What you never knew about the New Delhi Railway Station

So many wonderful things have happened during my two days in Delhi that it’s hard to recall them all. Little miracles abound: the elaborate assembly line of skullcap-clad boys in the back courtyard of the mosque next door, making chapatis at 7AM; the delicious chai that a rotation of kind-faced, wrinkled men bring to my door in the morning, free of charge; the way the fog and smoke soften the sun’s light as it hangs low in the sky throughout the day; the unbelievably good-looking young man who sold me the world’s most expensive nut brittle at the Oriental Fruits Mart yesterday; the shopkeepers, rickshaw drivers, and hotel workers who have all gladly conversed with me in Hindi, even though I have no idea what they’re saying half the time, and they know that I have no idea what they’re saying. It’s all been just incredible.

But the best part has been exploring the back corners of the New Delhi Railway Station and the winding alleyways of Paharganj with the folks at Salaam Baalak. SBT has seven “contact points” around the railway station – places where runaways and street kids can come for breakfast, lunch, non-formal education, and basic medical attention. Many of these kids live on the streets or in the railway station; others live in one of SBT’s shelters. I was lucky enough to meet the volunteer coordinator, many of the kids of all ages, the director, some teachers, and the doctor who works there part-time; all were full of smiles and welcomes. My job will be to teach English and other non-formal education classes: to the littler kids in the mornings, at the contact points around the railway station; then to conduct tutorials with the older kids, some of whom have trained as tour guides for SBT, in the afternoons.

For now, I’m looking forward to getting on a plane this evening and flying to Calcutta to visit one of my best friends from college, A., and her family for a week. More news, and pictures, to follow!

Rustic charm?

How strange it is to be spending Christmas Eve by myself, in a shabby hotel in Paharganj (should be Backpackerganj, or, as my father suggested, Pahargrunge), having spent all evening speaking broken Hindi and worrying about getting kidnapped/electrocuted/lost/ripped-off. After many happy, warm Christmases with D & D in Cambridge, or just with my parents at home, this is *truly* a new one.

But while I can hear every conversation on the street below my $12/night room, just witnessed a massive dog fight outside, haven't spoken English in 3 hours, and am in a part of Delhi entirely new to me, there are just enough comforts to make things bilkul merry. The people who work at my hotel -- though they did, in fact, rip me off -- are good-hearted. After phoning downstairs and requesting hot water, I could take a perfectly hot shower under a real shower head. My mobile phone works. My internet (look, see!) works. The electricity works. The lighting is soft. Best of all, I can listen to Bach advent cantatas and get my Christmas music fix: just doing my part for the noise pollution. And I just got to call my parents and grandfather in Boston, which is pretty great.

I've very rarely felt frightened or threatened in India, and I don't think I was tonight -- but when, upon dropping my bags in my room, I paused to think about my situation (young woman traveling alone in unfamiliar territory at midnight with a vocabulary of maybe 15 Hindi words at her disposal), I did grow a little apprehensive. Perhaps loneliness has something to do with it: these sorts of situations would be almost worry-free if I had a traveling companion looking out for me. Perhaps it's just the darkness and the sound of men's voices outside that scare me, and everything will be fine when I wake up in the morning and the bazaar downstairs comes alive again.

Last Christmas, I stood on the bank of the Sea of Galilee and looked out over the deep waters and up at the stars. I was with a friend; we stood together there for a long time, happy (for lack of a better word) to be alive and to be with each other. I never dreamed then that in a year's time, I would be here.

Parties of all sorts

After a total of nine hours of Sanskrit testing -- four hours on Thursday evening, and five hours on Friday morning and early afternoon -- I am a free girl again. And it feels great. However, I really got a headstart on my newfound freedom early last week, when I began ayurvedic panchakarma treatments, spent nearly every evening staying up late talking with S., and attended a fantastic birthday party.

Though the week of one's final examination in Sanskrit wouldn't seem like the best time to start a pretty serious ayurvedic treatment regimen, it turned out to be one of the best things I could have done with my final week. There is nothing more relaxing than coming home from school every afternoon and spending a couple of hours at the clinic, getting rubbed with strange-smelling ayurvedic massage oil, sitting in a steam chamber, and practicing my Hindi with the ladies who do the hard labor over there. For a few days I had to drink pure ghee at the end of the treatment: it would make me nauseous and tired for a few hours, but afterwards I would feel incredibly calm and grounded. I guess having a cup of fat swimming around in your body does that to you.

Living with S. has been one of the greatest blessings of this winter. She was the perfect person to guide me through this final week, reassuring me at all hours of the day and night that my final Sanskrit exam was *just a test* -- and a test that didn't matter, at that. She listened to me recite all the verses I had to memorize. She sat with me on our balcony for hours the night before the exam, talking about everything but school.

Wednesday night brought a joint birthday party for two of my classmates, G. and J. It was held on the roof of G's host family here; we were served delicious food (none of which I could eat, of course, because of panchakarma), blew out the candles on two kinds of cake (one "veg", without eggs, and one "non-veg"), and treated to a gorgeous classical Indian music concert given by one of my Sanskrit teachers and one of the Marathi teachers. I sat oh-so-happily on the giant swing on their balcony, gazing at the few visible stars and listening to my teacher's accomplished voice singing traditional Marathi songs, bhajans, and later, even some Sanskrit pieces. At the end of the evening, G. and I joined our teachers on the music rug to sing some of the stotras that we had learned in class this fall.

I attended another great party on Friday night, to celebrate the end of the semester, but I'm afraid that one didn't turn out so well. All of us students and a few added friends went out to this dimly-lit, roadside restaurant, where they served hard liquor and kebabs to crowds of Indian men puffing on cigarettes. We sat outside and shared plate after plate of delicious, heavily spiced meats, paneer, and vegetables, sipping all the while from (in my case) a gin-and-Limca with lots of ice, which is surprisingly good. However, my ayurvedically-purified stomach rebelled pretty quickly, and I found myself heading home early in a rickshaw (I still remember paying the driver Rs.50 for a Rs.15 ride...) and spending the entire night throwing up: the first time that I've really been sick here. Luckily, I got to spend the day afterwards getting some special ayurveda treatment, lying in bed, reading Anna Karenina, and talking with friends and family. I feel much better.

The rest of the weekend brings more R&R, plus all the errands that I have to run before leaving for Delhi on Wednesday afternoon. I'm free!

Almost the end, and almost the beginning

The last couple of weeks in Pune have brought a whirlwind of Sanskrit study sessions, late night discussions with S., quasi-uncomfortable ayurveda treatments, and hurredly-made plans for the next few months. I sit here in my room, which is looking infinitely more spiffy thanks to M and G’s discarded carpet, and recall that day in September when I was so happy to find this little place. Its yellow walls, flourescent lights, and exposure to huge amounts of traffic have held me well. I’ll be leaving all my things here while I travel around in at the end of December and through January, so this isn’t quite goodbye. But it’s close.

When S. moved into my bedroom a few weeks ago, it really started to feel like home – she’s wonderful, perhaps as a sister (if I had one) might be wonderful. And in a funny way, she reminds me of the first roommate I ever had: a straight-talking and sweet girl who grew up in more than 10 different countries; we roomed together for a year at our boarding school up north in the Himalayas. I’ve spent so much of the past few months taking care of myself; I had forgotten the twin comforts of taking care of someone else, and letting myself be taken care of. I hope S. keeps living in this room while I’m gone this spring. I like knowing she’ll be here, keeping an eye on passing traffic and enjoying the much-prized bathtub.

Sanskrit’s been an adventure, too, of the less comforting sort. (Isn’t it always?) I have an exam on Friday – an 8-hour monster made up of written answers, listening comprehension, spoken conversation, and a repeat of the placement test I took three months ago. My instincts have told me to pull out all the stops studying for this exam, and then my (other, stronger) instincts have told me that this test – just like all the other ones this semester – will have a net impact of approximately Zero on the rest of my Sanskrit education. By Friday, I hope to find myself somewhere in the middle. For now, the process of reviewing, miraculously void of the pressure any student would feel before a final exam, has been nothing less than pleasurable. It’s great to look back on something like vocabulary: how much I’ve learned! How much more I haven’t! I’m amazed that I can understand some spoken Sanskrit. My own conversations still come to a screeching halt whenever I have to express more than a simple clause. In grammar class we’ve been learning Paninian syntax -- today it gave me chills, it was so elegant. Most important, I’m trying to soak in these last few hours of my teachers’ company. It’s not just their teaching skills I’ll miss: their laughter, chin-dimples, patience, and gentle chiding have made a very difficult language a very happy home.

When I move on to English-teaching at the NGO in Delhi where I’ll be spending at least February though April/May (see www.salaambaalaktrust.org!), I hope my Sanskrit teachers’ examples stick with me. I’m looking forward to getting out of the classroom – and back into a very different, very welcome, kind of classroom.

I’m looking forward to leaving Pune, too: I enjoy the city, but it (the part of it that I see, at least) is pretty homogenous. Hindu student youth. Middle class, middle-lower class, upper class. Autorickshaw drivers who use the meter. So bring on the insane diversity and history of Delhi. Let me drive among centuries’ worth of royal detritus. I dare the pranksters and scammers to try their worst. (Okay, maybe not their worst. I take it back.) It’s been too long since I heard the beautiful, familiar, muezzin’s call to prayer blaring outside my window.

And finally, after three months of living with ayurveda students, PK (ayurvedic panchakarma) has come into my life with a bang and a cup of melted ghee. Daily massages, sweating sessions, ghee drinking, and strange brown tablets. Diet regulations are even more bizarre to my western stomach. But I do feel better, clearer, even after only three days on the soft-core end of the panchakarma regimen. (Thing step up pretty dramatically this Saturday.) The best part of treatment is that it’s an opportunity to speak in a few languages that aren’t English. My ayurveda doctor, Dr. G., speaks Sanskrit herself. That’s always a joy. Plus, the two ladies who work for her speak Hindi and Marathi, and were so amused when I attempted to speak to them in Hindi on my first day of treatment that they now refuse to speak to me in any other language. So I sit in the steam chamber and attempt to carry on conversations involving the five verbs that I know, four of which are in the polite imperative. Finally, thanks to a few choice spots on my body (that shall remain unnamed), I have learned to say the following sentence in Marathi:

Malaa gudagulii hotaat. I am ticklish.

Ode to the commute

It's hard to believe, but I've got less than two weeks left in Pune. Next Wednesday I fly out to Delhi for a few days in a cheap hotel in Paharganj, to be spent visiting a couple of NGOs and writing essays that will somehow convince my college to give me a whole lot of money so that I can spend the summer in Jerusalem, learning Hebrew and studying Torah, even though such subjects have nothing to do with my academic career thus far. All this while recovering from ayurvedic panchakarma, which starts in earnest on Sunday. (You don't want to know the gory details. Trust me.)

I'll be back in Pune during the coming months, that's for sure -- all the company in Delhi, where I expect to be working for at least February/March/April, won't compare to my beautiful friends and teachers here -- but in the past week I've been thinking about just what it is I've learned and loved in the past three months.

I turn to little things. The daily wait at the corner of Karve Road, a gringa amidst groggy science-and-technology-college students, all of us standing around aimlessly in the early morning smoke and fog. The (now chilly) ride to school, discussing little things with J in the rickshaw, sometimes accompanied by various members of our rickshaw driver's family. We drive through this great slum area: just full of kids running around, bathing, eating, chasing after the goats. At the end of it await M and M, my teachers, full of eager "suprabhatam"-s ("good morning") and winking complaints about what lousy students we are. Ten minutes behind schedule we start class, and from then on, it's four hours of intensive Sanskrit. But all this I've said before, so I'll move on to anothe great moment in the day, which is when I walk home from school, picking my way through the crowds of elementary school kids on the street where I live. Three schools, one lane, and a whole lot of hectic recess. It's great. They all wear elaborate uniforms and sport colorful backpacks, jaunty hairstyles. They run around chasing after each other and waking up rickshaw drivers from their early afternoon naps in the backs of their three-wheelers.

And I love the evenings, too, which find M, G, S, and me all at home in one overlapping moment, preparing a bazillion things in the kitchen at once and engaging in impromptu Hindi lessons. We smile, sigh, get frustrated together: all over "India" (spoken with eyes wide and exaggerated vowels), this mythical and mysterious place that we spend all our energy trying to dissect and figure out, for ourselves and for each other. "That's India," we advise, knowing that none of us really knows, or will ever know, India. Whatever that is.

We trade "sweetie"-s and sympathetic "oh no!"-s, responding to each other's war stories in a continuous flow of sharing the miracle that we're all here, now, in India. Each of us came here for truly different reasons, and we're sheltered here (we help shelter each other) from what's Out There. But in the end I believe that no matter how much we exoticize, criticize, [insert verb] it -- Eddy hisses a sigh somewhere -- there are moments in every day when we are truly here and unseparated from India. Whatever that is. Those moments turn into stories funny and sad and objective, but once they were flesh-and-blood stories; once we were really out there in India, living our lives.

I guess that's why, at the end of these few months in Pune, it's the daily trips to and from school that stick with me. I feel a lightness in my step when I walk those walks, some sloka or stotra or other undoubtedly playing on repeat in my head, forgetting for several moments at a time that I'm not actually from around these parts. And when I remember what I've forgotten, I feel proud, because for less than a minute, India was as good as home for me.

Sun and music

I had an incredible day yesterday. I spent the morning reading and studying in my sunny bedroom...



And at night, my roommates and I attended a three-hour Indian classical music concert. It was held outdoors on the gigantic cricket pitch of the Law College campus (where my street, Law College Road, gets its name). We snagged seats relatively near the stage, and had the pleasure of sitting among a group of my roommate M's fellow ayurveda students. Even their revered teacher, Dr. L, showed up in a dapper cap and round gold-rimmed glasses. As the sun went down and the concert began, we saw a flock of bats fly across the cricket pitch. Jupiter and Venus shone bright, looking down on us from the eastern sky. I sat between my roommate S and my (wonderful, adorable) astrologer, R.

Here's a photo of G and M, my two roomies and the resident uncle-ji and auntie-ji of our flat. They're here for M's ayurveda studies, and to attend some "sits" in Vipasana meditation, which they both practice regularly -- especially G, who meditates for two hours every morning (from 4:30-6:30!) and every afternoon. Back in the west, they split their time between taking care of their sustainable farm in Fairfield, Iowa, and doing pro-bono sustainable development work in southern Mexico. From them I've learned the value of almonds, soaked and peeled, that it's okay to treat yourself to lunch someplace ritzy and expat-y every now and then, and that cinnamon sticks boiled in water make excellent tea.

And here's one of me and my other roommate, S, who just graduated from NYU and plans to go into the music business once she's finished with ayurveda treatment in India this year. (My other roommates, the three tall German ladies, are at a wedding in Rajasthan right now.)

The concert was beautiful: the group consisted of two Muslims and three Hindus, happily jamming together on the tabla, the mandolin, the voice, a simple drum played with one hand, and a more complicated standing drum set. They started off with two classical songs, then broke off into incredible (and incredibly long-winded) solo improvisations. First was the mandolin, followed by the drum set man. This drum set man. His work on the drums was great, but halfway through his performance he started speaking into the microphone. "The breath," he said, "the breath is the rhythm we all have." (Great, I thought, he's getting all kooky and romantic on us.) Then he took his hands off the drums and started to breathe into the microphone. First simple, then in ONE-two-three, faster and faster, then far more complicated, six or eight mini-beats per round, and all of a sudden his breath was as if whirling through the air, flying in circles at top speed.

And then -- oh, then! -- he started beatboxing. (This is just about the last thing I expected at an Indian classical music concert.) Now, I'm not really one for beatboxing in general, but this man was something else. He was, if I can say this, beatboxing classical Indian music. His mouth made the sounds of an entire tabla set. When his beat had become sufficiently complex, he winded down and said: "A conversation between me and an airport official in America." And then (imagine this!) he actually beatboxed the conversation, hand gestures and all. You could completely tell what was going on in the scene; he perfectly communicated this hilarious few minutes of his life...in beatbox. It was as if he was speaking a language--a language that everyone could understand. The audience was in stitches.

Then the other players came back on, and they finished up with some more improvisations (this time on voice, drum, and tabla) as well as some set songs. The last one they sang was called -- in the spirit of the gathering -- "Ishwar - Allah". Very beautiful. So there you have it...just another Saturday night in Pune.

"The Ramayana in Global Perspective"

Yesterday, my Sanskrit class attended a wonderful (and by wonderful, I mean both educational and totally laughable) conference hosted by the "Aikyabharati Research Institute." The topic: The Ramayana in Global Perspective. Needless to say, all but three of the participants were Indian. My class got to witness the final speech, delivered by the revered "Swami-ji" to a gray-haired crowd of older and middle-aged Indian scholars sitting in plastic chairs.

So we showed up to this flourescently lit room, outfitted with a table and a podium raised on a platform. Below it were the plastic chairs, in which the scholars (most of them women, though the presenters were almost all men) chatted to each other and drank from tiny paper cups filled with sweet chai. Several swamis dotted the audience with their saffron robes, sacred threads, and foreheads (frankly) face-painted with exacting patterns of white, red, and yellow. Two swamis sat at the table on the platform; both wearing white and orange robes, one’s forehead and eyes completely covered in white with a streak of red up the middle, his head bald except for a long crop of matted black hair in the back; the other’s wrinkled face barely visible underneath gigantic bifocals and a white beared tinged gold with henna. A series of men stepped up to the podium, alternately delivering addresses and introductions in Hindi and Sanskrit. One swami announced that he had just published a book – “The Cosmic Energy of Vijnana” – in Marathi, and clarified (with a great amount of humor, for a swami of his stature) that if anyone was short on sleep, he or she should read it. Swamiji with the painted forehead blessed the first twenty copies of the book. Then he blessed several boxes of sweets, which – to everyone’s great pleasure – were passed around the audience, along with more mini-cups of chai.

Everyone’s sugar rush was just turning into a sugar crash when Swamiji began to speak. He delivered an address in extremely Sanskritized English – in fact, wouldn’t have been surprised if he had written his speech in Sanskrit and then translated it into English— involving hugely complicated sentences, words about the School of Justice and the School of Mercy and the Rule of Cosmic Discipline and how “Rama suffered for our sins” (sound familiar?), all ostensibly prescribing how the Ramayana should be read across the globe. Lots of Shree Ram this and that. Reading the Ramayana as literature is only useful if it ends in spiritual gain. (I might agree with him on that point, but with a different logic.) More of Rama suffering for our sins; we must repent so that his suffering his not in vain. Dharma, karma, samsara, chakra, dosha, guna: fire-and-brimstone Hinduism!

Swamiji yelled and spitted into the microphone, his consonants as harsh as if he were reciting Vedic Sanskrit – which was something he did often, judging from the grainy quality of his voice, the breakneck pace at which he spoke, and the fact that he had the entirity of his hour-long speech memorized.

It would make a hilarious counterpoint to your average American academic conference. The American Academy of Religion party favors—canvas bags—are great, but when all is said and done, wouldn’t everyone be happier with some sweets?

Mumbai

I woke up to "At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks," the headline of the New York Times online. It was 4 AM, and I was up early to get a headstart on coffee before driving the six hours to Nasik for a field trip.

There was so little news at that point -- the attacks had only happened several hours earlier -- that I assumed the best (it's funny when "the best"=a few small bombs going off in popular locations, less than ten dead and a couple more wounded) and groggily let my eyes skim over the article. Pune is three hours out of Mumbai, and there are rarely even bomb scares here, so there was no doubt I was safe. I did, however, notice that I had been to two of the attacked places that the article mentioned -- simply while traveling through Mumbai for a few hours. It gives some sense of the scale of the (what I then thought were relatively small) attacks.

And so we drove through the night, speeding through Pune's empty streets and watching the sun rise over the gentle red hills of the Maharashtrian countryside. Devotional Sanskrit songs streamed out of the sound system. Driving through this beautiful country -- roadside tea stalls filled with early morning crowds of men, makeshift huts on spare strips of land, wandering turbaned men clutching their walking sticks on the side of the highway -- I felt so far away from the morning's news. There was no question in my mind that India was the place for me to me.

I'm thankful to have had that drive this morning. A few hours later, when we had turned around and driven back to Pune (the school didn't want to risk its students traveling today), I read any reports I could find on the scene in Mumbai. The Taj in flames. Hostages. Seeking out American and British passport holders. Leopold's. Blood on the floor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria Terminus and Mumbai's largest railway station. Roads leading to the airport. The Chabad house. Hospitals, a movie theater. Machine guns, guns, guns, gunmen.

I'm scared -- everybody's scared. I know that I have no real right to be, since I'm sitting eons away from where fear rightfully lies. Perhaps my particular brand of fear comes from love of this country, and according disbelief (or naivete) that anything of this scale could happen here, now, today. India's past is full of violence; in smaller pockets, its present is, too. Bombs in Delhi have punctuated the last few months. Jaipur in May. Ongoing crimes -- violent or systematic -- against women, the poor, the socially exiled. I wonder if current events will provoke a violent backlash against India's large and peaceful Muslim population. But my India has never experienced something like what happened last night; the images painted by the words of the New York Times seem to me a new and bewildering modern art form.

I know it's all over the world, these beautiful countries speckled with (or drowned in) violence. For me, it only makes me want to stay on, so that I can ride through that countryside many, many more times and remember how perfect it is here. Hey, it's Thanksgiving, after all.

The stars

I found this article gracing the cover of the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section (yes, I read the Styles section first) just in time for my all-day meetings with not one, but two, astrologers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/fashion/23psychic.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

Looks like I'm not the only one turning to the stars for advice. I do get the sense, however, that none of the psychics, Tarot readers, and spiritual mediums in the article have studied the massive, exacting, almost impenetrable science of Vedic astrology. (According to many, it's the sheer difficulty of Vedic astrology, and not any bogus-ness, that makes for so many bad astrologers these days.) My roommate M says that one of today's experts has been studying Vedic astrology for more than 30 years; he teaches it, now, in the States and here. The other has only been studying for 9 years, having turned to astrology after becoming a successful CPA. Way to foresee the economic recession -- and where all everyone would be turning for help.

I've had a few interesting brushes with astrology and the like. Twice, astrologers have approached me out of crowds on the street and told me that something very important is about to happen to me. Neither of them asked me to sit with them for a reading, or to pay them. The first time, I was in the middle of applying to Harvard. The second time, I was in the middle of packing my bags for this trip.

Anyone ever been to an astrologer, psychic, palm reader, Tarot seer, medium?

Friday adventures

I had the ride of a lifetime today -- on the back of my Sanskrit teacher's motorbike.

Professor M rides a bike like she teaches grammar: slowly, safely, quietly assured of her prowess. As I struggled to kick down the foot-rest, she chuckled and scolded me, "Don't move!" Calmly rolling her eyes at my awkwardness, she added, "I can't balance if you do that." And, just as she does with grammar, M innocently underestimates the task at hand. Surrounded by at least fifty other honking motorbikes, rickshaws, trucks, buses, bicyles, and oxen at a traffic light, she remarked--and this was not a deadpan--"Traffic is less today."

What a ride it was. We rolled through the slums and the army encampments in our school's neighborhood; we zoomed over bridges and through winding side streets. The city never looked more beautiful.

Our destination was the Pune office of Samskrita Bharati, which (we discovered) is actually just the apartment of the man who runs the Pune branch. He spoke to us in very slow and easy Sanskrit, with a lot of English words thrown in, about how Sanskrit was no longer just a language for Brahmins and Hindus. He then showed us an array of books published by Samskrita Bharati, all highly Hindu in subject matter. The first-year Sanskrit primer's first chapter read, "This is Shiva. That is Saraswati." "The Brahmin goes to the temple." But -- length and quiet Hindutva aside -- his lecture was hardly fire and brimstone. At the end of the afternoon, his wife served us delicious homemade ginger sweets.

Breaking news: it looks like our class is going to go on an overnight field trip next week to witness part of a five-day Vedic animal sacrifice, supposedly the only rite of its kind done in India today. Twenty-four animals. Too exciting.

And now off to prepare for a dinner party my flatmates and I are throwing tonight. Feels great to be done with the week, though I'll admit that one thing I'm *not* done with is today's exam -- three hours spent working on it in school this morning, and two essay questions to go. The thought of the animal sacrifice keeps me going.

Haps and mishaps

Haps: Tomorrow brings a field trip to the local office of the Samskrita Bharati organization, a group that promotes spoken Sanskrit and Sanskrit education -- often, I hear, with a serious Hindu nationalist agenda. It should be an interesting trip. Thankfully I don't know enough Sanskrit to throw political insults at our gracious hosts, and our teachers assured us that they really would be gracious, too.

Mishaps: Project de-Perfectionize is well under way! In this morning's reading class, I innocently paraphrased a sentence about a princess planning to returning to the house of her father, the king. My teacher, fed up of the word I always use for "house", asked me to throw out a few synonyms. I said the following: "grham, sadanam, sadman, saranam, nivasah, vesya."

"House, house, house, house, house, prostitute."

Laughter and blushing ensued.

In other news, on Sunday I have back-to-back appointments with two Vedic astrologers. Suggestions for questions I should ask them?

Tulsi Vivaha

Sometimes it seems like all I do these days is go to weddings.

On Thursday afternoon, I attended the annual marriage of the Hindu god Krishna with the sacred Tulsi plant. “What,” a friend asked me, “is Krishna doing marrying a plant? What would that be called – floraphilia?”

Good question. Luckily for us, there are a whole bunch of stories that point toward the answer (to the question of Krishna’s marrying a plant, not to the question of the technical term for such unions – though, come to think of it, perhaps that’s what the American right is thinking when they disavow gay marriage: “first people marry someone of the same sex, next they’ll be marrying plants like those idol-worshippers; even a civil union with someone of the same sex is bad enough, but a civil union with a *plant*?”).

According to a Google search, Tulasi Vivahah originates with Vishnu, the god of whom Krishna is an avatar. Vishnu was being seriously bothered by a demon named Jalandhara. Because Hinduism is so wonderful, however, even demons can perform religious penance and obtain favors from the gods in return. This Jalandhara had been particularly austere, and had been granted immunity to death – as long as his wife, the goddess Vrinda, was faithful to him. Try as he might, then, Vishnu couldn’t kill Jalandhara.

Clearly there was only one option. One night, Vishnu assumed the form of Jalandhara, and led Vrinda to stray from the path, so to speak.

Killing the demon wasn’t the problem – it was his wife that proved to be trouble. Vrinda went berserk when she found out the trick that Vishnu had played on her. She cursed him into the form of the black Shaligram stone. Impressed with her fidelity, Vishnu decided to make their relationship legitimate: he transformed her into a Tulsi plant and promised to marry her every single year.



Other stories about Tulsi Vivahah likewise preach wifely fidelity. (Notice a pattern in my Sanskrit education? My teachers *just might* be eager for us all to get married, auspiciously and soon.)

In any case, on Thursday afternoon we set up a marriage ceremony for Krishna and Tulsi on the gravel outside the Sanskrit classrooms, under the huge banyan trees. We had a cooking lesson (in Sanskrit), and then the pandit came to deliver a lecture about Tulsi Vivahah (also in Sanskrit). Once everything for the marriage had been set up, my classmate R stepped up to the plate to perform the puja. The pandit told him everything that he had to do (in Sanskrit, of course), chanting Veda all the while. Lots of water-dripping, sandalwood–spreading, flower-giving, light-offering ensued. The whole thing was just beautiful, a tiny little golden Krishna murti being married off to a tulsi plant twenty times his size.



When it came time for the actual marriage, we all stood and our teachers joined in for the traditional marriage hymns. We walked around the perimeter of the blanket on the ground, circumambulating the newlyweds. Then we all ate sweets that had been blessed by Krishna and Tulsi.

The best part: smack in the middle of some Vedic stotra or other, the pandit’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and conducted a lengthy conversation with the person on the other end of the line – in classical Sanskrit.

Panini

...and I don't mean the sandwich.

Today was a great day in my Sanskrit education. In grammar class we started to learn (and by started, I mean *inched* out the *very* beginning of) Paninian grammar, which I like to think of as the world's first computer program, a key to the Sanskrit language. So exciting! To start, fourteen sutras that provide the tools for understanding Paninian code: short strings of letter-syllables, brilliantly arranged by...well, I haven't learned what they're arranged by, but it must be genius, whatever it is. Thus, am completely regretting the fact that I've not studied a particle of computer science.

We started with where and how the sound "a" is pronounced in the mouth, and began to learn two sutras about the strengthening of vowels.

In listening class, we came across the aorist imperative -- another great moment. Starting to think all this Sanskrit has finally begun to permeate my skull!

YES, WE CAN!

This morning's election bash brought many a tear and many a gulab jamun.

Aam, vayam saknomah! Yes, yes we can!

Pratidinam

Or, "Every day".

I realize I haven't yet written much about school, even though it takes up most of my time (and *definitely* most of my energy) on most of my days. So because it's early in the week and I have yet to realize the vast amount of grammar and vocabulary (not to mention sung verses) which I must memorize by nine o' clock on Friday morning for the weekly exam -- and because I'm too excited about the election to buckle down on my homework quite yet -- I'm going to share what it was like to go to school today:

After pushing the snooze button a few times, I got out of bed at 7:15am and padded to the kitchen, where I grabbed the big cappuccino mug before either of my roommates could get to it. Filled it with illustrious Nescafe, and inhaled. I took my second mug back to my room, where I worked on understanding the short story that we had been assigned for our "Modern Literature" class coming up today. Often -- too often, perhaps -- one comes across words and sentences in Sanskrit literature that make one think "surely this doesn't actually MEAN what the dictionary says it does" or "there must be some contextual definition that I'm missing" or "I'm definitely breaking up the sandhi [what ties Sanskrit words together] incorrectly." And all too often, those words or sentences mean *exactly* what you thought they did.

Exhibit A: Last year's selection from the Mahabharata featured one character calling his enemy an "impotent sesame seed."

Exhibit B: Today's short story contained a paragraph about how the narrator's father would go to the temple every day after lunch and sit in the middle of the floor surrounded by villagers, singing songs while smoking a hookah.

Exhibit C: We're currently reading a Puranic story in which an old Brahmin man, afflicted by leprosy because of some serious evils committed in a past life, insists on visiting a local prostitute. His wife -- whose saintly devotion the story is supposed to encourage -- carries him there on her shoulders. On the way, however, he kicks a sage who, having been falsely accused of robbery, is sitting in the gallows. What's more, the "dvijottamah" ("the best of the twice-born," an epithet my teacher claims is used without a trace of irony) kicks the sage with his left foot. Obviously the sage curses him. The devoted wife protects him. The gods-- powerless compared to the faithful wife -- get involved. Stay tuned.

At eight, I walked down to the corner where my friend J, who is taking Marathi at the same institute, picked me up in a rickshaw. We drove out, first through the city, then through the slums, to Deccan College campus. My two teachers and my two classmates arrived with many a "suprabhatam, katham asi?" (good morning, how are you?) exchanged. We started our first class: reading the Puranic story cited above. No English is spoken in class; instead of each student translating a few lines into English, each student is expected to give a Sanskrit "anvaya" (a rearrangement of the words in the sentence into their proper syntactic order) and then a Sanskrit paraphrase that shows he or she knows the meaning of the lines at hand.

Two hours later, we break for tea. Often teatime is held completely in Sanskrit; today we talked in English about corrupt landlords and the older ages at which Indians are getting married these days.

Then it's time for grammar class. Often we spend grammar class drilling Sanskrit's infinite noun declension paradigms. This week, however, we've started studying numbers -- something most foreign language students learn a few weeks into their first years. It's one of the things I've always loved about Sanskrit, actually: the fact that I could say "Upon hearing the words of his beloved son Rama, King Dasaratha, whose soul was great, collapsed from his affliction upon the surface of the earth as if he were a tree that had been cut down" before I could count to ten.

But after completing a worksheet on numbers, we spent the rest of class time talking about astrology. It's no small thing, here.

Then we settled into "Modern Literature," the words of which--being written without sandhi and usually with good syntax--we only had to paraphrase.

We finish every school day reciting the shlokas (verses) and stotra (devotional verses) we're required to memorize each week. This week brings a super-long stotra written by Shankaracharya in praise of Bhairava, Shiva in his wrathful form. It's composed in iambic Something. On a wild guess, I wonder if it's called an "astakam" ("making eight") because there are eight triplets in each "paada" ("quarter of a verse", or literally, "foot"). [**Correction: this is NOT why it is called "astakam." Bad, bad Nell.**]

Then we walk over to the Marathi classrooms, where J and A are finishing classes with their two teachers. We all sit on the ground and eat delicious homemade Indian food with our hands from a tiffin. After lazing around for a bit, laughing and washing our dishes together, we split up into autorickshaws and head into our afternoons.

And now I'm here.

Go Obama!

Limerick

My friend D, whom I've known since seventh grade, composed this limerick for me out of nowhere:

nelly is secretly asian
with freckled skin, unlike a raisin
she struts down the street
in her pink flip-flopped feet
and her firey good looks are just blazin'

Readers: if D has written a limerick for you, too, do share!

Barack, I did puja for you today...

Love marriage

I heard an incredible story yesterday.

I was at the last Diwali party of the week, held at the home of the sweet lady who helped me find my flat. Mrs. K and her family host foreign students who are studying in Pune; my friend A stayed with her over the summer, and my German roommate-to-be, F, has stayed with her for the past few months. In any case, she, her husband, and her son are incredibly warm, and invited the lot of us over for a little Diwali bash. We ate sweets , watched CNN, and spoke in lots of languages at once. There was a lot of laughter.

When one family at the party -- a young husband and wife, and their baby son -- had left, Mrs. K told us the story of their marriage.

A few years ago, the young lady had been staying with Mrs K as a paying guest while she worked for an Indian cosmetics company in Pune. While she was in Pune, she met a young man from Kerala. They fell in love, and wanted to get married. Eager to show off her boyfriend to Mrs. K, she had him (and a group of his friends) come by the street where Mrs. K lives, so that Mrs. K could spot him from the balcony. Mrs. K, suspecting he would be a "dark little man with a beard, like all those Keralans", was surprised to see a fair (and shaved) man below her balcony. She called him up, he met the family, and everyone became friends.

There was just one problem. The young lady was Hindu; she came from a very strictly Rajput family based in Varanasi. The young man was Christian; he came from a very strictly Catholic family in Cochin. Everyone knew their parents would never agree to let them be married.

So the K's took matters into their own hands. They took the couple, and a few friends as witnesses, down the local court in Pune. They got married there.

But everyone knows you're not really married in India until you've had a religious wedding -- and, let's face it, a PARTY. Plus, they still hadn't told their parents.

Everyone thought for weeks about what to do. Finally, the girl went back home and told her family. They reacted badly (to say the least) and locked her in the house for days. Finally, her younger brother intervened on her behalf, and convinced her parents to let her return to Pune and to her job. Her parents called the K family, saying that if their relations found out about the marriage, the family would be cast out from society and shamed for generations to come. The young lady's sister and brother would never be able to find spouses.

Many tears and negotiations later, her family finally consented to the marriage -- as long as it was held under firm Hindu guidelines, and as long as no one found out the boy had been brought up (and indeed still was) Catholic.

The boy was fine with this. The girl was ecstatic. A few more hurdles remained, though, the first of which was convincing the boy's Catholic family to consent to a Hindu wedding. After putting their heads together, the K's figured out how to jump this one: Mr. and Mrs. K (two very fair Brahmins) would pose as the young man's parents; assorted members of their family would pose as the young man's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The man's family would never have to know.

They rehearsed for weeks leading up to the wedding. Everybody knew everybody else's character. The wedding passed without a hitch -- until, that is, the bride and bridegroom went to a Hanuman-ji mandir to pay their respects. While they were there, dutifully praying to Hanuman with all their relatives (and fake relatives), they heard a voice cry out, "Hey, Shenji Joseph! What are YOU doing here?!" It was one of the young man's friends from school, who by a strange twist of fate had ended up in that city, at that temple, at that moment. Before the innocent friend knew what had happened to him, four of the men from Mrs. K's family had pounced on him, muffled his voice, and forcibly dragged him out of the temple.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The second wedding ended well, and the couple flew to Kerala to be married as Catholics. (For, the young man's parents had said, it would be just FINE if the two were married -- as long as the ceremony were absolutely Catholic as could be.) The young woman's parents, satisfied that they had convinced their entire family and neighborhood of the groom's pure Brahmin roots, even attended the wedding.

They are now living happily ever after as a practicing Hindu-Catholic family.

My room smells like gunpowder

What began on Sunday evening as a spatter of sparklers down the street has, by last night, morphed into a full-on war zone of firecrackers and various other assorted (and probably illegal) explosives.

Having spent most of Diwali thus far locked in our rooms (me, studying; K, undergoing the worst of Ayurvedic pancakarma) K suggested that we go out on the town to celebrate the unbelievable mix of Christmas, New Year’s, Eid-al-Fitr, the Fourth of July, and a Typical Indian Wedding that is Diwali. Our first stop yesterday evening was the chai stand on the corner, where the world’s best chai – I know, I know, I say that about every chai place I visit – is served in thimble-sized plastic cups to autorickshaw-wallahs and guys who work in cell phone stores. K needed the chai energy more than I did: for the past three days he has lived on nothing but the leftover water you get when you boil one part rice in eight parts water. (He has also, much to my amusement, started to question his European-football-fan-like devotion to Ayurveda. As he mused the other day, “How can anyone do this and live a normal life at the same time?”)

We hopped in a rickshaw to visit Pune’s big Parvati temple, which is appropriately located on Parvati Hill (“Parvati Parvata,” hah). The streets were crammed with huge piles of marigolds sold to passerby, and glowed with the bright lights of sweet shops from which overflowed teetering stacks of boxes of “sveets” all wrapped in shiny paper. Our driver dropped us off on the side of a road and pointed at a path that basically led straight up the mountain. We paid him and set off. Kids scampered across the cement pathway, running off to the clusters of houses that dot the hillside so that they could set off fireworks. By the time we reached the top and had paid some attention to the various temples that make up Parvati’s compound, the sky had darkened and the pyrotechnics had started in a serious way. We walked along the parapet that runs around the perimeter of the main Parvati temple, and joined a surprisingly small number of families who had gathered at the highest point in Pune to watch the fireworks.

The view was incredible: all three hundred and sixty degrees of Pune exploding in bursts of color and light. Every building, every street, every hilltop – not one was without its telltale volcanic eruption of sparks and technicolor. And constantly, too, for there was no grand finale to this firework display. When a serious cloud of smoke had settled over the city, we said our goodbyes to the view and headed down.

Then the fun started. “Do you want to walk for a bit?” I innocently asked K. “Sure,” he responded, and before we knew it, we had set off on the most nerve-wracking walk of our lives. All over, people were lighting firecrackers and rockets. In a bit of a wrong turn, we found ourselves walking on the side of a road, not exactly in a slum but in a slum-ish area, where large groups of kids were setting off fireworks on every spare patch of earth. We watched as, one by one, they scampered into the road, set down a firework, ran away, and waited for it to explode in the face of an unsuspecting motorcycle driver or autorickshaw-wallah. Defiant, they drove right over the sparkling bangs. If this was how Rama was welcomed back to Ayodhya back in the day, I'm surprised he didn't turn around and make a beeline straight back to Lanka.

We found that we had passed our fire-trial of sorts (Sita ain’t gone through nothing compared to this!) when we reached a big intersection. Understandably, very few autorickshaws were doing business last night: we finally got hold of one, however, who would take us relatively near to our apartment. Then, in an ill-fated attempt to cap off our night with a quiet round of e-mail, we walked up Prabhat Road to the bigger internet café on Law College Road. Prabhat Road, being in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, wasn’t as bad, explosive-wise, as the Parvati Hill environs, but there were definitely just as many sparklers in action. Prabhat Road folks seemed to favor actual fireworks – the kind that go up into the sky and burst in a shower of color there – as well as the bright sparklers that don’t make any noise, but which turn around themselves at incredible speeds and have their way of getting into the road (and again, under the wheels of innocent cars). There were also plenty of sparklers which, when set on fire, burst open from the sidewalk in a ten-foot-tall fountain of light that makes them remarkably hard to distinguish from an electrical circuit problem gone wrong. And, of course, there were the usual large groups of teenagers, who set off the same kinds of fireworks as the slum kids – the ones with far more bang and far less light – except in huge piles, so that instead of hearing the sound of a single gunshot, passers-by will witness what sounds like an entire battle.

To top it all off, the internet café was closed when we got there. So we stopped by the vegetable seller on the side of the road and had him hack open two coconuts for us. We sipped the cool, calming coconut milk through straws and jumped together at the particularly loud bangs.

We arrived home to find all the kids from our building setting off the REALLY, almost obnoxiously, loud kind of firework right outside the windows of our apartment. I almost cried. K suggested I put cotton and ghee in my ears. Such is life here.

Shubha Deepavali, everyone!

Party like it's 1399

Team 2008:

1. The rented event space.
2. The constant, constant, constant photography and videography. Of everything.
3. The fur hat (??) worn by the groom-to-be.
4. The Hindi film music.

Team 1399:

1. The arranged marriage.
2. The invitation of the entire family, neighborhood, city...
3. The pandit and the various Hindu engagement rituals (though the pandit was ignored, and the rituals were – my guess – considerably shortened).
4. The food. It was spectacular, in the eternal way food can be.
5. Did I mention the marriage was arranged?

Yes, it was a fantastic party. G and I arrived a couple of hours early so that our Sanskrit teacher could wind, prod, and poke us into our saris. (Actually, G wore her sari perfectly; I proved a more difficult case.) When I had finally squeezed into my bodice, petticoat, and multiple foldings and windings of heavily starched blue silk, I—-hardly able to breathe-—baby-stepped my way into the swirl of colorful fabric, sprinkles of rosewater, and flash photography that awaited me in the marriage hall.

Up on a raised platform was the bride-to-be, simultaneously subject to engagement rituals administered by the pandit, and to photographs administered by the multiple professional photographers. She was surrounded by seven blushing maidens – her young female relatives and friends. She couldn’t have been more than 21 years old. A couple of different saris later, she received blessings and gifts from her fiance’s parents. Then the reverse was done for the groom-to-be, who also wore multiple outfits. The crowd started paying attention when it was time for the couple to exchange rings, give each other garlands, feed each other sweets, and – the crowning moment – take their first photographs together. In those first fifty bright flashs, the couple who had barely seen each other before that very hour became truly, truly engaged. Everyone clapped. And you could really feel the change in the room, too: all of a sudden every eye was on the stage, the couple was smiling radiantly (if a little bashfully), more rosewater was sprinkled on the guests, and the whole room felt that something miraculous and exciting was going to happen to these two people about to start a family.

I recovered from the party by nursing my sari-fed aches and pains and spending the rest of the weekend in quiet Sanskrit land. I even composed a verse myself – since I wrote it in Sanskrit’s simplest meter, though, it really shouldn’t have taken the four hours that it took to write. (Oh well. I guess even Kalidasa had to start somewhere.)

And now I must learn 32 lines of a stotra in Vedic Sanskrit by Friday! (It’s these kind of tasks that give the Language Of The Gods a bad name.) Readers, please: put in a good word with those gods for me.

Love, quickly

Unfortunately, no time tonight to write about the magic and the wonder of the engagement party I attended on Saturday afternoon. But I was thinking about this little love poem as I watched these two beautiful people exchange rings (and, er, meet for the first time):

Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
in the mingling of ourselves, you and I,
lovely is the world.

-- Yehuda Amichai

Sari saga

I think I graduated to some new level of Indian-ness today: I bought my first sari. (Wow, I guess that means I'm planning to acquire more over the course of my life. After I saw what went into buying the first one, I might want to hesitate before considering any more sari purchases.)

In another wonderful display of Indian-ness, my Sanskrit teacher -- whom I've known for about three weeks -- invited me to her brother's engagement party, which will take place this Saturday. Just as I readily accepted, my classmate G informed me that we would be going sari-shopping. Now, I brought barely any clothes to India with me, and my entire wardrobe currently consists of cotton slacks and casual salwar tops. I wasn't expecting the engagement party to be a jeans event, but I thought I could get away with buying a nice salwar kameez and putting on some mascara.

I thought wrong.

Turns out engagement parties are *definitely* sari-only occasions. The brightest, silkiest, most bejeweled of salwar kameez sets simply will not do. It has to be a sari -- and the flashier, the better.

So today my two Sanskrit teachers, my two classmates R and G, and R's two friends who were visiting with him, went sari shopping. We walked into a huge department store on Laxmi Road, bypassed mannequins dressed in what seemed to be pure diamonds stuck together with some thin fabric, and entered one of the floors of the department store reserved for saris alone. This was the "casual" sari floor -- above us was the "designer saris and bridal wear" floor. What I saw before me was incredible. There were saris floor-to-ceiling on shelves that stretched around the perimeter of the room; each sari was folded up into a little pack so that only the main color and the border peeked out. There was a huge pile of sandals at the entrance to the room. There were what looked like large mattresses spread out on the entire floor, with only narrow passageways left between them so that shop attendants could carry sky-high stacks of saris to customers. Whole families -- mothers, fathers, daughters, sons-in-law, babies, grandmothers, cousins -- sat on the mattresses examining sari after sari, shifting through massive piles of saris that had been unfolded and subsequently discarded. I have never seen so much color in one room. I have never seen so much expensive silk in one place, not to mention strewn all over the room in total disorder: it was as if each singular, elegant, delicately-crafted sari were just another scrap of fabric.

We spread ourselves out on a mattress and soon we had made a pretty big discard pile for ourselves. G selected a simple, deep red sari with a silver pattern embroidered on it. I decided on a deep blue sari with a pale green, shiny border. (Okay, so it was the first one I tried on. I really didn't have the energy required to sift through yet more saris and, from those, pick a few to try on.) One of my Sanskrit teachers took digital photos so that we could see what we looked like. Unsurprisingly, we also got some unsolicited feedback from the other customers.

But that was only the beginning. Then we had to go have blouses measured and fitted, and we had to buy petticoats that matched the colors of our saris more or less perfectly. When the whole thing was over (and it still isn't over -- everything still has to be tailor-made and picked up after two days) I went home, made a pot of chai, looked at my Sanskrit grammar sheet, and gave up on doing homework for the night. So now I must wake up early tomorrow morning to read the Venisamhara, and thus I must stop writing on my blog and get myself out of the Shree Cyber Cafe. Good night, folks, and I would appreciate any tips on how to wear a sari without falling over my own feet.

Fish curry and other delights

Early Wednesday morning I arose and dragged a rickshaw driver out of his pleasant doze to take me to the Pune railway station. The streets of the city were dotted with makeshift huts, filled with sleeping families, that seem only to pop up on the roads at night. The railway station was deep in its groggy morning bustle, everyone and everything gray in the smoke and fog of seven AM. I found my train and my coach without event – an accomplishment and a tribute to the Pune railway station, given previous experiences in other cities – and sat looking out the window for the duration of the three hour journey. It was a peaceful trip, the green-gray landscape punctured only by the villages through which we chugged our way, and by the dark outlines of mountains looming in the distance. We chugged into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in the heart of Mumbai, formerly and currently known as Victoria Terminus – V.T. Station – in the heart of Bombay.

And it was awesome. Awesome, as in, I was in awe. It’s just like a European railway station--okay, maybe that’s because it is a European railway station – as hectic as Gare du Nord or King’s Cross, and as beautifully constructed, but filled with hundreds of Indians. The vaulted ceilings and huge passageways through which sunlight glinted and shone in particle-bits filled my heart with excitement and hope. So this is Mumbai, I thought. This is the famous Bombay.

Completely lost, I followed a middle-aged woman dressed in jeans who had been on my train; confident, small, and alone, she looked like she knew what she was doing. I followed her through what looked like three main passageways, each grander than the last, until finally she exited the building. So did I, loosing her in a crowd of people. Amazingly, I didn’t see a taxi stand. I walked around the perimeter of the building and ran my eyes over the impressive façade of V.T. Station—but not long enough to distract my mind from the canvas bag on my shoulder. I clutched it to my side for fear that my passport, tickets, and several thousand rupees (I had maybe $90 on me, which goes a long way) would be taken from me without my knowledge. I definitely inherited my mother’s sensibilities on this score. How well I remember that time my father and I had boarded a train to Dehra Dun, ducked out to get a cup of chai on the platform, and returned to find our backpack – filled with wallet, credit cards, and a doctoral dissertation – gone. Thankfully, thankfully, we had taken our passports with us to the station platform.

Eventually I spotted a line of taxis streaming into yet another corner of the station. When I got there, no one—not a single driver—tried to ambush me, rip my bag from my shoulder, and drag me to his taxi. I was quite surprised. This had been my usual experience at train stations; come to think of it, though, it’s never happened when I’ve been alone. I asked two groups of security guards where I could find a taxi. They looked at me with laughter in their eyes and slightly cruel smiles of amusement (or maybe I'm just projecting): look at the white girl, already lost in Bombay!

Finally a round man in a tattered shirt and the white turban of a Sikh came panting over to greet me. He dragged a bedraggled-looking old man—and me—to this taxi down a little alleyway, arguing vehemently all the way with the other man. The rapport between them was how I imagine it to be between brothers who teased each other too much growing up. “Where’s your luggage?” the first man asked me. “This is it,” I said, pointing to my bag. He looked at me in disbelief. “Okay, 350 flat to the airport, madam.” This, surprisingly, was the rate that Lonely Planet had cited. Perhaps my lack of luggage, the fact that I was traveling alone, and my long salwar kameez convinced him I was less of a tourist than I was. And again, when we got to the taxi: “350! Don’t pay him any more, okay? 350!” “Okay,” I laughed and wagged my head in agreement. He yelled at my driver some more, tapped the window, and galumphed off.

The taxi was absolutely crumbling. It had no windows except for the front and the back ones. When I sat down in my seat, I found myself literally resting the nape of my neck against the rusty metal cylinder that pumps gas into the engine. We grumped and rumbled our way out of the alleyway, my driver muttering in Marathi the whole time. “Sub thik hain?” I asked him in the only words of Hindi I know. (“Everything okay?”) “Sub thik hain,” he grinned in return, and I liked him immediately. This was going to be quite the adventure, I thought. Raindrops began to fall on the windshield, and my driver reached his arm outside the hole where the window should have been, grasped the windshield wiper with his fingertips, and moved it in a wiping motion over four inches of the windshield. He only made it more blurry than the rest. But I trusted my driver—he seemed like a nice guy—and I was going to the airport on a good flat fare. Salaam, Bombay, indeed.

Not for long. We drove two minutes into a run-down part of town; it was filled, to my surprise and happiness, with Arabic writing, women dressed in the full niqab, and men with white skullcaps. It was the first Muslim neighborhood I had visited on this trip to India. Thinking of my beloved, boring Amman, I felt strangely and wonderfully at home. But my driver stopped the car in a lurch, and a young man came running over. The driver motioned for him to get in the cab. “Oh, no, you don’t,” I thought, remembering everything I had ever read about white women letting more than one man into the front of taxis in which they traveled.

Unwilling to be made into a textbook case of sexual harassment, I put up a fight. “No,” I said sternly, “no no no no no. We are going to the airport. Now. No one else.” My driver shrugged his shoulders, conveyed an expression of total innocence, and yelled at me in Hindi. Realizing I didn’t understand, he got out of the cab, the other man got in, and my old driver said to me through the window, “He drop you! My shift, bas!” (“Over!”) “350 only, okay? 350! No more you pay him!” I slapped on my most pissed-off look, and slammed back with a sigh against the seat. The gas tank rattled. “Fine. Go. Let’s go.”

My second driver started driving, but it wasn’t long before we stopped again. He waved to someone in the taxi next to us, and the other taxi pulled over. “Get out,” said the second driver, “you go there. He take you.”

“What is this?” I fretted. “Why does no one want to take me to the airport? I am I cursed or something?” This was completely unlike the India I knew, where people practically fell over themselves trying to do a service and get in a conversation – plus a rupee or two – with foreign tourists. The whole thing was a little sketchy, for lack of a better word, and I was starting to get nervous.

“This is it,” I warned both my third driver and my second driver, who was now standing outside the window. With the most commanding voice I could summon, I demanded: “This is it. No more switches. No more stops. I have to get to the airport. Now.”

“350!” Responded Driver Number Two, completely ignoring my request. “350! No more! You pay him 350!” We sped off. The third driver was the worst driver yet: apparently unable to keep his hands steady on the wheel, he swerved the car back and forth constantly, braking and accelerating wildly. “I could drive this car better than you could,” I thought, “and I haven’t even driven since my driver’s test, let alone on the left side of the road.” I am always prepared for some amount of bad driving in India – it’s just the way it’s done, and it usually works out fine, unless a cow gets in the way – so to say that Number Three’s driving worried me is saying something. Perhaps too quickly, I decided I didn’t trust him.

Not far out of the city proper, he pulled over on the side of a highway. Pointing at a red light on the dashboard, he said matter-of-factly, “Fix battery.”

I threw a fit. “Are you kidding me?” I yelled in English. “I have to get to the airport! This is ridiculous! I can’t believe this!”

“Battery, battery!” He yelled back, feigning the expression of total innocence that I had seen one too many times that afternoon.

“Fine,” I spat. “But jaldi karo, okay? Jaldi!” (“Do it quickly!”)

“Jaldi, jaldi!” He intoned back, already out of the car and running across the highway to a little shack on the other side. “Great,” I thought, “he’s going to fix our battery in a roadside paan shack.” To add to my frustration, he actually left the car running while it was parked, ensuring that our battery would die quicker than ever.

I—at least a little bit legitimately, I think—freaked out. Five, and then ten minutes passed by. It felt like hours. I thought the car was going to explode, that I was going to be abducted, that Number Three was smoking God-knows-what in this little shack while I was stranded on the side of the highway in a car whose battery was quickly expiring. Ten, fifteen more minutes passed by. It felt like days. I started to cry, expressing feelings of fear and helplessness that I may have tried to hold back for a few hours too long into my trip to India. It all came out in the back of that taxi, purring along on the side of a Bombay highway. I sobbed and whimpered like a toddler.

So I did the only thing I could think of: I called my parents, who were fast alseep in New York City at three AM.

I knew that they would have left the phone cord plugged into the jack for precisely emergencies like these. My mother answered groggily, and upon hearing my voice and my apology for calling in the middle of the night, sat bolt-upright (judging from her tone) and asked me in a very worried voice what was wrong. I blubbered out the whole story, and how I was sure everything was going to be fine but things were scaring me a wee bit too much.

My confident and commanding Mummy talked me out of the taxi, staying on the phone while I grabbed my bag and crossed the highway to find my driver in his precious battery shack. He was just standing around. All the men in the shack looked at me in surprise. “How long would this have taken if I hadn’t come to find him?” I thought. My parents on the phone, I wiped my tears and demanded in English, “Listen, buddy, I don’t have all day, so I’m just going to get another taxi. Bye.” I turned around and walked back to the highway.

The driver stood there in disbelief.

I reached the side of the highway and raised my hand to hail another cab, but Number Three came running up behind me. “Okay, okay,” he said. “We go to the airport now.”

I was about to kill him.

“I’m so glad you called, sweetie,” said my Mom and Dad. That’s the kind of parents I have, even when they’re woken up in the middle of the night for no reason.

We got to the airport without a hitch. He even cut out out all the swerves, quick brakes, and dramatic accelerations.

In a weird twist of everything, my arrival in Goa brought me one of the best taxi rides of my life. (Not the best – that one was between the Syrian border and Damascus – but definitely up there.) Number Four and I drove off into the tropical paradise of Goa, lush with coconut trees and grass and calm people. We watched the red sun set as we headed north, talking and laughing all the way. Kishur, the driver, informed me that I must be married by 22 at the latest, and that I will be an old woman at 25. He was only 30 himself, he bragged, and he already had a beautiful wife and daughter. Lucky Number Four.

And that was the auspicious start of a beautiful two days in Goa: my friends and I migrated aimlessly from the white beach, to the no-shoes restaurant, to our straw huts. We beheld the big sky full of stars and breathed the fresh air. We drank cocktails and ate fish curry. (At least I had one day after Yom Kippur to enjoy that blissful stuff!) We swam in the light of the setting sun.

But back in Pune, I have to say, I am just as happy. I love the familiarity that has come to shine on life here, and the comfort of studying Sanskrit for hours on end. I had missed my roommates for those few days away; I unlocked our flat to find a garland in my doorway and a sign that read “Welcome Home”. Unbelievable!—Even my return to normal life has been a celebration.

Daily grind

Yesterday my roommate and I saw this tie-dye creation on the pavement of one of the busiest streets in Pune. "That's so India," he said, and I think he was pretty much right. Only the night before, my other roommate and I had been driving home in the monsoon rain from a (truly bizarre, and a little bit painful) mediation class when we passed not one, but three mobile temples to the goddess Durga, slowly rolling down Karve Road. These were complete with blaring techno music, strobe lights, and young men dancing in the rain in their wakes. Why? This week is Navaratri, the set of nine nights where a WHOLE lot of goddess-worship goes down. Earlier that day, K and I also checked out the shrine of the goddess Yogeshwari: the patron saint, if you will, of Pune. But the place was so crowded (note: with *women*) that it was impossible to even edge in. Men, by the way, had to go in way over on the side.



So instead we went to a humongous men's clothing store on Laxmi Road, one of the brightest shopping streets here, and picked some linens for K to have tailored into shirts. While we were there, we witnessed a small man with an Elvis hair-do and, well, an Elvis-inspired costume loudly spit Hindi jokes into a microphone and embarrass innocent shoppers. Imagine the shelves of linens (pictured below) stretching around the perimeter of a room the size of your average CVS or Duane Reade. Then multiply that by five stories, and you'll have some idea of how much fabric was in the place.



I had almost as much fun shopping at FabIndia (Pune branch! Yes!) yesterday, where I came away with towels, bedspreads, bath mats, and pillowcases enough to make my little room truly feel like home. This is the "after" picture, but you probably don't want to know what the drab "before" looked like. As K noted: "I didn't know it was possible to make this room look good!"




Every morning I wake to the sounds of boisterous traffic flying right outside my window. Because I'm on the first floor (not the ground floor but the one *above* the ground floor), my corner bedroom is basically perched on a highway. Well, no. It's just one of Pune's typically congested, honking, traffic law-shunning, death-defying streets.



Luckily, I can float into the peaceful kitchen, where I might join my beloved (I know, I'll shut up about how amazing they are) roommates at our oversized kitchen table for some ginger tea and last night's leftovers. We've cooked together a few times now, and I think I've really discovered my inner Rachael Ray. Rachael may have E.V.O.O. and lots of surface area, but I make vegetable masala and whole wheat chapatis! For a girl who really can't cook, this comes as an incredible -- and incredibly welcome -- surprise. I am, however, still working on spice ratios for the perfect chai.




Then I might shift back into my room to listen to Bach over the incessant honking, and get to work on the day's Sanskrit. Today's project is to translate a handful of multi-claused sentences from English to Sanskrit; this I must somehow manage to do without an English-Sanskrit dictionary. But first I am off to an English bookstore on the other side of town, followed by hunting for a bathing suit (where, oh where, do you find a bikini in India?) and stopping at the vegetable-wallah to get some greens for tonight's masala.

Yes, I am enjoying this week-long break from classes a great deal. Tomorrow is my last day in Pune before I head down to Goa for some much-needed fresh air and swimming. Then, oh then, it's back to the musty books and this pleasant grind.

Punewali

Dear World,

I live in Pune.

I have a spacious bedroom in a flat that I rent from a rotund, sweet landlady who occasionally activates her inner real estate hawk. I share a kitchen with three Ayurveda students: two German girls and one American boy, all of whom are just great. I have my own bathroom, a toilet that flushes, a removable showerhead whose water reaches lukewarm (hey, that's pretty good for a geyser a million years old!), and -- the piece de resistance, ladies and gentlemen -- a BATHTUB. No one in India has a bathtub: I am truly blessed. Best of all, I have finally figured out how to tell rickshaw drivers the way to my apartment building.

I go to school every morning with J, a Marathi student who takes classes in the building next door to the Sanskrit classrooms. The same rickshaw driver picks us up every morning. Deccan College campus, where the AIIS Sanskrit building is, is really something else. It's way, WAY out on the outskirts of the city, and it's always empty. It's totally green and overrun with long, wild grass and beautiful banyan trees. There are pigs, dogs, water buffalo, cows, and goats roaming around. This morning I spotted a green, blue-tailed parrot perched in a window of the deserted chapel that I pass on the way to class. After the incredible congestion and dirt of Pune city proper, Deccan College is like a spa. On second thought, it's more like a safari.

More adventures with the atrocious, notorious Indian bureaucracy: registering with the police, purchasing a cell phone, and arranging for a wireless internet USB plug-in -- all of which took about 5 trees' worth of paperwork. But those were the tasks of today, and after 6 hours they're all done. I wait, fingers crossed, for cell phone and internet to activate. (Please please please please please activate. Please.)

I have the rest of the week, and the week following it, off from school. I love Sanskrit class, but this comes as quite a relief. I'll get to catch up with my work for the next week or so. Then I'm going to Goa for a little beach vacation with my Sanskrit and Marathi buddies. It may be a task to get there -- I take a train to Mumbai, then a long taxi ride to the Mumbai airport, and then a flight to Goa -- but I hope that it will be worth it. Goa is too beautiful to miss. The fresh air and sea winds there will be very, very welcome.

And so I must sign off before my minutes at the internet cafe expire. Here's hoping for a technology-filled weekend, and--on this most incredible beginning of all beginnings-- l'Shanah Tovah.

Oncoming traffic

Here's a quick update, as I sit in my friend G's apartment and use her internet when really I should be reading the Venisamhara of Bhatta Narayana -- with commentary -- and translating for my tutorial class on Monday.

Pune is absolutely nuts. Since I got here I have been both hitting the ground and running. The traffic is unbelievable; crossing the street takes 20 minutes and it's a matter of life and death. Completely polluted: everyone walks around with these huge scarves tied over their faces. I have gone from hotel to G's apartment and (fingers crossed) on Monday I will move into my flat. I rent a bright room on a busy street from a kind, round landlady who rents out the rooms in a three-bedroom apartment to ayurveda students and, apparently, me. Finding this place was an epic journey. I had no idea how hard it could be to find a flat here; the fog of BS (if you'll excuse my language) that I had to navigate my way through was, and still is, thick. Since I've been 5 places since arriving in India 10 days ago, I have a gigantic pile of laundry to do. I've been sick twice. I cried three times yesterday, all for different reasons and in front of different people. I think I've talked to more strangers in the past week than I have in the past sixth months. I filled up four notebook pages with vocabulary words learned in a single hour of Sanskrit class yesterday. It has taken me the past hour to deconstruct one verse of poetry -- and I *still* have no idea what it means.

If it were not for my incredible friends here, who immediately took me in, hugged me, protected me from oncoming traffic, and cooked for me, I don't know what I would have done. Can't believe I've only known them for two days.

I have to get back to the Venisamhara, but there is more to come. I am sure I will need many hours in the internet cafes that line Pune's congested F.C. Road before I can explain everything that's happened to me here so far. Be forewarned.

Jaipur, continued

I woke up in Jaipur on Saturday absolutely starving. So S, her roommate L, her friend A, and I all sat on the balcony and ate an omelet while looking out over the quiet, sunny morning. Here is a picture of the view down the street (look at all of the green! I felt like Moe the Dog in Tropical Paradise), and a picture of the vegetable seller who comes around every morning.















Then S took me sightseeing. We started at the Hawa Mahal, a huge palace with a gorgeous facade where some Raja had kept all of his gazillions of wives locked up. The thing is, he built thousands of little windows into the facade so that the women could look out over the busy, pink-hued streets of Jaipur's Old City.

We continued on to the King Jai Singh II's unbelievable astronomical observatory (constructed c. 1727-1734), where the compound of massive sundials and other instruments "for measuring the positions of the heavenly bodies" looks more like an installation in a modern art museum than a scientist's utopia. The gigantic sundial at the center of the compound can still tell the time in Jaipur to an accuracy within 4 seconds. There are twelve mini-sundials, each for a particular sign of the zodiac. There are two crater-like instruments for measuring the positions of the stars. There are countless other structures, none of them properly labeled, but all of them very cool-looking. Finally, there is a little shrine on the edge of the compound.

We then headed to the stylish Anokhi cafe for a tea-and-study break. I had a salad (yes, yes, another salad!!) with bitter arugula (!!!) and stinky bleu cheese (!!!). This was topped with the most delicious slice of carrot cake I have ever had and some organic French press coffee. Why I ever left Jaipur is a mystery to me.

That evening, S and L threw a party in their apartment. We all sat on the balcony under the stars, this diverse bunch of American kids who all happened to share the same interests. I don't think I've ever been to a party where every single guest understood my little obsession with India/Sanskrit/literature/everything. It was fantastic. Even when the group broke into Hindi for minutes at a time, it was fine. We ended the night salsa dancing. Salsa dancing! I learned some slick moves, none of which I remember.

We went back to Anokhi the following day for some recovery food. I had falafel and pita, for which I have been harboring a bizarre craving for the past two weeks. (I think it was that 2AM falafel on the grass of the Wesleyan campus that set it off.)

Later in the evening, S and I went temple-hopping to some of the local temples. We arrived in time for the evening aarti at the gigantic, white Birla Mandir, where we were positively crushed by devotees and tourists alike -- all pushing their way up to the front to receive prasad from the saffron-clad brahmin pundits. There's a lot to notice about the Birla Mandir, starting with the crowds of Japanese tourists who were all praying to Lakshmi-Narayana in the main prayer hall. The place is white and spotless, having been built only in the late eighties. There are two large statues in the front; these depict the main donors, presumably Mr. and Mrs. Birla. The artwork inside the temple reveals an effort to create, as S put it, "textbook Hinduism." The "trinity" of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva appears often; scenes from the Bhagavad Gita are prominent. I particularly noticed the presence of the epics within the temple. Behind the main shrine was a huge carving of Sita's svayamvara (husband-choosing ceremony, literally "self-choice", but of course she doesn't really do the choosing) from the Ramayana. There were stained-glass windows depicting the sage Valmiki writing the Ramayana, and Vyasa writing the Mahabharata.

But the real treasures were the engraved figures on the pillars which supported the temple from the outside. Here one could find the poet-saints Kabir and Surdas, as well as Guru Nanak and Sankaraachaarya. Things got even better on the other side of the temple, where one could see "JESUSCHRIST", "Moses and the Ten Commandments", and Zarathustra. Hinduism is the best.

We finished the night with visits to three more temples in the area -- seriously, this neighborhood is like a Hindu strip mall -- one Ganesh temple where the elephant-headed god was eating delicious laddoos, one Hanuman-Durga temple where we found an entire shrine to the Ramayana, and one little Shiva temple where anyone (anyone at all!) can come up to the Shiva murtis, give flowers, and pray. Another treasure at the Shiva temple was a shrine to Sai Baba where both the picture of Sai Baba and the statue of Sai Baba had chunks of bread glued to their mouths. Hey -- I hope I'm eating when I'm dead, too.

I'm afraid the journey home wasn't as wonderful as the weekend itself. I woke up at 4:30AM on Monday morning to catch a train at 8:15AM (okay, so I'm jet lagged and woke up 2 hours before I had to), but the train was delayed three hours. I spent two of these hours sitting in the Upper Class Waiting Room, watching Punjabi families eat breakfast and old, fat men change clothes. There was a pidgeon flying around the ladies' room. The last hour I spent on the platform talking to one of the only women there, a principal at a school in Haryana who studied English at university and very much wanted me to join the Self-Realization Fellowship. I finally got on my train--I had been waiting at the wrong end of the platform the whole time, despite directions to the contrary, so I had to run--and I sat there for four hours just looking out the window. The rest of the time I alternated between reading my novel and looking out the window. In other countries I love to walk around and see life; in India it's hard to walk, but I've found that just *sitting* is the equivalent. You can see a lot of India just by sitting in a waiting room for two hours. You can see even more by looking out the window of a train ride across Rajasthan and into Haryana and Delhi. Slum after slum, village after village, town after town: India is breathtaking. With a perfect cup of chai from the chaiwallah who goes up and down the length of the train selling tea, I was very happy indeed.

And so today -- in one hour, in fact -- I move to Pune. I start Sanskrit again. I get an apartment. Oh my goodness.