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.

Strung with Tungsten Stars

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

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

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.