Dear dedicated reader,
I thought that perhaps it would be prudent to do a small follow up on my previous “would you rather” question to say that one problem in our house, at least for the moment, has been solved.
“The mouse” as Auntie-ji has taken to calling him (though I suspect that he is one soul in several bodies), is at last dead. Though his corporal form may have expired, his story will live on, however, in the form of this blog.
Every night, around 8:30 or 9 pm, my host family and I eat dinner in front of their favorite Hindi serials, a past-time that I enjoy as nowadays I understand enough to follow their dramatic and often implausible plot-lines. Their favorite, Pavitra Rishta, has recently revolved around some drama regarding the young wife’s ability to speak English to her husbands’ business partners. While ensconced within this enthralling story, I saw out of the corner of my eye a small, brown form dart out from underneath the shelf which holds their television and dash towards the sofa on which Auntie and Pappa-ji were seated.
“Ah, Auntie-ji,” I hesitated and she looked up from her roti. “I don’t mean to alarm you but the mouse is underneath your seat…”
The reaction was immediate – Auntie-ji leapt up spryly and called for Mamta to come and dispense with the mouse, running to close the doors that led to the hall, the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the children’s room.
A moment later, Mamta arrived, ready for action with a long toilet brush in hand. Toilet brushes in India are really a collection of a sort of reed all bound together, something like a broom, and therefore, apparently, ideal for mice-killing (?).
Mamta crouched down near the sofa and stuck the toilet brush underneath, tapping it and her feet in a mouse-killing rhythm. The mouse must have been terrified, because it darted out from the sofa, and for a moment all was complete confusion as we all jumped, Mamta towards the mouse and Auntie-ji away from it. I, for my part, pulled my feet up on the sofa on which I was seated.
The process of tapping and poking/prodding began again underneath the TV shelf, and finally, the mouse ran out and scampered around the room, frantically looking for a way to avoid Mamta’s toilet brush of death. Mamta, however, was too quick and with a merciless blow she stunned the mouse into inactivity. Another blow was enough to render it completely helpless, and after a few more quick blows in succession, she pronounced it dead.
With a deft scoop, she picked it up with toilet brush and began to carry it outside, as per Auntie-ji’s command. Auntie-ji, for her part, had her hands over her ears and was hiding behind the couch on the other side of the room. Once Mamta had disappeared outside, Auntie-ji came out as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, took her place on the sofa, and resumed eating her roti-sabzi.
I followed suit, silently wondering why on earth I ever thought traps would have been easier.
Best,
Cat
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Independent once again
Dear dedicated reader,
I have now celebrated my fourth 4th of July here in India. On reflecting, I think that while the others that I have celebrated here may have been more involved (you may remember reports of fireworks and fire hazards over the Himalayas, an awkward but ultimately entertaining party with the Principal and his family or bottle rockets set off over the Bajipura Highway that came this close to causing an accident), this one I believe will be no less memorable.
My fourth of July consisted of only one American simplicity this year: making an apple pie from scratch for my host family. I told them a few days ahead of time that I’d like to make something for them to celebrate my Independence Day. With some trepidation, my host mother told me that that would of course be fine.
“I’m not a great cook,” I warned, “but I know how to make a few things.” No reason to get expectations too high.
In the days leading up to D-day, my host sister, Ayusha told me with delight of things that past students who had stayed with her family had made. “Didi [big sister]," she told me, "I have had cookies,” she recounted, “and cake, and pancakes, and … I don’t know, so many things.”
Great, I thought to myself, I can see that the bar had been set very low.
I racked my brain to think of something that I could make that everyone in the family could eat. At first, I thought perhaps that I would make cake – however, on inquiring, I found out that Pappa-ji, my host patriarch, does not eat eggs and I did not want him to feel left out.
Luckily, I had past holidays in India to draw upon and the day before the 4th, I remembered a Thanksgiving many years ago celebrated here in India where everyone in our apartment contributed something that their family traditionally eats. Mine was apple pie.
I also remembered, with some satisfaction, that this dessert was completely vegetarian in the Indian sense.
The afternoon of the 4th, I set out to collect the ingredients that I would need to make my pie: flour (simple), butter (simple), baking sugar (easily located in the grocery store), apples (out of season but still locatable), and cinnamon, called dalchini here in India. Since dalchini is usually used whole within dishes here, like in tea or with vegetables, I wandered from store to store, looking for what I found out was called “dalchini powder”. No place had it, and after much sweat, rain and frustration, I found myself returning home without it.
Of course, I should have realized that the reason that there is no dalchini powder available is because everyone in the middle class has someone who can grind their dalchini into powder for them. This week, our grammar review is on the causative verb form, a unique form in Hindi that connotes one not performing an action itself, but causing an action to be performed. "The servant verb," Swami-ji laughingly told us, "though you won't find that name in any grammar book. As if to demonstrate this principle, on hearing of my difficulty, my host mother immediately called our maid, Mamta (who, in general, regards me with a wary amusement), to grind some of their stock of whole dalchini into powder for me.
As I set to making the pie, my host brother Arjun and my host sister Ayusha gathered around eagerly, sitting on the counter and watching as I cut the butter into the flour, added ice water and massaged the ingredients into a loose dough. Mamta helped me cut the apples into tukare (small pieces, as I learned!) and inquired curiously into what I could possibly be making.
“It’s a pastry,” I tried to explain, “I’ll roll it out like roti and then put these apple pieces inside it.” I held up the thali (round metallic dish with high sides used for eating dinner) and indicated that I’d put everything in there.
She looked at me dubiously, but continued to cut and peel apples.
“You know how to cook?” She asked, slowly turning an apple in her hand and digging into with the peeler.
If only it were that simple, I thought, like riding a bicycle. You either know or you don’t. How could I explain that I was somewhere in between?
“Sometimes,” I answered, truthfully. “I know how to make this.”
She gave an non-committal headshake as if to say, “We’ll see” and continued to peel.
The apples having been arranged carefully in to the rolled out dough, I gave some to Ayusha and Arjun to munch on while I worked with Mamta on rolling out the top lattice pieces. Once it had been assembled, it was time to cook it in the large, somewhat glorified toaster oven that my family had, an item not often found in an Indian house. As I got ready to put the pie into the oven, Auntie-ji came into the room and looked pleased. I asked her how she had come to have an oven, such an unusual thing in India.
She laughed for a long time, then she said, “Two years ago, I thought, you know, that I would be making all these things, like pizza, pies, cakes, pastries. And Pappa-ji, he said to me, why have you taken this thing? But now, you see, the only people who have used this oven are all you people [students]!”
I laughed. “Well, then it was worth it!”
After 40 minutes, the pie was ready to eat. My host-family waited excitedly for me to cut it and add a dollop of vanilla ice cream that I had brought from the market. As I served it to Pappa-ji, he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, Happy Independence Day!” and held out his hand for a handshake.
“Happy Independence Day to you too!” I replied, very self-satisfied.
Best,
Cat
I have now celebrated my fourth 4th of July here in India. On reflecting, I think that while the others that I have celebrated here may have been more involved (you may remember reports of fireworks and fire hazards over the Himalayas, an awkward but ultimately entertaining party with the Principal and his family or bottle rockets set off over the Bajipura Highway that came this close to causing an accident), this one I believe will be no less memorable.
My fourth of July consisted of only one American simplicity this year: making an apple pie from scratch for my host family. I told them a few days ahead of time that I’d like to make something for them to celebrate my Independence Day. With some trepidation, my host mother told me that that would of course be fine.
“I’m not a great cook,” I warned, “but I know how to make a few things.” No reason to get expectations too high.
In the days leading up to D-day, my host sister, Ayusha told me with delight of things that past students who had stayed with her family had made. “Didi [big sister]," she told me, "I have had cookies,” she recounted, “and cake, and pancakes, and … I don’t know, so many things.”
Great, I thought to myself, I can see that the bar had been set very low.
I racked my brain to think of something that I could make that everyone in the family could eat. At first, I thought perhaps that I would make cake – however, on inquiring, I found out that Pappa-ji, my host patriarch, does not eat eggs and I did not want him to feel left out.
Luckily, I had past holidays in India to draw upon and the day before the 4th, I remembered a Thanksgiving many years ago celebrated here in India where everyone in our apartment contributed something that their family traditionally eats. Mine was apple pie.
I also remembered, with some satisfaction, that this dessert was completely vegetarian in the Indian sense.
The afternoon of the 4th, I set out to collect the ingredients that I would need to make my pie: flour (simple), butter (simple), baking sugar (easily located in the grocery store), apples (out of season but still locatable), and cinnamon, called dalchini here in India. Since dalchini is usually used whole within dishes here, like in tea or with vegetables, I wandered from store to store, looking for what I found out was called “dalchini powder”. No place had it, and after much sweat, rain and frustration, I found myself returning home without it.
Of course, I should have realized that the reason that there is no dalchini powder available is because everyone in the middle class has someone who can grind their dalchini into powder for them. This week, our grammar review is on the causative verb form, a unique form in Hindi that connotes one not performing an action itself, but causing an action to be performed. "The servant verb," Swami-ji laughingly told us, "though you won't find that name in any grammar book. As if to demonstrate this principle, on hearing of my difficulty, my host mother immediately called our maid, Mamta (who, in general, regards me with a wary amusement), to grind some of their stock of whole dalchini into powder for me.
As I set to making the pie, my host brother Arjun and my host sister Ayusha gathered around eagerly, sitting on the counter and watching as I cut the butter into the flour, added ice water and massaged the ingredients into a loose dough. Mamta helped me cut the apples into tukare (small pieces, as I learned!) and inquired curiously into what I could possibly be making.
“It’s a pastry,” I tried to explain, “I’ll roll it out like roti and then put these apple pieces inside it.” I held up the thali (round metallic dish with high sides used for eating dinner) and indicated that I’d put everything in there.
She looked at me dubiously, but continued to cut and peel apples.
“You know how to cook?” She asked, slowly turning an apple in her hand and digging into with the peeler.
If only it were that simple, I thought, like riding a bicycle. You either know or you don’t. How could I explain that I was somewhere in between?
“Sometimes,” I answered, truthfully. “I know how to make this.”
She gave an non-committal headshake as if to say, “We’ll see” and continued to peel.
The apples having been arranged carefully in to the rolled out dough, I gave some to Ayusha and Arjun to munch on while I worked with Mamta on rolling out the top lattice pieces. Once it had been assembled, it was time to cook it in the large, somewhat glorified toaster oven that my family had, an item not often found in an Indian house. As I got ready to put the pie into the oven, Auntie-ji came into the room and looked pleased. I asked her how she had come to have an oven, such an unusual thing in India.
She laughed for a long time, then she said, “Two years ago, I thought, you know, that I would be making all these things, like pizza, pies, cakes, pastries. And Pappa-ji, he said to me, why have you taken this thing? But now, you see, the only people who have used this oven are all you people [students]!”
I laughed. “Well, then it was worth it!”
After 40 minutes, the pie was ready to eat. My host-family waited excitedly for me to cut it and add a dollop of vanilla ice cream that I had brought from the market. As I served it to Pappa-ji, he looked at me and said, “Ah, yes, Happy Independence Day!” and held out his hand for a handshake.
“Happy Independence Day to you too!” I replied, very self-satisfied.
Best,
Cat
Monday, July 4, 2011
Video Follow Up
Dear dedicated reader,
I know some of you were anxious to see what I've been writing about, so here is a short video of the recent visitor that we had at the institute so you too can experience the rollercoaster of emotions having a cobra in the room with you brings.
Best,
Cat
I know some of you were anxious to see what I've been writing about, so here is a short video of the recent visitor that we had at the institute so you too can experience the rollercoaster of emotions having a cobra in the room with you brings.
Best,
Cat
Friday, July 1, 2011
Full of Charm
Dear dedicated reader,
The staff of AIIS, the institute at which I’m studying, work exceedingly hard to keep us on our toes. While we routinely leave at 3 or 4, they stay until 7 at night, diligently preparing for the next day. Yesterday for my weekly “lecture” I talked about Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, and was struggling for the word for fiction. This morning, the teacher who was presiding over that class came and found me as I drank my morning chai and told me the correct word.
“It was bothering me all night,” she told me in Hindi.
When I say they keep us on our toes, I also mean literally. Every other week, we have a “monolingual” guest who comes to be interviewed by our class. Our first week, it was an autorickshaw-wala who recounted to us the irritations of taking around foreigners who aren’t able to speak in Hindi and who gave us advice on the best places to catch a rick in Jaipur.
This week, our guest was a snake charmer, in Hindi a “sapera”, who politely answered our questions about the perils and intricacies of snake-keeping. His story was an interesting one: He was raised in the snake-charming tradition and lives in an area of Jaipur where many folk artists stay – not only snake-charmers (though he says there are many others) but also folk dancers and artisans.
Most interestingly, according to his guru, snake charmers from his tradition only keep the snakes for a month because he believes it will bring bad luck to keep them for longer. This is one of the reasons that they don’t defang the snakes – they are going to release them into the wild again so they need to keep their teeth.
He discussed the way in which the venom is extracted from the snake’s fangs by means of a balloon attached to a small vial. The snake, biting the balloon, releases venom into the vial since it believes itself to be biting a small animal. He told us that from then on, they can only feed the snake cooked or raw meat – to feed it a live animal will cause it to release venom again.
Despite these precautions, we asked him if he’d ever been bitten when the snake was poisonous and he said that he had been taught to make a special medicine for when that happened. They apply a tourniquet to wherever the bite has occurred, most likely the hand or the foot, and then he takes this medicine which, in his description, sounded a lot like an ipecac made of herbs and tobacco. It causes him to throw up repeatedly, and in this way, they are able to avoid being killed by snake poison.
He talked a little bit about working the “tourist line” as he called it here in Jaipur. Snake charmers, we came to understand, used to exist primarily in the villages, going from house to house to collect donations from villagers who, in their devotion to Lord Shiva (whose animal is the snake), would support the craft of the saperas. These days, however, it’s not like that anymore and most snake charmers have shifted to the cities to work in tourist areas.
While summer is not the tourist season (due, as you may have guessed, to the extreme heat), he said that in winter he’ll see anywhere between 500 and 1500 tourists in a day. This, of course, is not limited to foreign tourists though obviously there are many – people come from all over India to see the City Palace which is where he usually sits. I asked him if he needed a license to secure a place, but he said no: overtime, if you go to the same place enough, other people will simply move away from you, and since he’d been going for the last 15 years, that was what had happened. Furthermore, he said, there is no license; however, occasionally a policeman would come and he’d have to pay them a bribe to continue to sit there without being harassed.
Finally, we asked him if he was teaching anyone else his craft. He said without much emotion that no, he wasn’t. He’d taught people to handle snakes but teaching them to catch them was tricky because they had to be very fast. One girl in our class asked if his children would become saperas like he had but he said that nowadays fewer people are becoming snake charmers, maybe only 10% of those who were before, and that his children were reading and studying for other professions.
When his interview was finished, he slowly took a basket from his plastic bag and placed it on the floor. We all leaned forward at our desks to see as he uncovered the basket and two large cobras emerged, hissing and striking at him, showing what seemed to me to be their extreme displeasure at being forced to lie on top of one another in this tiny basket.
He brought out his peculiar looking instrument made of a hollowed out gourd and began to play, swaying the end in time to his music. The snakes stood at attention, following the ends of the instrument with their eyes and enormous hooded heads and every so often striking out at it with a loud “hissssssssss”.
A crowd gathered as students from other classes came in to watch the tamasha (spectacle) before us. Everyone was possessed with a wary kind of excitement, bubbling up from their nervousness at the idea of two live cobras in the room!
When he had finished, he allowed a few students to come and touch the cobras. As one of our group put it “When else will be I be able to touch a cobra and live?”
Best,
Cat
The staff of AIIS, the institute at which I’m studying, work exceedingly hard to keep us on our toes. While we routinely leave at 3 or 4, they stay until 7 at night, diligently preparing for the next day. Yesterday for my weekly “lecture” I talked about Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, and was struggling for the word for fiction. This morning, the teacher who was presiding over that class came and found me as I drank my morning chai and told me the correct word.
“It was bothering me all night,” she told me in Hindi.
When I say they keep us on our toes, I also mean literally. Every other week, we have a “monolingual” guest who comes to be interviewed by our class. Our first week, it was an autorickshaw-wala who recounted to us the irritations of taking around foreigners who aren’t able to speak in Hindi and who gave us advice on the best places to catch a rick in Jaipur.
This week, our guest was a snake charmer, in Hindi a “sapera”, who politely answered our questions about the perils and intricacies of snake-keeping. His story was an interesting one: He was raised in the snake-charming tradition and lives in an area of Jaipur where many folk artists stay – not only snake-charmers (though he says there are many others) but also folk dancers and artisans.
Most interestingly, according to his guru, snake charmers from his tradition only keep the snakes for a month because he believes it will bring bad luck to keep them for longer. This is one of the reasons that they don’t defang the snakes – they are going to release them into the wild again so they need to keep their teeth.
He discussed the way in which the venom is extracted from the snake’s fangs by means of a balloon attached to a small vial. The snake, biting the balloon, releases venom into the vial since it believes itself to be biting a small animal. He told us that from then on, they can only feed the snake cooked or raw meat – to feed it a live animal will cause it to release venom again.
Despite these precautions, we asked him if he’d ever been bitten when the snake was poisonous and he said that he had been taught to make a special medicine for when that happened. They apply a tourniquet to wherever the bite has occurred, most likely the hand or the foot, and then he takes this medicine which, in his description, sounded a lot like an ipecac made of herbs and tobacco. It causes him to throw up repeatedly, and in this way, they are able to avoid being killed by snake poison.
He talked a little bit about working the “tourist line” as he called it here in Jaipur. Snake charmers, we came to understand, used to exist primarily in the villages, going from house to house to collect donations from villagers who, in their devotion to Lord Shiva (whose animal is the snake), would support the craft of the saperas. These days, however, it’s not like that anymore and most snake charmers have shifted to the cities to work in tourist areas.
While summer is not the tourist season (due, as you may have guessed, to the extreme heat), he said that in winter he’ll see anywhere between 500 and 1500 tourists in a day. This, of course, is not limited to foreign tourists though obviously there are many – people come from all over India to see the City Palace which is where he usually sits. I asked him if he needed a license to secure a place, but he said no: overtime, if you go to the same place enough, other people will simply move away from you, and since he’d been going for the last 15 years, that was what had happened. Furthermore, he said, there is no license; however, occasionally a policeman would come and he’d have to pay them a bribe to continue to sit there without being harassed.
Finally, we asked him if he was teaching anyone else his craft. He said without much emotion that no, he wasn’t. He’d taught people to handle snakes but teaching them to catch them was tricky because they had to be very fast. One girl in our class asked if his children would become saperas like he had but he said that nowadays fewer people are becoming snake charmers, maybe only 10% of those who were before, and that his children were reading and studying for other professions.
When his interview was finished, he slowly took a basket from his plastic bag and placed it on the floor. We all leaned forward at our desks to see as he uncovered the basket and two large cobras emerged, hissing and striking at him, showing what seemed to me to be their extreme displeasure at being forced to lie on top of one another in this tiny basket.
He brought out his peculiar looking instrument made of a hollowed out gourd and began to play, swaying the end in time to his music. The snakes stood at attention, following the ends of the instrument with their eyes and enormous hooded heads and every so often striking out at it with a loud “hissssssssss”.
A crowd gathered as students from other classes came in to watch the tamasha (spectacle) before us. Everyone was possessed with a wary kind of excitement, bubbling up from their nervousness at the idea of two live cobras in the room!
When he had finished, he allowed a few students to come and touch the cobras. As one of our group put it “When else will be I be able to touch a cobra and live?”
Best,
Cat
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