Udaipur, India

Dear Jeff

I have a strange tale to unfold. The events and sentiments very mixed up. I would have liked your company and your council at some points.

Begin:

I’m in Udaipur.

Been here four days. Spent the first three soaking up the relaxed atmosphere, passively. One of the most beautiful city views I have ever seen stretches across the small lake from my balcony. First, I should confess to having left behind, for a few days, my budget traveler principles. The hotel is wonderful. Luxurious by India’s standards, if a bit shabby and faded. A host of boys change my sheets and towels each day. There’s an air conditioner and room service, and I’ve caught up on the world’s turnings by tuning into the BBC’s hourly news channel.

A cop out, I know. I needed the break tho, from the heat especially, and this, the Lake PicholaHotel, looked good. The sunset and the daylight playing on the beautiful facades of the adobe and marble clad buildings across the way. It’s worth the splurge.

My second in less than a week.

But there’s a catch to this urban pastoralism (isn’t there always?), and that catch is snagging at these sentences.

Let’s try chronology:

In Bangkok a month ago I ran into a couple of travelers–an Indian guy and an older American woman. We were caught in a “find a room on KoSan Road at 6:00 a.m.” dilemma, and as we waited for people to get up and get outta the fully booked guest houses, I got to talking with them. They’d been traveling around India and Nepal and Thailand together, and they seemed a very odd pair, so I figure they were probably platonic… but who knows, eh?

Anyway it turns out Ahmed (Ligat Ahmed Shiekh) is from Udaipur, and his family has a guest house there. He hands me a card when I tell him I am planning to go to Udaipur on my way back south to Bombay before flying to Africa (and you).

Udaipur was the only sure place on my agenda back then.

So:
Fast forward to 4 days ago. I’m on an all night train from Jodhpur to Udaipur. It was an awful ride. Dust blowing in the whole time, caking my hair and skin. The desert’s gifts choking my lungs worse than any cigarettes, the long journey made bearable only by the company of a Punjabi woman close to my age. We talked for hours–but that’s a different story… 

Off track. De-railed

Anyway. When I stepped down onto the hot platform of Udaipur’sstation, I was tired and sweaty (no: positively muddy!) and not up to arguing with the rickshaw drivers whose commission scams mean they push very hard to take visitors to the hotel of their (i.e. the driver’s) choice. Besides, after a long hot journey and some difficult travel across Rajasthan, I wasn’t up to visiting (not Ahmed er anyone else), so I went to a hotel instead of his father’s guesthouse.

But now (May 28^th)

I am not in the hotel anymore: I’m at Ahmed’s, and Jeff, I’m not sure what kind of “guest” I am supposed to be…. Yesterday he took me to Eklingi and Nagda. I gazed around at ancient Jain temples, made small talk, took pictures, played cards.

At night we went on a paddle boat across the lake.

He has used his “influence” around town so we can queue jump (he even tried to get me a job at the university here, without having to produce a CV–though, his buddy, the chancellor drew the line and for one “influence” didn’t open a door at his beck and call).

I suppose he feels this privilege game will impress me somehow.

“I am king” he tells me of his conversation with one traveler who commented on his dealings in town. “Not likea King.” (Udaipur has a maharani)

Actually Ahmed is a lawyer withthe past claim to being a big university jock. Now he’s tainted withwhat looks to me like minor mafia shadows…. Irony aside, he has been very solicitous: heaping my plate with more and more of his mother’s home cooking (dhal and okra and chapattis) despite my saying no. I guess he knows what I want and need.

“It’s our culture,” he explains when I complain that he doesn’t listen to me.

He’s adjusting the air cooler in my room–a little to the left, up a little.

“There, now it blows at you good!”

The next morning he’s finding tapes for the stereo.

Turning it on and playing with the volume and its controls,

“You like bass?”

***

Zoom ahead

“You want to see a Jew?”  he asks today.

We are on his motorcycle.

He means “zoo” it turns out, but we struggle to reach understanding through his accent.

He’s a bit quieter today. I was ill this morning and so bowed out of the 7:00 a.m. trip he’d planned for us to Jaisamand Lake. And I left him for a while to wander Udaipur’s city palace on my own this afternoon.

 Now I think he’s offended. And I am sad.

Last night I teasingly chastised him for his Indian corruption and queue jumping when we butt in front of some 60 Indian couples and families to get a paddle boat first. Today I didn’t eat, no matter how hard he pushed (you know how the thought of food makes me ill when I’ve been sick).

It’s not fair, though–the distance I am erecting–he’s done nothing to “take advantage.” But I don’t know what’s expected of me here, and it makes me uneasy: my guest/non-guest status, the gender and culture gaps being what they are.

Images of the Godfather fill my head like an old cliché…it turns out Ahmed’s father made all his money as some kind of arms dealer. He had a munitions and small arms manufacturing business, I think, until his son decided that the business was pretty dangerous, what with them being Muslim and the tensions ratcheting up as the BJP gains political power, and the Kashmir regional skirmishes are getting more and more intense.

I’ve maybe been a little risky here, myself.

The Indians in general, and Muslims in particular, are not known for their liberal views of unescorted male/female contact, let alone friendships.

Though Ahmed’s religious philosophy is well thought out and sensitive, to do him credit. We have had many lengthy very interesting conversations.

I’m being paranoid I think, but God! it’s awkward, and there are times when I truly wish that I were born a man so that I could stop the gawking, the assumptions, and these games.

I am here for two more days, and I’ll admit that I am missing you, Jeff, big time. It might sound weird but I really miss the way you treat me as a human being, recognizing my sovereignty over my own affairs.

I wonder how women live like this?

Know you are wanted, always… Hah! You are a wanted man! You have made your way into my independent psyche, if simply because the respectful distance you keep brings you closer to my heart.

I await your actual presence in Africa with excitement and longing.

 I look forward to exploring some of that world with you…

…especially when I find myself in the doubly sticky heat of a

sticky situation

in the middle of the Indian oven of May…

You will not find abundant wealth without finding by its side the rights of people that have been trampled.

 

No rich morsel is eaten without there being in it the hunger of those who have worked for it.”

 

—from The Sayings of the Islamic Shia thinker Ali

At the time I was in India, the BJP was just coming into its own as a formidable political force, following decades of one party rule led by various members of the Gandhi family.

Ahmed’s family was Muslim and obviously had prospered since the partition era rifts.

But now, he told me, the future looked threatening for his father. As the only son in the family, and as a professional himself (Ahmed was a lawyer), he had apparently advised his father to retire from the family business—arms manufacturing, as it turned out. One can understand why such a business in the hands of a Muslim might be seen as a target by  fanatical Hindu nationalists.

As I understand it, Ahmed’s idea was to purchase his father sanctuary with the relative annonymity that comes from being the host of a small guest house, rather than the owner of a munitions factory. His father was a tall distinguished gentleman with perfect India-inflected English. A gracious man, all old world courtesy.

Ahmed’s plans for the family’s future made sense, given the climate. The riots that broke out in Bombay and across central India and Rajasthan in the early 90s had much to do with poverty, nationalism, and religion: perennial hot button issues in the region.

Today, more than 15 years later, The NYTimes has an interesting article illustrating the new India.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html

 

The article follows the rising middle class in India, many of whom are riding the tech boom that has been bolstering India’s economy.  A slide show of picutres accompanies the story. Most of them focus on a walled community consisting primarily of a large 25 story complex of ultra modern condominiums. The walled area is surrounded by shanty slums that house the people who act as servants and grounds keepers for the young condo dwelling professionals and their families. The article’s author looks at the divide in this microcosm of contemporary Indian society, and labels these kinds of stratified suburban developments, the “Two Indias.”

In reality, as every Indian will tell you, there are many more than two Indias. Some of these issues are new, some are not.

Last week there were stories about bombings in Jodhpur—apparently by Islamic extremists.When I was in Old Delhi in the early 90s, I was hustled by Kashmeris wanting to spread the word about their plight. Last month, the Tibetan refugees of Dharamsala were in the news, protesting China’s policies in Tibet, and calling for demonstrations against the torch run through the region.

poverty, nationalism, and religion

…the complex fraught relationship between  identity and economics…

More than anything, when I think back to my time in India, I think about the poverty. Even to someone who had travelled through South East Asia, the Philippines, and Central America, India’s poverty is heart-wrenching. Of course, the contrast between the poor and the rich is always intensified in developing countries like India, and the Philippines, and Kenya, and Guatemala… in part because of the level of the people’s deprivation, in part because of the numbers.

Two weeks after meeting up with Ahmed and moving over to his father’s guest house, I would ride in one of India’s ubiquitous black sadan taxis through the city now known as Mumbai… I was on my way to the airport to catch a 5:00 a.m. plane for Nairobi.

My last views of the subcontinent consisted of watching the people stretched out on the mats that we past. There was a whole city of people, sleeping on the sidewalks of Bombay.   They lay on their backs, one beside the other, like neat rows in a dormitory. Under the night sky!

At first, in the darkness I didn’t know what the soft mounds were. It went on for kilometers. This was not the itinerant street person of Toronto or Montreal. These people were neat and organized. Their space on the sidewalk was their home.

In the morning, they would roll up their blanket and mat, and get themselves ready for work.

By the time the taxi got to the outskirts of the city, where there were no longer any sidewalks, the neat mats gave way to what seemed like a hundred thousand corrugated tin roofed squatter shacks. Squashed in and leaning against each other like a chaotically haphazard satire of city planning. There was no water, sewage, electricity, or garbage collection in these areas.

I would encounter the same type of endless shanty development—inhabited by different faces and surrounded by slightly different vegetation—on the way into Nairobi some eight hours later.

In that last pre-dawn moment, as I silently bid Bombay goodbye, I gazed out of the black taxi’s window at the spectacle, and as the horizon began to lighten, I wondered about karma… and fate….

What all those people might be hoping for… and what preparations were underway under those makeshift roofs, with regard to the new day.

This

was India

(I reminded myself, as I tried to imagine the combination of hope and despair that lived along the 1.5 hour ride from the city to the airport)

This is the World

(for the majority of people on the planet)

There is no reconciling one’s self to such a thought.

Ever.

The morning I arrived in Udaipur, I didn’t think I had the energy to make a re-acquaintance with Ahmed, nor to track down his father’s guest house, so I headed for a rather elegant little higher-end hotel on the edge of the lake, instead.

At $18 a night, it was probably the best bargain I came across in all my travels.

Less known to foreign travelers in search of the exotic, Udaipur was primariily a favoured vacation spot for the people of India, itself.

And the city is a very romantic spot: somewhere to go for a honeymoon, or to take the family to, when one needs a break from the Rajasthan heat.

However, even for Indians, the month of May is not a holiday time. I might be the only guest currently in residence at this lovely hotel. My tiny balcony overlooks the lake.  But for the women doing laundry in the mornings on the other side of the water, the entire city seemed sleepy as I settled into the luxurious room they assigned me.  

& the heat outside gives me an excuse to enjoy the luxury. Mnn… I bask in the air conditioning of this hotel, the 12 foot ceilings of my room, the antique, authentic colonial four poster bed with its faded silk drapery, the hand woven tapestries on the walls and the Persian rugs on the floors (frayed but surely hundreds of years old), room service, and a television with a 24 hour BBC news channel.

Yes, I am happy to leave the backpacker scene behind me for a few days. I sit down at the cherry wood writing desk and set into some serious work at last. Everything I could wish for was here… all for less than $20 dollars a day, food included.

On my second afternoon at the hotel, I venture out to walk along the small lake’s ancient stone walls. I watch children bathe naked at the pumps; women are washing clothes on a cement edge that gives access to the lake itself. I take in the sunset over the incredible aged marble facades of the buildings, and then wander back to the comforts of a real bed and my own bathroom….

***

A child named VJ latches on to me as quick as lightning, when I venture out again, two mornings later—after catching up on world events, and generally just blissfully sitting in the room, watching city activity from my balcony, or lounging in the comfort of an overstuffed chair, and the pleasure of more uninterrupted writing.

VJ assures me he is the greatest guide among the town’s children, and he will show me around the city.

I am off to find bananas, I tell him, so he takes me down alleys, past children playing and cattle wandering the cobblestones. We pass a woman leading mules carrying baskets of bricks, and finally end up at a small marketplace.

Back in my room, I had been a simple observer, thinking about the beauty and the quiet charm of this city.

Now, the children on the street are all a-twitter when they see me. By the end of our little sojourn, VJ and I had amassed quite a following.

As we made our way back to the hotel, I asked him to take me past the address Ahmed had given me. It was a single dwelling, stand-alone house, not very big, set on a residential street not too far from the lake.

But I didn’t stop to see if anyone was in. Still not sure whether I would bother Ahmed and his father. Still feeling that I lacked energy for conversation, or anything other than writing and observing form a distance, for the next week.

‘Perhaps,’ I told myself, ’I should just bide my time until I have to head down to Bombay, and catch my flight to Nairobi?’

***

This morning there is a beautiful Crested Whit serenading me from my balcony’s ledge. The Indian newspaper I picked up down in the lobby blithely lists reports of “militant” actions and retaliations, numbers of deaths and injuries. There is real political unrest in this country right now, with the rise of the right wing nationalist BJP. I am still trying to understand this land and these people. I think of Jodhpur and the fort and the maharaja’s personal safari tour. The heat and the questions. It doesn’t really matter how many times I go over my notes.

             Letters. Fragments. False starts.

I am sitting on this old bed with its dusty panels, looking at the things I have written so far… all the “desires to say” result in more and more blank spaces… I think of the odds of having met Ahmed in Bangkok, and the nagging obligation that I feel has ensued as a result; I think about when the woman on the train had asked about my family and loved ones… I think about the letters that I owe everyone, and remind myself that I should send something to my mother to let her know where I will be going next…

         she worries… perhaps justifiably

I think about Michael and Jeff, and Johnny and, gosh, Scott! …and Glenn and Heather (what is she doing now, already a mother with two children) and my friends Jinnean and Trisha too …all left behind one way or anothere, as I wander restless through this life…

fantasy, mere fantasy

here-fantasy

ghosts

The past haunting every attempt at ‘now’

disturbing

I’d never make a Buddhist

not cut out for the complacency:

“Come place yourself in my hands”.

My philosophical cusp:

“The universe looks rather like a thought…”

So:

“Who’s thinking?”

I wanna know…

Good better best, never let it rest

…but my good isn’t getting much better,  I am afraid,

and my best is nothing to write home about….

And with that thought, chuckling at the whimsy, I put my writing down.

Stepping out of the hotel lobby and into the late afternoon heat, I enter the picture one more time. Merge with the casual foot traffic and let the flow of the city guide my feet.

***

On Tuesday night, just as I am beginning to get a grasp on context and proportion, Liagat Ahmed, of the Sandal Guest House, shows up.

The children had told him that a strange foreign women knew his address, and it would seem that he sent them scouting the streets to find out where I was staying.

With his best more-than-Indian technique of hospitable coercion, he forces my hand on the move to his father’s place.

“I will pick you up and help you move your things first thing in the morning”

(…as if I were moving in with him and bringing dowry trunks?)

Then he offers me an evening tour of Udaipur on his motorcycle

(Note: at this point, motorcycles tended to be one of the few things that really did scare me!)

But Ahmed is all old world courtesy, and we buzz slowly around the town’s city of lakes district and eventually find a light festival in full swing at one of the big park areas. It is a magical place.

“Oh, five minutes. I forgot…” He stops and runs inside a building to hunt for a phone

“I told my mom… its okay.” He says when he remounts and kick starts the engine.

We are at his house now. His mother awakened at 11:00 p.m., when we arrive after our evening with the lights–awakened simply to serve us!

Ahmed has not had a meal this evening, and I am to sit with him and be gently prodded into eating, even though the bulking agent of the lentils I had three hours earlier means I have trouble forcing even one chapatti with a scoop of dhal down. Tasty though it be.

We are in a smallish, dimly lit alcove set up with a rough wooden table and four chairs. The room is just off the kitchen, with a door open onto the inner courtyard.

He gives up reluctantly when I turn down a second chapatti, perhaps more hurt than offended.

His mother had silently came in and out with the dishes and glasses of tea. She wore a flowing light gray suit set, in a Muslim loose-pants-and-long-smock style. Her long straight gray hair loose hanging down her back. Before long, she had padded into the shadowy nether world of the rooms on the other side of the open courtyard and Ahmed and I were alone.

Tomorrow morning I will join this house and its intimacies, new-found misgivings and all….

The woman who would share my rail car was around my age. She introduced herself to me and said she was a school teacher, on her way to Udaipur for a conference the following day. The train ride was long and hot and, even in our more comfortable cars, the dust made its way through the windows and doors, to coat our clothes and set us coughing from time to time.

Before she arrived to share my car, I had already figured it was going to be a long night. Unlike other countries I had vistited, I began to seriously dread the journeys from one destination to another in India, and the fact that I had waited at the train station four hours—me being early by two and a half and a train delay making up the difference—didn’t add to my peace of mind this time around. I try to be philosophical in such situations, but stoicism comes much easier when the mind is less anesthetized by the numbing agent of an unparalleled boredom.

Stoicism and Buddhism are about concentration. 

Then an agent shows up on the platform I had been restlessly prowling, and my name doesn’t seem to be on the reservation list. My imagination whiles away the nothing-to-think-about time with vague terrors of not having a seat for the 14 hour journey, or of the train departing without me, and my having to start the process of waiting and moving all over again the next day.

“Are you going to Udaipur?” she asks in perfectly accented, grammatical English. 

“Yes.”  I am somewhat surprised to be drawn out of my fret. No one else here seems to have had much English, nor been much help, although the circle of five farm boys with their curious prodding eyes have been undeterrable, badgering me for more than an hour: standing closer and closer to me, their faces taking up my entire field of vision, as if closer proximity would make up for the fact that I don’t understand Hindi… They tire me, these Indian men.

never sure when honest curiosity spills over into sly insinuation

always needing to be on my guard

But this woman… about 26 probably… she has a round face and a pleasant, wide mouth that’s given either to a simple smile, or an “Oche!” clicking–a habitual, perhaps subconscious sound that peppers her conversation, like a Western “uh huh” or “hmn” or “oh”.

It turns out she will be traveling in my car, and she is pleased by the prospect. Not often out on her own as a single woman, she was bound to feel some trepidation, and Ithink she was intrigued by the worldly bold way I am handling these boys. Besides, she is looking forward to using her English.

She tells me that teaches English at a city school in Jodhpur.

Finally, after a month in India, the chance to get a woman’s perspective!

As the train starts us moving, my traveling companion asks me a few questions about where I am from, and the inevitable “Are you married?” 

I turn that the question back at her after my reply: Soon, she will have an arranged “alliance.”

For a while, she says, she had actually contemplated moving to America. She would like to do a PhD, but teaching at a university means less mobility when it comes time for marriage, and she must go where her husband lives.

I tell her of the book of Indian women’s short stories I’ve been reading. We talk about women in this country, and she tells me there is progress.

“I can see the difference between my mother and my sister… my father and my brother in law.”

“Women have careers now. Money equals independence.”

She agrees with my view that the higher rate of divorce in the West is not necessarily a sign of moral corruption.

“Here, where there is little divorce, the women make the sacrifices. Always women sacrifice. And many are unhappy.”

She talks about her teaching and the pleasure she feels when children prefer her class:“They are often most happy when they know I will be their instructor.”

Why do they prefer her class? She shrugs, but seems proud at the same time. She does not believe in beating students, for instance, when beating is still very much part of the Indian school system.

And: “If sometimes it is hot, or they have had too much to do, and they request that we not work so hard for one class, sometimes I let them go. We go outside and do not work.”

She has an MA in literature… a kindred spirit. She asks about the West, about which (following some recent letters she’s received from friends), she says now has misgivings.

“It is materialistic?”

I try to explain about the different communities—the artistic and intellectual community to which I claim a certain kinship seems less materialistic—but, yes, too many of us focus is on money and on buying things. The comfort and the status that brings.
What of family? She is surprised by my ability to leave everything behind and just wander the globe, and looks at me with the same expression that she used when she asked about my ability to travel alone all over the world. “Are you not afraid sometimes?”

Yes, I am afraid sometimes, and sometimes I miss my family.

“So why do you keep doing this?”

The question opens up a silence. As I contemplate the whys, the landscape passes… It is almost dawn now; we have been talking through the night.

The steady rhythm of the train’s wheels on the tracks makes me think about how far I’ve gone, and it makes me wonder why I have no answer for her.

The dust has been coming in all night. At one stop soon after the sun had set, she got up to lock the doors to our carriage, so we have made the entire journey.  Just the two of us, alone in this car. She said her brother had warned that she should not let anyone join us.

Deep in the darkness, at one stop about half way to Udaipur, she asked me to tell a man banging on the door to stop wanting into our car, and to go away.

I did so in my most authoritative, Western English.

He could have been anyone: a chai seller, the conductor, or a bandit.

At dawn she went to her teachers conference and I wandered out into the light, in search of a cheap place to stay.

everywhere & nowhere 43

McLoud Ganj, Himachal Pradesh, India

Dear Jeff,

In my manic way, this letter will reflect my complete satisfaction and sheer joy at what I sometimes encounter on these travels.

(Although, I imagine a little of my confusion and a little of my habitual amateur philosophy will probably seep in—just to dispel any possibility of consistency.)

Truly, this place has paradise potential.

Sometime in our travels—sometime in the hazy future of “after now”—we will have to return together.

***

 
As for now: 

After the sweat, and the heat, and the hassle, and the continual grasping of the Gangic plains, the Himalayan air is sweet. The sounds escaping into the silent unscalable barriers and walls erected between people in the name of culture are quieted here.

Down there, despite the millions of sweaty hungry tired bodies in the press for space 

there is essentially no/body there.

No room among the mixed karmas for an individual in essence…. 

It’s not only the poverty that is dehumanizing; it’s the mass:

as if Einstein’s e = mc2 had imploded in the 45 degree temperatures.

there is no energy left in the equation, except to badger

But the colours and the smells and the tastes… Jeff!  I am left in wonder.

Spectacular, pervasive, undeniable. Almost overwhelming, definitely exotic and exciting.

The women all wear bright silk, cotton, or chiffon saris, even the cheaper rayon is magnificent: the chemical hues fantastically saturated, putting the lie to stories of heat, haze, grime, despair. The women have diamonds or coloured glass pierced to their noses, 5-10 bangles at their wrists, strands of delicate chains on their ankles, and, if they are Hindu and married, the mark of their faith on their foreheads. A beauty mark imbued with significance, so different from cosmetics.

 the word beauty can never describe them

*** 

Then, as if unable to resist the blasting contrasts, there are the people on the street: the old, the young, the lepers, the deformed.

Begging, ragged: “Yes” “Yes, Mam” “Bak-shish Mam?” “You help?” “I have no parents Mam”

Down one road, in Bombay, was the Indian equivalent of a road work crew: the men busy patting out the asphalt that will become a road—by hand! with a bricklayers level, inch by inch.

And, Jeff, the asphalt was being transported by women.

Tattered faded skirt edges tucked up between their legs, they shunted back and forth, bent and stumbling under the weight of the huge plats of mixed cement or asphalt, balanced on their heads. The black tar steaming. One hand on the plat for balance…

Under the heat of the midday Bombay sun!!

The women seem to do most of the manual labour in these crews. In lieu of, or perhaps so as not to overwork the few asses. I look over at the side of the road, many of the men squat in the shade of a tree smoking buris, until it is their turn to do the tap tap with the next platful of tar.

***

While on my way to this beautiful mountain town, I had a 12 hour train lay-over in Delhi. My time around the Old Delhi station and the surrounding market environs came as a perfect contrast to the haven that was my destination.

Delhi at 43 degrees.

The streets of the main bazaar are a river of flesh and cloth

pressing pressing

The sari stalls hang their textiles like a flag ceiling over narrow alley streets, but they were no match for the heat. Stall workers selling fried savouries call out their wares, and the Kashmiri carpet sellers’ militia of slick touts are out looking for yet more clever ways of chatting up prospective buyers. 

The bicycle rickshaws practically knock me over at every hesitation…

 ***

Now, after a two and a half day journey to get here, I find myself in an elsewhere of unimaginable dimensions.

They say this place isn’t “Indian” (although I have also heard that India “proper” is much sweeter and less aggressive in the south, as well).

From my limited experience of this Himalayan society, I’d have to say they’re right, though.

This cool mountain air and the friendly smiles of the people who wander the village paths are a great relief. Truly, I was not prepared for what I saw in Bombay and on the plains.  I am thinking that, while I have a longing to see more of that other India, I may wait for another trip…. when I can arrive to gentler temperatures and, perhaps, when I am escorted by a burly big Canadian kinda guy, who can act as a bit of a buffer.

Because I am loving this village.

Dharamsala-McLoud Ganj. Where the Dalai Lama resides and is flanked by his Tibetan followers. Buddhist philosophy and friendly smiles replacing the Central Hindi hustle and the male leers.

When I wander the mountain trails, eagles and hawks or smaller falcons swoop and glide, surfing the unpredictable currents. To the north, the snowy peaks of the famed Himalayan heights beam down on this valley, sparkling with the rarefied privilege of being that much closer to the sun. 

& the Buddhist chants, the sonorous Himalayan brass horns, the cymbals that accompany them: they all seem to fit, somehow. 

I have seen many intriguing pictures and postcards of Tibet, and would like to go there, as well. While China severely restricts access, some people here have been known to sneak across the mountain passes (it is a 3 to 5 day trek).  

Something to think about….

Yes, this place is magic. An almost paradise to a weary foreign girl who needed a rest. And a chance to maybe gain back a few pounds. There isn’t much to do, but that is the point. The Buddhists know that ‘now’ is chalk full of impressive presence, if one would just sit quietly for a spell.

***

A few days ago, I was spectator to a magnificent storm. The wind coming up from the valley floor far, far below, smashing into the hills and rebounding. The rain was almost horizontal, and the hail stones were the size of those jumbo marbles so prized in schoolyard games when we were kids. The storm would ease off to the north, only to return again after unsuccessfully attacking the barrier of the peaks —prowling around us like a mountain cat circles its prey.

& somewhere up there a snow leopard is watching this storm too

***

Today the air is even sweeter as a result. Pine and alpine hardwood trees act like breathing companions. I went walking the steeper hills a couple of days ago. Originally thought I might make my way over to the lake everyone talks about, but I got lost.

& just when I thought I was in a nowhere of true Himalayan proportions, I smiled my surprise as two mongoose slid across the trail and scampered out of sight when they smelled me. Still grinning, I turned a corner and stood face to face with the shaggiest, somberest looking mountain goat I have ever seen. 

& it wasn’t alone.

There were hundreds of goats, and very young kids, casually chomping, clinging to the slopes, finding firmness in the most unsuspecting footholds. Sometimes they would plaintively bleat out their impatience at a kid’s rambunctious interruption of routine.

They looked down at me idly from varying heights.

all this, and on the horizon, the snow capped peaks of this mighty range

The clearing I had stumbled upon looked into a mountain valley with a deep ravine and a magnificent glacial frame. Looking closer, down the way, I could just see tucked into a corner of this pastoral, a modest ashram/temple to Siva, and the faded timber of a lean-to which, as I drew closer and could read the sign, turned out to be the “Rest a While” café.

The man inside–get this–was playing a flute to while a way the hours!

mongoose, sheep, mountains,

ravine, flute,

unexpected ashram,

refreshing chai…

perfection

I wish you were here…

There are millions of things to keep a body and a mind occupied. Three to eight day treks, a waterfall, a freak zone community that, I swear, isn’t a throw-back. It is the hippies themselves… reincarnated.  They inhabit a space right next to the more intellectual institutions of the Tibetan monks, which offer courses in meditation, Buddhist philosophy, the Tibetan language and culture. Bookstores sell everything from Dickens and Shaw to to books on Tibetan Medicine and translations of the Book of thte Dead, in every imaginable language.  

& the food is fantastic

Haven’t been sick for weeks!! 

Even the dogs in this area are content, well fed, free of mange as they wander the rough path roads searching for and getting affection.

With all this to occupy mind and body, I am still thinking about you, Jeff. The conversations with the local people and the travelers are diverting, informative, engaging… but fleeting, and my bed is big and empty.

***

About Africa: write to me Poste Restante GPO Nairobi, if you get the chance. I’ll be calling you soon, anyway. Madagascar sounds the best to me. Maybe if you fly to Dar or Nairobi, we can see Tanzania, Zanzibar and Madagascar, and maybe one of the other islands.

& finally, just to bring all this dreaming down to earth, there are a few things I’m going to need again. (You seem destined to act porter for a demanding woman on the move)

• 1) contact solution (Baushch and Lomb, Multi Purpose)
• 2) film (About 3 rolls 200-400 speed…. The film they sell here is always cooked long before it gets into a camera)
• 3) I don’t have my walkman… did I leave it with you at the airport? If not, it’s been stolen and if you bring one, we will have something to listen to on those long bus rides. My tapes lay in the bottom of my pack looking back at me mournfully.
• 4) One really good book
• 5) One strong broad-shouldered, deep-chested Saskatchewan male body equipped with a smile

In the meantime, take good care of yourself!

everywhere & nowhere 42

I was reading Naipaul early in my travels through this complex country. In the end, I can’t be sure if that was a good idea or a bad idea

[T]o awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see one’s self and one’s group the way the outside world saw one, and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the other groups.

V.S. Naipaul India: A Million Mutinies Now, 420

everywhere & nowhere 41

India was definitely a turning point for me: in terms of acknowledging how little I really I knew (about ANYTHING)… and in terms of my limits when it comes to processing or even approaching an understanding of the world that “goes round and round”, as Gertrude Stein put it. 

The sub-continent confounds, even as it charms and irritates.

It didn’t help that I arrived in the last month of the dry season, just before the monsoons.

Silly me, I thought that would mean I got to miss the rain. Little did I know that everyone, even poor stupid travellers, pray for rain at the end of the dry season. During my time there, the central plateau and the mid-west coastal areas were averaging 45 degree heat (that’s Celcius. American Translation: between 120-130 degrees Fahrenheit).

Stepping off the plane in Mumbai (then Bombay), the humid air whumps travelers in the chest and then envelops them, like some kind of over-zealous Great Uncle, who wants you to know how happy he is that you’ve arrived.

And I stepped off the plane a good 5 hours after the sun had set for the day!

The following entries are cobbled together from memory and journal logs and letters, records that I didn’t begin keeping until April 29^th 1993, when I was on my way to the mountains to escape the heat and the oppressive push-back of the lowlands. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this land has enticed Western wanderers and travelers for centuries. India is a lesson in culture shock even for a seasoned backpacker.

I have a complete gap in my record keeping when it comes to that first week in India. I didn’t even take any pictures…

Think: dazed blonde Western girl, completely out of her element, wandering around in shock

***

He told me his name was Dada, tho I have since found out that “Dada” is an Indian label of respect, so I think he was pulling one over on the tired looking solo newcomer who had just stepped down from the airport-to-city-centre bus.

He was young, maybe 9 or 10. Too young to be working the street scene this late. I made a deal with him: he would show me the way to the budget hotel I had picked out from my guide, and, in return, I would buy his string of jasmines… for 10 rupees and a smile

Bombay, 12:30 a.m.

I always seem to be arriving in these places at inopportune hours—like when it is dark, and a wandering single female with a backpack surely must she need help.

“Yes?” “Yes Mam!” “You need something Mam, yes?” “Change Money”

“Yes Auntie, cheap hotel. Yes, Mam, you follow me.”

Soon enough, I would learn how to wade thru swarming ‘I’ll be helpful’  moments…a vitally necessary trick, as I navigated multiple stops through Northern India on my way to the mountains.

always aware of the price at the other end

In India they call it back-shish. Young guys literally tear the bag off your shoulders, even though you’ve told them you can manage yourself. They march off twenty or thirty paces (inevitably in the wrong direction) and then demand a tip-payment for their troubles. Hah!

Dada was sweet, however. He’d sold no jasmines late into the evening, and my offer was high.

There are not many tourists in Bombay these days, what with the weather averaging 40 degrees, and, um, the riots and bombings. (Can’t decide which is worse, myself.)

As we plodded the six to ten city blocks in the after-midnight humidity, we passed two cat-sized dead rats (long tails straight, scaly and unmoving now–the reason for their demise unknown), and many crumbling old colonial buildings which, in the dim humid gloom, all looked exactly the same as the hotel I eventually settled into.

The buildings brood and sweat, even in the deepest dark of a late April night. 

As we walked, I glimpsed bits of the nearby sea a few times. The water reflecting under the moonlight when we turned down one alley or another.

And quiet and still as it was, I imagined it must be ready to boil

the still water’s surface tension:

an illusion held together by an old kettle,

like the one Shiva drops hot rocks into,

when he wants to create steam for his sauna

On the plane over from Bangkok I sat beside a Bahranian man, who handed me an American twenty dollar bill and the address of a place to stay, should I ever get to Dubai.

Then, there was the sign, as I stood in line awaiting my “You may enter India” customs stamp of approval.

It was the kind of lit-up digital sign, with scrolling letters, that you might see in the Queen Street Subway station in Toronto. This one letting me know in slowly passing English words that the airport terminal offers free limited porter time

for the elderly, the disabled, and “unaccompanied ladies”

“All very interesting, if not enlightening,” I think looking around after I’d passed customs wondering idelly how I was going to get into the city… when, finally, materializing out of the group of people the building was disgorging, an Indian Canadian gentleman smiled at my dazed confusion, and offered to help me through the flash strike by the taxi drivers at the airport. With all the taxi drivers standing rigid and uncompromising outside their cars in a state of solidarity and defiance, I had no idea how I was going to get anywhere at that hour…

an unexpected glitch to betray my lack of expectations

The friendly Indian Canadian man directed me onto a bus that would head for the city’s old port area. He gave me a lesson in how not to let anyone see my money and, with total old world courtesy, reached over from his seat beside me to indicate the fleeting shadow of a mosque, out on the water, as the bus headed to town.

The next day, refreshed, there was Bombay to explore. First stop: the intriguing but off-limits Towers of Silence–a Parsee burial ground where bodies are foisted onto scaffolded platforms sometimes hung from tall trees. They are left to be picked clean by vultures… which may seem somewhat macabre, except the Parsees believe that fire, earth, water, and air are sacred elements, and so they will not corrupt them with dead bodies and stinking flesh.

an elegant argument, if one stops to contemplate the logic

It kind of makes sense given the number of people in this city, too. (Even though the Parsee are a tiny minority in this billion plus Indian population.) I heard the railway stations in Bombay push thru 70,000 people per hour. 

That’s a lot of flesh, no guff

like so many things in India, it blows all sense of perspective

Sure, it’s overwhelming at times. Took a night train from Bombay to Delhi. I wandered out of the New Delhi terminal into the sun and the heat-blasted streets….

Everywhere, again: “Yes…” “Yes Mam?” “Yes, you buy!” “You take my rickshaw!” “You need information where you going? Where you come from? Mam, yes…”

no no

NO!

knowing nothing

I am on my way to Dharamsala. A little mountain town overlooking the Himalayas, where the Dali Lama and his Tibetan Buddhist followers live in exile.

“Slow, quiet and peaceful,” someone said.

God! It sounds like paradise. A week in Bangkok… four days in Bombay… and an afternoon in Delhi:

too many people

too much heat blasted flesh

does this  crush of bodies never stop??

The press of people in these cities is, I figure, more monumental and more uncompromising than the mighty Ganges, herself… goddess though she be.

Still, if you take a picture (exchange elbows and action for the press of a button), this India is as hot and as colourful, and as frustrating and as fascinating as everyone promised.

The women’s saris: a riot of colours too bright to be found in nature.

Indian women are intoxicating, with their fabulous flowing silks and chiffons, their dark faces and shiny smooth black hair, pierced noses, ankle chains, and forehead adornment.

“Yes, Mam” “Yes?”  My head is spinning with so much seeing.

The sounds crowding together under the sun’s glare.

“Yes?” a rickshaw knocks my bag almost off my shoulder.

I am in the Old Delhi Market.

Am accosted by a good looking guy, 20ish, very well dressed.

He has been watching me, as I made my way through the market, and is amused by the stanch ,“I’m not interested. No!” facial expressions that I have learned to adopt. 

“You are too strong,”  he complains, smiling. “It will just make me try harder!” 

I allow myself a smile at that, and he follows me, pressing a card into my hand with his own bright smile.

(The family’s export business.)

He finds me a restaurant.

“Maybe I will have tea with you too!” he says, seating himself.

When he finds out I am writing (a disguise I use to convince myself that something concrete might yet come of all this wandering), he tells me he is from Kashmir. Then tries his best to press-gang me into the cause line. 

“I have letters, hmnn, from friends… One woman from England. She is a writer too, and she puts together an article on what is happening in Kashmir. Maybe you would be writing too? What do you think of all this in Kashmir?”

Be it cowardice, or just fatigue; maybe foresight, or even just plain sloth, I stick to a pacifist line.

“I don’t believe in violence.”

“Not in the cause of justice?” he asks.

Okay, I have a certain amount of sympathy for his cause …like the Mayans in Central America… The problem, however, is that I don’t really believe in his idea justice. The problems of Kashmir feel different from the Maya oppression. I have been reading V.S Napaul. I have read Rushdie, and some of the writings of Gandhi. I distrust any “justice” that enlists violence against civilians, especially when it uses nationalism, as a focus for its cause.

I don’t say that, though… it would sound trite even to my ears. 

Just before I make my way back to the railway station, where I plan to hole up and while the hours ‘til my train departs this evening, he finally convinces me to visit his family’s business.

Everything on display is hand-made in Kashmir. There is another persuasive argument, upon my entry, in favour of maybe taking some information back with me to America about the region… Photos for Amnesty International, or maybe coded messages for guerrilla supporters outside India, who knows?

opportunities for intrigue abound

& me, new-comer-to-it-all, I grew up on Ludlum spy thrillers… but… “Perhaps he means, it’s the least I could do, if I wasn’t going to buy anything?” I thought, somewhat cynical because this was at least the 500th ‘push’ of one type or another. And I’d only been here in India a week. I manage to pull myself out of the illusion, just as possible international intrigue scenarios start spilling into the many colours hanging from the alley shops. 

All that I have been seeing and all that I have heard today, spinning together like a dream 

In the narrow passages of the Market, crowded by stalls,

saris hang like flags over the alley,

perpetually trying to maufacture shade.

The shade,

like all the shady deals: illicit and romantic

 (pulling the wool over here eyes)

stories of children forced to the loom.

It is all of a piece/peace…

full stop

**** 

No. I am off, I remind myself, to Dharamsala. Where they are pacifists. Where meditation rules…

& where, if I am lucky, people don’t focus quite so much on the desperate if understandable commerce of the poor…

“Yes, Mam”s, constantly needing my trade to feed their families, or fuel their causes…

Howsoever just they may be.