Pop Quiz #3

Choose the true statement:

a) On a recent train trip, I think I became engaged to a young man named Naveen. My Hindi’s not that great, but he kept giving me jewelry and talking about next weekend.

b) One of the things I love about my current corner of this round earth is that the religions work sensuality into them—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism…there is always something extra for the senses, be it incense, sacred fruit offerings that you get to eat, colored powder to throw at everyone and everything... It makes me think that the religions that focus on the soul to the exclusion of the body might have missed something.

c) I fell asleep on a bus to a village I’ve forgotten how to pronounce, and was awoken by a man poking my arm all over. At first I was ready to start throwing punches until I realized he was counting my freckles.

d) All of the above

Before I came, everyone was always telling me that to live in India would be a great adventure. And, lordy, it has been. You all have read so many of my stories, seen my pictures, and occasionally received a phone call from tomorrow (I love time zones!). I've seen gorgeous things, broken my heart over the not-so-gorgeous, come up with observations that sound profound but quite possibly mean jack (when looking over the tallest waterfall in India, I said to myself "Water always changes color when it falls long distances." Seemed profound at the time) and eaten the longest-running string of fantastic food in my whole life.

One of the funniest things about India, though, is the running conversation I've been having with her people about what it means to be Indian. No other place I've ever been has had a citizenry so caught up with their various concepts of the character (or even existence) of a national identity...or so willing to talk about it. Maybe it's because I've never been to a country with so many living people who remember its beginning. To relay those conversations would, frankly, take too long and quite possibly be boring for you. So I'll limit it to this...as I've been here longer, many conversations have included various claims on how Indian I am. If I'm late, I'm Indian. If I do something good for other people, I'm Indian. If I unconsciously use certain phrases, I'm Indian. But if I want to buy something, I'm definitely a foreigner and will be expected to pay 2-3 times normal price.

It used to not bother me so much. I'd either haggle down or realize it was only 30 cents to me and frankly I can afford that...but the longer I live here, the less patience I have with the various doubletriplequadruple standards, especially the ones that do not apply to me--I get away with a lot as a white woman, and I shouldn't. Part of that is just the old childhood instinct--"that's not fair." But I actually think more of it is that as I live here longer, I feel more and more a part of this country, and it's frankly hurtful when I can't convey that. Even writing this post, I had difficulty thinking of observations to share because I can't quite remember what I'm supposed to think of as "normal" or "different." It's not just that I know some Hindi words now or that I dress in semi-Indian clothes. It's that the very texture of my skin has changed, the taste on my lips when I lick them in the heat, the fact that I can't get hungry before 8 p.m., that nodding my head now includes several previously unknown variations on that simple gesture, that simple American things like Cub Foods have to be explained to me before I remember what it's like to be in my own country.

My own country. That phrase has gotten a lot more complicated.

Pop Quiz #2

Choose the correct conversation snippet:

a) "Mirrors? I can't stand 'em! And besides...other people have headlights." Friend with a motorcycle who had ripped off the mirrors on it. Not sure what he'll say when he gets run over by a water buffalo. Will keep you posted.

b) "Now is the time to SWASHBUCKLE"--in my notebook in class. Not sure who wrote it because my brain had shut down due to terminal boringness

c) "No matter what you do, I will not be happy." Professor Chandran in giving us our term paper assignment. An inspiration to all future teachers, I can assure you.

d) All of the above

India is full of "what the..." moments. My most recent was when I was walking back from the Children's Home I work at when a strange man hauled off and hit me on the arm with a bag of vegetables. What? Or it's more difficult to get the paperwork to leave the country than it is to get into it. Huh? Or climbing a lovely mountain only to find a vendor selling the chance to shoot BBs at soda bottles once the view got old. Say what?

Some of them aren't always funny, though. For instance, the most common "what the" feeling I have is about children. Indian children seem to be nailed to opposite ends of the childhood spectrum. They're either insanely pampered and can therefore look forward to a future as a totally obnoxious human being...or they spend every moment from the time they can walk desperately struggling not to starve to death. Dirty children forced to beg on the streets become dirty young people carrying their younger siblings around to beg once they're no longer "cute,” then are married off to some stranger in order to repeat the cycle of poverty and hopelessness. It is so DAMN HARD. It seems there are so few kids who have what I in all my arrogance would term a solid normal childhood...you know, where you're loved and fed but not given so much attention as to ruin you. And after spending so much time trying to plug up the cracks in the systems so kids can change their future in America...it's even more galling to see that the systems here don't have cracks...because many of those systems just don't exist or are so confusing that they're nearly impossible to navigate. When your country holds a 6th of the world’s population, over a billion people...it seems to be nearly impossible to look after any of them..not enough money, even though to be rich in India is to live in a luxury I've never seen anywhere else.

All the foreigners in India are always rejoicing in how cheap life is here. You can get great things, great luxury services, for incredibly small amounts of money. But life is cheap in more ways than one. Life is cheap because so few seem to value it in other people. Even people I volunteer with, ostensibly kind and honorable citizens, will holler at the busboy or the driver for no apparent reason, as if the nature of their job determines the worth of their life. I was in an auto rickshaw coming home to the university, and we almost hit an old woman. She jumped out of the way...right into the path of a motorcycle which hit her with the worst sound I've ever heard. The basket of grain she was carrying (this was not a rich woman wandering around in the middle of the night I can assure you) scattered all over the road, mixing with the headlight of the motorcycle as it lay on top of her, still running.

And the auto rickshaw driver Wouldn't. Even. Stop. He wouldn't stop. I was screaming at him in my angriest Hindi, then switched to English because I didn't know how else to express my horror anymore. And he wouldn't stop. Later, my friends explained to me it was probably because of what would follow a scene like that---the driver of the motorcycle would probably get beaten up, even though it wasn't really his fault, and there would likely be a riot. I never found out, because the death of a poor working woman in the middle of the city was not enough to make the news.

Pop Quiz #1

One of the side effects of studying English in India, aside from various gastrointestinal disorders, is a growing inclination for outlandish and mildly literary statements and a compulsion to phrase observations in the form of test questions.

Complete the following phrase:

Still I....

a) Can't get used to getting stared at by dudes. It's happened nearly every day for months, and it still makes me uncomfortable

b) Love eating food with my fingers, be it rice, casserole, dal, bread, or gravy. Love. It. I'm pretty sure I'll refuse to go back to utensils.

c) Kind of stink at Hindi but now at least sound like a demented 5-year-old and can get my point across.

d) Get a kick out of how straight Indian men behave exactly like stereotypical gay American man. Man, they cannot get enough of each other.

e) All of the above

Outlandish Metaphor

Living in India is kind of like putting on a sari, the traditional female dress which consists of 6 yards of cloth folded and occasionally tucked into a petticoat...and that's all that holds it up. Somehow, this attire manages to be appropriate to all types of functions--insanely elegant parties, professional occasions, and hard physical labor. At first glance, it's gorgeous...like India. Upon closer examination, you see that things we keep hidden in the West are very much exposed, and vice versa. Then you try to figure it out by yourself and it's confusing as hell...like India. And when you really think about it, the entire structure of the garment depends on one thing (the petticoat), which you can't even see. Gradually, though, the folds and twists start to make sense, but only with the help and friendship of people who live here...like India.

Bonus Poem I'm Inflicting on You:

Like a sari,
India
Dazzles at first glance
then confuses
Hides many things
and exposes
The dazzle-glamour
held up by the unseen work-a-day

Chutney Impressions

Sometimes I think I love India because I don't know how else to react. A few observations to which I can tie no stories:

• One of the things that I encounter every day is the concept of things lost in translation. For example, when we were visiting a museum in Pune, Friend and I quite enjoyed reading the captions below the artifacts. A sampling:

Item	Caption
Hatchet	A weapon (really?)
A Hanging Pot	Cords for the string (…what?)
The only exit from the building	No Entry
Just read the caption	Erotic Nut-Cutters
A fork	A spoon

• It's pretty easy for me as a native English speaker to get a good laugh out of these, but now I always seem to hear Salman Rushdie's words in my head: He said that of course there are many things lost in translation, but that there are also many things to be gained. And I agree.

• Today, I got crapped on by an extremely exotic bird.

• Even after being around an exceedingly large number of yoga-rific people, meditation still eludes me. The closest I come is being on a train. As the pitter-pat train rain that is monsoon travel rattles its way through the country, my mind slows as I watch little boys hanging out the train doors, surf-singing, shoeless and skinny. Births and berths intermingle and forty hours pass before I realize I’ve covered a semi-continent.

• I went to the Jungle and saw wild tigers. Oh, and it was the Actual Jungle Book Jungle. Oh, and I got to dance with a remote jungle tribe around a fire. I held hands with a little girl, and as we smiled at each other without words and danced, I didn’t know if she was leading or if I was. The next day we went looking for tigers, with nary a one to be found. And yet, sitting in peace with the ghost of Mowgli, there was a silent magic just knowing they were there.

• One of my favorite things to do in India is work at an orphanage. I love those kids...they're adorable and I don't have to make them fill out paperwork. On Sundays, I try to bring some other college friends with me so that more kids get attention. Last Sunday, as I was singing songs to the 12 children in my lap, I looked up and saw a lot of kids with formerly bleak lives getting love and affection from adults from America, Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, India, Norway and Sri Lanka. Sometimes, I apparently live in an after-school special.

• As I was trying to get on the plane to Thailand, I was told I couldn't go because I had left my residency certificate in Hyderabad (still paperwork is the bane of my existence). All my newly-learned swear words flooded through my head and I was in a panic. And then, through a combination of crying, phone calls, fax machines, and very nice people, I somehow got on the plane. It was so typically India: a stupid bureaucratic detail can completely screw you over, and then 6 people in two states will frantically work to help you break the rules. Oh, India.

• On the train ride back to Hyderabad, I shared a compartment with 60 college-bound, 19-year-old boys, all of whom insisted on having an oddly Russian-esque dance party for almost the entire 16 hours. Except one, who tried to convert me.

• One of the things you find out in India is where your lines are. What will you tolerate, and what will you not. It's as if I had drawn those lines with a big piece of chalk long ago, and I had thought the dust left behind were my lines. But the wind and the sweat and the monsoon have pushed that dust away...and shown me that the wide lines of dust were simply on top of thin lines drawn in indelible ink. And so in some ways I have become a much more tolerant person. And in some ways I will tolerate much less.

Adventures Adjacent to Matrimony

I want to die.

I want the festering stone of curry and bread and the 1978-90 rice crops of Southeast Asia to finishing gaining sentience and claw its way out of the gasping, convulsed hole that is my stomach and leave me be. Once I can fit through my door again, I am going to kill Vijay.

Vijay, with whom I've shared several brief and awkward phone conversations, recently drove 50 km to hand-deliver an invitation to his sister's wedding. When I arrived the next day, I was immediately forced to sit in the very front row, displacing grandmothers and other dignified and closely-related-looking figures. Keep in mind the fact that I still don’t know the names of the people getting married. The bit of the ceremony that I caught through the blasting Bollywood music and the massive crowd always gathered around the alter was lovely--the bride and groom took turns pouring rice, grain, and jewels over each other and saying things in…Sanskrit? The rest of us hurled rice at them as hard as we could--seriously, I think maybe they’re trying to physically harm the new couple to let them know that marriage is no picnic. I’m also pretty sure I accidentally cursed the bride by hurling rice at her with my left (gasp) hand. I was immediately assured by my colleague Ram and his wife that it was ok, but Indians love lying to foreigners, so I remain unconvinced.

Either way, we began the number one Indian party ritual: eating oneself into oblivion. Foreigners are at a distinct disadvantage during this particular tradition, as people REALLY like feeding foreigners. At one point, I had 7 waiters, 2 Rotarians, an in-law who only spoke Telugu, AND the bride all trying to get me to eat more. I was sweating and snotting and emitting extraordinarily undignified noises when they finally stopped putting food on my plate…and dragged me over to the dessert table, where they made me try everything. After I was almost weeping blood, Ram then took me to another wedding to which I had no connection…where I had to eat MORE so as not to be rude or inauspicious. This is why people kill over religion.

The next day, Ram sent me a text message asking me to have an affair with him. I then discovered one of the best things about Hinduism—if you are angry, you can put the fear of WAY more than one god in someone.

Slices of India

I don't think I've much of a soul left. It's scattered all over the subcontinent, held hostage by elements anguished and absurd.

Darjeeling, a hill station famous for tea and Tibetan refugees in the Himalayan mountains, took a disproportionate part of my immortal me. A trip to Darjeeling is a trip through so many ages and aspects of India. It involves stopping in Calcutta, where rickshaws are still pulled by people. It involves seeing people from all over India trying tea in houses that are still reminiscent of the British Raj. Through slices of fog you can see the Himalayan Mountains. Then the fog shifts and you see a community of Tibetan refugees (I hate China). The fog shifts again and you see a grillion point five posters of Prashant Tamang, winner of Indian Idol. A final shift shows a Nepali woman walking up hills that leave me gasping for air, only she is carrying a 50-kilo bag on her head and walking at twice my pace. Darjeeling reflects the incredible mixing pot of India, the chutney of culture that ensures you had best keep your sense of wonder handy wherever you go. You will need it often.

On the way to Darjeeling, my French friend Sam managed to change his pants in the middle of a restaurant. In his sleep that night, he mistook my friend Bobby for his girlfriend, an experience from which Bobby has still not recovered.

But then the fog shifts again, and laughter gives way to something quite different.

As part of my Rotary duties, I got to vaccinate children against Polio. Every day I leave campus, I see people whose lives have been permanently marred by polio, people condemned to a life of lying on the road showing their pain, depending on the humanity of hundreds of people who walk by--humanity that so often goes undemonstrated. Their spines look like punctuation--question marks, ampersands, and tortured brackets. My bones quivered inside my skin as I inoculated children when the consequences of no vaccine were so poignantly around me.

And so the fog shifts once more, and we're left with the frankly nonsensical.

Nagarjuna Sagar, home to one of the largest dams in Asia and college town of my sociopathic postmodern ex-friend, Surya Raju. He said he wanted to show me some Bhuddist monuments, waterfalls, and a fun boat. Instead, he misrepresented my deepest held beliefs to everyone we met, introduced me to a professor who proceeded to confess that his wife no longer "cooperated" with him, then coerced me into speaking at a general assembly of 150 students . . . only male students ages 19-22. I was covered from ankle to elbow and still felt naked. One student said that "itwasaverynicespeechyouaresobeautiful." I suggested that he might just think that because I was the first non-family woman he'd seen for months, possibly years. He just stared at me.

I'm not sure sarcasm translates particularly well.

Since then, Surya Raju has written me a foot-long poem expressing his pain that I have completely stopped speaking to him. He also inexplicably offered me his kidney.

Ind-ventures (Please. Just this once. Let me pun.)

My new policy is to only pose for pictures if someone lets me hold a baby.

You see, somewhere deep within the Indian psyche is a near-uncontrollable devotion to Hospitality Towards Strangers. It's lovely--when it's not deeply disturbing. When said Indian has no recourse to provide hospitality to firangs (foreigners), most seem to resort to maniacal staring.

Case in point: Some friends and I took a trip to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. We took a night bus to Hampi, an ancient capital of the Vijayangar...naragarnasomething empire. We arrived exactly on Independence Day, along with about several hundred Indian tourists who had clearly never seen a real live white person. If we stood still for more than a minute or two, we got mobbed. I'm serious. At one point, I was in the center of a group of about 50 Indians, all of whom wanted to take a picture with/of me. I literally had people asking for my autograph. That was cool for about a minute and then it got progressively annoying and scary.

We ran. And like every day in India, we ran into situations equal parts absurd and sublime.

In a country with such a long tradition of concern about purity, I am constantly amused by how little there actually is. Most of the Muslim ruins around Hampi were built on top of Hindu bases, complete with carved depictions of Hindu gods. We climbed huge rocks in the sunset to see a Hindu temple and listened to music from a mosque wafting over Friday boulders. In climbing a mountain to visit the temple of Hanuman the monkey god, a monkey jumped onto my friend Sam's backpack to search for snacks in all of his pockets.

Other noteworthy images and observations: an 11-year old girl sweeping the ground at my hostel, right beneath a sign that said "abolish child labor." Sleeping under mosquito nets still feels like sleeping in a fort of blankets, and I still giggle inside every time I get in bed. On the train back, we met Mr. Kumar, who was extremely proud that he spent "one whole hour talking to foreigners." He mostly just talked about the fact that his mother forced him to get married three years ago, but, due to both of them working on postgrad degrees, they had never spent more than a month together. "I have not had much satisfaction in my marriage." On the train ride home, halfway through the state of Karnataka, all the people, buildings and vehicles turned earth-red.

Several weeks later, some of us took a train to Pondicherry, a former French colony. There, we rented scooters and motorcycles and braved Indian traffic to find a beach near a remote fishing village. The driving was made more difficult by the fact that the motorcycle that I was on did not have a horn, which is like not having a steering wheel, doors, and turn signals on an American vehicle. We compensated by yelling OUR HORN IS BROKEN every time we came up on somebody and feeling extremely classy.

On the way home, the motorcycle stalled like you wouldn't believe and we couldn't get the damn thing started for about 15 minutes. As I looked up in frustration, I saw a statue of what I think was Jesus. Or possibly Krishna. Having exhausted all other avenues, I raised my hand and said. "Can we get a little help here? My mom's been in the God business for quite a while now, and I help people sometimes. Whaddya say?"

The motorcycle immediately started, and now I'm pretty sure I have to be a Christian. Or possibly a Hindu.