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

This is the first in a (potentially) 5-part series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur

Power Cuts, Prayer Books, and Baking Silver: Rosh Hashanah
September 30, 2008

When the power went out and the conversation swirled between English and Hindi and sincere smiles, I blessed the newly lit candles with bumbling words and hands brushing the light towards my face. An hour earlier, I stood on the front porch of my office, leaning against the square grided iron screens and watching the polluted and overcast skies for glimmers that might suggest three stars had announced the beginning of the days of awe, nibbling at a chocolate cookie with a white fudge chunk in the center. Before the meeting and the power cut, I had been frantically downloading recipes, searching through vegetarian instructions for conjuring eastern European food that might create an imagined Jewish feast for my friends.

The streets by my office are effectively still the streets of a village – the caged chickens ready to be butchered for your table and pocket-sized stores selling Haldiram’s snacks and paan are the same as any in Kolkata proper, but some of the buildings behind them are more plaster than concrete, and the tallest tower just two or three stories, interrupted by the occasional five-story apartment building with shiny metal gate and clumsily uniformed watchman. The streets are still being paved, and during the day men sit in dotis and tank-tops, crushing bricks with hand-held hammers so that the red refuse can be scattered across the dirt lanes and topped with tar in an ever expanding network or semi-drivable surfaces. As we walked through the streets, we saw that the power cut had affected the whole area, candles sitting in shop windows and the distant lights of the central and south sections of the city mixing with generator-powered beams and the blinding headlights of auto-rickshaws to illuminate our way. The first evening of the New Year passed in an easily mixed-up combination of dark and light and greasy and fermented and abstract utilitarianism and self-authored scripts.

The first morning began early – the famous stench of the streets made it easy to give away the last chunk of my breakfast bread to a young woman and her tiny daughter begging in front of the chipping white façade of St. Andrew’s church. I turned to see two new friends walking towards me from out of town, interested and intent but reluctant to be up at this hour. We threaded together through an alley, and a man sitting on a ledge in a white kurta pajama and matching skull cap waved us through the heavy wooden doors. Inside, the Beth El synagogue reminded me of others I’d seen in India; a raised pulpit in the middle, a flimsy wooden balcony for the women, dark wood benches holding a strange pile of underused religious materials, a recess and a stage for the torah, and a general feeling of a rectangle filled with light but rimmed in aging blue and white paint.

We ignored the middle-aged white man sitting with a prayer book and a safari hat, grabbed some of our own, and settled on the benches. We dissected a section of a pamphlet retelling a holiday parable, and explained ourselves in barely overlapping stories to the man in the hat, who took more interest in us than we did in him. We were thinking of going, thinking we’d circle and click and soak just a little more, when a venerable man with a walker and a retinue of three came bumbling through the door and stopped by the side of the pulpit to bless a prayer shawl and wrap himself and consider standing for his service before he gathered his tiny following to sit in a circle of the dusty benches under the only circling fan in the room.

We introduced ourselves to the most talkative of the group.
Mordechai Cohen.
Where are you from? From here?
Oh, we’re from Iraq, Iran.
[A glitter pause for effect.]
Well… we came from Baghdad 200 years ago. So yes, we’re from Calcutta.
[A wide smile.]
And… my wife, she is French, born here while her father was on assignment with the English army.
And these men are the caretakers?
[We gestured to the ones who had let us in]
Oh yes, we’ve always had Muslim caretakers for the synagogues. One lives in the basement, the whole neighborhood is Muslim. Always better to give your gold to the thieves for safe keeping, right?
[Again with the glitter pause. We smiled politely, and I privately interpreted this as meaning that they would be safe from extremists in a mono-religious neighborhood.]

The man with the walker was David Nahoum, last resident of a powerful family, proprietor of the famed plum cake sold at a third-generation bakery in New Market, and final holy man of the barely-used synagogues of Kolkata. He led a short service, mumbling through the standings and sittings and turnings, while I flipped back and forth through the all-Hebrew prayer book and picked out familiar phrases. A handful of Americans studying abroad in Kolkata joined us, and pulled a magical packet of apples and honey from a bag to share. After the service, we wandered around the synagogue, snapping photos and murmuring comments. As we left, Mordechai Cohen and his wife Aline offered us rasgullah, a classic local sweet to ensure that we would have a sweet new year.

As the four of the last thirty-five Jews of Kolkata piled in to a taxi cab, we walked with our new friends through the puja-ready roads (it was a market day for market days) to a second synagogue, Magen David. Magen David’s bell tower soars four or five stories above the street, and one or two above its closest neighbors, but we had to squeeze past a stall selling plastic barrettes to get to the lumbering metal gates. When we reached them, we never imagined they’d yield, but the strings of locks and chains were connected only to themselves, and a nearby vendor stepped aside to push his weight against the metal bars. We stepped in to a strangely well-kept courtyard, and were eventually joined by two hurrying, smiling, traditionally dressed Muslim men, who led us in to the synagogue. Magen David was the imagined form of Beth El; the columns supporting the balcony were solid and stone, rather than wood, the balconies themselves lined with wrought metal banisters. Everything about the place was robust, recently repainted and burnished and dusted. We asked who had paid for the restoration of a place so seldom seen (on Fridays a young man lights candles, alone, in Beth El and Magen David while the other three synagogues lie completely dormant), and got a non-answer in return.

After the dim light of the tomb-like sanctuary, the bustle of the streets, even as we passed through the downtown Government sector, seemed to lift us up and carry us along on a stream of tea vendors, bus exhaust, and business chatter. We ate lunch on the sidewalk, gulping grease and fresh-squeezed juice under the sign for the Foreign Tourist Railway Booking Office. I’d been here once before, on a ferry from Howrah – the massive station on the far side of the river – and knew we were near the water. We strolled down to the docks, dodging painted buses and grass-infested railways crossing guards, and scouted for a spot by the water. Like the banks of any good river in an industrial port, the Hooghly is lined with trash heaps, temples, opportunist stalls, laundresses, bathing men, and splashing boys. The water is determinedly brown, without any hint of blue – depending who you ask, either the result of the waste and chemically painted idols dumped routinely into its flow, or a simple matter of heavy silt carried downstream.

The Hooghly feels far from holy, but it’s an offshoot of the Ganges, on her way to meet the Bay of Bengal. We tiptoed down towards the water, edging our sandals against the serrated concrete to keep from joining the tide. We gathered by a trash heap, and read a prayer, and distributed some bread. Then we retreated into our own worlds, and tossed out the breadcrumbs, counting out the habits, the memories, the patterns, and the thoughts of the last year that the coming one could do without. We feasted, for the second time, on apples and honey, and wobbled with sticky fingers back up the bank.

The afternoon was spent in escape – at a bookstore café, gathering vegetables and names, resting in the dim light of another late-afternoon power cut. As the day gathered towards evening, people trickled in and food began to stack up on the counters and soon there was sizzling and scouring and scampering and, a few hours and a dozen guests later, dinner. The table was circled with the semi-agnostic descendents of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, and spread with braided bread (tomato flavor, not round), figs, a beet, wine, two colors of grape juice, and our third round of apples and honey. We blessed the collection of ritual oddities, and replaced them with more substantial food. We ate, and ate again, and finished with Bengali sweets while discussing the nature of the baking silver used to decorate the diamond squares of nuts and ghee and jaggery. As the darkness outside settled, Regina helped with the dishes while cards were dealt and elbows began to lean on the table in pairs. The wine bottles were opened – eventually – without the help of a corkscrew, and we raised our motley assortment of tea cups and glasses to toast beginnings, new and old.

Around the Bend: A Travel Novella (Part II)

June 13th-July 10th, 2008
Leh, Ladakh, and the Nubra Valley, Jammu and Kashmir State

Also featuring: Kolkata, West Bengal; Varanasi, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh; New Delhi

[Note: continued from the previous post – please read Part I first!]

Chapter 5

When the valley floor started drooping in beautiful wrinkled camel-colored folds, like a forgotten wool coat thrown over the back of a chair at a winter dinner party, we were too busy feeding our own stories into the quickening breezes to realize that this was the beginning of the valley. When the floor dropped down – not just by a hundred yards, but by half a mile – we straightened up on the bike and then leaned forward again into the wind, we pulled over between freshly blinded curves and exhaled into the vastness. We felt giddy and alone and perfectly integrated with the undulating road. We laughed at the occasional Jeep blasting its horn at a passing army truck, sorry for the passengers locked in a metal box.

We roamed down the mountainside, and sped along a tiny indented road rushing a little above the valley floor. We watched passing oasis towns – created by glacial runoff in the otherwise spectacularly brown and blue and metallic landscape – grow and shrink. We came to a crossroads bearing a yellow sign that shouted ‘Diskit!’ and we tucked in and sped across a miniature dessert. Sand dunes rolled out to either side, and soon they were swatting our faces, pinching our cheeks and slapping our hands with a thousand immaculate grains of sand. Halfway across our little Sahara the raindrops began – and it seemed a miracle that they didn’t mix with the dirt in the air to splatter us with mud – so that we were being pelted by hot dry hard grains and cold wet soft drops until the mountains reared again and we went up up up and left that silly sandy little flatland down below.

We switchbacked and straigtawayed and honkingly blind curved our way for another twenty kilometers, until, with early afternoon sun melting our memories of a night in North Pullu, we passed the first tilled fields and thin swaying poplars and white gompas and low stone walls of our new home town. There was a closed ‘Peace’ restaurant and a ‘Main’ street and we swung through not-quite-right until we parked by a small stream running downhill from the town prayer wheel. We walked under a gompa, ducking unnecessarily and tracing a tiny path to a beautiful courtyard and a tree house hideaway room with a cloth ceiling and two walls of windows looking out on gardens and hillsides and buckets of hot water and glasses of fresh mint tea. We settled.

Later that afternoon, when Vam and I turned the curve of the main road, bending it in our minds to fit ourselves into this isolated town’s image of itself, we recognized a lanky blonde figure waving from the upstairs window of a restaurant – Mar and Ty had made it safely to town, and soon there was feasting and guest-house touring and tall tale telling. There were adventures the next day – Mar and Ty sampled the next metropolis’s debatable delicacies, and Vam and I popped both wheels on the bike, failed to get them fixed, and ended up in a ‘bar’ set up in the open space of a man’s family farm, eating sliced cucumber and tomato and trading tall tales of 1999.

In the morning, Ty had disappeared, returned early to Leh, and as the three remaining adventurers, Vam, Mar and I decided that the slow spread of roads across the Nubra demanded our company for leaning, singing, speeding, slowing, frolicking, and general criss-crossing. We dined on Ladakhi bread and local apricot jam, we slept under the windows and lapped up the stars, I let the thin sunlight dry my hair and blow through the clothes that would take too long to wash – and soon we were ready to go.

Chapter 6

The Diskit gas station consists of a distinctly unprotected pump, set in a clearing of slightly more regular gravel than the dirt-and-broken-boulder landscaped surrounding it. Off to one side, a low building houses the station attendant – if you need a fill, just knock on the door. We did. Soon we were spinning back across the miniature Sahara, and this time the yellow concrete sign shouted ‘Panamik!’ as I slowed down to turn left and we saluted the armed men guarding the infant desert. The road to Panamik was a pleasant jigsaw puzzle of landscapes – low curving hills and sharp cliffs against unvarying plains, sand spilling across the road in slippery dry sheets and low-land marshes flashing our reflections back at us, malicious thorn bushes and graciously welcoming green trees bending slightly in the breeze to wave us by prayer wheels and low white farmhouses and cows and the odd bus.

All three of us noticed a resemblance to our mental images of life in the Roman Empire.

Stepping down from the bike, I felt like a hero in a Western. I discovered a miraculous macaroon, and Mar pulled us all into the Hot Spring Guest House where a casual old man fussed in a thatched kitchen filled with blackened metal and produced a brilliant dal. We settled in to our rooms, and discussed rebellion on the low rooftop and admired the mountain-stunted view from the northernmost point a tourist can go in India. We ate a dish that approached Chow Mein (too familiar, at this point), but Pakistan and China both stayed stubbornly hidden, for all their physical proximity, behind the rosy peaks.

In the morning, Mar took me to the hot spring to admire the moss, and we skipped around puddles and talked about romance in the travel-sphere – bathing was suspicious, but the guest house had a direct line, and I cleansed my body, if not mind and soul in a soft blue plastic bucket of earth-temperature water. On the way back to Diskit, I soared, and Vam picked me up and carried us both up to a hill-top monastery that left the distance we had just ridden a little line in the palm of our hands. That view of the Nubra valley immediately pre-sunset was the most beautiful doll-house spectacle I have ever seen.

We all turned in early, and snapped our eyes open at five am to retrace our steps past the curves, high roads, low marshes, desert folds, epic snowline, all cut by a fresh serving of unadulterated light and Christmas-morning views ready to be unwrapped and gasped and cooed over. We held close and let go and ate crumbles of crackers, until we arrived back in North Pullu. The bases looked different in the light – smaller, more commercial, less ours – and we posed for photos and turned our wheels upward towards our old friend.

Two or three kilometers later, in the middle of my babbling, Vam slowed the bike. He had an apocalyptic look on his face. A handful of cars passed us by. None of those that stopped had an air pump – until two massive olive green carriers pulled over, and two dozen soldiers poured across the road and swarmed over the bike like so many camouflaged ants. They refilled our front tire and left us with enough air to reach Station 49, and the conclusion that it was a bust, not a small leak. We sat on a half-broken stone wall and kicked our frozen feet into the mortar and looked up. The station soldier disappeared into his half-oil-barrel home to make us tea and Vam announced that we were stuck again, stuck for good and stuck together, and I couldn’t stop smiling at the utterly complex simplicity that this trip had lent to our lives.

Another pair of riders pulled over, and I discussed foot tattoos with a beautiful Brazilian woman in white while an Australian man helped Vam to examine our newest bump. At eleven am, just on time, a volley of empty cargo trucks pulled out of North Pullu and started folding back and forth up the foothills towards us. The first one to pass pulled over at a wave, and offered to carry us and the bike to Leh for about ten dollars. We shoved the bike in the back, jumped in the cab, and waved our new friends into the distance, promising a celebratory dinner that evening. The truck was classic – decorated to the proverbial hilt with small plastic pieces, painted flourishes, dented and buffed aluminum crowns, and hand-painted cursive messages to passers-by: ‘horn ok please,’ ‘permit J&K state,’ and the like. The interior was equally effusive, with a quilted plastic ceiling bearing dangling hearts, a dashboard filled with stickers of important monks, a handful of surprisingly unfaded photos of the driver’s family wedged above the rear-view mirror, and Tibetan pop blasting on the radio.

Chapter 7

At Khardong-La we stepped on to frozen ground and smiled at the captain who had rescued our friends and snapped a few shots and meandered quickly back down to town. On the edge of it all, I sipped a luxurious mango smoothie while Vam wrestled the bike down from the truck and collaborated with half the mechanics on the street to repair the wheel. Soon we were tripping back to town, and eventually stumbling in to a ground-floor room at a miracle hostel that came with a library, an internet café, and a rose garden patio. That night we dined on pizza and lemon meringue pie by a crackling fire and we clashed in the moonlight in argyle and green and woke up entangled in the unreasonably adorable and ever shockingly fictitious tourist scene of Leh.

Leh wrapped us comfortably together, just slightly exposed, and spit us out on two consecutive mornings. After Vam left, while I was still lingering and he was negotiating the youth hostel in the unimaginable morass of Delhi, Mar and I crossed a different valley and climbed a different (small) slope and found a modest palace and a power plant and a series of large high-schools that must serve whole swaths of the valley’s villages.

In Delhi, Vam was standing outside the domestic terminal, and I smiled and we quickly got lost together in the freakish familiarity of Connaught Place. That night, on a shiny new train near a shiny new baby on her way home with her posh young mother, we watched the clouds stack and shuffle themselves to form a hundred different stained glass windows across the plains of northern India. We woke up in Kolkata, West Bengal to join a Rainbow Pride March before stumbling through the thick air towards edibles and restables and after the clarity of the mountains it felt like equal parts mental and physical metropolitan marsh – overflowing with ever-lingering afternoon rains and street side vendors whose homes suspiciously resemble their shops and shirts sticky with emotion clinging in the damp air.

The morning presented the towering remnants of the British Raj – beautiful old buildings and super sleek suburban malls, all mixed with leftist politics and famed Bengali poetry. On the ferry, Vam and I counted the types of transportation we had taken over the last three weeks, and smiled at the total: bus, bike, foot, truck, airplane, train, rickshaw (auto and cycle), taxi, boat. We had stolen a block of time, and twisted it to our liking, and now reality was trying to snap back to the shape it was used to holding. I waved out the back window of my yellow taxi cab as he disappeared, black t-shirt twisted at the shoulders under a heavy backpack, in to the wandering crowds of commuters.

Epilogue

I arrived in Varanasi with a brand-new chest cold from the journey and a pair of German friends picked up at the railway station in an attempt to out-smart the auto rickshaw racket. Sabri and Ann and I tripped up five flights of stairs to the roof-top dorm room, but the mesh walls seemed insufficient protection against the mid-monsoon rains, so we settled for cupboards with miniature windows for fifty rupees each. You make friends quickly when you travel alone.

Varanasi fascinated me for its proximity, its associations with death and water, with recycling and renewal. It presented me with the worst side of tourist-ready India, with heavy monsoons twisting the river and clouds obscuring the bright colors of the city, streets streaming with trash and cow patties (making dodging massive bulls in tiny alleys even more dangerous). My stomach twisted and my fragile sense of belonging balked at the offers of opium and obscene rides. The fourth of July passed on a roof top restaurant with my new friends and a trip down Jack Kerouac’s road, as it was meant to be traveled. On my last night, after viewing and considering and cleaning and preparing, we ate with the monkeys and watched the light fade and I felt better for knowing that I’d been and was ready to say goodbye.

At the station, I saw a head of blond hair far lighter than my own and we locked eyes and giggled and I sidled over and dropped my bag in imitation of hers. She was Finnish, and offered me a made-up name, Anne, when I tripped over her given one. We laughed at the ridiculous spectacle that Shiva’s city had laid at our feet, we laughed at the late train, and laughed at the habit of wandering the globe in circles to come home.

On the train, I was mistaken for a Canadian – always a compliment – and slept above a handsome German couple and across from a set of Bangladeshi Muslim clerics on pilgrimage. In the morning, I was cured – my chest was empty, my head was light, and my feet moved me of their own accord to book a ticket on to Delhi and a hostel for the night. Agra is not a place to stay. Agra is a place to stop through – Anne bought a ticket out for that very same night.

I visited a fort and a tomb and settled into an inner dialogue on the intricacies of carved stone and empire building and life as it had been passing in India. In the morning, I woke up just after sunrise, and entered The Monument with the first dozen visitors. The light was dull, but the white marble glowed like the oversized toy of a young prince, opalescent and immaculate and utterly secure in its own grandeur. I walked slowly, and made friends, and left them to walk in patterns formed on a whim and embedded with meaning after the fact.

Floating on my morning’s visual feast, I wandered on to a flaking teal bus, and followed my elementary school instructions to sit at the back (because other people, at other times, have been forced to sit at the back of the bus, so we who have the choice should sit there and leave the front for those who are older or otherwise require or enjoy the ease of the front). I was joined by a figure I had noticed that morning, watching the inlays glisten in the gloom of the inner tomb – a young Englishman, Ken, on his gap year adventures. We exchanged recent life stories, leaving bits buried in forty kilometers of upturned fields, and when the bus dropped us in Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s imagined capitol, we turned up the trash heap together, and were instantaneously married in the eyes of the hawkers pushing silver necklaces and glass beads and guided tours. We spent the next hour trying to shake off our self-assigned young guide, while looking up and out at the massive mosque we had entered, and the half hour after that climbing the next hill and feeling guilty because for once, this man had not asked for anything from either of us.

The Moghul Emperor Akbar’s court – abandoned after twelve years because the water had not been properly engineered and the new capitol was traded back for Agra and Delhi – spread before us, and for once I matched the squares in the guidebook with the stone blocks rising solidly on all four sides. My favorite pillar – and it’s important, when faced with so many beautiful carvings and so many monuments to pick favorites, otherwise it all blends together into one red stone wall – was the throne pillar, a fifteen-foot high seat connected to surrounding balconies by small passageways, so that Akbar could arrange clerics of every religion around him in a circle, and conduct theological debates with the hope of coming to some consensus. The clerics staged an uprising, and Akbar had them all killed for attempted regicide – but the seed idea was fascinating, and the pillar was decorated with symbols from a dozen faiths.

That night, on the train to Delhi, in my heavily sweat-stained shirt I matched the moon to my music, and the woman sitting next to me asked how many years I had lived in India. I smiled. At a wandering friend’s air conditioned home I unfolded and cleaned and prepared for re-entry. My head was still floating, prepared to look down at the expected marshmallow clouds. My hands were still, my clothes filthy, and my gifts stacked carefully and wrapped in one another to prevent breakage.

At the airport gift shop, I filtered through a pop-up version of the Kama Sutra, and thought about arriving in Delhi and hating the filth and loving the mountains and settling in the south and stretching my legs up and down the country and returning to the one place I felt in place for this extended vacation, and I decided that I don’t like to travel alone so I chatted with a beautiful British-Bangladeshi Nokia rep and we agreed that they’ll try to take you to the newest mall, but there’s so much to see and its all changing so fast that we were lucky to have visited and would be coming back soon for more.

Around the Bend: A Travel Novella (Part I)

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

Prologue

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

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

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

Chapter 1

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

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

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

Chapter 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(... to be continued...)

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

Life Without Commas: Lily Arrives in India (Again)

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

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

Dear Future Volunteer

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

Dear Future Volunteer,

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Lily

The Thank-You Letter

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

Dear Reader,

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you again for your time and your ongoing support.

Sincerely,

Lilliputian

Resident Alien Goddess

(My Body In India)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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