Cat in India

Monsoon Rain

2011-07-13T09:30:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

While I'm on the road in Ahmedebad, Baroda and Kadod, I haven't had time to write a proper blog post. But, I will provide you with a story nonetheless via this video of Jess and my attempt to get to the Adalaj Stepwell outside of Ahmedabad. Enjoy!

Best,
Cat

Toilet-brush of Death

2011-07-07T14:40:00.002+05:30

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

Independent once again

2011-07-06T16:00:00.000+05:30

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

Video Follow Up

2011-07-04T12:06:00.000+05:30

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

Full of Charm

2011-07-01T09:42:00.002+05:30

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

Would you rather...

2011-06-23T13:42:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Sometimes, in college, when we were bored on long car rides going to and from debate tournaments, we would play this game “Would you rather…?” The chooser is presented with two options and has to choose between them. A favorite was “Would you rather have a ketchup dispensing bellybutton or a pencil sharpening nose?”

In that vein, dear reader, I would like to tell you a little bit about my homestay. I live with a lovely joint family not far from the institute and am carefully looked after by the mother of that family, Auntie-ji, who sees to all of our needs here in house. She is soft-spoken and sweet, speaks English exceptionally well (I actually wish she did not speak it quite so well) and has two adorable children, Ayusha, age 8 and Arjun, age 6. Her husband has a position in the Indian military and is stationed in another city in Rajasthan, though he has been home for the past week, on leave from his job. The house is rounded out by Pappa-ji, the 84 year old grandfather who was a lawyer for the Rajasthan High Court and still practices law out of his office at the back of the house.

Because they have two extra rooms with their own bathrooms, they have often taken study-abroad or AIIS students into their care over the past few years. When Rachel and I arrived on our first afternoon in Jaipur to make their introduction, they greeted us with a detached politeness that was welcoming while at the same time belying their previous experience with foreigners coming and going in their home.

The day we arrived to move in, we quickly chose our rooms, Rachel taking the one at the back with its own entrance, I taking the one through which Rachel must pass to get to the rest of the house. Our induction to the house, however, came when Rachel discovered a dead rat in her closet, which the family quickly called the servant to come remove. This, we were to learn, was merely foreshadowing.

A few nights back, I was awoken by a hysterical Rachel who had crept into my room and perched herself on my bed, recounting to me that she had awoken with a similar uninvited intruder: a small brown mouse had taken it upon itself to crawl into the crook of her arm and nestle itself in her armpit. When she woke up to find her new friend, she screamed and flung her arm out, causing the mouse to fly through the air and then run, terrified, into the bathroom. Rachel, herself terrified, had then run into my room and spent the rest of the night in my bed (which is quite large). The next morning, when we repeated this story to our Auntie-ji, she assured us that she would administer some “medicine” strategically to the various mouse holes in the house.

“There is only one mouse,” she said, “and we have been trying to catch it for several weeks.”
I explained that, having had much success with traps back in the states, I wondered if those were commonly used here in India.

“They are,” she said dubiously, “but this mouse is very clever.”

The medicine having been administered, we believed that we could sleep easily. We were wrong.

Two nights ago, I awoke with an itch on my stomach, which I groggily moved my hand towards, searching for some relief. Putting my hand to my stomach, however, my whole body tensed as I heard the familiar crunching sound that accompanies a large bug being mashed to death. Paralyzed, my hand clutched whatever it was that I had unwittingly captured through my shirt, unwilling to let go, unsure in the dark whether the thing which I held was fully dead or not. After a moment of thought, I got out of bed and turned on the light, shook out my shirt and watched in horror as a the body of a large, dead cockroach fell down and landed on my bare foot. Shaking my foot with a full body shudder, I jumped back and hopped from one leg to the other for a bit for my involuntary shaking subsided.

Knowing I had to sleep, and that there was little I could do to prevent this happening again, after a few moments of thought I determinedly tucked my t-shirt into my pajama pants and got back into bed. All night, I could feel phantom cockroaches crawling up and down my legs.

So, dear reader, I present you with the question: Would you rather the mouse or the cockroach? It is a subject which has sparked some lively debate amongst my peers here and I would love to know your opinion.

Best,
Cat

Hindi Class Begins

2011-06-22T14:23:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Our Hindi classes have begun in earnest and each day, I wait with Rachel, my housemate, outside of our gate for the appointed autorickshaw carpool to arrive and take us to school. Waiting with my satchel given to me by the program and my little water bottle dangling from my hand, I feel l like a small Indian school girl. The reality, of course, is that I am a big, clumsy, sweaty American girl who is often tongue-tied as I reach for the correct Hindi works to express my complicated English thoughts.

Since last Friday, these classes have kept us exceptionally busy – the first day, we were told that each week, we would prepare to complete the following:

5 pages of Hindi journal writing
2 page film review
2 hours conversation with our Hindi language partner
1 20 minute oral presentation
2 hours of listening comprehension
1 magazine article
1 piece of literature

This, of course, is in addition to 20 hours of instruction a week and countless vocabulary lists that support all of these different activities. By the end of the first day, Friday, I had already learned close to 150 new words. The pace has not lessened and I find myself studiously emulating my former students and their grueling schedule: waking early to go over my flashcards, spending my afternoons reading and diligently looking up words that I don’t know, and spending my nights reviewing and writing in my journal. I liken the approach of AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) to an attack on my language skills from all sides. Any weakness is eradicated as my skills are strengthened in a plethora of different ways.

One of the best parts about being in the Advanced class is that the expectation is never that we simply translate or read aloud together. We are expected to arrive at class, ready to have conversations about whatever it was that was assigned to us, be it a movie or literature or a magazine article. In this way, I’m beginning to understand the foundations of having an academic Hindi vocabulary – the difference between speaking properly and speaking in the street. Additionally, my street Hindi is benefiting as I begin to iron out what I know and what I need to know.

It can be frustrating to want to comment on the complicated themes of a Hindi film and to want to use my academic vocabulary to express my ideas concisely, only to find that my tongue and mind will not cooperate, that it is as if a thick blanket is constantly hanging over my head through which I must make myself understood. However, I have never been pushed or challenged in this way and am enjoying it immensely. There are no slackers here – everyone is in this game to reach that elusive goal: fluency.

Best,
Cat

Kingdom of Dreams

2011-06-17T14:20:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Apologies for the radio silence – A week has passed and I’ve often opened my laptop with the intention of writing to assure you that I am safe, that I have arrived and that all is well; however, each time that I found myself in this situation, something found a way to intervene and prevent my completing this letter to you.

We’ve been kept exceptionally busy since we arrived – from stepping off the plane, we were whisked into the waiting, competent arms of the American Institute of India Studies (AIIS) program staff. For a few days, we moved about hurriedly and awkwardly, a monster with 60 heads, as the Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi programs were all oriented together before being bussed, flown and driven to our various destinations. We were oriented and re-oriented – the mad lib of Indian orientations was repeated once again, the blanks filled in the same way – and generally led about by the nose to various tourist destinations.

This included but was not limited to a much built up visit to the “Kingdom of Dreams”. I had seen a sign at the airport for this mysterious place: it was a picture of a large Indian-esque palace with a life size picture of Shah Rukh Khan, arms outstretched, in front of it. In truth, the place is something of an Indian Disneyland – food from every part of the country is represented in stalls like a kind of Indian Epcot center. Overpriced souvenirs culled from each part of India abounded, as well as suitably thematic decoration, finishing with a large sandbox meant to replicate a beach from Goa.

The arrival of our large tourist bus was greeted with a welcoming committee of men with drums standing in front of a huge life-size ornate golden elephant. Upon entry, a demure woman with a tray of red paint greeted us and placed a graceful finger-full on our faces, pressing rice into the wet red mixture with care. The sweat which slicked the surface of my forehead immediately caused this gentle welcoming gesture to become a full on uncontained run of red down the bridge of my nose.

It was clear that our program organizers were very excited about taking us here so I did my best to remain optimistic as we paraded past men and woman in ornate, elaborate costumes meant to replicate dress from many different parts of India. We were given a credit card with 650 rupees that could only be spent at this location and told to find dinner. A few of us wandered until we found a Mumbai chaat stand and availed ourselves of its menu to eat some delicious papri chaat (fried crackers with potatos, lentils, tamarind sauce, yogurt and green chutney).

The strangest part of the experience was that this outrageous tourist attraction, this false recreation of a reality that only exists in travelogues written by colonialists, was filled not with foreign tourists, but with Indians from every corner of the country.

Truly, the experience is best communicated by video:

Now, we are in Jaipur and I’ve moved in with my host family, the Mehrishis. I’ll save their introduction for my next letter, dear reader.

Best,
Cat

Filling in the Blanks

2011-06-10T17:45:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

“Think of your worst trait and magnify it by ten – that is what you will turn into on your worst day in India.” The woman speaking to us paused to let this sink in. I looked around the hotel conference room, full of prospective Critical Language Scholarship recipients heading to India, and I wondered if everyone else was thinking the same thing as me: what *is* my worst trait?

While conducting this reflection, I realized that, at this point in my life, I have attended no less than four orientations preparing me for life in India – one with Brown, Princeton in Asia, Nanubhai, and now the State Department. Therefore, I have decided that the best way to communicate what the common denominator experience of being oriented for India is like is to provide you with an “India Orientation” Madlib!

“Congratulations ________ (name of group of hopefuls) on your decision to go to India. I’d like to provide you with _______ (amount) of advice about living in India based on my _____ (number) of years of experience. First of all, let’s talk about safety. You should never go out at ______ (time of day) because of _________ (weather/wild dogs/monkeys/rapists) or, if you do, make sure that you have travel in packs or have a male friend with you. Also, please let us know where you are because we are afraid of ______ (threats to your personal safety/litigation).

Now, it is likely that you will fall ill during _____ (some/part/all day everyday) of your visit and therefore you should be prepared with _____ (immodium/doxycycline/advil/lopamine/larium/probiotics/Tylenol pm/Sudafed/cipro/airborne/tums), but, make sure not to self-medicate: go the _______ (qualified medical professional)! One thing that usually makes participants sick is the _____ (food/smells/heat/change in climate/bacteria). Therefore, you should watch what you eat and make sure you never eat _______ (fruit/uncooked vegetables/street food/unfiltered water/anything tasty looking). This will most likely make you feel like ______ (nasty horrible thing). Also, I checked the high in _______ (city of arrival) and it is _____ (three digit number) degrees, so make sure to drink plenty of ____(a liquid).

Getting around in India will also present some challenges. The roads in India are like _______ (something crazy). The most common transportation (unspoken assumption: for foreigners) is the ________ (three wheeled device with an engine taken from a lawnmower). You can take these, but not after ______ (time of day).

You may know that the culture of India is very different from ours, and you may experience some culture shock on your arrival. Men, don’t wear ________ (typically informal American piece of clothing) and women, we suggest that if you don’t want your _______ (Part of the body) stared at or touched that you wear ________ (typically traditional piece of clothing).

Lastly, we’ve purchased travel insurance on your behalf and I’d like to go over it. It provides benefits fo most things, but not ________ (a contact sport), ________ (a pre-existing condition), or _______ (an act of terrorism). So, please keep those restrictions in mind.
We hope you have a great time in India this ______ (summer/year/semester)!

Safe travels!”

Here’s hoping you all now feel fully oriented. We head out to the airport in just a few hours for our flight! The next time that I write to you, dear reader, I will be staying at the Taj Ambassador in Delhi.

Best,
Cat

Back again

2011-06-04T01:47:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated readers (or those of you who still remain),

I’ve long since left Nanubhai and Kadod behind but I am thinking of reviving this blog as I enter into yet another Indian adventure, this time under the purview of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program (www.clscholarship.org). I’ll be moving to Jaipur for ten weeks this summer and after a year of doctoral study I’m very much looking forward to seeing my old friend India again, this time, with different eyes.

I remember the very first time that I made the transition across the ocean as a sophomore in college, venturing to this place that I had studied but never seen – the alternating waves of elation and terror were so overwhelming that I considered, on disembarking for my connecting flight in London, simply turning around and going home. When I think back to that first experience, my memory catches on the surface level things – the smells, colors – those things that India is known for. I remember outrageous arguments with autorickshaw drivers and dust and heat and occasionally an elated rain. I remember thinking, “There is no reading about this place. There is only being here.” I still feel that way, even after three years of Indian residency.

The things I read in graduate school about India seem flat – two dimensional. Regardless of the quality of their empirics – their method, their contribution to the literature – it feels far away and somehow lacking. As I’m only a beginning scholar, I struggle sometimes for the proper words to intimate the why behind my feelings of distaste for these studies. Maybe it is that when I think of India, I think of my students, my close friends, the place I lovingly refer to as my village. My mind seems unable to comprehend India in aggregate.

In many ways, my understanding of India is like my Hindi. At first, formally schooled, I studied Hindi and India at a distance, from afar. I immersed myself in its study and believe myself knowledgeable. I was wrong. I couldn’t keep up in a conversation and while I could argue fine, I was miles away from true knowledge of the language. In Kadod, I achieved a sort of unschooled comfort with language and with India – I had to relearn many things that I thought I knew, be always ready for the cognitive dissonance of living in an unfamiliar place. My tongue became accustomed to producing the sounds on command and my mind found a way to reconcile itself to a new palette of experiences by inventing explanations for what I saw that gelled with my American way of understanding the world.

This combination of schooled and unschooled experiences are what I bring to my journey this summer. My relatively fluid Hindi needs grammatical supports – structure – to improve and my mind needs the combination of reflecting on my experiences in reference to theory in order to move forward in my scholarship.

I am hoping to document my attempt to do both of these things. While I cannot promise the array of characters that you came to know and love in my previous blog, I will do my best to communicate my experience with thoughtfulness, honesty, and with some luck, humor.

Best,
Cat

Cultural Transition

2010-02-19T07:28:00.003+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

As many of you know, I am no longer residing full-time in India and have largely abandoned this blog. I'm afraid that due to the nature of my new position, it is difficult to a) keep up with it and b) to tell the stories of events from my everyday life with the same voice that I used to employ. I think, in many ways, I have changed over the past year and in some ways the behaviors that used to baffle me no longer cause so much confusion.

I am now residing in Brooklyn, however, and I have to say that I may have to redirect my critical lens to some of the bizarre cultural patterns that I am now being subjected to as a returned ex-pat.

Regardless, this post is to alert you to an article that I had published in Education Times, a sub-section of the Times of India, about my experience as a teacher. The article can be found here:

http://education.indiatimes.com/educationTimes/getArticleDetail.do?sectionid=79&articleid=200911252009112515283162d464467a

Though below is the text, reprinted for you all.

Best,
Cat

Students' Speak: Lost in Translation

On my first day as an English teacher at Kadod High School (in Gujarat), I found myself at the front of a dim classroom in front of over 60 pairs of confused, unblinking eyes. It was June, the fans had slowed to a halt with another electricity cut and I was vainly searching for a piece of chalk and a duster. In America, these staples of the teaching profession are kept in the classroom; I hadnt thought to bring them with me. I was there as a teacher through the Nanubhai Education Foundation, an NGO which works to bridge the gap between rural and urban Indian schools by sending American trained teachers to teach in rural vernacular-medium government schools to improve students English and technology skills.

Lack of amenities

Upon asking, I found that the school had no photocopier and only sponsored photocopies for its teachers with special permission from the principal. The school textbooks were beyond the means of many of my students. In the US, the school I taught at in the poor part of Boston had been deemed under-resourced. Looking around at my current classroom, at the cracked blackboard, the cramped benches and the crumbling walls, I wondered if we in the US could ever understand what under-resourced truly means.

About the students

Despite this, I found that after some shyness my students were practically jumping out of their seats to answer my simple questions that first day. Their eagerness belied their excitement to learn. They hungered for knowledge in a way that I had never seen in my students in America. Furthermore, their respect for their teachers, their respect of the knowledge that their teachers offered them, was unlike anything I had ever seen while teaching in Boston or even in my own days as a student.

However, I was soon to learn the constraints within which this eagerness is regularly channeled. “Teacher, should we copy our essay in a blue pen or a black pen,” asked one diligent student, as I worked at writing away on the blackboard. I cringed inwardly and instructed the student, as I myself had been instructed by the other teachers, to copy the essay in a blue pen. Turning back to the board, I continued to copy an essay on the dull topic ‘Computers and the Future’ from a cheaply printed exam guide.

Copying, I had been told by other teachers, is a necessary evil. The annual exam is graded harshly and mistakes are not tolerated in student’s essays. The level of English expected from class IX students does not match their current ability level, after years of learning English from government teachers, who barely speak the language themselves. Many of the students I taught could barely read English, couldn’t speak at all and yet, somehow still managed to pass the annual exam because of teaching practices such as these. Is this a triumph of ingenuity of the schools to make up for what they lack or a symptom of a much bigger disservice to its students by the Indian government or is it both?

Comparing classrooms

As for myself, I could only capitulate to the system. The methods that I learned as a teacher, in the US, for engaging the students in an interactive environment, were meant for classes of 30 in classroom spaces that allowed for some freedom of movement. These methods did not translate to my classes of 60 with barely enough room for me to pass between benches to check my students work. Furthermore, the school administration did not appreciate my attempts at classroom interactivity. I was often told to control my classroom better and that Indian students learned better sitting at desks and copying things off the board than by playing games.
For me, this begged the question - did the students learn better or memorise better? Does memorisation denote true understanding?

As an American, I can sing the words to popular Hindi songs without understanding them. Can English be learned as merely another subject like math or science where one memorises the relevant facts and regurgitates them for the annual exam or does the language require a certain special treatment that the government syllabus has yet to accord it?

Concluding questions

On a policy level, I hear that things are changing. At a conference I attended last week, run by the English Language Teachers Association of India, a Gujarati policymaker informed the participants that reforms in the way English is taught are being pushed forward. For example, Gujarat now requires an oral test of the class VIII and IX students. These fabled reforms have indeed filtered down to the practice level. However, I’ve watched these oral exams actually administered. The teacher asks the student to recite a poem or an essay that they have memorised and then grades them on how well they remember it. Is this what policymakers had in mind?

In the end, I think the question is - what does learning look like? As an American educator working in the Indian context, it is a question that I found myself asking every day. I find that I do not have an answer, instead I have one last question - will these methods prepare these motivated students for life outside the school?

(The writer is the Executive Director of Nanubhai Education Foundation and a former full-time teacher at Kadod High School. Her interest in Indian development began at Brown University, where she double majored in South Asian Studies and History and spent her junior year studying at St Stephen’s College in Delhi while interning for the NGO TARSHI)

Training Begins

2009-11-18T10:43:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

It is only proper that I begin with the context: a number of the more athletically motivated fellows staff have decided that they are going to run a half marathon in February to raise money for Nanubhai and as a way to keep fit and motivate themselves. While seated around the dinner table in the Bajipura apartment, infected with their raucous enthusiasm, I decided that if my staff could do it, well by golly so could I.

Since that time roughly two weeks ago, the general upheaval which characterizes my life in this country has come in to play and by fate’s roll of the dice I no longer live in our Bajipura apartment and have moved into the downstairs bedroom of our two fellows who live in Surat, the nearest city where we have one site at P.R. Khatiwala High School. Now that I’m located in a city, I have access to all sorts of amenities within a 5 minute autorickshaw ride of the house such as a real grocery store, a mall, a coffee shop, and most of all, a gym.

All of this contributed to the optimism which prompted me to decide to go running in the area surrounding our house.

I start out blissfully content with the morning sun shining down on our porch, the act of stretching bringing on that sense of enlightened anticipation that it always fills me with. With a flick of my finger, my ipod brings the upbeat strains of Natasha Bedinfield into my ears, telling me that not only is this morning beautiful, but ‘no one else could feel it for [me]’ and that I should ‘live my life with arms wide open.’ Sentimental state that I am in, it only heightens my euphoria.

After a brief stretch of the limbs, I set out gently from our porch, jogging my way through gated society and observing the mid-morning activities of our neighbors: hair-brushing, hanging clothes on the line, talking on the phone. I feel almost transported back to the Porter Street hill in Somerville down which I had to go for all my morning and weekend runs, that sense of energy filling my limbs as I strode downhill, until I finally hit the turn onto the main Highland Ave and set off on the real test of endurance. It is like that this morning, hitting the road that leads past Khatiwala High School (which we live behind) until I arrive at the main highway.

The first reservations set in as I observe a group of men sitting shirtless by the side of the road, the pick axes by their side indicating previous intense physical labor, the glistening of their skin the sun corroborating this assumption. As I put one foot in front of the other and naturally speed up as if to prove something, I can’t help but register the absurdity of my running to compensate for me sedentary lifestyle. No matter, I think, push on.

The real uncertainty hits as I realize that I am going about the same speed as a stringy man in a torn shirt ahead of me pushing a loaded down flatbed pushcart to which he is applying all his bodily strength to move its reluctant wagon wheels forward. To avoid comparison, I speed up, which of course leads to my lungs starting to burn and the slowing of my pace as I turn around and head back in the other direction.

Surat, you should know, dear reader, was 7 years ago proclaimed the most polluted city in India. While that title since has been bestowed upon some other hardworking and deserving city, the smog stained buildings and the thick haze hanging over the highway despite the sunny morning make it easy to see how that might have been the case. Like Providence, everyone claims that Surat has come so far, but I can attest that they are a long way from ‘Water-Fire’ like rebirth.

At this point in the run, despite Katy Perry enticing me onwards, I slow to a walk, my lungs really burning and the remnants of last week’s cold blocking my nose. Whether this halt is a result of my general poor level of fitness or Surat’s smog or the rising temperature of India at mid-morning or that cigarette I smoked when I was Thailand, it is hard to know; but at this point I am definitely feeling my optimism begin to curl into a ball and hide behind the cloudiness building up in my head.

According to my rough estimate, I have been running for 10 minutes.

I begin to do a sort of compromised run-walk that pacifies my sense of determination as well as my failing body until through the motivating beats of Jordin Sparks I hear jeering coming from the side of the road. I turn my head in time to see a bus full of private school boys, arms flailing out of the window to catch my attention, urging me onwards. I begin to miss the sweet, adorable faces of my students at Kadod and mentally curse the obnoxiousness of the over-privileged adolescent. Until, of course, I remember that I was one.

The nail in the coffin is a number of Rajasthani women, heads covered with the tails of their saris, giving me a look of horror as I shuffle onward. I smile in a lopsided way and slow to a real walk, turning back down the road to the house in embarrassed defeat and mentally filing this under “Notable experiences” in sub-category “Reasons I need to join a proper gym.”

Best,
Cat

Alternative Transport System

2009-07-31T00:02:00.004+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

After many aborted attempts to get my driver’s license so I could buy a motor scooter and zip happily and efficiently between the schools I must visit to observe our Fellows, I must bow to the monolith of Indian bureaucracy and admit defeat. Why I cannot get my license is an overdue story for another time: needless to say, I have discovered another way to jet between schools and it is not the bumbling local bus system.

I stumbled upon the “chakra” system of transportation by accident: I never had any reason to discover it when I lived in Kadod because I never had any reason to travel anywhere that wasn’t regularly serviced by buses. A chakra is an over-sized autorickshaw: basically like a normal auto-rickshaw but with a backseat. I’ve sometimes heard them referred to as tempos in other places around the country. Locally, they are the source of controversy and with reason: I thought it was only my American sensibilities that found the idea of cramming 14 people into space meant comfortably for 7 and watching the driver drive with four men sharing the front seat with him ludicrous, but it turns out the locals feel this way as well. Darshanbhai, Kadod’s local phone booth owner, warned me off the chakras, citing the state of Indian roads: “Driving is crazy! In buses, government will give you money for accident and hurt. Government will give you nothing if you are hurt in chakra!”

Sadly, I must take my chances. The entrepreneurial spirit of the chakra drivers appeals to me and furthermore, the bus only comes about once every one and a half to two hours. To take a chakra is the same price as the bus and they leave much more often. What is the catch, I hear you ask? Well, they drive like maniacs, overcrowd the vehicle to the point of people hanging off of it and they won’t leave until they’ve reached hanging off capacity, which means you could be waiting for the chakra to go almost as long as the bus, depending on the time of day. However, its added modicum of efficiency is enough to convert me to traveling using the system daily.

I found myself waiting today, as I often am, at the Madhi bus station. In order to get from my current residence in Bajipura to visit my old home town of Kadod and the new teachers stationed there, I must change chakras at the Madhi bus stand, which is located in between Kadod and Bajipura since there are no direct chakras that go from Bajipura to Kadod. This change can take anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and the whim/greed of the chakra drivers.

The drivers themselves, despite their insistence on ignoring my pleas to please leave when they have sufficient passengers, have taken an interest in me. Because I’m often at the station by myself in the middle of the day waiting in the back of one or another of their vehicles, in the beginning, they took to standing around at a safe distance and gawking at me. When the word spread that I could speak Hindi (the chakra network updates almost as quickly as Twitter, or so it would seem), they dared to take a step closer and ask me a few questions, mostly predictable: where are you from? Why are you here? Do you know those other girls teaching at Madhi? Do you like India? Etc.

At first, I answered cautiously, unsure of their motivation. I was still new at the system, I hadn’t yet learned which drivers go between which villages and who lives where and who will take you home if you get stuck near nightfall at the Madhi bus station or who will let you pay later if you don’t have a five rupee coin. Each passing day, I’ve learned more: who listens to old hindi music and which drivers like the poppy new versions, who has children, who can read. Each day, they’ve asked me more about myself: why did I come here? Why do we teach in the schools? Do I miss my family? Who is in my family? The camaraderie between myself and these men, young and old, was totally unexpected.

It still won’t get them to leave with only 13 passengers though. Rupee beats relationship, or so it would seem.

Best,
Cat

Poor Substitute

2009-07-15T11:33:00.003+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I am sorely behind in my accounts to you. I don't make my apology lightly - I think about you almost daily and hope that my anecdotes of daily life here can resume once things become a little more settled. In the meantime, I present the following to you as a poor substitute for my usual detailed updates.

I had an article published in the Indian paper DNA recently that provides a more rounded reflection on my experience than I usually provide. If you are interested, it can be found here:

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/interview_indian-student-works-hard-but-isn-t-prepared-for-jobs_1273822

Best,
Cat

Parallel Universe

2009-06-06T02:58:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

This feeling of déjà vu is unmistakable. It was only a year ago that I lay here in the middle of the night writing on this same cot, pulled out in the center of the room so as to be under the fan (and in the process defying all Western rules of space use which don’t apply in such insidious heat anyway). The feeling, however, is somewhat unwarranted as while the circumstances for laying on this cot might be the same, the difference is that our comfortable house in Kadod which we turned into a home has been completely stripped of everything except for this cot and the massive cupboard which houses our English children’s library. The refrigerator is still here, housing one lone bottle of water which I brought with me from the train. The water is almost gone. Tomorrow I will have to buy more.

Bracketed by returning to Kadod, my experiences of the past two months in the US feel strangely foreign. Is foreign the word I want? Or is it parallel? Like another universe, perhaps.

Vimalbhai, our friend who rents his car and driving services for a living, came to pick me up from the train station, bottle of water and flowers in hand, looking for all the world like my grandparents did at airport when they met me not two months before. “Sister, you are the big boss now!” He exclaimed, making me laugh with embarrassment. He followed this assertion with an insistence that he treat me to some roadside sugarcane juice made by running sticks of sugarcane through a manually operated press that squeezes the juice out. As I took my first sip of the sweet, green colored liquid out of a dubiously clean plastic cup, my mind flashed back to the time that I had spent at the Princeton in Asia orientation last month in order to meet our new Kadod fellows. Sitting in on the ‘Health and Wellness’ session, the head of PIA had detailed how you lose the necessary antibodies to protect you from disease when you leave the country for a few weeks.

Vimalbhai looked at me expectantly. “Tastes like India!” He shouted, partially as a question.

Looking into his expectant face, I gave a hearty “Yes!” and a mental shrug, washing it down with my sugarcane juice.

The drive back to Kadod didn’t feel real until we reached the part of the highway that is only sugarcane fields as far as the eye can see. Amongst this expanse of sturdy, leafy stalks, I knew that somehow I had found my way back here, resisting the siren call of all the major cities on the East coast I had visited while home. As we approached the final stretch of the interior road the leads into the village, I started to see faces that I recognized: Anish, my 9E student on his motorbike, the woman who runs one of the local restaurants at the bus stop next to the man who runs the nearby shop whose t-shirt always reads “Work like a dog; Sleep like a log.” Turning from the main road onto Bazaar street, I felt a sudden pang of anxiety. What if… what if I missed Kadod more than it missed me? What if this was going to be one of those sequels that isn’t as good as the original movie?
I guess I shouldn’t have worried.

Vimalbhai stopped the car in front of the local phone booth and yelled to Darshanbhai to come out. All of a sudden, the car was surrounded by Darshanbhai’s family reaching through the window to grab my hands and say a welcome home. My smile widened until my face couldn’t contain it. It was a feeling that repeated itself often today as I reunited with Kamleshbhai the tailor and his family, Vimalbhai’s wife, daughter and nephew Avinash, Vikrambhai and his family, Taiyaba and her family.

How is it possible to feel so at home when it’s home that I’ve just left?

Best,
Cat

Return At Last

2009-06-05T05:50:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Sitting in the Mumbai airport waiting for a dawn departure to the train station en route to Kadod, I finally have time to compose my thoughts to you, dear reader . My lapse in communication these past few months is inexcusable: Over stimulated by my last month in Kadod as a teacher and subsequently overwhelmed with a whirlwind two month visit to the US during which I assumed the responsibilities for my new position with the Foundation, I can tell you that this unaccounted for time left me happy but in turns frazzled, anxious, and unable to write. Know that I have not forgotten you, nor do I intend to as I return to India.

The past 24 hours have had the makings of a most curious transition. The outward markers of my Indian existence which I shed so easily while at home amongst family and friends in the US have been slowly reassumed and the feeling of transformation was most unusual, inextricably linked to the legs of my journey back.

Like transformational waves lapping at the edges of my mind, the first washed gently over me as I sat in front of a chatty Indian girl on the first leg of my flight to Frankfurt. She spoke to her seat-mate, a fellow Philadelphian bound for a German beer festival, of her life growing up in India and what it was like in Bangalore. As I listened distractedly, I felt strangely disconnected from her experience and to soothe and immersed myself in catching up with the blockbuster hits from this past year, feet firmly planted in America.

The next wave was stronger, firmer and more unsettling. I walked through the spidery, dark halls of the Frankfurt International Airport passing an international myriad of hurried and leisurely walkers to my gate (I myself fall squarely in the former category). At the end of the hall, I spotted the sign I had spent half an hour following signs and searching for: C16. Upon turning into the gate, I was greeted by a sea of brown faces peppered here and there with a few foreigners like me. The strange familiarity of this pierced my consciousness – the strength of my recognition and the depth of my discomfort surprised me. However, like pulling on an old pair of jeans folded in the back of the closet, after squirming for a minute of so I found that my discomfort left me and I sat down on a bench to wait for boarding. The recollection of the feeling, however, that definitive shift of mind, stayed poignant.

And then I was fully drenched as yet another wave crashed over me: The airline attendant presented me with my specially ordered vegetarian meal, which on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai can only be Indian food. Know, dear reader, that I’ve been on an Indian food ban since I left Kadod, knowing that upon my return this would be my only fare for the next year.

At first, as I peeled back the sides of the aluminum top and revealed the tripartite dish underneath (rice, saag, and rajma arranged like a tiny reproduction of the Indian flag in my easily reheatable airline food container), I reluctantly eyed the contents. Running my eye over the rest of the tray left me feeling similarly disappointed: a small salad with limp, diseased looking lettuce, some suspicious looking raita (yogurt with vegetables mixed in) and a dessert which took my unexercised eye a minute to finally identify as a type of halwa (milky Indian dessert) with pureed pistachio.

I took up my plastic fork with trepidation and for a moment poked idly at the rice in the center of my tray. I took a bite. Not atrocious. I took another. The buttery feeling the rice left on my tongue brought back a picture of the daily blue bowl of rice, sitting on my kitchen table in Kadod. I took another, this time taking a little of the patriotic green saag. Too soon, I decided as I swallowed the spicy bite with distaste and took a bite of my neutral looking roll to soothe my unamused mouth.

Next I decided to turn my delicate attentions to the halwa. My spoon dove gently into the soft mass and brought up a bite. Things were beginning to look up, I decided as my tongue agreeably caressed the spoon, searching for more sugary halwa. For an airline approximation, this was good. I promptly ate half of it and, spurred by this victory, decided to attempt the suspect raita which I also found surprisingly pleasing.

It was then that I spotted the small packet of mango acchar (pickle). Acchar is a commonly used Indian table condiment that is like a spicy jellied fruit that you eat small portions of in conjunction with your main dish for flavor. There are many kinds, but spicy mango is popular and common. Normally, acchar is one of my favorite parts of the meal. However, on this occasion, I found myself twirling the sealed butter packet sized container between my hesitant fingers. My fingers passed over the pull tab that would open the lid. It felt like a . . . . commitment. It was so unarguably Indian and as I watched the oil shift from side to side through the clear plastic packing in time with the ministrations of my fingers, I balked, thought, breathed and pulled back the tab, spreading the contents over the top of my main dish.

The linguistic transition seemed simple after my commitment to the cuisine. Watching Billu Barbar (SRK Bollywood blockbuster from earlier this year) during the latter half of my flight was like splashing on the sandbar compared to the mental steps I’d made over the previous sixteen hours. My mind played with the Hindi phrases in my head, puzzling over some of the more complicated ones and storing others for later use.

And now I have arrived: after being checked diligently for swine flu by men in white breathing masks, fighting eager Indian passengers awaiting their luggage at the belt and changing my money from dollars into rupees, my transformation is complete. I’ve even changed back into Indian clothing thanks to a conveniently located bathroom near customs.

Only two more hours to go till I’m en route to Kadod. I can’t wait.
Best,
Cat

P.S. I just killed my first mosquito.

An Exciting Announcement

2009-02-27T01:45:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

It seems strange to qualify anything that I write to you, dear reader, as ‘personal’ since my account of my experiences here can only be described as personal. But I have a personal update that doesn’t have to do with anecdotes of delightfully incorrect sentence structure or classroom management or even cheating on exams.

I’ll be staying here in India for another year and even better than that: I’ll be staying here in Kadod! Our Foundation is expanding our program model to two additional schools in the surrounding area next year and over the past few months has been discussing the possibility of hiring an India Director to manage its operations in country. I’m happy to share that as of this morning, that person will be me! While the decision to trade in my chalk and duster for a mobile and mobility is my own, it does seem strange to choose a student-less existence after three years of working with students full-time.

Oddly enough, in an unpredictable twist to my own story, it seems I cannot get enough of Gujarat. That, however, will not stop me from returning to the U.S. from April 8th to June 2nd. I will be in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during that time, so if that is in your general direction, let’s connect.

Best,
Cat

You Coming Sister Marriage?

2009-02-15T11:59:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I came into my Spoken English class a week ago to find my boys huddled in a group around one bench, whispering feverishly to one another in Gujarati. I heard a snatch of “Melisha ma’am” and “Ketrin ma’am” as they spoke. What were they up to?

The huddle broke as they saw me and I saw Hitesh, my small, rambunctious and usually unprepared student from 9D hide something quickly behind his back. Oh god, I thought, I hope this tete a tete isn’t yet another attempt to scare me with a very realistic looking plastic lizard.

He walked slowly forward and a wide, toothy grin broke out in a shine across his face.

“Miss,” he said in his voice which is surprisingly scratchy for a kid, bringing his hand out from behind his back and presenting its contents to me, “you come in my sister’s marriage?”

I looked down at what he was holding out to me. It was a card upon which “Melissa ma’am and Cathrine ma’am” had been scrawled on the neat blank line designated for names and inside it was full of the Gujarati of a formal wedding invitation: our first.

“Of course,” I replied, delighted.

Apparently, Melissa and I had graduated from crashing weddings with Sejalben to being invited in our own right. Of course, this presented a new problem: were we ready to strike out on our own? I mean, an Indian wedding is not exactly the minute to minute affair of a New York wedding: there is lots of idle time between dinner and the ceremony, sometimes hours, for guests to roam and chat and somehow everyone (except for the clueless American teachers) knows how long this time is supposed to be. How would we fare without our crutches?

It turns out I needn’t have worried.

“We’re going to be late,” I whined as we readied ourselves to leave the house this afternoon for the wedding. As we threw the bolt closed on our front door, I ran my eye over Melissa’s sari and my own bangled arms, hoping we would be up to the measure of the critical Indian aunty’s eye.

We made our way as quickly as we could up the main road of Kadod and back into the neighborhood where Hitesh and his family live. I had often seen him when I was out on my bike, running around his plaid play shirt and school uniform pants. As we reached the road where I knew he lived, I realized I didn’t know where we were supposed to go. As many times as I had threatened to go to his house and tell his father about his Gujarati jokes, his missing text book, his constant lack of a pen, I had never actually done it because of his disarmingly adorable smile and so I didn’t actually know where he lived.

Confused, we stopped just outside the large temple which dominates this part of town and contemplated our next move. Kids and adults in finery were milling around, but there was no sign of any of our students. Melissa and I looked at each other. We were failing our first closed-book cultural test.

Luckily, our cheat sheet arrived.

“Miss!” Hitesh bounded out of a house up the street where a large tent had been set up for the wedding proceedings. He was dressed in a flat pressed blue collar shirt with a sewn in slogan on the back proclaiming ‘No Fear!” and a pair of tight jean pants. His hair had been slicked back and despite his diminutive size he was almost looking fourteen years old (which he is).

He stopped bounding just in front of me. “Hungry? You eat?” He asked me, smiling excitedly with eyes darting back and forth between me and Melissa. He immediately started leading us towards a large gravel yard at the end of the street where long bolts of cloth had been laid in parallel with large platters and bowls made from dried leaves placed in front. He indicated that we should sit, so after a moment of weak hesitation we did, and he plopped down right next to me.

As soon as we sat, the other mass of children who’d started to follow us out of curiosity and it turns out would follow us all night, also sat. By now, eating dinner had gained momentum and adults were following our lead and sitting to receive the portions that were being doled out by local boys (all my students, incidentally) onto the leaf plates.

“Miss,” Hitesh said, catching my attention and pointing, “this is my aunt, and that one, my uncle and that one my grandfather and there my grandmother.” It was the longest English sentence I had ever heard him speak.

“All your relatives are here?” I asked him.

“Yes, miss, and my sister, her marriage, she is in house for beauty parlor!” He said laughing at his own wit. As Mayur, one of his classmates, threw down a large spoonful of unidentified cooked and spiced vegetables onto my platter with a plop, Hitesh pointed at it.“In Gujarati, saag,” he said seriously and I nodded with a smile in appreciation for his identification, watching out of the corner of my eye as the boys who moved down the closely packed line of plates serving food kicked up dust as their shoes shuffled down the row. I then watched it settle on my food, smiled at Hitesh, and dug my fingers into the saag to take a bite.

After dinner, Hitesh took us and the cadre of seven to ten year olds who’d decided that they’re new occupation was trailing American teachers like lemmings to his uncles’ house where his sister was being readied for the wedding. He tried to shoo away the kids but they persisted in staying and staring at us with their big eyes so he merely blocked the stairwell as we made our way up the rickety steps to the second floor where his twenty year old sister Pritee was being adorned with jewels by her best friends. She tried to get up as we entered. “No no!” we insisted as we indicated she should sit. Both her arms were covered from the sleeve of her sari blouse all the way to her finger tips with deep, dark intricate mehndi.

Hitesh, who after a few minutes came running into the room after successfully stopping the onslaught of pre-teens introduced us to his sister as “my American teachers.” After a short congratulations, we left the house. As we got outside he said, “Now I am fresh, miss.”

I stopped, confused I stumbled to put our discarded sandals back on just outside the doorway of his house. “What do you mean?” I asked him.

He threw up his arm and exposed his freshly scented armpit to me. “Full Perfume!” He shouted happily.

“Oh, ah yes,” I said, as the scent of white jasmine floated towards me, “very nice.”

Undeterred by my tepid response, Hitesh charged forward into the street, motioning for us to follow. “She sister marriage nine and coming my house now groom and you see!” He smiled over his shoulder as he marched onwards.

Confused but trusting that he had everything in hand, we followed him (and the seven year olds followed us) out across the street to a house a little further down next to the gravel yard in which we had enjoyed our carefully narrated wedding banquet.

Leaving our sandals at the threshold, we ducked our heads past the low dark doorway and found ourselves in a room full of glittering saris and embroidered kurtas with relatives of the groom inside them. The groom himself lay sprawled out on the floor on a mat in the corner, relaxing but looking nervous. We gave a quick palms together ‘Namaste’ to everyone as moved through the room to the back, following the excitable Hitesh.

Inside the room, an old wrinkled woman in a purple silk sari indicated that we should sit, saying “Please seat yourself,” over and over to us in Gujarati. She came and sat next to us and took Melissa’s arm in her firm grip. One of the clan of seven year olds was sent dutifully for cold drinks.

She began to speak in a rhythmic, slow Gujarati, her tongue caressing each sound carefully. Her care, unfortunately, was lost on us as we looked at her blankly and then at Hitesh, who glancing quickly at the ceiling with a concentrated look, began to try and translate.

“You, married? She ask?” He said. We told her no.

“You… liking India?” His scratchy voice intoned again with intense concentration. This question and answer continued and each time he dutifully translated so the groom’s mother would be able to comprehend our answers.

I was ecstatic, but not because of the conversation or because of India. With every sentence of English Hitesh uttered, I became even more so. Here was a student who never, and I mean never, spoke English in the classroom if it could be avoided. Despite coming to Spoken English class everyday, he’d loll around at his bench, tell me in Gujarati that he didn’t bring a pen, and then after I gave him one wouldn’t open his notebook or follow directions and after it all would look at me sadly and say plaintively, “Miss, outside game?”

This was different, however: perhaps born out of a desire to meet the demanding rules of Indian hospitality and also his happiness at our coming to the event, Hitesh was now presented with a genuine communicative goal. And hence flowed forth the English!

I guess it was all he needed.

Best,
Cat

An Overdue Haircut

2009-01-30T23:26:00.003+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

When I first met Mr. Tailor’s androgynous offspring, Krishna, I was stymied.

“Your… child is so cute,” I said, calling out the reserve word I formerly used when making cold calls to parents in the Boston Public School system when I couldn’t determine the sex of their child.

“Oh Thank You!” Kamleshbhai (Mr. Tailor’s true name, or so we’ve discovered) exclaimed with his usual exuberance. No follow up, no pronoun use. I couldn’t ask any questions about the small cute kid now running haplessly around the shop without giving away that I didn’t know his sex and since Krishna is both a girl’s and a boy’s name here, I wasn’t getting any help from that quarter either. So, I simply smiled and nodded emphatically.

Krishna, for his (or was it her?) part, burst into tears on sight of me. I seem to have that effect on small kids around here.

Since that encounter in Mr. Tailor’s crowded and colorful workshop, Melissa and I uncovered the answer to this elusive question through a recent invitation: I had stopped by Mr. Tailor’s shop as I sometimes do to sit in the back near the foot powered sewing machines whose whirring needles punch the fabric in a rhythmic way while Mr. Tailor looks on, now and then stopping to cut a piece of material.

We had been discussing the coming of Narendra Modi and the business acumen of the Gujarati people when he abruptly veered away from these topics.

“You…will…” he began in a sort of stop and start English, struggling to force the language to express his thoughts. I peered at him curiously until he switched into Hindi and the words began to flow. “You will come to our house on Thursday for the babri?”

“Babri – matlab (meaning)?” I asked him, not understanding.

“Er,” he paused, thinking of the best way to say it, “the haircut of my son,” (ah ha!) “he is cutting his hair for the first time.”

“Isn’t he like, two years old?” I said, confused.

“Yes, it is our tradition, no haircut until he is so old and then we will shave his head.” Suddenly, I remembered: I had seen photos of the ceremony at people’s houses and read about it in my religion class in college, but this would be the first time that I would see it for myself.

When we arrived on the appointed day, an awning had been set up over the street, blocking any traffic making the mistake of trying to get through on this special day. Chairs had been set up in rows outside for no one in particular’s use. All the men were simply standing around outside talking to each other while the women sat sequestered on the floor in the small main room of the house. Kamleshbhai smiled widely as he saw us walking up the street: when we arrived under the awning, after some warm ‘namastes’, he motioned for us to go inside with the rest of the women and take our seats. The room was packed wall to wall with women ranging from the beautifully wrinkled faces of old women with crooked teeth and wireless spectacles to young black-haired women bedecked in sparkling bangles and colorful, jeweled saris.

There was one open space on the floor which, after a moment of hesitation, we decided was the perfect size for two American teachers. When Kamleshbhai saw that we had elected to sit on the floor, he motioned to an empty bench in the corner where we could sit comfortably, but since none of the other women were sitting in such a manner, we protested and said that we would be fine on the floor. What we did not realize was that his generosity was not for our benefit but rather for his, since the open space in which we had elected to sit was right in front of the shrine to Ganesha where the family would need to sit for the ceremony. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late: the arm of Indian hospitality had swung into action and rugs were being pulled from the other room and placed in front of us to give the parents and Krishna somewhere to sit as they performed the necessary pooja. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, but by the time I protested and said we would be happy to move it was far too late. I mentally added it to the ever-growing list of faux-pas by the American teachers.

Kamleshbhai and his wife sat on either side of small Krishna, whose hair had been loosed from the pony tail holder that usually keeps it out of his face in a tight sprout from the top of his head. When the priest began to chant, Kamleshbhai smiled down at his tiny son and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer; Krishna followed suit, straightening his tiny fingers into a gesture of piety, looking up at his father for approval.

The ceremony itself was merely a prelude to the big show which followed: once the rice had been powdered and thrown at the shrine of Ganesh-ji and two one rupee coins had been pasted to the wall using ghee, Kamleshbhai’s sister, as per tradition, grabbed a lock of Krishna’s hair and used a large blessed pair of shears to cut off a huge hunk of Krishna’s hair. Looking at the hair in her hands, Krishna began to loudly cry and was taken outside where the rest of his hair was shorn short so that it would be easier to shave.

The guests followed and I watched as both of Krishna’s parents had to physically restrain him as the barber brandished his sharp razor over Krishna’s screaming head. I gasped and bit my lip with nervousness each time the razor was brought towards his head: Krishna was wildly bucking and kicking in his parents arms, screaming a frenzied plea to all the delighted adults assembled to watch. Despite his parents cooing, and promises of forthcoming chocolate, he raged on; meanwhile, I found myself impressed by the skillfulness of the barber who always seemed to move the razor away from his rearing scalp at just the right moment, averting potentially bloody accidents left and right. The poor kid had cut hair covering every part of his exposed face, his neck, his arms. I would have bucked and screamed too, in that situation.

Just after the barber ran the razor artfully down the last curve of Krishna’s scalp, leaving him completely bald, Krishna was whisked away in the arms of his aunt inside to have the stray hair washed from his face and to have his clothes changed. When he emerged again, this time clad in a golden colored kurta pyjama, he was still bawling in her arms, refusing the comfort of all his well meaning relatives. When a sympathetic aunt handed him a Cadbury chocolate bar, he screamed even louder and threw the chocolate bar with all his might back at her face, narrowly missing her nose.

Perhaps as a way to distract from the ill-mannered reception of the his first haircut, Kamleshbhai drew our attention away from Krishna and his adoring relatives with an invitation of lunch. Two runners had been laid down on the street under the awning upon which, as with many feasts we have been to here, we were to sit. The rocky, gravelly street did not make for the most comfortable vantage point for eating lunch; however, I did not want to offend Kamleshbhai, so I maneuvered my legs around in my sari so that I could sit and eat the thali-style meal which was being served to us by jean-clad teenage boys (a theme for feasts here).

Just as everyone had gotten settled in neat rows of hands digging into food and mouths chewing thoughtfully at their Gujarati delicacies, an unexpected visitor arrived to partake in the proceedings. I looked up from my plate, hand poised in front of my mouth to deliver a tasty portion of papad when I saw a large cow with overgrown horns sauntering right into the middle of the tent.

For a moment, everyone just stared at it and for the briefest of seconds I thought it was going to be allowed to walk as it pleased through the tent. It stopped, looked, and then swung its head dangerously towards the left and stuck out its large, hammy tongue dripping with oozing saliva to indulge in some sabzi from the platter of a woman sitting across from me. She leapt up with a scream of fright and Melissa and I started back as well, thinking the scream would force it to head in our direction. Immediately, the men descended upon it, thwacking it and making clicking noises until it was run out from under the tented awning and made to promenade itself back up the street.

As we savored our meal, Krishna, tears freshly dried and smiling now as if all was indeed forgiven (I have my suspicions about the role the chocolate may have played in this decision), made is way in the company of his cousins down the row of guests, smiling and gurgling attentively as the perfect host. His newly bald head shone in the noon sunlight and as he passed me, he even put out a little hand.

As strange as the whole thing seemed at the time, on reflection, how natural is it to dress up male babies in white dresses and sprinkle water on them? I’m just saying, is all.

Best,
Cat

The Oral Test

2009-01-29T21:38:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I sat in the wooden chair that is present in each and every classroom behind the small wooden desk where I usually rest my teaching materials for the brief half hour that I have to make an impression on each class during a normal teaching day. Teaching while seated is acceptable here, but I just can’t do it: I always teach standing, moving frequently in between the benches if I can and trying to keep the students engaged by having to track me with their eyes.

However, today, from my new vantage point in this chair, I looked up into the eyes of 9th standard girl who was so nervous I could see the sweat beading on her forehead (though this could easily be attributable to the 80 degree average that Kadod seems to run regardless of the season). Pushing a piece of stray hair behind her ear and then quickly returning her hand to crossed arms tightly hugging the front of her body, her eyes nervously flitted to mine and then to the back of the classroom and then out the classroom door. She chewed on her lip, then stamped her foot, impatient with herself. Finally she shook her head. “No, miss,” she said, defeated.

I looked at her reassuringly. “It’s okay,” I said. “Can you recite an essay for me? On any topic?”

The girl launched in on an essay entitled “My Favorite Game”: “There are many types of games,” she began, “but they are mostly indoor games like playcards, karam, or chess. Outdoor games include football, volleyball and cricket. Cricket is a sport played with 11 players to a team, it –“

“That’s fine, thank you, you may sit,” I told her. What I had just heard was a regurgitated version of an essay I had taught (ie. been forced to write on the board while the students copied into their notebooks) several months back. Before that, I had asked this girl, roll number 39, to recite one of the poems from the book for me. Next to her roll number I noted a terse “poor” under the poem heading and “good” underneath the essay heading, just as Tabussum had showed me to do earlier.

“Roll number 40?” I called out, looking up across the classroom which was a buzzing sea of moving lips and hands in ears as each girl stared down intently at her textbook to try and do last minute practice before their fateful number was called.

My tendency towards melodrama is getting away from me. The results of this oral exam in actuality is not that ‘fateful’, thanks the seedy underbelly of the Kadod High School exam scheme. The way the system works is thus: The students take their second trimester exams, the teachers give them marks out of 40. After this, the students are required to take an “oral exam” to determine their competency in spoken English. What this really means is that they are required to recite a poem of their choice from the textbook and memorize an essay on a topic of their choice, also to be recited.

Wanting to actually play the part of a real teacher, I asked Tabussum to let me administer the oral exams in my classes and she obligingly taught me how to do it. She told me to take down their scores as “poor”, “average”, “good” or “very good” and informed that later she would ‘translate’ this into marks.

When I pushed her to let me just assign them marks, she blushed and explained what this ‘translation’ actually entailed. She would look at the rating that I gave the girls and assign a mark based out of ten to the rating I had given them, except in the case of the girls who had failed in the exam. In their case, she would simply give them the requisite number of marks to pass.

“You see,” she said, “They need seventeen marks to pass. So that girl who has taken ten marks, I will give her seven marks,” she said with an embarrassed smile.

On seeing my look of horror, she blushed even further. “I know it’s not right,” she said. “But if the girls fail, it’s a difficult for us, later.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her, still shocked.

“There is so much paperwork,” she explained, “if the students fail. It’s not good, I know, but teachers do like this.” She shrugged.

After a tense moment during which I could see her awaiting my reaction, I raised my eyebrows and gave her one of my what-will-be-will-be smiles. It was no use arguing: even if I think it’s wrong, what do I know about these things? The whole exam system is so beyond my comprehension that what use is it to fight even this one cog in the system? She and I had already disagreed when I’d tried to get her to agree to let me give them a real oral exam.

“Why don’t we just ask them questions? Like the kind they’d encounter in a real conversation or that I ask them in class?” She’d shaken her head and argued that Sejalben had already told them how we’d testing them on the exam: strict memorization and recitation only.

So, as I sat in my chair and looked up at roll number 40 (otherwise known as Priyanka) in her nicely pressed blue jumper, knitting her fingers together while she looked into the distance and recited “The Rain, The Beautiful Rain” I hoped that perhaps one day someone asked her a question to which she could reply:

“Thunder crashing / rain slashing / brings the rain, the welcome rain!”

Best,
Cat

Obamarama

2009-01-28T21:20:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The Obama-fever has reached all the way to our village where everyone wants to stop me and congratulate me on the ascension of our new president. “Obama, yeah, he is good man,” Sagar, one particularly outspoken student in my Spoken English class, commented yesterday while making the Gujarati sign of approval, interrupting an activity that had nothing to do with the current president or his personal merits.

“Uh, thanks for that contribution, Sagar,” I said dryly while trying to get the class back on track. His strangely timed comment merely reflects the prevailing mood around here: Obama is featured daily on the front of both English and Gujarati newspapers and while I’m sure the level of coverage is nowhere near the frenzy that it must be at home, the hunger for knowledge about this man has led the students and our friends in Kadod to stop and grill us for information. One student even stole my biography of Michelle Obama off my desk when I wasn’t looking so he could take it home and show the pictures to his family.

As I walked into my 11th standard class on the day after the inauguration which Melissa and I watched from the comfort of the principal’s office (which in one corner conveniently houses a big screen TV under a crocheted dust-cover), I could hear the murmurs of the seemingly hallowed name under the breath of the students. The class clown, Bhavin, suddenly shouted, “Teacher! OBAMA!”

I smiled at him. “Yes,” I said after I reached the front of the class and the students had finished their ritual “Good morning teacher” and sat down, “it is the beginning of a new age in America, I guess.”

Earlier in the month, we had spent some class time diverging away from the fascinating topics the curriculum has to offer, such as excerpts from a 12th century poem and a nonsensical story about a boy with a stammer who enters a debate competition, in order to read an op-ed from The Indian Express comparing America and India’s human rights legacy and history of minorities in political offices. India came out very favorably in the comparison and so I thought it would be nice amidst all the hype for the students to read something to make them proud of their own country. Along the way, I had to explain the history of slavery in the US, the Jim Crow laws and the current racial dynamics of the US in English, none of which I’m sure was faithfully translated into student understanding, but the students did have some thoughtfully worded opinions to express about the subject after we finished the reading and so all in all it seemed like a worthy exercise.

Perhaps this was one of the reasons that the students seemed particularly excited to discuss the inauguration speech. “Did you watch?” I asked them, incredulously

“Yes, ma’am,” a good portion of the room replied. I was surprised. So many of these young men and women cared about the swearing in of this president on the other side of the world?

“And you understood it?” I continued, trying not to sound dubious.

“Not all, ma’am. Ma’am, please explain?” They looked at me pleadingly.

And so I found myself scrapping my lesson and being charged with the daunting task of making accessible to these students the eloquent words of our new president. The students, prone to chatting and side conversation, sat very silently with an intense kind of gaze as I tried to remember his speech and make it understandable to them point by point. I left out some things which had little do with Kadod, but overall, they seemed to catch the meaning.

The maturity with which the 11th standard students approached gaining knowledge could not be expected from my ninth standard boys, who, aside from stealing my books when I am not looking and passing them around excitedly to look at pictures of Sasha and Malia, have become obsessed with the similarity between “Obama” and “Osama”.

“Obama! Osama! Teacher!” They shouted at me as they hung around after school waiting for our Spoken English class to begin.

“Teacher,” one student with a relatively high level of Spoken English said, “Obama is a killed Osama.”

“Uh, what?” I said, puzzled.

“Obama Osama is killed,” he tried again. Try saying that five times fast.

Hitting him on the arm, his friend called him an idiot in Gujarati and tried again on his behalf. “Teacher, Osama say he kill to Obama.”

“Osama wants to kill Obama,” I repeated, becoming ever more confused. “Or Obama wants to kill Osama?”

“Ah, yes teacher,” they nodded, “like this.”

“Well,” I replied with a shrug, “I guess that makes sense.”

The obsession has escalated to the point where it is present even in our Spoken English dialogues. Our unit this week is focusing on formal/informal speech and polite ways of saying things versus impolite ways. I asked the boys to create a dialogue in which a famous person is invited to their house and they serve them tea and breakfast.

After much huddled whispering and a refusal to show me their Spoken English notebooks before performing, I and the rest of the Spoken English class were subjected to the following:

Student 1: (pretends to knock on door)
Student 2: Ah, come in, is it you, Osama?
Student 1: (enters, wearing two handkerchiefs tied around his face and head so only his eyes are visible) Oh yes, it is me, Obama.
Student 2: Please sit down. May I offer you some chai or chocolates?
Student 1: No, please. No chai.
Student 2: You are come to visit me. Is dangerous. You bring a pistol?
Student 1: No pistol I bring. This time.
Student 2: You wanted man.
Student 1: Yes, I am a wanted man. Okay, I go now.
Student 2: Okay, goodbye Osama.
Student 1: Goodbye, Obama!

Fin.

Let’s hope such a Dr. Seuss-esque meeting never occurs.

Best,
Cat

Visit to the Ivory Tower

2009-01-25T17:12:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

A ten minute walk, a 2 hour bus ride and a half hour rickshaw ride from the Surat bus station led Tabussum (our co-teacher), Melissa and me to the desk of the Surat University Library yesterday. A supposed academic power-house of Gujarat, the campus itself was made up of the same concrete style buildings that characterize the prevalent architectural style here (reminiscent of the riot-proof American university buildings constructed on many campuses in the 1970s). The campus had an unkempt feel: the gardens were slightly overgrown, the paving stones askew, the piles of rubble from various construction projects spilling out into the campus pathways. It may only have felt that way because of the emptiness: no students could be seen anywhere, likely because of Monday’s being Republic Day (the anniversary of the day that the Indian Constitution was adopted) and thus a long weekend.

Outside the library on the steps, two middle-aged men sat idly reading Gujarati periodicals. As we approached, they glanced at us over the tops of their newspapers carelessly, then, did a double-take and put their newspapers down. As we moved to walk past them, they held out a hand to stop Tabussum.

“Where are you going?” They asked her in Gujarati with a look of concern.

The purpose of our visit was to become visiting members of the Surat University Library. Recently, I’d been expressing my desire to Tabussum to conduct some research on teacher training approaches in India and she had taken the initiative to ask her former professor in her B.Ed program (the equivalent of a certificate program in the US) to recommend some books and how we could obtain them. This type of initiative is one of the things I appreciate most about Tabussum: unlike many of the other teachers at the school, she has an avid interest in her own continuing education. “I have an interest in wanting to learn EVERYTHING,” she once told me. “I feel that I just don’t know very much.” She laments the few opportunities that there are at the school for her to improve her practice and it was because of this that she brought our attention to a small newspaper clipping about a research conference taking place in Ahmedabad in a few weeks on approaches to English language teaching.

“We will go, I think, if the principal gives us his permission?” She asked excitedly.

“Definitely!” I said. “The Foundation would love for us to attend a conference of this type.”

“But” she said fretfully knitting her fingers, “what if the principal does not gives us the money for the fee? Then I think we will pay with our own money, all right?”

“Tabussum,” I said reassuringly, “don’t worry about it. I’m sure the Foundation will be interested in the conference and want to sponsor the fees.”

“Even for me?” She said dubiously.

“Especially for you,” I replied with a smile. As it turned out, the principal did have some objections to our attending a research conference though the Foundation was able to smooth things over in this regard and now all the remains is for us to write a research paper to present. Thus, a trip to the University library and as an added bonus, a meeting with Tabussum’s “sir” as she calls her former B.Ed professor who is now the head of the M.Ed program at Surat University.

Tabussum gave a much shortened version of the following account to the man holding out his hand to stop us on the steps of the library. He listened with a skeptical expression and took up his newspaper again, a sign which we took as meaning that we’d gained admission into the hallowed hall.

As we entered the high-ceilinged room, I glanced around at the bare walls and the few small glass cases that housed announcements and thought about the differences between this and the Rockefeller Library which I worked at as an undergraduate. There was nothing that I recognized as the collegiate atmosphere here, but hopefully that didn’t mean there were no useful books. I could see behind the wooden desk at the opposite end of the room that the doorway opened up into a large, dark room with shelf upon shelf of books. We began to walk towards the stacks when we were stopped by the man behind the front desk.

“Where are you going?” A favorite question, it would seem.

Tabussum explained why we were there, to take a visiting membership with the library. The man began to shake his head violently.

“It is the 4th Saturday of the month,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

I looked at him blankly, unsure what this information had to do with anything, but Tabussum slapped her forehead in a gesture indicating some kind of slip of the mind. She turned to look at me and said, with some embarrassment, “It is the fourth Saturday of the month, Miss Cat. I forgot it.”

“And?” I prompted, still looking confused.

“We cannot take membership on the 4th Saturday of the month. Or the 2nd Saturday.”

“Oh, well… of course,” I said mildly. “That makes perfect sense.” I turned to the man behind the counter. “When is the library open?” I asked him, thinking perhaps we could come back another time.

“It’s open every day, from 9 am to 9 pm,” he told me in halting English.

“I see,” I said. “Every day?”

“Yes.”

“Saturdays too?”

“Oh no, ma’am. On Saturdays it is open from 11 am to 5 pm.”

“And Sundays?”

“The same time as Saturdays, ma’am,” he answered quickly.

I kept myself from pointing out the obvious contradiction. “I see,” was all I said. It turned out that we actually could not take membership on any Saturday because even if the man who usually processes members was there, he would be busy with other work. I agreed in as unironic tone as I could manage that naturally of course that would be the case. We left feeling defeated to make our way over to see Tabussum’s former professor.

Her professor’s office was located in a similarly box-like concrete building up a flight of dusty stairs, down a long, bare hall that opened into chipped paint classrooms on either side. At the end of the hall, there was a temporary wall dividing a larger room into three small shoe-box sized offices, in which plastic chairs and a plastic table had been placed. Seated behind this plastic table covered in papers, was Tabussum’s sir.

Tabussum had spent many words on telling us about how inspiring she found Professor Ansari in college and it was easy to see why. Tall, with a sharp, angled face and somewhat dark skin, he extended a breezy hand to greet us and with a charming smile motioned for us to sit down. His manner made one feel immediately at ease and I could see why Tabussum reported that he had been all the students’ favorites.

I wasted no time in asking him the questions about his M.Ed program that I had been thinking about on hearing that we were to have this meeting. I peppered him with questions about the course of the program, the details, the students, the expectations. He dutifully outlined their program and pointed me to a number of resources where I could learn more. One of the more interesting things on which he commented was how he had to conduct himself with the students.

“Here in India,” he said, “the teacher is held up like a kind of god.” He shook his head. “I have to watch my conduct all the time. If I were to sit in my office here and smoke a cigarette, it would be something like front page news. So, I am careful, especially with my students. You see,” he continued, leaning forward, “I can only meet with my students in large groups. Because, if I were to meet with them in small groups, people might suspect me of something.”

“Partiality?” I supplied.

“No, not partiality, exactly. But rather, some special,” he paused, “relationship. You understand?” I nodded. “Even if I am meeting in this office with a student one on one with the door open, there will be some talk of oh, what is he doing there with that student. So, I only advise them in groups of five and must be careful to conduct myself appropriately. Because here,” he said, “people cannot envision the type of professional relationship between student and teacher that you have in the US. If there is a boy and a girl, they will talk because they can only see them as lovers.” He sighed. “It’s not good.”

Tabussum nodded emphatically and agreed that it was for this reason that they had to keep their association as former student and teacher a secret. To hear them describe it made me harken back to my first days here when the principal described the “gap” that should be there between students and teachers. It seemed that it operated on all levels.

Despite our disappointment about not becoming library members, the afternoon was well spent in the company of Professor Ansari and he offered to mail us the forms that were necessary in order to take membership of the library. As we left the university and walked past the weedy gardens and piles of construction materials, I couldn’t help but think how fortunate Melissa and I were to have a co-teacher like Tabussum. I still don’t know what exactly it’s been about her life experience that has made her so much more open than the other teachers, but I suspect that this professor has had something to do with it.

How many other students or even fellow educators are missing out on such personal inspiration because of the concerns that Professor Ansari detailed before? One has to wonder...

Best,
Cat

Narendra's Flower Girl

2009-01-23T18:13:00.003+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

A week ago, we were looking at the face of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the kites that we were flying over the roofs of Kadod. Today, we were looking into his face directly while shaking his hand in front of 50,000 people.

How did this come to pass? Even I am still wondering, to use an Indian-English turn of phrase. From what Melissa and I can piece together retroactively, a strange chain of events seem to have set each other off and aligned perfectly to produce this moment.

The chain begins last week with Mayuri, the daughter of a friend of the principal’s who recently has married an NRI from the US and will be moving there in a matter of months. She wanted to practice her English and hang out, we needed to run errands and so we decided to combine the two into an afternoon in Bardoli that, because of Mayuri’s easy-going personality, was a huge success.

We were on our way back to the bus stop when Sureshbhai, the President of the school who previously took us on a tour of his farmhouse (a tour best remembered for the part where he demonstrated how to flush his western style toilet) saw us and offered to give us a ride home. Piling into his rather luxurious car, he insisted that he buy us some bananas before returning to Kadod. We protested: it really wasn’t necessary to get us bananas, but he strongly insisted and wore our protesting down. As he negotiated with the banana seller out of the car window, he caught sight of a poster just behind her head. He pointed at it.

“You see that?” he said to us in his shaky English. “That is Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat.”

“Ah yes,” I said, “I’ve heard of him.” And had I heard of him. My friends from my time in college in Delhi had compared him to an Indian Hitler. Representing the BJP, or Hindu nationalist party of India, his name was widely linked with a series of religious riots that took place early in his term as Chief Minister. He’d been blamed for inciting a lot of the violence towards innocent Muslim families at this time which some called a genocide. While this is a rather extreme view, I had also heard Tabussum, our Muslim co-teacher, talk about how he “was not good for her community.” However, aside from Tabussum, on probing into the politics of families in the area, Hindu and Muslim alike, I found that they took a very positive view of the Chief Minister’s time in office.

“He is all about progress, you can say,” Sejalben, the principal’s daughter-in-law, told me when I asked her about it. “He has so much self-confidence.”

“He is never married,” Daybalben told me, “because he is married to his work. No wife, no kids, nothing to distract him from the government and also no one for his enemies.”

Needless to say, when Sureshbhai told us that he was coming for the celebration of the birthday of Subash Chandra Bose (an Indian freedom fighter) to Haripura, a very small village one kilometer away from Kadod, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t the only one. All anyone could talk about this week (besides the inauguration of Barack Obama) was the imminent arrival of the Chief Minister and the construction of a helipad in the open field next to the petrol station. It was being said that as many as 100,000 people would attend from all over Southern Gujarat.

Melissa’s and my loose plans to attend were contingent on the rumors of school closing early on that day being true. We’d heard this rumor floating around the school and it was confirmed later in the week by not the principal, but rather by Darshanbhai and his father who run the local phone booth and have no children in Kadod High School. Once again, I found myself puzzled by the circuitous route by which Melissa and I receive information.
The tailor, Kamleshbhai, whose shop is across the street from the phone booth, had come over to discuss the CM’s coming and invited us to go with him on his motorbike.

We probably would have too had the principal not called us onto his porch later in the week, smiling broadly at us as we took our seats in the weathered plastic chairs with which we’ve become so familiar during our time here.

“Sureshbhai has called to me,” he began as he rocked gently back and forth from his seat on the porch swing, “and you are to present a bouquet to our Chief Minister, Narendra Modi when he comes at Haripura tomorrow.” Anyone could see his eyes were brimming with excitement at being able to relay this news to us.

For our part, we were completely speechless. “Uh,” I began, trying to give my brain a chance to catch up, “this is such an honor, sir,” I began.

“You will go on the stage and shake his hands!” The principal cut in excitedly and I smiled widely to show that I shared his excitement, though inside my mind had already jumped towards thinking about the thousands of things that could go wrong. How would we hand him a bouquet? Would we have to sit on the stage? What if I dropped the bouquet?

“What should we wear?” was all I could get out.

“Anything you like,” the principal said airily. “You should wear American clothes!”

“Er,” I looked at him, thinking about my closet and the t-shirt and jeans folded there that represented all that was left of my “American” wardrobe, “we can just wear saris, I guess. I mean, we are teachers, after all.”

“As you wish,” the principal said with an amiable head bob. “And if he asks you anything, you say you are from Kadod High School, Kadod, because he will know we are a good school and ours is a good school despite being in a small village and we try very hard and he will want to know how you have come to teach there.”

And hopefully not deport us for violating our visas, I thought to myself. I had never seen the principal so excited; he was practically gushing, pushing his English to its outermost limit in his excitement. “We will definitely mention the high school, if he speaks to us,” I assured him.

“But, he probably will not have time,” the principal warned suddenly, as if coming back to earth. I nodded; knowing Indian ceremony, we would probably be two of fifteen people to present him with bouquets.

The principal told us to be ready at 7:30 am, so in the warming new daylight, we stood on our porch as Sureshbhai’s driver drove in through school gates to pick us up the next day. He hurried us into the car where we were taken to Sureshbhai’s house to be briefed on what we would need to do when presenting the bouquets which were then entrusted to us to be carried into the giant tent on arriving at the event. The bouquets were bulky and lotus shaped as a tribute to the BJP’s emblematic logo. After all the criticism that I had levied at the BJP in my papers in college, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that I would now present a major BJP powerhouse with the logo of his own controversial party.

The security wasn’t as intense as I had expected, though in India security does tend to leave something to be desired (I once traveled from Delhi to Mumbai with a knife in my bag that I had forgotten about and only remembered after disembarking). Three separate police officers ran a metal detecting wand over my bouquet and then with a shrug and the type of strange glance reserved for white people in saris, let us in. The tent itself was a massive affair and surprisingly, air-conditioned. Huge sections were set behind crowd control barriers for women and children to be seated on the ground; behind this, some chairs for men and then a large standing room only area for the overflow. On the sides were couches set up in rows for VIP seating. Carrying our giant bouquets of flowers and with passes pinned to our saris, we qualified (completely undeservedly) for this upgraded cushioning of our behinds. Large screens to simulcast the event had been set up in all sections and though we had a perfectly good view of the stage from our second row seats, a large wall sized screen ensured that we wouldn’t miss a moment of what was promising to be quite a to-do.

Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the simulcast screens as the CM’s helicopter was shown touching down on the newly constructed helipad and he was loaded into a fancily decorated bullock cart to travel to the tent in the same manner that Subash Chandra Bose himself had some sixty years before. It seemed that only a moment passed before he was entering the tent and everyone was standing and cheering. As he raised an arm to the crowd in a gesture that incited more cheers and screams, I felt a dryness in my throat and a familiar pounding resounding in my chest that I haven’t felt since first learning public speaking in high school. Was I nervous? To hand a bunch of flowers to politician? It had suddenly occurred to my subconscious just how much I had heard about the political endeavors of this man and all the scenarios of potential mishap that I’d played out in my head while talking to the principal came rushing back into my mind.

I forced myself to take a breath. He was just another person, I told myself, and besides which he wasn’t even my Chief Minister! Would I get this worked up about meeting Ed Rendell?

We’d been told to follow the lead of Sureshbhai’s son, an NRI from San Diego named Dharmesh who along with his wife who had been more than happy to show us her $15,000 diamond ring in the car while cracking her gum, was presenting a bouquet to the prime minister. After Narendra Modi took a seat, he moved forward toward the staging area and we followed nervously behind him. I almost tripped on my sari as I got up.

Before I knew it, we were climbing the stairs towards the long table on the stage while Modi was sitting with other dignitaries. The silence in the hall as the crowd watched us was overwhelming. As we reached the top of the stairs, I heard the announcer, a youngish women with a silky voice, say into the microphone, “A bouquet from Dharmeshbhai, his wife Debbie, and a bouquet from Spoken English Teachers Miss Melissa and Miss Catharine.”

At the sound of our names, the reign of silence was broken with a large number of voices loudly cheering and whooping from the very back of the hall. As I took my first step forward across the stage, I couldn’t look to see where it had come from, but my mind was suddenly transported back to my high school graduation, taking my first step forward to get my diploma while my family looked on and screamed their support. Actually looking into Narendra Modi’s eyes, shaking his hand, and saying ‘Thank you’ are all a blur to me compared to that cheer, one that didn’t go up for anyone else who came across that stage. It was like a validation; a message from Kadod saying “you’re a part of us now,” and really, that feeling couldn’t be topped.

Best,
Cat

Back in Action

2009-01-17T12:04:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

School has begun again and after not wearing a sari in so many days, it is surprisingly pleasant to be back in one again. I forget sometimes that it is still shocking for those outside of the school to see us wear them: for Melissa and I, the wrapping and wearing process has become as second nature as brushing our teeth. It occurred to me recently while I was riding my bike through town yesterday afternoon that we still aren’t the everyday fixtures in Kadod that we somehow hoped we’d become. For any family who lives farther from the school than a five minute walk, they rarely see us on any regular basis and our appearance is still, for them, fodder for comment and occasionally giggles and stares.

For the students and teachers, however, our presence has become simple and unremarkable fact. I had hoped that this meant for the English teachers that some of the initial intimidation factor had gone, but in this it turns out I would be wrong.

“Rashmikaben,” I found myself asking one of the 8th standard English teachers in the staff room yesterday, “I have a question about the 9th standard exam paper.”

The students second set of exams are school exams in the sense that they are made by teachers in the school as opposed to their annual exam which is made by the government education board and taken at the end of the year. On the surface, this sounds remarkably like a regular U.S. system of trimester based exams; however –

“Yes,” she said, looking unsettled and quickly ruffling around in her massive pile of papers to retrieve the exam in question which she had herself had written.

“Oh, that’s okay it’s not necessary- “ I tried to put her at ease and let her know it was really a simple -

“What is your question?” She continued, cutting me off anxiously after locating the paper.

“Well,” I began, feeling somewhat anxious now myself, “I reviewed the paper answers with 9B (one of the sections I take) yesterday and the girls had some questions about certain answers which seemed all right to me, given the question.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Is this about the ‘snacks’ question?”

The 9th standard exam consists of a number of different sections. First, there is reading comprehension in which the students are given a passage that they have read during the trimester about which they answer some simple open response or multiple choice questions. Here is an example from the most recent exam:

Q-1: ‘Experiment’ means:
a) test b) trial c) judgment
Needless to say, I was scratching my head as the girls asked me, “But ma’am, is it a or b?”

The second part of the exam is a postage stamp sized picture which has been made grainy by the photocopier. In it, one can vaguely discern that some children are outside of the school. Some of the children in the background play on a playground and some in the foreground are eating something out of a tin. A paragraph describing the picture is provided and the students must fill in the appropriate blanks. It was about this exercise (which is alluded to nowhere in the curriculum) that I had a question:

“Well, yes, it is actually about the snacks question,” I said carefully. “You see, I was wondering if you were taking multiple answers for that question.”

The question was the following sentence. “The children are eating ______.”

Rashmikaben looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I tried again, using a simpler sentence structure. “Is only snacks correct?” I asked.

“The answer is snacks,” she told me in English. She looked at me to see if this had satisfied me but seeing my hesitation she became frustrated. “I can’t explain in English,” she told me honestly.

“It’s okay, feel free to speak in Hindi,” I said.

“You see,” she began, “in the question, they are looking for what type of food, yes? So the students cannot answer breakfast because that is what you eat in the morning, or lunch, because that is the food of the afternoon and dinner is the food of night. So the students are eating this during their school free time, so the answer must be ‘snacks’.”

“But,” I asked, “how do you know what time of day it is from this picture?” The students could have been eating this during the designated long break at the school which would make ‘lunch’ the associated word in their minds.

“You don’t,” she said, “that’s why it must be snacks.”

“I, uh, see,” I said, though I did not. I thought about all the times that I had been offered ‘breakfast’ in Kadod even at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock at night. The word was an accepted alternative for light snacks and the picture was so ambiguous that the only truly incorrect answer given the context would be dinner.

Rashmikaben looked satisfied with my acceptance of her explanation and went back to her paper grading. I, however, couldn’t help but sit in my plastic chair at our blocky wooden staff room table and continue to ruminate over our conversation. If this was the type of rigidity with which the exams were graded, how could I win? The goal of these so-called assessments does not seem to be to test the students comprehension of English or knowledge of vocabulary since even students who understand the subtleties of the words in question wouldn’t necessarily follow the same logic which I had just been presented with, a logic that at best was one woman’s subjective opinion. How are the students who study hard in this subject being rewarded? With confusing and misleading information based on a teacher’s own confused understanding. Don’t get me started on the fact that she couldn’t justify her own answer in English.

I could go on to detail some other problems that I found in the exam, which was riddled with typos, misleading directions and other such traps, but what would be the point? The real point is that the disconnection between what is taught and what is actually tested is so complete that I’m not sure that even if I were to teach to the test through the syllabus, which I devoted more time doing this semester, that it would have any appreciable difference in student marks. I taught the students the meaning of the word ‘experiment’, spending much more time this trimester focusing on vocabulary acquisition than in the previous trimester. However, never could I have prepared them for a question like the one they found on their exam, which ostensibly is how we are measuring the students’ success in our English-only classes.

Fine. To hell with the exam. I’m just going to keep teaching them English.

Best,
Cat

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

2009-01-14T21:04:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I’ll never forget the image: Kadod’s villagers atop their sloping corrugated roofs, faces to the sun squinting into its rays to follow the unpredictable swooping of the lines which they fed from spools in their hands, the ends of which were attached kites of all colors flooding the sky and dancing blithely in the wind. Popular Bollywood tunes pounded from giant black speakers rented for the occasion and hauled up to the top of the houses to amplify the atmosphere.

The festival of Uttarayan is much anticipated: on almost every house tour that we’ve taken in our many visits here in Kadod, this festival has been detailed as we reach the roof terrace or the top floor of the house. “This,” the family giving us the tour will announce with pride, “is where we fly kites in January.” In the morning, the family prepares a special dish of sesame seed ladoos and take these, along with a special berry-like fruit called boor to the temple to offer up to God in celebration of the beginning of the time in which the sun starts moving to the North (I had to look this up on Wikipedia as no one explained this to me). Then, everyone climbs to the topmost turret of their houses and flies kites.

Melissa and I had been awaiting this with the same bitten finger-nail anticipation as our students as we watched every business in town set up an array of multi-colored paper and plastic kites outside their shops. I watched the hostel boys make some careful purchases one day, turning the kites over in their hands before selecting ten or fifteen kites to buy.

“Why so many?” I asked one of them, as he walked away with his precious purchase wrapped in newspaper.

“Teacher,” he said, as if it were obvious, “I need them if the others get cut.”

The seemingly innocent diversion of flying kites from roof tops does indeed have a darker, competitive side and one which the boys and grown men of Kadod gravitate towards: the spools of cord which tether the kites to their adept fliers have been carefully embedded with shards of ground glass such that, when skillfully maneuvered into position by their owners, they can rub against the string of another unsuspecting kite in the sky and break the string, freeing the kite to waft at the mercy of the winds through the air until it finds a final resting place upon a palm frond or in a street gutter. The gutters of the Kadod streets have been running hot pink and deep purple and electric blue leading up to the festival as students take their kite strings to be ‘colored’ by a local expert who sits on the side of the street with a rickety wheel like contraption which reminds me of what you use to wind yarn into a ball before knitting a sweater. He runs the string carefully through pink or blue or purple dye stained fingers, dipping them periodically into a rusted can full of dyed water like a potter at his wheel, turning the white threads the intense shade of the student’s choice.

Our hosts for the festival were Darshanbhai and his family who run the local STD/ISD/PCO booth (the Indian equivalent of the payphone) from which Melissa and I make all our calls overseas. The frequency of our visits have kindled a friendship with this family who speak with us in a mix of English, Hindi and Gujarati. Darshanbhai et al are part of what I like to think of as Kadod’s party squad: a number of younger couples who live on the main bazaar road who make it a point every festival to do things up right. Loud music, dancing, and as Darshanbhai told Melissa in a melodramatic whisper a few days ago when he invited us to the roof party, “drinks” (a definitely hush-hush off the menu item in the dry state of Gujarat).

To my relief, we were not asked to take part in any such illegal activity, though as we carefully made our way onto the roof made of planks of corrugated iron or steel or some such thing this morning, we saw that despite the early hour, the party was in full swing. Men, wives, teenage boys and small kids looked up into the sky as they loosely held running spools or tensely controlled kite strings, causing their kites to dive low to snag an unsuspecting soul on another roof or to fly high above the reach of others' strings.

Darshanbhai, along with his younger brother, took it upon himself to teach us to fly. The first few attempts were soon aborted by the quick cutting string of their next door neighbor who’d cut their kites down as a joke as soon as they’d launched. After a heated but well meaning shouting match between roofs, the neighbor left well enough alone and we were finally able to get some air between us and the kite, which was toned a patriotic shade of orange and green and emblazoned with a picture of a smiling Narendra Modi (Chief Minister of Gujarat).

As soon as the kite was up, Darshan’s brother handed me the spool and instructed me how to hold it so the thread would run easily off and the kite could be let out as far as the wind would take it. Darshan himself controlled the kite’s movements, ducking it down or raising it up or frantically pulling in a jerky, sawing fashion as he went in for the kill on another kite string.

I found myself lulled into a semi-trance regarding the looping and soaring of our kite. Against the back drop of the cloudless blue sky, I had to squint to see which way the string moved and my eyes worked over time trying to pick our kite out of the plethora of moving bodies across the skyline. All of a sudden, I was jolted back to reality by what can described as nothing less than a piercing war-cry followed by a high pitched scream. I looked over to see Darshan and his brother rejoicing with an arm-flailing dance and their young neighbor Parth still screaming his congratulations at a pitch that made my ear beg for mercy.

“We cut a kite! We cut a kite!” They told me hurriedly as they refocused and went in for a second kill. This pattern continued until three, then four, then five, then six kites had been cut, all followed by the requisite screaming. I came to understand through watching this ritual repeated that the whooping was not only self-congratulatory: it also served the important purpose of letting the unfortunate soul (always located on a roof-top within hearing distance) who exactly had been victorious. This was then followed with an affectionate exchange of trash talk as the loser reached for the next kite in his arsenal.

Then, all of a sudden, our kite began to drop. We pulled in the slack in the hope that we could jerk it back into the air, but as we frantically tried, I noticed a similar phenomenon across all of the roofs in Kadod. That was when it hit me: the wind, fickle as it was, was dying. The collapse of the kites was valiantly fought as I watched men and boys try for the next two hours to try and get their kites back up in the air; however, their efforts were in vain and eventually they turned their energy towards shouting between roofs and dancing wildly.

When darkness set in, the dancing didn’t stop, but Melissa and I decided it was time to head home. Our kites, unflown as they were, were still intact, waiting for another day when we will climb to the roof our humble guesthouse and attempt to make them air-worthy.

Best,
Cat

Queue Strategy

2009-01-13T16:02:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

After an extended trip to Bangalore and a late night trip back on the public bus, the exploits of which included extended arguing with the man at the Surat station inquiry window at the and delicate negotiation of the water-logged station bathroom, I am happy to be back in Kadod. The anonymity of being “outside” (as they refer to it here) was replaced immediately with the home-town affection as some boys hanging around on their doorstep late at night greeted us with a warm “Hello madam!” as the rickety bus pulled away.

The students are still in exams, which is how I am able to afford the luxury of a few days away. Wandering outside of Kadod, despite having traveled pretty widely in India, always brings new revelations as I am able to size up my travel destinations against the security that I find in the village. This particular journey made me realize that, on account in living here in Kadod, my cultural growth in a particularly important area has been somewhat retarded and I will have to give more effort in the future toward its development, as simply a matter of survival. The area of which I speak, is of course, plain uninhibited pushiness.

This quality is essential in a country where queues (as lines are termed in British-cum-Indian English) exist merely in the realms of abstraction. I don’t have much opportunity to wait in lines in our sleepy town – there isn’t much to wait around for. As a result, my Westernized “queue strategy” (so termed by the popular comedian Eddie Izzard) has no cultural relevance in this context. To put this in perspective, let me share the recent experience that for me brought this new revelation sharply into focus:

While in Bangalore, I thought I’d entertain myself one morning by going to the movies, a luxurious waste of time that I sorely miss living two hours from the nearest theater. The latest Hindi film blockbuster “Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi” was punctuated with an intermission typical of all movies shown in India (even Western ones which don’t share the same Indian penchant for length). I decided to take advantage of the time given for a bathroom break as I knew it would be at least an hour and a half till I’d have another such opportunity.

The bathroom itself was unremarkable: stalls set up in neat rows down a good-sized room. There weren’t enough, obviously, but there never are, and as a result of the intermission and the lack of supply there were a good number of women standing around waiting in what looked to me to be a short line. I stepped in behind the two women standing in this fashion and waited with patience as stall doors opened and one of the women disappeared into the now empty stall.

All of a sudden, I felt a rush of air by me as a stylish looking girl in skinny jeans and a vest whooshed in just as the next stall door opened and occupied it as soon as it was empty. Then a few other girls swooshed in, right past what I regarded (foolishly!) as the line and began to camp outside of stall doors, knocking every so often as if to tell the people inside that time was of the essence and what right did they have to be taking so long anyway?

I looked around puzzled, my sense of order somewhat shaken. Just at that moment, the woman standing in front of me whom I had previously regarded as my ally in holding our queue ground abandoned me to this mass chaos as her friend emerged from a now opened stall that was snatched up by one of these recent intruders. I now saw that my Western eyes had interpreted the scene quite differently than how the landscape of this innocent bathroom appeared to the casual Indian observer.

Well, what was there to do but woman up out of necessity? As soon as there was an unoccupied opening outside a door stall, I staked it out, trying to look as aggressive as the others, punctuating my defense with some half-hearted door knocking (though for me, this gesture felt a little ingenuine and a result I think did not carry the same punch as that of these seasoned veterans).

My power play for stall space worked and I was soon back inside the movie, using the remaining minutes of the intermission to contemplate wryly how even the smallest of social conventions require the eye of cultural translation. And of course, once my eyes had been opened in this way, I started seeing the analog everywhere: In the way that I had to push my way towards the counter at the Barista on MG Road (equivalent of Starbucks), holding my money in my outstretched hand in a menacing and obvious way as if to say yes, I do actually have the means to purchase my order and I will fight for my right to do so; or in the way that, on going out for dinner at what most Americans would term a hole in the wall but is actually a quite well respected and famous Bangalorean dosa haunt, my boyfriend and I were instructed by the man at the entrance to literally camp out over a table, hovering until the coffee came and then sitting down at the table, squeezing in to the bench before the current table residents had even finished sipping at their filtered coffee or paying the bill.

On our journey back to Kadod came the culmination of this lesson, my assessment of what I had learned as it were: trying to fight for our right to ride the public bus back to Kadod. We’d been waiting for an hour to catch 9 pm bus which would put us back in Kadod around 11 pm. When the time for departure came, the locals were crowding in around the bus door with seasoned skill that Melissa and I could hardly negotiate with our large backpacks until I made a strategic cut in front of a pushy man holding a large box that got us the opening onto the bus stairs and ensured our ability to board the standing room only bus. Relieved that we’d made it, I felt we’d passed the test with flying colors.

Perhaps we would have gotten away with it to if we hadn’t fallen for a different social convention: plain old well-meaning polite helpfulness. Just as we’d secured our place standing near the door of the bus, we saw the helpful inquiry window man who’d laboriously gotten us to this point motioning for us to get off and talk with him. Assuming it must be important, we relinquished our places in the now completely full bus, with hoards of hopefuls still pushing to get on behind us and stepped off.

“What is it?” We asked, somewhat flustered.

“I just wanted to tell you that there’s another bus at 9:45 pm,” he said, patting the side of a bus parked parallel behind him and smiling. “In case you wanted to take that instead.”

I let out a low, frustrated groan as I looked at him incredulously and watched the mass of people pushing into the 9 pm bus. We tried to push in as well, but it was hopeless.

“Drats.” Turns out I still have so much to learn.

Best,
Cat

Welcome New Year

2009-01-01T10:45:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Happy New Year!

As the watchman rang the bell at midnight, Melissa and I found ourselves fighting the deadened silence with our cries of “Happy New Year” in a deserted school courtyard. Here in Kadod, 2009 was ushered in with less pomp and more circumstance as Diwali and Eid represented the true new year for the majority of the residents. Our noise-makers sounded like noses blowing underneath the silent, starry sky. For a moment, a pack of dogs started to sing a dirge in honor of the passing of 2008 so we listened respectfully, and then went back inside the house to sleep so we could get up and teach this morning as January 1 is not a holiday here.

The coming of the new year predictably leads one to reflection on the time that has passed since the bell tolled on the last New Year’s Eve and the journey that brought me from South Boston to Kadod has been an eventful one that you’ve followed dear reader as I’ve adjusted to my life here in this village. The trail has been inevitably forged with successes and failures. I felt some satisfaction yesterday as I looked around my classroom and realized that I had a roomful of students whose names I know busily engaged in productive exam preparation (since, now knowing the format of the exams, I can actually prepare fruitful practice for them). The perseverance it has taken to accumulate all of this knowledge and amalgamate into anything resembling effective teaching has taken Melissa’s and my combined and sustained effort over these past seven months.

This feeling of satisfaction was short-lived as a few students lolled about at their desks, no notebook, no pen, no decorum and after plentiful warnings coupled had to be thrown out of the room, where they continued to create a ruckus, jumping in and out for attention and distracting the other boys. After the class, Tabussum and I took three of the instigators to the male supervisor, who screamed at them in Gujarati and slapped them across the face so hard that I could only look down at the ground, bite my lip, and wonder what the right thing to do actually is.

The feeling of satisfaction returned as we walked around the village after school and we stopped to talk to the regulars: the previously taciturn fruit man who has warmed to our onslaught of inquiries about his health, family, origin etc; the triumvirate of families who run the phone booth, the general store, and the infamous tailor’s shop; Gitaben and her English-mincing son Manishbhai who informed us excitedly that he has just applied for a job in America (though he doesn’t know where it is); the students whose houses we pass and the small children who scream “Ms. Ivins!” every time they see Melissa’s smiling face (since she teaches the fourth standard, the small kids really have a thing for her). Yogeshbhai, whose son built a telescope from scratch, gave us a friendly wave on his way to Surat with the telescope in the back of a truck, the vegetable-wala who sits in the main square by the temple smiled and said “Namaste, teacher”, and the crew of kids who play at the temple and ran and screamed and tried to scare us by jumping out of dark corners as we passed by on our way home to the gates of the school.

As we passed inside the gates, a large black-faced monkey bounded from the roof of the prinicpal’s house, shimmied down a school drain pipe and then ran to freedom through the streets of Kadod. The small children screamed with nervous laughter and fear.

It was this quiet existence that stood with us in the silence at midnight as the sound of the midnight bell died away: this settled pace of our everyday life. As Melissa and I listened to the dogs howl and the crickets chirp in the first minutes of 2009, it felt right that these routines which have become etched into my internal clock, my sense of place and my orientation would usher us into the new year.

Best,
Cat

Merry Christmas from Kadod

2008-12-25T12:31:00.005+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I don't usually put store by the adage that a photo is worth a thousand words, but after trying to describe the Christmas celebrations of the English Medium School here in Kadod to which I was invited yesterday, I find that words really cannot communicate the atmosphere as well as the following:

Surrounded by pint size Santa-clad garden gnomes was honestly almost, but not quite, as good as being at home. I am missing all of you dedicated readers very much.

Merry Christmas!

Best,
Cat

The Joy of Giving, Part II

2008-12-20T15:19:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I can now understand why Ganesha, the “remover of obstacles” enjoys such popularity as a recipient of worship.

After the principal assured me that Sandipbhai would take my packages to Bardoli to send them by courier, I alerted Melissa who also had Christmas gifts to send so she could jump on the efficiency train and mail her package at the same time in the same trip.

Sandipbhai recovered from his mysterious illness within two days and on very morning that he showed up at school to teach his waiting class of third standard students, Vikrambhai came to the house and told me to take the packages to the principal’s office around 3 o’clock so that he wouldn’t forget to call Sandipbhai to take the packages. I obligingly did so and the minute they left my hands and were sitting on the floor of the principal’s cluttered office, I felt as though a burden had been lifted from my aching shoulders.

Note to the uninitiated: never celebrate your success too early here in India or your hubris will be punished by the vengeful, bureaucratic gods. We were dispensing books on our porch to awaiting 9th standard students after our post-school Spoken English class when the principal’s wife came to tell us that we had a call. We shut down the library and went to the principal’s house, where the principal’s son informed us that he was on the phone with Sandipbhai, who was currently at the courier service with our packages.

“He says,” Jaydeepbhai explained, “that to send all the packages to the same address will be this much money,” he wrote the figure down on a piece of paper for us to be clear, “and if you send to two different addresses, it will be THIS much.” Underneath the first figure, he wrote another figure that was almost twice as much and way more than we had been quoted previously.

“Just to send the packages to different addresses? Why does that make any difference whatsoever?” I muttered, then checked myself. Requests for logic hold no weight around here. Aloud, I said, “So, what should we do? Will it be less to send it by post?”

The principal’s family discussed this query in Gujarati for a few moments before confirming that yes, it would be best to send it by post from Kadod.

I sighed and resigned myself to the possibility that I might never send these Christmas gifts.

The next day, the packages were returned to me from Sandipbhai and at the beginning of the lunch break, the principal approached me to tell me that Pradipbhai, one of the other peons who had thus far not been involved in this arduous and lengthy process, would accompany me to the post office to send the packages myself.

He showed up outside the door of the house on a motorcycle that he had borrowed from one of the other male teachers. He placed one of the packages in front of him on the bike, then indicated that I should sit on the back. I shook my head in a vigorous ‘no’. Despite having achieved unprecedented comfort levels in performing such complicated actions as walking up and down stairs, negotiating sitting on chairs, standing on tables and other such feats in a sari, my list of accomplishments did not include riding side saddle on the back of a motorcycle while carrying three large packages and today was not going to be my day to start.

He gave me an exasperated look and indicated the back of the bike again.

“We can’t just walk?” I pleaded. The post office was only a seven minute walk. He revved the bike’s motor in response and looked at me impatiently.

With numerous students having been attracted by the commotion in the schoolyard and the entire male teaching staff looking on from the upstairs balcony, I carefully hiked up the bottom of my sari and settled myself on the back of the bike, I tried to rest the packages in my lap, but I couldn’t manage this and still cling desperately to the back of the bike, so I settled for them falling over the side of the bike an unbalanced way. Pradipbhai revved the bike and started uneasily off.

It only took going a few feet to realize that this unequivocally wasn’t going to work. The bike was completely off-balance and after a jerky start, nearly toppled over to the great amusement of all the onlookers. I tried to laugh but was inwardly mortified as my students and co-workers saw me in this undignified position.

“You can’t ride side saddle?” Pradipbhai asked me in Hindi accusingly as he dismounted the bike in disbelief.

“I’m American,” I said, and shrugged. “And anyway, I warned you…” We started off towards the post office by foot in a frosty silence, Pradipbhai feeling cheated of his ride on the bike.

The Kadod Post Office itself looks as if it has been lifted from a Dickensian novel: Painted a dusty, dung color, the stacks of yellowing papers piled high around the obscured, unused computer underneath the face of clock eternally frozen at 7:20, the wrinkled clerks look over their glasses in a pinched way at long, faded tables written by some post-master from better days, a cup of fresh steaming chai sitting by their side which they sip in a distracted manner. As Pradipbhai and I entered, it took several minutes standing at the counter before the man sitting there looked up and acknowledged that, in fact, someone actually wanted to send something somewhere.

After his cursory acknowledgement, Pradipbhai launched into a long explanation of my packages and where they were going and then passed them over the top of the counter for, apparently, inspection by the entirety of the postal staff. Each person took the packages in their long fingers and turned them over carefully, perusing each side of the package with care.

After a few minutes of this perusal, some dusty papers were removed from an old rusted scale onto which the parcels were placed one at a time. I watched as the post-master shook his head in disbelief at each one. What did it mean?

He turned back to Pradipbhai after ten minutes or so and pronounced that not all of the packages could be sent. Only two could be sent and the other two would have to go to Bardoli.

I listened in disbelief. “Why?” I said carefully, trying to control the modulation of my voice.

“They are big and there isn’t enough postage to send all four of the packages,” Pradipbhai explained to me as if this were obvious.

“The POST OFFICE doesn’t have enough postage?” I said incredulously.

“Exactly, they can’t send them all at the same time. But, if you go to Bardoli, you can send two of them from there.”

I explained with as much patience as I could muster that as I worked at the school, didn’t it seem a little impossible that I would be able to take them half an hour away to the Bardoli post office when the hours of said post-office coincided with those of the school, especially when I had no car? Pradipbhai admitted that yes, this could potentially be a problem and relayed it as such to the post-master.

The post-master looked at me dubiously. “I suppose,” he explained in a Gujarati that was then translated to Hindi for my benefit by Pradipbhai, “that if you come back on Saturday that you can send them at that time. We’ll have enough postage by then. In the meantime, you may send two packages.”

The post-master then proceeded to order a cup of chai, sit behind the counter and do nothing for half an hour under the guise of selecting which of my packages would be prepared for their US departure. I sat on a ripped, dirty couch for reserved, I supposed, for the ranks of over-ambitious post office visitors such as myself. After half an hour’s time of doing nothing, the post master handed me four forms which I was to fill out in triplicate for each package.

I have to admit that I have cultivated a bad habit since coming to live here: because I know that most people in town barely speak English at all and almost no one can understand when I speak with an American accent, I have a tendency to mutter when I get frustrated. I spent the next two minutes doing exactly this while filling out these forms under the watchful eyes. “I’m so glad,” I said, more to myself than anyone, “that you gave me these forms now instead of half an hour ago when I was sitting doing nothing on that couch. It is so much more enjoyable to fill them out while you and everyone else stand around and watch me. This, in fact, is the high point of my day!” Pradipbhai and the post-master merely looked on as if I’d said nothing.

By the time I left, over an hour had passed in which time no other customers had come into the post-office and I was still carrying two of the four packages back to the house in defeat with the assurance that, perhaps, if I was lucky, the postage to send the remaining ones would arrive on Saturday.

I looked forward to my return visit with all the joy that I usually reserve for visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Best,
Cat

The Joy of Giving

2008-12-18T19:26:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Of course, even the simplest things become huge undertakings when done in Kadod.

“Our festival” Christmas, as we’ve taken to calling it here, is approaching and in preparation for said festival, we have been decorating away in attempt to make our house in Kadod feel slightly less tropical and preparing packages of Indian gifts to send to our families in our absence.

Of course, the true joy of giving these packages would not be complete without a few truly Indian obstacles to ensuring their successful transfer to their recipients.

My journey to send these packages began with determination. Having located two appropriately sized boxes in the bazaar, I began the process of bubble-wrapping, newspapering and labeling everything in the box so that my grandparents on the other side would be able to distribute my gifts appropriately. Having secured everything inside and taped the box shut, I felt confident that these packages were ready to brave Indian overseas mail processing and possibly beyond.

The logical next step in my American mind was to figure out from where to send them. Could they go by regular post? I caught Vikrambhai, one of the schools’ peons, in the hallway and showed him my package with the same large smile that a child has when showing their mother a picture their drawing. “Where can I take this to send it?” I asked him in Hindi.

He eyed the package dubiously. “You can’t send it like that,” he said definitely.

“What?” I was confused. “What do you mean?” It had an address. It was in a box. What more could it need?

“You have to get some cloth,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“But, why?” I asked him. He merely repeated what he’d said, believing that I hadn’t understood him the first time. I shook my head. I didn’t understand.

He gave an exasperated sigh and that is how I found myself sitting in the principal’s office.

“You can’t send the packages like that,” the principal told me authoritatively. “You need some cloth.”

“But, what is the cloth for?”

“To cover the packages,” the principal said, eyeing me curiously. “Of course.”

“Ah,” I said, pretending to understand. “You must cover the package in cloth?”

“Yes, otherwise they won’t send it,” he said matter of factly. “You can get some in the bazaar.”

“Will paper do?” I asked, thinking I had no idea how I would cover the parcel in cloth and remembering that thick post paper people often use in the US.

“It won’t keep out the rain,” the principal warned. I said I understood but would it do? He nodded and I was off to the bazaar again. I brought the box with me to the stationary shop to show them exactly what I was up against.

They looked at me with the same confused face I had recently given to Vikrambhai. “I want to send this to the US,” I repeated in Hindi. “I need some paper or cloth or something?”

The shop assistant looked at me for a moment, and then went to the back, returning with brightly colored wrapping papers. I eyed them with irritation. “No, you have like plain paper? Or something?”

“You don’t want this?” He asked. I gave an emphatic no and he returned to the back. After rummaging around noisily he returned with some electric blue, but plain, thick paper. “That will do,” I said with a resigned sigh. I wrapped it up in the shop, rewrote the address, and took it back to triumphantly present to Vikrambhai.

On seeing the package, Vikrambhai simply laughed and shook his head. “It won’t do,” he said plainly. “You need cloth.”

Sigh. “Where do I go?”

He started off towards the gate and I followed him out into the bazaar. We walked past the stationary shop, past the General Store, and down an alley towards where Melissa and I go to the beauty parlor. To my surprise, we stopped outside the beauty parlor, whose downstairs doubles as a tailor’s workshop. Pravinaben, the woman who we go to have our eyebrows plucked, was sitting on the step.

“What’s going on?” She asked amiably, eyeing the packages in our hands. Vikrambhai explained that I needed cloth to cover the packaging. She told me to leave her some money and come back in a few hours. Thank god for Indian multi-businesses.

Around 5 pm, I picked up the packages which had now been sewn into nice looking pillow covers on which I was to write the address. The next morning, I waylaid Vikrambhai yet again and presented him with my beautiful cloth covered packages. “They’re ready now, right?” I asked.

He nodded, laughing at how happy I was. After loading the packages into some oversized plastic bags for easy carrying and giving him some money for the postage, I felt a burden lift from my heart knowing that they had been successfully sent.

However, if I’ve learned anything here, it’s don’t count your chickens before they are sent to the US, or so the saying goes. An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door.

“Sister?” I heard Vikrambhai’s voice call out from our porch.

“Coming,” I replied. When I reached the door, I was ready to put out my hand for the change from the postage. Instead, my two packages were loaded into my surprised arms.

“What happened?” I asked frantically.

“One of the packages is too big and heavy,” Vikrambhai said knowingly. “You have to make it in to two.”

“What?” The postal service was refusing to send my package because it was too big? It barely weighed five pounds!

With a sigh, I was off to the bazaar yet again to find two smaller boxes in which I could split the larger of the two packages, since, having appraised all of the boxes in my house, Vikrambhai had pronounced all of them unsuitable. Perhaps seeing the utter defeat written across my face, the stationary shop did not charge me for the new boxes and the 16 year old shop assistant even gave me a sort of “buck up” encouraging smile as I left.

Having repackaged them, I lamented that I would have to go yet again to have them sewn. “Not so,” Vikram contended, “they’ll send these small ones without cloth.” The logic of why exactly that would be escaped me but I trusted his judgement. More money in hand, he was off to the post to send the packages.

To my dismay, not even half an hour had gone by before I heard another plaintive knock on the door.

“Sister?” I heard the concerned call. I dragged my feet to the door. The two uncovered packages were in his hand. “They need to be sewn.” With a longer, more defeated sigh, I threw up my hands in the air and we trudged out into the bazaar once more to have the packages sewn by Pravinaben.

The next day, I awoke with a new feeling of success. “Today the packages will go,” I thought confidently. I collected them from Pravinaben’s early in the morning and as soon as I saw Vikrambhai, I handed them off. We exchanged assured smiles. Today would be the day.

Knock, knock. I skipped the door in anticipation of good news. “Sister,” Vikram started hesitantly.

“Oh no,” I shook my head. “What happened?”

“You see,” he began, “to send them from the post will be this certain amount of money, which is very expensive. If you send them by courier service from Bardoli, then it will be cheaper. Do you want to send them from here by post or by courier?”

The difference in cost was astounding and the post wouldn’t even guarantee their arrival. Which is how I found myself sitting once again the principal’s office, comparing my options. “So, if I want to send them more cheaply with a fully assured guarantee, I should send them from Bardoli?” I repeated, just to make sure I had it right.

“Yes, but they can be sent as you wish,” the principal replied with a smile.

“So, I have to go to Bardoli,” I said slowly. Bardoli is a half hour’s bus ride away, and I would have to wait till the weekend to go.

“No,” the principal said, “we can give the packages to one of the teachers who live in Bardoli and he can take them to the courier service for you. I will tell him as the principal and he will do it.”

Normally, I’d be embarrassed to take advantage of his authority as principal for such a personal errand, but the thought of waiting another week to send the packages was too appalling. “That would be great,” I cried enthusiastically. Thanking him profusely as I exited his office, I found myself following Vikram to the classroom where this teacher teaches the primary school. I could feel my excitement building as we walked across the schoolyard. Finally, the packages would go!

The teacher in the 3rd standard class, however, simply looked confused. “Oh, Sandipbhai is not here today,” she informed us. “He is ill – but perhaps he will come tomorrow or the next day?”

“Eh, Bhagwan,” was all I could say.

Best,
Cat

Don't Cry Over Spilled Yogurt

2008-12-16T20:28:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The principal gave the familiar motion with his hand from his porch the other night as I came back from the bazaar that indicated that he wanted to talk with me. There was a man standing on his porch who looked similarly familiar but whom I could not place.

“You have been to that Hanuman temple?” The principal asked me slowly. “The one where there is a holy man living?”

“Ah yes,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. We’d never told him about our visit to Swami-ji. “Some friends of ours in town took us to see him.”

He nodded, satisfied with my answer. “I also go to see him regularly,” he said, a smile breaking over his face and filling me with relief. Since the conversation started, I’d had a baseless suspicion that we were about to be reprimanded for another breach in school rules that I was unaware of. This was apparently not to be the case.

“Yes, he is very wise. And he knows some 17 or 18 languages,” the principal went on. “He has even toured in America, to help the peoples.” I nodded, encouragingly. “He is interested in helping all the peoples of the world,” the principal finished thoughtfully.

I said that yes, he had had been very helpful to Melissa and I when we visited and lent us his book free of charge. But where was this conversation going, I couldn’t help but wonder…

The man on the porch piped in now in Gujarati which I couldn’t follow. He was talking excitedly and suddenly I remembered that we had met him the same night that we went to visit Swami-ji. He lived at the temple and took care of the shrines there. He was a youngish man with an honest, grinning face and he now turned and beamed his smile in my direction.

“He wants me to tell you that Swami-ji has asked for you and Melissa to come to the temple tomorrow night. There will be some teachings and –“ the principal hesitated, searching for the right word, “and – a feast?” I nodded, indicating that I understood. “It will be simple food, but so so many people will come – I think, nine thousand people will come…”

“Nine thousand?” I said disbelievingly. “Really?”

“Yes, or one to two thousand,” the principal said without missing a beat. The temple to which he was referring was rather small and I could hardly imagine it accommodating such a huge number, be it nine hundred or nine thousand.

“So I should tell him that you will go?” The principal looked to me for confirmation.

I looked at the eager face of the man waiting for an answer and at the friendly smile of the principal’s and replied that yes, of course, we would go. We had been intending to visit Swami-ji again to return his book and this would be the perfect opportunity.

However, the next night, after a day of teaching and lesson planning, I was hardly in the mood to do anything except collapse on the beds in our living room and stare blankly at the wall. I hoped desperately that the principal would forget about our promise to go. The Hanuman temple was all the way across Kadod, and now that it was dark I was even less excited to make the trek.

As 7 o’clock rolled around and night had descended on Kadod, I felt sure that the principal had forgotten all about our conversation the other night. We receive about twenty requests in a week from various sources to visit this house or that family or come to watch this ceremony. Maybe one is actually followed up on.

As it happened, this was to be our one. At 7:05, we heard the loud rap on the door that I’ve come to associate with the principal’s family (that is, when they don’t walk directly into the house without knocking). We opened the door to reveal the principal’s expectant face.

“I have just come from that temple,” he began, “and Swami-ji is expecting you for dinner.”

In this way, I found myself grumbling as I walked along beside a more cheerful Melissa holding a large flashlight which we borrowed from the watchman and making our way through the dark back alleys of Kadod to the Hanuman temple. I was in a foul temper when we reached the outer walls of the temple, black thoughts in my mind as I removed my shoes and my stubborn irritation persisted while we made our way into the inner temple complex.

All of this melted away, however, on seeing a surprisingly familiar face: the father of Jayeshbhai the tailor (who had originally taken us to visit Swami-ji and introduced as “those who seek knowledge”) was standing by Swami-ji, along with the principal of the primary school, the physics teacher and a number of other friendly Kadodians. It seems the Hanuman temple was the place to be on this fine full moon night.

On seeing us, we were welcomed by all five men with smiles and “Kem Chos”. They led us to a space on the floor where a number of other people were eating. In front of us they placed a large platter made of dried leaves and onto this was plopped a large unappetizing blob of kitcheri and next to it was dribbled an Indian sweet of small balls of sugar called “booni” along with long dried sticks called “gattiya” (forgive my spelling). A tall steel cup was placed down as well and a whitish liquid that I could only assume was a yogurt based drink was slopped in, spilling down the sides as the teenage boys in charge of the food distribution hurriedly moved on to the next empty container.

I eyed the food. The men had gathered around us and looked down intently as I slowly put out my fingers and pushed them into the sticky kitcheri. I gathered up a delicate handful and brought it to my mouth. Despite its rather unwholesome look, it tasted delicious. Slowly, I helped myself to more.

The primary school principal sat down next to us and was immediately served as well. Others who I didn’t know also sat on the cloth put on the floor and ate with vigor. The primary school principal pointed to the large cup of whitish liquid, instructing me to pour it onto my food to imitate the saucy mess that he was swishing about with his fingers on his plate. I took up the metal cylinder in my hand, ready like a good cultural explorer to follow his example. I made, however, one fatal mistake: I leaned my nose down towards the glass and took a sniff.

My nostrils were filled with a sour milk smell that overpowered me and I quickly put the tumbler back on the granite floor of the temple, trying to get as much distance between me and it as possible without attracting attention. Whatever it was, I wanted no part of it. Surreptitiously I gave a sideways glance to see if my repulsion was apparent to others, but the primary school principal was busy shoveling another handful of kitcheri into his mouth. I slowly continued to eat the kitcheri and sweets plain, but as usual the boys had given me way more than I could ever possibly consume in one sitting and as I got full, I made as if to get up.

The scolding began as quickly as I began to move. “NO!” said the smiling man from the night before who lived in the temple. “You cannot get up,” he told me firmly in Hindi, “until your entire plate is finished. This is prasad, an offering to the Gods… you cannot waste it.” I had been unaware that this meal was prasad or I certainly would not have tried to get up, and so I nodded understandingly and with an apologetic look tried to make my fingers move towards the dish.

I had almost succeeded in making my uncooperative fingers move towards my plate when I smelled Swami-ji towering over me, his shadow ominously cast over my plate. As I looked up, I saw him backlit by the moon, his top-knot piled on top of his head and his white beard dangling down, rustled gently by the night breeze. I shivered involuntarily.

“You are enjoying?” He asked with a well-intentioned smile.

“Oh yes,” I exclaimed, perhaps a little over-enthusiastically. I forced my hand towards the kitcheri. “It’s very delicious.” While I mastered my fingered and made myself eat a few more bites, Swami-ji lectured to Melissa and I on the importance of the day – a lecture I sadly missed in my concentration on pleasing the assembled crowd with my appetite.

“But,” he said chidingly, “you have not taken any of your drink. It’s very good for your health!” He said emphatically.

“Ah, yes, well –“ I began. “You see, I’m allergic.”

The surprised look on their faces was nothing compared to my inner surprise. Where had that lie come from?

“Uh, yes,” I continued. “I can’t eat any dairy like this. It’s very bad for my health. I will become very sick.”

Swami-ji nodded slowly, as if deciding whether to believe me or not.

Melissa chimed in. “Yes, she has a very serious allergy,” she repeated sincerely. I have never appreciated Melissa’s friendship more than at that moment. “She can’t eat anything like this.” I didn’t look over at her for fear of bursting out in nervous laughter.

“Ah well,” Swami-ji finally said thoughtfully, “Perhaps you can have hers then, after you finish yours?”

I could almost hear Melissa’s silent hesitation. She had already drank one fourth of her cup and pronounced the stuff entirely undrinkable. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she picked up her tumbler slowly and took a deep breath. In a moment, she was downing the entire contents of the glass in one big swallow while the onlookers watched approvingly.

“Very good for your health,” Swami-ji said again as he wandered away to talk to other visitors. I finally had the self-composure to be able to look over at Melissa apologetically. She looked a little sick.

Jayeshbhai’s father, sensing perhaps, what was really going on, waited until Swami-ji’s back was turned, and threw the contents of my glass over the wall of the temple.

Thank God.

Best,
Cat

Marriage Troubles

2008-12-14T11:50:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

As I mentioned previously, wedding season means weddings in the air and Tabussum and Parulben, my and Melissa’s co-teachers respectively, have been feeling the breeze.

Tabussum and Parulben both live in Mandvi, a town about 15 km away from Kadod and so, after many invitations, this weekend was the first time that it worked out for Melissa and I to actually go to Mandvi to call on their families. Afraid that if we took the bus we would never find her house (which would have been the case since it was a good many twists and turns from the bus stand), Tabussum arranged for her brother to come and pick us up in Kadod.

As we got into the car, she apologized. “We took out our seat covers for washing,” she said anxiously. I assured her that since plush flower print seat covers are primarily an Indian phenomenon, I barely noticed.

Tabussum was visibly excited that we were finally going to be meeting her family. When we arrived at her house, deep in the Muslim section of Mandvi, she jumped out of the car to tell her family that we had come. Her mother, her sister-in-law, and her other brother came to the door to create a sort of receiving line into the house. On taking our seats inside, we opened with our usual “awkward visiting American” line, commenting on how beautiful the house is.

“We don’t have any pictures on the walls,” she explained hurriedly, “because in our community, it’s against our religion to have a picture of any living thing.” Whenever Tabussum discusses the fact that she is Muslim, she always simply says “in our community”. As the only Muslim teacher at the school besides Daybal, I often think it must be difficult for her.

Her sister had been staying with her for the past two weeks because she just gave birth to a beautiful baby boy and so she and her mother sat down with us to show us her wedding photos.

“We are searching for a boy for Tabussum,” her mother informed us as we ooh-ed and aah-ed over the photos.

“Really?” I asked her. “And have you found anyone?”

“One person has offered, but we said no,” she said thoughtfully.

Tabussum explained. “My brother is also of marrying age, so we are expanding our house, then we will find him a husband, then me. But, in our community,” she paused, “it’s difficult to find a husband who is educated. I have my M.A. and I want my husband to be educated also and for this we have to look very far outside of Mandvi.”

We nodded sympathetically at her mother. She just smiled peacefully.

This was in stark contrast to the state of frenzy in which we found Parulben’s mother when we made our way over to her house later that afternoon.

We were welcomed into the house with a sad smile from a lovely elderly Gujarati woman wearing a striking yellow sari. Parulben was smiling behind her.

“What am I going to do?” Parul’s mother moaned to us as we sat down in her parlor. “We are looking for a boy for Parul and we have found NO ONE, just NO ONE… she MUST get married this year. She is 24! What will we do?”

Melissa and I looked at each other. We had just entered the house.

“I have been feeling so much tension,” she explained, rubbing her shoulders anxiously. “So much tension in my body because of this problem.” The pain on her face made it clear that this was true. She wrang her hands in emphasis.

I expressed my sympathies.“And it’s not just me!” She continued woefully. “Parul’s father has been feeling it too… even now, he is consulting with a specialist about the problem.”

“For his body?” I asked her with a sympathetic look.

“No,” she replied, “For Parul’s marriage!” It was explained that this specialist would be able to present some eligible families for them to contact who also had children of marrying age. In fact, he was due back to report any time in the next hour.

“I was going to many events this year,” Parulben explained to us with a sympathetic smile for her mother. “To meet other young people like me, for marriage. But,” she shot a glance at her mother, “so far there is no one.”

“And it is being so difficult in our Rajput community!” The mother wailed. “The groom’s family, they demand so many things. And we have three other daughters! Three daughters! And if we give Parul anything which we did not give to the others, we must present they and their husbands with it later because otherwise they will say, ‘look, you have given Parul these things and not to us!’. It is so difficult for us, you see…we are just middle class type people.”

Melissa and I nodded our sympathies again. “It’s not like this in our community,” Tabussum added, “but for them it is so difficult.”

“Yes, so difficult,” Parul’s mother echoed.

“In our community,” Tabussum added, “the bride’s family just gives as they wish, as a present to the couple, but in their community, so many things must be demanded, like the family can ask for a house, or a car or anything.”

“Yes, yes,” Parul’s mother said. “It is very expensive to have daughters. And we must find someone for Parul soon because soon she will be so old and it will only become more difficult.”

“How soon would you like her to marry?” I asked, curious.

“If we find someone, as soon as possible! According to when is a good time, of course,” her mother said definitively. “By May, at the latest.” She made a determined gesture with her hand.

Parul nodded as she listened to her mother. I wondered at her ability to soothe her mother’s anxiety and also to know that within the year she was most likely (if the process did not kill her mother first) be married.

On leaving Parulben’s house as we made our way back to Kadod, I found myself lost in the comparison between these two families. Despite that these girls were the same age, with the same qualifications and the fact that Tabussum had told us previously that in her community, her qualifications made marriage prospects exceedingly difficult, Tabussum’s mother had seemed so relaxed, as if Tabussum’s marriage was an afterthought, while for Parulben’s mother, it seemed that she could talk of nothing else (and indeed, we didn’t talk of anything else the entire time we visited at their house).

The experience definitely arranged food for thought…

Best,
Cat

Wedding Season

2008-12-07T16:28:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Wedding season is upon us in Kadod. Since it is now only 75-80 degrees here during the day, the students are wearing sweaters to school while their parents are planning the marriages of their older siblings. Late November through early January seem to be good times for weddings as they can be outside without inspiring sun stroke or heat poisoning (both of which can put a damper on the generally festive air) and it tends to be good time for NRIs (non-resident Indians) to come and visit their families.

All of this is a long way of saying that Sejalben’s cousin was getting married this week and an invitation was proffered to Melissa and myself to tag along and watch. Despite three days of body ravaging sickness brought on by suspect pani puri (a street food that spreads delight and joy when made with uncontaminated water), we were well enough by Thursday to make the trip to Bardoli. Though not, of course, without the requisite cultural faux-pas.

American Teacher Mistake #1: Melissa and I thought that perhaps simply by wearing our nicest teaching saris and putting on some make up, we might fit in.

We were greeted at the entrance to hall by Sejalben, who though pretty on normal days, looked positively glamorous on this occasion. Her hair had been professionally put back and the ends curled into tiny ringlets which fell about her ears playfully. A glittered headdress of sparkly flowers completed the ensemble, as well as matching eye shadow and bangles which set off a beautifully bordered Gujarati sari. Eyeing the fancy work, I couldn’t help but ask, “Is that heavy to wear?” She assured me that, while it was, it was manageable.

Every other female at the wedding was similarly attired, hair let down or put up in fanciful fashions otherwise unseen. Everywhere in the room the light caught the gleam and glitter of ladies’ outfits and in some cases, powder which they had put in their hair specifically for added sparkle. The overall effect was like walking into a medieval court of old with jewels and gold as far as the eye could see.

At least, this was the case on the women’s side. As I turned my head to survey the men’s side of the room (which of course was seated separately from the women), I was surprised to see most of the young men in jeans and fashion t-shirts or simple button downs. The older men were mostly wearing khakis and shirts of the style that every Indian bureaucrat wears to work. A few men related to the actual bride were in suits, but other than that, any of these men could have been watching a cricket match in their living rooms. “Why don’t the men dress up?” I asked someone.

“Probably because the women feel that maybe someone will see them and think, “I will marry that girl because she is so beautiful…”. Men don’t have to worry about that kind of thing,” She replied. I nodded thoughtfully and turned my attention forward towards the stage.

The ceremony that we were to watch was an afternoon offering to the gods done by the bride and her family. As I understand it, the bride and the groom have separate ceremonies the day of the wedding with their own families and then late in the night, the groom arrives at the place of the brides on a horse and the actual wedding ceremony takes place. For this particular ceremony, the bride and her parents were seated on a bench at the front of the room with their closer family members seated on the floor all around them. A large fire burned in an urn in the front of the stage, letting off smoke into the hall that scorched our squinted eyes and made them water. Just to the side of the fire were all the wedding gifts, which had been carried in procession style from the hall by the male family members. None were wrapped, so that everyone could admire exactly what had been given.

American Teacher Mistake #2: I tried to watch the proceedings carefully despite the talking around me since it was the first wedding I’d seen. After watching for a while, I asked Sejalben what it meant when the priest gave instructions to spoon water out over this coconut, or hold hands with her mother, or move this powder here or there. Sejalben only shrugged. “No one knows what these things, not even the priest, I think,” she said, laughing. “We just do it as a kind of a custom. The smoke of the fire will take these offerings up to the gods.”

After she said this, I looked around me and I suddenly understood why in the background of Sejalben’s wedding video, there was this festive music dubbed over all the real noise of the wedding: the conversational buzz in the room as everyone talked to their neighbor completely drowned out the ceremony going on at the front.

As soon as it started, the ceremony was over and I watched as some of the guests literally almost bolted out of the room. “Where are they going?” I asked, confused.

“Dinner is being served in the downstairs hall,” Sejalben explained.

American Teacher Mistake #3: Coming from my waspy upbringing, I grew up with wedding dinners served in three courses by tuxedoed waiters. While seating cards ensured that guests would hopefully have interesting conversation with the other people at their table while waiting for the food to arrive, there is no guarantee and no salvation if you are stuck at the boring, geeky table. I felt the Indian approach to the wedding dinner had a lot to offer that we WASPs could learn from.

First of all, unlike many other places in Indian life, efficiency at a big feast such as this is prized above all else. Because not everyone can eat at the same time due to space considerations and the large size of the wedding, quick table turnover is of importance. To this end, the tables are set up to effect this turnover in the most efficient way possible. Instead of ungainly round tables like the kind we are accustomed to at large social gatherings in the US, the Indian wedding dinner makes use of long, thin banquet style tables, almost like a sitting at the bar of a restaurant. Two tables are placed facing each other with a space in the middle so that the “waiters” (gangly adolescent boys in t-shirts and jeans) can move down the line as quickly as possible. This creates a kind of conveyor belt phenonmenon where plastic plates, utensils and eventually food can be dispensed quickly. Boys carrying giant serving tureens straight off the cooking fire move down the line plopping portions on plastic thalis (large round dishes). Once they’ve served everyone in this manner, they continue to move up and down the lines between the tables, calling out what they have to offer (‘pooris, pooris, pooris, pooris’). If you need more, you simply hail them and they’ll replenish your plate with verve.

Second of all, there is little to no conversation while eating. Eating is purely business and there will be plenty of time after dinner before the groom’s family actually arrives (at 2 am, most likely) and the wedding will start. Refueling for this long stretch of evening which is ahead of you is essential as you may not get home until five, six, or even seven in the morning. Having not bolted out of the room and thus getting in on the second dinner shift, Melissa and I tried to make polite conversation with our neighbors, but found ourselves rebuffed as they focused on ingestion.

After dinner, we found ourselves in the strange bridal limbo of waiting for the groom and his dancing family to arrive. The groom’s family dines separately and then dances while he rides a horse all the way from the dinner location to the bride’s marriage hall. The groom was scheduled to arrive around 9 pm: it was currently 6:30 pm. We amused ourselves by trying to speak Gujarati and Hindi with the people around us, but eventually that wore thin.

American Teacher Mistake #4: Not bringing any money to the wedding. Sejalben suggested that we ditch the wedding for awhile in favor of taking advantage of the shopping which Bardoli has to offer and then returning to the wedding later. We found ourselves piling into a car with Sejalben, and her mother-in-law, both dressed to the nines, and making our way to one of the fanciest sari shops in town. Sejalben, after looking discerningly at several fancy saris, selected one and purchased it on the spot. Melissa and I contented ourselves with just looking.

On returning to the wedding, Sejalben instructed us to go upstairs with her where we entered a backroom filled with women who were… changing?

American Teacher Mistake #5: Not bringing any other clothes to change into for Wedding: Act II. All the women around me opened whole suitcases that they had brought with numerous outfits and, having gotten the opinion of everyone else in this backroom cum wedding staging area, proceeded to take off whatever beautiful sari she had on and replace it with another perfectly lovely one.

Sejalben looked at us: “Do you want a sari to wear?” She asked me.

I gestured to the one that I already had on.

“No,” she said shortly. “I meant a fancy one, with handwork.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “Uh, sorry?”
It was then that we received by messenger the news that the groom was “stuck in traffic” and would not arrive until midnight. This was the point at which we American teachers, not properly attired and feeling fatigued, decided that we would take the principal up on his offer to drive us home early.

We were sad not to see the couple happily married at 3 am, but we wished them well all the same.

Best,
Cat

SCOPE of the Problem

2008-12-04T21:40:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The entrenched hold which cheating has on this country’s educational system is much deeper than I ever would have suspected. Needless to say, this most recent item completely shocked me:

Some background first: The Government of Gujarat has undertaken to sponsor a specific English curriculum which they hope will enhance the English skills of the students and teachers who study with it. It is called SCOPE for short, though at the moment I cannot for the life of me remember what it stands for. It’s originally a Cambridge based curriculum and it shows in all the cultural relevancy that its materials have for students in rural India. The English teachers at Kadod High School take turns teaching it in the mornings at the same time as my Integrated English-Technology class and more than once have they shyly knocked on the computer lab door in need of some help with an exercise that is beyond their cultural comprehension.

For example: Match the following people with their dates of death: a) Charlie Chaplin b) Queen Elizabeth c) Pablo Picasso d) Beowulf. The respective dates of death follow.

I know my students immediately see the relevancy of this exercise to learning English in their own lives.

Irregardless, the principal was very anxious to start the program at Kadod High School and our Foundation is helping to sponsor part of the students’ tuition in taking the program. Many students who could afford to pay the other half of the tuition were anxious to do so and many teachers were taking studying for the exam very seriously. Why, do you ask?

The benefit of participating in the government scheme as opposed to private English classes is that, of course, it helps future prospects. If I understand the system correctly, teachers in government schools are not hired on the merit of their teaching, their interview responses, or any other standard measure which we use in the US. Rather, because government school teaching positions are government jobs, they are governed by the same crazy system that governs the hiring of any other government employee. Therefore, schools look at your marks from your B.A. and B.Ed, your masters if applicable, and all of these are translated into certain numbers of points. These points determine if you are first, second, third etc for your pick of teaching jobs at different schools.

Now, extra points can be earned in a number of seemingly random ways: 1) participation in the National Cadet Corps (a band of students akin to the Boy Scouts who march in procession for Independence Day, Diwali and a number of other functions throughout the year) during your high school years. 2) Taking a government sponsored exam, such as that given in the SCOPE curriculum to prove your proficiency in English.

With this in mind, many of the temporary teachers (teachers hired to fill vacant permanent positions on a yearly basis) were anxious to take the school sponsored opportunity to take the exam and the principal called on us to tutor these teachers in preparation. Melissa and I sat in the staff room and tried to encourage these teachers to speak English as much as possible in the hopes that it would allow them to pass the exam, which took place last Sunday.

On coming into the staff room this morning, I was interested to hear how the exam had gone from one teacher we had worked with very often.

“How was the test?” I asked, innocently enough.

“Oh, it was fine,” was the reply. “We all ended up copying off of Sejalben’s paper.”

“Come again?”

If this is the attitude of the teachers, how can we expect any more of the students?

Best,
Cat

Thankfully Undertaken

2008-12-01T08:53:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

It would have been simple enough, I think, for us to have fallen into away-from-home holiday blues for Thanksgiving. Thankfully, the same indomitable, resourceful spirits which (probably?) inspired us to move here saved the day, bolstered by some non-perishable acquisitions made by Melissa during her most recent trip to the US for the Diwali vacation.

On first setting out to make our holiday dreams into reality, we realized that the principal obstacle was our glaring lack of food preparation facilities. Our comfortable guesthouse, advantageous as its location and all other amenities are, is not blessed by the presence of a working kitchen. Instead, all of our food is brought to us on a twice-daily basis from the hostel kitchen located 100 feet from our house.

Kate (my travel partner of Nepal fame who elected to stay some time with us in Kadod), Melissa and I, after several conferences on the matter, decided that the best thing to do, rather than to try and make use of the hostel facilities for an evening, would be to find a suitable, friendly off-site kitchen owned by an Kadodian family with an adventurous palate and not too many family members (we only had so much pumpkin pie mix, after all). After considering several possibilities, we settled on Daybal’s house.

My phone call informing Daybal of her selection proceeded in the following confused matter:

Me: (hesitantly on hearing lots of noise in the background) Daybal? I have a question for you, but I want you to know before I ask it that you can say no…
Daybal: (shouting over the background noise) WHAT do you people want to ask me?
Me: Well, Thursday is a really important American festival where we make lots of American style food and we wanted to know if we could make dinner for you and your family. But, we’d have to make it in your kitchen.
Daybal: You want to use my kitchen?
Me: (finishing her sentence) To make dinner for your family.
Daybal: YOU WANT TO USE MY KITCHEN?
Me: - To make dinner for your family. Yes.
Daybal: I (long pause) am coming over to your house.
Me: UH, that’s not necessary. We’re about to go out. But… well, listen, let’s talk about this tomorrow when I see you at school?

It was decided that the conference would continue at that appointed time and sure enough, the next day Daybal arrived on my door step.

“What the hell were you trying to say yesterday?” She asked me with confused affection.

“We just want to make some food for your family, but we have no kitchen here, so we need to use someone else’s kitchen. Do you mind?” I asked, hesitatingly.

“YOU people want to use my kitchen,” she said. “It’s fine, of course, but you make me a list and I’ll get whatever you need.”

I politely declined this directive and said we’d bring everything necessary. She started to argue, and I finally just said, “Daybal, seriously, I know that you have to say this because of the rules of hospitality, but please just let us be American this one day and do everything for you and your family because you’ve done so much for us?”

She looked at me for a moment, then laughingly agreed. Thus, our location was set.

All that was left was to acquire the necessary food items. A tentative menu had been agreed upon in our previously mentioned tete-a-tete’s about the upcoming holiday and Wednesday evening Melissa and I ended Spoken English Class early in the hope of purchasing all the necessary vegetables. We were unsuccessful only in our search for corn, but did manage to find potatoes, sweet potatoes, something we mistook for string beans which ended up being akin to a flavorless lima bean, and rolls. The vegetable sellers seemed puzzled about why we would need so much food for just the two of us, but we simply explained by saying we had a religious festival and it was required of us, an explanation which seemed to satisfy even the most pressingly curious.

The next day, our time inbetween having to teach was spent furiously peeling, chopping and generally preparing for the short amount of time that we would have between the end of school and our imposed curfew to cook and pull off this dinner. Everything was sealed, bagged and tinned in preparation for the shift of location to Daybal’s waiting kitchen. We were even able to put a jello pumpkin pie into the fridge, crust in all, using a tin which we normally use to hold papad (a thin Indian cracker served with every meal).

Arriving at Daybal’s, of course, began the process of negotiation over the actual terms of using her kitchen.

“Why have you brought these containers?” She yelled as she watched us unpack various sundry items we had brought with us.

“Well, we didn’t know what you would have…” I began carefully.

“I have containers!” She lovingly chided.

“Well, now I know, and anyway we needed something to carry the leftovers home in…” I explained.

“Leftovers?” She looked at me blankly.

“See…” I began. “This holiday is pretty much about giving thanks and then making more food than you could ever possibly eat to give thanks for. You eat so much that you are stuffed, then you eat a little more. Then, you take the rest home and eat it for the rest of the week.” She looked at me interested.

“And that is the purpose of ‘Thank You Day’?” She asked me.

“That is the purpose of ‘Thank You Day,” I replied, smiling.

The cooking that ensued mostly involved a lot of rescuing spices from Daybal’s hands just before she dumped them into our food. “Don’t you want cumin?” She’d yell just before we rescued it from being poured all over the mashed potatoes.

“Trust me,” Kate, our master chef, kept saying to her, “I have a plan.” Daybal merely responded by looking at Kate dubiously.

As a mediocre chef at best, my job somehow became the meaningful involvement of Daybal’s three children in the cooking process. Her two young daughters took a particular interest in the mashing of the potatoes, a process which they had previously never seen, and soon I was supervising their small arms holding our flat spoon-cum-mashing implement and keeping their fingers out of the pot. Meanwhile, I tried to keep Afifa (at 2 years old, her youngest), from killing himself: first, from falling down the open staircase while running wildly around with a baseball cap positioned over his face, then from sticking his fingers in an active electrical socket while dancing on an unstead table, and finally from poking out his eye with a large meter long stick which he brandished in an uncivilized way while tearing about the two rooms that made up the house. At these antics, Daybal merely laughed and said he was a ‘jungli’ (a kind of tribal person who lives in a jungle, apparently).

Between Kate’s negotiations, Melissa’s stirring and the prevention of Daybal’s meddling, the dinner was finally ready and the tarp upon which I had previously dined for both Eid-Ul-Fitr and during Ramadan was placed on the ground of the common room. Rashidbhai, Daybal’s husband, came and sat with his friend from his work who had been invited to join the proceedings after Daybal screamed at him to turn off the coverage of the Mumbai bombings on the TV and come and sit on the floor with the rest of us.

As we sat in a circle on the stone floor around the food, we three Americans realized that the Indians were waiting for us to show them the proper way to go about eating the food at hand. For Melissa and I, it was a strange but satisfying role reversal.

“So,” I began, “we usually go around and say something that we are thankful for before we begin to eat.”

“Like a prayer?” Daybal asked.

“Well, sort of…” There was a such a mixture of religious beliefs in the room that it didn’t feel fair to call it a prayer, exactly. “Just, something that you are thankful for.”

We were about to begin when Daybal, in her typical way, hit her husband on the arm and asked him what he was going to say. “You have something in mind?” she said to him. He mumbled that he did and explained what it was. Then she did the same thing to his friend and when she was satisfied that they would not be left stumbling for words, she turned back to me and told me I could begin.

“Well,” I said, “predictably I guess I’m thankful for having good enough friends here that they would allow us to take over their kitchen and eat strange food that they might not like and who have welcomed us so much into their lives here in Kadod.” I looked at Melissa.

“I’m thankful for having good friends like you all, too--” began Melissa.

“No man!” Daybal yelled at her. “You can’t say the same thing!”

We all laughed. “You make the rules now?”

“She has to have something different!” She insisted. The circle of thanks proceeded in this ceremonious way, punctuated by interruptions from Daybal’s idea of what it should look and sound like. Once it was finished, after a moment of silence, the eating commenced.

After hours of talking and negotiating, the sound of us all thoughtfully going about eating our food was a nice change, and we Americans were happy to see that our version of Thanksgiving was a hit as the Indians asked for seconds and thirds. The canned cranberry sauce was a particular favorite (probably owing to the typical Gujarati sweet-tooth).

After enjoying the food and the refrigerated pre-packaged pumpkin like dessert (Shout out to Jello for it being surprisingly good), the evening was coming to a close. We hadn’t even touched half of the mashed potatoes that we had made.

“You know,” Daybal announced, “I gave up my diet just for today, just for YOU people and Thank You Day.”

“You know,” I said, “That’s pretty American.”

Best,
Cat

The Bat Cave

2008-11-09T18:42:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Sitting alone in the dark of the biggest cave in Nepal, I began to relax. I could hear the voices of the others farther on in the chamber and see their lights flash in a disorganized way around the walls. They were looking for footing in order to climb the steep incline of the cave floor; an ascent I could not make because of my inappropriate footwear. Their voices became more and more distant until they cleared the steep incline and their lights and voices were subsumed by darkness and silence.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I packed only my flip flops for my four week trip. I knew I’d be coming to Nepal; I knew one of the major attractions here for tourists is trekking. I can only assume my thinking just hadn’t gotten that far or I seriously underestimated the terrain I’d be dealing with (only, you know, the highest mountain range in the world…geez, Cat). Either way, this is how I found myself holding on to a stray root stretching out from the side of the path as I gingerly tried to find footing on a slick, narrow trail stretching downwards hundreds of feet at a terrifying angle. I could see farther ahead the guide we’d hired from the tourist information booth in this tiny village of Bandipur (a local science teacher at the Nepali medium school who only had a half day of school, incidentally) looking up at me with a concerned look on his face.

I faked a smile like I do this everyday and his face relaxed, but only slightly. The rest of our group (Kate and a Spanish couple who’d jumped into our hike just as we were taking off) looked equally concerned as they reached the plateau in the path where he was standing. I let go of the root that I was clutching, still smiling, and continued to move downwards, slowly, concentrating my full attention on each step. I could hear the others chatting as they caught their breath down below me, but I couldn’t let myself be distracted: my mind was busy calculating the likelihood that the next rock would be the one I would slip on and would pitch me face first over the mountainside.

With a luck that I can only attribute to God or sheer, embarrassed determination, I was able to make it down to where everyone else was standing. This, however, was only the beginning. Our hike out to our a destination, the largest cave in Nepal according to our trusty and ever present Lonely Planet, was reported by the same to be about an hour and a half. At this juncture, we’d hiked approximately fifteen minutes. I gritted my teeth and slugged some water before following Sandra the Spaniard down the trail under the watchful gaze of the snow peaks rising towards the heavens on the other side of the valley. At that moment, their peaks appeared as hands in prayer, soliciting the sky. Hopefully on my behalf, I thought.

To my own amazement, one and a half hours later we arrived at the narrow opening of the cave, sans broken ankles or any other injury save a little soreness in my knees. Around the opening to the mouth of the cave were a few idle looking Nepali men who demanded payment of 50 rupees and offered up the hire of a large industrial sized flashlight of which the Spaniards promptly took advantage. Kate had brought a practical head lamp which I figured I’d just follow (I mean, really: a girl who can’t be bothered to pack sneakers can hardly be expected to remember fancy gadgets like flashlights!)

Entering the cave, I had a sudden flashback to a five day field trip we’d taken in the 7th grade to West Virginia, during which spelunking was mandatory. It was a rather narrow gorge that we were expected to crawl down on hands and knees, and I chickened out about ten minutes in when we got to the part where we were expected to go underwater and then come up on other side (called ‘the keyhole’ or some such thing). I’d waited outside, cold and wet, until the rest of my group emerged, triumphant, from the mouth of the cave. As we entered, I told myself this cave wasn’t nearly as narrow and anyway that was twelve years ago and I am an adult now, after all.

Navigating without a light was a little like trying to find my way to the outdoor bathroom at our guesthouse at 3 am: I kept having to stop and sort of feel around with my sandaled foot to see if I was all right to continue forward. Kate kindly kept turning around to shed a little light (literally) on the situation and in this way, I managed to make it out of the main entryway and deep into the cave itself. The rock itself was smooth and though navigating it in my flip flops was difficult, I was able to scramble across the rocks with the use of all my limbs as supports.

The obstacle which finally stymied my progress was a rather smooth decline to the next passage in the cave that had been made particularly slick with water dripping down from somewhere in the cave’s ceiling. Kate went first and I made to go after her until she made the intelligent observation that I might not be able to get back up again. The surface was very slick and there didn’t seem to be many natural footholds, at least that we could see. I hesitated, unsure of what my options were. With no flashlight, it was impossible for me to turn around and exit the cave to wait there, but continuing on seemed impossible in light of the terrain. After another moment, I finally said the only thing I could think of: “I’ll just wait here; you guys go ahead and I’ll get you when you come back.”

“Are you sure?” asked Kate. “Do you want the light?”

I hesitated again. I didn’t want to take her flashlight, but the idea of sitting in a cave in complete darkness didn’t really appeal to me either. “Uh, yes,” I admitted. And then, “Sorry…”

She handed me the headlamp, which I put on. They made to move on, and while I could see them, I tracked their progress with my flashlight, hoping to be useful in any way that I could. After they’d moved out of flashlight range, I could still hear their voices but realized that I was pretty much on my own.

At first, I felt very relaxed. “This isn’t so bad,” I thought to myself. “I mean, the Buddha meditated in caves by himself...” I settled myself into a cross legged position on the high perch where I was stuck. I glanced around the cave, flashing my light into different crevices as I did so. As I looked up, I saw my first bat. I wasn’t really frightened, particularly: I’d seen tons of bats hanging from trees in Kadod. A voice from my past, perhaps from the very same seventh grade camping trip, that it wasn’t a good idea to shine lights on bats for too long. I quickly refocused the light on the ground of the cave.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing. I could still here the vague echo of the others who by this time had disappeared much farther into the cave. Soon this was gone and it was completely silent. I could see why such an environment would be conducive to deep meditation. I tried switching off the light for a moment, but the cowardly spelunker in me found the blackness of the cave was too overwhelming and I immediately switched it back on again. I straightened my spine and closed my eyes again. Breathe in… Breathe out…

It was at that moment that I heard a distinct swish…

I jerked my head in the direction that it came from and saw, to my horror, two bats unpredictably flapping around only a few feet from where I was sitting. I stifled a scream, knowing on some primordial level that this would only make things worse and it came out as a squeak. My breathing quickened and I could feel my heart pounding as I immediately pulled my legs into my chest and my sleeves down over my arms.

All was silent for a moment and I dared to put my head up, but at that moment the swishing started again and I thought I heard a squeaking close to me. I felt my body involuntarily curl into itself. I ducked my head into my legs. I didn’t know if the light made it worse, or better and in looking up again, I really did scream as a bat dived at my head and came inches from my body.

The scream, of course, served no purpose at all since the others were too far away to hear me. I briefly considered trying to leave the cave myself, but the bats were coming from the direction of the entrance itself. I found myself pressing my face against my knees and simply whispering “Please come back…” over and over to no one in particular. Every time I heard the swishing, I’d press in harder, trying to compact myself so much that I’d disappear.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour but in reality was probably only ten minutes or so, the lights of the others flashlights appeared at the far end of the cave. I unwillingly pried my head away from my legs fearfully, but tried to relax my face so they wouldn’t know anything was wrong. I mean, really, I’d already caused enough trouble and after all this was entirely my fault in the first place. I hoped my smile looked like one of contentedness and not of desperate happiness that they had returned.

Making our way out of the cave was much simpler than coming in and soon we were sitting on the thin ledge outside the narrow opening leading inside, discussing which way would be best to return. We decided on the way we came, which meant a longer serious uphill battle, but was much easier for me to navigate in my flip flops than the slippery, steep trail leading down to the road. Really a relief, after having come so far, and all in my flip flops! It was almost something to be strangely proud of. It was with this feeling that I started on the return trip home.

That is, until I remembered the possibility of lurking leeches attaching themselves to my bare feet…

Best,
Cat

P.S. Trip pictures to come on my return to Kadod!

Bus-iness as usual

2008-11-08T17:26:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Somewhere between watching a woman repeatedly throw up into a small plastic bag that she carried with her for that purpose and becoming a little too close to the migrating limbs of the narcoleptic man sitting next to me, I realize that there are few joys that delight more than taking the local bus.

Seriously: as we careened haplessly around a hairpin corner on a mountain road with no guard rail with a thousand foot drop on the other side, I happened to quell my terror long enough to spot a comfortable, close windowed, air conditioned tourist bus out of the corner of my eye. The look of utter boredom which was apparent on the faces of the passengers within said bus as they passively took in the countryside was enough to convince me that if I were to die on these mountain roads (a fate which I felt at this point in my observations of Nepalese driving was assured), I would much rather do so while listening to a sixty minute loop of the same Nepalese music with the wind blowing in my face than in some comfortably cushioned video coach.

But really, I should start at the beginning. Bolstered by Obama’s heartening win, Kate and I arrived at the New City Bus Station in high spirits. I can’t attribute these completely to politics: we’d been looking forward to leaving the unchecked chaos of Kathmandu since we arrived. Our destination was the small mountain town of Bandipur which had been recommended by friends and a random Frenchman with whom Kate had struck up an acquaintance before I arrived. We also wanted to break up the seven hour ride to the other major tourist city here in Nepal, Pokhara.

Upon our arrival, we did what any good westerners might do: we set off to ferret out where the tickets for the buses were sold. Immediately, we were set upon by some adolescent boys asking in their accented English, “Where do you want to go?” We’d become used to this routine from our exploration of Kathmandu’s Metro Bus Service (a series of small vans with boys who travel with them and shout out the names of where the van is going to any interested passerby), so we told them. Immediately they grabbed our arms and ushered us frantically to a window which said clearly in Devanagri the name of our destination.

“You pay 220 for one – okay?” The boy/man shouted at us with a frenetic energy I can only attribute to local urgency or cocaine. I looked at Kate.

“I think you should ask at the window,” she said.

I turned back to the window and yelled over the head of the boy/man to the guy sitting behind the grill in Hindi, “Hey bhai, how much to go to Dumre?”

He mumbled back a number that sounded the same, so we handed over a 1000 rupee note in the hopes of getting change. The boy/man immediately took off with us in tow and unceremoniously pushed us onto the bus.

“You sit here,” he said, indicating the seat directly behind the drivers.

I threw down my bag and Kate headed towards the back of the coach, as we had previously agreed on sitting apart during the journey in order to allow each other to fully get in ‘the zone’ (not to mention give a little space).

Boy/man then disappeared and left us wondering what the hell happened to our change…

I settled into the seat “assigned” to me. As the bus started and boy/man got behind the wheel, I learned early on that there are a few distinct advantages to having the seat directly behind the driver’s:

1. Front row seats for the magic show that is keeping a Nepalese bus on the road.
2. Intimate acquaintance with the top part of the bus’s engine as it is located (gasp) directly in front of you, shaking and rattling and overheating your legs which must rest on it out of necessity.
3. There’s no one sitting in front of you to throw up/spit/toss trash out their open window that will subsequently splash on you through your open window.
4. First pick of the various snacks peddled at the national high way bus stops including but not limited to: freshly cut cucumber, Indian cheetos, and small dried fish speared on wooden kabobs replete with eyes, scales and fins.

Actually, my favorite part of my particular vantage point was that I got to observe first hand that the driver of this multi-passenger vehicle and I actually have a lot in common. Just like me, the driver would occasionally get thirsty while driving, fumble with his water bottle and hold the steering wheel lightly with one hand or perhaps his knee; also like me, he’d occasionally get sick of the music playing and I’d watch his eyes leave the road so he could fumble around on the dashboard for a different tape, which he’d then have to insert into the bus sound system and press play. But don’t worry: only once or twice during these minor distractions did we actually face the possibility head on collision with an oncoming vehicle.

Another delight was watching the woman across from me breast feed her baby. Now, I am in all for public breastfeeding: I mean, if the baby needs to be fed, it needs to be fed and really its just a natural relationship between mother and child. However, usually, after the feeding is finished, you can count on the mother to remember to put her breast away. Unfortunately in this situation, mom was so distracted by having to throw up in her plastic bag every so often, she and baby simply fell asleep, both forgetting that her breast was still hanging around, literally. I wasn’t sure if, as one of the only other woman in the vicinity, I should say something? I mean, what would you have done?

With a sudden eventual jolt of the bus stopping at some discrete village location, she awoke and rearranged herself accordingly. Fortunately, this particular jolt also woke the narcoleptic man next to me whose head had migrated to my shoulder and elbow to my stomach, and he similarly rearranged. Not so fortunately, his new consciousness also made him realize that his bus stop was imminent, and on seeing an acquaintance of his out the bus window, he poked me in the eye with a rolled up newspaper while wildly gesturing to “Vikram” and hitting the back of the seat of the bus driver to get him to stop the bus. The bus driver having obliged, he got down and I was free, but by that time, our interminable bus ride became terminal as I saw a sign which indicated we were only five kilometers from Dumre.

I mean, honestly, who wouldn’t want to travel this way?

Best,
Cat

Acute Aesthetic

2008-11-05T08:59:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

My shifting perspective is perhaps being influenced by my travel mate: Kate, a now itinerant artist, moves through the world with an acute sense of the aesthetic and I believe that this tendency is rubbing off on me as I wonder at the new visual feast around me. India itself possesses an incredibly varied terrain, but I myself have not seen much of it these past few months as I’ve bicycled Madhi Road over and over again. Much of India’s visual symbolism I’ve internalized and can now translate easily into meaning. Being in a new country, despite its many similarities, has brought with it new symbolism for the same meanings and I find myself staring wonderingly at the strange blend of Indian and East Asian architecture I am presented with, not to mention the world that contains them.

First, I am watching the prayer flags above a towering Tibetan stupa flutter and the prayer wheels lining its base spin, their inert prayers tactilely activated by the devoted and the curious and released in a clockwise fashion out over the open Kathmandu valley, rising above the shadowed mountains which line its edges and freed into the snow capped universe.

Then, I am sitting in a quiet courtyard in the village of Patan while Kate works in her sketchbook. I listen and watch as two Nepalese girls quietly and unself-consciously choreograph a dance to a popular Hindi film song. Above them, old crumblingly sturdy brick buildings continue their centuries old march onward with pigeon infested garlic hanging to dry from their eaves. Around their doorsteps, ducks and dogs and goats gather for a kind of quotidian worship of the hand that feeds them and their rooftop rose gardens sway lightly in soft valley breeze.

Wandering on, I stop for a moment outside a courtyard of the same town and watch surreptitiously from behind a pillar as an old Nepalese woman shovels rice in a fierce and determined way. She brings her shovel slowly back, picks up a bundle and then throws it in a flinging motion across the courtyard where it scatters on a pile next to a large spread of rice drying in the sun, waiting for feet to sift lightly through it, a practical prayer in each grainy step.

While Kate makes quick, hurried sketches of figures which she observes in the bustling of Patan’s touristy Durbar Square, I find myself making similar quick sketches in my head but, lacking Kate’s practiced skill, with words. I watch as an Anglo of ambiguous origin (Italy? Britain? South America? We can only guess) himself sketches along with a gaggle of thrilled Nepalese children to whom he’s given the use of a set of colored pencils. They eagerly adore his sketches and show him theirs proudly. His smile invites others to join and to me the resulting tableau looks almost biblical. Occasionally as I watch, he looks up, we make eye contact, and I look away, embarrassed by my casual staring. As soon as I think he’s not looking, I look back, fascinated by the childrens’ fascination with him.

In these moments that I’ve described, I’ve never felt more aware of the kind of voyeurism that is tourism. Observing these small, private interactions feels too intimate, more intimate than even when I see such things in Kadod. I think the difference comes in the egalitarianism of it: in Kadod, my life is as up for scrutiny as anyone else’s, as the frequent intrusions on our American constructed privacy often demonstrate. Here, with my hotel room and my camera and my own ambiguous origin, I am inscrutable beyond my immediate exterior and my wide, constantly gawking eyes.

It just doesn’t seem fair. And yet, I can’t look away.

Best,
Cat

P.S. I'm posting this in the middle of our morning watching of the election coverage. What a luxury to be able to watch full coverage outside your own country (albeit 9 hours and 45 minutes ahead) Go Obama Go!

Re-setting Clocks

2008-11-04T09:42:00.005+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I had to set my clock 15 minutes forward today.

Apparently in an attempt to differentiate itself from the overpopulated country shadowing it from the left, Nepal has elected to be 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, as opposed to India’s 5 hours and 30 minutes. Or so I discovered today at approximately 7:48 pm, or 8:03 pm, depending how you look at it.

This quirk is itself only one of the small that have punctuated my early experience of Kathmandu. Having arrived here yesterday afternoon armed only with my visa in need of renewing and the standard traveler’s aid otherwise known as the Lonely Planet, I can honestly say I was completely unprepared.

Nestled in the Himalayas beneath sprawling snow-capped peaks, it is easy to imagine that living here bestows upon its inhabitants a sense of cosmic alignment and direction that is lost to those of us who are only passing through as itinerant wanderers. This feeling is reinforced by the muddled way in which those of us not in the know are forced to meander the unnamed streets of this smiling metropolis. Yes, you read right: none of the streets in Kathmandu have names. The result is that most advertisements you see not only include the name of the place and an endorsement of their products, but also a detailed line drawing replete with landmarks illustrating how to get from the location of the advertisement to the store itself.

This reality is particularly terrifying in the tourist haven (or hell) of Thamel where every narrow alley which passes for a thoroughfare looks exactly the same, lined with t-shirt shops, guesthouses, and trekking travel agencies all selling and advertising the exact same services. The effect on the hapless tourist is like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods, except any trail of bread crumbs would likely be eaten by stray dogs, cats or errant cows.

Lucky for me, my best friend Kate (and my travel partner for the next 15 days) arrived from the US the day before I did and was able to secure us a spot in a lovely guesthouse just outside of this maze of Daedulus called the Tibet Peace Guest House. It is located next to an English Medium School (I just can’t get away!) from which I heard the familiar sounds of chanting issuing forth this morning as we made our way to find filter coffee. After twenty four hours here, I’ve noticed that everything feels familiar: the signs are written in Devanagari script (same as Hindi), the language shares many of the same words, the people dress in the same fashion (plus nice thick sweaters), the traffic emits the same diesel fumes and the country, like India, is largely Hindu. Even the tourist outlets seem to sell the same hippy styled clothing, the same embroidered t-shirts, the same wooden carved chess sets.

The fifteen minutes of difference seems to come mostly in the attitude in which people approach their interactions with each other. Last night at dinner, I smiled at a waiter and he actually smiled back at me. I was slightly shocked. Having spent the last two weeks traveling in India, I was expecting the grittiness with which most foreigners are man-handled, especially in well worn grooves of the tourist industry. What I’ve found couldn’t be more different: Street hawkers simply smile and walk away if you say “No, I don’t actually want to buy some tiger balm, whatever that is” and taxi drivers greet you by saying “I value the divine in you (the literal meaning of namaste). Do you want a taxi?”

Over the past twenty four hours, I’ve found that this absence of abrasiveness has me re-setting my own clock. My urban shield, built up since leaving Kadod, is still feeling out what defenses are actually needed and which can be abandoned in favor of trustfully and positively interacting with other human beings. What calibration is needed I have yet to figure out exactly, but I suppose I have 14 more days.

Best,
Cat

Trading In

2008-10-17T00:39:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

This Saturday, I trade in my chalk and duster for a backpack and train tickets. I couldn’t be more excited or more nervous.

Living in India and traveling in India are so different that the latter is like being in another country altogether. Distinguished by my backpack, my camera, my white skin, no matter how long I’ve lived here, no matter what I wear, no matter how well I speak the language, every day becomes my first day in India.

It’s a phenomenon I joke about often and is best illustrated by the following three connected anecdotes from our most recent trip to Mumbai:

Having taken the well beaten path of least resistance (read: Lonely Planet India) in picking our accommodation for our five day sojourn, Melissa and I found ourselves in the known tourist district of Colaba at the southern-most tip of Mumbai. Our hotel had a nice view of the Taj (the nicest hotel in India) from its crumbling location four stories up and one block away. Our welcome to our exulted lodgings was having to politely ask a sleepy eyed construction worker to move just as he was raising his hammer to strike a chisel against the sandbag reinforced wall of the stairwell so we could continue the endless climb to the lobby.

After a refreshing non air-conditioned sleep in our surprisingly bed bug free beds, Melissa and I parted ways in the morning after an indulgent American style breakfast at a local cafe: she, to take her GRE (the whole purpose behind our visit) and me to take in what I could of the sites. I had set my heart on braving the rickety ferries of Mumbai harbor to visit Elephanta Island, home to some temples carved into stone rock faces.

There is a wariness that you must always wear as a traveler here, one that I’ve all but dropped living in the village. The hardened urban shell that I’d perfected while living in Delhi is cracked and in disrepair from living in Kadod, a place where guile is relatively unknown and where its does exist, it is unpracticed and mostly harmless. Walking alone towards the ticket booth for Elephanta Island, however, I felt as one who doesn’t exercise for a long time: nervous I would strain myself or become winded from the interactions I knew were coming.

It was not without reason. As soon as I started walking towards India Gate, one of the most well known landmarks in Mumbai, I was hassled with “Madam, photo?” “Balloon?” “Magic Balls?” “Peanuts?” “Ice Cream?” “PHOTO!”

I kept walking, my eyes looking straight forward. I had a goal and I was going to make it. Arriving at the ticket booth, I stopped, my assured exterior disappearing as I eyed the lines of windows with men sitting behind each. Signs in India have a crowded quality that makes it difficult if you are relying on them to find what you want easily. It is, however, essential that you locate what you want immediately; if not –

“Madam, what are you looking for?” Someone asked me almost immediately.

I decided to just be forthcoming. “I want to go to Elephanta Island,” I said.

“I sell the tickets madam,” this random man told me as he pulled out a bundle from his pocket. “120 rupees, madam”.

The guidebook had said 90 – but my guidebook, leftover from my time in Delhi, is four years old, so I hesitated once again. “Is there a window?” I asked him.

“That window is for tours, ma’am,” the man said.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just try the window and see what happens,” I said.

He shrugs, uninsulted. “If you wish, madam, but that man and I are in business together.”

The man at the window confirmed this and I bought the ticket from the bundle in the first man’s outstretched hand. He directed me toward the ferry loading dock, saying if I hurried I could catch the next one. I lit up with the brief glow of success when the man at the dock demanded 120 rupees and I produced the ticket for the same amount from my pocket. I had successfully navigated one tourist trap! The joy was short-lived.

I had harbored hopes that I would somehow make friends aboard the ferry with other tourists in the same easy way that I had when I was backpacking in Ireland; however, as I eyed the boat’s other passengers, I realized with some gloom that there was no one in my age range aboard. It was mostly Indian couples – there was one other British looking man, but he looked to be about 60 and not very friendly so I gave him a wide berth and for the next hour watched the approach of the Island from the front of the boat.

As soon as the boat hit dry land and I set foot upon the dock, I felt a hand thrust into mine. I looked into the eyes of its owner, who introduced himself as Krishna. Employing tactics I myself used as a canvasser for Greenpeace that one ill-fated summer, he did not ask me if I wanted a guide (I did) but rather merely acted as if it were an assumption. We agreed on the short 1.5 hour tour of the Island, he outlined our itinerary and I agreed. This temple-touting is a common phenomenon here and while some travelers hate it, the historical sites have such poor signage here that I find that, even if what the touts are telling me isn’t true, it’s still more interesting than just looking at the edifices on my own. I find this especially true at religious sites where I feel an inherent ill-comfort.

The tour itself was a whir: he talked quickly, gave me time to take a picture and then abruptly moved onto the next feature. The tour, while detailed, was so rushed I barely had time to process any of the information he was feeding me. I resolved that I would simply go back to the caves to look them over again once he had finished with me. However, after the end of the hour and a half, I somehow found myself sitting in a café belonging to his brother’s sister, drinking filtered water while I paid for him to drink a rather expensive beer. Trying to keep things polite and following the rules of hospitality that I’ve learned in Kadod, I allowed him to lead me through all of this and once his beer was finished, somehow found myself agreeing to go back to the boat and go back to the mainland. On the way, the other foot fell: He wanted me to pay him 1000 rupees for the tour. And the best part? I did it! I just did not, after being led around by him for the past two hours, have the heart to haggle. He told me he thought I had a very agreeable personality. If someone gave me twenty dollars, I’d probably say that about them too.

On the boat on the way home, I kicked myself in the ambivalent way that only tourism in India inspires. On the one hand, I gave myself a good whack for being so agreeable, for worrying more about relationship management than what I wanted, which was to see the caves in detail. On the other hand, it had been an exceptionally good tour except for the pace and while I didn’t quite think it was worth the full price I paid for it, I suspected the money would go towards good use. He’d told me all about his family and his sons and his wife and how hard he’d studied to learn the six languages he does tours in. I knew at least that part was true, and if the rest of it was, then I knew he needed the money more than me.

However, just at the moment that I was feeling the most foolish, a second staple of tourism in India occurred. A man came and sat next to me. I had observed him earlier in the journey: he was sitting across the boat with his wife and his teenage son and daughter. He smiled a broad smile as he sat, and I, as wary as ever, returned it slightly less enthusiastically.

“My son…” he began. I waited. I could sense a mental struggle for the words. “Salman Khan? (a famous Indian film star)” He finished hopefully.

I smiled and replied in Hindi, “If you want to speak in Hindi, you can. I’ll understand. What do you want to say?”

He looked both surprised and relieved. “My son,” he said, “doesn’t he look like Salman Khan?” He gestured across the boat where I could see his family looking at him strangely for walking all the way across the boat to talk to the lone white girl. He gestured to his kids, who obediently came over. They sat on either side of me and began to ask me questions: where was I from? Why was I in India? How had I come to speak Hindi? The girl, 17 years old, wanted to know how I liked teaching English; the boy, 21, wanted to tell me I was pretty because I was so fair, wanted to know if I drank or smoked and wanted to compliment my Hindi. Talking to them reminded me of talking to the kids in Kadod and I enjoyed our ferry ride-cum-English lesson. They produced pictures that they had had professionally taken at Chowpatty Beach, another Mumbai landmark, the day before. I laughed as I saw the skinny son making muscles in the surf. When we arrived at the dock at India Gate, they made me take a picture with them and promise to come visit if I made it out to Madhya Pradesh. I said I would.

The whole encounter, so typical of Indian tourists I’ve encountered (minus all the conversation in Hindi, which I wasn’t really capable of the last time I lived here), really lifted my spirits as I headed towards the big outdoor market in Colaba to see if I could find some funky jewelry to bring back for some of my friends in Kadod. It was here that I hit Indian tourism staple number three…

Somewhere between the large book stall where I hungrily indulged in too many book purchases (there being no English language bookstores within four hours of where I live) and heading towards a jewelry stand I remembered glancing at the night before, I made the mistake of making eye contact with a man laden down with drums. Eye contact indicates interest and despite my heated protests in both Hindi and English, this man simply refused to believe that I was not interested in his oh-so-useful wooden drums.

“Madam!” he pleaded in broken English as he followed me. “Price usually 600 – but for you… 450 madam, 450…” I kept walking. He followed.

5 minutes later…

“Okay, madam, okay… special price, just for you. For you, only 300…” I kept walking. He followed.

5 minutes later…

“My children will not eat madam, but you will take it for 200. 200 is good price madam.”

It was no use to explain to him that I had absolutely no use for a wooden drum; that I had no one to give it to, no place to put it, no interest in playing it… all of these things were superfluous. He had decided on selling the drum, and sell it he would. I stopped to browse at a bangle shop, hoping that perhaps they stocked my size. When I emerged, dazzled slightly by so many bright colors at once, I thought briefly as I started walking that I had lost him. That is, until he jumped out at me from behind a bush.

“Okay, madam, okay. You take for 100. Last price madam. Absolute last price.”

We had reached a street crossing and I turned and looked at him seriously. I said in Hindi, “Do you know where the 103 bus picks up?” I had heard that this local bus was a good one from which to see the sights of the city and what I really needed was to sit away from con men and just think while watching pretty things go by.

He looked at me with the characteristic surprise that usually comes when I speak Hindi. “It picks up back there,” he replied simply in Hindi. “Come, I’ll show you.”

On the way, he asked me about my Hindi, I explained that I lived here, and he began, with the added vigor of now being able to speak in a language he spoke fluently, to berate me with stories of his starving children, his poor wife, their hunger, their poverty… With the sun beating down and the sweat rolling off my back and my eyes searching desperately for the bus, it was difficult to listen to what he was saying. When we reached the bus stand, I found myself agreeing to buy a drum. As I got out my wallet and handed him the hundred rupees he’d asked for, I found myself thinking I spend more than this on a daily cup of coffee in the US.

Just as I handed the bill and put out my hand to take the drum, he looked up into my eyes and said meaningfully, “Come ma’am… you must give 150 rupees at least.”

Well, I lost it. I was tired and sweaty and India-weary and so, I tried to take the money back from him as I blubbered in Hindi. I grabbed at it but of course he wouldn’t let go, and at just at that moment, the bus arrived and I ended up just grabbing the drum out of his hands and running to jump on the bus. My haphazard throwing of myself down into a seat made the conductor look at me in pity and he didn’t bother collecting my fair. Meanwhile, the drum sat heavy in my lap, branding me with idiocy for all the world to see. I glowered at it, sinking into my seat and hoping I wouldn’t have to move for some time.

The coup de grace, however, dear reader?

I’d gotten on a bus going in the wrong direction. It was a mere ten minutes before the conductor called last stop and I ended up getting off in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, as a tourist, I had an out. I merely hailed a cab and made them take me to my hotel, where I holed up for the rest of the day, vowing never to venture out into India again.

I’m hoping this next month will whip my flabby endurance back into shape. Amritsar, here I come.

Best,
Cat

P.S. I’ll be updating my blog en route as I can, though I can’t promise the usual every 2-4 days.

Swami-ji Himself

2008-10-14T23:44:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

It is always refreshing when our few hours outside the school each day lead to new discoveries. Our latest is perhaps our most incredible yet: in an unassuming temple quite near to our home, unbeknownst to us until now, lives a 93 year old guru. We made his acquaintance over the weekend through the family of Mr. Tailor

“Even at 93,” Mr. Tailor’s brother, Jayeshbhai, told us, “his skin is still tight. He does not seem this age. He is traveling on tour in the USA two times, all over the world he travels and all places in India. He is speaking all Indian languages, so many languages.” He listed them off on his fingers, “Marathi, Telegu, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil…all of these he is speaking. And he has the powerful command of English,” he said, waving his hand emphatically, “So he will have no trouble in talking with you.”

We nodded and listened to all this as we walked at a double pace to keep up with Jayesh’s long legs striding purposefully along towards the temple. Weighing probably 115 pounds, Jayeshbhai is easily the tallest person in town, standing at some inches over six feet tall. His long, slightly skeletal fingers are adept at the sewing which is his profession and he seems to do most of the work that his brother arranges. While his English is less confident than his brother’s, it is no less powerful, to use the Indian turn of phrase.

The day before, we had gone to pick up some saris that Melissa had dropped off earlier in the week. Since we now wear the saris daily to teach, it was necessary for her to acquire a few more so that she would have enough variety in her teaching wardrobe to please the finicky staff room. The blouses were unready, but as usual we found ourselves in happy, friendly conversation with Mr. Tailor’s whole family who all work in some capacity in the family business.

As is common practice, they brought up the personal problem of our acne, examining Melissa’s and my faces, still unaccustomed to the heat of the climate.

“Take these pills daily!” The tailor’s father told us in Hindi, brandishing a bottle that he pulled off a top shelf above the sewing machine. “Ayurvedic! They will solve ALL health problems, and clear the skin!”

Jayeshbhai piped up. “You have met my Guru? Swami-ji?” He asked.

We shook our heads.

“You want to meet him?” He asked us in his sleepily excited manner.

“Uh well…” we looked at each other, then shrugged. “Sure, that would be cool.”

“Do you want to go now?” Jayeshbhai pressed, his eyes starting to shed a little of the characteristic sleepiness. “He can cure any body problem – you will ask him about any question of the body and he can cure it. Including,” he indicated our faces, “mosquito bites.”

“Uh…” Melissa and I, simultaneously suppressing a laugh at this common Kadod diagnosis of our acne, stalled. We hesitantly gave our regrets, saying that now was probably not the best time, but perhaps another day? Jayeshbhai suggested the next afternoon at five and was happily satisfied when we agreed.

All of which is a long way of saying that this is how we found ourselves doing double time to keep up with his leggy walk towards a temple devoted to Hanuman that we had previously never seen. The approach to the temple was a dirt path leading its way through an unassuming part of the village. It was a part we had not yet encountered though we were happy to hear the reassuringly familiar cries of “Madam!” and “Teacher!” as we passed the porches and open doors of the neighborhood’s houses.

Once inside the temple, we removed our shoes and were led by Jayesh towards a door in the building which made up the outer wall of the complex. The first sensation I felt upon entering was the twitching of my nostrils in response to the overpowering smell of unwashed hair. I took a moment to recover before my eyes adjusted to the dimmed light and noted an older Indian gentleman with a long beard and high topknot sitting in the lotus position upon a cushioned bed. It was exactly as I would have imagined a guru to be found.

Jayeshbhai went before us into the presence of the guru and put his hands together in the traditional greeting gesture and bowed low, touching his forehead to the guru’s feet. “Swami-ji,” he began, “I have brought the American teachers. They are ones who seek knowledge.”

It was a surprising phrase to hear issue from Jayesh’s mouth and immediately made me question my previous estimation of his English, all the meanwhile turning over the pleasing moniker that I had just been given. “One who seeks knowledge…” I liked the sound of it.

Swami-ji motioned that we should sit and after an embarrassed ‘namaste’ of our own (that did not involve bowing or foot touching), we took a cross legged seat on a tarp on the floor in front of his bed. He asked us the usual regimen of questions: where are you from, what are you doing here, etc. I was grateful that at this moment Melissa took on the larger responsibility for communicating with this man: I, usually impetuously gregarious, for some reason found myself completely tongue-tied. I was also still a little disturbed by the smell of the room, which I was trying desperately to hide until my sensitive nose became accustomed to it. I remembered reading somewhere that your nose can become accustomed to any smell after being continuously exposed to it for three minutes and I was counting the seconds and hoping that it was true.

He and Melissa began to discuss the proper practice of yoga and he offered to let borrow his English language book, the title of which I couldn’t help but notice was “Yoga Sadhana and Magneto Therapy.” Inquiries yielded elaboration: Magneto Therapy is apparently the utilization of the body’s magnetic properties to create harmony within the body and mind. Of course.

Swami-ji elaborated. “You see, the body itself is a magnet,” he said thoughtfully. “The top of the body, or the head, is the North Side. And the bottom of the body, or the feet, is the South side.” I took this new information in skeptically as he continued. “You see, I had a woman once who came to me and said she has spent thousands of dollars on headaches. Her son was in a hostel and during the week, he was fine; but when he came home on the weekends, he was getting too many terrible headaches. The first question that I ask that woman was: in which direction does the boy sleep at night? And she tells me that he sleeps with his head facing North. You see, this will not do, because, as you know about magnets when you have to of the same pole facing each other: they repel! And it creates all sorts of problems for those who sleep and rest in that direction. So I told that woman to get her son to sleep with his head facing South or East. And he did, and he was cured. It’s a very powerful thing, the magnet of the body.”

Swami-ji continued and told us a story about a man who had come to him with recovering from a heart attack. Swami-ji instructed the man to rub an industrial sized magnet on the area just above his heart three times a day for 10 minutes to remagnetize this part of the body and increase its power. The man was fully recovered in no time at all!

I pondered these success stories as a man from the temple handed us a refreshing drink of milk mixed with 32 herbs that are, apparently, potent for the body. As I sipped at it absently, I noted that I share many a Westerner’s general skepticism for alternative therapies, but I couldn’t help but feel that it didn’t seem right to doubt them in the presence of the man who had been practicing them on satisfied patients for many years. I thought about the headaches that I sometimes get at night: was I sleeping in the wrong direction?

My thoughts were interrupted by the finishing up of the conversation between the guru and Melissa on the subject of daily yoga practice. She was thanking him for the book and it seemed that we might leave. The same awkward greeting process was once again gone through as we said our goodbyes. My shy ‘namaste’ didn’t seem to do the encounter justice: I somehow felt that we should back out of the room, heads bowed with our hands clutched in a praying gesture at our chests as a sign of respect for a man who clearly leads a life of contemplation. Jayeshbhai once again touched his head to the guru’s feet, and then we were on our way.

On the way home, Jayeshbhai asked if we wanted to borrow his ‘magneto belt.’

“Uh, come again?” was my reply.

He described it as a belt that fits snugly around his head and is filled with industrial strength magnets. “I wear it for one or two hours a day while I work,” he said confidently.

We said we’d think about it.

After we parted ways with Jayeshbhai, Melissa and I discussed candidly our spiritual encounter. We both agreed that we wanted to read the book and give it a fair trial. I was relieved to see that she felt as conflicted as I did about the power of ‘Magneto Therapy’ and both of us laughed good naturedly at the idea of wearing a ‘magneto belt’ while we went about our daily routine. The idea, along with the whole idea of the magnetized body, seemed too absurd.

However, I also noticed that we both switched the directions we were sleeping in that night…just in case.

Best,
Cat

A "Properly" Indian Classroom

2008-10-14T01:44:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

As it is the middle of October, I find my mind turning to my compatriots in the US, most of whom are still working on the first sixty days of the school year, the part where you use your exceptional teaching ability to establish the order and expectations and tone of your classroom that will last you the year through and are the foundation for your ability to get things done.

To my own frustration, my development in that department has been a bit delayed, having been thrown in haphazardly with no preparation as to what to expect from the school or students and no orientation about what to teach, not to mention schedule and class changes that went well into our first month here. As a result, it was difficult in those early months to set the appropriate, productive, unchaotic tone. While my novelty got me through the first few weeks, the students, intelligent as they are, have realized my deficiencies (crippling inability to speak the Gujarati, inconvenient aversion to corporal punishment) and are exploiting these mercilessly to thwart my attempts to teach them a language that some of them don’t care to learn.

In theory, my co-teacher Tabussum and I agree that hitting students is wrong (not to mention illegal, although here you wouldn’t know it), and thus I recently proposed a workable class system so we could be a more united, organized front. One of my more proud accomplishments in the past few months, aside from now being able to wrap a sari in under ten minutes, is learning the names of almost all of my 240 students. If anyone of them is misbehaving, their name goes on the board. If they are caught again, they receive a check and must come and stand at the front of the classroom. If they are foolish enough to be fooling around WHILE standing at the front of the room, it’s straight out of the classroom and to the principal’s office. Tabussum agreed to give this system a try.

As is so often the case, the gap between theory and practice remains wide. The first day of our attempt to institute the system, Tabussum arrived at the door of my class bearing a standard 12 in/30 centimeter metal ruler. As she offered no explanation for its presence, I, unaware of its purpose, began to teach my lesson and the predictable amount of side conversations began as well. I turned sharply around and raised my eyebrows into my meanest, sternest teacher face at the offending student.

After a second warning, I was about to put the name of the boy on the board when I heard a distinctive “THWACK” and turned in time to see Tabussum pulling away the metal ruler from the back of the now pained 9^th standard boy. I paused for a moment, unsure if I should continue as she went on to yell at him in Gujarati for misbehaving or stop and watch in the same fascinated manner as the rest of the class. Merely watching made me feel party to this particular method of behavior management, so I uneasily tried to continue as she, hawk-eyed, made the rounds of the benches, raising the ruler in a threatening manner anytime a student dared to even think about talking.

While I normally find our co-teaching arrangement very satisfactory, I must say that at moments like these its deficiencies become apparent. Luckily, Tabussum speaks excellent English – the first co-teacher we had, as nice and welcoming as she was, barely spoke any English at all which made coordination of teaching philosophy (or anything at all) virtually impossible. When Tabussum arrived to replace her, I was happy to learn that we both shared our idealism about what an English class could and should look like and she was pleased to inform me that Melissa’s and my teaching methods matched much more closely what she had been taught in her B.Ed program than any of the teaching that she had observed so far at government schools and she was looking forward to learning a lot more.

Under increasing pressure from the principal, however, to maintain classes that look and sound like properly Indian ones, I fear she is beginning to crack and the ruler may merely be the first indication. She recently disclosed to me that the principal approached her about the noise level coming from our ninth standard all boys class and asked her to control the classroom “properly”. I asked her why the principal did not just approach me himself: the general consensus, it seems, is that since Melissa and I are not from here, we don’t know what is to be expected and therefore can’t really help in bringing it about.

In light of these dismal expectations for my abilities, I wonder to myself how much role I *can* have in solving behavioral issues. After so much experience sorting out these things in the US, I find that my traditional leverage points (my relationship with a student, my knowledge of his/her individual goals, dreams, not to mention my relationship with his/her family and my ability to talk these things through fluently with both parties) are mooted in the face of volume and cultural appropriateness and linguistic ability. The only one remaining is my ability to create engaging, relevant (oh, educational buzzwords!) lessons that create a motivation in the student to want to pay attention.

And so, for now, I guess that’s the route I’ll continue to take.

Best,
Cat

Supposedly Unflappable

2008-10-10T21:23:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Whenever I embark on accomplishing something here, I have come to regard unexpected, unanticipated or just plain unwelcome obstacles as merely a matter of course. The seemingly simple matter of photocopying a few pages requires the principal’s signature and the (uncharacteristic) functioning of the photocopier; finding a classroom for before school Spoken English means apparently working around the early morning cleaning schedule of the school peons; getting our modem fixed means waiting days or even (at this point) weeks.

To all of this I am accustomed and my helplessness in the face of these things does wonders for relaxing my attitude about them. I have shelved my American sense of absolute efficiency in favor of an attitude which believes that everything will happen the way it will happen in its own time and I, buffeted in the waves, will merely paddle with the current. In fact, in this respect I believed myself to be unflappable.

Perhaps by karma itself, I find that my hubris has been called out: I must admit that the circumstances I am about to relate have genuinely surprised even me.

Some context: Upcoming is the Diwali vacation, a three week holiday that happens in the middle of the second trimester. It provides a nice ellipsis after the constant pressure of exams and the almost holiday-less teaching schedule of June, July and August. It is akin to the Winter Break of American schools, only it is longer, lasting three weeks instead of one and a half.

Melissa and I, anticipating that this break would be one of our few opportunities to really travel and see the country (as well as fulfill our visa-created obligation to exit the country after 180 days and re-enter again), began planning our break back in the beginning of September. Train schedules were pored over, American friends were coordinated with, hotels were contacted, tickets were bought and the details were finalized. With only ten days to go until our break, our excitement has been building as the final itinerary pieces have fallen into place.

All of this came to a halt the other day when we were summarily informed that the Diwali holiday, scheduled to begin on October 18^th, has been moved to “the 25^th or the 27^th…”

“Which is it?” We asked. The bearer of the news was unsure.

Melissa and I pondered this quietly for a moment. I, usually hesitant to swear, couldn’t help but feel that the phrase, “WTF?” was appropriate and used it quite freely on this occasion talking in the fast, overly exaggerated American accent that I use when I want to make sure that no one around us will understand what I am saying.

“But, how did this happen?” We asked Tabussum, our co-teacher.

“They wanted to make the schedule for the schools the same,” she replied hesitantly, sensing that we were feeling slightly distressed. “So the university schedule and the schools would have the same holiday and then all the students are being on holiday at the same time…”

“Who’s brilliant idea was this?” I asked with a resigned, only semi-sarcastic smile.

“The government of Gujarat,” she explained.

Ah yes, I thought and for a moment I had a brief image in my head of the crowded, paper filled desk of the Gujarat Education Minister – stamps and paper weights to keep documents from flying away under the powerful Indian variety fans (quite unlike our wimpy American window fans). Buried under all of this, hidden away perhaps under the shelved bill to allow students to bring their textbooks into their exams, is the resolution to change the vacations. Cleaning out some papers, he finds it and, after a pause, realizes he should probably take action soon as the holiday is set to begin in a few days. He hands his decision to a peon who is sent to disperse it to all the government school principals.

Perhaps that’s how it really happened; perhaps I’ll never know.

“But, what should we do?” I hear Melissa asking, rousing me from my day-time reverie. She had already arranged her tickets back to the US to see her family during this time.

Sejalben, also in the immediate vicinity in the staffroom, turned in her chair. “You will need to ask the principal,” she told us.

“And I can take your classes,” Tabussum offered helpfully. “He will probably say yes.”

Luckily for us, further obstacle was prevented due to the principal’s subsequent agreement that yes, we could leave a week early. In light of some of the class behavior I’ve been experiencing since classes resumed, I can’t help but feel a little relieved by this. Perhaps a month away from the school will give me some time to think up creative ways to control a room of 65 boys that don’t actually involve the very refined Government school method of beating them into submission…literally.

But, on a final note, seriously: who changes a vacation for an entire state a week beforehand? The whole situation is just so (and I never use this expression frivolously)… Indian.

Best,
Cat

P.S. Here is my itinerary for the (now) month long vacation.

October 18-21: Amritsar

October 22 – 23: Delhi

October 24 – 25: Train ride from Delhi to Bangalore

October 26 – Nov 1: Bangalore

Nov 2 – Nov 14: Nepal

Nov 15: Back to Kadod

The Zoo Revisited

2008-10-09T22:13:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Despite the departure of the monsoon rains, our house and the surrounding environs are beginning to resemble a zoo once more. In the absence of the constant, beating rain, the dry ground insects seem to have multiplied and insistently find their way into our house, our furniture, our food and our beds via cracks in the windows, screens, floors, and doors. Even as I write this, I can occasionally feel the tickle of their tiny legs on my neck or on the back of my leg and I frantically try and swat them away before they sink their malicious pincers into my tender skin.

The reduced water level of the Tapi river has also brought new problems. There was a knock on the door yesterday and when I answered, one of the 7^th standard hostel boys said to me calmly, “Snack, teacher. Snack.” I looked around outside as he retreated down the steps, wondering what the snack could possibly be. Perhaps ladoo, an Indian sweet, for the festival?

Then, I spotted it. The reason for the knock.

“You mean SNAKE!” I yelled correctively after him in horror as I watched the long, slithering form writhing in the hand of the snake catcher fearlessly heading for his bike. A crowd of the hostel boys had gathered and they cackled at my obvious discomfort. I hid behind a pillar as the “snack” went by.

Later that evening, I was sitting on the porch reading when I noticed the principal standing in the middle of another group of boys which had formed on the far side of the yard. He motioned from afar for me to come over. I obliged, leaving the relative security of my porch and heading across the school yard. As I got closer, he waved his hands to indicate that I should give the growing crowd a wide berth and join him up on the raised ledge on the edge of the yard. He was peering curiously down into one of the brick basins which encases the palm trees which line the outer boundaries of the school courtyard.

As I hoisted myself up next to him, he said simply, “Come, look there!” and pointed into the basin itself.

As I looked down, I gasped. It was just as I had seen in the movies: a small snack, hissing, gathered in a coil, its hooded head raised straight up in the air.

“A toxic snake,” the principal stated seriously. “It is small, but it is very, very dangerous.”

I took a step back. “It’s a cobra?” I asked, timidly, unable to take my eyes away from the spectacle.

“Yes,” he replied, “it’s a baby.”

“And if it bites?” I asked.

“You must go to the hospital,” he replied. “But you cannot delay, even for 10 minutes. If you delay half an hour, it will be too late, even from a small bite.” I nodded, taking in this tidbit of information.

Another snake handler was summoned and was able to lift the snake out of the basin using a long stick like instrument with a set of moveable pincers on the end that held the snake far away from the body. As he lifted it out, there was a collective gasp from the group of gathered boys and everyone gave an instinctive, synchronized step back. The snake handler, gingerly taking the snake by it’s head, forced it to open it’s mouth and take the end of its tail between its fangs, so that it formed a loop. Like this, he carried it out.

After its departure, as we walked back to the house, I asked the principal if the snake would be killed.

“No,” he said, thoughtfully. “They will take it to the jungle and set it free.” I mad a face. “Far from here,” he added quickly with a smile. Then he continued, slowly and purposefully, “You see, this is why I tell you to close your doors tightly. If you are not careful, it can slither inside and hide in your home. You must be careful.”

It was only today, however, that I learned this lesson in earnest.

This afternoon, Melissa and I were sitting in the main room of our house, lazily using the last day of the Navratri festival to spoil ourselves by watching episode after episode of the TV on DVD that I brought with me to keep us amused. School had been cancelled unbeknownst to us and so with our planning completed it seemed like the time for such an indulgence. Our dinner of parathas and daal had been put on the table in the usual blue lidded containers (all of our food comes from the hostel), but since it was a little early, we had decided to wait and eat it later.

Leaning forward to advance the DVD to the next episode of the show, I noticed with some puzzlement a dark, hairy hand undoing the lid of our dinner containers and reaching in for a parantha. Assuming that someone (perhaps the watchman) had come in the backdoor of the kitchen but unable to see the owner of the hand from my current position, I rose and walked a few steps towards the kitchen to greet them. As I got closer, I couldn’t help but scream.

Sitting on the table, a paratha in each hairy hand, was a huge, dark faced, yellow haired monkey, staring at me with unblinking eyes!

Instinct took over as I screamed “MONKEY!” to alert Melissa as I took to my heels and ran out the front door of the house.

“Oh God!” Melissa shouted and followed me out. I didn’t stop running until I was all the way out in the courtyard. The real guard, alerted by our screams, came rushing over and asked us in Hindi what was wrong. Even the hostel boys who had been placidly been playing volleyball stopped their game to stare at us.

“A monkey…” I managed to say in Hindi, pointing at the house.

“A monkey is inside?” He asked me quizzically.

I nodded frantically. “Please look?” I said pleadingly. He grabbed his long stick and set off for the house. As he got to the gate, he stopped and pointed at the roof of the principal’s house. There was the criminal himself, parathas still in hand, sitting and peacefully nibbling on the edge of one of them while his long, ugly tail hung down over the edge of the roof. I scowled at him. He scowled back.

The guard merely laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“You should –“ He began.

“Keep our doors closed,” I said, still scowling. “Yes… we should.”

Best,
Cat

The Garba Lesson

2008-10-06T19:02:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

My head has always known that I am a great dancer.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that my body disagrees. It fumbles and trips and awkwardly moves at untoward times in untoward directions. My body and mind have perpetually fought over this issue: through childhood ballet classes, middle school dances, high school proms, college frat parties and last of all, an ill-fated hip hop class at my fancy Boston gym.

My head sees how beautiful a dancer I could be. My body just has no vision.

Opportunities for dancing here in quiet Kadod (outside of the occasional bizarre yoga class) are few, but when they do come, they are served up as spectacularly as all special events here. The most recent is Navratri, the nine day festival devoted to Mataji that is currently playing havoc on my students’ ability to pay attention in class. The nightly dancing begins at 10 o’clock and routinely goes until one, two or even three o’clock in the morning. My students show up for class cheerful but tired and their sharpness is dulled by the sand in their eyes.

These past few days, there have been many inquiries into whether Ms. Ivins and I will make an appearance at one of these nightly dance extravaganzas.

“Teacher, you play garba?” Hitesh inevitably asked me the other afternoon as I walked in the corridor. For a kid who shows up to my class with no notebook, no pen and no textbook, he speaks a surprising amount of English.

“Uh, maybe?” was my truthful reply.

My mind says yes, but my body, it turns out, says a resounding no. Melissa and I decided that we wanted to venture out to one of these nightly gatherings; Garba is, after all, the traditional dance of Gujarat. Sejalben, the principal’s daughter in law, agreed to give us a short lesson.

“I’ll just teach you the basics and you’ll be ready to go!” She exclaimed happily as her husband Yashpalbhai set up his laptop with appropriate music.

She began to shuffle around the floor of our house, showing us the basic step.

“Left, Left, Right, Right, Turn, Turn, Back, Back!” She repeated happily over and over. I watched dubiously before joining in. It was a simple four steps; it couldn’t be that hard.

One half hour later, Sejalben had me firmly by the shoulders. “You turn THIS way!” She said laughing with frustration. My mind said, “Of course!” My body said “Why is she touching me?”

She let go and I tried it again. My mind zigged with the music, but my body zagged once again.

“This is hopeless,” I said with an apologetic laugh.

“Well…you almost had it,” she said with a smile that showed forgiveness quickly losing patience.

It was with that vote of confidence that I was sent off to play garba for real the next night. It was strange, leaving the school gate in the heart of the night in that way. We walked as far as the temple before we came upon a large gathering of people in the temple courtyard, clustered around a chair upon which had been set a small tray with fire and other offerings for Mataji.

“Oh miss!” Chetan, the daughter of one of the other teacher’s who lives near the school, yelled out to us. We stopped and sheepishly went over, hanging back from the crowd, who were forming a circle. The music began to play.

“Miss, you must play!” She said, as the dance took off. I took note: all the men on one side, all the women on the other. It moved round and round in a neat circle with a variation on that simple four step that Sejalben had showed us the night before. The players came in all shapes and sizes: old women clapped and stepped simply while young teenage girls twirled their hands in the air in time to the four step and tiny small girls in sparkling dresses followed and jumped and clapped. Everyone was synchronized, stepping in time; it was like the Electric Slide minus the open bar (and thus, minus the sloppiness).

“Come, come!” Chetan beckoned.

“I, uh…” I started.

“NO!” My body said, gluing my body to the stone bench where I was perched.

“GO!” Yelled my mind.

I jumped up, shedding my sandals in the process and joining the crowd. Jumping in was like jumping rope: you had to wait for just the right opening, but when it came, I was in and all of a sudden, my body cooperated and I was doing it! I was dancing!

After a few rounds, Chetan looked down at my feet and then up at me while she twirled her arms skillfully in the air.

“Ma’am, you dance well,” She said in Hindi. “You dance like this in the USA?”

I hadn’t realized the amount of concentration that doing that simple four step and clap had been taking until she said this. My mind tried to process the Hindi while maintaining the four step… it was like trying to pat my head, rub my stomach and jump up and down and my feet forgot what they were doing while I tried to formulate a reply. Finally I said, in babbling Hindi while stumbling to keep moving with the circle:

“Chetan, I…I can’t talk and dance!”

And the dance just kept evolving. Just as I’d feel confident that I’d finally gotten it, the girls would say, “Now do this, Miss!” (in Hindi, no less!) and try and get me to swing my arms in a playful pattern the way they were doing or raise my knees or twirl or sing. I’d try for a little until inevitably I’d lose my concentration and fall out of step and sometimes out of the circle altogether. When this happens, they would pull me back in, like a kid who falls off his bike, verbally dust me off and get me going again.

By the end, my body was saying disagreeably to my mind: “Okay, you can have this one. But no more!” My mind was willing to let it rest with that. For now.

Maybe these nine nights will bring about a truce? I can only hope…

Best,
Cat

Lending Library

2008-10-02T09:15:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

It has been so long since I taught a class that I worry that I have forgotten how. My fingers are itching to hold chalk again, my mind hungers for the split-second decisions you must make at every moment, the awareness of what every child is doing all the time.

Instead, I spend my days designing curriculum, an occupation I find rewarding but easier to do in tandem with teaching. During the last two weeks, the students have been taking their first set of exams, which means no classes (even our Spoken English class has been cancelled so students can prepare). The school is on a rough trimester system here: the students take a formal set of school administered exams at the end of September, January, and then finally their annual exam in March/April. The other teachers must help administer the exams by being proctors. I am excused from this responsibility because of the small matter of not being able to speak Gujarati.

We have not, however, lost all contact with the students during this time. Five or six times a day, I will hear students calling to me from beyond the overgrown barbed wire that separates our house from the school. They wait patiently until I arrive at the open door and when I come out onto the porch, they say simply, “Book?”

I cannot take credit for this ever-growing arrangement: the genesis of the book-lending program that operates out of our guesthouse has its roots in a humble plastic bag. Early in the summer, one of the interns mentioned to one of the boys in her Spoken English Class that we had some English storybooks available in the guesthouse if he wanted to borrow them. Naturally, he came by our house during the school courtyard’s most crowded part of the day and when the other students saw that the American teachers were on the porch, they pushed in to see what was going on. The intern had to resort to smuggling the goods to the boy in a plastic bag or risk being overrun at that particular moment with requests for storybooks.

Over the summer, a few other students came to know of the arrangement. I have christened it such as it has never, even now, enjoyed any formal publicity. They heard from Amin that he had borrowed some books and so they also surreptitiously whispered what they wanted and received their deliveries in similar plastic bags. This book trade continued on a small scale up until the time that the interns left Kadod.

On returning from our Independence Day vacation, perhaps infected with the revolutionary feeling of the holiday itself, Melissa and I decided that we wanted shed the shackles of the furtive plastic bags and go public with the lending library. We began to give the books openly, even bring the entirety of the library (quite extensive at this point) out to the porch so the students could peruse the contents in a leisurely, unhurried way. Picking one book up carefully in their hands, a ninth standard boy would lightly turn the pages and take in the colorful schematic of the illustrations, perhaps putting this down, perhaps examining another, until he had finally made his choice.

The system is simple: we record the name of the book and the name of the student in the notebook that we keep for this purpose and simply check it off when the book has been returned to us. The students are surprisingly punctual: they return the books without fail within two or three days of borrowing them and the book is nearly always in perfect condition.

Slowly, unbeknownst to us clueless American teachers, word of the program has spread from mouth to mouth. It started with siblings of the ninth standard boys: my student Asad has five sisters, one of whom is also my student in 11^th standard, and she came with her friends to borrow some of our more complicated chapter books.

“Do you have any books about Hannah Montana?” She asked me, hopefully. I could only offer a short book-from-movie version of High School Musical: 2.

Soon afterwards, his younger sister showed up with her friends. She was in the seventh standard and her friends were delighted with the beautiful pictures. When the sixth standard girls saw the seventh standard girls with picture books, they soon came calling to me outside the door and soon this spread to even younger ages: fourth, third, and finally even little Anush from the first standard. I was hesitant to give him the book, but it was clear his siblings were going to carry it for him, so I carefully put his name in the record book and asked that it be back in two or three days.

I have no doubt that the popularity of this organically grown program has less to do with our ingenuity and more to do with the utter lack of English language alternatives here in Kadod. I recently discovered the school library, tucked away behind a few classrooms on the far side of the school. A dusty affair, the books are kept in locked glass cabinets and permission to browse can only be taken from the librarian himself, who on an impossibly confusing key ring holds the keys to the various cabinet padlocks.

“I’d like to see in this cabinet, if it’s all right,” I asked him on my first trip. I had spotted a few shelves of English books amongst the endless titles of Gujarati and allowed myself the small hope that perhaps I would not have to import all of my future reading material after all.

He smiled and came over, fumbling with the key ring and looking at the fifty or so keys it contained in a befuddled manner.

“I think I have it here,” he said, more to himself than to me, “wait a minute…”

I did.

He eyed the padlock, then the endless keys on the ring, and announced, “It’s broken. That cabinet can’t be opened.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “It can’t be opened at all?” I looked longingly at the books in English collecting dust behind the glass.

“The key isn’t here,” he said sadly. “And the padlock is broken. What can I do?”

I nodded and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t feel too badly. What could I have possibly expected?

And thus the alternative underground trade in storybooks continues to flourish out of our house.

Best,
Cat

The United Services Club

2008-09-29T08:19:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I won’t say too much about my trip to Mumbai: it was a good time, a chance to eat pizza, drink diet coke and sit in cafes, allaying my homesickness among other things. One day I decadently sat in a Barista (Indian Starbucks) almost the whole day reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, enjoying my ability to be in public space without having to constantly entertain and acknowledge, sinking into delicious, bourgeois anonymity. Suffice it to say I found Mumbai lovely, though after a weekend of playing the part of the hardy white backpacker, I was hungering to get back to the familiarity of Kadod.

One incident, however, does deserve special mention. While in Mumbai, I had the pleasure of seeing my friend Anamika whom I studied with at Delhi University. Despite not having seen each other since I left India and the woes of cross continentally keeping in touch, we easily fell into our old friendship, which was a relief to me. She told us she wanted to do something special for our last night in Bombay, and it was for this reason that on Saturday night we found ourselves standing outside the gates of the United Services Club.

The United Services Club is an exclusive club only for members of the Indian armed forces at the southern most tip of Colaba, the neighborhood we were staying in while we were in Mumbai. Its facilities include an 18 hole golf course, two club areas and a lovely patio where Anamika was hoping we could enjoy the setting sun while sipping cocktails. “It’s my cousin,” she explained, “who has the membership. He was in the armed forces. We’ll be his guests.”

I suppose I should have known that there would be some trouble as her cousin, pulling up with his car and his driver outside the gates of the establishment, abruptly said, “Get in the car!” on seeing us. We obeyed and as we got in the car, the guard, who had been eyeing us suspiciously the entirety of our time waiting at the gate, turned on his flashlight and pointed it deliberately into our eyes through the car window.

“Who are they?” He asked the cousin gruffly, indicating us with a shake of his high beam flashlight.

“My guests, friends,” the cousin said, telling his driver to get going. The driver pulled off, leaving the guard unsatisfied with this explanation, but what could he do?

Anamika, I think as shaken as we were, uneasily began the introductions.

“Cousin, this is Catharine,” she began, “we studied together at DU…”

“Where are you here from?” He asked me pointedly.

“Well, I’m living in Gujarat,” I said, “but we’re from the US.”

“Ah, so, you can speak Gujarati then,” he said.

“Not exactly—“ I started.

“Well, foreigners aren’t allowed in this club, so you’ll just have tell everyone you are Gujarati, okay?” He said.

I looked at Anamika. Her face told me that she had obviously not known this obscure club rule.

“Where are you living there?” He asked us in the same pointed manner.

“In a village sort of near Surat,” I explained. “We’re teachers.”

“I see. Well –“ he paused, “Don’t tell anyone that either. Say you teach in a private school in Surat or something.”

I nodded, confused. What could I talk about at this place?

After a drive through the darkened golf course, we arrived at the grounds of the clubhouse. The driver parked the car and we nervously got out of the back and followed the cousin towards the lodge. The breeze coming off the ocean swept over me and I could see the lights from distant ships off the coast. It had become fully dark by this time and the stars were coming out. The lights of the cabana style clubhouse shone in a constant, welcoming way. It was, just as Anamika had described it, obviously a lovely place to have a cocktail. It remained to be seen whether we actually would or not.

As we walked past the two lazy looking uniformed guards at the gate of the clubhouse, they started to say something to the cousin in Hindi.

“Don’t bother them,” he replied, also in Hindi, “they’re Gujarati. They’re my guests.”

The guards made a blatant scoffing sound, followed by a disbelieving chortle.

“Ask them!” The cousin said defensively in Hindi. “They speak Gujarati! Ask them!” Before they could, however, we had moved on in towards the clubhouse.

The atmosphere inside was like something out of an old movie. We approached a table where Anamika’s aunt and a friendly couple were sitting. “Come, sit!” Anamika’s aunt cried as we approached.

“Have something, na?” The aunt said to us. We’d barely sat down. “What will you have?”

“I think water will—“ I started.

“Nonsense!” She replied. “Have a rum and coke.”

“I’m really fine—“

“Have a rum and coke! It’s really the best drink. You should have one. Also, our time here is limited, so it’s best not to fool around with water,” she said insistently.

“I guess I’ll have a rum and coke,” I reluctantly agreed.

“Oh good, my nephew will get the drinks,” she said, nudging him. “He’s the member here.” He gave us a begrudging smile and went off to get the drinks.

“Can we walk around and I’ll show them the place?” Anamika asked her aunt.

“Er, I think not,” her aunt said, looking fretfully around. “Best that they just stay here.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cousin approached by a formal looking man in a suit, who I had to assume was the manager. I saw them exchanging words, every once in awhile glancing meaningfully in our direction. I tried fruitlessly to make some awkward conversation, but the tension in the air was palpable. A few moments later, he was back at the table.

“Anamika, I have to speak to you,” he said frostily. He took her aside and they exchanged some words while Melissa and I exchanged an awkward glance. Causing this level of trouble had not been our intention.

Anamika approached the table and sat back down. “I, uh, think we’re going to have to leave,” she said awkwardly. I could see plainly that she felt terrible and embarrassed. I for one could not have found the situation funnier.

It turns out, I discovered from Anamika’s aunt as we got up to leave, that because the club is associated with defense forces, it is Indians only, no exceptions. “If we let in one nationality, that would be mean we’d have to let in every nationality,” she explained, “including Pakistanis.”

“I completely understand,” I told her as we were escorted out by one of the staff.

After we passed the gates, I finally let out the laugh I’d been holding in all the time. “I mean, after all,” I told Anamika, who was looking really dejected by this time, “What could be funnier, more ironic and more just than two white people getting kicked out of an exclusive club in India?”

Best,
Cat

You Are Looking So...

2008-09-23T10:28:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

And then, of course, there are the days when it is not me making the mistakes.

“Do you want to weigh yourself?” The principal asked me recently.

The question was put to me as I sat in the living room of his family’s house, watching a commercial for Chik Chik hair shampoo in the interval of the Hindi TV serial which Melissa and I have become absolutely addicted to called “Balika Vadhu”.

I couldn’t have heard that right. “Sorry, what did you say?” I asked him politely, turning away from the TV as the pale-skinned actress’ hair bounced in silky, shiny playfulness, enticing young women everywhere to buy Chik Chik.

“I was asking, do you want to weigh yourself?” He repeated, his kind smile lighting up his whole face as it usually does.

“Weigh myself,” I repeated, trying to maintain a dead pan.

“Yes, we have just gotten a scale.”

“And you are looking so thin now,” Sejalben piped in, looking up from the test papers she was grading.

“Well, uh, thank you,” I said, embarrassed. “But I think I’ll be all right. Also, won’t it be in kilograms?”

“Yes, but that is no problem,” the principal said with a wave of his hand. “Yashpalbhai (Sejal’s husband) will convert it to pounds for you.”

I looked over at Yashpalbhai, who was sitting on the couch, and he nodded agreeably.

“You can do it now, if you’d like,” the principal continued. “We have the scale right here.” He indicated a corner of the room.

“Uh…” What to say? “I think I’m all right. I mean, uh” Stall, stall! “The commercial break is almost over…”

“No, you are fine, go ahead,” he urged.

“Well, I… what if I don’t want you to know the number?” I said slyly, smiling.

Everyone laughed.

“As you wish,” he replied with the same kind smile.

Phew.

However, lest my head get too big, Manishbhai, the fruit-seller in the village who is studying English so he can go with his 3 year old son to Australia, stopped us in the bazaar yesterday (not an unusual occurrence, he pounces on us every time he sees us).

“Madam,” he said, waving us over to his and his mother’s fruit stall with a smile, “I am feeling so happy to see you today.”

I returned the smile, warily. “Thank you. How are you?”

“Madam, today I am feeling so happy because I am meeting you,” he said exuberantly.

“Uh, that is great,” I said, shooting Melissa a look. We were just turning to go when he started to stutter.

“I think, Madam,” he began, “that when you are coming here… when you are coming here, you were looking… (he struggles for a word) so ….thin. And now you are looking so (He moves his hands apart in a growing gesture, still struggling) ….fat. You are looking really beautiful madam.”

There was a long pause where he looked pleased with himself for getting the whole sentence out.

“I… uh, I honestly don’t know what to say to that,” I said truthfully. Then, Uh, “I’d better be going.”

“Have a nice day, Madam!” He called after us cheerfully.

I’m still not sure I have the hang of Indian compliments.

Best,
Cat

P.S. I'll be in Mumbai from tomorrow morning till Sunday, September 28th, so check back then!

Observations on Homesickness

2008-09-22T18:56:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The pace of life here in all its agreeable slowness gives much time for personal reflection, and as I sat thoughtfully peeling a tamarind in the kitchen today, looking out through the open doors at the back of the house into the garden full of blooming, red flowers, I felt a pang of sad dislocation.

On most days, the uprooting of myself from the US and my subsequent replanting here feels painless, and indeed even wonderful as I soak in the familiar newness of it all. But, I would not be human if there were not those few days, like today, where I experience the growing pains of putting down new roots in foreign soil, real pangs of sadness.

Homesickness, in all its clichéd predictability, is all too real and it is a side of my experience that I am reluctant to show because, while misery may love company, company does not love misery. And though, honestly, I experience no misery here, I do sometimes feel the longing to be at home.

It is a longing that functions on many levels: First, there is always the question of the material things that one does without: the foods one especially misses (Sweet corn! Soy milk! Dark chocolate! Peaches!), comfy mattresses and pillows, jam that doesn’t taste like chemicals and an internet connection that moves faster than paint dries. While these things form the crust of my homesickness, they are easily cracked and their absence only symptomatic of a deeper feeling.

Underneath, there is that soft, tender question of personal habits: where one finds peace, be it in the confines of a bustling coffee shop or on a blanket in a public park, taking exercise through a jog down a public sidewalk or a long bike ride on a city street. There is knowing what constitutes ‘good value’ and ‘good quality’, and knowing instinctively where to find these things. There is a latent preference for browsing in a stationary shop in delightful, unhassled anonymity.

But even underneath this, there is something more. Merely the symptoms, these daily changes in custom which I have mentioned are still only superficial and on most days easily accommodated. Harder to swallow is the rocky, well packed foundation upon which all of this rests and which on such days my newly formed roots stretch boldly to touch: that elusive feeling of difference, of scrutiny, of self-consciousness.

The heart of the matter, it is characterized by a constant decision making: today will I go with the tide, or will I fight it? On almost every occasion, I choose the former; however, it is always a choice. There is always the possibility of falling into my own internal grooves, my own culturally embedded way of acting, and because of this is it impossible to remain neutral, to live life in an uncomplicated, unintentional kind of way.

I often feel like a child, having to be explicitly taught social cues, learning only through misstep subtle cultural signals and messages. Most days, I don’t mind: learning these things through mistakes is often a good source of stories and laughs and there has certainly been no shortage since I came to Kadod. But there is also the reality of how others perceive these missteps, and occasionally it is not always funny.

A small, but meaningful example: a week or so ago I was sitting in the computer lab, reading as I sometimes do, and the principal came in. I didn’t notice right away, but as he did, the staff stood up, despite their being no students in the room. He began to talk to one of the teachers about some small issue that he had, and as he did he glanced my direction. When I realized what I had done, I stood up, uncomfortably, knowing that I was late on the draw. He left, and I sat back down to read, but found I could not focus on my book. After a moment I asked the one of the other teachers in halting Hindi, “When sir comes in the room, we are supposed to stand?”

She looked at me as if it was the most obvious thing in the world: “Of course, we must show him respect,” she replied.

I nodded. What must he think? I have so much respect for him and his family, and yet this feeling doesn’t translate without these small culturally appropriate indications. While I generally have no problem ‘acting American’ as that is what I am, I like to do so with cognizance of the implications of how I act, why I do what I do and how it is different.

Obviously, no damage was done in this case, but it is a small indication of how I must always be self-aware, always ready to be instructed culturally and never truly, comfortably, unintentionally at ease with those that I know.

And that knowledge can sometimes, on those select days, be a very little bit lonely.

Best,
Cat

Giddy Up

2008-09-22T01:22:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Today, I literally rode off into the sunset.

Of course, before doing this, I had to ride through all of Kadod, passing the public bus stand, the bustling vegetable bazaar and most of the back roads where my students live and were blithely playing outside. I made quite a spectacle, being led along at a snail’s pace on a beautiful looking white and brown horse bedecked with tassels and colorful saddle while I held onto its mane for dear life, screaming slightly every time it made an untoward move.

Did I mention this was my first time ever riding a horse?

All the while, I was listening to the agreeable man who had invited me on this expedition talk about his devotion to Islam and the number of people that he has converted to said religion back in London, where he lives permanently and owns a news shop. Unable to get off the horse, or to get him to stop leading it forward or to do anything at all except try and keep my balance atop its back, I merely listened politely and responded with an interested, “Really? That many people??” every so often.

To explain fully, I must rewind to about a week ago when some 7^th standard girls came by the guesthouse in their uniforms to deliver, most unexpectedly, some delicious English chocolates to the American teachers. When we asked them why they were giving them to us (they had never spoken to us previously), they explained that their uncle had just come from London and he wanted to meet us and could they please come back to see us at 6 o’clock that evening?

I agreed and at six o’clock found myself sitting on my front porch steps, surrounded by three twelve year old girls.

“Teacher,” they asked me in Hindi, “Do you wear clothes like these,” they indicated my salwar kameez, “in the US?”

“No,” I replied honestly, “I don’t.” I explained that I usually wear pants and shirts.

“And capris? And skirts?” They asked me curiously. I nodded. They switched backed to Gujarati and chattered away at a pace that I couldn’t follow.

Suddenly, they turned back to me, “And you wear lipstick and make up?” They asked me.

“Sometimes,” I said truthfully. “Not all the time.”

“And you dance?” They asked me.

“Badly,” I admitted.

“Teacher, will you dance now?” They asked eagerly.

“You first!” I smiled.

They looked at me seriously. “We can’t dance right now,” they explained, “because of Ramzan.”

I reined in my smile. “I see,” I said.

They switched topics. “Teacher, can you come to visit our house on Sunday? Our uncle wants to meet you!” House visits being a particular pleasure of ours on the weekend, we agreed and settled on a time.

Sunday rolled in lazily with an uncharacteristic heat after a spell of unrelenting rain which flooded our house and curled the pages of all our carefully kept books. We were working idly on the porch when the girls arrived to escort us to their house.

The mysterious uncle from London turned out to be a thin looking Indian man of medium height and graying hair with an open, accented way of speaking English that made me feel immediately at ease. He explained that he was from Kadod originally and came here every Ramzan to give money to the poor and spend the holiday with his family. His wife, whom he called up so that we could hear her delightfully English accent, was still in London with his three sons, the youngest of which we learned is “unmarried and looking.”

“So,” he said, “if you are interested,” he brandished a picture at us, “you just say the word.” We laughed politely, unsure if he was kidding.

After the passing of the awkward silences that characterize these visits, he asked us if we’d like to see the stables. As this is a particularly heavily populated neighborhood of Kadod, I agreed, unsure of where exactly the stables would be located. It turned out that they were the first floor of the house itself, the living quarters being located only on the second floor. We made our way inside, our eyes adjusting to the dark interior.

Following a trail of stray hay and horse manure, we were led to the back of this garage like structure where we found a beautiful brown and white Arabic horse, peacefully grazing on some feed and looking content. As we vocally admired its shiny coat and impressive build, the Uncle told us in that Indian way that cannot be refused, “You must ride him!”

At first, my knee-jerk reaction was to refuse, as I am accustomed to doing to all unorthodox invitations here.

“But I will walk the horse right around the block, no problem,” he insisted.

My click-whirr refusal jammed and suddenly I thought: why not? He clearly knows what he’s doing and this horse looks friendly enough…

“Sure, okay…” I found myself saying, even as Melissa was giving a polite “No thank you.” She heard my words jar with hers and she looked at me with surprise. I shrugged, just as surprised at myself.

“Great!” He had the men working in the stable saddle up the horse and lead it outside. Getting it over to a small wall which I could stand on top of to hook my foot into the stirrup and then hoist my leg over was a small and lengthy production, by the end of which had gathered a fair-sized crowd of people standing on their porches, idly watching my progress.

Once on, I grasped at the reigns for balance, realizing that I was, in fact, much higher off the ground than I had anticipated previously. The Uncle put the reins firmly in my hands and then took the other end up near the horses mouth in his. As the horse began to move, I screamed slightly and hunched over, grabbing at the saddle.

“Don’t be afraid!” He chastised. “Relax. Sit up straight. Keep your balance.”

He began to lead the horse around the square, and slowly I began to relax a little, but not enough to let go of the saddle.

He began to lead it up the road, away from the house and the enclosed square.

“Uh…” I began to say, realizing we were heading towards the main market area.

“Not to worry!” He replied. “Just relax!”

I suddenly realized that, unable to get down or steer the horse myself, I was completely at his mercy.

We began to make our way out into the main bazaar, and I could see people sitting on their porches, spotting me, and yelling to the rest of the house to come out and gawk. Word travels fast and by the time I reached the main road, there were large clumps of people in front of every house, eyeing me as I went by, some openly laughing, some just staring. I looked down at them, looking petrified as the horse moved ever forward, helplessly watching as the Uncle led me out towards the bus stand where the busy rush hour buses were packed full of onlookers.

The Uncle seemed to have no qualms about taking up the whole of the street by leading my down the middle, despite the fact that we were now on a main thoroughfare and honking, angry traffic was now accumulating behind us. I looked back at some of the honking cars and tried to convey my apologies through my sympathetic look, to show that really I was as unable as they were to do anything about the situation. Forgiveness was not forthcoming in their looks, voices or gestures, which quickly moved from peeved to full out annoyance.

All the while, the Uncle was making small talk about light, breezy topics such as his faith in Islam, the power of Islam to change people and many, many English that he has successfully converted to Islam, most coincidentally through marriage into Muslim families. As a captive audience, I kept up a steady stream of short replies all while trying to keep my balance and hide my terror from the now many onlookers and band of small children following us and shouting “Teacher!” and “Horse!”

By the end, I had gotten the hang of using the reins and was able to steer the horse on my own, though this fact did little to allay my general terror. When we finally arrived back his house, I dismounted with relief and thanked him profusely for going to all the trouble.

“What? No trouble!” He said adamantly. “Now you must come back four or five times between now and when I leave so that you will learn properly. You will have it in no time at all!”

I nodded in as non-committal a manner as I could muster and tried not to think too hard about the questions I’d be getting from the students in school on Monday.

Best,
Cat

Breaking the Fast

2008-09-18T10:33:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The other day, my cell phone rang. This is not unusual, as its electronic tones can be heard many times a day, usually with some kind of call based marketing which is very popular here (since incoming calls are free).

However, this call was not one of the many singing advertisements which plague my ear drums on a daily basis; it was Daybal. She did not identify herself, but I knew from the accent and breadth of English vocabulary that it must be her. She sounded frantic.

“Can you tell me what this message means?” She asked me. “I got this text message and I don’t know what it means.”

“Sure, go ahead and read it to me,” I said.

“Reply via same, centre enabled thelesimia…spleen…” She read, spelling out each word carefully and saying “dot” for each period. “What does enabled mean?” she asked me.

“Uh, it means made to be able to do…but my question is: what is thelesimia?” I asked her to spell it again. I was still completely confused. “Listen,” I said, “why don’t I just come over and look at it?”

“You’d do that for me?” She said, incredulously.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the floor of her house, puzzling over the mysterious message. “I don’t think this is an English word,” I told her.

‘Do you think it’s African then?” She asked me.

I held back a laugh. “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. She nodded distractedly. She was cooking up a storm and plopped a steaming plate of fried something or other down in front of me on the floor. I looked at her.

“I can’t eat this,” I told her.

“EAT IT!” She said, hitting me on the shoulder.

I shook my head. “I can’t,” I replied. “It’s Ramzan and I know you are fasting. I can’t sit here and eat in front of you.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Eat it! We are breaking the fast soon anyway.” After all, it was starting to get dark. I hesitantly picked up a pakora and put its oily crust in my mouth. She smiled encouragingly and turned back to her pot. “Stay,” she asked me as she stirred vigorously, turning pakoras over and over in the bubbling kadai. “My husband will take you home after we break the fast.”

I shrugged. “I don’t want to impose,”

“Stay! Don’t be silly, you!” She said, turning and shaking her metal stirrer at me, drops of oil flying.

I agreed and she handed me a large tarp to spread out on the stone floor of their main room. As she began to unload her steaming, oil-soaked pakoras into a dish, her husband came in. We exchanged a smiled greeting and his two daughters who were with him, Mizba and Asba, came over to greet my excitedly. Unlike usual, their heads and upper bodies were completely covered by large cloth headcoverings, covering their hair completely with only their adorable faces sticking out

They gathered around the tarp, along with Daybal’s sister in laws who had just arrived and greeted me by slapping me heartily on the back. I have this longstanding joke with them about how big my wrists are (too big for tiny Indian bangles) and so they grabbed me by my wrist and motioned for me to sit with them. As I did, Daybal’s small three year old son appeared from behind the back of his father. I put out my hand for a high five. To my surprise, he pinched me and ran away. Everyone laughed, except me, who looked at this small, mischevious devil hiding in the body of a cute baby boy with hidden ire. In response, he threw his topi (hat) at me so that it hit me hard in the chest.

“How…cute…” was all I could muster as they continued to laugh.

In the meantime, Daybal had spread all the dishes out on the floor in the center of the ring of the hungry: while Mizba and Asba were not keeping the fast, no one else had eaten or had anything to drink all day, as they would do for all of September because of Ramzan. They passed out glasses of rose milk and plates of dates, pear, custard and pakoras.

I waited for them to dig in.

When they didn’t, I looked around and realized that they were praying as they waited for something. Just then, I felt Daybal’s elbow in my side.

“Cover your head!” She told me matter of factly.

Embarrassed that I might have offended them, I wrapped my dupatta (scarf) around my head in the way that all the other women had. Daybal eyed me for a moment and then clicked her tongue in surprised approval.

“It suits you,” she said.

At that moment, what they were waiting for came. The call to prayer floated in the window as the light of dusk died from the sky and the setting sun gave way to night. For those who hadn’t eaten all day, they ate delicately, slowly, savouring the meal that they had waited twelve hours for. No one spoke. All that could be heard was teeth colliding in chewing and swallowing and tearing of pakoras and the slippery china grass (custard) dancing on everyone’s tongues.

I sat, nibbling on a pakora, feeling strange that I could not share in that feeling of breaking the fast.

Best,
Cat

Ganapati bappa moriya!

2008-09-16T15:50:00.006+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

“Ganapati bappa moriya,” a mischevious Hitesh chanted under his breath as I passed his bench in my 9D class today. I stopped, turned to face him, intending to discipline him for joking around. Instead, as his twinkling eyes met mine with an elfish smile, I couldn’t help myself. My frown became a chuckle.

I mentioned that the Festival of Ganesh has been going on for the past ten days in our small hamlet of Kadod. Each night, Melissa and I have ventured out to see the ganapatis, snuggled away in their havens of glitter and flashing lights, prasad (food offerings) at their feet. We’ve snacked on ladoos (the favorite Indian sweet of Ganesh) and joined in the clapping at the nightly puja and arti. None of this, however, prepared me for what I saw yesterday.

The feeling I have today is one that every college student knows: that feeling of “What exactly happened last night?” and the waves of embarrassment that come when you run into someone who you saw in a previously compromising position: your eyes slide away and you pretend to look at the ground as you hurry past, knowing that you both remember that the other was there. Conjure up that feeling from your past, dear reader. Now, imagine this happening with every person you see.

The scope, I had known: I had been told by the students that there would be dancing as they took the ganapatis down to the river on the last day of the festival, that people would throw rang (colored powder) and generally fun would be had. All this I knew. What I had not been told was the scale: there were 25 ganapatis in Kadod alone, and 25 more in the surrounding countryside. Each neighborhood had it’s own belovedly decorated statue and was bringing it to the river in style.

‘Style’ in this circumstance means atop a large flatbed truck bedecked in enormous human sized palm leaves, surrounded by children handing out vats of sweets to passerby and followed by a huge procession of young men banging drums and wildly dancing to Hindi film tunes belted out by speakers the size of a small child traveling on the bed of the truck. The sight of one is enough to impress: the sight of fifty, one after another, was unlike anything I have ever experienced. For a party in a state that has banned alcohol, it was wilder than I could have ever anticipated.

Add to the image a misty, pink colored coating on everything as the rain beats down from the sky atop the parade. Twenty pound sacks of rang were carried for the occasion and handfuls were thrown festively and arbitrarily in the air create a pink haze and mixed with the light rain to create pink puddles running through the muddy streets.

Perhaps the image in your head now looks something like this.

Melissa and I were lucky enough to snag seats at the local phone shop where we go to make international phone calls. The family who owns this place invited us to join them as they saw us meandering about and it was from here that we saw the procession of town familiar faces parade by in pink. Some groups had had special Ganesh T-shirts ordered for the occasion, emblazoned proudly in orange or black. All sported headbands with the same slogan: Ganapati Bappa Moriya! It is the same words which were chanted by every group who came by while they stamped and waved their arms and danced wildly.

“It’s like a regular parade without any rules!” Melissa observed as we watched another firework explode in the middle of the street amid the crowd with no previous warning. As foreign teachers, we made easy targets. Every time a procession passed, our students would run up, prasad in hand, offering it to us. To refuse prasad would be unacceptable since it was the food offered to Ganesh, so we’d obligingly put out our hands, only to be covered in rang (the colored powder) by the hidden hand of our mischevious students! Soon my brown hair had acquired a pale pink color and the small granules of ground powder covered almost every part of my clothes and body. They pulled us out into the street to dance garba (the Gujarat traditional dance) with them, laughing as I stumbled through the steps, my inept feet treading on those of the woman next to me.

The earlier floats were tamer: a few dancing boys, a few drums, mostly older women walking along behind the trucks singing. It was the later floats that were riotous and rowdy, each one trying out do the one in front and behind. And like so many unregulated functions, it eventually turned ugly.

“Fight! Fight!” One of my students ran up to where we were standing by the tailor’s shop. “They are fighting, madam!”

“What?” I craned my next to look down the street where the procession had been held up for a few minutes. It was the first lull in about two hours, so I had assumed that things were winding down. I was wrong.

At that moment, the procession started up again, and I could see the discord in the approaching group written on their angry faces. They were shouting, and some men were holding others back as the ones entrapped struggled to break free and use their fists to say what their mouths were already busy communicating. As they got closer, I gasped. At first it looked like a trick of the light, but I realized that one man’s face was completely covered in thick, red blood. I turned away.

The men moved on as the sole Kadod policeman came and began to threaten to break up the fight with his stick. As the men ran off further down the road towards the river, the policemen was surrounded by revelers, unaware that anything was wrong, who danced to pulsating disco music being belted from one of the nearby flatbed trucks. He swatted at them playfully with his stick and they laughingly dispersed, changing the prevailing mood to a lighter one.

It was perhaps because of this that Melissa and I decided that it was time to head down to the river, away from the general craziness and towards the peace that we knew would come with people saying goodbye to their ganapatis going their final resting place beneath the waters of the Tapi river. We thanked the tailor and the phone booth family for their hospitality and set off down the road, weaving between flatbeds and dancers with the ease of well seasoned crowd navigators.

We were not prepared, however, for what met us at the fork in the road where the Kadod main square opens up towards the school. Hundreds of young men had crowded in, all straining to see what was happening up a small side street. We also stopped, blocked by the massive wall of bodies.

At that exact moment, something must have happened, because I watched as hundreds of straining faces looking away from me suddenly turned and looked straight into my eyes. Their bodies followed and they began to run frantically towards me, dispersed by some unseen force up the road. At that moment, I froze. I knew I had to get out of the way or I would be trampled, but my body wouldn’t move. Suddenly, I felt a hand pushing me towards a wall on the side of the road.

“Madam, go!” The boy shouted. He was one of the 12^th standard boys who stays in the Hostel. All the secondary hostel boys had been allowed out for the festival. I pressed myself up against the wall and my breathing returned, glad for the intervention and was jostled by the elbows of the runners, who had been dispersed by police farther up the side road. Apparently, police had arrived from Bardoli to direct the increasingly unruly crowd control.

The boy, named Bhavin, took Melissa and my hands and waded into the rushing crowd, shouting in Gujarati, “Get out of the way!” He pulled us along as people yelled and pushed and finally we came out on the other side of the marketplace, near the river.

“Thank you,” I said, as he embarrassedly let go of my hand.

“No problem, madam,” Bhavin replied, looking at the ground. He looked up, “Do you want to see those ganapatis in the river?”

We nodded and he led us through the accumulated street vendors, selling hot roasted corn and pani puri down towards the bank of the river. We had to duck around the flatbeds from which they were unloading the beloved statues and anywhere between six and twenty men could be seen hoisting them up in time to carry them down the slope to the river bank.

As we drew closer, I saw a rickety hand made raft waiting and watched curiously as they loaded an 8 foot statue on with ten or fifteen people to accompany it. The raft was tied to a tow rope, and they were pulling themselves out to the middle of the river and back again to drop the statue into the water.

After a few moments of watching, Bhavin turned to me, “Ma’am, do you want to go on the raft?”

“Uh, what?” I said.

A few other students who had spotted me and come over to watch with me chimed in. “Yes, ma’am, go on the raft!” They said encouragingly. I eyed the structure, sagging under the weight of the giant statue and too many accompany people. I looked over the loose ended ropes which had been used to lash it together and the cracking planks that indicated its architect’s temporary structural vision.

The pressure became greater as more people joined in. “Go on the raft madam! Go on the raft! Ganapati Bappa Moriya! You know how to swim, right?”

While I would love to say that in the name of adventure (and subsequent blogging), I went on that raft and will forever preserve the memory of playing a key role in such an incredible festival, I firmly declined in favor of preserving my life.

Which means that I am here today, to field such embarrassing questions from my students, “Madam, you dance?”, “Madam, you play rang?” and random cries of “Ganapati Bappa Moriya!” as I walk by.

Best,
Cat

D.G. Patel turns 90

2008-09-14T10:49:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Saturday, D.G. Patel celebrated his 90th year on this earth. What does D.G. stand for, you ask? I have no idea. This lack of knowledge, however, did not disqualify me from being invited to give a speech at his surprise birthday party.

All I know is that Saturday morning at exactly 10:45 am, a school peon appeared at the door of my classroom, interrupting my teaching, insisting that I accompany him to the temple.
“But – I’m teaching a class…” I protested. In vain. I was whisked out and barely allowed to even stop at the house to drop my books before being marched down to the temple hall. The next thing I know, I’m standing in front of a crowd of 100 men wishing a man I’ve never seen before many happy returns of the day.

The story, of course, does not begin here. It all really began when Mizba and Asba, Daybal’s two adorable daughters, came by our house on Friday as they often do.

“Come,” Mizba told me in Hindi, “Some people are doing some thing at the temple. Want to see?”
Since Melissa and I had nothing better to do, we went. On the short walk to the temple, we acquired the usual entourage of five to nine year olds who hang out in that general area and love to pester us with persistent lines of questioning that include only: What is your name? How are you? and my favorite, phrased as a question: Bye Bye?

The metal shutter that usually closes off the hall where we took our yoga class from the rest of the temple complex was open and as we approached, we could see that there were a number of people inside working on the hall. Watching the preparation for the festivities was all well and good until –

“Come in! Come in!” Sureshbhai, also known as the “President” appeared at our side. “We are preparing for a birthday celebration. D.G. Patel – he will be 90 years old.”

We nodded enthusiastically, as was expected of us, despite not knowing who D.G. Patel is or what his role is in the town.

The English medium school principal was also there and on seeing us, joined the conversation. “Tomorrow!” He exclaimed. “You must come tomorrow and celebrate the birthday with us. At 11:00 am. Okay?”

We nodded and politely accepted the invitation. As we walked away, I turned to Melissa. “Pity invitation?” She nodded and we both laughed.

It was because of this that I found myself being dragged away from my class at 10:40 am. I barely had time to stop in the house and put down my chalk and eraser before being chastised for not going straight to the hall.

When we arrived, the first thing I noticed was the rows upon rows of middle aged Indian men lounging in plastic chairs facing the front of the room that had been impeccably decorated with streamers, balloons, and flowers for the occasion. A large painted banner proclaiming in neat block-letter English “D.G. Patel Turns 90!” had been hung across the front of the hall. Underneath it, a small, unassuming white haired man with a cane and spectacles was sitting.

Melissa and I had stopped at the threshold of the hall. As far as I could see, there were only men here, milling about, talking on their cell phones, slowly drifting to sleep in their chairs, waiting for the event to start. Suddenly, a familiar figure in a green salwar kameez appeared and grabbed my arm.

“Where the hell have you been?” Asked Daybal. She is the only Indian in Kadod who has a competent enough command of the English language to use such expressions with confidence.

I laughed. “We thought we were supposed to be here at 11!” I protested as she led us over to the miniscule women’s section, where four or five other women, some in saris, some in nice salwar kameez were seated. I began to feel as though I had underdressed for the occasion. But then I realized I was sitting in a hall full of men in jeans and business casual. I felt better.

Sureshbhai, clearly flustered, came over to greet us distractedly. “Okay, so, you will say a few words for his birthday?” He asked me.

“A few words?” I repeated quizzically.

“Yes,” he said. “You will address everyone, just give a small speech, one to two minutes.”

My first staff meeting flashed before my eyes. “Uh, yes?” It hadn’t been a question, so I suppose my begrudging agreement was not necessary and anyhow he had already moved on to put out the next fire.

I sat in my seat, turning over in my mind, what would I say? I wouldn’t be able to pick D.G. Patel out of a line up and I was supposed to speak at his birthday party?

I turned to Daybal. “So, who is this D.G. Patel?”

“Oh!” She said, “He’s so rich! His whole family is in USA. He’s got two cars, two houses, two wives…you know.” I couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

At this point, the proceedings started. A spotlight was lit from the back of the hall and Sureshbhai, being videoed by a wedding video crew hired especially for the occasion, began to deliver a speech. Whatever he was saying must have been funny as people were laughing.

After a few moments, he indicated that Melissa and I should stand and come to the microphone. There were an awkward few seconds where I thought about not complying, but the sweet smile on the face of the old man sitting behind the world’s largest birthday cake made me reconsider. Putting one foot in front of the other, I made my way to the mic.

I looked out over the sea of men with cell phones attached to their belts. Already two had gone off just during Sureshbhai’s speech. I took a deep breath and squinted out at the audience, blinded by the spotlight and the light from the wedding video crew, who had just shoved the lens in my face to capture my every unplanned word.

“I guess we’d just like to say Happy Birthday to Mr. Patel and wish him many happy returns of the day on behalf of the Nanubhai Education Foundation,” I said slowly in English.

I could have said “Long live DG Patel, his two houses, two cars and two wives!” for all the audience could understand my English. Everyone clapped and I was given a rose to take to the old man, who smiled happily and confusedly as I presented it to him. The camera crew captured the whole moment in stills and on celluloid.

I feel certain that D.G. Patel will cherish it for many more years to come.

Best,
Cat

Election Fervor

2008-09-12T19:38:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

I receive only small glimpses here of the election fervor that I hear is going on at home. These highlights come from 10 second spots on the Gujarati news which I occasionally see at the principal’s house, short articles in the English language newspaper that I infrequently get to read, or from the online version of The Economist.

Honestly, I prefer it this way: having made up my mind whom I will vote for, I’m uninterested in the particulars of who said what or the ups and downs of the various campaigns. All I can do is hope that the candidate I favor will make America see in them the things that I do. And, of course, send in my absentee ballot.

Being in India four years ago for the lead up to the last presidential election had a distinctly different feel. The politically charged atmosphere of India’s capital was a more fertile breeding ground for conversations with my Indian friends about American politics (or any politics, for that matter). The Democratic Convention was hotly debated over our cups of cold coffee – this year, I didn’t even know the Democratic Convention was going on until one night when we were sitting at the principal’s house watching the news with his family.

He turned to me. “Catharine, why is Obama so famous?” He asked me slowly.

As we watched a short clip of Obama on the screen, dubbed over in Gujarati, I tried to think.

“Well, he’s a different kind of candidate than we’ve had before. He’s the first African American candidate we’ve had for president.”

The principal nodded. “And what will he do about America in the world?”

“Hopefully make it better.” It was all I could think to say.

Recently, my grandfather sent me a copy of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. Previously, I hadn’t really known much about his policy stances: I had just cobbled together what I thought he believed based on second hand hear-say and audio clips from Meet the Press. I read it hungrily, thinking of all the policy issues about which I care deeply and had simply left behind at home 3 months ago; however, the experience of reading it against the backdrop of my surroundings here was a strange one. He writes with so much faith in the American way of living, the ideals of American culture, and while I know that he grew up in Indonesia, his devotion to my motherland made me feel a little unpatriotic. Why am I here when there are so many problems in my own country?

And yet, that thought itself irks me. I’ve been accused of training my students for jobs in call centers: Is it true? Is helping students here realize their dreams to become air hostesses or electrical engineers (both jobs that require you to speak English) bad because India’s job market competes with that of the US? I ask to myself. Should my ambition to help be limited by the borders of my own country?

My reverie was interrupted as one of the computer teachers, Nitinbhai, caught my attention and pointed to my book. The only place with air conditioning in the school, I sometimes venture into the computer lab during the school day to read between classes.

He asked me, “Obama?”

I nodded.

He clicked his tongue in approval. “Barack Obama – my idol,” he struggled to get out in English.

Surprised, I asked him why.

He looked stymied for a minute as he thought of what he wanted to say. Dhirinbhai, one of the other computer teachers who speaks English quite fluently encouraged him to say what he wanted in Gujarati. After a short exchange, Dhirin relayed Nitin’s thoughts.

“He wants to say that he holds him up as an idol because he has struggled and overcome his struggles in the US and now he is running for President.”

Nitin chipped in. “He is a good man,” he said in Hindi.

It looks like Obama is leading the Kadod polls.

Best,
Cat

Mr. Tailor

2008-09-09T19:18:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

Although our lives here are indubitably based almost entirely around the school, its students and its staff, there is a two hour period in each day between the end of class and our 8 o’clock curfew that we are allowed outside of the school grounds and during this time there are a few village characters that play a role in our lives here.

One such character is Mr. Tailor. Whether or not this is his actual name, we don’t know; however, it was as such that he introduced himself and this is the name by which we call him. Whether or not it’s coincidence that his profession happens to be the same as his name, I also don’t know: what I do know is that he makes the best clothes of any tailor I’ve ever met.

His unmatched skill was proven yet again when I went by recently to pick up some sari blouses that I had asked him to make. The designs were elegant, the stitching flawless, and all for the low, low price of rs. 170 (approximately four US dollars). However, like everything here, our relationship with Mr. Tailor goes far beyond the simple “measurements taken – clothes made – bill paid” interaction.

“I am the best tailor, right?” He asked us as I looked over the blouses.

“You are the perfect tailor,” Melissa enthusiastically responded. “The best tailor!”

“Do you have internet?” He asked suddenly.

“Uh, yes?” I replied, a little wary of where this new subject could possibly be going.

“I also have internet – we have one modem that you put in your computer like pen drive and it is 250 kilobytes per second!” He has particularly exclamatory way of talking.

“That’s great,” I replied with an indulgent smile. I have become accustomed to random topic shifts, especially when I am speaking with someone in English here. I know well enough that when speaking in a language you struggle with, you grasp at whatever you can think of. However, I had misjudged the situation: this topic actually had a point.

“Do you want to borrow that pen drive?” He asked us.

“But… we have internet,” I explained.

“Yes, but this will be so much faster!” He exclaimed, bringing his hand down in an large agreeing thump on his sewing machine.

He explained the terms of our borrowing the modem: he didn’t need this modem at night (what he’s doing with it during the day while he tailors I don’t know) and the first two months of use are free – “So,” he said, “You can take this modem then from that Friday evening and return it that Monday morning before 7 am.”

“You mean, Sunday night?” I said.

“No, Monday morning is fine,” he said, as I inwardly cringed at the thought of being presentable enough at that hour to traipse through the village to return the modem.

We agreed, and he gave us the modem to take home that night, calling after us that we should not bring it back past 7 am sharp!

Like so many gifts and favors here, this one turned out to be more of a burden than a favor. We could not get the modem to work in our computer and we still had to bring it back at that unspeakably early hour. We sighed and resigned ourselves to our 30 kbps connection.

Later that night, Melissa’s cell phone rang. It was just after eight thirty. We looked at each other: who could be calling?

She picked up the phone. “Hello?” I heard her say. Thinking it was her mother, I went back to reading my book. As I tried to reabsorb myself within “The Audacity of Hope”, I heard her say: “But, uh, how did you get this number?” I looked at her over the top of my book.

“Who is it?” I mouthed.

She cupped her hand over the talk piece. “It’s the tailor!” She said in an amused whisper.

I almost laughed out loud. She scolded me to restrain myself.

After a little more confused chatting, the conversation ended. “How did he get your phone number?” I asked incredulously.

She sighed. “The phone guy gave it to him.”

The man who sold Melissa her cell phone and to whose phone booth we nightly make the trek to make international phone calls was directly across from Mr. Tailor’s shop. Their families are great friends and whether we are at the phone booth or at the tailor’s shop, the other man is always there.

“And he’s coming over right now.” She continued.

“Uh, what?!” I jumped up, pajama clad.

“Well, I told him that the modem wasn’t working in the computer so he said that he’d come over with his brother and fix it. Now.”

I rushed into the other room to change out of my pajamas. I had just enough time to throw on a kurta and some pants before we heard a knocking on the door.

The tailor and his brother entered. We offered them water in the style of Indian hospitality; they declined. Instead, they immediately set to work on the computer. They had brought along with them some lacking serial number or other.

Quickly following their sitting down in the chair at the computer, there was another knock at the door. The principal peaked his head through the crack of the door left ajar.

“What is going on here?” He asked in that innocuously concerned way that he has perfected.

“Oh sir,” I said, jumping a little. “They are just…” How did I even begin to explain why they were here. I mean, we didn’t invite them…

Luckily, Mr. Tailor jumped in. “We are here installing this pen drive,” he explained in Gujarati. He continued along at a quick pace that I couldn’t follow, but whatever he said must have been to the principal’s satisfaction because he nodded and let them carry on their work, under his hawk-eyed supervision.

After they got the pen drive up and working, the principal gave a waggle of approval and left. We thanked the tailor and his brother. “Don’t forget – “ he began.

“I promise we’ll bring it back by 7 am,” I assured him.

“And Saturday, you must come to my house for Ganesh Chaturthi!” He exclaimed. Ganesh Chaturthi is the proper name of the Ganesh Festival that is currently going on. “Our garampatti is the best!” We assured him we would.

Like I said, so much more than just a tailor.

Best,
Cat

P.S. When Melissa did take the pen drive back, just before 7 am, Mr. Tailor was not, in fact, at his shop.

Battling the Heat

2008-09-07T10:01:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The air hangs like a thick, wet blanket over everything here. The last few days have been so hot and humid, even the most hardy locals are complaining loudly as the sweat drips in salty droplets down their faces. It’s too hot to eat, to sleep, to teach, and so it’s lucky that today is a school holiday.

Despite the heat induced malaise, I watched yesterday evening as families banded together on the main street, combining what collective energy remains to decorate the town for the ten day Festival of Ganesh-ji, the god with the head of an elephant. As we walked to the phone booth yesterday, Melissa and I stopped on the narrow street to watch as strings of lights and paper flags were thrown back and forth between men leaning precariously out of second story windows.

“Teacher, would you like to see the garumpati?” I looked down as I felt a tug on my kurta. The small children whose high pitched voices follow us with cries of “Teacher! Oh, Teacher!” everywhere we walk had crowded around Melissa and I, boxing us in and insisting that we go into one of the houses to see the garumpati, whatever that may be.

As a roll of heat thunder resounded in the sky, we dutifully followed, swept into the house by small hands and feet. The light was switched on and I gasped a little as the light revealed a neon blue, pink, yellow and seven foot statue of Ganesh. I turned to one of the older girls.

“Did you make this?” I asked her wonderingly.

“All of us, we put these jewels,” she explained, gesturing towards the statue. “The paint was there. This is our garampati,” which I deduced means statue made for this purpose. She continued, “Tomorrow we will put it outside and then in ten days, we will carry to the river and…” she struggled for the words she wanted in English, “put it there?”

“You’ll dump it in the river?” I paraphrased.
“Ah yes,” she said, with an agreeable head waggle, “like this.”

I looked at the statue admiringly. “So, tomorrow, when there is no school, it is so people can come look at the garampati?”

“Yes,” she said with excitement, her eyes flashing, “and ma’am, you must come!” I agreed with a smile.

All over town, hutches for the garampatis have been erected, both large and small. Temporary structures, they are made of large pieces of wood with tin roofs, humble looking on the outside, but inside lined with fabulously patterned cloth, palm leaves, and have lanterns hung from the ceiling. As we exited the house, I watched as a small boy, no more than four feet tall, struggled to lift a giant palm leaf twice his size upright and lean it against the outer wall of the hutch. Another man immediately grabbed it and latched it into place.

In the morning, I was roused from my sleep by the sound of music issuing from beyond the enclosure of the school gates. True to our word, we dressed quickly and walked down to the temple next to the school. The garampati had been placed spectacularly in the center of the extravagantly lined hutch and surrounded by smaller statues of Ganesh, all bejeweled and painted colors of bright orange, pink, blue and yellow. Music issued from an unassuming mobile phone which had been hooked up to a blaring speaker system which pointed out over the main square of the town.

The puja was just beginning and we were pushed into the crowd standing at the opening to the hutch.

“Aisai!” (Like this!) One of the little boys in a red shirt shouted to me, clapping his hands wildly in time to the song that everyone around us was singing with fervour, clapping all the while and stamping their feet. I joined in and around me the clapping seemed to get more vigorous every time hands made contact in time to the music.

The clapping stopped and some chanting began. The person leading would shout and everyone around seemed to know exactly what to shout back. Melissa and I simply watched as they lit some small offerings in a large tray. This tray was then brought around to everyone standing at the edge of the enclosure. I eyed it as it traveled closer to me, trying to memorize the gesture that everyone seemed to make over it as they waved their hands and touched their hearts and then their heads. The fear of offending is always imminent. When it finally came to me, I hesitated, looked around for outside confirmation that they did, indeed, want me to participate, and then half-heartedly waved my hand over the flames and then brought them up towards my head. I breathed a sigh of relief as my gesture inspired approving nods from those around me. Disaster averted once again.

Or perhaps it only seemed that way. I felt a hand on my arm and I looked up into the face of the man who delivers our boxes of (bourgeois) bottled water on a tri-weekly basis.

“Paise?” He asked me. (Money?)

“Uh, sorry?” I replied, confused, hoping he’d let go of my arm.

He did, but only to brandish a pink pad with a form in Gujarati in my face. “Paise!” he insisted once again.

I was still confused. “I don’t understand,” I said in Hindi.

He started to explain something in rapid Gujarati.

“I don’t speak Gujarati,” I said lamely.

Someone came over and took his hand, saying something to him in Gujarati. He retorted something quickly back and they looked at me. The impression I got was that I was supposed to give money, but instead this person was saying I shouldn’t have to. I decided that if the students can pretend they don’t understand my English when an assignment is due, it’s my right to do the same.

“I don’t understand,” I repeated again as they continued to look at me expectantly. The person arguing with water-man explained that he should leave us alone and he turned and left in a huff.

Living in India Rule #1: Don’t piss off the guy who brings you water.

Of course, I had little time to contemplate the potential ramifications of my actions in that moment, as just then Melissa and I were led by the arm and positioned in front of the statue of Ganesh-ji, suddenly blinded by people taking flash photos using their nifty hand-held camera phones. A perspiring diva, I tried unsuccessfully to hide the sweat stains on my kurta with my dupatta (scarf). Aishwarya Rai, I am not.

Best,
Cat

Spoken English

2008-09-04T18:14:00.001+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

As the school year starts up in the US, I continue to trudge through the utterly dull and lifeless Gujarat state English curriculum with my school-day classes here in Kadod. This most recent episode will highlight a typical teaching interaction:

Me: Okay students, today we will be doing dialogue writing. I will write a dialogue on the board, and you will copy it into your essay notebooks. Understand?

Students: Yes, ma’am.

[Some students still look confused. Tabussum tells them in Gujarati to take out their essay notebooks.]

[Students take out their essay notebooks. One student raises his hand and I call on him.]

Student: Teacher, can I copy this essay in a black pen?

Me: It makes no difference to me. Copy it in whatever color you like.

Tabussum: [interjects] No! You must copy it in a blue pen!

Student: Yes ma’am. [searches to find a blue pen in his backpack].

Fin.

Truly inspiring, is it not?

Meanwhile, the other aspect of the Foundation’s work here in Kadod, before and after school Spoken English classes, have easily become the highlight of my day. With a small class size, (mostly) cooperative, motivated students and license to do whatever fun, interactive activities I want, how could they not be?

The focus of Spoken English class is, unsurprisingly, on goading the students into actually speaking this language that they pretend to learn during the school day. While some of the 9th grade and 11th grade sections have quite strong reading, comprehension and writing skills, the ability to actually communicate in this language is still very low for almost all the students across the board.

Melissa and I have decided that the best way to learn to speak is to practice practical situational English and gain confidence in the sentence patterns that you actually use on a daily basis to get things done. Luckily, no one is more familiar with what basic sentence patterns these are than Melissa and I who have to struggle through using them in Hindi on a daily basis ourselves.

Our inaugural unit has been on travel, a theme that is easy for the students to get excited about. However, I found myself working in some unexpected (but somehow, typically Indian) vocabulary into our most recent lesson on purchasing a railway ticket.

The object of the lesson was for students to feel confident in how to buy a railway ticket, including asking how long the journey would take (a surprisingly idiomatic English expression), how much the tickets would cost and how many tickets they would need. The students were to write a dialogue about buying a railway ticket and then perform it for the class. The following two dramas resulted:

Group 1:

Ticket Seller: How can I help you?
Traveler: I would like to go to Jaipur
Ticket Seller: How many tickets do you need?
Traveler: I need 5 tickets.
Ticket Seller: That will be Rupees 5000.
Traveler: 5000! The posted price is only Rupees 2500! That 2500 will go in your pocket! I will report you to the Indian Railway Authority.
Ticket Seller: Oh no Sir! Please do not! I will…

The student speaking broke off at this point and looked at me. “How do you say “nikalna dena” in English, teacher?” He asked.

“To be fired,” I replied with a smile. He continued.

Ticket seller: I will be fired! I will give you the tickets for Rupees 2000.
Traveler: Okay, I will not tell. Give me the tickets.
Ticket seller: Don’t tell! Oh thank you sir.

Fin.

This was an excellent dialogue; however, even more funny to me was the one that followed it:

Group 2:

Ticket Seller: How can I help you?
Traveler: I would like to go to Delhi.
Ticket Seller: I have no tickets to Delhi. There is a waiting list.
Traveler: Oh please sir! I must go to Delhi! I will give you Rupees 3000 for one ticket!
Ticket Seller: Oh! Blackmail!

I broke in at this point, my vocabulary correction radar on high. “Actually, I think the word you want is bribe,” I suggested. I wrote the word on the board.

“Bribe, ma’am?”

“Uh, yes, when you want someone to do something for you so you offer them a lot of money – this is a bribe.”

He nodded and continued.

Ticket seller: Oh! A bribe! All right, I will sell you this ticket.
Traveler: Oh thank you!

Fin.

Afterwards, I kicked myself. How could I have forgotten these culturally appropriate ways of solving problems when I made up my vocabulary list? It must have just slipped my mind…

Best,
Cat

Birthday Surprise! (for you)

2008-08-31T10:04:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

So, I have an announcement to make, in honor of the fact that it is my birthday and this is (hopefully) the one day of the year on which I can do no wrong:

I have pierced my nose.

Some of you were already aware of this news, but since my two most dedicated readers were not (namely, my grandparents), I feel it is now time to come clean.

I have always, secretly, wanted to do this, but there was continually some obstacle or another preventing me. I considered it the last time I was in India, but I didn’t want to be “that girl who went to India and got her nose pierced” (I was already that girl who went to India, after all). The thought flitted through my mind my senior year of college, but at that juncture was looking for a job and didn’t think it was the right timing. I thought about it again my first year out of college but by then was working in a school and didn’t feel like enquiring what the school’s policy was on facial piercing. And so I put it off and put it off and put it off.

It was in this frame of mind that, at the slightest suggestion from the interns, about two months ago I made up my mind to get it done here in Kadod. Nose piercing for women is practically ubiquitous here and I felt more comfortable going to the local Kadod jeweler to have it done than I would to any piercing parlor in the US.

One night while we were watching television at the principal’s house, I happened to mention my intention to Aunty (which I have taken to calling the principal’s wife) and to Sejalben, who immediately suggested that we go the next day. My stomach lurched slightly: so soon? Just like that? After all this time of waiting and postponing, I could just go and get it done tomorrow? I felt excited and nauseous all at once.

The next evening, Sejalben instructed us to gather at the car. We piled inside, five in the back seat, Aunty in the front and Jaydeepbhai driving. I assumed, because we were going by car, that the jeweler must be in Bardoli and mentally steeled myself for the long ride. Imagine my surprise when after a two minute drive up the main street of Kadod, Jaydeepbhai abruptly stopped the car on the side of the road and Aunty instructed us to get out! We were in front of a small shop that I had never noticed before, whose glass window was set slightly up from the road such that you had to climb a few steps in order to enter the premises. I nervously did so, just behind Aunty and Sejalben, taking off my sandals before entering as is customary.

Inside, the jeweler was sitting behind a dusty glass counter, through which I could see an array of gold jewelry large and small. Aunty quickly explained in Gujarati the purpose of our visit and he obligingly took out a piece of cardboard, through which a number of gold nose pins had been unceremoniously shoved for safe-keeping.

Their sizes ranged from marble to pin head sized gold balls. After some deliberation and consultation with the others, I chose the second to smallest one. “People will barely be able to see this,” Sejalben declared. “I think you are doing this piercing for yourself only!”

In some ways, I was.

The jeweler indicated that I should take a seat on a plastic stool, and he took the nose pin that I had selected out of the cardboard. I was so nervous, I didn’t check to see if he had sterilized it or not: in retrospect, this was probably not very diligent. He came around the counter and stood over me. I took one last look at Priya and Vanisha, both of whom had their noses pierced.
“Are you sure this doesn’t hurt?” I asked them. They assured me it did not.

I steeled myself.

The next thing I knew, he had taken the end of the nose pin itself and shoved it through the cartilage in my nose. It took exactly a fraction of a second and then it was over. I blinked.

“That’s…it?” I said incredulously.

Priya and Vanisha were surprised. “I’ve never actually seen anyone do that with the nose pin itself before!”

My ordeal, however, had one final stage. The man, focusing his eyes on my nose, reached behind him and grabbed some metal pliers off of the glass counter. He slowly brought them up towards my nose and inserted them into my nostril.

“OW!” I flinched as he turned the end of the nose pin into a spiral so that it would stay in and not fall out of my nose. In a moment, his work was finished.

“Uh, okay, that hurt,” I declared. My eyes watered a little as he brought a mirror for me to admire my newly acquired facial feature in. I looked at it wonderingly. It was done!

As I stood, I could still see the gold glint out of the corner of my eye, even without the mirror. This was slightly disconcerting, but all of the others reassured me that after a few days I wouldn’t even notice it anymore.

“Just don’t eat channa (chickpeas) or anything sour,” Vanisha advised me.

“Why?” I asked curiously.

“Because it will cause a bump to be there,” she explained. The science of this is unclear to me, but I wasn’t willing to risk it.

So far, it’s been a month and all is well. I’ve changed the nose pin to a small diamond, which merited another trip to the jeweler after a misled attempt to try and change the pin myself, the details of which I will not terrify you with.

In the words of my friend Brian, “Cat, you got your nose pierced in a village in rural India? You aren’t going to be able to give blood for a long time…”

Best,
Cat

P.S. Babby, please don’t be mad!

My "Duty"

2008-08-28T09:26:00.000+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

The rules of Indian hospitality continue to confound me.

Yesterday to my horror, I was told by my co-teacher Tabussum that one of the school peons who has been so kind and helpful to us, Vikrambhai, had been in an accident. The subject came up because another of the school’s peons was making the rounds in the staff room to collect donations to pay for Vikram’s hospital bills. Apparently, he had been doing some work from the school and had fallen from a desk and cut his leg. There had been some blood, but as it didn’t seem serious, no one was overly concerned. After school, he had gone immediately to his farm and strongly exerted himself in this work, which led to the wound in his leg becoming infected. He had gone to the hospital for an operation, but the operation had been unsuccessful, so now he is in a hospital in Surat.

Saddened by this news and eager to help out, I asked to be able to put my name down for a contribution as well. She cheerfully passed me the paper on which she had written her name and said I could give whatever I felt comfortable giving. I was told that since my money was in the guesthouse, I simply had to find Manubahi (the peon taking up the collection) the following day and give him my donation.

Last night, I carefully put aside the money that I would donate with my school things so I would not forget, and this morning I went in search of Manubhai. I found him after only a short while, talking to another male staff member just outside the computer lab. I pulled the money out of my pocket and made to hand it to him.

He looked from me to the money and back and shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, in Hindi. In English, I added, “This is for Vikrambhai.”

He shook his head and said something that I didn’t understand. I looked at him, confused, and he shook his head again.

At the moment, Dhirinbhai, the computer teacher whose English is excellent, came down the stairs and Manubhai looked at him and repeated what he had said.

“What’s the problem?” I asked Dhirin.

“You see, you are our guest, at this school, and so we cannot accept your money,” he said, repeating what I suppose Manu had been trying to say.

I made a face. “What is this,” I said, trying to hide my irritation, “this is for Vikrambhai, he’s been so good to us!”

“Yes, I understand that,” Dhirinbhai said, “but ‘Sir’ has instructed us not to take your money.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I made another impatient face. There was an awkward pause where they looked at me and could clearly see my displeasure at this pronouncement.

“Sir has told you this,” I repeated.

“Yes,” Dhirinbhai said again, “and I think that if it’s a problem, you had best talk to him.”

“I will,” I said.

I went upstairs to the principal’s office. I was a little nervous, as my last encounter with him had been over the bicycle, and while I was sure that this would not still be a sore subject, I couldn’t help feeling a little apprehension. However, I soon quelled this with the thought that really this was too much. I couldn’t help donate to someone’s hospital bill because I was a ‘guest of the school?’

It was a few minutes before his office was free for me to enter, so I had this time to think over what I would say.

He welcomed me in and indicated that I should sit.
“What do you need?” He asked me with a smile.

“Sir,” I began slowly, “I heard from the other teachers that Vikrambhai has had an accident.”

“Yes,” he said, with concern, “he is in the hospital in Surat. Yesterday I have been to see him and he is doing well. He should be well in – 15 days, I think.”

I was relieved to hear this news. “Sir, I saw that the staff has taken up a collection for his hospital bills and I would also like to donate, but I’ve been told that you say I cannot do so?” I phrased it as a question.

“You are our guest, and therefore we cannot take your money,” he explained slowly.
”Yes, I understand,” I said, “but Vikrambhai has done so much for us since we’ve been here and been so nice to us… I really want to help.”

“Yes, I know,” he said, “but it is not necessary for a guest to give money.”

I pressed on, and suddenly had a flash of inspiration. “Sir, I really feel it is my duty to give money to the collection, as Vikram has been so good to us and it would not be right for me not to do so.” I had heard this line before from almost every Indian I know: It was Dhirinbhai’s duty to help us establish our cell phones, it was the principal’s duty to provide us with games and entertainment, it was our acquaintance Manishbhai’s duty to take tea to his mother each day at her shop.

This appeal seemed to affect him. “If you want to give money, I have no objection,” he said at last.

“I do,” I insisted.

He called for Manubhai to bring the list into his office and I was finally allowed to hand him the money that had been in my pocket. He seemed pleased, and I wondered if it was mere formality that had not allowed him to say yes before.

Confound the rules of Indian hospitality. Who should have to appeal to give money for someone’s hospital bills?

Best,
Cat

An Unexpected Solution

2008-08-27T08:27:00.002+05:30

Dear dedicated reader,

And just like that, as things are wont to happen in Kadod, my bike problem has been solved.

Of course, the solution came out of one of the bike’s very problems: the attention it draws. You see, seventh period I went to take my all boys class, 9D. With exams starting this week, they have been rowdier than usual recently, and today was no exception.

“Please take out your books and your notebooks,” I began.

“Teacher—“ One student interrupted. “We don’t have.”

I looked around the room at the sixty five faces looking back at me blankly. “You didn’t bring your books?” I asked them incredulously. “All of you?”

“Teacher – “ the same student started, “we – no class… 6th….”

I have learned, over the past few months to decipher such incoherence as I am often on the producing side of it when trying to speak in Hindi to other adults.

“You thought you weren’t going to have class after 6th period because exams start tomorrow,” I finished for him.

He looked relieved. “Yes, teacher.”

“Well,” I said, addressing the whole class, unsure of what to do, “I assume you all brought notebooks and pens. Or,” I added sarcastically, unable to help myself, “are these basic tools of the school day at home as well?”

The students began shuffling around in their bags for their notebooks and pens. I looked at the clock and winced at the wasted instructional time, and at the fact that I now had to make an impromptu lesson plan that would capture their attention for the next 25 minutes. “Since your exam is approaching, very soon, it would seem, I’ve prepared a review of Units 5 through 7 for today..."

I settled the students into busily copying some review notes that I had written on the board when one of the students named Vicky called me over.

“Teacher, Spoken English class is today?” He asked quietly as the students around him vigorously copied what I had written on the board. Since the interns have left, Melissa and I have assumed responsibility for before and after school one hour Spoken English instruction.

“Yes, I think so,” I said.

“But, school will be out early. No eighth period. Exams,” he replied. I hadn’t anticipated this. Perhaps if I could understand the Gujarati announcements in the morning I too would be in the know, but as it is, it has become a matter of course for me to obtain my information on the fly this way.

“Well, I guess we’ll see who shows up,” I said with a shrug. I was about to walk away when the same student stopped me.

“Teacher,” he said quietly, “Your bicycle?”

I had to laugh a little. “Yes, it is mine.”

“From Bardoli?”

“Yes.”

“And you ride it?”

“Well,” I confided, “I did, but there is some problem in it.”

He looked excited. “Teacher, I service your bicycle!” He said it so loudly some of the other students stopped copying what was on the board.

“We’ll talk about this after class,” I said, giving the teacher-look to all who stopped copying, causing them to laboriously take up the task once again.

After an arduous twenty more minutes of corralling the sixty five students’ attention on the last period of the day before school lets out early and the day before exams begin, the bell rang and the students poured out of the classroom, pushing each other in their race to see who could sprint to the gate (and freedom) first.

A few of my boys from the afternoon Spoken English class hung back, including Vicky. It took me a minute to realize that the reason they were hanging around was to see my bicycle.

“All right, let’s go,” I said, laughing. As we walked over to the house I explained the problem about the chain. They listened studiously and nodded a few times. After reaching the house, they waited on the porch (as per the rules about students not being allowed in our guesthouse) as I wheeled the bike out from its hiding place in our sitting room.

“Oh teacher,” they cooed, “very nice cycle.” I fielded the normal questions: where did you get it, how much did you pay, how did you bring it back, how much did you pay, why did you pick this one, how much did you pay, all as gracefully as I could. Then it was time for business.

Vicky and another student, Amir, crouched down to examine the chain. They spotted the problem in under one minute and explained it to me in even less time.

“Teacher, the chain is too loose,” they said, pulling at the offending part to show me. They explained that I can get it fixed in town and that they’ll come on Sunday to take me to the place (a relative of Amir’s) to get it fixed.

Problem solved, just like that. I have to agree with Melissa’s observation: “We should just ask the kids everything. They are so helpful and way less judgmental!”

True that.

Best,
Cat