 as the personal prayer place of the founding king, showed a rare blend of Hindi and Jain architecture, mixed with the traditional Islamic vines and geometries. I stood on the edge of the prayer space and traced the hybrid stone patterns holding the ceiling above bent backs wrapped in soft white kurtas and felt, for the first time since the Days of Awe had begun, that I was praying in my own way, pausing and reflecting and asking and telling softly.
I stepped backwards and skirted the pool, admiring the glint of the streetlights on the shallow dark water, and slipped back to the street. I pulled a scarf over my head, as much to deflect stares as for any sense of modesty, and followed the thoroughfare through another market, past strange fences and empty corners, to the Sidi Sayed Mosque, the one I had left to find. It was dark now, and the sunset prayer was just ending. I asked a woman sitting on a bench near the pool whether I could go inside, and she smiled back and nodded vigorously, so I left my shoes tucked near her seat and treaded across the flagstones. This mosque was less ornately carved, but I followed the guidebook’s recommendation to inspect the finely carved stone jali screens – each one centered around a depiction of the tree of life, and I thought about a carpet that my mother happened to give me when I was just the height of the roots to the branches and a song we used to sing in Hebrew school on Sundays.
On the far side of the street stood a twice-recommended restaurant, and, holding a precious image of sitting alone at a table with a rose and a book and a candle in my mind, I followed a uniformed boy up the clattering elevator shaft. On the roof, a warm evening breeze played with the loose cloth of my linen pants and the bits of blonde fuzz that always escape my ponytail to tickle the back of my neck and the edges of my face, tourism advertisement-style. The lights of the city were flashing, but not invasive, and the sounds drifting up were entertaining but not distracting – the world was carefully insulted and heightened, and I folded my legs beneath me on a low wooden bench to begin an epic thali.
The meal seemed to fill in bits of my mind that had been sitting empty, servers drifting in and out of the dark, my thoughts following the flavors up and down the mountain roads that had been preventing any sense of stability. An hour later, the wind picked me up and carried me off to bed, where a smiling woman with orange hennaed hair and cotton saris met me on the neighboring cot. We watched a television awards ceremony and spoke in clips and drifted easily to sleep underneath the accommodating grumble of the air-conditioner.
The second day was for the meeting, and it passed quickly in power-point presentations and planning and government procedures. After the cards had been traded and smiles worn down for the day, we were invited to join in a Garba, a traditional dance gathering to celebrate Navratri. Navratri is celebrated most thoroughly in northwestern India, and I was variously told that it was Diwali, that it ended with Diwali, that it is a dance festival, a pooja, or a preparation. The meeting had been held at one of many offices of the world’s largest union, in a building overflowing with brilliant, empowered women, and as I came down the five flights of stairs, I realized that most of them were dancing in a shaded concrete courtyard.
As I reached the edge of the crowd it opened timidly and engulfed me immediately. The spinning women relieved me of my bag, and of my reluctance to join, and pulled me quickly into a snaking line. I stepped in and out, picked out the other white-blonde face I was supposed to meet, and soon she was pulled into the swirl as well. We imitated steps and swished our wrists, we was spun out and in circles and back in to the morass until we were drenched with sweat and my muscles were twitching with a strange combination of exhaustion and the pounding music.
By the time we had arrived at my host’s home, an hour before dinner, women all over the city were still dancing. Her apartment stood in a strange brand-new development wasteland, shiny gaping half-finished infrastructure stretching out towards the darkening horizon, and the courtyard was full of women in chiffon and sequins, polyester blend silks and shimmering threads, taking turns at a fenced-in rectangular grass dance floor.
I hardly slept that night, but a voice came through the static of the phone to smile and in the pre-dawn light at four thirty the next morning I ventured through the deserted streets of Ahmedabad to wait at the gate and board a series of three flights and hold a little boy on my lap whose mother was traveling alone and enjoy the food service that they’ve abandoned in the US. And I knew that it was ok, that something had been sown up, some flapping window shades had been pulled tight by the glow of old stone and the ever-mystic roof-top breeze of the night before and that even if I began to disintegrate the way I had the day before I left these closures would keep the sand from slipping and I’d have a chance to build a driftwood fort on the beach and stand up to see the reassuring line of the horizon. I stepped out of the easy air-conditioning of the airport into moist air, taxi slip in hand, securing in the knowledge that this was my third landing in Kolkata and that this time, I was home.
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1 comment:
Lovely post. So sorry I didn't get around to sending you the photos - am doing so by email now!
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