The Book List, Part I

(and part of Part II)
June 2007 - May 2008

Before I left:

Shantaram, by Gregory Roberts

One thousand pages of marauding adventure novel – a slightly silly, slightly bloody, but very thorough introduction to India – appeared under mysterious circumstances on the doorstep of my houseboat, and will be coming soon to a screen near you, with love from Mira Nair, Johnny Depp, and Amitabh Bachchan.

The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri (selected stories)

Stunningly beautiful writing, set on the blurry line between Indian and American culture.

Culture Shock! India: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette, by Gitanjal Kolanand

This was the one book assigned by AJWS. It is clearly written, and somewhat useful… but very snooty, and includes long sections on how to deal with caste conflicts among your servants.

Since taking off on a plane towards Delhi:

The Moore’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie

I was given this book by experts in International Living, and told to read it on the plane. The brilliant (and meandering) story line leads from the backwaters of Kerala (Jews and spices make a delicious combination) to the teeming streets of Mumbai, with a hundred layers of interlocking metaphors (or palimpsests, in this case) in between.

Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett

Because I love Discworld, and because the first Terry Pratchett novel that I read was one that Michael had picked up in an English-language bookstore in Montepulciano, Italy in 1998, and because it is easy to find British mass-market paperbacks in the former Commonwealth, and because I needed my first taste of escapism. Plus, this one is about gender-bending.

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange of Modern India, by Edward Luce

An excellent and somewhat panoramic (if spotty) view of ‘modern’ India. The author is a British reporter for the Financial Times who has been lucky enough to interview most of the major players in Indian culture and politics, and his analysis of everything from the meaning of highway construction to the interplay of Hindu fundamentalism with the many forms of Islam that have come up throughout Asia is insightful. This was also recommended by AJWS, and I think it would be make much better required reading than Culture Shock.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Heartbreakingly beautiful, and many people’s favorite book of all time. A friend once mentioned to me that she felt as if the story line was just a vehicle for Roy’s gorgeous prose…

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

With the aftertaste of Roy’s writing in my mind, this went down perfectly… and helped to organize some of my thoughts and frustrations on the complications of leaving the liberal land of Wes, and stepping into a strictly gendered society.

Passage to India, by E.M. Forster

A painstakingly detailed (and pretty, if slightly dry) portrait of British India – but Forster’s depiction of race relations is in many ways just as relevant now as it was in 1924.

Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins

My holiday present to myself was to begin reading this book, which I had bought months earlier, and let tease me from the shelf. It is quirky and funny and creative and exactly what I needed.

White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple

Set in Hyderabad, and spanning the golden age of the Nizams, when the rulers of the princely state of Hyderabad were the wealthiest men in the world, this historical treatise (lightly disguised as a novel with enticing writing and animated descriptions of key events) gave me a much richer appreciation of the place I’ve been calling home. Recently, a friend and I completed a long-awaited adventure: the search for the dollhouse that British Resident James Kirkpatrick built for his Muslim wife, Khair-un-Nissa (photos are available for your viewing pleasure on my picasa account - just click the photo icon)

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of those books… the ones that other people have said helped them find meaning, and you feel like you should read… but his vision of love, however poetically mapped out, was not one that resonated with either my desires or my experiences…

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Just as beautifully written as her short stories and fun to breeze through (even more fun to pick up on both the Indian and American cultural references), but ultimately lacking something…

Biopiracy, by Vandana Shiva

This was left at our house by a wandering visitor, and although it is more manifesto than explanation, I loved her straightforward eco-feminist critique of intellectual property rights, globalization, and other massive structural forces changing the way that seeds and cells exist on earth.

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

As the bus began to climb the curves of the mountains that would take us to Dharamsala for Passover, Shlayma handed me this book. Both the scientific and the Buddhist explanations are simplified for the layperson, but the Dalai Lama’s simple description of the relationship between science and religion is the most articulate I have ever heard. I recommend this book to anyone who is tired of (or intrigued by) me harping on about the similarities between these two systems of thought.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Absolutely worthy of all the hype that it receives. If you haven’t read it yet, you probably should. Soon.

Supplemented by pieces of:

Pathologies of Power, by Paul Farmer

If you know me at all, you know why I love this book. If you don’t, pick it up and read it. I asked my mother to send it for a Chanukah present because I needed to hear the preface, ‘Bearing Witness.’

The Revolution Will Not be Funded Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

At the closing ceremony of the US Social Forum last August, I heard Andrea Smith speak. She was electrifying, of course, and mentioned a new book that she had helped to edit. I was entranced by the title, and asked for a special round-the-world-delivery birthday present. As I expected, it is very radical, fairly brilliant, and both deeply disturbing and eminently satisfying to read while working in the ‘NPIC’ (with, yes, its love of unnecessary acronyms!)

Malgudi Schooldays, by R.K. Naryan

Classic, but less than gripping if you didn’t spend your childhood in India.

Blink, by Malcom Gladwell

I was bored, it was on our friend’s bookshelf, and it entertained me for an afternoon.

[along with many sections of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides to South India and/or India, of course]

Currently lost (and often found) around page 200/600 of:

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

I promised this book to myself as an end-of-thesis treat in Middletown, Connecticut. One year later, I picked it up at a bookstore in Hyderbad, Andhra Pradesh, and have been entranced ever since. It is about the patterns that people make, in their heads and in the sand, during humanity's varied and desperate attempts to find meaning in the world… quite simply, this book explains why I started reading (and writing and story-telling) in the first place.

From Pujagutta Circle to the Mecca Masjid

Impressions from a Sunday Stroll
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
May 4, 2008

I was told that I couldn’t stay, and the panic that rose in my throat at the thought of going home was enough to raise my chest from the bed, enough to make me aware of each fold in the cool sheets behind my back when I let go, enough to realize where I had landed and how soon I was leaving. So I decide I would start walking. There aren’t many traffic lights here, let alone street corners (the words ‘city block’ usually draw a blank stare), so I couldn’t play the follow-the-green-light-game, but I bought myself an overly-intellectual adventure novel and shoved it in my bag and called a Cascadian friend and asked the clerk to point me and stepped into the shade and started strolling in the right direction, down the wrong side of the street. When I stopped to ask for assistance, for reassurance spaced a few kilometers apart, most people pointed to bus stands or asked the whereabouts of my motorbike – but I’ve found that if you smile broadly enough and walk away with the proper head bobbing and step springing and follow the fingers with the toes they point you in the right direction despite the incredulous tone behind the answer. The songs bubbled up – as they do when I’m happy (not laughing out load but overflowing internally with the giddy thought of my own existence) – and although they started under my breath they were soon swinging in the breeze –

The city’s changing, ‘cause we are changing,

And we’re all in this together…

[changed to, with a shift in the wind]

I open my mouth to the Lord, and I won’t turn back,

I will go! I shall go! To see what the end is going to be!

And as the white skullcaps multiplied the streets grew narrower and I passed a camel and an impossibly small horse pulling a wooden platform bearing darkly wrinkled men in purple plaid lungis (in addition to the normal traffic of autos to minivans and everything manufactured by Tata in between) and at one point the sometime-flagstone sidewalk was dyed red from the minerals seeping out of the green flaking doors of a street-side storage room and two men asked if I wanted a room and three khaki traffic cops waved me forward but only one 12-year-old voice called out as I passed: ‘madam, which country?’ I paused at the center but I didn’t stop because I love to concept ‘to meander’ but I was entranced by my destination, so the first thing that stopped me (after seven or eight or ten kilometers and only two blisters from my precious cracking Chacos) was the clearly palatial dome of the hospital. I turned right and leaned against a waist-high wall and hid behind a bush and covered my hair (or shaded my head) with a white scarf that I purchased in Jew Town in Cochin but baptized in dance class in Secunderabad. This was the beginning of the curlicues.

I wandered past the waiting patients (waiting in the shade, not waiting for a doctor) past the reserved parking spots (for doorways that looked permanently closed but a garden that might have been recently trimmed) past a man reclined along the steps of a podium leading nowhere, a heavy worn book in his hands. I stood on the edge of the nowhere raised platform and looked across a small deserted street and a wide abandoned canal to the smooth succession of domes that I imagined held an ancient house of worship, but which (after going over the ‘river’ and through the stench wearing the mask of an idyllic late afternoon sunlit view) I soon realized topped the home of the high court of Andhra Pradesh. The gates were open on one side but locked on the other for Sunday so a surly young guard had to open the padlock from inside the compound to let me out past a Hanuman statue bearing unusually garish kissable lips.

I retraced to follow the crowd and it snuck up on me: the endless piles of bangles and pastel cotton baby shirts and sequined chiffon saris draped down garage doors, black burqas with bright beading, kitchen utensils pre-aged from the grime of transport and too many touches, pickpockets with wide eyes and autos inching and children running. I walked past the gateway to the city, past piles of books in a long curling letter with pink and gold covers whose proprietors I trusted not to harass me so I followed their directions and found myself in front of a pigeon paradise, followed my bare feet past small raised marble tombs (one decorated and attended), followed the Hindu tourists to the outer edge of the prayer hall where blasts were heard last May because the dissidents from Far Away think that a city born of mixed religions is the perfect canvass on which to have their grievances painted. I curled my fingers through the metal caging that descends down the open façade of the Mosque and leaned my face against the diamond openings, watching the patterns in the bowing, the rows of heels pointed back and away, foreheads forward and above great (glass?) chandeliers wrapped in dirty white cotton quilted dust covers.

So I sent a piece of a prayer in or up or out and as the men filed past the lean security guard with the peaceful pretty face I disengaged my fingers and followed the pricking matt across the piercingly hot smooth flagstones to the water where the setting sun was bathing with the forearms of an elderly worshipper released form his tasks. When the light left, I followed it, and when the fluorescents flickered on to reflect in the tiny mirrored shards next to my head I finished my tea and the tea finished its biscuit and together we squeezed past the glitter and the oncoming army vehicle’s flapping front flags and boarded our own set of wheels home through the back allies past the infinite miniature groceries and the singular Big Bazaar, past the Hussain Sagar and its towering cornstalk Buddha to a bookshelf we’ll be stacking and a wardrobe I’ll be packing in one month’s time. And I thought of the morning’s panic, but I couldn’t find it in my throat (or my stomach, where it might have lodged on another day, or if I had remembered to eat lunch that afternoon), so I closed some curtains and watched the reflection of my face in the black glass behind the water filter, sliced softly by iron curling bars and patterned with beige plastic mosquito screens and realized that the wandering day – as wandering days would – had led me back to the place I should have started from.

The photos that accompany (tell) this story are available on my Picasa account (click on the photo icon on the right) in an album titled ‘Hyderabad: The Old City (vs. new clothes).’ Another recent photo album, ‘The British Residency’ is worth checking out if you are curious about Hyderabad’s history, ancient doll houses, or The White Moghuls.

Telling Stories

As part of the AJWS World Partners Fellowship, we are asked to complete periodic small writing assignments. The last assignment was a series of questions related to Passover -- we could pick one, and post our answer on a group website. Shlayma and I both answered the same question, and I asked her permission to post both answers, because her words resonate with many of the thoughts spinning through my head these days. Myla answered a different question -- which also reflects on many of our shared thoughts and experiences -- and I've added her thoughts below.

Question:

While the Exodus was happening, Moses instructed the Children of Israel in how they would later tell the story of the Exodus to their children and to future generations. This consciousness of the significance of the experience and projection about how, in the future, to tell the story, relates to your experience as a WP fellow. What consciousness do you have about the significance of your experience? How do you imagine this experience will shape your identity and what stories will you tell about it?

My Response:

i. There are stories that people don’t want to hear, and then there are the stories that I don’t want to tell.

Recently, I posted a blog article about a weekend trip we took to Goa for Shlayma’s birthday – and, after months of very little feedback from my (mostly) American audience, received a slew of compliments on my writing, my sharing, my adventuring. At first, I wanted to blame my readers for responding to the peace, the ease of the story when they have commented very little on stories of confusion and conflicting values… but I have also started to realize that I was able to write clearly about Goa for the very same reasons I was taking my readers to task. Goa was nothing if not easy and escapist, which places writing about Goa in precisely that same category. For two weeks, I have been trying to write about the Pesach weekend I spent in Dharamsala with Shlayma, a host of wandering Jews, and a community of exiled Tibetan monks, but the words have refused to come. How do I do justice to the images of monks murdered by Chinese police just last month, images that are hung across every temple and holy site? How do I explain the selfish motives that drove me into the mountains, the peace I found from watching others struggle? The simple answer, of course, is that I can’t, and that I’ll write the story soon despite all that, and shrug at the holes in the narrative and the injustice at the world, and get back to writing grants. And the simple answer, unfortunately, is usually the one that makes it out into the world.

ii. We.

All of my stories about India start with ‘we.’ Never in my life as my story been so completely intertwined with the stories of others. I think of the Passover questions – how is this night different from all other nights? – and I think that this journey is different from all other journeys because it is so completely shared, shared with Myla and Shlayma, and shared with the billion plus souls breathing in the industrializing pollution and breathing out the endless singing syllables that make up the polyglot beauty of India.

iii.

For me, being in India has been very much about story-telling. The moment I began to feel comfortable here was the moment I began to write about my experiences – and by writing, of course, to process them. It has become a way to place a few filters on the unremitting waves of impressions I’ve felt in this country, and to play around with a few details in order to find some more coherent sense of patterns in the morass. I don’t know which stories I will tell at home, and at this point, I’m not interested in guessing. All I ask from the stories that form in my mind is just that – that they continue to form, to be told, to make it out of my head and into the world.

Shlayma's Response:

It is always unsettling to me when people back home say how much I inspire them by being here. From my perspective, my time here has been largely selfish and ultimately useless. I try to demystify the exoticism of doing time in India, but to them my mere presence here is a tremendous sacrifice for a greater cause. I guess I am surrendering to some extent, because I’ve given up a lot—mostly my egotistical pride around doing “selfless” service. Being here, amidst many material discomforts and disturbing realities, has been a very humbling experience. As a result, I’ve questioned the motives that drove me to come in the first place, and whether my presence here has had even the smallest benefit. Nevertheless, however critical I am about the effectiveness of long-term international service work, the struggle to make sense of my global social responsibility has meant something to those that have not chosen to engage with these questions in the same way. For many of my friends and family, my choice to be here challenges them to think about their own choices, and my stories move them to become informed about injustices in the world. While I have no idea how this experience will shape my identity or what value it will have in the future, I know that at this moment in time living in India, working at an HIV/AIDS NGO and celebrating Passover seder in the mountains with Tibetan exiles is a story in the making—one that is inspiring others to think and act in ways that will hopefully shape a better world.

Myla's Question and Response:

Pesach is the holiday of freedom. The haggadah includes the following instruction: In every generation, each person should view him/herself as if s/he personally left Egypt. Since we say this every year at the Seder, the implication is that not only does it happen every generation, but that every year we should experience liberation. Thinking about your experience as a WP fellow, in what ways are you freer than you were last year? In what ways are you less free? What impact will leaving India and this experience have on your level of freedom—will you be more free to have left, or less free because of the memory of the experience?

I think there are some practical and concrete limitations to freedom. If one does not have food, or access to resources or work that can get them food, it is likely they cannot be free – free from starvation, stress, pain. However, on a somewhat abstract philosophical level, I do think that freedom in some ways is a frame of mind, a perception of one's circumstances. Being in India has made me see the multitude of freedoms that I enjoy that I was less, if at all, aware of before coming to a developing country. Many of the freedoms I always had, but didn't recognize as such.

I am free to demand, as a voting citizen, member of the press, or otherwise, that a corrupt government official resign. In India, such a demand may result in a murder. I can vote in America for whoever I want! In Florida people have been turned away for minor offenses, such as being black, but for the most part US citizens can vote. In Pakastan and Nepal's elections, people are afraid to leave their house during voting because of violence and bombings that may occur, something I have never had to worry about when voting. I have always been extremely critical of the American government, but it is perhaps important to keep a perspective of relativity and recognize that the frustration I feel at various things in my government does not measure to much in comparison with the atrocities committed by some governments in other parts of the world.

My worth as a person is not "more" than someone else's worth. I am not better than other people. And yet, I have many people who would give me money or help if I asked for or needed it. There are people who are invested in me and would pay for hospital bills if I got sick, food if I was hungry, or education if I was curious – I am also fortunate to have health insurance. This doesn't make me worth more than the person I see begging for money on the traffic junction corner as the motions towards the sleeper baby in her arms... but it perhaps does make me more free. I can ask for money if I am in need, large sums of money, and receive this. She can't. I am confident that I will be able to provide for my family one day, almost irrespective of the circumstances. She can't. I am free to know that, most probably, I will survive barring some freak accident, and so will my children. She isn't.

I am not rich in my country; but relatively, and by virtue of being able to be able to travel abroad, and even by virtue of having white skin, I am rich. Money aside, I am rich in culture and experience and opportunity. I can go to most countries in the world on my passport. I can volunteer and "help" others just because I want to; because I feel motivated to help others, and see the world while I'm at it. How perfectly selfish.

I am free to dress, be, and love who I want, for the most part. I am free to have sex with who I want, and to have sex at all. I am free to say no to sex, and take action against anyone who tries to violate that right. If I am raped or if my spouse dies, I do not know with almost complete certainty that I can never remarry. Fear of stigma, inability to remarry, or of being murdered are not obstacles for me for leaving a bad relationship/marriage. While statistically and realistically I do naturally fear domestic violence in my country for myself and those I love, I know that I would have support of my family and friends if I ever was in an abusive situation and tried to leave. I wouldn't be forced to move back in with my parents and be shunned from society; I would be allowed and welcome to move back in with my parents, if I needed, and would likely praised and admired for my strength in leaving an abusive partner. My family won't be insulted if they have no say in my chosen life partner, and I don't have to fear that they will disown me if I choose someone they don't approve of. I don't have to fear that I will be unable to marry because my parents cannot provide a significant dowry, and I don't have to fear being murdered for not giving enough dowry. While starting a family may mean I will have obstacles to pursuing higher education, it does not mean that I will be unable to do so, or discouraged from doing so. If I marry I am not voiceless in the decision of where I will live, and with whom (e.g. moving into my in-laws' home, wherever that happens to be).

I would say that the recognition of my own freedom, which I did nothing special to deserve, burdens me, and also makes me grateful for my undeserved circumstances. I still have issues with my country and its government and women's rights in my culture, but in comparison they seem relatively tame to the issues so many women face in India. So, in response to the question, I think I will return to the USA to feel that I am much freer as an individual than I had realized before now, and hopefully this understanding of relative freedom, or freedom in relation to others that I feel undeserving of yet thankful for, will help me to be a better person and do my part to work for equality and towards social justice. If I take literally the assertion that I personally have left slavery in Egypt, then surely I have come a long way. My hope is that this new perspective of freedom, and the memory and somewhat limited understanding of the vast inequality of freedom in the world, will help drive my motivation to effect change.

The Dragonriders of Pern

Shlayma’s Birthday Weekend
Arambol, Goa
April 4^th-7^th, 2008

The font was larger than I remembered, the binding cheap, and the type falling off the right-hand side of the page. The cover was burgundy instead of green, but soft and pliable from repeated readings on the beach. I felt distinctly as if I were meeting on old friend, but one I had always been a little reluctant to let other kids see me playing with. This book, I later hypothesized, was a large part of the reason I was able to be happy during the mythically tortuous period known as ‘middle school,’ while my class was divided into social straight-jacket strength cliques, and my own clique routinely kicked out one friend for rotating periods of time. I picked up the novel, turned it over, and slipped it back into the English section of the chest-height bookshelf, paying more attention to the long wooden table than I did to the rows of titles that had to be compressed to re-accommodate their recent neighbor. I slipped my flip-flops back on my feet and sauntered across the restaurant, folded my newly-tanned limbs across the polished wood, and ordered a cheese platter and a green salad with vinaigrette.

We left India before we left Hyderabad. To be precise, we left India when we pulled up to the new airport, over an hour outside our bustling city. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was built with a private-public partnership, completed on its 10-month construction schedule, and – along with a sister project near Bangalore – is the first ‘world class’ airport in India. It is meant to raise profiles, to welcome business, to grease palms for investment and infrastructure. Steel and glass sit in a wave across the recently empty plain, palm trees with branches still bound by string lining the driveways of fresh cement and drying paint. The stiff, warm breeze on the open runway whipped our clothes in circles around our bodies, and gave us a loving hug goodbye. One and a half hours later, we landed in Goa.

Goa is a former Portuguese colony, a tiny state south of the middle of the west coast of India and dwarfed by its neighbors, Maharashtra and Karnataka. It seems to consist mostly of beaches, populated mostly by half-naked Europeans enjoying the sparkling ocean waves, cheap hippie paraphernalia, and easy-access drug culture. In a pseudo-new wave (you know, man, you can just be free here) way, Goa feels very colonial; the local people are treated more like a resource (cheap labor for European-owned restaurants, a ‘friend’ to go home from the night market with) than as human beings, and any concept of a ‘local culture’ is quickly drowned in images of transplanted backpackers who arrived a decade ago and never left. The pizza, however, was superb, and the ‘pancakes’ were actually delicious crepes filled with stunningly fresh fruit.

The ocean waves leapt up to greet us the moment we minced across the hot sand from our dirt-cheap huts made of woven bamboo and draped with pink mosquito netting. The receding tide buried our toes in the wet sand that marked the momentary edge of the Arabian Sea, and the foam flicked into our faces, teasing. The water was warm, and it pulled and pushed at our meandering limbs until we internalized the pattern and floated up or dove beneath with each creaking crest. I didn’t take a shower in the afternoon because I knew that the most precious time with the ocean would be sunset, that swimming out towards eternity would be blissful, and that if I didn’t show up, she might not call back for a second date. The last few moments when the burning ball is still visible seemed to run in high-speed, but the colors – the blue-gray of the water solid steel and woven with thick silk ribbons of orange and pink, a few threads of gold – lingered as I pushed my newly resuscitated Spanish and introduced myself in Hindi to smiles emerging from nearby waves.

We sat on beach chairs, and I read. I read at the lunch table, over pasta with prawns, and on the porch of our huts with the bamboo walls. We walked on meandering paths, and passed whole stretches that didn’t contain clothes made out of recycled Indian cloth that very few Indians would ever wear. We dipped in a fresh-water pond a hundred yards across, but only a few meters deep, and I read on the shore. I re-entered a world that I have rarely articulated but frequently inhabited, and I smiled at the horizon because it was there, cutting a clean line across the back of the page, to share my secrets.

We carried wine and candles and brown bread to the sand and counted the cabaret stars when the curtains pulled back and the sky showed off her new tattoos. We sang with the waves, and sometimes against them, and cupped our hands around the sputtering flames and sanctified a day of rest and a weekend away. We ended the vacation the same way – but instead of weekly candles there were yearly candles for Shlayma’s 25^th, and instead of bread to be blessed there was chocolate cake to be cut. By the time we were crammed into a cab meandering towards the airport we had bathed in pools of relief, washed away hours of air conditioning and plasticized wooden desks, replaced it all with mouthfuls of saltwater and the permeating smell of sunscreen left to melt off reddening thighs and shimmering shoulders.

And as I leaned into a pile of women and let the road whip my hair into a massive knot behind my face, I thought of the last time I dipped into the Indian Ocean. I thought of the white sand beaches of Zanzibar, the Beach Boys we had gone there to talk to (we missed our appointment with the local AIDS activist), the little resort we stopped by and the relief of the water against our skin as I dipped blonde dreadlocks into the salt and stared intently out towards what I imagined, eventually, would take me to India. And on the eastern shore of the same body of water (its always the same body, with water) I had looked back, towards Zanzibar, or maybe towards the San Juans or Pemaquid Point or the Mediterranean (it all goes in a circle, so you’re always looking in the direction of any or everything, I imagine), and I sang (out of tune) and danced (against the water, this time) and smiled.

This post was brought to you by the novel Dragonflight, written by Anne McCaffrey, and first given to me by my cousin Ann.

A Tactile Weekend

Purim, Holi, Milad-un-Nadi, and Good Friday
March 21^st-23^rd, 2008

It was a tactile weekend, but it wasn’t ecstatic because it was full of sensation; it was slow because it was seeped in color.

I. Friday: Purim

I had to change my costume at the last moment, because the flower-sellers were driven inside by the unseasonable rains. Every morning and every evening (except, of course, for that morning and that evening) two women sit on the corner that connects our neighborhood to the major thoroughfare, their wooden cart, dark blue paint peeling, carefully stacked with a coil of jasmine buds strung on cotton thread, a pile of yellow flowers something like an elegant enlarged dandelion, and a small change box. For a few rupees, you can buy a forearm’s length of flowers; for Purim, I had been planning on draping myself in them.

When I got dressed to go shopping for party supplies, I got dressed to get soaked; cotton pants that could be tied up by my knees, a well-dyed kurta that would remain opaque but wouldn’t bleed color all over my skin if wet, and plenty of plastic bags to keep my wallet dry. The looks we got, splashing through overflowing sewer flow and street refuse, bulging bags of groceries in each hand, were precious: women don’t go out in the rain, most men will wait until the downpour passes, and even the poorest people would at least have the decency to cover their hair with a plastic bag! Crazy Americans; we came home with puddle footprints below us and silly songs on our lips, and I loved every moment of it.

The power went off just before the first guests arrived; I almost didn’t recognize them in the half-gloom of the hallway; stumbled around the kitchen table in circles looking for storm candles and a match; thought it was silly to do a full round of introductions in the dark. I slipped backwards into the bedroom, where my beloved Feminazi and Kali were coming into full form, un-twisted the cardboard from two toilet paper rolls to make horns, and simplified my costume from flower queen to holy cow with a large bindi and a lot of brown cotton. And what do you do, on Purim, when a guest walks in without a costume? A guest who hasn’t worn a costume, for any event, in over a decade? You help them to cross-dress, of course. We draped a sari, and exchanged eyelash batting tips. In various rooms, at various times, we burned a bra, cut heads off of cheap plastic dolls, emptied packets of breath fresheners that look like condom packs hanging from vendor’s stalls in the street. We danced to bollywood and TLC and ate biryani and forgot to make hamentashen with the mini pineapple and orange and berry jams I brought home from the grocery store.

II. Saturday: Holi

When I pulled out the white sequined-bib shirt I bought on my first day in Delhi, I knew it wouldn’t make it down the street. As we turned around the corner, our little neighbor, a small Sikh boy with waist-length hair gathered in a bun high on his fine-boned forehead, smiled at me, gesturing with a water gun and mischievous eyes. It was a very direct question.

So I handed off my backpack to a friend, raised my hands in surrender or supplication or mock surprise, and walked into a shower of pink water and green powder and orange hands patting my face. The mother of the Punjabi family that lives downstairs rushed inside to bring me a special drink, and the daughter handed me bags of my own colors and the father sprinkled something blackish-fuchsia in my hair that he mentioned ‘wouldn’t come out for a long time.’ I pinched cheeks (with blue) and patted heads (with red) and let myself be drowned in buckets of brackish water by many-colored midgets squealing with delight.

And then we went to the party. As we headed down the driveway to our friend’s apartment building, I heard the screams and the splashes, and we paid the driver with tinted bills. I walked into a color war, and was greeted with a mouthful of blue and a chest-full of orange and a shower of green. The courtyard was a mud bath, and the pile of little plastic bags grew as we emptied the powder into buckets and pores and white cotton reservoirs quickly dyed puce and scarlet and everything in between.

There was a third event, this one on a roof-top, with more home-made drinks for the holiday, and ayurvedic herbal powder that smelled as if it were probably much healthier for our lungs. I dozed in the sun, on a thick carpet under a patchwork tent, and listened to a human knot untangle itself. Later, I stole a whole half-hour, and sat by myself on a balcony and looked at the clear blue sky, and wondered how it had managed to escape the powder that had been tossed across the city.

The afternoon rains switched off our electricity, and I lay on the couch with a rotating audience and watched Shah Rukh Khan swivel his hips in Om Shanti Om, and cut vegetables for a meandering stir-fry to feed the masses as they scrubbed the colors from their faces, and examined the orange and pink stains in my hair that, three weeks later, still haven’t completely gone away.

III. Sunday: The Aftermath

We collected guests over the weekend. By Sunday morning, there were nine of us piling into three autos, half-trusting the brakes to work in the heavy late-morning (still completely unseasonable and unexpected) rain, heading across the city to a famed restaurant for a brunch of delicious (if overpriced) dosas and chutneys. We split under the weight of differing desires, and the three giants of the crowd waded off through the soaking streets to go in search of the Public Health Museum.

We met up with the bronzes in the AP State Museum instead, and waved to the Egyptian mummy and tried to read the Telugu script picked in black stone. We walked through the puddles that criss-crossed the ‘gardens’ and held hands and talked about our wives. We sat down for tea, and stood up for trains, and walked barefoot on wet white marble to look out over the city from Vanketeshwara’s perch on a hill. As our guests dispersed back to out into the world, I caught a ride to a home filled with the smell of boiling pasta and simmering tomato sauce and feasted on a quiet conversation in between the sound of the rain and the sputtering candles and guitar chords wandering off into the evening.

Past the Phantom Tollbooth

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).