Back on the Hilltop!

I'm happy to be back, and I'm trying to hold on to my feelings of appreciation for things here:
     that the water is safe to drink right from the tap
     that the power doesn't go off for several hours a day
     that the Health Center is here, and that I'm rarely in need of it
     that I can eat salad, and fruit without peeling
     that I don't pass hundreds of homeless kids and adults camping on sidewalks every day
     that teachers show up and do their job
     that I don't have to bribe anyone, any time
     that everyone has access to toilets
Of course India has a lot to be proud of, and arguably a great future. But it's undeniable that I live a privileged life, a life that is less stressful than that of the vast majority of Indians . . .

a few tentative conclusions

India: the short version, or, some tentative conclusions

What will I remember about India?

•      The unresolved contrasts between thatched mud huts or construction-debris shacks without water or electricity, and the gleaming, gated, high-rise apartments right behind them; between village life and city life; between the educated elite (or middle-class) and those deprived of the basic right to an education, to health care, to a job, to sufficient nutrition.

•      The persistence of native dress, even in cities, especially for women. Why not? The sari, kurta, and salwar kameez are flattering, comfortable, and cheap (of course a sari can be a costly garment, but the advent of the nylon sari, ghastly as the designs often are, meant that an inexpensive, easy-care sari could be within the reach of the masses; it also made the fortune of the Ambani family).  India is deeply conservative in many ways, and the survival of these modes of expressing national identity are consonant with that conservatism. Even women who might reject that explanation, however, wear the kurta with jeans, because it's comfortable and looks good. Manual laborers are likely to be wearing a short dhoti, but it's not that rare to see men wearing a lungi [the long skirt-like wrap], or a long kurta with pyjama pants, or even jodhpur-type leggings [suddenly, seeing the desert city of Jodhpur, I understood the etymology of "jodhpur": I wish I could tell Tony], but almost always in pure white, unlike the plethora of patterns for women's textiles.

•      The persistence of caste, religion, and color-prejudice, even among the most educated class. Indeed, rather than diminishing, the Hindutva movement has emphasized and valorized these distinctions, and reservations [affirmative action or aarakshan] for the Scheduled Castes and tribals (adivasi) has led to a rebound of resentment.

•      The paradoxical contrast between the friendliness, generosity, and kindness of the ordinary India, to a perfect stranger, and the apparent absence of civic responsibility. The latter is manifest in behavior that includes the chaotic, competitive, and ego-centric driving-style, the incredible litter everywhere, the lack of amenities like integral sidewalks, and the low voter turn-out. Even the willingness to help a stranger might display civic disregard, as with the young men who were perfectly happy to lend their photo and passport-copy so that I could purchase a SIM card under their name, circumventing the law that tracks SIM-card purchase. An Indian explained this willingness to break laws as a combination of "no consequences," and "everyone does it."

•      In reaction to the negatives (and no one is more critical of corruption, mis-government, etc. than Indians) the optimism that many young Indians express, reflected also in the CNN series, "India Positive," a daily dose of some good news, usually about individuals trying to make a difference somewhere.

•      For every one Indian author [writing in English] and known outside the sub-continent, there must be a hundred unknown [not to mention those writing in native languages].

•      Indians can be masters of English, but English as spoken by the ordinary Indian (as opposed to those educated in English-medium schools) can be quite a challenge for an American ear to decipher. The famous witticism about England and the US being two nations divided by a common language applies even more to India and the US. It's largely just speed and accent that strain communications both ways. On the other hand, Indian languages often adopt loan-words from English, so that in the middle of a torrent of Hindi a familiar English word [sometimes, the proper name of a commodity] will float up.  And of course English has borrowed its own share, like jodhpur, and "dekko"--doubtless more of these loan-words are in British than in American usage. Since returning, I've learned (from the excellent Imagining India, by Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani) that veranda, avatar, cheroot and typhoon are also gifts from India's tongues.

•      The importance of history: India has a lot of it, and although much physical evidence has been destroyed deliberately or by neglect, what survives is still abundant and almost all is contentious, a record of conflict between Hindu and Muslim, Indian and British, and a potential source of future conflict. The fantastically beautiful and technically accomplished stone temple-carvings, for instance, are idols that would presumably meet the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas in any Islamic-fundamentalist future. No Hindus visit the lovely Mughal tombs of Sringanapatnam, and a Hindutva regime might turn a blind eye to their destruction, as with the mosque in Ayodhya.

getting around India

Transportation experiences:

SUV-type A/C taxi [2.5 hours]
ancient, public inter-state bus [4 hours]
auto-rickshaw
private car with driver
car-hire non-A/C with driver [eight hours]
2nd-class non-A/C sleeper train [eight hours]
private non-A/C long-haul bus [nine hours]
new, efficient, city bus
new A/C public airport shuttle bus
inter-city plane [Jet Airways]
A/C Delhi taxi
non-A/C Delhi taxi
new, A/C, city sightseeing/shuttle public bus
cycle-rickshaw [ethical dilemma: see below*]
motorbike [OK, I was just offered a ride for one block and I didn't accept: no helmet]
1st-class A/C class sleeper train [18+ hours]
2nd-class A/C sleeper train [there are multiple classes on Indian trains!] 
new (2010) Delhi metro [to the airport]
and, mostly, . . . shank's mare!

*Rickshaw-wallahs are uniformly skinny, stringy, sinewy men, who look undernourished and exhausted (and are often seen collapsed, sleeping, in their vehicles at the side of the road). They have to work in the pollution and danger of city traffic. It seems wrong for another human being to physically (laboriously) transport me, when I can walk. But if I don't use the cycle-rickshaw, the rickshaw-wallah will not eat. Not using the service might make it go away in the long run, but in the short run, it will deprive the men and their families of a livelihood.  Probably economists have something to say about this dilemma, and I look forward to discussing it with my development-economist son.

Diwali!

     Imagine Christmas gift-giving, in early-summer weather, with the soundtrack of July Fourth, the new clothes of Easter, the food-and-family of Thanksgiving: that's Diwali. It's a time for lights, flowers, shopping, some religious ceremonies, and days of firecrackers and fireworks (and this being India, the pyrotechnics are exuberant and entirely unregulated). Last night the incessant explosions reached a crescendo around midnight, but continued with only slight abatement right through the rest of the night and into the morning. (The windows are open, because it's not hot enough for AC now.) Some blasts were extremely close, and at times I wondered how the people of Sarajevo, for instance, could have borne their bombardment. I had leisure to wonder, because sleeping was out of the question.
     However, I was so fortunate to be invited to share the day in a home. After last-minute shopping, my host, Rouma, and I returned to prepare for the late-afternoon arrival of the Brahmin pandit, or priest, who would visit the house to do the puja. This service is meant to ask Lakshmi and Ganesh, especially, to bring prosperity and peace to the home: the point of all the beautiful lights and flowers adorning houses and shops is to entice the goddess of wealth to visit. I'd offered to help, but was given the most pleasant tasks: pulling petals off roses, to heap in a marble lotus-shaped bowl, and bathing and garlanding the small bronze elephant-headed Ganesh figure.
     The preparations included garlanding the various gods; lighting small candles at the house-door; spreading a cloth over the carpet, and arranging on it bowls or thalis (steel trays) of flowers, fruit, sweets, water in a steel cup, a clay oil lamp, and cushions for sitting. The pandit arrived, dressed in a pure white kurta-pyjama (having visited at least eight or ten houses already, for the same ceremony, with many more to come that day), and we all sat cross-legged as he lit incense, chanted continually in Sanskrit (sounding quite like Gregorian chant) while ringing a small brass bell; put a red-paste mark and rice-grains on our foreheads, instructed us to shower the small images of the gods with marigold petals, and to offer the oil-lamp smoke, to garland each other, to offer the fruit, to sprinkle the images with water, etc. He tied a red thread around our wrists, dropped a silver coin into a small bowl of milk, and after making the offerings (prasad), gave us each a handful to eat: puffed rice, a wafer-shaped sugar lump, fruit, a lentil sweet, sweetened rice cooked with saffron. Finally, he blew several chest-resonating notes on a conch: if the gods had dozed off during the service, they'd be alert to our presence now!
     In the evening we lit dozens of little clay oil-lamps and arranged them on the roof-terrace, the balconies, and the sitting-room. A couple of young women from Spain, and a Frenchwoman my age, arrived for dinner, although we had to retreat from the terrace to the only slightly quieter sitting-room, as the explosions increased. The Indian food was superb, the conversation thoroughly interesting, and I did valiantly attempt to sleep at midnight, when the guests departed. I'll try to nap today before heading for the airport: maybe the sleepless night will help me re-adjust to the 9.5-hour time change . . . .

My kind of religion: book-worship

          Okay, it's not worship: Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs' holy book, is venerated only. [Sikhism, like Buddhism, is a non-theistic philosophy; a key tenet is that service to humanity is service to god.]  But the Golden Temple at Amritsar is quite a testament to the reverence of the faithful.
          After a brief visit the afternoon I arrived [google Golden Temple for pictures], I went back next morning at 4 AM, when the Granth is transferred from its marble and gold-domed overnight home at one end of the huge white temple-complex, to the Golden Temple itself, which sits in the middle of a vast tank or pool (where golden koi swim).  It was hours before sunrise: the temple-complex was brilliantly lit and thronged with barefoot pilgrims wrapped in cloaks against the Punjabi chill. [There were more people at 4 AM than there had been in the daytime.] Some were still sleeping under the colonnades; some bathed in the holy pool, despite the temperature and breeze. Women's heads were covered; most men wore the towering Sikh turban, and quite a few men (and women too) had silver kirpans (curved daggers) slung on a bandolier and resting at handy hip-level. A few tall, fierce-looking men in saffron turbans and long blue coats carried spears with large leaf-shaped blades that did not look merely decorative.
          The causeway to the Golden Temple itself was already packed solid, so I went up some stairs and found the sleeping-place of the holy book (behind glass panels). Descending on the other side, I positioned myself where I could see the palanquin being readied for the procession. It was being garlanded, though it needed no ornamentation, being entirely covered in gold leaf intricately worked. A brocade bed and two pillows were laid in the carrier; a saffron processional flag appeared; a small gold turret was added to the palanquin's canopy, and then garlanded (the whole thing now being of gold completely overlaid with golden flowers); a fine cloth was spread over the marble floor at the place where the palanquin would receive the book.
          Throughout these preparations, the faithful kept praying aloud, in musical call-and-response fashion, while other  recitation-chanting from the gurus [translated into English on an enormous flat-screen display, in the daytime] came over the loudspeakers, so that at times there seemed to be a competition. Then a loud shofar-like note was heard, from an S-shaped brass instrument that towered over its player (how interested Tony would have been!), and the enormously heavy palanquin was carried by a dozen men to the foot of the stairs. These stairs--and all surfaces near the book--were swept continuously by stooping devotees wielding lengths of cloth.  
          The horn sounded again: above, two tall silver maces appeared, then a man in white who held a huge silken pillow on his head, on which the book rested. Behind him, someone swished it ceaselessly with a silver-handled whisk made, I believe, of plumy white lambs-wool. At the appearance of the Granth the fervor of the crowd was unbounded: some cried out in prayer, others fell to their knees and bent their faces to the ground. As the book neared it was inundated with showers of rose-petals flung by pilgrims, before being placed in the palanquin and carried past the crowd on the causeway.
          The next day I waited for an hour to cross that causeway and see the inside of the Golden Temple itself. It's like being inside a Faberge egg: every surface is covered in brilliantly colored and patterned gilt and paint, mirrors set in the ceiling, walls of elaborate floral porcelain or marble inlay. A two-storey crystal chandelier hangs over the book, which rests on brocade cushions strewn with rose-petals, protected by a many-tasseled silken canopy. A priest chantingly recites from the holy Granth; musicians play (harmoniums and drums), and the faithful throw coins and bills on its cloth dais.  Although the Sikhs have had a bloody history (depicted in gory museum paintings at the complex), it resulted largely from persecution: they themselves are inclusive and tolerant.  And I have to warm to those who hold so dear a book of wisdom.

monuments and memories

Here's some advice to anyone thinking of a visit to the Taj Mahal: (1) don't stay in awful Agra, epicenter of tourist-exploitation; (2) don't bother with the "Taj by Moonlight," however romantic and exclusive (only on non-Friday, non-Ramadan, full-moon nights, by advance ticketing) it sounds: whether it was mist, pollution, or the placement of the moon, the building's silhouette was barely discernible in the distance; (3) do see the Taj at dawn.
     The air was fresh and cool, there were few (relatively speaking) tourists, and I even managed to be ALONE in one chamber of the tomb for five whole minutes. [It's difficult to be alone in India at any time, much less at the Taj.] I was prepared to find this icon over-hyped, but was actually moved by its perfection. As the sun rose, the building's color changed, through all shades of pearl. The jalis, stone screens, made lacework patterns on the floors. Thanks to an expert guide I heard the amazingly prolonged echo under the double dome.
     Another sound effect was potentially more sinister: the whispering gallery in the Agra Fort (a walled Mughal palace complex even larger than the Lal Qila in Delhi), evoking the machinations of court life. Machinations like the imprisonment of Shah Jahan by his un-filial son Aurangzeb. The usurping emperor did provide dad with a beautiful marble pavilion from which he could gaze downriver at the monument he had built to Mumtaz, although his eyesight had almost completely gone. Poignant, and just another strike against Aurangzeb, my least-favorite Mughal.
    The human scale of the "Baby Taj," built by Nur Jahan for her parents' interment, was very pleasing: similar in plan to all Mughal tombs, but small and delicate, with lacy jalis, it has colorful floral motifs as well as the endless geometric patterns. [Forgive me, dear math colleagues, but the relentless geometry and horror vacui did get a bit wearing.]
     Fatehpur Sikri is another World Heritage site notched on my counting-stick.  More compact and better preserved than Hampi, and in a completely different [non-Hindu] style (google for photos), it again displays the astonishing Mughal taste for splendor and good living. Unfortunately the water ran out, and the court had to abandon it after only 15 years' use.
     Rajasthan memories: the desert from the train window turning pink at sunrise; antelope springing away in the scrub; men in colorful, loose (non-Sikh) turbans; women in swinging skirts, bodices, arms weighted with silver bracelets to the shoulder, heads and faces veiled with translucent scarves in brilliant colors, spangle-edged.
     Jaisalmer, my destination, is a 12 c. fortress-city (of 99 bastions: it resembles Carcassonne) filled with butterscotch sandstone haveli [mansions], in fanciful forms (colonnades, turrets, cupolas, balconies, bays, etc.), all fretted with filigree stonework. Each looks like the sand-castle it is. The wealthy Jain merchants who built this secure trading depot competed in decorative extravagance. Unfortunately, the fort has not conserved its water or its architecture adequately, and is in danger of becoming a sandpile again. I stayed outside the town (the only ethical option, Lonely Planet says), in a small inn run by an ex-pat New Zealand woman and her Indian Muslim husband (much younger, with another, "village" wife much younger than he--younger, in fact, than the Kiwi's daughter back in Australia). If I were a novelist, I'd return for a month of note-taking on her story.
     On my habitual walks, this time in late afternoon, I struck out to the edges of the town, where the scrub began, along a street of thatched mud-cement houses seeming to emerge from a scarp. Although I strode with the brisk step necessary to discourage the constant curiosity of every inhabitant, I was so persistently and charmingly invited to take tea in one home that I feared a repeated refusal would damage US-Muslim relations. So I climbed the sandy slope, removed my sandals, and sat cross-legged (an empty cement bag having been spread for the guest) in the tiny packed-dirt courtyard .  My host (a hotel worker who spoke some English), his mother, his aunt, her two young daughters, his bare-bottomed toddler son, and eventually his father, a lean, craggy-faced, turban-and-lungi-clad exemplar of the Rajasthani tribesman, were all introduced. Smiles and gestures replaced chat. My host was probably in his twenties, a fine-featured, small but handsome man, with brilliant teeth and sparkling eyes. His wife and another child were in their village: they would move when his house (which was being constructed out of sand and cement next door, about a foot high at this point) was finished. Every drop of water to mix the cement (and make the tea--and, perhaps, wash the steel tumbler?) had to be carried by hand. I drank the sweet milky chai, with no ill effects. Nothing was requested. (I gave a small amount of money, "a gift for the children.") This will be one of my best memories of the desert.

I've come from the desert on a horse with no name

although it was actually an iron horse, the Jaisalmer-Delhi Express. "Express" it may have been called, but it took 18 hours, not counting the time to get to the train, and from the train through mid-day traffic, to the guesthouse--via auto-rickshaw (which in Delhi, I've learned, run on clean, compressed natural gas--unlike the belching buggies of Bangalore).
          I'm also back, after nine days, to the land of technology. [I've been too spoiled by access to a couple of clean computers to go back to the Internet cafes, where the keyboards look like bacterial support-systems.] The hotel in Agra had a tv (except for the hours when the power was off) with only one English channel (happily, BBC World News). The guesthouse in Jaisalmer, run by a 68-year-old New Zealand expat librarian married to an Indian Muslim (who has a village wife also: what a story there) had neither tv nor internet. In addition, of course, I can't speak or read Hindi or Marwari or Rajasthani: I had the sudden understanding of what it feels like to be illiterate, looking at signs or directions in a script that might as well have been Arabic or Chinese, for all the meaning it conveyed to me. This sort of isolation, though, can be restful and conducive to contemplation. Not that I've reached satori, alas: it was too hot for enlightenment . . .