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.