A Fine Balance: October 2009

26 October 2009

A New Year, A Hidden Treasure

This week marks two months for me in New Delhi, and finally, finally, I'm starting to get the hang of things here. Or, maybe really and truly finally get a sense of humor.

I will admit, there are times when India still baffles and enrages me---like, when, today while trying to buy a three-ring binder for a student I am tutoring (more on my new glamorous career later), I was first ignored for 25 minutes by the shopkeeper who was texting on his cellphone and then proffered, in this order, a plastic sheet ("sorry, ye three ring binder nahin hai. ye sheet of plastic from 1964 hai. Please keep looking."), half an envelope that had been torn down the middle, and finally, the only three ring binder that was in stock, which had clearly survived both world wars and been digested by a camel at some point. Or, the occasional man who falls off his motorbike while craning his head in traffic to stare at me.

But mostly, I am finding that my relationship with New Delhi is evolving beyond the first (primarily abusive) stages into something more nuanced. I'm not sure if this is love, or even really a romance, but something good is happening and I like it.

I. Coronation Park

What I like most about Delhi is that it is a city of multiple personalities---none of whom seem aware that the others exist. One of these dichotomies is the difference between North and South Delhi. South Delhi, where we and almost all other members of the middle and upper class live, is fully engaged (if not successfully engaged) in the march towards modernity, while North Delhi lags behind like the ragged entrails of the past. In search of a bit of this, yesterday afternoon we set off for Coronation Memorial, once the site of coronation ceremonies and ascension celebrations in India's past life as a British colony, now an overgrown plot not far from the Yamuna River where the statuary ghosts of King George V and several Viceroies were dumped and forgotten at Independence.

We arrived at dusk, after a metro ride from Connaught Place in Central Delhi and a bicycle rickshaw ride down a dusty stretch of highway rimmed by crumbling one story buildings and banyan trees with the glowing pink orb of the sun slowly sinking in the sky. Soldiers lolling by a clearing alongside the road claimed the park was closed, but after a few minutes of pleading they allowed us in so long as they came along as escorts and only stayed five minutes. Lucky for us meant the typical variety of Indian army escort--two soldiers leaned against the gate, smoking beedis until they were overcome by boredom after three minutes and left us to this otherworldly gathering of statesmen in the jungle. A small black bird perched on King George's head and peacocks meandered like shades through the long grass as the shadows grew longer and longer. In the silence I tried to imagine the grounds when Queen Elizabeth arrived on elephant for her coronation as Empress of India, with throngs of well wishers and Britons in full regalia, but instead found myself wondering if instead of the Yamuna River we had crossed the Styx.

II. Diwali

I know what you really may want to hear about now is the monkey we accidentally hit at extraordinarily high speeds (it wasn't my fault), but as that is pretty much the entire story right there, I will now enchant you with a tale about Diwali in Delhi.

Two weeks ago was Diwali, the festival of lights and the Hindu New Year. What this means in practical terms is that local markets that would otherwise sell bangles, tupperware, and Hanes underwear rejected by the first world markets, convert themselves for a short while into a mecca of glitter--snow globes filled with glitter, terra cotta statues dipped in glitter, objects constructed entirely of tinsel, vendors with dried fruits and nuts, and, in the eastern version of the Christmas spirit, speakers blaring Bollywood music at every corner.

In addition to it being an ideal opportunity for your landlord and landlady to invite you for the world's foremost awkward beer drinking and temple attending, it is also an open invitation for anyone with opposable thumbs and a lighter to set off firecrackers---and apparently almost everyone meeting these humble criteria do so. While this did yield a priceless sign on the Delhi metro, "No crackers allowed", it was also an experience I feel prepared me to better understand the Blitz or everyday life in Kabul. Apparently, common sense as applied to the Indian teenager specifies that the best place for lighting something like an M80 or a string of bottle rockets is in the middle of a narrow street or under the carriage of a car, which never failed to make walking outside after dark a terrifying experience. It brought me back to the old days when I was terrified of being electrified randomly in Delhi, though the chance of losing a limb or experiencing grave bodily harm did seem genuine.

But this post is supposed to be about how I have come to enjoy living in Delhi, and it still is. We did not explode, remained ambulatory, and did not permanently lose our hearing during Diwali, and we were invited by our landlord and landlady, Uttam and Poonam, to a Diwali drink. This being Delhi where nothing is what you expect, we were served beer and mini pizzas while Uttam told us a long dramatized story about the various shunts he has had inserted throughout his body, and were then forcibly stuffed in the car and dragged to the local temple by Poonam, who we have been instructed to call Aunty and who, I do truly believe, treats us the way she treats her children, albeit perhaps when they are wayward or acting disabled. At the temple, a napkin was promptly tied on my head and I was instructed to light candles while Poonam prayed and Uttam complained that his calves were sore, and when it became apparent that I was inept even at the simple task of lighting candles with no wick and balancing them upright somehow in a line on ground outside the temple, I was relegated to waiting by the side holding a box of cookies. Oh, the holidays. How they bring even faux families together.

23 October 2009

A glimpse into my research... [Link Fixed]

Here's a draft presentation I developed to give my academic advisor an overview of my project and explain the methodology I used to select the districts in which I will be doing field work.

Again, its very draft, but also exciting, because it lays the groundwork for what I hope will be my first week or two in the field in mid-November. Also, depending on which version of Microsoft Office you have, the fonts I use may not display properly.

19 October 2009

The North Country

Hello, there. It's been a while.
To give you a quick summary of the exciting events that have occurred since my last post (a month ago?).......we took the LSATs, traveled to Ladakh in the north, fired our cleaning lady, hired a new cook (this one old enough to have a 7 year old son, which means she must be at least.....19? That's old enough to cook), ran over a monkey, and celebrated Diwali, in that order.

But let me start from the beginning.

A few weeks ago, we set off for Leh, the principal town in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of India that sticks out like a bun on the top of India's head, wedged between Pakistan and China. Ladakh was, before being annexed by the British in the mid-1800s, an independent kingdom ruled by a Tibetan Buddhist king. Now it is a minority region within a minority state (for those of you who didn't get the foreign affairs memo, Kashmir is a Muslim majority region that belongs to India but is the center of a bloody dispute between India and Pakistan that has raged for decades and continues to suffer from violence and instability as it is frequently infiltrated by Pakistani militants. No, Mom, Leh is not in Kashmir) which is a distinctive designation even in a country as patchworked as India.

Landing in the Leh airport after the short, brilliantly scenic ride from Delhi is like landing in an alternate India---one that is possibly located on the moon. The airport, a small hangar located on the Air Force base there, is empty, cold, and quiet---three sensations that immediately tip you off that you are not in regular India. The town is a collection of traditional flat-roofed mud brick buildings sprinkled in a flat(ish) valley of poplar trees along the banks of the Indus river. Immediately beyond the floodplains all signs of life immediately cease and there is nothing but desert and giant metalic peaks jutting into deep blue sky.
What is so fascinating about Ladakh is that it is really not"regular" India. Ladakhis are ethnically related to their northern neighbors, the Tibetans, rather than to the Aryan stock that comprises the rest of the country, and thus look Tibetan rather than Indian. Ladakhi, the local language, is written in the same script as Tibetan and shares linguistic roots, and Ladakhis are predominantly Buddhist rather than Hindu or Muslim. And, lest you think those reasons were enough to make these people different, for the six or so months every year that it snows, Ladakh is completely cut off from the outside world, allowing local culture to continue to flourish without the dilution of globalization. Old men and women still dress in heavy woolen robes with little slippers and carry bundles on their backs over the mountains and families in remote villages outside of Leh slurp bowls of boiled Ladakhi noodles in their tiny houses decorated with pictures of the current Dalai Lama and the Tibetan city of Lhasa, while prayer flags flutter in the breeze overhead, sending prayers to the gods. In downtown Leh, the signs of seasonal tourism are visible in the embroidered t-shirts that say, curiously, "yak yak yak Ladakh" and the couple of internet cafes that get intermittent reception, but there are no beggars and the furry donkeys that wander the streets outnumber the shopkeepers. *

But what most endeared me to the Ladakhis was their perpetually rosy cheeks and layers of clothing---cold weather people everywhere are cut from the same (insulated) cloth. I have hot tea and sweaters in my blood and so do they. Just as you will never encounter a rural Mainer swathed in a flourescent polyester sari encrusted with rhinestones going for a stroll through the mountains (though this is extremely fortunate on account of the physical construction of most rural Mainers rather than most saris), Ladakhis are much more inclined towards practical outfits of black and green with the occasional sassy red belt, and towards quietness and reservation rather than the boisterous clamour that characterizes most of the country. Passing stout little farmers trudging home along the road at sunset with their donkeys and sheep in tow, bound for warm huts in small villages, I imagined I could sense a little of the familiar Puritan work ethic of Northern New England. And for once I finally felt like I had a leg up on the Indian tourists that disembarked from the plane with us, clad in the aforementioned attire and who instantly began to look as miserably uncomfortable with the temperature as I do on any given afternoon in Delhi.

Anyway, I don't want you to think I've lost my edge and am not going to poke fun at a few things in Ladakh. Part of me almost doesn't want to, I had such a heavenly time wearing six layers and complaining that my toes were going numb and staring at the mountains through a blistering altitude headache, but I'm going to anyway.

Because we were only in Leh for five days, not enough to resign ourselves to joining a trek to trudge over some ridiculous pass, wear the same underwear for a week and eat ramen noodles in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains (all things I did legitimately want to do), we decided on a series of day excursions around Leh.

The first was a visit to the Shanti Stupah, a Buddhist prayer monument perched on a hill above Leh that was constructed by the Japanese in the mid 1980s. It is not exactly as historical as some of it's 11th century neighbors, but it is shiny, white, and very clean, and has a cafeteria where you can get Nescafe and the ramen noodles you are missing by not trekking---all good things.
It also had the most horrifying bathroom in India. I wish to qualify this statement with the background information that I have had the honor of previously using the facilities in some truly unusual places in my life---an absolutely pitch black outhouse in Costa Rica where I nearly fell down the hole, a cabin on the side of a sheer mountain face in Peru during gale force winds, a rock on the side of the road in the desert as the Indian Army was passing in a convoy, but this still wins. I won't elaborate too gruesomely lest your stomachs turn and you become unable to continue, but nearly every person who had ever used this particular place must have been confused about what exactly one ought to do when confronted with an outhouse.
In this respect, Ladakh certainly was India. By way of a brief analogy, every time I have ever been to an ATM in India, there is a small waste paper basket in the cubicle beside the machine where you receive your cash, where you are meant to deposit your receipt. For reasons I cannot fathom, the waste paper basket is always invariably completely empty and every single person has thrown their receipt on the floor, so that there are hundreds of scrunched up balls everywhere. Ladakhi bathroom 1, Dana 0.

The next day we drove to Pangong Lake, a psychadelically blue strip straddling the India and Tibet border. I don't know why I thought, in a valley surrounded by 21,000 foot peaks that the drive to the lake would be dull, but I did. It was not.
The guide service we were using had provided us with a 4WD Toyota Qualis and a driver named Sherab, who said he was 23 and from a village near Leh. Sherab, I might add, had certainly experienced the influences of globalization and was wearing acid washed bell bottom jeans, a t-shirt and whose hairstyle was a chin-length bob, the proper maintenance of which required stopping at every instance of water (streams, rivers, mud puddles) to be wetted and slicked back--call it nature's extremely-short term hairgel. Sherab had also brought along a musical selection for the 8 hour round-trip drive that included Ladakhi pop music (which sounds like Incan flutes and could pass for ethnic elevator music) and a CD of someone who sounded like Chris Rock doing standup comedy about the state of black men and how rotten the Bush administration was. So, winding up a one lane road with no guard rails at 16, 000 feet and rounding blind corners at speeds that were beginning to make me internally promise a range of things including born-again Christianity if we survived, we were treated to long rifts about 'the motherfuckah who fucked up eeeeeverythang' while Sherab grinned wildly and ran his fingers through his hair in the rearview mirror.
Then, as if things hadn't quite become surreal enough, we rounded a corner, came down into a valley, and across a clump of tourists standing in a mushy field pointing at something. It turned out to be a marmot, the squooshy mustard-colored-rodent-like creature that dwells at about 12,000 feet, who had come out of his hole and was wandering around standing up on people's legs and begging for ritz crackers. There are pictures to prove it. I have no idea if this marmot was friendly, rabid, or insane, but he nearly sat on BJ's lap--though he quickly abandoned us and went back in his hole after he realized we had not brought baked goods.

The rest of the trip was much less exciting. We made it to Pangong Lake, where Sherab had a chance to slick back his hair using lake water rather than a roadside puddle, and I had the chance to use another toilet perched on a mountainside, and then we returned over the same terrifying roads back to Leh, the journey only punctuated when we would occasionally swerve to avoid a rock in the road and nearly plunge us over the side to our deaths and then Sherab would laugh and say something in broken English about how we had nearly crashed.

The rest of the trip went as such: We visited a monastery where I slipped down the stairs and nearly snapped off my tailbone, went for a hike with a guide who trotted ahead of us as we (I) wheezed desperately in the thin air and sat down every five feet vowing never to move again, and then spent the rest of the time reading a German Marie Claire on the roof of the guesthouse peacefully getting a sunburn severe enough to qualify as a facial peel. But it was all wonderful, really.

And now I fear this post has become too long and you will have to wait for the next installment to hear about the death of the monkey and how Diwali in Delhi is not unlike living in Baghdad during an airstrike.
Until then, love, kisses, and best wishes for a clean bathroom in your future.

*Granted, this is a country that by and large remains woefully untouched by the improvements of globalization in ways that are largely detrimental and carrying a bag of potatoes on your back seems less quaint when contextualized with the fact that a majority of people in Mumbai still shit in the open and most villages do not have paved roads or access to health care, but give me my moment in the sun. Ladakh is lovely and feels still very much like a mountain kingdom in the sky, okay?