“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain til you see their specks dispersing?- it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
A little while later, our small congregation gathered in the main lobby into two semi-circles facing one another. Three more were departing for Hampi, five were remaining. One could shatter this feeling in the room, but I doubt anybody could describe it. It’s the inimitable experience of saying goodbye to a person when you don’t know when you may see them again. I may not see any of them again. Or perhaps, in a month, in a year, in a decade, some insane stars will align for a moment, and I’ll run into one of them. Or perhaps, with Sarah, I’ll take a road trip and find myself in Vermont, find her number, and track her down. That’s one of the fun and terrifying things about being a human, and getting to know other humans— you just never know.
I’ve been giving long hugs and saying assurances and giving out vague safety advice and telling people I will see them again when the reality is that I’m going through the very human experience of just not knowing. I guess and wonder and hope, but we can never know. My previous experience has not given me much hope. But I’m hoping that I’m past a point to see this whole goodbye experience as a negative one. I think about it and feel happy that people leave. It’s a reminder that the world is turning. It reminds you of virtually everything: leaves turning in fall and big fields of grass that are mowed and grow and mowed again, books you enjoy as you finish and think vaguely that you’ll never read it again, good and bad classes in school. What don’t we say goodbye to in the world? What doesn’t depart from our experience, only to resurface in a memory or in a similarity or a brief sway of déjà vu? People don’t die when they turn the corner outside of the guest house. Sarah didn’t fade into a fog of non-existence when I saw her shadow weld itself to the darkness of evening. Vanishing from sight does not equate with vanishing from existence.
Somewhere in their head, what their eyeballs are processing, that corner doesn’t remain still. They take the steps, and suddenly the corner becomes a path, which turns into a side-road, then a main-road, and it leads to a plane, train, bus, rickshaw, cab, motorcycle, bicycle, whatever else. And strange faces are waiting around the next corner or in buildings or on beaches or in shops we expect and do not expect to enter. Whole worlds unfold based entirely on whether I turn left or right. In a similar way, these people on these new paths will walk through doors, and not walk through others. And the world is constantly shaped by our movement, the precise way that we are shaped by the world’s movement.
We say goodbye in order to acknowledge that the other is still there. Saying goodbye is not an uncomfortable euphemism for an acknowledgment of death. Nobody simply becomes nothing when they leave. We part ways and our lives become richer, heavier with the weight of what lies behind us, more vibrant because of the multifaced nature of what lies ahead of us. We say goodbye and strain our ears, hoping to hear the faint beginning notes of a future hello laying in the silence after the word.
When I finally had to say goodbye to Juliana, Lindsay and Emily, three of my favorite people here, in one night, I started approaching Lindsay for a hug. Lindsay had been taking that whole night hard. She was pretending to look for the cab that was certainly not there yet. And I held my arms out, and she stepped back and shook her head. “Not yet.” And so I hugged Emily instead, and Lindsay finally approached me, reluctance spread across the whole of her face. And she was crying a bit.
That’s how crazy it is to say goodbye. That’s how heavy it can feel sometimes. I realized how tied up we get with other people. I’m happy people cry when we say goodbye, in a way, because it reminds us of how great other people are. It reminds us of how much love we have the capacity to form, and nourish, and feed, and how much that love is created simply because we like other people, and think they’re fun and exciting and full of energy, and they give something to us. Lindsay gave something to me nobody else could give. So did Emily, and Juliana, and Sarah, and everyone else, even the ones I didn’t spend much time with. So it’s crazy to let that go. It’s crazy to have your heart filled up because of another person in your life, and then to feel like it may deflate when you give them that last hug for a while. When you see their eyes one last time and tell them “have a safe journey”.
But I think we make it that way sometimes. I think we drain the joy from goodbye, when we should be recognizing the happiness in it. We should acknowledge the newness of saying goodbye, all of the pathways and strangers and unformed futures that is implied by the word goodbye. People come back, too. Lindsay has already made plans to visit Samantha and I on her way from San Diego to Santa Cruz. These were the more basic farewells. These were “see you in a while”.
And I admit, the transition of having a group of people one could call fairly consistent in that we would see each other every day, to seeing any semblance of a “group” blow away like smoke, is pretty disarming. It perks you up and gets you wondering about where the hell you are and what precisely is happening around you. It makes you wonder what isn’t made of smoke. And you start to think that maybe everything is just big bundles of smoke, forming and looking, smelling, seeming, being really enjoyable, but it’s always ready to spring away.
Two of those other people leaving with Sarah will probably, unless something very strange happens, never wind their way into my life again. Turning the guest house corner had a little more weight there, because it’s really infused with the feeling that it’s the last time you’ll see some people.
Why is that so difficult for people? Why is that so difficult for me? Or maybe difficult isn’t the correct word. Maybe it relates more to how amazing it is that people we know, even on a surface level, are just going to be gone. Individual’s worlds are horrifically small in comparison to the actual size of the planet. We don’t have very much room for a large amount of people. And we all have our homes, our locations we return to when journeys fade into their final notes. Those homes are all over the planet too, and we often don’t know where each other’s are, because we’re meeting on the paths, and we’re taking walks down and talking about what we see and what we’ve seen. How often do we get into where we always end up going back to?
But it isn’t sad. One of the guys is going to Japan for another semester. He’ll head home for a month, then go through the whole process again, a new culture, surrounded by people who most definitely look different from him, bombarded by a language he doesn’t comprehend, thrown into situations where fundamental assumptions are made that he will have to become adjusted to. That’s what India was like. That’s what, I would imagine, most countries are like. He’s excited for it all. Why should he not be? That’s the path he’s determined, and he’s ready to do it all.
I’ll say goodbye, because it’s important for me to do so. But I will not be sad when I do it. Whether I see a person again or not, our footprints went in the same direction for a time. We’ll always carry memories with us, and they may reshape themselves, fade into a dullness so that we struggle to remember first names, or vanish completely. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And I will take joy in time spent, not lament the ceasing of it.
I think Kerouac’s quote is great. I love the idea of people becoming specks, because it’s two-way. We slowly diminish into particles according to the other person. But we never cease. We never vanish. It’s only the leaves changing, moving from a green to an orange, or a red, and slowly a brown, and dropping down, fading into the earth, and winding its way, through energy or a spirit or whatever, back into a new plant. It’s the ‘too-huge world’ (and is it really too big?) trying to get the better of us, but I’m ready to wave happily, smile at my friends, and wonder, feeling mysteriously happy, whether I’ll see them again or not.
And I know that sometimes I will.
Instead, both yesterday and today, I've wandered around the guest house, paying little attention to what people are doing (they are mostly busy with essays and doing things on the computer involving travel), messing around on other people's tablas (because mine are in the mail), and staring at pages and pages of reading I never had the motivation to read during the year.
I have things I can blame this apathy on. I can blame it on my opinion of this academic institution. I can blame it on the ungodly dullness of my classes. I can blame it on, well, whatever. I do blame it on these things. But I'm tired of complaining about it.
The amount of shit that gets talked on the University of Hyderabad may be warranted, but it also gets pretty old. I wonder sometimes if we're just a spoiled whiny group of American students. Then I remember that each person on this program has scooped together thousands of dollars to be here. I guess it makes sense for people to be so unhappy with how things are here.
I don't know what I am. Completely unmoved. I don't give a damn about my finals. I don't even give a modicum of a damn. It's irresponsible on my part. But there you go. Grit my teeth and pass my classes to the best of my ability. Cruise. It's what my brain prefers these days. And sleeping.
I think there's a funk here because my partner in everything India took a nasty shot below the belt, and she had to recuperate. I'm glad she went home. I was starting to really get worried about things when she finally got on the plane home. And now she seems happier, she seems to be steadily recovering, and at least it feels like she has access to medical services one can trust.
I told Sam that it feels selfish to feel badly. It feels silly. Individuals here gave up a lot of people and treasured comforts for six months. Sam will only be gone for a month. Or, I mean, I will only be gone for one more month. Then we'll be reunited, and it feels so good. But she astutely pointed out that we came here not thinking we'd give each other up for half a year. We went together, and at the end of everything, for reasons beyond anybody's control but god's, she had to leave early. So am I justified to feel like crap? In a way, I guess.
Am I justified to pretend like finals don't matter? Probably not, but I'm doing that anyway. I don't worry about these things until I'm trying to take the test, and my lack of preparedness sinks in. It's just one quarter. And I wasn't here to study. I was here to see India. It's been my mantra, the little saying that comes in handy when I want to reduce any guilt involved in not reading articles that don't interest me, or writing essays a day before they're due. I'm here to see the country.
Now I just want this last week to end. I don't know where I'll go after I'm done here. I'll be glad to move on. I may go somewhere with my roommate before I go to Sri Lanka. We were talking Goa. Just sit by the beach and think. Or not think. Even that sounds a little exhausting right now.
It's only a month now. Feels almost like a countdown.
Today, like many other days, I’m writing this blog while burning incense, listening to music (Led Zeppelin), and typing accompanied by a burning candle.
Unlike other days, I’m writing it from my home in Moreno Valley, California.
Much has happened for Kevin and I in these passed three weeks. Sometime around October 24th, I began having nightly fevers: a rather unfortunate yet nightly clockwork cycle of intense chills, followed by alarmingly high fevers, sweats, and sleeplessness. This continued for a week until I final went to a doctor at Apollo Health City in Hyderabad on October 31st, the beginning of what would be many visits to two different doctors, leading to over 12 different blood, urine, and body-imaging tests, and 11 different medications. What would arise out of this would be four different diagnoses: urinary tract infection, viral fever, malaria, and hepatitis.
Technically, by medical definition, I did end up with hepatitis, or an enlargement of the liver. This led to a slew of viral hepatitis and HIV tests—all of which were negative (of course).
Malaria was seen as the main culprit. Although a malaria smear test had come back negative, my main doctor felt that it was a false negative: malaria takes a cycle through your body in order to duplicate itself and can sometimes not show up on smears. But all my symptoms screamed malaria and I was missing symptoms of many of the other tropical diseases that so many other Indians become afflicted with in the course of their lives.
But, with the fevers continuing in spite of two different kinds of antimalarials and broad spectrum antibiotics, as well as an enlarged liver and a doctor who hinted at needing to admit me into her hospital, both, my parents and myself felt it would be prudent of me to look into coming home. Kevin agreed. I didn’t want to get worse in a hospital so far away from home, especially so close to the ending of our program: Kevin and I are finished with our classes, all we are waiting for are finals and then a freedom to travel until we board a plane to come home.
Luckily, medical insurance through EAP is amazing. Medical Evacuation was covered under our plan and I was placed on a Business Class seat on KLM three days from the day I initially and frantically called them to start a medical case file. The day I boarded KLM was the marker for 2.5 weeks of nightly fevers above 102F. I landed in LAX on Sunday, November 11 to a teary-eyed mother and an appointment with the second in command of Infectious Diseases at Loma Linda hospital (thanks to an incredible friend through my old church, Kieth Anderson).
My meeting with this doctor was incredible: not only did she meet me on incredibly short notice, she opened her clinic an hour and a half early just to meet me and figure out my case. Since our meeting on Monday, they’ve taken a lot of blood for me. We are specifically testing for malaria (I have blood taken twice a day, 6 hours apart in order to catch the parasite in my blood) as well as Hepatitis E, liver functions, and Dengue fever. Since my arrival in California I have not had another fever until today: my last fever before today was on my flight from Amsterdam to Los Angeles. Luckily I have an appointment with my doctor at Loma Linda tomorrow to review tests and discuss my fever patterns and hopefully the blood tests will yield some helpful results.
It has been a frantic couple of weeks. How quickly things changed. Today, in a heap of exhaustion, my grandmother, mother, and I all watched a documentary on the Dalai Lama. Throughout the movie, however, the documentary highlights different aspects of Indian culture. It made me feel a sense of loss to see those oddly comforting familiar faces and scenes: human beings like sardines on trains steaming through agricultural heavens, beautiful chocolate-skinned women with stunning gold nose piercings and brightly colored saris, a busy side ally with men and women squatting on the ground selling any vegetable one could possibly want, begging children and men on rolling carts coasting down the streets of Delhi, Himalayan hillsides with terracing… prayer flags, Hindu temples, mosques. I clutched my pillow tightly, a little sad: that was my India.
In the midst of that spiraling nostalgia, however, the next image was helpful. The image was of an elaborately decorative sand mandala: a huge Tibetan Buddhist 3-day endeavor of colored sand and tiny designs and careful hands and religious images: greatly symbolic and beautiful and difficult and spiritual and time-consuming. At the end of the creation and celebration of sand mandala, however, the people that strained over it use those old wooden brooms tucked away in their monasteries or houses and simply sweep it all away- their hard work gone in the swiftness of one moment and one movement. Therefore, the sand mandala is symbolic of an important Buddhist principle: all of this around us is temporary.
My time in India was temporary. I knew this, but I also thought I securely held a couple of different plane tickets in my hand- one to Delhi to see the Taj Mahal, one to Sri Lanka to explore Buddhism and jungles and pilgrimage sites with my beautiful Kevin at my side. I had plans and dreams and Lonely Planet marked up. I had told people I wouldn’t be home till December 14th. Come on God/Great Spirit/Life- I’m supposed to be there till December 14th!
But, I had totally forgotten that both, myself and India, are and always will be extraordinary sand mandalas.
I had many moments towards the end of my time in India that were characterized by real fear: I was really, genuinely sick, and the doctors didn’t fully know what was wrong with me. I realized that people die. That I could die. That sometimes you just get bit by the wrong mosquito, or you step in the wrong grass and get bit by the wrong snake, or you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time and something happens. People my age die. Good, amazing, inspiring people my age die. Not for any reason or for any punishment, but because that happens. Because we’re all sand mandalas and there are lots of brooms, and if there aren’t brooms there are some nice breezes, or there are children who run inside to have dinner and didn’t look down when they came in. And that’s okay, its just the way it is.
And when I realized that, I knew that it was important for me to do all I could to come home and spend my time trying to heal with my family around me, that what was important was making my family feel safe, making me feel safe, and that fulfilling some self created ideal of what India was supposed to be (it was supposed to be till December 14th !) was not necessary and was some odd form of self-imposed attachment. What is important to me is my health and my relationships with loved ones- when I need them and they need me. What I had to do was make strides at healing a body that I need to have last me a lot longer than 20 years old- I mean, I need to go back to India again, and I still have all of Africa to see!
So here I am- home. I met my baby nephew Jayden and my mom took the whole week off work to be my “personal hand maiden.” I’m missing India in a way that is sweet and gentle and knowing. Knowing because I have sense of peace and confidence that I’ll go back to that beautiful and complex country again some day, and I’ll explore what I didn’t get to explore this time, and with a profound appreciation for all of it. In the meantime, how fitting that I come back to California in time for Thanksgiving? I have absolutely so many things to be thankful for here in California and in India. And, amongst those things in India, my glorious Kevin who had played my personal nurse, maid, and hero these passed few weeks before I left for home. I love you, Kevin. You really are my hero and I miss you so much already.
A few California things to be thankful for:
1) Family (particularly baby nephews and hand maiden mothers)
2) Friends (the ones that have called, emailed, and shown up at my house with flowers and hugs)
3) Mom food (homemade veggie stew) and Mexican food (God bless the burrito)
4) Bath tubs with bubbles
5) Southern California in Autumn: Red leaves, scarves, pine trees, mountain tops, and valleys that are so clear from November breezes that you think you can see forever
So, I love you India, you can be sure I'll be back.
But you, California... its really, really good to be home.
Oh, and by the way, as stated on this website: I'm still not freakin scared of malaria. :-)
Some pictures, as always...
Meeting my baby nephew...
With my sister and my mother
"This is from India... some day, I'll take you there."
Visits from my grandmother and my step brother
So, Samantha and I have met some interesting people and had some interesting moments I'm pretty sure never got related. It's certainly worth relating now:
Hoshang Merchant Encounter #2: Run For Your Life!
I was waiting for my independent study professor to show up at the english department, reading a book of post-modern poetry and offending nobody. I try to keep a low profile most of the time. But my efforts failed dismally, for after a couple of minutes, something dark in the air changed.
Suddenly I hear a voice I know well and fear deeply. Hoshand Merchant, the homosexual poet's voice of University of Hyderabad, has sniffed me out.
I look up and find he's leaning heavily on the same table I'm reading at, his long kurta hanging over the desk, his crooked smile directed right at me, his hungry eyes trying to burrow into my soul.
"What are you reading?"
I hold the book up awkwardly. "Post-modern poetry."
"Ohh, that sounds just lovely. Just lovely."
Pretty soon he's on a tangent about how he COULD have gone to an American University for a month to give lectures and generally improve all aspects of that university's life through the sheer magic of his character. "But they didn't want to pay me what I wanted..." He sighs heavily and closes his eyes in mock or real pain. "So I didn't go. I just couldn't."
Oh, man. I am reminded of why I disliked his reading and him so greatly. A complete drama-queen who has nothing to say that doesn't involved him as the subject.
After a little while, he learns that I'm taking a poetry class with another professor. He is both impressed and humiliated. His eyes and mouth go wide with shock. "Why did you not take a writing class with ME? I am the poet of this department!" He moves to the open door of his office and I think "Thank Krishna, he's too hurt to talk any longer." But no. Definitely not. I couldn't get out of his clutches without a little obscure allusion-infused verbal molestation:
He looks back at me with his serpentine eyes, a devilish grin, and says "Fe Fi Fo fum, I smell the blood of an english one!" And vanishes into his office.
I'm sitting there, my little book of poems in my hand, completely dumbstruck as to what he just said to me, and what it's supposed to mean. By this point in our university's career, this man's dark deeds are well known to me. I know that a former SIP student was kicked out of Hoshang's class for complaining about a sexual and racist comment muttered to him at the end of a class by Hoshang. I know that he asks our friend Zeph crude and unprompted questions about sex when Zeph asks him about purely academic concerns. I know he has called our friend Matin, and asked in terms too disgusting to repeat about when Matin will come over and please him. He's a filthy, deranged, and worthless professor. I am not in the least comfortable with him making references to a story where a giant (whose line he quoted) EATS a boy. The implications are far too disturbing.
He emerges again with a book in his hand. "You're the english one." He points his wormy finger at me from across the room, and sweeps near to hand me a book. His book. A copy of which I've already received through Zeph. (And the three or four that I read were about as terrible as I expected). He hands it to me, and resumes his leering position over me, leaning on the table, when a stranger came into the office, a stranger I never saw but will be eternally grateful towards. Someone who yelled “Hoshang!” And he turned, his eyes lit up, his arms spread out for a hug, and he pranced away into the hallway to embrace a woman who inadvertently saved me from being devoured. I made a swift escape, and never saw him again…
…except, once. It was a frightening moment. I was buying ice cream at the place to get food on campus, and I turn and see him strolling through, his arms behind his back, his chin a little pointed towards the sky (or was it his nose?), dark sunglasses on, and a troop of five students following him like crippled orphan puppies. I ducked behind a corner and waited for the dark feelings in my soul to go away.
Hyderabadi Police and Auto-Rickshaws: Not in Front of Barrista, You Won’t!
Sam and I went to a coffee place in Banjara Hills (Read: Little America), and as we came outside there were ten or so auto-rickshaws parked in front of the building. There’s a lot of willing-to-pay customers that come from that coffee place, and a lot of them are white (pay twice as much sometimes). Sam and I knew this and walked across the street, where bargaining would be a little simpler.
We were standing on the center median, waiting to walk across, when I heard a siren, far off in the distance. Vaguely turning my head I saw a large tow-truck like vehicle approaching, and thought even more vaguely that it seemed a little strange. Just as I turned my head back to the street we were trying to cross, I heard glass shatter.
And another.
Sam and I turned back to see that tow truck pulled up alongside the row of rickshaws, and a man with a long wooden stick beating the rearview mirrors on the right side of the autos, one by one. He got to the fourth when a crafty driver pulled out right in front of the truck and sped off. A couple other drivers weren’t so quick. They truck left six or seven rickshaw drivers equipped with one less mirror.
Most of the drivers were laughing. The two drivers of the tow truck and the mirror-smasher had a strange solemnity that I think can only be attributed to how gravely the city of Hyderabad takes its problem of rickshaws. They appear to see it as some sort of blight. Or they just don’t like them parking there. But I definitely got the impression that they were making a full day of work out of vandalizing rickshaws all over the city.
I saw the city of Hyderabad considers them a blight because there’s a newly-introduced effort to ban them from the city, and institute a “loan-helping program” where rickshaw owners can apply for easy loans to afford a cab, which will improve the city’s “traffic problem”. A traffic problem is all that was cited.
Now I may not understand the complicated mechanics of traffic. I know there’s definitely a science to how cars get backed up on roads. But it seems common sense that smaller, more numerous vehicles will be less of a problem than full-sized cabs. Does it not? I invite anyone to correct me. So I think a question needs to be asked. What does Hyderabad really want to do away with rickshaws for?
All we have to do to understand is look at Mumbai, which phased them out for the purpose of improving aesthetics. And we need not be surprised by this. Thousands of people’s lives changed (and most of them harmed, no doubt), for the sake of a city’s image. Way to go Mumbai. And way to go Hyderabad!
Loan-sharing, in all likelihood, will not do a whole lot for the majority of rickshaw drivers. They live day to day as it is. Can we suppose that a loan will be enough incentive for them to invest in a much more expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, expensive to fuel, and difficult piece of machinery? Rickshaws are good for both sides because of their simplicity. You just stick your hand out, and soon enough you’re in a rickshaw. They’re easy to work. Taxis, on the other hand, are far more expensive, to use one and to fix. So it’s pretty silly to think it’ll just be a clean change.
Anyway. The very interesting part of this story is just the understanding one gains about Indian police. They don’t like something, they smash it. Couple that with Parth’s lesson “They stop you for anything, pay 20 rupees!”, we have a pretty solid method of comprehending them.
Rickshaw Ride From HELL: Pull the %*$! Over!
I had to go into the city to sort out some complications with railway tickets. I was not relishing it, because getting into town can be hard, and I was under the impression that I was in a hurry.
I got to the station, went to fix things, and the man would do nothing for me without showing him Samantha’s passport. Well, damnit. I was more than a little tempted to bribe him, but I haven’t bribed anyone here, and I don’t know the science of it. I’m sure he would have gone for twenty rupees, but when you want to bribe somebody, there seems to be a need for some kind of finesse. And with language barriers, it becomes only more troublesome. I’d give him the money and probably have to explain four times what it was for. And anyway, what if he didn’t take bribes? What if I was arrested, taken to some prison up in Bihar, given a fake Bangladeshi passport, paraded around the country as the latest invention by Muslim extremists to blow up trains, and executed for efforts to bring down the great nation of India?
I mean, you never know.
So I decided to go back, and take care of it by going AGAIN into the city, because the office was open late.
Auto-drivers wait like famished hawks outside of any major traveling station. And they love white people. They love white people the same way some people love dogs. You can kick them, starve them, and spit in their water, but as long as it ends with a good friendly pat, they’ll love you forever. “Thank you so MUCH for taking us to this place for four times regular price!”
So ten men congregate around me, shouting out the same price, which is far too high. I just want to go by meter, an option they all find repugnant. They form unions in the blink of an eye, where you may THINK of you have options, that surely one guy will come down or go by meter, but they all stand there shaking their heads, knowing you have no choice. 130 or nothing.
But a man holds his hand up in the back. A big smile, and comforting smile. “Meter.”
I clap my hands and mock sorrow for the others, who are obviously upset at the scab who broke protocol. “Maf Kijiyeh!” (“Sorry!”), and I walk off with him. I should have known.
He turns the meter, we go off, and I’m watching it very closely, to ensure it isn’t tampered with. But it never moves. The guy checks after a couple of kilometers, pretends he’s amazed for about half a second then says “Sir, my meter is broken, but we can go for 150!”
“Pull over.” I’m not surprised, and not worried. I just don’t want to deal with this guy. But he doesn’t pull over.
“No sir, we can go for one fifty.”
“No, just pull over, I want to go by meter.
“What’s your price?”
“Meter! I said meter! Why did you tell me meter when it was broken?”
“150 is good price sir.”
“Will you just pull over?”
“No sir. Name your price.”
“100.” (they’d never want to do this, and he scoffs.
“Please sir, 150.”
“Pull over! Stop! Stop! Enough!” I’m trying all English and Hindi words that come to mind. But he won’t listen. He keeps going. I become seriously furious. It’s the most angry I’ve been at someone since I’ve come to India, because he just says “noooo sir!” with his stupid friendly grin and assures me 150 is fair. I want to punch him right in his stupid face.
Finally, when he believes I may jump out of the rickshaw he’s trying so hard to kidnap me with, he says “Okay, one-hundred.” But only the pacify me. Not really to AGREE on a price.
After that he amuses himself by asking every half a minute if I will pay him 130 instead.
“sir, 130?”
“No!”
“Pllleeeasse, sir.”
“No!”
“Plllease sir.
“No! 100!”
“No, sir, 130, pleassee!”
And so on, and so on, and so on. I get him to shut up by extracting my ipod, pretending it’s a cell phone, and making up another language that he won’t understand, while occasionally throwing in “please sir” in the conversation to indicate I’m talking about him. But he doesn’t say anything. But, stupidly I put it away and he begins again.
FINALLY, we reach Gachibowli, which is close to campus, and what we have to tell them for them to know where to go (nobody knows about our campus, really). He stops, turns, I step out, so angry I’m prepared to walk the last mile to campus, when I open my wallet and…
I only have a 500 rupee bill. I try to explain this, that I need to go a little further to borrow money, and suddenly he’s not so friendly. He agrees, but I have to tell him I’ll pay him 130.
I get to campus, find Uncle Das, the coolest man in the world, and pay the stupid driver his stupid fee. And he’s upset at 130. He doesn’t understand why I’m not giving him 150, or even more. After all, didn’t he take me to campus? Didn’t he pet me like a good dog?
No. Go away. I hate you. I didn’t say it, but I felt it. I certainly felt it.
Professor Mohanty, the Creative Writer: The Cause of All Misery
I took on an independent study project so I could try to enjoy my classes a little more, but it turned out to be my worst class by far. It’s run by the head of the English department who has the attention span of a three-year old. Whenever I’m speaking in his office he’ll get up and leave because something colorful in the other room has attracted him, or he has a paper he wants to sign.
He has good info when HE talks, but the worst listening skills I’ve ever seen. He asks me to do presentations and then stares at the floor while I talk. He asked me to write some poems, after about six weeks, and I brought in two. He read the first one (I think- either he glossed it or he’s a fast reader), then looks at the second, which is two pages long. After the first page he glances at me, smiles and says “These are good. I didn’t know you could write.” And hands them back to me, the second page untouched.
Anyway.
We missed two classes because he was gone and then there was a school holiday. So I find him the day after the holiday to reschedule, and he says (And this is around October 23rd or so) “Actually, I’ll be gone until November 7th. We can meet then.” And walks into his office.
I’m both elated and angered, elated because I don’t like the class, angry because I hate being blown off in the way I was just blown off, but I go back to the SIP House, and eventually decide I’ll just drop the class anyway. I really didn’t need it.
Arjun, Tabla Maestro: All Good Things Come From Tabla
Samantha and I have been taking tabla. It’s a very, very good experience I’ve gotten out of being here, and I love playing the instrument. Another plus is that we have a very cool and (inadvertently) funny tabla teacher. His name is Arjun.
There’s pretty much no where to start with this guy. He’s just a very intriguing character. A good place to start though, is names. He has weird issues with names. He ended up learning all of ours very well, except for two. One person, Kyle, he calls “yourself.” “So for this Kaida, why don’t Samantha and uh… um, yourself play together?” He finally learned it because we all made a concerted effort in class to address Kyle loudly by his name, so now Arjun calls him “Koah”, but he can’t be faulted for that, Indians just have a difficult time with Kyle’s name anyway.
He also calls Juliana ‘Jubliana’, like Jubilee Hills’, but she likes it.
The funniest thing about Arjun, unfortunately, probably has something to do with his unique phrasing. I hope we don’t find him funny because of bad English, because its not that. It’s that he choose really strange ways to say things.
He was trying to teach us the art of good dukkha playing (dukkha is the big piece that makes a deep sound), and one has to press the heel of their hand onto the surface of the drum. He demonstrates on all of our wrists so we can observe the pressure and says “You see? This is invisible beauty! You must strive for invisible perfection!”
Arjun also loves a good hierarchy. Even in the first class, he tried to establish people who would be his “go-to’s”. Initially he found that person in Alex, who plays very well. Something happened halfway through classes though, and the leader shifted to me. The leader has weird responsibilities. It makes it kind of awkward, though we all feel its weird, so its not like people resent the leader. But as Arjun will be leaving a practice, he’ll say
“You must practice for at least one more hour. Then, perfection will come! So… uh, Kevin, why don’t you lead the team?” And then he’ll stand there smiling until he’s satisfied that we’re off on the beginning of a very beautiful practice.
Or other times, if he gets confused: “Kevin, what are we playing right now?” “Kevin, what is she saying?” (If there’s a language issue), “Kevin, will you set the tempo?” It’s basically just a little bit odd. There’s a video on Youtube of Arjun demonstrating what we’re playing for our performance in a few days, and if you listen carefully, as we’re all sitting behind him like a warped version of sesame street, he looks to his right, where I’m sitting behind him and says “Kevin, what tempo shall I play?” and I awkwardly mutter nothing for a bit until he decides what tempo he should play, and he’s off.
We have problems with complicated questions. “Arjun, should I hit that note like this, or like this?” “Yes!” “Arjun, how do you determine the balance between pressure and speed?” “Practice, you must practice!” “Arjun, are we doing this for the performance, or will there be something different?” “You will know from what I have told you!”
Or, the most complicated problem is money. When we’re due to pay him, he stands, looks at all of us, then says “So, Alex, um… payment?” And then we all extract our money. But people haven’t gone to all the lessons, so they tell him: “Arjun, this is 600 because I missed two lessons.” “Oh no no, you can pay full, it is fine!” “No, but I didn’t go to two, so I don’t think…” “No no, we all have it, we all know, we all are practicing perfectly! Full price I think is best.”
We think he kind of plays dumb on us when these problems come up.
Either way, he’s a good guy, and he’s taught us a lot, and he’s very excited for the performance. Hopefully I can find a tabla teacher when I return (or pick up drums, per Samantha’s suggestion).
There’s more stories, of course. I’ll leave it here. Maybe I’ll write a part deux later.
Kevin and I haven’t gone anywhere by ourselves since our one year anniversary.
After Kerala, and the relishing of a boat ride where all that mattered was waking one another up and watching the sunrise, or finding a little, rotten shack by the water on Vypeen Island all for ourselves, it was mandatory for both of us to relish it all again- only this time, on the other side of India, at the Bay of Bengal, in the ex-French colony of Pondicherry.
Almost all the international students here with us have already been to Pondicherry, and on our way out the door they were all shouting restaurant recommendations, their favorite hotel accommodations, and directions to the best beaches- None of which Kevin and I actually remembered.
Our taxi barely made it to the train, arriving only minutes before departure, and our taxi driver even saying on the way “You have… well… 80% chance of not making it.” As we pulled up, he pointed to the train on the second platform, hurriedly explaining that THAT one was ours, and that we needed to just walk ACROSS the train tracks of the first platform and get ourselves into the first open door. Which we did- successfully, after some encouragement from Kevin as I stood on the platform and he on the tracks, with me eyeing both directions as he waived his hand at me to jump down, promising it was safe for me to run across the tracks- despite my having seen “Fried Green Tomatoes” and KNOWING all too well what happens when people play on train tracks. (For those who haven’t seen that movie, Chris O’Donnell, everyone’s favorite character, gets his foot stuck and dies while rescuing a woman’s Sunday hat that had been stolen by a light breeze and joyously blown onto the tracks below.)
Nevertheless, we were on our way, with fruit and train tickets and vague ideas of where we might try to stay.
We arrived in Chennai the next morning and found ourselves at the biggest bus terminus in all of Asia. Yes. The biggest. We were there. And, in the midst of the biggest bus terminus in Asia we found our bus to Pondicherry and jumped inside, feel very proud of how comfortable we are traveling in India after these passed 4 ½ months.
On the bus, a friendly resident of the state of Tamil Nadu, Vazeer, an online English teacher, made conversation with us. Kevin and I were both incredibly over-involved in our books: Kevin was reading Pablo Neruda’s memoirs while I engulfing myself with a book called “A Fine Balance” about life in India during the national Emergency of the 70’s. He opened the conversation with, “You both look like VORACIOUS readers!”
And I thought, “Did he just say ‘voracious’?”
After our bus ride, he invited us out to lunch in Pondicherry, which resulted in a rather quiet consumption of biryani and vegetable noodles, a fight for the bill, and cordial “goodbye.” Kevin and I found a rickshaw and made our way into the French area of town.
The first stop was a hotel on the beach, which turned out to be the ashram/hotel of Sri Aurobindo, and included rules such as “No alcohol” and “Curfew 10:30PM” and other things youthful folk such as ourselves are less inclined to be a part of. After walking a block or so south, we found another hotel that had only a few rooms looking towards the ocean- one of which Kevin and I snagged for 700 rupees a night.
700 rupees? Magh! I call this priceless!
Going down the beach...
After unpacking, I passed out into a heap of sleep, and Kevin did some initial explorations. When I awoke, we wandered down the main street of town and followed some random back alleys into other areas. Our findings include…
1) A large, rather epic, Gandhi statue. This is not surprising. You find these all over India.
2) An “Aqua Show.” A small, but earnest attempt at a fish and aquarium show. It also included a small grassy knoll to show off some bunnies and goats. I think the show itself was run by a farmer/environmental/agricultural organization.
3) A park of war memorials. This led to a realization on my part: Europeans are big on their war memorials. Maybe just Western cultures in general. I haven’t seen more than 1 or 2 war memorials in DELHI… then I come to Pondicherry and it is like being in Washington D.C. again. However, immediately upon having this thought, I realized that India just doesn’t do a lot of foreign wars. Then again, they’ve had a lot of internal conflict. Maybe that’s why we see Gandhi statues or even just people statues everywhere- they have people memorials rather than war memorials.
4) A bookstore. These are the death of Kevin and I. I bought “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Kevin bought some Thich Nhat Hanh and Culdera books.
5) A fancy French restaurant… that served wine.
Gandhi statues V. War memorials: You decide
And that is where dinner begins. I am not your typical college student. I don’t drink at parties. I’m the one that has a sip of Kevin’s drink, or maybe just has a small rum/coke thing and then calls it a night and goes to bed. However, I come from a family of hard core wine drinkers. I’ve never liked wine, either, but I am eerily determined to enjoy it. In that spirit, Kevin and I wanted to enjoy a glass of wine with our French dinner in our French colony.
Wine: the other water
We both got white wine, and ordered massive amounts of bread, French onion soup, quiche, and pesto pasta (kind of French), and then apple tarts with custard and vanilla cream. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of ordering Quiche Lorraine, totally forgetting that “Lorraine” means “quiche with a whole mess of bacon cooked inside it.”
I didn’t know what to do. I ordered it. Its already in front of me. But I haven’t had pig in over a year. Kevin and I consulted one another. Kevin said he’d probably just eat it. I agreed- I never wanted to be the crazy, wasteful, hater vegetarian who couldn’t just suck it up and enjoy something should it already be in front of her. So, I did. I took a bite or two. And honestly? I just couldn’t eat it. Could NOT eat it.
Look, I don’t think pigs have intense mental processes, or that humans aren’t “intended” to eat meat. (Although, on the “intended to eat meat” argument, the human body’s intestines are only designed to digest remarkably small amounts of meat- amounts that we get in HALF of one burger or steak.) I became vegetarian because I feel that American consumption of meat and the lifestyle of mass consumption of animal products in general is not only harmful to the people eating it, but also to the environment (that absolutely can not sustain it), the workers (who are usually immigrants with zero rights within the walls of a really dangerous, unsafe factory), the animals (who shouldn’t have to be pumped with steroids and live totally miserable lives for no reason other than to meet the demand of us carnivores/herbivores) and the ever-globalizing attitude that “meat = high class/developed”, and therefore ALL nations eager to join the “Mile High Club of Consumption” should up their meat intake, and further continue the cycle of mass environmental, social, and physical degradation.
(I’m also intrigued in spiritual vegetarianism as well, and the notion that eating vegetables and non-animal products is something that causes less harm to everyone in general- which fits nicely with trying to live as peacefully and non-violently as possible. But that’s a slightly different conversation than the whole cycle explained above.)
However, one thing I always promised myself was to remain open. I know in India that meat consumption is definitely low key here. People raise the cow, most Hindus don’t even eat it, and Muslims go buy it only if they are cooking cow for dinner THAT night. I told myself- if I was ever in a position where a host had cooked me meat or there was some kind of cultural experience involved, I’d see it as not a part of the structural violence of the American meat packing industry, but as part of a different attitude, one of sustainable consumption practices of people other than the good ol’ US. Or that I just needed to be polite. But, back to the story.
So I have some pig in some egg in front of me. And I just can’t eat it. So I had them pack it up, and later that night I gave it to a homeless woman who couldn’t care less if there was a little porky-pig in her meal that night- she NEEDED to eat. This seemed the best option. I know- not a very climactic ending, but a memory worth remembering. Its one of the moments that contribute to the construction of myself as a “Vegetarian.”
After wine, dinner, and an hour conversation on the beach, it was bed time.
The next morning, we took a bicycle rickshaw to the center of town and rented a scooter for the day. We took the scooter down the road and towards the beach, finding a nice, secluded area were the only people nearby were at least a half kilometer away. Kevin went straight for the water, and I laid back to enjoy the sand.
The typical "Couple goes on vacation" shot where you either have us holding the camera away like this, or an awkwardly set up timed shot.
Pretty soon, however, Kevin came running out of the water to announce that he had been attacked by a jellyfish. Nothing serious. Just a red lashing to his leg. He quickly returned to the water, hardly phased by the potential of another jelly encounter, because Kevin loves the water THAT much. He was attacked two or three more times during the duration of the swim. I went swimming once, and I only had to see the fat, floating brain of a jellyfish to know that I didn’t want to get attacked by it, and got out of the water.
"SAM! There are Jellyfish!" Then, surveying the damage. Then "Screw it! I don't care!"
In my Indian bathing suit (i.e. Western clothing) enjoying the jellyfish-free sand.
We drove back into town and showered off the sand, changed clothes, and found a little restaurant serving really good spaghetti. We drove the scooter around the beach for a little longer until stopping for ice cream, and then headed back into town to drop it off.
Scooter-ing
On the way back to return the scooter, we stopped at a Hindu temple for that fine elephant-headed god, Ganesh. Outside the temple was a giant, elaborately painted elephant, “blessing” people for a rupee. This is the best money-making method in the universe: train an elephant to bless people outside of a temple dedicated to an elephant-headed Hindu god. Genius. Unfortunately, Kevin and I watched one father go crazy on his daughter when she wanted to take a picture with her brother next to the elephant. After grabbing her brother’s hand and putting on her photograph smile, he yelled at her, to which she responded by refusing to move, and then he began to hit her until she ran around the corner to her mom. All of this in front of that big elephant.
The temple pimp
Who knows, the girl could have been a crazy, wild, unmanageable one, but I hate watching little girls go through shit. How hard it is to be female in India. Now, America is NOT perfect either, its hard to be female in America, too. But India is a different kind of hard (again, more generalizations)- with marriage expectations, with dowry bullshit, with a total lack of control over your own life (depending on how your parents are), with boys being completely and openly favored over girls at birth, being horribly stared at, being a minority… when married Hindu women ask me about America and about my life, they ask this list of questions (usually):
1) Which country? (Answer: Ah-mer-ee-cah.)
2) You are married? (Answer: Yes. Point to Kevin.)
3) How many sons? (Answer: No sons. I am busy being a student. I do not want children.) (Response: Oh. No sons.)
4) Do you have brothers? (Answer: Not really. Just a sister.) (Explaining step-siblings is complicated.)
Sometimes they point to my neck and ask why I’m not wearing a certain type of jewelry worn by some married women. Or, some women have actually pointed to my arm and asked me why Kevin’s name wasn’t tattooed to it, and explain this by pointing to THEIR arms and showing me their husband’s name in black ink on their forearm.
Again, let me reiterate, not all women have these problems- some have different versions of these problems, some worse, some better, some totally different. These are just a few I’ve encountered, and I struggle with them deeply.
The other day during the writing of this blog, Kevin and I spent some time sitting in front of Mecca Masjid- the second largest mosque in India. All the women were sitting outside in their black robes, waiting for their husbands or brothers or sons to get out of prayer. And Kevin and I sat there, wondering, “Where do the women pray? Where’s the women’s section?” Who knows. I don’t. Maybe its in the mosque across the street from Mecca Masjid, maybe its in a downstairs or upstairs area like how it is separated at the Riverside mosque. I don’t know. But I struggle with it. I struggle with it because I don’t want to make assumptions about something I don’t understand. I want to talk to one of these women- and I haven’t yet. That is something that has gone unfulfilled so far about this trip- I really wanted to spend some time speaking to the Muslim women around me.
Back at the Ganesh temple, Kevin and I shared looks of compassion and went inside. We circled the center area once, then sat down along a wall to watch people in their holy moments. I like this more than trying to participate myself.
Then we dropped off the scooter. One thing I’ve forgotten to tell you is that Kevin and I damaged the scooter during our beach outing. We had a dropping/freak accident where the scooter ended up in the sand, tires spinning (we were not on it at that point). We had never looked at the damage when it happened, only wanted to get up and go before any one saw what happened. It started making weird sounds the rest of the day. When we arrived to drop it off, the people surveyed the scooter and realized immediately something had happened to it and said they were going to withhold the deposit we gave them (100 rupees to rent for the day ($2.50), 200 rupee deposit ($5).) At first, Kevin and I pretended to be outraged- how DARE they assume we damaged their scooter and that the cost of fixing it would be 200 rupees! Then they started making phone calls. Kevin and I looked at one another, both of us knowing that we probably messed up something fundamental about the brakes and front wheel, decided that its probably going to cost them much MORE than 200 rupees to fix, and decided to just run and leave before they came back to us.
At first we were mad- we lost our deposit. Then we realized we rented and damaged a scooter- all for 300 rupees. In other words? HA!
After that, we wandered down the street and found another street of interesting stores: a handmade paper store (we bought stuff to do origami as well as some sandalwood incense), then a Indian arts store where I bought beautiful red, yellow, and green beaded, dangling earrings like the one’s an old friend of my mom’s used to make by hand. We told ourselves, “no more shopping,”- that was until we saw a “Spiritual Bookstore.” Kevin went in and came out 30 minutes later with 4 or 5 new books on Buddhism.
We found a little area with some live music. The live music was being played by two young boys and a girl (probably college aged). All their music, except for one song, were American covers: Jewel, Green Day, Alanis Morisette, and Evanescence. It was eerie. We left and had dinner at our favorite French restaurant. Drank a whole bottle of red wine and ate three or four baskets of bread with oil and vinegar, feeling vivacious and young and adventurous and present. We had a little bit left in the bottle and didn’t know if it was appropriate to take the bottle with us—so we called my mom and step father and clarified international wine etiquette with them. They said to take the bottle with us. So we wandered our way over to a pizza place, bottle in hand, and indulged in a margherita pizza.
"Hey Steve, wierd question...
The next morning was lazy- especially after all the wine the night before. We had a hard time seeking out breakfast initially, then found a place with amazing fruit.
We had a rickshaw take us to the Botanical Gardens but found them to be closed, so we wandered down the street a bit and found a huge open market of fruit and vegetable sellers. We indulged in apples, oranges, tangerines, and bananas before wandering into the Jardin Botanique. The garden itself was huge and highly vegetated, full of little ruined statues and playgrounds and seating areas. We were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, and decided it would be best to head out, pack our belongings, and take the bus back to Chennai.
Fruit market and a FERN GARDEN! at le Jardin Botanique
On the bus, Kevin and I had thought we nailed the best seats on the bus. Snuggled together without any room for a third person to nudge their way in, we had two large open windows and a place to put our feet. How lucky could we get?
Little did we know the bus would end up over flowing with people- at the moment when all potential seats were completely taken, a group of 3 women boarded with 4 or 5 young children… and needed room. The women sat in the aisle, while one quickly shoved her 3 or 4 year old daughter to stand in the space between Kevin’s legs. Kevin wasn’t digging this arrangement, and offered his seat next to me to one of the women in the aisle while he sat on the steps to the door. As the woman sat down, I offered to take the child and placed the child in my lap while she grabbed another young one and put him on her lap. Thus began the semi-usual questions about my marriage status, my sons, my brothers, etc. But she was really, genuinely sweet and quickly would translate what I’d say to the other two women- her sister and cousin. They got off at a semi-ambiguous spot where, they told me, they were going to see family “in the village.” When the whole lot of them were finally off the bus, they all turned around and waved from the ground before grabbing up all the little hands and directing all the little feet down the road.
Kevin and I arrived in Chennai and had the absolute best dosas we’ve ever had. This was partly because of a cilantro chutney that we had never tasted before and generously dipped our dosas into with our fingers. We bought a third one for the train. It became apparent quite quickly that a foreign presence was rather unheard of for this tiny restaurant, and, at one point, we had an unofficial semi-circle of waiters and restaurant-goers standing in awe of our totally un-Western eating habits. Kevin and I can eat completely with our hands and drink filtered water from the tab without fear. This surprises waiters, who are quite used to bringing out utensils and bottled water.
Kevin and I say “NAY! We are INDIAN!... Kind of!”
On the train ride home, a young boy who is dying to be a Christian minister came up to me to offer me some food from his family. His questions are slightly different:
“What is your good name?” (Samantha)
“Are you married?” (Yes)
“How many sons?” (None. I’m a student.)
“Are you Christian?” (No.)
“Oh… Hindu?” (No. People sometimes ask me this if I deny Christian, maybe thinking I’m a convert. I wear a bindi- maybe that confuses people? I don’t know.)
The boy looks stumped, so I jump in.
“Well, I’m not really anything-- in America, sometimes people just don’t choose a religion.” (I’m not going to even go INTO Unitarian Universalism with this kid.)
He looks even more confused. He looks at Kevin. I follow his gaze and continue.
“He’s kind of Buddhist.”
The boy nods. Something he’s heard of. Kevin had bought some jasmine flowers from a vendor on the train and we give them to the boy to give to his mother. I watch from the corner of my eye as she puts them in her hair. The boy looks at Kevin.
“What is your work?” he asks.
Kevin responds with, “I’m a student.”
I add, “He’s a writer!”
The boy sees Kevin’s journal and asks if he can see it. Kevin and I share a look that says something like, “Man. Hope the kid doesn’t pick the wrong page to read.” He hands over the journal just before an Indian gentleman behind the boy leans over to him and whispers something that I can only imagine to be “That is personal. Don’t read it” because the boy handed the journal back almost immediately and said “Thank you” before shaking my hand and running back to his berth.
Sleeping on trains is a difficult task, but we make the most of it. I always frantically wake up to see if my stuff is still there- Kevin and I always made plans to buy locks, but never got around to it. No problems… yet. Probably because we sleep plastered to our belongs like barnacles on a boat. One thing I do enjoy is the waking up when the sun is up- people come up and down the aisles selling chai and coffee, and its so wonderful to sip on a hot cup of anything while the hills roll on by and we roll, yawning, into our home away from home.
In the morning, on the train ride home. Hell yeah, he's a writer.
- Location:Pondicherry
Samantha, myself, and 13 other individuals took the longest trip of our time in India thus far and traveled down to Kerala for eight days. Before I dive into the gritty of our days there, a little bit about Kerala.
Kerala is a long narrow strip of land situated on the very bottom of the West coast of India. People (meaning both tourists and Keralans) fondly refer to it as “God’s Own Country”, implying some sort of natural beauty and awe-inspiring quality that one won’t find anywhere else- which is surely incorrect, but the name isn’t entirely misleading either. Kerala also boasts to have the first democratically elected communist government, but I don’t know enough about the history of communism to support or refute that claim. Kerala, either because of those wiley reds or for some other reason, has a stellar education system, and proudly flaunts its 98% literacy rate, which is extremely impressive, given the fairly low numbers throughout the rest of the country.
So, the past eight days:
We left the university smashed into one five-seater and another nine-seater (naturally we defied these ‘recommended seating arrangement’ numbers with practiced skill) and showed up at the station early, scrounging around for something to eat for the train ride. We loaded up on the Indian equivalent of junk food (I like these mango cream cookies called ‘Treat’) and began boarding. My first bizarre experience (they never end here):
I was buying some bananas from a vendor right next to our car when a man comes up to me and asks, “Which is your country?” (single most common question you’ll get in this country)
“USA”
“Oh, do you live in Germany?”
“Uh, no, USA.”
“Which state?”
“California.”
“Is that North or South?”
“More like West.”
“Oh, OK, so Germany is on the East coast?”
“Germany?”
“Yeah.”
“Germany is in Europe.”
The man’s friend laughs at him and explains in something I don’t comprehend.
“Germany is not a state?”
“No, it’s a country.”
“Well, my friend lives there, and speaks German!”
“Awesome.”
I have to give the majority of Indians that we speak to credit, there’s never a lack of enthusiasm. They’re ready to find out as much as they can about you, and equally willing to share anything they might know or have heard about to relate to you as much as possible.
A later conversation showed some interesting (and not rare) assumptions Indians make about tourists.
“What are you doing in India?”
“We are students in Hyderabad, until December.”
This man’s eyes light up “Oh, Hyderabad! You know that’s the capital of Andhra Pradesh!”
It goes without saying that of course we know. We’ve lived there for a few months now. It would be more than a little embarrassing if this were surprising. But I don’t want to be too harsh— it seems more than probable that a lot of people coming through the country don’t know all the states and capitals, that’s a lot of information to learn, and I probably know more Indian state and capital combinations than I do U.S. ones. Don’t tell my middle-school history teachers.
A sign in the train station that shows people getting killed by a train. I don't know why the illustration is neccessary.
Our train ride was 24 hours, give or take a little bit. The train rides are becoming more and more tolerable, we spend a great deal of time writing, reading, talking, stretching our legs, taking naps, standing by the open doors and admiring the countryside, and wandering around the train. It’s not like an airplane where you can’t move whatsoever. Plus, the meals aren’t bad here and we like to laugh at the vendors that come by saying the goods they sell in funny voices (it’s a requirement if you want to sell things on trains to mutter in very high or very low voices, I think).
When we reached the border of Kerala, it was an observable change. Everything suddenly became greener and thicker. Suddenly we were winding through what looked like rain forests, with the occasional house to shake things up a bit. When we weren’t in the forest, we were passing by sudden spouts of jagged mountains that rose and fell as quickly as our train was moving.
Finally, we arrived at Kochin, the large city in the center of Kerala. We met with the man who organized the bulk of our activities for the week (this trip was organized and paid for by EAP, so we had a lot of things we’d be doing as a group), and took off on a bus to our first hotel.
We stayed at a ritzy place called the Fort Hotel, we discovered later that our rooms were 50 dollars a night! (a stark contrast to the standard 5-10 dollars, but also, these rooms had air conditioning, HOT water, tiled bathrooms, and complimentary breakfast).
Kochin is really a series of islands connected by both bridges and ferries, and out hotel was in a smaller area known as Fort Kochin. Our hotel was right on the bay of Kochin, it looks a lot like San Diego, to save me of a longer description. Our hotel offered the services of a “sunset boat” for 500 rupees an hour. We accepted.
One often has experiences here that, if you’ve been here for a while, you can understand best by classifying it as “purely Indian”. But purely Indian is a difficult and broad term, because it can be used to describe a lot of different things. Our boat was most assuredly purely Indian. It was a double decker contraption, the bottom housing some crude benches and the steering wheel, and the top being an open section outfitted with plastic chairs just slightly too few in number for all fifteen of us. “Anyway,” the ship’s mate informed us “it’s too dangerous for you all to stay on the top.”
What?
We quickly learned that the boat, being very tall and not very wide, was in real danger of capsizing, especially because of all the people on top. Juliana, the mate, and myself were standing on the middle section of the boat, where the stairs up and down were, and we’d all stand in the middle if we felt the boat giving one way or another— which we felt often.
At some points, the grungy, cranky, salty captain in the belly of the boat would shout out in Malayalam for an extended period of time, betraying a serious anger, but the young ship’s mate would only smile at us and indicate a place for us to stand and preserve the delicate balance of the vessel.
Purely Indian, I tell you.
We cruised around the bay, taking frantic pictures of the sunset on all twelve of our cameras (in large groups our ‘tourist status’ is noticed even easier by this tendency for us to all photograph the same exact things), and arrived back an hour later. Dinner, a massive gathering in one room to watch The Departed, and then sleep.
Samantha and Sue wrestling
The next day was our city tour. We ate, met our tour guide Glenn, and left on our bus again. He showed us the Chinese fishing nets, giant, awkward contraptions of wood that dip into the water when the lever is moved, rest for a while, and then are pulled back up. The fishermen were eager to show us the details and even let us move the net in and out of the water— for a tip, of course.
Pullin' up the fish
Here the area bustled with the various nets swinging up and down, shy-faced men trying to sell us Indian paintings on little strips of silk, old men with toothless smiles waving live fish and crabs in our faces and pointing at restaurants that will cook them for us if we bought some, and the general thunder that erupts when a gaggle of white people show up anywhere in a busy Indian part of town.
After the confusion we left on our bus to see a church. Kerala has a lot of different religions (including, Sam and I found out later, very noisy Muslims who conduct hour-long calls-to-prayer at six in the morning and eleven at night and broadcast the calls out their speakers mounted on top of the mosques, and are conveniently located right next to our hotel). Rather than going in, we stared at a huge group of Indian teenager girls who were laughing at and taking pictures of us while we did the same to them, then some of our group went to a field next to the church and played a little bit of Cricket. That game is startlingly popular here.
Cricket
We then went to “Jewtown”, the Jewish section of Kochin, where once a community of Jews thrived, but now only 4 families and either 13 or 30 people are active participants anymore. It’s descended into being a tourist trap selling the same familiar crap we see all over the country- overpriced shawls, jewelry, wall hangings, Hindu statues, and paintings. We did find one bookstore, which is a place I’m always willing to spend my money.
The synagogue was especially nice for Sephora, Emily and Natty, three people of Jewish heritage in our group. I’d never been to a synagogue before, and realized with a strange feeling that I’ve entered so many more religious buildings here then I ever did back home (countless mundirs, a gurdwara, a Buddhist temple, mosques, a Bahai temple, a church, and now a synagogue) but this didn’t surprise me. India bleeds religion.
We left, “shopped around” some more (Sam and I walked around and joked with the vendors, all of which gesture at their store as you walk by and count off all the things they and everyone else’s brother are selling), and ended our tour with a short walk through a palace. Speaking perfectly frankly, palaces bore the hell out of me. I’ve never enjoyed history through looking at old buildings with displays of different clothes and weapons and gadgets people owned hundreds of years ago, honestly, who gives a damn?
We got an interesting re-telling of the Ramayana from our tour guide. The Ramayana is painted in excellent detail over several of the palace walls, and the story was especially relevant that day, because the BJP (the conservative Hindu political party) was discussing plans for a bundt to be called the next day. A bundt is like a strike, but more widespread: shops will close down, public transportation workers won’t show up, and the general intention is to simply stop the process of a country for a day. Why would they do such a thing? Because they want the government to build a bridge from Indian to Sri Lanka, the way Ram does it in the Ramayana when he goes to save Sita (except he builds it by firing arrows into the ocean until they make a bridge). Allow me a brief digression.
I don’t know what the general consensus is in this country on the Sri Lanka bridge, but I found this idea offensively idiotic. We’re talking about a place with an alarmingly high poverty rate, filled to the brim with malnourished families, homeless children, and a terrible unemployment rate. We’re talking about a country where people live under big tarps held up by chunks of wood. We’re talking about a country that may be developing, but has some immense domestic issues it needs to be rectifying. And what does one of the main two parties want to shut the country down for one day for? So the Indian government will spend millions to construct a bridge over the ocean to Sri Lanka, simply to recreate an event in a popular Hindu myth.
Honestly, there’s no practical improvement that will be had by building the bridge. It’s purely a religious thing. Simple as that. I just don’t understand the stupidity.
Moving along…
That night we got to see a Keralan dance extravaganza, with a variety of different acts, ranging from a demonstration of the oldest martial arts in the world (3000 years old, an awkward affair that incorporates swords and looks like mediocre stage-fighting), to a man who is supposed to represent a popular Hindu goddess and runs around the stage with a sword screaming at the audience. The most well known is the reenactment of a Hindu myth with two characters, and they dance around for a length of time making indecipherable gestures at one another that practiced viewers would probably comprehend. For me, it was the one uninteresting act.
Kathakali
We wandered back to the hotel, ate at a restaurant just next door, had “Keralan pancakes” which are crepes filled with tons of coconut, a lot of sugar, and the occasional peanut. Then we went to bed again.
The next morning, after breakfast, we left on our bus for a two-hour drive to where all the houseboats were. House boating in Kerala is, from my understanding, the most popular tourist attraction in the state, if not all of South India (there is the lure of Goa, where drug-cultures from Europe, America, and random countries from other regions go to celebrate and rave- far out). Anyway, it was my favorite day we spent in Kerala.
The backwaters imply, in my mind anyway, a series of narrow, hardly navigable swampy rivers that house fist-sized mosquitoes, snakes the length of fire hoses, and panthers desperate for the taste of a man’s flesh. My conception was wrong.
In reality, the backwaters are wide channels of water that mostly resemble rivers, except when they open up into gigantic channels that are more akin to lakes that join together a multitude of rivers. The foliage on the sides of the water is not representative of the thickest jungles on the planet- one sees a great deal of houses and farmlands as they proceed through the water, and seeing people hunched over one of several staircases that lead to the water in order to collect it, for bathing, washing, or mayhaps drinking. Honestly, who can tell?
We had three houseboats. Samantha, Sephora and I shared one. It quickly distinguished itself as the “quiet boat”, where we spent the majority of our time reading and writing, occasionally punctuated by a conversation. Seph is a thoughtful person who likes literature, philosophy and religion, and conversation with her tends to dip into the deeper realms of these subjects. We spent a long time that evening talking about death, culminating in some intense stories we’d heard or seen about the 2004 tsunami.
Upon boat arrival: coconuts and relaxation.
Anyway, the other two boats could be called “drunk boat” and “skeleton boat”, respectively. The former is obvious. The latter could be called what I called it because it was vacated for most of the night so that people could participate in the festivities on the other boat more completely. Our boat led the trio the whole day, and we could periodically hear Bob Marley and the uncontainable laughter of women who seized the opportunity to strip down to their dusty bikinis (honestly, who’s worn them since we got here? nobody.), load up on liquor, and dance around like the crazy white people we all are, somewhere deep down in the very tissue of our existences.
We docked somewhere for lunch on the border of an especially large connection of rivers, and I ate speedily so I could swim around the boat for a while before we left again. We noticed that it didn’t take long for the few fisherman located between the three boats to completely disregard their fishing- the white women were completely loose on the boat, and when would these guys ever see it again?
It was like light pornography in the flesh. It was hilarious from our side, the girls continued dancing, occasionally leaping onto the shore to do something- we were too far to see what that was. But three or four fisherman stared, their hands folded patiently behind their backs, their loose fishing lines flapping sadly in the light gusts that blew over the water- completely mesmerized.
We left a little after that. Later in the day I saw Morgan and Kyle dancing on the bow of the ship, hanging a little bit dangerously over the edge. I mocked their sloppy dancing from afar, and they danced more vigorously in return. Kyle tottered on the edge, and, after I turned back to something else, fell into the river. It would have been priceless.
For dinner we docked again, and shared a dinner on the drunk boat. It was like dining in a cemetery. We didn’t turn on any more lights than were necessary, and the partiers of the day lounged around like victims torture. Their spirits were low.
We left the boat around the time people, from their awkward, jagged positions on the floor, would lift their heads up and moan at their fatigue, and then ask where the rest of the beers were. The perfect solution to an evening hangover. Drink it off, buddies.
Samantha and I brought blankets and pillows up to the rooftop patio area of our boat and admired the stars, and made the decision to wake up early to watch the sunrise. It’s been years since I actually saw the sun coming up. I was awake as it came up a few weeks ago, but I didn’t see it.
So we did that. Clouds blocked the sun specifically from our view, but we still got that enjoy that strange sensation of watching the world seamlessly morph from a black, formless, shapeless land, to one of shadows vaguely resembling things we know, to a place populated by the furtive birds most eager to eat, to one bristling with life and movement, and the morning ghosts of color.
It was sweet.
Sunrise and a morning swim
Our boat served breakfast and we proceeded off into this vast, seemingly endless lake filled with fisherman standing in wooden canoes, stabbing the ground with long poles and making very weird sounds while they do it. I’m not sure what the poles were for.
Some of them waved and looked at us for a moment before resuming their work. Others were gathered around one another and talking as we passed. More simply focused on their work, and didn’t allow themselves a pause as we came by. It was very bizarre to realize that what I was seeing was most likely a daily routine for these people. We were in such a strange, foreign place that seemed almost like something from a dream, and in reality it was the home of many, many people.
We landed an hour later, loaded onto a bus to go to Thekkady, a former hill station five hours drive from where we were. The bus, the same one that’d been taking us everywhere, was extremely rocky, and made it difficult to read, so it was one of the more boring traveling experiences thus far. I did manage to make it through my latest book called Buddha’s Warriors, about the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
I encourage anyone who doesn’t know of it and who feel interested to find some literature on it. By now it seems the literary world hasn’t necessarily neglected it, though I think writing on Tibet and its recent history is far too dismal, given what happened to that country. In a brief, Kevin-sided explanation, I can tell you that Mao viewed Tibet with an unsurprising greed in respect to its natural resources, exploited a controversial and hardly founded claim of “suzerainty” over Tiber, which means Tibet is autonomous only partially, and China has the right to control its foreign matters, and then begun a hasty invasion of the country. What a lot of people are not aware of is the violent resistance to this occupation was spirited, drawn-out, and had large numbers (though not nearly enough to be of any real use against the nearly two-hundred thousand troops deployed by the communist country).
What is also astonishing in the fact that it is so unknown is that over one million Tibetans were killed over the decades of fighting between the Tibetan’s unorganized resistance and China’s “People’s Liberation Army” (a disgustingly dubious name that fit one-hundred percent into China’s theory of propaganda). It wasn’t just deaths incurred in war- it was through the public torture of monks, nuns, abbots, and laypeople alike. People were burned alive, forced to shoot family members or well-respected religious leaders, tossed into wells to starve, beaten to death in town centers, executed only after being tortured, or hacked to pieces.
I could go into much more detail, but I’ll refrain from now. One last thing: the CIA sponsored groups of Tibetan soldiers by transporting them to training centers in parts of Asia and the States, giving them full-fledged guerilla warfare training, and then parachuting them back into Tibet when they were ready to train their fellow Tibetans.
All in all, a good book. Sorry.
Anyway…
We reached Thekkady, a place sharing some similarities with Mussoorie (I’ve forgotten how to spell that place’s name), but with so much more of the Keralan forest surrounding it. We were placed in an even nicer hotel with complimentary bottles of water and packs of red-faced and belligerent monkeys who scampered around the various buildings looking for open windows to infiltrate. I saw one try to take on a jackfruit that was larger than it, but it gave it up.
Samantha and I walked around that evening, and we found an ice cream place that gave me three scoops of pista, mango, and strawberry, and then tossed a variety of nuts and different flavored goops in to top the sundae off. I didn’t like all the chaos, it interfered with the decadence that is Indian ice cream.
We also met a nice elephant who was reserved for giving short, depressing rides to anyone who would pay the ten rupees to do so. I don’t like supporting the elephant-riding people, because the elephants never look too pleased at their state. Then again, I’ve rode a camel, so who am I to criticize. But we did go up and pet the elephant. They feel like leather about a foot thick. But they’re such neat creatures.
Later in the evening we attended a show that showed off more of that ancient martial arts I mentioned. There were six men who would emerge at different times in this giant dirt pit to show us their leaping skills, or how they did different routines, or (as the show progressed) how various weapons situations would be handled. We saw sword on sword, sword on dagger, spear on spear, spear on dagger, piece of cloth on dagger (the most impressive, every time the dagger would take a swing the cloth would be used to wrap the attacker into a position where a shoulder was inches from being dislocated). The show concluded with a man jumping through two flaming hoops side by side. I don’t know what sort of enemies they may have been fighting three-thousand years ago, but this seemed like a worthless skill, despite all the flash and glamour.
Tibetan/Indian martial art-thing: Kevin attacking Kyle
I went down into 2 burning rings of fire...
As we were leaving, the six men emerged and gestured for us to come down into the pit. They showed us the weapons, took silly pictures of us pretending to do the same things they were doing, and explained all the different rituals they had to do. None of the Indian attendees to the show were invited. That same white privilege thing that allows us cool experiences, but always makes me feel weird at the same time.
We awoke the next morning at a rude 6:30 AM so we’d have enough time to get to the boat that went through the various rivers inside the Tiger reserve. It was cold and we got the last batch of seats on the first storey, but we had fun looking at the eerily still water with bunches of dead trees sticking up from the water, and watching fruitlessly for tigers. We spotted some Bison meandering around, and saw a herd of elephants far off in the distance, but that was all.
The Tiger Reserve: which is sky, which is reflection?
After breakfast back at the hotel we had time, so Kyle and I went for a walk around the town. We ended up in a residential area, and a man approached us excitedly explaining that there was a town and a shrine nearby that we could go see. We reluctantly followed, and with good reason. We eventually got to a gate that said “TIGER RESERVE: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED”, and the man took us on a path that ran parallel to the fence that houses the tiger reserve. We passed by a janky little shack and the guy conversed with her a bit while we kept on (we didn’t want his help in the first place), and he runs up and says “actually you have to pay this place one-hundred rupees to use this path.” So Kyle tried to confuse him into believing we’d pay later, but he wouldn’t have it, so we shrugged and turned around and left. He called “fifty rupees!” to us as we left, which made it even more obvious he was just trying to screw us out of some money.
One thing about the culture in India that drives me insane is this perception of tourists. I feel like every trip we take somebody is trying to take advantage of the stupidity we’re assumed to have. I wish sometimes that two white guys could just walk around somewhere maybe white people don’t show up very often without having some guy show up and try to find a way he can make money out of those two guys wanting to see something.
Anyway, we walked down a different road, passed some belligerent and lascivious monkeys doing indescribably lewd things to one another, and found ourselves at a different sign warning of the same tiger reserve. We walked in through the open, unguarded gate (weren’t they worried about the tigers just walking out?). Turns out there was a neighborhood. A neighborhood, inside the tiger reserve. Didn’t make much sense to me, but so be it. So we walked along a road for a very long time, just chatting and enjoying the nature, when we saw an entrance into the foresty part of the reserve. With some fear twisting in my stomach, I went in, scanning the forest carefully for any conspicuous orange and black shapes. After we walked in about two minutes we both decided it wasn’t a good idea to do this inside a tiger’s home, and we turned to leave. Just then we heard what was, to me, the unmistakable sound of a tiger roaring.
I stopped, and looked at Kyle, our eyes must have been equally widened. The silence grew around us like something huge.
“No fucking way dude.” He muttered, and we strained our ears to listen again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then it came again. Kyle relaxed, I stiffened.
“We need to go.”
“It’s just a buffalo, or… something.” Kyle looked in its direction and started walking again, with no urgency.
“Wait, are you sure?”
“Yeah it was like, goooooooo!” Kyle imitated the mooing, bellowing of a bison. I agreed, slightly. Nevertheless, we left with speed. I definitely didn’t want to run into a tiger.
Walking down the road more, we came to a gate. Just outside was the shack demanding its hundred rupees to walk down a road next to it- the white person’s tax. We laughed at this and continued on our way, back to the hotel where we left for a spice plantation tour.
We rode the bus to a farm type place that was situated more or less in a jungle, and our guide, a man involved with Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund explained the different contraptions on the farm that saved or collected energy, or were used for irrigation. Then we proceeded down a dark path and stopped occasionally so he could show us the pepper, cinnamon, tea, coffee, or other plants growing there.
Spice Tour: How chocolate begins...
Man working on the spice plantation
At one point, we saw the infamous Mysore spiders. There was a collection of them, with the largest in the center of the tangle of webs, and the guide smiled at them knowingly and kept his distance. “Spiders.” He says with a dark fascination.
“Are these poisonous?” I ask him.
“Oh yeah.”
“Really poisonous?”
He nods with satisfaction.
“As in they could kill you?”
“Two or three bites.” He laughs at this and walks on. I have a flashback of when we first noticed the one spider, and slowly realized we were surrounded by twenty or so of them. I follow close behind him.
We left the farm, feeling a collective case of goosebumps. Our official touring of Thekkady was over, and we left to our own devices for the rest of the evening.
That night we ate at a deserted restaurant that offered to play movies while we ate. Sephora was glancing over the films and spots one “Oh! let’s watch the one with the sexy people in it!” She hands it to the man, who looks at it, at Sephora, then vanishes. Later another man emerges with him and they talk to one another in Malayalam, the only word we can catch on occasion is “sexy”. Finally they reach a consensus, approach Sephora and say “Madam, there is no sex in this movie. Is that okay?”
Sephora was mortified. We all found it hilarious.
The next day we left early and spent seven hours on the bus. It’s funny that now, I can summarize such a boring, long period of a day into one unimpressive sentence. I guess its funny in that same way that I can make one week into one single blog.
Anyway, we reached Kochin again, finally, and Samantha and I hired a rickshaw to take us about 50 meters to the ferry to another island in Kochin where we could go to the beach. From there, we needed another rickshaw to take us the 23 kilometers, so we paid another 175 rupees. Then we found ourselves in the ghost town that is Cherai beach.
After rejecting one hotel we looked at, Sam and I wandered to the shore with our luggage intending to find another place to stay. We met a Spanish couple on motorcycles who found a home stay place that had two rooms for 350 each. The female and Sam and I investigated the rooms, came out looking mildly satisfied, and the Spanish man, massive dreadlocks, helmet in hand, surveys the building for a moment, looks up at the sky and says “two couples. five-hundred for both.” The owner shrugged. We’d never negotiated room rates before.
We talked to this couple and found out they’d been motorcycling all over the Indian coast, and had made a stop in Nepal for a few weeks before they started the coast trip. They were approaching Goa, where they would sell the bikes and return to Delhi, ending their six-month excursion. I have to admire them for their state of roughing it. I imagine it would be a hard trip to take, especially for so long, and especially for having to stay in craphole places every night.
We talked to them for a while about issues in Spain: the education system, the problem with Basque separatists, the problem of terrorism and how much they both hated Bush (“Bush is saying [points with menacing glares] you are terrorist, you are terrorist, but he is terrorist, he is greatest terrorist of them all!”). Needless to say, it was a fascinating encounter.
Samantha and I found a shack of a restaurant still open, and had prawns, dal and rice. We decided to eat fish in Kochin, because the local fishing business is huge (thus we don’t profit giant destructive fishing companies), and because the fish is supposed to be dang good. The prawns were ok.
After we ate we sat out on the beach to watch enormous crabs chase on another, dig holes, and let the waves carry them back out to sea. I was chasing a large group back into the ocean when I turned around and saw a shadow kneeling next to Samantha. I figured she was taken for being a solitary woman and was being harassed, so I came back to find Dof, the soul-searching Israeli kneeling next to her.
“I’m so glad to see you guys, you have no idea the shit I went through to get here. I get to Kerala, and I have no idea where I am, or what’s going on, and I see no white faces, and I don’t know what to do.”
We spent the next hour listening to his life-story unfold in front of us.
“You know I come here after military, we Israelis must be in the military, so we go on trips when we’re done. But I don’t want to come with large group, I want to come alone, and figure things out, for myself. I don’t have lonely planet, I don’t have map, I don’t have friends, I do it all for me.”
Kevin, writing from the balcony of our nasty, shack hotel on the beach. And then Kevin with Dof, our new Israeli friend.
Dof has been figuring out that all people think and feel and do is based upon how our society creates us. “99% of what we think is propaganda”. He’s also discovering the reality behind the enemies his country creates for him. “I am supposed to hate Muslims, but I stay with one in Kashmir for one month, he is the nicest man I’ve met.” Among many, many other things. I think Dof’s issues are more than Israeli problems, but I won’t get into that in this blog.
We went back to our hotel with Dof in tow, introduced him to the Spaniards, and then went to bed. I woke at four the next morning, unable to sleep on our sandy, creaky, thin, filthy bed. I went out to the beach to watch the same crabs do the same routine. After a while I got tired enough to sleep again, so I went back.
We spent that day at the beach. The waves were perfect, and I discovered later that day, the rays were definitely shining. I got probably the worst burn of my life (its currently peeling, so that’s good). It was almost worth it though- I hadn’t been in the ocean yet, and the water is great this time of year. Eventually, almost everyone from Hyderabad showed up, as well as a few of the people from Delhi (they’re on a several week break right now), so we got to catch up with some people we haven’t seen in a long time. We let the evening slide away on the beach, listening to Dof philosophize at length, playing a drum that Zeph bought from an Indian kid, and just watching the sun drift behind clouds until it was standing on the horizon. Then we returned to Fort Kochin, the original island we were on.
Sam, playing by the ocean, and then a group of school girls that she ended up buying ice cream for.
I was so grumpy and in pain from my sunburn, and exhausted, and sick of crappy beds that we splurged on a more expensive hotel room for our final night in Kochin. It was worth it.
The next day, we awoke early, packed our things, meandered around Fort Kochin a bit, and took a ferry back to the mainland, where our train was awaiting us. Then we spent twenty-four hours reading, writing, sleeping too much, being awakened at one in the morning by several people coming onto the train who didn’t have the decency to talk at normal voices so they woke up the entire car by shouting to one another down the train car (I seriously wanted to strangle somebody), and passing the time in other pleasant ways. Then we arrived in Hyderabad again.
It was good to be home.
So, yes, I bought the widely Hampi supplied Westernized Indian clothing- i.e. the kind of clothing you BUY in India but can’t WEAR in India.
Gypsy sellin' skirts in town. I bought one from her.
However, since tourism is what keeps the people of Hampi alive, you’re able to have more conversations with Indian people- because they speak English! And some French. And Italian. And German. Luckily for us, we came in the lull of tourist season. One kid, trying to push his mom’s infamous masala rolls on me (unsuccessfully), told me he couldn’t wait till next month because “All the Israelis come!” All the menus promise hummus and pita (which I asked for a number of times) but none actually supply them right now… at least, not until the Israelis actually come. In the meantime, its Nutella. Because all the Frenchies are here.
Instead of our usual train, we were stuck taking an overnight sleeper bus. Although our initial reactions were all overwhelmingly positive, we soon realized that you’re actually trying to sleep on the TOP of a moving BUS. This is not actually possible to do, because you’re constantly waking up, wondering if this tilting turn will be the last turn of your life before the bus tips over and crashes into the cows its speedily avoiding. And, it turns out, we may have actually HIT a cow that night- a number of people from our party woke up in the middle of the night because our driver hit the breaks so hard that everyone slid forward in their beds. When they looked out the window, a mob of people were slowing gaining speed and chasing after the bus while the bus speedily pulled away!
It was a close one.
By the time we finally got to Hampi the next morning, loaded ourselves into our incredibly cheap hotel with no hot water, and had a huge breakfast on the roof, we all made the mutual decision that this trip would be us “vacationing”- “not traveling.” There is a very distinct difference between the two. Traveling requires educating yourself on the ruins, the history of the empire this place was so important to, trying really different food, and fitting absolutely as much as possible into your weekend until you’re thoroughly exhausted because you said “YES!” to every history lesson people offered you. When we travel, all of us have read Lonely Planet about a dozen times and have everything planned out to the minute.
When you vacation, you eat what you want- even if its totally American food. You sleep in. Your plans sound something like, “Yeah… lets just… I don’t know… wake up. Eat. Then see what we feel like. Maybe shop? Or rent scooters and drive around the hills? Whatever. See you in the morning.”
The first day was spent wandering through town and hearing people’s average prices for stuff (you can find similar things in about 10 other stores, so wait for the best price), going to the main temple in the center of town, getting blessed by the temple elephant for one rupee (he takes the rupee from your hand, gives it to the guy sitting nearby, then places his trunk on top of your head briefly.)
The temple elephant, blessing me upon the giving of one rupee.
At the main temple, in Sacred Center
We also, miraculously, found our way to some boulders by the river in an effort to lay around lazily and read for awhile, but were soon discovered by some native Hampians who enjoyed watching us wade through the water in our basketball shorts and t-shirts. Kevin also had a close encounter with a musk ox herder in which he ALMOST convinced the guy to let him bathe a musk ox. The man, of course, would not allow this. He expressed his reason to us by imitating a musk ox mauling someone.
Relaxing by the river, watching musk ox bathe
After that, some of us took naps and ate chocolate on the porch of our hotel (the girls), while Kevin and Kyle went exploring through the banana fields and discovered that you can suck a honey-type liquid out of the small flowers of a banana stalk. When they returned, we found ourselves surrounded by about 20 village kids- some climbing on top of Kevin (at one point, there were 6 or 7 and Kevin was frantically asking me to take them off of him, although I was busy getting photographs of it happening). We ate dinner at an “Italian” restaurant with delicious pizza and pasta, while the owner tried to sell us his psychadelic paintings. After dinner, we had henna done on our hands, and then fell asleep.
Playing with village kids
The second day was spent shopping. Kevin and I woke up earlier than the rest of our group, and we wandered over to breakfast next to the river and had a huge meal topped off with deliciously fresh fruit salad. When the rest of our group finally woke up, we spent the rest of the morning shopping until 1PM or 2PM until lunch.
Henna... before, and after
The afternoon was spent doing something I’ve never done before: scooters. We each rented a little scooter (Kevin and I shared one) and wandered off into the hills! Although I tried driving one for a short while, I didn’t like it. I enjoyed being on the backseat, even though I’m fully aware that in Biker-Lingo this makes me the side-kick “bitch” on the back. I’m totally okay with this- I know my limitations.
Scooter action.
There were paved roads all over Hampi that wander off into hills and towards more ruins and temples, through banana fields, rock quarries, and beside rivers. We went scooter-riding for about 5 hours… just running our way through empty roads all throughout Hampi, waiving and “Namaste!”-ing all the villagers we could find.
At one point, we found ourselves past a huge temple and next to a river. Beside the river were some boats that resembled bowls made out of reeds and tarp. The guy nearby, smoking with his friends, waved us over and offered to take us out in the boats around some of the temples that were out in the water. (The water is full of temples and ruined bridges- the river was dammed and the water level became crazily high, enveloping a lot of architecture along the side of it.) None of us could pass up on going out in boats like that, so we paid up, and went out on a ride.
Boat action.
After that, we kept running around with our scooters until the sun was setting and we were running out of gas. We spent the very last remaining moments of sunset on top of some temples at the very top of the uppermost hill in Hampi. Below us the town was seriously alive- these past few days (and even now as I write this) is the Ganesha Festival. A 10 day festival in honor of Ganesh, the Hindu god with an elephant’s head. There were drums playing and music and kids dancing and huge Ganesh statues all over the place.
Sunsets on ruins, dancing, and festivals
The next morning we agreed to wake up at some semblance of an early hour (8AM) to have breakfast, check out of our hotel, and then wander over to the river. We took a boat across the way and hired a rather anxious rickshaw driver to drive us to the base of the Hanuman temple. Hanuman is another Hindu god, except he’s a monkey. The mountain that his temple is built on is appropriately home to hundreds of monkeys. At the base of the mountain, you can buy bananas to feed them as you hike up… which you quickly learn is a bad idea, because the big, mean, spitting monkeys are the only ones who follow you up the mountain because all the other little monkeys are scared to get in the big ones’ way. But the top of the mountain, near the temple, had an incredible view, and we sat up there and relaxed for a good, long while until our rickshaw driver, in his anxiousness, walked ALL the way up the mountain to tell us he was tired of waiting. Kevin and I sat by a small pond on the top and watched frogs jump in and out of the water, counting them as they appeared and disappeared and reappeared.
Indian tour guides, spitting monkeys and flowers
In the midst of all this, we were helped out by two friendly Indian kids, native Hampians, who took to Kevin and Kyle and enjoyed picking Lindsay, Emily, and I all flowers whenever they saw them. They hung out with us for most of the day, all the way till we bought them lunch at a restaurant nearby, and they scampered off while we did our final shopping. Kevin later told me something rather disturbing: one kid is looking forward to being a member of the Indian army so that “When we go to war with Pakistan, I can kill Pakistanis. Muslims are a poisoned people.”
Oh, from the mouths of babes.
In another conversation, the other little boy asked me if we had cows in America, at which point I described to him, in unflattering detail, the inner-workings of the meat packing industry slaughtering “thousands of cows a day.” He looked sad until him and I shared a moment with a cow, thanking it for being such a good mother.
After another lunch by the river at a restaurant with a fatty tree swing, Kevin and Kyle went adventuring while we women finished our last minute shopping. By the time we all met up again, we had some ice cream at a local shop that tried to push his Bhang Lassis on us (Lassis with a lot of pot in them) while we watched our favorite temple elephant walk by in another procession to Ganesh. We read for awhile on the porch of our hotel, took a bus into town, caught another sleeper bus into Hyderabad, and found ourselves back home at the University in time for classes Monday morning, feeling oddly relaxed.
Tree swings, lunch, and more elephant action
This is the beauty of the vacation. You’re not too tired when you get home.
AND it makes for shorter journal entries, even though I imagine Kevin would argue differently.
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Another weekend gone. India is moving at the speed of something incomprehensibly fast, and every time I recall this or that event that passed only a few weeks ago, it sometimes feels like a lifetime. It is for that reason that I think the blog will prove most useful, because we won’t be forgetting these trips any time soon, and the details are all logged away so that even long after we’ve forgotten them the words recorded by our former selves can serve to remind us about what we did.
Being back in the states also feels like a truth that only partially exists in my memory. Home feels so long away, not necessarily far because it’s only a twenty-something hour plane ride to traverse half the world. But existing in that context is sometimes a tricky thing to remember. Which is good. For now, for me at least, it’s all about living in India.
So, Mysore:
Mysore is described with characteristic accuracy that the city “just seems to have a way with tourists”. It’s true, and yet I continually wondered why as we were there. Isn’t it bizarre that cities have such auras to them, that various group or individuals who visited there can express similar sentiments and feelings they have about the place?
Mysore’s got a palace, a couple museums, and some neat temples. But there was something much more to the city. The shopping areas were nestled into narrow alleyways that wound upon one another like a tangled thread of eels- our hotel was located right in the middle of the bustle, and it was exciting to step outside and just proceed in a direction, like a great deal of India, we rarely knew what we were getting into.
But before that, we had to tolerate what many people called the worst train ride yet, for various reasons.
When we first got on the train it was eleven thirty at night, which is much later than we’re used to for boarding trains. We find all of our seats occupied by (sometimes two) people already asleep, and we have to nudge (or shake, in some people’s cases) all of these people awake, who groggily glare at us as we explain in American-talking-to-foreigner-English that they are in our seat. Most of them moved. Some were shouted at for trying to go back to sleep. Lindsay, in a triumphant gesture meant to indicate that her seat was absolutely hers, placed her cell phone on her bed as the particularly stubborn man clambered off of it. One minute later it was missing, and I followed Lindsay through a couple of crowded cars on the train looking for the person she thought stole it. He showed up later and got shouted at again, but assured her he had no cell phone. Of course, you never know what to believe.
We awoke at six the next morning, thinking Mysore would be just around the corner. We were informed an hour later that it was well over several hours before we’d be there, and so we settled into a disgruntled passing of the time reading, staring out the window or lamenting how bored we all were. Leaving earlier works better because it’s typically that you wake up and in a little while you need to get off the train. We didn’t reach Mysore until about four in the afternoon. Before that we dealt in various ways with the incessant staring so common in this country- at one stop a heavily bearded man approached the window of our compartment, wraps his hands around the bars, rests his face on the outside of the window, and stares in at us with a wide-eyed something I can’t explain. Moments later, Zeph, who had stepped outside of the train, walks up to his left and mimics his behavior, staring in at us with a puzzled blankness on his face as though we were zoo animals. It definitely broke the tension.
Sometimes when staring is really bad I’ll pretend like the people really trip me out, and stare back at them like they’re the strangest things in the world. At another stop I spent several minutes ducking behind an obstacle and then emerging timidly like all the people outside were really freaking out. It’s what makes me believe that staring is not rude, but simply natural in this country, because when I start doing that they start laughing and tend to look away. It’s hard to remember sometimes that what we think of as rude is seen in a completely different light by people from other parts of the world.
We FINALLY reached Mysore and rickshawed to our destination, after a fair amount of meandering because the driver didn’t know where to go and took us to a similarly named, but incorrect hotel. Everything was settled, we found three rooms at the cheap but shoddy Hotel Maurya, and proceeded vaguely in the direction suggested to me by a man who thought that we’d like to go to a small handicrafts market up the road a bit.
In the process of telling a girl I had no money, another man named Joseph seemed to materialized by my side and told me a handy phrase in Kananda to tell people to go away. She wasn’t listening, but he continued talking to me and I found out he worked at the place we were going, so he led the way.
It was a smaller version of a market we would visit later on our trip, but there were piles of colored dust one mixes with water to make paint (I bought some thinking it was the material people give themselves bindis with), small fruit stands, an occasional vendor selling different oils and incense, and a stand where one can buy corn roasted over smouldering coals. Delicious, as is most things one can eat here.
These are paints, not for putting bindis on your head...
After a brief run through the market Joseph showed us a place to buy incense and oils and bid farewell, but before he left he told us his band was playing at a blues bar in town, and encouraged us to come.
The little shop is run by a man with impeccable English wearing a white doctor’s coat who shows us the innerworkings of the incense and oil industry as though we had paid for a tour. First he explains the material incense is made of, while a dark-faced man with old hands sits in a corner busily preparing for the process of incense creation. Suddenly the “doctor” throws the man some of the black clay-like stuff and he sets off on furiously rolling up incense sticks and collecting them in a pile, while the doctor continues to tell us things of interest. After a while he moves into oils, and the other man disappears as the doctor explains the purposes of each oil then walks down the line applying it to our hands feet or arms, and telling us to smell them. The oils all smelled very nice, but the most interesting part were the ayurvedic applications for each oil:
“This is (insert oil here), you can rub it on the soles of your feet and every night at one o clock you will have the most pleasant dream of unrequited love you can imagine!”
“Oh, this is a most precious oil. If you ever want to do especially well on an interview for a position you are not qualified for, soak ten of your hairs in this oil for ten minutes, and the boss will think you deserve even his position!”
Making incense
Of course, I exaggerate. He did claim one of the oils applied to the feet did something beneficial for a certain organ, or something like that. In my opinion, it’s a bunch of silliness, but the oils still smelled nice.
I bought incense, and we left the doctor. Samantha and Kyle began talking to another man who seemed to materialize like a ghost, and I heard their conversation turn to what sounded like an intriguing conversation about the negative impact of our current president and Iraq.
Samantha learned that the man received his educating in England through a program run by UNICEF, and that in his childhood he had lived as an orphan. We told him where we were going and he found us two rickshaws for a good price and leaned in as we’re driving away, telling me that the music at the bar we were going to was very good.
Man who actually was impacted by the work of UNICEF, and Sam, totally excited by it, next to him
Again, our rickshaw driver was lost, and stopped for directions various times, where sometimes they’d speak to us and sometimes they’d speak to him, but rarely did it seem to help. Finally, with more luck than anything else, we found the second rickshaw and went up for dinner.
Dinner was good, set on the rooftop of a hotel that seemed badly deserted. We had fun playing a game where we say “who’s the most likely to…” and then on the count of three we all point at whom we think is the best candidate. Samantha won “most likely to object to cannibalism vehemently if our stranded group was talking about resorting to it” with virtually no competition. I tend to win anything having to do with animals. Weird. (In the past, Samantha and I have won “Most likely to have known each other in a past life.” We like this one.)
We went down into the blues bar, which was a very unilluminated, soggy looking bar with a couple of morose Indian men staring into their respective glasses and a bartender who really wanted a large group of tourists to hang out there. They told us there was music upstairs, and Kyle and I ventured forth to several girls behind us saying “Yeah, you guys go check it out, we’ll just wait here…”
Upstairs was a blue-light/strobe light combo, a couple of dirty tables, and two men dancing separately on a small sized dance floor. They saw Kyle and I and beckoned for us to join them, at which point we spun around and left with as much haste as possible.
There must have been a mistake, somewhere in Joseph’s directions, so we left the hotel and wandered, finding more shops, including a candy store where we bought chocolate candies with Sonic the Hedgehog on the front.
I fed a cow some baby bananas, and we ran into an Indian sweet shop (Indian sweets are SO delicious) that made a delicacy of the city called Mysore Bath. It’s not pronounced “bath”, but “baught”, and it was amazing. Then we found our way to the palace, illuminated at night but closed by the time we reached it, and then we walked home. Samantha saved my life by calling my attention to a car as I walked into the street. I forgot one of those essential rules you learn as a child about looking both ways.
At the palace, late at night.
The sweets shop
The next morning we went up to Chamundi hill, where an especially vital temple is located, or vital for the locals at least. We were able to bus up there and check things out, and then our group split up, a larger group went with the Indian woman from our group, Sue, to meet her family who lives in Bangalore. We stayed, wandered around the top of the hill, then decided to walk back down to Mysore. We were about 3,300 feet up, but there’s a pathway constructed especially for the purpose of walking down.
Sam asked a woman selling flowers if she'd be willing to put them in her hair. Here, Sam getting those sweet flowers put into her hair. Samantha has also fallen in love with cows... seriously in love. She actually made a promise to this one that she'd never eat one of its 'brothers or sisters.' Anyone else thinkin 'Vegetarian for life'...?
A ways down there’s a huge statue of Nandi, who is the vehicle for a Hindu god, but I can’t recall exactly who. I think Shiva. Either way, Kyle tried some of the sugar cane juice they get by feeding the cane through a machine that pulverizes it. It was tasty.
Here, Kevin making an offering of marigolds at the temple
Kevin, Kyle, and Zeph at the look out point near the temple
A man Samantha lovingly calls, 'Kyle's girlfriend.'
Further down, the scariest spiders one can fathom:
I know that if a hell exists, and if hell is determined by what a person would least like to experience, I will be locked in a room where all of the furniture is made out of these live spiders who crawl in unison and hold the form of whatever piece of furniture they’re supposed to be. Isn’t that a weird thing to think about? It’s totally true. The largest ones were easily the size of our hands, if not a bit bigger.
Hell in an insect.
The kids Sam never knew she had but was reunited with while walking down the hill
We ate at the bottom of the hill at a really good pizza place, then we found another rickshaw to take us to a government-run sandalwood factory that we never ended up going to. Instead, he took us to, in my own words, “another shitty-ass emporum”.
Emporiums are the stores run exclusively to completely rip off tourists with goods one sees only in emporiums, but in every single one you go into, no matter where you go. There’s usually twenty people working in a store that admittedly looks much nicer, but the prices are astronomical and there’s a general feeling of nastiness as you look at things you know are just a crappy as what you see on the streets, but its made to look much nicer.
After less than a minute of browsing, we emerged and I tried to figure out where the factory was. I’m much more comfortable with approaching strangers in India for help, and I hope that transfers to back in the states, because locals are exceedingly helpful when you appeal to them for it. These specific guys tried to help but we had language issues, so they ended up with shrugs and laughter as they sauntered off.
So in pure Mysorean fashion, we wandered up the street, and after a few minutes found St. Philomena’s Church. I hadn’t been to a church in India up to that point, and the architechture was so impressive that I had to see the inside.
This for me was an especially gratifying experience because I got to see something I consider a fascinating phenomenon. The church is very much Catholic, but it was a completely “Hinduized” church, if that phrase can be used to describe it. All along both walls were different shrines to important saints, and even the pope. There was an idol of the pope surrounding by flashing lights and places to leave donations and what have you. The Central point of interest inside the church was a scene with Jesus on top and other biblical figures I couldn’t identify doing different things are you went further down the shrine. It was amazing, and struck me because I’ve always seen Christianity as a religion more spare than others in its representation of god and such, and so it was very strange to see it so impacted by the religious culture of India.
I love religion. India is such a fascinating culture for it. I’ve been to far more places of worship in this country than I ever went to back in the states. And I just love what religion means here. It informs virtually everything people do. Hindus go to their temple every day, just to say hi to god. Sikh Gurdwaras run almost twenty-four hours a day, where the music plays all throughout the day and one is welcome to worship whenever they want, and with no specific instructions on how to do so. At the most unexpected moments we will turn a corner or our train will pass over a bridge and the sound of the Muslim call to prayer will creep its way over to us, and suddenly there is a feeling of being seized that is difficult to explain, and you feel a solemnity that is in no way heavy, but simply a fitting brand of seriousness for the occasion of hearing something as splendid as a language you cannot understand calling large groups of power to contemplate god. The Buddhist monastery we eventually visited this weekend was another powerful experience of how people create and sustain god, and we finally viewed a Buddha statue inside of a monastery with the appropriate amount of awe that I’ve been searching for this whole time.
What? Christianity? In India?
We met a woman outside of the church who immediately set into talking to us. She told us about her travels to the states, what services go on at the church, how all the religions are very unified and should not be seen as opposing forces or even simply different, but as things all working towards the same goal. Then she went into good places to visit, and went so far as to write some of them down in Samantha’s Lonely Planet. She highly encouraged a visit to the Bravindian Gardens, which are set right next to a dam and looking beautiful when lit up at night, just as they would be lit up that very evening.
So we went. Thanks Church lady!
(Side note: the people in Mysore were extremely nice. It’s probably evident from this blog, but had we had way more interactions here than we’re used to when we travel, and the people had useful suggestions and just wanted to learn a little bit about us and where we were coming from. I love that aspect of traveling. All the different lives coming together and the crazy and sometimes simple but rewarding interactions we share with strangers. The science of strangers if a very interesting one to me.)
There’s a bus that takes about an hour to reach the gardens, and I sat next to a pleasant man who told me all of the good temples to visit in Mysore. He was surprised I hadn’t been to all of them, but satisfied that at least I went to Chamundi hill, because that was the best one in Mysore. He read through the lonely planet, curious to know what was recommended, and then I showed him a few of my pictures, and tried to wow him with the fact that I’ve taken 2500 pictures in India so far. After he saw about twenty photos, helpfully telling me all the places I’d already been to and taken pictures of, he said “You have all of Mysore in that little box!”
Crazy baby sitting in front of Kevin on the bus ride to the dam
We reached the gardens, heavily populated by tourists of various kinds, and we wandered around the gardens. It was a little bit until they were lit up, so we got to the top of the dam where we were hoping to walk along the lake that lives behind it, but a large collection of police watch the entrance to the pathway and blow their whistle at you insistently if you tarry too close to the gate. Kyle assured us we could make it if we acted casual and just went for it, but Samantha and I were much more skeptical. In the end, Zeph and Kyle made a halfhearted attempt and got whistled at. We relented, and returned to where the lights had already been lit.
India has a fascination with pretty lights. Every big, historical place to visit has some kind of light show, and we’re often told to go visit one or another because they’re not to be missed. Everyone in Mysore raved about the palace being lit up, the woman at the church acted as though the gardens were to die for, and when the lights came on while we weren’t looking in the gardens, we heard a frantically approving round of applause from the assembled crowds below. It’s kind of funny, because we’re typically not very impressed with the lights. The gardens were certainly beautiful, but I feel Americans just haven’t cultivated a similar appreciation of intricate lighting.
We saw a giant building on the top of the hill facing the gardens and went over to it, finding out that it was a hotel. It was easily the most beautiful hotel I’ve ever seen, and we sat in the front patio to watch the lights and relax. Kyle, Zeph and I wanted to see the rooms, so we asked for prices to pretend that we may stay there, and were shown positively regal rooms, the cheapest price of which was around ninety dollars.
And that’s where I leave you with Samantha…
Samantha:
…and since they had left to go check out fancy rooms (fancy being $90or $100 a night), I flipped open my slowly deteriorating Lonely Planet Guide and peer at the page that opens in front of me. In bold writing, my eyes wandered to the subtitle that says “Tibetan Refugee Settlements,” followed by type that explains all the joys and spiritual beauties, along with over 5,000 monks, that await you independent-minded, Lonely-Planet-Reading folk, 26 kilometers from a main south Indian city. I, of course, immediately intend to go to this place on a weekend Kevin and I find available, and look a few pages before that to find out where this place is.
And it’s in Mysore.
Freakin’ Mysore.
So, upon the boys return, I excitedly read to them about the Tibetan settlements, and they also feel the vibe, and we plan on leaving the next morning. We took the bus home that evening, grab some masala dosas for dinner, and go to bed in our horribly cheap, $6 a night hotel room, still reeking of urine even after we tried everything to make the Indian-style-squat-toilet work, but now complimented by the smoke of amber incense Kevin purchased at the oil/incense bazaar.
The next morning we start our day off early. We begin with a saunter through the early-rising and infamous Devaraja Fruit & Vegetable Market of downtown Mysore. There are hundreds of thousands of fresh bananas, and blue tarps hang dangerously low above our heads making something resembling a “roof,” and old men and young men running around organizing their stalls and prepping their produce while women and cooks scrutinize their limes and apples and avocados and artichokes. Kevin and I try these tiny little bananas called “sweet bananas” and buy a huge avocado. I then stop (causing everyone else to pause) at a small rickety shall, have chai, and chat with a very determined young, male, vendor trying to push “genuine coral necklaces” onto the boys and I. I start a conversation with him about what he’d do with the money I gave him if I were to buy these coral necklaces. His friend nearby yells about his girlfriend, causing the boy to smile. I recommended that he visit this remarkably long-distance girlfriend, whom, he tells me, lives in South Africa.
“You better start selling more necklaces!” is the only thing I can think to say.
Eating avocados at the market
After strolling through the fruit market and idly buying a few vegetables, we walk towards the center of town to a line of hotel restaurants near the main palace. One restaurant is filled to the brim with local people (always a good sign- “Eat where the locals eat” is what we say here at EAP. It works… sometimes.) They gave us tall glasses filled with chai, all served by a friendly waiter that was happy to suggest some of the local “favorites.” Now feeling full, we march our way over to the palace, followed by beggars, “guides,” and horse drawn carriages! No joke! We made a little freak parade!
The palace itself was… well… just a freakin’ palace. OK, I recognize that these places all have really beautiful, rich histories. Someone very powerful once lived in the room that I’m now standing in. And I recognize the beauty of architecture and how these places are like little capsules in time, and blah, blah, blah. But, seriously. I’m kind of done with the palaces and the castles and the fortresses and the walls. I’m not really in India to revel in old, drafty, and sometimes gaudy, houses, of really wealthy people who paint portraits of themselves and their mothers and then separate themselves with high walls and gold-plaited locks.
I like dealing with salesmen, and locals, and the people that bug you on the street, and the meeting of folk on the train, and the conversations had over the purchase of prayer beads or hand made shoes. I like these things much more. And they have a much lower “Foreigner Price” than museums and castles do (i.e. entrance fees to places of “historical interest”- i.e. castles, forts, museums, etc- have two prices: Indian resident Rs. 5, Foreign Tourist Rs 250. Its insane.)
At Mysore palace, before Samantha began to condemn visiting historical sites such as these...
Nevertheless, we were there, in the middle of this palace, and then in the middle of its courtyard next to a pair of sad looking elephants that gave rides to families by walking in circles for a small fee. I got to pet the elephant. It felt like what I imagine sharks to feel like if their bodies were perfectly dry. Elephants are so big and substantial… they need so much more room than that palace could offer.
After running around the inside and the outside of the palace for awhile, joking with vendors and laughing with/at rickshaw drivers, we went to our hotel, picked up our stuff, and finally boarded a bus to Kushalnagar- the small village hub to access the Tibetan refugee settlements. And then, 2.5 hours later, and after the rather loud and obnoxious singing of some young, Tibetan teenage girls, we jumped off our bus, into the arms of another rickshaw, and found ourselves in a small village… swarming with beautiful men and women wearing burgundy and yellow robes.
Man. I love monks. Some people don’t know how far my love of monks goes. It’s very deep and rabbit-hole like.
(In one breath: It begins with a Unitarian Universalist garage sale and me, at 12, running around with my step brother and wanting to like adult reading level books and seeking out any book that might actually interest me in the piles and piles of cardboard boxes, and then the finding of a book without any cover, written by some guy named His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and reading it, with a pen in hand, and reading more books by this strange and distant yet not so untouchable man from a far off land somewhere that was once Tibet, before it became Tibet with parentheses and the word “China” next to it, and more books, and then, finally, a class that explains Buddhism, and beginning to understand what people were saying in that almost instinctual way, and then I hear a lecture, and I see this His Holiness in real life 8 years after I read the first book, and then, imagine this, I’m there in his new host-homeland only 9 years after the first time I even heard his name. And I’m not made of money, so I can’t exactly take the plane ride/pilgrimage to his new home in exile, but I can certainly visit a small settlement of Tibetan monks living just 40 kilometers from where my little cheap hotel is resting in the not so little town I’m visiting.)
And I do. And while this story does not explain my love, it does explain its origins…, which sometimes makes things self-explanatory.
Lonely Planet neglected to tell us, however, that this settlement is super-government-protected, and signs are posted in very obvious places declaring this space a free-from-foreigners space by some law with some penal code in Indian-government-jargon and a threat of some number of years in jail if I stay there. And what does this little girl-turned older girl with her beautiful boyfriend and fellow male companions say to that?
“Ha-ha! Screw you, Indian Jail!”
Screw you, Indian police
And, after a few unsuccessful attempts with hotels that don’t want to risk putting up a foreigner that night, we find a hotel with a front desk clerk who has a buddy at the police department. (These are the best kinds of desk clerks.) He says the police aren’t coming by that night, but that they will be by at 10AM the next morning, and we better be out by then. He recommends staying away from the main town with its tourist attractions (about 3 km away from the monastic school/town we were staying in) and hanging out for the big debate class that was taking place in the old temple that night, in one hour. He wonders if we’d be okay with that.
And, again, I think- “Wait… let me get this straight: you’re asking me if it’d be okay if I attend class with a bunch of Tibetan refugees rather than visit some tourist attraction in town?"
So we end up sitting freakishly silent and slow moving, cross-legged, behind about 300-400 Tibetan monks practicing their chanting on an outdoor pavilion for one and a half hours. We were dripping in sound. And our butts hurt on the cold concrete, while all the other 400 people with us sat comfortably on small cushions, cross-legged, and swaying back and forth to the sounds they themselves were in the process of creating. Meanwhile, every so often, a monk with a microphone began in the deepest, monk-yish, almost Gregorian chant-like-sound, to fluidly re-start the monks on a new chant. We sat with this giant class while the sun set behind the monastery, the air grew cold, our bellies became hungry, and we left our giant family of monks to their music for some Tibetan chow mien-like noodles at the restaurant next to the monastery.
Ahhh... monks.
Of course, a friendly, English-speaking monk had to help us. The monk at the counter didn’t understand what meal we wanted, and this monk took it upon himself to organize the receiving of our food and drink, as well as all payment processes. Of course, amongst all people involved, everything ended in a smile and 4 plates of noodles and 2 plates of bread and something semi-curry-like. After eating ourselves silly, we walked outside into total darkness and wandered around a few stores- buying prayer beads, “Sera Jey Monastic University” bags, and wall hangings. These felt like solid purchases because, God and government knows, foreigners aren’t even supposed to BE HERE in the first place- therefore, they aren’t catering to us! These beads aren’t for tourists! These beads are for the monk students!
The next morning, we woke up at 5:30AM and packed up all of our belongings for a stealthy exit from the police. We walked the 3 kilometers back into the main tourist part of town and had breakfast at a little restaurant with good chai. We then wandered our way into the main tourist attraction- the Golden Temple. Surrounding the main temple were smaller rooms with large Buddhas and wildly detailed paintings of different gods and goddess figures and hells and heavens, or another room filled with the sound of more chanting and music, while incense smoke literally billowed out of the doorways with the music trailing loudly behind it.
We wandered all along the grounds, always asking monks if we were allowed to go into a room by pointing to ourselves and pointing to the room and hoping for a head nod of approval. We got some disapproving nods- one of which was particularly sad. We were not allowed to go into the main Golden Temple. It was full of monks that morning because, from what we were told by the desk clerk, today was a holiday in celebration of something resembling spring. (Although its not technically spring by USA standards, the monsoon season is basically over, and a whole new wave of planting occurs here.) But inside the temple that we didn’t get to see was an 18 meter high gold Buddha! It’s horribly unfortunate that we didn’t get to see it. Keeps the mystery, yeah?
Prayer flags, prayer wheels, and monasteries
Also on the outskirts of the main grounds, past gardens and small Tibetan high schools, was an entire wall of prayer flags and prayer wheels. We all walked alongside the wheels, turning them and stopping for pictures of what had felt to be some revealed treasure we weren’t actually supposed to see, but completely stumbled upon. Following our time with the activity of prayer, we bought more things from some Tibetan stores in town- Kevin purchased some beautiful wall hangings, the other boys bought more prayer beads (they were all playing with their beads endlessly), and I bought a Tibetan singing bowl. I’ve completely fallen in love with this bowl since I’ve returned to Hyderabad… I “play” it every morning, and almost every time I come into my room. It’s amazing. It’s such a perfect “om,” and the way it vibrates in my hand, and then the sound left over… ah, man. Awesome. If I was actually good at meditation, I’d use it. We’ll see where it takes me.
Monk on a motorbike
Monday was spent in a traveling stupor:
9AM-12:20PM: Settlements to Kushalnagar to Mysore by bus
-Lunch-
1:30PM-6:00PM: Mysore to Bangalore by bus
6:15PM-5:45AM (the next morning!): Bangalore to Hyderabad
On the bus, we were all split up because of some various reasons, and I was in the ladies section of the train- a small cubicle, still surrounded by men, but full of women. It was totally wonderful. We sat and talked about “western” culture compared to Indian culture and its impact on women, and how we perceived our bodies, and marriage, and men, and food, and bombs, and Bush. Then, one of the older women in our section who did not speak any English started to take out endless amounts of home made Indian food from her bag and proceeded to feed all of us with it. The girls around us who were in their 20’s were all laughing with us as the woman handed us more and more food and we thanked her by calling her “auntie” and smiling and nodding ceaselessly. We definitely made friends that night- INDIAN friends! People who live in Hyderabad and want to show us the best bazaars to shop and the greatest places to get ice cream! I’m excited. I hope we follow through on that.
Meanwhile, on a different portion of the train, Kevin had taken a sleeping pill to sleep through the entire night of train ruckus. Front what Kyle said (his berth-mate), he walked around, went past his bunk a couple of times, while looking for his bunk, hair a mess and bound up in a bandana, laughing to himself as he walked back and forth.
And now we’re back in Hyderabad. This weekend we are going to Hampi. The weekend after that Kevin and I have decided to… imagine this… stay in Hyderabad! We’re going to stay in Hyderabad!
My nose piercing is a little swollen and oozing some nasty white/yellow discharge. I have a new hilariously awkward practice of plunging my entire nose into a coffee mug of warm, salt water twice a day to stop any infections. It helps a lot, but it’s definitely awkward. But I do it while listening to Ani Difranco, and that makes everything wondrously bearable. I love Ani Difranco, kind of like I love monks.
But that’s a different rabbit hole.
Kevin Eldridge, Ani Difranco, monks
But the reality in India is that music is a sorely underrepresented art form (at least commercially), and the bulk of what's available for purchasing in the states is a huge mass of pop hindi music one can't really distinguish from all the other songs in its genre, and the extremely popular American music of three or four years ago. So their music stores here aren't very much fun.
Rhinos look extremely bizarre when they're milking.
Tonight we leave for Mysore, a big city in Karanataka (I believe), and it used to be the seat of the Maharaj, back when they were still around. Samantha and I have worked on our traveling itenary even more and discovered that we've left ourselves hardly any time in Hyderabad in favor of exploring the cities of South India nearly every remaining weekend to us. My reservations about doing this are very small. I've found a rich appreciation of travel deep in my bones.
One never realy knows what you can expect when you're traveling to a new city and state. You can read all you want in your guide but the text and the maps and the do's and don't's simply don't allow you to realize just precisely what a city is like. And we've found everything from some of the most beautiful landscapes I've laid eyes on to the dirtiest city I've ever seen- hands down.
I do wish that my hindi understanding was growing, rather than becoming stagnant. It's entirely true that you can have a sufficient experience of India with just an understanding of english, but I think this is also a misleading thing to say. A lot of people know some english, but they rarely know enough to really engage in conversation with them. You can answer questions about your country, if you like India, and do the other basics, but then the person is inevitably staring at the ground, the sky, or you, probably not at a loss for what to say, but hindered by their inability to express it in a language you understand.
It's so weird having finally come into contact with the power of language so late in my life. It's a twofold realization: I've been reading extensively and I've been marvelling at the fact that the world is so heavily populated by people I am unable to communicate with.
In terms of reading, I go through books now absolutely awe-struck by the power of the english language. Not to say that other languages are less powerful (I'm sure they're basically the same), but so many difficult ideas and concepts can be related to me virtually without hindrance. I can read a page and have learned a great deal about characters and settings and histories and what have you, and most languages are equally capable of doing the exact same thing.
And then there's this whole country full of people who speak Hindi or Telugu or Gujarati or Marathi or Garwali or any of the other one hundred or whatever languages, and we simply cannot interact the way humans typically interact.
There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about that.
I do like the idea behind the story of Babel, at least on a specific level. I like that whoever is responsible for the creation of the bible thought a bit about the myriad of languages in the world and saw something unsettling about that.
The argument I'm on the verge of making is used to make a case for the Englization of the world- which is something I'm not a big fan of whatsoever. A great deal of countries that have large amounts of english speakers within them is often because of that particularly diseased shadow of colonialism hanging over the nation. So I don't think a language should be made universal, it just feels bizarre to me that there's so many ways to talk to people that only make sense to a specific group of individuals.
At the same time, so much of a particular culture is rooted to language. The typical outlets for the creation of a culture and an identity are centered around language, authors write in a specific language, music is directly related to sound, which is informed by the kinds of words a person uses. Even nonverbal forms of art are impacted by the language that the artist speaks. Some art from a hindi-speaker might deal with ideas only properly expressed in the hindi language. No matter how much you translate a piece of work, or an idea, or a phrase, you can never be sure if you've done the language justice. "Lost in Translation", I guess. Such a strange idea.
I can give this blog right here to a hindi speaker and have him translate. Only the most naive would believe that it will surface with the identical messages that it had when I wrote it. It goes through a native hindi speaker who also speaks english, and his understanding of language, of the world around him, of the new target audience as well as the old, and of me will all influence how he translates my blog. And then he's as much authored my blog as I have. Then someone translates it from hindi to dutch, and on and on until its something virtually unrecognizable. I might read it retranslated from ten different languages back to english and think "I wrote something sort of like this one time".
How is it that I can pass by hundreds of people every day and be unable to learn anything about them? That's a mental inability to connect, on any meaningful level.
It isn't a lonely feeling in this case because there are many people from the U.S. that speak English just fine. We do our connecting there. And it explains why we've formed meaningful relationships with the other students in the same program, rather than with people we've been meeting in our travels. But it's a difficult truth.
Can you make a case for a single language that exists the world over? A lot of people think english is the savior for this exact problem I'm writing about. Peace Corps has a ton of volunteers who are in tiny villages in some impoverished part of the world teaching villagers and townspeople english skills. Is that the answer?
I personally feel that, given what I wrote about about language being a vital informant and shaper of culture, that when you start using more english in the world you are working slowly towards a global society composed of smaller regions that look more similar to one another than they used to. If everyone starts thinking and speaking in the same language, it seems inevitable that our social values and the way we behave will become closer to one another.
So what is the Peace Corps trying to do when they spread the english teachers the world over? Are we interested in the preservation of the diversity between societies that forms the backbone of what makes our world a fascinating place? Can that kind of preservation exist when we're having people learn what is quickly becoming a "global language"?
A lot of people believe in India that you need adequate english skills in order to be a successful person. You should see the billboards around any major city you go to. They depict men with their mouths taped shut, or being outshone by a person front and center, whose lighter skin and broad smile somehow indicates that not only is he doing well, but he is doing well because he can speak english. They usually read something like "Feeling stuck? Come learn first-rate english with us"...etc. In this country, english skills are both a mark of higher education as well as a real gateway into a more prosperous lifestyle. To deny it would be to deny that the sky is blue. English enables people to live "better" lives.
Yet it exists in this country purely because several hundred years before the government of a large Island off the coast of Europe decided it wanted to own the world.
I've heard people say that colonization was the greatest thing to ever happen to India. It gave India railways, electricity, an educational system, a judicial system, and all the infrastructure a developing country can only dream of. One man claimed that colonization gave India everything that it has today. But is infrastructure all that matters to a country? I'm learning more and more that national identity is a heavy concept, and plays no small role in the consciousness of a people of a nation. What did being owned by a bunch of rich white people make Indians think about themselves? We can't pretend that colonization wasn't simply a slightly more dignified form of enslaving people. Britain didn't conquer India just to give them all the infrastructure and leave. It was so they could own a bigger piece of the world, and receive an appropriate amount of profit for it. We can't pretend that Britain wasn't in the habit of shipping food back to the homeland in the midst of crippling famines all throughout India. We can't pretend that one of their primary interests wasn't in forming a monopoly in the tea industry. We can't pretend that Britain didn't use their unjustified ownership of India to exploit nearby China with opium. Sure, they have a lot of very impressive infrastructure. There's even beautiful buildings that British people built while they lived here. But does that mean that Britain marching around the world back then and telling strangers that they were officially British subjects was a good thing? Should these various countries be officially thanking the United Kingdom for all they did in the name of humanity? Certainly not.
And we can also not pretend that all forms of one country raping another turns out so shiny and bright in the end. We'll have to wait and see how long it takes until Iraq has railways, or gets consistent electricity back in all regions, or has citizens that feel comfortable walking around at any time of the day. It could be a while. But I find myself doubting that Iraqi citizens will be thinking "Well thank god the U.S. came over here, and gave us all this great infrastructure. Thank god."
I've gone from milking rhinos to this, all in one blog.
I suppose it amounts to something again bordering on a rant, but it gives you an idea of the sorts of things living here in India makes me think about. There's an awful lot to think about. More later.
-K
----------------------------------
And, on a totally different note, today, Samantha pierced her nose. She's been wanting to do this for a long time, and, with a posse of 5 other young women, went to the "Women Only" beauty parlor downtown, and did it.
She's thrilled.
(Double click the picture to see larger)
Due to some unforeseen taxi issues, we ended up traveling by train. After the bombings in Hyderabad, my imagination was on some form of steroid, and I pictured myself on a train doomed for bombing… full of “scary” looking individuals leaving “scary” looking bags on the train as they, rather quickly and coolly, got off. Of course, this wasn’t at all the case. The train was filled with large families and lots of children, all heading towards Aurungabad for a Hindu pilgrimage, or for business, or because a family member was sick in the state neighboring ours. The young girls next to us, practicing their henna skills on their mothers and aunts, saw me looking over and invited my hands to be adorned. Of course, the henna ended up looking like exactly what it was- like a little girl colored all over my hand. Which is fine. It was free. And it made me feel safe.
Gettin' henna-ed by a 12-year-old
During the rest of the train ride, our group of 5 spent most of the time reading our Lonely Planet Travel Guides about Aurungabad. Our student advisor, Sephora, had food poisoning the day we planned to leave and could no longer travel with us—thereby taking her plans, our hotel reservations, and our understanding of what the hell we were doing with her.
However, with Lonely Planet in hand, we feared not. Upon arrival the next morning (we took an overnight train), we found a cheaper hotel with a terrace courtyard of pillows and sofas, food, and, for those who smoke, hookah. After piling our stuff into our hotel rooms, we packed our backpacks and boarded a n absolutely crazy city bus to the Ellora caves- only after boarding two other buses and not finding any place on them to sit, or stand, for that matter!
For 19 rupees each we found ourselves stumbling off the bus and into the middle of a small, one-street town called Ellora. The minute we stepped off, of course, vendors approached us. One of which, with his brother, was incredibly successful. While most of the villages in this area build their economies around the caves and all the tourists they attract, the other half spend their time mining in smaller areas miles away, and bringing the stones back to the tourists. The vendor that nailed us, a gems and geodes seller, made bank off the fact we didn’t realize how readily available all the stones were. We’d find out later that the exact same necklaces and pendants, of equal quality and from the same locations, would be available at all the other 35 or 45 locations around the caves; with a price range of 50 rupees to 950 rupees. Lindsay bought her one pendant for Rs 400. I bought a smaller necklace for my sister and one for myself at Rs 400 total.
We both got ripped off, but not too badly.
The cool thing about getting ripped off is that you make connections. The person that ripped us off hooked us up with an American-turned-Indian named Joe; an ex-massage therapist from Pasadena/Arizona/New York (he’s lived in a lot of places) who left the States to live in India… indefinitely. He’s lived in Ellora for the entire year, the white local, who, when you speak to him, isn’t cracked out at all. Normally, when you think of Westerners that choose to come to India and live a “transient” existence in a small cave-town, and don tiny white tank tops, a scarf, and an orange skirt, that you’d be talking to someone whose currently-shaved head was once adorned in dred-locks while he smoked way too much pot and talked about how Hinduism could save the world.
Joe wasn’t like that at all. He was like… normal. I could picture meeting him in a coffee shop back home and not being suspicious of any drug use whatsoever.
What was great about him was that he was patient… as we meandered through each cave, he’d point a few things out, then just chill, wait, and walk with us wherever we wanted.
And each cave was incredible. In total, at Ellora, there are 34 caves- the first batch of which was Buddhist, then Hindu, and then Jain. Each “cave” is actually a room, immaculately adorned with carvings, in one giant piece of rock. These were hardly caves in the “hole in the side of the wall” sense- these were masterpieces of something ancient and sandy. Inside them were rock monasteries where the 5 of us would sit cross-legged on the hard ground and try out our best “Om” to see what kind of crazy vibrations we could create. We’d even try to do it in harmony. We weren’t bad at all.
Kevin next to a Buddha
Cave exploration
After lunch, we continued on towards the Hindu and Jain section, which was all near a waterfall. Joe however, being the local he was, knew of some sweet secrets beyond the waterfall. He veered us away from the path, up and over the waterfall towards the top. On top of the waterfall was absolutely lush and green- a view of a valley full of cows and crops and palm trees and orchards and hills and temples and little distant people with little rickshaws. It was breathtaking. One of those, “Holy shit. I’m really fucking alive right now” moments.
An old monastary
More exploring
We continued to go past more railings towards what he said was one of the best swimming holes around. Set way back in the hills behind the caves were pools and pools of water with little waterfalls from each one, surrounded in green, and topped off by a cave-converted-into-active-Hindu-temple.
At the swimming hole
After we had finished swimming, Kevin and Lindsay wandered over to the rock-cave-temple where a Swami was sitting, waiting to bestow upon them a bindi. Then we made our way out of the swimming holes, and sat next to the top of the waterfall for awhile (at which point Kevin accidentally knocked a fatty boulder off the waterfall that went crashing down to the pathway below- THANKFULLY not hitting anyone.) After we had seen the final Hindu cave, we finally “caved in” to our feeling of fatigue and hiked back towards the small town for chai and ice cream. We said “farewell” to Joe, boarded the bus back to town, and headed “home.”
At the top of the waterfall... feeling both, vertigo and alive.
Near the final Hindu cave
The next day, following breakfast, we hired a taxi to take us on the two-hour drive to the Ajantha caves. The Ajantha caves are different than the Ellora caves in that they are a) a UN World Heritage Site, b) better preserved, c) have sweet paintings on the walls, and d) something else that isn’t coming to mind right now. In other words, it’s like an Indian National Park. Your taxi isn’t allowed into the park, and you have to park in a main area surrounded in little “gift shops” (selling geodes, gems, and necklaces- shocking!) and then board a bus that takes you into the canyon where the caves are. During the bus ride, a movie plays about the history of the area.
The whole geography of the land itself reminded me of Zion National Park, or even Sedona… with less red rock. The river below had obviously carved out the canyon, leaving small mesas in the middle and high mesas as walls with green hillsides and water buffalo grazing on top of them.
At Ajantha!
Inside these caves, all the statues were much better preserved and much more monitored. Unlike Ellora, where we could touch statues and pretend to be apart of the statue itself, Ajantha had railings and cave monitors and shoe-removal requirements. Flash photography was not allowed for preservation purposes. Lots of tourist groups moved slowly from cave to cave till they finished all 20-something of them. Each cave was perfected with a 15 foot tall rock Buddha sitting off in the distance, bathed in a soft yellow, almost green, scientifically-proven-preservation-power light… just enough for people to take hazy pictures of imposing Buddhas preserved right at the moment they are about to turn the wheel of righteousness.
Buddhas
This trip has definitely changed by perceptions of the Buddha as a revered figure. Usually, in Hindu temples, or even Christian churches, you see huge, impressive statues of gods or goddesses or Christ himself on the crucifix. You get used to big, eye-catching, and sometimes frightening idols or statues. Until this trip, I had never seen a Buddha so large, with such presence, that I had to stop in my tracks and just marvel in it. It changed my perceptions of the Buddha himself, and I found myself really stirred by this figure, as if it were real, and watching from its perch, and it had power all unto itself. I guess statues can do that, and I wonder how that impacted the people living in these caves… to have such an outstanding presence around you. Do you become accustomed to it? Does it fade away? If I were to put that big of a statue in my room, would it be like a constant reminder of Buddha, and the principles of Buddhism… kind of like the 3 to 5 prayers Muslims make daily in Hyderabad?
I don’t know. All I know is that Buddha blew my mind.
More Buddha
Kevin in one of the final caves
After we had adequately explored the caves, we were starving. Luckily we found a woman selling freshly picked cucumber by the bridge that led to a mesa and a viewing point. We all stopped by the river and ate cucumber… thinking that having a cucumber (which has what, negative calories?) would hold us over to walk up the mesa and walk back down to the bus station.
Eating cucumber!
By the time we reached the mesa, my goose was cooked. I was ready for water and food, and definitely ready to head back towards home. When we reached the top, however, a young man and his brother were waiting to sell their rocks to us. Of course, we weren’t interested, but once they got talking to Kyle and Kevin, they offered to take us on the other side of the mesa, towards their little village in between the hills, and then back down to the bus stand. I wasn’t down- I doubted we could walk quick enough (and enjoy it) to get to the last bus (which left in an hour and a half). Kevin and Kyle were excited, so our group split with promises to meet back at the bus stand.
All of us at the caves
Kevin said it was beautiful. An outstanding green mesa, a small village of 60 people, tall grass, waterfalls, and quiet temples. He took some amazing pictures of his little explorative hike above the caves.
Kevin and Kyle at the top of the mesa before leaving on their mini-excursion
During Kevin's excursion, the final pic is with their guide... but the big freakish creature is the water buffalo Kevin and I will own one day, and Kevin will bathe each morning after we have coffee together.
There they go...
One of the most intriguing/confusing/saddening/frustrati
“Remember me!? We met when you walked through here-“
“Come to shop 37! Remember that? 37! Best prices! My name is David, I show you how to get there…”
“Hey! Madam! Sir! Madam! Hello, Madam!”
“Rocks! Geodes! Good prices! Good gifts! This way, Madam!”
“MADAM! HELLO MADAM!”
“OVER HERE. COME HERE!”
It was endless. Normally, that stuff makes me frustrated enough to leave without picking up any goodies, but I really wanted to pick up some geodes for my family back home- all the people in my family -my father, my mother, my grandmother- collect pretty rocks to set around their homes. How cool would it be to get some from a Buddhist cave? (Sorry to ruin the surprise to those who are reading this.) Kevin and I agree to a few prices and that he’d make each final call (sometimes, by acting like he holds the purse strings in our “marriage” it makes the prices go lower, plus it takes the pressure off of me when I have to walk away.)
At the first shop, they poured rocks into my hands and lap and onto tables and chairs in front of me, with me picking out one of every 15 that I found to be unique from the rest. After I had picked 4 really beautiful rocks, we began to negotiate the price.
“Kitanay ruppeeai, ji?” (How much money, sir?)
“Umm…. for you? Special price. End of tourist season, no tourists. We want to sell to you.”
“Tikay, ji. But how much?” (Tikay means ‘okay’. He begins to calculate each rock.)
“400 rupees for that one. 1,500 for this- it’s a very nice piece, you see. 900 for that one. And 600 for that. But, see, we give you some discount. So… original price is Rs 3,400, but for you… 3,000 rupees ($75).”
(I look at him with a blank face.)
“3,000 rupees? Too much.”
“Well, what is your price madam?”
“Honestly? You will laugh.”
“YES! Madam! Honestly! What is your price?”
(By this point there are about 6 people in the shop listening, and all the other 20 shop keepers waiting to see if I buy are outside the shop hoping I leave.)
“Well, I’d give you 100 for that, 150 for that, 200 for that one…. and…100 for that. So, 550 rupees. ($13).”
“Madam. You can’t possibly-“
(I keep my blank face.)
“Okay, how about this… (fiddles with calculator)… 2,000 rupees. Very big discount. Very special price.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but I won’t pay it. I’ll give you 550.”
“Madam…”
“550.”
“Madam, we won’t do that.”
“Fine. Thank you for your help!”
And I walk out. As I walk out, he shouts “Okay- 1,500!” To which I keep walking away.
As I walk out, all the shopkeepers swarm Kevin and I as I head towards the next shop. We do the same spiel- he pulls more and more rocks out from his shop, showing to me in them with flashlights (the power was out in the shopping complex) and telling me about how his entire family has been mining for geodes for a long time while he points to a gaudy-color photograph taped to the wall of his “brother” mining a huge chunk of amethyst. I believe him, though. When Kevin and Kyle went hiking with the guide, they asked why the village was empty and the guide pointed to the hills and told them about the geode mines most of the people work in. It makes sense.
I pick another 4 really beautiful pieces. He adds a small chunk of amethyst as a “gift.” We begin to bargain.
“Well, ma’am… 2,200.”
“650.”
“Oh, ma’am. I can’t do that. Too little! Look at these pieces! They’re so unique! So beautiful!”
They were beautiful.
“Alright. 700.”
“Ma’am… how about 1,800?”
“No, sir. 700. That’s it.”
Kevin walks over.
“Oh, sir. This is my husband. Honey, what do you think of this? What price would you pay?”
Kevin sits and thinks for awhile.
“650.”
“See sir? We can’t go further than 700.”
“Ma’am, please, I can’t go lower than 1,500. You see, business has been terrible. No tourists. Please, please buy for 1,500.”
“Sir, we can’t. We live in Hyderabad. We are students. We don’t make money. These gifts are for family, we have to take trains home, pay the taxi driver, and pay for school. I’m sorry. We can’t pay that.”
Kevin and I are being urged by a friend to walk out of the store- the rest of our friends were in the taxi already waiting for me to finish. I felt oddly gross at that point- it was clear that tourist season was bad. Everyone, even Joe, had told me that. These people don’t have much except these geodes and small stores. What is a 150 rupees difference to me? That’s $3.
“Sir, what is your cost on these? Do not lie to me. I do not want to be lied to. Tell me what your cost is for these rocks.”
He thinks for awhile.
“Well, ma’am… um… 1800? That’s why 1500 is good deal. You speak in some Hindi to me, I like that. I give you good deal.”
I don’t buy it.
A few minutes later he says, “How about 1200?”
All of us EAP students have talked about this dilemma before. It’s sometimes really hard to bargain to such a low price to people who, you know, have such difficult lives. But, then again, from our end, it feels very easy for them to look at us and see “foreigner” and give us excrutiatingly-inflated prices. Whenever I bargain, I look at each item and try to think hard about what their costs must be for each piece. Usually, they inflate each price by about 3-5 times as much as the original cost, so its easy to figure out. Then I add a little for their profit. I really try to think of a price that is fair, but sometimes it becomes a game on the buying end, too- how low can you get them to go? I know they’ll probably never sell anything at negative profit, so, if it doesn’t work out on your end, then so be it. Buy it for a few dollars more. But, is it possible that business might be so bad they’d go ahead and sell something just for the cash? I don’t know.
He won’t have my 700. Kevin and I start to walk out. Someone runs over to him and whispers into the his ear.
“Ma’am- we’ll do it for 850 rupees. My uncle just said we could.”
“Sir. 750. That’s it.”
We keep walking.
“PLEASE madam. Please. 850 rupees. Please take them for 850.”
Kevin and I look at one another for awhile and talk amongst ourselves, was it really worth fighting over? One of the pieces in the States would sell for $15 or $20 alone. Probably more.
We start to walk away again, then he shouts, “MADAM! Please! 800 rupees! Just 800 rupees!”
At this point, I walk over and pay for it. We shake hands, they wrap up all the pieces, and we walk away.
And, as we walk away, we’re mauled by 5 shopkeepers.
As we make our way to the car, Kevin has a giant piece of amethyst shoved in his face and a man begging him to take it for 1500. I have the old shopkeeper, Mr. 3,000 Rupees, with all the pieces in his hand, ready to be wrapped, begging me to take it for 1,000 rupees. Kevin and I are both shouting “NO!” simultaneously as people chase us towards the exit. Some people sit in their shops and watch with sad looks on their faces. I wonder how much money these people actually make selling their tigers eye necklaces and Mountain Coral.
While Kevin begins to get agitated with the amethyst dude, I hear him shout “NO! I don’t even WANT IT! NO!” as the guy STILL follows him with the purple stone. My shopkeeper keeps lowering the price:
“1,000!”
“No. I said 550. And now, I’ve already spent money, so all I have is 500. You’ll have to sell for 500.”
“900!”
“No.”
“900! Please, madam! Just 900!”
“No. I said 500.”
“Madam…. 850, 850 is as low as I can go. I can’t go any lower. Please take these for 850.”
Now Kevin joined in, “Sir! She spent her money already. All she has is 500. You’re not going to get anything higher than 500.”
“Pleeeasee madam. Please!”
He starts to follow me to the taxi. Kevin and I are in, we close the door, and finally, he looks at me and breathes a huge sigh, his arms resting on the taxi. We’re the only people in the parking lot…. but I don’t even remember people being in the parking lot when we pulled in that morning. This place was almost empty.
“Ma’am, okay, 550. I need this money. Please. 550.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. 500 is all I can do.”
He looks genuinely sad and frustrated. Looking at the sky, and looking at the rocks. The taxi driver looks at me as if to give permission to drive off. As our car begins to drive out of the parking lot I hear a distant “OKAAAY! MADAAMMMM! 500!” We look back and the guy is holding the rocks in the air yelling at us to come back.
I look at Kevin. We stop the car. I hand him 500. And we drive off.
So, who won? Did anyone? This business feels pretty ugly to me. Granted, bargaining is a part of being in India. But this? This felt like bargaining with truly desperate people. By the time he got to 500 rupees, which, shall we remember, is just $12, I kind of wanted to give him the money. Is he just really good at fooling me into believing he really needs it that bad? I’ve never, EVER, had a shopkeeper treat me this way nor behave so desperately at the prospect of losing business. They were all so frantic to make any bit of money. Something felt wrong about it. Poverty feels gross. And these people aren’t even the poorest of the poor… or are they? No. There were no women in that shop. Women tend to be the poorest of the poor.
Poverty is so horrible. And its so frustrating to deal with. There is no solution I can give with my money that will have any long-lasting impact. All I give are hardly even short-term solutions.
I’m currently reading a book called “Banker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank.” A bank that lent only to “the poorest of the poor,” thereby focusing on rural women and day workers. They make loans of even $1 that some people pay back over the course of a year… but it helps improve their lives! The success of this bank is amazing, and its now got branches all over the world, even in the very poor urban areas of the USA. Having read this book, it makes me wonder- how much is the rent on his shop? If his family mines, how much are their tools or the repairs? And food, during the dry season? How much money does it take for this person to live, and how well do they live? Who do they owe money to? Where will that 500 go?
The fact he has a shop is proof he is not the poorest of the poor. But I can guarantee, he’s probably not doing to well. So, how do you bargain with that? Its so many contradictory feelings at the same time- you don’t want to be ripped off because you’re a white foreigner, but you also know that this person is probably not doing so hot.
I don’t know. I have no answers for this. Only questions and confusion.
After we left, I felt pretty quiet for most of the 2 hour drive back to Aurungabad. We ended up eating dinner at our hotel with a group of 3 young college students from Washington state, friends from high school that have each taken 1.5 months off work to travel around India together. On a note totally different from poverty, one of them helped Kevin and I greatly.
Kevin and I have had terrible chest pains (as you have seen in Kevin’s previous blog about Gujarat.) Absolutely horrible. I had gone to the Health Centre on campus after returning from Gujarat because I could hardly even eat food without feeling pain. They gave me some low grade anti acids, but nothing helped.
During a talk about malaria pills, one of the travelers from Washington, Jason I think, described how he had traveled to Brazil and became really sick from his Doxycycline (the same anti-malarial Kevin and I are on).
“I was having terrible pains in my esophagus and chest- just excruciating. I couldn’t eat, and it’d wake me up at night.”
Kevin and I looked at each other excitingly, then told him about the same problem we had, and how we were the only students with it at the international guest house.
He described how he would take his pill at night, without water, then go to bed. The doctor told him that this causes the pill to settle in the esophagus, and because the pill is such a strong antibiotic, it was BURNING his throat and stomach! The doctor recommended that he take the pill in the morning with a large glass of water and food, he did, and the burning went away.
Kevin and I are the only students still taking the malaria pill (everyone else stopped).
We both take it at night.
We usually took it without water.
We had stopped taking them just after the incident in Gujarat because everything hurt so bad, and, ever since, we began taking them in the morning with water… and things have gotten better.
So, not only does Doxycyline cause you to vomit if you take it on an empty stomach, it also can burn the tissue in the throat and stomach. Man. Sometimes I wonder what this stuff is doing to my liver. I’m alittle worried. A lot of students are taking it because their doctors said that the impact on the liver may be worse than the chances of getting malaria. Who knows. Malaria? Liver damage? Vomiting and throat burning? I don’t know.
At the mini Taj Mahal
The next day we spent exploring Aurungabad. We visited the “mini Taj Mahal”- literally, a smaller version of the Taj made by a Mughal ruler for his wife. We also made an adventure out of finding a small Hindu temple on the top of a hill, hiking up to it and spending time practicing our Hindi with the families at the top. That was, of course, only after we went down a slide in a small kid’s area at the bottom of the hill.
On a slide... being kids again
On the way to the temple and at the temple on the top of the hill...
On the top of the temple
The train ride home was… interesting. We packed Chinese food to eat on the way (we learned from our trip there in which we lived on chocolate cookies and chai), but, unfortunately, we got sleeping births next to the door that led to the second class seating area- a very crowded, slightly sketchy section of the train that many people have told us to avoid for safety and robbery concerns. The result was that new people came in and off the train all night- and, upon seeing us, would sit on or around our beds.
Eating dinner on the crazy train
At one point I woke up to see about 6-7 men sitting on one birth across from our section( about 1 foot away)… watching me.
No lie.
Watching me sleep.
6 guys.
Don’t get me wrong, I felt totally safe- there is a policeman nearby, and I was on the very highest bunk with Kevin, Kyle, and Zeph all underneath me. Nothing was going to happen, its just gross to be so objectified, and it happens frequently. When I woke up to see them all looking at me, I covered my face with a piece of clothing from my bag and fell asleep again, while all the time sleeping and clutching my bags and purse.
In the end, everything was alright. We got home the next morning just in time for breakfast, and for some people, yoga. Kevin and I have been terrible about going to yoga. In the morning I find that all I want to do is sleep in with Kevin, have tea, and read the newspaper over breakfast.
Can anyone blame me?
I’m finding out more and more that India is not only about studying, but also relaxing. I’m only taking three classes- Hindi, Politics, and Sociology. My independent study has fallen through horribly, and I realized that trying to do it in a way that I would feel as satisfactory would not be really possible, so I’m letting it go. Dance is up in the air- turns out they may charge and it may be during my class. But I’ve still got tabla.
Long story short: I enjoy reading books about poverty, drinking tea, going to class, and traveling. This is my India.
Kevin and I have many more trips planned. Check out our itinerary we worked on today during Hindi class:
Sep 7th-9th Mysore (with entire EAP group)
Sep14th-16th Hampi (with smaller group)
Sep 21st-23rd Bangalore (with smaller group)
Sep 28th- Oct 6th Kerala (EAP Sponsored, prepaid trip)
Oct 12th-14 ______________
Oct 19th-21st Pondicherry (romantic getaway, just Kevin and Sam!)
Oct 26th-28th Goa (with smaller group)
Nov 2nd-4th _______________
Nov 8th-11th Kevin’s parents are visiting! (Nov 8th- 15th)
Nov 15th-18th ______________
Nov 23rd-25th Stay in Hyderabad- study for finals!
Program ends-November 30th
Dec 1st-2nd- Stay in Hyderabad, prepare to leave!
Dec 3rd – Dec 10th Sri Lanka
Dec11th – 15th Delhi (Agra, Jaipur, Varanasi)
Come home Dec 15th !
Pretty crazy, huh? I love traveling. Its really grown on me- especially because in India, its cheap and convenient, and I have generous parents. Kevin and I were trying to figure out jobs where we could travel for the rest of our lives. I know many people in the past have tried to do this before.
Hopefully we succed at it.
Parth is a friend of ours from college back home, and most of the time (since he’s moved from India) he lives in Anaheim, but he went back to India for the summer, and so we made it a priority to visit him there and experience the “other” side of India- as in, what sort of country is it when you live there and can speak the language (or, at least, what is it like when you’re with people like that)?
On the airplane there was some kind of medical emergency, and they announced over the speaker that if there was a doctor on-board, the assistance would be appreciated. Even though a doctor did identify himself, about ten or fifteen nun-types (the Hindu equivalent) walked to the front of the airplane where the problem was and offered their own assistance in the form of various herbs, idle talk amongst themselves and with the stewardesses, and heavy doses of staring. When they were told to return to their seats, it was only after repeated requests, and then only reluctantly.
Parth would teach us a song in only a few hours that, had I known at the time, I would have been singing under my breath:
“yeh mairah India (This is my India…). I love my India” It’s a song one sings whenever one has an experience that is truly Indian. Hordes of women (and indeed, the entire plane) staring directly at someone having a medical issue is a completely and undeniably Indian experience.
We found Parth relatively easily off the plane and he loaded us into his car and we made our way into Ahmedabad, the former capital of Gujarat (but it grew too quickly, and so the capital was moved to another city- Gandhinagar). He gave us a quick run-down of the city (lots of farmlands, lots of Muslims, not many tourists) and then we stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall type place to pick up some breakfast.
On the way to Parth’s house was when we first learned the song:
As we approach Parth’s house, Parth, halfway through a sentence exclaims, “look at that!” as a woman washes her naked boy’s butt by splashing water up into his crack, right on the side of the road. Then he sings the song.
“My uncle taught me that song. Whenever you see something crazy in India, you sing it.”
After Parth fed us, he insisted that we “take rest” until noon or one- we had been awake since three that morning in order to ensure that our plane was not missed. We’d forgotten that we’re in India, where security checks are minimal and one doesn’t need to arrive any earlier than a half an hour before departure at an airline. Lesson learned.
After taking rest, Parth wanted lunch so we left his house with Neekunj and Checko (his two cousins) with us. We ate at a South Indian restaurant and had probably our first authentic South Indian culinary experience (ironic, since Gujarat is Central India). Parth then took us to a music store so we could buy some authentic Indian tunes (I got some poppy stuff I haven’t listened to yet and these two crazy guys rocking tabla and sarode together).
Then we went to Parth’s family’s farm. For some odd reason, they have a giant farm of Eucalyptus trees, but the family rarely visits it, and another family lives on the farm and takes care of whatever farmerly concerns there may be. As we were driving out we noticed far off in the trees bands of peacocks (usually two females and a male), but the birds are very skittish, and wouldn’t let us get very close. Samantha also saw some strange animal she described as a cross between a cow and a horse. I wondered what sort of farm we had wandered onto for a moment, but Parth confirmed that such animals exist. I didn’t have the luck to see one.
The family that cares for the farm lives in pretty intense poverty, and it was a little uncomfortable at first just arriving and checking out what basically amounts to their backyard. They were friendly but spoke only Gujarati, and Parth nor his cousins were very interested in conversing with them for any extended period. We poked around the trees, checked out an abandoned servant’s quarters used when the farm was a bigger enterprise, and shot a few rounds at a plastic bottle with an air gun. Then I drove a tractor.
It didn’t go very fast, and whenever I accidentally hit too much gas it threatened to throw everyone off the tractor, so I attempted to avoid anything too crazy in the scheme of driving. If I kept a list of things to do before I died, I don’t think driving a tractor would be on there, but at least now I can say I’ve done it, should such a conversation every crop up.
In the evening we were slated to visit Parth’s aunts house for dinner, but Parth made copious plans between the farm and then that never came to fruition. This was a key element of the great experience that was Gujarat: Parth ensures there’s never a dull moment by planning for twice the amount of time that we really had there.
“On our way to the house we can visit my cousin, he’s a doctor- like, a really good doctor, and he can give us some medicine for your heartburn!”
“Kevin, do you like bumper cars? There’s a great place to do bumper cars in Rajasthan, even better than the bumper cars here! Way better!”
“Oh yeah, we’ll get Sam’s nose pierced, we can definitely do that the last day we’re here. We’ll have plenty of time.”
We arrived at his aunt’s house and ate traditional Gujarati food, which is delicious. The best part of it all was eating Indian family style, all sitting around the living room, chatting (or, in our case, listening to rapid Gujarati and laughing at jokes we aren’t catching whatsoever), and having our plates showered with food until we insist quite firmly that we’re near bursting.
Then shopping. Gujarati dress is ornate, typically littered with little mirrors or other shiny pieces of whatever, and we showed up at an evening bazaar and allowed Parth’s cousins to engage in their brutal haggling with the vendors in order to get Samantha the cheapest deal possible. I believe she ended up paying ¼ of their original price, but we’re quickly getting used to the fact that this is the standard expectation for a good haggler.
Rows and rows of dresses like this.
Again, we weren’t catching much of the details with the haggling, but occasionally we’d get a translation:
“C’mon sir, these two are students, they’ve spent most of their money just coming to Gujarat! You think they can pay 400 rupees (10 dollars) for this? You’re crazy!”
“No, little girl. You are like gods to us. You have all of that money and more, and you try to bring it down until we aren’t making anything.”
“Do we look rich? We are not rich! We have no more money than you. We cannot afford these prices. Give us good prices!”
Gujaratis, at the very least, tend to lie extravagantly in their never-ending quest to save money. More on that later.
Parth's hard-hitting bargaining cousins.
We left the market just as the rains began, and ended our night by visiting a traditional pan shop- another Indian treat Samantha and I had avoided, but it was for more specific reasons this time. However, under the pressure of Parth’s hospitality, we had virtually no choice but to try it.
We reached Parth’s house and were finally allowed to collapse into the bed Parth had provided for us. It looked to be a decent night of sleep, save for that pesky heartburn issue (which we’ve finally rectified).
The next morning we woke early to embark on a city tour arranged by the state government. We emerged into the city and finally found the bus station where the tours are arranged, and we waited patiently for our useless tour guide to show up, then we left. We were the only people on a bus that could seat at least forty people. The woman was not happy from the very beginning.
Parth (In Gujarati): “Do you speak English? My friends don’t understand Gujarati”
Woman (In Gujarati): “Of course I speak English, do you think I am stupid?” (Trust me, this response was much, much longer, but Neekunj was sparse with his translation.)
Parth: “No, I just wanted to make sure that you could, because my friends wouldn’t understand it.”
Woman: “Of course I can, you think we run tours where all we speak is Gujarati!? It’s a city tour for tourists!”
Naturally, the woman spoke fairly poor English. Parth resorted to repeating everything she said and adding as well, because the extent of her knowledge of most of the places she pointed out was that it was “very big and very beautiful”. So maybe we’d accidentally taken the tour for blind people. Sometimes she threw out names I couldn’t make out, but in the end, it didn’t really matter. The tour was way cool, and we got to see a Jain temple finally and we ended our trip at Gandhi’s famous ashram, where he embarked on his salt march that was a major turning point for the Independence struggle of India.
Jain temple. No pictures allowed on the inside. It was filled with different gods and goddesses, and had virtually nobody inside of it.
Gandhi.
At the ashram, we fiddled around at the various buildings until we found the building that Gandhi and his wife lived in. Gandhi’s room is locked up, but you can peek inside and glimpse his spinning wheel and the mattress he used to sleep on. But, never forget, we’re in India! White tourists never stop at the bare minimum, one must always attempt to see as much as possible. Parth asked the keymaster if he would let us into Gandhi’s room, and initially he was denied rather sternly. But only a minute later the man approached us again dangling his keys and smiling: a sudden change of heart, I guess. He let us in and told us simply not to touch anything. Parth said later that Samantha almost cried, and I think he’s right.
Before the tears were flowing.
That's Gandhi's spinning wheel.
We didn’t have enough time to view the exhibit on Gandhi’s life, so, the tour having concluded, we returned to the bus station and drove to an Indian restaurant where they served OK American food. Most of it was burning my and Samantha’s throats.
After this we saw where Parth is working this summer, interning at the largest hospital in Asia at a pharmacy. When he told his boss about our heartburn, we ended up with four packs of medicine: some cipro, some ibuprofen, some heartburn-fixing pills, and some lesser equivalent. This would impact our trip in a very big way in less than twenty-four hours.
We left a little later to Gandhinagar, the new capital of Gujarat. It’s not much of a city though, because its been built recently. We were leaving to visit a temple for a branch of Hinduism that has distanced itself from the religion a bit and worships a man who trekked around India when he was thirteen years old until he settled in Gujarat. At the moment I can’t recall his name. The religion prides itself on very immaculate temples, so the temple itself is surrounded by a huge and very well-kept garden, and the temple is very clean and neat compared to most Hindu temples. After we paid our respects we went into a super expensive-looking museum-type building where they showcased the man’s life as he wandered through the country, and then we watched a movie called “Mystic India” that did the same thing. Both were very well done. There were some more exhibits we could have checked out, but we were tired and ready to leave, so we did.
Women chilling outside the entrance to the temple. They didn't allow pictures, so I just took a few of the people hanging around at sunset.
We were meeting more of Parth’s family around the city for dinner, but it wasn’t quite time, so Parth decided we’d go to a mall-type place with an arcade to kill some time. We had to buy tickets just to get in, and there were a few restaurants, a decent arcade with half of the machines broken, bumper cars that would be illegal in the states for their speed, a mechanical bull (that I destroyed with my riding skills), and a star-tours type ride where you could choose from six different “stages” and they’d project the DVD onto a screen while the rickety set of chairs rotates in the appropriate direction. My favorite were the cars, where the speeds we reached were doubtless dangerous, but more fun than any bumper car you’ll encounter in the states. Yeh mairah India. They don’t worry about things like courtcases because of back injury in this country, and I love that.
We finally headed to the restaurant, which was inside of a hotel Samantha and I were not dressed appropriately for. More family introductions, and we waited for nearly an hour while Parth and his father examined the premises to evaluate whether it will serve for his sister’s marriage next summer or not.
The restaurant was supposed to be Punjabi food, but I’m not entirely sure if it was or not. I’m sure some of it was, but we also ate some noodles and things like that. An appropriate word would probably be something like smorgasborg.
Anyway, I had the grossest thing I’ve tasted in India: buttermilk. I’ve never tasted it even back in the states, but I’m sure that the way they make it here is much different from anything you could find in the states. Just thinking about it makes me feel genuinely sick, and I mean genuinely. They get buttermilk then they chuck in a GIANT handful of different herbs and spices. It tastes really, really, REALLY nasty. They ordered me a fat glass because I was curious, but I wasn’t able to even border on finishing it. Ew… still feel nasty just thinking about it.
After dinner I popped that little pill in my mouth. This would prove to be the greatest single mistake of my India career thus far: never trust a pharmacist (no offense Parth).
We drove back home, went to sleep, and I awoke at three still feeling as though I had just eaten the dinner. It occurred to me vaguely that perhaps the pill had something to do with it. One hour later I was hanging on the toilet, heaving out the fourth course of the meal. An hour later came the third, then the second. By seven o’clock I was seeing the undigested appetizer again, and then the water I’d drank.
Samantha did some online research and found that (surprise!) the pills stop acid production in your stomach completely! COMPLETELY! They are only to be taken with their counterpart that somehow works the food without any acid.
Parth: “Never take these pills again! Ever!”
Yeh mairah India…
The next morning we were slated to leave for Rajasthan in the afternoon. Come afternoon I was having difficulty standing, but I sank into the car and we made our way off, and after about two hours I was willing to try a banana.
Crazy Indian Transportation Services.
The car ride was very fun, we got to participate in about 40% of the conversation (the rest was in Gujarati, which Sam and I were fine with), and Parth gave us different lectures on Indian culture and driving.
“In this country, Sam, if some guy hits you on his scooter, every guy around him will come beat the shit out of him.”
“Is that legal? People are cool with that?”
“You can hit anyone and everyone in this country. Except your wife. That’s not cool.”
“You see this guy? He just walks onto the road with all that shit on his head. He doesn’t care that I’m coming on, just about to kill him. It’s my responsibility to make sure he lives. If I hit him, it’s my fault. I like to go really fast, then stop right in front of them. Oh, look at this guy!” Lays on horn, swerves tightly around a man carrying a sack on his head. “Stupid people!”
“What about the cops Parth? If one pulled me over, I think I’d try to give him like five-hundred rupees (12 dollars). I mean, I don’t know what to pay them, but I don’t want to get screwed with. Maybe like a thousand?”
Neekunj and Parth’s eyes are wide.
Parth: “Five-hundred rupees!?”
Neekunj: “No, that’s way too much.”
Parth: “You give them like, twenty! Maybe!”
Neekunj: “Sometimes nothing.”
Parth: “I don’t care if you’ve killed somebody, you don’t give them anything more than twenty.”
Me: “But won’t that offend the cops? That’s only like fifty cents.”
Neekunj: “No, it won’t offend them. You’re paying for their breakfast, their tea.”
Parth: “I’ve driven away from a cop before. They can’t do anything. They have no gun, no car to catch you with. All they can do is blow a whistle at you as you drive away from them.”
Me: “What about speeding? Do they care about speeding?”
Parth: “Speeding? How will they stop you? Stand at the side of the road and wave as you go sixty miles an hour? (waves hand) ‘Excuse me. Please stop and get your ticket!’ “
“Indian people are crazy, guys. If some guy hits a cow in their car, nobody would get too mad, except the owner would beat the crap out of the guy. But if a white person hits a cow, the Indians are going to hunt every white person down in this country and kill them.”
I love my India…
We reached Rajasthan very late, and I was still feeling my stomach refuse to make any acid, so I knocked out without much ceremony.
Rajasthan is the state just above Gujarat, and it shares a border (and culture, sometimes) with Pakistan. A great deal of it is desert, but the city we went to, Udaipur, is not at all a desert, but still a great place to see. Parth and his cousins were particularly excited for the Shri Nat Ji temple, which is devoted to a grown-up version of Krishna. It was the most intense temple experience we’ve had.
In the early morning we arrived at the temple, but we were still late, so Parth was charging through the massive crowds of mostly elderly Hindus in order to make a specific ceremony in time. We’re winding up to the entrance of the temple when a skinny Brahmin with a giant beard sees Sam running and starts chasing her, saying things I can’t understand. I know he’ll want money, so I tell him to leave, but he won’t go away, and before I know it, we’re going through different passages where people are chatting, bowing to lesser deity idols, purchasing red and orange flowers as offerings, receiving tours of their own, meditating, sleeping, and chilling out on the ground. We finally get to a more or less open-room, but between the groups of pillars that mark the boundaries of the room, Hindus are packed together like sardines.
Yeh mairah India…
A security guard tries to block us but the Brahmin says something and he lets us through. Parth weaves his arm around my shoulder and we muscle our way into a giant crowd of men who are holding their hands up, around their chest, or over their face as they chant to Shri Nat Ji, who is nearly done with his breakfast. The deity isn’t actually eating, but there’s a specific time for him to be fed, and its considered auspicious to engage in Darsan (physically viewing God) during this time. Men start shoving one another rather aggressively, but not to be violent, its only a chain reaction of one more person trying to get some room in the crowded gathering. After a minute, a guard is yelling at everyone to leave so another round of people can enter the hall. We leave and must wait for Neekunj, who went the normal way through a line. As we wait the Brahmin is chattering to Parth, and Parth occasional relays information about the temple we could have discerned by opening our eyes and noticing simple things.
The Brahmin takes us around and shows us a series of twelve paintings: they explain the various rituals with Shri Nat Ji that occur either daily or annually. Certain times of the year the deity is believed to be doing specific things, and certain days are absolutely insane in terms of viewing the God.
Outside the temple again and the food markets have started opening, so Parth treats us to even more foreign food. We buy a bunch of bananas to feed begging women and children and cows with, and I discover that cows really enjoy unpeeled bananas, and begging people generally do not. Cows also have enormous black tongues that grab food like a finger. Who knew?
We only have about eight hours in Udaipur before we have to leave for Gujarat again, so we drive back into the city and start our examination of the city by stopping at a lake and watching some people leap into it from one of the big stone walls on the edge of the lake. A bearded man introduces himself to me and notes with satisfaction that I am American.
“I served in the Indian army for 11 years and I’ve seen all sorts of places. I’ve been to Kashimir, Calcutta, Bangladesh. I’ve been to North and South and now I live here, just over there…” he points to his house but all I see are hills where he’s pointing, but there’s no time to ask questions. “My children all are married, one daughter in 2000, one daughter in 2001, one in 2003 and now I am a man with no responsibilities. I love to meet foreigners because this is a wonderful place and people visiting it is a very good thing. Listen, do you know that I can swim this lake four or five times back in forth every morning? Every morning! I can do it, and I do do it, and I’m in wonderful shape because of it!”
Pointing to his house
I love my India…
A woman sold us some bizarre fruits she covered with spices. I wasn’t a big fan, but Parth and his cousins loved it. We took a boat ride out to an island on the lake, where there was basically nothing except some people one pays to take pictures of you in silly-looking Indian clothing. It was just a little too weird for us to pay for it. After a half an hour or so we decided to leave again, and waiting for us at the shore were three beautiful, giant camels.
To the garden on the lake
Twenty rupees a ride. We went twice.
Riding Camels: A dream come true
We drove over to a garden place, where again, not very much was happening. A couple passing us that we recognized from the lake stopped and Parth asked them how the gardens were. They were particularly impressed by the fountains.
Inside: “These are nice fountains? Look at them, they’re leaking everywhere! How is that a nice fountain?”-Parth. Not a particularly spellbinding place, but we had fun all the same.
The "nice" fountains made more interesting by Kevin
Our last destination was a palace used by the various kings of Rajasthan. Rajasthan was one of the few locations in India that wasn’t conquered by the Moghul emperors, and the palace is especially proud of that heritage. A lot of the rooms have different paintings of Hindu kings beating off Moghul invaders, with one particularly gruesome portrait of a king cutting the Muslim king and his horse in half with one strike of a sword! (Yeah right.)
Our tour guide was funny, but he wasn’t trying to be. He seemed sort of like a wax-man miraculously brought to life, only without all the bother of emotions:
“Notice the short doorways. People were not short then, they were tall. But it was designed so that invading Moghuls would have to bend their head down to go through the door, and then they would have their head cut off. This way please.”
“Notice the beautiful marble. You think it is for a bath, but I am sorry, this is not a bath. This is for money.” (We did not think it was for a bath)
“This particular king was a crippled man. He had a special elevator to come into the top of the palace. Notice this door-“ he knocks on the door, it sounds solid. “But it is not a door. You see, this king had a sense of humor. He would tell his visitors to please use the door to exit, but when they would pull the handle, it was only a wall. It was in jest: a joke.”
We were about to leave back to Gujarat when the urge to do some shopping hits us. We were escorted into a tourist trap briefly but made a purchaseless escape, and then I found some paintings I wanted. Parth took it upon himself to get them at half-price. This was the most intense bargaining I’ve seen, as Parth and the man argued passionately for at least ten minutes about the price. A brief translation:
“You are an artist, and so am I. I am getting a bachelor’s in biochemistry, and as a pharmacist I’ll only make 3500 rupees a month! I cannot afford this, and I spend as much time as an artist as you do. You have your little brushes, I have my little pipets!”
He got them at half-price.
Udaipur: The "white" city
The drive back was in about 90% Gujarati. Parth was driving a little more crazy and we got back two hours quicker than it took to leave.
Our last day was to be spent picking up loose tourist ends, but it turned out to be a much slower day. We didn’t leave until late morning when we had some juice and a light breakfast, and then we were dropped off at Gandhi’s ashram by ourselves to go through the museum and shop a bit at a store that sold handwoven material and clothing. But then those monsoons hit the museum, and we had to pass the time deflecting an Indian baby that crawled over to us any chance it got, and dealing with the other Indian tourists staring at us as we waited for the rain to subside. When it became clear that it would not, Sam and I ran across the street to get completely soaked and then do some shopping. Then we waited for Parth to get a car so he could pick us up. By that time it was late afternoon, and Samantha’s nose was still not pierced, which was a goal of this trip.
Unfortunately, that never happened as we checked a few stores out and discovered they wouldn’t do it. Parth instead took me to a nice kurta store where I bought two “dressy” kurtas, should any occasion come up where it would be appropriate to wear them. Maybe it won’t be too weird to wear them back home, at the right time. We’ll see.
Our flight was delayed an hour, and we got the text message in time to stop at one last restaurant Parth particularly liked. He treated us to giant puris (fried dough type things) and ice cream. I will miss the ice cream of this country greatly when I leave. They do it great justice.
Finally, our bags packed to bursting, a thick dark sky frowning over us, Samantha and I hugged Parth gratefully and bid our farewell. He told us that he had more fun with us up there than any other time he was by himself, and we responded with a genuine assurance that it was the most fun we’d had in India yet. We found a professor of Anthropology heading to Hyderabad who took us to the appropriate flight counter, and concluded our trip in the neatest way possible, minus the massive turbulence on the way back.
What a journey. Some notes:
Food:
We ate more new food in these five days that we may have tried up until that point in India. That’s the beauty of being with people who know the cuisine intimately, because its always a risk to order food you are unfamiliar with, especially if nobody working at the restaurant can explain the details of the dish to you. Parth loves eating, and as a result of that we tasted Gujarati food, Punjabi food, wonderful South Indian food, a variety of street food (SPICY samosas), slowly cooked corn, a whole range of different ice creams, sweet spongey breakfast breads, hand-squeezed pomengranate juice, Indian omelettes loaded with spices, Dosas (like crepes) with potato patties in the center, and much, much more. I realized my distaste for buttermilk (already described and still making me feeling nauseous) and pan, which is a lot like chewing tobacco, only sometimes without the tobacco (this is how we tried it). They mix a bunch of unidentifiable pastes and spices on top of a banana leaf and then encourage you to shove the whole thing in your mouth, and as you chew it copious amounts of thick, sweet, brown saliva is produced, which some people spit out. Hyderabad is big on the pan, and one sees the rickshaw drivers hocking up the brown goop like nobody’s business.
Parth: "Tea should be so hot that you have to drink it like this. If Indian tea isn't hurting you, then it isn't Indian tea!"- traditional way to drink tea, evidentally. We'd never seen it before.
Hospitality:
Indians are all about their guests. The only things Sam and I paid for were souvenirs and clothing. Not a single meal was to be paid for by us- it’s even considered offensive to insist to strongly to do so. Parth’s family was very warm towards us, and delighted in asking unanswerable questions, or questions with answers too heavy to get into (Which is better, America or India?) But it is absolutely true that Indians are just very friendly people. What really complicates this truth is the fact that they are very cold, intimidating strangers, and tend to frown at you as they stare unblinkingly either without knowing it or without caring. But the general rule we have found is that knowing them even a little bit unlocks them and allows them to treat you in a drastically different way. But another thing of importance is the role of strangers in Indian culture. It’s considered strange to act too friendly with strangers, but the barrier between who is a stranger and who is a friend is very small, and usually only requires one afternoon to make the transition from the former to the latter. Strangers too are immensely willing to help, whenever Parth was lost the only solution was to pull up to the first person walking on the street (almost always a man) and shout “chacha” or “Bhaee!” (‘Uncle’, ‘Brother’) and then ask how to get where you’re going. Parth even stopped a Sikh man on his motorcycle to get directions for about three minutes. It’s just natural for them. They don’t even consider it being nice, but only doing what anyone would do.
Another lesson from Parth:
“We have terrible emergency people here. You need an ambulance they come like two days after you’ve died. In the states if there’s an accident, I was told early on not to do anything. Ignore it, because you could be responsible. If you try to help and something goes wrong, that person will sue you. In India if there’s an accident everyone will be moving people from the road. Some random dude with no education might be putting bandages on you, or doing whatever he can do. And you don’t sue them for trying to help you.”
The simple fact that they address strangers with names indicating a family connection shows you how Indians tend to see people they don’t know. Immediately some kind of connection, even trust is there. It’s not a broad, open-hearted trust, but it’s a confidence that the people you encounter will work for your benefit, unless otherwise indicated.
Another interesting note is that hindi has no real word for “goodbye”, and the equivalent for “thank you” is typically for big favors. After getting directions or whatever, the two people part with no ceremony. Sometimes they don’t even get the uncertain head wobble that usually means the barest of thank yous. Usually Parth would just drive away, unless the person gave him very detailed directions. Then he would get “thank you” in English. Very bizarre.
Gujarat:
I describe it as a Hyderabad/Delhi hybrid. The look is similar to Delhi, but the western shops is completely Hyderabad. There were almost no tourists there, so Sam and I got a lot of stares. The city is LOADED with cows and bulls, all walking around the streets at their leisure, not traffic’s. And that is one thing people will not honk at. You can honk at weakened old women shaking on their cane through an intersection. You can honk at armless children. You can honk at the most decrepit, feeble person imaginable. But no one honks at a cow. They have right of way, and one will wait until they have moved or they will go around. I’m convinced that the cows know this.
Religion:
I saw some great religious activity in this city. Parth took me to his daily temple, where we prayed over an egg that represents Shiva. Hindus believe Shiva shouldn’t be idolized, but I’m not sure why. We did this ritual where we poured milk over it and then washed it clean with water. It solidified my appreciation for Hinduism because of all the chaos of the temple. Hinduism is so spontaneous, and I think Hindus incorporate it so imaginatively into their religion. There’s such diversity within the mythology and the gods and goddesses themselves, and that diversity is reflected in the way Hindus choose to celebrate their god. One can have an experience like the one we had at Shri Nat Ji, and the same day find themselves alone with a Brahmin at the top of a hill at a tiny temple, taking in the complete and awesome silence of the same Hindu God. We also finally got to see a Jain temple, which have gorgeous architecture. Plus, we saw Gandhi’s ashram, a religious experience in itself.
That was the extent of it. I know it was a giant blog. Thanks for reading. Sam's will be here soon, I'm thinking.
We've had a lot to do lately, and haven't been able to keep up our baby very well, so a consequence of that is some of you don't know what's been happening with us lately. We've had some adventures, and are due to start another one in a couple of hours when we leave for Ajunta. I've especially been feeling the guilt at not blogging, so I wanted to post this little ditty before a class of mine starts, and just give some bare facts.
I'm not a big fan of classes right now. They're sort of (read: really) boring me, and boring things are rarely things I choose to devote much energy to. I'm working on a perspective shift.
We also visited our friend Parth in Gujarat. It was amazing, and there's a lot of different things we could talk about, and will. Just not now. Suffice it to say that we rode giant camels.
We're also learning Tabla like a pair of fiends. I look forward to being a master at the instrument, and starting a rock band where I play tabla.
Or maybe not, but who knows.
Anyway, the point is, we will be reflecting, soon. There's much reflecting to be done and I really wish I had access to livejournal this weekend so that I could get started on it. But I don't have access, so I'll wait. I hope you're all well. See you soon.
-Kevin
Kevin, Friday, August 17th
Samantha is, once again, sick. She’s laying next to me, listening to a mix I whipped up in a few minutes, aimed at mellowing the sick. I don’t know if it will succeed. But she’s just got a bit of a fever and some digestive problems (no barfing though, ALWAYS a plus). So, I’m in charge of the updating, even though I think there’s more enthusiasm for the act from her this time, she’s not feeling up to it.
We spent last weekend continuing our examination of the city. We’re gradually beginning to understand it more and more, which has been a positive development- I’ve never lived in one of those cities that was ever worth “learning”. Not to dis on Riverside, but there isn’t really enough of it to go learning its different sections and the various secrets those sections hold. Hyderabad, on the other hand, is made up of several different areas that are fairly distinct from one another, and by using the bus system to travel from one to another, we’re slowly understanding their relationships to one another.
I’m not sure what it would have been like to grow up in a city. Life seems like such a different experience if one spent most of it in the city. There’s something startling about a city- all the people going around and around, it seems like it’d be easier to lose track of the fact that they’re all people.
I’m astounded by the buses here. They pack so many people onto them, and Hyderabad is absolutely FULL of buses. If you really want to get a sense of how populated this country is, ride a bus. There will be about ten men hanging out of the back, not even inside the bus, but taking a ride all the same. I’m always thinking, feeble, where is everyone going? You get off at any stop, and all you see in any direction is people. Women in their burquas or nicab, standing next to women in Punjabi suits of turquoise and orange and scarlet, standing next to a group of young boys leaving their Islamic school, standing next to one of the oldest men you’ve ever seen carrying a giant canvas bag of something looking immensely heavy. This is one group. You scan the area, it’s like a repeating pattern. After a while, it feels like wallpaper. You have to remind yourself to be mindful, before all those people become as noticeable as the oxygen one breathes.
It would be the same any place as full of people as India is. In a way I find it depressing that all of these people can be following the lines of their lives and there’s virtually nobody to notice. Or does it just feel that way because I don’t notice it? Surely there are people who notice them. It’s silly to think otherwise. It’s just overwhelming to realize that yes, the world really is THAT full.
Samantha and I went to a dance demonstration in celebration of a group of visiting professors’ imminent departure from India. The demonstrators were well-versed in Kuchipudi and another form of dance both lumped into the “traditional Indian dance” forms….
Samantha: Sunday, August 19, 2007
Kevin gave up writing this blog after the computer shut down on him and only saved the first page… he had written over two pages. After that, he didn’t feel like writing it again. It comes so naturally the first time, you know? The second time is like the revision you have to analyze and think about. And its so exhausting.
So I’ll take over.
I’m feeling better, by the way. It was a one-day-kick-ya-in-the-butt type thing, but, really, I kicked its butt. Thus we’ve spent a considerable amount of time this weekend lounging- particularly because most of our friends are gone on a little trippy-poo.
However, on the topic of last week we did do some interesting things.
We got dressed up and watched Kuchipudi dance forms by the lake, where Kevin also befriended a couple of stray kittens and continued to sneak them chicken from the kitchen:
On a date night, we decided to go down to Hussain Sagar, the lake in the middle of town, and explore a bit. Since Kevin, at the time, had finished the 5th Harry Potter, we were therefore allowed to see the movie. So we spent the evening taking a boat out on the lake, visiting its famous Buddha statue, and then IMAXin’ it with some really big screen Harry Potter. During one scene of the film, in which the evil woman who’s name I can’t remember is about to take over Hogwartz, an Indian fellow next to us made a groan as she poured three spoons of sugar into her little tea cup, and said exasperatingly, “OH! Three spoonfuls!”
Yeah. Freakin’ British!
Hussain Sagar was fun, too. Upon arriving at the middle of the lake and seeing the Buddha statue, it began to rain—in true Hyderabadi fashion. I had brought an umbrella… everyone else on the statue platform had not. As we waited in line for a boat to pick us up, we were totally drenched. The rain was just POURING. The boat finally came and Kevin and I were the last two people allowed on, even though there were many more drenched people behind us.
As we boarded, the man allowing people on yelled, “There’ll be another boat!”
Kev and I stared at the drenched and soaking people as our boat took off, and, at that moment, it only felt appropriate for me to begin singing…”Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feeeeeeeel you. That is how I know you, go onnnnnnnn!”
That same fateful weekend, we spent a day at Swampadanam Gardens- a garden of crafts and artists selling anything you can imagine. We found an ox…
Ate some delicious, almost-Mexican, street-food…
And rented a PADDLE BOAT to paddle around a little circular lake! Which we eventually got stuck in a small “creek” like area because Kevin actually got out of the boat (while in motion) to use the restroom. When trying to get back in, Kevin had to get in and out twice to try and push us out of the mud. Then, a janitor had to push us. It was definitely epic.
Then Kev chased some geese.
Later that night, we went out again to a coffee shop called “MOCHA.” A very hip, very western spin on the café that includes hookah and all the organic-chique-20-something-year-old hipness you can imagine. There are three different times of chocolate cakes, coffees that are presented to you like wine, hummus, salads, wraps, paninis, fruit juices, shakes… everything. You sit on the floor, they bring you food and drink, and just chill. Its nice, because it feels like home.
But then again, its very easy to get carried away feeling safe. You can definitely design your experience in India to be something totally out of touch with the reality of most Indians. Yesterday (this weekend), we spent the entire day in a certain area of town that houses most of the nouveau riche. One could swear they were in Beverly Hills. We went from place to place and it felt like I hadn’t even left home… from a posh Indian clothing shop, to an organic food market, and finally, to dinner at a place called “Little Italy.” (Which was really nice- I was craving some penne and parmesan like my mom used to make me when I was little girl.)
I don’t want India to only consist of these very isolated experiences of wealth and comfort. This isn’t the reality. And I do not feel as though Kevin and I have only built India with these experiences. But I also want to be very conscious of my surroundings and very aware of what I’m making of all this. I think it s really important to be mindful of how contradictory India is in so many ways.
This week was also interesting in that it was India’s 60th Anniversary of Independence from Britain! We celebrated with decorations and flag hoistings across campus, and a very interesting presentation by students in the Telugu department.
In the performance, one student went into the middle of the field and pretended to be a rock. Then, another student, representing himself as Hindu goes and shapes the rock into the form of Krishna. He leaves, followed by another student representing Islam, who re-carves the structure into the shape of a man praying to Allah, then proceeds to read the Qur’an. After he leaves, a man comes in as Christian missionary and changes the statue in a statue of a man raising his hands in devotion to the Christian God. As he finishes, the other two men notice what has happened to the statue, and all three begin to fight. (Of course all the people are laughing in the audience right now.)
Then this man who simply represents a neutral party, offers to help them with the statue- they throw him to the ground and keep fighting. He gets up again and begins to carve. And what does he carve the statue into?
Gandhi.
Pretty bomb, huh? The whole crowd went wild.
This week will be an interesting week. This Thursday, Kevin and I are leaving on a 5-day trip to Gujarat, a state in the North East bordering Pakistan. Our friend from college, Parth, lives there, and will be taking us under his wing and the wing of his family to see Gujarat and maybe even a little slice of Rajasthan. Kevin and I have three things we must do in Gujarat:
1) Visit Gandhi’s house (its in Ahmedabad- the city we’re staying in!)
2) Visit Udaipur (in Rajasthan. A little bit of a trek, but doable.)
3) Ride a camel.
I’ve also purchased my tabla and I’ll begin tabla lessons this Monday! Tabla pictures coming soon. :-)
I've been trying to determine some personal... "goal"-type things for the remainder of my stay here in India. I think that it is now... "I" week. Our stay in India can be counted by the letters of the English alphabet. It's the start of our third month here. I've been wondering if I should try to work towards more specific developments, mentally, spiritually, or otherwise.
What have I been finding myself doing? I suppose a lot of that has been catalogued so far. We've done a lot of travelling, now, we're exploring the city of Hyderabad. I've been reading a LOT (but not any of my school material). But what am I doing here? How should I go about "sucking the marrow" from this experience? It's not every day that you like in a foreign country for half a year. It could be just once. What do I make of it?
I've always had this watery belief in the whole "you make your own experience" theory. It makes sense, but I don't really practice it. I feel like a lot of things make sense and appeal to me, but I don't make further efforts to incorporate it into my life. Buddhism for example. A religion that I find myself drawn to. Inexplicably, almost. But I'm no Buddhist. Writing is another. I find an indescribable draw to writing, but I don't write dilligently. I wrote sporadically at best. So even if I do make resolutions to do this or that, I rarely follow through. I'm not very good on the follow through part, which is what's essential. People can think whatever the hell they want, but if they don't follow through, then it doesn't mean anything.
So how should I "make" this experience? Continue to read? Try to meet interesting people? Forge fascinating memories in the furnace of India? Or what? Should I be working on a novel? A full-length play? A book of poems? There's no denying that I have ideas for all three. I have ideas for non-fiction, essays, political writing, and screenplays too. But those ideas just roll around inside the grey matter, and they very rarely are given birth to. I just let them roll around and fizzle out, and they're replaced. I'm a very lazy writer. I guess that accounts for my reluctance to even use the term. I always thought any words like "artist" "writer" "dancer" "singer" "musician" should be reserved for those who devote the appropriate amount of time engaging in those activities. Plus, I think it can very easily be construed (perhaps not mistakenly) as pretentious when you refer to yourself as one of those things. It's not quite as solid and evident as being a teacher or a statician, or something like that.
So we have yoga, but once again, I find it's too early for me to wake up and do it. I'm in India, and my lazy habits persist just the same. That's certainly something I've discovered in this country: I had a built-up, completely baseless notion that something would "turn" within me when I got to this country. Leading up to our departure, India seemed like such a momentous adventure that I thought I'd emerge from it all this immensely changed individual. But I don't feel change occuring, or maybe just not in the way I imagined it would. Much more realistically, change occurs day-to-day, in a minute way. You don't wake up one day and find yourself three years older, but it sometimes seems that way. You're the same person as you've always been, but your memories don't present it that way. Our lives break down into phases. This happened when I was eight, or that happened before I broke up with my last girlfriend. We give flavors to these memories. We think of years of our lives and emotions well-up in an undeniable way. I think the way our memories present our experience makes it seem like we should expect more from the present moment. But it's rare that the present feels so momentous. It shrinks to a managable amount, and only when the past starts to form as an entity in our memory do we give it a flavor, and the memories become more distinct, and our experience as a collective appears more powerful.
I imagine India will be the same way. So in that sense, I'm working more on how these six months will be categorized in my brain. I decide what happens tomorrow, and then that somehow weaves itself into the narrative of this whole period of my life. Who knows what it will look like coming out of it. I honestly have no idea.
On a more concrete side of things...
The mosquitoes here are incessant. You have to give them credit for their energy. I don't remember a time anymore when I didn't have bug bites. I need to start wearing shoes again, because the sandals offer me no protection. Thankfully, I've been fairly dutiful on the malaria pills, but that's 90% Sam's doing. She's got a fine memory.
Sam and I form an interesting unit in this whole group of people we're associated with. There's another couple here, but they're married, and I don't know anything about them. You can divide the international students of Hyderabad here into 3 categories, this semester at least: you have EAP people, CIEE people, who hail from multiple colleges, and then the hodgepodge. EAP are the UC, and as we've known each other for a while, we tend to cling together. It's an unfortunately accurate word, I think. Cling may be strong, maybe it's just good old group dynamics at work. It's the same thing with CIEE- they got their bonding done before they showed up. The hodgepodge consists of two Swedish students, two Danish students, a French student, and some random Americans. They formed their own collective.
Anyway, Samantha and I function differently in that we're pretty much a pair. We do things together. I don't think it has that same smack of distaste some people view couples that work as "pairs". I think if you come to a country together, it makes sense to spend that time together. Anyway, we're not attached at the hip.
But a difference from us and lots of people on the trip is how we're developing, in a way. I think probably a common characteristic for most study abroad students is that they're on a sort of quest for inner, outer, and in-between development. It's the same here. I get a feeling of searching from people here. Nobody really knows what they're searching for, and it's highly likely they won't exactly find it, but there's definite questing. People want to find their individualities, and then allow them to grow a little more.
Samantha and I aren't so much a contrast as a different take on the same thing. We're both interested in our individualities, which has always been an important factor in our relationship- but at the same time, we're experiencing that development together. So we're not so fiercely devoted to the discovery of our individualities within a sphere of one as we are interested in those individualities within the realm of a relationship, and love. That definitely changes things. That makes for a different experience of India. If we're doing things "alone", there's really two of us. And naturally, having a partner in all of this gives us a different take on what India's like.
Anyway...
Things I miss back home:
1.Warm Showers.
2.Concerts. (The Shins, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Arcade Fire?!?!?!)
3.Listening to music a lot (it seems like I never have time... weirdly enough)
4.Lake Arrowhead (what a nice lake)
5.Seeing animals that aren't on the verge of death (dogs, mostly)
Amazing Things about India
1.Musk Ox everywhere.
2.Indian food never gets old!
3.Neverending spirtuality.
4.The friendliness of strangers.
5.Abundance of reading time.
I'm going to end this string of never-ending thoughts with a quote:
"You dun si' insi', and jibba-jabba with yo nonseenz, ya go ou' an ya doo sumthin wif yaself likes yous gots a pair."
-Benjamin Franklin
It’s been awhile since we’ve updated- things have gotten crazy around here. We’ve actually received homework assignments and articles and books to read and projects to prepare and in-class presentations to prep for. What happened?! I’ve been running around making copies of books and readings and syllabi so much that I think the Xerox man who seems to live at the library knows me on a nearly name-to-name basis.
Our classes are as follows:
Kevin’s taking a Sociology of Gender class examining feminism and different theories of gender relating primarily to the Indian context. He’s also taking a Religion and Politics class (we’re taking this together, actually) regarding Muslim-Hindu relations in modern India from Independence to present day political-religious issues. Finally, and he’s kicking ass on this one, Intermediate Hindi. He is one of only 2 from our group that will actually be going on to Intermediate Hindi- the rest of us have opted for Basic Hindi. Intermediate Hindi is a serious challenge because our group is behind that class- because of our experiences at Landour Language School, we’re about smack dab in the middle of where Basic is and where Intermediate is. So, I’m pretty proud of him. He’s also taken it upon himself to finish the ENTIRE Harry Potter series in a time period of about 2-3 weeks. He’s currently on Book 5. Once completed, we can go see the movie at the IMAX theatre. He’ll probably hate it since books tend to be better than movies.
Along with Basic Hindi and the political science class, I’m taking the Sociology and Anthropology of Health and Medicine in India (that’s a mouthful) that will talk about issues of hunger, health services, and nutrition in India. I’m also desperately trying to secure an independent study with a rather amazing professor of Human Rights on campus. Although him and I have already met and he expressed his willingness to take me on and hook me up with an NGO in the area, I’ve been struggling to keep in contact with him and I have been warned by other professors that he is a very busy man that can not say “no” to an eager student. Since I fit in the “eager student” category, I hope I’m not the bite that’s too big for him to chew. I’m going to run by his office today in hopes I can maintain another contact with him.
When we’re not making copies or reading, we spend weeknights and weekends exploring the city.
Friday
Last weekend, we spent a lazy Friday afternoon at the IMAX theatre. Now, this is no ordinary IMAX theatre. On the first floor, there is a rock wall and the second floor three different “fun houses” and a several Western-based fast food restaurants. Since it was monsooning all over Hyderabad, we hid out inside the IMAX for the afternoon- munching on familiar food (Subway sandwiches) with unfamiliar twists (Masala Subway Sandwiches with Indian Veggie Patties). Afterwards, we meandered over to the first “fun house”- a haunted house with a young Indian man wearing cowboy attire to buy tickets from.
Kevin scaling walls.
A “haunted house” in the middle of a posh Indian movie theatre? It was too good to pass up. We each bought our tickets ($1 each) and waited in line. One of our friends, Lindsay, was already genuinely frightened.
Lindsay being all freaked out
By the time we got in, we were all, to our surprise, a bit freaked. Call it “Group Mentality,” but together we created a stumbling line of people, holding one another by the waist, getting taunted at by Hyderabadi men dressed as crazy doctors doing “post mortem” autopsies on things that jump at you. As we screamed and stumbled our way around the fun house, the final room involved a bed with someone or something on it that actually made it move and chased you to the exit while a midget ran at you from behind.
I’m not lying or exaggerating any of this.
As you run to the exit, open the door and fall out, you end up right next to the line you were in to get into the house, where a bunch of men and women are waiting to have their turn. The twenty or so people who were now in line, all laughed when they saw us. We were quite a spectacle.
The second fun house was a 3-D house. Donning those plastic glasses that the IMAX at Disneyland makes you wear, you enter hallways of neon-colored dots and lights and painted scenes accented by background techno music. In one room, you can not tell what item is “real” and what is painted on the wall: trees and flowers and grass and animals all look almost touchable. And finally, the biggest joy of them all, a tunnel with a bridge in which the rest of the room SPINS around you, leading you to believe that you’re about to fall over.
Falling over
The third fun house was a “mirror maze.” The first room involves you putting on plastic gloves and watching a video of Star Trek clips imposed into a story line about how you are the chosen one to go into outer space on an Indian Government mission. “BUT,” the video says, “You must be careful for aliens!” (To which Kevin commented, “THAT’S foreshadowing!”) And, with that, they open a door and you’re in a room full of mirrors.
And you genuinely have NO CLUE which way is the real way until you’re nearly about to walk into it.
Finding each other in the mirror hall ways. "IS THAT YOU!?"
After getting out of the mirror maze, they walk you into an impressive room of beautiful neon lights and reflections on mirrors, which, of course, leads to a dark room… FULL OF ALIENS! People dressed in alien suits and small mechanical aliens jump out at you and poke you and chase you to the exit.
All of that fun for only 120 rupees (3 dollars).
Afterwards, we took a taxi across town to a bar called Fusion 9. A place that normally plays live jazz (but we missed it), and sells really posh drinks and gourmet food. Kevin and I each had a foo-foo drink (Peach Margaritas and some Blue Punch thing), and an Italian pizza.
Drinkin' little girly drinks
Saturday
On Saturday, our EAP group had another city-tour.
Our first stop was Charminar Palace. An old palace owned by the Nizzam family who basically owned half of Hyderabad during the Mughal empire, and then again through British rule. He held some of his palaces, but most were taken away from him during independence. He still owns a few universities, palaces, and hospitals in the area. His palace in Hyderabad included paintings and clothing from the time period, all which proved rather interesting.
Kevin being "blown away" by the palace
At the palace
Following Charminar Palace was lunch (we had traditional South Indian food) and a trip to the Hyderabad Salar Jung Museum. It was unfortunate that no photography was allowed inside the museum because Kevin and I experienced one of the most intriguing cultural moments of our Indian adventure! We turned a corner in the museum to find well over 50 people seated in front of a giant grandfather clock. Wildly fascinated, we sat and waited for the clock to strike the hour.
On the hour, a little mechanical man comes out, hits a bell, and goes back inside.
That was it. Seriously.
When it happened, people applauded and completely cleared the room in less than 30 seconds.
The only people remaining in the tiny auditorium were the people from our group- seriously stunned at what just happened.
Turns out that the clock is a relic of a certain Mughal king, and that it has always worked to the second and the little man has always come out on time… or something like that…? What do you think? Applause worthy?
Afterwards, the group split- Kevin went back to the University, and I stayed with another group to go the Charminar and the Mecca Masjid.
In front of the Charminar- me, Kyle, and Nianna
Charminar is the main symbol of Hyderabad. From the top of it, you can see the view of all of Hyderabad with all the domes of mosques dotting the countryside, and all the hills and lakes across the way. At sunset it was truly spectacular. What was most amazing for me was the fact we were on top of the Charminar just as the call to prayer was being sounded from Mecca Masjid.
Mecca Masjid is the second largest mosque in India (we saw the first in Delhi!) It is called “Mecca Masjid” because a few of the central bricks to the mosque itself are bricks made with dirt and clay from Mecca. It was this mosque that was bombed a month or so before we came to India. They still don’t know who bombed it- the Indian government blames “radical Islamic militants” and refuses to explain why. I say, come on. A mosque bombed by Islamic militants? Yeah. That makes sense. I’m quickly learning through my reading, classes, and conversations that it’s tough to be a Muslim in India. In my political science class, one girl asked, “Why did the Muslims come to our country?” While this isn’t directly an exclusive statement, it gives you a glimpse of how Islam is perceived by a grip of people in India- not all, but a lot. Islam is perceived of as the invading force. Pre-Islam was a “golden age,” and the Mughal empire was seen as decline. But, what does that mean for Muslims here, now? Does it mean the mass death of thousands openly committed by the predominantly Hindu government, like in Gujarat a few years ago? Muslims are heavily integrated into this country- is it not their country, too? Do they not contribute to its success and failures, just as the Hindu population does?
Part of the Mecca Masjid and men at prayer
When the call to prayer sounds, it sounds through speakers attached to tall poles set at the four corners of the mosque grounds- you can hear it everywhere. And, from atop the Charminar, you are looking directly at the mosque as the call sounds.
By the time we got down to the mosque, all the men were at prayer in the main room (I don’t know where inside the building women pray- visitors and tourists are no longer allowed inside the mosque since the bombing). We received quite a few skeptical looks from the men as they filed out of the mosque. Hyderabad is not a very tourist-centered city, and I feel as though non-Indian travelers are a rarity.
At the mosque
Sunday
Sunday morning, we went around the lake.
Kevin eating lake crap... and then me, kissing him.
Afterwards, we originally planned to go to “Film City”- the Indian version of Universal Studios. But by no means is it “Bollywood”- it’s “Tollywood.” Our state of Andhra Pradesh is the only state formed by the British based on a common language. While most states were created based on geographic ease and what not, A.P. includes nearly all the Telugu speaking communities in South India- this makes up a huge population of people who speak Telugu, even though it is only one state. Therefore, they are not part of “Bollywood.” They consider their films a different breed.
Those plans changed when one of us found a flier that described a free, open-air, music festival taking place by the main lake in the middle of the city. About 8 of us boarded rickshaws and buses and successfully made our way into the center of town.
The festival itself was relatively quiet and dead when we arrived. Crowding together underneath the shade of tent, the whole group immediately stood out. Camera’s directed their attention to the group of non-Indian folk swaying and bobbing their heads in the back corner. We ended up on the big screen multiple times.
Alex, Kevin, and Kyle throwing up gang signs at the concert
Our group on the big screen
We even had an awkward sort of “celebrity” status at the festival. Tired of standing after a couple hours and finding no where to sit except in the “Reserved VIP” section, a few of us wandered over to the guards to ask who was allowed to sit in VIP. The guards didn’t even blink, just waived us in and let us sit down in front to watch Mrigya, a world music band on their way to South Africa after the show.
Yeah- we're rockin' the air Tablas
Then, it began to pour. As always, Hyderabad’s constant monsoon afternoons.
Some of us ran to the front to take rickshaws to the nearby IMAX, some of us ran to the back of the stage. Those that ran to the back of the stage found one of the people in our group, Alex, sitting in the back with a Red Bull in his hand and a cigarette in the other… “interviewing” the bands. No one even stopped us as we stumbled back stage and spoke with the band members. A 20-something year-old girl from Pakistan giving out “free Red Bulls” came over to us and handed us drinks. Later, I’ve heard, Alex was found in one of the dressing rooms sharing a joint with “Soulmate”- the second headlining band.
And I’m thinking- “What the hell was this? ‘Almost Famous’?!”
And for what reason? Because we were foreigners? Because we were white?
After I went backstage for awhile and had my Red Bull, I left to meet some people at the IMAX for an early dinner, then went home to catch a puppet show on campus.
Puppet show "action"
From Kevin:
Samantha and I have discovered that our University is a wonderful place to be entertained. This is certainly a plus, given the distance between us and the “center” of the city, it’s not as convenient to venture forth into Hyderabad as it was in Delhi or Mussoorie. Luckily for us, they seem to take their international programs here very seriously, and because of this they organize a substantial amount of activities for us to attend.
One of the first was an hour-long lecture on Human Rights in India. The man was fascinating and, though she did not attend, the feedback was positive enough to convince Sam to pursue and independent project with the faculty who gave the lecture.
Our other excursions have proved especially interesting…
We attended a puppetry show nearly a week ago, an event I had mixed feelings about: puppets can be pretty sweet, but at the same time, they can most certainly not be sweet. But we went.
The puppeteers were a group of people associated with a group that attempts to preserve and increase appreciation for traditional Indian culture (whatever that’s supposed to be- I think a lot of times that phrase is very much associated with conservative Hinduism). So their shows retell popular Hindu religious myths, to the background of a variety of Indian instruments, and set on an interesting stage.
My enjoyment was hampered largely by the fact that most of the show consisted of several puppets represented famous Hindu figures as they “danced” onstage, the puppeteer would pull them up, tilt them to the left, straighten, tilt them to the right, repeat- then repeat- then repeat, etc.
So I got a little tired of the puppet’s dancing, and felt myself falling asleep. I think Samantha liked it a little more. At one point several monkey puppets were on stage, doing lewd things to each other. This was surely the most enjoyable part of it all.
Our next event happened a day or two after, when the SIP (Study in India Program) directors hosted a fellow faculty member in English as he read from some of his poetry. A quick paraphrase of his bio:
“A Christian educated, Hindu born, Sufi-at-heart Gay poet…” There was a lot more, but I think that’s some of the essentials.
He is very much an Indian man who prides himself on his homosexuality, definitely something one is not accustomed to encountering in this country. Hyderabad has laws against homosexual acts. Evidently sodomy is illegal in India itself. Anyway… I have a little bit to say about this man.
I have virtually no tolerance for writers who feel themselves (and “the writer”- that shadowy, omnipresent, omniscient, protector of culture who [in their eyes] is bested by no one in importance) to be this great source of something divine, and should be treated as such.
This man was precisely that. And his poetry was bad.
I wasn’t appalled by it- just massively unimpressed. Unimpressed to the point of being impressed, by the unimpressiveness. Why was this man in front of us, reading these poems? Has he been published because he’s such a vocal homosexual? I was skeptical, because his poems didn’t radiate his sexuality (but they didn’t radiate anything, either), so he wasn’t using it to sell his stuff.
What confused me more was the audience’s response. Most of them were visiting faculty members, and they LOVED him. They were (to use the poet’s phrase) “eating out of the palm of his hand”! But he had nothing to say!
One of the most annoying things about him was how he prefaced all his poems. He had all these “interesting” stories about friends of his who’ve done fascinating deeds and said fascinating things, and they all like his poetry- fancy that!
“My friend from Russia- he’s a Marxist and an atheist you know, and he has a disease… (sighs deeply, raises his voice in hoarse misery) he can no longer speak. Oh, so I tell him I pray for him, and he’s an atheist you know, and he says “well who gave you the right to pray for me? (laughs, looks around, ensuring the room is joining him) Anyway, he’s read my poem, and he liked it…”
After his poem, there is a silence. Probably composed mostly of this dumbfounded awe professors from all over the U.S. are feeling towards him. From Sam’s and my corner, it’s a silence made entirely of numbness- the silence of shutting your brain off to prevent something unpleasant being processed by it.
He clears his throat, smiles. “That is a good poem, I think he has great taste…”
I wish I had vomited right then. The symbolism would have been unmistakable.
Sam pointed out another tendency of his. I like the way she phrased it too. After every poem, the poet (I can recall his name) looks up, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and he examines the crowd. Looking for faces of awe. “He looks up after every ______ing poem as though he just dropped the bomb.”
No bombs dropped, though. At least, again, from our end.
Question and answer time comes, and people are throwing out little queries, the wonder splattered all over their faces. Why!? A history professor from South Dakota University asks:
“What’s your language background, do you write in English only, or do you first write in Hindu?”
Hindu. Hindu. Do you speak Hindu?? A HISTORY professor!
A man responsible for the higher education of perhaps hundreds. Absolutely astounding.
He replied just English.
I raised my hand, against my deepest inclinations, and ask a question about the utility of poetry. I ask if he still thinks it has a purpose, or I try to, before he interrupts me to talk nonsense for a while about how he spent a week in Ezra Pound’s castle because he loves Ezra Pound, and he met this wonderful woman who just loved him and blah blah blah…
blah blah blah… so Ezra wrote these wonderful things… blah blah blah… poets are god’s gift to the universe…blah blah blah we are the outsiders, like the gays, like the dalits, like the women, the children, we are the outsiders, and that is our function…
I was ready to go. Thankfully, he heard enough of himself for one night, and read two more atrocities before we could politely leave.
Sigh…
A group of us formed our own little poetry circle, and that was much more enjoyable. A lot of people were reading blogs or spoken word relating to what’s going on here in India and what’s going on within their heads. It was a much better night.
Just tonight, we ended up at a demonstration of Kuchipudi, an Andhra Pradeshian form of classical dance. It seeks very much to tell stories, largely through hand and facial movements, and it was by far the best night we’ve had on campus so far. I got a lot of videos. I don’t think I could give much more description of the dance and do it any kind of justice.
Nianna reading her spoken word poetry.
Creative-Expression Night at Sam and Sue's room
Mussorie:
I freakin' loved this cow. We're pretty sure she was pregnant.
Kevin with one of his Hindi teachers. On the last day of class, Kevin brought each of his teachers a box of Bengali sweets from downtown. Here, the teacher holds his box proudly.
Kevin and I with one of our favorite teachers- Lalit-Ji (he's in between us). Lalit is famous for saying "SSHHHAABBBBBAASHHH!" a word in Hindi that means "Good job!" whenever you get something remotely right in class. Next to Kevin is Yusuf Ji. He loves American slang. He's known for saying, "Talk to the hand!"
Me with my friends Jaminie and Angela at our apartment in Mussorie. We were "dressed" up for the "Dinner with the Teachers" on the final night.
Delhi:
Kevin as Buddha at the temple gardens.
At the temple gardens.
See a swastika? Not. Swastikas don't point that way. The swastika was originally a Hindu symbol before being hijacked. Here is one at the temple gardens.
Guess where. Temple Gardens!
At the Delhi metro- NICEST metro in the world. Suprised?
At Jama Masjid, the largest Mosque in India located in Delhi. The second largest is in Hyderabad!
Full frontal Jama Masjid
At the mosque.
Hyderabad (There and on the way there)
Kevin living dangerously by sticking his body outside the train.
Yeaaahhhh
Eating in the Study in India Guest House cafeteria
EAP students chilling out in a handicraft garden
View of Hyderabad from Golconda Fort- relic of the Mughal empire. From here you can hear the call to prayer from over 5 different mosques in the immediate area.
Golconda Fort.
The Yoga Centre on campus. Kevin and I go every morning to the 7-8AM class. Way cool.
Yoga Centre sneak peek.
More shots from Samantha's room
A poster Kevin and I found on campus on our way to get a snack in between classes. I loved it... obviously. Lots of political activity on campus. This organization also puts up a lot of quotes from Marx.
Half a world away and our consumption of ice cream has not slowed one bit.
Kyle and I in our class on the Religion and Politics of Modern India. Awesome class. The teacher is funny.
Kyle and Kevin playing with one large broom.
Most assuredly, the power will go out any moment, and a fellow EAP student down the hall, Lindsay, will make a small utterance of a shriek in her completely dark, window-less room, and run in here until the power returns. Another EAP student, Emily, just ran in to say “hi” before returning to her dorm in the Ladies-Only Hostel across the way, only to smack the palm of her hand against her forehead upon hearing the thunder, explaining to me that the rain floods the ladies hostel rooms by rushing down the hall and coming up from under the door.
Luckily for me, I’m sitting by a window, and I can watch the rain from the comfort of a rather colorful bed, smelling it as the wind picks it up from the courtyard below and pushing into my bedroom. I just remembered that Kevin and a friend of ours, Kyle, went to “Che Dukan” (Hindi for “6 Stores”- our name for the small shopping complex on campus) on their bikes to pick up their Hindi books. They’ll be totally soaked when they come back- or knowing Kevin’s disposition for ice cream, they’ll wait it out in the small grocery-like stores there and have a cone or something.
Rain here, however, goes on. And it starts slowly, kinda trickling, rather warning-like, until it falls in full. During the day in Hyderabad, its slightly steamy, and dark yet puffy rain clouds and thunderheads just roll on by over head. It’s almost systematic how it rains in the afternoon- like it does in rainforests.
And we’re definitely in a rainforest Our campus is some 20-something-hundred acres, covered in foliage and forests and weird birds and where weird animal sounds come out of bushes and roads open up to lakes. Bikes are required to get around campus. Kevin and I rented a bike each at $22 for the whole quarter. Men and women get separate kinds of bikes. I get a basket on the front of mine. We both have little bells we can strike to tell people in a pseudo-polite method to get out of our ways. We both forget, only sometimes, that India follows the British method of left-side driving… so sometimes other drivers on the road are quick to remind us with pseudo-polite honking.
Kev and I by bike
I love it here. I realized I loved it here on a drive from campus to the hotel to pick up all of our luggage and move in. On the drive to the hotel, the afternoon storm was about an hour and half away and clouds were letting sunlight in. We drove past herds of funky musk ox walking in the middle of the road, all caked in mud, a baby calf chasing after its humongous mother along the side of the road, chickens running around dangerously close to the butcher shop, people coming out to buy food for dinner, Muslim women running from place to place in their long, black robes, and school girls with long, black braids running around from place to place to get home with big back packs on the backs, and the sides of the road opening up to glistening rice-paddy looking fields where little green plants stick up from under inches of water, and men sit and talk under huge banyan trees.
In other words, when I’m not puking my brains out and having constant diarrhea, I’m madly in love with India.
And when I am puking my brains out in the midst of all that diarrhea, India’s still pretty astounding. Especially because medical care is so easy and accessible compared to the United States. Monday morning, after vomiting for the 10th or so time that weekend, I went to the doctor on campus who simply asked for my name, my symptoms, how I liked India, encouraged the consumption of fresh bananas, and then handed me some medication and said I could take the ambulance back to my dorm. 10 minute visit. If that.
I’ve never lived in a dorm before. My room mate is a fellow UC student from Berkley named Suhasini (pronounced Sue-hoss-ah-nee. Her parents are from India- we all call her “Sue.” I call her “Suhas-the-Boss.” It rhymes, you see.) Her and I became friends over the course of the past month and a half, and we now carry mutual keys to a room on the top floor of the Study in India Program Guest House. Over the past two evenings here, we’ve decorated our room in scarves, colorful pillows and bedding, wall-hangings and pictures. The Guest House is also a very relaxed place… Kevin fell asleep with me and stayed in my bedroom last night and no one could care less. Especially Sue, who I think finds him pretty hilarious. This morning she woke up, and having forgotten he stayed here last night, freaked out when she only saw his body and not mine in bed- “I thought he ATE you or something like that!”
My bedroom
This morning, we all woke up at 6:30AM to attend our first Yoga class on campus. Yoga here is every morning from 6-7AM, 7-8AM, or 4:30-5:30PM. All of us California folk attended the 7-8AM session.
Now, yoga has a reputation of being one of those “new-age-y” “hippie” things. If you’re into Indian culture or health or wear tie-dye, people have a slight tendency to assume you’re down for yoga. Honestly? I’ve never been intimate with yoga on a level where we felt comfortable with each other. I’d leave yoga classes in the past feeling kind of inadequate, inflexible, unhealthy, and tired. I hated “Downward Dog” with a flaming passion, and I could never understand why people where so freakin’ down for sticking their butts up in the air and hurting their biceps while the blood rushed down to their head. Yeah. Relaxing my ass.
However- I’d like to call myself an open-minded human being. I know yoga has huge benefits, and increases flexibility, and has spiritual elements with it that I’m unfamiliar with. And, hey, I’m in India- which is a common excuse amongst the students around here for trying just about anything new and interesting.
So, we rode our bikes to the yoga center and joined 15 other Indian students for the hour.
And I loved it.
And I loved it because they went really easy, and there were three teachers, and one teacher modeled the move, another talked about it, and another walked around and helped you position yourself. And the older one who walked around and helped you position yourself kept saying things like, “During this stretch look DEEP inside your inner self! See what’s going on in there…?” And then, at the end, the last 7-8 minutes were spent in meditation which he prefaced by describing to us the importance of getting into touch with our God for awhile and spending time in prayer and relaxation. He also guaranteed us that we’d love yoga after 10 days of practice. So, hell yes, I’m going back tomorrow.
I like what sort of life one can create for oneself when they are truly dropped in another country and separated from everything that constituted their life beforehand. I have no job, I’m living off the generosity of my parents and grandmother, I have no car, I have no “old” friends, I have no “connections” on campus, I no longer have that sense of immediate access (i.e. “I want a veggie burger, I’m going to get into my car and go buy one right now” or “my clothes are dirty, I’m going to go put them in the washer right now knowing there is no one else in line and there will always be power.”) As one professor involved in the Study in India Program (SIP) says, “The Indian experience means things aren’t immediate and easy.”
She’s definitely right. For instance, you don’t buy textbooks for classes here. Teachers recommend readings, and you have to go the library and copy pages… or chapters… and in some cases, huge portions of books, in your own spare time. And most students hand wash clothes- for the experience and for the ease of not dealing with pesky washing machines during power outages. I’m used to cold bucket showers where the water rushes off my body only to spill on the entire bathroom floor (no separation between shower and toilet in the bathroom- which is totally fine). SIP Guest House living is pretty “modernized” and it makes for a good hybrid of some select comforts of home within an Indian experience- Wireless internet, food, air conditioning, and a guarantee that you won’t experience any flooding during the afternoon thunderstorms.
But, to return to my original point, ones life becomes entirely ones own in these sorts of situations. Blank walls on every side: classes, people, rooms, food, opportunities, hobbies, travel, schedules.
For instance, I’m growing increasingly interested in the raw foods movement and incorporating more of their eating principles into my diet. I’m actually going over to the Ladies Hostel tonight with beans I bought at an Indian Organic Market called “24-Letter Mantra” and I’m going to sprout the beans and eat them as snacks during the week- a sprouted bean makes a complete protein! And, last night, as Kevin read Harry Potter, I had such a good time just sittting on the edge of my bed peeling and eating fresh carrots and apples from the organic food market while listening to Cat Stevens. What is it about eating raw, fresh vegetables? Let alone to Cat Stevens?
Buying beans and fruit at the organic food market
And I’m freakin’ so excited about yoga and how the yoga center is so open with all of its windows that look out into these big Hyderabadi jungles and let all those beautiful jungle sounds creep into the room while you’re talking to your God for 10 minutes every morning amongst the prayers of 30 other people.
And Kevin and I are planning on taking Tabla lessons at night- we’re meeting the teacher this week or next. The Tabla is a traditional Indian percussion instrument, usually played together with the sitar. I’m also looking into traditional Indian Dance classes, we’ll see if I have time amongst the music lessons. But I really want to get into touch with “that side” of my self while here in India… I’m also planning a trip to the art supply store soon to get back into canvas and oil paints again.
And Kevin had a date with fate yesterday and heard a lecture by a professor who works for a human rights organization here in Hyderabad. If I got it right from Kevin’s story about his lecture, he’s a professor who actually helped some organization peacefully negotiate in the jungle for hostages in times of distress with different socialist and communist organizations- everyone trusts him. Other members of his human rights organization have actually been assassinated a few decades ago because of how “radical” (i.e. people deserve to have land, people don’t deserve to be beaten up by the government, women shouldn’t have to worry about being killed by their mother-in-laws if they give birth to a girl, these are rather general and stereotypical, but you get it etc.) their message was at the time. I went by his office to speak to him today, but he wasn’t there, so I left him a note, basically begging him to let me be his apprentice. I hope he lets me. I want so badly to get involved in some NGO-related work while here in India. There are few for street children and women’s-empowerment: but all of these sorts of organizations are easy to become a part of if you have a connection to get you in.
See?
India’s amazing.
But, don’t get me wrong. Amongst all my plans is a haphazardness- a glue that doesn’t stick and things that won’t remain constant. Classes that I tell my mom I’m taking suddenly aren’t going to work anymore for some unbeknownst reason. In the midst of all these plans and decorations are questions about what to do next. And then it rains. And its still raining now… an hour since I began this entry.
And this feels like a Rumi-deserved entry. Jelaluddin Rumi is probably one of my favorite poets of all time. Rumi was born in 1207 AD. At the beginning of Kevin’s and mine relationship, like in most sweet beginnings, in the midst of all those 5 page long emails and such, I use to conclude all of my emails to him with poems I had read that day that I thought he’d like. And he liked them. Obviously. If he didn’t like them, we would have never dated in the first place. Right? ;-)
But now, some Rumi for you…
Untitled
“Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
or the ball can guess where it’s going next…
…You have said what you are.
I am what I am.
Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.”
(This is the picture taken of us in the temple garden back in Delhi by that guy with the very old camera, who superimposes Hindu gods into the photo. Here, Kevin and I are seated with Krishna.... I think....)
I am actually surfing the web for the first time since we got here. It's not quite as decadent as I think I'm inadvertently making it sound. It's simply decent. At least I got to check out some of the news. The journalism in India is bizarre.
What I mean is that newspapers have no qualms whatsoever with publishing openly slanted articles. In fact, I wonder sometimes if the newspapers themselves embrace the fact that they're presented the "facts" from a very biased perspective. In addition to that strange characteristic, journalism in India has a tendency to use heavily "emotional" diction when it writes about basically anything. An example, which will kill two birds with one stone I think, because it'll give a little window to what's going down in Hyderabad these days:
"Leftists Rioters Cause Bloodbath..."
And the title for another article covering the same event:
"Police Brutality Disrupts Protests..."
Both of these newspapers, in my opinion, demonstrate a very obvious bias throughout their articles, not just in the headlines. It's interesting that, without more research into more seemingly "neutral" newspapers, we have to read two or three papers covering the same story in order to formulate our own conception of what occured here, or there, or anywhere.
Anyway, the headlines I used weren't made up. But I want to preface what I'm saying by alerting everyone that Hyderabad has not descended into a center of chaos and terror, or anything like that. They're just having some Communist problems.
India has seemed, from our experience so far, to be much more politically charged than the motherland USA, god bless her. That could be because of a number of things, things I don't have the appropriate comprehension to try to relate or even understand thoroughly myself. But specifically here in Hyderabad the Community Party of India and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (They are different...) have been staging protests for some time relating to land distribution. From what I've gathered, they're upset that so many people in the country live without any land in their name whatsoever, and they're even more incensed about the fact that the government moves extremely poor communities out of the way in order to implement questionable development projects in the area that those people lived, and then either screws up the resettlement process, or completely ignores it or refuses to do so.
Basically, it's all the unfairness and bulliness of Eminent Domain without any of that pesty business of a government taking responsibility for its actions and providing the same people you've screwed with any means of supporting themselves. The government doesn't even bother insulting them with land or homes of drastically lower quality compared to what they were used to. They just say "get the hell out, we'll fix you up later" and then never come back, except to proceed with whatever project brought them there in the first place.
And those silly communists think the government should own up to all of this?
As you can imagine, there's considerably more than a little bit of tension between these two sides, especially when the parties can rally up impressive manpower and shut down city intersections or raid government offices, apparently trashing them (a tactic I have no admiration of), and especially when the well-respected leaders of the parties go on hunger strikes until their demands are met. The government doesn't tend to like those sorts of things. They even arrested the leaders and threw them in a hospital. Those bastards will EAT.
So, on Saturday our trip into the city was cancelled because massive protests were planned, and it was widely expected that something bad would happen. Naturally, in a village close to Hyderabad, several people were shot and six were killed. They were police bullets, but it's unclear why exactly they were fired. One newspaper called it a peaceful protest illegally broken up. Another said the leftists provoked the violence by throwing stones (never a smart move, but honestly, aren't live bullets a tad overzealous of a response to rocks?)
Several days before that, the police busted our their special water-cannon trucks so they could fire them at communists staging similar rallies and protests. Again, who knows who did what- the police don't usually just start firing those at people randomly, but again, I'd not be surprised if someone spat in a cop's face and all of a sudden twenty people are being smashed up against a wall by a firehose.
It's unclear what's expected to happen in the coming days, but there's a slight feeling of worry in the city, especially because it's enormous mosque had bombs detonated within it just two months ago, and recently there was a bomb scare of several of the city's largest Hindu temples. Religious peace may have been a positive exaggeration of the nature of things here. Samantha has read that the city has religious conflict break out often enough to refer to the riots as "annual".
Again, I don't intend to worry you here. The native Hyderbadi with us seems unfazed by these occurenced, and Sephora said things were equally tense when she lived here, but she was hesitant to even classify it as tense.
Maybe India just has these things happen more.
I'll preface what I'm about to say again by emphasizing that I don't know what caused the six people to be fatally shot, and I won't ever properly know it. I don't trust the newspapers enough. But I have a few thoughts about these kinds of things I want to get out, particularly since I just finished reading a book by Arundathi Roy, an Indian author who writes some pretty scathing political essays.
It's a tragedy that people trying to carry out peaceful protests have to worry about these sorts of things. By "these sorts of things" I mean stupid people letting their frustration carry them to do something abysmally idiotic like throw random objects at the police. Common Knowledge: don't hurl things at people with guns, especially if they're known to use them frequently. Another of "these sorts of things" is the fact that police have to be so reactionary when it comes to any kind of protest being staged, but especially peaceful ones.
Arundathi Roy said something I won't likely forget: how can a government proudly call itself a democratic nation when it gives no means to its citizens to voice their concerns and their wishes peacefully? If they have to march out police in riot gear, equipped with guns (even if they are loaded with rubber bullets) and fire hoses (even if they won't kill, but only badly wound people), then what sort of respect does that give to the process of peaceful demonstration? If a government works so badly to stamp out or even simply discourage these methods of making yourself heard, then what is an obvious alternative some of these (especially the very frustrated and desperate) people will be turning to? Violent protest.
It makes sense, doesn't it?
Think about it- thousands upon thousands of people find themselves upset about the policy of their country. Let's say it's a democratic country. Let's even say it's the U.S. of A. Say it has to do with a war. Randomly- Iraq. Say these people don't think our government should be gearing up for war, and it wants to make itself heard. So they go through the hopelessly complicated process of planning a massive demonstration, they have the people, the location, the demand, and they begin their march, or whatever they've chosen.
We all know the cops will be there. We saw it just months ago at the immigration demonstrations in L.A. And I'm not saying it won't make sense. It makes perfect sense, because without the cops, something bad could happen. But does it ever seem like that's all they're there for?
All it takes is a couple of idiots acting stupid, and suddenly an entire crowd is being tear-gassed, shot at with rubber bullets, beaten with clubs, and told their congregation has suddenly turned illegal. They risk jail if they don't get the hell out of dodge. Even if they are trying to leave, some officers won't hesitate to smack them around a little. Shows those demonstrators how a real democracy functions.
I'm not saying this always happens, but we've seen it enough to not be surprised by it when it does. Isn't that a shame? We're used to police breaking up demonstrations in this way. What sort of message does that send? I'll tell you:
The government doesn't give a damn what it's citizens think if they disagree with the policies of its legislative, executive, and judicial bodies. They can go to hell, because they don't ultimately have total control over every enforcing body within the nation. They're just a random group of powerless people who happen to disagree. They had their voice when elections rolled around. Now let the experts take the wheel.
I personally find that a tragedy.
I don't believe these people will run off after these failed peaceful demonstrations and become terrorists. For that, a lot of countries are lucky. But I'm talking about the U.S. In some of these countries where leaders WON'T be eaten alive because of these sorts of things, people start dying a little more frequently in the midst of trying to find a voice. People get pissed off over here, too, but I'm sure it does even less in terms of impacting public leaders, or getting them thrown out of office.
So yeah, terrorism is an extremely complicated, convoluted, nearly impossible-to-understand phenemenon, but is the typical American conception of what terrorism is accurate? Is it really about a group of angry Muslims who hate freedom? Do they really just want to see a lslam conquer the world? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that they are hardly listened to when they aren't blowing people up or shooting at them? Are they risking their lives any more when they try to kill people instead of just crowding together and voicing what they dislike about their respective countries?
This kind of violence is counter-productive, but that's probably difficult to explain to people who are stripped of land, stripped of basic rights, stripped of basic means to earn a living, stripped of the ability to think and act as they wish, stripped of their dignity or recognization as a respectable, non-invasive group of human beings, stripped of their knowledge that they can go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow, stripped of their ability to flourish and thrive as every human being should- they probably don't care so much that bombs and guns might soil their message, or harm the movement, if such a movement exists. I imagine a lot of people would feel the urge to act just as violently in a similar situation, and some of them would possibly act on that urge.
Look at how many people in the United States fear an attack on the second amendment. What would they do if people starting screwing with their rights? Why do they value the right to bear arms anyway? To protect themselves from the government (specifically the military), should the need arise. Can we pretend they wouldn't be branded terrorists by Uncle Sam too, should that unforunate event ever occur to cause internal resistance within the states?
The United States was started by a bunch of terrorists who didn't want their government taking any more money for their tea. They were pissed, their demands weren't being met, so they removed themselves from the body of the British Empire, and they engaged in combat with Britain's military. How do you think Britain painted them? Terrorists- if the word existed then. If not I'm sure they had an appropriate equivalent.
What I'm trying to say is, well, a lot of things, but I guess at this point I'm thinking that terrorist has become one of the most loaded words in the English language. Think of all the things terrorist means and implies without saying any of it. Think of all the generalizing the word "terrorist" does. Think of all the possibly valid frustration, anger, and desperation we may be condemning by calling someone or a group a terrorist and then leaving it at that. Whenever people are labeled as such, their reasons for their violence, the history of the events that bred such hatred and anger is completely ignored, and even erased. No longer are they people who've suffered a great deal, and are channelling their frustration through the only available channel left. Now they're just a bunch of crazies perpetrating evil, and hating freedom.
Hating freedom. What a pack of lies. What a shameful pack of lies.
I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll creep back as far as seems appropriate and start there.
We reached Delhi remembering the heat of this country quite profoundly, and both joyous and saddened that we had to leave that semi-haven known as Mussoorie. It was a wonderful time we spent up there.
The Hyderabadites knew their time in the capital of the country was limited, so we spent it engaged more or less in “finishing up” the biggest of the sights to see, minus the red fort which is supposed to be the most astounding. We did try, but some Muslims were staging some sort of protest that made the rickshaw driver we hired make us reconsider. We ended up at a hindu temple instead, getting bindis, receiving invitations to Karanataka (Southern Indian State) from random people, and exploring the more-or-less abandoned gardens nestled strangely behind the temple.
There was a man in possession of the oldest camera I’ve ever seen, and he took our picture for 15 rupees and developed these really bizarre pictures with a superimposed Shiva towering over the two of us, vaguely smirking and looking pleased with himself.
We saw the largest mosque in India. Truly beautiful. It was such a contrast to the madness of so many hindu temples we’ve seen, where a large amount of people are coming and going and paying homage to various Gods and Goddesses. The mosque is devoid of any real representation of Allah except for beautifully carved Arabic scriptures. I particularly liked the men who stared at the central part of the mosque, looking very much at peace with themselves.
We met up with Sephora, our new savior. She’s the “student advisor” who went through the Hyderabad program two years ago, and basically has the answers to the immense amount of questions we didn’t even know we had until she showed up. She’s extremely relatable, and has already proceeded to connect with a lot of the students. Very cool person.
She was our guardian on the train-ride we took. We were seated in first class, but the B section of it, so our rooms weren’t as private as some, but this worked out because the order of our train car quickly disintegrated into a state of chaos where our bags were hastily shoved behind and on top of one another’s in random places, and we were sleeping in beds that weren’t ours, but weren’t claimed by any others until randomly at 2 in the morning two men are angrily nudging Zeph awake and asking why he was in their bed.
26 hours sounded brutal, but we had a lot of fun playing hearts, watching School of Rock, reading, writing, and bothering Sephora. The worst time of it was when Alex had her backpack ransacked and her wallet, camera and plane tickets were stolen. She didn’t lose much money, but the camera was a big deal.
An interesting observation about trains in India. They don’t care what you do. We made a habit of going to the in-between area of another car where we could open the door and admire the countryside, going about 50 or 60 MPH or however fast trains go, I can’t usually measure that.
The workers of the train would come by and simply admire the Americans who were admiring India. It still surprises me sometimes how fascinating we are to some of the people who live here. The director of the program made an important observation in saying the other day that “India is one of those rare countries where anti-american sentiments are not easily found.” It’s true. People seem to be REALLY interested in the fact that we’re American. And, strangely, they want to see what American money looks like. (So, Mom and Dad, if you have any spare one’s lying around, maybe send ‘em our way?)
We arrived around 8 at night and met Nunu. I could write blogs upon blogs about Nunu. She’s not really named that, but she told us her name is too difficult to pronounce, so she goes by Nunu. Nunu looks Chinese, but she hails from a state to the east of Bangladesh where most of the people look that way, and she insisted without me ever disagreeing that she is really an Indian. Her position is similar to Sephora’s, but her loyalties are more to the University of Hyderabad than to UC.
Nunu is the most aggressive person I’ve encountered in a long time. She’s short with short black hair and thin glasses, and she speaks good English with an accent that isn’t quite Indian, it isn’t quite Chinese, and it isn’t quite several other things. She also knows Hindi and the mother language of her state, the name of which I didn’t catch.
A good example of how Nunu is occurred today. After registering at the police office (a remarkably painless experience), I tried to buy some apples from a fruit vendor. He wanted 35 rupees each! That’s nearly a dollar, and good prices here are 10 rupees (“it should only be 8” Nunu said). I told Nunu just because I wanted to know standard prices, and said that the man had tried to ask for 35.
“What!? 35? Who tried that?” She yelled. I pointed at the fruit vendor ten feet from our cab. “Drive up to that man. No, that one.” She told our driver. Nunu leans out the window and starts jabbering in Hinglish at him.
“Excuse me, no not you, you. You try to charge 35 for one apple? That’s outrageous. You know they should be no more than 10. I want two. Give them to me for ten.”
And that’s exactly what the guy did. Nunu will not take shit from anyone.
With a Rickshaw driver:
“We want to us the meter, will you do that?”
“Yeah, we’ll use meter.”
Nunu looks at it. “It isn’t reset. Reset the meter, or we’re getting out.” We’re already moving on the highway. I worry that Nunu will bail out of it without waiting for it to stop, and that we’ll be expected to follow.
The driver makes an argument I can’t understand.
“That’s ridiculous. Stop it, we’ll find someone else to drive us. Stop, stop stop!”
The driver chuckles and resets the meter. That’s everyone’s response. They laugh, like she’s some sort of comic show, and then they do exactly as she asks, because she won’t take crap from them, and I believe they can detect it.
(By the way, I just ate that apple. It was delicious.) Hyderabad is also the city of juices. Anyone who knows anything about my eating habits knows that juice has a big spot in my heart. And the juice here is AMAZING. I can’t overemphasize the heavenly, succulent goodness that is Hyderabadi juice. I had some amazing grape something last night, but it’s served like a smoothie. They have an abundance of flavors, too.
We’ve become oriented with the campus a bit. Samantha and I made the decision to live on-campus, because the process of lying to basically everyone about being married, then finding an apartment with a leaser willing to lease for four months, then purchasing furniture sounded daunting. Sam and I won’t be together, but we’ll be in close proximity, and the atmosphere looks to be way cool.
School in India is an interesting thing. School had already started when we arrived, and we were handed schedules and told to basically go to any class we wanted. They would allow us a period of time to decide which classes appealed to us. I’m still trying to decide between a Gender studies class (taught by a really intense woman who is part of the Study India program, she’s probably the reason I wanted to take it in the first place), a Dalit Literature class (Dalit is, I’ve gathered, a fancy [and probably inoffensive] word for “Untouchable”), and a Religious Literature of India class. We have to take Hindi, and we’re encouraged to only take three classes, so… that’s that. The campus is pretty interesting. We’ll have to get pictures. University of Hyderabad is one of the top 5 schools of India (according to the Program director), but the campus is certainly not outfitted to please American sensibilities. That’s part of being in this country- I think they realized landscaping and painting the outside and insides of buildings one color is pointless. So they don’t bother. Same with trash cleanup and the like. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, one has to adjust to these differences in hygienic standards. I imagine the U.S. will feel pretty sterile when I get back.
We haven’t been able to see much of the city, which is frustrating, because from what we’ve seen so far Hyderabad is a city comprised mostly of strange looking indoor stores selling clothing or electronics. I know it’s much, much, much more than that- the city has a rich history, but we’ve been unable to experience any of it so far. The fact that the campus is far removed from the meat of the city is more a hindrance than anything else at this point, but we’ll probably grow to appreciate it as a peaceful place to retire when the center of the city has grown too intense.
Samantha and I have tried our hand at catching up on the newspapers. We tried learning more about this Glasgow attack, but the details I could find were scant at best. We had an interesting taste of Indian partisianship when we read two newspapers covering the same thing: yesterday a protest in Hyderabad turned into a riot, and one paper called it a “bloodbath staged by leftists” while another said a “standard act of police brutality”. I’m sure both, as is always the case, have condensed whatever happened into an easily-digestable and largely inaccurate summarization of whatever occurred. It is interesting to note when this country feels strangely like home. Watching television and the news is certainly one such example.
We took our first bus ride yesterday. It was about as one would expect it to be. Most of the people who came were girls, so they were riding in the front, the designated “female only section”. Kyle and I were in the back where men steadily piled in until it was impossible to turn or move out of the way of the creepy ticket clerk who grunted “teekheets!” and occasionally made a hissing sound at people, not to scare them, but to get their attention in case they had just got on the bus.
Kyle moved up front and I got a seat, which is rare, and after a while Sephora looks back and tells me that the next stop is ours. As I move to get off in the mad rush of people streaming in and out, this man steps on the bus and blocks me from leaving, asking for my ticket. No one was getting their tickets checked. People get rides on the bus without ever actually stepping inside the bus, they just cruise on the outside and hit the side of the bus when they want the driver to stop. But I showed him, and he let me off.
In some confusion, the bus takes off, and I’m the only one standing at the stop. Everyone else hadn’t gotten off yet. I charge after the bus only to find chaos at both ends: Nunu is busy arguing with someone about how many tickets she bought, and the same man won’t let Kyle exit out the back. I was accidentally holding his ticket. Finally, since the man couldn’t explain to Kyle what he was to do, Kyle just left on the front end. It all worked out, but was a little unnerving. I don’t have any idea how we’ll figure out the bus system without the careful, incessant guidance of Sephora and Nunu.
Samantha was sick for a day, but is recovering slowly. At least a hospital visit wasn't warranted this time. Tomorrow we are moving into campus rooms, which will be nice- the hotel we're at is very neat, but it will be good to finally be able to unpack our things for an extended period of time.
Hopefully we'll be able to update you all more as we unfold the corners of the city. See you all soon.
-Kevin
Update:
Sam ended up going to the doctor on campus. More antibiotics and bananas. She's doing better.
More pictures coming once we move in to our rooms with free internet access!
We are back in Delhi. It's lovely to be in the center of Indian madness again. Tomorrow, we leave for Hyderabad. A few days after that we start school. In between those two days we're supposed to find an apartment, get what we need to successfully live there, register for classes, and take care of an assortment of nonsense I'm not yet familiar with. Our train ride is slated to be 36 hours long. I may be able to finish every book I brought in that time.
Sam is arguing that it's 22 hours. We'll see.
We had a party with our teachers, that went awkwardly- the people who taught us hindi were way cool, but it's an entirely different thing to sit around shooting the crap with them, rather than learning the complexities of a foreign language from them. But, we were celebrating with them because we took our final. They went decently, but not wonderfully. Hindi is a challenging language.
Today Samantha and I met the student consultant for Hyderbad. She's awesome, and she went through the program two years ago, so it's a good person to be helping us with problems we have. I can't type her name correctly, so I will refrain from that. She cleared the air a bit on classes and housing concerns that we had.
To the parents: we got our packages. Thank you endlessly for them. The candy is delicious.
Oh yeah, Sam learned she can work with an NGO that empowers women towards self-sufficiency with some kind of literacy program for them and their kids, or something of that nature. I wasn't listening when she heard the details, but she's pumped like a bicycle tire.
Today we'll visit the red fort if we're lucky. And maybe the largest mosque in India, the Jama Masjid. Hyderabad has the second largest.
This morning we visited a sweet templed called the Shri Lakshmi. There were people impressed with our indian attire, weird gardens with statues of random animals everywhere, and a man who takes normal pictures of you and then superimposes a sweet Shiva towering over you, blessing your existence or something of the sort. Our existences feel blessed.
We went to an Indian dance club yesterday. It was like stepping back into the States for a moment. Kind of weird. We saw a woman wearing a zebra mini-skirt. Outrageous. Naturally, the large, rowdy group of white people we went with destroyed the dance floor. I mean destroyed in the dancing sense. Like they were dancing up storms. Of dance fire.
I think that's it. We don't know what happens in Hyderbad mostly, and we don't know where the internet's at. We'll have something more substantial in a few days I hope.
Quick Thank-You Note from Sam:
Mom and Steve- thank you for the package. I'm eating a chocolate covered altoid right now. The box was totally beat up when it arrived... and its so heavy! But, now, loaded with love, we're on our way to Hyderabad!
- Location:Delhi!
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gr8whitebuddhas- Samantha and Kevin's India Adventure
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