Tripping through puddles in a green & white sari

A first happened today: I left the house on my own. I know that sounds a little odd, considering that I’ve been touring for almost ten years now, alone, through wierd stretches of North America. But when you lose your voice, or when you’ve suddenly become lame, your legs don’t work, and it’s like a bad dream where you can’t fly high enough above the heads of an enemy. You want to scream but there are no words.

Take an artist who has focused on communicating ideas, pictures, beliefs more than anything else, then put a muzzle on their mouth, release them into a busy Indian street, full of eyes and questions and assumptions. Whoa. What will happen if I ever end up in China?! I might need to do another tour with Ember Swift, who knows some of the language!

Let me give you an example. On the third night that we were in Varanasi(Sept 3rd), while Chris was inquiring about some distilled water for our inverter, a guy walking past me spat against the back of my sari. As he disappeared into the dark of the street, I wanted to call after him and ask “Brother, was that an accident?” Later on, when we reached Connie and Rajiv’s place (my “adopted” Indian mom and dad) I pepper-sprayed them with questions, voiced frustrations, and scrubbed away the spit. They’ve lived in India a long time. I wish I could roll with the punches better. They amaze me. Sometimes I feel pangs of jealousy when I watch their children, Priyanka and Arjun, who will grow up with East and West curled up inside their hearts like a friend. I see this confidence in Chris, and wonder if I could ever find it in myself. Maybe if you are still here, in ten years, we can compare notes on each other, looking for the changes that make us older “in a good way.” I think of each piece of snail mail you kind folks have sent me, sitting high on a top shelf in my office, every note, every letter tucked into burlap basmati rice bags. I feel blessed with what you have already shared. I’m not worthy at all.

While I’m thinking about gratefulness, i want to say thank you to the folks that have left comments connected to this blog (a feature that is currently disabled, though you can send me an email personally) For the record, I want to mention these folks by name. So…. thank you FUR, Steve, Nikkiana, Christy, and most recently Drew (who sent some helpful tips on de-bugging my Indian culinary experiences.)

At dawn, pilgrims and tourists head across the water in row boats. The water was high during monsoon season and the current required two men at the oars.

The last two nights a heavy wind has been coming off of the Ganga with such force that the massive tree

Every day, the gutters in the street near our house would run with a different shade of dye. Sari’s would be flung over the edge of the factory roof, to dry.

behind the “school” has been shaking and groaning violently. We’ve been waiting anxiously for rain, which finally came today. Walking to the internet cafe, I notice that the gutters (read: open sewers, filled with plastic wrappers, various kinds of animal and human crap, vegetable peelings) are quickly starting to flood over. I dance across crumbling stones and broken brick while my BATA flipflops (called “Chappals” here) make sucking sounds in the mud. I look for islands of dry land, holding my sari folds in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. There’s a sari making factory along this gully (gully basically means a tiny alley way), and everyday, the gutter along one side runs pink or green. Today it’s bright blue.

I walk past scrawny chickens, past the children who greet me with a “namaste” and the crowd of rick-shaw pullers at the corner. I’m looking for the dog, deeply wounded in the back from an unfortunate fight who’s been dying, slowly, for the last two days. He’s still semi-alive, on the side of the street, eyes glassy, fur matted and covered in flies. People on the street die this way too. Friends of ours in Delhi are walking through alleys like this one, bringing them home. The Indian dinner and concert that we held in Toronto last November went towards funding these folks. (Go check out the website, since Chris and I will be working there for one week next month. (www.delhihouse.org)
I’m leaving now, to find a tailor who’ll make me a sari blouse without the pointy boobs. That’s hard to find around here, trust me.
soon,
m.

Miranda vs. the Insects, part 2

I was telling you about the house, so I’ll fill your eyes with more pictures.

You are opening the heavy iron gate of the compound. Step into the heaviness of the heat, the kind that leaves the clothes on your body wet with sweat and sticking to your skin. It’s late afternoon, and there’s the crinkled buzz of a P.A. system being brought to life, followed immediately by the Muslim call to prayer from the masjid a hundred yards away.

AaaaaaaaaLaaaaaaaaaaa… It’s a sad and beautiful sound, punctuated by bicycle rickshaw bells, boys yelling at the ghetto cricket match in the Shiv temple yard, and the barking of stray dogs. Like a school of fish, dragonflies shoot past as if they are polishing the sky with rasping wings, and the the paper kites, flown by children from the rooftops, dart like birds of prey after them and each other.

The local Masjid, with its brilliant green colour well-loved in the Islamic community.

Through the gate and down the tiny mud road of the compound you continue, past the hibiscus bushes covered in red flowers and rebellious vines. Tall green grasses and shrubs grow wild in a small neglected field. A hundred or so monsoons have not been kind to the buildings here. New green growth slides its roots even deeper into the crumbling carved walls of an old abandoned temple shaped like a bell, crouching in between houses that have hardly fared better. Someone is ringing a bell in another temple, to wake up their god. There’s a love song, full of longing. Clouds begin to roll in, laundry is quickly gathered. Someone is cooking food, can you smell it, heavy with spice?

Chris has been playing a lot of sitar every day, and cooking food for me, since I would never eat if he didn’t. I have a one track mind: get the house in order, clean, stock the spices, pull the rocks out of the garden, keep the ants from eating everything. We eat almost every meal outside, since even the tiniest crumb on the floor gathers a tribe of a hundred or more ants for a frolicking church picnic.

This monitor lizard was hiding in our landlords home, before being dispatched.

The floors of the house are semi-unfinished cement. The walls are white-washed in a fading beige, falling to the floor with the touch of a broom, like a Buffalo snow storm. We have stored most of the furniture (that was in the house when we arrived) in two of the spare rooms. In the larger room beside the bath we have pushed two single beds together and cleaned the shelving for our clothes. Twelve feet above our heads, steel beams hold up slabs of limestone which form the ceiling. Mold and termite tunnels threaten along one wall. There is one window looking out into what once was a porch with pillars, but has now been cemented in. This long “porch” room is where Chris and I spend most of our time, sitting on cushions on the floor. The kitchen is built into the far end, near the bath, and boasts a small fridge that runs on the government supply of electricity lasting from four p.m. until nine in the morning. From 9 a.m until 3 p.m., when the power is cut, an inverter (a battery thing, that stores power and then releases it for up to 4 hours or so) manages to keeps a few lights and fans running during the day if we need them.

On the second night that we slept here, there was a huge power failure and all the surrounding streets went dark. (I remember the panic people went through during the power failures in North America several years ago. But power failures like that happen many times a day here; transformers simply blow up with no warning.) I woke up and the overhead fan was dead. It was 3:30 a.m. With the fan off, my ears were now picking up the disturbing sounds of some kind of political rally gone bad, or a street fight or some over-zealous religious meeting. I lay still. Chris was asleep.

There had been some kind of riot in the centre of town that day and police with “actual guns instead of sticks” had come in to keep the peace. A curfew was in place in that quarter. A lot of rumors were going around that a Hindu had killed a Muslim or the other way around and people were scared that there would be violence. I knew that there was a late night qawwali program taking place over the next three nights to celebrate one of the saints, a few small streets away. Was I hearing some really excited mystical folk Islamic preaching? Then a woman started yelling, and others joined in. After a few minutes i began to wonder if someone was having some kind of spirit manifestation instead. The woman began to moan, then scream. Other voices joined in. I woke Chris up.

I insist my Indian cooking to be fantastic, but preparing a meal IN India, was something all together different, and I needed help. There were new utensils and ingredients, hiding in hiding in different forms, and I felt lost. Was everything going to harbor some sort of crawling creature? Didi (the Hindi word for “older sister”) helped me survive even though communication was difficult (my Hindi needs a lot of work, and she didn’t speak English) Watching how she dealt with the tiny stones, mouse crap, and weevils that come along for the ride in the basmati rice gave me confidence in how “it should be done.” Crouched on the rough concrete floor, I learned how most of the Indian women in Varanasi made the family meals.

By the time i got out of bed, threw on my sari, and told Chris I was going (with or without him) to find out what was going on, the woman’s screams had turned into the kind that made my blood run totally cold. In a sleepy haze of fear we stumbled out of the house and walked along the edge of the compound to get a better idea of what was going on. The woman had stopped screaming. Two of the pundits-in-training that lived in the compound were also doing the same thing. The four of us stood in the blackness and listened. What sounded like a heated domestic fight was now all that we could hear.

Chris started to ask the two fellows some questions and they began to explain that a particular guy living near the compound came home late night after night after spending the days wage on drink. They had been awake for the last two hours, listening to the commotion. Probably the woman had had enough and spoke her mind. Probably all the folks around got into it as well. Very likely, the husband tried to silence her with some beatings.

All I knew is that I had never in my life woken up to anything as brutal as that. I wonder what really happened. I see the tensions of many people of many classes and religons trying to live in a very tight living environment. It blows my mind.

I’ve hardly told you anything yet, about the daily life here, but this is the worst time for power cuts, so least I lose all this writing, I am throwing this up on the site.

till the next time,
m.

Miranda vs. the Insects, part 1

Twelve days have passed since I last wrote. Yes, I know, I owe you some details, and have been tardy. But I’ve been on a rampage of sorts, and have only today found the strength to run screaming like a coward into this internet cafe. There’s a battle going on, one of Alfred Hitchcock sized proportions, in our adopted Indian home.

I’m worried that if I tell you about the wildlife I’m finding in my dried goods you might never dare to visit this most amazing country. For those of you who have experienced India in all of it’s monsoon glory (and have attempted to cook real Indian food in their kitchens) I would be open to any advice you could give on what to do when you keep finding tiny stones, beetles, weavels, grubs and other non-vegetarian items in the food stuffs. Let me move on to some other stories for a while. Right now, any thoughts about my kitchen are depressing me.

On the way home from a market trip, Chris and I were caught in a monsoon shower. I’m holding some bamboo poles we just bought (to hang mosquito netting over our bed.) There’s a real trick to riding side-saddle on the back of a bicycle. Especially when there’s so much other traffic (bullock carts, Tata trucks, pedestrians, goats, cattle, cars, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycles carrying entire families) missing your knee caps by mere inches (or less). An important phrase to emphatically project is “juga do!” (make space!)

The 1st of Sept. feels so far away that I don’t know where to start. There’s a happiness that wells up in me when I play back the scene of how my adopted Indian dad, Rajiv, met us at the train station. It always makes me laugh. Our eyes, blurry from a restless sleep on the overnight train, saw him walking down the train platform towards us, twirling jasmine flowers in the place where his eyes should be…crazy pin-wheels. Beside him was Jai, (another dear friend of ours)full of enthusiasm and mirth. Of the twelve or so Indian train stations I’ve spent time in, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more happy.

The place that we are subleting for the month of Sept. is a ground level “cement-like” building located in a compound owned by the descendents of a certain prince whose kingdom used to be in West Bengal (which is now a communist state.) Sadly, I’m missing details on the full history of this family. My Hindi is too poor, so I’ll have to get another briefing from Chris. The greatgrandfather of the current owner added to some of the preexisting structures here, located right on the banks of the Ganga(Ganges River.) Some friends of ours are renovating the building directly opposite us which they are using as a school, and on the other side of the wall, the landlord has his residence, next to the Kali temple which his family maintains. Thirty seconds away, along a dirt path, other friends have been living for about ten years, so advice is never far away. I have found a lot of comfort in these very good people. They have softened the sting of my own ignorance that follows me like a stray ghostdog, everywhere I go.

One of the unexpected joys of our stay here has been the garden in front of the house. One of the unexpected frustrations of the garden has been the gardener (which we didn’t know came with the house.) The German lady who is the actual tenant of the residence has been away in the hills of India for the last four months, and it’s strange to suddenly have an “employee” who has a real lack of work ethic. I’m sure you’ll hear more about this in future letters.

I spent a lot of time that month in the garden, clearing the soil of bricks and stones. It felt good to throw myself into some physical labor, even though the temperatures hit over 100 degrees Fahrenheit by 10 a.m. When the rains came, I would continue, and it was wonderful.

I’m nervous about the constant power cuts here in Varanasi, so I’ll be posting this right now, and continuing immediately after, with another blog. Back in a minute.

P.S. The music here at this cafe is now pumping Indian dance music. This is a nice change from the Bollywood film song they’ve been playing on repeat here for the last 2 hours.

m.

Arrival in Varanasi, India

Standing in the open train door, 70 miles an hour, past villages waking up…this is how I spent my second morning in India. It’s 6:30 a.m. and I am wearing the sari I slept in, smelling of sweat and dirt and train. A novel could be written about the train.

It’s evening now, and the task at hand is to find the vegetable market (subzi mundi) and get some odds and ends…a clothes line, candles, soap, and kitchen goods. Most of the day has been spent in cleaning and arranging the house to make it feel more like home. Little green lizards called geckos run everywhere. One of them took shelter in the lantern I picked up while cleaning this afternoon, and suddenly it was sitting on my hand. I studied its beautiful lime green skin. Both of us were surprised.

I will write more in a day or so. I’m getting a blast of Hindi film music as i write, and it’s a little hard to hear my own mind. I should get used to it in a couple days, since silence never happens anywhere I go in the city. I can barely contain my excitement when I see how many paper kites are being flown from the roof-tops by the children. It’s still the season for it. We are going to buy 20 of them and bring them home in our suitcase, so those are also on our shopping list. One of my more successful Hindi phrases is: “Mujhe patang bohut pasand hai!” But telling the vegetable seller “I really like kites!” won’t help me get the greens I need. Emergency lessons in numbers happens shortly. As my language increases, my fear will decrease, and i will find my own footing. Right now i can only tell Chris not to blow my cover by translating everything into English for me when he has a conversation with a local.

I need a drink… something cold. They sell an orange fizzy drink in India called “Mirinda.” It’s my favourite.
Peace to you M.

Our place in Varanasi, for the month of September.