Ok, listen up. The possession ritual took place in a temple known for this sort of thing on the sixth day of Navratra (spring worship of the Great Goddess) in Chainpur, a small village in Kaimur district, Bihar, in the Gangetic plain about 90 km southeast of Varanasi. Arriving at the temple early in the afternoon, we entered the courtyard to see lots of folks, mostly family groups of adults and children--two or three folks at the smaller end of the spectrum, and eight or ten at the larger, sitting cross-legged on the concrete facing the shrine (established beyond the porch surrounding the courtyard) of Harsu Brahm, a ghost with great power, a former royal priest who was seen standing on the burning ghat during his cremation at Varanasi. All that is left of his “seat” is a small stump of black rock around which his shrine is built.
Murmuring and chanting created a kind of soothing hum, along with the rather more staccato and excited vocalizations of the possessed. It went like this: Somebody seated would after a while start swaying back and forth, then more and more and more. Some folks were extremely active, crying out, slapping the ground rhythmically, rolling their eyes up and back into their sockets, their clothes getting disarranged. As far as I could tell, no one lost consciousness, though that isn’t to say it may not have happened when I wasn’t there.
Priestly shamans came and went from these groups, sitting a while, leaving for a while and coming back to talk to the spirit speaking through the possessed. Sometimes the shaman laid on hands, sometimes he fashioned an amulet for the possessed person to wear, or struck the possessed devotee gently on the back or shoulder with a stick, or gently slapped them. A trance might continue for hours in an individual case (some possessions had started before we arrived, all those were completed when we left three hours or so later, new ones having started in the meantime), often calming down for a while and then starting up again.
Most of these devotees were women, though we realized after a while there were men too. Maybe 10 or so possessions were visibly in process at any one time. The temple priests are of course men, descendants of Harsu Brahm himself. The decision to bring somone to the temple for the purpose of releasing a troubling spirit is a family affair, though we spoke with at least one woman who spoke of feeling peace and relief from her terrible headaches which no doctor has been able to cure, every time she comes there.
How do you know you’re possessed? Folks feel “heavy headed,” lose their appetites and experience general malaise. Possession may be tantrically induced by another family member where ill will exists toward the vicrim. During possession, ”anything” may happen. Women may beat a family member or start to remove their clothes (family sitting nearby will prevent this: to protect female modesty, we were asked not to photograph). I saw no one doing either. Whatever happens, the spirit is responsible, not the woman, and the women are said to (and say they) remember nothing of what transpired while the spirit was manifest.
In the most agitated possession I saw a woman sat on the ground cross-legged (this is everyone’s posture), rhythmically leaning forward low to the ground from the hips, slapping the floor with both hands and clapping them together before lifting up to sitting level and starting the same rapid sequence again. Her upper body described a fast, wild circle, her unbound hair was flying, her head swung around on her neck. Each time her hands slapped the earth, her head came dangerously close to the floor but never actually hit it. From time to time her eyes receded in their sockets. Much of the time they seemed to perceive objects in the environment. Her breathing and speaking patterns were hoarse and rhythmic. Her excitement would build and decline, and then she would sit listening to the priest. Towards the end of the possession she was able to smile at us. At intervals the priest questioned the spirit.
A possession can end only when the spirit speaks a ritual formula, “Harsu Brahm ki jai” (All praise to Harsu Brhahm), the sign that it agrees to leave the possessed person. In one case we saw a woman struggling in a weak voice to say, “Harsu….. Harsu…,” who could get no farther. The spirit also states an amount of payment for the priest must be made as among the requirements for what must be done for the spirit to leave the person. We did not learn what it was, since the priest we questioned happened to be a family member of the possessed devotee.
Local folks are impressed by the fact that people identify similar symptoms as possession. Another way to think about it is that cultures teach folks how to be ill, how to talk about it, and what ways it ought to be addressed. The people my friend spoke with told of going to lots of doctors, none of whom could cure whatever ailed them until they came here. One wonders if there can really be the funds or ability for such a lot of people to go to such a lot of doctors, though this temple is a famous one to which people come from far away, including, according to one priest, the son of a certain high official in Varanasi. Perhaps (only perhaps) this formulation is a way of comparing traditional to modern ways more than an empirical statement about alternatives. One also wonders why, if the shaman is known to be effective, people don’t come here first. In any case, everyone seems to know a story of someone in their own extended family (a very large group of people) who had some definite symptom—blood in the urine in one case I was told about—being treated by respectable doctors, such as at BHU—and then later being cured by a shaman. Probing discovered that the treatment at BHU was frequent and expensive. What the BHU diagnosis was, and what was the correlation between the cure and stopping the BHU visits was vague.
I take at face value the reality and intensity of this experience of auspicious possession for devotees. Per the above notion that cultures teach people about sickness, the open character of the courtyard made the attributes of possession widely available to public inspection by members of the community who crowd in. I even found myself moving my own head (faintly!) in time with some of the possessed and with the songs piped in over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t hard to imagine gradually build up the aerobic quotient.
Why mostly women? Women are generally considered more religiously sensitive than men, at least as devotees. To the extent that the disturbance is manifest in the family, the family is where the women always are. They can’t easily go out and blow off steam like men do (not to say the guys don’t bring it home, but at least they have that outlet). Since women have little status and identity within the patriarchal family (especially daughters-in-law—-most of the women we saw were fairly young, i.e., not yet likely to be matriarchs in their own households), this is a setting in which a huge amount of family and public attention is paid.
But what impressed most is this. Here is a public space where women can go safely out of control in a society where women are obliged to exhibit both subservience and rigid self-possession in public. Here female uncontrol is divinely sanctioned and occurs within the safe confines of the temple where women cannot be molested for their infractions--in fact, the infractions are not theirs, but the spirit’s.
The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Holi, the Hindu spring Festival of Colors celebrated this year on March 1. On Holi, men roam the streets in gangs. In talk about Holi in Varanasi (celebrated by Hindus all over the country, though not necessariliy in the same way—in Mathura, women are said to beat the men on Holi, for example), sooner or later women and men alike make the point that WOMEN DON’T GO OUT. On the eve of Holi, there are large public bonfires, the materials for which are gradually accumulated over the preceding month. Vandalism and petty theft is rampant, folks crash about stoned on bhang shouting rude and obscene remarks and drenching one another’s faces and clothes with hard core dyes—green, yellow, red, pink, blue--paintball style, and nobody can say boo. The small boys command the small neighborhoods and gallis (the narrow alleyways of older Varanasi), the big boys command the major thoroughfares. On Holi the fundamental male lessons of alliance, conquest and defeat are given visible and dramatic form.
During Holi might makes right, and men must band together to project might and defend themselves from the might of other men, and women hole up in the house since nothing,including molesting women, is disallowed.
Pause here to clear throat and signify that Holi INSIDE is no piece of cake. Did I mention that playing Holi INSIDE with the womenfolk of the family I was visiting and their brother, one delighted 14-year-old moving back and forth between inside and outside the house, himself dyed a muddy combination of many different colors, the women of the house poured buckets of blue and yellow dye on me and turned my hair and skin glowing blue-green? It washed off my skin, but the next day I slunk out to get my hair dyed a color you have not previously seen: shocking brown with, when i stand in the sun, arresting green highlights. Objectively speaking, the blue-green was more flattering to my complexion, but a Western woman with green hair who needs to talk to local people is a culturally impossible category.
So in possession rituals the women go wild where the community assembles, their families safely in attendance. Anything they do is not their responsibility. What mostly happens is their clothes are disarranged, an otherwise unthinkable condition for women in public. That and they are totally spent and calm by the time it’s done.
Lastly. At the center of the courtyard is an old gnarled neem tree with sacred strings encircling its trunk (wrapping trees is a practice that appears over and over in southern and southeastern Asia—sometimes the wraps are scarves), encased in four stone walls at its base, with sacred pennants thrust in the packed earth around its trunk to signal the apirit-power of the tree. At its foot are many many hardened blobs of concrete, somewhat randomly placed against each other. Each contains a spirit successfully exorcised and obedient to Harsu Brahm. (Other spirits have entered rice brought from the home of the possessed at the time of the exorcism' once the spirit agrees to leave, that rice is burnt in the fire pit of the temple.) A win-win for the spirits and the formerly possessed. The former are honored but confined, the latter are released.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
I and the Village
I spent the last 3 days of Navratra, the spring cycle of worshiping Maha Dev, the Great Goddess, about 90 km south of Banaras in the Kaimur village district of the stateof Bihar. Seema, my hostess studies village rituals in this area by comparing Kurmi rituals in the plains to those of the Kharwar tribe in the highlands, which is considered a Naxalite area. She and her husband are landlords in the village and owners of a farm that produces cereal crops and vegetables for market.
I attended a shamanistic exorcism ritual, a community blood sacrifice of goats (251altogther—folks were assigned a number, just like at Baskin-Robbins), and a non-violent sacrifice in which thrashing goats offered to the Goddess were made through her powers to lie inexpliably still while the priests offered prayers. I also trooped up a mountaintop at night to a 2000 year old living temple, the oldest in all Bihar and perhaps India itself, with only the garbha griyha standing following a large earthquake, or several, that leveled what was likely a large temple complex whose ancient pieces are strewn around the site.
This was all fascinating and exhausting, as the hot, dusty summer winds, the loo, are beginning to blow in from the western deserts of Rajasthan. The temperature in Varanasi today is about 108 F. (the heat, everyone says, is several weeks early) and will rise until the monsoon comes in June to punctuate it with violent rainstorms, the roads a running flood, as temperatures begin to abate in a process that takes until Otober to be truly comfortable. The dry heat is on the prowl to grab moisture away from puny little water-based beings. I drank 3 liters a day and wanted more. In this area the first gesture to a guest is a drink of well water, which I gratefully accepted while moving from house to house in Seema’s extended kin network.
One out of 10 people in the world live in the Gangetic plain, participants in an ancient cycle based on monsoon replenishment of the land and Himalayan meltwater replenishment of Ganga-ji. Most of the population in the area I was in are Dalits, and though caste discrimination is illegal, traditional hierarchies persist. The income of the poor is small, irregular and unreliable. In these parts many do not eat, in government parlance, one square meal a day, two squares being the government standard for poverty.
Land redistribution is the Naxalite solution (its goal unachieved, its means spectacular--of late blowing up railway tracks and road bridges). Friends argue that redistribution would create holdings too small to support large Indian families. Small plots also tie families to the land—even a single cow has to be fed and managed every day. For some members of the family to go to school or travel at all, a holding must support either a family large family to provide workers or be profitable enough for the hire of auxiliary workers. And whatever land a household acquires will be subdivided among the surviving sons when the father dies, making them less profitable still.
Add water table stress from irrigation of rice and wheat, water intensive crops to which much of this area is devoted, as opposed to gram and lentils whch drink much less water, against a background of reduced Gangetic flooding. For the past two years late and scanty monsoons and early heat have disrupted planting and harvesting, with significant crop loss. Food prices have risen alarmingly (18% since September), though not especially as returns for the farmer. Though the government pledges to buy crops at a guaranteed support price, it doesn’t always, which forces the sale of perishable crop at unfavorable prices for the farmers, who are not organized. My friends report near famine in the villages here during the last two years.
What happens if the crops fail? The state has reserve stocks—maybe enough, maybe not. A significant percentage is said to have been lost to mice, insects and water. Non-literate peasants forced off the land and migrating to the cities increases the surplus of uneducated urban labor and leaves the land to industrial interests that want to mechanize it on a large scale with destructive indifference to generations of social fabric for those who remain.
The political parties—the presumed alternative to Naxalism—have responded with high dramas swirling around claimed cultural and religious threats to distract from the unaddressed problems at issue. My friends think literacy is the best hope to counter the isolation and poverty of agricultural communities. Illiteracy is high even among the landed classes, who imagine that mere possession of land will see them through all futures. What education is available to boy is less available to girls, in whom families invest less resources because they will live most of their lives as wives in other families. There are programs that target girls for education and nutrition, and programs for food subsidy and distribution and microfinancing. How they work at bedrock is hard to know.
It’s not clear what would immediately change with literacy alone. Folks could farm smarter, perhaps the main point, might be cheated less often (or not), or make better choices for their children. But it’s not as though there are jobs in the village crying out for literate workers, and in Varanasi the unemployment rate is above 70 per cent, affecting both the college educated and the underclass. Perhaps the point is to set literacy in generational motion, both for its immediate pleasures (I saw newspapers and at the mela around the temple were displays on small paperbacks that looked like romance novels—also-----bicycles carrying folk-art decorated coolers of ice cream with cones strapped to the basket!) and long term gains.
Three days did away with whatever romantic views of village life I might have entertained. Settlements are dusty, hot and far apart, organized as clusters of small dwellings. Life expectancy in this area is about 60 years. Roads are narrow, mostly unpaved and difficult to traverse, not wide enough for two approaching vehicles to pass without backing up and going forward again, carefully. (The roads are built up from the fields to resist washing out. We rode in a well-traveled jeep (luxury mode both for the four wheel drive and the roof against the sun) piloted by an unbelievably skilled driver and accompanied by relatives and a young goat for the bloodless sacrifice—the fulfillment by my friend of a promise, a menotti, made on her behalf by a maternal aunt in the event my friend had a son, which she did five years ago. We had to leave the road and light out across the fields when roads were closed for repair or accident.
Most villagers move on bicycles (neither road nor bicycle lit at night except by moonlight) in wagons drawn by human and animal power, and the occasional motorcycle. Though settlements are scattered, everyone is connected to everyone else by one or two, not six degrees of separation. Against the sun, small dwellings of rammed earth with roofs of curved ceramic tile are constructed as much like dark, cool caves (no windows) as this dry hot climate permits. For the more prosperous who live in concrete and brick family compounds, electricity is simply unavailable most of the day, and expensive so that families with it live without it as much as possible (no light for curling up with a paperback or textbook). Prosperous landholders have hand pumps; wells near crossroads serve others.
Tradition—the whole fabric of festival, ritual, kin relations and the daily round of community life--is the major source of cultural cohesiveness and sociability and knowledge of the skills of survival here, though said to be weakening. How it will survive television and eduction, those powerful bringers of desire for what is beyond—both spottily availalble, one perhaps too powerful, the other perhaps not powerful enough--is a question for which there are no easy answers and much suffering to come in one form or another. Indian television has many channels devoted to puja (worship) and darshan (a ritual practice of gazing on the god). One ‘effect’ of television is to show village tribals and lowlanders that their distinctive rituals differ from those in the ‘next country’ (the term for the world beyond the villages, includin adjacent villages). They believe those rituals must be better or truer than their own and are constantly asking Seema hto show them these rituals they imagine to be so much better than their own.
There is a well known claim by Amartya Sen that democracies have avoided famine because the press is able to inform citizens of approaching food crises that generate political pressure to address the situation and get resources to those in danger. I’d say the increasing threat of famine in India, where Parliament has failed to address the substantive needs of the people for infrastructure and a sustainable agricultural policy, will be a strong test of that hypothesis.
I know; you wanted to hear about the possession ritual. Stay tuned.
I attended a shamanistic exorcism ritual, a community blood sacrifice of goats (251altogther—folks were assigned a number, just like at Baskin-Robbins), and a non-violent sacrifice in which thrashing goats offered to the Goddess were made through her powers to lie inexpliably still while the priests offered prayers. I also trooped up a mountaintop at night to a 2000 year old living temple, the oldest in all Bihar and perhaps India itself, with only the garbha griyha standing following a large earthquake, or several, that leveled what was likely a large temple complex whose ancient pieces are strewn around the site.
This was all fascinating and exhausting, as the hot, dusty summer winds, the loo, are beginning to blow in from the western deserts of Rajasthan. The temperature in Varanasi today is about 108 F. (the heat, everyone says, is several weeks early) and will rise until the monsoon comes in June to punctuate it with violent rainstorms, the roads a running flood, as temperatures begin to abate in a process that takes until Otober to be truly comfortable. The dry heat is on the prowl to grab moisture away from puny little water-based beings. I drank 3 liters a day and wanted more. In this area the first gesture to a guest is a drink of well water, which I gratefully accepted while moving from house to house in Seema’s extended kin network.
One out of 10 people in the world live in the Gangetic plain, participants in an ancient cycle based on monsoon replenishment of the land and Himalayan meltwater replenishment of Ganga-ji. Most of the population in the area I was in are Dalits, and though caste discrimination is illegal, traditional hierarchies persist. The income of the poor is small, irregular and unreliable. In these parts many do not eat, in government parlance, one square meal a day, two squares being the government standard for poverty.
Land redistribution is the Naxalite solution (its goal unachieved, its means spectacular--of late blowing up railway tracks and road bridges). Friends argue that redistribution would create holdings too small to support large Indian families. Small plots also tie families to the land—even a single cow has to be fed and managed every day. For some members of the family to go to school or travel at all, a holding must support either a family large family to provide workers or be profitable enough for the hire of auxiliary workers. And whatever land a household acquires will be subdivided among the surviving sons when the father dies, making them less profitable still.
Add water table stress from irrigation of rice and wheat, water intensive crops to which much of this area is devoted, as opposed to gram and lentils whch drink much less water, against a background of reduced Gangetic flooding. For the past two years late and scanty monsoons and early heat have disrupted planting and harvesting, with significant crop loss. Food prices have risen alarmingly (18% since September), though not especially as returns for the farmer. Though the government pledges to buy crops at a guaranteed support price, it doesn’t always, which forces the sale of perishable crop at unfavorable prices for the farmers, who are not organized. My friends report near famine in the villages here during the last two years.
What happens if the crops fail? The state has reserve stocks—maybe enough, maybe not. A significant percentage is said to have been lost to mice, insects and water. Non-literate peasants forced off the land and migrating to the cities increases the surplus of uneducated urban labor and leaves the land to industrial interests that want to mechanize it on a large scale with destructive indifference to generations of social fabric for those who remain.
The political parties—the presumed alternative to Naxalism—have responded with high dramas swirling around claimed cultural and religious threats to distract from the unaddressed problems at issue. My friends think literacy is the best hope to counter the isolation and poverty of agricultural communities. Illiteracy is high even among the landed classes, who imagine that mere possession of land will see them through all futures. What education is available to boy is less available to girls, in whom families invest less resources because they will live most of their lives as wives in other families. There are programs that target girls for education and nutrition, and programs for food subsidy and distribution and microfinancing. How they work at bedrock is hard to know.
It’s not clear what would immediately change with literacy alone. Folks could farm smarter, perhaps the main point, might be cheated less often (or not), or make better choices for their children. But it’s not as though there are jobs in the village crying out for literate workers, and in Varanasi the unemployment rate is above 70 per cent, affecting both the college educated and the underclass. Perhaps the point is to set literacy in generational motion, both for its immediate pleasures (I saw newspapers and at the mela around the temple were displays on small paperbacks that looked like romance novels—also-----bicycles carrying folk-art decorated coolers of ice cream with cones strapped to the basket!) and long term gains.
Three days did away with whatever romantic views of village life I might have entertained. Settlements are dusty, hot and far apart, organized as clusters of small dwellings. Life expectancy in this area is about 60 years. Roads are narrow, mostly unpaved and difficult to traverse, not wide enough for two approaching vehicles to pass without backing up and going forward again, carefully. (The roads are built up from the fields to resist washing out. We rode in a well-traveled jeep (luxury mode both for the four wheel drive and the roof against the sun) piloted by an unbelievably skilled driver and accompanied by relatives and a young goat for the bloodless sacrifice—the fulfillment by my friend of a promise, a menotti, made on her behalf by a maternal aunt in the event my friend had a son, which she did five years ago. We had to leave the road and light out across the fields when roads were closed for repair or accident.
Most villagers move on bicycles (neither road nor bicycle lit at night except by moonlight) in wagons drawn by human and animal power, and the occasional motorcycle. Though settlements are scattered, everyone is connected to everyone else by one or two, not six degrees of separation. Against the sun, small dwellings of rammed earth with roofs of curved ceramic tile are constructed as much like dark, cool caves (no windows) as this dry hot climate permits. For the more prosperous who live in concrete and brick family compounds, electricity is simply unavailable most of the day, and expensive so that families with it live without it as much as possible (no light for curling up with a paperback or textbook). Prosperous landholders have hand pumps; wells near crossroads serve others.
Tradition—the whole fabric of festival, ritual, kin relations and the daily round of community life--is the major source of cultural cohesiveness and sociability and knowledge of the skills of survival here, though said to be weakening. How it will survive television and eduction, those powerful bringers of desire for what is beyond—both spottily availalble, one perhaps too powerful, the other perhaps not powerful enough--is a question for which there are no easy answers and much suffering to come in one form or another. Indian television has many channels devoted to puja (worship) and darshan (a ritual practice of gazing on the god). One ‘effect’ of television is to show village tribals and lowlanders that their distinctive rituals differ from those in the ‘next country’ (the term for the world beyond the villages, includin adjacent villages). They believe those rituals must be better or truer than their own and are constantly asking Seema hto show them these rituals they imagine to be so much better than their own.
There is a well known claim by Amartya Sen that democracies have avoided famine because the press is able to inform citizens of approaching food crises that generate political pressure to address the situation and get resources to those in danger. I’d say the increasing threat of famine in India, where Parliament has failed to address the substantive needs of the people for infrastructure and a sustainable agricultural policy, will be a strong test of that hypothesis.
I know; you wanted to hear about the possession ritual. Stay tuned.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Memsaabs Bounced!
Only the special few have been tossed out of the 5-star Amarvilas Oberoi near the Taj Mahal.
What was I doing at the Oberoi, where Bill Clinton hung out when he visited the Taj? (HE was not thrown out. Fulbright’s India director, who also did not get thrown out of the Oberoi but was given a tour that included the Koh-inoor suite where Bill stayed, told me that one showers there in transparent glass and marble surroundings with a grand and unimpeded view across the treetops of the magnificent Taj.)
Around New Year’s my friend Megan, 28, invited me to come to Rajasthan with an intermediate stop at Agra with her mother and her aunt, both roughly my age. I readily accepted. We took train, plane, and car, the latter from Delhi to Agra with the garrulous driver, who honked at every living thing on the road, of a small white Maruti, our trip luggage lashed on top.
This is not about the Taj, but it is as breathtaking as one expects, a grand shimmering bubble floating on the horizon when we visited at dawn. Like good tourists we also inspected every other grand pile in the vicinity over the course of the day, all built by one or another of a long and fractious line of ruling Mughals with exceptionally testy intra-familial relationships. It will here be recorded that in front of Akbar’s tomb my salwar (the string-tied bloomers beneath the kameez), in the stuff of nightmares, suddenly gave way and descended to my ankles. I was lightning fast in swooping to retrieve them, and so shocked and awed only the immediate crowd (exposing only white calves and a failure to properly inhabit the culture).
After a day of taking in much weapons-grade sandstone and marble, we were ready for a drink. Alcohol is hard to come by in India, especially for women. According to Megan’s Lonely Planet, we could have a cocktail in the high class, air conditioned ambience of the Taj Oberoi—drinking Westerners of all genders among their best clientele—so off we went. This was a challenge for our driver, who couldn’t at first find any among the humble class of local rickshaw wallahs and taxi-ists who knew what or where it was.
But finally we drew up to a coach carriage roundabout in front of a faux Mughal palace with beautiful, non-randomly fair-skinned doormen outfitted in eunuch drag--elegant red kurtahs with gold detailing over full length ivory dhotis, pewterish gold turbans--gliding over the marble to greet our band of four, tootling up in our dusty compact with its canopy of mismatched luggage. We gathered up all the dignity our rumpled clothes and windblown hair permitted and climbed out to faultless manners and gracious greetings. Not a bad way, we thought, to spend time before dinner on New Year’s Eve.
We sent off our driver and got down to business. This meant submitting our bags to screening on a side conveyer belt in an unadorned niche off a side entrance. Something I’ve never done before in any hotel. This is 26/11 land, but the whole thing felt awkward as we hoisted our stuff on the belt. One could not picture Bill doing that. We were followed the whole way by staff standing attentively about, but not helping. As we crossed a courtyard to the lobby, one eunuch directed us to the pink orb of the late afternoon sun hovering over the carefully manicured terrace garden. Very aesthetically sensitive, us and the costumed help pausing to enjoy nature’s gifts together. And so, with Megan’s aunt briskly in the lead, we went to find the bar.
Oh, so sorry, said one of the slaves, effectively and expertly cutting us off like a border collie herding stampeding sheep. We must call and see if the bar has any room to spare: It’s New Year’s Eve. Right. At 4.30 in the afternoon with an entirely empty lobby. He smiled apologetically.
Everyone smiled, pityingly as I think of it now, at us. We sat in pleasantly cooperative anticipation, like it is perfectly normal for folks at swanky hotels to check in daylight to see if the bar’s full. By now us older broads had pretty much figured out the score, but Megan was still sure all was going according to plan, and dispensing regal receptivity as the benevolent mistress of the situation among servants attuned to her every wish.
The verdict came. Oh, so sorry, no room at all! Such a pity! Had I thought of it, I would have asked just to look at the bar to see what they would come up with to keep early drinking patrons from glimpsing Another Kind. But this was a “light boot” as somebody later described it, and all the players were perfectly behaved.
Where are you staying, one of the eunuchs asked as we walked out, so pleasantly only a cynic could be suspect. Megan named our cheesy mid-grade hotel. He took it in and with barely a pause and a well bred lift of the eyebrow—And how do you like it there? In this context a negative answer would have been pathetic over-sharing; an enthusiastic one totally confirming of our yokel status. We said we liked [the cut rate stuff] fine, and with a final display of gracious smiles all around, trooped out to the terrace to call our driver.
Across the roundabout, sleek rich people in sleek rich cars pulled up at the entrance to the main lobby. No one was rumpled. We waited in the cold, as it were, for our driver. When he came the doorman glinted engagingly one last time and waved us off, four more Lonely Planet parvenus dispatched without blood.
There was still dinner to be had before boarding an overnight bus to Haridwar. Our driver promised to query the locals for a good place to eat.
He must have had difficulty pegging us. Camped at a standard tourist hotel, we had nonetheless gone for cocktails at the Oberoi. And twice he had taken us to the bus station, the strongest possible contrast with the Oberoi. So where did we belong?
With great fanfare he picked us up from our hotel and drove to a kind of thatch-roofed wooden shed with a Polynesian decor filtered through an Indian aesthetic, bad lighting, a semi-karaoke floor show, and food about which it is better not to comment. As we alighted, he happily waved his hand and told us: All the people from the Oberoi go here.
What was I doing at the Oberoi, where Bill Clinton hung out when he visited the Taj? (HE was not thrown out. Fulbright’s India director, who also did not get thrown out of the Oberoi but was given a tour that included the Koh-inoor suite where Bill stayed, told me that one showers there in transparent glass and marble surroundings with a grand and unimpeded view across the treetops of the magnificent Taj.)
Around New Year’s my friend Megan, 28, invited me to come to Rajasthan with an intermediate stop at Agra with her mother and her aunt, both roughly my age. I readily accepted. We took train, plane, and car, the latter from Delhi to Agra with the garrulous driver, who honked at every living thing on the road, of a small white Maruti, our trip luggage lashed on top.
This is not about the Taj, but it is as breathtaking as one expects, a grand shimmering bubble floating on the horizon when we visited at dawn. Like good tourists we also inspected every other grand pile in the vicinity over the course of the day, all built by one or another of a long and fractious line of ruling Mughals with exceptionally testy intra-familial relationships. It will here be recorded that in front of Akbar’s tomb my salwar (the string-tied bloomers beneath the kameez), in the stuff of nightmares, suddenly gave way and descended to my ankles. I was lightning fast in swooping to retrieve them, and so shocked and awed only the immediate crowd (exposing only white calves and a failure to properly inhabit the culture).
After a day of taking in much weapons-grade sandstone and marble, we were ready for a drink. Alcohol is hard to come by in India, especially for women. According to Megan’s Lonely Planet, we could have a cocktail in the high class, air conditioned ambience of the Taj Oberoi—drinking Westerners of all genders among their best clientele—so off we went. This was a challenge for our driver, who couldn’t at first find any among the humble class of local rickshaw wallahs and taxi-ists who knew what or where it was.
But finally we drew up to a coach carriage roundabout in front of a faux Mughal palace with beautiful, non-randomly fair-skinned doormen outfitted in eunuch drag--elegant red kurtahs with gold detailing over full length ivory dhotis, pewterish gold turbans--gliding over the marble to greet our band of four, tootling up in our dusty compact with its canopy of mismatched luggage. We gathered up all the dignity our rumpled clothes and windblown hair permitted and climbed out to faultless manners and gracious greetings. Not a bad way, we thought, to spend time before dinner on New Year’s Eve.
We sent off our driver and got down to business. This meant submitting our bags to screening on a side conveyer belt in an unadorned niche off a side entrance. Something I’ve never done before in any hotel. This is 26/11 land, but the whole thing felt awkward as we hoisted our stuff on the belt. One could not picture Bill doing that. We were followed the whole way by staff standing attentively about, but not helping. As we crossed a courtyard to the lobby, one eunuch directed us to the pink orb of the late afternoon sun hovering over the carefully manicured terrace garden. Very aesthetically sensitive, us and the costumed help pausing to enjoy nature’s gifts together. And so, with Megan’s aunt briskly in the lead, we went to find the bar.
Oh, so sorry, said one of the slaves, effectively and expertly cutting us off like a border collie herding stampeding sheep. We must call and see if the bar has any room to spare: It’s New Year’s Eve. Right. At 4.30 in the afternoon with an entirely empty lobby. He smiled apologetically.
Everyone smiled, pityingly as I think of it now, at us. We sat in pleasantly cooperative anticipation, like it is perfectly normal for folks at swanky hotels to check in daylight to see if the bar’s full. By now us older broads had pretty much figured out the score, but Megan was still sure all was going according to plan, and dispensing regal receptivity as the benevolent mistress of the situation among servants attuned to her every wish.
The verdict came. Oh, so sorry, no room at all! Such a pity! Had I thought of it, I would have asked just to look at the bar to see what they would come up with to keep early drinking patrons from glimpsing Another Kind. But this was a “light boot” as somebody later described it, and all the players were perfectly behaved.
Where are you staying, one of the eunuchs asked as we walked out, so pleasantly only a cynic could be suspect. Megan named our cheesy mid-grade hotel. He took it in and with barely a pause and a well bred lift of the eyebrow—And how do you like it there? In this context a negative answer would have been pathetic over-sharing; an enthusiastic one totally confirming of our yokel status. We said we liked [the cut rate stuff] fine, and with a final display of gracious smiles all around, trooped out to the terrace to call our driver.
Across the roundabout, sleek rich people in sleek rich cars pulled up at the entrance to the main lobby. No one was rumpled. We waited in the cold, as it were, for our driver. When he came the doorman glinted engagingly one last time and waved us off, four more Lonely Planet parvenus dispatched without blood.
There was still dinner to be had before boarding an overnight bus to Haridwar. Our driver promised to query the locals for a good place to eat.
He must have had difficulty pegging us. Camped at a standard tourist hotel, we had nonetheless gone for cocktails at the Oberoi. And twice he had taken us to the bus station, the strongest possible contrast with the Oberoi. So where did we belong?
With great fanfare he picked us up from our hotel and drove to a kind of thatch-roofed wooden shed with a Polynesian decor filtered through an Indian aesthetic, bad lighting, a semi-karaoke floor show, and food about which it is better not to comment. As we alighted, he happily waved his hand and told us: All the people from the Oberoi go here.
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