the fat crow sits in the fig tree

Note!

2009-05-29T19:39:00.003-04:00

Hi everyone --

I've recently learned that it may not be the best idea, security-wise, to be writing in such a public forum. So if you'd like to receive e-mail updates from me (or otherwise correspond) just send me an e-mail, or post a comment on this blog, and let me know.

Thanks!
- Your local Fat Crow.

Twelve hours in Afghanistan

2009-05-26T03:53:00.001-04:00

I’ve been sitting, at once patient and nervous, in the plane for two hours. We’re flying over Pakistan, mountain range after snowy mountain range. I’m wearing the soft black headscarf that I’ve carefully wrapped around my head in the Delhi airport. Finally the pilot announces that we’re to begin our descent into Kabul. (“Good morning. Air traffic control was temporarily shut down, but they should be up and running by now.”) Finally we land, taxi, and as I step out onto the tarmac and into the hot, dusty wind of Afghanistan, I catch sight of two planes – one belonging to the UN, and the other belonging to the ICRC – and it’s pretty much the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.

So I walk into customs, and as soon as I get there, people start talking to me in Dari – including an officer who opens a new booth and invites me to be the first person in line. After learning that it’s a small miracle the conveyor belt worked in the first place, I grab my bags and head out of the airport where Z. is waiting for me, complete with his friend E. (and E.’s fast car). Apparently the road running from the airport into the city – a short one, and one that leads almost directly to the place where I’ll be living – is the nicest in Kabul. It’s wide and smooth. It’s also, I learn, one of the more dangerous ones. But that’s okay: soon we turn off onto a dirt road and we’re home. It’s wide and clean, but incredibly bumpy – the car jostles and knocks around as it tries to navigate a terrain that’s more like those mountain ranges I flew over than a nice residential area, which is what it is.

The house is large and, like all the other Afghan houses on our street, lives comfortably behind a tall wall, a strong gate, two friendly guard dogs, and a garden. We have a roof and a barbeque and 10 housemates, though several were there just on business (filming a documentary on an NGO started by one of the men who lives in our house) and have since left. As in many social situations thus far, I’m the only woman there. Talk about a new experience.

Later that night, I go to two parties. The first is held in a restaurant on Chicken Street called Haji Baba’s: the food, terrible (though unbelievably fancy and expensive by Afghan standards); the company, wonderful. It’s a party honoring the teachers at the circus where Z works, and it involves 50 or 60 Afghan men sitting around two tables laughing raucously for hours. At some point there’s a buffet, and everyone gets up to load his plate 8 inches high (not kidding) with oily rice, bland soup with what looked like Kix cereal in it, chicken that’s mostly fat and has been sitting in an ocean of gravy for a while, and some greasy substance that might once have been a vegetable. Then there are soft drinks and electric neon-colored desserts. To return to the company: everyone rough-houses each other laughs and jokes around in Dari (no one really bothering to notice me, even though I’m the only woman there) and finally, after the meal is over, they all get up to tell jokes. The jokes turn into real stories. Then one of the eminent teachers leans over to me and starts to translate, and I find myself learning a whole lot more Afghan potty humor than I ever thought I would.

After we’ve escaped the circus party, we head to another party. This is an expat party, held behind the seriously-guarded walls of a compound, and which allows me to at last remove my head gear. Here I bond with various brave, cool, good-hearted expat women, learn about some journalists’ adventures with the Army in the dangerous southern belt of the country (“but Darfur was much more interesting, really”), and listen to a couple of beefy security-guy types complain about Afghanistan.

So perhaps there are two parties. There is one party in restaurants like Haji Baba, or maybe also at weddings, bumping around in taxis, or just out on the street. This is a party of long jokes and innocent dirty humor, oft-recited litanies of greetings (“How are you? How is your health? Your family? Your house is well? Your business? Your third cousin twice removed in-law?”), oil and rice, mouths wide with laughter, and mostly men. There is another party behind layers of security guards – in ritzy restaurants, basement bars, air-conditioned offices, Western-style supermarkets, and armored cars – to which flock the strangest mix of foreigners. There are adventurers, do-gooders, businesspeople, journalists, photojournalists, videographers, private contractors and private consultants, and security men who look like they just walked out of a gas station on the Jersey turnpike. To all of this, add one shameless tourist: me.

I'm back home.

2009-04-20T21:21:00.002-04:00

And that's all for now. The fat crow will be back in about a month's time, peppy and ready for the summer. See you then!

Little gifts

2009-04-07T22:54:00.003-04:00

Today brings an appraisal of some of the brightly colored, (non-edible) bite-size morsels that make India so delicious. These are the habits and norms that I’ve seen in action every single day here: some of them have grown in charm over time; some have become so regular to my eyes that I hardly see them anymore; some struck me on my very first day in India, and have never lost their spark. In no particular order –

1. Affection between men. Co-ed friendship is a novel phenomenon in India. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of friendships here are same-sex ones, and perhaps that’s why these friendships are particularly close and openly affectionate. On the streets of India, one of the most touching sights to see is a pair of men holding hands: it happens all the time, and it’s completely normal. American-style bear hugs, back-slaps, and shoulder-punches are far less common – holding hands, I think, just isn’t considered emasculating, or even particularly effeminate. (And little do Indian men know that if they walked, fingers intertwined, down an American street, passerby would see them as a couple. Shocker!)

2. The natural body. Ornaments, clothes, and grooming seem to hold great importance in this country – more on that later – but underneath those concerns lies a general love of the human body as it is naturally. My guess is that many people associate physical exercise with the poorer classes: historically, a thin, toned body has been the product of hours engaged in manual labor. Gyms, where one would do this kind of labor voluntarily, are very new here. From what I’ve observed, it’s not that the ideal is gross obesity – it’s that like one’s family, caste, and community, one’s body is given at birth and so is not meant to be altered drastically. Whatever the class-ist implications of Indians’ willingness to let the human body take its course – not to mention the health risks facing many exercise-averse Indians today – I often pause to appreciate the body-acceptance that flows from this attitude. (I have more of a problem with longstanding physical ideals like fairness of skin.) You only need to watch a small collection of Bollywood movies to see that women of all shapes and sizes are considered beautiful. America’s obsession with thinness hasn’t completely hit India, and I’ll take refuge here until it does.

3. Dairies. I love being able to buy fresh cow’s milk, paneer (simple cheese with the consistency of firm tofu), ghee, dahi (slightly sour, watery natural yogurt), and even buffalo milk from the small dairies that pop up all over Indian cities. It’s great to skip all the processing and packaging that plagues American dairy production: here, you can get your dairy products almost directly from the cows themselves. Thank you, small dairies, for bringing city girls like me one scrumptious step closer to the countryside.

4. Meal timings. Trains are late, and so are meals. The only one that isn’t is chhota-breakfast (small breakfast), which takes place almost as soon as you get up. That’s just tea and biscuits. Then there’s real breakfast, taken at around ten or eleven. There’s a tea break (again, with biscuits) a couple of hours after that. Then there’s lunch between two and three o’clock – and none of this soup-salad junk, either. We’re talking about a full meal. A couple of hours later calls for more tea and biscuits. Then there’s a larger snack around six or seven, when workers and students have finished for the day. That’s when hordes of people crowd chaat stands and snack joints, all clamoring for spicy fried delicacies. Several hours later is the biggest production of the day: dinner. Most restaurants crowd at nine or ten, with entire families pushing to get in. Once, a friend and I ate at a popular Punjabi restaurant late at night – we must have started dinner shortly before midnight. Joining us were two huge Punjabi families, complete with babies and toddlers, staying up into the wee hours in pursuit of sunset-hued tandoori chicken and glistening skewers of paneer tikka. But the fun doesn’t stop, because after dinner, there’s dessert…

5. Lovers’ lanes. In Delhi, I’ve noticed that any clean, public space is a haven for young couples seeking some precious time alone. Boys play with the edges of their girlfriends’ dupattas on the steps of the Metro; couples sit with their heads together on the benches of the Lodi Gardens. They linger for hours at tables in Café Coffee Day – not working on their laptops, as is often the case in Cambridge, but gazing into each other’s eyes and saying nothing in particular.

6. There’s room for everybody, even when there isn’t. In Mumbai, I’ve seen a lot of commuter trains come and go. Each car is packed with people, including those riding perilously in open doorways and on the roof of the train itself. Women’s scarves flap in the wind as the train hurtles toward Mumbai Central or Victoria Terminus. On the Delhi Metro, it’s the same story: people will push and push and push until every last person is squeezed inside. Three passengers cram onto two seats, and seven onto five seats. When people have places to go and jobs to attend, personal space becomes an unnecessary luxury.

7. Total grooming. Unless they live in extreme poverty, Indians are rarely unkempt. Hair is always combed, oiled, and braided. Jewels are donned. Shirts are hardly ever ripped, and most often collared. Pants are tailored. Salwar kameez are washed and pressed. Shoes are shined. (None of America’s messy ponytails, baggy pants, and ripped sweatshirts! Amazing!) I admire India’s love of physical presentability: it seems, somehow, more respectful of oneself and one’s community to look clean and neat. Only occasionally do these efforts come across as vain; most of the time, they simply show that people care about being seen as responsible and respectable.

Anything I missed? The fat crow is always open to comments and suggestions --

Delhi, edible

2009-04-07T22:37:00.004-04:00

There are little more than a handful of places where I go to eat in Delhi. This might seem tragic in a city where food is cheap, abundant, and yummy – but the truth is that I keep coming back to the same restaurants because they’re just so gosh darn *good*. If you plan on visiting Delhi, eat at one of these places. Trust me: I’ve visited them enough times to know that they’re always, always delicious.

1. Sagar: the cheapest, best, and most popular restaurant in Defence Colony. The dosas, idlies, uttapams, and dahi wada are tasty, of course, but it’s the full-scale thali that takes the vegetarian cake. (A thali is a pile of food neatly organized on a platter: bread and rice in the middle; multiple vegetable preparations, soupy lentil daals, yogurts, and sweets around the perimeter. The thali is perfect for the person who can’t decide what to order.)

2. Haldiram’s: I know, I know. I’ve often written about how much I adore this multi-level food paradise nestled in the heart of the old city, but Haldiram’s is such an essential stop on Delhi’s food trail that I believe it deserves one more mention. The ground floor is lined by glass counters filled with goodies to take away. The left wall is devoted to endless variations of traditional Indian sweets: three kids of jalebis, ten kinds of laddoos, seventeen kinds of barfi, and on and on. The back wall presents a funny combination – on the left side are the Bengali sweets, and on the right side are the chocolate eclairs and upside-down pineapple cakes. In the back-right corner is the kulfi seller: he offers ten flavors of pure milk-made Indian ice cream, sold on sticks like popsicles. On the right wall are the savories and snack foods, best among them the Gujarati dhokla and the freshly fried samosas. (There’s much more than that at the snack counters, yet somehow I never seem to make it past the sweets on the opposite wall.)

But, as you know from previous raves on this topic, the fun starts one flight up. By now, I’ve tried almost every single type of chaat that Haldiram’s has to offer – and they’re all delicious. After all, all chaat dishes are prepared from the same basic ingredients: some doughy fried bread, crispy crackers, or puffed grains as a base, sweetened yogurt to drench them in, green chutney to spice them, tamarind sauce to make it all sweet and tangy, and baked potato cubes, chickpeas, or lentils to fill it out. The miracle is this: though the dishes are made out of these same ingredients, each one tastes completely different from all the others. Further miracles await: there’s much more than chaat at Haldiram’s, and it’s worth your while to extend your tastebuds farther. The North Indian thali, served like a T.V. dinner on a compartmentalized white tray, is a good place to start. It includes rich daal makhani, spicy vegetables, cool raita yogurt, rice, and roti bread freshly smoked in a tandoor oven. Beyond that, I’m a fan of the crowdpleasing paneer tikka – generous cubes of firm cottage cheese, rubbed with spices and baked just enough to make the edges crunchy and the inside soft. It goes well with the two kinds of paranthas (one plain, one laced with mint and coriander) available; each is a flakier, more buttery version of this heavy flatbread popular in the North. Finally, the chole bhature – two giant puffs of fried dough served with spiced chickpeas – is a particular joy, especially if you have the nerve to join the local breakfast crowd in consuming all that fatty goodness before noon.

3. The samosa and chai stand behind Khan Market: a favorite of my dad’s, and for good reason. Five rupees will buy you a hot, fresh mini-cup of chai; a little bit more will buy you a spicy samosa served in a banana leaf bowl. You eat standing, along with all the taxi drivers and shopkeepers, and if you’re a woman, you’ll definitely be the only one there. This corner is also a great spot for people-watching – it looks right onto Khan Market and all of its well-dressed inhabitants. The samosa man also serves something he calls “bread pakoras”: fried slices of white bread. Let me know if you’ve ever had one of these, or plan to.

4. The Turtle Café, also in Khan Martket: only for consumption after you’ve assuaged your upper class guilt by dining “with the people” at the five-rupee chai stand above. This one occupies the top floor of an English book store, and does not feature Indian food at all. (I knew I’d been in the country long enough when I started enjoying the overpriced Western goods at the Turtle Café a little too often.) In any case, if you have a yen for carrot walnut cake, safe salads, or pesto pasta, race to an outdoor table at the Turtle and let your tastebuds forget you’re in Delhi. And hey, don’t beat yourself up about it – as soon as you get there, you’ll see you’re not the only firangi dying for a slice of lemon cheesecake or a plate of baked ziti.

5. The HaveMore, in Pandara Market: it’s time to head back to India, and to the gravy-rich North in particular. Join the massive Punjabi families (and all their cute kids!) in enjoying the hot kebabs, creamy vegetable dishes, and crispy-yet-chewy breads on offer at the quasi-luxurious HaveMore. If it’s winter, get the sarson-ka-saag (spiced and pureed mustard greens) with makki-ki-roti (buttery, firm flatbread made of cornflour). Yes, you will want to have more, though your arteries will protest.

A few others:
a. Gulati, an upscale place next to the HaveMore, where the kebabs – and the tourist-watching – are even better.
b. Saravana Bhavan, which is a chain of South Indian restaurants similar to Sagar. They originated in Chennai, and they have two outlets in Connaught Place – one on Janpath, and one near the Regal Cinemas building. Here, again, a thali is a great way to go: Saravana Bhavan crams even more dishes onto their thali trays than Sagar does. It’s a little overwhelming.
c. If you’re staying in Paharganj (which I sincerely hope you’re not), try the restaurant on the roof of the Hotel Rak International, just off Main Bazaar. Word to the wise: don’t order off the menu. Instead, poke your head into the kitchen and ask the chef what he’s making fresh that day. A big bowl of masala mixed vegetables or palak paneer and a plate hot, fresh rotis is cheap and filling – plus, you get to bond with the European backpackers and watch the commotion on Tooti Chowk three stories below. If you show up around seven thirty in the evening, you’ll also get a concert of bhajans floating up from the temple next door.

Bon appetit!

Patience: India's greatest virtue?

2009-04-07T14:31:00.002-04:00

A lot of people don’t like waiting – especially people from cities (like New York) and countries (like America) where everything is served up *fast*. But in India, time moves slowly: people don’t walk, but amble; traffic doesn’t speed, but sputters; plumbers don’t arrive, but call to say they’ll arrive tomorrow; public works projects never finish (if they start at all); shows start two hours after they’re supposed to; court cases lag for years; trains depart fourteen hours late. The amazing part is that, from what I’ve seen, many Indians don’t seem to mind waiting. They linger over cups of chai and amuse themselves with card games and conversation. They live one more day without hot water. They don’t protest when the government doesn’t deliver on promises of better sanitation or building public parks.

(Here’s a side note. Those last couple of examples show how the great Indian capacity for waiting – while it may be the product of some fantastical inner peace – doesn’t always work in Indians’ favor. Perhaps if ordinary people demanded more immediate action from their elected officials, and were less contented to wait behind endless rows of red tape, the government would learn to be more efficient. Perhaps if consumers refused to employ lagging plumbers, those plumbers would realize the importance of showing up on time – and of actually fixing the plumbing, instead of solving the problem partway in an effort to guarantee themselves future business.)

(And here’s a second side note. There are a few situations in which most Indians are scramblingly impatient. Lines have this effect: people will wait on line at the train station or the bank, but they’ll cram themselves against each other as if physical proximity to the service counter will speed up their waiting time. This makes most lines in India highly, highly uncomfortable for the person who values a few inches between herself and the people behind and in front of her in line. Sadly for India, I haven’t yet learned to bid adieu to such worldly attachments as personal space. Indians are also incredibly impatient when it comes to public transportation: they’ll push and scramble to board trains, leave planes, and find seats on the Metro. This leads to a lot of crushing and some minor, good-natured violence.)

In any case, I have started to love waiting. My reasons are simple, really, and I’m sure you could read about them in any old self-help book: we all lead busy lives, so every now and then it’s important to *just do nothing*. In that respect, then, a wait is a blessing. It’s an opportunity for a person to lift her eyes and look at everything going on around her – to observe people, places, interactions, and signs that perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It’s an opportunity for her to think, imagine, dream. It’s an opportunity for her to reflect on just how much she really wants (or needs) whatever it is she’s waiting for. She waits, she breathes, the world turns just fine.

The glorious autorickshaw

2009-04-07T05:26:00.000-04:00

On this blog, I’ve often written about autorickshaws – little three-wheelers that, though present in other countries (such as Thailand, where they masquerade as “tuk-tuks”), I will always consider uniquely Indian. Since September, I’ve taken approximately 500 rides in autorickshaws. (That’s seven months in India, thirty days in each month, 2.5 rickshaw journeys per day, and rounding down from there.) If each ride is an all-inclusive, pocket-size vacation to the vibrant streets of this country, that’s a lot of *India* that I’ve seen through the grubby front windows of her three-wheeled chariots.

Perhaps it’s only because I’ve spent so much time in them that I believe autorickshaws offer the most, and the best, of urban India to the curious traveller. There are other ways to get around, surely: taxis (as they do in Mumbai, where I’m sitting right now), public buses (not for the faint of heart or, for that matter, the female), the Metro (recently built, and only in Delhi). Yet only the autorickshaw can capture, in the midst of city traffic and urban congestion, the freewheeling spirit of the open road. Only the autorickshaw serves as a sightseeing vehicle of wonders large and small. Only the autorickshaw offers opportunities for conversation and interaction without forcing them upon the passenger. For me, these are the foundations of living in India: base-level connections without which I’d be cloistered and closeted.

First, the open road. Anyone who grows up in New York City doesn’t really know much about the open road (whatever that is), but maybe it’s precisely because of this ignorance that careening around in open-air vehicles – even through oodles of urban traffic – never stops feeling special. That rush you get when the driver revs up the engine or takes a curve at a precarious angle: it doesn’t go away. It’s like riding on the back of a motorcycle, but you can fool yourself into thinking it’s safer. Those frequent, minor brushes with danger breed sighs of relief at the end of autorickshaw journeys: you feel as though you’ve accomplished something monumental simply by sitting in a backseat and letting someone drive you to your destination. An autorickshaw ride is at once functional, personally satisfying, and entertaining.

It’s also the best way to see the city. Sightseeing tours cart visitors from monument to monument, each journey placated by the glass windows that separate the passengers from the outside world. In a rickshaw, those barriers vanish. A rickshaw can take you to the Jama Masjid: better yet, it can wheel you slowly through the marketplaces that surround Delhi’s gorgeous mosque, exposing you to the sounds of Quranic recitation and screaming children, the smells of freshly slaughtered chickens and fried vegetables, the sights of coarse gray beards and bright young heads topped with knitted white skullcaps. To me, it’s the most interesting sort of sightseeing; in a rickshaw, you can experience it only inches away, for free. (And all this, without having to navigate the streets on foot: a nearly impossible task. A rickshaw may have fewer barriers than a taxi or bus, but there are still some barriers in place – and that can be a good thing.)

Rickshaws throw their passengers into close contact both with their physical surroundings and with other people. The first interaction a rider experiences is with her driver: will he take her where she wants to go? Does he know how to get where she wants to go? Will he charge her the local price, the foreigner price, or the outrageous foreigner price? After these matters have been settled, it’s possible that there might be no further conversation: this is a situation that I have long since come to appreciate. I take it as a huge compliment when a driver doesn’t wish to find out my native country or whether I’ve been to the Taj – I may be paying the foreigner fare, but to him, I’m no tourist. Of course, the driver may want to talk to his passenger (or the passenger may wish to converse with the driver), but I’ve found that these conversations can be controlled in subject and in length. Because rickshaws are so exposed to the outside world – and because the driver has to swivel around almost entirely in order to face the passenger – conversations cannot run too deep, or too long. If a passenger is unresponsive, the driver will generally take the hint, and focus on the road. Yet important questions can be asked and answered, too: the semi-dangerous nature of the ride (not to mention the language barrier) simply necessitates that those exchanges be kept succinct.

There are a number of other human interactions that are wonderful – and sometimes painful – to experience in an autorickshaw. I like to witness the cameraderie between drivers: if two are stopped next to each other at a traffic light, they’ll probably have a short conversation. Perhaps they already know each other; perhaps they don’t. Then there are exchanges mediated by the passenger herself: with its lack of walls and windows, the autorickshaw lends itself particularly well to beggars and hawkers. This can be a frustrating drawback, but it can also be an opportunity to give a smile or a handshake – even if all the beggar wants is a ten rupee note. Rickshaw travel means that humanity is all over the place, in your face, until you speed away: in the end, that’s probably more valuable than the relative peace that a taxi would afford.

So next time you find yourself in an Indian city, don’t hire a taxi for the day. Hop in an autorickshaw: smell the country; talk to her people; learn something; have fun.

*This is the first in a short series of posts about why I love India. It’s a simple theme, but a meaningful one: this is my last week here, and I’m eager to leave on a high note. Among other topics, I’ll be writing about the joys of Indian newspapers, same-sex friendship, waiting for things, grooming habits, riding the Metro, the use of public space, and some great places to eat.

Sick crow

2009-03-28T00:08:00.003-04:00

The fat crow would like to apologize for her lengthy silence.

Last Sunday I woke up with some serious chills, and on Monday I was admitted into a hospital here. Lots of things happened -- diagnoses, injections, breakthroughs, tablets, improvements, discouragements -- lots. It was not very fun. (Not to mention that I had to put my students' long-planned final project on hold, which was a big disappointment.) Thankfully my dad was in the hospital with me, every second.

But a couple of days ago I was released from the strange sterile jail, and I'm recovering with Z in a hotel next to the Lodi Gardens. I'm feeling a lot better.

Just to say: with a few more days of rest, I will be back and blogging.

Dosage of poetry for a hectic week

2009-03-19T23:39:00.002-04:00

A wonderful friend from college, N., sent me this poem the other day. It seems to speak to the highs and lows of the urban landscape of faces in India --

Something this foggy day, a something which
Is neither of this fog nor of today,
Has set me dreaming of the winds that play
Past certain cliffs, along one certain beach,
And turn the topmost edge of waves to spray:
Ah pleasant pebbly strand so far away,
So out of reach while quite within my reach,
As out of reach as India or Cathay!
I am sick of where I am and where I am not,
I am sick of foresight and of memory,
I am sick of all I have and all I see,
I am sick of self, and there is nothing new;
Oh weary impatient patience of my lot!
Thus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?

Christina Rossetti.

Study date

2009-03-15T22:39:00.002-04:00

On Thursday at the Bangalore airport, I was so busy perusing the glorious Duty Free that I nearly missed my flight back to Delhi. The excitement did not stop there. I arrived, left the airport, and arranged for a pre-paid taxi to take me back to Civil Lines – only to find, upon sliding into the cab, that there was another person in the back seat: Z., who had flown in from Kabul that morning. Quelle surprise!

We spent an excellent three-day weekend together, appreciating the precious spring weather and sitting for hours at my favorite café in Khan Market, furiously typing away at our laptops. There were long dinners and long discussions – the best of which we shared with my friends L. and A., who invited us over for homemade spaghetti and meticulously-washed salad. We visited Haldiram’s twice, once for Sunday brunch (a fantastic New York diner substitute, it turns out, especially given the superior food) with C., who’s back in Delhi on business.

Haldiram’s. I wish I had a picture. I’ve written about how, to me, the Old City—and Chandni Chowk in particular – represents everything I love about Delhi. It was where I looked bleary-eyed upon the gray and the poor on that first memorable morning in India, and since then, it’s always where I go to remind myself why I’m here. Haldiram’s, which is a three-story restaurant, take-away, cafeteria, and dhaba all in one, is, for me, the taste of that memory. Everyone has his or her palate triggers: Proust had his madeleine, and I have the food at Haldiram’s. If you can make it past the lobby and its glass-enclosed displays of permutations upon permutations of snacks and candies, the second floor is where you’ll find the real masala of the Old City. There, you can order 15 different kinds of chaat, fresh dosas and uttapams, full-on North Indian meals, and the puffiest bhature in the world. The best part of the cafeteria is that it’s made for sharing: the only way to go is to order everything you possibly can (especially foods you’ve never had before, with the Haldiram’s guarantee that they’ll be delicious) and try to beat your dining companions in scooping up large, dripping spoonfuls of each gorgeous dish. There’s nothing like it.

That morning on Chandni Chowk, highly satiated by hours at Haldiram’s, I looked around me and saw India’s great beauty once more. It was laced into the sight of a golden-domed gurudwara standing next to a minareted mosque, the hordes of eager cycle-rickshaw drivers, the clang of temple bells, the endless arrays of sweets and snacks in the lobby of Haldiram’s, and people’s honest expressions (smiles, frowns, grunts, smirks, boredom, desperation, annoyance!) all bared for the world to see. I saw them, and I was again convinced – as I believe I have to be convinced every day, in order to survive – that this is the country for me.

Bangalore: IT and Idlies

2009-03-10T05:44:00.003-04:00

After witnessing the beginning of Holi celebrations in Delhi -- a full *week* before the holiday (no pun intended) itself -- I hesitated to believe my father's claim that "in the south, Holi is nothing more than an afterthought." But he was right: today we've only seen a couple of color-drenched people. I guess we'll have to see about tomorrow, which some say is the real festival day. Today, in any case, it turns out that Eid Milad-un-Nabi (the Prophet's birthday!), with its loudspeaker lectures broadcasted from the mosque down the street, is a far bigger deal.

Bangalore. I haven't had too much time to get out and see the city -- mostly I've been taking advantage of the Super Unbelievably Fast High Speed Internet Access (hello, IT city!) at our hotel to get work done on the ol' laptop. The last time I was in this city was five years ago, accompanied by my best friend A., her dad, and a whole bunch of food fanatics, some of whom I'm proud to call my relatives. Five years ago, my best friend and I walked the city alone: that's how safe it was, and still is. Even now it's a mixture of Honolulu, Queens, and India.

Back to the food. The incredible safety of this "modern" city made its mark five years ago: the meals, even more so. Bangalore is the center of South Indian Vegetarian Everything, served up specially for hardworking IT-types on snappy lunch hours. Above are some visual aids for two distinctly South Indian edibles: sweet milk coffee presented in two metal tumblers, and fluffy rice flour idlies with sambar, coconut chutney, and ghee. The pictures are from the famous Mavalli Tiffin Room on Lal Bagh Road, courtesy of Wikipedia.

And speaking of the best of both worlds (fast-paced, high-tech Internet; fast-paced, low-tech food), tonight my dad and I are going to one of Bangalore's massive malls to finally see the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." I know I'm a little behind the curve on this one, but perhaps it's not too late to ask the Fat Crow audience: what did you think of the movie? Realistic, or "poverty pornography"? How's the acting, and the now-famous A.R. Rahman score? Does it stand up to all the hype?

A note before Holi

2009-03-07T01:54:00.006-05:00

Hi, everyone. I apologize for the long silence. It’s been a bit of a crazy week.

Still, we all know the perils of neglecting to perform “atithisatkaaram” (hospitality to guests) in Sanskrit literature – curses, spells, wrath, more curses – so I’d rather not risk ignoring my virtual guests for too long. Here’s a quick update.

I’ve taken the past few days off work for medical reasons, and am planning to spend next week in Bangalore with my father. Both of us are hiding from the danger that is Holi in North India. (Wikipedia it!) I can only compare this holiday to Mardi Gras, but it’s far crazier, and in a different sort of way.

Next weekend, Z is visiting from Kabul, and it’s back to work for the week after that. This is to be followed by more travels with Z (to Mumbai? to Dar-es-Salaam??), then a final fortnight with my students in Delhi, and then – unbelievably – home in April.

In a certain sense, looking back on them, these many months in India seem like tossed colors on Holi. But now is not the time for sentimental (albeit colorful) reflections. It's time to prepare for Bangalore.

Heaven in Civil Lines

2009-02-27T00:16:00.002-05:00

This week, I uttered a welcome "hello, you!" to the nicest commute known to Delhi's 9-to-5-ers.

I moved into a gorgeous room on the roof of a tiny hotel in Civil Lines, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city that is home to Delhi University. The room is spacious and clean. There's plenty of furniture -- all wood, nicely polished -- plus a T.V., a fridge, and a gigantic sofa. I get more than one minute of hot water. There's hardly anybody staying at the hotel, so the owners let me stay at a very reduced rate. It's still four times the amount I was paying in Paharganj, but oh boy, is it *ever* worth it. There are two large windows that look out on to green trees and through which you can hear the birds chirping. It basically feels like a resort -- except I LIVE here!

The best part of my new digs is the neighborhood (or lack thereof). In this new incarnation of my life in Delhi, I walk out from the hotel and onto Flag Staff Road: a wide, clean, traffic-free street whose sidewalks are lined with....flowerbeds. My neighbors are a string of gated palaces, the homes of Delhi's rich and famous. There's absolutely nothing and nobody here. It's fantastic.

I'm a short walk away from the neighborhood Metro stop, so I get to ride the amazing "subway" to Connaught Place every morning. It's so clean, cheap, and efficient that it puts even European subways to shame. (Nothing, of course, will ever compare to the glorious grub of the New York City subway, but obviously I'm biased.) The Metro must be the subject of a longer blog post in the future -- it's the strangest mix of everything you ever suspected and never suspected about India.

Of course, once I leave the Metro stop at Connaught Place (er, Rajiv Chowk, sorry) I have to take an auto back to my old stomping grounds in Paharganj. Now that I spend a manageable amount of time there, it's far less bothersome. Circumventing the walk through Main Bazaar is the best thing in my life since sliced bread. Or the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary. Whatever.

And in other good news, my friend and co-worker L. is back from her trip to Canada, and I'm going over to her place tonight for dinner -- or, since it's Friday, make that Shabbat dinner. Things are looking up.

Weekend of surprises

2009-02-21T08:01:00.003-05:00

"This is my brother-cousin," I told the over-protective man who works the reception desk at the hotel where I live. "He's passing through Delhi on his way to Gwalior." My friend M. looked pleasantly surprised at my introduction, but he played along -- and though I suspect the receptionist was less than convinced, I'm sure he appreciated my effort to look as though I was not, in fact, operating a brothel out of his hotel.

M. came to stay the night -- he had an early train to catch in the morning, and my hotel is a 3-minute walk away from the railway station -- and to introduce me to some friends of his. They're on a study abroad program in Hyderabad, and were playing hooky from school so that they could take themselves on a 10-day trip to the northern part of the country. We were planning to meet them at a concert at the Purana Qila. Just as we were heading out the door, M. got a call from his friend N., who informed us that the concert was quickly becoming more annoying than amusing. We decided to meet for a late dinner at Saravana Bhavan in Connaught Place instead.

As we all gathered, I thought I recognized a familiar face. Was that J., from high school? Could it be? J., whom I remember has having no interest whatsoever in India, now studying in *Hyderabad*?

J. and I had the great, if surreal, opportunity to catch up on more than two years of each other's lives (and, err, indulge in a little gossip about the lives of the people with whom we went to high school). We never really talked much when we went to school together -- we knew each other, and were in a few of the same classes -- but it turns out we have far more in common than I had thought. She's a Religion major at Bates, and wants to focus on Buddhism. She's even studying Sanskrit! All this made for a truly pleasant discovery. It was certainly surprising to discover her in Delhi, of all places: a city where I came to be alone, to escape, to start new projects. At the moment we recognized each other, the cosmos winked.

Following a lively dinner, we piled in rickshaws and drove to the N-block of GK-1 in pursuit of a dance club. (For a second I thought guiltily, strangely, about my students.) Our rickshaw driver decided to drop us off in M-block instead. By the time we finally found N-block, we had walked in a huge circle and decided that all of our futures would really be better spent living in the palatial homes of Greater Kailash, W-block.

Up on the roof in the tropical night air, we sat on luxurious low couches, sipped wine, experimented with the signature Masala Martini. (No comment.) We watched the young and the beautiful (but most of all, the rich) of Delhi sit on *their* couches and drink *their* wine. It was great company, and a gorgeous night. Conversation flitted about like excited parakeets in a cage. By the time M. and I left, I would have been ready for anything: I think a Proper Night Out was just what the doctor (or ayurvedacarya, or astrologer, or guru, whatever) ordered. M. and I collapsed in our beds; I didn't envy him for having to catch a train at 6AM the following morning.

This morning I got a call from N., both of us still in bed, and we planned to meet up in Paharganj and spend a while in the old city today. Last night he had invited me to come along with the Hyderabad group to Chandni Chowk; I countered with an offer to help them navigate the chaat counters at the (original!) Haldiram's there. We chatted for a few good hours -- bombarding each other with tales of travel, India, rickshaw-wallahs, policemen, literary theory (??) -- before accumulating all the members of our group and readying ourselves for a trip to the most famous street in Delhi. I realized how long it had been since I had spent any real amount of time with lots of people my age: were it not for the streets of Paharganj, I could have been back in college, spewing stories and laughter with my roommates. Amazing!

I will, however, add this: that no matter how hard it is to travel by myself around Paharganj, it is even harder to be in a group of seven Americans. Shopkeepers, random people on the street, and (of course) rickshaw-wallahs were EVEN MORE aggressive than usual. I found myself in the strange position of taking visitors around "my" city -- bargaining, giving directions, making plans, ordering food. It was wonderful to play tour guide, and it was wonderful to be with these interesting, intellectually astute, fun-loving, somewhat goofy, often sarcastic, and (quite frankly) good-looking people. I loved it.

It's impossible not to have a blast at Haldiram's, and today was no exception. First there was the rickshaw ride over there: four of us in the back, one on the laps of the other three. Another rickshaw driver really took a liking to the girl who was sitting on our laps, and basically followed us all the way to Old Delhi in his rickshaw making comments to our driver and casting not-so-sly glances back at our fair companion. At one point he was so interested in her that he nearly drove his rickshaw into a public bus. Then *we* almost collided with a public bus. Then we bumped the back of another rickshaw.

"You're all crazy!" Said N. in Hindi to the driver.

He turned around, nodded vigorously, and smiled so widely that we could see his betel-stained molars.

"What a country!" Exclaimed N., "You tell people they're crazy, and they're, like, 'YES! WE ARE!'" N. stuck his thumb in the air and mimicked the driver's expression perfectly.

At Haldiram's, we hawked tables, stuck two together, and piled them with as much chaat as we possibly could: raj katchori, paapri chaat, bhel puri, a double dose of pani puri. To this we added two north Indian thalis, two orders of paneer tikka, two kinds of parantha, and a chole bhature. We were sweating and exhausted by the time the meal finished. It was...unbelievable. There's no real way to describe Haldiram's -- you just have to go there and see, smell, and (best of all) taste for yourself.

Afterwards, we nibbled on sweets downstairs and went our separate ways: me, back to Paharganj (with a positively evil rickshaw driver); everyone else, to the Lal Qila.

I'm incredibly full right now: on chaat, on chat, on this crazy, crazy country.

Friday, fun, yes

2009-02-19T23:05:00.002-05:00

After a challenging beginning, this week has turned out to be quite the success -- and not just for me.

One of my best friends from college, I., landed two lead roles in productions at Harvard. At the end of March, he's going to be playing Hector in "The History Boys" (my favorite play!) and then he'll be playing Claudius in "Hamlet" (you know, also good). The news about this absolutely brightened my week.

Another highlight of the week has been hearing about the admissions process for the pilot program of Tajiran-e-Jawan ("Young Entrepreneurs") -- a project put together by my boyfriend, Z., and his friend, M., in Kabul. It was an astounding success, and the real program hasn't even started yet!

As for me, I'm looking forward to going to a contemporary Indian music concert tonight at the Purana Qila with my friend M and some of his buddies from an SIT program in Delhi.

And school has been great this week, but more on that later. I've got to run off and give my older students their first quiz!

The day I stepped in cow dung

2009-02-16T07:52:00.004-05:00

Until today, I had actually managed to avoid the large piles of cow poop that lie, goopy and stinky, on the streets of my neighborhood. I was innocently walking into Main Bazaar earlier this evening, reflecting on the unsettling events of the day and trying to put them in the past, when all of a sudden my flip flop slipped and slided in green mush. None of the aforementioned mush reached my feet, and I have the cosmos to thank for that one. So I traipsed cow dung down the remainder of Main Bazaar all the way down to Tooti Chowk, and thought "this is nothing less than what you deserve, Paharganj."

Before I stepped in holy cow feces, this is what I was thinking about:

I'm grateful to have found a slightly less bothersome -- and, for that matter, quicker -- way of walking to my older students' dorm in the mornings. Come time for the return trip, however, the new route is just as bad as the old one. I'm afraid I was harassed, pursued, and entreatied one too many times this morning. When yet another group of three men leered "hi beautiful, how are you today?" (and there *is* a significant difference between when these words are spoken aggressively, and when they are spoken pleasantly), I spat a rather strong expletive back at them. For several precious moments, they were too stunned to react. (I, too, was a little shocked at my behavior.) This bought me some time to walk away, but I hadn't gone very far when the ringleader began to walk beside me. "Why you talk shit," he accused, "why you talk shit to Indian people. You not liking Indian people. This is India. You are in India. No talking shit. No talking shit in India."

Good thing I was too terrified to do anything other than ignore him and speed up my walking as if I hadn't said a thing in the first place: he quickly tired of trying to shame me, and retreated to his pack of adoring followers. I'm just worried about the next time I run into him -- I hope he doesn't remember me.

I wish I had the grace to let these things pass, but sadly, I'm still smarting on two counts. The first involves victimhood -- though I'm not sure if I'm really much of a victim in this situation. The second lies in the particular words that my assailant chose to throw at me. It's not hard to see why.

But something scarier happened when I was on my way home from school in the afternoon. I was walking down the wide street that links Connaught Place with the railway station and saw, ambling toward me, a man who gave me that mythical "uh-oh" feeling. He was dark, dirty, and disheveled, but his walk wasn't like that of a street sweeper or ragpicker: those men and women walk with a great deal of humility; this man swayed and swaggered. His shirt was open all the way down the front, baring his chest. There weren't many people around us as he veered in my direction, and I knew not to even look his way. He still tried to touch me, however, sticking out his foot and making a slow grab for my body. He must have been drunk, and perhaps mentally or emotionally unstable. I sidestepped his reach with as much nonchalance as I could muster, and (for the second time today) quickened my pace and moved into a slow stream of other people walking down the street. Any larger reaction only would have made it worse.

It made me see the morning's incident in a different light. At least the men who leered and jeered at me earlier today knew the consequences of their actions: they understood that no matter how much I provoked them, they couldn't get away with anything more than the most basic of verbal abuses -- not in crowded Paharganj at noontime, anyhow. But the man in the street this afternoon was a different story. In his mind, there was nothing to stop him from physically reaching for me, following me, or doing who-knows-what else. I'm thankful that both his mental and bodily reflexes were too slow to allow him those courses of action.

Ten minutes after that was when I stepped in the cow dung.

I seem to be playing a woeful ballad on this blog lately, and I dislike that. Here's the other side of my one-rupee coin: I love my students. I love them, love them, love them. I love them when they have no idea what I'm talking about, and I love them when they don't have even the slightest intention of paying attention in class. Those daily moments of joy and laughter are worth all the unwelcome advances in the world: I promise you that for every story of yet another bothersome walk in my 'hood, there's a story of a kid's smile, sometimes missing a front tooth or two.

Back in Pune

2009-02-15T06:49:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting in the waiting area of Pune's mini-airport, where I am one of two foreigners among a crowd of middle-class Indian businessmen. To me, that's Pune in a nutshell: a small, but perfectly pleasant waiting area frequented by middle-aged men with slight paunches and briefcases, college students sporting tee shirts and dupattas, and the odd whitey. Outside, the sun is shining through the smog. My internet works. There's nothing to complain about.

I was back in Pune this weekend to visit friends, bid my respects to my Sanskrit teachers, and remove a whole bunch of things from my room in my old flat here. When I left Pune two months ago, I took a single black suitcase with me: all my Sanskrit dictionaries and notebooks, some clothes, a yoga mat, a bag of ayurvedic party favors, two pairs of shoes, two shelves of novels, a once-worn sari, and various other items (nail polish remover? empty picture frames?) I had resigned to the dust of my old room, until now.

On Friday, I went out for a gorgeous, fancy lunch with my old roomies, M., G., and S., and their new roommate, D., from France. Unable to part with them so quickly afterward, I returned to our flat later in the evening and spent the rest of the night chatting and gossiping away, sitting around the kitchen table and laughing. I remembered how much of the joy I experienced while living in Pune was born and sustained around that kitchen table. Saturday was a day out with S.: more lunching, more shopping, more sitting around tables and laughing our heads off. On Saturday night, I had a fantastic (and fantastically long) dinner with my father, my Sanskrit teachers, and my Sanskrit classmates. Sunday brought more long lunches, this time Brahmin thalis at the Hotel Shreyas, with the teachers and students. This was followed by more sitting around tables and laughing with M. and S. at a dive on Law College Road. As weekends go, this one was pretty perfect. My dad even got me a bunch of roses for Valentine's Day.

My father and I stayed at a perfectly nice (but characterless) hotel on clogged, popular F.C. Road, but I spent almost all weekend out with the few buddies I picked up during my few months in the city. I never hands-down loved Pune when I was living there, and I still don't: it's the people I knew there who really make the city worth returning to. Over breakfast one morning in the garden of the Vaishali restaurant, also clogged and popular, my dad commented on how nice and pleasant Pune is. It's true: aside from the pollution and traffic, Pune really is an easy place to live. It's incredibly safe, even at night. The rickshaw-wallahs use the meter. The weather is bearable. There are good places to eat, and good apartments to rent. The women wear brightly colored saris and salwar kameez sets.

I tried to explain to my dad what, exactly, I didn't (and don't) like about Pune. The heartless traffic and the crushing pollution are easy offenders -- but Delhi is polluted and smoggy, too, and somehow I don't mind it so much there. Perhaps the very thing I dislike about Pune is something that enchanted me so much when I first started living there: it's just a regular city. The place is filled with students on the one hand, and middle-class Indian families on the other. Both groups, at least in the areas that I frequented, tended to be Hindu. There are flyovers and sweet shops and public buses and shopping malls. The giant banyan trees growing through the concrete are the only clue that Pune has a wild side. It's just a regular city.

I know the place has history and diversity: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyplace in India that doesn't. But to have both of those elements in public space is important to me, and that's one of the reasons I chose to spend the rest of the winter and spring not in Pune, but in Delhi.

Delhi is a Difficult Place, no doubt -- last week's blog rant (see the post "100 and 0") can attest to that -- but it is unbelievably exciting, multifaceted, challenging, mysterious, layered, old. And Delhi is a special place for travelers in a way that Pune isn't: goodness knows I'm an elitist when it comes to tourism (or just an idiot who thinks she can blend in when she's in Delhi, Amman, Paris, whatever), but I've come to appreciate the fact that Delhi has a built-in propensity for foreignness. The city has died and been reborn many, many times at the hands of both "native" and "foreign" rulers. I like living in a place where it might be interesting, but it certainly won't be unusual, to be different. I like living in a city that embraces those differences, throwing them all into the mash and jamble of Delhi's winding alleys and broad boulevards so that they can live together. In that respect, in fact, it's a lot like New York.

Experiencing Delhi's capacity for travelers has become one of the reasons I enjoy Paharganj. Last week I wrote about the clouds in that sky: the large presence of foreign backpackers draws the absolute worst of touts, whistles, peeps, shouts, and all manners of treating normal humans as if they were machines dispensing money, sex, or both. But there is something comforting, too, about living and walking the streets with fellow travelers. I smile when I see *yet another* dreadlocked European backpacker being subjected to the entreaties of *yet another* young Indian man with oiled hair and skin-tight, acid-wash denim bell-bottoms, one hand enthusiastically gesturing at his uncle's bangle store, and one hand (just as enthusiastically) scratching his crotch. I smile, feeling sorry for them both: I'm grateful that I'm not silly enough to wear dreadlocks in a country where they're reserved for paupers and yogis, and I'm grateful that I've been spared the attentions of this particular man in the acid-wash jeans. Those scenes remind me I'm not the only one dealing with cultural misfires every day. They remind me I'm a guest in this country, and that there's no way I could ever blend in. They remind me that sometimes--but just sometimes!--it's okay to be a stupid tourist. They remind me that it's okay to be different.

My plane is about to take off: better shut down my laptop and get on board!

100 and 0

2009-02-10T19:54:00.004-05:00

Since the Shatabdi Express rolled into the New Delhi Railway Station from Jaipur on Sunday night, I've been ricocheting from one extreme to another like a volleyed ping-pong ball.

On one side of the table lie a series of quasi-successful classes, both with the older boys (unforgotten homeworks! extra compositions! parts of speech!) and with the younger set ("what is your name?"! "how many ____?"! the days of the week! singulars and plurals!). English is a breathtaking -- and breathtakingly difficult -- language, both to learn and to teach. My students seem to be on board for the scenic (if bumpy) ride, and that's a joy to see.

We have an unusual relationship. I've written about how I'm a big sister as well as a teacher: so much of their growth seems to depend upon adults (or slightly older children, like me) paying attention to them for decent stretches of time. They have several adults already taking care of them, of course -- the dorm supervisor (for the older kids), and a couple of other teachers. Whenever I show up, there are precious few of these grown-ups around. In the mornings I might see a supervisor in the dorm office, or another teacher in the giant hall that serves as a classroom. In the afternoons, I see the kids' head teacher sitting around reading the newspaper, and the (overworked, sweet-tempered) assistant teacher taking a much-needed break. Add boredom into the mix: my three 18-year-olds have nothing to do in the mornings, an early afternoon computer class three days a week, and nothing to do in the late afternoons or on the weekends; the contact point kids, most (if not all) of whom are not living in SBT dorms, have nothing to do after 2PM every single day. Someone smiling and laughing with them makes a huge difference, even if it's at the expense of a "productive" English class.

Which is a good thing, because I really have no idea how to teach English anyway. Readers, please: I welcome suggestions, tips, and book/Website recommendations!

The students' (understandable) need for positive attention often ends up in total clamor, with many little bodies vying for the affections of my eyes, ears, and hands. This is just as true of the older kids as it is of the younger ones, though it manifests itself in a different way. The Three Musketeers fight to hold and read from whatever book we're studying together, while the Connaught Place kids just shout and grab: their antics are distracting, but I can't deny how flattering they are, too. After playing and laughing at the beginning of each class, it's hard for me to draw back and become a Teacher again. I'm still working on how to fuse the two personae.

On the other end of the table lie several memories, big and small, from the past few days. One haunts me in particular: a seven-year-old student in my afternoon group whose face showed the horrific signs of being blinded as a younger child. Although there is a sprawling, blood-red scar where his left eye used to be, R.'s right eye (engorged to twice its size and covered with a heavy gray film) still functiona a little. Unable to learn with the rest of the group because of his disability, R. crawled around my feet and clung to my ankles all afternoon, shouting for my attention. At the end of the class, I gave him 'Goodnight Moon' -- a kids' book I had been reading with the other students -- to look at. He held it up close to his right eye and a sort of peace came over him. I won't forget R.'s confusion (minor desperation, even) about who I was, and what I was doing with his friends in our makeshift classroom. I won't forget his infatuation with 'Goodnight Moon'. I certainly won't forget his face.

Something of a more daily shock (can I even say that? Is it still a "shock" if it happens daily?) is the experience of walking down the street in my neighborhood. For almost my entire life, I have nothing less than * relished * my daily commute. Going to high school in New York City, that meant a love affair with the Subway and the M-86 crosstown bus. In Cambridge, it meant taking twenty minutes to get to a classroom five minutes away. (The town’s ridiculous layout makes this relatively easy to do, often unintentionally.) In Pune, my favorite parts of the day were the bumpy rickshaw rides to and from the Deccan College campus. Paharganj is a different story.

Logistically, walking is not easy to do in this neighborhood: there are no sidewalks. You either cram yourself into the tiny space between the jumble of parked cars and the storefronts, or you walk in traffic. The entire Main Bazaar of Paharganj, for that matter, is under construction -- its ground surface is often nothing more than rocks and mud-sewage-sludge. But what really bothers me are the men.

The journalist Anita Jain writes that there are “around 930 women to every 1,000 men according to recent census data, the vast discrepancy a disturbing result of infanticide and sex-segregated abordion.” (2003, p.50) On the streets of Paharganj, this figure might as well be 50 women for every 1,000 men. It’s entirely possible that I will walk the thirty minutes to work every morning and see no more than ten – TEN – women. Ten. Perhaps I’m more aware of these things than I need to be, but let me tell you anyway: it’s scary. I may be in absolutely no physical danger, but still I feel vulnerable and preyed upon. These men’s stares, low whistles, and whispered comments pick and grate at my dignity, not to mention my sanity. Throughout my entire walk to school, I can’t afford to look up * even once *: meeting a man’s gaze is considered a sexual come-on, and only a prostitute would be so bold as to stare back.

“So-called ‘eve-teasing’ is a common phenomenon in India,” says Jain, “perhaps due to the disconnect created by the realtive visibility of women in the public sphere – as opposed to in certain parts of the Islamic world – even as gender relations are still largely circumscribed. Men see, but they are not allowed to touch, leading to pent-up frustration.” (86) I’m nowhere near as sympathetic to these men. (And, for the record, men on the streets of Syria and Jordan practically ignored me when I was there last summer.) Staring, I more than understand: I’m a foreigner, after all, and white skin is unusual here. Staring is fine. But I’ve witnessed enough Indian men being perfectly polite to me that I cannot tolerate leering and commenting from the others. Media be damned: these young men have no excuse for treating me like a low, dirty, sex object.

Excuse my rant.

And so it’s been a week of highs and lows. A few short hours can take me from the grunge of Paharganj to the luxuries of dinner at the Taj Hotel with a family friend, and from the chaos of the classroom to the peace of curling up in bed with a novel. It’s all part of what makes India so exciting, I guess. It’s part of what makes India, India.

Spa weekend

2009-02-08T21:16:00.002-05:00

They don't really bill Jaipur as a calm weekend getaway (and given the hyperactivity of the city's rickshaw-wallahs, it's easy to see why), but that's exactly what the Pink City was for me this weekend. My father is currently living in a gorgeous, quiet hotel with a pool and lounge chairs; I parked there for a three-day weekend and got up only twice. My cold dried up, I slept more than ten hours every night, I fed myself silly. Thank you, Jaipur, spa locale of the future.

On Saturday afternoon I went to meet my friend S. at the Anokhi Cafe. She's studying Hindi in Jaipur and was reading the Hindi version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when I arrived. While we caught up on several months of life and gossip, I slurped Assam tea and gobbled down what might be the world's most delicious carrot cake. (Okay, maybe the carrot cake at Magnolia Bakery is better. Maybe.) We then went to meet her roommate, L., at the Shree Radha-Govinda Dev Temple in the Old City. We were just in time for the evening aarti; as we arrived, the pundit drew back the stage curtain (yes, this is a celebrity performance) to reveal Krishna and Radha. Bells clanged. Light was offered. Water was sprinkled. The scene on the ground, however, was surprisingly quiet -- at least by comparison to those I've seen at other temples. I found myself able to look Krishna and Radha in their big eyes for minutes at a time: a real darshan.

Then we queued up to get prasaad (sweets that have been offered to the deities, blessed by their presence, and returned to the public) at a little counter next to the main shrine. You donate a few rupees and get a bag of laddoos in return: the more you pay, the more you get. There, two interesting things happened. One was that an old woman begged me to cut the line in front of her. In a country that rarely forms line-shaped queues (preferring, I think, to crowd and mob) this was very unusual indeed. "MERE AAGE", she pleaded over and over, "IN FRONT OF ME!"

Yet in total contrast with the old woman's generous sentiments, we actually *were* mobbed as we stepped away from the counter. Fifteen pairs of male hands -- mostly boys, but quite a few grown men as well -- appeared in our faces, begging for the sweets we had just been given. They didn't look like poor men; in fact, some of them were very well-dressed. I had no idea what to do. I saw S and L giving out pieces of their sweets, so I began to distribute mine. This was a bad idea. Fifteen pairs of hands became twenty-five, and the crowd swelled with neediness. It's disturbing to pause, look around, and find yourself surrounded by outstretched palms and dark, staring eyes. I've been coming to India for a long time, and it's never happened to me in *any* context. People can get aggressive in the temple -- usually when pushing forward to have a glimpse of the deity -- but this, I have never seen before. Has anyone ever had a similar experience? Thoughts?

After having darshan of Radha and Krishna, I hopped in an autorickshaw and headed back to the hotel to meet my dad for a late dinner. We joined lots of Indian families (children and babies most certainly included!) eating thalis and dosas at a popular south Indian restaurant at the prime dinner hour of 10PM. The food was delicious, but the real attractions were at the ice cream store next door. At this unusual ice cream store, a hungry customer could have her choice of fantastically named (and dressed) ice cream sundaes: "Pink Strawberry Pina Colada", "Tropical Sailboat", "Virgin Brownie Hot Fudge" and, my personal favorite, "Lemon Kookie Crumb Pizza".

As I sat on the train going back to Delhi late last night, I looked out the window and saw a few dim lights in the distance. It was a graciously familiar sight: I was on Amtrak for a moment there, traveling from Boston and primed to arrive late at night in grimy, glorious Penn Station, bag of textbooks and empty Diet Coke bottle in tow. I would stumble off the train and look around at the fluorescently lit, golden walls of the huge cavern station below 34th Street. I would follow the signs to the One and Nine Subway lines, even though the Nine has long since been discontinued. I would get on the local and rumble uptown to 110th Street, where I would get off, stick my head above ground, and breathe in the smell of darkened Broadway. I'd cross the street, ignore the loud pleas of our corner's resident homeless man ("Can ya help me get a warm meal please?"), and walk to Riverside Drive. Then I'd turn toward my bright lobby, greet F., the doorman, and walk past the spitting mini-fountain to get in the elevator and get out again on the third floor.

That might have been the first real pang of homesickness I've felt so far.

Sniffles and other small woes

2009-02-05T18:07:00.002-05:00

I have a cold -- a dripping, sniffling, shivering, sniveling cold -- and I'm out of tissue paper. More accurately, I'm out of toilet paper, which is what I've been using to mop up the liquids pouring out of my nose.

Sorry. Too graphic?

It's almost 5 in the morning, and soon I have to walk down the street to the railway station and catch a train to Jaipur. I'm going to spend the weekend with my dad and some friends there, nursing my cold and recovering from a long week.

Classes have been all over the place for the first several days, mostly because I've been trying to assess my students' existing English capabilities. Every passing hour reveals just how much of the language they lack, and--far more importantly--just how much I lack the skills to teach it. To make myself feel better, I stick with the mantra that the whole gig is ultimately more about friendship and mentorship than about formal education; I wouldn't yet consider delving into "The Cat in the Hat" with my 18-year-olds a wasted morning. (Besides, vocabulary is always more fun to learn when it rhymes -- and when your dignified, Harvard-educated tutor wildly bounces up and down on one leg while reading aloud, all in a poor imitation of the Cat in the Hat.)

As for the younger kids, it's hard enough just to get fifty percent of them to pay attention at once. Their afternoons have almost no structure, so I'll end up with anywhere from five to twelve students actually participating in class, and the rest rotating between praticing "How are you?", playing marbles on the side, or bashing each other over the head. The older boys at the contact point, whose job is to keep the kids in line and generally amuse them while their teachers are reading newspapers on the side of the classroom, love to interfere with the class: they interject their own few sentences of English whenever they can and translate everything I say into Hindi, both of which I find pretty disruptive. (Would you? Or am I reacting too strongly?) In any case, a lot of my energy goes either toward ignoring them, or toward trying to persuade them to be quiet for two minutes at a time. It's a big distraction, especially when I mostly want to spend time with the smiling, enthusiastic, crazy younger set.

And I am realizing more and more just how sketchy my neighborhood is. It's really not the most fun place to live. Oh well -- at least I have my sunny room, not to mention all the kind people who work at the hotel and who have been taking such good care of me.

Off to the railway station, to Jaipur, to cough drops, and -- finally! -- to the weekend.

Day One

2009-02-02T10:33:00.004-05:00

Today was my first day at work. I am already exhausted, incredulous at the months ahead and, perhaps most of all, inspired.

I spent the morning chatting with the three older boys who requested an English teacher. At 18, they're not really boys anymore, but they have a marked innocence about them: it could be the product of their broken English, but I think it springs more from the nervous excitement in their faces than anything else. Also, they're all shorter than I am. (This country is great for the self-esteem of the average white girl: she feels beautiful just because she's pale, and statuesque at the mediocre height of 5 feet and 6 inches.) Two of the boys are studying computers as part of a B.A. correspondence course -- video and sound editing in particular. The other has finished twelfth grade, but for some reason (and it's not hard to see the obstacles in his way) has not yet entered a university-level course for further study.

We sat in a circle on the second floor of their dorm building, which does quadruple-duty as a study room, sleeping area, dining hall, and computer lab. Tomorrow, when things get more formal, I suppose we'll migrate to a long desk. We talked about where they were in school, how much English they had studied, why they wanted to learn English ("very important for high society gatherings," said R., the oldest, at which point S., the second-oldest, fervently nodded his head in agreement), and what they wanted to practice. It will take many more days to assess where they really are with the language -- and goodness knows I'm the least experienced tutor they've ever had -- but my heart leaps around a little when I think about working with such dedicated students. They've had far more than their fair share of difficulties in life; their commitment to education and optimism about the future feels disarming.

In the early afternoon, I headed over to the Handuman mandir contact point to meet the kids there. There are up to twenty kids (aged 9-15) who come every day, but their afternoons are pretty unstructured: a class was just finishing as I arrived, and the rest of the afternoon was to be spent playing marbles, cuffing other kids on the head, or in self-study. "Who wants to learn English?" one of the teachers asked after I had walked in. Four hands flew up in the air. Great, I thought, another small group -- this will be a breeze. Boy, was I wrong about that: when the others saw their friends practicing "what is your name?" and "how old are you?" in English, the group instantly grew ten kids larger. Almost all of them knew no English at all. Communication is such an amazing thing, though, because the gigantic language barrier didn't seem to matter. Things moved slowly, and sometimes frustratingly, but everyone had some fun in the end.

Then there were two tenth grade boys studying by themselves off to the side; the staff told me that they had wanted help with English, so I went over to introduce myself. I was greeted with almost total silence. As it turns out, they've been studying English for two years -- but they can hardly speak a word. I took at look at their textbooks, issued by the National Institute of Open Schooling: are first-year English textbooks supposed to use technical grammar terms on page five? Perhaps -- but it certainly explained how all of their energy has been directed on simply learning how to read. As R. said, "I can read, but there is no meaning." Their faces lacked the enthusiasm and smiles of all the other kids I met today. I'm still thinking about why.

I've vowed to come more prepared for everything tomorrow, and so it's time to flip through the coloring books, newspapers, magazines, and comic books that I bought this evening from overpriced stationery stores in Defence Colony Market. For some reason I also bought a stuffed elephant. It didn't seem out of place for the younger group at Hanuman mandir. Perhaps we can name it together (Nellephant?), give it a life story, sew sisters and brothers for it, all in English of course.

So I'm currently accepting any tips and tools of the trade that my readership has to offer! Anyone taught English as a foreign language before? Had experience with kids of these age groups? Worked with "underprivileged" students? Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Sunset reflections

2009-01-31T07:46:00.003-05:00

My second post today! -- trying, and failing, to make up for a month of very poor blogging. The events of this afternoon were too lovely not to write about, though, so here I am again.

Early in the afternoon I stepped out on to the hectic Main Bazaar of Paharganj, which leads straight from Tooti Chowk to the New Delhi Railway Station. A huge pile of sewage-smelling mud is the first sight greeting someone who might be exiting Tooti Chowk and entering the Main Bazaar by the tiny alleyway that connects the two. A sewer runs directly under the poorly-laid concrete of the Main Bazaar (hey, it explains a lot about the way Main Bazaar functions), and there's been serious construction on it all winter. When I came to visit for a few days in December, the huge pile of mud and exposed sewage pipes was located closer to the railway station end of the bazaar. Now it's directly outside Tooti Chowk, and in its wake is a huge bump that runs the length of the bazaar as if it were a fault line.

I suppose that's not particularly lovely, but to me, it was a relief to walk out into the Main Bazaar in the afternoon sunlight and know *for sure* that I was in India. There's nothing like it. The harsh bazaar feels safe to me: there's comfort in the bejewelled middle class Indian tourists and the countless men hawking their goods (sleeping bags! underwear! fake anything! incense! God!), not to mention the healthy dose of foreign faces that crowd Paharganj. It's a sight to behold, and it's one that sucks my energy right out of me, spraying it on to the big wide world outside. Imagine how much I would hear, see, touch, and learn if walking down the streets of Boston required that much mental effort.

So I walked down Main Bazaar and swung a right at the New Delhi Railway Station. Then I followed a long, wide street down south to Connaught Place, a huge complex of shops and buildings that--despite having spent so much time in them--I can never manage to navigate. I met my co-worker and friend, L., in the parking lot in between H-block and G-block; we commenced a long search for a Cafe Coffee Day that would have a table for us. This proved to be next to impossible on a Saturday afternoon: every single table at the four places we tried was occupied by young Indian couples holding hands and looking into each others' eyes. Finally (finally!) a table opened up just as we were about to leave, and we sipped frothy cappucinos with the lingering canoodlers.

L. took me to visit the outlet of Salaam Baalak where I'll start work on Monday morning. It's right behind a row of bangle shops next to the Hanuman Mandir (which, for some reason, is called the Ganesh Mandir) just outside of Connaught Place. There were a couple of kids there when we showed up, so we played and read with them for a while before catching a rickshaw to Khan Market and to the errands that lay waiting there.

I'm not surprised by it anymore, that there would just be three unsupervised children hanging out at a SBT contact point with no supervision and no activities in sight. "You can see why these kids get into drugs at the age of eight or nine," L. said, "when there's nothing to do and no one to look after them." One of the girls' names was Madhu ("sweet" or "honey"), so I sang her a Sanskrit verse about sweetness. It held her attention for about a minute, before she was back to singing me some Hindi songs she had learned. Completely adorable.

I can tell that a lot of the work ahead will be babysitting: being a "didi" (older sister) to a whole bunch of kids. I don't mind that at all. It sounds like a cliche to say so, but I think it will be a real learning experience for me. And for a teaching and tutoring fix, I'll be working with a couple of older boys who have requested an English teacher. One, A., really wants to work on grammar. (Now *that* is a blessing.) The other wants to learn more English so that he can be a tour guide for SBT. And then there is the work of finding teachers for myself: one for Sanskrit, and one for Hindi.

Right now, though, I want to stop and listen to the sounds of Tooti Chowk at sunset. On one side of my hotel are the rhythmic clanging of drums and bells as a hub of women crouch in the tiny little temple next door, singing hymns at the tops of their voices. On the other side is the call to maghreb prayer from the madrasa/mosque below, ringing out in the clear voice of a young man training to be a muezzin. Last, there's the bubble and quiver of my new electric kettle -- which I'm very much not allowed to keep in my hotel room -- calling me to a cup of tea. I'm going to go answer it.

The view from Tooti Chowk

2009-01-31T03:04:00.000-05:00

It’s amazing how much light streams in through the window of my new room – my new home, if I could call it that – here at this run-down, somehow functioning, hotel in Paharganj. I stayed in this very room when I was in Delhi a month ago, and its window really did make an impression: I can look through one of the many panes down on Tooti Chowk, where loaded carts, loaded people, cows, dogs, and cycle-rickshaws form a constant hustle and bustle. From where I stand on the second floor up, it almost looks like no one leaves the little street, and that they just shift places constantly: a perfectly conserved ecosystem of people and animals going about their lives. The other selling point of this window is that I can not only watch everyone and everything two stories below, but that I can watch people watching them. Chowk-spying seems to be the favorite pastime of the residents of Tooti’s second stories: we lean our bodies into the railings, or press our noses against the windows, and gaze at the organized chaos below. Housewives come out on their balconies to collect the laundry and stay there mesmerized by the moving picture on the street, still cradling bundles of clothes in their arms, until the spell is broken and they return inside.

My favorite sight is this. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned it before. From my perch on the second floor, I can see straight down not only to the street below, but directly into the courtyard of (what appears to be) a school for Muslim boys. These boys of all ages, in their white skullcaps and white cotton salwar kameez, are the greatest reality T.V. show I could have imagined. In the morning they line up to wash their faces at a line of basins. Then they assemble into an elaborate formation in which they make large, fresh chapatis: one boy mixes the dough, another two knead it, another forms it into little balls, another rolls them out, one has the special job of tossing the rolled dough in between his palms, another two or three take care of the stove, and another organizes the cooked bread into tall, neat piles on sheets of newsprint. Throughout the day they pray there, study there, eat there, and, of course, play there. It’s utterly fascinating. “I wonder what the boys are doing right now,” I think when I come back from shopping on the street; “What are they doing this morning?” I muse when I wake up. (Does this make me some sort of stalker, "Rear Window"-style? Oh dear.)

So I do love this room, and all of the sights to which it has already opened my eyes. Delhi, especially in the sunshine of that sweet time in between winter and the hot season (you can’t really call it spring), is starting to welcome me. Or perhaps I’m crazy for feeling that – but somewhere in myself, I still insist on believing that this city has always spoken to me, ever since that first evening walk in the Lodi Gardens nine years ago and that first morning being pulled down Chandni Chowk in a cycle-rickshaw. I’m keen to listen to her murmurs again.

Now it’s off to drive in the nuts and bolts for my job, which starts on Monday, and to run a million errands before the sun sets and it’s time to come back to this already-beloved little room of mine.

The good life

2009-01-27T00:15:00.002-05:00

Today we have to leave all this and return to colder, bleaker Delhi. Z and I never went to Gokarna, and never went to Kerala: we stayed here, sped around the backroads on rented motorbikes, and watched the sun set into an ocean so shiny it looked like it was covered with a satin bedsheet.

One day a while back, we were attacked and harrassed by a crazy taxi driver. That was the only blotch on the otherwise sparkling-clean slate of our trip.

We visited the glorified remains of Francis Xavier. One can't see the actual remains, of course -- they're kept in a gilded casket far out of one's line of vision -- but there are some fantastic photographs hanging up next to the display.

I let in my parents on the Kwality Walls ice cream carts' best-kept secret: Butterscotch Cornetto ice cream cones. I started a wonderful novel, "The White Tiger," by Aravind Adiga. I learned how to play backgammon.

I am a happy girl.

Balconies and motorbikes in Goa

2009-01-19T00:19:00.004-05:00

These are the colors I can see: bright green, shining yellow, whitewash white, dusty red, and spotless blue. That's what Goa looks like -- or at least it's the view from the balcony of my room here. Z and I are staying on the top floor of a small house just a pathway's walk from the beach. Once we walk down that path, we come to the beachside restaurant (specialties: freshly caught fish, fruit juice and, strangely enough, noodles) and to the small collection of beach chairs that look out on the white sand and the perfect blue-green ocean.

If we don't want to look at the ocean, we can enjoy the fantastic collection of tourists. They come in all shapes, sizes, languages, and swimming suit preferences. And if even the tourist-watching fails to entertain, there's always the possibility that Z may take me for a joyride on the back of his rented motorbike. Yesterday we drove out through the fields and small towns, all the way to the backwaters and the villages of our part of Goa. We flew past pristine Portuguese churches and rows of shops selling elaborately-designed fabrics to foreigners, and in the evening, we drove to the almost-deserted beach just north of Colva to watch the sunset. Every night, we sit with my parents for hours at some beachside restaurant or other, consuming long dinners of fresh fish and vegetables, talking and laughing late into the dark when the stars have come out and already proceeded across the sky in arcs.

So that's Goa. The next few days may bring a trip to Gokarna (literally, "cow's ear") to soak up a very different beach scene, this one populated by Israelis and Hindu pilgrims. After that, it's down to Kerala for the boat rides and spice markets, and all of the restaurants there that make my mother so happy: it wouldn't be a family vacation if we didn't return to Kerala at least for a day or two.

A little magic

2009-01-14T00:24:00.002-05:00

It's been too long since my last update. There is a reason.

Almost as soon as I flew back to Delhi from Kolkata -- happy as a cow, and frankly so stuffed I felt like one, too -- I had to dash back to the airport to pick up my boyfriend, Z. He's taking a much-deserved vacation from his job(s) in Kabul, Afghanistan, and had actually been in India for a while already, relaxing in the South with a friend. We dropped his things off at our quirky, surprisingly luxurious hotel in Old Delhi, and went to stretch our legs on a long walk in the Lodi Gardens.

Our stroll reminded me of the first time I had ever been to the Lodi Gardens. It was the first time (well, the second, if you count the time when I was a baby) I traveled to India, and I was eleven years old. It was exactly this time of year, and the air was smoky and polluted and mysterious. That’s the particular Winter Delhi smell that settles upon the city in the evenings. My parents led me around the Lodi Gardens on that first night in Delhi; I still remember how its dark, murky, hulking, and eerily (yet undeniably) beautiful tombs mirrored the novel mix of fear, awe, and excitement churning inside me.

We’ve had some fantastic meals in the past few days, and that first afternoon and evening in Delhi brought two of them. One was a dahi wada (perhaps my favorite food in the whole world) and a masala dosa at Sagar, an understandably popular vegetarian joint in Defence Colony. The second consisted of a midnight sarson-ka-saag and makki-ki-roti at the Have More on Pandara Road – one of the only markets that’s still open for dining into the early hours of the morning, because apparently, entire Punjabi families (kids included) enjoy dinner at about 12:15AM. We arrived just in time for the rush.

Over the following few days, Z performed magic, juggled, and balanced large objects on his nose for groups of delighted kids at Salaam Baalak. In between shows, we explored Chandni Chowk, ate massive amounts of chaat at Haldiram’s, and climbed the tallest minaret of the Jama Masjid.

One night we visited the ornate – yet tranquil – Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, where Sikhs fell over themselves to help us find head coverings and give prashaad. It was the first gurudwara either of us had ever been inside, and it was nothing short of exquisite. The outside, with its immaculate reflecting pool, was perhaps even more so. The whole place shone with the well-wishes of the millions of Sikhs who pray there: just incredible.

And now we’re in Mumbai with my parents, just for a day before heading to Goa. Must be off! – Now that Mummy is here, there are about nine restaurants and food stalls on the agenda for today, and we’re already a meal behind.

Quickly in Calcutta

2009-01-03T10:08:00.003-05:00

Here's a short update from gorgeous, curious Kolkata, where I've spent the past week with A., one of my best friends from college, and the 15 some-odd members of her immediate family.

I get the sense that my trip to Calcutta was *not* that of the average tourist. In the past seven days, maybe one full day (split between two half-days) was devoted to traditional sightseeing. The other six days went to two noble pursuits: visiting family, and eating.

I really can't emphasize those enough. I've met so many Bengalis and eaten so much Bengali food that I feel as if I've been here a month. I've witnessed so much good-natured shouting and gesturing that I might even be starting to understand the Bengali language itself. All of A.'s family thinks of me as a sister, daughter, cousin, niece, grand-daughter. In the great Bengali naming tradition, I even have my own family nickname -- "Nelli". I've received presents and compliments and slaps and reprimands. A.'s little cousins sit on my lap and call me "Didi" (elder sister), and A.'s aunt Maima (so-called because she's the wife of A.'s mother's younger brother) literally pops sweets into my mouth with her right hand, feeding me like a baby. This is the biggest, kindest, craziest family into which I have ever been welcomed. Every day there's so much morning bustling and fussing that it takes hours for everyone to shower and leave the house; every evening there are so many relatives to visit that it's midnight, or later, before we return home again. In between, there have been endless traffic jams, nights at the disco (and don't think we left the family behind!), mall-hopping, a Hindi pop-rock concert, the nicest hotel in Calcutta, washing our feet in the Ganges, darshan of Kali Ma, and a magic show.

And everywhere -- *everywhere* -- there's food. I've been stuffed to the brim with elaborate home-cooked meals, spicy Indian-Chinese fusion food, dainty French pastries, rich and flavorful snacks, and mountains of Calcutta's famous sweets. I've probably gained about 10 pounds, each one a token of the way A.'s family has deeply cared for me over the past week.

What you never knew about the New Delhi Railway Station

2008-12-26T22:35:00.002-05:00

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?

2008-12-24T13:40:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-20T21:54:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-11T07:50:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-06T22:13:00.007-05:00

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"

2008-11-30T19:47:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-27T02:27:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-22T21:44:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-21T07:54:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-20T11:04:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-16T10:12:00.007-05:00

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

2008-11-12T04:36:00.003-05:00

...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!

2008-11-05T09:16:00.002-05:00

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

Aam, vayam saknomah! Yes, yes we can!

Pratidinam

2008-11-04T04:36:00.006-05:00

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

2008-11-03T08:35:00.002-05:00

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

2008-11-01T06:23:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-30T08:42:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-20T12:13:00.001-04:00

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

2008-10-19T11:41:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-14T10:23:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-12T06:22:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-06T05:20:00.011-04:00

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

2008-10-01T06:32:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-27T04:53:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-24T00:13:00.024-04:00

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.

Evening interlude

2008-09-23T10:25:00.005-04:00

Some things are too good not to be blogged about, so at the risk of overestimating my readers' interest to hear about my life here, I'm going to write about all the awesome things that happened in the last couple of hours. More on Jaipur to follow, I promise.

1. I walked to Khan Market. This is another thing that may not seem like a big deal -- and it probably isn't -- but for me, it's quite something. First of all, Delhi is not a walking city. There are either no sidewalks at all, or they're crowded with triple-parked cars, or they're just ridiculously busy. In my neighborhood, the first two definitely apply. As for the third: in several past experiences, there have been small crowds of young men who seem to be waiting around solely for the purpose of staring at foreign ladies. Still, since it was the early evening and the sun was still up but the heat was well under control, I decided to walk to Khan Market. (The embarrassment of taking an autorickshaw just two blocks -- really long blocks! -- down the street was also a deciding factor. I've already done that more than I would like, and at this point I just feel silly.) And so I actually did walk down the street to Khan Market. Not once was I bothered, or even stared at for longer than a few seconds. I don't know to what to attribute this wonderful change: perhaps it was because I was wearing a really long, black kurta and had my hair in a braid -- and thus could pass off, at least from the back or at a distance, for an Indian woman; perhaps it was because I just noticed the stares less, or cared less about them; perhaps it was because I was a woman walking alone, and couldn't possibly have been a tourist, what kind of weirdo tourist would do that? In any case, a walk in the cool evening felt wonderful.

2. I had an early dinner at the adorable (and overpriced, and touristy) Turtle Cafe above the Full Circle bookstore. I had (gasp!) a salad. Yes, at the Turtle Cafe they wash their lettuce and vegetables with purified water. Hey, tourism has done some great things for salad lovers in this country. I finished it off with a kiwi-cucumber smoothie. Fantastic.

3. Since I can't do laundry before I leave (one day is definitely not enough dhobi turnover time), I was forced -- forced -- to buy some more kurtas at the branch of FabIndia in Khan Market. But at less than ten dollars apiece, who's complaining? Ladies, listen good: if you want an outfit that is comfortable, flattering, and cheap, look no further than the kurta tops at FabIndia. They fit all shapes and sizes, hit at the not-too-conservative, not-too-flashy mid-thigh, come in three sleeve lengths, have a cute little dip in the neckline, and can make a pair of jeans look elegant. Best of all -- especially for the girl who likes to wear a single outfit in multiple colors (come on, repetition is reputation) -- they come in zillions of hues and patterns. Yes, FabIndia is probably the one place in the world (yes, yes, other than H&M, obviously) where I can feed my rather unfortunate but hopeless obsession with clothes.

4. As I was walking around the inside circle of Khan Market, I heard a loud, obnoxious autorickshaw-wallah yell "Hello! Hello! Hello! Madam! Hello! Hello! Madam! Hello!" and just as I was about to dismiss it as just another over-eager driver, I looked at his face. It was the same guy who drove me to the Old Delhi railway station and ripped me off so egregiously. I hope he was expecting me to smile and wave, because I mustered up the most contemptous facial expression I could imagine and shoved it in his direction. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that -- thankfully it was dark, so he couldn't see the details -- but he got the picture and drove the opposite way. I guess I had an opportunity to run after him and yell at him for cheating me, and (again, thankfully) I was too surprised to do anything beyond grimace. How strange.

5. Something stranger, also involving an autorickshaw. I was doing some friendly haggling (in my little Hindi) with a driver outside Khan Market for the short journey back, and just as I had given up and turned to find another rickshaw, this man stepped out of the first one. He was wearing cargo pants and a white tank top -- an older-ish man, muscled and fair, his gray hair buzzed close to his head. I assumed he was a tourist, but he spoke with an Indian accent. Or perhaps it was some other foreign accent, and I just didn't recognize it.

"Here," he smiles, "these are for you." And he held out a small bouquet of roses, the kind street kids try to sell you at intersections. They throw the roses in your lap, run away for a second, and then come back, hoping you'll pay them for the bouquet. Then they refuse to take the flowers back until the (usually long) light is about to turn green, and if you haven't paid up by then, they snatch the roses from your hands and run back to the curb. Anyway, this guy hands me flowers. And I look at him incredulously, like, are you serious?

"What, you don't like them?" He asks, with that smile. (Well, sir, they're quite pretty, but honestly this is like one of those moments at the airport when the security lady asks you if you've taken any packages from any unknown persons, and you really don't want to have to say yes. )

"They're beautiful but it's not necessary, really," I answer.

"No, please," he holds them out, "they're for you."

On the assumption that this is just a normal guy who didn't know what he was going to do with his Connaught Place intersection flowers, I take them. "Stay happy," he says. "Keep smiling."

Sure enough, he put a smile on my face. It's not every day a stranger gives you a bouquet of roses, just because he heard you haggling with a rickshaw driver in bad Hindi. I just hope they don't blow up any minute now-- but I performed a thorough investigation, and it seems like they're as harmless as they look.

That's right, folks: it's just another night here in Delhi.

Jaipur: Just getting there

2008-09-23T05:05:00.006-04:00

Few journeys feel more victorious than the autorickshaw ride from the Old Delhi railway station to one's hotel, having returned from a solo trip to Jaipur. Sitting in the back seat, bouncing around on the half-paved roads, gazing out at the clogged and sunset-golden city in rush hour, let me tell you: the Red Fort has never looked redder, the sari-clad ladies on the backs of motorcycles have never looked more beautiful, the age-lined faces of shoe shiners on the street have never looked more delicate. It was kind of a miracle that I got to Jaipur and back, given that I've never travelled in this country alone and don't speak a lick of Hindi. (Okay, that's an exaggeration: it wasn't *really* a miracle, and I do speak five words of Hindi.)

I wish I had had the courage to take a picture of the scene at the Old Delhi railway station, where I arrived on Friday afternoon scathing from the insulting, but all too understandable, experience of being wildly ripped off by an autorickshaw driver. The double fare that he charged me and the lies about the "closed roads" I wouldn't have minded so much if he hadn't snapped a few pictures of me with his cell phone as I got out of the back seat. He was so young and eager, and I hate to look permanently pissed off (as I have on so many trips here) -- not to mention that five dollars is nothing to pay, even when it should be two -- so I tried to smile and be nice. I only wish there were a kind, respectful way to let the driver know that while I don't mind paying a little bit more because I'm a foreigner, lying to me and taking pictures of me makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Suggestions are welcome.

Anyway, it all kind of melted away when I walked into the railway station. It's this amazing place. "Tons of people" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's more like tons of everything, everywhere: whole families sleeping on the floor of the main hall and on the platforms, people pushing and shoving in ticket lines a mile long, chaos in the parking lot with taxis and rickshaws driving every which way, animals scrounging for food, vast piles of luggage (all calmly balanced on the heads of coolies), fuzzy announcements over the loudspeaker in an indecipherable mix of English and Hindi, chai-wallahs and samosa-wallahs and cutlet-wallahs and special-coffee-wallahs and Mountain-Dew-wallahs hawking their goods, bright saris and jeweled salwar kameez and tight jeans (faded in all the wrong places) abundant, and one old woman inadvertently exposing a breast as she stuggled to balance a load of vegetables on her head while descending the staircase on the wrong side. The best part of all is that no one -- not a single person -- harrassed, bothered, or even noticed the little white girl who was totally lost and confused looking for her train to Jaipur.

Finally I found the giant board that listed all of the departing trains and their platforms. Thank goodness I can read Devanagiri script (thank you, Sanskrit!) because the electronic chart kept on switching from English to Hindi. Platform 16, however, turned out to be more elusive than expected. I scoured the station for a sign to Platform 16, but all the signs and overpasses only led to Platforms 1-15. I felt like Harry Potter in King's Cross, looking for Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

"Bhai sahib," I said to one chai seller, "ek question hain. Platform sixteen kahan hain?" (Brother-sir, there is one question. Platform 16 where is?)

"Aage, aage, beti," (Over there, over there, little girl) he said, and pointed to an entirely different branch of the railway station -- one I hadn't even noticed before. So I walked down the street and into Old Delhi railway station, Part II.

Finally I saw a sign for my beloved Platform 16. The train, the Delhi-Ahmedabad Ashram Express, was waiting right there. The next challenge was finding my coach, A1, before the train left the station. This I did, after walking the length of the train and growing progressively more worried that my coach didn't exist. Thankfully it was at the very end of the train. I grabbed a three-rupee cup of tea from the chai man on the platform, boarded the train, and found my berth. Since the Ashram Express is a sleeper train, each berth has two levels of cushioned lengths on which to lie. Until people actually go to bed, though, all four people in the berth just sit on the two lower "beds". It's really comfortable. They give you pillows and blankets.

I shared my compartment with an older couple -- he a Muslim in traditional garb, she a Hindu reading a biography of the popular guru-saint Sai Baba. (One of those "only in India" sights.) There was also a younger, rounder man who alternately read film gossip magazines and yelled in English at coworkers over his cell phone for calling meetings without his permission. I fell asleep as soon as the train started to move. A little while later, the young guy poked me and used his good English to tell me that the old man had bad knees, and would I agree to take the upper bed so that he could use the bottom one? Of course. So I climbed up there and fell asleep again. First, however, I set the alarm on my cell phone so that my worst India nightmare wouldn't come true: missing my stop on the train. I shouldn't have worried -- it was so freezing in there with the air conditioning blasting right in my face that I woke up every twenty minutes on the dot.

When I got to Jaipur, my friend S was there to meet me at the station. Bless her, this tiny American woman wearing a traditional salwar kameez with gigantic purple patiala pants (otherwise known as Aladdin pants). She spewed Hindi at the autorickshaw drivers until they agreed to charge us the regular, non-foreigner-inflated price. And then we rode through the streets of Jaipur in the night until we arrived at her apartment, a spacious place with high ceilings in a quiet, upper-middle class neighborhood. We ate her delicious home-cooked Indian food, watched an episode of "Friends" on her laptop screen, and passed out, exhausted.

I know this isn't really much of an accomplishment, this whole thing, but it sure felt like one to me. More to follow soon, complete with photos this time, about the rest of the weekend.

Travels and travails

2008-09-19T01:08:00.002-04:00

This is the picture on the wall of my room at the India International Centre in Delhi -- auspicious, no? That crow looks a little pudgy to me. Perhaps it's been fed by all of the walkers, picnickers, and "laughers" (people who laugh for therapy; it's kind of cultish, really) in the Lodhi Gardens.

And indeed, the journey across the earth has been eventful. It started with my spending the night in a hotel in Newark, New Jersey, because my flight was at 8AM and my parents would have had to drive me from the city at 4AM to get there. Well, I got up at 4:30AM and took the hotel shuttle--along with a huge, raucous Lebanese family--to the airport. I stood in line to check in, handed in my passport, and --

"Ma'am, have you changed your name?"

"No."

"Have you bought your ticket yet?"

"Yes. Two months ago."

"We don't have you listed."

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I frantically handed the nice lady a copy of my itinerary from Orbitz.com, whereupon she raised her eyebrows, smirked, and pointed to some small print on the bottom.

"Ma'am, your flight leaves from JFK."

Note: thank goodness it was so early in the morning, because if I had had my wits about me and realized the gravity of the situation -- namely that I am completely incapable of traveling alone and should be locked up in a prison for unbelievably absent-minded individuals -- I would have broken down and cried right there. However, having had zero cups of coffee that morning, I calmly informed her that I was "freaking out," and could she help me?

Of course, the mess-up deserves some explanation. For those of you who were not with me during the two hours one early morning in July when I went to Orbitz.com and booked a ticket to India, just know that there are lots of flights to India that look very, very alarmingly similar. Most leave at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, arrive in London later that evening, and connect to flights that leave from Heathrow at 10PM to go to New Delhi. In my total indecision about which flight to pick -- and general confusion about this whole trip -- I chose a flight that left from JFK, but somehow thought I had picked a flight from Newark. Given the multiple confirmation e-mails that Orbitz.com sent me over the past two months, there is absolutely no excuse for doing what I did. But at least there is an explanation.

And, realizing how I made this mistake in the first place, I was relieved. Everything was going to be okay. There was, clearly, a 7:30AM flight leaving from Newark: it was the one I intended to book in the first place. I could get on it, or at least get on standby. It was even the same airline. So I paid a minimal fee, got an aisle seat, and flew to London on a virtually empty plane. Shaken by my apparently wild incompetence, I watched two movies that took my mind off of it: "The Kite Runner" and "Happy-Go-Lucky." I recommend both, should you be on a transatlantic flight with nothing to think about but your own utter incapability to do anything properly. Really, though, after everything, the flight was pretty idyllic.

Things continued to go well at Heathrow, where my beloved Terminal 3 was unnaturally empty. I went through connecting flight security with absolutely no waiting in line. When I got in the queue at Starbucks to enjoy my last cup of non-Nescafe coffee, the man in line before me had a voucher from his airline (he was delayed five hours) and bought me a cup of coffee. People are fantastic.

Unfortunately, that was when my troubles started again, and I'll keep this one short. I spilled coffee on my white shirt, got up to run to the nearest duty free and get a souvenir tee shirt to wear on the plane, realized once I had circled the duty free unsuccessfully that I had left my yoga mat at Starbucks, ran back to Starbucks where they were calling security because of an abandoned package, convinced the men at Starbucks that I wasn't a terrorist, got my yoga mat, went back to the "Glorious Britain" souvenir shop, and found a very ugly, ill-fitting long-sleeved tee shirt that says "City of London, England." I went to change in the ladies' room and shortly found myself sitting in the waiting area wearing a horrendously ugly tee shirt and feeling, yet again, rather silly.

Yet again, my flight was blissful. The plane was empty (people, fly Virgin Atlantic!!) and the people on it were far more interesting. Lots of large Indian men who, when asked whether they wanted chicken or vegetarian, answered "both, and some juice and coffee and tea, too." I had a whole row to myself, and slept like a baby. We arrived in Delhi at the sane hour of 11AM. The airport had been renovated since my last visit, there was no line to go through customs, and the place was deserted -- very, very few international flights land during the day. I took a taxi to "Lodhi Road" (technically Max Mueller Marg, after the nineteenth century "Orientalist" German scholar), and my driver only tried once -- and rather halfheartedly, at that -- to take me to a hotel run by his "cousin".

Successes of the first two days: finding the picture of the crow in my room, picking up my train tickets to go to Jaipur (today!), taking several autorickshaws without accident, miraculously escaping the monsoon downpours, finding out I actually have an apartment to live in when I get to Pune, sorting through beautiful clothes at FabIndia (actually located next to the market which was bombed only a few days ago), and having idly-sambar-chutney for breakfast.

Amazing. Jai Hind!

Occidental pastries

2008-09-16T00:51:00.015-04:00

A. and I completed our Goodbye New York Pilgrimage with some faithful prayer at the shrine of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. (Have you noticed that most of my blog thus far has been devoted to food? I should really get a life. And show some consideration for those who are fasting Ramadan.) Barnard girls, Columbia students, residents of Morningside Heights, and certain well-travelled individuals may well be informed about the glorious Hungarian Pastry Shop. For all the rest of you, just know that one doesn't really go there for the pastries. Aside from the excellent pumpkin pie (thanks for the tip, K.!), the goods have been sitting around for a while -- and even if they weren't, I'm afraid they still wouldn't be a rave party on the tongue.

Eddie Said might have something to say (and perhaps did say something) about the arrangement of the pastries under the glass counter of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. On the right side of the counter are the cheesecakes, pumpkin pies, chocolate ganaches, and tiramisus. On the left side of the counter -- separated by a metal barrier -- are the baklava, poppyseed rolls, hamentaschen, and other "exotic" (hee hee) Eastern European/Middle Eastern sweets. Last year, as A. and I were making our pilgrimage to the Hungarian Pastry Shop before I departed for a summer program in Jordan, we ordered a tiramisu. At that moment, I had the unfortunate lack of discretion to say something along the lines of "You always choose the western ones." To this day, I have had no peace from A. for making such a hoity-toity (and probably intellectually misguided) comment. Oh dear.

All this to say: here are some pictures of the orientalist pastry cases. These, as you can see, picture "the western ones."

But as I said, you don't really go there for the pastries. You go there because it's right across from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (the world's largest Gothic cathedral, I think). You go there to sit outside at the sidewalk tables and drink Moroccan tea while either freezing to death or suffocating of the heat, depending on the season. You go there to relish the warmth (if winter) or cool (if summer) of the indoors, because the place insulates like no other. You go there to sit at one of the tables that are crowded so close together that there's no way it isn't a fire hazard. You go there to watch tons -- I mean, *tons* -- of intellectual types read books in lots of different languages and chug down black coffee. You go there to eavesdrop of the conversations of said intellectual types. You go there to see what said intellectual types are wearing.

I go there for the bathroom. To be precise, I go there for the bathroom walls (and ceiling and floor), upon which are scrawled feminist/communist/capitalist manifestos, declarations of freedom/gender/being, extended debates about Israel and Palestine, and rather juicy gossip. To anyone who's ever had the joy of reading what's written in the middle stall of the girls' bathroom in Adams House: darling, the Hungarian Pastry Shop is your Paradise.

Here are some treasures.

NYC, I will miss you.

2008-09-13T23:35:00.009-04:00

Today, A. and I embarked on the same pilgrimage we undertake every time one of us is leaving New York City for an extended period of time. We eat at the overpriced, not-so-good Popover Cafe and convince the (alternately surly/flamboyant) waiter to take a picture of us.

Then we walk and walk. This time we made it as far as H&H bagels (see photo of A. with a pack of lox), where we loitered for a while because of the air conditioning and amazing bagel smell.

We hopped on the subway -- also, thankfully, air conditioned, but not nearly as sweet-smelling -- and got off at 14th Street. We wandered around Greenwich Village, where we found some statues (see picture) and some well-dressed junkies (too embarrassed to take a picture).

We also found a bar with a special name: The Stoned Crow. I will not speculate on the meaning of this particular name, except that it must have been incredibly auspicious for us to have found it on this particular venture downtown.

We continued on to a massive street fair in Little Italy--I have never seen so much meat and pastry in one place--and then to the inevitable Babycakes for the inevitable frosting shot. For those of you who don't know what a Babycakes frosting shot is:

1. It is a crying shame that you are so unenlightened.
2. Babycakes is a vegan, gluten-free, spelt-tastic bakery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the pastries actually taste like real food. It is incredible. You can ask anyone who has been there. The website is www.babycakesnyc.com.
3. Babycakes, while famous for its beautiful cupcakes / muffins / brownies / cookies, is especially famous for its secret-recipe frosting. The only thing we know about the frosting is that it's sweetened with agave nectar (??) and that it's *amazing*. And because it's vegan, well, it must be good for you.
4. Erin McKenna, the genius behind the Babycakes empire, knew her fan base. So she decided to make it possible for customers to purchase tablespoon-sized portions of the unbelievable Babycakes frosting. They squirt it right out of the funnel and into tiny paper cups. Today, the frosting was purple.
5. These frosting shots, by the way, cost $1.50 each. This would be utter highway robbery for regular frosting, but trust me, at Babycakes it's totally worth it.
6. Also, Erin McKenna was in Babycakes while we were there today. I was so high on frosting that I didn't see her, but A. was smart enough to snap a picture of "my frosting shot" that caught the estimable Ms. McKenna in the background. Unfortunately, it's really blurry. My one brush with celebrity: blurry. Thanks.

And so it is with the taste of agave nectar on my tongue that I must get down to sorting out what I need to take with me for the next seven months in India, and -- more importantly -- what I don't. Wish me luck!

And 14 hours later...

2008-09-10T13:31:00.005-04:00

Two days at the Indian consulate, and this is what I have to show for it. Isn't it beautiful?

Here is another morsel from www.sanskritquoteoftheday.com--yes, I should be purchasing industrial-strength insect repellant and starting to pack instead of perusing Sanskrit quotes of the day from the past three years--but this one is actually relevant to this post, if sappy.

वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्।

"[My] household is indeed the world."
-- Maha Upanishad 6.71

"U goin out 2nite?"

2008-09-07T14:19:00.015-04:00

This weekend I exchanged many parting words, celebrating my last hurrahs by going to see "Hair" in Central Park (a friend and I woke up at 5 in the morning to wait for tickets), travelling to Cambridge to bid farewell to my wonderful friends and teachers, and "going out" at Wesleyan with my best friend A.

Each event of the weekend struck a chord that resonated with a particular part of my life. "Hair," for example, was the first real musical in which I was ever cast -- at the tender age of twelve. (I don't see why parents don't give their teenagers a copy of the libretto to "Hair" instead of "Our Bodies, Ourselves.") Seeing it in the Park, remembering every single lyric (and there are many of them), I felt some of the same blithe freedom that "Hair" brought to me eight years ago. What's more, I saw the play with a friend whom I've actually known since I was seven: we danced together for a long time in the City and, years later, found each other at Harvard. The whole 24-hour event took me back to the years when I was on the verge of teenager-dom, and in many ways, I feel the same anticipation -- both excitement and fear -- about the coming year that I felt about adulthood when I was at that age.

And Cambridge, of course, had its own Cambridge feel. There's not much to say on this score. For me, at least now, it's a total clash of extremes: the people there inspire me to improve *and* make me happy with where I am; just looking at red brick, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I'm trapped in Lamont Library at four in the morning with a giant cup of coffee and half a response paper to write. Aside pictures the view from (what would have been!) my room this year.

By far the most wonderful part of the weekend was visiting A. at Wesleyan. While it was quite the adventure to get there and back (Middletown-New Haven taxi drivers are fascinating!), the trip was well worth the added effort. On Friday night we "went out"--as they say--to various parties attended by girls in strappy black dresses and bearded men in flannel. Where the gigantic lawn gatherings and balcony soirees are hiding at Harvard is a mystery to me. It was an excellent time, truly topped only by the 2AM falafel sandwich that A. and I shared from the falafel cart perched at the edge of the main quad. "Do you want hot sauce?" asked the nice veiled lady making our sandwich. "Bring it on!" we enthused: such a bad choice. But flaming mouths aside, really, it was a fantastic falafel.

The party continued the following morning, when A. and I dined on massive breakfasts at O'Rourke's diner in "bustling downtown Middletown". This was followed by a personal (though rainy) tour of the gorgeous Wes campus, where it is indeed possible to buy 12-year aged balsamic vinegar and homemade pizza dough at the student grocery store.

As A. so aptly noted: "They know their audience." Excuse me while I transfer.

Happy Ramadan!

2008-09-02T01:28:00.003-04:00

That's just it: wishing all our Muslim friends a blessed month of Ramadan. (Actually it started yesterday, but still.)

Cool fact: this evening, sitting with a friend by the Hudson River, I saw the crescent moon rise over scenic New Jersey.

Crow pose

2008-09-01T04:32:00.004-04:00

Today in yoga class I was able to hold crow pose -- the pose that I want to reach more than anything else in the world, even more than, say, headstand or a full caturanga -- for a whole two seconds. It was fantastic. Crows have figured into my life a great deal recently. I once read that the Sanskrit student should strive to become like the crow in her alertness, attention to detail, and readiness to pounce. I saw many, *many* crows while I was in Michigan, just out riding my bike. They scared me. (Think the universe was telling me to study those noun declensions? Yup.) There is, of course, the fat crow. And now there is crow pose, which doesn't make me act (or look) like a crow, but which I have been working on for a long time. As much as I wish I were Nell Gwynn --the first actress on the English stage--in a past life, I'm starting to think I might have been a crow. Not the coolest of animals, but at least it can fly.

Many, many other small special things happened to me this weekend. People that I had been thinking about completely randomly (like my eighth grade math teacher) showed up on the street the same day; I saw a magic trick; I found myself in Times Square twice; old friends from Michigan slept over; I walked to Brooklyn and back; I saw a friend whom I haven't seen in a long time; I learned that another friend is engaged to be married. I even saw the hilarious 'Hamlet 2.'

It doesn't sound like much, but for me, this weekend--jammed with all kinds of small and wonderful and bizarre things--has lasted forever.

Check this out

2008-08-30T09:00:00.005-04:00

Here's Maya, the *other* Harvard girl who decided to take a year off and away. Read her blog about learning opera and vocal performance in beautiful Milan, Italy.

http://mayasmilan.blogspot.com

Up north

2008-08-23T00:19:00.006-04:00

My "year off" is actually a bit more than that -- including this summer, it's more like fifteen months off, the most recent two weeks of which I have spent in the corner of northern Michigan. This is the Congregational Summer Assembly, a religious retreat (for hard-core Congregationalist families) founded by my great-grandfather and five of his seminary buddies in 1901. Basically, the same families have been coming here for the same hundred-or-so years. So because I'm departing for Home Sweet New York City tomorrow, and because I have nothing more interesting to write about, here is a picture of pristine Crystal Lake, upon which the CSA is located.

There are wonderful things to do up north. For example, you can grab a bottle of the thirty-year-old biodegradable shampoo that's lying under the deck and wash your hair in the lake. You can drive up to Elberta (the town next door) for a cup of fantastic coffee from the Trick Dog cafe. My mother is fond of stalking the Amish family that sells its products at the Elberta Farmers' Market. You can take a bike ride without a helmet. You can play ping-pong and off-key piano in the Assembly building. You can go see a production of the annual CSA Operettas -- one featuring adults and one featuring children every summer. Now you can go on the internet and watch TV, though these are very new-fangled. (You can't, however, have a cell phone conversation.) Best of all, you can greet everyone you see on the street, even if you don't know each other. It's amazing up here. Also, the soft-serve ice cream selection is vast.

Weeks at the lake are subject to elaborate planning schemes along the lines of "I will wake up at 6am every day, watch the sun rise, go for a bird watch, eat roots and seeds for breakfast, and then sit down to some Sanskrit verb paradigms." Actually, maybe I am the only one who plans things like this. In any case -- I did not accomplish any of the above. So if you can get over the guilt of not really doing *anything* for two weeks straight, this is a beautiful place to be. For the guilty and unproductive, it is a mix of peace and torture. The most useful thing I did was go to a book sale at the local public library (where I diligently shelved books two summers ago!) and add to my growing collection of orientalist literature. Treasures: "The Asiatics" (1935) and "Coromandel!: A Novel" (1955). And I read one chapter in my Sanskrit textbook, which is a start.

But as we say in the Yogasutra (courtesy of the fantastic www.sanskritquoteoftheday.com) --

स्थीरसुखमासनम्। प्रयत्नशैथिल्यानन्तसमापत्तिभ्याम्।
"Asana is steady pleasantness. Asana is perfected by relaxation of activity and the dawn of unboundedness."

And here are my steady and pleasant parents at the Trick Dog cafe.

Eye candy

2008-08-20T03:10:00.009-04:00

A delectable visual preview of some of the places I will be traveling this year.

Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi

Amber Fort, Jaipur

"Zooming Luxury Bus," Pune

The ever-beautiful Anthy's Guest House, Goa

The Shri Radha Rahman temple in Vrindavana

And finally, Jerusalem.

Two love poems

2008-08-19T14:12:00.005-04:00

One about human love, and one about the Sanskrit language.

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

--Robert Frost, "Meeting and Passing"

केयूराणि न भूषयन्ति पुरुषं हारा न चन्द्रोज्ज्वला
न स्नानं न विलेपनं न कुसुमं नालं्कृता मूर्धजाः।
वाण्येका समलंकरोति पुरुषं या संस्कृता धार्यते
क्षीयन्ते खलु भूषणानि सततं वाग्भूषनं भूषनम्।।
--भर्तृहरि

Armbands do not adorn a person, nor necklaces bright as the moon / Nor baths, nor fragrances, nor flowers, nor ornamented hair. / Speech alone adorns a person, when one holds it in a refined (samskrta) form. / Ornaments waste away, of course, but the ornament of speech remains a true ornament.
--Bhartrhari