Past the Phantom Tollbooth

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

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

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)

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.

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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

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:

1. Details
   
2. Synchronicity
3. Cause-effect (ridiculousness of)
4. 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

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

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.