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.