I wore the first salwar kameez made for me to a conference on Indian higher education, where I was one of (many) speakers and needed to be professionally presentable. Monday I selected material for four more “suits,” two dressy and two everyday. They’ll be finished in 10 days.
What's a salwar kameez, you ask?
It’s the modern Indian woman’s compromise with the traditional sari (could kameez be related etymologically to chemise? ) It consists of a sheath with short sleeves and a scooped or vertically slit neckline, fitted close to the body around the arms and upper chest and following the lines of body to the hem, just above or below knee length with side seam slits. Worn beneath are bloomers to the ankle called the salwar that vary in billowingness. Draped over the shoulders is a long scarf or dupatta. It’s most likely to be worn by the young. The sari is a more traditional garment with a very tight top that ends midway down the rib cage to create a bared midriff. It has a longer dupatta than the kameez because it has to do more work. Instead of bloomers, a long rectangle of fabric ties around the hips and waist.
In Sex and Suits, Nancy Hollander says that the history of women’s fashion in the West is the story of copying male dress. This may also apply to salwar kameezes which I’ve heard it described as a feminine version of the kurta pyjama worn by men, a three-quarter length, sometimes shorter, loose shirt, slitted a bit on each side, with three-quarter sleeves and a small Chinese sort of collar.
Secular men of the world wear British-descended slacks, belted with a tucked in shirt along with the wear the kurta pyjama. Most common still is an untucked-in shirt over loose pants. Sadhus, of course, look quite different. Bare-chested, with markings on their face, long, loose hair and beards, they wear dhotis, a huge piece of white cloth wrapped back to front and somehow pulled through the legs to tuck in at the waist in back. I don’t quite get the mechanics but it never betrays modesty.
Gender-differentiated dress lands the maintenance of tradition on women, a traditional female task. In Varanasi, which is quite a conservative city, some young women wear tight jeans with their kameezes in place of the salwar, but female Western dress appears almost exclusively on Western females.
We wear it well because we know how to. It’s interesting to see Western women struggle self-consciously with newly acquired salwar kameezes (few attempt the midriff-baring sari). Wearing it is meant to signal some knowledge of and appreciation for the culture— that we’re not wholly outsiders. What it shows is exactly that we’re outsiders. The dupatta falls off, our haircuts don’t go with the drapey femininity of traditional shapes, our complexions are pastily inadequate for the rich and dramatic tapestries of color and pattern. We’re afraid to sit on the ground or the steps. It’s a lot of fabric for Western women to manage. We stand awkwardly amidst it while Indian women glide by with ease.
Westerners sometimes wear the dupattalike a Western scarf, draped around the neck with its two ends descending down the front of the kameez. This is exactly wrong. The point of the kameez is to cover the front upper chest area. Indian women put the ends of the chunri down the back and use the rest of it to cover more or less of that front area. In a sari women may show flashes of bare midriff, especially in the back, without causing alarm, but no clothing is cut to show or suggest cleavage. Same with legs. I’m the only woman whose calves I’ve seen since I arrived in Banaras. (I should add that Westerners who have been here a while live quite comfortably with their salwar kameezes.)
Indian female dress is an erotic (to my mind) dialogue of tight and loose, display and concealment to be manipulated at any moment by the wearer.
Fabric is sold in department stores and special sari shops in five yards that include the kameez and the already matched salwar, usually in contrasting color, and a silk or chiffon or cotton chunri. This is what goes to the tailor after you’ve been measured. The best (but more ordinary ones as well) establishments have tailors on site and a mind-bogglingly huge inventory of fabric colors and patterns in swatches that will be taken out and displayed to you for as long as you can stand it. Milk tea is served in small glasses to revive your spirits if you flag. If the structure of these garments is unvarying, colors and patterns bloom riotously. These are not Western patterns. They tend to be highly elaborate with lots of variety and detail. Never drab.
Where I went to get four more, the salesman said, “You are fair; you can wear any dark color,” which to my mind, of course, Is funny. Noorie, my comrade in arms for this shopping trip—it’s a bit overwhelming to do by yourself—was told that because of her fair skin she could wear any color when she was buying hers. Of course, we look at the brown skins that so dramatically set off these fabrics and imagine that any color looks gorgeous with Indian complexion.
Saris may be cotton or synthetic (big debate about which is better—synthetic has no-wrinkling to recommend it, but it looks a little differently (I haven’t decided about this) or, expensively, silk which unlike cotton is thought to be more resistant to ritual pollution. Vegetable-dyed cotton is both printed and embroidered. Hand-sewn sparkles and gold are considered very feminine. My one (so far) handmade is a fine avocado cotton with small embroidered polka dots of peach and and, about eight inches from the hem down, rows of different hues of peach, avocado, and chartreuse flowers embroidered geometrically to just below the knee. Delicate, feminine, set off with a peach and avocado chiffon dupatta.
My salwar, on the other hand, seems like a pair of trousers for M.C. Hammer. The waist is enormous. Peach, in my case. It drops in a yoke to just below hip level, then falls in small pleats at the top of the front legs but straight in the back. All this fabric is gathered up by a drawstring in a pocket at the waist.
Only it doesn’t COME threaded. You have to pull that drawstring through with a safety pin to wear it the first time. I did not know this, and opened up my newly tailored suit about half an hour before I had to get in a rickshaw to go to the conference. No safety pins anywhere! After pathetic attempts with a fork, I simply had to get them on. I ended up drawing the pants up above my waist and circling the fabric with the drawstring, something like the munchkin mayor in the Wizard of Oz, a human sized sack from ankles to rib cage and full of possibilities for disaster. This jerry-rigging definitely spoiled the sleek line of the kameez. I was more worried the trousers get loose from the drawstring and collapse around my ankles. I borrowed a safety pin from Pratima, who runs the computers at the Centre, and who sensibly pins on her chunri. I retreated to the bathroom and properly finished my ensemble.
Indian women do everything in a sari. They give papers, they go out with their famiies, worship, cook, cut grass with a scythe and gather it into great bundles tied up with a rectangular cloth to sell to farmers for their cows. They carry piles of cow dung on their heads (and the grass as well, and vegetables and lots of other things). They sweep the road in their saris. They manage their saris gracefully and effortlessly, or at least that’s how it looks to me.
When it doesn’t seem effortless is bathing in Gangaji. The men wear short bathing trunks or a kind of tight cotton jock strap rendered in different colors. The women step down from the ghats into the Ganga with sari intact. Here it tends to swirl around so they clutch it to keep their legs concealed. They don’t swim, like the men and boys do. Not surprisingly, there aren’t as many women bathing. Often theydo the washing, beating the laundry against the stone steps of the ghats. Both men and women work as dhobis, doing other peoples’ washing for money.
I will acquire a wardrobe of salwar kameezes but didn’t start out thinking that. Ordinary folks, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, vegetable peddlers, folks at temples, priests don’t seem to mind Western dress (providing shoulders and knees are covered). A high university administrator obliquely suggested I’m not quite kosher, to mix metaphors, commenting pointedly on the well dressed students at BHU (girls have dorm curfews, too: 9.00), implying a care for proper dress that isn’t reflected in my cargo pants and cotton shirts, meant for dusty hot journeys and sitting on the stone steps of ghats and temples. The wife of a colleague was dispatched off with graduate students to shop for proper dress three days after her arrival. In terms of what’s expected from peer adults for a person of my station, this one seems high on the list.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Osmagogic Varanasi
Turning onto the road that leads from Hyderabad colony (where my flat is) to the rest of the campus I am each morning enveloped by the sweet smell of jasmine. A few yards down and the air is entirely filled with cardamom. Someone has an ilaachi tree in the yard. Sundar (beautiful) and bura (bad) smells are densely, almost archeologically layered here and come on you unexpedtedly, by turns overwhelming and subsiding. Connected to the breath, they have an immediacy that cannot be ignored. I smell the body of the rickshaw wallah exerting himself on my behalf, the aromas of fried dough and spicy potatoes in the street stalls. Saffron in heavenly milk desserts. In crowds there is a more noticeable presence of soap, perspiration and breath than in the States—not unpleasant, more reminders of our humanity as emitters of odors and the trouble to which we go to laminate others on top of them. The reek of rotting food rises from the side of the road, weaker on campus than in the town gutters where trash and dirt collect. The flanks of ambling water buffalo and Brahma bulls radiate a warm, musky aura. Near them is the heavy aroma of dung. In the temple there are the lighter, softer smells of flowers and incense punctuated by the hard, sharp odors of burning and smoke.
The other night I was at a lovely three story hotel above a steep flight of stairs near Assi Ghat. Overlooking Gangaji , it is elegantly remodeled from the ancestral home it once was. Fifteen warmly intimate and warm rooms, all distinct, lovingly fitted out with beautiful Indian furniture and art, collected and commissioned by its owner for whom the making of this wonderful interior is a life project. Here guests are made comfortable amidst artists who gather to perform and work here. While I was there I saw a mural being painted by Suresh Nair, visiting as a professor of painting at BHU, and two of his students. The mural depicts Bharata Puzha, the goddess that inhabits Nila Nadi, a river in Kerala, where Suresh spent his childhood. It fills the upper half of a walll of what will soon be another bedrooml. From her lotus the goddess gazes at us with a slight knowing smile. Great whorls fill out the background around her. These look for all the world like breaking waves, almost Chinese style, but Suresh would only go so far as to say they were energy. From a spacious roofed veranda, one of the common areas a few steps away, one sees the lights of Gangaji, which seems as big as the sea in the dark. Musical performances are often held on this spot.
Several of us were dinner guests of Adam Grotsky, director of the Fulbright program in India (and a graduate of Penn!) who was in town, and his wife Olga, an artist in her own right, who is learning immersion Hindi in a school here. Also on hand were Surej and Ramuji, a musician and singer. Ramuji is a man who appreciates sensuality and pleasure. On this night he was wearing an especially fine embroidered silk salwar kameez of a peach color. When dinner was done and we were standing around talking, we complimented him on the lovely fragrance surrounding him. He pulled out a tiny flask of this magical scent, which he said was saffron and musk, and put it on the wrists of Megan, my Fulbright comrade in arms (with whom I had quite another sort of olfactory adventure recently), and me. Then he then scented our chunris, the scarves of our own far less rich salwar kameezes. He puts on this scent after his morning bath, he said, to keep him fresh in the hot weather. It was transporting, I’m not kidding. Every day since I have indulged my nose in my chunri where it lies folded in the closet bureau. Next time I see him I will ask him if a humble Westerner can acquire that lovely perfume.
It always made me a little sick to smell incense In America, like the reaction I have to the artificial-air smell of a closed up airplane that suddenly opens to admit passengers. The first time I smelled incense in India, it was rich and inviting, like it was in exactly the right place. It seemed to oxygenate the air instead of eating it. American incense must often be of an inferior make, like peanut butter adulterated with sugar, or artificially flavored teas.
Food is relatively cheap here (in Indian terms the prices are alarmingly up after more than a year of drought and worse is anticipated as a result of this year’s late and severe monsoon flooding); spices are relatively expensive. On my kitchen shelf there is a jar filled with fresh whole cumin seeds. Sitting on top in the same jar are pods of bara (big) ilaachi and chottah (small) ilaachi—masala for the vegetable dishes and lentil-mung stew and rice I eat almost every day. Next to it is jar of garam masala, a powder of spices including black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cardomom, coriander, bay leaves, nutmeg and mace that flavor food in very small quantities. I use ginger and ilaachi and sugar to make chai or flavored milk tea in a small two-handled rounded basin, the standard form of an Indian saucepan, into which I throw all the ingredients after I’ve smashed them with my heavy mortar and pestle. On the wall hangs a net bag of shallots (piyaz) and garlic (lehsun). Next time I go to the spice shop I’ll get cloves and bay. I have found a good spice shop but have to learn how to make use of it—how much one gets, what the names are. This is fun.
Culturally distinctive smells need no language to be received, but the layers of refinement that go into the combination and presentation of smells are another thing altogether, complex and with their own rules. Like saffron and musk. To return to the breath idea, of all the parts of the sensory apparatus, olfaction seems to best foster the meditative imperative to exist in the present moment.
The other night I was at a lovely three story hotel above a steep flight of stairs near Assi Ghat. Overlooking Gangaji , it is elegantly remodeled from the ancestral home it once was. Fifteen warmly intimate and warm rooms, all distinct, lovingly fitted out with beautiful Indian furniture and art, collected and commissioned by its owner for whom the making of this wonderful interior is a life project. Here guests are made comfortable amidst artists who gather to perform and work here. While I was there I saw a mural being painted by Suresh Nair, visiting as a professor of painting at BHU, and two of his students. The mural depicts Bharata Puzha, the goddess that inhabits Nila Nadi, a river in Kerala, where Suresh spent his childhood. It fills the upper half of a walll of what will soon be another bedrooml. From her lotus the goddess gazes at us with a slight knowing smile. Great whorls fill out the background around her. These look for all the world like breaking waves, almost Chinese style, but Suresh would only go so far as to say they were energy. From a spacious roofed veranda, one of the common areas a few steps away, one sees the lights of Gangaji, which seems as big as the sea in the dark. Musical performances are often held on this spot.
Several of us were dinner guests of Adam Grotsky, director of the Fulbright program in India (and a graduate of Penn!) who was in town, and his wife Olga, an artist in her own right, who is learning immersion Hindi in a school here. Also on hand were Surej and Ramuji, a musician and singer. Ramuji is a man who appreciates sensuality and pleasure. On this night he was wearing an especially fine embroidered silk salwar kameez of a peach color. When dinner was done and we were standing around talking, we complimented him on the lovely fragrance surrounding him. He pulled out a tiny flask of this magical scent, which he said was saffron and musk, and put it on the wrists of Megan, my Fulbright comrade in arms (with whom I had quite another sort of olfactory adventure recently), and me. Then he then scented our chunris, the scarves of our own far less rich salwar kameezes. He puts on this scent after his morning bath, he said, to keep him fresh in the hot weather. It was transporting, I’m not kidding. Every day since I have indulged my nose in my chunri where it lies folded in the closet bureau. Next time I see him I will ask him if a humble Westerner can acquire that lovely perfume.
It always made me a little sick to smell incense In America, like the reaction I have to the artificial-air smell of a closed up airplane that suddenly opens to admit passengers. The first time I smelled incense in India, it was rich and inviting, like it was in exactly the right place. It seemed to oxygenate the air instead of eating it. American incense must often be of an inferior make, like peanut butter adulterated with sugar, or artificially flavored teas.
Food is relatively cheap here (in Indian terms the prices are alarmingly up after more than a year of drought and worse is anticipated as a result of this year’s late and severe monsoon flooding); spices are relatively expensive. On my kitchen shelf there is a jar filled with fresh whole cumin seeds. Sitting on top in the same jar are pods of bara (big) ilaachi and chottah (small) ilaachi—masala for the vegetable dishes and lentil-mung stew and rice I eat almost every day. Next to it is jar of garam masala, a powder of spices including black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cardomom, coriander, bay leaves, nutmeg and mace that flavor food in very small quantities. I use ginger and ilaachi and sugar to make chai or flavored milk tea in a small two-handled rounded basin, the standard form of an Indian saucepan, into which I throw all the ingredients after I’ve smashed them with my heavy mortar and pestle. On the wall hangs a net bag of shallots (piyaz) and garlic (lehsun). Next time I go to the spice shop I’ll get cloves and bay. I have found a good spice shop but have to learn how to make use of it—how much one gets, what the names are. This is fun.
Culturally distinctive smells need no language to be received, but the layers of refinement that go into the combination and presentation of smells are another thing altogether, complex and with their own rules. Like saffron and musk. To return to the breath idea, of all the parts of the sensory apparatus, olfaction seems to best foster the meditative imperative to exist in the present moment.
Blackberry Gobbler
This is what comes of setting down a city girl, more or less, in a more rural place: Faithful housemates Rahu and Ketu were grossly slandered. They never ate my vegetables. It was a mouse (more likely, mice). This is the verdict of experts on the local microfauna. That’s good because Rahu and Ketu (not MY Raju and Ketu) are demons. It never felt quite right to so malign these watchful, noiseless creatures. One dispatched a bug yesterday before my eyes. Fast. Neat. I offer my apologies.
Nagas, undemonified, are altogether better. Primordial, pre-Vedic, biding their time. Buddhists also have nagas. I must consider other names more suitable for autochthonous guardians.
But who knew Indo-mice eat Blackberry keys? Do they do it as a strike against modernity?
Local wildlife so far encountered: Lizards, Bhrama Bulls, Water Buffalo, Dogs, Peacocks, Mynah birds, Monkeys, Snake (wrapped around a man who would like you to take his picture and pay him for it), Millipedes, Ants, Bees, Roach (one, ugh), Butterflies, Flies, Moths, Goats, Mice, Daddy Longlegs, Chipmunks, some kind of Weasel. Birds and Insects unfamiliar to me. I'll keep the list up to date as the parade continues.
Lakhs and crores of these (rough translation: many multiples).
Tourists, of course.
No mosquitoes.
Nagas, undemonified, are altogether better. Primordial, pre-Vedic, biding their time. Buddhists also have nagas. I must consider other names more suitable for autochthonous guardians.
But who knew Indo-mice eat Blackberry keys? Do they do it as a strike against modernity?
Local wildlife so far encountered: Lizards, Bhrama Bulls, Water Buffalo, Dogs, Peacocks, Mynah birds, Monkeys, Snake (wrapped around a man who would like you to take his picture and pay him for it), Millipedes, Ants, Bees, Roach (one, ugh), Butterflies, Flies, Moths, Goats, Mice, Daddy Longlegs, Chipmunks, some kind of Weasel. Birds and Insects unfamiliar to me. I'll keep the list up to date as the parade continues.
Lakhs and crores of these (rough translation: many multiples).
Tourists, of course.
No mosquitoes.
Monday, October 5, 2009
My Friends at the Malaviya Peace Centre
Time for me to introduce and say thanks to the terrific folks who are hosting me so graciously here at BHJ. I owe a great debt to the Malaviya Centre for Peace Research, a unit in the Faculty of Social Sciences, whose director, Prof. Priyankar Upadhyaya and his lovely wife, Anju, have a talent for hospitality and knowing just what a visitor requires for comfort. I am looking forward to many pleasureable hours and conversations with them both.
Then there is Dr. Manoj Mishra, a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Center who did yeoman work supervising and organizing what it takes to turn a foreigner quickly into a working scholar when I first arrived. Manoj made sure the furniture got to my flat, organized my cell phone, satellite television, internet connection, stayed after the refrigerator guys when the one I got didn’t work, advised me in my first weeks about how to do everything I needed to do and zipped around Varanasi with me on the back of his motorbike to help accomplish all these things. His help has been absolutely essential, and I thank him with a grateful heart. His beautiful and smart wife Ani took me salwar kameez shopping and fed me excellent Indian food, and his mother told me about her family customs. Both she and Ani welcomed me to their house like I was family. And Anchal, 4, their bright little daughter, danced for me on her goddess day and did me the honor of showing me her special coloring book.
Likewise, my colleague Ed Brantmeier, a fellow Fulbrighter at MCPR, Assoc. Prof. of Peace Education at Colorado State, and his warm and friendly wife Noorie, also helped me navigate the early days, taking me shopping for essentials, sharing their cook and driver with me, and feeding me a couple of times when I had no food! They have given me the outsider’s insider perspective on the Varanasi experience. They have been so generous and helpful, and their kids, 3 l/2 year old Noah, who goes to school here and is whip smart, and unflappable sweet 18-month-old Ian, are a source of hilarity and delight.
At the Center Ajay has made every electronic thing operate, Pratima has assisted me with Hindi and taught me how to work my cellphone, Sankeeta has come and solved the various hookup and physical problems associated with starting a new household, and Papuji watches it all and makes sure it goes according to plan.
All of these people have unfailingly offered their time and attention and help to do things it would have been very difficult or impossible for me to do myself. I thank them all for their kindness to a stranger and the welcome they have all given me. I look forward to working with this wonderful crew during the next nine months.
Then there is Dr. Manoj Mishra, a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Center who did yeoman work supervising and organizing what it takes to turn a foreigner quickly into a working scholar when I first arrived. Manoj made sure the furniture got to my flat, organized my cell phone, satellite television, internet connection, stayed after the refrigerator guys when the one I got didn’t work, advised me in my first weeks about how to do everything I needed to do and zipped around Varanasi with me on the back of his motorbike to help accomplish all these things. His help has been absolutely essential, and I thank him with a grateful heart. His beautiful and smart wife Ani took me salwar kameez shopping and fed me excellent Indian food, and his mother told me about her family customs. Both she and Ani welcomed me to their house like I was family. And Anchal, 4, their bright little daughter, danced for me on her goddess day and did me the honor of showing me her special coloring book.
Likewise, my colleague Ed Brantmeier, a fellow Fulbrighter at MCPR, Assoc. Prof. of Peace Education at Colorado State, and his warm and friendly wife Noorie, also helped me navigate the early days, taking me shopping for essentials, sharing their cook and driver with me, and feeding me a couple of times when I had no food! They have given me the outsider’s insider perspective on the Varanasi experience. They have been so generous and helpful, and their kids, 3 l/2 year old Noah, who goes to school here and is whip smart, and unflappable sweet 18-month-old Ian, are a source of hilarity and delight.
At the Center Ajay has made every electronic thing operate, Pratima has assisted me with Hindi and taught me how to work my cellphone, Sankeeta has come and solved the various hookup and physical problems associated with starting a new household, and Papuji watches it all and makes sure it goes according to plan.
All of these people have unfailingly offered their time and attention and help to do things it would have been very difficult or impossible for me to do myself. I thank them all for their kindness to a stranger and the welcome they have all given me. I look forward to working with this wonderful crew during the next nine months.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Paris and Me
Hilton, that is, have more in common than I ever imagined.
(Be advised that there's strong language for gentle ears in this one.)
Early this morning I walked to the small temple near my flat, as I do each morning, to watch. I sit on a stone bench where people sometimes sit before they step onto the raised platform that marks the boundary of the sacred space around the temple, which in this case is a kind of small chapel with a sanctum sanctorum holding a shrine in a space a little bit larger than a telephone booth. From the sheltering roof rises a characteristically shaped, orange-colored shikhara or spire. The outside walls of the chapel enclosing the shrine are a little larger in area, but not much. The chapel sits on a patio-like concrete base, a kind of smooth-surfaced porch supported by narrow wooden posts. Before it is a larger plaza area on which sits a marble sarcophagus of a great man, whose name I haven’t yet been able to work out. It was lovely and several folks spoke to me. Folks are so pleased to share their faith and so proud of it.
The biggest temple in Banaras is Vishwanath on campus, about a ten-minute walk from me. It was built in the 1930s as a response to the caste discrimination practiced by another extremely important temple with the same name. Worshp there is quite a different experience. The ritual is impressive. It unfolds much the same way each time, presided over by highly trained Brahmin pujaris. the first time I saw it I was gobsmacked, and maybe I’ll describe it sometime. (Hindu ceremonies are not short; it's a long description.) The smaller temples, vernacular structures of all different kinds, from the tiniest and most humble shrines to somewhat larger but still modest structures, like my temple, are far more varied in what happens there. My temple is a shrine to Hanuman, the famous monkey god who helps Rama win back Sita.
I bought some bananas at the tiny stand fairly near my flat (practicing my Hindi), then after I had worked some hours, my friend Megan (who studies the local prostitute community) and I went on a shopping trip. Shopping for anything but vegetables and basic household goods is a major affair logistically. The shops you need to go to aren’t necessarily close to each other, you don't know what shops to go to, if you do they're hard to find, nobody except locals can figure out the names of the roads (no signs, of course, and naps aren't detailed enough or reliable--the roads change their names according to which stretch you're on and worse, which side of the road) and the drivers mostly aren’t literate (30% literacy rate in Varanasi, a university town) so you can’t show them an address. Then there’s the whole issue of whether the place they take you is actually the place.
But we had Megan’s regular driver, and Megan speaks Hindi, so we were fine. We shopped for kitchen utensils and towels and sheets and saw some potted plants we liked and added those to the collection we were amassing in the tiny autorickshaw we were traveling in. When we were all done and worn out, Megan’s sweet driver Raju brought us tea in little clay cups from a chai stall. It’s the custom after you're done to break the cups by throwing them on the ground so they can work themselves back into the earth.
We dropped our stuff at Megan's flat and intended to walk to a nearby veg restaurant. We were navigating a narrow little gulli, the name for the small, twisting alleys for which Banaras is famous, when a water buffalo approached us going at a trot in the opposite direction. Cows and buffalos are all over the place, slow moving, and generally no problem but you have to watch their horns if they start to move quickly. I find them to be upstanding members of the polity. They’re calm, and the cows especially have beautiful faces. Because they're holy they wander anywhere they want. This bull was moving a little fast, and I suddenly saw he was having a bad bout of diarrhea. In that narrow little alley, I thought the problem was going to be sidestepping what was hitting the flagstones as he moved past, but before we could think, all this stuff came out of him and splatted all over us as he went by.
As point person I suddenly had big polkadots of bull shit, the real stuff, all over the front of my little powder blue light cotton shirt, my cargo pants, and my sandals. As he passed, I felt it hit my arms, my nose, my forehead, my chin and just above my lip. My purse also got baptized. Megan got splattered too, a little less thoroughly. I’m sure it's in my hair, so I’ll take a tap bath in the room that serves as my shower room when I’m done writing this. Well, we just stood there for a minute, and it really stank and I gagged a little, and I thought everyone would laugh at the pasty girls getting it, but they didn’t. Nobody wants to get nailed by buffalo diarrhea.
There was no question of going to the restaurant, so we went back to Megan’s, stripped off our shirts, put them under the shower, and jabbered about how much awfuler it would have been if we hadn't been close to Megan's flat. I scrubbed face and arms and hands and purse. We put on new shirts and went off to an excellent tasty meal of spicy cabbage salad and vegetable biriyani and some fabulous vegetable concoction called sabze kohlapuri, after the place it originated.
There is a passage in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the current hot novel about Varanasi, in which the protagonist gets a shit-soaked cow tail smack in his open mouth as he walks down an alley. Cows are very dusty here but they don’t walk around caked in shit at all, and until tonight it like seemed a very implausible incident. We didn't even get good old healthy cow manure. (I see women going to market balancing neatly stacked pyramidal towers of sun dried cow patties in large baskets on their heads to sell for fuel.) This was one sick ungulate.
The Paris Hilton part is her famous line at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards: “Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple.” The FCC socked Fox TV for some ridiculous amount of money for indecent speech. But her point was correct....
I submit truth as a defense.
Megan, who’s lived in India a lot (though this was a first for her, too) knew of a Fulbrighter who, the first day she was in India, stood under a tree and a monkey pissed on her. I've considered it, and I think it's worse to be peed on by a monkey.
After dinner, I loaded my shopping booty onto a bicycle rickshaw home, and the rickshaw wallah and I sped through the warm night breeze and all the people out on the streets socializing and selling vegetables and food. Balance in rickshaws is a little precarious, and i was juggling plants and sacks. At one point I thought I would lose it all, and the rickshaw-wallah stopped to help me reorganize. I gladly awarded him the extra he asked for when we got home.
Later in the evening I went to another little temple. After I paid my respects to the Mother Goddess, I was invited to share in a dinner prasad taking place on the hard dirt in front of the temple for maybe 20 boys in their early 20s, a great young-men age, which I accepted just exactly to establish my credibility with the neighborhood folks. There was daal and mashed potatoes and some vegetable mash I didn’t recognize in the dark (or the small portions I ate) and a coarse-crusted bread I thought at first was a small baked potato, all scooped out directly onto our plates by the hands of the boys who were serving it (afterwards they washed the dishes in the water spigot outside the temple that purifies the hands and feet and heads of devotees). Thus I broke most of the rules of eating Indian food that you aren’t sure is safe, and had a grand time.
When it was over, along with everyone else, I took my paper plate and threw it in the grass nearby. Trash disposal in Varanasi.
P.S. This morning, the next day, I acted out in fractured Hindi an account of last night's adventure for Irmila, the woman helping me clean this week. Much merriment all around.
(Be advised that there's strong language for gentle ears in this one.)
Early this morning I walked to the small temple near my flat, as I do each morning, to watch. I sit on a stone bench where people sometimes sit before they step onto the raised platform that marks the boundary of the sacred space around the temple, which in this case is a kind of small chapel with a sanctum sanctorum holding a shrine in a space a little bit larger than a telephone booth. From the sheltering roof rises a characteristically shaped, orange-colored shikhara or spire. The outside walls of the chapel enclosing the shrine are a little larger in area, but not much. The chapel sits on a patio-like concrete base, a kind of smooth-surfaced porch supported by narrow wooden posts. Before it is a larger plaza area on which sits a marble sarcophagus of a great man, whose name I haven’t yet been able to work out. It was lovely and several folks spoke to me. Folks are so pleased to share their faith and so proud of it.
The biggest temple in Banaras is Vishwanath on campus, about a ten-minute walk from me. It was built in the 1930s as a response to the caste discrimination practiced by another extremely important temple with the same name. Worshp there is quite a different experience. The ritual is impressive. It unfolds much the same way each time, presided over by highly trained Brahmin pujaris. the first time I saw it I was gobsmacked, and maybe I’ll describe it sometime. (Hindu ceremonies are not short; it's a long description.) The smaller temples, vernacular structures of all different kinds, from the tiniest and most humble shrines to somewhat larger but still modest structures, like my temple, are far more varied in what happens there. My temple is a shrine to Hanuman, the famous monkey god who helps Rama win back Sita.
I bought some bananas at the tiny stand fairly near my flat (practicing my Hindi), then after I had worked some hours, my friend Megan (who studies the local prostitute community) and I went on a shopping trip. Shopping for anything but vegetables and basic household goods is a major affair logistically. The shops you need to go to aren’t necessarily close to each other, you don't know what shops to go to, if you do they're hard to find, nobody except locals can figure out the names of the roads (no signs, of course, and naps aren't detailed enough or reliable--the roads change their names according to which stretch you're on and worse, which side of the road) and the drivers mostly aren’t literate (30% literacy rate in Varanasi, a university town) so you can’t show them an address. Then there’s the whole issue of whether the place they take you is actually the place.
But we had Megan’s regular driver, and Megan speaks Hindi, so we were fine. We shopped for kitchen utensils and towels and sheets and saw some potted plants we liked and added those to the collection we were amassing in the tiny autorickshaw we were traveling in. When we were all done and worn out, Megan’s sweet driver Raju brought us tea in little clay cups from a chai stall. It’s the custom after you're done to break the cups by throwing them on the ground so they can work themselves back into the earth.
We dropped our stuff at Megan's flat and intended to walk to a nearby veg restaurant. We were navigating a narrow little gulli, the name for the small, twisting alleys for which Banaras is famous, when a water buffalo approached us going at a trot in the opposite direction. Cows and buffalos are all over the place, slow moving, and generally no problem but you have to watch their horns if they start to move quickly. I find them to be upstanding members of the polity. They’re calm, and the cows especially have beautiful faces. Because they're holy they wander anywhere they want. This bull was moving a little fast, and I suddenly saw he was having a bad bout of diarrhea. In that narrow little alley, I thought the problem was going to be sidestepping what was hitting the flagstones as he moved past, but before we could think, all this stuff came out of him and splatted all over us as he went by.
As point person I suddenly had big polkadots of bull shit, the real stuff, all over the front of my little powder blue light cotton shirt, my cargo pants, and my sandals. As he passed, I felt it hit my arms, my nose, my forehead, my chin and just above my lip. My purse also got baptized. Megan got splattered too, a little less thoroughly. I’m sure it's in my hair, so I’ll take a tap bath in the room that serves as my shower room when I’m done writing this. Well, we just stood there for a minute, and it really stank and I gagged a little, and I thought everyone would laugh at the pasty girls getting it, but they didn’t. Nobody wants to get nailed by buffalo diarrhea.
There was no question of going to the restaurant, so we went back to Megan’s, stripped off our shirts, put them under the shower, and jabbered about how much awfuler it would have been if we hadn't been close to Megan's flat. I scrubbed face and arms and hands and purse. We put on new shirts and went off to an excellent tasty meal of spicy cabbage salad and vegetable biriyani and some fabulous vegetable concoction called sabze kohlapuri, after the place it originated.
There is a passage in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the current hot novel about Varanasi, in which the protagonist gets a shit-soaked cow tail smack in his open mouth as he walks down an alley. Cows are very dusty here but they don’t walk around caked in shit at all, and until tonight it like seemed a very implausible incident. We didn't even get good old healthy cow manure. (I see women going to market balancing neatly stacked pyramidal towers of sun dried cow patties in large baskets on their heads to sell for fuel.) This was one sick ungulate.
The Paris Hilton part is her famous line at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards: “Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple.” The FCC socked Fox TV for some ridiculous amount of money for indecent speech. But her point was correct....
I submit truth as a defense.
Megan, who’s lived in India a lot (though this was a first for her, too) knew of a Fulbrighter who, the first day she was in India, stood under a tree and a monkey pissed on her. I've considered it, and I think it's worse to be peed on by a monkey.
After dinner, I loaded my shopping booty onto a bicycle rickshaw home, and the rickshaw wallah and I sped through the warm night breeze and all the people out on the streets socializing and selling vegetables and food. Balance in rickshaws is a little precarious, and i was juggling plants and sacks. At one point I thought I would lose it all, and the rickshaw-wallah stopped to help me reorganize. I gladly awarded him the extra he asked for when we got home.
Later in the evening I went to another little temple. After I paid my respects to the Mother Goddess, I was invited to share in a dinner prasad taking place on the hard dirt in front of the temple for maybe 20 boys in their early 20s, a great young-men age, which I accepted just exactly to establish my credibility with the neighborhood folks. There was daal and mashed potatoes and some vegetable mash I didn’t recognize in the dark (or the small portions I ate) and a coarse-crusted bread I thought at first was a small baked potato, all scooped out directly onto our plates by the hands of the boys who were serving it (afterwards they washed the dishes in the water spigot outside the temple that purifies the hands and feet and heads of devotees). Thus I broke most of the rules of eating Indian food that you aren’t sure is safe, and had a grand time.
When it was over, along with everyone else, I took my paper plate and threw it in the grass nearby. Trash disposal in Varanasi.
P.S. This morning, the next day, I acted out in fractured Hindi an account of last night's adventure for Irmila, the woman helping me clean this week. Much merriment all around.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Blackberry Delite
I have a couple of extremely quiet housemates who don’t take up much space. Our deal is that I get the floors, they get the walls. They’re homebodies, on top a delicate green with a grayish cast, peach on bottom: Lizards, though I think of them as Rahu and Ketu, asuras who longed for Amrita, the divine nectar, but were tricked by Vishnu, then mutilated as divine payback for their presumptuousness and made half-nagas. For revenge they occasionally eat the sun and moon. My nagas wholly deserve their gluttonous appellations.
Rahu lives in the bedroom, sallies out often and watches me closely. Ketu is more reclusive and stays in the kitchen. My guys aren’t as fleet as their Thai cousins that you watch and watch and they’re utterly still, but avert your eyes for one second and they’re across the room. These two are slower and heavier.
No wonder. They’re pigging out on my vegetables and fruits. I bought a mess of onions, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, Indian hot peppers and a green pepper. That was when I thought I had a refrigerator. My new red one, while beautiful, arrived in an unworking state and had to be carted off in a wooden wagon attached to a bicycle to be repaired. So I kept them in the cool bedroom towards the moment when the refrigerator returned. For several nights, Rahu courteously left them alone. He seemed satisfied with his mosquito diet.
But then I woke to find a neatly dug hole in the remaining tomato. He had spit out the seeds. I was willing to share that much. But every night thereafter he feasted on something else. Same M.O. Each time, I thought, well, ok, but he didn’t touch anything else, so he must not like what else was on offer, and my remaining vegetables will be safe. But he was biding his time. One night he went after a bag of prasad (sweets given at the end of worship) I brought back from a puja and planned to open in the morning to record its contents. There had been part of a coconut in there, which I gave to my rickshaw driver the night before, and nuts, and a kind of white wafer, maybe made of eggwhites. I thought that was it. But there must have been something else, since I found its liquid remains the next morning.
He got more aggressive. He went after one of the potatoes that until then had sat untouched with the onions, making his usual neat hole with his pointed little snout and sharp teeth and digging out the flesh. Finally, he excavated the green pepper. One night I brought home a banana. I really wanted that banana, my only breakfast the next morning, but Rahu had gotten it! I was so hungry I just cut off his half and ate the rest.
The restored refrigerator has finally returned. I have cold water and ice, and an impregnable fortress to thwart the devouring thief Rahu.
But he had one more surprise for me. I brought my out-of-service Blackberry along for its address book of my life. When I took it off the charger this morning, I noticed the four keys at the corners of the keypad had all been gnawed—by Rahu’s sharp little teeth! He did cosmetic damage on three of the keys but shredded the surface of the backspace key which is now a collection of small sharp edges sticking up. Fortunately, it functions, so I just store it face down. This Rahu is a Naxal.
Folks are asking for pictures. I am starting to take them, but still struggling with the transfer. For some reason I haven’t been able to load pictures from the web onto the blog. Bear with me.
Rahu lives in the bedroom, sallies out often and watches me closely. Ketu is more reclusive and stays in the kitchen. My guys aren’t as fleet as their Thai cousins that you watch and watch and they’re utterly still, but avert your eyes for one second and they’re across the room. These two are slower and heavier.
No wonder. They’re pigging out on my vegetables and fruits. I bought a mess of onions, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, Indian hot peppers and a green pepper. That was when I thought I had a refrigerator. My new red one, while beautiful, arrived in an unworking state and had to be carted off in a wooden wagon attached to a bicycle to be repaired. So I kept them in the cool bedroom towards the moment when the refrigerator returned. For several nights, Rahu courteously left them alone. He seemed satisfied with his mosquito diet.
But then I woke to find a neatly dug hole in the remaining tomato. He had spit out the seeds. I was willing to share that much. But every night thereafter he feasted on something else. Same M.O. Each time, I thought, well, ok, but he didn’t touch anything else, so he must not like what else was on offer, and my remaining vegetables will be safe. But he was biding his time. One night he went after a bag of prasad (sweets given at the end of worship) I brought back from a puja and planned to open in the morning to record its contents. There had been part of a coconut in there, which I gave to my rickshaw driver the night before, and nuts, and a kind of white wafer, maybe made of eggwhites. I thought that was it. But there must have been something else, since I found its liquid remains the next morning.
He got more aggressive. He went after one of the potatoes that until then had sat untouched with the onions, making his usual neat hole with his pointed little snout and sharp teeth and digging out the flesh. Finally, he excavated the green pepper. One night I brought home a banana. I really wanted that banana, my only breakfast the next morning, but Rahu had gotten it! I was so hungry I just cut off his half and ate the rest.
The restored refrigerator has finally returned. I have cold water and ice, and an impregnable fortress to thwart the devouring thief Rahu.
But he had one more surprise for me. I brought my out-of-service Blackberry along for its address book of my life. When I took it off the charger this morning, I noticed the four keys at the corners of the keypad had all been gnawed—by Rahu’s sharp little teeth! He did cosmetic damage on three of the keys but shredded the surface of the backspace key which is now a collection of small sharp edges sticking up. Fortunately, it functions, so I just store it face down. This Rahu is a Naxal.
Folks are asking for pictures. I am starting to take them, but still struggling with the transfer. For some reason I haven’t been able to load pictures from the web onto the blog. Bear with me.
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