Court of Lilliput

Framing

2009-12-06T22:58:00.000-08:00

Kolkata, India and San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, USA

This blog was intended to be a holding place for a collection of writings about two years spent living and working in Hyderabad and Kolkata (and Delhi and…), India. It skips over most of the daily details, although some overview of those can be found in these types of posts – the pieces I posted here allowed me to hang some glittering words around an assortment of experiences that stretched my mind in every possible direction. As I tried to sum up my ‘learnings’ for a closing presentation to a community that raised me, these are the bullet points I came up with (and the details? those are in the blog posts):

• The mutability of language and the vagaries of communication
• Patience: total capacity vs. current reserve
• Resources and the impact of American consumption
• Comfort as a choice
• Experiencing otherness

Both years were spent with the same NGO, and with support from AJWS, but everything from the type of work to the type of office, from my room-mates to my dance classes, from the cuisine to the root of the language was radically different, in wonderful ways. I don’t have a review article for the whole experience, but below is a volunteer report, a short piece I was asked to write up by the office I worked with in Kolkata. Considering that I left from Kolkata, I think it’s an appropriate place to leave this archive – for now.

Volunteer Report for Sep 2008 – May 2009

I first met members of the NGO’s Kolkata office at the all-office Program Management Retreat, which was held at a small beach-side resort south of Chennai, Tamil Nadu in December 2007 – and I felt an instant companionship. There was something excitable, something subtly deviant, about the group that caught my attention, and from the World AIDS Day shirt to the gender-bending I knew that these were people I should get to know. As we discussed the inter-related but often competitive strategies of empowering women versus breaking down the idea of gender entirely in between sessions on grant writing and program management, my first impressions were confirmed: the Kolkata office had a lot to teach me.

Effective social change work requires a dynamic and inclusive ideas of community, and that is exactly what I found when I arrived in Kolkata, a city dedicated to the goddess in all her forms, and exported as the poverty-ridden once-shining center of the painstakingly dismantled British Raj. I came looking for intellectuals, artists, communists, queers – and found all that and more, in abundance (if there is anything that India does not lack, it is abundance). As I started moving around Kolkata, meeting different circles of people, both through work and through friends, I was amazed at the strength of the influence that the office, and especially it’s director, have had on the queer and AIDS activist communities – everyone linked in to those circles knew of the director and the office’s work, and felt that it had been influential in encouraging them to pursue their interests and to seek answers to difficult questions.

My main work in the Kolkata office was technically based outside of it – helping to organize and expand the NGO’s national and regional advocacy work with a focus on women’s empowerment and access to resources – but this work fused naturally with learning about and assisting with the office’s emerging advocacy projects, as well as the community events and resources that it has become known for in Kolkata, from the Pride march to the film festival to the resource library. I got to know other projects within the office as I helped individuals with project planning and document preparation, and was lucky enough to visit a major partner in Orissa while assisting them with grant writing. Although I traveled frequently, especially during the second half of the year, Kolkata remained my home.

One of the highlights of my year was the Jewish festival of lights, Chanukah; with another volunteer, I was able to host a gathering for the office in my home, and after many months of learning about Bengali culture, food, and traditions, had the opportunity to share some of the traditions that I had grown up with (not to mention fried potatoes, which seem to be a fairly universal dish). From sharing lunches to late-night abstract editing to celebrating holidays, marches, and successful events together, my time in the Kolkata office was both a precious opportunity to learn and to give, and great reminder of the power of community in the face of adversity.

The Book List, Part III

2009-07-20T00:12:00.001-07:00

December 2008 – May 2009

Recreational:

Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins is my favorite source of absurdity in a country – not to mention a world – that has a sometimes surprisingly deep and abiding love for boxes. I was skeptical when I was given this book as an apology, and I waited a long time to read it – until the American thanksgiving crossed over the end of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. It became my first auto-rickshaw reading, balanced on the edge of the bench next to the driver and immediately behind the exhaust pipe of a bus, against the edge of a bag pressed against my chest – which is, in a sense, exactly where Robbins belongs. This was not my favorite of his, but it was magical and familiar and twisted and enlightened, and that was enough.

A Backward Place, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
It is stunning, and humbling, and in the end not at all surprising, how little the expat experience, let alone ‘scene,’ has changed in India over the last fifty years – an insightful sliver of individual ambitions and reformed identities in a world where everyone seems to be living out of context.

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
A classic, which I have very little right to review here. I found it contained a lot of wisdom, many forms of which had passed through my mind at various points, but rarely with Hesse’s elegant poise.

The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh
This made an excellent commuting book, as large sections of it took place in and around Gol Park, which I passed every day on the way to and from work. Although it is not considered one of Ghosh’s best books, it provides a quietly powerful analysis of fantasy and of lives built between worlds.

The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple
Somewhere between feeling guilty of being an escapist reader and wanting to both judge and improve my own writing about India, I decided it was imperative that I read this book. Written as Dalrymple was converting from a travel writer to a historian, these brief and brightly colored essays on travels through India are at turns disgusted, amorous, and incredulous – but my favorite thing about them is that they lay out contrasts, and rather than spelling out the difference, allow you to make your own judgments about the serious spectacle of life in and around the country.

The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen (second half)
As carefully written, and as equally dry and brilliant, as the first half – very academic, but definitively worth reading.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
The winner of the 2008 Booker prize, I read a very Indian counterfeit copy of this book (probably wrapped in cellophane and sold by a boy at a traffic light or an illiterate man in stack of books on the sidewalk – but I borrowed it from a friend, so I wouldn’t know the details), and enjoyed the rush of the story and the knowing details. I’m far from convinced of its enduring brilliance, but I do think that it provides a valuable portrait of one more mustachioed entrepreneur.

Theoretical:

Same-Sex Love in India, Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai
This revered book presents a thorough review of the depiction of various forms of same-sex love in Indian writing from ancient to modern times, accompanied by detailed and insightful essays on the patterns, pressures, and paradigms that the authors have identified in the texts.

Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Geetanjali Misra and Radhika Chandiramani
The title says it all.

Current:

Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond, Pankaj Mishra
The introductory essay is tantalizing, and although the main sections of the book seem to be less personal (I got about halfway through the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, for the umpteenth but still relevant time), Mishra seems to be an author to keep an eye out for.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Around page 130, I realized that this book was about (among other, both larger and smaller, things) World War II, and was ready to start reading it. I’ll report back in another seven hundred pages.

Aila

2009-06-17T23:58:00.000-07:00

May 25, 2009
A slum in Howrah, and an upscale neighborhood in south Kolkata, West Bengal

I was holding her and the world was revving up, bare bottom against impending rain, tiny legs and withered feet nearby, upset trees pushing walls and pulling concrete sidewalks, fast enough to pass easily to the other side, bright orange sindoor streaked through oiled black hair and false pairings so that at nineteen or maybe at sixteen with some years tacked on she looked like a painting of the immaculate conception – because some days you don’t want to think about the other way – soft cloth draped around wide eyes and quietly pursed lips, a smooth forehead given over to lack of choice catching the pot before it boils over and bending easily so that wading through plastic bags locked through sandal straps and half-submerged dogs seem like small annoyances, a privileged taste of daily discomfort to chastise human adaptability.

We talked about automatic car washes the sound of rotating whipping strands hitting heavy glass with a soapy thud in monstrous rollers slapping up and down and around the perfectly sealed bubble so that even the slightest leak would cause a gasp of surprise but the whittled bits of water flying sideways through the mostly-rolled up windows and gathering on the rotting rubber door seals caused only enough worry to move the electronics to a different lap while the wheels bumped up the curb and carried us down the sidewalk, around the improvised road black through patches of eye-induced sunshine bright enough to illuminate the slowly changing scenery of endless traffic jams, buses stuck near the top of horizontal trees and small white sedans pulling back branches to slap the next kid in line with a wet green surprise.

Under an easy stream of hot water, through yellowed glass and maybe a metal grate or over a low concrete wall, I could see the palms bending backwards over the railway tracks, silently swirling wide skirts, just on time for their date with the nearest edges of the city – it was a flying ceramic roof tile that had sent us scampering in the first place, umbrellas bending into angry upside-down spiders and black tarps snapping against twine leashes as we scurried between doorways and submerged drains, down six-inch alleyways, towards infrastructure less prone to unintentional scattering so that now, roof tiles three floors above me and walls thick enough to block electric signals, windows double-barred, beds made with space to spare, where generations are three decades apart and babies given five times their weight in antibacterial plastic playthings, the storm seemed safely tucked away in bed long before I set out through freshly swept streets in search of dinner.

At the end of the story – weeks later, ensconced in heat rashes and air conditioning – the communists drove up, white hammers crossing nicely curved sickles on red flags flapping a low flat-bed truck draped in donated clothes forward, an old man seated like a sometime king in the center, looking nonplussed and oddly out of place as younger men scurried to doors and stores with canisters and requests for change – anything to help the victims, baby food for the little ones in the sunderbands, stacks of mismatched scarves flowing over strong city worker arms so I scurried off down the street, calling for the bill, bag of bulging chiffon and cotton on the way back, momentarily not minding the sweat pouring easily through every pore in a single-minded mini-quest to feel less guilty about the piles I was leaving, to align some abstract goal with the current exit plan in the hope of being a responsible guest ready to slip out the side door through one more massive city-side traffic jam, one more dinner, two more lunches plus a handful of airport meals, through re-immersion movies and back to the far side of the storm.

[This was written on June 14, a day and a half before leaving Kolkata, and posted from the US]

The Great American-Bengali Passover Seder

2009-06-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

April 8-16, 2009
A Journey

1: At large
I had only eaten rice-based foods that day – idly for breakfast, and an extensive south Indian thali (rice, rice, dal, vegetables, and curd rice) for lunch – so I decided to put off Passover by one sundown in order to mark it better. My last supper was kebabs, parathas, and curries served aboard an imaginary train on the top floor of a freakishly slick Hyderabadi mall.

This was my second Passover in the City of the Nizams, and it passed as easily as the year before – the restriction on eating leavened bread hardly noticeable save a few moments in airports, where I had to walk a few steps past the coffee shop to find a masala dosa for breakfast.

2: In miniature
I arrived in Chennai on what was officially the second night of the holiday, and celebrated on what was unofficially my second night of observation.

Two of my co-workers insisted, almost, on helping me, sharing something. I heard myself warning them, repeatedly, of the length of even a shortened version of the Passover seder, saw the three of us, home-brewed wine drops spilled to the count of ten and the sweet and the bitter combined, sleepily searching for dinner in the last canteen left open. But the re-telling – that I did first, coherently for a deconstructed fable of imagining a homeland, followed by an incantation to equality in freedom.

3: Just right
I landed in a headlong rush home, slouching in the back bench of the flaking yellow taxi, calling and texting, arranging food contributions and personal absences. Once inside, I gleefully flung off the rubble I’d collected through the past two weeks of travel, throwing sweaty salwars, a slightly mildewed toothbrush, emptied bottles of shampoo and lotion off to their respective corners, flipping switches and re-arranging until I had completely arrived. It is important, when preparing to celebrate a holiday about exile from slavery towards freedom, when in the fourth quarter of a life built in a foreign land, and just returning from an excursion to sites marked with first footsteps and bloodied knees and dance floor histrionics, to have arrived before getting ready to leave again.

I gathered the recipe and washed the lentils and turned on the stove. I begged the gardener to find me a new can of gas, and waited on the doorstep for as long as it took me to realize it would not be long enough. I rinsed off the remaining airport grime, and, large metal pots bulging from a creaking woven bag, threw my arrival to the dirty, humid Kolkata wind, and caught an auto-rickshaw to a friend’s house.

We cooked, and listened to good bad music (this is required for long spells of cooking), and vaguely discussed what we were going to do with fifteen people who had no idea what was going on. The fifteen people – five less than we had guessed, but just the right number to fit in a circle of chairs and bed and floor, mostly Christian, Hindu, and various identifies between there and determinedly atheist – arrived, with wine, and sweets, and quiet chatter. We followed an order – which is, after all, what seder means – and interrupted it consistently with our own deviations.

There were four Jews, and thus four opinions – but we agreed on ‘Go-down Moses,’ and although we started on the far side of off-key, and the rising chorus lit up the evening. By the time the meal had finished, the room was half asleep, and the weight of travel, the release of the determined burst of energy that had taken me through the holiday caught me up and carried me home. The next day was the Bengali New Year, and I spent the day inside, cradling my queen-size two-inch foam mattress and meditating on the dirty but elegant lace curtains that separated my known and daily re-created world from the adventures on the other side.

Five Photos, Take Two

2009-05-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

March 30th - April 14th, 2009
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and Chennai, Tamil Nadu

In February 2008, I spent a week working from the Chennai office of my NGO, and wrote about the trip in the form of five ‘photographs’ – below are five moments captured in the same spirit, from a trip I took to work in the southern offices of the same NGO during April 2009.

1. Home, again.
‘My girlfriend says that I can be a chauvinist pig sometimes.’ This was the first thing I heard about Deepthi. A year and a half later, after a plane flight and a twelve-hour work day, I stumbled in to the home she was building with her new fiancé. The basic structure is classic upper middle class Indian – smooth plaster walls, stone floor, high ceilings, windows leading to balconies, built-in bedroom cabinets, a two-burner gas stove and industrial sized bottles of filtered water in the kitchen. Wicker furniture – holding books, ashtrays, wine bottles filled with filtered water – was spread around the room, accented with beds-as-couches and bright, thickly woven cotton drapes. The place felt like a canvas, one that had been stretched and prepped, where the sketches had been drawn but the colors were just being added.

2. Excess
I was giddy all the way home from work, lifted automatically to my toes as I poured a bucket of cool water over my head, giggled and fidgeted my way in to make-up and tight black clothes with a friend. I ignored the empty expanses we passed on the way to the club, and tried to let the grotesque concrete skeletons of half-completed office parks and walled apartment complexes flick quickly by on the edge of my vision. Excess, the momentary hotspot of the mercurial and yet numbingly consistent Hyderabadi nightlife, was inside a hotel that I’d heard about from wealthy friends who used to brunch there, swim there – past the edge of the city, where even a hint of metropolitan poverty, of congestion or the unmet needs of millions, could not disturb the full first-world fantasy. The club itself came in two layers, with stylized dens for lounging, and a porch from which to view the miles of surrounding construction while leaning on glass tables with white podiums lit from below.

3. Planes
I’ve always felt at home on an airplane, suspended in between, scanned for intentions, packaged for delivery – I pick up when I walk through the door, tugging or shouldering my pile of clothes a little closer, standing up, stepping briskly ahead. I enjoy flying in India for the air-conditioned luxury it affords, and for the higher standards of customer service, in that sickeningly entitled American sense of expecting to be seen as an individual and valuable consumer. I read somewhere that the Indian skies are filled with more private than commercial jets – I’m not sure if that is still true, but the culture of the skies is both elite and quickly changing. The air hostess on my first flight to India wore a saree; every air hostess I’ve encountered since has worn a tight, short skirt or hip-hugging pants, with matching eye shadow and lipstick. The airports – which mostly seem to have been built in the seventies, all square concrete and fluorescents, with some strange angles serving as decoration – are quickly being renovated into glass-wave-topped steel-gridded shimmering temples set outside the cities they service. At the Hyderabad airport, I had a dosa and a giant cup of steamed chai, both at easily ten times the street price, and at the other end, in Chennai, the steamy air of the waterfront city hit me as soon as I stepped out of the cabin and on to the royal rolling steps descending from the side of the plane.

4. Konchipuram: Blessings from Ganesha
His skin was soft and warm against my hand, fuzzy and wrinkled. I set the coin on top of the previous child’s donation, and ducked down; he dutifully lifted his trunk, and placed it lightly on the crown of my head. It was over quickly, and as he dropped the two coins in a waiting priest’s lap, we stepped out and back into the milling crowds of temple goers. The architecture, now familiar, of layers of gods and demons scrambling in extensive detail up semi-pyramidal roofs, of compounds and sanctums and footpaths for clockwise circumambulation, was augmented with hundreds of offerings, crimson threads and soft pink lotus flowers, strings of jasmine and votive candles flickering in the heat of summer. The colors were peeling, and we all agreed that we liked the plain stone better, in any case, that it communicated something calmer, internal, familiar.

5. Amethyst
We were arguing with the auto driver – a common occupation in Chennai, and one of my least favorite things about this particularly flat, humid, and centerless city – when we finally pulled off the right road, and in to paradise. Stone basins of water lilies linked the curving path to our right, and white lights, small strings of them and sweet muslin-shaded living room lamps glinted from the trees and railings ahead. The entrance to Amethyst is the portico of a mansion, and the room immediately inside is tiled in black and white, with ceilings at least twenty feet high and a sweeping staircase leading away. The room is open, with grass screens rolled at the top of doorways and sweeping fans hanging with comforting regularity from the ceiling; tables spill from it into the garden, and diners lean in, over western delicacies, flaky pastries, fresh salads. There are days when the famed food of south India – fermented rice and lentil flour steamed, pan-fried, deep-fried, half-fried, stewed (idly, dosa, vada, uttapam, upma) – seems heaven-sent… and then there are days when I dream of returning to Amethyst.

To Be Rendered Invisible

2009-04-18T00:13:00.000-07:00

Poverty, Dance, and Private/Public Space
Kolkata, West Bengal, India

I.
The first thing you see in Calcutta is all the extra people. The metropolitan area is saturated, and our neighborhood has the same population as my flat-mate’s native country.* Poverty in Calcutta is not relegated solely to some overflowing, putrid slum, where life is lived in super-saturated color and overwhelming stench and the chickens waddle in open sewers, past the pattering feet of kids (the goat variety as well as the human). Poverty is camped out on the sidewalk – street children, encased in a permanent grease-paint smear and oversized cotton shifts, sleep in front of the glass-case windows of the cafes, and whole semi-permanent colonies are erected, tents with wooden poles and sleeping mats and charcoal stoves boiling with sambar in the permanently thick, dusky evening light.

The first thing you learn to do in Calcutta is to render the extra people invisible. To see every detail – to acknowledge the sludge you are breathing and the sleeping family you’re stepping around on the way home from dinner, the young men gathered on corners in loose white tanks and acid-stained jeans chattering and staring, the old men in lungis lounging, the women sweeping the gutters as you step out of the auto on the way to work – is to live in a constant state of complete overwhelm. To see the details behind the sidewalk melee – the colonial buildings, the balustrades, the peeling walls in a million colors (some mold, some paint), the cross-legged vendor in his shop and the marble dais separating a department store from the street – you have to see past an initial, incredibly personal level, past private lives being lived in a public space; you have to see through people’s lives and out the other side, as if the people living them weren’t there.

This is an incredibly disturbing exercise. It is dehumanizing – an act of erasing – and in the process you often learn how to erase yourself, how to fade to the background as much as your own appearance will allow (and, admittedly, my appearance doesn’t allow much).

II.
Staring is accorded a different status in India. It may be a reflection of the high value placed on separation between public and private combined with the utter lack of just that, or it may come from a basic difference in the concept of an individual… but people stare, unabashedly and calmly, and often without comment, with a similar quizzical-less look at things both familiar and strange. As the world around me stares, I’ve started to stare back, mirroring the blankly curious looks in a profoundly unconscious and disturbing way.

III.
There’s a moment when the angle of your shoulder blades align, a moment when you’re lifted unexpectedly and smoothly, when the weight of your entire body is transferred in an instant – and you trade. There’s a moment when I can speak easily, despite a lack of common languages, when hands will follow mine on the floor, when we can color one another in. After all the erasing, the disappearing, the fading – the honest attempts to render myself invisible to escape the wondrous stares and to render the others invisible to escape the horror of comparing the resources used to create my comforts with their concrete mattresses – that moment of recognition, a moment on a roof-top dance studio under metal and thatch and hanging Rajasthani lanterns, under a moon and a breeze and beside tree-tops, re-creates the recently transparent surfaces, outlines bodies and then promptly colors outside the lines.

In a country where public touch is strictly of the same-sex variety, watching a pile of black spandex move feels radical in and of itself. To be part of the pile, exposed and entirely protected from the eyes that come later on the bus and in the flood-lit late-night streets, is sublimely liberating – liberating enough to create an internal peace which, mixed with equal parts exhaustion and hunger, floats me through those empty roads, rocking wildly against muted strangers in a steel auto-rickshaw, back-bone pattering against the wooden rails of an ancient bus bench, feet stumbling over the sleeping children on the corner outside my house. It is enough to float me home to the calm sea-green light of my porch, to the high ceilings and rocking fans of my own museum, where invisibility and want can be left at the doorstep, where outlines can be created and colored outside of and details can be put on display for discussion over dinner.

*The approximate population of both Ballygunge and Panama is 3 million.

13 things to do while visiting ancient ruins

2009-03-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

March 1-5, 2009
Aurangabad, Ellora, & Ajanta, Maharashtra

I’ve been visiting a lot of gorgeous, ancient pieces of stone lately, and decided to compile a list of things to do while visiting ruins.

1. Imagine what you would look like carved in stone.
2. Listen in on other people’s guided tours (look casually in another direction).
3. Pretend you’re not dehumanizing the vendors by completely ignoring their existence. Ignore their existence (or be followed, it’s a personal choice).
4. Accept requests to be in photographs with women, small children, and families. If, in the process, a woman hands you her baby / baby sister, take the child, coo, pose, and return. Politely decline requests to be in photos with young men, especially those trying to take your photo with a camera phone while you’re not looking.
5. Experiment with ways to use a scarf / dupatta / handkerchief / spare map to keep the sun out of your eyes. Alternatively, experiment with the speed with which your eyes can adjust to sudden darkness by counting the seconds before you can pick out details on the back wall of the cave/palace/temple.
6. Design your ideal lunch menu. Adjust for local options. Procure, consume, enjoy.
7. Process all those situations in which you never quite figured out what happened / what she meant / where he went / why you reacted that way. Process whether the person(s) in question really need to know your new analysis of the situation.
8. Re-create the life story of the worker who created a particular detail (the mason who carved that cornerstone, the artist who designed that frieze, the ancient chaiwallah who brought the workers refreshment), and imagine what they were thinking about when they painted/carved/etc. the detail in question.
9. Take artsy photos involving late afternoon light, and let yourself believe that a hundred thousand tourists haven’t taken exactly the same shots.
10. Imagine how a future archeologist would interpret the patterns and meaning of your life based on different objects that might be preserved. Repeat for your city, country, and/or civilization.
11. Have your hair braided by the female attendants guarding the ruins. Nod curtly but politely at the male attendants. If you are being followed by any overly eager tour guide style attendants, explain that you need peace to enjoy the beautiful objects that they guard, and back away quickly.
12. Learn, preferably from visiting monks, how to honor/pay your respects/genuflect to and circumambulate the deities/prophets/kings depicted.
13. Enjoy the art (or what’s left of it – and recreate the rest in your mind’s eye)!

Please see the (forthcoming) photos albums for actual descriptions of the stunning Ellora and Ajanta caves, and to hear the tale of the family adventures we took there…

Home: A Scrappy Manifesto, or A Manifestation of Scraps?

2009-02-17T00:19:00.000-08:00

February 12, 2009
New Delhi

When she said I couldn’t go, the tears jumped up and knocked smartly on the back of my throat, and that made the realization easier. One of those little revelations, the ones that are lived over and over again.

So I left, and leaving, as it often does, allowed me to decide, on an upbeat swing note for the music passing between my ears, that the place I was leaving had succeeded in becoming another home. That I was leaving something worthy of being left with some measure of respect, with an ironic smile for the memories and expectations, with a bustle of importance, maybe with a little ritual. There’s always a little ritual, with home.

There was a mustard yellow tent on a rickety set of plywood risers for stacking crates, smoothed over with collapsed cardboard boxes and glowing in a populated parking lot next to a school and a church and a hundred thousand houses with calendars opened to August and doors with bright orange x’s marking the bodies found inside. There was another tent, an earlier one that I sometimes forget, but it was surrounded by the most brilliant green and inhabited by a first breath.

There was a bunk – a number of bunks – but there was a closet as well, and a cot on a porch with the indelible inedible orchard trees framing Orion and illicit hand-holding pairs of fleeces and patchily inbred deer passing in the streetlights leading towards the communal washrooms down the path, and in the moonlight leading toward the private beach at the bottom of the hill.

There was a flag – plain blue, with the globe spinning softly in the center in dull greens and grays and wrapped in white ribbons – that hung above each one, over a desk or a bed or a bricked-in fire place, and a collection of oddities – a home-made incense holder and a decorative bird’s nest and stuffed microbes and a heart-shaped puzzle box holding a cheap white plastic bead necklace – that sat in front of each collection of books on each consecutive set of shelves. Next to the flag was Moby, and once, next to Moby was Ani.

There was a cave, and a lookout, and there were castles for princesses and studios for artists. One the other side, there was a cabin.

There was a tree, but I can’t tell you where, or why.

There was a cot in a common room, but it only became mine when the other lights were out and I could see the dining table in the moonlight through the mosquito netting and the borrowed refrigerator hummed companionably at me.

This morning, there was thick light slicing the polluted air into heavenly strips hanging from lush, stunted trees. There was music blasting wordlessly from my lips as I passed elderly couples in salwars and dotis meandering past the peacocks, young couples in multi-pocketed jeans and sparkle shirts cuddling on benches, a man doing push-ups between two rocks, a woman in green seated on a wide balustrade and saluting the sky. The sounds rolled down my legs, picked up my feet, and marionetted me to the tent and the roof and the cabin, to the flag and the sarong repeatedly laid out on blue pleather benches rumbling softly past the lives of a million unknown faces.

There are vehicles that become home, and people, and rooms rented for a night. There are communal kitchens, and these always have dish-washing tension. There are bits, scattered and scrappy but planted securely and distributed in the seven seas and in the one tiny stream that connects the eighth.

Scraps: On the other side of the tents was a laboratory with a white couch for tossing winter coats. There was a studio by a lake, and on a roof, and there was pattering in an old school, but somehow it’s the changing room, the bit of transformation from street clothes, past a naked body, and off to lycra-blended cotton and a place dedicated to the glory of movement that always felt the most real. There was a Ville and a World and a Land and a Pad, and there will be many more.

Personalities, Borders, and Other Recent Inventions

2009-02-07T06:03:00.000-08:00

December 25th, 2008 – January 1st, 2009
Bangkok, Thailand and Siem Reap, Cambodia

The pedals were whirling smoothly of their own accord on the slight downhill, the chipped pink paint of my rented bicycle purpling in the fading light, when I realized that there was no more resistance. The gear – conveniently covered to protect itself from the half-paved tourist-worn red dirt roads – had slipped. We started walking, Benj and I, each balancing a bike and peering forward for rides and behind for imagined bandits. As we reached the giant beheaded gate, the moon was just coming out to tease us – silly wandering children, she chided, and dipped behind the tiered crown of a beaming stone face. The first man who stopped, worried for our safety or our delicate foreign legs and shaky psyches, spoke spotty French, but five minutes of monsieur and mademoiselle couldn’t make up for our nonexistent Khmer. He gestured towards his own bike, but the sizzle of a day’s worth of sweat instantly evaporating from my calf made me jump back and in the end we were walking again, balancing bikes and glancing in zig zags across the road to the sounds of small apologetic gasps emanating from young Cambodian families piled on motorbikes and overweight Germans cuddled in rumbling tuk-tuks.

When the mini tractor, nothing more than a green wooden wagon attached to a motor piled with one young man, three little boys, and a stack of five white pig buckets passed us, I said a cartoon ‘shucks’ in my head and went back to tracing the now completely darkened road, the half-grin of a momentarily hopeless situation settling quick across my face. When the mini tractor backtracked to offer us a ride, we passed over five bucks, stacked the bikes on the buckets, the boys on the bikes, and ourselves on the slightly widened wood where the handle of the wagon connected to the engine, and rattled backwards in to town. The boys grinned as we passed darkened fields and roadside water stands and told us they had tried to sell us bracelets earlier that day – we asked them pointless questions about the ruins, and the moon congratulated us on our friendly ride.

She was standing ahead of me and to the left when I decided she was American, and was about to leave the room when I saw the eagle with its crossed arrows on her passport. We were in between countries, passing the disgusting grey edifices of casinos splashed with neon signs above dirty naked children and trafficked goods passing between Cambodia and Thailand when I ran up behind her and with a hello, asked to join her caravan. Ash was traveling with her father and his friend, and as we filed in to the snaking lines of the entry stamp office we were exchanging basic details, and as we filed out we were discussing travel exhaustion and the moment when you don’t want to meet one more new person, when you are closed and barricaded and turn around and start the most amazing conversation with a complete stranger.

A shining minivan carried us, along with three bright blonde children, their parents busy shielding their eyes from an en-route DVD showing of Blood Diamond, to our first seven-eleven. In between stops, and long before the sky painted streaks over Thai farmers and the skyscrapers crept up on us and Bangkok swallowed us whole, her father leaned back around the sanitized pleather headrest to say ‘they’re just like long-lost cousins,’ and to smile forward at his friend and ask why they don’t chatter like that anymore. There’s a point in a friendship when most of your stories have already been told, I thought, but Ash and I had newness to exchange, and for the moment, that’s what kept the words bouncing off air-conditioned windows for hours at a stretch. She was teaching, and living, and we talked about building patterns and making friends and uncomfortable comforts and the calm femininity of Thailand and the masculine-presenting mother-worshipping melee of India; we talked about comparative cross-cultural relationships (with the vague conclusion that the hardest part is context for expectations), about singular beginnings and being happy with your own life as you have chosen to live it.

The fist day, when I stepped out of a cab with the English bloke (we met in the taxi line at the airport) and on to the sky train I couldn’t help grinning at its smooth efficiency. I picked up packaged sushi and leaned my travel-gritted backpack against the shining plastic seats. The first few nights were a blur of detangling – but the day the bicycle broke down, I woke up. I savored the dark plywood walls and plastic plum blanket and oversized bamboo cutting growing out of an Angkor Beer bottle in my cheap guest-house room, the thick names of the three glowing Isreali girls who taught me a new old card game at a rest stop with a perfect breeze and easy-going dollops of sunshine, the left to far-left political conversation I shared with a Norwegian bus-mate. I savored the stone, of course, although it seemed small and perhaps precious compared to the soaring walls of the Red Forts and the miles of carvings on mosques and temples that have come near to saturating my eyes’ ability to pick out details over the last sixteen months. The ancient Khmer stones were overpopulated with Japanese cameras, but when the bikes carried us to the quieter spots we drew up images of old-time monasteries, of aromatic woven grass carpets for Kings… of why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.*

By the last day, the question of borders had been solved (they are mostly arbitrary and often bloodstained, but with the privilege of an American passport many of them quickly dissolve), but the question of personalities had become imminent. I used couch surfing** to coordinate both my stays in Bangkok, cutting down on cost and adding up characters along the way. When 2009 hit, I was standing in the middle of the Thai equivalent of Times Square, and a few hours later a Belgian helped me to contact my Cameroonian host so that my Canadian co-surfer and I could reach an obscure suburb of the city where I slept for an hour and a half before taking a hot-pink taxi just around the corner to the obsequiously ostentatious Bangkok International Airport. “This is globalization,” the Belgian said with an eager smile, “Europeans helping North Americans to find Africans in Asia.”

This is my inconclusion on the recent invention of personality. Over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear to me how easy it is to guide a stranger’s first impression of your fundamental character. Pick a story to start with – the houseboat one leaves them interested but with little knowledge about what I do or care about, the travel ones give them insight into adventure and homeliness, my opinion of India leaves me looking eager and worn at the same time, (only a true masochist chooses to start with a negative portrait). This part is easy – and dangerous – because most people don’t get past the stories. If you’re always on the road, you’re always meeting, interacting, and if you’re charismatic, that’s great – people are impressed by openness. But if you’re always interacting with a new face you don’t have to dig far, you don’t have to face the parts of your personality you’re not proud of, and you don’t have to deal with the fallout of complex relationships over time.

I’ve met a number of travelers – some Couch Surfing hosts and surfers, some travelers circling the globe with no desire to settle, some off for a few months and happily ignoring what they left and where they’re going, others with less of a plan and more of a series of vague instincts to turn left or go up that hill – who use travel to escape not just their contexts and original communities, but to escape the responsibility of a simple piece of the social contract,*** of caring for others over time, and for letting others take care of them, and to escape the vulnerability that engaging in that contract implies.

As I realized this, I remembered why I moved to Kolkata – to join a queer community in work and activism, and to build a community of friends in a place where I had reasonable grounds to believe I would find people who shared my interest in abstract ideas and concrete delicacies. I wanted to be known, not broadly but deeply, to make a home and invite people into it. I stayed in India for Round 2 for a number of reasons – one of those reasons was to build on the experience of the first year and the comfort I had gained in this colorful blast of a context so that I wasn’t just managing to make it here, but was actively creating it (whatever it is, experience or daily jostle or a simple revelation or two).

When I stepped off the plane from Thailand, shaking the last strains of ‘Camp Rock’ out of my airplane-addled head, I didn’t want to face the famed daily discomforts of India. But the strangest thing happened – the discomforts were comfortable, familiar. They made me smile, despite and after and before the furrowed brow bit and the part where I ignore the four-year-old beggars on my street and the half-dead dogs napping in the sun and growl at the driver who tries to cheat me and the bus that comes inches from running me over as I cross the road. Walking down my street, I felt totally separate and completely integrated – the common stranger, the local that girl, the one who, in all her strangeness, belongs here in this corner of a post-colonial communist moss-covered city.

* With all due respect to Lewis Carroll, and to the Happy Medium poster that hung in my bedroom on the houseboat.
** Couch surfing is an idea – but it is also a social networking travel website (www.couchsurfing.org) designed to coordinate free places for travelers to stay. The idea is simple – you put up a profile with a small description of yourself and a brief statement about whether you can offer a couch for a traveler to stay on for free. When you want to travel, you can search the database of profiles for people offering free accommodation at your destination, and send messages asking other couch surfing members whether you can stay with them. After the rendezvous, you can add members as ‘friends’ and leave ‘references’ on their profile, recommending them to other travelers (or not). Of course, simple builds on itself, and there are groups and official meet-ups, chat rooms and, I’m sure, many applications I haven’t even discovered yet. It has some significant pitfalls, surrounding the fact that most people on this planet seem to be both fundamentally caring and fundamentally strange, but it’s an invaluable resource when used well.
*** While (more often than not, in my experience) fulfilling another important piece of the social contract, to welcome and care for the stranger.

A Miracle of Re-Creation

2008-12-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays!

with blurry photo love from my fabulous office this Hanukkah,
Lily

On Orphaning Children and Putting Turkeys in Hibernation

2008-12-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

26 November 2008: Terrorists attack Mumbai
28 November 2008: Thanksgiving dinner in Kolkata

As the first people trickled in to the room, we were still cooking – I’m always still cooking, usually forget to change into something nice to host, and use it all as an excuse to add some bustle and activity to the quiet beginnings of an eventually eventful evening. The house smelled like stuffing, successfully recreated sans turkey, with a dash of soy sauce to darken the gravy. Soon the voices were gurgling all around me, and after two days alone in my house – enjoying a spot of winter sunshine sprawled across my queen-sized bed with Sen’s thoughts on gender while the bodies were cleaned out of CST*– the swirl of so many people’s company was exhilarating.

The phone call woke me up, and I registered the 212 area code as foreign without thinking about the fact that it was from New York City, not Seattle. ‘There have been unprecedented attacks on foreigners in Mumbai,’ AJWS informed me. ‘We are requesting all volunteers to stay inside their residences for the next forty-eight hours.’

There was: laughing cow and crackers, dates and nuts, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans in excess garlic, vegetarian chili, Israeli salad, pumpkin pie with ginger cookie crust, and cakes (from Cakes, of course). There were: attacks on a train station, an airport, shipping docks, two luxury hotels, two hospitals, a café, and a guest house. I gathered information – the first numbers I heard were eighty dead and nine hundred injured, the last were that over a hundred had died, and maybe another hundred or two injured – from concerned callers around the world, jotted it down on a notepad and tried not to make it look like notes from an academic lecture.

Behind me, the room kept swirling, but I remembered that it was Friday, and that there were candles, and put those two thoughts together with a friend to say a blessing for Shabbat. The mourner’s kaddish waded knee-deep through the back of my mind, but I didn’t let it out, just thought it as I looked up at the oil painting of the flat-owner’s family guru sitting cross-legged above the candles and smiled, pretending not to pretend that I hadn’t heard that hostages were still being held, that the train had been full of commuting laborers and that although they demanded foreigners they killed indiscriminately.

The first article I read was titled ‘Brooklyn Couple Killed,’ from the New York Times. I remembered the couple – we’d followed a collection of diasporic Jews from Keneseth Eliayahoo to the Nariman house after Friday night services last January, and ended up at my first Chabad experience. The imported and recreated food tasted strange rather than comforting, and although the idea of the community was nice and the Rabbi welcoming, I had been eager to leave. Rivka, his wife, was sweet, and we discussed her wig and adorable baby boy Moishe as we walked quickly down the alleyways towards Colaba Causeway.

Fresh from two days of a media fast when the rest of the world was feasting – and I mean feasting in a carrion sort of way, a morbid fascination with spreading the flames in a misguided attempt to honor the dead and understand the shifting fabric of reality – I read for hours, squinting through salt at the same ten images, and finally forming my own headline for my mental marquee:

Orphaning other people’s children will not make this world a safer place for anyone’s community.

Followed quickly, on the same mental marquee, by two of my favorite bumper stickers:

When Jesus said love thy neighbor, I’m pretty sure he meant don’t kill them.
When we attack the innocent, we become the enemy.

When I woke up on thanksgiving morning, America was eating dinner. I had no desire to run away from India, to escape the momentary mess that had been made out of people’s lives in Mumbai and people’s minds around the world – Kolkata seemed far away from all of that, safe despite the warnings, secured by the value of the open Nepalese and Bangladeshi borders and its own markedly faded glory. But I did want to gather around a chattering dinner table – preferably two or three pushed together, with as many different table cloths and some burnt orange and evergreen decorations – so I opened a book, tucked the people and the horror deep inside, and escaped.

The emails came quickly, of course, and I tried to write properly assuring responses, with a pinch of analysis and a dollop of heartache and an empathetic smile at the end:

When I heard about the attacks in Mumbai, I thought about the sickening extremes people are driven to in order to try to protect their sense of community, of a home and a place in the world, and the strange double-meanings of thanksgiving, stuck between honest gratitude and blatant colonization...

I've heard the American media is going a little berserk... people here are more mad at politicians for mishandling the situation than they are at supposed Pakistani ties. With one billion in the denominator, and a series of fairly regular bombings in large cities over the last few years, this is a big deal... but not such an affront to people's sense of the world, and how it works.

It’s the cycle, I think, that makes it all the most maddening, the dehumanizing and dominating and not expecting the exact same treatment in return – the idea that these tactics move a cause forward paired with the equally terrifying idea that the American army has made the world a safer place in the last eight years. The question of the day became the concerned inquiry, became whether you’d lost a friend, but questions of the day fade quickly. There were protests and funerals – there was even an unexploded bomb found two weeks later in the CST baggage room – there were op-eds and accusations, speculation on retaliation and billboards preaching solidarity.

Now the billboards for the ‘Great Indian Shopping Festival’ (Christmas!) are up, and the disturbing radio ads for recommendations on strategies for India’s ‘War on Terror’ (who thought of that brilliant phrasing?) have receded. If we just, well, kill enough of them, they’ll clearly stop killing us. Simple math. As we stacked the low stools we’d used as ground-level tables for thanksgiving and ushered the last guests out the door to the strains of a husky woman’s voice on our new sound system, the violence that had been graphically splattered across the front pages of the world’s newspapers for the last few days felt worlds away – I could even pretend that the children sleeping in the cement pipes at the end of my road were comfortable on their stained cotton t-shirt of a mattress, almost enjoy the glow of feeding people and being thankful for a colorful community without the sucker punch of remembering the cost of my comfort to millions of other people’s lives. Almost.

*Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, formerly Victoria Terminal
Note: I highly recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the attacks, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

The Book List, Part II

2008-12-03T23:59:00.000-08:00

June 2008 – November 2008

Summer Reading:

On the Road, Jack Kerouac
I was given a classically tattered, duct-tape bound copy of this by a traveling Oregonian working at a circus that had stopped in Hyderabad just a few months before I was set to embark on an unplanned adventure. It was clearly a matter of fate; my mother suggested I just might find my father tagging along in the duct tape. I shared the opening with a mountain-top companion, devoured the middle in a molding closet-sized Varanasi hostel over the fourth of July, and turned the last dog-eared pages as I lay under fresh white sheets in San Francisco. The story rambled and roamed, as expected, and the characters made excellent caricatures of stories from the fifties, sixties, seventies – of discovering the ecstatic, and negotiating a road between that and the necessarily mundane details of staying alive in a socially bound world.

Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
From ‘The Book List, Part I,’ posted in May 2008 – my sentiments remain exactly the same: 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.

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (selected stories)
Still beautiful, eleven months after I started to read them. Differently beautiful than the stories I’d read before I’d spent a year in India, but mostly because the details struck different types of familiar chords.

Going Postal and Making Money, Terry Pratchett
My favorite fluff; Pratchett never fails to garner me strange looks as I sit giggling over a paperback on a bus to downtown Seattle. Both books had an entrepreneurial bent perfect for inspiring a year of new projects in a newly familiar place.

The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, told in a fundamentally humanizing way by following two families; Arab Palestinians forced out of their home to Jordan, and eventually to Gaza, and Bulgarian Jews who narrowly escape the Holocaust to settle in the same home that the Palestinians so recently ‘fled.’ Twenty years after both families are forced from their land, a young man goes to visit the home he was born in, and meets the young woman who has grown up there. The story is entirely non-fiction, based on meticulous research, and follows the history and trajectory of each family, as well as the friendship that unfolds between the Palestinian boy and the Israeli girl.

When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
I started this on Orcas Island, read it through a sleepless night in Delhi, and watched at least three movies on the transatlantic flight in between. The poetry of the book’s first-person multi-voiced words and the importance of the story being told – of Japanese American families forcibly interned in camps during World War II – transcended the abrasive discontinuity between reading locations.

The Re-Immersion Period:

The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
Selected as my introduction to Bengal – descriptive, adventurous, and insightful. Ghosh is not as artistic or extraordinary a writer as I’d expected, but his story of identity and the complex undercurrents of supposedly ‘simple’ lives in the Sundarbans (literally, ‘beautiful forest,’ the delta where the Ganges lets out into the ocean) left me curious enough to keep an eye out for his other works.

Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Album
Cheesier than I expected, but sweet and wise and a good reminder to live life, find peace with death, and cherish the moments in between.

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
This is a book about being alone, about finding meaning in seemingly familiar activities and brutally ignoring the discrepancies, a tale of a post-9/11 Gatsby in a smoldering city and a failing marriage. I read it too soon after landing in a new place, but a few months in, it would have made a great read; the sentences are delectable, and the clunky zip-wired plot is well laid to dash the reader from sanity to total discombobulation and back.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
A megalomaniacal rant on philosophy and convention combined with a maniacal love for the technical details of a motorcycle as equal parts metaphor and tool. My training in science and philosophy of science balked at Pirsig’s rough deconstruction of those two fields, but his detailed description of probable escapes from ‘gumption traps’ still comes to mind when I think I’ve lost my last ounce of patience with the Indian service sector. After reading this, I felt decidedly ready to take a break from ‘meaning of life’ books, although I realize this may be difficult due to my conviction that the stories we tell are the only grasp we can have on reality.

Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
After failing to summit K2, Greg Mortenson stumbled down the mountain and into an isolated Balti village. Before he left, he promised to return and build them a school; over the next decade, he built over fifty schools, vocational training centers, and water systems for schools in the mountainous region along the Pakistani-Afghan border. The best and most important parts of this book are the records of conversations Mortensen had with the mountain men and women with whom he worked. The book is not a masterpiece, but it’s a story you should hear; think ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains,’ less artfully written, and with a protagonist equally likely to be shot at by revolutionaries but less likely to cause an intellectual paradigm shift in his field.

The Householder, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A simple story, told in simple words, about the mental somersaults we turn on the way to viewing ourselves as adults ready to shape our own lives and to take responsibility for the lives of others. [Ruth, Polish by ancestry, married an Indian architect in London, and they lived together in Delhi from 1951 to 1975.]

Current and Ongoing Literary Adventures:

The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen
I’ve made it through about two-thirds of this strangely encyclopedic yet repetitive classic. Sen discusses a billion aspects of life in modern India (gender dynamics, China, Tagore, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP, voice), and how it came to be this way, while repeatedly highlighting two themes; that the strength and beauty of India lies in her (a) heterogeneity and (b) rich argumentative tradition. A collection of academic and journalistic essays, it is slightly dry, brilliantly worded, and probabilistically available even in the most remote areas of India – they sold it at the mountain-top NGO campus I first stayed at with AJWS, forty five minutes north of Mussoorie.

A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty
My goal is to read anything and, eventually, everything by Rabindranath Tagore, the late great Bengali polymath intellectual. Because I’m in Bengal, and because he’s estimated to be the only person to have written the national anthem for two countries (India and Bangladesh).

Comparative Pujas: Durga vs. Kali

2008-11-14T02:54:00.000-08:00

This post represents the fourth and final part in a series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur... extending through and/or including Lokhi Puja, Kali Puja, and Diwali.

Comparative Pujas: Durga vs. Kali
October 2008

This is what I understand: the city shut down. The women – conspicuously under-represented in any public enterprise – were everywhere, sequins glittering on saris and ruffles bouncing on little girls’ swishing cotton and gold-lame skirts. The artistry was instantaneous; the bamboo polls that had been sitting, lashed upright with string in towering structures for weeks, became more real than the overflowing sidewalks and slowly molding apartment balconies with overnight cotton bunting and steel nails and hay and plaster and paint and glittering idols and real electric chandeliers.

Durga’s eyes are everywhere in Kolkata, all three of them with a bride’s wide nose ring drawing a perfect curve across her lips. They peer at you from the rear-view windows of auto-rickshaws, they gaze from billboards and sit silently inside roadside shrines by the dozen.

This is what I understand: Durga is a conglomerate, a goddess created to defeat a demon who thought he’d worked a way out of the system. She carries the weapons of ten gods in ten hands, and two of her children are incarnations of the same goddess she represents. Her sons are the sons of that goddess, of Parvati the good wife and Shakti the formless female energy.

Kalighat, known for its bloodied goat bodies and incessant beggars, is the name of our nearest Metro station. I’ve never been inside the temple, but I drive by its subsidiary burning ghats every day on the way to and from work, and twenty-five percent of the time I notice my co-commuters marking the passing with a gesture of respect.

This is what I understand: in the season when the natural light fades, we celebrate its memory. Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, and like the gods it represents, it comes in a million iterations. Diwali follows Dassera, which is Durga Puja, and Diwali is for Laxmi, but Lokhi Puja comes between the two here because Diwali in Kolkata is Kali Puja – and you always worship Ganesha first, for auspicious beginnings.

The air was thick the night I walked home with my neighbor, but we could almost breathe when we stopped on the bridge and watched the hand-detonated fireworks blooming over our affluent neighborhood. The streets, as they should be, were carpeted with the cardboard shells of sparklers. Earlier, when our knees were close to buckling, but all the cabs were going the wrong way, we stepped inside what had been an artic tundra populated by polar bears for a global-warming-aware Durga and was now a haunted house for a bloodthirsty Kali and would soon be a soccer field for the boys team.

Kali was deep in a cave, protected by her terrific handmaidens, bare-breasted women with long tusks and longer hair, their hips wrapped in tiger skins. This Kali wasn’t just an image of a woman with a blood-red tongue and a necklace of skulls; she was the tongue, a long pinkish gash in the Styrofoam stone immediately suggesting humanity’s passage into the world through a pair of garish oblong purpled lips.

This is what I understand: we celebrate what we love, and what we are terrified of, and they’re usually the same thing.

[Note: photo albums of both Durga Puja and Kali Puja are available on my Picasa account]

The Importance of Getting Out to Getting Back In: Navratri in Ahmedabad

2008-11-06T04:14:00.000-08:00

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.

F(e)asting: Eid and Yom Kippur

2008-11-01T05:03:00.001-07:00

This post represents the second and fifth parts in a (potentially) 5-part series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur

F(e)asting: Eid and Yom Kippur
October 2, 2008

I intended to move my fast for Yom Kippur forward, to place it during Ramadan so that I could share it with some of the city’s residents, but the calendar got in the way. Instead, I was unexpectedly home alone on a pleasantly gloomy weekday afternoon when I was invited to break the fast I’d never started. It was Eid, the feast after last day of Ramadan, and when I arrived the host was watching a documentary on climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania. By the time the other guests had arrived, the mutton biryani and stewed chicken and sweet vermicelli were flowing, and by the time I left it was clear that last year’s memory of an unintentional two-day fast combined with this pleasant closing meal and the upcoming Hindu festivities had ensured that I would never start the ritual pause I’d just celebrated completing.

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

2008-10-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-11T03:09:00.000-07:00

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.

Around the Bend: A Travel Novella (Part I)

2008-09-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

June 13th-July 10th, 2008
Manali (Himanchal Pradesh) to Leh, Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir State)

Prologue

When you come around the bend in the road, the one that seems sure to fling you full-speed over the edge of the world (past the rocky scree-scattered slopes to the shores of some mystically sparkling lake – or possibly just to the next chapter after this thing called life), you realize that this is where dragons are hatched, where legends lurk and folktales are distilled from patterns formed by shadows of rocks carved over centuries by strong winds and soft waters, that this is the physical location (or perhaps just closer, closer) that they referred to when they dreamed of something larger and claimed that it whispered them guidance in those still moments when they slowed their breath enough to listen or reached that frantic state just above listening, where the ecstatic speaks for itself.

This is the home of the Gods, the home of the ancestors, the origin of your endlessly expandable expendable thoughts (and maybe, just maybe, all those things are the same thing in any case). The mountains – and we danced around just the base of their peaks, at 10,000 and 18,000 feet – are utterly elemental, and they remind you in the simplest way possible that you, you little mound of sentient flesh, are utterly insignificant and therefore powerful beyond belief.

So we rode – in awe – and watched, and breathed in through our freezing wind-pinched noses and out through the tumbling words that formed sentences and marched off in bands of stories to form new folklores in the crevices between the Himalayan peaks where the sun only reaches every other third Sunday on leap years (but the mountains don’t go by calendar time).

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, three blondes and a semi-repatriated NRI set out on three borrowed vehicles – with insufficient woolens, some Yak cheese and (thankfully) fewer digital cameras than people – to cross world’s reputedly* highest motorable road. They had met on an (epic, by definition) 57-hour bus ride in which they ‘narrowly’ escaped asphyxiation (starvation, and hypothermia) when they were forced to spend the night on the bus, behind a seemingly endless train of goods-and-tourist-carriers stuck where a river had rudely crossed the famed Manali-Leh highway before the vehicles could get their wheels rolling. And so there they sat, our four heroes and a comic caravan of mountain men smoking beedies in the small shelter provided by the highly decorated cabs of their trucks while Korean and German women clicked cameras at the peaks surrounding the unfortunately rushing waters and college students studied altitude sickness at approximately 4,000 meters above sea level.

The travelers arrived, to a collective sigh of relief, in Leh, the capitol of Ladakh – a charming hillside city filled with Tibetan prayer flags and the markers of a booming tourist industry: sings written in Hebrew and English (but not Hindi or the local language), internet cafes, white shoulders peeking around torn hippy paraphernalia, Kashmiri salesmen, Italian-trained chefs, Korean food, cheap drugs and overpriced ‘antiques.’ Minutes after being left to his own devices, our semi-repatriated NRI found his own vehicle, and although his traveling companion would have preferred to test her dancing legs on the endless slopes to the gleaming tip-top-temple, she did her best to give in to the romanticism of the open road (a slippery slope easily greased by a sunset ride through the high-altitude Himalayan valley).

And so our heroes were picked up and carried along in the stream of too-cool-for-the-lowlands tourists, through cafés offering American, Israeli, French, or Spanish breakfast, past trekking gear posts, past patios for the making and trading of stories. In this otherworldly (and microcosmically every-worldly) landscape, identity was the currency, and description – sparkle of mischief in the eye required – the preferred mode of bargaining.

Chapter 2

I wasn’t there when they got the permits we would need – I had a project to finish, and was wrestling with the cloud-blocked local satellite internet when I heard the announcement, delivered by a pair of grinning faces astride a bike. That afternoon we met – the three blondes (your narrator, Mar and Ty) and my travel companion, Vam** the semi-repatriated NRI – and that evening I went through my requisite panic for the love of leaving.

You’re being unreasonable. I know. What will help? I don’t know – waiting. Ok, then let’s leave now. Right now? Tonight.

After that, I was set to hit the road early in the morning. Four breakfasts, three cinnamon rolls to go, two new used vehicles, and one stop at the petrol station later, it was nearly two thirty in the afternoon and we were just starting up the road.

Leh shrank behind us, folding in to the valley as the road lifted up and shot us sideways along soft golden slopes glowing kindly in the afternoon light. Small streams of ice water gave the first hints of snow, and as we paused to re-fasten our bags we added layers of jackets, scarves, socks. The first stop was South Pullu, an army checkpoint where men wrapped in olive green khaki checked our permits and shuffled aside to make room at the local chai stall. The second stop was Kardong-La, where the thin air whipped our lungs and stole the breath from beneath our words and the frozen breezes nipped any piece of flesh so unfortunate as to meet the outside world. The view was expansive (as it should be at over 18,000 feet), but not as stunning as the panoramas of ice and height and distance, of lancing sunlight and dancing cloud formations that had been so sumptuously spread before us on the way up – so we stepped into the metal-walled canteen and dined on hot maggi noodles and more (always more) chai. We left the pass, around six thirty in the evening, with two extra pairs of yak-wool gloves and one less sleeping bag (thanks to high-altitude pickpockets).

The descent was chilling and the day’s last sheaths of clear mountain sunlight were stuck on the far side of the pass, leaving us in a grey shadow-land while white mountaintops sparkled with snow. This section of the road was rough, scattered with small boulders and gouged by a million invented creeks. Vam and I stopped once, to make sure that Mar and Ty were within sight, steadily spinning down the switchbacks behind us.

By the time we stopped again, the little light we had had prancing along with us was marching off to bed. We paused for a moment in the shelter of what looked like a giant metal oil barrel turned on its side, buried half underground, and pierced with a few brick-sized windows and midget doors at each end; when the road behind us remained empty after five, ten, twenty minutes, we parked the vehicle where it could be clearly seen, and knocked on the neighboring tin can.

A withered soldier came to the door – I had never seen Vam speak to anyone with such complete deference, sir’s peppering every sentence. The man – maybe forty-five, but with white stubble standing out on his dark chin and an olive beanie pulled low over high cheekbones – waved us inside. The warmth emanating from a thin, round stove in the middle of the room folded around us, and the low curve of the walls gave the impression that we had just stepped underground. The soldier waved us to a seat on a bench where we could warm our hands, while he ruffled through the contents of a second bench – his kitchen – and produced his last box of Maaza mango juice for me and a bag of mixed nuts for Vam, before sitting on a third bench – his bed. Vam explained that these supplies, along with a bottle of XXX Rum, were the special rations that the army provided to these men posted along the ridges of reality, and as thanks, he left some of his cigarettes on the bench as we bowed back out the door. The bite of the wind hit us immediately.

Chapter 3

We had two choices: drive five kilometers back up to the pass, hope we find Mar and Ty on the way, and sleep on the floor of the canteen, or drive five kilometers further down to North Pullu, where the soldier said that some civilian buildings were being built near a large army base and police station. I voted for down. Mar and Ty had each been wandering this spinning ball of dirt for years, and I had no desire to continue our highway experiments with low-oxygen sleeping arrangements. The road improved as we continued our descent, but I was still giddy with excitement to pass the Buddhist temple at the upper gate of the base and pull into the yellow pool of light waiting for us outside the main office. At least five men answered each of our questions, and soon we were pulling back out and spinning across the dark road, blinking to adjust our vision before the sign of our dreams wavered before our eyes: double beds hot water Indian Chinese Continental Kitchen oxygen First AID local yak-wool products available for Sale! The beaten dirt disappeared under our feet as we ran to the front door.

Sorry, hotel is not built yet. But this building, please, is there anywhere we could stay? The hallway, if you have your own bedding. We don’t. Yeh bibi hai? (Is that your wife? I finally understood a sentence). Ji han (yes, sir). My wife is out of town, she is up at her village, so you can stay in my room – don’t worry, I’m a safe man and I won’t hurt your wife, she’ll be safe in here.

As we stepped through the kitchen, with its conglomeration of skinny boys and mountains of noodles being drained from heavy black pots, I was giddy with relief. Our savior was a recently retired soldier – he served in the local Ladakhi unit for twenty three years, and the partially finished hotel was his retirement project.

He gestured for us to take a seat on a large bed, and we gladly traded mud-caked shoes for thick synthetic blankets and the ability to lower our scarves enough to let full sentences fall from frozen lips. The man’s quarters were small – a single bed pushed against one wall, and a double against the other, thick matting in between. Two large sets of windows filled most of two of the walls, giving a spectacular view of the pre-moon inky blackness outside the not-quite-yet-hotel. At the back of the room, a windowsill supported a small shrine to Buddha – water bowls, incense, Tibetan inscriptions, and a popular photo of the Dalai Lama waving at the camera with one arm around a young and powerful monk. Although the walls of the room were thick plaster, the roof was thatch, and an open-air skylight the size of a basketball pierced a hole to the heavens. Two low tables, one on either end of the double bed, held the man’s possessions – a red and white plastic cooler, lace doilies, and a cardboard box for clothes. We were soon served steaming chai, and I held the thin ceramic cup to my face to warm my tingling cheekbones as I smiled and let the tension drain from my jaw.

I listened with what was left of my waking mind to the conversation in Hindi – picking up basic vocabulary and the smattering of English words and re-arranging them in my mind into a semi-coherent narrative about my ‘husband,’ ‘marriage,’ and our foolishly late passing over Kardong-La. A policeman – in his late thirties, skinny with smooth skin and a healthy mustache, almost a cartoon Indian cop – came and went and came again to say the women had not been found and there was nothing more he could do. An optimistic traveler’s trust in the utter absurdity of the world and the strange resilience of its human inhabitants had combined with an easy acknowledgment of my utter lack of control over the evening and all its inhabitants to created a wooly layer of clouded across the floor of my mind; the news that Mar and Ty were still ‘out there’ sent a few mental porcelain plates shattering, the shards lodged comfortably. I smiled my thanks to the policemen as he left and belatedly wondered about my status as a ‘good wife’ and a loose American.

I smiled again – facial expressions are so much simpler to translate – at Vam as he followed the policemen out the door and towards the army base, the wooly layers continuing to build up inside my mind. I gratefully gulped the contents of a small metal soup bowl, but all memories of hunger drained from my mind as two massive plates of Chow Mein – noodles cooked with the remnants of vegetables and impressively few spices, a wonderfully plain and absurdly boring dinner – were placed on a white plastic tray and balanced on the mattress next to me, on the spot where the my only means of verbal communication had recently been sitting. While he was gone, and our host was present, I ate with ‘evident relish,’ smiling at each bite and emitting an animalistic variety of small positive comments. When I was alone in the room, I stored my fork in the remaining pile of pale noodles and stared intently at the layered floor and ebony glass windows, visually dissecting the suddenly scintillatingly removable bits of the shrine. When Vam returned, I eagerly shoved the remains of my plate into his chilled fingers, and made space for the night-time moon dust falling from his jacket to the bed.

I have to go back to the officer’s quarters – he explained between bites – they’re young, hip Punajbi guys, and I told them we were engaged but not yet married because my parents don’t approve, that we met in New Zealand in 2005 when you were studying abroad (I tried to imagine fitting this asynchronous detail in to my life story, and smiled at the awkward result)… but I’d given up the reigns long ago, so with blatantly false promises to return in ten minutes, I re-wrapped my extremities and allowed myself to be led across the near-freezing compound. The light and warmth of the room that opened to us would have felt like salvation enough from our brief trip through the high-altitude valley night (with stars you could touch if you were humble and brave enough to gleefully announce your insignificance) without the familiar babbling of television in the background: Star TV, HBO, murder mystery, gleaming advertisements featuring Aryan-toned Indians with perfect kitchens, Nicholas Cage’s Ghost Ride blazing a trail of fire and lost souls across our suspended evening. The officers were in casual dress, American sweatpants and matching navy sweatshirts with thin cloth covering the perfectly rounded buns of never-cut hair that marked them both as Sikh.

They waved us a welcome as an anonymous soldier ushered us through the door, to a cot with a bright green wool blanket and a stove-side view that allowed us to quickly shed a rainbow of warm garments. I flexed my fingers, and answered a question about things ‘to do’ in America without the constant entertainment of extended family. It was OK now – the army had found Mar and Ty at their roadside station and were sending a truck to retrieve them. This was strictly beyond any call of duty – the army gave up sovereignty of the road at dark, six or seven in the evening, but the temperature was literally dropping to zero, and they worried on our friend’s behalf. ‘This is not an easy place,’ the older officer – on an acclimatizing stop-over before continuing to a higher post – remarked with a pre-proprietary smile. So we settled and chattered and turned down food but drank tomato soup and by the time we were forcing some syrupy sweet carrot halvah down our throats Mar and Ty were losing elevation.

Mar sat at the outpost’s stove, trading pieces of her broken Hindi for pieces of the soldiers’ broken English – but the fumes made Ty dizzy, and she turned in early, wrapping herself in the adjacent room. It was only a little while after Mar had joined her for sleep – they were just drifting off – when six soldiers burst the doors of their room, yelling gruffly with flashlight accompaniment for the two women to come with them.

The young captain set the black receiver on its cradle, and flashed us a confused smile.

They won’t come – they won’t go with the soldiers.

This message had been relayed from the outpost to the peak and then down to us – direct communication wasn’t possible, and civilian voices were not allowed on airways so close to Indian’s northern borders.

Ask again, tell them we’re here, tell them Vam and Lily are waiting for them.

Chapter 4

The call repeated itself on an unpleasant relay track until, around eleven thirty, we got a positive; they were heading down the mountain. When the trucks pulled into the graveled yard, we jogged out to meet them, accompanied by a random smattering of curious soldiers. Mar and Ty climbed down from the massive cab, and Vam was immediately directed to take Ty to the base’s doctor. I found Mar, and together we ran off for the unfinished guest house. The porch light was on, casting an imaginary safety net over the steps, but the door was locked. I felt guiltily exposed and completely at home, and when our host peered bleary-eyed around the door – it was past midnight – I ushered Mar easily through the kitchen to our room. Our host, walking ahead of us, had already re-settled his bedding on the floor, and before we could protest had traipsed directly back to dreamland. I waved Mar silently to the smaller bed, and settled on the edge of my own with a black leather journal and a strong determination to stay awake. After 45 minutes, I pivoted easily to a horizontal pose – ten minutes passed, or maybe fifteen before a ghostly grinning face and a sharp tap at the window sent me running to the front door. Vam dripped frozen night air as he stepped in to the bedroom and enfolded me and disappeared with a few breaths of the warm bedroom air to keep him company back to the hospital.

The rising sun and a shake to the shoulder dragged me into a hallucinatory morning of reporting officials, oxygen re-fills, mutton maggi breakfast, and the efficient bustle of an important stopping point on the only road connecting the Nubra Valley to Leh. Time had folded in on itself in so many layers that I don’t remember when it started to snow – I just remember that my automatic reaction was to sing Christmas Carols.

Hark how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say, throw cares away...

Flakes swirled through the hole in the thatched roof, and the morning sweats that had woken me a week before in the height of the Hyderabadi summer seemed several small lifetimes away.

Mar and Ty’s bikes were still stranded on the mountain, and the policeman who hadn’t found them the night before now offered to ensure a ride to Diskit.

Diskit?! The nearest town with a hospital, in case Ty gets sick again. Oh, of course – Diskit.

Vam and I left on our own, re-wrapped and reluctant, but ready to smile our goodbyes at the Bhangra-dancing group of Indian tourists buying chai and noodles from our new Ladhakhi friend. The flurries followed us at first, and the sun took her time catching up with our spinning wheels, but that mystical little breeze created by our own forward motion snuck under our skin and soon we were smiling and chattering and singing as the road unfolded in strange bends and familiar hand-painted signs.

(... to be continued...)

Notes:
* Generally known to vary from 'reality' - 'Khardong-La' is among the highest motorable roads in the world, but there are reportedly some higher crossings near Lhasa, give or take a few hundred feet.
** For the purpose of correlating stories told in photos with those told in words, Vam and Ra are the same person
*** If you'd like to view the photo album and don't have the link, just drop me a note!

Life Without Commas: Lily Arrives in India (Again)

2008-09-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

21-29 August, 2008
New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai, India

I landed which means I must have taken off must have enjoyed my last morsels of Qdoba Mexican food procured from the shining SeaTac terminal with its northwest salmon décor must (not!) have cried the night before reluctant to fold away and finally willing to unleash the tension of the last eight months the smell of shit the barking dogs the constant stares the speeding slow pace the gleaming lives of the upper middle class reminding me of the blindness of my unimaginably unequal drain on the resource pool so I’m stepping sideways in it from a place guaranteed to an emerging archipelago of islands from the Delhi International Airport to the cab where I switched my shoes to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club where my mind could relax with gin and tonic and koti rolls and a friend of a friend might drive me home so I have a mattress for the sleepless night and company for the first meal complete with flies and brilliantly spiced shwarma and off to the station with a generalizing conversation on the changing role of women that would be slightly over half the population in India and eastern feminisms so that when I boarded the train I didn’t mind the old man talking to me was gracious and happy to share his joy of the low hill country the emerging teak forests that we were lucky to see because the train was late so after another sleepless night and a long day of reading Ghosh and chattering recyclable packaging and European architecture I took a nap and he came he finally came was there touchable in the dream lanky like me and not yet bald from chemo and genetics but teasing me doofusing lounging and welcoming so that when I woke with a start he stumbled with me but I stumbled with the same twenty years of without and the kind gentleman left me on platform nine three-quarters of the way down with my three bags leaning against the Narnian lamppost and protected fiercely by my blank stare at the familiar canvas of Secunderabad Railway Station flickering only enough to allow the grand entrance in black and grey a million expectations of flittering now fluttering thoughts breaking across the platform in a great wave so that they rushed around my ankles and tripped me up the stairs and he said there was no hurry so I waited for the tide to recede whispered fleeting memories of the dream companion who led me off the train and I folded into arms burrowed so I could breathe and then we took the rickety rickshaw home to the hotel to collaps happily into the cheap golden bedding the starched white sheets and I had television company for another sleepless night but woke in a panic that I had landed so I arranged the world around me and when this had sufficed I slipped on to the networks and on to a road and alighted at the café amidst the bright colors and paninis and read in the shade with the breeze at my very own one-woman table when messengers suggested that I go to see a girl about a play – Wilde’s Ernest – that she had organized a reading of for that afternoon and of course I knew all the players and of course the room was a beautiful white wash against the semi-lush green garden and specialty bookstore and aged olive green chaise lounge and the voices came quickly but soon the movie was starting and the boy was leaving but the traffic trapped me against the northern edge of the lake with the Buddha waving the evening light my way and a Catholic vigil nuns in saris holding candles on my right yet I made it to the platform to miss the message and pick up the sweets and was only carried down the wrong side of the road for a moment before I landed back at the hotel pocketing the simple citrus candies from the front desk and lugging my ‘necessities’ all sixty or seventy pounds of them to a new room that was recently flooded and I think the black mold missed my lungs but for the next few days I slept downstairs in our invented hostel Mrs. SSR president and founder and a proper Telugu mother to bring pickles and I waded through the monsoon streets for packets of morning milk I went to work and finished the book I met the women and made the phone calls I suppressed the panic that this return was a ridiculous idea and traced the familiar lines of the city with a white-gloved finger to see if I would pick up dust or chattering chucks of memories and I rode the waves of confidence and familiarity and the possibility bred between them and the night before last I put the finishing touches on a present and boarded a train and read about Sen's India and landed lightly back in arms in a home away for the weekend so when we sat on the rooftop last night and the lights of the stretching-flat city reflected on the underbellies of the clouds I watched the changes in his face as it observed mine and I smiled at the panorama as we leaned back to watch the same sky begin a different cycle.

Dear Future Volunteer

2008-08-25T04:26:00.000-07:00

(free-form letter to future volunteers working with AJWS)
August 11, 2008

Dear Future Volunteer,

My name is Lily, and I spent the last year as a World Partner Fellow working with NGO X in Hyderabad, India. As a documentation officer on the ABCD Project, I wrote reports, worked on grants, participated in project planning meetings, launched a resource website, and helped my co-workers to develop abstracts for an international conference.

Its common to hear that India is a place of great extremes... what I didn't realize before leaving was that not only is India home to the extremely poor and excessively rich, mountain deserts and sea-level swamps, multi-million people metropolises and endless acres of tiny farming communities -- its also everything in between. The only things that are difficult to find there are stick deodorant and public trash cans. The ride from the airport to your first destination will probably be the most frightening experience you have -- once you're used to the mad dash that constitutes Indian traffic, malaria and monsoons won't look so intimidating.

As you begin to adjust to the kaleidescope experience that confronts you each day as you leave your home (and often through the walls when you're trying to sleep at night), you'll be able to settle in to your life at work. The most useful thing I did for my own volunteer experience at work was to loosen my concepts of productivity and success -- I counted every friendship, every clear communication with co-workers, every nonverbal interaction with the young children we served and the tea lady who served us, as a success, as something to take pride and comfort in. This allowed me to feel productive right away, even when I was still adjusting to my office and apartment, and accomplishing astonishingly little in the way I was used to counting 'work' after eighteen years of rigorous education and summer research jobs.

Once I had 'adjusted' (always a relative word) to my daily life in India, people began to ask me how I felt I had changed, and the first thing that always came to mind was my capacity for and store of patience: my capacity increased exponentially, but my supply was often scraping bottom. My mother told me she worried that India would make me too 'hard' -- constantly bargaining for each service rendered, coping emotionally with the daily interaction with extreme poverty -- and while I would never pretend that there was anything 'easy' about living in India, I like to think of the experience as a perfect example of 'productive discomfort.' Sometimes its important for us to step outside of the familiar, to take life out of context, in order to gain a clearer of view of ourselves and the world that we live in. Working and living in India is a perfect opportunity to do just that.

Welcome to the rabbit hole. Its a long drop down, but its worth the ride.

Sincerely,

Lily

The Thank-You Letter

2008-08-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

('what I learned in India,' written as a closing activity for the AJWS World Partner Fellowship)
June 27, 2008

Dear Reader,

I am writing to thank you ... (this was originally a thank-you letter to financial supporters, but I thought I'd take this chance to thank you for reading!)... and to share with you some of my experiences as a World Partners Fellow. When I arrived in India, over ten months ago, the first thing that I noticed was the sheer number of people, smells, colors, and noises; they intrude on your senses completely and leave you no personal space. India is a country of contradictions and functioning chaos; she teaches you how to move calmly through the morass, and how to distinguish what pieces to hold on to and when to let go.

As a volunteer at my NGO, I was given the chance to live and work in Hyderabad, a city of over seven million in the state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. At work, I was able to expand my knowledge of HIV/AIDS, and the state of the epidemic in India, to work with Indian colleagues on a variety of projects, and to visit the children and families that my program worked to support in rural Andhra Pradesh.

At home in the apartment that I shared with two other WPFs, I learned how to cook authentic Indian and make-shift American food (or authentic American and make-shift Indian, depending on your perspective), to meet friends in the city and to explore Hyderabad’s many strange – and eventually familiar – sights and sounds. I enrolled in dance classes, and continued the study of world dance – Bharata Natyam in particular – that I began as a young child and explored intensively in college. Each Friday evening, my flat-mates and I celebrated Shabbat together – we melded the different traditions we had each grown up with, and created a few new ones.

These lessons – what habits you give up or pressures you give in to, what patterns you hold on to and re-create, which different traditions you adapt to, and which you continue to resist – are what I will take home with me when I fly back to the USA. These observations about another country, and how I chose to live my life and engage with the work of my NGO in that country, are the stepping stones I will use in the coming year, when I return to India and to my NGO to work on new and exciting projects.

As I continue my journey in India and with AJWS, I hope that you will continue ... (to read, and to share your own stories with me). To learn more about my adventures in work and life abroad, feel free to view the photo albums that are linked on the right-hand side of the page. If you would like any additional information about my work during the past year, or AJWS’s programs, please feel free to contact me directly.

Thank you again for your time and your ongoing support.

Sincerely,

Lilliputian

Resident Alien Goddess

2008-06-04T04:12:00.000-07:00

(My Body In India)

I. I started stretching because the foothills tied up my calves and when I got down to the plainsit wasn’t necessary anymore but it was habit because in new places habits form quickly.

II. Women touch women (she led me by the waist) and men hold hands with men (and walk enmeshed, embracing) and sometimes men try to touch women but women are never supposed to touch men – except when they’re in the street and all the sharpest edges meet and – and as I look down from a few inches above I have never felt so physically isolated and restricted – absolutely free and un-touched and absolutely not free to touch – in my life.

III. The classes were held in a KG-10^th standard school complex, and when I hit the flagstone floor of the classroom with the flat of my foot, it rocked in its setting. The mothers roosted on a long wooden bench outside the room and chattered while the fathers stood under a tree and consulted or leaned on a low wall and checked their mobile phones. No-one came in on time, but by the end of two hours of overlapping classes the small room was packed with thirty girls in miss-matched yellow and green salwar kameez’, dupattas tied around girls waits or diagonally across women’s breasts.

A dusty photo of a forty-something-year-old woman in a red and gold sari, with close-cropped grey hair and square 1980’s reading glasses presided from the wall above the glass-front bookshelves (Hindi, English, and Telugu titles locked away with corresponding-language cobwebs). The young teacher, sculpted behind acid-wash jeans and a pink striped kurta and theatrical brow bones and beautiful hands, seconded her authority from a small square of rough matting decorated with a pleather briefcase, a hefty metallic watch and the splintering, even beats of a smooth stick on a rough wooden block, matched by the drum syllables formed by tongues and the hardened heels slapping stone.

IV. I slept on a cot in the living room (draped each morning with a cheap Rajasthani block print) so that I could have my own physical sleeping space, but (like most lines) it was mostly an illusion, a stop-gap to keep the pressure of so many other surrounding bodies from silencing the shy voices in the odd corners of my mind, the ones that only come out late at night or early in the morning, when most of the others are asleep.

V. The first time I put on a salwar kameez, at a tiny store in a massive market in Delhi, I felt like I was wearing a sack. The cloth of the tunic top (kameez) hugged my shoulders, grazed my ribcage, and flowed out from there, obliterating any visible shape of my hips and legs. The (salwar) pants sat above my belly-button, held against my natural waist by a cotton drawstring and only deigning to touch base again when they reached the bottom of my ankles. The chiffon dupatta (scarf, worn across the chest with one end falling off each shoulder and down the back) conveniently covered the pretty orange-green-mirrored embroidery the ringed my neck, and further hid any potential physical shape (when I could keep it on, which took at least two weeks to master). Ten months later, I feel scandalously clad in jeans and a tank top, and when we walk through our neighborhood in makeup I feel like a harlot, and when I get to the Westernized IT side of town I feel like a prude against the occasional whispering miniskirt, but when I wear a kurta (traditional top) and properly loose plants I get better prices at the vegetable stand.

VI. There is a heightened awareness, caused by: pollution (lungs), dirty water (bowels), chilies (nasal cavities, tongues), perfectly encompassing heat (skin, every inch of it), bucket showers (scalp, hands), bucket laundry (arms), uneven streets (back, legs), lithe waists peeking out from traditional saris (breasts, hips, spines). So when I’m sick of the stares and tired of keeping my hips from swinging or my voice from singing, I pause and release and let myself swing and sing and I think: just another alien goddess, walking down the street…

Giants in the Sky: Passover in Dharamsala

2008-05-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

(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

2008-05-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

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.

The Dragonriders of Pern

2008-04-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Past the Phantom Tollbooth

2008-03-19T03:24:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What an enthralling place to make that attempt!

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

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

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

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

Five Photographs

2008-03-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

20-27 February 2008
Chennai, Tamil Nadu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I' Statements

2008-03-03T01:51:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Water Lilies (Like to Travel)

2008-02-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

AJWS World Partner Fellows Mid-Year Retreat
Mumbai, India and Bangkok, Thailand
January 17^th-27^th, 2008

In Motion

I love leaving, embarking, stepping out and feeling the surface of the street that is about to take me away. I love to travel. I love to lean against the window and watch the world flashing incomprehensibly by as the past few hours or weeks or days are slotted into sensible categories in my mind, as memories are chopped up and re-arranged, and competing stories of what-just-happened-to-me-? are narrated in the suddenly blank space behind my eyes. I love arrivals. I love the first impression, the details that stick for no apparent reason while the rest of the world blurs into a continuous wall of new images because you don’t yet understand enough to see the differences, the spaces in between.

The first thing I remember is the highway ramp leading to a raised road, our taxi speeding up the dark slope and along the broad, sinuous curves. The third and fourth (and fifth and sixth, and the shack on the roof, and the minaret next door) floors of hundreds of apartments flashed by, each screened porch’s laundry line partially blocking the too-private view of a bed with floral sheets, a dirty white door in a yellow wall, a dark wood cabinet lonely in the middle of a room, an immaculately clean kitchen counter. At five thirty in the Mumbai morning, the taxi had little competition on the road, and it flashed through the puddles of white cast by intermittent fluorescent street lamps at a speed that might have frightened us during daylight hours.

The first thing I remember is the water. Leaving the airport, it hung in the air in perfect curtains, effectively limiting our view of Thailand to green and white highway signs printed in (yet another) unfamiliar script. At the ashram, it greeted us by the road, and ferried us over to an Island-like paradise. It snaked around the dining hall, and led us from our dormitory to the meeting hall. And it was full, chock-full, of water lilies and their floating floral relatives.

In Millions

I love swimming in a sea of people. I love the fact that so many individuals can exist in such a small place, their lives stacked to overlapping. I love listening to the chatter of strangers, the clicking of soles on stone, the bumping of bags down a sidewalk.

Mumbai [19 million] tried to seduce me. She put on her softest ocean breeze, her clearest skies, her quietest hotel rooms. She whisked me down sidewalks past toweringly intricate colonial architecture mixed with mosques and temples and synagogues, through art galleries and cafes, to fresh baked bread and goat cheese that melted my heart on the spot. We spent an hour perched on the remains of a fort that must have once guarded the city from water-borne attacks but now provides a rambling collection of rough stone walls for groups of skinny young men, cuddling couples, and wandering chaat (snack) sellers. I’m pretty sure the ocean winked at me. The horizon certainly smiled.

Bangkok [9 million] is known as the sex capital of the world. We heard that people find it overwhelming, dirty, full. We found it stunningly clean, uncluttered, well-infrastructured. The taxis are hot pink. The traffic is no worse than Hyderabad (granted, not a difficult feat); while sitting in rush-hour gridlock in my Tuk-Tuk (a close cousin of the Indian auto-rickshaw), I met another American traveler, sitting along in his Tuk-Tuk in the next lane. We talked about our travels, and I tried a slice the apple-like fruit he was snacking on. The street food didn’t make anyone sick. The seafood was divine. Images of the King plastered every other surface. We visited compounds of endless temples and pagodas and tiny mirrored tiles and we watched the artists touching up the murals around the edge and we smiled at the care they took to fill in the peaks on the tiny golden crown of the adventuring prince.

In Mythology

I love stories. But if you’re still reading this, I think you know that by now.

And what part of this was a retreat – other than the retreat from our daily lives, of course? We traded tales and depicted details of our lives. There were sensitive sessions and terribly technical tools. There was talk of the vaguely frightening specter that is Next Year, and there was a visit with an American activist living and working abroad who knows half of the crazy characters I have planned and marched and spoken out with. But the important thing is that seventeen of us, seventeen of us who met for the first time in the heat of Delhi’s late summer, seventeen of us sat down and we told stories for a week.

The first time I went to Thailand, I was seven years old, and we crossed the border for a day trip from Malaysia. I remember three things: the rickety cycle rickshaw that we rode in, the pungent smell of the durian market that we passed, and the serene glory of the massive reclining Buddha that we saw. I remember one story: when Buddha was bit by a deadly poisonous snake, he refused treatment. It is my time to die, he said. And he was at peace. The reclining Buddha is Buddha when he is ready to slip out of this reality. The one thing I wanted to do in Bangkok was to find another reclining Buddha – preferably one at least as large as the one I remember (the size of a small concert hall), one that would overwhelm my ability to see it.

After visiting the Emerald Buddha (which is made of Jade), after posing with dancing mosaic monkeys and drinking down delectable details on a scale I could barely have imagined existed – and I do try to imagine the hours and the hands that went in to laying each tiny piece of tile and glass and gold leaf – I skipped the chance to eat lunch for a trip to visit Buddha on his death bed. His square pillow was twice my height. His peaceful face stared at a corner of the red and gold patterned ceiling, and I smiled at the familiarly soft curve of the back of his shoulders as they cast off their burdens.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P.s. I’ve gotten into a habit of putting most of the necessary story line and facts in the captions to my photos – so for a differently full description of my mid-year retreat, try perusing those.

P.p.s. We had to leave the country due to visa ish (our visas are valid for the duration of our fellowships, but we can’t stay in the country for more than six months at a time) – so AJWS was forced to take us to Thailand.

Christmas in Cochin

2008-01-06T22:02:00.000-08:00

This holiday season brought to you by the letter ‘C’ and the number ‘2’: Part II
22-27 December, 2007

There are four points to be made here:

Details
Synchronicity
Cause-effect (ridiculousness of)
Two answers

1.
We played chess – it was a draw. My little friend taught me a classroom game that involved finding numbers written randomly across a piece of paper. The Men in Black – those going on a pilgrimage to a temple in Kerala – said their evening and morning prayers together, and washed themselves below my window under the open hoses by the side of the train tracks. The Malayali nursing students heading home for the holidays passed up and down the train cars, chatting and visiting and switching seats. I listened to an episode of NPR’s ‘wait wait… don’t tell me’ as the sun set over rice paddies in Tamil Nadu and an Alison Kraus album as it cast thick morning light on the coconut groves of Kerala, and finished Passage to India in between. After 25 hours, each face in the packed sleeper car looked familiar. [When the berths run out, you can buy ‘wait list’ tickets, which means you can board the train but have to find an empty bed to share with all the other wait list passengers. There were over 500 wait list tickets for sleeper class on the Sabari Express that night]

I got down in Ernakulam Town, and caught a black-on-black auto to the ferry dock. I paid my 2.5 rupees, and balanced my backpack on a handrail so that I could stand on the very edge of the boat, with a full view of the massive container ships, five-star hotels, and concrete bridges connecting the endlessly green islands that make up Ernakulam and Kochi. I got down (or rather, stepped up onto a massive, ancient dock) at Fort Cochin, and directed a driver down YMCA Road. The blue metal gates of number 1964 swung open easily, and familiar voices met me on the other side of a wide screen door.

My mother first took me to visit Pat and Don when they were living in Bologna, Italy. I was three months old – Liliana tre meze. The second time we visited them abroad they were living in Penang, Malaysia, and I was seven. I still remember the feeling of bushes slapping my salt-water sandal clad feet as I rode on the back of Pat’s bike to the market where a man slit fluffy white chicken’s necks and dropped them in a massive boiling silver vat so that customers could buy the glistening pink meat minutes later. I remember the Ramadan break-fast meal and the Muslim Malay women in their head-to-toe covering; the Tamil Indians carrying jars of milk on their heads, spears and hooks piercing their lips, tongues, and chests, in a festival procession overseen by a massive image of Hanuman; I remember the Chinese schoolgirls piling onto buses in miniscule skirts and bleached-white collared shirts.

This was my third trip to stay at the Hotel Fels, and it was absolutely wonderful to end an epic train ride across a relatively new country in a familiar living room with familiar faces. I had done my assigned reading – The Moor’s Last Sigh and The God of Small Things – and my non-assigned daydreaming – fresh seafood and universal healthcare schemes – so I felt prepared for the fishing nets and constant green and fresh dried spices and mythical magical tiles of Fort Cochin. It is ‘God’s own country,’ a few different voices had reminded me on the train, reiterating the advertising slogan for Kerala tourism.

And so I searched for tickets on a Thursday, and bought them on a Friday, and left on a Saturday at noon. And that is the story of how I found myself sitting on a floating dock, eating curried prawns from a banana leaf by candlelight, watching a fisherman slip by in a silent wooden canoe to the sounds of a classical music concert and the soft pattering of Seattle voices. [Another Seattle family – whose children I went to elementary school with – were also visiting. It’s a small world] In the morning, I got a tour of the green (everywhere), the massive trees (dripping with ferns), the star-decked homes (that would be the star of Bethlehem), the fish vendors along the boardwalk, the scantily-clad European tourists, and the churches and the mosques and the synagogue.

2.
Jews first came to Kerala as early as 72 AD, and settled in Cranganore (also called Shingly). There are numerous accounts of travelers meeting the Jewish community there, and a pair of copper plates dated around 400 AD declare a series of privileges granted to the Jewish community by the local Hindu rulers. In 1471, the line of Jewish rulers ended, and after a dispute between two noble brothers for the throne, the younger prince escaped to Cochin. According to legend, the prince swam to Cochin with his wife on his shoulders, and was welcomed by the Maharajah, who granted him a piece of land near the royal palace. Soon afterwards, the Cranganore community was sacked by the Portuguese (or the Moors, depending which account you’re reading). In 1568, the Cochin Synagogue was completed, and the area around it came to be known as Jew Town.

In the last few decades, most of the remaining Cochin Jews have relocated to Israel, leaving behind only a handful of elderly family members. They have regular services (sephardi orthodox), and use the small but steady stream of tourists to make a minyan for prayer. The synagogue is open to tourists during the week, and as I stood decoding the Ten Commandments carved into a piece of marble and set in the wall, I listened to Indian tour guides explaining Judaism. They would recite and the age and source of each of the glass chandeliers, and explain that the blue and white floor tiles had been brought from China in 1762. There are only three patterns, but each tile is different – the boat is farther down the river or the flowers have opened just a little more.

A few hours before my flight home, I returned to Jew Town to buy some gifts from Sarah Cohen’s Embroidery shop, and was lucky enough to be introduced to Sarah Cohen herself. With gray-white short curly hair and wrinkled skin, full of a bustling energy and advice or a story for anyone with a moment to listen, and wearing a fancy sari for her lunch out with an English author… she reminded me precisely of the stereotypical Jewish grandmother, but draped in a sari with a heavy Indian accent.

Bibliography: ‘Kerala and Her Jews,’ compiled from a number of research papers, and available at the Cochin synagogue for rps 10. Or try picking up The Moor’s Last Sigh.

[P.S. I was also lucky enough to visit the Palace, near the synagogue, and peruse amazing ancient murals. My favorite was three wives giving birth to four heroes – completely graphic and absolutely graceful.]

3.
On Christmas, I relaxed. And took a short walk, and bought myself jalebi, my favorite Indian sweet. For the Eve, we had a cocktail party with amazing fruit, and for the Day, we had a dinner with nut and herb stuffed chicken and kebabed vegetable compotes. For a Christmas present, the other Visiting Seattlites brought me along on their family trip to the backwaters. [The backwaters are an endless maze of lakes, rivers, and canals that connect and flow through and in and out of Fort Cochin. You can rent a houseboat and float down them for pleasant eternities… or for an afternoon, depending on your schedule.]

A car took us out (over a number of bridges) of Cochin, and pulled off the road at nowhere in particular. By the side of one of the bridges, we climbed into a long canoe made out of dark wood lashed together with rope and sealed with tar. A wiry man in a doti (a simple cloth wrap-skirt) and t-shirt pushed us off the bank and down the river with a long bamboo pole. We took a right down a little canal, just wide enough to let one boat of tourists pass another, and just shallow enough for children to bathe in. The dense green – trees, bushes, flowers, vines, floating plants, moss, long grass (except where the goats have gotten to it) – folded in and over and around us, and we floated happily. Cathy and I talked about feminism and travel, and the rest of the family played cards on the canoe benches.

The guide pulled over and asked us to get out twice. Once, for a demonstration by two old women spinning twine out of coconut fibers, while a third woman turned a crank that twisted the new-formed threads into a coiled rope. The second time for a short spice tour, which ended with the obligatory mid-morning tea break. Both stops were both fascinating and utterly bizarre and gave us the unsettling feeling that we were on an amusement park ride.

Lunch was two boats and one car ride away, on a tiny island just big enough for a kitchen, an open-air cafeteria, and some coconut groves. After our red rice with curries, we got back on the little lunch ferry (plastic chairs arranged on a large raft shaded with woven palm leaves) with about twenty other tourists, and spent the afternoon crossing a series of lakes. It was warm – but not too hot – and the water was sparkling – but not blinding – and the coconut trees looked so packed on to edge of every island that they might be about to topple into the water.

4.
We talked about stories and endings and why you can’t make cause-effect statements backwards in time. They teased me about details, and I thought about why I love them so much. The little birdies have been chirping that there aren’t any new ideas, and the old ideas are all too black-and-white in their patterning. Someone asked me if I write about what I had for breakfast, or silly things like that, and I said – of course not! And then realized that of course I do, because those silly little things seem to be the most real, or maybe not real, but the most accurate way to tell a story or represent some sort of lived experience. And when I think about playing chess with the little boy on the twenty-five hour train ride I remember the feeling of work and friends and obligation slipping off my shoulders and out the open window with the breeze, and when I think about the ten commandments carved in a piece of marble set in the wall of the Cochin synagogue, I think about connections with ancient civilizations and bloodshed and community and the shape of a biblical language and my godfather who supported my religious education and my father who would never visit me in a mythical blue-and-white tile but might just laugh at a little clenched fist making its way all the way to the other side of the world.

Chanukah in Chennai

2007-12-29T23:49:00.000-08:00

This holiday season brought to you by the letter ‘C’ and the number 2: Part I
4-13 December, 2007

On the first night of Chanukah, we placed two candles (one a little taller than the other) in the bed of wax accumulated on the upturned stainless steel lid we use as a Shabbat candle holder, and used one to light the other.

The train ran away from the stern station master, and soon we* were stretching in the early morning light filtered through the overpasses, blinking signs, and union election propaganda of Chennai Central Railway station. It was the special slow stretch of the traveler who is pretending to have gotten a satisfactory nights’ sleep in order to convince themselves that they’re ready for the next day’s unknown adventures. This illusion is aided by the common practice of waking up just a few minutes before getting down from the lumbering metal box in which they passed the last immeasurable stretch of hours. A driver, looking suspiciously like Kevin Kline, met us by a pile of unlabeled agricultural goods and drove us away, past the longest beach in Asia (I think), past the high-rises and sprawl of Chennai, past endless palm-roofed tea stands (one of which provided us with breakfast), past a strange DizzyWorld resort that looked suspiciously like it was trying to become DisneyLand, and down the statuette-dotted drive of the Tamil Nadu Tourism and Development Corporation (TNTDC) Resort.

*(These are different ‘we’s. The first is Myla, her father, and I. The second is two of my co-workers, K and M, and myself, joined at the station by a third co-worker, C. My life in India is a very communal experience.)

The ocean said hello, having already greeted a number of my NGO’s staff as they arrived from Kolkata (West Bengal), Bhubaneswar (Orissa), Karur (Tamil Nadu), and (of course) Chennai. But the ocean wasn’t happy with just a hello, and soon went in for a big sloppy kiss, soaking us with a vertical rain from the waves. The wind whipped our hair around our faces and curled our clothes around our bodies while the top layer of sand jumped up and danced an inch above the ground, covering and uncovering strange lumps, one of which turned out to be the remnants of a salty dog. At the end of the long curve of beach away from our resort stood the prize: a beautiful stone temple that survived the tsunami (and centuries of daily ocean kisses). We admired carvings and clambered over boulders. I tried to lift Krishna’s Butter Ball (that beloved mischievous boy) and memorized the coastline from the top of a monkey kingdom/tower/temple. As the sun ran away over the horizon, we gussied up and gathered. The first-ever gathering of all our NGO staff, from five different offices. There were speeches and applause, and symbolic oil lamps ringed with carefully arranged flower petals.

The second night of Chanukah, I placed eight neon storm candles in a row on a metal tray, and used a ninth to light two. I fell asleep with the waves whispering out the window, the candles burning low on an armoire, and a piece of the National AIDS Control Policy (NACP III for 2007-2012) on my lap.

And so began the Program Management Training, at which I learned a lot of useful technical information, took a lot of notes, and spent only one session writing a letter to a friend: ‘I’m sitting in a circular conference room, the waves of the Bay of Bengal hitting the beach to my right, a powerpoint on logical frame work analysis to my left… I missed tea, and I started to cry… I’m not sure if I needed the caffeine, the sugar, the warmth (over air-conditioned), or the excuse to pause… but I suddenly felt I’d been denied something essential. So as soon as I had the chance, I walked out to the ocean – the sky was dramatic, the waves affectionately chatty, the ancient temple at the far end of the beach properly poetic in the misty distance – but I couldn’t cry. A woman in a bright orange salwar kameez tapped my shoulder and offered me a pamphlet on ayurvedic massage – I set it in my lap, said I was sorry, but too busy with work, and went back to staring at the waves. When I gave up on the ocean and walked back to the conference room, she called out ‘which country?’ as I passed. My answer garnered a massive smile.’

The night of the missing tea incident each team stayed up writing concept notes for new grants, putting our session workshop on program planning and grant writing into instant action. It was the third night of Chanukah, and when I returned to my room, the sight of my room-mate’s peaceful sleeping face was more comforting than the idea of setting up rickety candles could ever be.

In between Learning Things from powerpoints, I learned other things, about gender politics in India, ambitions, plans, accents, pan. I made new friends, and positioned myself so that I could study the horizon at every possible moment. On our last night in Mahaballepuram, I opened the Cultural Show with the story of Chanukah, and lit four candles (plus one) in the window of our circular conference room. R played the veena, and the Kolkata office played a Bengali music video about accepting love and sexuality of all forms. Not all apples are red. Some might even be blue.

The next night, the Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar offices crammed into Kevin Kline’s car (five men in the backseat, two women riding shotgun) and sang songs in Hindi, Oria, Malayalam, Telugu, and English to quicken the drive back into the blinking lights of The City. I woke up in a wooden sleigh bed that came with a complementary breakfast of all-you-can-eat idly, dosa, upma, and wada (different ways to cook rice flour and ground lentils: patty, pancake, mush, or donut), and let someone else pay too much for auto that took us to our NGO’s Chennai office for… another training, on Comprehensive Care, Support, and Treatment. Incredulous that we were once again sitting and listening all day, but genuinely interested in the topics, ten of us spent three days sitting in the Country Director’s office and learning about anti-retroviral therapies, home-based care, and child-centered approaches.

Each night, we Ventured Out:

The first evening, I ran away, through muddy back allies of strange suburbs, to a massive ashram where my friend Blanca was chatting with a Spanish couple who fell in love through meditation. Blanca was spending the weekend with old friends in a small apartment outside the ashram, and we settled in to twisting realities projected from pretty faces with The Island. In the morning, I took a shared auto through the city, feeling like a regular World Traveler.

The second evening, six of us landed in the flashing neon lights and sparkling eighties party dresses and acres of saris and carpeting of chocolate ice-cream bar wrappers that fill T. Nagar. Two of my new friends helped me to pick out my first sari, and more co-workers trickled in to meet us on a rooftop restaurant.

The third evening, I went back to the ocean. The line between the water and the sky was lost in the dark past the grandmothers sleeping on the sidewalk and the couples cuddling in the sand and the fisherman lost in the shadows of their longboats, so that the sky that started behind me with wisps of clouds and a few blinking stars wrapped all the way back to my feet.

The fourth evening, which may or may not have been the last night of Chanukah, a train ran away from the station master. On board the Embassy Express – every other person was on their way from a hi-tech job in Hyderbad to the American Embassy in Chennai – I felt absolutely ready to come home.

High rises, Slums, and Statistics

2007-12-19T02:22:00.000-08:00

OR: What to do when every day is World AIDS Day?
December 1, 2007

I woke up in an identity crisis. The Discovery Channel show on how animals express emotion playing on our friend’s TV that morning may have crept into my unconscious and put me in a particularly vulnerable state, but there was no way to avoid the fundamental issue: I was on the verge of tears because it was World AIDS Day and I had no particular plans.

My NGO focuses on technical assistance. We have some direct implementation programs, like a support center for ‘sexual minorities’ that runs out of our Kolkata office, but mostly we help smaller NGOs to help themselves to help the people. So our partners had programs, but we didn’t. And I, with my distinctly lacking Telugu skills, would not be much use to a busy event without a co-worker to translate for me. My co-workers were all out in the field evaluating the partners, because it’s the season for evaluation and next-year planning. And so there I was, sitting in a Westernized flat in a wealthy neighborhood where people know about condoms, but probably don’t worry so much about AIDS. Not educating, not advocating. Just lounging in bed on a lazy Saturday morning.

Last year on December 1, I was sitting behind a police line on the sidewalk in front of the white house dressed as a bottle of anti-retroviral pills. Soon afterwards, I was sitting in a locked van, wrists tied behind my back in plastic cuffs, watching the sun set over the traffic jams of Washington, DC as we drove towards the city park jailhouse. And eventually, I sat free on the front wall of the police compound, greeting each activist as they were released, and enjoying the glitter of the stars reflecting on the Potomac courtesy of bail provided by DC Fights Back! and the Student Global AIDS Campaign.

The year before that, I was madly selling home-made t-shirts in the campus center to raise money for an amazing NGO I was lucky enough to spend a day visiting in Kibera, one of the densest slums in the world, where nearly a million people live in one square mile of land on the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. Lauren was running AIDS-related documentaries one floor above me, and we were both deliriously under-slept. That night, with a slew of helpers, we plastered the walls of a dance hall with condoms, set up a six-foot-tall red plywood AIDS ribbon in the hallway, and put on an amazing party.

So what was I doing sitting so still, feeling so well rested, watching the red ribbon pinned on the anchorwoman’s shirt with feelings of vague approval and intense guilt? An ad came on for a movie premier that night; four famous Indian directors and a broad spectrum of Indian stars and starlets in a beautifully produced set of stories about living with HIV. I felt torn between wanting to see it because the thing looked well done, and not wanting to watch because that activity felt so distinctively insufficient. At this point I realized that I was acting like a petulant child.

So we went to the lake. I was sitting with my head against the window of our friend’s car, staring out at the gargantuan office buildings of Hi-Tech city (where all those calls to 1-800 customer support lines are directed) when Myla handed me her cell and said ‘Leah needs information on AIDS in India – they have to give a talk for World AIDS Day in an hour.’ My brain, or at least the part that stores all the numbers, looked up, stopped slouching and dusted its jacket.

“In 2007, the estimated number of people living with HIV in India was cut in half, to 2.5 million, revealing an adult prevalence rate of just above 0.3%. But even with this drastic downward revision in the estimation of the Indian epidemic, India is home to the world’s third-largest population of people living with HIV, following South Africa and Nigeria. India faces unique challenges, with a relatively low adult prevalence rate, but an astronomical number of people who will need care, support and treatment services in the coming decade and beyond. Based on antenatal data, six states have been defined as ‘high prevalence,’ with a HIV prevalence rate above 1%: Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, and Nagaland. The six high prevalence states together contribute 70-80% of total positive cases in the country, and as of the latest numbers, Andhra officially has the highest infection rate, at 1.2%.”

[maybe I just copied that from the Annual Report, but since I wrote it in the first place, I’m pretty sure its not plagiarism]

She asked me if I knew how many Indians had died. I had no idea – we focus on living positively, finding out who’s affected, and trying to figure out how best to support them, I answered. In any case, AIDS is not even in the top ten killers in India – so why is there a National AIDS Control Office, but nothing like the same level of funding for Malaria, TB, or everyone’s favorite, water-borne diarrheal diseases? One of my co-workers explained that the health budget is significantly determined by international funding, and thus… NACO! It sounded like a plausible explanation to me. Or at least the beginning of one.

While I was chattering away, we passed the lake. The lake, however, was looking a bit ill (since the monsoons stopped a few months ago), and not up for visitors. So we kept driving. We passed slums, and a few herds of buffalo doing a half-hearted job of blocking the roads. I wished Leah good luck, and passed the phone back to Myla. ‘Well, that was my contribution,’ I thought, and ordered a lemon tea and walnut date bread at the pseudo-Starbucks Coffee Day café chain.

‘If every day is AIDS day in my world, doesn’t that count? Do I need a World AIDS Day?’ I asked the tea. ‘How much more can my awareness be raised?’ The tea didn’t respond. The steam rising off the cup, however, muttered subversively, ‘there’s always something to learn, always something to celebrate, always something to shout in the streets about.’ But steam dissipates quickly, so I held the warm cup against my cheek and replied. ‘I’ll work hard on Monday, on helping some sliver of people with some sliver of the hardships they’re facing. And the day after, I’ll do a little more.’

And so once I gave up my illusions of grandeur, of tying specific implications to a specific day, the rest of it went simply, and pleasantly, by. I went to dance class, and stood in the back behind the rows of giggling girls, and gestured and smiled and sweat. I met Myla in the congested market that surrounds Secunderabad Railway station, and she recognized me in a crowd of hundreds from blocks away by the glint of my hair in the neon lights. We called our friend Blanca and cooked for her and sipped fresh coconut juice straight from the nut and watched Pirates of the Caribbean in a pile of mango candy wrappers. There was no planning, no protesting (at least not outside my head) – just a quiet day of rest to prepare for the next week of work out in the world.

Strung with Tungsten Stars

2007-11-26T03:56:00.000-08:00

November 8-11, 2007
A Diwali weekend

Diwali was tooth-achingly sweet, eardrum shatteringly load, eye blindingly bright. It was deliciously too much, so that every crevice of my innards were filled with rava (wheat) and jaggery (sugar) and ghee (butter) and every fiber of the rest of my mass was brimming with accumulated sensations and sticky thoughts and sky-blue fuchsia feelings.

That afternoon my boss walked through the office with a sparkler and the fire hit the white marble floors and disappeared. It avoided the computers, but lit up the balcony. The children in the street below had been setting off sounds all day, and when it was our turn the roof looked like a small battle zone. As the sun went down, the city lit up and the constant noise pushed palpably against my skin as I rumbled home in an open-air auto.

The cab pulled up outside our flat, my roommates pulled each other downstairs to meet me, and I pulled a bright scarf around my neck. The festivities were beginning. When I was first draped in another woman’s gray pinstripe business sari, I stood up straight and they ood and awed at my height, but soon there was dancing, breathless waltzing carrying a six-year-old while singing ‘I could have danced all night’ and spinning in circles. There were super sweet Indian delicacies, and piles of biryani (the essential Hyderabadi dish – basmati rice cooked with spices and meat or veggies) to be carefully placed in the mouth (the trick is to pinch the rice, then push it off your fingers using the back of your thumb). Soon, I was sitting on the marble floor and playing hand-clapping games, so the perfectly ironed pleats of my dress would just have to accommodate themselves.

We slept. We woke to the high-pitched joyful screams of our young neighbors (three girls, aged 2, 5, and 6, one behind each of the three doors on our landing), and scuttled in circles, giving sweets, taking sweets, shaking hands and admiring new dresses. We were given chapatti stuffed with sweet batter, fried coconut patties, and balls of cinnamon flavored sugar. Then we left for breakfast. Breakfast brought famous dosas and stories about New York Jews and since we couldn’t believe we were still eating the afternoon went by in a sort of a blur. There was lunch (lunch?!) cooked by our new friend’s chef, and television-food comas and lazy discussions of ceremonies.

Then two of us went out in a cab and came back to a neighborhood that we’d never seen somewhere in the city we supposedly know. We were invited in to the living room where we admired the piles of flowers and incense and little oil lamps arranged around the goddesses, and looked apprehensively at the piles of food waiting in the kitchen. When the ceremony started, some time passed before I realized that the daughter-in-law was calling out each name of the goddess Laksmi, and I wondered as we passed number 137 if she would read out the whole booklet, but by the time she got to the last, the 1008^th name, I was entranced. Fruits were broken, lotus flowers folded, knees bent, foreheads marked. Each of the little oil lamps was lit, and afterwards, they were placed along the front wall of the house, continuing the fences of fire trailing down every ally.

We were given explosives. Fountains of sparks were set off from the middle of white designs painted on the threshold of every doorway. The ground was littered, but more like carpeted, with wrappers and burned fuses. The air shook and the eyes of the children glowed. We ate, inexplicably, and practiced short Telugu phrases to say that we liked the food and didn’t mind the ironic darkness of a mid-meal power cut when it was nearly daylight outside the house. The ride back, out of Secunderabad and to our young friend’s flat in the Western part of town, was chilly when we passed through the military and Muslim neighborhoods, but something more akin to an amusement park extravaganza as we dodged mid-road blasts in the Hindu areas.

When we walked in to our friend’s home, a second shrine was waiting and so more prayers were said, but these were mostly silent prayers, and requests and thanks to ideas more than to idols. We used the oil lamps sitting by Laksmi and Ganesha’s feet as Shabbat candles, and blessed the fact that we had found white wine while we blessed the wine itself. There was a lot of singing and quiet thoughts, and very little eating of that thing called dinner. Soon it was time to take our own magic box up to the roof and add a few more stars to the planetarium of fireworks. Imagine the Fourth of July, or any normal fireworks show, but 360 degrees, the biggest star bursts lighting the sky over the wealthiest neighborhoods. Smoke blocked most of the natural dome, but eventually more permanent stars peeked around the clouds, and by two in the morning there were conversations between moving lips under the evenly spaced stars of Orion’s belt. And even then, another bouquet of fire hit the ceiling and splashed across our easily blinded eyes. Time slowed down and sped up and ran around the block while we tried to leash it and then gave up and let it go.

In the morning, we ate famous food (but don’t worry, it was late in the morning, and light fare for famous food). We browsed books and talked about titles and Salman Rushdie’s obsessive depictions of strange Bombay childhoods. At dusk, labyrinthine sparkling rocks and strange Jabberwoky cousins slouched or slithered and dematerialized behind the softly bent trees of KBR national park. ‘When you admire nature,’ the signs reprimanded gently, ‘you pray to its creator.’ Peacocks, their hundred Argus eyes closed, stalked haughtily by.

We spent the day digesting the sweets and the lights and the noises and the conversations, and sat bundled on flowered velveteen couches. But when we went out, out to the top, where the dresses are shorter than the ones I’d wear at home, and the table-side fountains are filled with rose petals and floating candles and the dark smooth wood is draped with cloth to evoke the desert oasis of an imagined India, we buzzed with energy. The music danced me. I thought of contra lines and tea totaling jazz ensembles and body isolations and learning to stop pointing my toes and steaming up the windows of the Space Needle with high school hip-hop. To cool off, we returned to the roof, and sat again with the stars and watched the extra fireworks being detonated around the city.

The morning was late as mornings after so many days of excesses should be. In the afternoon we walked by the water (which makes everything better) and went out to visit the new (1992) statue of the ancient (3^rd century BC) time when this place was a major center of Buddhist thought. And I stood under the Buddha with a maybe and watched the water stretch and breathe and felt like the city had embraced me. I gave it an A-frame hug back.

(For an alternative telling of the same weekend, with perhaps more straightforward detail and explanatory photos, take a gander at Planet Bollywood, my flat-mate Myla’s blog… the photos that accompany this tale can also be found in my picture albums)

Elevator Speech

2007-11-15T21:26:00.000-08:00

The Assignment (for the World Partners Fellowship):
An elevator speech is, as you may know, the 30 seconds that you have to hook someone before they lose interest. Imagine yourself in an elevator with the CEO of the Gates/Ford/Rockefeller Foundation (okay, a long elevator ride); what would you say about the NGO to make it seem like a good funding prospect? And, in this assignment, how do you describe the work that you’re doing succinctly, but in a way that makes us want to know more? Note that this should be more interesting than just reiterating the organization’s mission or your work plan.

The Speech:
India is home to the third-largest population people living with HIV in the world. My NGO – (spell out the acronym here) – began as a listserv to provide scientific updates and build a network of people working to fight the spread of HIV in India. It has since grown into an organization with offices in Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and New York, and provides a wide range of services, from family-centered care to support centers for sexual minorities, the second largest prevention of mother to child transmission program in India to the first national directory of AIDS service organizations. The program I work with, (full program name here), works to support children affected by HIV. We focus on the family as the unit of intervention, providing child and caregiver support groups, educational scholarships, nutritional support, recreational activities, advocacy opportunities, and referrals for any medical services we can’t provide directly. We work with ten grassroots NGO partners in five high-prevalence districts of AP, providing additional staff and extensive trainings to help each NGO to scale up their child support programs. My current project is to document some of the best practices of our program, as we plan on expanding it to other high and medium HIV prevalence states in the coming year.

Reading Woolf in a Cyclone

2007-11-15T21:07:00.000-08:00

October 28-31, 2007
Advocacy Follow-up Workshops
Nellore, Nellore, and Eluru, West Godavari
(with a lot of soggy travel in between)

“Now the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as the nurses call it) – and the tears still stood in Orlando’s eyes – the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from ocean liners…

‘A toy boat, a toy boat, a toy boat,’ she repeated, thus enforcing upon herself the fact that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; its something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is – a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy – it’s ecstasy that matters.”

~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I got on the same train, happy to have a Same Train to get on. I climbed up to the top bunk – the safe bunk, the bunk which is least likely to attract random bed-mates or sandal thieves – laid out my scratchy yellow blanket and starched white Simhadpuri Express sheets, curled up around my precious laptop-heavy backpack, and quickly fell asleep. I slept well – too well – and was just beginning to allow the fact that the train had not been moving for some time to seep into my groggy thoughts when K tapped my bunk and said the tracks were flooded. The train had been still for over three hours. Some passengers were shuffling out the door and picking up other transport from the small station across the tracks. Others shook their heads and wondered why any sane person would leave the secure shelter of a train during a cyclone.

A cyclone is caused by a dent in the ocean, they explained, and a dent in the Bay of Bengal had been flooding the southern coast of Andhra Pradesh for the last twenty-four hours. Being far from the ranks of Sane People, K, M, and I joined the sleepy but jumpy brigade of Track Crossers through the rain, and met two of our field workers on the other side. One of the workers was in her second trimester of pregnancy, and despite the size of her belly and the fact that she too had slept on the train, there wasn’t a single wrinkle in her beautifully embroidered silk sari. I was impressed. The five of us crossed a second set of tracks, and entered the small open-air building that serves as the Singarayakonda train station (konda means hill or mountain in Telugu). It contained one ticket window, two simple wooden benches, and a handful of resigned, damp looking men in white linen shirts, their dirty black duffle bags (filled with other white shirts for the next work day) resting by their feet on the concrete floor.

My half-dissolved dreams from the train sat down on the bench with me, and we waited together to see what would happen next. A big white Jeep pulled up outside the station, and with an awkward passing of umbrellas and bags and a careful lifting of saris and slamming of doors, we were inside a new metal box. And unlike the train, this metal box could move in the rain. ‘You saved us!’ K shouted happily to the man in the front seat. Our Saviour, the head of a NGO partner from Parakasm district, turned and said, hands folded and smile beaming, ‘No, Jesus saves you.’ As his driver backed out of the parking lot and into the wet streets, my eyes went to the plastic crucifix sitting on just that spot where Indian taxis tend to have a small statue of Ganesha, Lakshmi, or one of the other pantheon favorites. ‘Oh,’ my almost-awake conscious noted, ‘they must be one of our faith-based NGO partners.’

Satisfied with my brief analysis, and happy to be in a moving vehicle, I settled against the cold glass. Soon we were passing fields of water. Some had been rice patties, some had been sugar cane fields, some had been raised fish ponds, but each side of the highway now formed its own lake. Small islands of palm-thatch roofed huts, a few protected with blue tarps, stood on slightly raised mounds of mud, and the palm trees standing up to their knees in water shook obstinately green heads in the passing gusts of wind and rain. ‘This is important for you to see,’ someone told me. They said it a few times. ‘To see how hard it is.’ They were smiling the nervous smile of someone driving down a very wet road very early in the morning. We passed one car with its nose smashed in and pushed up against the jersey barrier, a bus with its back end firmly in the mud, and a crowd of women with umbrellas who forced us onto the wrong side of the road to get past. They were standing around a woman’s body lying in a strange still pose between the second and third set of wheels of a massive truck. Her blood, if it had been spilled, had been washed away in the rain, but the distance that her mourners kept made it clear that she was dead. One of the field workers from the faith-based NGO (there were nine of us now in the car) folded her hands and began to pray. The driver pulled back onto the left side, and forty minutes later we drove up to our Same Hotel in downtown Nellore.

We were more than a few hours late, and after a brief ‘washing up’ we gathered in a conference room provided by the hotel: field workers and a few directors from our NGO partners in the southern coastal districts of Nellore and Prakasm, the program manager, one program officer, and myself. Switching consistently between English and Telugu, we spent a very Logical afternoon talking about Advocacy, Children, AIDS, Stigma, and Discrimination while the illogical rain filled the city streets outside. There was a heated discussion on whether ‘resource mobilization’ counts as ‘advocacy,’ and therefore whether most of the partners had been doing much advocacy work at all. I presented, with Telugu translation by M and additional Indian adaptations of my ideas by K, on advocacy tactics. The partners made plans and formed committees. There was tea in small ceramic cups and crackers on flimsy paper plates and a beautiful thali lunch where I was taught to mash banana up with my curd rice for dessert. We took a group photo under the fluorescent lights and quickly dissolved at the edges as everyone contemplated the efforts required to get home through the water waiting outside.

None of the trains were running because of the flooding, and the local buses were all filled with displaced train passengers. In the half hour I had to get ready for a second night-time journey, I slipped in the puddle that had mysteriously formed near the door to my room, smacking smartly into the white marble floor. Whimpering to my unsympathetic audience -- a pair of twin beds -- I watched the beginning of Jurassic Park on cable TV while my tailbone got over its initial anger with my clumsy feet. On the way out the door of the hotel, I reprimanded the hotel manager – through M’s Telugu – for not having someone properly mop up the water, feeling both completely childish and utterly justified.

We climbed back into the white savior jeep. I remembered driving through some deep puddles, each a few car-lengths in size, earlier that morning, and tried not to contemplate the condition of the roads we were about to enter. We backed up across the stream that lined the main roads, and trundled out of Nellore. Some roads were closed; on others we passed young men pushing motorbikes, an old man and peddling a cycle rickshaw, its wheels half submerged, water washing softly across the women passengers feet resting on the floor of the little vehicle. It was dark, and the streetlights storelights houselights reflected brightly in the light brown water. Beautiful, in an entirely bizarre way.

As Nellore city faded in the distance the roads changed. They were nice. Recently, the BJP (Hindu nationalist party) had secured a World Bank loan (two of my favorite organizations?) to improve the roads, and even out by small villages the Nellore highways are beautifully paved. Nice, but, unfortunately, significantly underwater. Water lapped at the bottom of our doors. Each time we slowed or stopped the car, a wave washed over the windshield, blinding us completely. We passed a few cars with the passengers pushing them through the waves, or trudging along the side of the road, clothes plastered to their bodies and shining in our headlights. Jeeps had never felt like such a great idea. I felt impervious in our Big White Box. The rain came and went, and each time we entered a grossly overgrown puddle at least one person folded their hands and shut their eyes to pray. We listened to Christian gospel in Telugu and tried to stay away from the ‘horn please’ tails of trucks. I sang my own favorite gospel songs under my breath and smiled down at the waves and wondered at the small crowds of empty vehicles around every roadside building, but we never stopped to join what must have been very crowded cozy damp living rooms.

Somewhere between the waves and the rain and the crinkling of shifting business clothes I pulled out Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, and opened to my precious goodbye-card bookmark. I was almost finished reading it, and this seemed like a suitably dramatic circumstance in which to say goodbye to the young nobleman turned noblewoman extraordinaire. My cell phone has a small flashlight on the end, and I traced it along the glorious sentences. They sounded prophetic against the sound of a million raindrops on metal and glass and more water. Ecstasy. ‘Do you have to sit for an exam tomorrow?’ K asked me teasingly. ‘No,’ I smiled, and read a few more pages.

We passed a handful of tollbooths staffed by plasticized policemen who insisted on taking our receipts back and forth through the torrent. After the third or fourth tollbooth, we passed to dry land. The rain slowed, and stopped completely. The cement with its World Bank Bright White Lines was slick, then damp, then dry. The bushes planted along the middle of the road sat quietly in the still night air. Suddenly, our Telugu gospel sounded even more joyful. We picked up speed, and pulled into a restaurant in Ongole, Prakasm just before closing time. The restaurant was disgusting, and lit with baby blue bulbs, but marginally clean and sufficiently stocked with cold bottled mineral water. We stuffed a few minutes worth of stale biryani into our mouths while staring, exhausted, at the stucco walls, and quickly climbed into a hired taxi.

I slept, cradling my still sore tailbone against the soft edges of the seat as I tried to curve by back to become as horizontal as possible. The driver reached Eluru, West Godavari, in record time, and soon we were rising up a comfortably packaged hotel elevator shaft to air-conditioned rooms on the fourth floor. There was a bed! And it was mine! This was my chance to sleep, horizontal and not in motion. I tried, and when I realized it was hopeless, I watched ‘You, Me, and Dupree’ on HBO. I tried again, and failed, and tried to cry, and failed. I tossed and turned, and succeeded quite satisfactorily at that. A text message lit up my phone: one of our first friends was leaving Hyderabad to go home to Mumbai. Funny he’s just waking up, I thought, and finally fell asleep. While I slept, an English-language edition of Thu Hindu was slipped under the door: the front page story showed a bus floating away, a handful of passengers marooned on its roof. An hour or two later, I woke and showered and dressed and held my head cautiously in my hands while I stared out at the low but solidly real buildings of Eluru. I sipped the orange-flavored Oral Rehydration Salts that I’d brought just for mornings like this and enjoyed the slightly sour squish of fresh idly against the roof of my mouth.

We conducted our second Advocacy Follow-up Workshop in M and K’s hotel room, with partner NGO staff from East and West Godavari districts. The schedule was the same, although the digressions into the relationship between resource mobilization and advocacy were significantly more heated. We visited two District Officials in order to practice Advocating; I sat in the front row and smiled and understood nothing except that we got a few empty promises and a little more rain. When the Telugu stretched on, I wrote a letter to a friend, and after our partners disappeared down the elevator shaft, I started piecing together the words to describe driving through the cyclone for my AJWS telephone check-in.

I put on my traveling-over-night salwar kameez for the third night in a row, and after another blue-lit dinner, I found myself sleepily slapping bugs on platform three at the Eluru train station. Our train pulled in at eleven, and I laid out my top-bunk train bedding as my mind shut off the light in the attic to fall quickly into a rumbling sleep. We stepped down at the Secunderabad train station amidst a light drizzle, and paid a scab cab driver to take us to work at seven in the morning. There was an auto strike on, which was technically annoying, but seemed a small inconvenience after the weather we had recently survived. I let myself into the office, splashed water on my face and daytime clothes across my body, and ate children’s milk biscuits while catching up on email. The work day passed in a pleasant blur, and I walked into my apartment in time for a Telugu lesson and a glorious Halloween dinner.

This adventure was made possible by: the NGO that Saved Us; Myla, who lent me Orlando; Adrienne, who gave me a beautiful little card which I keep as a bookmark; Eleanor, who donated the north Indian cell phone that happens to have a flashlight, and Pastor Monts, who taught me the words to so many gospel songs.

Happy Halloween!

2007-11-12T22:20:00.000-08:00

We feasted on fear. And sillyness. We didn't dress up, although some people would count what we wear everyday as a 'costume.' For the mashed potato head, all credit goes to Houseboat #11. Dal with tomato and other choice chunky bits made an excellent pot of guts, while the steamed green beans quickly slithered off to become snakes in the grass. The mystical idly cauldron bubbled with apple cider, and the suspiciously orange witches fingers tasted much better than my first attempt at glazed carrots. Custard apples provided a significantly bizarre dessert.

Gregorian chants drifted through the house... and when I slept that night, I dreamed about dancing with skeletons.

Too much to consider

2007-11-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

My favorite Hindi teacher paused our lesson to tell me how much I look like Bollywood actress Karisma Kapoor, except for the hair color. Our country director agreed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karisma_Kapoor

On the way to work, out the side of our open-air auto, I saw a boy flying a red plastic kite next to the squat stone bridge separating a major traffic circle from the sprawling Secunderabad Railway station.

The woman standing behind me on the bus was so tiny that her elbow hit me in the middle of the back as she held on to the strap from the ceiling.

I’m always startled to see the wrists, the bare forearms of women in black burqas, bright saris or salwars peeking out at the hem. Their eyes and toes may be the only pieces of flesh that normally show, but when you’re packed like sardines on a bus, holding on to the railings along the roof is the only way to keep from falling.

When I saw the two white people standing in the entrance to our office I was so surprised that I said ‘oh, white people!’ They looked at me strangely, and told me to travel to Bali and join the Peace Corps.

Fruit-flavored Oral Rehydration Salts (water with salt and sugar / home-made Gatorade) are my new favorite health snacks.

We don’t have pepper in the house. I don’t salt my food. And I sit in the middle (not sure why, but these patterns happen). So my roommates filled both the salt and pepper shaker with salt, so we can have one on each end of the table.

Myla and I giggled by the skincare section of the import grocery store at the giant (by Indian standards) Canadian men wandering around. The Canadians, along with various jerseys from Brazil, Greece, and a handful of Nordic countries were imported for the World Military Games in the middle of October.

I took my first bus to our Nutrition Training at Hotel Megacity in Hyderguda, near the downtown we’ve never seen. They dropped me off in the middle of an intersection. Since then, I’ve improved my on-and-off-the-moving-bus fine motor skills.

Crossing Uppal bus station (a massive traffic roundabout) reminds me of that puzzle game where you try to get the little brightly colored plastic cars out of gridlock. It’s a giant weaving of people, bikes, autos, buses (everything moves for a bus – they’re gargantuan), cars, a few crossing guards, street sweepers, and vendors. The funny thing is, it feels safe to move through the mass because everyone has to move relatively (relatively) slowly as they negotiate some semblance of forward progress.

We started Telugu lessons. Mi peru aameti? (What is your name?) I’ve almost memorized the full form of all the vowels. A, aa, u, uu, i, ii, e, ee, ai, o, oo, au, am, aha = 14 vowels, two more than Hindi.

I was bored listening to Nutrition lectures in Telugu, so I read a few hundred pages of a book about Modern India. And stared at the view off the roof of the hotel. There was a surprisingly large population of other roof-dwellers – a guard with a gun, an emaciated worker looking out at the city from a pile of trash, two men in dirty white tank tops negotiating near a doorway.

We have friends. We have friends. We have friends. Ok, we have acquaintances that may soonish allow us to truthfully make the statement that we have a social life. We have friends!

Couchsurfing is amazing. Not every Couch Surfer is as amazing as couchsurfing, but the first time we met one we hung out over hookah and chocolate brownie with chocolate ice cream until eleven at night. It was glorious.

The lake is glorious. On Sunday night, we ate at a restaurant with a glass wall looking out at the Hussain Sagar, its massive Buddha statue lit up for the evening. The breeze off the water is heavenly. The reflection of the evenly spaced street lights across the far side of the lake reminds me of the reflection of the lights of Queen Anne Hill on Lake Union in Seattle.

Banjara Hills has stores I can’t afford. It has more Levi’s stores than I can count. And malls with more sparkling marble and glass than any I’ve ever seen in the States. The houses are massive, and equally shiny. But in the ones that are still being built, still being propped up by the standard bamboo-like scaffolding, small societies of impoverished construction workers live.

Our New Friend drove us to a lookout over the city. It reminded us intensely of Southern California. The palm trees and the mansions and the fact that we were in ‘Filmnagar’ (where Tollywood actors and directors live) probably helped.

There are these bulbous, big, beautiful, smooth, dirt-brown rocks smattered throughout the city. A coalition called Save the Rocks (not kidding) works to save them from destruction by developers. Apparently they’re a classic part of the Andhra geography, and also, well, very old.

We watched Manchester United play on the screens at an English Pub. It was creepy, but fun.

The tailor across the street fixed the button on my pants for two rupees. I felt guilty when I realized it was his ten-year-old son who had done the sowing... but glad that the kid got to keep the money, and glad to be supporting local business – so local we can check to see if they’re open from our bedroom window.

I’ve found only one source of herbal, non-caffeinated tea in Hyderabad – Fabindia, the uber-commercialized chain clothing store – but when I drink it right before bed, or just after I wake up, with a book and spoonful (or two) of honey, its happiness in a strainer and I forget about being overwhelmed and missing the fall leaves and just look out the window at the thick morning light or the lone streetlamp perched by the trees across the neighbor’s roof and I smile.

[Coming Attractions, aka Way too much to consider: religion in India, body in India.]

Should I bring my own chains?

2007-10-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

‘Should I bring my own chains?’

‘We always do.’

- I ♥ Huckabees

Definitions, thoughts, and addendums to the entry ‘Making Headlines:’

1. Definitions:

a. GG4L = Goode Glaciers for Life! My (absolutely benzoes) unit at Camp Orkila, where I worked, lived, laughed, and sang with a cabin full of nine-year-olds for four summers. So much of what I learned and became at camp informs every random corner of my life… the Moose song (about a Moose who likes to drink a lot of juice) is only the beginning.

b. Idly = a small patty made from rice flour and a certain type of ground lentils (idly dal)… you mix the powder with water, it ferments and thickens… you pour the dough into round moulds (idly makers consist of a few levels of these) and steam for 10-14 minutes… the flavor is slightly sour, and reminds me of sourdough or that delicious Ethiopian bread…

c. WPF card = A snazzy AJWS business card printed for the World Partner Fellows… they’re not personalized, and just contain the contact information for the NY office… but in a land of business cards, they’re useful as social bartering material.

2. Thoughts:

a. My mother asked a very reasonable question: if I try not to make eye contact with men, how do I work with them all day, let along travel with one? To amend any previous statements: I try not to make eye contact with men I don’t know, unless I need something from them (aka auto drivers, shop owners, etc.). In the office, I try to treat everyone in more or less the same way… and kindly but firmly reprimand anyone who calls me ‘dear,’ or a ‘good girl.’

b. In answer to an AJWS questionnaire about settling in: I'm really lucky in terms of my work situation -- I have my own desk and a column on the team's monthly work plan. My office has a crazy work ethic, which has fired up my own drive and gotten me integrated into office life faster than I expected. Of course, things are far from perfect, and after some seriously strange media coverage on my first set of field visits (see blog for details), my next project is to put together some ethical guidelines for media + children + AIDS (and in my case, + white people) to distribute to our offices and partners.

c. Indian English is its own language. Some examples of common words used at work which I’m certain are not ‘proper’ English: updation, learnings, abusements. Some words that are recognized by spell-check, but are used much more frequently here: felicitated, cadre, miTigaTe.

3. Addendums:

‘We will start a unit which will be helpful for death ceremonies for HIV+’s’

‘We should feel that we are all suffering: Lily’

Making Headlines: Crematoriums, Suffering, etc.

2007-10-15T00:17:00.000-07:00

Aka My First Field Visits, October 3-8, 2007

It was just after 8:30 pm when I shouldered my hiking backpack (the one I had been so happy to unpack just two weeks ago), said goodbye to my flat-mates and the prospect of a candle-lit simchat torah dinner, and skipped down the stairs into the end of the rush-hour bustle on Tarnaka-Secunderabad road. After a few tries, I found an auto driver willing to not cheat me, and landed easily on the black marble benches of platform 1, Secunderabad Station. Minutes before our train was set to arrive, my co-worker, M, called, and we pushed (only sort of politely) on to the A/C triple-tier sleeper car. One brief night of fitful rumble-filed sleep later, we stepped down into the warm, slightly wet air of Nellore, the capitol city of the coastal district by the same name. Our hotel was nice, the cable TV stations were even nicer, and we picked up breakfast (idly, of course) at an open-air restaurant on the way to the bus station. The two-hour bus ride to Kavali was occupied by intermittent napping and smiling at a girl about my age taking hundreds of cell phone photos of my white face. [Note: children and women get a smile in return for pointing a camera at me, men get a glare, and I try not to take direct photos of people whom I haven’t met.]

M woke me as the bus driver pulled, apparently arbitrarily, to the side of the road, and as I stumbled down the steps, we were met by two grinning young women – the project coordinator (PC) and the multipurpose health worker (MPHW) who implement my NGO’s OVC program at the grassroots NGO (lets call it NGO-A for this entry) we were about to enter. A small white archway, painted with red lettering and red ribbons, announced the entrance to a compound of three buildings set around a courtyard occupied by a few motorbikes, benches, and a woman setting a baby to rock in a sari cloth draped from a small fruit tree. We were ushered into the main office, and served tea with a side of introductions. We were then promptly ushered back out, and through the care wards. In the first building, the patients stood to meet us, or sat up and spoke from their metal cots stretched across with netting and laid with sheets. They looked weak, a little haunted, but their smiles were broad. In the second building, which M unnecessarily translated for me as the ‘terminal ward,’ the skeletons wrapped in skin, fingers tapping lightly to pass time, chests expanding slightly for attempts at breath, could barely turn their heads. There were no introductions here, and we passed, a small procession of prosperity leaving a grotesque exhibit, quickly back into the sunlight.

While M reviewed the records for our OVC program with the PC and MPHW (in Telugu, of course), I made faces at the children appearing around the edge of the office door. The grinning kids couldn’t speak any more English than the women in the office, but they were happy to communicate by other means. With a ‘it will make them happy’ from M, I stood up to go and play. The little ones disappeared. I peered out of the barred, glassless window. Three faces were peering up, but giggled and dropped down at the sight of my own. Hide and seek had begun. Eventually, after passing through an animalistic snarl-smile game, this turned into a full-on version of Simon Says / do-as-I-do, with a growing audience of older women looking on. We danced. They sang for me. We did somersaults. I touched the ceiling; we waddled on the floor. Eventually, it was time for lunch; meat curries and the special Andhra chutney (leafy greens fried in spices??) with white rice on a banana leaf.

After lunch, we loaded onto an auto and a bike, and took the smooth highway roads out to a tiny town where NGO-A runs an orphanage and school. I asked them later why they had started it. ‘Because,’ the NGO head explained, ‘when we started the care and support center it was one of the first, as part of the state AIDS control program, and people would leave children at our gates in the middle of the night. So we built this to take care of them.’ Practically all of the resources used to build and sustain the orphanage are drawn from the local community – the villagers donated the land, and the labor and materials to build the dormitory and schoolroom. A local TV station did a segment on the home, and decided to donate school uniforms. My NGO provides school supplies, doors, chairs, etc for the classroom. A local businessmen provides enough money to pay two teachers – the NGO head’s wife and brother-in-law work for free as an additional teacher and caretaker.

As we entered the school compound, eighty-odd children, from maybe three to eleven years old, filed out of an open classroom, and sat in a perfect grid, giggling at this strange young woman being offered a nice plastic chair and a cold Limca soda in front of them. After some language-strangled introductions, a talent show began, with individual and group songs, dances and exercises. I taught the first verse and chorus of ‘a great big moose’ (GG4L!) – they made excellent moose antlers, although I’m pretty sure there aren’t any moose in India. They taught me their aerobics routine, and then asked me to lead it. We tried to play elbow tag, but when this seemed to dissolve, they taught me a very different version of hide-and-seek (it involved me being blindfolded with my own dupatta in a large circle of children, trying to track three of them by the sound of their voices). The afternoon wore on, and villagers trickled in, standing quietly at the edge of the playground to watch. After some more official business, and a dash of logistics in translation, we climbed back into the auto to the sound of many ‘good-bye Lili’s (the difference between the vowels in my name are quickly lost in any other language). The buses weren’t coming, so M flagged down a car, and we rode quickly back to the lights, the hotel food, and the Samuel L. Jackson HBO comical-cop movies of downtown Nellore.

With a slightly better night of rest, and a proper set of idly’s behind us, M and I met the PC and MPHW for NGO-B… who had waited breakfast for us, so… after another set of idly’s, and a short car ride to an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Nellore, we left our shoes at the door and went in to meet the director of NGO-B. NGO-B is well established, and provides a wide range of resources; they work in disaster relief and preparation along the coast, in HIV prevention and support services in nearby slums and villages, on income generation projects for the old and disabled, sustaining traditional arts. While M, the PC, and the MPHW leafed through home visit and support group registries, I read the National AIDS Control Office (NACO) policy on Children and AIDS (with a little dozing and a lot of water in the morning heat). For lunch, we were invited to walk a few doors down to the home of the NGO-B head; there was a pile of sweet carrots cooked with mustard seeds, dal made with dark greens (to be dribbled with pure ghee butter), fried greens with chillies, tamarind and white rice, curd to cleanse the palate, fruit, and a strangely green ice cream with raisins and cashews for dessert. We feasted.

After lunch, we traveled to what I thought would be a slum, but was actually an urban clinic in a nice neighborhood. The beds inside were empty, but a woman in a light purple sari occasionally walked in and out of a door marked ‘counselor.’ Left alone, I dozed in a chair. Eventually, women, different ages, draped in different colors, some matching, some wearing tired cloth and tired expressions, trickled in, trailing toddlers in khaki shorts. They sat in a circle on the brilliantly white tiled floor, and when the PC and MPHW joined them there, I sat as well, smiling greetings with enthusiastic head wobbling to try and make up for my complete lack of language. The meeting – a support group for care givers of children infected or affected by HIV – began and soon M joined, asking their permission for me to take photos. I looked at them through the lens, and listened to the cadences of the conversation. Three quarters of an hour passed, and we waved goodbye, trailing schoolchildren’s stares as our car pulled away from the clinic.

On the way home, M stopped to grab a copy of the district newspaper; a newspaper which contained a strange article about someone named ‘Lily Walker’ who had visited NGO-A the previous day, and promised to build them a crematorium, to provide daily funds for the orphans, and to fix their roof. The photos with the article were clearly of me, although I remain sure in the fact that I barely spoke with the NGO-A head, and mostly just played with the children (providing, of course, such lovely pictures). Back at the NGO, M and I observed a second caregiver’s support group, reviewed more files, talked some more official office talk, looked at photos of programs supported by our NGO, and waved goodbye as the sun was setting. Another night of HBO – John Tucker Must Die – which I justified with our ten-hour site visit days and an intense desire to communicate in fluent English, even if my conversation was with a television screen.

I woke up mentally prepared for one final site visit, and one overnight train home. When we entered the painted metal gates of the large compound of the Sisters’ church and NGO-C, the first things I noticed were the crosses painted on the low wall complemented by a haloed statue of Mary in the center of the driveway. The road leading in was lined with trees being hung with lights for the impending saint’s day feast, and we passed a church and a playground before stopping at the main office. The sisters, Roman Catholic nuns, wore cream colored cotton sari’s, long silver chains laying a cross to rest in the middle of their chests (the silver seems significant in a country where every woman who can even marginally afford to wears gold). The Sisters welcomed us to a dining room, and fed us with tea and sweets and savory chips before ushering us on to an office set aside solely for our OVC program. NGO-C’s main activities center around a home for ‘differently abled’ children; they have a school, vocational training, physical therapy, and a dormitory. The sisters also do outreach work in nearby areas, and it was through this work that they became interested in HIV issues. After the requisite record-reviewing (while I read about access to medicine in India) and expansive lunch-eating – the centerpiece was a special fried fish this time, as sisters eat plain foods – we left the comforting compound for a trip to some nearby villages. Leaving Nellore proper for the neighboring mandal of Kovur, we drove across the top of a damn, an adventure akin to driving through a shallow estuary; however, it seemed to be a main road out.

Our first stop was at a government-funded school run by NGO-C for disabled children. It wasn’t the school children, however, that we were supposed to interact with. A self-help group for HIV infected and affected children was run on the porch, and it was those children, along with a handful of widowed parents and grannies, that we were there to meet. There was an exchange of names, and of songs, and since we did not have time to stay and teach, I sang the refrain from ‘Be Blessed’ (Ebony Singers spring ’07!) in return for a Telugu tune about Jesus’ love.

Back in the car, and past an increasing number of raised ponds ringed with palm trees and small fishing huts, we pulled up an increasingly thin dirt road to the middle of a small but bustling village. Down an ally and around the back of a house we found the meeting – a group of maybe fifty children seated on tarps and facing a row of empty chairs. Assorted mothers and grandmothers sat in the back row, learning against the palm-leaf-roofed houses, pulling the youngest kids in and out of one another’s laps. M, the PC, the MPHW, and I sat down as the panelists, but quickly took a back seat to the usual Music and Dance Revue, which included my rendition of the first verse and chorus of ‘River’ (for those Islanders who care to know). We then embarked on a rousing round of ‘head, shoulders, knees, and toes,’ as they taught me the Telugu word for each body part, and I taught them the motions. The children learned quickly, but an old man in the audience, one whose mind was never quite anchored to this reality, had the biggest and the most glowing grin of them all.

As we waved goodbye, and they clustered together, an elementary school rumble broke out over the opportunity to stand near and wave… and I momentarily felt like the coke bottle in ‘The Gods Must be Crazy.’ Led in the opposite direction from where we’d come, the path back to the car brought us to the front porch of a man living with, and dying from, full-blown AIDS. Handsome, but wasting and match-stick thin, with two grinning, momma-sari-twisting young boys, he spends his days on a cot placed on the porch, partaking as he can in the life passing by along his street. I smiled, unsure of what was expected of me, and M exchanged some sentences I had no hope of following. We left, ponds flashing by as we deserted dirt roads for the highway, and a more direct trip back into town. When we returned to the Sisters’ compound, it was glowing, every fence and tree, every window and eve strung with multi-colored Christmas lights. Over tea and sweets and savories, we recorded our impressions and thanked them for the visit. Their smiles were warm and their genuine enthusiasm palpable as they explained that to gain the people’s trust, they wanted to offer more than information, they wanted to offer services. We smiled, warmly, and left.

Time for dinner, time for shower, time for train. Time to get a phone call from another NGO partner, in another district, begging us to please come to an event the next day in West Godavari. They would pay for everything. Weren’t we already in the field? A business man would be giving one lakh (one hundred thousand) rupees worth of nutritional supplements away to HIV affected children, and having a rep from our NGO at the event would just make the whole day. The volunteer could come too. The possibility of this actually happening fluctuated, so at the moment that I was lying on the top bunk on the train, inches from the air conditioner, pages from finishing ‘God of Small Things,’ and only so many hours of transportation away from my very own bed in my very own apartment, it still came as a surprise, a sort of a mind-game, that M and I would be getting down from the train at Vijayawada sometime between one and two am, and hiring a taxi to drive us two hours through the night (sleeping in the back seat with luggage as a pillow) to Tadepallegudem where we would sleep another two hours in a decently accommodated hotel. But it did actually happen, and after it actually happened, I actually watched most of a modern Lassie movie on television before breakfast had been served and cleared and showers had been taken, and I actually almost cried when Lassie drowned in the river. She probably came running miraculously back over the hill, but that would have been after we had already left.

The approach to the event hosted by NGO-D was not promising. The building looked half-built, and we climbed two flights of newly poured concrete stairs with no right hand wall before emerging onto the second floor, which was rather conspicuously missing the back wall. The room, however unfinished, was packed with over two hundred children, caretakers, NGO staff, and media, with a massive pile of all of their accumulated footwear announcing the crowd at the entrance. I was introduced to a dozen men, none of whose titles I could hear over the garble of giggling, crying, and generally restless children. As the day ripened, and the guests of honor had still not appeared (the guests of honor having clearly no appreciation for the work of the mothers trying to keep their kids relatively still in the massively packed room while nothing in particular happened), some of the braver twelve-year-olds came over to introduce themselves and sit with me. When the guest of honor finally did show up, and I was asked to sit at the front of the room, I continued the smile-sillyface-frown-wink-smile game with the kids in the front row to pass the time as a series of speakers talked about what I presumed was the importance of fighting AIDS and helping children. After speeches (including a rather forced and translated one by yours truly) came handout time, with a massive milling confusion snapped into frames as each child was held by the arm and posed to receive their gift while the donor received a promo photo in return.

I photographed, I handed out, I played hand-clapping games with a little girl in denim and a polo shirt. I smiled blankly at adults, and more sincerely at children. I gave away the AJWS WPF card when I was asked questions above the din. Finally, I ducked away to the office of NGO-D, to a fresh-cooked lunch, and to a journalist waiting for interviews and photos. After my recent bizarre appearance in the Nellore district paper, I wasn’t sure that journalists were a particularly good idea, but decided it might be worth giving my own words a try, with minimized answers about my own life and maximized answers about NGOs, and how ‘we’re all affected by AIDS.’ So there were more photos, more words, more NGO tours. There was waiting and showering and eating under disco-lights. And then there was a bus, with a reclining seat that un-reclined as I slept like a prop in a Charlie Chaplin movie, and that dropped us off twenty kilometers outside of Hyderabad at seven-thirty in the morning because it lacked a permit to enter and security is high these days.

I arrived at work early monday morning, left my luggage behind my desk, brushed my teeth in the office bathroom, and ordered idly for breakfast. A few days later, my office received some news clippings in the mail. ‘We should feel that we are all suffering: Lily.’ ran the headline. The subtitle read, ‘A strong feeling of an American youngster for the victims of AIDS, Interview.’

Of Trains, Rains, and Potholes

2007-10-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

I said it best in shaky handwriting, bumping happily down along half the length of India on a pseudo-sterile blue pleather bunk:

September 16, 2007, 10:37pm

Woke to sick Becca. Early morning taxi down the mountain with golden light. Own baggage to train. Nap, views through thick scarred yellowed windows. Finished ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’ [by Salman Rushdie]. Strange uplifting in absurdity. Recognized road to Anna’s apartment in Delhi. Back to sweaty station. Boarded 21-hour train to Hyderabad. Bad food, ice cream. Hot gross bedtime. Liminal. Under water?

September 17, 2007 (written a few days later)

Train, train, train. Woke up to Myla hip bump. Read [Monstrous Regiment] in bed. Breakfast in bed. Lounged in bed. ‘Got ready’ for day. Sat on bed. Started ‘In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India.’ Lunch (plus apple and P.B. later) in bed. Beautiful shifting views, blue-tinted bed-side window. Talked the talk with Myla and Shlayma. Hung out of train. Hung out in train. Chandra from NGO met us at Secunderabad station. False start, apartment! Through the rain for food for the masses. Wander in sleepy apartment-home. Hyderabad has clean air – crazy language.

And so it was that seventeen World Partners Fellows left Dev-Dar-above-Mussoorie for a few hours in the still-steamy grime of Delhi, and that six WPF left Delhi for Hyderabad (the other eleven boarding different trains for different journeys). We were met, we were ushered, and in turn we ushered Adam on to Vijiawadda and Leah and Lauren on towards Patta Patnam (?), somewhere past Vizag.

And then there were three: Lily, Myla, and Shlayma (in alphabetical order – or by height). In a fairly nice neighborhood enclave in a fairly spacious, fairly ugly flat. With grey-white marble floors and black detailing. And pink walls (some more peach, some more decidedly pink). And a brown table with brown upholstered chairs and a clear plastic table-cloth dotted with brown flowers that were not meant to be brown in nature. We have two bedrooms, four beds, two toilets (one Indian one Western), two small enclosed balconies (one for Laundry, one for Contemplation), and two glass-covered cabinets cluttered with a fascinatingly horrifying collection of inherited kitsch.

So we sat, the three of us, on our (astonishingly brown) chairs and pretended we had enough energy to figure out what we needed to make the apartment our home. This part of the story is rather fuzzy and worn-out, or perhaps just never recorded in my short-term memory; the weather was pleasant, the neighborhood full of little allies that would possibly all make sense in a month or two. The street we were shown to Go Buy Things on was Big and Busy and Overwhelming. The stores were overpriced (or rather, we were brought to overpriced stores because it is assumed that since we are white, and American, we have lots of money and a strong desire to spend it). The water availability was hopeful but confusing (no hot water; a shower head but that bathroom rarely has running water; constant water supply to the rest of the faucets but refill the tank but don’t overfill the tank so maybe you won’t always have water but usually you will). When we went to bed, our second night in the city, our first night alone in our apartment, we were exhausted and disoriented, but we were Here. And we hoped that being Here would be Enough.

On September 19^th, we woke to tea (boiled for ten minutes in a frying pan on our gas stove) and toast (also frying-pan style); we pulled on our salwar kameez’s (purchased in Delhi, matching scarves pinned awkwardly under the shoulder straps of our bags), and scattered into the streets towards our respective offices. Chandra, who had met the six new AP residents at the train station, knocked on my door precisely fifteen minutes after we should have left, and my first commute began: 45 minutes, 50 rupees, a million roadside shops, and plenty of exhaust. We bumped a vegetable truck, we scraped along the side of over-flowing buses, we cut across oncoming cadres of motorbikes, we stood still in parking-lot traffic, we raced towards billboards with Tollywood stars splashed across them. As tantalizing as all this is, I’ve invented two games to entertain myself during the daily journey from Tarnaka to Musheerabad and back: one, try to elicit a smile from any other woman stuck in traffic (while never making eye contact with men), and two, attempt to memorize the name of every single storefront along both sides of the road. This should take me a while.

My first impression of my NGO’s office was that it is beautiful. Set on the third story of a nice residential apartment complex in a middle-class neighborhood, it has high ceilings with cream molding and softly spinning fans, glass-front cases filled with books, pamphlets, and conference programs on HIV/AIDS, and a small pooja-room (not because anyone in the office seems to be particularly religious, or that the staff is overwhelmingly Hindu, but to make the organization feel more like a family). The NGO has three offices, two in India, and one in New York, which run a wide variety of AIDS Advocacy programs. Two programs are run out of the Hyderabad office: one that focuses on PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission), and one that focuses on care and support of OVC (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) and their families. I work on the OVC project, in a room with three mustaches, and my very own desk. I have documents to read, and data to enter, and soon I will have projects to begin. Life at work is good.

Life at home is very much in transition – hopefully, at this point, a transition to being settled in. We cook each other dinner. We light candles, and found sticky-sweet wine for Shabbat. We hang our laundry on the Laundry Balcony and try to remember to cover our shoulders and knees when we do. We stay up late watching movies in a pile of mango candy wrappers. And last weekend, we took an adventure across the city to the shiny, mall-infested land of Banjara Hills… which is another world, and another story, altogether.

Notes:

Our apartment is in Secunderabad. My NGO is in Hyderabad. And they are in the same city. So, what may once have been “twin cities” have clearly merged – as far as I can understand (and I can understand practically no Telugu, which is the heavily dominant language here), they even have one city government. In a vague sense, Secunderabad seems to be north-east of the lake that sits at the center (of what?), while Hyderabad is everywhere else. In a vague sense. In India, names change frequently, and nothing is very well labeled, but everyone gets where they’re going in a fairly reasonable – depending on the weather – amount of time.
I have been asked, by AJWS, not to use the name of the NGO at which I will be working for the next nine months in my blog, just in case my blog (and personal opinions) are what comes up when some random person on the planet decides to google the organization. This sounds reasonable to me. I’m also not supposed to use anyone’s last name. Sounds like a plan. We’ll see how confusing this gets, and if I have to make up a secret code, or start inventing fake names.
Trains: self-explanatory. Rains: still monsoon season here. Glorious. If you know how much I love rain, because this is serious rain. Potholes: the road back from work is having new pipes laid under it. The cement is torn up, and it’s a semi-construction site, but that doesn’t stop rush-hour traffic. It does, however, cause you to occasionally hit the ceiling of the auto.

L’Shanah Tovah

2007-09-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

Greetings from a new, new year. I’m sitting in my Hyderabadi apartment with my two flat-mates, Myla and Shlayma. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah with full group of fellows up in the mountains… and Yom Kippur as a trio in our new home: an as-yet-undecorated, marble-floored, pink-walled flat in an unknown, monsoon-soaked city of six million. It’s been quite a transition. My thoughts for the Jewish near year have been lost and found in various corners, but my overall meditation on life as it is beginning in ‘Incredible India’ (as the tourist slogans go) comes from Trudy (that philosophical bag-lady standing on the corner of walk-don’t-walk):

“On the way to the play, we stopped to look at the stars. And as usual, I felt in awe. And then I felt even deeper in awe at this capacity we have to be in awe about something. Then I became even more awestruck at the thought that I was, in some small way, a part of that which I was in awe about. And this feeling went on and on and on… My space chums got a word for it: 'awe infinitum.'

Because at the point you can comprehend how incomprehensible it all is, you’re about as smart as you need to be. Suddenly I burst into song: 'Awe, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee.' And I felt so good inside, and my heart felt so full, I decided I would set aside time each day to do awe-robics. Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.”

– The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Jane Wagner, performed by Lily Tomlin

Note: yes, this is the same play I played with in my thesis. And yes, I’ll be working hard on my awe-robics this year. ‘Nuf said.

To Review (chronology is overrated)

2007-09-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

“The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air… the next thing I noticed was the heat.”

– From the opening of Shantaram, by Gregory Roberts

“To understand India at all, you must be able to hold on to completely contradictory images, and realize that both represent the true India.”

– From the introduction to Culture Shock! India, by Gitanjali Kolanad

To review: we landed in Delhi, to the smells and the thick air (and the airport parrots). To go even further back: I found some young, vaguely Jewish looking folks at the London Heathrow airport, and we gathered into a small crowd. Name, school, NGO assignment for the year. Memorize, forget, repeat. The words couldn’t come fast enough, and were followed by distinctive pauses, stating ‘I know almost nothing about you.’ Hello stranger, thank god for Cadbury’s chocolates on British Air. I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the flight (yes, the new animated one – we can discuss this later).

So customs was easy and our luggage arrived and, sweating profusely and gulping bottled water, we climbed into two taxis. We knew to expect cows in the road. We did not know we would see them grazing on the jersey barrier in the middle of ten lanes of traffic moving through a space designed for four. Traffic lines, in India, are more like suggestions – very general, subtle suggestions which may be easily ignored.

We arrived at a sprawling pink hostel in the embassy district of Delhi (not exactly a neighborly area) with more young, vaguely Jewish looking folks (aka white, in our new context) who had arrived the day before. With a few quick introductions by Anna (our in-country AJWS program coordinator), we were released into the teaming, steaming streets. I jumped into my first auto-rickshaw (think a motorcycle with a small open-air European-sized car loaded on the back) with two other girls, Myla and Becca, and headed for Conaught Place. Conaught place, a fairly central and fairly upper-curst area of New Delhi, is made up of a series of concentric circular roads surrounding an underground market topped by a park. The buildings in the area are tall, dirty white, curlicued images of aging colonial architecture. The shopping there can be high-class – United Colors of Benetton sits on the inner circle – but we wandered up and down the spoke streets, and I found a loose sequined cotton blouse for a few dollars. The question of whether or not to wear Indian-style clothing here isn’t just one of tourism, voyeurism, whiteness, etc., but one of comfort and commodity; that “India fab” (not to be confused with FabIndia, a clothing chain) garment has saved me from unbelievably gritty hot weather (but back to such complicated questions of assimilation/appropriation later).

After learning to dodge traffic (again, traffic lights are more suggestions than anything else), and landing safely back at our Pink Palace, the fellows (two still in the air somewhere) were loaded in a bus and shipped out to a suburb to visit Sunita, AJWS’s Volunteer Coordinator for India. She had a feast for us, but the comfort of spending a few hours in someone’s home was almost as filling as the fifteen varieties of sweet and savory. With an early evening and an even earlier morning, we met our last two fellows, plus the NY program director… and twenty of us (17 fellows, 3 staff, along with many boxes AJWS papers) boarded a bus out of Delhi and up into the mountains.

The beginning of the trip was beautiful, but uneventful. It was difficult to tell when we left Delhi, as a mix of suburbs, road-side vendors, and small towns seemed to stretch continuously for hours out of the city. Eventually we emerged into miles of rice and sugar fields, taking the long way around certain towns; Independence Day was imminent, and celebrations were blocking many major roads. But the real excitement came when we reached the bottom of the foothills of the Himalayas, and began a seemingly endless climb up into the clouds. The road we were on was not precisely a one-lane road, but it barely fit two cars passing one another, let alone two buses. All of the curves were blind, and none of the fencing along the edge (short concrete buttresses – if there was anything at all) looked as if it would stop a fall. Our bus’ horn was blaring constantly (except at the cows, who clearly deserve more respect than that) as we tried not to look down the sheer green drop a few inches from the wheels of the vehicle.

It was dark when we arrived at our destination – an education-focused NGO* with its own campus past Mussoorie, past Kempte Falls, and past Kempte Falls Villiage. They had recently expanded their programs to include a gap-year residential college, and we stayed in gender-segregated open dormitories. That night we climbed blindly up their hand-made steps (reconstructed after the recent rains)… but in the morning we were greeted with a stunning view of the surrounding mountain-hills. At our little retreat, we learned crucial skills: how to use squat toilets, how to eat dal and rice using a chapatti that can be torn and handled only with your right hand, how to deal with upset stomachs, and how to focus a camera on distant hilltops. Our days were filled with AJWS sessions on development, Indian history, and NGO politics. We climbed up and down the NGO campus, ventured out to nearby town-outposts, got up at 6:30 am for yoga with the gap-year students, and watched Planet Earth on DVD (the mountain episode was especially educational in our setting).
*(an NGO which Barb Crook worked with in the mid-90’s!)

After a little more than a week of sitting in circles and talking alternated with walking up hills and staring, it was time to pack once again, time to wind back down the slithering roads to Delhi. The plan was: a few days in Delhi, a few more educational sessions and some time to explore. Next, those fellows with placements in the north (Maharastra, Gujarat, Uttar Pardesh) would return to Mussoorie for Hindi classes, while those fellows with placements in Andra Pradesh would head to Hyderabad for Telugu classes. Instead, after a few days of adventures and conversations, after a lovely closing dinner, the Southerners were gathered and told that two bomb blasts had been set off in Hyderabad just a few hours before. Our train tickets had already been canceled, and Sunita would meet us at the hostel the next morning to discuss our options.

(the story, from here, picks up at the "... and then I woke up in a bad reality tv show" post. chronology is overrated.)

P.S. Coming attractions: the adventures in Delhi, Old and New, deserve their own meandering post, to be written some day soon.

Where the Ganga flows out of the Himalayas

2007-09-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

(Haridwar: a weekend getaway adventure)

When we stepped out of the taxi in Deridun, the first thing we noticed was the warmer air. The second was the large brick bus station in the distance. It was surprisingly empty – less than a third of the thirty-plus bays had dilapidated metal buses parked and waiting for the scattered passengers to enter. Vendors selling every form of snack food lined the interior of the building, but business was slow. When the bus to Haridwar pulled out of the station, the three of us traveling together – Rachel, Myla, and I – constituted over half the passengers. But when the bus pulled out of the station, the driver stalled at the entrance to the major road, and the bus quickly filled up – not just the seats and the luggage racks, but every inch of the isles were packed with bodies. As the bus rumbled along, young men or middle-aged couples would flag us down and attach themselves to the doorway, squeezing up the steps or simply hanging off the side.

Haridwar is a small, holy, tourist-ridden (Indian tourists, mostly) city that marks the spot where the great Ganges river flows out of the Himalayas. From the highway, it looks like a long cluster of pink buildings above long, smooth steps that line the rushing, brownish Ganga. Thousands of figures can be seen along the banks, bathing, drinking, and collecting the holy water. A massive statue of Shiva, wrapped in a leopard skin, his trident resting on the bank, overlooks the scene. From its main causeway, Haridwar looks like many other Indian cities we’ve passed through. It is full of rickshaws – pulled by horses, men on bicycles, and small motors – full of mobile fruit stands, chemist stalls, ‘hotel’ restaurants, women in beautiful colors, men in sweaty blue work-shirts, and children selling and begging. The bara bazaar, just an ally away from our accommodation at the Hotel Om, seemed to specialize in prayer beads, red powder for ceremonies, and a saffron cloth printed with variations of “om” mixed with images of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesha, or Krishna.

As we meandered through the stalls, and slowly sweated out the bottles of water we had consumed that morning, we began to wonder if we might be ‘lost,’ and whether we had any idea which way was ‘out.’ So we turned left, past a tall yellow brick façade, under a dirty archway, found ourselves on the bank of the Ganga. Crippled beggars – one pushing himself along on a small wooden board with three wheels – mixed with holy men and everyday bathers. I walked towards the steps, hoping to rest and watch the astonishingly polluted but beloved water flow by, but the stares we got as we walked closer were far more reproachful than the usual wondering looks, and we decided to keep moving. Soon, we came to a bridge overlooking a famous ghat – at this spot, Krishna supposedly left a footprint on the bank, and dropped some sweet nectar. Every night, thousands of people gather at the sound of chiming bells for a ceremony in praise of the river. As we pressed in to take photos of the gathering masses, we were blocked in by a police barricade, apparently put up to keep worshipers from storming the river during the ceremony.

The sun was settling when prayers began to blast out of loudspeakers rigged to the bridge and nearby temples. Small leaf baskets, filled with flowers and the flicker of candles, which had been floating slowly down the river, began to be released in greater numbers. Most of the bathers climbed back up the steps, and official representatives spread out through the crowds to solicit donations (receipt provided). As the light from the sky faded, bright torch-like balls of flame appeared in white-robed priests’ hands, flames leaping and falling to the ground as their bearers swayed, burning oil splashing on the river bank. We made friends with our neighbors on the packed steps, who explained some of the prayers, and invited us to visit them at their flat in Delhi. As the ceremony ended, and the police barricade was lifted, worshippers flowed in and out, young girls marking our foreheads with yellow and red for a donation of a few rupees. After watching the crowds, thousands passing up and down from the water, we wandered away from the Ganga with an Israeli friend we met on the banks, and drifted off to dinner. Electricity (and therefore fans, as well as lights) flickering on and off, disco-style, we fell asleep.

The next morning, we got up early to see a few sights before returning to our scenic but chilly language school. Just around the corner from our hotel, and up a short alley past red and gold wedding attire, we found the base of a cable car running up the side of a foothill to Mansi Devi, a temple to a goddess who will grant all your mind’s desires. Jockeying with the Indian tourists, we boarded small Disneyland-esque open-air cable cars, and rose up above the city (there was even an old Mickey Mouse statue in the atrium). The ride was surprisingly relaxing, and we stepped off the swaying cartoon-yellow car onto the crest of the hill. From the cable-car, we were swept into the small bazaar that has grown up around the temple, selling offerings, jewelry, and the like. Through the vendors and past the shoe deposit stall (key: bring a bag for your own shoes), we elbowed, shouldered, and pushed our way into a single-file line between shoulder-high red metal fences leading into the actual temple. Inside, there was no open space, but a series of shrines, with different offerings to be given at each. At one, people dropped incense into a fire, and marked their foreheads with ash, at another a man patted my back and head; above an amorphous orange figure, worshippers tied red strings around a tree, and at the central shrine people threw baskets of offerings to priests who looked like dock-workers, catching and passing the gifts towards a statue of the goddess.

On the way out, as Rachel and Myla combed the stalls, a couple asked if I would take a photo with them. This seems to happen a lot – even more to me because of the blonde – but I was still surprised when they handed me their infant to take a photo of the two of us. Indian babies are used to being passed around, and the tiny one quickly fell asleep in my arms. Since I had been in many people’s photos, I decided it might be alright to ask for a photo on my camera as well, but the whole experience was as strange as always. As we left the temple, I saw the young couple in the crowd, and we smiled and waved. The swinging cable cars brought us back down the mountain, and Myla and Rachel and I boarded a series of crowded buses back to Mussoorie.

Of course… we stepped off the bus and right up to the head of a parade in honor of Krishna’s birthday. Children extravagantly dressed up as various gods, and perched on the back of open trucks, with music blasting, chugged past. Frequently, the parade stopped and some of the older god-actors descended to the concrete to act out a story as they lip-synced and danced to the music. The crowds were heavy in the narrow mountain streets, but the sights were worth every moment of being pressed from every side. As we walked towards the taxi stand, wondering if we would ever make it up to our guest house through the winding traffic, I stopped for some jalebi (dough deep-fried in clarified butter), and we rode happily up toward our welcoming mountain home.

Living Vertically

2007-09-07T04:31:00.000-07:00

A little over a week ago, we were given 5,000 Rps and a train ticket for six (2^nd class AC, with veg meals, very high snazz) to leave the land of limbo*. The tales we had heard about Indian train stations and cars were fantastic, but whether due to the early hour (there is something distinctly unnerving about sweating so much at 5:30 am in the Delhi morning heat) or a state of over-anticipation, the trip was happily uneventful. Carnival-color-flashing scales for weighing bags, English/Hindi mutt signs, beggars sleeping in the middle of trampling feet, porters carrying suitcases twice their weight on skinny necks, teal-blue faded train cars pulling in, filling up, pulling away. We carried our own bags, stuffed them above our own seats, and settled down to catch up on the sleep we had missed the night before.

*(Anna’s – our in-country program director – apartment in Delhi, with the daily question of whether we would be traveling north or south, learning Hindi first or getting started on Telugu, and whether that uncertain beginning would happen this afternoon, sometime tomorrow, or in two weeks)

This being India, of course, the notion of sleeping because there might be nothing better to do was quickly debunked. A constant stream of food – water, tea and crackers, hot breakfast, more tea, mango juice – and adorable twin Sikh boys running between our seats and theirs to shake hands and say “hello, hello” kept me awake and wondering. Five hours and endless sugar (?) fields later, we stepped off our rocking metal transport and into the distinctly cooler air of Deridun. Anna met us at the station, fed us, and packed us into taxis to climb back up the switchbacks to a little nook of the Himalayan foothills just a town or two away from our first orientation destination. And so The Southerners rejoined rest of the fellows at the Dev Dar Woods guest house and the Landor Language school, about 4 km or a half hour walk above Mussoorie.

The trees here are dripping with green. Green climbs sideways up the short stone walls that hold in the hills, green slicks the soles of our shoes. The color swings from branches with grey-white languor monkeys and insinuates itself through the cracks in the bedroom floor.

Our Hindi classes are alternately speeding and crawling along. When clouds drift in through the door – I mean marshmallow puff passing over the threshold, visible and prickly and soft – I smile slightly and turn back to the next new letter. When the electricity goes off in the middle of a lesson, the teacher continues without a pause, and the light inevitably flicks back on a few minutes later.

The views off the sheer sides of the foothills are cottony white. When the curtains part, they reveal a sea-green coral carpet of trees covering folding mountainsides. And if we’re very lucky, if enough layers have been lifted, if six of the seven seas have parted, we may glimpse the white-gold tips of the real mountains. The Himalayas laugh. They would laugh at our pathetic gasping lungs, out of air from climbing these little precursor mounds, but we’re far too small to merit such grand attention.

Four of us took a seven-hour meander on Saturday. Although we began with a dirt-trail descent past guest-houses and forested homes, we soon stretched along a major paved road. With our cross-strapped backpacks and sweaty American t-shirts we must have cast a strange image to the small boy who carries water up and down this slope every day, to the girls giggling in flocks on their way home from school. When we finally left the road, escaping context, we pranced under power lines and scrambled along goat trails that provide barely half a foot of horizontality in this world of vertical living.

Here, everything is either up or down. The sidewalks and roads are not smooth concrete, but are scored to keep cars that are climbing up from sliding back down, and to keep the pack mules that are sliding down from catching too much speed. Unfortunately, there is not a parallel wet/dry dichotomy. Instead, there is a steady continuum from damp to soaking. Damp is preferable, and even somewhat precious. Plain old ‘wet’ is more common. When I don’t want to connect my body to one more soggy-cool surface, I remember the absolute smog-heat of Delhi and try to appreciate my cold bones absorbing one more ounce of chill.

After sixteen hours of Hindi classes, two weekends, one sweet new years, and an untold number of paperback novels and bollywood music videos, the seventeen World Partners fellows will be scattering in the (thankfully hot) winds. Maybe the Southerners will actually get on a train to Hyderabad. I hear the ticket has been bought, and our placements are still set. My apartment is waiting (two rooms, three young women, no air conditioner)… and since we finished the Deva Nagri alphabet today, it’s clearly high time to start in on another…

I heart Shahrukh Khan

2007-08-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

So I've spent four nights in this Real World World Partners, with six people in a small apartment in a sprawling city...

Some adventures include: the spice market near Chandni Chowk, the Qutub Minar, Chakde! India (yes, we saw a bollywood movie in Hindi!), our first Indian clothes, the Lotus Temple, home-cooked meals, and free internet... (there are photos from some of these adventures added to the original album that I sent out)

We were supposed to be learning Telugu in Hyderabad this week, but I'd say we were pretty productive in our own limbo-world-way. Tomorrow we'll head up to Mussoorie to learn Hindi with the rest of the folks, and perhaps head to Hyderabad in two weeks, when everyone else goes to their placements. Until then, goodbye smog, hello winding roads up into the clouds...

L

p.s. this post brought to you by the best escapism combined with cultural immersion I've yet found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan