Today at 2 p.m. dark clouds loomed high in the sky and everything was a little still. Then the wind whipped up suddenly, the trees and grasses waved around orgiastically, there was thunder and lightning. Within 20 minutes the sky turned dark as night and the rain lashed everything. At the time I was eating lunch with Manoj, my colleague at the Centre for Peace Research. We hurried to his motorbike and flew back to the Centre while the rain pelted and stung. The monsoon began a little late this year and has ended a little late as well, so I'm able to see the tail end of it. This is the third big rain since I arrived (one was in Delhi and caught me on the way to my plane here). It's a wonderful thing, this transformation of what is punishingly hot into the cool and soothing, at least if you have a dry place to be. Through the wind and mist, I saw a lone Indian woman in her saree holding an infant close under a tree to shelter from it.
The monsoon is an occasion for everyone to empty out of the building and stand around under the portico entrance enjoying it. Everyone relaxes and smiles and laughs at the people who got caught in it. Now the rain is steady but unrelenting. Looking out the window is like looking at the landscape from underwater, which it of course is. The field outside is becoming a series of lake archipelagos and the wind sweeps the rain in sheets. In town it will be flooding dangerously in the streets, halting and snarling traffic, which is likely to stay snarled even after it stops. It puts a damper on my plans to go to one of the oldest and most important ghats in the city tonight to see the first big night of public Durga festivals. It will be impossible to get through the city, and possibly dangerous (not from the people, from the flooding). Last time we lost power for hours. (Then everyone comes out into the hall as well and socializes and watches the rain.) ht now, we have it, fingers crossed. But there goes my appointment to have the satellite tv and printer installed at my flat this afternoon....
Today gives a small inkling of what it must have been like for thousands of years for the dry, hot, awful weather of the earlier part of the summer to finally break. With the coming of the monsoon there would be water for the crops (agriculture commands the greatest number of Indian workers still), and for the people after a long period of deprivation. The monsoon was critical to the very continuation of Indian civilization, but it was not without its own evils, for all the pleasurea of fertility and coolness it brought. If the monsoon was not plentiful enough, the crops would fail. If it was too much (and even if it wasn't) buildings and homes and people would wash away in the floods. Every years in Varanasi, Ganga climbs up the steps of the ghat and washes away buildings and a part of a temple or two.
The now ongoing autumn festival, perhaps the most important of the ritual year, lasts nine nights and celebrates Durga, the warrior aspect of the Goddess, whom we met in an earlier post, and who comes home this time of year to visit her parents. Durga puja marks the seasonal transition from the fierce monsoon to the mild weather of the autumn and its harvest. Now that the monsoon has come to a close (nearly!), this is the time to enjoy its fruits.
Alas, I won't be able to go into town because of the flooding, though I'm hoping to attend the celebration at a specially constructed pandal on campus, which I watchede folks put the finishing touches on last night. A pandal is something like a Mummer's float, but stationary. The one on campus is commercially sponsored, but communities traditionally construct and sponsor pandals and vie to make the best one. There are 175, Manoj says, in the city, and the papers are full of how the pandal committeess are always violating construction regulations and the police don't do a thing! The one I saw last night is a wildly decorated tableau of ten-armed Durga slaying the demon Mahishasur, who comes out of the mouth of the lion that later becomes her vehicle (each god's chosen form of transportwhat the gods tool around on). At her side are her daughters by Shiva, Saraswati (the brainy one), Lakshmi (the wealthy one), and her sons Ganesh (the scholarly one) and Kartiikeya (the leader of warriors). Also present are Ganesh's pet rat, Kartikeya's peacock and somebody's eagle. I'll have to fill in more details later.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Cows on Twitter
Shashi Tharoor is a hotshot Indian policitian with prospects, currently Minister of State for External Affairs and MP from a district in Kerala. He nearly won the campaign for UN Secretary General after seven years as UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information under Kofi Anaan. He has a reputation as a human rights advocate.
A sophisticated guy, unlikely to be caught in a Twitter scandal about religious and political sensitivity.
Maybe sophisticated is the problem.
Asked by a journalist if he would be traveling "cattle class" to his home district in Kerala as part of recent austerity measures for government officials conspiculously adopted even by Sonia Gandhi, he twittered this:
The ensuing Congress scandal, cheerfully fanned by media, who acted amused, was serious enough to send him, hat in hand, to Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress party, to make an apology so he could keep his job.
The verdict: insensitivity by haves and the opportunity to score on a rival. A volatile mixture of media and identity politics, the familiar democratic brew. What's interesting is WHAT sets off different cultural groups and what symbols come to stand for conflicts that are always there, waiting.
A sophisticated guy, unlikely to be caught in a Twitter scandal about religious and political sensitivity.
Maybe sophisticated is the problem.
Asked by a journalist if he would be traveling "cattle class" to his home district in Kerala as part of recent austerity measures for government officials conspiculously adopted even by Sonia Gandhi, he twittered this:
"Absolutely, in cattle class in solidarity with all our holy cows."The joke (his defense) was received as careless disdain for travelers without tax-supported perks of their own, a lack of appreciation for the conditions in which ordinary Indians do travel, an insult to cows which are holy in India, and dismissiveness of government efforts to cut back. This from somebody who had to be told to vacate a five star hotel where he and a colleague had lived high on the hog for more than three months.
The ensuing Congress scandal, cheerfully fanned by media, who acted amused, was serious enough to send him, hat in hand, to Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress party, to make an apology so he could keep his job.
The verdict: insensitivity by haves and the opportunity to score on a rival. A volatile mixture of media and identity politics, the familiar democratic brew. What's interesting is WHAT sets off different cultural groups and what symbols come to stand for conflicts that are always there, waiting.
How to Clean an Indian Floor
I’ve moved into my flat, but it will be a while before I’m really LIVING in it. It's on the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) campus in Hyderabad colony, the name for the particular group of flats. I’m about 30 minutes' walk from the Faculty of Social Sciences where I’m working when I’m not going to town. The most prestigious professors and administrators occupy quite luxurious houses laid out in several rows nearby called the Principals’ colony. Hyderabad is much less luxurious than that but amply comfortable. It houses middle level administrators, readers and lecturers, and visiting folks like me. My flat has two bedrooms, a study, two bathrooms, one Indian style, one Western (thank you, though a friend swears by regular use of Indian style). The Western style has a toilet alcove, shower room (water faucets on the wall, hot water tank above and what my colleagues call a “geezer” (geyser), which makes me grin, and a sink alcove. Two outside balconies, one small, one larger and more sheltered--therefore cooler--but it’s already a little hot to sit outside comfortably by 7.30 a.m. The walls are kind of lemony. There are ceiling fans. Each window is shuttered and fitted with burglar or monkey bars (depends on your sense of what to worry about), though it’s a no crime area except for bike thefts.
I have a nice new red refrigerator sitting in the dining room because that’s where the plug is. It doesn't work, which makes it hard to eat at home right now. I have a two-burner hotplate in the kitchen and a filtered water system that empties into the sink and is separate from the regular tap. A few mornings ago I cleaned the floor Indian style. (It being India, there are many styles. This is a method used around here by traditional women who work as maids and cooks.)
You fill a bucket with water and sling it, and I mean sling it, over the stone floors and then use a long-handled wiper (think of a car wiper blade almost a yard long fixed perpendicularly to a long handle). All the grit and dust dissolve in the water, and the wiper pushes it along. The floors are pitched to make the water from all the rooms in the house eventually move toward drains in the kitchen and bathroom. This is hard work since you have to wait for the bucket to fill from the tap and carry it, sling out the water with what i would call controlled abandon(there is a certain pent up aggression that gets joyfully released by this), and go back for more. It takes quite a number of buckets (the joyfulness margin of utility diminishing correspondingly).Wrestling the wiper is hardest of all. A lot of aerobic muscle goes into slinging and wiping to send all the water full of grit and dust on its appointed path. It took me about two hours to clean the floors this way. Frankly, I flunked the Indian wife test. There were big puddles left where I didn’t wipe properly, and I certainly didn’t get all the grit. I was drenched in sweat the whole time (it was over 90 degrees inside) and I had to periodically retire to the one air-conditioned bedroom for a bit of a breather.
You do it all barefoot as you do everything inside barefoot. You can tell if any grittiness is left with your bare feet, which are enjoying padding around in all the water, though you have to step carefully because you’re walking on slick stone, and could fall and crack your skull open. It’s kind of like Ganga flooding the house. The current goes into every room and rinses it clean—-purifies it--and blesses the house with smooth clean floors.
I have a nice new red refrigerator sitting in the dining room because that’s where the plug is. It doesn't work, which makes it hard to eat at home right now. I have a two-burner hotplate in the kitchen and a filtered water system that empties into the sink and is separate from the regular tap. A few mornings ago I cleaned the floor Indian style. (It being India, there are many styles. This is a method used around here by traditional women who work as maids and cooks.)
You fill a bucket with water and sling it, and I mean sling it, over the stone floors and then use a long-handled wiper (think of a car wiper blade almost a yard long fixed perpendicularly to a long handle). All the grit and dust dissolve in the water, and the wiper pushes it along. The floors are pitched to make the water from all the rooms in the house eventually move toward drains in the kitchen and bathroom. This is hard work since you have to wait for the bucket to fill from the tap and carry it, sling out the water with what i would call controlled abandon(there is a certain pent up aggression that gets joyfully released by this), and go back for more. It takes quite a number of buckets (the joyfulness margin of utility diminishing correspondingly).Wrestling the wiper is hardest of all. A lot of aerobic muscle goes into slinging and wiping to send all the water full of grit and dust on its appointed path. It took me about two hours to clean the floors this way. Frankly, I flunked the Indian wife test. There were big puddles left where I didn’t wipe properly, and I certainly didn’t get all the grit. I was drenched in sweat the whole time (it was over 90 degrees inside) and I had to periodically retire to the one air-conditioned bedroom for a bit of a breather.
You do it all barefoot as you do everything inside barefoot. You can tell if any grittiness is left with your bare feet, which are enjoying padding around in all the water, though you have to step carefully because you’re walking on slick stone, and could fall and crack your skull open. It’s kind of like Ganga flooding the house. The current goes into every room and rinses it clean—-purifies it--and blesses the house with smooth clean floors.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Just So Stories: Parable of the Tub
As a young strong man beloved by his people, so says the guide, the Mughal emperor Humayun (see previous post) slipped in the bathtub (all that marble), cracked his skull and died. This is a good story, immediately vivid and sympathetic for certain audiences. It comments on the leveling power of death, which comes even to emperors who command the universe, which they are always having to extend or reconquer. In the hands of my guide, a cheerleader for India’s rising middle class, himself a proud member, it’s a very middle class story.
By that I mean it’s a cautionary, unheroic tale with a little schadenfreude thrown in, not of death in battle, or from heartbreak or assassination by relatives, or martyrdom, but from the impersonal treachery of aspirational domesticity: marble tubs that, regardless of their private status as evidence that you are somebody, reach out and grab you if you do not possess the attentive foresight (non-slip bath mats!) that is central to middle class virtue. Even if you do.
Humayun, mystic and astrologist as well as emperor, carrying the dynastic curse of addiction—-opium, for him--somewhat unfairly tagged as the non-achiever of the dynastic line, slipped (say the scholars) descending the stairs of his observatory in Delhi. Here’s how Wikipedia tells it (also more colorfully than the scholarly sources, but at least it references them):
By that I mean it’s a cautionary, unheroic tale with a little schadenfreude thrown in, not of death in battle, or from heartbreak or assassination by relatives, or martyrdom, but from the impersonal treachery of aspirational domesticity: marble tubs that, regardless of their private status as evidence that you are somebody, reach out and grab you if you do not possess the attentive foresight (non-slip bath mats!) that is central to middle class virtue. Even if you do.
Humayun, mystic and astrologist as well as emperor, carrying the dynastic curse of addiction—-opium, for him--somewhat unfairly tagged as the non-achiever of the dynastic line, slipped (say the scholars) descending the stairs of his observatory in Delhi. Here’s how Wikipedia tells it (also more colorfully than the scholarly sources, but at least it references them):
On March 4, 1556, Humayun, his arms full of books, was descending the staircase from his library when the muezzin announced the Adhan (the call to prayer). It was his habit, wherever he heard the summons, to bow his knee in holy reverence. Kneeling, he caught his foot in his robe, tumbled down several steps and hit his temple on a rugged stone edge. He died three days later.This is a more remote and scholarly death, certainly not the right reward for piety. If the steps in Purana Qila were anything like those to the tomb, treacherously slick in the rain the other day, I’m not surprised. Given that 16th century males might have been generally no taller than me, those were big high steps with not much tread. Akbar, his successor, was 13.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
An Unaccompanied Woman
My new status. Unlike the more circumspect Thai and Cambodian men, Banaresi men look boldly at unaccompanied Western women. This is never followed by comments (as it would be in Philly) except when I’m being asked, not in a leering way, though some rickshaw-wallahs are hard to shake, if I want a rickshaw ride. The look suggests my too available status. Unaccompanied women running around loose are a traditional peril in India, emblematized in the now virtually extinct (and never as prevalent as the British claimed, a topic for another time) practice of suttee. If men happen to learn that I have no kids (the first question) and on top of that no husband (the second), I become truly incomprehensible. In rickshaws I present myself as a married mother of two to avoid the hassle, though the visible absence of a husband is still a problem to be wrestled with.
Specifically, an unaccompanied woman may not climb the minaret to look over Delhi at Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in India, built by Shah Jahan, the fourth Mughal emperor and builder of the Taj Mahal. Jama Masjid was his last great project before his son Aurangzeb, a devout Sunni depicted as one of the great villains of Indian-- and even more, Banarsi--history, imprisoned him for the rest of his life (9 years) across the river from the Taj, then set in motion an animosity between Hindus and Muslims, on whose rough mutual alliance the stability of the Mughal empire had depended, by anti-Hindu policies, especially the notorious jizya tax. This was a tax paid by Hindu men because they were not liable for military service in a jihad. The disunity sowed by Aurangzeb’s efforts helped lose the empire to the British, who had been waiting 150 years for just such an opportunistic crack in Mughal power.
Aurangzeb destroyed the Hindu temples of Banaras to replace them with mosques, a pre-emptive strike against a city whose centrality as a place of study for Hindus made it a strategic threat, and against lingam worship, a particular abomination from the Mughal point of view: all those licked and worshiped phalluses. It was the second time the Muslims did in Banaras, the first during the original Muslim invasions of the 11th and 12 centuries. So the oldest standing structures here date from the 18th century. Banaras never quite recovered its former architectural glory as the “Athens of the East” in one European description, attained under another great Mughal emperor in this line, Akbar, who tolerated Hinduism and permitted temple building.
The most beautiful thing I saw in Delhi was Humayan’s tomb. The Mughal dynasty from 1400 to 1800 goes Babur, Humayun, Shah Jahan, Akbar, Jahangir, Aurangzeb. Humayun was Shah Jahan’s grandfather His tomb was built by his wife, the pretty remarkable Hamideh Banu, now become an unaccompanied woman herself, who camped nine years on the site to make sure it was done right. She met Humayan when she was 13. They were married on an aupicious date the groom, a mystic and astrologer, calculated with his astrolabe.
Hamaideh was the great Akbar’s mother, his name chosen from a dream Humayun had. Given her son's legacy as a great builder and religiously tolerant leader, she seems to have raised him right. When he was off on his military campaigns, he left her in charge of the empire. The tomb she built is the design precursor of the Taj Mahal. It’s based on Persian garden design (Hamideh was from Persian royalty).
To go there is to see something very special. I went on what turned out to be a monsoon day—the monsoon was late this year and has not delivered the usual amount of water (though floods are swamping Delhi as I write), as it has not for the last several years, another global warming indicator. Monsoon tourism is absolutely the way to go. The temperature is cool, other tourists stay away, the grass is green, green, slurping up all the rain, the sandstone is red, red, and there’s ozone in the air to make you feel good. As is often the case with deceptively simple things, photographs do not convey the sculptural seductiveness of those pure geometrical forms. Red standstone inlaid with black and white marble. The first onion dome in India, indeed the first Indian garden tomb. Its high central ogive ogive arch is also the first in Muslim architecture. The “roof" of the first floor is a gorgeous marble terrace, a kind of plaza surrounding the main tomb structure. Nothing sits on it except the occasional small marble sarcophagus containing the occasional small relative. The lovely gateway into the gardens frames the receding arch beyond, the entrance to the tomb itself. Passing through it, you are faced immediately with high marble steps to the roof terrace. The octagonal structure that forms the bulk of the building sits on that terrace. Humayun’s still, marble sarcophagus lies all alone in the center of the tomb facing east. To be in the middle of all this grand symmetry is nothing but beauty and calm. One of the best things I've ever seen. The formal gardens are landscaped with mulberry, African mahogany, teakwood and banyan trees, laid out in traditional Persian charbagh design divided by water channels or walking paths into four parts (char- four, bargh- garden). There are 8 areas so divided for a total of 32. A dominating north south flowing water channel runs from the tomb to the entrance. It reminds me a bit of the reflecting pool on the National Mall, which I have to think is a modern descendant of Islamic garden landscaping by way of the French. Beyond the margins are two lesser but beautiful structures, also tombs. One for the emperor’s trusted barber,the daily holder of a razor to his throat, and one for Isa Khan, one of his powerful generals. Surveying the gardens from the terrace, I thought of Monte Alban in Oaxaca, an enormous fortified stone plateau from which the Zapotecs could see the surrounding valley and, ringing them 360 degrees, the sacred mountain landscape. You could SEE the thunder god approach. Or any hostile human forces on the ground. Humayan’s (infinitely smaller) roof terrace is not unlike that in its idea, though what it surveys is not wild sacred nature, but nature dominated into the unambiguously civilized, a religious and political work of art.
Not so controlled and domesticated the day I was there, were wraith like women who seemed to live in or at least haunt the otherwise empty chambers containing and surrounding the sarcophagus, save for the bats on the ceiling. The effect was eerie. They had wild hair, their skin chalky with dust and poverty, their saris much lived in. They were very thin and gliding in and out of the rooms to see who was there and beg for change--unaccompanied women taking shelter in a deserted (as it was on that day) structure built from heartbreak (but also strategically to claim the future for her son) by another unaccompanied woman.
Specifically, an unaccompanied woman may not climb the minaret to look over Delhi at Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in India, built by Shah Jahan, the fourth Mughal emperor and builder of the Taj Mahal. Jama Masjid was his last great project before his son Aurangzeb, a devout Sunni depicted as one of the great villains of Indian-- and even more, Banarsi--history, imprisoned him for the rest of his life (9 years) across the river from the Taj, then set in motion an animosity between Hindus and Muslims, on whose rough mutual alliance the stability of the Mughal empire had depended, by anti-Hindu policies, especially the notorious jizya tax. This was a tax paid by Hindu men because they were not liable for military service in a jihad. The disunity sowed by Aurangzeb’s efforts helped lose the empire to the British, who had been waiting 150 years for just such an opportunistic crack in Mughal power.
Aurangzeb destroyed the Hindu temples of Banaras to replace them with mosques, a pre-emptive strike against a city whose centrality as a place of study for Hindus made it a strategic threat, and against lingam worship, a particular abomination from the Mughal point of view: all those licked and worshiped phalluses. It was the second time the Muslims did in Banaras, the first during the original Muslim invasions of the 11th and 12 centuries. So the oldest standing structures here date from the 18th century. Banaras never quite recovered its former architectural glory as the “Athens of the East” in one European description, attained under another great Mughal emperor in this line, Akbar, who tolerated Hinduism and permitted temple building.
The most beautiful thing I saw in Delhi was Humayan’s tomb. The Mughal dynasty from 1400 to 1800 goes Babur, Humayun, Shah Jahan, Akbar, Jahangir, Aurangzeb. Humayun was Shah Jahan’s grandfather His tomb was built by his wife, the pretty remarkable Hamideh Banu, now become an unaccompanied woman herself, who camped nine years on the site to make sure it was done right. She met Humayan when she was 13. They were married on an aupicious date the groom, a mystic and astrologer, calculated with his astrolabe.
Hamaideh was the great Akbar’s mother, his name chosen from a dream Humayun had. Given her son's legacy as a great builder and religiously tolerant leader, she seems to have raised him right. When he was off on his military campaigns, he left her in charge of the empire. The tomb she built is the design precursor of the Taj Mahal. It’s based on Persian garden design (Hamideh was from Persian royalty).
To go there is to see something very special. I went on what turned out to be a monsoon day—the monsoon was late this year and has not delivered the usual amount of water (though floods are swamping Delhi as I write), as it has not for the last several years, another global warming indicator. Monsoon tourism is absolutely the way to go. The temperature is cool, other tourists stay away, the grass is green, green, slurping up all the rain, the sandstone is red, red, and there’s ozone in the air to make you feel good. As is often the case with deceptively simple things, photographs do not convey the sculptural seductiveness of those pure geometrical forms. Red standstone inlaid with black and white marble. The first onion dome in India, indeed the first Indian garden tomb. Its high central ogive ogive arch is also the first in Muslim architecture. The “roof" of the first floor is a gorgeous marble terrace, a kind of plaza surrounding the main tomb structure. Nothing sits on it except the occasional small marble sarcophagus containing the occasional small relative. The lovely gateway into the gardens frames the receding arch beyond, the entrance to the tomb itself. Passing through it, you are faced immediately with high marble steps to the roof terrace. The octagonal structure that forms the bulk of the building sits on that terrace. Humayun’s still, marble sarcophagus lies all alone in the center of the tomb facing east. To be in the middle of all this grand symmetry is nothing but beauty and calm. One of the best things I've ever seen. The formal gardens are landscaped with mulberry, African mahogany, teakwood and banyan trees, laid out in traditional Persian charbagh design divided by water channels or walking paths into four parts (char- four, bargh- garden). There are 8 areas so divided for a total of 32. A dominating north south flowing water channel runs from the tomb to the entrance. It reminds me a bit of the reflecting pool on the National Mall, which I have to think is a modern descendant of Islamic garden landscaping by way of the French. Beyond the margins are two lesser but beautiful structures, also tombs. One for the emperor’s trusted barber,the daily holder of a razor to his throat, and one for Isa Khan, one of his powerful generals. Surveying the gardens from the terrace, I thought of Monte Alban in Oaxaca, an enormous fortified stone plateau from which the Zapotecs could see the surrounding valley and, ringing them 360 degrees, the sacred mountain landscape. You could SEE the thunder god approach. Or any hostile human forces on the ground. Humayan’s (infinitely smaller) roof terrace is not unlike that in its idea, though what it surveys is not wild sacred nature, but nature dominated into the unambiguously civilized, a religious and political work of art.
Not so controlled and domesticated the day I was there, were wraith like women who seemed to live in or at least haunt the otherwise empty chambers containing and surrounding the sarcophagus, save for the bats on the ceiling. The effect was eerie. They had wild hair, their skin chalky with dust and poverty, their saris much lived in. They were very thin and gliding in and out of the rooms to see who was there and beg for change--unaccompanied women taking shelter in a deserted (as it was on that day) structure built from heartbreak (but also strategically to claim the future for her son) by another unaccompanied woman.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
A Passage to India
I’m here! I had a series of travel disasters, self-inflicted, of course, none enough to sink me. I find myself lumbering clumsily through the world accompanied somehow by genies of good fortune who have my back despite my best efforts to screw things up. I did actually miss my flight to India, quite a trick. Most of the time I know that a departure time of 2040 printed on the ticket means 8:20 in the evening, but what with moving myself out of my house, my renter Adam Goodman and his friend Peter in, transferring my car to Sharrona and Ben who will soon have a new baby, and packing at my friend Litty’s, who housed me for the transition, I managed to convince myself, but only myself, that 2020 was TEN twenty in the evening. An angel of a flight agent rebooked me for following day at no charge, (there was a moment when 3 agents, all working class Philly girls of a certain age, were huddled putting the thing together for me, I bless them) .
For my sins I had a middle seat and a six hour layover in Frankfurt. FINE. Even here those genies were at work, as you will see. My friends Sharon and George rescued me with a bed for that night in lovely, green, restful Wallingford, and the next day I got to the airport with time to spare. By some serendipitous inattention of the flight agent and plotting of the genies, I paid no overweight on some very overweight bags (I was carrying all my books, at least 2/3 of the total weight the weight of my luggage) The plane sat on the tarmac for six hours after the time it was supposed to take off, hot and no food. There was a tail problem to fix, then an impossibly long line of planes ahead of us, while waiting we ran out of enough gas to go across the Atlantic, then we had to drive to the airplane gas station, spend 40 mins. filling the tank back up, then drive back and wait again for our takeoff.
My middle seat was between a young mother and her adorable, just learning to crawl seven month old Guiliano, and a lovely grandmotherly German. Mom needed help with the baby when she had to go to the bathroom or whatever, during which I played with Guiliano and looked around for things he could eat, the corner of my Kindle case, my bracelets, various toys, the disinfected seat remote, that sort of thing, getting him to smile, and just looking at him while he slept.
When they had thought it wouldn’t take long, and the inside was getting hotter and hotter, they let us off the plane for 45 minutes. Be sure and take your passport said the hostess. When we filed back on, guess who was the only person without her passport. So while I emptied the contents of my stuffed purse, frantic that I was about to hold up a planeload of passengers then 90 minutes into their waiting period, mom went back and retrieved it from between the seats where it had fallen. I wasn’t holding anybody up at all since we were due for hours more wait. So the genies were helping again. They helped the whole plane, keeping everyone remarkably forgiving and good natured about the wait. When I said at some new announcement that events were unmoglich, the German abuela (sorry, can’t remember the German word) , replied charmingly that they were shrechlich.
And that six hour layover? I needed every minute. The plane made up an hour over the ocean, so we spent a total of 13 hours on that aircraft and arrived 5 hours late.—the passengers were remarkably forgiving and calm, and we landed. My bags were transferred to the plane to Delhi, but I thought I was supposed to claim them to take them through customs before getting a boarding pass from Lufthansa. So I was the last person in baggage claim, sans bags, till the nice agent came out and explained, no, I needed to go on and get my boarding pass for the Delhi leg, time’s a wasting. I spent some time running around getting lost, only to hear myself paged when I finally surfaced in the proper concourse. WHAT? I had visions of the next flight waiting for me and paging to find where I was. It turns out you can’t answer a page in the cavernous Frankfurt airport at an airline desk, no, you need an information desk, which in Frankfurt was as scarce as water in a desert. When I finally found one, the alarmed agent there told me I had left my handbag which I knew contained all my money, my credit cards, medicine, and various other crucial things, medicine, BUT NOT MY PASSPORT, which I was now carrying in my zippered cargo pants pocket, at baggage claim. So I had to sprint a quarter of a mile or so back (having practiced earlier at the Swarthmore track near Sharon’s, I had a good fast pace—I also have had memorable sprints in Bejing and Charles de Gaulle) and talk my way backwards through lined up Germans (very cooperative, thank you) and passport checkpoints to pick up my purse, miraculously intact, then talk my way back through a different set of Germans and travelers and passport checkpoints, and run another quarter mile back to the Lufthansa desk, where I didn’t have any regulation documents since I had been re-booked. I had to go to another desk to acquire those—you get the picture of frazzled, furious with myself passenger, and MADE IT to the next gate. Who says you never get any good exercise on a translantic flying trip. The Frankfurt Delhi flight was, against this background, uneventful, though I had not slept at all, and so was up for about 30 hours straight, which was, from a genie point of view, perfect for making the transition to India time, 10.5 hours ahead.
No major disasters at the Fulbright guest house in Delhi, apart from losing my room key once. No, the disasters came when I had to fly from Delhi to Varanasi. Jet airways, my original airline, was on strike, so I was rebooked on Air India, which left 30 minutes sooner than the original booking. Alas, the cab to the airport was not similarly rebooked (not my fault for once) and the rain was ongoing, so there were massive traffic jams and flooding, and I ended up at the airport at 10:00 am for a 10:15 flight. Stilll they got me on, even though I had to go wait at two different counters to pay overweight, at the last minute, misplaced and couldn’t find my boarding pass (are you getting the pattern here?). I was the last passenger on, transported in my very own shuttle bus to the plane, boarding at 10:40, but the plane sat until 11:15.
I am a moving travel disaster, with a cloud hanging over my head like Al Capp’s famous Dogpatch character Joe Bftrsplk, from which everything falls out—keys, passport, boarding pass, glasses, credit cards--but the genies got me here anyway.My two days in Delhi were quite interesting. I survived a tout with my money intact, an adventure for another time since, in the next post, I’ll describe my visit to Humayun’s tomb.
For my sins I had a middle seat and a six hour layover in Frankfurt. FINE. Even here those genies were at work, as you will see. My friends Sharon and George rescued me with a bed for that night in lovely, green, restful Wallingford, and the next day I got to the airport with time to spare. By some serendipitous inattention of the flight agent and plotting of the genies, I paid no overweight on some very overweight bags (I was carrying all my books, at least 2/3 of the total weight the weight of my luggage) The plane sat on the tarmac for six hours after the time it was supposed to take off, hot and no food. There was a tail problem to fix, then an impossibly long line of planes ahead of us, while waiting we ran out of enough gas to go across the Atlantic, then we had to drive to the airplane gas station, spend 40 mins. filling the tank back up, then drive back and wait again for our takeoff.
My middle seat was between a young mother and her adorable, just learning to crawl seven month old Guiliano, and a lovely grandmotherly German. Mom needed help with the baby when she had to go to the bathroom or whatever, during which I played with Guiliano and looked around for things he could eat, the corner of my Kindle case, my bracelets, various toys, the disinfected seat remote, that sort of thing, getting him to smile, and just looking at him while he slept.
When they had thought it wouldn’t take long, and the inside was getting hotter and hotter, they let us off the plane for 45 minutes. Be sure and take your passport said the hostess. When we filed back on, guess who was the only person without her passport. So while I emptied the contents of my stuffed purse, frantic that I was about to hold up a planeload of passengers then 90 minutes into their waiting period, mom went back and retrieved it from between the seats where it had fallen. I wasn’t holding anybody up at all since we were due for hours more wait. So the genies were helping again. They helped the whole plane, keeping everyone remarkably forgiving and good natured about the wait. When I said at some new announcement that events were unmoglich, the German abuela (sorry, can’t remember the German word) , replied charmingly that they were shrechlich.
And that six hour layover? I needed every minute. The plane made up an hour over the ocean, so we spent a total of 13 hours on that aircraft and arrived 5 hours late.—the passengers were remarkably forgiving and calm, and we landed. My bags were transferred to the plane to Delhi, but I thought I was supposed to claim them to take them through customs before getting a boarding pass from Lufthansa. So I was the last person in baggage claim, sans bags, till the nice agent came out and explained, no, I needed to go on and get my boarding pass for the Delhi leg, time’s a wasting. I spent some time running around getting lost, only to hear myself paged when I finally surfaced in the proper concourse. WHAT? I had visions of the next flight waiting for me and paging to find where I was. It turns out you can’t answer a page in the cavernous Frankfurt airport at an airline desk, no, you need an information desk, which in Frankfurt was as scarce as water in a desert. When I finally found one, the alarmed agent there told me I had left my handbag which I knew contained all my money, my credit cards, medicine, and various other crucial things, medicine, BUT NOT MY PASSPORT, which I was now carrying in my zippered cargo pants pocket, at baggage claim. So I had to sprint a quarter of a mile or so back (having practiced earlier at the Swarthmore track near Sharon’s, I had a good fast pace—I also have had memorable sprints in Bejing and Charles de Gaulle) and talk my way backwards through lined up Germans (very cooperative, thank you) and passport checkpoints to pick up my purse, miraculously intact, then talk my way back through a different set of Germans and travelers and passport checkpoints, and run another quarter mile back to the Lufthansa desk, where I didn’t have any regulation documents since I had been re-booked. I had to go to another desk to acquire those—you get the picture of frazzled, furious with myself passenger, and MADE IT to the next gate. Who says you never get any good exercise on a translantic flying trip. The Frankfurt Delhi flight was, against this background, uneventful, though I had not slept at all, and so was up for about 30 hours straight, which was, from a genie point of view, perfect for making the transition to India time, 10.5 hours ahead.
No major disasters at the Fulbright guest house in Delhi, apart from losing my room key once. No, the disasters came when I had to fly from Delhi to Varanasi. Jet airways, my original airline, was on strike, so I was rebooked on Air India, which left 30 minutes sooner than the original booking. Alas, the cab to the airport was not similarly rebooked (not my fault for once) and the rain was ongoing, so there were massive traffic jams and flooding, and I ended up at the airport at 10:00 am for a 10:15 flight. Stilll they got me on, even though I had to go wait at two different counters to pay overweight, at the last minute, misplaced and couldn’t find my boarding pass (are you getting the pattern here?). I was the last passenger on, transported in my very own shuttle bus to the plane, boarding at 10:40, but the plane sat until 11:15.
I am a moving travel disaster, with a cloud hanging over my head like Al Capp’s famous Dogpatch character Joe Bftrsplk, from which everything falls out—keys, passport, boarding pass, glasses, credit cards--but the genies got me here anyway.My two days in Delhi were quite interesting. I survived a tout with my money intact, an adventure for another time since, in the next post, I’ll describe my visit to Humayun’s tomb.
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