To India and Back: A Belated Travelogue

At long last, this is the post that has been holding up all the other posts I might have written in the past few months. At first, I thought I'd just jump in here and start talking about kale soup or graham crackers, but that didn't seem right.

First of all, of course, it had been months and months since I'd last posted.

And second, in the middle of those months and months, I went to India.

Plus, one of the reasons I named this blog "A Life Divided" in the first place was that my life is divided between India and here, even though the "here" part makes up the majority these days. It didn't feel right to hop back into my parallel life and hop back again without a comment.

So, the kale soup will have to wait a little bit longer, as will the graham crackers, and an extremely belated travelogue will ensue. Perhaps this will be a lesson to me, and next time I'm in India, I'll post as I go along, eliminating the need for a long overdue catch up post.

So, here goes:

I was in India for most of January, almost 4 weeks in all, divided among Delhi, Benares and Goa. I'd agonized about the planning, but it all worked out quite well--8 days in Delhi (3 at the beginning, 5 at the end), 10 days in Benares and an even week in Goa, plus one long(ish) day of travel getting from Benares to Goa.

My time in Benares, was, as always, interesting. I stayed, once again, in my beloved room 17 at Anami Lodge, right on Assi Ghat. I like Anami for many reasons--great location, family-run, cheap--but I like it better when I'm staying in room 17, which has a big balcony overlooking the river. I spent my first night in the much cheaper room 14 (250 rupees a night compared to 700 a night for room 17), but it was totally worth the money (about $9 a night) to shift once whoever was staying in room 17 realized that I was back and required it to be available.

Here is the sun rising over the river, viewed from my balcony, the one morning (my last morning) I was awake early enough to see it.

As there always are, in Benares, there were walks up the river. Last year, I saw someone having his portrait painted. This year, there were 2 Western guys painting what appeared to be either graffiti or an ad on a wall on one of the ghats.

Another day, I wondered through the gullis in Bhelupura towards the river, and saw this statue being sculpted before me.

When the man who I assume commissioned the statue saw me taking a photo, he insisted that I also take a photo of the photo the sculptor was working from. I agreed it was a good likeness.

As always, in Benares, in addition to all the walking, there was hanging out, and a lot of it. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have a more active social life there than I do here. There were dinners in and dinners out and a nearly infinite number of cups of chai. There were arranged meetings and accidental meetings and one 5 hour lunch date. There were endless hours hanging out in Harmony Books (more about that in a moment).

One of the lovely things about Benares is that I always make instant friends. Last year, it was Shagufta Siddhi, who sadly was away during this visit. This year, I was even luckier and made 2 instant friends. One was a hip woman from Bangalore named Navita (here with her charming daughter Shalu) with whom I shared that lovely 5 hour lunch.

The other was a Smith alum/UPenn grad student named Katy Hardy. Here is Katy posing in the stunning sari she was about to buy.

And here is the pile of saris Katy didn't buy. (Except actually, she did buy one of them in the end. It's also interesting to note that Katy's gorgeous sari was actually plucked from someone else's reject pile--the other woman's loss, clearly.)

One thing to note about Katy is that she speaks fabulous Hindi. I have lots of friends who speak excellent Hindi (all much better than mine, alas), but Katy's Hindi stood out, and not just to me. The evening we went sari shopping, the sari designer was so impressed by Katy's Hindi that he kept saying things that were supposed to be compliments but didn't come out that way. First, he told her that upon hearing her Hindi, he thought perhaps she was an Indian with a pigment condition. Later, he said that if he'd just heard her on the phone, she "could be 100% nagging Indian housewife," which was my favorite thing anyone had said for days. I repeated it probably a few too many times for Katy's liking, but I couldn't help myself.

And, as always in Benares, there were the hours upon hours I spent in Harmony Books. If I bought books to equal the time I spend there when I'm in Benares, Rakesh would need no other customers and I would have no money left, having spent it all on books. I was in Harmony every day I was in Benares, for chai and chat and catching up, for plan making and book browsing. (Rakesh, by the way, wrote an essay last fall for Publisher's Weekly about selling books in Benares; I was delighted on his behalf. The essay is here. How did this come about, I asked him? It turns out that the editor of Publisher's Weekly had wandered into his shop one day a few years earlier. Knowing Harmony, I wasn't at all surprised by this.)

But one day in Harmony stands out. I hadn't even been planning to go to Harmony right then, but I was walking past and popped my head in to say hello. There, I found Rakesh and Katy deep in conversation with a woman I'd never seen before--Asian features, British accent, Indian clothes. It became clear that she was living in Benares and volunteering. Katy informed me, in Hindi, that the woman had a monkey in her house. I thought, at first, that this was a bad thing, but it turned out that the woman had voluntarily taken in the monkey, a baby orphaned when its mother died on the electric wires. The monkey had been living with her for several weeks--he played in the garden during the day and slept in his own room at night. It was clear, though, that she couldn't keep him indefinitely and wanted to make sure he was reunited with his monkey brethren. To that end, she was trying to find a wildlife rehabilitation center to take him. And she had found one, except that it was in Orissa, which is not at all close to Benares.

So, the problem was not actually the monkey living in her house but that the woman didn't know the best way to transport the monkey to Orissa. Planes and trains were clearly out. But she wasn't sure enough about the road conditions to commit to hiring a car and driver to transport the monkey (with her as escort) to Orissa. It was, we all agreed, a conundrum. The woman had to go (to get back to the monkey, perhaps,) and Rakesh and Katy and I spent a few minutes pondering her situation.

And just when I was thinking that this was one of the reasons I loved Benares--because really, when else do I get to participate in a conversation about the whys and wherefores of monkey transportation?--and was about to leave Harmony to get on with my day, the door opened and a man stepped in. In a sonorous voice, he announced the imminent arrival of the director of the British Museum and his entourage.

Well, maybe it wasn't time to leave quite yet.

The problem is that Harmony is not a very big place. To illustrate this, I am posting a photo I took in Harmony in 2009. It has not gotten any more spacious in the intervening years.


The ensuing 10 or 15 minutes were very stressful for Rakesh and quite entertaining for Katy and me. Neil MacGregor, the British Museum director, came in along with several of his colleagues, and they began to browse the shelves, joining the several browsers already in place. Katy, meanwhile, decided to see if she could hand sell something to one of the Brits and in doing so, nearly gave Rakesh a coronary by attempting to climb up on the counter to get the book off of a high shelf over the door. I got behind the counter and took money and gave change. (I also stood on Rakesh's stool to get the book when Katy's attempt failed.) We chatted with the other customers while Rakesh paid attention to the VIPs, and after about 15 minutes, they swept out as quickly as they had swept in. Katy and I were quite tickled by the events, and Rakesh was just exhausted. In typical Benares fashion, I finally left the shop much later than planned, walked around the corner and ran smack into Navita and Shalu (see above) and ended up sitting with them for tea. My plans for the day were never completed, but I was perfectly content anyway.

Later, I posted on Facebook about the juxtaposition of events, monkey lady and British Museum dignitaries all in the shop within a 20 minute span, and one of my friends commented, "We're really going to have to step up our game here," which made me laugh.

So, as you might imagine, I was sad to leave Benares a few days later. It had been mellow and fun, relaxing and interesting, a bit of a whirlwind at the end (I haven't even mentioned the Bengali-German-British wedding we went to on my last night). Better, I figured, to leave before I was quite ready than to stay too long. And, after all, I was heading to Goa, where I would meet Andy and Janna, who had been there for several weeks already. If you have to leave a place you love, it's always good to have sun and sand waiting on the other end.

I had last been in Goa in 2004, where I'd spent a lovely week in Mandrem, in the north part of Goa. Why it took me 8 years to go back, I'm not sure. Not surprisingly, Mandrem is much more built up than it was 8 years ago, and Arambol, the next beach up, is nearly unrecognizable from the mellow, empty spot it was when I first went there in 2000. Still, while there may be more hotels and touristy shops and way more Russians than there were 8 years ago, the beach at Mandrem is still clean and clear and nearly empty, and that counts for a lot.

I made a tactical error at first and booked a guest house I'd found online. I won't name it, because it wasn't really their fault that I left after one night. I picked it because it looked cheap, clean and quiet, and it was, basically, all of those things. But it wasn't the place for me. First, I found the owner, whose baby the business clearly was, extremely annoying--the kind of annoying it's hard to overlook. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night to discover that it gets very chilly in the middle of the night if you're sleeping in a bamboo bungalow. Then, I woke up again at 7:30 sharp, when some nearby construction began--trees being wrenched from the ground and crunched up into sawdust, was what it sounded like. This would not have been pleasant at any hour, but it was especially unwelcome after having been up at 3 a.m. putting on pajama bottoms and sweaters. The final straw occurred when I opened the door and a snake slithered in. I knew it was probably just a garter snake, but I still didn't want it inside. The owner said the housekeeper would deal with it, and a few minutes later, she marched into my room with a big stick. I thought she would hook the snake on the stick and then toss it back into the garden. Instead, she beat the snake with the stick in my room, then tossed it outside, where she beat it some more. Poor snake. I felt very bad to be the cause of the snake's demise, and I was pretty sure that was the last night I'd spend there.

Thankfully, this was a problem easily solved. Janna and I went to the Villa River Cat, where I'd stayed in 2004.



Rinoo, the owner, remembered me and showed me the single room he had available--a very blue room, which I took instantly. By the afternoon of my first full day in Mandrem, I was settled into the blue room at the River Cat very happily, the poor dead snake a rapidly receding memory.

You can't tell from this photo how blue my room was, but trust me that it was very, very blue.

My first morning there, I was awoken by roosters outside and, amazingly for a night owl such as myself, saw bits of another sunrise through my tall, tall windows.

The River Cat is aptly named. In the back, beyond the lovely veranda and the garden, there is, indeed, a river:


And on that lovely veranda are cats.

Lots and lots of cats:


There were 9 kittens in all--5 bigger and 4 tiny--and 2 mama cats. Only one of the kittens had a name, the all black one whom Rinoo had named "Shoe Polish."

I was convinced that Shoe Polish being named made him (or her) more friendly. Here, s/he consented to use Janna's lap as a napping station:

Janna, as you can probably tell, was thrilled. And even more so a little while later when one of Shoe Polish's siblings arrived:

Here's the aerial view:


Janna and I spent quite a bit of time on the veranda, playing Scrabble, drinking tea and watching the kitten antics. (Kitten on the table, the chairs, in the hammock, on the steps, etc.) I even had to partake in a kitten rescue mission. Two little girls staying at the hotel were so enamored of the tiny kittens that they brought three of the four of them upstairs and were swinging them on a swing, while the mama cat paced and yowled on the veranda downstairs. (I was the mean grown up who said, "You have to take them back downstairs." One of the girls immediately said, "It was her idea," pointing to her friend. I was not swayed.)

I made an instant friend in Goa as well, an American woman living in Sweden who was there on holiday with her (sort of) ex-boyfriend and her 5 year old daughter, who grew fond of me over the couple of days we hung out and gave me the parting gift of many magic markered drawings, including one of my own hand and, my favorite, a purple (vegetarian) dinosaur with big teeth. My new friend was shocked when she heard that I was returning to Delhi for 5 days before I went back to the US--why go to Delhi if I could stay longer in Goa, she asked, not unreasonably. I told her that my Delhi was more fun than her Delhi, for one thing, and that the thought of going directly from tropical Goa to New England in January, with no transition, seemed unnecessarily harsh. It would be good to have to wear a sweater again for a few days before I had to wear a winter coat.

And so, after a week of sun and sand and sea, of lovely fresh fish and fresh fruit, of kittens and also a roly poly puppy, the incongruously named "Big Boss" who'd been adopted by the folks at a local restaurant, I regretfully left Goa to return to North India and then, a few days later, North America. One thing is for certain--I will not wait another 8 years to go back.

And there, really, my travelogue ends. Delhi was Delhi. I hung out with Sunil, lunched with Rasil, strolled with my friend Janet, conferred with the tailor, ate chole bhatura at the Bengali Sweet House, hopped on and off the Metro and ran around buying tea and gifts and more tea and snacks and just a few more cushion covers for my blue textiled living room.

And then I came home, and now, a few months later, I'm already thinking about my next trip.

There is a brief addendum. Janna stayed on in India for 6 or 7 weeks after Andy and I left, and one of the places she visited was Udaipur. I'd given her the name of the Ganesh Art Emporium, a funky shop run by an artist named Madhu Kant Mundra. Over the years, I've bought many, many Ganesh postcards from him as well as refrigerator magnets, tiny framed pictures of an elaborately dressed Krishna ("Krishna in his party frock," Abby calls them) and other sundries. The walls of my living room hold four framed prints of Madhu's, including my favorite, the Buddha in a boat rowing across a blue, blue sea . Janna had indicated that she'd found something for me there, but I had no idea what to expect until she came home in March and handed it over. When I saw it, I laughed and laughed, and immediately began to plot its place on my walls.


The Buddha with kitties. How apt.

The End.

Delhi Metro Love Updated

I've written about my love for the Delhi Metro before, in May of both 2009 and 2010, and I saw no reason not to do the same in 2011. Prior to my most recent trip to India, my love for the Delhi Metro was limited to the trips I was able to take between a few stops in central Delhi and up to the railway station. I still spent much of my time in rickshaws and taxis and occasionally buses. Being able to get around Delhi almost entirely by Metro was a fervent wish rather than a reality.

Thanks to the Commonwealth Games, though, Phase II of the Delhi Metro was complete before my arrival in January 2011, and in the 11 days I spent in Delhi, I spent A LOT of time on the Metro. My love, if anything, is even greater than it was before. I claimed--after my 50 minute, 23 rupee ($.50) ride between Gurgaon and the railway station--that if one could marry a public transit system, I'd consider it with the Delhi Metro.

The key numbers in all of this are 3 and 500. Three is the number of rickshaws I took in those 11 days in Delhi. Prior to this, I often took more than 3 rickshaws in a single day. 500 is how many rupees I put on my Metro card; when I left, there were 100 rupees remaining.

Riding the Metro was, above all, predictable. There's not much in India that I can say that about, but with the Metro, it was calmly, reassuringly, predictable. You walked down the stairs into the station. You put your bag through the scanner and let the security person run a wand over you. You followed the well-marked hallways to your platform. You looked at the electronic signs which accurately told you when the next train was coming. And then the train came when it was supposed to. Yes, of course, there was some jostling while entering the cars, especially at rush hour and at the bigger stations. But again and again, that was my experience. Amazing. The stations can be full and bustling, but they can also be empty. There's no place to sit, and security guards are visible everywhere. Even if you were inclined to either misbehave or try to camp out, you wouldn't get very far.

And then there are the ladies cars.

The first car of every train is reserved for women. Very, very occasionally I would see a man or two in the ladies compartment. Much more often, I would see men, upon realizing where they were, either leaving speedily of their own volition or being encouraged volubly to leave by the many women around them. I do understand that the ladies compartment is of less use to couples, families, and, of course, men, but for me, it was a godsend. It was usually much, much less crowded than the rest of the train, for one thing. It was crowded at rush hour, of course, and I had to stand with some regularity, but I never saw it packed to the sardine levels of the rest of the cars. It's not that I didn't see the occasional lady misbehave in the ladies compartment--there was certainly some aggressive rushing to seats and unfair saving of seats--but for the most part, it was pretty calm.

An added bonus--the people watching was great! Cameras are forbidden in the metro, and the main reason I wished I'd had a camera on my Indian cell phone was so that I could have taken some photos of the fascinating outfits I saw. The metro seemed populated by people from all strata of society. There were college students talking on the mobiles ("Mummy, can you send the driver to the Green Park station--I'm on the Metro and will be there in 10 minutes."), working women, women with children, women with bundles, women in jeans, women in saris, women in all manner of sandals, many of them wearing flesh colored toe socks beneath. (It was winter, after all.) I realized, in the Metro, that I'm not used to seeing Indian women's legs--because they're usually covered either by a sari or a kameez--but in the Metro, I saw legs, mostly jean-clad legs, every day. There were women reading and napping and many, many women talking on or looking at their mobiles. I myself read several books while on the Metro, though I never napped.

The unexpected part of taking the Metro so much was how much I walked. On the one hand, there was a Metro line that went to all of the places I go most, so I could hop on and off with ease. On the other, when I traveled farther afield--and even when I was just going back and forth from market to station--I had to walk. Once it was clear I could (mostly) get away without taking rickshaws, I didn't want to take them at all. If the choice was between haggling with yet another rickshaw-wallah or walking, I walked. One day, to my amazement, I discovered (thanks to my iPod pedometer) that I had walked 24,000 steps. No wonder my feet were so sore!

But the Metro's presence in South Delhi has led to new possibilities. At some stations, including Green Park, there is a fleet of cool battery-powered rickshaws which run between the station and nearby markets for a fixed price (15 rupees in Green Park). Plus, the drivers all wear nifty Vodafone caps.

Two brief notes on rickshaws. Sunil called me one day, very excited. He had seen a "Radio Tuk Tuk" driving by his house. In Delhi and Gurgaon, radio cabs are common. But a radio rickshaw? A totally new thing.
I only rode in a radio tuk tuk once, on my last day in Delhi, and I didn't, alas, call it ahead of time. It just happened to be going by when I was looking for a rickshaw to the station, and even though the driver was slightly hesitant about going against the rules by taking a passenger without a reservation, he eventually agreed and asked me for the same price to the Metro station I'd been hearing from regular, non-radio rickshaws (and then asked for baksheesh when we got there). But while I was in that radio tuk-tuk, en route to the metro for my last day of metroing and walking around Delhi, I spotted a rickshaw with a pink roof and lettering that matched the signs in the Metro. "Women Only," it said.

The Metro has brought more changes to Delhi than I can name, but that, certainly, is one of the more memorable ones.

A Chicken Story

Chickens are in the news these days. Not long ago, my town passed a zoning ordinance that allows people living in certain neighborhoods (including mine!) with properties of at least a certain size to keep chickens. This is a change from a few years ago when there was a front page story in the local paper about two children who had to make a special case before the zoning board so that they could keep their four chickens—Guinevere, Gurley, Mabel and Carmelo--who had been deemed illegal. Meanwhile, another person in my office just got chickens, bringing the number up to three in one small office.

All of this talk about chickens brings to mind a particularly memorable chicken, one I encountered a number of years ago in India. Here is my chicken story.

It was summer, monsoon season, and I was in Bangalore. My hotel had once been handsome but now was dumpy. My room was forgettable, the food lousy. But there was a lovely garden and a veranda beside it. In the garden lived a flock of chickens along with one scary rooster who charged at me whenever I walked by.

One rainy afternoon, I had no plans and decided to sit on the veranda and write some letters. I sat down at one of the tables with paper and a pen. The other tables were empty, but a hen from the garden hopped up on one of the chairs and promptly went to sleep. This amused me, but I didn’t think much of it.

A little while later, a man came out and sat at the table where the chicken was sleeping. I guessed he was the hotel accountant because he carried with him an armload of bulky ledgers which he spread out across the table. He wore thick spectacles and settled down with the books, adding up numbers, making notes. Hard at work, he didn’t notice the chicken, and they coexisted peacefully for a long while.

The chicken’s peace was disturbed, though, when one of the hotel servants alerted the man that he was sharing his table with a chicken. The accountant had the servant shoo the sleepy chicken back into the garden. The chicken was not pleased. And so the battle began.

From the moment she was banished into the garden, the chicken attempted to regain her seat. At first, her forays were furtive. If a chicken could tiptoe, that’s what this chicken was doing. Every few minutes, she would hop up onto the veranda, and the accountant would shoo her away, sometimes with a stick, sometimes with his hand. She tried to go around the other way, not obviously up the steps right in front of him. A few times she nearly made it, but he caught her every time. It goes without saying that I was rooting for the chicken. It also seemed to me that the accountant was just distracting himself unnecessarily because clearly she wasn’t going to give up. This was one tenacious chicken.

The stalemate lasted for more than an hour. I recorded it as a play by play in the letter I was writing. The chicken did not accept defeat and join her sister chickens in the garden. She wanted her seat back, and she would not be refused.

Finally, the accountant got up and left—not for long, but long enough for the chicken to get back to her chair. I swear she looked around to make sure the coast was clear. I like to think he left as a means of conceding defeat. When he came back, he resumed his seat, the chicken had resumed hers, and we all sat there quietly for the rest of the afternoon. The accountant, I will add, left before the chicken, who stayed until it got dark, secure in her victory.

I don’t know if this means more about tenacity of chickens or the vagaries of memory, but I no longer remember the name of the hotel or even, really, what else I did in those few days in Bangalore. But ask me about the chicken, and I can tell you a story.

*Enormous thanks to my colleague, Nancy Eckert, chicken owner and chicken artist extraordinaire, for today's illustration!

**The Blogger Outage of 5/12-13 wiped out this post and the comments. I've re-posted it in case blogger isn't able to restore it. Very frustrating.

Photo of the Day: Delhi Elephant

I should be jaded about seeing elephants by now. I've seen them just about every time I've been in India. Sometimes they're creating traffic jams (once, in Varanasi, while I was on my bike) and sometimes they're blocking traffic in such a way that a pedestrian can cross the street freely and with no fear of being run down. (Alas, that only happened to me once, but there's always hoping.)

Sometimes, I have to wait until the very end of my trip to see one. A few years ago, I was in the car with Navtej and Sunil, on the way to the airport, when the headlights picked up several shapes lumbering in the distance--3 elephants, on the airport road. "I wonder where they're going," I said. "To the airport, of course," Navtej replied, and we all laughed.

So it was on this most recent trip. I was having lunch at Rasil's house on my final day in Delhi, and over the wall, we saw the swaying top of the elephant's back. This elephant and its mahout apparently roam the area--one of Delhi's nicest neighborhoods--looking for people with well-lined pockets who might want an elephant ride. When I left Rasil's house and walked down the service lane beside her house, there they were. The mahout beckoned to me--perhaps I was one of those people who would like a ride--but I waved him away. I did get close enough, however, to take this photo. And then, elephant sighting completed, I walked through the gate into Lodi Garden and onto the rest of my day. I was very sad to be leaving India, but at least there had been an elephant to wish me farewell.

A Visit to Navdanya

Vandana Shiva, the noted Indian environmentalist and activist, is speaking at Amherst tonight. I'm very sad that I will most likely have to miss it--an unavoidable work conflict, alas--but I'm grateful to have had a chance to meet with her for tea this morning.

I met Vandana Shiva for the first time in Delhi in January. Since I was going to be in India already, I was asked by a colleague to investigate the possibility of sending Five College students interested in sustainability to an organic farm and education center outside of Dehradun, run by Dr. Shiva's NGO, Navdanya. Through my friend Rasil (in whose documentary, Harvest of Grief, Dr. Shiva is a clear and excellent voice), I was able to meet Dr. Shiva for tea. A week later, I went up to Dehradun to spend a few days at the farm. (Of course, since this was India, it was more complicated than that. I was originally supposed to go to Varanasi first, but my train was delayed by 11 hours, 17 hours, 23 hours and then finally canceled, so I had to do some frantic scrambling. The folks at Navdanya were very accommodating, though, and didn't seem at all fazed when I asked if I could come up the next day rather than the next week.)

I had a lovely stay there. Dehradun is in the foothills of the mountains, and the farm is on the outskirts. In addition to the permanent staff, there were 6 interns and volunteers in residence when I was there along with a January interterm group from Colby College (small world!). I didn't write about it at the time, though I meant to, so I thought that Dr. Shiva's visit was a good excuse for me to post some Navdanya photos now.

Here's the sign you see at the entrance:

After which you go down a peaceful road toward the farm:

Then, the office and dining hall (and the stone wall outside where I sat several times to take advantage of the office's wireless connection!).


A particularly interesting sign in the office . . .


Although the sun came out during the day, nights and mornings were freezing. I slept under two incredibly thick and heavy comforters (the being suffocated by your covers means of staying warm) both nights, with my fleece hat on. The second morning, Jeet Pal, a member of the staff, brought me a cup of herbal tea, which I sipped sleepily (and warmly) from under my pile of covers. Given this, I was especially glad that Navdanya has solar hot water heaters--and the water was hot even when the sun wasn't out! Here's the building next to where I stayed.


A project by a recent intern documented all the local staff and farmers associated with Navdanya. I was only there for 2 1/2 days so didn't get to meet everyone who works there, but those I did meet were all very kind and helpful.

The second day I was there, I went on a farm tour with the Colby group, which had just arrived. We walked through the fields and ended up at the seed bank. Seed is saved from each harvest (Navdanya has 40 something acres of farmland) and then distributed to farmers, both locally and across India.

A posted list of seed varieties:

The rice room!

The fields were also labeled. There were a mix of vegetables and grains, plus some experimental fields.
There were also trees of various sorts and a medicinal herb garden. I wondered what a person had to do in order to have his name on the sign next to the tree he planted.


There are lots of reasons I'd love to go back, but one is to look at the cool trees again:

My Parallel Life

I have been in India for more than 3 weeks now, and what I like to say is that for these brief weeks here, I am living my parallel life. It’s as if my life is proceeding along two parallel tracks, like those people movers at the airport, each moving along at the same speed, simultaneously and 10,000 miles apart from each other. Most of the time, I’m in the US, with house and cats and job, with Alex and gardens and friends. But every year or two, when I can, I travel the 10,000 miles to India and it’s as if I’ve stepped sideways onto the other people mover, stepped into my parallel life.

This is true in Delhi, where the streets are familiar to me in some kind of fundamental way. When I lived in Delhi on my Fulbright, I carried a map around with me for months. The day I realized that I’d forgotten my map—and that I didn’t really need it anymore—was a joyful one. That knowledge has stayed with me, mostly. If I were plunked somewhere in north or east Delhi, I might have a problem, but in south and central Delhi, I know my way. I can give directions with confidence. I don't hesitate. Sunil actually called me in Benares to ask me about how to get somewhere on the metro. I told him, of course, but only after a certain amount of gloating.

I stayed for a few nights in Sunil's friend’s apartment in Green Park. The friend was an academic, off to Toronto to teach for a semester. Her apartment was small but comfortable, and the rent was reasonable. “I could live someplace like this,” I found myself thinking. Not that I have any plan to move back to Delhi anytime soon. But it was comforting to know that there might be possibilities, that even though the price of Delhi real estate now trends toward the astronomical (the rent on the much nicer apartment I visited was more than five times that of the first), there are still places in Delhi where I could see myself living, see myself happy.

This sense of a parallel life is even more striking in Benares. It’s been more than 8 years since I lived in Benares, and still I have a social life here. This is, in part, because of the people who live here, who I have known all these years—the family whose house I lived in, Rakesh at Harmony Books and Govindababa the western sadhu, Ramuji. All I need to do, it seems, is show up, and I am sitting in Harmony, drinking chai and chatting, eating lunches and dinners out and in, falling into a fluid group of people, some who come and go and some who stay. I've made new friends this week, and I've reconnected with old ones. This happens whenever I come here, without exception.

I've been having breakfast every morning at the Aum cafe, partly to take advantage of the wireless and partly because they make nice porridge. Because it is a cafe run by a spiritually-oriented American named Shivani, it attracts many people here on some kind of spiritual quest. I've met a number of people who are in India for the first time. When I tell them that I've been coming for 20 years, that I've lived in Varanasi and Delhi and Jaipur, several of them have paused and then said, "Sweet." And, of course, it is sweet. I am so happy not to be in India for the first time. But there is no question that I earned my contentment here. I put the time in, I stuck with it, and this is my reward.

I've also discovered that I'm not actually envious of westerners who have lived here longer than me, or those who basically live here permanently. I'm happy for them, that they've been able to do it, but it's not actually what I want.

Which brings me back to my parallel life, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The blessings are obvious. My life is infinitely richer because part of it has been lived in India, because my life here continues. I can't imagine my adult life without it. But the problem with a parallel life is that you can't be on both sides at the same time. Wherever you are, there is always something missing, and there is nothing, really, that you can do to change that.

A Walk along the River

Please note: I'm skipping right over the fact that I haven't posted in months, and I'm just going to jump right back in. So here goes.

Whenever I’m in Varanasi, I walk along the river, from Assi Ghat, where I stay, up to Dassaswamedh Ghat, the Main Ghat near Godolia. When I realized that I’d been in Varanasi for a week and basically hadn’t ventured further than Shivala (maybe halfway to Godolia), I decided that the time had come for my walk.

I’m going to use today’s walk to illustrate what I often tell people at home when they ask what it is that brings me back to India over and over again. Sometimes, if I’m trying to be brief, I say that it is because it’s always interesting, because I never know what I’m going to see. (And, in fact, I wrote an essay about this very thing a few years back.)

That remains true in other places in India, but it is especially true for me in Varanasi. Here are a few of the things I saw in the maybe 4 hours that I was out.

First, there was the man having his picture painted. A small crowd had gathered by the time I got there and remained after I left.

Then, when I got to the main ghat, I heard singing, and it turned out to be coming from this boat. Notice the men with drums and the man with the horn in the back. I’d never actually seen a singing boat like this before. They stayed by the main ghat for quite awhile and then set off into the river.

There was a lot of activity on the main ghat getting ready for the evening’s grand aarti. Platforms (for the priests) were set up, and people were preparing flowers and other offerings for the stands. Right near the ghat, many of the shops sell items related to devotion and puja.

Slightly farther away, though, the wares turn to more worldly goods. I’m contemplating a larger series entitled “Unattractive Underwear Displays.”

I had a late lunch and wandered through Viswanath Gully, which is always part of my routine. No pictures from there, alas.

The walk back down was especially lovely, almost as lovely as the other night’s stroll down the nearly empty ghats after 11 p.m. under the full moon. (If anyone is wondering if this was safe, the answer is, I’m not entirely sure. But I had Rakesh from Harmony Books serving as my gent escort, so I wasn’t worried. Our only threat came from some extremely loud and not-happy-to-see-us dogs who barked at us until we left the road and walked onto the ghat.)

Partway down, I stopped for a cup of chai. It was still and quiet, and I watched the lights on the river. In what was perhaps a first, I turned out to be sitting next to a vendor (of beads and malas) who didn’t ask me if I wanted to buy something. He called me "didi" (sister), which I prefer to “madam,” which I get called most of the time, and said I looked like I was enjoying the shanti (peace). I said I was. He said he would leave me to it, and I said thank you.

I saw these dogs sitting attentively next to the chai wallah. I wondered if they’d developed a taste for tea, but it turned out that when the chai-wallah cleaned out his milk pan, he gave them what was left and that was what they were waiting for. As it happened, I had a packet of biscuits in my bag and while, generally, I don’t approve of giving dogs people biscuits, I figured that with most likely hungry street (well, ghat) dogs, it probably didn’t matter. Where there had originally been 3 dogs—mom, pop and pup—lined up for biscuits, word spread quickly, and soon I had an extended family, including 3 or 4 very earnest puppies, surrounding me. Once the biscuits were gone, they returned to the chai-wallah in the hope that they could have more milk to wash down their cookies.

One thing that didn’t surprise me: I was asked 10 or 12 times on the way up the river, and almost as many on the way down, whether I wanted a boat. One man announced, proudly, “I have boat.” To which I replied, in Hindi, “Well, that is a very good thing for you, but right now, I don’t need a boat.” I think one of his buddies laughed, but I’m not sure he did.

I will be very sad to leave tomorrow.