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.

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.

Everyone Likes to Watch

I've been a little scarce in the push to get everything ready for my fly-away date --September 6 .

But must take a moment for these pictures. In one, Indian holy men, sadhus, peer through smoked lenses while Rahu eats the sun during the recent solar eclipse of an earlier post. Lots of Americans know the other picture. It has come to be seen, nostalgically, as an image of delight in new media and mindless submission to popular culture in the allegedly primitive 1950s: These viewers go toward the light -- the movies, our artificial sun and moon -- in their 3D glasses.

There's an Italo Calvino story, "The Daughters of the Moon," a magical realist allegory for our time--or not, depending on how you like to think about these things. Its first paragraph is a presumably real excerpt from a science article and lays down the conceit of the story.

Deprived, as it was, of a covering of air to act as a protective shield, the moon found itself exposed right from the start to a continual bombardment of meteorites and to the corrosive action of the sun’s rays. According to Thomas Gold, of Cornell University, the rocks on the moon’s surface were reduced to powder through constant attrition from meteorite particles. According to Gerard Kuiper, of the University of Chicago, the escape of gases from the moon’s magma may have given the satellite a light, porous consistency, like that of a pumice stone.

This in its own way is a fable of cultural collision. The collidee, the moon, is worn down and softened into a lighteness of being that bears, patiently, the traces of its traumatic encounter with the collider (in my wild reach for fabulist parallels, the fire and dazzle of India.)

It's a different fable from the one about being reborn as a whole new person. You might say both are true stories. I like this one better.

My Name is Khan

New York Times: Shah Rukh Khan, understandably annoyed from being detained by immigration officials at a New Jerey airport last Friday, had this to say: "The US doesn't lead an isolated, parallel universe existence...there is a whole world which makes all the good and bad that is happening. So if we are scared of violence and terrorisim, all of us are responsible for it. It's not that the world is and America is not."

Kipp Report: The king of Bollywood began his acting career in television; in 1988, he landed the role of Abhimanyu Rai in a popular series called Fauji, and in 1989, he acted as Senior in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, among others. In 1992, he made his film debut in as Raj Mathur Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman. He has since made over 70 movies, many of which have been successful. One of his films, the 1995 hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, remained in cinemas across India for over 10 years. His latest project, My Name is Khan, is about racial profiling, making the incident at Newark airport last week ironic. He was travelling to the US to promote his movie, but was detained for questioning as part of routine security checks.

Natural Analogues

I had to post this image by Ed Kashi (note the match with Varanasi's most ancient name) for Corbis in today's New York Times: the ropey back of an old man against the soft texture of his hair and the placid reticulatedness of the sea. There is resilience and comfort in patterns like this one, familiar from river currents and tree trunks and rooted plants and, yes, the skin of experience. With a little effort we can see in such patterns cultural traces as well. Here is an analogue of Indian civilization, or at least the aggregate of historical cultures we clumsily call India, written in flesh. Here are grooves and rivulets that become tributaries and branches and alluvial paths for exploring, a footprint of becoming in time. It puts me in mind of something an old friend, Mike Adams, says. He argues that the profoundest psychological engagement with the deep pattern of life is imagistic. Without denying the power of seeing (honored, after all, in the title of this blog ), I wonder if any less intensity attaches to patterns expressed audially and proprioceptively. Still, this iconic image relates, as Hindisum does, the individual to the larger reality with which we are--shall we say, cosmically--imprinted.

Midnight's Children

So.....Happy 63rd Independence Day, India!
(Left-click on this image to see how dramatic it is, full size.)

Nationalism and tradition celebrate together in this image of dancers whose coordinated movements bring to mind red-robed Durga, the many-armed Mother Goddess in her warrior aspect. Instead of mace, sword, disc, arrow, trident, she hold flags as attributes of her power. Durga is the mother with a thirst for the sacrificial blood of animals as well as devotees. So reinvigorated, in some ancient versions she bestows fertility on the land. Durga originated as an mountain goddess among the non-Aryan cultures of India. She began as a liminal sort of deity, eating meat and drinking liquor and blood, which are polluting to Aryans. Likewise, her strong warrior spirit distinguishes her from the traditionally submissive Hindu woman. Later she took her place as an establishment goddess who protects the stability of the cosmos, a challenge she takes in stride and treats as play.

In Hindu mythology, she springs from a great convergence of light and heat energy emitted by male gods frustrated by their inability to defeat the dangerous buffalo demon Mahisha. They surrender their potency so she can save the universe. She operates without male allies--sometimes creating female helpers from herself on the battlefield--and always wins.

Durga is not the center of Indian independence festivities, though. That is Bharat Mata, Mother Goddess India. More about her another time. Consider, rather, the president of India, Smt. Prithaba Devisingh Patil, a Durga-like figure as Commander of the Indian Armed Forces. She is decidedly not Durga-like insofaras she must rely on her male and female allies in Parliament who both limit and enable her power.

Her address to Indian citizens on their national birthday spoke directly about communal violence (the commonly used term used for religious strife), the politics of water, the rights of women, swine flu, the need for social justice in the continuing economic development of the country, and the maintenance of India's ancient civilizational heritage. She portrayed India as the land, its oldest image, but as the "noble mansion" described by Jawaharlal Nehru in his 1947 Tryst with Destiny speech , an edifice President Patil said is supported by four pillars of democracy, inclusive economic development, social empowerment and a value system based on a civilizational heritage. Her speech was, of course, delivered at midnight, as was Nehru's on the occasion of the birth of independent modern India. With this new metaphor of the country as a living space built for and by its people delibered at the "stroke of midnight" (he called it the ending of a period of ill fortune brought about because "we have endured all the pains of labor," he created a new mythological space and time for the nation.

Industrial Picturesque

Reading Viaduct - Photos by Juan Levy

The Reading Viaduct is a mile-long earth berm along which the Reading Railroad used to bring anthracite coal from Pottsville to Philadelphia. It runs above Northern Liberties and offers an updated version of a strain of English romanticism that helped make Central Park. The “picturesque" English park was for contemplating classical ruins in a natural landscape, a nostalgic refuge from industrialization for the class that had brought that world into existence, not least with steam-powered railroads for transporting coal (Like good burghers, they disdained the aristocratic French gardens of Versailles in their own choice of an aesthetic).

Today the bones of this late industrial fabric are having a go of their own at nostalgia. Made softer by wildflowers and grasses among rusted rails and weather-carved wooden ties, those bones are quite beautiful. On Sunday, walking the viaduct under a big sky was akin to being in a spacious meadow where warehouse mountains popped up every so often.

Clusters of Center City skyscrapers to the south never intruded on the serene horizontality of the berm. Where small trees were burned between the ties, the woody remains were like black and brown sea corals with eyes at the end of each velvety charcoal knob.

This is industrial picturesque, a phrase that doesn’t properly capture the look of signal bridges made graceful and fragile (and classical: what is a signal bridge, after all, but industrial post and lintel). English picturesque meditated on the aspirations of classical civilization to timeless beauty and knowledge. American civilization was built on the railroad, emblem of the mobility and strength of industrial capitalism. If English gardens showed how timeless values surrender to nature and time, the lesson of the Viaduct might be that what once pushed relentlessly forward is now stilled and vulnerable--but also a gift to be re-adapted in this moment as a unique space for the community.

The berm looks out on (and eventually the Viaduct could connect to) surrounding neighborhoods, abandoned buildings, and artists’ studios. An imaginative reincarnation of the Viaduct would bring additional energy and beauty here. My "excellent adventure" neighbor Juan Levy brought me along on a scouting mission by folks thinking along the lines of the wildly popular High Line in New York City (Kate Brower points out the Viaduct is considerably wider than the High Line).
A couple of these folks, John Struble and Sarah McEneaney, founded a non-profit group in 2003 to develop the Viaduct as an open public green space with its railroad fabric intact. You can find out about their terrific work here. And this link shows how local artists engaged the Viaduct last April. I intend to join up when I come back; it’s a wonderful project.

The trip was partly a chance to test a camera Juan was recommending for India. Along with Waldo Aguirre and Brendan Keegan at Annenberg, whatever image quality I manage to achieve in video and still shots (and getting the images back here!) will be with the help of these good folks.

Totally incidental: After a fierce thunderstorm yesterday, tons of rainwater pushing the Schuylkill along were smoothly sluicing over the spillway by Boathouse Row. As they tumbled over the dam in the late afternoon, those gallons of muddy water looked like (stay with me now) gallons of molten milk chocolate and, where they violently churned up the river below, frothy whipped cream. It was GREAT.