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
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
SCOPE of the Problem
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
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
Monday, December 1, 2008
Thankfully Undertaken
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
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
Sunday, November 9, 2008
The Bat Cave
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!
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!
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Bus-iness as usual
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
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
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Acute Aesthetic
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!
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!
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Re-setting Clocks
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,
This quirk is itself only one of the small that have punctuated my early experience of
Nestled in the
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
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
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
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