A Beautiful Life

Saturday

Saturday morning I get up at six thirty. I’m going to a yoga lesson at Mister Singh’s house. His daughter-in-law told me to be there at seven o’clock, “on the dot.” I can’t be late.

I put on a t-shirt and track pants and walk next door. Mister Singh sends me to the third floor where his son and daughter-in-law live. We’ll have the yoga lesson in her living room.

His daughter-in-law brings out a blanket for herself and gives me the nice, padded yoga mat that I suspect she uses when she’s not sharing her yoga lesson with a white chick. The instructor arrives and they talk in Hindi to each other, sometimes gesturing towards me. I’ve told her I’ve done yoga before, so I shouldn’t be a burden or drag down the quality of the lesson for her, at least I hope not.

Mister Singh opens the door carrying a blanket. He will also join us for the lesson today. He spreads out his blanket and stretches out his legs in front of him. “See?” he tells me. “You start by stretching, then do like this.” He shakes his legs out.

This man with his long white beard, who has to be in his seventies, then grabs his legs and folds himself up into the Lotus position. “I’ll show you,” he says. “Yog is not exercise. You cannot do it quickly. You have to go slow.” He calls it yog, not yoga, just in case you were thinking that was a type-o.

The instructor is ready to begin. He stands and narrates in Hindi, and Mister Singh and his daughter-in-law do as he says.

“Can you understand?” she asks me.

“No,” I say, but it works for me just to watch them and mirror their actions. We start with some breathing, then do some simple stretches and bends, then it’s onto the mats where our legs get tangled up in front of our heads.

“Nose touch,” the instructor walks over to me and says. Nose touch? I look at Mister Singh’s daughter-in-law. Her nose is touching her feet which are folded up in front of her face.

“Oh no, my nose no touch,” I say, laughing.

I should say now that I am the most flexible person I know. People actually make fun of me for the way I sit with my legs knotted up. I stretch all the time. I’ve had years of dance and lots of yoga lessons where I’m the one that the instructor points at to show everyone else how it’s done.

But not in India. This is one of the reasons I wanted to take a yoga lesson here; to see how different it would be.

It’s different all right.

Next our feet are in the air over our heads. “Floor touch,” the instructor tells me, and takes my legs and stretches them all the way onto the ground behind my head. I think they’ll snap right off. It kills. I can barely sustain the position and my legs begin to shake.

My legs shake for the rest of the lesson as we hold weight-bearing positions that use muscles I’ve let slacken for who knows how long. All the while the aged Mister Singh is pulling and pushing his body into variations of all the positions we are doing with seemingly no problem.

Mister Singh leaves a little early. He’s going to work on food donations for the gurdwara. We wrap up less than an hour after we began, but it’s not soon enough for me. I feel slightly tortured.

“We usually go faster,” Mister Singh’s daughter-in-law apologizes to me. “If you come tomorrow it won’t be so slow. We had to go easy today because Dad joined us.”

Easy? I almost died. “Thanks, but I’m going to the gurdwara tomorrow morning at five,” I tell her.

“Well maybe you’ll be back in time. I’ll send someone over to check.”

I thank her and hobble off down the three flights of marble stairs marveling at how Mister Singh must have just taken this same path.

Back at my room, I try to steady my quivering Jello legs. I call up Mohinder, the man who’s meeting me at the orphanage. He tells me I should have my driver drive towards the Ashram towards Mathura, then we should call him and he’ll give him directions from there. It sounds like a shaky plan, but who am I to dispute it?

I call up Palminder and tell him to come pick me up at noon. Until then, I catch up on some blogging. There’s lots of spare time when you get up at six thirty in the morning on a Saturday.

Palminder arrives on time and I describe my plan to him. We have to go to Ashram towards Mathura then call this man at this number. He gives me a funny look. He wants to call Mohinder before we leave. It seems like a fine idea to me. He dials the number and talks to him, then passes his cell phone to me in the backseat.

“Yes, Vicki? I’ve told your driver how to get there and I’m just leaving, so I’ll see you there,” Mohinder tells me.

Palminder finds the place with no problem, pulling up to a three-story concrete building and pointing it out to me. “Welfare Home for Children,” he says to me, pointing to big red lettering on the top of the building.

There is a large gate around the place and no way to get in. I don’t see Mohinder anywhere. Palminder calls him back up. We should go around the building to the other gate, he tells us. We do. A man opens the gate and ushers me inside. Mohinder isn’t here yet. Can I sit for a few minutes and wait? Sure.

There’s a little plastic molded play set behind the entrance: a few slides and ladders to climb on. That’s a good sign. Inside, the building is very clean and tidy. The air isn’t on, but there is a huge window unit in the room they take me to where I sit and wait. Two women offer me water and I say no, then they bring me water anyway. There is no refusing Indian hospitality.

I’m sitting in a large room with a couch and a table and a fridge. There is a bulletin board full of pictures of children. On one side are the kids who’ve been adopted. They are embraced by smiling parents. On the other side are pictures of kids at the facility. Many of them are embraced by this portly white woman in a sea green dupata who appears in photo after photo.

Mohinder arrives just a few minutes after I sit down. He introduces me to two men. One is the architect of the building. The other is an aging Indian man with a British accent, and I don’t quite catch the reason he is there to tour the facilities. Is it to donate money? From the way Mohinder dotes on him and rather ignores me, it seems this may be the case.

I present my large bag of biscuits. The woman says I can only give two biscuits to each child and they’ll get the rest after dinner. She takes the bag away and comes back with just four or five packs that she’ll allow me to take upstairs to the children. I am not to be trusted with my wealth of biscuits, apparently.

Mohinder takes us around the ground floor, showing us the kitchen and a storage area. The room where I was waiting, he says, is used for counseling the parents and the adoptive parents, he explains. The white woman on the bulletin board is Dutch. She’s not here right now, but she’s the one who’s in charge of the facility.

He shows us the social worker’s office and takes us up to the second floor, pointing out the quality of the woodwork. There was no skimping when this building was erected. It’s of fine construction.

On the second floor landing, there is a large shelving unit full of tiny black shoes and several sets of large blue plastic sandals. We have to take our street shoes off and put on a pair of sandals before we enter the room where the girls are. They take pains to keep it clean and nice.

We open the door to a roomful of bunk beds and little girls. There are three women here who greet us. The men walk off, Mohinder talking about the construction and the capacity of the building. I open a package of biscuits and am swarmed with tiny hands reaching up towards me. I pass out biscuit after biscuit. A woman points to a small girl curled up on the bottom of one of the bunk beds. I figure I should let her sleep, but the woman shakes her awake a little roughly so she can get her treat. Sleepily, she takes the biscuit from me and munches it. A little munchkin about two feet tall wearing a t-shirt and a diaper has decided that she wants to stock up. She holds her biscuits in her right hand and reaches up to me with her left, making insistent noises and grasping the air. She follows me into the second section of bunk beds where another little girl is sleeping and is roused in a similar brisk fashion. Three or four older girls wait patiently in the background while the younger ones flock around me. When I give them their biscuits, they bow their heads and smile and say “thank you.”

The men are back. Are we ready to see the third floor? We get our shoes back on and ascend the staircase. About twenty boys are seated on a big Persian rug. The boys are all older than most of the girls upstairs. No one here is in diapers. I only have about four biscuits left, so I refrain from handing them out. In the back of this room is a quarantine room so when a child gets sick, it doesn’t spread. There’s also a small classroom. The institute brings teachers in rather than sending the children away to school.

We go up onto the rooftop. Here is where they hang the wash. You can get a view of the surrounding buildings too.

I follow the men back downstairs and ask the woman at the desk if I can have more of my biscuits. The boys didn’t get any. She brings several packages out. I go upstairs and see that the boys have been dispersed from their rug. They are now sleeping. It’s one thirty in the afternoon and these little boys are sleeping. It seems there are not a lot of other things for them to do. I wonder how much time they spend merely asleep or laying around.

I ask the woman if I can give the boys some biscuits. She assents and calls them to attention. They jump up out of their beds and form an orderly line, each one taking his treats and saying thank you in turn. When I’m done I have a few leftover. I ask the women in the room if they want them. They are only too happy to accept and nibble the rest of the package away.

I rejoin the men downstairs. They are talking about sponsorships and companies who give money to the facility. I ask if they do adoptions in the United States. “Yes. You can ask my wife all about that.” She works here full-time as a social worker. I don’t know anything about adoption. I don’t know if domestic adoption is cheaper than international adoption, but the plane tickets alone to India for one trip would set me and my husband back $4,000. And I know we’d have to travel here more than once. This may be an utter impossibility. Still, I wanted to see the facility and make the connections while I was here just in case.

I barely sit down when the men stand up. They’re ready to go. I take this as my cue to leave as well. I shake Mohinder’s hand and thank him for the tour. Palminder is waiting for me at the door. I follow him out to the car and tell him to take me to Malviya Nagar. We’re going to pick up Katie at Susie’s place, then head to the Museum of Modern Art. Katie’s a painter, so she’s been eager to see the place.

I call up Susie. “How was the orphanage?”

I was surprised. I was surprised at how nice it was, at how the children there are pretty advantaged compared to the poor kids I see out begging in the streets. These kids have clean clothes and three meals a day. They go to school instead of working. They have multiple people looking after their well-being. It was still sad to know they don’t have families, but it wasn’t as sad as what I see on the way to work everyday: kids in filthy clothes or no clothes at all begging for a few rupees or food, and little boys using every fiber of their will to try and sell useless magazines that they can never hope to read themselves. Those kids need more help than the ones I saw today.

We pick up Katie and find the museum easily. It’s a stately building with a rounded dome just outside of India Gate, probably built by the British because it smacks of the same architecture as the President’s house and government buildings in this same area.

Inside we find a jumble of paintings: portraits and miniatures and sketches and landscapes. The artist’s name is posted next to most of the paintings on a typewritten card, but there is almost never a year given. Some of the pieces don’t look very “modern” at all. I wonder how this collection got assembled: who decided what works got admitted? Where did they come from? They’re almost all Indian artists, but most of the works are in imitation of western art styles. Surprisingly, there are many, many paintings and sculptures in the Surrealist style: bodies with missing pieces and visible, melting bones. I wonder how surrealism made its way to India and why it seems to speak to artists here.

There is one room full of oversized canvasses that makes the place worth the trip. Here there is a wall-sized painting of three Indian bicycles with milk jugs hanging off the handlebars. It’s titled “Three Cows.” The milk jugs look like you could grab them and pick them up, and the background is like a comic book. The bicycles are life-sized, and as you walk past the painting, somehow the front wheels move and are always pointing at you. The effect is mesmerizing. There are also pieces here which blend traditional Mughal painting style with modern art. These artists are using their artistic heritage rather than throwing it aside and their work is all the richer for it.

The museum doesn’t take that long to cover, so about an hour later, we are walking through the little sculpture garden back to Palminder’s car. On our way, an auto-wala stops us. I flag him away thinking he’s bugging us for a ride, but he is insistent. “No,” he says, “Madam, madam, bomb blasts. There are bombs today. It’s not safe. You must go home. Go to your hotel. Go to wherever you are staying and stay in today, madam.”

Being so close to India gate, I wonder if a bomb has gone off nearby. I thought I overheard a conversation about bombs when I was in the museum, but I figured they were talking about the bombs that went off two weeks ago. I guess I was wrong.

I worry that we won’t be able to cross town to get home. I remember Jonaki telling me that they sometimes close down access to roads when bombings happen. But travel is just fine. There doesn’t appear to be anything unusual. The streets are neither empty or closed down. Everything seems normal. I wonder if the auto-wala was just trying to scare us for some reason.

Back at home, I turn on the news. Two men on a motorcycle threw a crude bomb in a lunch bucket in a crowded market. A kid picked it up and died. Twenty-three people were injured in the blast. There don’t appear to be multiple attacks this time. It looks like a much less sophisticated operation than the last attack when the bombs had timers and were planted all over the city.

I’m Skyping with Scott when my phone rings. “Hello. Kandhari. Where are you?” I hear.

It’s Mister Kandhari. He wants to know why he hasn’t seen me walk past his house today. Almost every night I walk to the market at some point and usually stop by to talk to him.

“I’ve been out today, Mister Kandhari.”

“You come and sit and we can talk,” he tells me.

I tell Scott I’m going to go. He is unnerved. Even though Mister Kandhari’s house is only a block away, I don’t think he wants me going out tonight and I don’t blame him. If he was in a city that was having multiple terror attacks, I’d want him to lock himself up in his room and shove a pillow under the door crack, not go roaming around his neighborhood at night. I promise I’ll steer clear of the market where I was planning on going to get some souvenirs. I’ll get them some other time, or I won’t get them at all, I tell him. Mister Kandhari’s house is safe, I tell him. I’ll be fine.

I eat dinner with Mister Kandhari. He asks me what I do in the evenings when I’m at the guest house. I tell him I write a lot. About what? About my time in India. I keep a blog on the Internet. Do I write about him? He wants to know. Yes, I tell him, thinking he might find this troubling. Instead, he is delighted. He smiles broadly. Have I talked about his garden and the gurdwara? Yes I have, of course. “Thank you,” he says.

Who reads it? Mostly just my friends. Does he have the Internet? I can show him the site. Only at the office, he says. But he wants to read it sometime. He wants to read it. We sit for a while then he says we should get to bed. We have to get up early to go to Bangla Sahib tomorrow. Am I still going with to feed the hungry?

“If you call me to make sure I’m awake,” I say. He shakes my hand and smiles. It’s a deal.

The little black dog follows me home again. I run upstairs to get him biscuits, but as I’m coming back down the stairs, I see him in the hallway of the guest house. He’s followed me all the way inside. I think the guard is slacking a little bit. What if this was an intruder instead of a little black dog? The thought is a bit troubling. I share some biscuits with the dog and the guard comes down from the balcony. I think he might be upset that I have the dog inside the gate, but instead he coos at it. “Indian doggie,” he says in a thick accent, smiling and chuckling. The dog trots off and starts drinking out of a puddle, and this gives the guard an idea. “Water,” he says, and comes back with a pot full for our little furry friend. This is the same guard who played so much with Ralphie when he was here. I like this guy. He strikes me as a very kind person. I’m not so sure what kind of a guard he makes, but he’s always sweet and considerate, even to a lowly stray dog.

I’ve met so many people here who have been so kind, I think, and I’ll be saying goodbye to all of them in just two weeks. In just three short months, I’ve discovered a beautiful life here in India with my friends from work and from church and from my neighborhood. I’m fortunate to be staying at such a nice place with such a helpful, sweet and good-natured staff. It’s a beautiful life I will leave behind—or rather carry with me. I’m so fortunate to have lived it.

Not Enough Biscuits

Friday

Just when I thought the food was getting boring… I eat a custard apple.

My friend from work and I were discussing seasonal fruits one day. She wondered what we grow in the United States. I talked about oranges in Florida and the apple orchard near my house. She bought some guavas from a cart in the industrial estate and shared one with me. I think it was my first guava. I know I’ve had them in juice blends, but I’ve never just eaten a guava. It was good: sugary with white flesh and tiny, tiny seeds, almost like a kiwi. She had the man at the cart put ashen-looking masala spices on it as he chopped the small fruit into quarters. Spiced fruit is common here. Mister Singh served me spiced apples and pomegranate seeds the night he was planning my Amritsar trip.

As we walked and ate our guavas, she asked me if I’d ever had a custard apple. No, what’s that? It’s in sections almost like a pomegranate and the texture is a little sandy. The next day, she brought some to work for me.

Friday morning I walk downstairs and present my custard apple to Mira. Can she cut it for me so I can eat it? She takes it and walks into the kitchen. In the meantime, there is a Texan on the phone near the kitchen. He’s twanging away and getting nowhere trying to arrange a car service. He passes the phone to Mira. “Here, talk to them,” he drawls and shoves the phone Mira’s way. She takes down several phone numbers and makes a bunch of notes in Hindi script on a piece of paper and hands it to the gentleman. “What’m I spose’ta do with this?” he asks, shoving the paper back at her. I think this man is not going to have a good time in India.

Mira brings me the note and my custard apple on a plate. “Sorry, madam. My English no good. Speak. No write. You write Ashok?” I take the pen and paper from her and write Ashok next to the first number. “Okay, thank you. No English,” she says. “Now Upander, guard.” I write the words down by the second number.

In exchange for this help, she shows me what to do with my custard apple. You don’t cut it. You just split it in half and scoop it out with the spoon. She splits it in half for me and pantomimes with the spoon.

We thank each other for the needed assistance and she shuffles in her aqua and white sari out to the balcony where the large Texan is sitting on the edge of his chair. He looks satisfied with the new note. I think we’re all relieved.

The custard apple looks like it has crocodile skin on the outside and tastes like, well, custard on the inside. It’s like nothing I’ve ever eaten before. It’s fun.

At work I finally finish editing the lengthy chapter seven on currency options. We have two more chapters from the author so far, chapters eight and nine, and I think I’ll be able to complete them both in my remaining time. It’s a goal anyway.

We have yet to hear a response from the author on chapter six and the passages that need to be rewritten. Shabnum is trying to call him as I’m leaving the office for the weekend. We’ll see what happens.

Everyone’s excited about the book sale tomorrow. Shinjini wants to know if I want any Rough Guides. There is always a whole bunch. If I had room in my luggage and the upper body strength to haul books, I’d go scoop up a whole load, but as it is, I practice self-control and turn down the offer.

On my way up to my room, Pachu stops me. He speaks rather excitedly. “Call. Three times. Call six thirty. Six forty-five. Six fifty. Three times.”

Can he tell me who called three times?

“No idea. Boy. Boy. Husband?”

Oh no, I think. Freaki Fredi.

“Did he leave a number?” I ask.

“No. Call again,” Pachu says. I’m sure he will.

I’m not in my room for ten minutes when the phone rings. “Hello. Do you recognize me?”

“Is this Fredi?” I ask.

“Yeah yeah. So did you think about Goa?”

“Yeah and I’m not going to be able to go, but thank you,” I say.

“Okay, that’s okay,” he says. “Some other time when you come back to India.”

At least he finally took no for an answer. But now he wants to go out for a drink. I want to believe that’s all he wants, but I don’t. I think I’m busy next week. And the week after. And then I’m leaving. It’s just too bad we won’t be able to get together. He’s still glad he met me, he wants me to know. It was nice to meet him too.

I remember I need to get the hem of my black pants repaired. I throw them in a bag and walk down to my tailor across the street from the park. This man knows how to sew. I run through the items in my closet and think hard about whether there’s anything else I can have him work on before I leave. That one kurta I bought is pretty baggy on me. I could have it taken in. It’s so much fun to have your clothes tailored.

“Namaste,” I greet him and he bows his head back at me. I show him the pants and ask him, “Kitne?” How much? He examines them and says, “No nothing. Small work.” He doesn’t want to charge me—again. Of course, I’ll pay him anyway. I couldn’t take the work from him for free.

I walk around the corner to the closest thing approximating a grocery store that I’ve seen here. It’s called The Big Apple. It’s lit with fluorescent lights and has wide aisles compared to the other food shops in the market. It even has cash registers. What it lacks is the kind of deep inventory that American stores are packed with. There are just a few items of each kind on the shelves. I’m looking for more biscuits. I want to make sure I have enough for all the orphans I’ll see tomorrow. They only have three packages of the ten rupee kind. The rest of their biscuit inventory is actually Oreo cookies and they’re priced at forty five rupees a package.

I buy the three remaining ten rupee packs and grab a box of oatmeal at the store clerk’s suggestion. It’s on sale, and I need to run up my bill a little bit so they’ll give me change. If I try to buy thirty rupees’ worth of biscuits with a 1,000 rupee note, they’ll throw me out of the place. The clerk takes the box from me and says, “Almost expired, but not yet expired.” I look at the date, which I’d previously ignored, and it says Jan 2008. It’s a strange definition of almost expired. Still, I figure, what can go wrong with oatmeal? I probably have some in my cabinets at home that’s older than this.

The cashier holds my 1,000 rupee note up to the light and gazes at it from three different angles. Then he passes it to the next register where a woman does the same thing. I think, “Please don’t tell me I have a counterfeit bill.” But the gazing seems to satisfy them, and they even give me change. How western of them!

After The Big Apple, I cross the street at the busy intersection to get back to the main market. When I first got here, this would have been impossible for me. I would have needed an escort, a crossing guard. My heart would have been racing. I wouldn’t have even known which way to look for oncoming traffic. But tonight I cross the street without blinking an eye, weaving in an around the stopped cars, motioning with my hand for the oncoming cars to yield to me.

I walk directly to Sagar’s. Since it’s been a day of new food, I decide to try something different on the menu. There aren’t that many things I haven’t yet tried. I don’t know exactly what I’m getting when I ask for the dahi vada, but I order it anyway. Then I ask for a banana lassi. Sweet, I say. “Sweeeeet,” the waiter’s eyes get large and he walks away.

I wonder what that was about until they bring my food. Turns out the dahi vada is covered in sweet yogurt. And a lassi is made of sweet yogurt. Both are delicious, but they’re a little much in combination with each other. "Sweeeeeet." The waiter was right.

On my walk home, the little black dog finds me. I open a package of biscuits and he eats the whole thing. I don’t understand why he’s so skinny. He has a collar on. Someone owns him. Don’t they feed him? Or does he have a bad case of worms? I should slip him some Mebex, the worm medicine Susie recommended I take when I get home.

When the last of the biscuits is gone, his nose finds my shopping bag and nuzzles it. He wants some more. The orphans or the starving dog? Who gets the biscuits? There is never enough to go around in India.

I decide one package is enough for the puppy tonight and walk home. He trails me all the way to my gate.

Honesty

Thursday

Thursday I have an email in my inbox from the newdirections program home office. They can’t put a link to my blog in their newsletter in light of recent entries. I understand, of course. My blog has been more personal than business-oriented from the beginning. Still, if I had written about breaking a leg or having chest pains or any other number of physical conditions, I don’t think there would have been an issue. No one was embarrassed on my behalf when I told them I had necrosis. The email was very kind, but still I feel a twinge of shame.

I debated about whether I should disclose the information about my health or not but finally decided that if I didn’t, it would be the end of my blog as we know it. How could I take this most important piece of information and pretend it didn’t affect me and my experience here and what I was thinking and seeing and doing? It’s certainly not the most glamorous or funny or intriguing part of what’s happened to me while I’ve been here, but it happened, and it’s part of my story, and that’s what I’ve been putting on my blog the whole time. My story. If I stopped telling my story, I don’t know what I’d post: a list of foods I ate and places I went? Why bother? We’ve been there already and had the meals together. A pancake at Sagar. A pasta dish at Liquid Kitchen. It’s all pretty routine by now.

Am I apologizing? I suppose I am, in case I’ve offended anyone or made them uncomfortable. I didn’t mean to do so. That being said, I’m going to continue to tell the truth, or at least try. It’s not worth the time and the energy it takes to write otherwise.

Thursday at work I get very close to finishing chapter seven. We have two more chapters from the author, and I’d like to finish editing them before I leave. I think I’m on track to do so. Then at least I will have handled half a book on my own while I’ve been here. I wasn’t here long enough to edit an entire volume, especially since at the beginning of my assignment I was working on multiple projects and meeting with people and learning about the editing process in general.

We’ve sent chapter six off to the author and asked him to revise the passages we found on the Internet, though we haven’t heard anything back from him. We’ll give him another day to respond.

“Good evening,” Palminder greets me on my way to the car. The drive has become so familiar and, unless it rains and causes havoc, it is routine and uneventful. We don’t pass any elephants or see any monkeys. The boys sell the magazines at the red light by Indraprastha Park. I am home in about forty five minutes.

At the gate the guard bows his head to me. “Good evening, madam,” he says. I don’t see the little black dog around anywhere.

“No dog today?” I ask.

“No, madam. Eighty two. Eighty two.” Mister Singh has stopped by. I go up to my room and drop off my bag. I take the book he lent me on the Golden Temple and the bag of scarves he gave me for our trip, then walk over to my neighbor’s house, wondering why he called on me.

Mister Singh is sitting in his bedroom on his couch watching tv. He wanted me to see this. There is a broadcast everyday live from the Golden Temple. It’s on from four in the morning until six a.m. and from six in the evening until eight p.m., the times when they “wake up” the holy book and put it back to sleep for the night.

“You reach home late,” he says. It’s already after seven. “Long work day.”

“And I’m the first one to leave the office each night,” I tell him. My colleagues work incessantly. Speaking of whom, I tell him, my boss has decided he wants to visit Amritsar. He heard me talk about it and it sounded so good, he wants to see it now too.

Mister Singh smiles. “Tell me when he wants to go and we can fix it for him.” He’s offering to set everything up again like he did for me. He’s a regular ambassador to Amritsar.

We watch the broadcast and listen to the hymn for a bit. He gets up and gets several books from the shelf behind his bed. One is wrapped in an orange bandana. Sikhs do this as a sign of respect for their holy books, Mister Singh explains to me. So this is what I saw everyone carrying around at the temple. He hands the wrapped up book to me and tells me to open it. I untie it and see that it is still shrink-wrapped. He tells me to tear off the packaging. I do. This is the Japjee, the Sikh morning hymn. The book’s in English so I can read it.

Poonam walks in clapping her hands, delighted to see me. I am likewise delighted to see her. She sits down next to me on the couch and says how much she enjoys listening to Mister Singh when he explains things to me. “I learn from him too,” she says.

Opposite the table of contents, there is a verse written in Punjabi. Mister Singh tells me this is the heart of their religion. It begins with a symbol that is like Om, but means more specifically that God is One. It continues with a symbol that means God is Truth. “God is the only truth,” Mister Singh says. “Man is never true. There is always something. But God cannot be untrue.”

I think of my dictum to be honest when I write. Am I? Can I be? It’s true that however much I disclose, there is still more that I keep to myself. Am I even honest with myself? Mister Singh is right. However true I try to be, it feels like an onion and I am never at the center, I’m always just peeling back layers. If I ever got to the middle, what would be there? Nothing? God? Some essential version of myself?

Mister Singh flips through the pages. The book begins with a short introduction, then has a verse about what makes a good Sikh.

“Read it out,” Poonam says.

I read aloud and surprisingly my voice cracks a bit in places because in reading this description, I very much recognize my kind neighbor, Mister Singh:

A true Sikh rises before the night ends
And turns his thoughts to God’s Name,
To charity and holy bathing.
He speaks humbly and humbly he walks.
He wishes everyone well and he is content to
Give away gifts from his hand.
He sleeps but little,
And little does he eat and talk.
Thus he receives the Guru’s true teaching.
He lives by the labor of his hands and he does good deeds.
However eminent he might become,
He demonstrates not himself.
He sings God’s praises in company of holy men.
Such company he seeks night and day.
Upon the Word is his mind fixed
And he delights in the Guru’s will.
Untempted he lives in this world of enticement.

Mister Singh shows me the rest of the introduction to the prayer. There is a brief biography on each of the ten Sikh gurus. He tells me the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, was put together by the gurus and they took hymns and wisdom from all over the world.

Verse 17 of the Japjee says:

There are myriad ways to worship the Almighty—whether they be through rituals,
self-abnegation, the practice of austerities, exaltation or contemplation.
Limitless are the scriptures and their elucidations. Numerous are the devotees
and their ways to attain self-realization.

Sikhs don’t try to change anyone’s religion, Mister Singh says. They believe, like the Japjee says, that there are multiple routes to God. Another large quote precedes the prayer in the book:

Some call him Rama, others know him as Khuda.
Some serve Him as Goswami,
Others remember him as Allah.
Some bathe at Hindu temples, others go on Haj
Some recite from the Vedas, others from the Quran
Some wear the blue robes, others are clas in white
Says Nanak, he who obeys His command,
He alone understands the secret of the Lord
Raga Ramkali V (Guru Granth
Sahib, 885)

Mister Singh tells me the story of the ninth guru who was beheaded at the gurdwara in Chandni Chowk when he refused to convert to Islam, the same gurdwara where Palminder picked us up the day we went to the spice market.

I could stay and listen to Mister Singh all night, but I tell him I have to leave. Mister Kandhari has invited me over to his house at eight o’clock tonight. I’m going to meet his daughter who lives in New York.

Okay then. I should go. I should tell my friends they can see the Golden Temple on tv whenever they want to, though. And he’ll ask his daughter-in-law about yoga on Saturday.

He gives me the Japjee. I can take it home and read it. I should also take the book on the Golden Temple that he lent me before. I can give it to my boss. As I’m leaving he asks if I’ll put the books in my room before I go to Mister Kandhari’s so they’re safe. Of course. I shake his hand and thank him. It’s so nice to have such pleasant company in the evening. Normally I spend the nights alone. He says he’s happy to have my company as well. He enjoys talking with me.

I take the books home and walk over to Mister Kandhari’s house. He’s in his living room talking to a business associate. Mister Kandhari is always working; his cell phone is always ringing or he’s always off to somewhere to meet somebody. He works six days a week, he says, then on Sundays, he runs the kitchen at the gurdwara. And everyday, he works for two or three hours on his gardens. I don’t know where he gets the energy, except that he seems to really enjoy whatever it is he’s doing.

His daughter is heavy set. She’s dressed in black western clothes and wears an enormous rock on her left hand index finger. It could be a diamond from how successful Mister Kandhari has described her as being. “Would you just give me two minutes?” she says and walks away into the house.

Mister Kandhari asks if I’d like to sit inside or outside. Outside, I say. It’s pretty nice and his garden really is beautiful. He has his house helper set up three chairs.

We chat about how things are going. I might go to Jaipur. There’s a place about two hours past there that’s good for meditation. He’ll tell me all about it if I go.

His daughter sits down with us. They talk in Hindi, or is it Punjabi, about what I can’t make out. She asks me some questions. What am I doing here? How long am I here for? What do I do back home? Her cell phone rings. “Take him to the Cheesecake Factory,” she says. Just hearing Cheesecake Factory sounds so funny in India. It sounds so out of place. She’s clearly talking to someone back home. Always working, just like her father.

She wishes she could stay longer, but she has to go. Maybe I could stop by tomorrow if I get the chance. She leaves on Saturday, so it’s pretty much her last day here.

“I hardly get to see her,” Mister Kandhari says. It’s a real Cats in the Cradle moment. I feel bad for him.

He asks me to stay for dinner and I do. We eat in a little sitting area in the corner of his bedroom. He turns on the tv news. There is more investigation into the Indian Mujahidin. It’s sad that there’s so much terrorism here, I tell Mister Kandhari. I didn’t know it was such a problem before I got here. “Yes,” he says. “They hate anyone who is not a Muslim.” They learn from a young age that people other than Muslims are evil, then they go out and kill.

When we’re done eating, Gopi brings two large containers of ice cream. “Take,” Mister Kandhari says. I do. Like his rice pudding, it’s made with less sugar than usual, but it’s still good.

We walk out into the garden and sit for another little while. It’s almost ten. It’s past the time when Mister Kandhari goes to sleep. I tell him I’ll be going. “Will you come on Sunday?” He wants to know if I’ll go to Bangla Sahib to feed the hungry again.

“If you’ll call me to wake me up,” I tell him.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, and shakes my hand on the deal.

Amritsar

So here are some videos of the border ceremony and the parade we saw in Amritsar. There's also a link to my pictures of The Golden Temple and surroundings which completely don't do the place any justice.

Photos of Amritsar:
http://s458.photobucket.com/albums/qq302/vkrajewski/

On Unaccepted Charity

Wednesday

As if something or someone were trying to prove a point to me, I spend Wednesday sweating my brains out. Is it hot in the office, or is this a symptom, a sign?

Palminder drives me home and as I walk into the Ahuja Residency, the shaky feeling is less bad than it has been. I’ve looked the thing in the face and told it, “I know what you are and you’re not going to scare me.”

Up in my room, I decide to test out the pepper spray my sister-in-law sent me to have when I walk to the market by myself at night. Comically, it has “American Defender” emblazoned on the side of its casing. She said it has a kind of safety on it like a barbeque grill lighter, but I can’t find it. I depress the pump and push hard. A little burst of red liquid issues forth. I’m hoping it doesn’t drip down onto my purse when I realize I’ve sprayed it in front of the air conditioner—and the air conditioner has an oscillating vent in it—and it’s about to blow my way. I can feel it when I aspirate one or two tiny drops. The pepper spray works.

I run into the next room and stick my head in front of the other air conditioning unit trying to breathe in as much fresh air as I can. I think it’s going to get worse and start burning and making me cry, but it doesn’t. You must have to use a lot of it. I’ll make sure to be generous should the occasion arise.

After recovering from this small incident, I dig out the business card of Mohinder Singh, the man I met at Mister Kandhari’s kitty party who deals in international adoption. He told me at the party that he would take me to see an orphanage if I wanted to while I was here. I think I’d like to go.

I stare at the card for a while, debating whether I should call him. I wonder if he’ll remember me. He does. I ask if the offer still stands. He says we can go on Saturday. I should call him around ten o’clock. My plan is to buy up all the five rupee packages of biscuits that I can get my hands on from the drain vendor at work and bring them to the kids. I concocted this plan last night before I fell asleep.

After we hang up, I grab my pepper-sprayed purse and head out towards the market. I only get a few feet past the Ahuja Residency gate when I see this small black dog with white feet trotting its way toward me. I stop and pet it. It looks young, maybe seven months old, and it’s so skinny. It must have worms or just be underfed. It’s loving the attention I’m giving it when a man walks up to me and says hello. Where am I from? I tell him I live about four hours from Chicago. Telling someone here you’re from Iowa typically doesn’t mean that much.

He wants to know what I’m here. How long have I been here? How much longer will I say? What do I do with my evenings?

“Pet stray dogs,” I say.

“But you must do more than this,” he wonders. I acquiesce. Yes. I walk to the market sometimes. I read. I write.

Don’t I get lonely, he asks.

I’m okay, I say. I’ve met a lot of nice people while I’ve been here.

Well we should go out sometime, he says. He can show me a nice club near here. He travels a lot for his business so he knows it can get boring; it can get lonely, especially in the evenings. He just spent three days in Duseldorf. There was nothing there to do, but he met a woman and became great friends with her. They will keep in touch now. She lives in Toronto.

He didn’t catch my name.

I’m Vicki.

I’m Fredi.

We shake. Do I want to join him for a walk in the park?

It’s nice outside and there are plenty of people around. Plus now I’m confident in my pepper-spraying skills, so I figure I’ve nothing to lose.

I met the gentlemen who maintain this park, I say. He doesn’t know them. Too bad. They’re very nice. We do a few laps around the little paved pathway and the little dog scrambles behind us, ears flopping happily.

Have I gotten to see much of India? Yes. I’ve been to Agra and Himachal Pradesh and Amritsar. What about Mumbai or Goa? Maybe next time, I say. I’ve had no time to make it down there.

Well I should go before I leave. He’ll take me. He has an apartment right on the beach in Goa. He’ll pay for everything. I’ll be his guest. It’ll be a great time. Three days right on the beach. He has speakers outside so there’s music. The whiskey will be flowing. It’ll be crazy. It’s freaky. He’ll show me a freaky time, he says. Freaky. And I won’t have to worry about any expenses. He’ll be my host in India and when he comes to the United States, I can be his host.

“Well I don’t have any apartment on the beach,” I tell him.

Where do you stay? he asks.

“Me and my husband have a townhouse,” I specify. He is not discouraged.

“If God gives you a good life, you should enjoy it, you know? Let’s go to Goa.”

I tell him thanks but I don’t think I have time.

Time? What time? It’s just three days. What’s three days? I should do it.

I tell him I can’t, but thanks.

Why not? I should at least think about it.

Okay, I say because I am so bad at just saying no and I’ve already tried two times. I’ll think about it.

He is finally satisfied.

I tell him I have to go, but it was nice meeting him.

He says he’ll take me out to dinner tomorrow night or Friday. He’ll give me a call at the guesthouse. I might just be busy when Freaky Fredi calls back. I shake his hand and walk out of the park. “I feel lucky to meet you,” he tells me. “I really mean it. It’s just too bad we didn’t meet sooner.”

Well it’s not every day a girl gets an all expenses paid vacation offered to her, even if it is from Freaky Fredi.

The little black dog follows me out of the park and rubs its head against my leg. I can’t say I feel unloved tonight. The dog looks so starved I decide to feed him my leftovers. I walk the half-block back to the guesthouse and the dog follows me. I tell the guard and his friends that I’m going upstairs to get some leftovers for the dog. The guards say, “Already lunch here today.” They fed the dog lunch at the guesthouse. I ask if they think the dog will stay while I go upstairs. “Yes, yes,” they say, “two days already.”

I get the Swagarth leftovers from the night of the bombing. They’re pretty tired but still okay to eat, especially for a stray dog. I go downstairs and the dog and the guards are all waiting expectantly. I put a little food down and the dog actually eats it. The guard finds an old board that I can put the rest of the food on without making a mess of the pavement in front of the guesthouse.

We all watch as the little dog has its dinner. He likes the mixed veggies and paneer, but only picks at the okra. One of the men makes a joke about the dog not being a vegetarian. They chuckle.

I walk off toward the market hoping to avoid Freaky Fredi, and I do. Mister Kandhari is sitting in his courtyard. He waves for me to come talk to him. I ask him how the election went. He was elected to the committee, but Mister Singh and his other friend were not. It’s too bad. Mister Singh seemed so excited about it. That stinks.

“How is everything going,” he asks me.

“It’s going good,” I tell him. Just then a car with two old men pulls up.

“My friends are here,” he says. He has to go. I get up to leave and ask him if his daughter is in town. “Yes,” he says. “You should meet her. Come tomorrow. Come tomorrow morning or evening… Come tomorrow evening,” he finally decides.

“What time?” I ask him.

“Eight o’clock,” he says.

His friends are walking into the courtyard as I’m leaving.

“Hello, American Beauty,” says a smiling old man in a blue turban. His comment isn’t creepy. It’s grandfatherly, like he could pinch my cheeks if I let him.

If a girl needed her ego stroked, tonight was the night. With an offer of a free trip to the ocean and a salutation like that, how can I feel like less than a woman? I fold my hands and bow my head in greeting, laughing and saying hello, good to see you.

At the market I figure on another veg burger and rose milk soda. As I’m walking to Kent’s, I see this little blonde dog with his tail tucked between his legs cowering between the moving cars. He looks so lonely. I walk behind the car he’s hidden behind wondering if he’ll be scared or if he’ll want some attention. He acts like he was just waiting for someone to notice him and love him. He presses his head against my leg and follows me every time I try to walk away. I feel like the patron saint of stray dogs tonight. I think I’d like to round them all up and get them the veterinary care they need and give them a huge, green farm with plenty of food and nice places to play.

At the outdoor stand, I order a rose milk soda and a veg burger and ask for two pieces of bread for the dog. “There is no charge for the bread,” the man at the register tells me. I feel like I’m having one of those Pay It Forward moments where an act of kindness begets another one. Only here they call it karma.

The men hand me two pieces of bread in a little plastic bag. I break it up and hand it to the skinny dog whose ribs and hips are sorely visible. In typical Indian starving dog fashion, he refuses. He just wants me to scratch his head.

After the men were nice enough to give me the bread, I feel slightly embarrassed. I hold it out for the dog who just yanks his nose away from it. I wonder if this is something how Freaky Fredi felt when I told him I wouldn’t go to Goa. Why won't you go to Goa? Why don’t you want this bread? It’s perfectly fine bread!

I thank the men anyway and tell them I know another dog who will appreciate it, so their gift won’t go to waste.

On the way back to the guesthouse, the little black dog is hanging out with the guards who click at him and talk to him. I offer him the bread but he refuses it too. The mixed veggies must have filled him up.

As a last resort, I break it up for the birds and put it out on my balcony. Somewhere, somehow, something will eat this bread. I refuse to let it go to waste.

I hope the kids at the orphanage will eat the biscuits I’m bringing them on Saturday. If not, there are going to be some really fat birds at the Ahuja Residency.

I Have India

Tuesday

Tuesday nothing happens again.

Nothing has happened since the beginning of July, reproductively speaking. I have not had my period since the week I arrived in India.

I’ve been nagged by this fact but choosing to ignore it, put off thinking about it, worrying about it, but on Tuesday there is nothing else to think about: nothing but this lack, this emptiness, this maddening nothing. I keep waiting and waiting, but nothing happens.

I tell Scott about this on our morning Skype call. It’s nothing, he’s sure. It’s just my body freaking out because of the time difference and the travel. It will all be fine once I get home, but I’m worried it won’t be. What if it’s not?

By the time I get home from work, I’m shaking like I was the day before. I can’t name the reason, but I know it in my heart. It's a dark shadow that's been tracking me at a distance. It's a diffuse cloud of anxiety that is now seeping into my room. I try to think about something else. I try to read, but I can’t concentrate. I think today is the day I need to face this thing down. It’s been coming to get me and now it’s here. I need to acknowledge its presence in the room. I remember my mother telling me something about early menopause years ago, but it can’t have been this early. It can’t have been. Or can it? I should call her, but I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear it. It’s just a few missed periods. Everything will be fine. But I’m afraid that it won’t be.

I look up the symptoms of menopause on the Internet. For the first time ever, it doesn’t seem like I have what I’m afraid of--or is that just a refusal to admit what I'm afraid of? I haven’t been feeling hot flashes, or have I? How would I know in the hundred-degree heat and humidity of India? I have had spells where I begin to sweat profusely in the air conditioning. But that can’t be a hot flash, can it? I look up the consequences of early menopause: more years spent with an increased risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, gum disease, incontinence, forgetfulness. I can lose my teeth and my hair will grow thin. Basically, I’ll be the crypt-keeper a year from now. Basically, I’m drying up from the inside out and getting ready to die.

What kind of cruel joke is being played on me that I just start beginning to feel like I could handle having a child and the physical capability to do so is taken away from me? Why does every baby I see suddenly look at me with adorable, longing, big wet eyes and wait for me to smile at it? How could this have happened?

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe Scott is right. It’s nothing. But it doesn’t feel like nothing. It feels like Nothing.

I decide to walk to the market, and maybe I’ll see Mister Kandhari or pet my dogs on the way. Maybe they’ll make me feel better, or at least distract me. Mister Kandhari isn’t home and the dogs are busy getting fed by a boy on a bicycle with a metal can full of something they apparently love.

I’m not hungry so I do a few laps in front of the shops. I go to the chemists and buy a pack of Mebex: the medicine Susie told me to take for worms.

A voice inside my head repeats, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and I feel better. I feel the kara on my wrist and think, “How can I be so worried about myself when there are so many other people in the world? Why don’t I just think about others?” I am comforted just by looking into the faces of the people passing me by. Things could be so much worse. I am so privileged. But even if I weren’t, I would still be me. I would still be okay.

I think of this book I read by the Dalai Llama on a plane trip down to Florida. It said the human condition is one of suffering. Every human being suffers, and every human has in common with every other human the want to escape this suffering, the want of enjoyment and happiness. I feel bound in this way to everyone I walk past. We are all bound.

The lump in my throat smoothes itself. I walk to Sagar and the doorman greets me. The waiter seats me. I start to order but the waiter interrupts and asks me how I am. It’s the same waiter I had yesterday. He smiles when I tell him I’m good.

I order a sweet lassi and paper masala dosa. It’s the giant, crispy pancake that comes with all the dipping sauces. It’s not my imagination that my pancake is extra big today, like three feet long. The woman sitting next to me orders the same thing and hers is only two-thirds the size of mine. I think they made me an extra special pancake. I feel bad when I can’t finish it.

I buy some paan at the counter that I figure I can either share with or drop off at Mister Kandhari’s place on the way home.

The dogs aren’t out tonight for me to pet, and Mister Kandhari isn’t home. His daughter-in-law is on her way out of the house as I walk past and she tells me I can just give the paan to the guard. It was sweet of me to bring it.

Back at home I think of calling my mother, but my computer is ringing before I have the chance. She tells me all about how the cousins from Texas were staying with her because they were evacuated in the wake of Hurricane Ike. Their kids are so cute, she says. And so polite. She tells me about my niece, Kathryn, and how much she’s eating now.

I tell her I have a question for her.

“Uh oh,” she says.

“When did you get menopause?”

“Really early,” she says.

“When?” I say.

“Why?” she asks.

“How old were you?”

“Thirty two,” she says. Thirty two. That’s two years younger than I am right now. I tell her what’s happening to me and she says that’s exactly what happened to her. Her period just stopped. She’d get it once every couple of months, then it just stopped altogether. But it was kind of nice not to get it, she says.

“Yeah, but you already had kids,” I say.

“Oh, did you want kids?” I’d always said I didn’t, but lately I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve always kind of envisioned myself adopting, but I thought as a back-up I could have my own kid. Now I have no back-up plan.

She says they can do things. They can give me hormones. I should just see a doctor when I get back. I’ll be fine. And I will be. But I’ll be different. When people told me India would change me, this was not one of the changes I had in mind. But at least I’ve been able to make an occasion of it. At least I have this wealth of new experiences to enrich me instead of just feeling impoverished, instead of just feeling grief and loss.

So I may not have a child, but I do have India.

Gopi and Worms

Monday

There are two people in the car this morning. Palminder sits in the passenger seat and a bearded young man with fluffy hair, Gopi, sits behind the wheel. He explains to me he’s driving today because Palminder is very sick. Poor Palminder. He can’t just stay home and sleep. He has to ride along with us, presumably to show Gopi the route.

At work, Amar asks me how my trip was. I tell him it was wonderful. The Golden Temple was amazing. He recalls being a child in 1984 and hearing that two Sikhs had assassinated the prime minister. At the time, Sikhs were fighting against the Indian government for independence. He says there were some terrorists who took over the Harmandir and the Prime Minister sent the army up to disburse them. In return for what the Sikhs saw as an attack, the Prime Minister’s two Sikh bodyguards turned on her and killed her. Amar remembers his school principal crying.

This is certainly a different view of the Sikhs. I have to make room for this information in my schema. Things are peaceful now, it’s clear. But at one point, not so long ago, certain Sikhs were regarding themselves as freedom fighters and others were regarding them as terrorists. “We are a martial people,” Mister Singh told me. I wonder how the peace was made, if the horror of this assassination was enough to quell those clamoring for their own state.

At lunch there is a cauliflower and potato subzi. I don’t think it’s bad, but Amar says it’s undercooked. After lunch, I’m talking to Shabnum and Yajnaseni walks up holding her stomach and whining. Lunch was so bad. It wasn’t cooked. She hopes there were no worms in the cauliflower. At least if it’s cooked, the worms are dead.

Worms?

Great.

We take our post-lunch walk as I ponder what I can do at this point to kill the possible worms in my stomach. How about a lot of hot coffee? How about some of that Indian after-dinner chew stuff? It’s supposed to be good for the digestion. I admit to myself that if there were worms, I probably can’t kill them on my own. I’ll probably need drugs. I'll have to email Susie and ask her for the name of that medicine when I get back to my desk.

Shabnum’s excited about the Pearson book sale coming up this Saturday. Am I going? I probably won’t, I say. I don’t have any room left in my luggage as it is, let alone the prospect of stuffing heavy books into it.

You should go anyway, Shabnum says. It’s really something to see, Jonaki agrees.

Maybe I’ll just go to browse then, I say. But Shabnum says there is no browsing. There’s climbing and yelling. The sale takes place twice a year in a warehouse where a giant pile, a heap of unsold books, is unloaded onto the floor. You get there at about nine in the morning and you have to climb up the side of the pile and start digging for books that look good to you. Last year Jonaki took off her shoes so she wouldn’t harm the books and then almost lost them in a landslide as she scrambled up the side of the pile.

Angshuman usually gets there early and digs a hole for himself in the pile. He picks up good books and calls the titles out to see if anybody wants them. The books are all, like, fifty cents a piece.

This sounds like an interesting event: something that might be the bonus round on a Japanese game show. I still don’t know if I’ll go, though. I wanted to sit in on Mister Singh’s daughter’s yoga class this Saturday morning. Yoga or book diving? It’s a tough choice.

I thought that Gopi told me he was going to drop Palminder off during the day, and he’d be driving me home by himself in the evening, but Palminder is still sitting in the passenger seat. I get in the car and we take off. I can see that Gopi, like Palminder and Sonu, is a Sikh. He seems to have pretty good English, so I tell him about my weekend trip. “I went to Amritsar,” I say. “And I bought a kara!” I hold up my arm and show him my bracelet. He seems excited about it. How did I like it? he wants to know. Did I go to the Wagaugh Border too?

Gopi is chatty all the way home. He tells me he lives in Punjab about 30 kilometers from Amritsar. His father farms wheat and rice. He has three sisters and a brother. He’s not married, but his number is up. It’s his turn. He points out sights as we pass them. This is the Akshardam Temple. It’s beautiful. Very beautiful. And here is a Sai Temple. Sai Baba.

I wonder how sick Palminder is and if Gopi will be my new driver for the rest of my stay. Not that I want Palminder to be sick, but Gopi is so much more friendly and helpful. Through all our conversation, Palminder sits silently with a familiar blank look on his face.

Gopi drops me off and I give both him and Palminder a tip. “Thank you, madam,” Gopi says and smiles, like he’s totally surprised to get a tip at all. Palminder just grabs the money and says nothing.

Gopi tells me tomorrow it will just be him picking me up. I say that’s just fine.

I spend the evening petting my dogs and having a mixed veg uttapum at Sagar. I think they finally recognize me when I walk in. It only took about three months.

God Versus Pizza

Sunday

Our wake up call comes right on time. Katie and Julianne don’t exactly jump out of bed. I can’t let myself lay back down because I know I’ll fall back asleep. This was the first sound sleep I’ve had since Wednesday night. Thursday night I was all worried about the trip and Friday night was the long, sleepless train ride.

We get ready and make it down to the lobby by four thirty. Our driver is waiting with the brown Vanagon. Susie and Sarah are nowhere to be found. We sit and wait. I’m antsy. We didn’t leave ourselves a lot of extra time. I wonder if I should go upstairs and check on them. I check the time. It’s just four thirty five. Still, we need to catch the train by five. Julianne says it’s fine. They’re coming. The driver says, “Late?” and this is all I need. There is no way I’m missing this train because I was being patient. I jump out of the van and run up the stairs. As I ascend to the second floor, I see that Susie and Sarah are on their way down. It’s okay. We won’t be late.

The driver drops us off at the station. We really were only ten minutes away from it like Susie said. The ride seemed so much longer to me yesterday morning for some reason. Maybe it was my lack of sleep the night before.

The Amritsar station actually has signs above the platforms, so it’s easy to find our train. Once again, my seat isn’t with my friends’ seats, only this time it’s worse. I’m not even in the same car. The place I’m supposed to be sitting is all the way down on the other side of the long train. My friends are in car twelve; I’m in car forty three. I decide I’ll just follow them into their car and sit by them, then when the porter asks for my ticket, I’ll ask if I can switch like I did before.

This train, the Shatabdi, is much nicer than the Chattisgarh. The seats are plush and clean and recline. I sit down next to Susie and the next thing I know, I wake up with a little tea service in front of me. There is a thermos and cream and sugar and a little package of biscuits. The tea even tastes good. I barely finish it when the porter comes by to clear it. I fall back asleep and wake up again when they are bringing us breakfast. There are little potato puffs and green beans with carrots. They pass out more tea and liters of water and mango juice. This train is nice. We should have taken the Shatabdi to get there too, but my friends wanted to save the money on a hotel for Friday night by taking the overnight train, and I joined the trip after these plans were already made. Who knew the Chattisgarh would be such a clunker anyway? I guess you just have to go to find out.

The trip is six hours total and we arrive right on time in Delhi. Susie stays behind in the station with Sarah and Katie. She needs to buy a ticket for something while she’s here.

Julianne and I walk out front. We’re going to try to split an auto-rickshaw ride since Defence Colony is pretty much on the way to Greater Kailash. There are all kinds of taxi and auto wallahs asking us if we want rides. Julianne says no to all of them until we get to the lane of green auto-rickshaws. They’ll take us for 120 rupees. Sounds good to me, but Julianne says no. They’ll take us for the metered price, but they’ll start the meter at 20 rupees. Sounds okay to me, but Julianne says “Why? There’s no reason they should start the meter at 20.” She walks to the prepaid auto booth and tells the man we need a ride to Defence Colony and Greater Kailash. He says, “No. Only one place.” So she tells him Greater Kailash since it’s farther. He writes up a bill for 68 rupees. We worry that the auto wallah will harass us when we try to go to two places instead of one, but he drops us both off without any problem. It pays to be persistent. So it only pays, like, the two American dollars we saved by going through the extra hassle, but still, it pays.

I am so relieved to be back at the Defence Colony. Even though it’s two in the morning back home, I call Scott. He told me to call him when I got back so he’d know I was okay. I surprise myself by getting totally choked up when I hear his voice. I can barely speak to him. That someone would want to talk to me at two in the morning is so sweet. And he’s not even groggy or crabby. He wants to know how my trip went and what I saw, and all I can do is bawl because he’s so caring and I’m so thankful for him.

I hang up with Scott and compose myself. I unpack my bag and flop down on my bed with the book on the Golden Temple that Mister Singh lent to me. It’s even better to look at the pictures and read about it now that I’ve actually been there. I didn’t have time to read a lot of the history before I went, so I’m catching up, getting the details of the Sikh’s struggle against the Mughals, then against British rule and finally against the Indian government.

I’ve only read a few pages when the phone rings. It’s Mira. She says, “Mister Singh call.” I thank her. I figure I’ll walk to the market and get a thank you gift for him, then stop by on my way home. I walk out and see Mister Singh standing outside my gate. Oh. He was calling in person. I’m glad I decided to come out.

He wants to know how the temple was. And the hotel. And the driver. Did the owner take care of us? He was supposed to take care of us. Did we have everything we needed? Were the rooms okay?

Yes, everything was wonderful. It was a perfect weekend trip, thanks for Mister Singh. I can’t thank him enough.

Good then. He is satisfied. We shake hands and he walks off back to C-82 while I go to the market. I find a basket of biscuits at the Defence Colony Bakery and buy a little decorated envelope at the stationery store. I think the envelope comes with a card, but when I get it home, I find there is none. I have to cut up a bag I got from a boutique to make the thank you card, but when I do, it’s cute. It looks like expensive paper. I thank Mister Singh for sharing his faith with me and for planning the trip for my friends and me. I tell him I will remember it for the rest of my life.

I will.

I take the basket and the card and drop it off with his guard, then return home where I watch a bad American movie about some college students who build a nuclear bomb. I had planned to catch up on my blogging, but this is just the brainless respite I need.

I’m about to take a shower when the young guy who helps clean my room knocks on my door. “C-82,” he says. I lock my door and walk outside. Mister Singh’s guard is waiting in the street for me. He ushers me into the courtyard. From the entrance I can see that Mister Kandhari and another man are sitting in Mister Singh’s living room.

“We have just been to the gurudwara for the election,” Mister Singh tells me. I see that my card is sitting out on his couch. They are all three running for some committee. They’re waiting for the results. They should receive a call in about an hour.

Mister Kandhari is beaming. “So?” he asks. “How was your trip? You didn’t come see me to tell me. I introduce you to my friend and you didn’t come see me!” I didn’t know I was supposed to. I tell him the trip was wonderful and the temple is amazing. “Is there anything like it?” he asks. No. There isn’t. It is one of a kind.

“Yes, she has given me a certificate,” Mister Singh says, referring to the thank you note I wrote him. He has already shown it to his friends.

His daughter-in-law brings us tea with ginger in fancy little cups and serves some of the biscuits I bought him. They tell me about the election. The third man’s son was just elected president. They are all very happy.

Mister Singh gets out another large picture book on the Guru Granth Sahib. Would I like to borrow it? Do I have time to read it? I actually do. I am interested in learning more about the hymns Sikhs sing. He tells me not to keep it with my shoes. To keep it nice. It’s a nice book. I assure him I’ll treat it well. He gets out another book that he’s sharing with his friend. It’s entitled “Essays on Sikh Values.” He says he reads it for about ten minutes each morning. There’s an interesting piece on Sikhism and yoga. Most Sikhs don’t practice yoga as part of their spirituality, but this piece talks about how the ancient practice and the religion are compatible. His daughter-in-law takes yoga classes. Am I interested in coming? A man comes to the house to teach her every morning at nine. I could come on Saturday. I wouldn’t have to pay or anything. They already take care of the fee.

That would be wonderful. I’ve been wanting to take some yoga classes in India but when I called the yoga centre, no one spoke English. “Hindi, madam. Hindi, madam,” was all I could make out.

“I have made some three new gardens,” Mister Kandhari tells me. I tell him I thought he had no more space, which is what he told me the last time I asked him if he was going to make something new.

“I know,” he says, smiling. “No space, but I just get in my head and I have to make. I have ideas in my head and I must make them. What can I do?” he asks.

“We’re going to go to Mister Kandhari’s house. Would you like to come with us?” Mister Singh asks. Okay. Why not.

Even though it’s just about a block away, we get into Mister Singh’s car and drive over. We sit in Mister Kandhari’s courtyard and he shows us his new compositions. There is one with a pine-looking tree in the middle and three straight rocks that rise up around it. He is fond of these rocks because they look like animals, especially the one on the left. You can see it has two eyes and ears and a nose. “Very clear. Very clear.”

He gets up and waters his garden, aided by his house helper who untangles the hose for him. He finishes and tells his house helper to move this newest piece with the animal figures in it up against the wall. I think to myself it seems to be balanced quite precariously on a tiny bucket. Just after I have this thought, it falls, mud going everywhere and the rocks falling out of their places. This is much like the moment when Mister Kandhari rammed the whole side of his car against that concrete pole. He is completely un-phased. He just tells his house helper to scoop up the dirt and stick the rocks back in the way they were. He steps away to water some more.

Just then I notice a flyer laying on his garden table. It’s for Dominos Pizza. I haven’t tried Dominoes yet, and pizza sounds kind of good to me tonight. I pick up the flyer.

Mister Singh says there’s a raga, a hymn, and the words to it are, “God, how can we know all your virtues?”

I’m looking at the flyer and noticing that the Dominos number is really easy to remember. It’s four four’s and four eights. Four four’s and four eights. I can remember this and order pizza tonight.

“God, how can we know all your virtues when we know our own faults? We know our own faults.”

Four four’s and four eights. A fault of mine would be that I’m totally obsessing about pizza right now. I guess it’s true; we do know our own faults.

Mister Kandhari returns to the sitting area. The men have to leave. They are going to the gurudwara to find out about the election. If they were meant to serve God in this way, they will win. If they were meant to serve in some other way, they will not win. Either way it’s fine.

I shake their hands and wish them luck. Mister Singh says, “I’m not worried,” and offers to drop me off at home. I can walk. It’s okay, I tell him. His friend wonders if I know how to get home. It makes me feel good that I do. Even if it’s only a radius of a few blocks, I have the Defence Colony C Block all figured out. Amritsar, now, that's a different story. I would have been lost without my friends of superior navigational prowess. But the rickshaw wallahs would have helped me out. There's always someone around to help, it seems.

I return to my room and decide not to order pizza after all. I’m in the mood for a rose milk soda and a veg burger from Kents. I can get pizza any time. The days are numbered when I will be able to enjoy my rose milk sodas.

The Golden Temple

Saturday

We climb off the train and into the station at Amritsar. In the middle of the platform are large piles of burlap sacks and black metal trunks. Freight cargo. I walk behind Susie and Sarah. They seem to know where they’re going. How, I have no idea. But they walk quickly and with purpose. We come into a large room in the middle of which is a scale model of the Golden Temple, just like Mister Singh described. Standing right next to the model is a man in a turban holding a sign: “Mr. Vicki,” just like Mister Singh described. We greet him and he turns and walks quickly across the street. Outside there is a large red billboard that reads “Welcome to Amritsar.” There’s no thinking we’ve gotten off at the wrong place.

There is some discussion about what we want to do. I’d like to go to the hotel and check in. Susie and Sarah don’t know if we can, but they say we can try. Most places won’t let you check in this early, but this is what Mister Singh told me to do. “You can reach there, then go to the hotel to wash up, then go see the temple right away.”

The driver leads us toward a large brown van that looks a lot like a Volkswagen Vanagon. There is plenty of room for the five of us to climb in. There is no air conditioning, but it’s improbably not that hot and the breeze from the open windows more than suffices.

Ten minutes later, we are at our hotel: the Sitara Nawas. There is a lobby with wooden doors and flowers and a marble front desk. The clerk gives us two keys and leads us to the third floor. One room has two beds and the other room right across the hall has three beds. It’s perfect.

The rooms are neat and clean and have fans and air conditioning that works quickly. There is a proper shower and a toilet “sealed for your protection” just like a hotel in the US might have. It’s a nice place. The sign in the lobby posted rates of four thousand rupees per night. Mister Singh told me we’d be paying eight hundred. I can hardly believe it. In fact, I’m ready for the bait-and-switch like Raju gave us, with the magically raising rates at the last minute. Only time will tell.

We go down to the lobby and begin the laborious check in process. We each need to fill in a page in this large book that asks for our address, our passport number and all the details of our visits to India. How long have we been here? When are we leaving? Why are we here? It feels like it takes an hour just to complete this, but it can’t have taken that long because we’re off towards the Golden Temple by ten o’clock.

We can see the temple from around the corner of the hotel. We’ll be able to walk there from here, which is a good thing because our driver seems to have vanished when we walk out front to find him.

Susie and Sarah walk out front again, leading the way down Amritsar’s narrow streets through shops and shacks set right up against the road. Amritsar is a very different city than Delhi. It’s a lot smaller for one thing. The roads are so narrow that cars don’t really drive on them save for the occasional taxi. This makes it nicer to be a pedestrian here. You can walk on the paved roads without much dodging and without getting stuck in piles of rubble at their sides. There are no sides of the roads; the shop fronts come right up and stop at the drains. It also seems, as Amar was saying, that men don’t pee in public here. The only time I smell urine on the streets is when we pass the “public convenience,” a public bathroom set in from the road.

Susie takes us to Lucky Tea Stall, a place I would never have occasioned on my own, but it seems okay once we sit down. The parathas we eat are so hot that, like the surface of the sun, no bacteria could survive there. Everybody chows down, but I can’t finish. I’m just not hungry. The chai is excellent, though, and mine is gone as quickly as I can drink the steamy, sweet drink.

The Lucky Tea Stall is just a block away from the Golden Temple’s gate. We snap some pictures of the proprietor and each other, and walk off toward the gate. I take the orange bandana that Mister Singh gave me from my purse and tie it over my head. The rest of the girls are wearing dupatta, and they wrap these around their heads. Once they do this, they look so Indian it’s hard to keep track of them in the crowd, especially from behind where I invariably find myself trailing along.

We find the shoe check and pass in our sandals in exchange for a token with a number on it. Next we walk through the footbath which is constantly fed with clean water. Unlike the one at Bangla Sahib, this footbath seems to be doing its job. It’s a bit dangerous, though, to walk on the solid marble with wet feet, and Susie almost looses her footing. We pass through an arch and see the glistening golden building appear before our eyes. “Oh my gosh,” I say taken aback, “It’s so beautiful.” I have to stop for a moment just to take it in, but my friends are moving on and I can’t get separated, so I move on as well.

The gurudwara is framed by an external gate that is all white marble with arches and domes. This white marble building is huge. It easily spans a full kilometer. Inside, the ground is solid white marble with varied geometric patterns of black and brown inlaid into it. This walkway around the temple is also easily a kilometer. The Golden Temple itself rises out of a square salowar, or bathing pool, in which you can see its reflection from any vantage point.

We walk along the white marble pathway towards the entrance of the Harmandir, the gleaming building in the center leafed in real gold. For all the conflict that the Sikhs have seen, threats of extermination from the Mughals and freedom fighting that culminated in an ugly assassination of the prime minister in the 80s, this place exudes a true majesty and peace.

If I have ever seen a palace built for God, it is it. The reverence that Sikhs have for their one true deity finds a sublime expression in the architecture here, its design and art and opulence. There are other temples I’ve visited where I feel like the money spent on the temple has impoverished the spirit of the worshipping done there, that the contrast between the richness of the building and the poverty of the worshippers is a sin in itself. The Golden Temple doesn’t feel this way, for although the building is ornate and exorbitant, the Sikhs give shelter to the homeless and feed the hungry three times a day at the huge langar where the metal plates never stop clanking. Thousands of people of any caste or creed eat here for free every day. Hundreds of people sleep here. And it’s all staffed by volunteers.

People bathe and wade in the salowar, which is supposed to have the power to heal lepers. Men stand at the corner with skimmers and clean the pool. We round the far corner and get in the long line of people waiting to enter the Harmandir. Susie and Sarah somehow take the express lane and blow past Julianne and Katie and me. We see them in the stream of people coming out of the temple before we even get in. They’ll wait by the exit, they tell us, as they walk past.

A beautiful baby with big, dark eyes is really interested in me. He smiles every time I look at him and wave. He stares at me and stares at me from his mother’s arms, waiting for me to look back and smile.

Women push past with browned leaves. I suppose these are offerings of some kind. I can see the man at the exit with a big bowl of Prasad (a.k.a. the brown goo), handing it out to everyone who walks past.

Finally, the man at the entrance lifts the orange cord and lets us enter. The inside of the building, impossibly, is more ornate than the outside. I don’t even know where to look.

Sarah said I shouldn’t take pictures inside, so I have only my recollection and the book Mister Singh lent me to furnish the details. Here’s how the book describes the inside. It does a better job than my memory could.

The lower floor “is faced with marble panels inlaid with exuberant and whimsical designs and motifs—from geometrics and abstracts to arabesques, flowers, foliage, fish, animals and a few human figures. Onyx, mother-of-pearl, lapis, lazuli, red carnelian and other semi-precious and colored stones are used in the inlays.” There are 300 fresco paintings. The walls are covered from top to bottom in detailed gach and tukri work. In gach, artisans crush gypsum and water and fry it into a paste. The paste is then applied to the wall and designs are etched out of it. Next, the designs are filled with gold leaf. In tukri, pieces of colored or mirrored glass are cut and laid into the gach to form patterns and reflections.

The first floor walls are marble, but from the ceiling up, the walls are gold-plated copper with jewels and mirrors and intricate patterns carved into them. Gold, silver, copper and brass are all used in the designs. It is the most ornate and intricate building I’ve ever seen. Every square inch is covered in some sort of wild design and color. There’s no way to take it all in, but the total effect of it is staggering. I think it’s the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen.

On the ground floor in the center is the Guru Granth Sahib, the enormous, handwritten Sikh holy book. There appears to be another copy of it on the second floor, and also in the small shrine on the roof. Lyrics from this book are sung constantly. All of the versus contained within are set to song and sung in the classical raga style at appropriate times of day.

The Harmandir is crowded on the inside. It’s hard to find a place to sit, but we do. The baby and his mother sit right in front of us, but the baby is no longer interested in me. There’s too much else to look at, I guess.

I am simply overwhelmed. I can’t concentrate. There’s too much gold and jewels and people and inlaid marble. Mister Singh said maybe I could sit here for an hour and meditate, but even if I didn’t have my friends with me, I’m not sure I could meditate here. It’s just too much. I wave goodbye to my baby friend and his mother and we walk up the second set of stairs onto the roof. We look around a bit here and decide we’ve seen enough. We walk down the marble stairs and out past the man handing out Prasad. None of us take the offering.

We walk out and meet Susie and Sarah who have been patiently waiting for us back at the marble walkway. On the way out we pass the 400-year-old Beri tree that Mister Singh told me about. It’s a huge thing and who cares if it isn’t really 400 years old. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It’s a good story. Baba Buddha, the first head priest of the Harmandir Sahib, sat under this tree while he supervised the construction of this temple that was first built 400 years ago, but has been razed three times only taking its present incarnation in the 1800s.

We get our sandals back and walk out into the streets. Susie buys some water and Katie and Sarah get lime sodas. I find a booth selling karas, the metal bracelets worn by Sikhs to remind them to do good works. This tradition, unlike the “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelet fad, is 400 years old. I buy a kara for ten rupees. I figure I can use a reminder myself.

I follow Sarah and Susie through the streets of Amritsar. We’re walking next to Jaliwanwagah Bagh, the site of a British massacre of Indians in 1919. The British killed over 300 unarmed Indians amid a climate of gathering political tensions and Sikh threats of self-rule. They wanted their gurudwaras back.

This site is only a few blocks from our hotel as well. We walk the gardens, look at the Indian Oil-sponsored eternal flame and read the short biographies of some of the freedom fighters featured with their portraits in the Hall of Martyrs. These are people who attempted or carried out political assassinations in the name of independence. The deeds are dark. These are not simply victims. They are murderers who believed they were killing in the name of justice. The Hall of Martyrs is a complicated place.

At the front gate I find a kitten. I’m attempting to approach it when Susie and Sarah go running off down the alley that leads back to the street. There is a parade complete with a marching band of sorts. There aren’t really any floats. It’s just people in trucks and people on foot with drums and horns. We walk off after the parade ends. I’m not sure where we’re going, but I’m following. Finally I stop and ask. What are we doing?

We’re trying to retrace the path the taxi took in the morning. We passed a restaurant called The Brothers and Susie and Sarah think we should go there for lunch. I try to tell them that the restaurant Mister Singh recommended was called Two Brothers, but they’re not interested. They want to find this place. We walk and walk and I lose track of where exactly we are when we emerge from a narrow road into a traffic circle that I remember from the morning drive. They’ve found it. The Brothers restaurant is just up the road from here. We actually catch back up with the parade in time to see people standing on rooftops throwing showers of flower petals.

The restaurant says it’s dhaba food—not synonymous with haute cuisine—but I guess it’ll do, especially since we don’t have a driver to take us to the destination of our choice, which would be Two Brothers.

We order thalis, platters of food that come with a variety of subzis and dals. It’s like its own mini-buffet. The food’s okay, but really oily. This is a chief complaint among the people at work: Indian food is oily. Now I know what they’re talking about.

We eat and split the bill. Outside we debate: should we walk back or hire a rickshaw to drive us? The rickshaws in Amritsar are larger than the ones in Delhi. The five of us could fit into one quite comfortably. We decide to take the rickshaw. The auto wallah will drive us back to our hotel for thirty rupees. I show him the business card that the manager gave us when we checked in, and he knows exactly where to go.

We have a few hours to kill before we go to the Wagaugh Border ceremony, the next thing on Mister Singh’s list of things for us to do in Amritsar. There’s apparently some kind of changing of the guard every night on the India/Pakistan border, which is just thirty kilometers from where we are. He said the car he hired would take us there.

I take a shower and we watch tv and take naps. Then there is a knock at the door. It’s the owner of the hotel, Mister Narander Singh. He tells us that Mister Diljit Singh has called three times today to make sure we arrived safely and to see that the car service is okay and we have everything we need. Mister Narander Singh would like to make sure we are having a good time. Is there anything we need? He tells us that the car will be ready to take us to the border at four o’clock, then he offers us each a Coke. He says we should eat dinner at Crystal. The car will take us there after the border ceremony. Then when we come back, we can go see the Golden Temple all lit up and night. He’ll go with us if we like.

Our driver reappears at four and is ready to drive us to the border. We drive through lush green farmland: wheat and rice crops. There’s also a park with go-carts and water slides and several “palaces,” giant halls for weddings and other parties.

We park in a lot that is three inches thick with fine dust. It clouds up under our feet as we walk toward the gate to the border crossing. Dozens of vendors are hawking freshly popped popcorn, sodas and water. We get to the gate and are turned back. We can’t bring any purses or bags in. We have to leave them in the car.

We make our way back through the dust bowl parking lot and stow our purses under the seats in our brown Vanagon, except I can’t leave my wallet or my passport unattended. I don’t have any pockets and I don’t want to hold it loose, so I shove my passport down my shirt to keep it safe. This is fine except that I also start sweating buckets and I can feel its pages curling. As long as it gets me through the security at the airport, it doesn’t matter what it looks like or where it’s been.

There is stadium seating around the wide gate that marks the border with Pakistan. The India side is packed full of revelers. The Pakistan side has about twenty people sitting there. We think this is because it’s Ramadan and the Muslims in Pakistan are all waiting to break their fast. That or they just aren’t interested in this little border ceremony at all.

There is a street party going on. A crowd of young people dance to Punjabi music, waving their hands in the air and jumping up and down. It’s a wonder they have the energy to move at all in this late afternoon heat. The dancing goes on until the ceremony begins, when the children are ushered back to their seats and a line of guards dressed like peacocks in flood pants stomps out in front of the small brick building at the front of the bleacher seating. There is am emcee with a microphone. He chants “Hindustan!” and the crowd yells something back. A line of men at the back of the bleachers waves a row of large Indian flags. “Hindustan!” chants the man in the pink shirt that is drenched in sweat. “Hindustan!”

Then there is something of a shouting contest. The man in the wet pink shirt holds the microphone to the mouth of the first guard who lets out a yell for as long as he can sustain it. During this, there is a horn that comes from the Pakistan side. The Indian man yells a bit longer than the Pakistani can sustain his horn note. This happens a second time and a third. The crowd cheers wildly. Little boys walk through the bleachers selling DVDs of the ceremony.

Suddenly, the yelling man snaps into action and does this crazy, straight-armed power walk towards the gate that marks the border. Halfway there, he stops and kicks himself in the head. The crowd cheers. He stomps hard with his feet a few times, then continues his power walk toward the gate. I feel like I’m at a zoo trying to decode some strange animal behavior. What does it mean when he kicks himself in the head? Is this a display of authority or just of flexibility? One things for sure, it is one of the oddest displays I’ve ever seen.

The whole line of guards takes turns yelling and power walking and kicking themselves in the head and stomping, the crowd cheering and yelling the whole time. Eventually, the gates are opened and a giant, exaggerated handshake takes place between the guards of both countries. Then the Indian and Pakistani flags are lowered simultaneously. Then the Indian guards close the gate and do their crazy power walk back to the little brick building.

When the ceremony ends, people flock to the guards to get their pictures taken with them. There are so many people around that we can’t even get out of the crowd for a while. We just have to stand and wait.

Soon there’s a path we can squeak through and we make our way back to the car through the three-inch-deep dust. I have chosen to wear black pants and I can see the dirt just caking onto them.

The driver is waiting for us at the car where our purses are all completely safe. I take my wet passport out of my shirt and stick it back in my bag.

There is a little bit of a breeze as we drive through the dusky night back past the farmlands and the wedding halls. We all concur: the ceremony was not what we expected. But what ever is expected in India? If it wasn’t a surprise, that would be a surprise in and of itself.

We eat dinner at Crystal, the place the hotel owner recommended. It’s really good food at reasonable prices. There are large paintings that look something like copies of Toulouse Lautrec works: close ups of slightly garish people in bars holding beers and ordering waitresses around. Katie, our resident artist, says they’re interesting. She says the people look so awkward and uncomfortable. She laughs and says she’s inspired; she’s going to do a whole series of awkward paintings. “But who will buy them?” Susie asks. They’ll have to be for a gallery show, Katie says.

The driver takes us back to the hotel and I pick up the tab for his services. It only costs about twenty US dollars for all the schlepping he did for us all day: picking us up at the airport and taking us to the border and dinner and back.

We have to settle the bill for the hotel tonight as well because we’re leaving at 4:30 in the morning and none of us are prepared to get up even earlier than that to mess around with payment.

This is where I expect our bait-and-switch. I expect to find out that we will be paying thousands of rupees instead of the hundreds that Mister Singh promised. But the manager on duty writes up our bills for 800 rupees. Actually, for the room with three beds, they charge 1,000 rupees, which is even cheaper when split three ways. I can’t believe we actually got this enormous discount. We’ve paid less than a third of the posed rates for our rooms.

Sarah has been sneezing like crazy since the ceremony at the border, and she decides to go upstairs to bed. The rest of us take a walk over to the Golden Temple to see it at night. We check our shoes and walk over to the langar to see the large scale cooking operation going on. It is crammed with people coming for their evening meal. The metal plates clank and clank as people come and go.

Now that the sun has gone down, the evening has a slight coolness to it. It’s a beautiful night outside. We walk through the footbath and up to the arch that leads to the Harmandir. We take a few more pictures and Susie says, “Ready to go?” But I’m not. I say I’d like to walk around the perimeter. It’s so nice outside and the place feels so peaceful. I’ll never be here again. I’d like to enjoy it. Susie says help myself. I can meet her back at the stairs. But Julianne says she’ll walk with me and this seems to change Susie’s mind. We walk the kilometer or so around the cool marble balustrade, stopping to talk to friendly Sikhs and their wives who wonder where we’re from and what we’re doing in India.

Back at the hotel, they ask if we want a wake up call. I didn’t count on this convenience, but am glad for the offer. We need to get up at four in the morning in order to catch our train, which leaves at five.

Just in case, we all set our cell phone alarms as back-ups, then fall quickly asleep in the soft beds with the thick, fuzzy, flowered blankets courtesy of Mister Singh. Our visit wouldn’t have been so easy, so smooth and so enjoyable without him.

Prayers and Baksheesh

Friday

I walk over to Shabnum’s desk and she has a site up on her computer monitor called Article Checker. It’s a Google service that lets you paste in a piece of writing, then it searches for content matches on the Internet. It’s basically a plagiarism checker. Just out of curiosity I try this with chapter six. It comes up with about a hundred different matches. Just when I thought I was done with chapter six, I find out there is a lot more work to be done. We have to flag all the copied content and send it back to the author to ask him to reword and revise.

Plagiarism is a common problem here. There isn’t the same kind of enforcement of intellectual property rights that exists in the United States. There is a whole market full of dubious DVDs that is affectionately known as “the pirate market,” and the stacks of books peddled in traffic, I’m sure, are unauthorized translations. There is a children’s movie in production right now called Hari Puttar—A Comedy of Terrors. Warner Brothers is suing the Indian producers who say they have no idea why. There is no copyright infringement going on.

Suffice it to say this is not the first time the office here has had to deal with such an issue. No one is shocked or surprised, though they are disappointed. It’s all part of the routine.

After lunch I take a walk with Shabnum and Jonaki and Preeta. Preeta says she’s going to go to the temple. The temple? I follow her. Just down the block from the nala vendors is a building that looks like a tiny version of Iskcon with orange and white spires rising out of it. This is a Sai mandir: a temple to Sai Baba. “You must have read about him,” Preeta says. Yes, I have. I checked him out online after a friend at Pearson told me a story about going to see Sai Baba at a crowded temple where he almost lost his shoes. Sai Baba is an Indian “saint” who is omnipresent, that is, he supposed to be able to appear in more than once place at the same time. But there is some confusion because there is more than one Sai Baba. There’s the one who this temple is to, who is deceased, then there’s the one my friend from Pearson actually saw, who has an afro and is still alive. He’s the one with the mystical powers of appearing all over the place.

Preeta tells me that this Sai Baba was all about unity. He believed in the universality of God and wanted to end the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. She tells me that the shrine in this temple is open every Thursday. She used to come every week until she got too busy at work. The best Sai temple in Delhi, she says, is in Noida. It’s the biggest one.

We retrieve our shoes at the door under the big brass bell where we left them and walk the two short blocks back to the office. Of course there’s a temple near the office. I don’t think you can be more than a few blocks from a temple or at least a shrine in all of Delhi.

I leave work a little early today in order to go home, pack and pick up my friends on the way to the train station for our Amritsar trip. I am home by five o’clock and ready to go by five twenty. I call Susie and let her know that I’m running early. Is it okay if I hang out at her place for a while? She says sure. I shove the last of my essential belongings into my backpack and tell Mira downstairs I am headed to Amritsar until Sunday. “Come back Sunday,” she repeats. Yes. I think she understands me, but it’s hard to say.

As I’m walking to the car, Mira calls to me over the balcony. “Where going?” she asks me. I repeat, “Amritsar.” She begins talking as she does, in no language known to man. I make out only the words market, bomb and be careful. Was there another bombing? I thank Mira for her warning and walk out to my ride.

We hit such bad traffic that I am not early in getting to Susie’s house after all. I’m glad I allowed so much extra time. Susie opens the door and I expect to see people ready with their bags. Instead, her roommate and her friend, Katie, are lounging on her couch, watching a movie on her laptop. They barely move when I come in. It’s as though the room is filled with Jello and everything inside is happening in slow motion. I realize just how piqued I’ve been when I hit this vibe. Everyone is so relaxed. I am their opposite, not having slept well the night before because I was worried about packing and worried about the train ride, just having downed another shot of espresso before leaving the office. I expect them to spring into action, to grab their bags, to busy themselves with checking if their place is ready to leave behind for their trip, but they just sit. “Hey, Vicki,” Sarah says from her place on the couch. Are her eyes half closed or am I imagining that?

“Was there another bombing?” I ask Susie as I take off my shoes at the door.

“No,” she says, “At least, I haven’t heard anything,” but then she turns on the news. There has been a shootout in South Delhi, it says. Two suspected terrorists have been killed. One cop is also dead. The shootout lasted for several hours. Two suspects were also arrested, and four fled the scene and remain at large. This must have been what Mira was talking about. Bullets were flying in an apartment complex not far from where I stay. Defence Colony is in South Delhi. Anyway, the shootout is over and there seems to be calm in the city at the moment. I am glad nothing else has blown up since last week Saturday. It seems that we can proceed with our travel as planned.

Julianne is at a meeting just across the colony from Susie’s place. We have to pick her up on the way. We all pile in to the Indica and stop at an apartment where Susanna’s banana yellow car is parked. Julianne comes down bearing the bangles I forgot at her apartment when I slept over last week. Somehow we smash four people into the small backseat and head out toward Nizamuddin Station, which everyone tells me is pretty close to where I stay.

It may be close in distance, but it takes forever to get there. The streets are clogged with cars. We are in the evening rush hour. We are parked on a flyover (which is what they call overpasses here) for over an hour. Even though I set out from my office at four thirty, I begin to wonder if we’ll make it to the train station by eight fifteen when our train is scheduled to depart.

Julianne wants to say a prayer for our trip. We bow our heads and she asks God to keep us safe and thanks him for the time we’ll spend together. She asks that the situation with our seating works out too. She is so sweet to be thinking of me in her prayer. Susie bought the tickets for herself and Katie and Julianne and Sarah. I bought my tickets on my own, so the seats are not together. I will have to sit by myself on the train rides unless we can get someone to switch tickets with me. This prospect has been stressing me out, especially since I hear stories of the trains not being the safest place in India. Pickpockets and thieves find trains lucrative from what I hear. They’ll even poison you to get you to pass out so you’re easier to steal from. Then you wake up having missed your stop without your money or you cell phone. Amar told me this happened to a friend of his. He only got home again because he knew the porters on the train and they allowed him to ride for free and pay when he returned. Suffice it to say I would prefer not to be alone on the train, especially on the overnight ride up to Amritsar. This is another reason I didn’t sleep well last night.

We finally arrive at the train station just about twenty minutes before we are scheduled to depart. I’ve already spent over three hours in traffic just to prove that travel in India is always difficult.

We ascend a concrete staircase that leads to the platforms where the trains take off. There are stray dogs trotting all over. Men with suitcases on their heads weave through the other pedestrians. Down the stairs to another platform, a sea of women sits on the ground forming a rainbow of saris. It looks like a painting.

Nowhere are there signs saying which trains depart from which platforms, and we can’t find any attendants either. I am so glad I didn’t just try to meet my friends here as Susie suggested. There are no landmarks, there is no visible organization to the place: just people walking in all directions and a bunch of staircases leading to platforms without signage.

Sarah, Susie’s roommate, goes off to ask some guards in an office where we can find the 8:15 Chattisgarh Express. While she’s away, Susie asks another man who looks at our tickets and simply tells us the train isn’t here yet. An announcement comes on in half Hindi, half English. I hear the words “Chattisgarh Express” and “delayed twenty minutes.” There is a long list of trains and I keep hearing the words repeated, “delayed one hour… delayed one hour.”

“Did you hear that?” I ask Susie, but she wasn’t listening. Sarah returns and leads us past the sea of saris up the stairs again to where the dogs are running around. We walk down the opposite side and wait on a different platform. There is no train here, but Sarah seems assured that this is the place. A rat plays with some paper thrown onto the tracks. A man walks by selling small travel pillows. We stand in a circle and talk about movies. Katie and Susie used to watch a lot of movies in Hong Kong when they were teaching there together because there was nothing much to do in the evenings when they first arrived. They throw out quotes from Meet the Parents and talk about tv series they like: Bones and The Office and a crime drama I don’t recognize.

It doesn’t feel that hot outside, but somehow my hair and back are wet with sweat. “It’s humid,” Julianne says. I guess it is. I feel so gross and know I won’t get a chance to shower until tomorrow since we’re taking an overnight train. Whatever condition I am in now is how I’ll have to spend the night. Eew.

The blue striped train pulls up almost on time. We find our car and enter. It is dirty. It’s been on a trip before us and no one has cleaned it out yet. There are food trays left behind and garbage on the floor. There is a funky smell like rotten celery. I follow my friends to the seats they have and sit down with them even though my seat is several rows away. The seats are blue plastic benches. The car we’re in has an upper bunk and a lower bunk, though other cars in the train have bunks that are three layers deep. This one is supposed to be nicer. We’ve paid extra.

We sit and sit and nothing happens. The train doesn’t move from it’s spot. A porter comes by and leaves pillows and sheets in brown paper bags for each of us. Another man comes by and asks if we’d like to order food. Isn’t it included with the ticket? No. We have to pay extra if we want to eat. Forty rupees. Since it’s an overnight train and I’ve been travelling since forth thirty, I have to order something to eat, otherwise my dinner will be the cereal bar and crackers I packed from home and that doesn’t sound too substantial. I order a vegetarian dinner and everyone else orders the “non-veg.”

It seems stuffy on the train. It feels closed in and dark. I try not to think about the fact that we’re locked into this little compartment until eight o’clock in the morning. I try not to get claustrophobic.

“Is the a/c on?” I ask.

No one can tell. “I can turn on the fan,” Susie says, and she hits a switch that I didn’t notice. Thank God. Moving air. I am rescued from the vague panic I felt creeping up on me. The train feels less like a coffin and more like public transportation.

We talk about my going home. Will Scott pick me up at the airport? Yes. I’ve seen the scene about a million times in my head. I jump into his arms and we kiss. He squeezes me so hard all the air comes out of me. An American Airlines employee yells at me for leaving my baggage unattended because I’ve dropped it all and ran as soon as I saw Scott. I see the scene once more.

We talk about snow. Susie remembers the one blizzard they had in North Carolina. A news crew came out and filmed her and her cousins playing in the foot of snow that accumulated on their street. We had so much snow last winter. I tell my friends about our driveway which is on a slant, so at the least bit of snow or ice, I have to slide up it sideways and shovel before I can get my car into our garage. I had to do that, like, once a week this past winter there was so much snow and ice. I hope the coming winter isn’t like the last one which never seemed to leave either. It didn’t really warm up until July, until I was leaving for India.

Now that I can breath okay, I’m resigned to just sitting in the train and not going anywhere. An hour and a half passes as we sit and talk. Finally, there are a few clanks and chugs and we begin to move, an hour and a half behind schedule. Amar once told me about a train trip from Assam that took him forty eight hours because once you’re running late on a train, he says, they de-prioritize you and make you wait at all the switches. So if you’re late, you’re really late. Sarah tells a similar story. She spent two days on a train once too, only it was in a lower class car so there were beggars all around and garbage and it was filthy. At least they have picked up the garbage on our train. At least there are no beggars here right now.

The porter comes by and we have to show him our tickets. Sarah asks if I can sit with them. He agrees. I can sit in the benches with my friends and when I sleep, I can use the top bunk right across the aisle, bunk 30. I don’t have to sleep in a shared compartment with strangers. I have a little bunk separated from the rest of the car by its own curtain. Julianne’s prayer comes through, or I get lucky, or both. Whatever the case, I am relieved.

They bring our dinners on little plastic trays. Mine is all smeared with white goo from a smashed contained of rice pudding that has leaked all over everything. I eat the smashed container of damp rice, then peal back the aluminum cover of a small rectangular tray. Inside are some wet potatoes. I eat some of these with a miniature plastic spoon. There is a second container full of yellow liquid and two long, skinny, red chilies. I try the yellow liquid. It tastes like bile. I leave it alone and try to eat a few more potato bits. Much like my haircut at Verma’s, even though I’m spending only about a dollar, I still feel ripped off when the porter comes to collect the payment.

I have to go to the bathroom before bed. I hula dance in the swaying aisle off to the front of the car where there is a western style bathroom and an eastern style bathroom (read: hole in the floor that leads right down to the railroad tracks beneath us). Susie says the eastern style one is better, it’s cleaner, but I still choose the western style. I don’t know why because I attempt to stand the whole time without touching the toilet anyway. The seat just makes this harder to do. Standing up and swaying like this makes me a little motion sick and I have to steady myself once I get back to my seat.

After dinner we talk a bit more. Susie mentions something about not oversleeping. We may miss our stop. Don’t they announce the stops? No. They just stop and you have to know when to get off. How will we know when we’re in Amritsar? I ask. We’ll just have to ask a porter or someone else who knows. I picture us all ending up in Pakistan with no way back.

Sarah gets out her book and starts reading. Katie climbs up into her bunk with her book. I say goodnight and crawl across the aisle up the ladder into my bunk by myself. It runs the length of the train instead of going width-wise and it seems narrower. But I’m happy for it; happy not to be in a cabin with the strange snoring man across the way; happy to be able to draw the curtain and be separated, at least by fabric, from the rest of the people on the train. I leave my curtain open for a while so I can read by the light in the aisle. I read about Babur, a Mughal emperor who took his father’s crown at the age of 12. I read about thirty pages then my eyes start glazing over. I put my book into my backpack, which is at my feet, then curl up around my purse so no one can steal it without waking me up. But they wouldn’t have to wake me up because I can’t fall asleep. I face the wall, then I face the curtain. Then I try putting my feet on top of my backpack, then under it, then I hang them off the side of the bunk. I stare at the curtain, then the wall, all the while listening to the two snoring men in our car. At one point, I remember I need to take my medication. I sit up as much as I can in the bunk and take my liter of water and pills from my backpack. As I’m doing this, a man in a turban lifts the curtain and peers in at me. “Hello?” I say and he drops the curtain and shuffles off. All night people shuffle past, I presume on their way to the bathrooms at either end of the car, or maybe they’re just looking for wallets and purses to rifle though. Who knows?

I think I finally get an hour or two of sleep towards the morning because when Susie lifts my curtain I’m kind of out-of-it. “We’ll be in Amritsar in about half an hour,” she tells me. How does she know? Susie just has a way of finding these things out.

I grab my backpack and slide out of the bunk so I can sit across the aisle on the benches with my friends. How did everyone sleep? It seems that everyone but me slept well. Perhaps they trusted Julianne’s prayer more than I did even though it seemed to do the trick for me. All of my belongings are in tact and I got to stay close to my friends so that we didn’t get separated. Or was this just luck?

Either way, we pull into the Amritsar station together, just an hour after the time we were scheduled to arrive. Susie pays off the porter. She apparently bribed him to tell us when we’d be reaching our destination. What prayer can’t take care of, a few rupees can.

Short Hiatus

I'll be offline until Sunday when I get back from the Golden Temple. I'm not taking my computer with me, so I'll have some catching up to do when I return!

Namaste!

The House of God

Thursday

I’m too full at breakfast to eat my banana. I throw it in my bag so I can give it to a beggar should the occasion arise.

After eating, I call on Mister Singh again. His isn’t home. His daughter-in-law comes down to see me. What did I need? I tell her I need the name of the hotel and the phone number of the taxi service Mister Singh was talking about. I leave the papers he gave me so he can write it on them. She says no problem. He’ll be home in an hour and they’ll get this done and have the papers sent back to my room at the guesthouse.

I catch my ride with time to spare today.

We stop at a red light and I see an old woman walking from car to car, tapping at the windows. I think, “Good candidate for my banana,” and dig it out of my backpack.

There’s a moment when she sees me, freezes, and tilts her head. It’s like I can see her getting a great idea. She hunches over and starts dragging her right leg behind her. Suddenly she is a crippled hunchback. She limps up to my window and raps on it. I roll it down and hand her the banana. She takes it but starts rambling in Hindi, clearly explaining to me that she wasn’t asking for a banana, stupid. She holds up a rupee. She wants money. I shake my head. Take the banana, lady. She rambles on while I roll up the window. She does one limp away from my car, then straightens up again and walks off as normally as could be. It comes off like a comedy routine. I hope she doesn’t slip on the banana peel.

At work I’m finally making some good progress on chapter six. I can see that I’ll be able to finish it by Friday.

After lunch I take a walk with Shabnum. She was reading my blog and says I didn’t get it quite right about the hijras. They aren’t servants to their gurus. They’re more like disciples or followers or students. I’m glad I have good editors.

There is an email in my inbox that says my package arrived. At first I just ignore it. I think it means that a package has been sent to me, but then I see it says it was signed for by someone with an Indian name. I must have a package here somewhere. Jane, my friend from work, asked if she could send me something a little while back, but I didn’t know if she really would. Now I think she actually has gone to the effort, but I wonder why no one here has brought it to me. I write down the tracking number and go up to the front desk. Is there a package here for me? Bibouti calls the guard shack out front. Yes, they have my package. I guess they were just waiting for me to psychically find out about it and track it down.

I go outside. They speak to me in Hindi and point to the address on the box’s label and laugh. I’m always good for a laugh here in India, apparently. I take the box down to my desk and pull at the packing tape. I can’t wait until I’m home to open it. Besides, this day has been dragging on and on. I need a little something to break up the monotony of currency forwards and futures and cross-hedging and yield curves.

No. I should save the package for tonight. I’ll be stuck at home if it rains with no company. It will be a great diversion.

No. I just have to peek. I’ll just peek.

It takes me a good five minutes just to get the tape off. I don’t have a pair of scissors handy, so I have to get creative. I use a binder clip. I told Jane that some salty snacks would be nice. There’s nothing really in India save potato chips and I don’t really like those. I lift open a flap of the box and decide not to disturb the contents too much. But what a great surprise. There is lip gloss inside. And it’s Carmex. I love lip gloss, and my lips are pretty parched, especially after my long day in the beating sun at Agra. I open the Carmex and decide I’ll leave it at work so I always have it to use during the day.

I peek a little more. There’s a magazine in there! An American magazine. How awesome. And there are two cards that I don’t open. This is way better than the salty crackers I was expecting. This isn’t a box of salty snacks. This is a box full of home.

In the car on the way back to the guesthouse I can wait no longer. I have to read the cards. The first one I open isn’t from Jane at all. It’s from another coworker, Linda. She tells me that I even made a visit to the eye doctor fun to read about. I am so buoyed. I love to know that people are actually reading my blog and, even better, enjoying it.

It begins to rain again, but today is not as bad as yesterday. I get home just before seven. I turn my funky skeleton key in the door and open it with baited breath, hoping to see the papers from Mister Singh sitting on my table with the information about the hotel written on them. There is nothing. Now what? Now I have to bother him again? Or do I just go to Armritsar with no hotel lined up? That was Susie’s plan. But Susie also uses the water here to brush her teeth and takes auto-rickshaw rides in the dark. Susie is more adventurous than I am.

I decide to let this issue simmer for a bit while I dig in to my package. There are lens cloths for cleaning your glasses. And a package of band aids. And hygienic toilet seat covers. I laugh out loud. Someone has been reading my blog very closely! Then I find a small white box with colorful ribbons tied all around it. There is a small purple note taped to the top with a quote on it, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” The note is signed by my director, the woman who first suggested the newdirections program to me, Nancy. Inside there is a smooth piece of quartz with the word “Create” etched into it. It’s beautiful. I cry from the kindness of all these people at home who took the time and the effort to do this for me. First I’m lucky enough to be able to participate in this program, then I’m lucky enough to have people like this cheering me on, supporting me. If I was feeling a bit alone today, I am no longer.

I open up a bag of Ritz crackers that was in the package and wander downstairs to find Pachu. “Did anyone drop off some papers for me?”

“Newspaper?” he asks.

“No. Paper. Just paper, with writing on it.”

“Oh, paper. Yesterday,” he says.

“Yes, paper like they brought yesterday. Did anyone bring some today?”

“No. No paper.”

It’s still raining out, so I decide that I’ll just call Mister Singh. I find his business card and dial him up. “Yes,” he says. “I wanted to talk to you. Why did you send back the papers I gave you?”

“Thank you for those. I just wanted you to write the hotel information on them.”

“Yes,” he says. “Give me the coach number of your train so I can call for your cab.”

I grab my ticket and tell him it’s 2A.

“That’s it? That’s the coach number?”

“Yes.”

“No. The coach number.”

“That’s what it says.”

“Maybe sometime you can come over and show me.”

Sometime? My train leaves tomorrow. “Can I come over now? I can show you now.”

“Okay,” he says and perfunctorily hangs up.

I grab my tickets and my umbrella and walk next door. The guard waves me in. I see Mister Singh through his bedroom window tying his turban. The door is closed. I get the guard. Should I just walk in or is there a doorbell? The guard opens the door for me and shows me to the sitting room.

Mister Singh joins me there in a minute. “Yes, I wanted the information about your train so I can call for the taxi, you see. He will meet you at the station and take you to the hotel so you can wash up. Then you will go straight to the Golden Temple. He will be holding a sign for you. We went on an eighteen-day trip to Europe and there was a French woman with us all the time. When you travel you need help so you do not have to worry.”

He leaves the room and comes back with a business card from the hotel where he, indeed, has made reservations for us. I am so relieved.

“Let’s just set this now,” he says, and gets on his cell phone to the taxi service. I can understand a few English words sprinkled into his Punjabi here and there. Miss Vicki, he says. Golden Temple, he says. Saturday.

“It is set,” he says, hanging up. When we reach the station, we should look for a replica of the Golden Temple, a little scale model of it. The taxi driver will be waiting there with a sign that has my name on it. I’m amazed he’s arranged all this for me.

Poonam walks into the room from out of nowhere. I am excited to see her. She is always so full of praise and joy. I throw up my arms and say hello. She mirrors my gesture. “I worship this man,” she croons as she sits down beside me. “You know why? Because he is so kind and so noble. I am so lucky to have such a friend. He has good heart. If there is someone to help, he will help. Just anyone.”

“I know,” I tell her. “He just set up my whole trip to Armritsar for me.”

“When you think of India, you will think of this man!” she exclaims.

“And I’ll think of you too,” I tell her. She is bashful about this.

“Oh, thank you,” she sings and touches my arm.

Mister Singh draws me a picture of the layout of the temple and shows me the path we’ll have to walk to get inside of it. “Remember the gate you come in so you can find your driver,” he tells me. Here there is a four hundred year old tree with berries on it that the birds like to eat at dawn. Here is the place where the profit used to sit to watch the temple being built. Here is where we can go to sit for an hour or so just to enjoy, or whatever we like.

A house helper brings three plates and some chaat: there is spicy apple and banana and pomegranate seeds. “There is chili,” he says looking concerned, but I am already gobbling. “This is okay?”

This is fine.

Next Mister Singh has another house helper bring a stack of headscarves for me to borrow and a bag to keep them in. We’ll all need to cover our heads when we go inside. There should be enough here for me and each of my friends.

Have I had my dinner?

No.

Then would I like to stay?

Is it okay?

Yes. Poonam tells me I should stay. Okay, then.

Mister Singh shows me a directory he produced for the people at his gurudwara. The front of it is filled with information about Sikhism which he begins explaining to me. Poonam grabs my chin as I lean forward to listen and smiles. She says I’m his “gurushishya,” his student, and soon I’ll know all about the Sikhs.

Mister Singh talks about Sikh marriages, the status of women in Sikh society, the meaning of the bracelet that Sikhs wear and, as always, the fact that the Sikhs fought against the Mughuls and abolished caste.

Poonam tells me, as always, that Mister Singh is a good man. He takes care of his wife so well. She needs so much attention and he is always there to give it to her.

Mister Singh says he is fortunate to be able to care for his wife. He is fortunate to have the money to do it with; it costs 1.25 lakh a month. Even so, even with this expense, he likes to give to charity. It is a Sikh value to help others. Whatever we do, we should help others. And we should be thankful for what we have. We shouldn’t complain to God whatever happens. We should bow our heads.

Sikhs don’t bow their heads before anything but their holy book. There are no idols. They don’t even bow to their gurus. Their gurus, he says, are like dust on the feet of God. They only bow to the book because in it is everything they need to know. It contains the wisdom of every religion that believes in one God only: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. There are quotes from all these religions in it.

The phone rings. It is Mister Kandhari. Mister Singh tells him in Hindi how he’s set up my trip for me. I understand, again, a few English words sprinkled throughout the conversation: trip, taxi, tomorrow.

He hangs up. Mister Kandhari is, how do you say it, a man-eye-oc about his garden. He gets up at five o’clock every day and works on it for three hours with three of his house helpers, watering, trimming, fertilizing.

Poonam says this work keeps him moving. Otherwise, he would get old.

Mister Singh asks how many house helpers God has? How big is God’s house? How many people does he need to help him? These are deep questions, he says.

He asks if I’d like to wash up before eating. I walk to the bathroom. On my way out, he shows me a file of papers. It’s receipts and records of all the blood drives he’s helped to run in Delhi. Then he’s helped with eye donations. And he raised money for a cricket player with kidney failure. The papers go all the way back to the 80s. They are a catalogue of good works.

Dinner is served. There are two vegetable dishes and a dal. Today, there is also tandoori roti, a thicker bread baked in a stone oven. Mister Singh gets out the pickles again, offering me first something stewing in mustard seed. This actually tastes good even if it looks like a long dead body in a jar. Then he gets out the lime pickles and plops one on my plate against my objections. I scoop it up to eat it and Poonam puts out a hand, “No!”

No?

No! You’re not supposed to eat the whole thing like that. You’re just supposed to touch your roti to it to let it get a little bit of the flavor. No wonder the lime pickle was so bad last time I tried it. I touch my bread to it and eat it. This is much more palatable.

After dinner, there is yet another large jar that we’ll try something from. These are olives, Mister Singh tells me, though they look more like peeled kiwi fruit.

A house helper puts an olive on each of our plates. “It’s very healthy,” Poonam stresses.

I eat it and it’s good, but it tastes like solid sugar. It’s candied. I wonder what is healthy about it, but don’t ask.

I ask Mister Singh what time it is. It’s ten. Ten? I’m late for my Skype call with Scott. I tell him I have to leave but thank him profusely for all his help. I reach to shake his hand and he extends his but doesn’t grasp mine with his thumb. He kind of keeps his hand together while we shake. He doesn’t quite have this gesture down like Mister Kandhari does. When I fold my hands and bow to Mister Kandhari, he acts like I’m being silly and grabs my hand to shake. I think maybe Mister Singh is more traditional in this regard. Next time, I’ll try bowing to him.

I grab my bagful of scarves and the gurudwara Mister Singh has given me and dash off back to the guesthouse where I scramble to set up my computer. I can’t believe my good fortune this evening to have so many people thinking about me and helping me out.

And all I’ve been able to do lately is obsess about getting that hotel name out of Mister Singh. Maybe I need to think more about others. Maybe I need to take a lesson from my neighbor and coworkers. How many people does it take to run the house of God? As many as He can get.

A Room or No Room?

Wednesday

By Wednesday, the subject of the bombings has been exhausted. It comes up no longer in conversation, though it still appears in the headlines. The police are tracking down suspects, the paper says, though it’s a little vague on the specifics.

The larger headline today, the one that takes up almost all of page one, is about Lehman Brothers going bankrupt and how that will impact the Indian economy. India stands to lose 25,000 jobs because of this event, the article says. Banks, apparently, do a lot of outsourcing.

At about quarter to nine, I walk over to Mister Singh’s house, as per Mister Kandhari’s directions last night. Mister Singh’s guard is outside polishing a posh sedan. He ushers me through the marble foyer and into Mister Singh’s sitting room. He turns on the ceiling fan for me and goes to tell Mister Singh he has a caller. I hope I’m not intruding. I don’t usually just show up at people’s houses.

Mister Singh walks into the room and sits down on the couch opposite me. He’s dressed in earth tones except for his blue turban. His shorts bear his skinny legs. How am I doing? How did I like the dinner the other night at the gurudwara? The Sikhs are nothing like the Hindus, he tells me. Hindus divide society into four castes: the warriors, the holy, the workers and the untouchables. Sikhs think caste is wrong.

His house helper brings a large framed piece of art into the room for me to see. It is a painting of Guru Gobind Singh on horseback holding a sword and a falcon, pointing at a large floating book: the Guru Granth Sahib. Beside him are some versus about Sikhism. Mister Singh reads them aloud to me. The same versus appear on the back of the frame handwritten by the artist.

This artist, Mister Singh tells me, painted a map of India with a naked woman on it to represent Mother India. For this, he was thrown out of the country. It was very controversial.

What would I like? Chai? Coffee?

I tell Mister Singh I can’t actually stay for tea. I have to leave for work at nine o’clock. He looks at his watch. It is five minutes of nine.

He goes to his bookshelf and takes out the book on the Golden Temple that he showed me the evening I had dinner with him and Poonam. He’ll loan it to me this time. I should take it and read it before I go. It tells all about the temple.

I ask him the name of the hotel he’s called and made reservations at. We leave in two days and I’m getting antsy to finalize our plans. He tells it to me but it’s hard to pronounce. The first syllable sounds like “shit” and this throws me off completely. He says he’ll get me all the information I need. His daughter-in-law is on the Internet right now printing out some things. He’ll have them brought over to my guesthouse. What room am I in?

Room ten.

What?

Room ten.

What?

Ten. Sometimes Mister Singh’s English just turns off and he suddenly can’t understand what I’m saying at all. He finally gets it. Room ten. Okay. He’ll have the information sent over.

He walks me out and shows me his little courtyard garden. There are two busts of Roman gods and lots of potted plants. There is a bonsai garden that is unmistakably Mister Kandhari’s work. “It’s beautiful,” I tell him. He tells me again how he is responsible for the rock wall that laps around the park across the street from him. When it was windy, it would blow the dust into everyone’s houses, so he had this wall built in front of his house, then everyone else wanted it too. They had to pay just two thousand rupees a piece for it. Everyone did.

I’m anxious I don’t miss my ride. On Monday when I went to the Taj Mahal, I forgot to call Palminder and cancel my cab for the day, so he ended up sitting and waiting for me until he asked the guard and they told him I’d left in a different car. I don’t want Palminder to think I’ve ditched him again and just leave.

I don’t want to be an ungracious guest, but I need to go. Mister Singh finishes his little garden tour and bids me goodbye at his black metal gate. Outside I see Palminder parked and waiting for me. I jog back up to my room to grab my backpack and purse.

Amar stops by my desk early in the day and asks me what I think about the American economy. It’s in a frightening state, I say. We talk about the headlines, about job losses. We talk about how the banking system in India is different than that in the United States. There are hundreds of small banks here, as opposed to the few giant corporations that have swallowed up all the neighborhood banks in the US.

I tell Amar I tried to open a banking account when I first got here. Finance wanted me to pay for my taxi fare with a check they cut for me. I was trying to cash it and open an account with it, but they asked for so much information I didn’t know where to start. They wanted a passport, two additional passport photos, a statement from work, a statement from the place I was living. The list went on and on. I figure this is different if you live here. It’s probably not so difficult, but Amar says it is. Indians have no social security number, so to do anything, you have to find different ways of proving your identity. This explains some of the famous Indian bureaucracy I’ve seen. The government doesn’t necessarily know who lives here, who exists. So it’s more difficult to get a passport, a utility set up, even a credit card.

At lunch Amar talks about the literacy rate in India. It’s something like sixty percent. This is better than Pakistan, which is like forty nine percent. Amar says there’s free public schooling here, but parents still won’t send their children because to keep them out of school means they can work and earn money for the family. I think of all the little boys selling magazines I see in traffic almost daily and the little boy running the ride at the small carnival outside Kalkaji Mandir. Amar says there are organizations that try to help with this. CRY is one. CRY is a good organization? I ask. Because there was a man from CRY who came up to me one day last week when I was petting Acha, Baby and Baloo. He wanted me to donate money but I couldn’t write him a check and he wasn’t supposed to take cash donations. He wanted to follow me back to my room so I could get my wallet and give him cash. He could go the bank with it and get a draft, he said. I told him I would donate online, but he wouldn’t get credit for having solicited my donation that way. He gave me the hard sell. He said people are so willing to waste their money on expensive dinners and drinks, but nobody wants to give a little bit to help others. I told him I want to help, I just don’t want a strange man to follow me back to my room so I can get my wallet. He said he wasn’t strange. He was my friend. He showed me a badge and a business card. I wasn’t sold. I told him I just couldn’t give that day, but thanked him for telling me about CRY. He didn’t care about educating me. He wanted to list my donation on his pledge sheet and I wasn’t helping him out. He finally walked away, disappointed. But Amar says CRY is a good organization to support. They have education programs for the underprivileged. Pearson also has a foundation where in exchange for learning a trade, people also have to learn how to read. They come because they want to know how to sew, which will make them money, but before they learn that, they are taught some basic literacy skills. How good. Pearson is just a good company.

In the afternoon there is a strange rushing noise and everyone gets up from their desks. It is pounding down rain outside. Arani returns from the nala vendor. He is drenched. He’d just walked out to get some tea when the sky broke open. This isn’t the change of season rain that Shinjini was walking about last week. This is monsoon rain, so thick it doesn’t even look like there are any drops, just solid water. Someone forgot to tell it that the monsoon season just officially ended. It didn’t get the memo.

Thankfully before I leave work, the rain abates. It is dark and stormy looking, but there is just a sprinkle as I walk out to the car. I get inside. “Lots of rain,” I tell Palminder.

“Yes, very rain,” he responds.

I know rain like this means bad traffic. The already narrow roads will pool up with water which will close half the lanes. Tomorrow, there’ll be a headline about it. “Rain Halts Delhi Traffic,” or something like that.

At one point, Palminder nudges his way into the middle of an intersection against the flow of traffic. There are cars pointed at us from all eight cardinal and ordinal directions. Sixteen headlights light up the car. Men shout and wave their arms. Palminder mumbles. The whole time, he is playing this peaceful chanting music with birds in the background, like something you’d use to meditate. The music goes on unaware of the chaos surrounding it. Two pedestrians in t-shirts appear and begin directing traffic. This happens in India. Anyone can direct traffic. They wade out into the water and tightly packed vehicles and begin pointing and waving. Cars inch past each other, and soon, there is a narrow gap between two of them that we can fit through. We are again underway without a scratch, though it was a close call.

We arrive home and it is again raining pretty hard. The guard meets me at my car holding out an umbrella for me. He follows me to the door holding the umbrella over my head as I walk. I thank him profusely.

Inside there are a few papers on my end table. There is a puzzle from Scott. A numbered code that I have to crack to figure out the messages he’s sent me. The last message is “Bye Bye,” and I cry as I finish it. I don’t want him to say goodbye to me. I want to keep playing this game with him, but it’s over.

Also on the table are some papers from Mister Singh, with his business card folded inside. It reads: Diljit Singh, chief executive, Herald Advertising Agency. The papers are general printouts of things to do while in Amritsar. He’s placed checkmarks next to everything on the list. We should go to the Golden Temple, then the site where the British killed hundreds of Indian soldiers, then see the changing of the guard.

There is no information at all about the hotel or the cab service he keeps talking about. I start to wonder if there is a hotel, if he does know a cab service, or if this is just some cultural miscommunication, if this is just a polite thing that he’s been making up the whole time. I start to wonder if it’s a good idea to go to Armritsar at all, especially if we have no hotel or cab lined up. I don’t want to travel without having these arrangements made.

I decide I’ll stop by Mister Singh’s place again tomorrow morning. I hate to bother him, but tomorrow is the drop dead date. I need to know if I have a place to stay in Armritsar or not.

Self Defence Is for Girls

Tuesday

Tuesday at work I tell everyone I see I’ve been to the Taj Mahal. I’ve been to the Taj Mahal! This is code for, “I’ve seen what you’ve seen there. I know the secret. I stood there. I felt it.” Everyone smiles at my news. Or maybe they’re just humoring me.

Shinjini says she’s surprised I went after the bombings on Saturday. I’m a little surprised too, but we hired a private car and steered clear of markets. I figured we’d be okay even if there were more attacks.

Amar says he went to Central Market on Sunday. This is the market also known as Lajput Nagar where I go to get my ten rupee earrings and hundred rupee kurtas. It is notoriously crowded and chaotic. If there’s a market where security is impossible, it is the Central Market where people smash on top of people on top of people. Amar says it was so quiet and so peaceful on Sunday. It’s hard to imagine it that way. “It was a best case scenario. I wish it could be like that all the time,” he smiles.

He says one of our editors and her husband were in CP when the bombs went off. They were parking their car. Debjani’s husband is a journalist and so wrote a first person account of the attack. Thankfully, they were far enough away so as not to be injured, but they heard the blast and saw the aftermath from their vantage point.

Yajnaseni says now it will be another six or eight months before we have to worry about bombs in Delhi again. Amar says it’s true. Everyone’s on high alert. Delhi is probably the safest place in India right now.

At lunch I ask Amar why these attacks happen. The terrorists are Islamic. They belong to a group calling itself Indian Mujahideen. Against whom do they have a beef? What are they hoping to accomplish?

“They are trying to punish us for our sins,” Amar says.

But who is “us” and what are the “sins”?

Amar is uncharacteristically silent in response to this question. It looks like he winces. I wonder if I’ve asked something I shouldn’t have. “It is like nine eleven,” he says, and I finally understand. There is no sense in it, no reason, not even any political objective. There is just tragically misguided, unthinking, unbridled anger. I understood, or I thought I did, why the US would raise the ire of people in countries that are not as privileged. We have so much wealth in our country and so much influence on the rest of the world, both good and bad. But India? There’s so much poverty here. Privilege can’t be the reason. It has to be something else. People are not religious enough, or too religious in the wrong way? Or maybe they’re still trying to target the section of the population that is middle class. It’s true that the bombs are not going off in the poorest places, in the villages and encampments. I give up. Terror is terror. It is never justified. There is no sense in trying to make sense of it. But if you can’t make sense of it, how do you counter it? You don’t. And the attacks go on and on.

After work, I decide to walk to the market and try a new salon I found called Girl Talk. It’s exclusively for women, the sign says. I dyed my hair a few days ago, and I figure a hot oil head massage will help the drying effects of the chemicals I used.

I walk around to the back of the market where the sign said the entrance would be. It’s dark and a little shifty. The entrance appears to be up a dimly lit staircase. I walk up a flight of stairs and see a door that has “Girl Talk” etched into the glass. I open the door and lean in. Several women look at me like I’m intruding. “Are you open?” I ask. They nod. There are no customers inside. Only women in black and white collared shirts. I step in. These are northeastern women. They look Chinese. Because I’m in a salon full of Chinese-looking women, I feel totally at home. I could be in the Coral Ridge Mall at Nails Plus.

I ask for a hot oil head massage. They tell me to change out of my shirt and put on a gown. I walk behind a curtain, change, and come back out to sit in the stylist’s chair. It occurs to me only after I’m indisposed in this fashion, getting hot oil smeared onto my scalp, that if I were a male pervert and I wanted to attack someone, I’d know exactly where to come: to the salon that has only ladies in it. I picture a creepy, leering, drunken Indian man staggering his way into the salon and I picture myself as Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, jumping into action with roundhouse kicks, protecting the comparatively short and tiny women in the salon. I could put my two months of Tae Kwon Do training to use in case of a situation such as this. Everything is fine, I decide.

This second hot oil head massage is lackluster. It’s all over in about fifteen minutes, and she doesn’t even leave the oil in my hair long enough for it to have any effect. Girl Talk, along with Verma’s, is a bust. It seems all the good salons are in the Malviya Nagar market by Susie’s place. I pay my four hundred rupees and walk out disappointed once again. For such a posh colony, they sure have stinky salons in their market.

I order a veggie burger and a rose milk soda to go at Kents. I also order a box of aloo tikka. I don’t want it for myself, but I figure I can share it with the dogs on the way home. When I run into Acha and offer her a bite, she actually acts afraid of the potato glob, kind of like me and the brown goo at the gurudwara. When will I learn that I can’t feed these dogs? They must be strict carnivores. They are the karmic balance for all the vegetarians in the vicinity.

As I round the corner, I notice that Mister Kandhari is sitting in his courtyard with his son. He asks me to come and sit. I tell him I’m just taking my dinner home with me. “One drink!” he exclaims. “One drink only. Then you can go.”

How can I refuse? I walk through the big metal gate, and Mister Kandhari’s son mixes some whiskey with a generous amount of water and a little ice. We talk about my trip to Armritsar. Mister Kandhari tells me I should talk to his friend, Mister Singh, tomorrow morning before nine o’clock. Mister Singh will fix the hotel reservation and the taxi cab for me. He will give me all the information I need. If I go looking for him and he’s not home, I should check here. That’s where he always is in the mornings, either at home or at Mister Kandhari’s house.

At the bottom of my drink, I bid my friendly neighbor a good evening and stroll home through the dark, hot night at the end of a thankfully safe and peaceful day in Delhi.

See the Taj and Get a Free Monkey

Find my pictures of Agra and Chandi Chowk and the spice market and Akbar's Tomb and crazy monkeys in my updated Photobucket gallery!

http://s458.photobucket.com/albums/qq302/vkrajewski/

Also, here's a monkey video for good measure:

A Long, Lovely Day

Monday

Monday I awaken at six, completely refreshed from my day of rest. I gather my things: my cell phone, my camera, a water bottle, my umbrella. I’m getting ready to go to the Taj Mahal today with Susie, Katie, Susie’s Uncle Dick and the father of this girl from church who has to work today. His name is Russ.

Susie calls at six fifteen just as she said she would. They are on their way. We are actually going. This trip has been quasi-planned and cancelled innumerable times because of Uncle Dick’s changing travel plans. Today it’s finally happening.

I climb into the way back of the big Toyota van next to Russ. Russ just got here late on Friday, so he still has jet lag and his head is still spinning from the sensory overload that is India to the uninitiated. He is full of questions. He asks me what I'm doing here and how long I've been here. He wants to know about Susie, too. How long has she been here? Two years. How often has she gone home? She hasn’t.

She hasn’t?

She hasn’t gone home in two years?

It strikes me now that Susie is having a kind of Into the Wild Christopher McCandless experience, that she would be fine starving to death on a bus by herself having eaten moldy seeds, that she is at total peace out here on her own, peace with a twinge of nihilistic oblivion somewhere at the end of it. Two years without going home. I could never do it.

Russ and Uncle Dick snap pictures out the window of the car, framing up shots of overstuffed auto-rickshaws and motorcycles holding whole families: the sites that I now take for granted. It is fun to have people around for whom this is all new. It makes me see my surroundings with different eyes.

The back seat of the Toyota is killing my back until we discover we can adjust the headrest so it’s not in the middle of our backs. After that, the ride is bearable, even comfortable. We each have our own air conditioning vent and the car remains cool as we drive through towns and countryside. There is a lot of open farmland on the way to Agra, and every time there is farmland, there are also the grass huts of the agricultural workers. I am amazed to see them. They are like something from a Gauguin painting, but real. People live in them. I try to reconcile this with all the boys we see in school uniforms in the populated areas getting ready to go to school. I can’t. There are two Indias: one for the educated and one for the workers, the people who live in grass huts in the country and tents in the cities, the little boys who persistently try to sell magazines to people in traffic. Sometimes I am annoyed by these boys when they won’t go away; sometimes I admire their happy resilience so much.

We get stopped at some kind of border crossing where our cab driver has to show some papers to an official. While this is happening, men with monkeys on strings approach the car. Uncle Dick wants a picture. The monkey man tells Uncle Dick to get out of the car. He can have his picture with the monkeys. Uncle Dick hops out and one of the monkeys leaps onto his shoulders, perching there for the photo. Another monkey hops onto the end of a large stick. He is surrounded by monkey. Susie takes the shot. Once it’s done the man wants 500 rupees or ten dollars. This is a little much. My whole elephant ride cost that much, and Sonu told me it was way too much. Susie passes the man twenty rupees and tells her uncle to get in the car, but the man won’t let him close the door. “Very poor man. Very poor,” he tells us.

“He’s not poor,” Susie says. “People don’t know better and they all pay him that much.” But I don’t see carloads of people cueing up to get their picture with this man and his monkeys. The cab starts to pull away and the man’s hands are still reaching into the car. Finally he gives up and lets us go. Uncle Dick notices a monkey smell and asks if he has any souvenirs on the back of his shirt, but he’s clean. It’s just the lingering scent of his little furry friend.

After about three hours we arrive in Agra. Our cabdriver pulls over to the side of the road and a man approaches the vehicle. He is Vinni, our tour guide. We say we don’t want a tour guide. How much will he cost? But he tells us he is included in the price of the cab. He’ll just appreciate a tip when he’s done. Can he get in? No one told Susie anything about a tour guide when she booked the cab, but we figure it’s okay. He’s well dressed and well spoken. He seems kosher.

If we didn’t have two strapping men with us, this might have been an issue, but as it is, Katie climbs into the back bench seat with Russ and me and gives up her seat to Vinni who starts explaining how we have to get to the Taj.

Several years ago, the conservators of the building noticed the white marble starting to yellow from pollution, so now there is a ban on gas-powered vehicles within two kilometers of the place. We’ll have to park then take an electric auto-rickshaw. The cab pulls over and Vinni hails a rickshaw. He tells us all to get in: all six of us. Susie sits on the side bar and Katie and Uncle Dick smash into the back seat. I sit very close to Uncle Dick and ask him about that funky smell. Eau de monkey, I believe? Vinni and Russ sit with the auto driver in the front on a seat that is built for one. In this very Indian manner, we crawl the short distance to the gate. It is somewhat amazing that the electric motor can handle all the weight we’re pulling. As we approach the gate, Vinni tells us to beware of pick-pockets and aggressive vendors. I’m glad he’s with us. He’s been very helpful already.

We walk down a sidewalk-width street lined with tiny shops selling cheesy souvenirs like snow globes and magnets. The vendors are surprisingly mild. I don’t even get accosted. At the gate, it is revealed that Indian citizens pay twenty rupees while foreigners pay seven hundred and fifty to get in. We fork over the cash to Vinni and he secures our tickets for us. He takes us to a second booth where they provide each one of us with a bottle of cold water and covers for our shoes that we’ll have to wear when we reach the tomb.

We walk through the gate and Vinni has lots of information for us: how tall the building is, how many towers there are, how it’s built with exact symmetry, how the towers slightly lean outwards. I am interested mostly in the story of why it was built by Shah Jehan: as a monument for his second wife who died in childbirth.

The Taj comes into view and it is shimmering against the blue sky behind it. It’s built right on the banks of the Jumna so there’s nothing behind it. It almost looks as if it’s floating: a massive, white, floating, glittering monument to love. I didn’t know what I’d think or feel when I saw it. People at work have told me that some people see it and are disappointed. It’s just a big building, after all. And then some people see it and are completely moved. I fall somewhere in between. It is beautiful. It is amazing to see something in person that I’ve seen reproduced so many times in pictures and movies. But there’s still something more I want to figure out while I’m here.

When my father’s father was in the hospital diagnosed with heart failure and nearing his death, he suddenly began talking about how he’d been to the Taj Mahal when he was in the service during World War II. He was not an effusive or emotional man. He never told stories. I’d never even heard him speak of being in the service. Yet here he was, nearly delirious, almost unable to speak, not talking about his dead wife or his remaining family, instead talking about this distant memory, talking about a few minutes spent walking around a tomb on the other side of the planet. Why?

We snap a bunch of photos and allow the Indians to take their pictures with us, then we finally approach the monument’s steps and have to put on our little white footies.

There is no photography allowed inside. We walk up to the headstones. In the center is Shah Jehan’s wife. His is right next to hers: the only detail that breaks the symmetry of the place. Vinni tells us this is because his son buried him here. The Shah was planning on building a black Taj across the river for himself, but his son imprisoned him in the Agra Fort and took over the empire, foiling his plans. His son didn’t care about symmetry or memory. His son cared about power.

I stand in front of the tombs imagining my grandfather in his twenties. He has to have stood here. How many millions of feet have stood here to see this grand gesture? To see a tomb?

So many monuments you see and you think about all the tortured craftsmen or even slaves that gave their toil and sometimes even lives to build. The Great Wall of China. The Pyramids. But the Taj isn’t like this. You don’t see the separate bricks that went into making it and imagine the people hauling them. You see one whole gesture. The building looks like one piece of air or cloud that arrived on earth because it was willed to do so. The Taj you look at and you just see love: delicate, timeless love. And I think as I stand where my grandfather must have stood, that this is what he must have seen as well, and this is what he must have remembered all those years later as his heart lost pace with his body and his mind drifted. We lose everything. Our spouses, our hearts, our minds. But what remains glistening like the Taj Mahal, untouchable by time, is only love. Nothing can touch it. Nothing can take it away.

I thank the Taj for yielding its secret to me and follow my friends out of the foyer past the intricate carved enclosure around the headstones.

Outside I realize that I’ve sweated so much that my clothes are soaked and sticking to me. I quickly drink the free bottle of water in an effort not to evaporate completely, but I am extremely uncomfortable. We walk thankfully into the shade of the trees leading down the path to the gate. There is no way I can dry off. Even once we reach the cool of the air conditioned van, I will be wet. I could probably literally wring the sweat from my shirt and pants. It’s disgusting. I just want to jump out of my clothes, but I have nothing to change into. I’ll just have to remain a puddle of yuck for the next unforeseen number of hours.

We meet Vinni back at the gate and he wants to know if we’ll go with him to see some Indian handicrafts. These are the places where he’ll get commission if we buy anything. We walk down the alley of vendors, including a Planet Hollywood, which is a dirty little shack with a metal garage door front that sells curried vegetables on metal plates. There are not even any Planet Hollywood t-shirts for sale.

This time packing back into the rickshaw is easier because we’re all so slippery. This time I don’t joke about smelling monkey on Uncle Dick because I’m sure I smell much worse. At least I’m not the only sweaty soul. Everyone is pretty well drenched.

We get back to our cab and the driver cranks up the a/c. Our next stop is a jewelry store where they sell stones mined in Agra: stars of India. They’re these stones used in the Taj Mahal that, when in direct light, produce a translucent star. They have pictures of these stones lit up at night and glistening in the Taj. I want to buy a ring to add to my collection, but the prices are high. I say I’m not going to spend more than fifty dollars, but they won’t come down. I leave the store and, as I’m climbing into the car, they change their mind. I can have the nice big stone I liked for fifty dollars. I’m their first customer today. It’s for good luck. I am always their first customer in India. I buy the ring as my souvenir of the Taj and we’re off to a rug place, that is, as soon as Vinni gets his cut of the cash.

In the next place we go, they are making rugs. It’s amazing to see them work. There are hundreds of threads stretched taught on this loom and the men are sitting, making knots in an intricate pattern of color with such speed that you can hardly tell what they’re doing. They make the knot, then cut the yarn, and make the knot, and cut the yarn. I don’t understand how they know where to put each color to make the detailed design they are making, but somehow they get it exactly correct just by having a picture of the design posted next to them.

The rug man takes us downstairs and show us where they create the design patterns for the rugs. He says the designs they make are hundreds of years old. Then he shows us a demonstration of how they trim the rugs once all the knots are made. Then he shows us how they have to use a little wooden stick to straighten out all the lines in the rug after it’s trimmed. All in all, it takes about four months to complete a typical rug made in this fashion.

They’re about to go into their sales pitch when we decide no one in our crowd wants a rug. Thankfully, the man isn’t too pushy and allows us to leave without argument.

The next stop is a place that does marble inlay work. The salesman here tells us that the people we’re looking at doing this work are descendants of the people that did the work at the Taj Mahal, that this is a trade that has been passed down through the families for hundreds of years.

He shows us how the craftsmen shape the pieces of precious and semi-precious stones on a grinding wheel, and how they scrape the exact shapes of these tiny pieces into the hard marble surfaces with tiny chisels. He shows us pieces less than a millimeter long that have several tinier pieces within them, mostly flower petals with stems and leaves. He takes us into a showroom and offers us tea. We decline. We can’t buy anything here. It’s all too expensive and large. They’re selling huge, heavy tables. Perhaps we’d like to see the room of smaller pieces, then?

He ushers us into a roomful of boxes and plates and elephants and coasters. Uncle Dick buys a set of elephant coasters for a good chunk of change, so good that they throw in a free elephant for him. Vinni says next we should eat lunch. We can eat at Pizza Hut, or there’s a Chinese place next door. We decide that Pizza Hut is fine. Vinni will leave us, then, but he gives us his business cards. They are handwritten in green ink with tiny lettering that tries to mimic a typewriter. We should call him if we ever need a tour guide in Agra again, and pass his name along to our friends. He wants my email address and Susie’s too because he knows we’ll both be in Delhi for a while yet. We tell him thanks, but it’s enough to have his contact information. He looks rejected, but sorry Vinni. No need to send me emails.

I’m still wet, but I’ve cooled off enough to realize that I’m also starving. It takes what seems like half an hour to decide on what pizzas to order, but we finally accomplish the task. I order a veggie and the crowd gets two chicken pizzas to split. Even though the veggie pizza costs about half of what the other ones cost, we split the bill evenly. I try not to be too George Castanza about this, but it seems like it always happens when I go out to eat. It’s truly no big deal, though. Susie paid for the auto-rickshaw on the way back from the Taj and Uncle Dick paid for it on the way there. Uncle Dick also got Vinni’s tip. It all evens out.

Next the driver stops at the Red Fort, the place where Shah Jehan was imprisoned. As we get out of the vehicle we are accosted by hawkers selling tiny marble inlaid boxes and marble elephants and fans made out of peacock feathers and tiny chess sets. One man tries to stick an elephant in my hand to get me to buy it. Another shoves one in my face. I make the mistake of showing a glimmer of interest and a crowd of them gather around me. “Chalo! Chalo!” I yell at them. Go away!

We walk all the way to the gate of the fort and Uncle Dick is framing up shot after shot, all the while the men are hounding me. “Madam, madam, a hundred rupees. One hundred rupees only!”

“Chalo!” I shout, then Susie looks at me.

“What are you telling them?” she asks. “Are you telling them ‘chalo’?”

Uh oh. Yes, I say, waiting for the bad news. “That means come here,” she says. “It means, like, let’s go. You’re telling them to come with you. You need to tell them ‘jao.’”

I look up and the men are laughing at me. “Jao,” I say, but this doesn’t work. One man jaws this word back at me like a twisted grammar school teacher. “Jaaaaooooo. Jaaaaooooo,” he says, laughing and laughing. Then they cram their merchandise back in my face. “Hundred rupees madam. One hundred rupees only.”

“Okay, I’m ready to go anytime,” I tell Uncle Dick, who is still framing up shots of the fort. “Anytime.”

Finally Uncle Dick is satisfied. We walk back with some effort because we are surrounded—especially me. Back at the car, the hawkers don’t let up. They stick their hands in and keep up their fevered pitches. Now there are better deals. “Madam, two for a hundred. All three for two hundred.” Russ hops back into the car. He has purchased a wooden chess set that he now can’t get opened. How much did he pay? 400 rupees. I think it sounds a bit expensive, but don’t say anything. It’s not like you can get your money back. I think these guys have a no return policy.

They won’t let Uncle Dick close the door, sticking their hands and their merchandise in, yelling out prices without abating. Finally the taxi driver starts pulling away. They walk with the vehicle, keeping on. Uncle Dick tries to close the door but they’re still there. It’s like we’re being attached by an octopus or two or three who’ve gotten into a trunk of sunken treasure. There are arms everywhere with the goodies we just can’t live without. Finally we pull out into traffic and the men have to give up.

A few miles down the road we stop at Akbar’s Tomb. I’m kind of tombed out, I think, until I see it and remember Amar telling me about it. Some people like it better than the Taj Mahal even. It’s more intricate, with more designs on it. It’s captivating. And the grounds are like a zoo, with hoards of semi-tame monkeys and deer and peacocks that have been there for years. Akbar would have wanted it that way.

Half way up to the tomb, I get an ocular migraine, the kind wherein I go partially blind because there’s a big flashing blob in front of my face for about fifteen minutes. But I don’t let it come between me and the monkeys. I take picture after picture and get some great video of three baby monkeys taking turns jumping off a bench.

I can’t say I’m surprised by my migraine, going from such extreme hot to the air conditioning over and over during the day. I would just like for it to go away. I would like to be dry, and I would like my migraine to go away.

Inside the tomb there is a guide looking for a tip. He tells us some trivia about Akbar that I can’t pay much attention to because I’m partially blind and still wet. We travel down a long, narrow passage to a plain room that houses Akbar’s headstone. Here a man in Muslim dress gives us each a handful of flower petals and tells us to throw them onto the tomb. I follow the instructions. Then he tells us we should leave money on the tomb. No one else does, but I get out some coins and set them down. “Two rupees!” the man cries like I’m the biggest cheapskate in the world. The other tour guide goes on about how there’s a five second echo in the room. Two rupees! I hear again. Shove it mister. I’m half blind and all wet. You’re lucky you got that.

The interminable tour guide takes us into the neighboring chamber where Akbar’s daughter is buried and shows us a trick of the acoustics in this room. If you whisper into one of the corners, you can be heard on the opposite side of the room. He hopes we enjoyed the information he says, holding out his hand with a ten rupee note cupped into it to show us just exactly what we should do. Someone gives him a tip. I am out of change, so I can’t.

Walking back to the car we are greeted by hawkers with the same merchandise they were selling outside the Red Fort. There are elephants and fans and boxes and chess sets. Except everything here is about half the price. They are asking two hundred rupees for poor Russ’s chess set. I pay a man and get a large green carved elephant for a hundred rupees. As I pass to the car, a man pushes another man in front of me. This man’s eyes are all white. He holds a few ugly necklaces. “Madam, there is a blind man here,” his helper points out the obvious, hoping this will incite me to buy. It is a unique pitch. But I am hot, I am still wet and I am now in pain from the pounding headache that always follows my temporary blindness. I jump around the blind man and make for the Toyota with Russ.

We are the first ones there. Uncle Dick has stayed behind to dicker with a hawker over a chess set. I think he gets one for a hundred rupees, or two hundred. I don’t much care. I just want the air in the car to dry me off. I just want to lean back and close my eyes and recuperate from the day.

We are all finally in the car and the driver cranks up the a/c and pulls away. We are on our way home. The air gives me goose bumps but I love it. I could close the vent that is blowing on me, but I don’t. For once in my life, I enjoy being cold. I take a nap. I think everyone in the car takes a nap. It’s comfortable and quiet, and it’s been a long day. Travel in India is not a spectator sport. You get jostled around. You need your elbows. Your senses are overloaded. Your clothes are dirtied. Your patience is tried. You are tired out when you are done.

We drop off Russ at Nizamuddin and reach the Ahuja Residency around eight thirty. I say goodbye to Uncle Dick and Katie and thank Susie for what was a totally smooth and fun and comparatively easy trip to see the Taj. If I were going again, this is the way I’d want to do it. There was no messing with auto wallahs or worrying about missing trains or busses.

Upstairs in my room, I call Scott to let him know I’m home safely. Then I pick the last three biscuits from my fridge and head out to see if Acha, Baby and Baloo are hungry. Before I can find my dogs, I find my neighbors. Mister Kandhari is in his courtyard. “I call you! I call you!” he says excitedly. I tell him just as excitedly that I just got back from the Taj Mahal.

“Come to our temple,” he says.

“Now?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “I just need to give these biscuits to the dogs.” I run around the corner and leave the biscuits on the ground, then climb into Mister Kandhari’s car along with Mister Singh and Gopi. The Defence Colony gurudwara is only, like, two blocks away. We park and get out. There are no footbaths here, only a sink in which I am told to wash my hands. We check our shoes and Mister Singh produces a white bandana with which I can cover my head. We stand outside. Inside there is a golden arch and a man singing a raga. There is another man who looks to be waiving a feather duster over the large copy of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. We wait outside for a break in the music, then Mister Singh motions for me to follow him in. The singing and chanting continues and pages in the book are turned. Mister Singh walks a few paces to the left to sit down. I’m glad I don’t immediately follow him because I notice that all the women are sitting to the right. I stay where I am and sit with the women. I’m not as worried about getting separated from my hosts at this gurudwara. It’s small and not as crowded as Bangla Sahib. It’s also close to home. If all else fails, I can walk home from here.

The chanting continues, then the book is covered with a golden cloth. The man comes back with the feather duster. Then a man comes around with the brown glop. Before I can think, I hold my hands out and get the warm goo straight from the hand of the man scooping it out. There are no garbage cans around. This is a whole ceremony. There’s no getting out of eating the goo this time. I take a taste. It’s something like cream of wheat with a hint of brown sugar. It’s not bad. I think, I’ll have to ask Mister Singh what the significance of this is when I get the chance. The woman sitting next to me feeds her goo to a tiny little girl crawling around the floor in an adorable yellow halter top and white frilly pants. The baby gets full of goo then gets interested in my rings, touching them with her tiny gooey fingers. The song goes on and a young boy is presented in front of the crowd. A large wreath of yellow flowers is hung over his head and some words are read.

Finally, the Gugu Granth Sahib is put on a cushion and covered in golden cloths. Everyone touches their heads to the ground as the book is raised and carried to the glass chamber where it is kept every night. Sikhs have this ceremony in the morning and the evening every day.

After the bible goes to bed, people mill about the clean, plush carpeted room. Mister Singh introduces me to a childhood friend of his who is impressed that I’m going to see the Golden Temple this coming weekend. He touches my head as in a blessing and tells me that I’ll be close to God when I go.

“Come, Vicki, come!” Mister Kandhari wants me to follow him. “I call you. I call you just a half hour ago, then you come. It is good. We’ll eat some dinner.”

Downstairs, a big meal is being served. Mister Singh explains it is for the occasion of the child being accepted into the church, the little boy who got the wreath of flowers placed on him just a few minutes ago. The family wanted to do this.

There are easily two hundred people in the gurudwara basement. We sit down in a row of chairs. Mister Singh said there never used to be chairs, but then they put them here for the people who are getting older and having trouble with their knees.

Young men come around with buckets and ladles and serve dal, then paneer, then a cucumber salad and finally kheer or rice pudding, as Mister Singh explains it to me.


He tells me for the third or maybe forth time how the Hindus have four castes, but the Sikhs think caste is wrong. Human beings are human beings, you see. That’s why the Sikhs serve food like this, where everyone can sit together, regardless of caste or religion.

“Happy?” Mister Kandhari asks me as he walks past with his empty plate.

“Yes, very,” I reply, as I always do when he asks this question.

The food is good and the meal is over quickly. An old man takes my plate away when I am finished. Then we meet up with Mister Singh’s childhood friend. He begins to tell me how the Sikhs think caste is wrong, but I have to excuse myself. It appears that my ride is leaving.

“Come, Vicki, come,” Mister Kandhari says and begins to teeter up the stairs. I follow Mister Singh to the shoe check and wash my hands. Mister Kandhari gets back into his car with great effort and a few grunts. They drop me off at the guesthouse less than an hour after I left planning just to feed a few biscuits to a few stray dogs.

It’s been a long, lovely day, but I’m certainly ready for a long, lovely sleep.

One More Nap

Sunday

The phone rings. It’s Julianne. She’s calling because she’s on the way to pick me up for church, but Jonaki is still sleeping. I tell Julianne I’ll have to skip church today. I’m in no condition for worship anyway. If it was painful last week after the gurudwara, it would be excruciating after my date with Indian wine which, I’m finding, seems a lot stronger than the kind I’m used to, or maybe it’s just that my tolerance is down because I’ve been drinking so little while I’ve been here. Either way, I feel like I might get sick.

Jonaki awakens shortly after Julianne’s phone call, springs up and gets dressed in just a few quick minutes. She’s going to call a cab. The hotel wants to charge her for a full day at first just to drive her home. She says she only got stuck here because of the bomb blasts, why are they taking advantage of her? They say ok. They’ll charge for a half day. It’s still exorbitant for a ride across town. She tries two other services. One leaves her on hold for ten minutes then tells her they don’t have cab in our area. They can’t help. She can’t get through at all to the other number.

She goes downstairs and has some breakfast while I stay upstairs, sitting in a chair with my eyes closed, hoping not to get sick. Jonaki walks out to the gate and finds an auto who will take her for 125 rupees. This is a quarter of what the cab service through the hotel was asking. She’s only worried about the border crossing. She lives in a different state. Delhi is kind of like Washington D.C. It’s its own state. Because of the bombs, Jonaki wonders if the border will be locked down and she won’t be able to switch autos like she normally does when going home. But it works out okay. She gets home fine.

In the meantime, I sleep and sleep and sleep. In fact, I pass the whole day lounging around in bed, watching BBC World News and CNN IBN. Turns out they found a few more bombs that didn’t detonate. One was at India Gate. The others were in a place I don’t recognize. There was an email sent to the press a few minutes before the bombs went off. It said there were nine bombs in all. Something like seven have been found or exploded so far.

Sunday I don’t even have the energy to blog. I am sapped. Drained. Empty. Nothing personally happened to me or anyone I know in connection with the bombings. I have no right to feel like I survived something stressful. All I did was stay in my guesthouse. Still, I do. I feel like I need a day to adjust to this new reality: a Delhi that explodes right under you, a Delhi with blood stains in its markets and auto-rickshaws. It’s sad. When I am trying not to get sick, I feel sad that my safe Delhi is gone. There will always be the question of danger now in my head. I will always feel a little on edge in the markets. I will steer clear of garbage cans, and who knows if I can climb into a rickshaw again? I probably will. I will be one of the hearty Delhiites who go on after an attack, because, really, what else can you do? Hole up and stop talking to people? Stop going places and doing things? Stop living? That’s no kind of life. There is no choice but to return to normal eventually.

After I take another nap, though.

Getting Bombed

Forgive my brief hiatus. It's been a stressful and then busy few days with the bomb blasts and a visit to the Taj Mahal as well. All is well and I hope to get caught up here in the next few days. I will also be loading pictures tomorrow from work where the connection speed is better. Please read on about:

Saturday

Saturday I wake up on Julianne’s spare bed. It is hard like a rock, but still somehow comfortable.

She makes spiced Indian chai and oatmeal with brown sugar for us to eat before Palminder arrives, right on time, to take us to pick up Susie and Katie on our way to Chandi Chowk to explore the huge marketplace in Old Delhi.

We load up the car and drive past India Gate, past Janpath, and into the narrow, clogged streets in front of the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid. Palminder turns up a long street that is lined with shops on both sides. There are lots of jewelers on one side and lots of temples on the other: a Jain temple and two gurudwaras where people cue up to wash their bare feet before entering.

Palminder announces, “Chandi Chowk,” then pulls over. But this isn’t quite where we want to be dropped off. We want to check out the spice market first. However, we don’t exactly know where the spice market is. Neither does Palminder, apparently. He insists we get out where he stopped, but Susie tells him to get out of the car and ask where the spice market is. After this direct instruction, he begrudgingly obliges. He drives back to the beginning of the street of shops and makes a u-turn, leading back up the far side of the street. Here he pulls over and tells us, “spice market.” We don’t see anything that looks like a spice market. Susie jumps out of the car this time to ask somebody where it is, but in the intervening moment, a cop tells us we have to pull out of the way of the auto-rickshaws behind us. We leave Susie behind as the car pulls up about 500 feet. Had I been left behind in such a fashion, I probably would have totally panicked and started digging though my purse for Palminder’s card while sitting on the curb and shaking. But not Susie. She finds the car with no problem amidst the crammed sea of auto-rickshaws and trucks and bicycle rickshaws and cabs, ducks her head in and tells us we’ve found it. The spice market is right around the corner. We get out of the car and tell Palminder we’ll call him when we’re done. He has to go park by the Red Fort, he tells Julianne in Hindi. There’s no parking nearby. You’re barely allowed to stop your vehicle to let people in and out.

We climb out of the car into a smash of saris and salwar and lungi. Susie walks quickly between the shoulder-to-shoulder people and crosses the street which is full of bicycle rickshaws. No engine-powered vehicles can even fit down the road we’re crossing. I try to take a few pictures but don’t want to get separated from my friends. I don’t want to be alone in this market.

Across the street and around the corner, I see piles of nuts and roots in burlap sacks and metal dishes. “This is the spice market,” Susie announces. In her two years of living in India, she has been here before. She just didn’t quite remember how to find it. I can’t fault her. The streets are a jumble of shops too numerous and chaotic to even be able to find a landmark. If there is a shop, there are ten more just like it just up the street. There are booksellers and jewelers and sweets shops and electronics stores and stores that sell random items like brooms and string and toys.

Once we find the spice market, though, the cacophony gives way to stall after stall of powders and chilies and roots with little price markers shoved into them. Every tenth person is sneezing—and that’s a lot of sneezing.

Susie stops us at a guli, an alley, and gives a little warning. If anybody is sensitive to smells, they may want to wait outside. We all brave it, following her down the narrow twisting path between buildings where men walk with great burlap sacks of chilies balanced on their heads calling to the people in front of them to make way. The smell is not so strong today. Last time she was here, Susie says, her eyes were watering. We make it out of the guli unscathed and walk back down the row of vendors. The street is jammed with bicycle rickshaws that can’t go anywhere because there are too many people and wagons full of burlap sacks. And this is the non-crowded time of day that the guidebook told us to visit during. I can’t imagine this place with more people in it, but, then again, I’ve seen a lot of things I couldn’t have imagined on my own in India.

We decide to try to find the Paratha Wali Guli, or the Alley of Bread. Several of my coworkers have described this place to me and told me I should go there. We use the patented Indian method of navigation and stop by a sweet shop, asking the friendly vendor if he can point us in the right direction. He says we can take a bicycle rickshaw or we can walk. It’s about a kilometer straight up the road, then turn right. We decide to hoof it. A walk is always a nice thing, and this way we can stop and look at the shops along the way.

Susie stops and bargains hard for a handful of watches with beaded bands. She gets five for four dollars. We come to a street where Susie decides we should turn right, and we do. The sidewalk is starting to get so crowded that we can’t negotiate, so we step into the road where no cars can go anyway. Food vendors line the walk and shops with the brightest, most glittering fabrics you can imagine: bright pinks and oranges and blues and greens. I snap photo after photo. I could take a thousand pictures just standing in one spot and each one would be different.

We walk and walk until finally Susie decides we should turn around. I decide to help out with navigation, asking every few stores where the Paratha Wali Guli is. “Famous place,” a shopkeeper tells me. “Turn right.” But no one can tell us exactly where to turn right. At the sari shop? There are hundreds. At the food vendor? There are hundreds of them too. I resolve to just keep asking. “Paratha Wali Guli? Paratha Wali Guli?” The shopkeepers dutifully point their fingers. Just to the right. Just to the right.

We finally find a narrow twisting alley that not even the bicycle rickshaws can make it down. This is strictly a pedestrian experience. You can almost fit your arms across the alley and touch the stores on both sides simultaneously. We have to be getting close. If I were an alley of bread, this is where I’d be. We walk down the row of never-ending sari shops with an occasional jewelers thrown in and everyone tells us we’re going in the right direction. We just need to keep walking. I feel like we’re totally leaving civilization behind. I wonder how we’ll ever find Palminder again, but I trust that with the power of the cell phone, we can just call him up and describe where it is we’re standing and he’ll magically appear. I hope. That is, if we ever see a street that a car can drive on again.

We take a turn to the left and it’s clear we’ve found it: shop after shop of bread and food. These places give a new meaning to holes-in-the-wall. They are tiny shops fighting for space. I leave it to Susie and Julianne to choose the one we’ll eat at. If I look too hard at any of them, I’ll chicken out completely. Men sit on the ground and rinse dishes at faucets coming out of the wall. Great pots of vegetables boil. And giant pans of fried bread fill the air with a savory scent. Susie wants to eat somewhere we can sit down. We find a place with a waiter who points us up a narrow marble staircase to a second floor eating area with a ceiling that barely allows us to stand up straight. There is a menu on the wall, but it is completely in Hindi. I am so impressed that both Susie and Julianne can read it. I have to rely on them once again to pick out something good. They come through. But, then again, I have a feeling that all the food here is good. We each get a metal plate divided into four sections. The sections are filled with different subzis: there is something sweet that’s maybe pumpkin, there is cauliflower, and there is a potato dish. There is one more section with a sweet-looking liquid and bananas, but Susie says not to eat it. If it’s not hot, it may not be safe. The heat kills the bacteria. We don’t want to take a risk of getting sick. We’re all planning a trip to Armritsar in less than a week.

We take pictures of each other in what feels like a little secret clubhouse above the bubbling crowd of Chandi Chowk. Katie asks the waiter to take pictures of the four of us with his camera and he kindly obliges, even turning off a light in the background so there’s less glare. He brings up fresh, hot parathas: stuffed, fried bread that we use to mop up the vegetable dishes we’re served.

When the meal is done, we’re all as stuffed as the bread. People start fishing for change but I decide to treat. For all four of us to eat this amazing lunch, it cost four dollars. No sense in breaking up the bill.

Afterwards, we stop at a bakery that boasts it has been there for a hundred years. All these shops are that old or older. Chandi Chowk market has been here since the Mughul Empire and some of the same families are in the same trades they have been in since the 1700s. Needless to say, they know how to make good food.

As we leave the bakery, we notice that we were just a few hundred yards away from the main road. We certainly took the long way around to find the Alley of Bread, but I’m glad for it. I loved the feeling of walking into centuries old Delhi, far from the gas powered engine and electric lights of modern society.

Julianne says we should walk down to the gurudwara. It will be a recognizable landmark that Palminder can pick us up in front of. We call him and he arrives on the spot in less than ten minutes. He has yet to fail me.

It’s getting on near three o’clock. We decide to stop by the gallery where Katie’s artwork is on display on the way back from the market. It’s a workshop-like space behind the Siri Fort Auditorium complex, full of paint and paintings and painters. The piece Katie painted at the Let My Country Awake event is here. I can see it in it’s finished form. She’s also done a companion piece: one with violent figures inside a lotus flower. There’s a lot of motion and dripping color in this second piece. They are both beautiful. Katie’s work is impressive.

Susie and Katie take an auto back to her place, and I drop Julianne back at her apartment in GK1 before going home.

At home, I call Jonaki. We were supposed to go out tonight. She has hatched a plan while I’ve been out playing. Here it is: she’s going to take an auto over to my place around seven. She’ll get ready when she gets here, if that’s okay by me. Then, around eight or eight thirty, two friends are going to come pick us up in their car. They’ll take us out to some bars, and they can then drop us back home when the evening’s over. It sounds perfect. I tell Jonaki I’ll see her soon.

I’m Skyping with Scott when I get a text message from Susie. “Are you there?” she asks. “Yep. Just talking with hubby,” I type her. Then my phone rings. I pick up but leave the Skype call with Scott going in the background.

It’s Susie. She wants to know if I’ve heard. Heard what? About the bombs. Three bombs have gone off in the city, in GK1 and Connaught Place and Karol Bagh. She wanted me to know because she heard I was going out tonight. I shouldn’t go.

GK1? Connaught Place? These are places I go all the time. I just came from GK1. Julianne lives there.

Scott wants to know what’s up. I tell him that bombs are going off. In places that I frequent.

The phone rings again. It’s Shabnum from work. She wants to know if I’m okay. She wonders whether I’ve heard about the bombs. I tell her I’m fine, but I’m worried about Jonaki. Jonaki is on her way over here right now. She told me she was taking an auto. Autos are notorious targets for bombings in India. Shabnum hangs up with me and says she’ll try to get a hold of Jonaki.

I turn on the news. Pictures of puddles of blood and crying people fill the screen. There is a repeated close up of a black puddle in the bottom of an auto. Scott is still on Skype. I don’t know what to tell him except that I’m fine and I don’t know if my friend is.

The phone rings again. This time it’s my boss from work. Amar wants to make sure I’m okay. I’m fine, I tell him. He says he got busy working around the house today and it’s good. We had made tentative plans to go out and do something, but now it’s best just to stay in. He tried to call earlier and couldn’t get through. The phones are jammed and not working right. Amar says to take care.

I tell Scott who was on the phone and why. Scott says there are a lot of people looking out for me here. I tear up. There are. I am so lucky. I have met so many kind people in my short time here.

Just then there is a knock at the door. It’s Jonaki. Thank God. “Thank God you’re here. Thank God you’re okay,” I tell her. She looks at me kind of cocking her head. Why am I acting so strangely? She hasn’t heard about the bombs. I have to tell her about the bombs. They’ve gone off all around the city. People are dead. People are injured. We can’t go out tonight. Obviously, we can’t go out tonight.

I hang up with Scott and try to get through to Julianne. She was supposed to go out with her friend, Carmen. I don’t think she was supposed to be in GK1, but I want to hear from her to make sure she’s okay. I can’t get through. There’s just a constant beeping. I don’t know if it’s a busy signal or something else. I call Susie. Has she heard from Julianne? Yes. She’s okay. I’m relieved. Very relieved. It seems that everyone I know here is accounted for. Everyone is home and okay. I tell Jonaki she has to spend the night. I don’t want her travelling across town tonight. She’s fine with this plan.

A sleepover party it is.

Jonaki calls her friend Kartik. He still wants to do something. His cousin is winding up four years in India. He leaves this Friday for the states, so he doesn’t want his last weekend here to be a bummer. Is it okay if they come over? They can bring some drinks. We can hang out, have an almost-party.

It’s fine with me, if they think they can get here. It’s unclear whether or not the police will be blocking roads and closing off sections of town. They say they’ll be over in a little bit.

Jonaki and I watch the news. They show victims on stretchers and always return to the close up of the puddle of blood on the green metal floor of the auto-rickshaw. Over and over. The puddle of blood. The body count is at ten, then it is at twenty. Forty people are injured, then it is 100. I have to turn off the television. There is no new information. Just that puddle of blood and now an exploded garbage can in the park near Connaught Place. Jonaki says that’s why there are no refuse bins in Patparganj where the office is: they’re great places for bombs. I think at first she’s joking because there’s so much garbage on the streets around the office, but she’s not. Terrorism is a serious problem here in India: a big one. I think of that article I read in that magazine at breakfast after the blasts in Jaipur that said that India is second only to Iraq in the number of terrorist attacks per year. It was one thing to understand that as a concept, but another thing altogether to feel this reality closing in around me, to wonder if my friends were safe, to have to change my plans because the markets we were planning to go to were attacked. Thank God we hadn’t set out earlier. It was just chance that kept me safe tonight, but I guess that’s the same as every night.

Jonaki says Delhiites are hardy. They’ll take this hit and bounce right back. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Unfortunately. That is the way with these attacks here. Bombs will go off, the headlines will feature police tracking down suspects for a few days, then the idea of the bombs will recede along with the immediate feeling of being threatened, along with the heightened security, until things are back to the same way they used to be before the bombs went off. I’ve seen this already with the bombings that took place in multiple cities just about a month earlier.

It’s nine thirty and still no sign of Kartik and his cousin Raj. Jonaki and I are starving. I don’t have any food in my place and it’s too late to ask Mira to cook for us. We decide to see if we can walk to the Defence Colony market. Just there and back. Real quick. We’ll order it to go. Downstairs, a woman puts a quick stop to our plan. She carries a white plastic bag full of food. “Everything’s closed,” she says. “But you can have some of our food. We’ll cook enough for you. I had to go all over just to get this. You won’t find anything else. It’s okay.” But she doesn’t know that we have two hungry men about to show up.

Then the guard tells us that it’s possible that one of the restaurants is still open. He gives us a menu for Swagarth. We try to call but can’t get through. Pachu dials the number for us and this does the trick. We order some okra, a shrimp curry recommended to me by some woman at breakfast one day, and a mixed vegetable dish. They’ll deliver it in twenty minutes. We won’t have to go without dinner tonight after all.

Kartik and Raj get here around ten o’clock. Jonaki has done well in describing them as not quite the everyday Indian type: they are both stout and their heads shaven. They look almost as if they could be twins in their t-shirts and blue jeans.

They bring in a giant load of booze and soda and chips. There’s beer and two kinds of wine and liquor. Two kinds of wine?

The food arrives just shortly after our guests. I start serving it up. Raj asks if I’m a big drinker. I say no. “You must not be,” he says. “You’re just all, like, let’s get the food.”

But it’s ten o’clock at night. I’m starving!

Raj isn’t hungry. He fixes himself a mixed drink and sits on the couch smiling. His cousin follows suit. I ask Raj what he’s been doing here in India for the last four years.

“Yoga,” he says.

His broad frame and booze-hounding demeanor make this answer sound all the more improbable, but what follows makes more sense.

“I’m done with yoga,” he says, smiling a half-baked smile and slowly, peacefully nodding his head. He is of Indian descent, but born in small-town Pennsylvania, where he’ll return in just six days after four years of living in India. What will he do? Get a job, probably. Probably doing something techie. But first he’ll spend some time at home, peacefully nodding his head and half smiling.

He wonders if I have any music. I play the limited selection I have on my laptop. It’s mostly a Rolling Stones box set that I borrowed from someone at work one day. Raj gets up and checks out the selection, double-clicking on Outkast. He wants to hear some hip-hop, he tells Jonaki when I leave the room for a moment.

The evening is a blur of Indian wine and quiet laptop music. For a while we take our tiny party out to the balcony where the night air is cool enough to be comfortable. Outside is quiet. It seems so safe. It’s hard to believe what happened tonight. It’s hard to believe it happened so close to here. GK1 is the colony right next to mine. But we don’t talk about the bombs. We talk about books and music and movies. We have something amounting to a hurricane party, defying the terrorists to ruin a perfectly good Saturday night for us in Delhi.

At three a.m. Jonaki hints to her friends that it’s time to go. She can tell I’m fading and she is too. Raj and Kartik gather their leftover booze, shake hands and take off into the night, apparently fearless.

I loan Jonaki some shorts and a t-shirt to sleep in and we crash in my king size bed. If anything could help me shake the image of that puddle of blood in the auto-rickshaw, an evening like this could. I sleep, and sleep well, if not a little too well.

I haven’t been a Mother Teresa tonight, running out to help those in need. I’ve been thinking of my own safety, leaving the aid to the locals. I wouldn’t have known where to begin helping anyway. But that is how I so often feel here. I don’t know where to begin. Give a leftover banana from breakfast to a beggar on my way to work? It’s a drop in the ocean. What difference has it made? What difference have I made?

Sometimes it seems like there is so much need in India. There is so much suffering. It is suffocating. It is insurmountable. Hunger and disastrous flooding and now terror. What else?

Sometimes a few glasses of Indian wine are all I can manage.

What Posh Means

Friday

Friday at lunch we talk about the diversity of India. Amar mentions there is a state in the northeast, Meghalaya, that is matriarchal. Land is passed from daughter to daughter. All the shopkeepers are women. The population is heavily Christian. “You go here and everything is completely different,” Amar says.

I wonder how many Christians there are in India. Amar says maybe two percent, but he says in a country of so many people, two percent is a lot: millions and millions of people. This helps explain why it seems like there are so many Sikhs too, when their proportion is only about two percent as well. Sikhs, also, are unmistakable in their turbans, wearing their copper kara (bracelets). They are easy to see, so that, too, probably makes their numbers seem larger.

In the afternoon I take a walk with Shabnum. We talk about the diversity of languages in India. I wonder if all the different languages keep people from travelling, if the languages increase the sense of insularity that people feel. Does language have anything to do with the violence and hatred between communities?

Shabnum says it’s not as bad as it used to be. Television has actually made a big difference. Lots of people learn Hindi from watching, so can better communicate with others. Her own grandmother picked it up from watching Indian soap operas. These are funny affairs with lots of extreme close ups and dramatic music and women who go to sleep in full make-up, wearing saris.

After work I go to Julianne’s house. She’s invited me over for another Bollywood night, and she’s made amazing homemade soup and bread. Her mother just made the soup and she was missing it, so she made some for herself.

We watch Namaste London, a film about a woman who has grown up in London, but whose father wants her to marry a traditional Indian man. She is engaged to a white guy who turns out to be totally insensitive and stands by when an old man at a party calls India a backwards land of snake charmers. In the meantime, her father takes her on a trip to India where he marries her off to a Punjabi man from a small village. She comes back to London and says the marriage isn’t legal, then resumes making plans to marry the insensitive white guy. Her Punjabi groom says he loves her truly and will wait for her for as long as it takes. At the very end of the movie, she leaves her insensitive white guy at the altar in favor of the Punjabi groom. Tradition triumphs. I’m a little disappointed. The Punjabi groom seemed kind of creepy. He drank milk straight from a cow and there was this disturbing scene where he put his hand over the heroine’s mouth, held a lighter up near her face and asked her what her name was. I hadn’t fallen in love with the Punjabi groom by the end of the movie the way the heroine had.

When the movie’s over, we talk about how strange it’s going to be when I go back. Julianne said the first time she came to India, she stayed for a month and when she got back, the houses just seemed so unnecessarily big. “What do you need all this for?” she wondered.

We also talk about Indian culture and the propensity for long, serpentine storytelling when a few sentences would accomplish the same end. Julianne says when she was watching her friend Maurine’s house, one day she went over there and there was water on the floor of the bathroom and a picture had been knocked off the wall. She asked the house helper what happened. The story started, then, on last week Tuesday when all she really needed to know was that the air conditioner had leaked. It’s the same way in church when the Indian man leads the sermons. It’s a long, circular, repetitive story when there is really only one quick point: we should walk with God. I wonder how much of this comes from being immersed in an oral rather than a written culture.

It’s the same with Hinduism where there is no one central text that the religion revolves around. Beliefs and practices are passed down orally, by the mothers in the families, Julianne says. So for each storyteller, the story may change. So as many storytellers as there are, that’s how many Hinduisms there are. Julianne says that Islam has the Five Pillars and Christianity has the Ten Commandments, but understanding Hinduism is like trying to nail Jello to the wall. Traditions are personal and familial in nature, rather than guided by an unchanging text. It can’t be understood in western terms. You need a whole other paradigm for thinking about it.

It strikes me that trying to find your way around Delhi is also affected by the oral nature of the culture here. There are few street signs and where there are addresses, they don’t necessarily progress in a linear fashion. Even the locals find their way around by stopping and asking passersby if they know where such-and-such is. The catch to this oral tradition of navigation is that no one wants to tell you “no,” so if a person doesn’t know where something is, they’ll just make up something. So you often get wrong directions. No matter. You just ask another person until eventually, someone points you in the right direction.

We talk until late into the night. I’m impressed with how observant and insightful Julianne is for her age. She’s done a lot and seen a lot and it shows.

Julianne makes the bed in her apartment’s spare bedroom. This bedroom has its own bathroom with shower. As I marvel at how nice this is, I catch myself. In the United States, I would have thought this place was junky, with a cracked concrete wall and a moldy shower curtain. But in Indian terms, it’s downright uptown. I’m finally beginning to feel that my standards have shifted. I finally understand what posh means.

Am I Yesterday?

Thursday

I finally finish chapter five of the finance book. Shabnum sent off chapter three to the author for his approval and gently mentioned the fact that we’re having to reformat all his tables, so it’s taking longer than expected. We believe this may have ruffled his feathers because he sent back a terse note saying to pay closer attention to the new chapter he’s sending. It’s an important one. This author/editor tension is so constant it’s almost a parody of itself. It’s always hard to criticize someone’s baby.

I’ve been looking forward to today because after work we’re going to the Italo Calvino reading put on by the First City Theatre Group. They’re the same group who did the reading I went to with Jonaki two weeks ago. They stage a free reading every two weeks. They make it look easy, but there’s a lot of work that goes into selecting the pieces, making sure they flow, getting the timing right, etc.

We’re standing around talking at about five thirty and Sukanya the intern with the big eyes hears that we’re going. Can she come too? She knows Momo, one of the guys reading. Why not? There’s room in the car. Now we just have to ask Amar if it’s okay if we leave a little early. We decide Sukanya should do it. We follow her over to Amar’s office, Jonaki and Shabnum and I, and we all stand there waiting for her to say something. She doesn’t. So we’re all just standing there in Amar’s office. I feel ridiculous and begin to laugh. Then Jonaki laughs. Then I laugh harder. Amar looks at us expectantly then says, “You are all going somewhere? Then go!”

By the time we actually leave the office, it’s just about six o’clock anyway, so no need for the conga line anyway.

We get stopped by some of Delhi’s famous ten-minute red lights. At one of these, a masculine-looking person sits in the median wearing a purple flowing dupata and kurta. Shabnum sees him and says she’s been seeing so many hijra lately. One touched her on the head the other day when she was stopped in traffic and she got so bothered that she didn’t give him anything.

A hijra is not to be confused with the Joni Mitchell album Heijira. A hijra is a person born with male and female sex characteristics. Or sometimes, they are just cross-dressers: men who feel a need to live as women. In India, these children are given away to and raised in a very hierarchical subculture wherein there are gurus and servants. The hijra consider themselves able to give blessings and will show up at auspicious events, especially weddings, in crowds. There they will dance and sing and demand money for their service. If you don’t pay the hijras a considerable enough amount of money, they will grow belligerent and curse you. No one wants to be cursed by a hijra.

When Shabnum got accosted the other day, she refused to give money. The hijra said, “Aren’t you afraid of being cursed by a hijra?” And Shabnum just said, “No.”

Which leads me to a new ad campaign that is springing up everywhere across the city that seems to be zeroing in on a “new” kind of Indian. It’s for a periodical, Mail Today. The billboards have messages on them like, “I’m not fair, but I’m lovely. I’m not yesterday.” There’s another one that features an Indian man flipping a pancake and wearing an apron that says, “Supermom.” It says, “I’m not just Daddy. I’m not yesterday.” India is changing. Even the billboards say so.

The idea that a man can do domestic work here is new. It reminds me of the 1980s in America. Wasn’t there a movie starring Michael Keaton called Supermom?

So too with the idea that someone with dark skin is as beautiful as his or her fair-skinned counterpart. Didn’t we have a “black is beautiful” movement in the United States in the seventies?

Everyone knows these changes don’t happen uniformly or overnight, but it’s nice to see them coming, even if just in billboard form. Billboards must mean someone thinks there’s a market for this kind of thinking.

Of course, in India, the people who live under these billboards in the road probably can’t even read them. What I’m saying is that these changes are only for the middle class, and, even then, probably only a portion of it. Tradition holds strong sway here. It is hard to break with the past. It is hard not to be yesterday when you’re being cursed by a hijra or when your mother and father want you to marry someone you didn’t choose. I wonder how “yesterday” I would be if I grew up here. It’s easy to say that I’d insist on a man who respected me as an equal and who took equal responsibility in taking care of the house, but how tall an order is that? How long would I be willing to wait? Would I be strong enough to be alone if I never met this man? Or would I cave in? Settle? Compromise? After all my friends had gotten married? After I passed the age when marriages traditionally happen? It’s hard to say how strong I would be if I were raised here, if I were under the pressures that Indian women face to marry and have children—scratch that—boy children. I want to think I’d be a pioneer, I’d insist on the respect I know I deserve, but it’s not so easy here. Nothing is so easy in India.

Past the hijra and the billboards, past the Jumna and the concrete jungle of Patparganj, we arrive at Connaught Place. Jonaki puts Palminder’s number in her cell phone so she can call him later when I need him to go home. Jonaki, Shabnum and Sukanya will be taking an auto back to Patparganj.

Sukanya says she knows Momo from school. She used to do a lot of student films. She actually auditioned for Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited when they filmed it here. She is glad she didn’t make it in, she says. It was so bad. I agree. The film was a disappointment.

Palminder pulls over near the McDonald’s where he dropped us off last time. We find The Attic where the reading is taking place with little searching and open the thick, wooden door. This time we’re early. Sukanya says hello to Momo, who blows her off a little. This will become a great point of ribbing in the ensuing evening.

The reading is good. There is a story about a man who cares for an office plant by taking it outside into the rain. The office plant grows into a giant tree, then loses all its leaves, even the last one, which turns a rainbow of colors before it flies away. It’s a story of nurturing and loss.

There is another story about a husband and wife who work opposite shifts and so only see each other for a few minutes each day. They find intimacy by sleeping in the warmth the other has left in the bed. This story, this aching for love in love’s absence almost makes me cry.

The last story has one of those unreliable narrators. It’s creepy. It’s about a guy who lives apart from society after killing a woman, though he doesn’t say as much. He says the dogs just dig at that place in his backyard because of the moles. But I don’t believe him.

The evening is a crisp hour long. It flies by. Afterwards, we congratulate the readers. They remember me, saying, “Thanks for coming back.” I think I’m easy to remember in these parts.

Shabnum’s fiancée has joined us, and he leads us underground and around a string of shops to a South Indian restaurant where Shabnum recommends I try the mini tiffin: it’s a bunch of different South Indian food in small portions. There is a little dosa, baby-sized idlis, even a helping of a bright orange sweet that tastes something like rice pudding. The dosa is served on top of a bright green banana leaf: a South Indian tradition.

The reading was a great time, as was dinner. We walk out into the muggy evening and Jonaki fishes out her cell phone. There are two missed calls, both from Palminder. I don’t understand why he’d be calling. I’ve only kept him two hours over his normal time and Ms. Sonu tells me that’s fine. Maybe I need to call her back and check on this again. Maybe there is some sort of problem with keeping him later than scheduled. Once again, I feel guilty for having gone out. I wonder why he was calling Jonaki.

Shabnum’s fiancée tells me I should request another driver if this one gives me trouble, but there’s always the chance that I get someone even worse.

Palminder shows up in a few short minutes and we speed off towards home, arriving in record time.

The Worst Tragedy of All

Wednesday

Wednesday morning at breakfast, Kim from California’s four-year-old boy is running around. “Ralphie,” she says. “Ralphie, sit down and have some milk.” Ralphie ignores her completely. Ralphie has been naughty since they moved here from Pakistan, she tells me. Ralphie is rebelling. She doesn’t know what to do.

Mira brings me an apple and, as she’s setting it down on the table in front of me, Raphie runs up and grabs it. He runs off with it.

“Here, take this one,” says Kim from California, holding up her apple. “I’m not going to eat it. Ralphie’s not going to eat it either.” Just to prove her wrong, Ralphie runs up and grabs the apple she’s offering me and sinks his tiny front teeth into it, then spits out the bite he’s taken. After this, he gives me my original apple back.

The staff here love Ralphie. They stand outside the door and play with him and his little cars for hours. The other day as I was coming home, Mira was telling me a story about Ralphie running up and down the stairs. “Up, down, up, down, all the day,” she laughed and repeated, “Up, down, up, down.”

I finish my breakfast, and when I go out to my car, Ralphie is sitting in the front seat, on the lap of the guard. They will miss Ralphie when he leaves on Monday to go live in his new home. Me: not so much.

At work I come close to finishing chapter five but get hung up near the end when I realize the author has built all the tables using the space bar. This will screw up the typesetting. I have to build actual tables. It will take some time.

Today, I receive a happier email than yesterday. The newdirections administrator says my revised newsletter article will work. I am relieved that I didn’t get a note saying my time here has been for naught, I’m being sent home or fired or other such bad news. I know I made a bigger deal out of this than it needed to be, but there are no clear guidelines for this program because every experience is different. You have to feel it out for yourself. Working within this nebulous framework is both liberating and worrisome. It is refreshing to basically be able to create my own expectations for the work I’m doing, but for someone who tends to need approval and affirmation, it’s difficult because those things basically have to come from within. Nobody is holding my hand telling me what to do, and telling me “good job” once I’ve done it. Just like I had to negotiate my way through my first days in India on my own, finding my ride at the airport, figuring out how the lock worked on my door, besting the hot water switch on my shower, I have to chart my own path through the work I am doing in the office, making sure that both the Indian and Iowan offices are taking the most value they can from supporting me in this endeavor. I’m glad I got my first newsletter article rejected. It gave me the chance to check in and make sure what I’m doing here really counts, is really making a difference.

Susie emails me as well. She wants to know if I’m going to the “Let My Country Awake” event tonight. I tell her I can’t stay the whole time. I can’t keep my driver too late, and I have to go home and get a little work done on my blog, but I’ll go for at least a little bit, just to check it out and see what it’s like.

I tell Palminder, “India Habitat Centre.”

He says, “C-83?”

I tell him, “No. India Habitat Centre. Just one hour.”

He tries again, “C-83?”

What is it with him? He never wants to take me anywhere and I’m getting a little tired of it. I know he can understand what I’m saying, but it’s like he pretends he doesn’t in hopes that he will get out of working. And it’s not just when he’s had a long day. That one Saturday all I did was go to the Lotus Temple for an hour and he was still anxious to get me the heck out of his car afterwards. And two Saturdays ago when I went to the blues bar with my friends from work, I only had him for four hours when he started sighing and asking Jonaki how much longer it would be at each new stop we made. He makes me feel guilty for going out. I know, I know. Eleanor Roosevelt would say that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. But I have a problem withholding my consent. Go ahead, Palminder. Make me feel anxious and guilty and ultimately, make me go home early. It is getting old, though. I’m not going to continue to let a pouty driver ruin it every time I go out somewhere by making me worry about him. Pretty soon, I’m going to withhold my consent. I swear.

He finally concedes and says, “Ok.”

The India Habitat Centre is a huge complex of red brick buildings very near the Defence Colony where I stay. The event is outdoors, in a little amphitheatre between the buildings. We pull up past a guard booth and into a circular drive. I ask Palminder how I’ll find him when it’s time to go. He says he’ll be out on the street, to the right of the guard shack. He can speak English when the subject matter is about his getting off work.
I walk through the four and five story brick buildings past a restaurant and people in business clothing milling around to where I see stage lighting set up and easels with artwork. The first painting I see is of a banana and an orange floating above and below a martini glass. I am perplexed as to how this is about unity and love, or against communal violence. There are more pieces here, though, and they look the part. One is a crowd of people reaching their hands towards the viewer. Near this one there is a sign: wet paint.

I find Susie on stage with her friend Katie. Katie is a professional painter and will be painting live during the show. There is a huge canvass in front of her, and she is mixing paint: blues and browns. Susie is helping her try to steady the easel, but it’s not working. She runs off and finds an event organizer who gives Katie a different easel that doesn’t wobble.

Susie shows me where she’s sitting. Gloria, the displaced nurse from the Bihar flooding, has come with and is saving us places.

I sit next to her and make small talk. Then some people start playing a guitar and a flute. I think the show’s starting, but this is just a sound check. The real show starts a good Indian fifteen minutes late. It stinks because that’s fifteen minutes of it I won’t get to see. I told Palminder I’d be back to the car by eight.

The show begins with no introduction. A woman sings the words to Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Let My Country Awake” accompanied by a violin and a guitar. Susie tells me this was written and rehearsed in a week. It sounds good, especially considering the speed with which it was produced.

After the song, a guy in a brown t-shirt takes the stage. He talks about all the violence in India, Muslim against Hindu, Hindu against Christian, and says that if anyone came here to be entertained or amused, “It would be the worst tragedy of all.” Really? Worse than the flooding in Bihar or the murders in Orissa?

I understand immediately why my monologue was rejected. I wrote it with the intention of being both entertaining and amusing. Instead, I guess, they were looking for something strictly serious, something that nobody could laugh at.

The ensuing acts fit this bill. A man with a guitar sings about burning tires getting put around people’s necks. “The most dangerous place in the world is in a womb in India if you’re a girl,” he goes on.

Susie’s friend Katie paints two figures inside an eyeball. One is hitting the other with a stick. Above the eye she paints the Hindi word for justice.

The man with the guitar goes on with his assorted atrocities, then finishes with a song full of forced rhymes and the repeated line, “Keep goin’.” So the words are something like, “When your car is in a crash and you’re feeling just like trash, keep goin’.”

Next, a theatre group takes the stage. They are dressed in solid black and each has a red scarf on. Their piece is in Hindi, so I don’t understand, but it’s visually interesting and creative. The scarves become nooses at one point and they make a human pyramid to form a gallows. Then the scarves serve to bind the wrists of several of the actors. At the end they use them for a sort of maypole effect.

Katie has plastered white over her painting. She’s starting over. This time she paints two figures in an embrace inside a lotus flower. She sticks with this image, adding color and texture to it as the night wears on. It’s hypnotizing to watch her paint.

The next performance is another theatre group, but this one is led by a guy with a bad lisp who screams angrily the whole time. This one is in English, but I kind of wish it was in Hindi. I might think it was better. As it is, it’s a lot of yelling about different terrible things that could happen. They hold up a sheet that gives a shadow effect and make it appear that a woman is being beaten and raped behind it. A man on stage screams, “Raped! Raped! Repeatedly raped! And now she’s dead. Dead! OH THE BRUTALITY!”

I wonder how this is a positive message about love or unity. Actually, it’s not. Their message is about how people sit idly by while terrible things happen. I know they’re trying to accomplish something with this evening. They want to motivate people to go out and do something that will change India, that will make it a better place. I can’t fault them for good intentions, but this kind of didactic art is really not my thing. It also seems that they’re preaching to the choir, so-to-speak; that anyone who’s already come out for an evening like this is probably doing what he or she can to help. There is not much need in India to be beaten about the head with terrible news. You can see it on the corner of every street.

It’s eight o’clock. I have to go. I say goodbye to Susie and inch my way out of the amphitheatre, retracing my steps back to the circular drive. I walk to the guard shack at the front of the drive and look around for Palminder. I don’t see him anywhere. I stand there for what feels like five minutes, hoping he will pop out and find me as usually happens, but to no avail.

Don’t panic, I tell myself. I’m not alone here. At worst, I will have to go back and watch this whole show, then ride home with Susie afterwards. I walk back up to the circular drive, thinking Palminder maybe pulled up there, but no luck. I decide I’ll try to call him on my phone even though it will be an international call. Do I remember the country code for India? I don’t think so, but maybe I won’t need it. I can always try. I dig and dig in my purse, bringing up little bits of paper. There is Sonu’s sister’s address in New York. There is the handout I took at the British Consulate Library. There is everything but the business card with Palminder’s freaking number on it.

Now I sit down on the curb and start emptying my purse. I take out my wallet, my camera, the roll of camper’s toilet paper I keep with me, a maxi-pad. It’s all spread out on the ground in front of me as I squat on the curb. Just then, I hear, “Madam?” I look up and Palminder is standing there, thinking God knows what about his strange fare. I scoop up the contents of my purse and he walks me to the guard shack and just beyond where the car was apparently parked the whole time. He was right where he said he’d be. I just didn’t see him because I was looking for him instead of the car, and he never popped out.

I stop shaking.

Why was I shaking?

Everything was fine. The India Habitat Centre is a safe place. It wasn’t late at night. I had a solid Plan B. But I was still alone. And things still weren’t going exactly as I’d expected them to go. It’s my (not so) secret fear to be marooned somewhere and not be able to find my driver. Since I don’t have a local cell phone, it’s pretty much up to me and me alone to locate him after he’s left me somewhere. I can’t just call him up and tell him where I’m standing or ask him where he’s parked. I just have to find him, which can be tricky in India’s crowded streets.

Still, I’d like to be more comfortable when things go awry. Getting nervous and worrying doesn’t help. It’s that attachment again: attachment to the exact way that I want things to be. It’s hard to shake. It’s like the guy tonight saying the worst tragedy of all is if people were entertained by the show. It’s a loss of perspective on what really matters.

Palminder drives me home. We arrive safe and sound in less than fifteen minutes. I put my initials in his book to keep track of my hours and give him his hundred rupee tip.

“Madam same time tomorrow? Nine o’clock?” he asks me, as he asks me every weeknight on the way out of his car.

“Yep, same time. Good night.”

Let My Country Nap

Tuesday

I am greeted at work with an email from Sara Larsson, the woman organizing the arts event against communal violence. It says:

We read through the monologue and we don’t feel it will be appropriate towards
the theme of the evening.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, we really appreciate your support for this event.

Thanks a lot for contributing and I am sorry we are not able to use it.

Not appropriate. Ouch. She didn’t even give me a chance to revise or write something else. Just a wholesale, round rejection. “We look forward to seeing you.” Right.

I try to be big about it, but my feelings are hurt. Getting called “inappropriate” stings. And it didn’t seem like she was being too picky about who gets to participate. I wonder if I’m the only loser who got left out.

Now I have to tell my coworkers who I invited to come see me that I won’t be performing, which will be embarrassing. I tell Jonaki, then Shabnum, then Amar that they found my writing inappropriate, so cancel your Wednesday night plans. Jonaki asks if I wrote about the necking couple on the bus. Of course I did. I also mentioned people peeing in public, but I could have easily edited that part out if given the chance, not that I wanted to.

I have a sense that it wasn’t any one little thing that got me kicked out of the “Let My Country Awake” show. It was probably the total effect of what I’d written. I don’t understand what they are looking for. They started out explaining that it’s a reaction to the violence in Orissa where Christians are being persecuted by Hindus, but then they said they don’t want the names of any specific places or communities mentioned. Then Sara told me in an email that she didn’t want to focus on hate or division. She wanted to be positive, focused on love and unity. I wrote a monologue, a personal story, about unity. But I guess it’s not unifying enough.

I wonder if it’s not Christian enough, because I actually have some Hindu philosophy in it. I wonder if she really did want to focus on the terrible events that are happening in Orissa even though she told me she didn’t. I take a few minutes and do some research on Orissa and find that it’s not so cut and dried. The Christians there have been trying to convert the Hindus, then there were several events that culminated in a Christian killing a Hindu swami. That’s when things really exploded. All of this is complicated and political. I don’t know enough about it to even have an informed opinion.

I notice when I look at the poster that the tag line for the event is, “To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.” I don’t presume to be able to speak for anyone involved in these incidents. That’s why I chose to write something personal, something about how I feel unity can work in my own life. I hoped that would be a universal message, one that other people could use to examine themselves. I guess I was just not cut out for this event.

A few hours into the day, I get an email from the head of the newdirections program. She’d like a 300 word write up on the benefits of my assignment so far for the newdirections newsletter. I dash something up and send it off, only to be rejected again. She wants me to focus on business results. She wants to know how the people in this developing economy are benefitting from my knowledge and skills. I had included a list of projects I’d worked on, but this was apparently not sufficient.

I revise my newsletter submission and send it off again, but don’t hear back. I hope it’s just too late in London to get a response. I hope this second try is what they’re looking for. I’m concerned that it’s still not right.

Two rejections in one day. I’m really racking them up. Now I’m afraid that perhaps I’ve had the wrong focus the whole time in the job I’m doing for Pearson. I’m afraid that I haven’t achieved the purpose of the program. I’m afraid that I’ve taken this gigantic opportunity and fowled it all up. I’m afraid they’re going to be sorry they sent me here, or pull the plug or who knows what kind of retribution might be exacted? Big opportunities come with big responsibilities; I know that. I wanted to do such a good job. I wanted to live up to the expectations or exceed them. Now I’m afraid I’ve blown it somehow.

Driving home, I feel so alone. There is no one to share my concern with. I feel like a failure.

The car stops in a sea of traffic at the red light before the river where all the men hock their goods. They see me today and keep walking. This has never happened. Usually they bang and bang on my window insisting I buy bad translations of Paul Coelho and William Darymple, or dubious magazines packaged in plastic sleeves.

I must look terribly upset for them to leave me alone.

This makes me feel even worse. Tears stream down my cheeks as the car revs into gear and we pull away over the bridge.

I try to remind myself of the lessons I’ve learned while I’ve been here. I think of the quote from the Lotus Temple about not being affected by either good or bad events; they are all temporary. I see a beggar on the street and think how much more fortunate than him I am. But none of this consoles me. I’m just feeling rotten.

I feel even more rotten when I notice that the lights are all off as I walk up the marble stairs to my room. The power is out again. It is asthma attack hot in my room on the top floor of the guesthouse.

I was going to veg out in front of the television or work on getting my blog caught up, but these plans are thwarted for the time being. The only thing I can do is walk to the market to find somewhere cool.

Acha and Baby are out on the corner by Mister Kandhari’s house. I pet them and cry, missing my animals back home, knowing I don’t even get to talk to Scott tonight because he’s going out to lunch with a friend. I am alone for the evening. Most nights it’s fine, but tonight I feel desolate.

I think of the book “Chant and Be Happy,” and what it said about food bringing temporary happiness. I think I’ll take even temporary happiness over what I’m feeling at the moment, so I walk to the market to Liquid Kitchen.

But even Liquid Kitchen lets me down tonight. There is no kimchee and no Chinese pickles. The service is slow. The pasta, I guess, is still okay. I don’t even order one of their desserts. And they don’t even have me fill out a comment card. I guess they figure I am a regular customer now. They don’t need to impress me anymore. Too bad. I liked being impressed.

I go back to my room. Thankfully, the power is back on. I jog in place in front of the window air conditioner and watch Last Comic Standing. They are roasting the host. I hate roasts, but I still watch because it’s better than the BBC News which is obsessed with some terrorist trial in London that didn’t go well for the prosecution. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is on the show. He makes me laugh. It’s good temporary happiness even if the permanent kind is elusive for me today.

Before bed, I check my email. Scott is trying to cash the check that Geico sent after the accident he had with my car, but the check is in my name. He doesn’t think the bank will cash it for him. I tell him I’ll just fix my car when I get home. Why not come home to a cracked up car? Just one more fun thought to top off my day.

I go to bed early, hoping to see things more clearly in the morning. I was so looking forward to this week, looking forward to performing. It’s not working out as I thought it would. But not everything does, and tomorrow is another day. I’m still in India, still having the most amazing time of my life. No one can take that away from me now, regardless of what happens in the future. I will carry these experiences with me for always.

More Photobucketing!

Check out my newest crop of photos at:

http://s458.photobucket.com/albums/qq302/vkrajewski/

Highlights include me in my orange bandana and steaming pots in which you could cook humans. Also look for the tiny monkey who missed his opportunity to steal my camera.

A Special Charan Darshan

Monday

Monday at work I have a clarifying question for my coworkers that I’ve been thinking about since visiting the Iskcon Temple on Saturday. Isn’t Krishna one of the avatars or forms of Vishnu? Isn’t that why he’s blue? Vishnu is usually blue, too, when you see him depicted in artwork. He is one of the main trinity of Hindu gods: there is Brahman the creator, Shiva the destroyer, and Vishnu the sustainer.

They tell me I am correct. Then I go on about how it’s confusing because Krishna has his own avatars. There is the unicorn-horned fish and the dwarf and the lion man. “Is that right?” they ask me. I tell them yes, I saw a display about it at the temple when I went.

“You are more religious than all of us,” Jonaki says. Amar and Shabnum and Preeta chuckle.

After work, I tell Palminder to go to the Iskcon Temple. He says, “C-83?” No. I want to go to the Iskcon Temple. Just for a half an hour. I want to check out the Radhastami festival that I saw a poster for when I was there on Saturday. It said there was a “Special Charan Darshan (Only Once a Year)” that runs from four thirty in the morning until nine o’clock at night on September 8th.

Radhastami, I discover with the help of my trusty friend, Wikipedia, is the celebration of the birth of Srimati Radharani, Krishna’s consort with whom he is bound in eternal, transcendent love.

I don’t know what to expect from the celebration. I hope it’s not too crazy. Not long ago there was an article that made the international headlines about a stampede at a Hindu temple. I can’t imagine the Hare Krishnas stampeding, but you never know.

As we pull up the hill and drive past the parks on the way to Iskcon, the streets are peopled, but not overly crowded. People walk leisurely, enjoying the relative cool of the dusk. There is even a little breeze to lessen the heat.

Palminder drops me off and says I can find him parked where he was last time. I assure him it will only be about a half an hour.

I walk past the same woman who frisked me on Saturday. She peeps into my purse and asks, “Smoke?” No. I don’t smoke. “Okay,” she says, as she feels me up then waves me on.

The grounds of the temple are tranquil. I hear music coming from inside. I check my shoes at the shoe stand and put the little token that will allow me to get them back into my pocket.

As I walk up the steps, I notice people touching the stairs just as they did when entering the gurudwara. I forget that while there are so many faiths here in India, many of them have common roots in Hinduism, so many of the practices, traditions and beliefs are similar. I touch the stairs and touch my forehead as the others do. Two guards at the door welcome me with nods and smiles. I am the only white person I see here, but I don’t feel like I’m causing a scene. No one here gives me crooked looks or stares. They all chant along with the Hindu monk who is singing into a microphone.

Inside the temple, the various shrines are closed. Intricately designed golden doors hide the idols inside from view. Garlands of flowers are draped everywhere, especially around the circular ceiling and over a life-sized statue of Swami Prabhupeda, the man who is responsible for spreading the Krishna consciousness across the globe.

The music picks up tempo, as do the accompanying drums. The monk with the microphone motions to the crowd that we should walk in a circle. We do. Another monk stands outside the circle and holds a little brass bowl with an open flame in it. As people circle past, they pass their hands quickly through the fire. When they’re not playing with the fire, they clap along with the music, as do I.

Eventually, the circling stops and people stand in place. Some sit. At one point, everyone gets on their knees and touches their heads to the ground, then they stick their hands up in the air and follow the monk with the microphone in chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare.

During this, three little girls sidle up next to me, smiling hugely. They want to know where I’m from. They tell me my hair is bright. They want to touch it. The guard comes up and shoos them away.

I decide to go downstairs to see if the bookshop is open. I want the book with the George Harrison interview that I found here when I came on Saturday: “Chant and Be Happy.” I walk across the grounds in the deep blue dusk. Tonight, the fountains are filled and lit and pulsing with water. Behind the counter sit five monks in saffron robes. They all have two chalk-colored lines running up their foreheads in the shape of a large paperclip. This is the sign of a Krishna worshiper. They sit back, relaxing. I have to ask them twice for the book I want. It costs twenty rupees: fifty cents. Even if I have to leave it behind in India, it’s worth the price.

I walk back out into the dusk with my slim volume in hand and take my camera from my purse. I want a snap of the temple lit up against the night sky. It’s pretty. As I get the temple centered on my camera’s screen, I feel a punch to my behind. A gaggle of little boys stands near me and laughs.

“No! No!” I tell them. I wish I knew the Hindi word for bad. I should have just told them, “Hare Krishna.”

They would be in huge trouble if someone saw them do this, but their parents are probably inside at the darshan while they are out here running wild.

I walk away, but one of the boys follows me, skipping. He wants a picture.

“Nihan!” I say. No! “Chalo!” Go away!

“Nihan!” he laughs, mocking me. He thinks it’s funny that I said a Hindi word to him. He races off back to his group of friends.

After a vibe-harshing experience like that, I decide to go back to the darshan and enjoy a little more of the chanting and singing. The guard ushers me in once again.

I kneel and listen to the music and watch the crowd. The bowl of fire has been extinguished and now there is just the Hindi song that everyone seems to know the words to. I wonder if this is the same thing that has been going on since four thirty in the morning. I can’t imagine they have the same monk sing for the whole time. They mast take turns.

I don’t want to leave Palminder waiting for too long, and I also don’t want to have to find his car in the pitch black, so, as on many occasions, I cut my festivities short to find my driver and return home.

I get my sandals back from the shoe stand and walk out past the gate where the guard greets me with a final “Hare Krishna.”

The darshan was pretty sedate. The crowd friendly and not too large in number. I wish I could have understood the songs they were singing, but I felt welcomed into their midst all the same, even if I did get a punch in the butt by some tiny hoodlums.

On the way home I read the first few pages of “Chant and Be Happy.” They talk about the familiar Hindu theme of seeking for happiness in impermanent places where we can’t really find it: food, sex, companionship, sports, arts. All these things are temporary. That’s as far as I get before we run out of light and I have to stop reading.

Where does true happiness lie again? I need a reminder like a punch in the butt, but I'll have to wait until I’ve got better reading light.

Baskets of Bread

Sunday

I’m waiting at a bathroom stall. I’m the next in line, but it seems to be taking forever. There is a long cue of women behind me. I decide to use the toilet that is not inside the stall because I can’t wait any more.

I sit down to go when a large lizard swaggers its way up to me. It has huge googly eyes that look like they’re made of plastic. I get scared but I can’t run away. A woman tells me it’s okay. He won’t hurt me. Just then, he opens his mouth to reveal a huge gaping maw like a crocodile’s. He snaps his mouth shut with such force that I feel the ensuing wind. The second time he opens his mouth, he’s going for my arm. I’m sure he can snap it right off. He begins to clamp down with lightning speed when I wake up swallowing a huge gulp of air.

I’m in bed. The googly-eyed crocodile lizard is nowhere to be found. I look at the clock but since it doesn’t light up, I can’t see what time it is. I turn on the light. I need to know what time it is because today is the day I’m going to the gurudwara with Mister Kandhari and Mister Singh. I need to get up at five o’clock to go with them. My clock says 12:01 but for some reason I wonder if it’s wigged out again. I get up and check my cell phone, which says the same time. I have five more hours to sleep. I close my eyes and drift off.

The phone rings. I look at my clock again. It’s 5:15. “Are you awake?” It’s Mister Kandhari with a friendly wake up call. I lie a little, telling him I’m up. Thankfully, I picked out my clothes and got everything ready the night before. All I have to do is get dressed and grab my purse. I’m out the door in less than fifteen minutes, walking through the drizzle to Mister Kandhari’s house.

As I approach Mister Kandhari’s gate, I see him sitting by his wicker garden table under the awning of his house. “Come in! Come in!” he says. “I have made you some tea.” He lifts a metal lid to reveal three tall, thin white mugs. I am so pleasantly surprised. It is the good kind of tea, not too sweet, spiced with ginger. I sit out of the rain and sip. There is also a tin full of five different kinds of sweets. Mister Kandhari recommends the biscotti, so I have one.

Mister Singh arrives just a few minutes after me and takes the third mug. He wonders if I’ve tried the biscotti. Yes. It was good.

They drink their tea in seconds flat, and I am still sipping. There is not a lot of time. We have to go. I take a few gulps and catch up to the men. We get in one of Mister Kandhari’s cars and drive a few blocks. We are picking up Poonam, the woman I met at Mister Singh’s house the other night at dinner. She is standing in the rain in front of her house.

“I was waiting and waiting,” she croons after she climbs into the car. We drive past India Gate which is still lit up against the purplish dawn. Mister Singh tells me some of the history of the Bangla Sahib gurudwara. It is one of the largest in Delhi. The gurudwara is built on the site of a house where Guru Harkishen Dev, the eighth guru of the Sikhs, had stayed when he visited Delhi in 1664. The tank, which you can still see in the compound was blessed by the Guru and is said to cure people of small pox and cholera. The tank’s water is changed completely every few days, and people volunteer to clean it. The entire site is maintained by volunteer labor. Mister Singh is a fountain of information and very generous in sharing it with me. Mister Kandhari fiddles with his car stereo and puts on some music. Mister Singh tells me they’ll be playing the morning raga when we get to the temple. I’ll be able to listen to it. He passes an orange scarf back to me which I tie over my head to cover it so I’m ready to enter when we get there. He tells me when I go to Armritsar I must also bring something with me to cover my head, and be sure to wear long pants that cover my legs. Poonam says what I’m wearing would be a fine outfit in which to visit the Golden Temple.

We pull into the dirt parking lot behind a large white building with golden domes reaching up into the inky sky. There are tent-like canopies surrounding the building so it’s hard to get a good picture. Poonam says we should leave our shoes in the car, but Mister Singh says it’s okay to leave them on for now. We’ll check them at the stand inside.

The rain is thankfully tapering off. I was afraid it would pour on me; I didn’t bring my umbrella. We walk through the parking lot and onto a white marble walkway. At each set of stairs that leads up into the temple, there is a two-inch deep, square pool of water. This is so no one can enter without washing their feet. The first pool we see is a little muddy. I wonder how clean my feet will be after I “wash” them in this way.

We check our shoes and walk into the line to get inside the temple. I can hear the raga being sung and drums being played. There are a lot of people here cueing up along the metal railings running the length of the stairs for crowd control, but the line moves quickly, not like at Kalkaji Mandir. Aside from the muddy footbath, the place is spotless, courtesy of the volunteers who sweep and clean constantly.

People bow down at the entryway and touch the stairs, then their foreheads. Mister Singh explains this is to benefit from the qualities of the pious people who have walked on these steps.

Inside there is a golden shrine that I can’t get very close to because of the crowd. Offerings of food, prashad, are placed in the shrine, and the clean tones of the raga ring out. Poonam, in her aqua green sari, walks away from us, sitting down on the floor on the far side of the shrine to hear the raga play.

Mister Singh and I sit cross-legged on the plush, flowered carpeting. He says they change the carpet every six months to keep it clean, and it’s all done with donations.

We don’t sit for long. There is work to do downstairs for the free breakfast. We rise, me much faster than the aging Mister Singh, and walk to the exit past a glass room where an enormous copy of the Guru Granth Sahib is kept when it is not on display in the main shrine.

Poonam stays behind as we walk outside and down the stairs to a covered area where the food is prepared. Heaping piles of vegetables lay on enormous metal surfaces. Mister Singh points to a large metal apparatus. It’s a chapatti machine for making the flat bread North Indians eat with most every meal. Women sit cross-legged and roll out little balls of dough. Pots you could cook a human in line the wall. They are full of dal. Four long narrow rows of grass mats provide the seating that people are beginning to fill. At a table full of baskets and bread stands Mister Kandhari. He has been down here since we arrived. He asks if I’d like to help. Certainly. He gives me a basket lined with leaves the size of garbage can lid. It is full of sliced white bread. He shows me what to do. Walk up and down the rows holding out three or four slices of bread at a time for each person. They will hold their hands out and I just need to place the bread into them. Okay? Can I do it? I think so.

Not everyone wants three or four slices of white bread. Some people hold up two fingers, or one. Some wobble their heads and smile or hold up their hands to indicate they don’t want any. I walk up and down waiting for a response from each person. Some appear to be in fine condition. Others appear to be in greater need. One man takes his bread with four oozing bandaged fingers. A few boys in blue jeans flirt with me. “Madam, where you are from?” they want to know.

I return to the table for a bread refill. Mister Kandhari hustles, busting open the packages and stacking them into my basket. Mister Singh is passing out chapattis. Another man has a giant kettle of milky tea and little plastic cups. Yet another man comes around with ladles of dal.

I walk up and down the rows with my magic, always refilling basket, giving people as much bread as they want. It feels great. Even though it hurt to get up at five this morning, I don’t feel tired now. I just feel busy. I just feel helpful. I fill up my basket and fill up my basket again. My arm is starting to hurt from holding it at an odd angle for such a long time, but it’s nothing too much to deal with. I think I could keep going for another couple of hours. The people keep coming. Hundreds of them. Men, women, families with children, all sitting on the narrow grass mats, reaching for bread with which to mop up their dal. As good as I feel, it’s hard for me to imagine doing this every morning for twelve years running, which is Mister Kandhari’s track record. The man is impressive.

Now a whole other crew works to clean the dirty metal dishes as they stack up by dozens. I return for another basket refill but Mister Kandhari says it’s time to go, but first, they’ll take some pictures of me if I’d like. He gives my camera to Mister Singh and refills my basket with bread. He wants me to pose with the people I’ve passed my bread out to. I feel a little fakey, but figure I’ll play along. Mister Singh takes my picture a few different times and it comes out looking awfully cute. Who knew an orange handkerchief could be so flattering?

Even though it appears that the meal is still in progress, we are ready to leave. Mister Singh takes me upstairs into the temple again. We need to look for Poonam and, he tells me, I can take pictures inside. Are you sure? Yes. It’s fine. We walk over the lush carpet once more, but there is no sign of the aqua green sari. Poonam is nowhere in sight. On the way out of the temple, people are holding out their hands and getting a little brown chunk of something. I hold out my hand and a man puts some glop in it. I notice people seem to be eating this glop. I’m not sure if I should. I hold the glop nonchalantly hoping for a discrete way to dispose of it. The place is so clean it would be crazy to try to drop it on the ground. A crew of volunteers would flock to the site with baskets and brooms and I’d definitely be caught. Mister Singh walks down to a railing overlooking a construction project. “You can take a picture. These people are all volunteer labor. They are building parking garage.” People walk with large bowls on their heads and move earth. More importantly, there are two trash cans by the railing where I quickly dispose of my brown goo as I reach for my camera. I know the goo is probably something holy. What I’ve done is probably akin to spitting out a communion wafer. In retrospect, I should have just eaten it, but at the time, it seemed like a bad idea. Maybe if there wasn’t so much goo… Maybe if it had been a smaller glop…

Mister Singh says we should go get our shoes. At the shoe check, we discover Poonam has already picked hers up. She must be waiting for us at the car.

It’s fully light outside now, but it’s still just seven thirty in the morning. We find Mister Kandhari and Poonam and drive away. “Well, how did you like?” Mister Kandhari asks.

“It was beautiful,” I say.

We need to drop off Mister Singh. He’s going to Lodi Gardens. Would I like to go with him to see? It’s the biggest garden in Delhi. Truthfully, I would love to see Lodi Gardens, but my friends are coming to pick me up to go to church, so I’ve got to be home by quarter after nine.

Mister Singh gets out on the side of the road and we pull away. Mister Kandhari says he’s going to stop at a garden on the way home. It won’t take long. It’s the place where he gets all his bonsai gardening supplies. It’s a huge place. People come here from Mumbai to get plants. It won’t take long. It will be a new experience for me.

Everything is in India.

He drives over the Jumna River and turns left onto an unfamiliar highway, then he turns over a curb and off the highway altogether. The car bounces along a narrow dirt path with random bricks in it. I think he may be taking me somewhere to dump my body, but he’d also have to take Poonam, unless she’s in on the murder ring. I could see her cheering him on. She’s so encouraging.

Then I realize the fields on either side of us look cultivated. It is a garden center after all. And it is huge. We drive with the fields on either side of us for a good half mile before Mister Kandhari stops the car at a shack. A snarling German shepherd with one floppy ear is chained to a post. A man comes out and holds the dog back so we can pass. Mister Kandhari talks to the man and considers the bonsai trees. Poonam sits down. Her knees are bothering her. She wants to know how old I am. 34. She is twice my age, she tells me. She is 68.

Mister Kandhari is done picking out his tiny trees. Now he digs through a pile of rocks, considering each one. He also buys two stone slabs that he will use as the base of his mini-garden.

Two men in dirty clothes carry the plants and rocks to the trunk. Mister Kandhari has to rearrange all the stuff from the gurudwara. He has giant metal pots and leftover roti packaged in aluminum foil. He gives a pack of roti to the men who somehow fit his purchases into the trunk, and we are off. It’s almost eight thirty now and Mister Kandhari is concerned about getting me back in time.

The car sideswipes a giant concrete post that is concealed in thick greenery. It runs across the whole length of the passenger side, making a grinding noise. His side view mirror is gone. This is a bad accident. But he doesn’t even stop. “We will get you home on time. When I say I will do something, I will do,” he says.

Poonam has been speaking to him in Hindi. He translates for me. She wants to be dropped off in the opposite direction, but he tells her he can only take her as far as the stoplight. She should be able to catch an auto from there. He once again pulls over to the side of the road and drops off another friend.

I feel so bad about his car and about not having time to take Poonam and her bad knees to where she needs to be. If I had Julianne’s number with me, I would just call and cancel, but I don’t, so I can’t. I need to be back on time, and I am.

Getting out of Mister Kandhari’s car, I can assess the damage. The trim is gone and there are streaks of dents along the length of his entire car. He seems unconcerned, much more concerned with the fact that he’s kept his promise and gotten me home on time.

He wants me to come see a movie tonight at his friend’s house. They’re showing Singh is King, the movie that was so popular when I first arrived here with the theme song that was inescapable. It played everywhere I went. Three times a day in the cab, when I walked into McDonald’s, everywhere, all the time. I would love to see the film, but I have to finish the monologue I’ve been invited to write for the Let My Country Awake event. I tell Mister Kandhari that I might be able to come, but I’m not sure. We shake hands and I run out, hoping for enough time to Skype with Scott and grab a quick bite before church.

I do get to say “hello” to Scott, and I’m downstairs scarfing some cornflakes when Julianne arrives apologizing for being late. It’s no problem, I tell her. I’m a little off my schedule today too. The real shame here is that Kim had real coffee at breakfast and she offered me a cup that I again find myself gulping down instead of enjoying. It’s not frequent that I get to enjoy real coffee with breakfast. She offered it to me that way, too. “I have some real coffee if you’d like some.”

Church is abysmal after my adrenaline-filled morning. We sit next to a man with atomic body odor, and the regular pastor is too sick to give the sermon. It’s the repetitive man again, who talks about walking with God because it’s good to walk with God and just what does walking with God mean? It means walking with him. I fight to keep my eyes open, then give in to the need to close them. When will the man yield the floor? We are all at his mercy until he does.

We finally hear our last about walking with God, and church concludes with an instrumental song. We mill around talking with people, then Suzanna, Julianne’s roommate, says she’s going to the Hong Kong restaurant if anyone wants to go with. I take her up on the invitation, as does this woman Rhonda, and Julianne. She drives us all there in her little banana yellow car. Then she drives us each home.

At home, I finish my monologue in a few hours. I am able to recycle some old blog entries and repurpose them, so it’s not like I’m starting from zero. I finish with plenty of time to join my neighbors for the movie, but I feel strange about the invitation. It’s at Mister Singh’s house, but Mister Kandhari invited me. I walk over to Mister Kandhari’s, but his staff tells me he’s not home. I decide I shouldn’t crash the party at Mister Singh’s house and instead walk to the market where I pick up a few take-out menus and buy a foot file. I haven’t been able to get my feet clean after my visit to the gurudwara, so I figure I’ll just file the dirt off. It wasn’t the gurudwara where my feet got dirty. The building itself was spotless, as were the walkways around it. It was the dirt path to the area where we served the food that did it.

Back in my room, I spend some time on Skype with my parents and order delivery from a new fast food place I found in the market: Kents. I can get a veggie burger and aloo tikka (little potato patties) here for cheaper than I can get McDelivery. And at Kents, I can order something called a Rose Milk Soda, which sounds compelling, and is. I think it has real rose petals in it. All this delivered to my door in about fifteen minutes costs less than three dollars.

The Chicken You Eat...

Saturday

I sleep in a bit, but am restless because I don’t know when or if to expect a Skype call from my husband. He’s gone to Chicago to visit my brother for his birthday.

Kim from California is at breakfast again. We chat about politics. She needs to find out how to get her absentee ballot so she can vote from here. I’ll be home by the election, so I don’t have to worry about it.

I laze around my room until one o’clock, when Palminder arrives and drives me over to pick up Julianne. We’ll be doing some sightseeing today: the Iskcon Temple and Safdarjung’s Tomb. Mister Kandhari said the tomb is nothing special when I told him I was going to see it last night, but it was once of the sights I read about in William Darymple’s City of Djinns before coming to India, so I figure I may as well go see it.

We pick up Julianne and tell Palminder, “Iskcon Temple.” He knows where it is. We drive through the serpentine neighborhoods and come to a hill on the far side of the Lotus Temple. This temple is for the Hindu god Krishna. The worshippers here chant the mantra, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare,” etc. Yes, these are the people known to some as the Hare Krishnas; the people in airports that give out flowers. Their temples are found around the world and likely in a neighborhood near you.

Julianne says she thinks it’s important to understand other religions so you can understand other people’s worldviews, but she’s always quick to point out that the other religions are just made up; they are not based in truth like her religion; they are wrong.

The parking lot is strewn with piles of broken bricks and bamboo sticks. The cars have Hare Krishna stickers on their rear windows.

We get an intimate frisking by the woman who also checks our purses, then we walk through a metal detector. The grounds of the temple complex are spotless. There is a circle of buildings with a manicured courtyard in the center. There’s almost no one around. We stop a group of students milling around a statue outside and ask if the temple is open. It’s not. It doesn’t open until four o’clock today. At the far side of the courtyard is a sign that says “Vedic Expo,” and I suggest we go check it out.

Once inside, we see that there are three exhibits that we can check out. The first is called the “Bhagavad-Gita Experience;” the second is a robot show, and the third is about the Ramayana.

The young man behind the desk with the two white stripes on his forehead greets us with palms pressed below his chin. “Hare Krishna,” he says. He says the Gita show is starting in just five minutes. Would we like to do all three?

Julianne says we should just pay for one show. We can come back to the desk if we want to see the other things later.

Julianne hands over five hundred rupees but he doesn’t have enough change. All I have is a five hundred rupee note as well. Julianne has a few hundred rupee bills. She pays for both our admission because she’s the only one with change. I’ll have to pay her back later, or pay for her entry at our next destination.

We walk into a lobby with a huge blue statue of Krishna resting on a bed of snakes. There are double golden doors though which we are rushed. The show is starting.

There is a dark room with flashing lights and statues in it. A voice over introduces us to the Bhagavad-Gita Experience.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Julianne leans over and half giggles, half wonders.

The funnier thing is that I have. This is no big surprise. This is just like Akshardam Temple, only on a little smaller scale and not so polished. I tell Julianne she should go to Akshardam. They have better robots there.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she repeats.

The voice recording stops and we’re ushered into a second dark room, along with three Asian people who are looking bewildered and shuffling about. There are stairs in between the rooms and they aren’t lit, so it’s a surprise when you get there.

A light comes on in room number two and it reveals a large mirror. “Look at yourself,” the booming voice-over says. “Who are you? Are you your face? Your hair? Your skin? Or are you something more?”

The recording goes on to talk about the Hindu concept of the soul, the Atman. The Atman, like I read in the Vivekananda book, is God within us. It is identical with Brahman, the all-pervading god and spirit of the universe. It is different from our face, our body, our worldly identity.

“Maybe by the end of this experience, you will know that you are not your body. You are something else entirely,” the voice-over says as the mirror in front of us disappears and we see behind it a line up of statues lit from behind, with little red LED lights that flicker in their chests. I think they are expecting a lot from their little sound and light show.

The man at the far side of the room with a flashlight ushers us and the shuffling Asian people into the next room. There is another small, unmarked step. Julianne tells me to be careful, but I’ve already half-stumbled on it.

We walk down a dark hallway with a statue in the corner of it. It appears to have spiky armor on, and it has two red, glowing LED lights where its eyes should be. Does this statue have two Atmans, I wonder, or is it just a demon?

In the next room, there are flashing white lights, evil sounding laughter and muffled screams. “Confusion,” the deep-throated voice-over says, “and sadness. This is what comes to those who are deluded.”

He explains while different figures light up on the walls surrounding us that there are three types of people. The first type of person I forget because I am too distracted by the laughing and the screaming and the flashing lights. The second kind of person is ruled by passion, he says. This person does anything to stimulate their senses. A distorted and large sculpture of a person shooting up lights up, and a similarly distorted and horrible-looking person playing an electric guitar accompanies it. The third type of person is ruled by ignorance. This type of person eats meat and has a bad temper.

People free of these delusions are ruled by goodness, though, the voice-over tells us. The flashing lights stop and totally different figures are suddenly lit with a blacklight that makes them appear colored in soft, warm tones. A man walks with two goats. A woman holds an armful of vegetables. The lights turn off and we’re ushered off the next precipitous drop into a room with three movie screens in it.

Here, we watch a movie about karma and reincarnation. “The chicken you eat in this life could eat you in the next,” the same familiar voice tells us. These messages don’t really affect me because I’m a vegetarian. I won’t be eaten by a chicken in my next life. But if the Hindus are right, Julianne might. She leans over and says she’s in so much trouble. She’s ignorant and now she’s going to be eaten. She laughs.

This movie theatre is so small in comparison to Akshardam. I wonder if there’s a rivalry between the temples. My movie screen’s bigger than yours. We have better lasers than you.

The room after the theatre, also guarded by a weird armored guy with glowing eyes, has a tiny statue of Krishna in it. He is in a golden chariot pulled by horses. The voice-over talks to the statue. “Krishna, thank you for showing me this form. But I know you also have another form different from your human form. When can I see this?”

Then Krishna himself speaks. “You can’t see my other form because it is beyond seeing.” Shadowy sculptures are lit from the side at the back of this room. There is a twenty foot tall face and another, smaller face that seems to be belching lava next to that one, and a large human figure against the wall next to that. Suddenly, rainbow lasers spiral out of the eyes of the twenty foot head. Krishna explains that this form is too frightening to show most people. It is fierce. It devours the earth and unleashes the powers of nature in the universe. The head belching lava lights up red as the spiral rainbows sort of hypnotize me. Clouds of dry ice arise as Krishna goes on about his all-encompassing power. What looks like a rainbow flying toaster screen saver rolls across all three giant Krishna statues at the back of the room.

Then the familiar voice-over comes back. “Krishna, thank you for showing me this form. But I prefer to think of you in terms that I can understand.” The lights come back up on the tiny statue posed with the horses on a large rock. The man with the flashlights ushers us into the lobby where we find a lit up display of all the incarnations of Krishna. There is Krishna the lion-man. Krishna the angry bore. Krishna as a dwarf. Krishna is also Buddha. Krishna is his own older brother. Krishna is a fish with a unicorn horn. Let alone the giant face with the laser eyes. That’s not even on the display. Krishna is a busy guy.

Outside the exhibit, I wonder where the entrance to the other shows is. There’s still the robot show and the movie, I think, about the Ramayana. Julianne isn’t keen to see the other displays. “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” she says. “Besides, you’ve read the Ramayana, haven’t you?”

I haven’t. It was one of the books I didn’t get to before I left. I read the Gita, but not the Ramayana. Not that the movie would do a good job of explaining it to me. The Bhagavad-Gita Experience was spotty at best in introducing the concepts explained in that book. I’m curious to see the other exhibits, but Julianne seems finished. We walk around the rest of the grounds because she wonders if there’s a restroom anywhere. Instead we find a book shop. I find a book entitled “Say Hare Krishna and Be Happy.” On the cover is a picture of George Harrison. It’s a very slim volume. I’d buy it if I weren’t running out of room in my luggage. It comes with an exclusive interview with George Harrison, the cover boasts. Julianne looks at another book about Krishna consciousness. When the vendor asks if she wants it, she appears slightly alarmed and foists it back at him. “No!” she says, and walks away. I follow her out.

Up a short flight of stairs is a gift shop. I find some necklaces. They remind me of the sandalwood beads I was once given by a Hare Krishna in Washington D.C. That necklace broke a while back. I’m excited to replace my Hare Krishna necklace, but I only have a 500 rupee bill. They probably won’t change it for me. Julianne says I can probably find such a necklace anywhere, but that’s not the point. I don’t bother trying to explain why I want a Hare Krishna necklace specifically. I’m not even sure why except that I feel like it’ll have happy Hare Krishna vibes. I’m sure this would be completely sacrilegious in Julianne’s mind.

I take two little wooden necklaces off the display and carry them to the counter. They only cost twenty rupees a piece. I think there’s no way they’re going to change my 500 rupee bill, but, shockingly, they do. “Hare Krishna,” the man behind the counter with the two chalk colored stripes running up his forehead tells me. Since I have change, I ask, also, to see a string of Indian prayer beads. Julianne is interested in these. “It’s kind of like the Catholic concept of the rosary,” I tell her, “Only much older.” I buy a string of dark red wooden beads—not that I know how to use them. But they’re beautiful.

We still find no bathroom, but there is an immaculately clean food stand and I haven’t had lunch yet. I ask Julianne what a ladoo is. It’s a sweet. Really sweet. They eat them in the Bollywood movies all the time. If it’s good enough for Bollywood, it’s good enough for me, I think. I get a ladoo. It costs ten rupees and I’ve got change because I bought my happy beads. The ladoo looks like a tan golf ball, minus the little divets in it. It seems like it’s made of sesame seeds, some kind of paste and lots of sugar. “I’m glad you like Indian sweets,” Julianne says as I scarf it down and crumple the little silver cardboard plate on which they served it to me. She doesn’t like them.

We get to the signpost that says, “Vedic Expo, Auditorium, Robot Show, Guest House,” and try to decide what to do. It’s three o’clock. If we stay for another hour, the temple will open and we can see inside. I figure we can watch the Ramayana movie, then it will be about four o’clock. But Julianne isn’t too keen on this idea. We leave for Safdarjung’s Tomb, but I ask her if she’d mind stopping at Kalkaji Mandir. It’s the temple she had to find on her “Amazing Race” day in Delhi. For her Hindi class, she had to find a list of places the teacher gave her by speaking to the locals in Hindi. This temple was on the list. She says it’s very different than Iskcon. I want to see how.

The cab pulls over to the side of the road and stops. I see nothing like a temple. Julianne says, “This is it,” and hops out of the car. I follow her into a covered, tiled walkway with a railing down the middle of it. The tile is full of bits of garbage. It is muddy and wet. Here and there men attempt to sweep up the mud and wet and garbage with handmade brooms made of sticks.

The side of the walkway is lined with people sleeping and beggars. The beggars know to hang out here because people who worship at the temple think it’s good for their karma to give to them, Julianne says. We follow this pathway in between the surrounding buildings for what feels like a quarter mile until we come to a small, white circular building that you can hardly see the top of. It rises up between the adjacent buildings and awnings with concentrically smaller circular domes.

“We have to take our shoes off if we want to go it,” Julianne says. We’d have to take our shoes off and stand in the wet muck, she means, in a stagnant line that is almost the length of the whole walk we just took. This is what a daily temple is like. Julianne says she likes to think about the use of the temples she goes to visit. “Who comes here?” she says. “Are they middle class, or is it lower class or is it a combination?” It is an interesting question. The beggars around the temple are definitely not middle class, but the worshippers here don’t appear destitute. In India, though, it can be hard to tell. Even the homeless men on the street will wear collared shirts and pants. And I’ve seen begging women in what look to me like beautiful saris.

There is a crush of people here. We choose to keep our shoes on and view the temple from the outside. There is a giant brass OM symbol and a shrine with burning incense to which people make offerings of food and money. There is a large brass bell at the entryway that people ring “to wake up the gods,” Julianne says. The gods aren’t getting any sleep today.

Next to the temple is a building with a brightly painted wooden façade. Inside music plays and people dance. We follow the tiled pathway behind the temple into a narrow marketplace. Piles of sweets are laced with dozens of bees. There are tables full of red and orange powder that people use to dye their hands and feet. Stalls full of colorful bangles and children’s toys and fabrics pile up one on top of another. Everywhere I look is photo worthy. I snap one after another picture, unable to take it the totality of the place. Julianne walks ahead of me, dodging an old woman with red dye on her finger who tries to put a smudge on her forehead. She tries to smudge me too. I dodge her just because I saw Julianne do it in front of me, but then I think it would have been fun to get painted by the lady. I think it was kind of insulting not to let her do it, too. It was a welcoming gesture and I rejected it. Next time someone tries to smudge me, I’m getting smudged, I resolve.

There is a small opening several hundred meters down the narrow pedestrian market. In it are a few carnival rides for little kids. A little boy bounces up and down in a jeep that spins around a small circular track. A boy not much older than him sits and operates the ride.

There are booths selling Hindi movies and booths selling knick knacks; religious statues and statues of white fluffy dogs sit right next to each other on display. There are photo booths where you can pay to have your picture taken against several different backgrounds. One is a temple with garlands of flowers, another is a beach scene. One of the photo booths has a tiny monkey tied up by its collar. His face is troublingly human. A woman throws him tiny balls of sweets that he contentedly picks up and munches.

We walk to the end of the market, then turn and walk back the way we came. The woman with the dye on her fingers is gone. It is a whole new smash of people we wade through this time. I thank Julianne for bringing me here. It’s not someplace I ever would have found on my own, and it’s so different from the “touristy” temples I’ve seen so far.

Back in the car, Julianne asks me if I know the story of the tomb we’re going to next. I know I read about it in City of Djinns, but I can’t remember anything about it. When we reach the tomb, I see why. It was built in the 1700s for a prime minister of the Mogul Empire. His name is obscure, as is the name of the emperor he labored under. There isn’t much more story than that, at least on the plaque outside the monument.

Once we get inside, it looks much like the other tombs I’ve seen. There are the onion domes and the arched doorways. We trade cameras and take pictures of each other, then walk inside to where the headstone lies. A man in a collared shirt asks where we’re from. Julianne walks away. “Sometimes I just don’t feel like chatting,” she says. We mill around some more and the man walks up to me. He says, “Please madam. I work here. I want to tell you about the tomb.” I think he’ll probably make up bogus stories about the tomb and expect money when he’s done talking to us, so I’m about to walk away as well, but Julianne decides to listen to him. He tells us that the grave marker that we’re looking at is fake, and the real body is buried nineteen meters below where we’re standing. I already knew that because every Mogul tomb is constructed that way. Then he tells us that while the prime minister was Muslim, his wife was Hindi, and so the tomb has architectural and design motifs from both traditions. This is actually interesting information. He points to an inlaid design in the tile floor. The Muslim holy flower is the rose, and the Hindu holy flower is the lotus. This tile is a design incorporating both. He points to the ceiling in another chamber of the tomb. This is a lotus design. And on the wall is a partridge, a Muslim motif. Two Indian girls have joined us. They ask why there would be a lotus design in a Mogul tomb. They didn’t hear the beginning of the tour. Instead of explaining, our tour guide rudely tells them not to ask questions. Only Julianne can understand this because he says it in Hindi. When he is done with our tour, he wants money, but we already paid a hundred rupees each for admission and we never asked him for his information. I high tail it out of there when he asks if we liked his tour.

Julianne tells me he wanted a tip. I know, but I didn’t feel like giving him one. She agrees. She said he was totally rude to the Indian girls because he thought he’d get money out of us, and it was creepy how he kept asking us to step closer to him. “That’s totally inappropriate,” she says. He would never do that to Indian women.

We return to the gate to find Palminder standing outside waiting for us. He points us back to the car which is parked nearby. It’s just five o’clock. I ask Julianne if she wants to go to the Gandhi Memorial. She says sure. We ask Palminder, but he just says no. He doesn’t know where it is. I don’t have a map with me. We try calling Susie’s roommate Sarah who is something of an encyclopedia of Delhi. Even Sarah can’t tell us where it is. The Gandhi Memorial is out for today. Some other time.

I ask Julianne if we wants to go back to Iskcon Temple since it’s open. We can see the inside. She says sure. We can go back, and since it’s close, we should eat at The Big Chill after. Brilliant! I can taste the vanilla malt already.

We tell Palminder to take us back to Iskcon. He gives us a little squint. “Back to Iskcon?”

Yes.

I think he just thinks I’m the weirdest, but at least he humors me.

We’re not that far from the temple and as we drive up the hill one more time, the topic of communal violence in India comes up because I’m participating in the event to speak out against it this Wednesday. I say it’s strange that most people here seem so accepting of other faiths, yet there seem to be flare ups where people just go crazy on each other.

Julianne says that people will tell you they’re accepting, but it stops at a certain point. I don’t understand what she means. When I talk with Mister Kandhari and Mister Singh, they are happy to explain their religion with me, and very careful about respecting mine. Mister Singh told me, “We don’t want anyone to change their faith unless they want to.”

Julianne says they’ll be accepting until you tell them that the only true religion is Christianity, that their faith is wrong, that what they are doing is worshipping in vain. I can see where this would be an impasse.

The inside of the temple is beautiful, adorned with an enormous lotus flower chandelier and huge paintings of the blue Krishna in different pastoral scenes. There are three large shrines that I don’t understand. There are pictures of different teachers in one of them. There are what amount to beautiful dolls in fancy clothes in another. People bring prashad, food offerings for the gods, and monks inside the shrines act something like zookeepers, placing the food in the exhibits for the gods to enjoy.

If I were by myself, I’d sit in the middle of the clean tiled floor and meditate like I see some other people doing, but Julianne looks well and ready to go. She seems a bit uncomfortable amongst the worshippers. It’s like being at a big, beautiful pool with your bathing suit all ready but not being able to jump in. It’s a trade-off, though, and one that I am happy to make. I am glad for the companionship we’ve shared throughout the day. I wouldn’t give that up just to indulge my inner meditator here for a few minutes.

On the way out of the temple there is a huge poster for Radhasiand on September 8th. It says there is a “Special Charan Darshan (only once a year)” that goes on until nine o’clock at night. I wonder if this was the festival that Amar was telling me about. I think, “Maybe I can come back Monday night after work.” Sure I won’t be able to see the robot show then, but I’ll get to see what the Special Charan Darshan is.

Julianne and I conclude our day of tourism at the American-esque restaurant in Kailesh Colony. I order the exact same thing I had the last time I went because I liked it so much. Julianne gets a chicken salad: it could be the very chicken that will eat her in her next life. I guess the Bhagavad-Gita Experience didn’t change any lives today, but it was fun while it lasted.

You Get What You Need

Friday

Friday is George’s last day. He asks me if I’m fully recovered from my cough and shakes my hand in parting. Maybe he’ll see me in the States some time. He’s working on an assessment that my company is involved with as well.

There’s a new woman at breakfast this morning as well. Another very friendly American: Kim from California. She’s here working for Unicef. She has a young son with her. They’ll be staying at the guesthouse until she can find a permanent place to live, so maybe ten days or so, she says. She wonders where her son is while we eat. She says she’s sure the people around are looking after him. “You can do that here. It’s so child friendly,” she says. “You could never do that back home.”

Palminder is right on time as usual, though I get no phone call today telling me he’s arrived. Maybe the guards were too busy looking after Kim’s son. Who knows?

I walk down at nine o’clock anyway to find the old, clunky silver car waiting for me: the one that sounds like a teakettle boiling when it idles. I get inside and notice a terrible exhaust smell. I lean my head back and close my eyes. When I open them again, we are stopped on the bridge over the river. Palminder says, “Just a moment, madam,” then he gets out of the car and removes a plastic bag full of something from the hatchback. He drops the plastic bag over the side of the bridge and gets back into the car. We drive off.

I am perplexed twofold. First, I must have fallen asleep, like, dead asleep, and I’m hoping it’s not because the car fumes knocked me out. I’m hoping I was just that tired from my restless night with the jumping spider and throbbing toe. Second, what just happened? Is it routine to throw garbage into the river? Or was this special? What was in the bag? Evidence? A human head? At least it wasn’t big enough to be a whole body. I’m so groggy I don’t even make an effort to ask about what happened, not that Palminder’s English would allow him to explain anything. I just lean my head back again and close my eyes, hoping I don’t wake up with my head in a plastic bag, hoping the fumes don’t also knock out Palminder. He seems spry enough.

At work, I hear that it’s Debamitra’s last day. She’s going back to Kolkata to teach full time and be nearer to her family. I’m happy for her but sad to see her go. I tell her as much. She was my trusted advisor, recommending earrings and a bag for the book launch, telling me I didn’t need to fear for my life on the Himalayan trip, fetching extra tea for me when I was still feeling sick. She sat right next to me, so I could always take a little break and talk to her if I felt a bit lonely. I’ll miss her. She seems surprised. “You’ll only be here for another month,” she says.

“Yes, but I’ll still miss you!”

Jonaki gives me the number of the travel agent at work and I dial him up. I ask for train tickets. I give him the name and number of the train that Susie and Julianne are taking to Armritsar to see the Golden Temple. He speaks to me in Hindi, then says, “Tikka?” It is the only thing I understand.

“English?” I ask. He says a bunch more in Hindi. So I guess that’s a “no” on the English.

Debamitra hears me struggling. She asks if she can have the phone. She speaks to the man and asks me for information. What time am I leaving? Who is going with me? How old are they? What class car do I want? There are too many questions. I can’t answer them all. I have to call Susie for more information. The question of age is a strange one. Indians seem to have to supply this information on all trips. I had to write down my name and age on the bus to the Himalayas. It seems a bit morbid, like this is information they’ll give to the reporter when the bus or train crashes, but I go with the flow. I figure the travel agent is asking about my friends’ ages so he can search for them in his database and get me seats close to them.

Susie supplies the necessary information and Debamitra calls the travel agent back. They’ll get the tickets for me. Debamitra says I’ll need to bring money to pay them on Monday. I’ll need 600 times three for the trip going up, then 900 times three for the trip coming back. Times three? Why would I need times three?

Didn’t I need tickets for my friends?

No! I just needed a ticket for myself. I just wanted the ticket to be near my friends.

She scrambles to call the travel agent back. He already sent someone to the train station. He has to call him on his cell phone to cancel the other two tickets. And there’s no guaranty that I’ll be able to be in the same car with my friends. Just the same train.

I consider cancelling altogether on this count. I don’t want to be by myself on an overnight train. Debamitra says I should make my friends get refunds on their existing tickets, then buy them again all together, but I don’t think everyone would be willing to do that for me. Who knows if they can get their money back?

Once again, it would be easier and safer not to go on this trip. But then I wouldn’t get to see the Golden Temple, the site that heretofore I have only been Photoshopped in front of. I want to make that Photoshop photo real. Plus the Golden Temple looks like one of the most beautiful places in India.

Debamitra says the sleeper car I’ll be on is an expensive one; it’s nice. It shouldn’t be a problem. I shouldn’t have to worry about it. Anyway, I might be able to switch tickets with someone once I board: her last bit of counsel and reassurance for me. She’ll make an excellent teacher, I think. She is diminutive, but large in spirit, always willing to help out, always concerned about others. Plus, she doesn’t let anyone push her around. I hope she’s happy in her new life in Kolkata.

At the end of the day we have samosas and jalebis to celebrate and I take a few snaps to remember her by.

At home, I feel particularly lonely because all my plans for Friday night were thwarted this week. Jonaki couldn’t go to dinner, Julianne already had other plans. I won’t even be talking with Scott tonight because he’s going out to lunch with his friends. It’s just me, myself and I until I go sightseeing tomorrow at one. I know it’s just a few hours on my own. I know I have plenty to keep me busy. I can read, I can write, I can watch tv, I can paint. But I just want to be with people. I just want to talk tonight.

I’m not feeling hungry, but I decide I’ll walk to the market to get a little something to eat: maybe a salad at Angels in my Kitchen where I ate with Susie that one time. As I pass Mister Kundari’s house, I see that he’s outside talking with his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. I fold my hands and tell him hello. He tells me to come in, come in! I say that’s okay, I’m just on my way to the market, but he insists. I walk in through the big iron gate and sit on a molded plastic garden chair.

His daughter-in-law must be off. She’s dropping the kids at a friend’s house. There’s a fan going overhead and Gopi offers me a cold glass of water. Mister Kundari’s bonsai garden is lit with little solar lights. It’s a lovely place to sit. He asks me how I’m doing and if I’m meeting friends in the market or whether I’m going there alone.

“I’m just going there by myself,” I say, but he doesn’t understand this. “Alone,” I say, and this satisfies him.

He’s going to change his clothes, you see, and then we will have a beer together, you see. This sounds pleasant. I refuse at first, but he insists again. “Gopi! Gopi!” he yells, and his young, thin house helper brings out an ice bucket and a tray with two glasses.

While Mister Kundari is inside, two women in their twenties appear at his gate. They smile bashfully and are welcomed inside by the guard. Gopi brings out more chairs for them. They used to work for Mister Kundari as fashion designers, and they are here looking to work for him again.

Mister Kundari comes out in the all white outfit I saw him wearing yesterday. It looks cooler and more comfortable than the dress pants and collared shirt he had on just a few minutes earlier.

He talks at length to the two young girls about their prospective employment with him—but he talks in Hindi so I don’t understand any of it unless they say good or okay, which they do a few times.

He pours me a beer and puts ice in it. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had beer over ice. But it’s Kingfisher. It’s pretty strong, so the ice is okay.

They talk on and on then Mister Kundari says, “Let’s go. Let’s go to the club where we went.” He wants to take us all there for dinner. The girls protest. They can’t go. They have to meet someone at nine; if they go to the club they’ll be late. They talk a little more, then leave.

I ask Mister Kundari who lives in his big house with him. Does his sister live here? No. She just comes to help with the house sometimes. His son’s family lives upstairs, “But I let them be. I don’t bother them. They have their own lives. I am alone. But I am very happy. Very happy. I have travelled the world. I have seen so much. I have been to Norway fifty times. I have been to United States. I have everything I need. Five cars I have. These cars are all mine.” He points to a slew of cars parked outside his gate then has his guard open a garage just behind us that houses a Mercedes. “I am very happy,” he says. “I have everything I need.”

“Come, have some food with me,” he says. I follow him into his house where Gopi has placed a buffet of dishes on an end table near a couch and chair which are covered in stacks of magazines that he gathers up quickly. “Here, read. I am well known in Defence Colony.” There is an article about him in a Defence Colony newsletter. He’s won fifteen different awards for his gardening. It says his wife used to be a doll maker and he ran a successful doll making business for a while, until he turned to the garment business because it would be more lucrative. It mentions how he helped with the free breakfasts at the Bangla Saab Gurudwara for twelve years. It says he’s a good and accomplished man. I notice I’ve been spelling his name wrong. It’s Kandhari.

I ask about his wife. She made dolls? “She has been gone now many years.” Mister Kandhari doesn’t say much more. There is a large picture of her on the far wall.

He digs out photos of his gardens and himself being presented with awards by various important people like the mayor of Delhi and a member of parliament. I ask how long he’s been gardening. Three years. Three years? He’s done all this in three years? It occurs to me I am in the presence of a talented man who can do whatever he puts his mind and attention to.

Dinner is good. There’s paneer and okra and dal and chapattis. There is also a dish of kurry that I notice Mister Kandhari leaves untouched. Why does this food exist if no one likes it?

We finish eating quickly and when we’re done, there are two cups of rice pudding. “I hope you like. I put less sugar.” It’s nice to have something that is not super sugary for a change. Indians call their desserts “sweets” with good reason.

I figure I should do the running away thing after I eat, but Mister Kandhari says I should stay. We can sit outside for a bit. His delicate bonsai garden is lit up with little solar lanterns. Lizards scamper up the walls eating bugs. An almost cool breeze blows. He asks me about my friends. Do I get to see them during the week? I should bring them over some time. We can go to the club, the Indian Moose Lodge, where we went before. I get the sense that Mister Kandhari is a little lonely. I also appreciate that he doesn’t ask me to go to the club with him alone. I think he respects that fact that I felt strange about it last time and doesn’t want to put me in that position again.

I tell him I should be going. “Will you still go to the market?” he asks. Yes, I tell him. I need to go to the ATM because I’ll be doing some sightseeing tomorrow. “Okay, then. You go,” he smiles and shakes my hand. “You come, five thirty on Sunday? You bring your camera. You will remember for life.”

I set off for the market but turn around half way there. It’s dark out and I don’t want to go to an ATM this late at night. I can go tomorrow. As I walk home in the warm night, it strikes me that I too have everything I need. It amazes me how India has provided for me. There is good, healthy food and kind people to share it with everywhere I turn. Every time I need help, I get it. Every time I just want someone to talk to, someone appears. In case Mister Kandhari wants to know, I am happy. Very happy. And I'll see him on Sunday at five thirty.

End Toe Violence in India

Thursday

Thursday at the office Amar comes over to talk to me. He says, “So you like The Big Chill, huh?” He’s been reading my blog.

Even though I just re-read my passage about Project Sink the Kurry, it slips my mind. But Amar remembers. He’s got two take-out menus: one from Pizza Hut and one from Nirula’s. Pizza sounds great to me, but Amar says he doesn’t like it. He’ll order pizza for me and something else for him, right after he calls to cancel our daba lunch.

A few minutes later, Amar returns to my desk. They had so many complaints about the kurry that they’re not serving it anymore. We’ll have okra today instead, or lady fingers as they call it here. Having just had okra for dinner last night, I am less than thrilled about the prospect, but, hey, it’s not kurry. At least it’s edible. We don’t have to order something else today after all.

At lunch, from out of nowhere, Amar says, “You know, don’t assume that everybody is limbless.” It takes me a second to realize he’s referring back to my blog again where I talk about the limbless beggars.

He tells me that Tehseen was giving money to a one-armed kid one time, then they noticed that the kid had just stuffed his arm into the back of his shirt. “They’re very good at it,” he says. “I’ve been ripped off so many times,” he says. There was another time when he was a student and a very pregnant woman came up to him and told him she needed cab fare; she had to get to the hospital right away. He was a student with little extra cash, but gave her 100 rupees. When he walked away, he saw her laughing with a friend.

I must say most of the amputees I see are clearly amputees. You can see their stumps very clearly. They are not hidden by clothing. And I maintain that anyone attempting to make a living by begging, fully limbed or not, likely could use a few extra rupees. Still, it’s somewhat dangerous to give. Once one person sees you’ve handed out money, you can become swamped with a crowd. Then it’s just reliance on their kindness and good nature that keeps your wallet and everything in it from being swiped. Anyway can happen when you’re so outnumbered.

Amar tells a story of a friend of his who had to carry a lot of cash for his job. His friend remembers being at a train station in Delhi, then waking up at a different station three hundred kilometers away without his watch, his wallet or his mobile phone. He remembers nothing in between. Thankfully, the conductors on the train knew him and allowed him to ride home for free and pay when he reached his destination. Amar says never to take food from people on trains. It could make you sleepy. Then there are the kids who throw crap on your shoe, right down the street from the next kids who coincidentally offer you a shoeshine. “You will meet these kinds of kids too.” He says there are good people and bad people here. These things don’t happen all the time, but they do happen. You just have to be careful.

At home, I call Alok to fix the Internet. He says he’s been waiting for my call and he’ll be over in just fifteen minutes. A half an hour passes and the power blinks off. Even if he does show up now, he won’t be able to fix anything. The router is useless without power. The room quickly grows uncomfortably hot.

While I’m waiting for Alok, I call Julianne. She can’t go to Mister Kundari’s house for dinner with me on Friday night, but she can go sightseeing on Saturday. I ask if she wants to go to the gurdwara on Sunday morning at five thirty, but she declines this invitation as well. She’s already been to a gurdwara. But I should go, she says. It’s very interesting to see. And the food is good. Anyone who wants to can eat.

Then she mentions she’s going to the Golden Temple at Amritsar with Susie. I ask if I can go with. The Golden Temple was one of the places that I saw online before I came to India. In fact, my friend Ryan at work Photoshopped a picture of me floating in front of it. How cool would it be to actually take a real picture of me at the Golden Temple? Julianne says she’ll ask Susie if I can tag along. The only problem is that they’ve already booked the train tickets.

As I’m talking with Julianne, Susie calls. She just ran into a woman named Sarah Larsen at an art gallery. Sarah is working on putting together an event that will be an artistic response to communalism in India, the religious discrimination and violence that’s taking place specifically in Orissa and Kashmir right now. She’s looking for all kinds of artists: musicians, painters, writers. Susie wants to know if I’m interested.

Um, yeah.

I just hope I’m up to the task. On one level, I feel I’m not at all qualified to speak on these topics. But, I figure, the values of peace and acceptance and unity are universal, and I’ve certainly been writing about them already in my time here in India.

She gives me Sarah’s number. She also tells me I’m welcome to go to Armritsar with them, but I should see if I can have a travel agent book my tickets for me. She says someone at work should be able to help me with this. The only problem might be that my seats may not be by their seats on the train. She says I should be able to switch seats, though, once we board.

I call Sarah. She’s got an untraceable accent. I wonder where she’s from. She asks what kinds of things I like to write. I tell her nonfiction and drama. I write a lot of monologues, I tell her. This is great, she says. They could use a monologue. Something on the theme of love and unity. Something about three to five minutes long would be great. She has to go. She’s in a meeting. But I should email my piece to her when it’s done. She’s throwing this event together really quickly. It will be next week Wednesday at the amphitheatre at the India Habitat Centre, very near the Defence Colony.

Since I’m having such a good time on the phone, I ring up Jonaki. I had also asked her if she’d be interested in having dinner with me and Mister Kundari. She also declines the invitation. It would take her over an hour to get home from where I live, and she doesn’t want to drive home alone that late at night. I can’t blame her. It’s probably not a good idea. Jonaki tells me, though, that there’s a travel agent at Pearson who can book my tickets for me. She’ll give me the number tomorrow at work. So maybe Armritsar is a go after all.

Alok finally shows up, sweating. I let him in but tell him the power’s out. There’s nothing he can do. I ask if he asked Pachu when he thinks the power will be back on. Pachu usually knows. He said it will be another hour and a half. So there’s no use in waiting. Alok stands around for a while in awkward silence, sweat beading up on his nose, then determines that he’ll come back tomorrow.

When he leaves, it’s already eight thirty. I walk over to Mister Kundari’s. I have to let him know that I can’t find a friend to have dinner tomorrow so we’ll have to cancel. His guard knocks at the door several times but no one shows up. Finally a young girl lets me in. She knocks on his bedroom door and after a minute, Mister Kundari emerges in a long white top and white pants. He was asleep. “I go to bed very early,” he says. “I get up four, five in the morning, so go to bed around eight.” I apologize for disturbing him but he smiles and finds my hand to shake it. He keeps shaking, “It is no problem. You come anytime. No problem,” he assures me. “Five thirty on Sunday I will see you!” he says. Yes you will. Five thirty. “You will remember rest of your life,” he tells me as I walk out into the night.

I remember the tailor wallah still has my skirt and walk over to fetch it. No matter the time of day, it seems my little tailor is in his shack. As I round the corner near the park, I can see by the warm glow coming from his shop that he is there once again. I pay him fifty rupees (about a dollar) and he hands over my skirt in a little plastic bag from some shop in Connaught Place. The hem is narrow and perfect. “Namaste!” I tell him. “Namaste,” he replies as he walks back behind his shop wall.

Next to his shop, a pile of sand taller than me has appeared. This happens all the time here. Big piles of building materials appear all over the place, then nothing seems to happen with them. The pile of broken bricks and concrete that I noticed in the parking lot that we cut through in the morning is now just sitting there and will probably remain there for the rest of my time in India. I don’t know if they drop too much off then never come back for it, or if the projects just get put on hold or take a long time to finish. I must say I am a bit baffled by all the piles everywhere in the Defence Colony.

When I’m done at the tailor’s, I walk to Archie’s Paper Rose, the Hallmark-type store in the market. I buy a thank you card for the Singhs and walk home.

At home, I’m walking up the stairs and I see Mira. “Power come,” she tells me and laughs.

“Oh good,” I exclaim. “Very hot upstairs. Very hot.”

“Yes, warm,” she says. This is perhaps the biggest, and definitely the most successful, conversation I’ve had with Mira. Most of the time she starts off talking and I can’t make heads or tails of what she’s saying.

Back in my room I feel a little hungry. Even though it’s already nine o’clock, I decide to order some McDelivery. I dial up the McDonald’s number and press one to place an order. A man reads from a script and asks for my phone number. Once I give this to him, he tells me my name and address. I am in their system. I order a McVeggie with Cheese Combo. He tells me it will arrive in approximately half an hour, depending on traffic conditions. That means I will be eating dinner around nine thirty. This is very Indian of me.

I watch a little television: “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.” Then I write out the thank you to the Singhs. I walk down to deliver the card to the guard, but on my way, I run into my McDelivery guy. He takes my food out of a McDonald’s backpack and makes change for the two hundred rupees I give him. The food, with the delivery fee included, costs three bucks. He puts on his red helmet and jets off on his matching red motorcycle.

As I’m walking next door, I stub my toe on the road. It hurts. I look down and notice a lump of blood pooling. I’ve pulled a Susie, but without even the excitement of falling off a pillar. It’s a drag when you bleed here because you can’t rinse your wound off with the tap water. You have to wash it in bottled water.

I give the card to Mister Singh’s guard who recognizes me from dinner the other night and walk back with my McDonald’s and my wounded toe.

At home, I smear a big helping of antibiotic ointment onto my left big toe and cut up more gauze and tape to bandage it. I think, at least my first aid purchases are getting put to good use. I think, what the heck with me and India already? Could I just stop with the minor calamities? There’s a chunk of toe that’s gone, and, what’s worse, I’ve totally messed up my pedicure. A chunk of the nail is also broken off. So now I have to grow back my bangs and my toenail. I’m going to need a lot of vitamins.

Speaking of vitamins, I enjoy my McDelivery. Just as I’m finishing up, I receive my evening Skype call from Scott, but only because I’m able to steal the Internet from an adjacent network. Hopefully, the stars will align tomorrow and Alok will be able to fix my connection.

I lie down to sleep but my toe throbs like there’s a heart inside of it. I also have visions of this jumping spider that I was unable to smash earlier in the evening jumping all over me as I sleep, leaving a little necrosis everywhere he lands.

Needless to say, it is not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. That’s okay, though. It gives me a little extra time to ponder what I’m going to write my monologue about. I don’t come up with any good ideas before I finally fall asleep, but hopefully this weekend I’ll have my Internet back and benefit from a little research on the subject of communal violence in India. Right now the only violence I really know about is what I've inflicted on my poor toe.

Lime Pickles and Philosophy

Wednesday

There is a quiet Indian woman at breakfast. She says only “hello” to me and spends the rest of the time reading the Hindustan Times. I think at the time that she mustn’t speak much English, but I realize afterward that she was reading an English language paper. She just wasn’t feeling very social, I guess.

On the way to work, Palminder cuts through the parking lot by the market. There is a new pile of rubble in the middle of it, and a woman works to fill some large potholes with the pile of cracked bricks and rocks. It strikes me that one of the only jobs I’ve seen women working in public is construction. I was just uploading a slew of pictures and came across the one of the women working in a highway median carrying big pots of dirt on their heads. I would guess that this would be one of the last jobs that women would have, but it doesn’t seem that way here. Manual labor is not strictly men’s work, though shop keeping is.

At work, I open my Lonely Planet traveler’s guide to the Corbett Tiger Reserve page and march over to Jonaki’s desk. “We should go on a safari,” I tell her. I’ve only got five weekends left here in India. If I want to see more things, I have to start making some plans. The Corbett Tiger Reserve was one of the things I found online before I ever got to India. It’s not very far from Delhi, so it seems a feasible thing to do.

I’m not sure how Jonaki will react to my invitation to go roam around the jungle on the back of an elephant. There are three hour elephant safaris at this park. I present the invitation almost as a joke just in case she thinks I’m crazy. But she takes me seriously. She’s got friends who have actually been there. She’ll ask them about it. She thinks we can go, maybe the weekend of the 20th. So there. Done deal. I may be going on a safari with Jonaki.

At lunch, I tell Amar about our tentative plans. He says the roads are very bad this time of year because of the monsoon rains. He says the best way to get there is by rail. The guidebook says there’s a train that leaves at ten at night and gets there at five in the morning. Amar thinks this is a better idea than hiring a driver. He also says there’s a different park, about seventeen hours away, that’s a lot smaller where you’re much more likely to see a tiger. “This Corbett Park is too big,” he says. There’s too much land where the tigers can hide. I’m not sure I’m up for another seventeen hour trip, though. I may take my chances with the park that’s closer.

Lunch is gross today. It’s some watery squash-like vegetable with no flavor. Tomorrow is the day they serve the weird vegetable protein balls called kurry. Amar and I are hatching a plan to cancel our regular daba lunch and order something better. The daba wallahs are famous in India. They mass produce and deliver lunches to business people for just three dollars a week. Amar says they were recently featured in a business textbook as a case study. I don’t mind the daba food usually. Sometimes, though, it can be a little less than wonderful. And every Thursday they serve kurry in a thin yellow gravy. I ate it and tolerated it for many weeks. Then, when I was so sick with my bubonic flu, Mira made the same dish at Ahuja for me. I tried it and it turned my stomach. I haven’t been able to eat it at all since then. Project Sink the Kurry launches tomorrow. I’ll let you know how our operation goes.

After work, we get stuck in the jamb by the river where the traffic usually piles up. A man walks by flashing orange towels he’s trying to sell. Then a man walks by selling water in little sealed bags. I wonder if it’s safe to drink, not that I want any. I just wonder. There are two men walking by holding metal trays full of coconut wedges. These guys are ubiquitous. I’ve seen them climb onto busses stopped at red lights. There’s the guy with the steering wheel covers and the car chargers. I take out my journal and start taking notes on all the vendors when a man with a stack of books comes up on my window and starts tapping. He’s got Paul Cohello and William Darymple. I assume these are bootleg copies, bad translations. Perhaps because he sees me writing, he is encouraged. I must want to buy a book; I’m writing in one. He knocks and knocks until Palminder says something to him in Hindi. He walks away. On his heels, a boy of about thirteen arrives at my window. He holds a filthy white rag and knocks and knocks. I shake my head at him, but he just continues knocking without pause. It goes on for over a minute when Palminder opens the door and says something to him in Hindi. Since he doesn’t say “good, okay, breakfast,” or “How much does it cost?” I don’t understand him. Whatever he says, though, does not immediately dissuade the boy, who puts his hand to his mouth repeatedly. Maybe he tells him, then, that this white lady is stingy and never gives up any cash, because he finally leaves.

Next we pass the dirt embankment where the pigs hang out along with a group of people who, I think, tend to them. Last week at this place I saw two naked little boys playing with an unwound cassette tape, tying each other up. It was that day that I thought about an international adoption. If I can’t feed and clothe everyone here, maybe I can help just one child.

We catch a red light and outside the car on the ground is a flyer. It says, “Manifesto for Election: Study, Serve, Struggle.” There is a list of about twenty points underneath the header. It sounds so good and Marxist, I want to reach out and grab the flyer, but I think this would just be too much for Palminder to take. He already acts as though I’m the strangest thing he’s ever driven around. It didn’t help that his introduction to me was the last day I spent with Sonu, in which Sonu was asking him to take snaps of us as we posed together.

I resist my urge to grab the flyer, and we next drive past the Old Fort and the paddle boat pond in front of it as we do everyday. I wonder what ever compelled me to think it was a good idea to go paddle boating with my taxi driver. I feel like it was a different person who had that particular adventure. Still, I’m glad she did, crazy as it was.

Back at Ahuja, I wait for Alok to come and check out my Internet problem. There is no sign of him, so I finally call him up at about twenty minutes to eight o’clock. He tells me he came earlier in the day and my Internet is working. This is infuriating. I feel like replying with the title of Judge Judy’s book, Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining, but with all the public urination that happens in Delhi, I fear he might take this literally. Instead, I’m polite. I tell him that my Internet isn’t working now and it hasn’t been working for the past three days. He says maybe he’ll come tomorrow to look at it. Maybe? I press him and finally get him to commit. He will definitely come tomorrow to look at it.

By the time I get off the phone with Alok, it’s eight fourteen, one minute before I’m supposed to meet Mister Kundari at his house. I scramble down the stairs and up the block. Everyone says that Indians are late for everything, but Mister Kundari seems to be incredibly prompt. I arrived just five minutes late for his kitty party and drinks were already being served.

As I round the corner, I see him in his maroon turban, leaning on his car, talking on his mobile phone. “Come,” he says, and begins walking back the way I came. “I have a friends to have to have dinner at my house. We will go to my friend’s house who you met. Diljit. You can call him Mister Singh. I can only stay few minutes.” I’m being passed off for the evening.

Diljit is the Sikh man who lives right next door to me. In fact, it appears that his building is connected to the Ahuja Residency. We walk through a lush entryway. A pink and green lizard scampers up the white plaster wall. The inside floor is made of white marble with light grey veins running through it. The door is wide open. We enter and approach a sitting room with a closed door. Inside three women sit: one old and infirm, one middle aged, and one young. “Come,” says Mister Kundari as we pass through the dark wood carved doors.

The young woman is Mister Singh’s daughter-in-law. She asks if I’d like something to drink. “Beer? Whiskey?” I tell her beer would be nice.

The sick woman in pajamas, thin with thin grey hair, is Mister Singh’s wife. She takes dialysis up to four times a week. While I wait for my drink, a young girl comes in and gives her a shot.

The middle aged woman in the white kurta and salwar (baggy pants) introduces herself as Poonam. She is a neighbor and a good friend, she says. She lives in one thirty six or some such number, in D Block. “Isn’t it so important to have good friends?” she asks, with great sweeping gestures and a whimsical smile. “This is what life is about!”

Mister Kundari agrees. Good friends can make your life good; and bad friends can make your life bad.

Mister Singh’s daughter-in-law pops back in. The beer is warm. Is whiskey okay? Whiskey with soda?

Why not?

She fixes a drink for me, and one for Poonam. Won’t Mister Kundari have some? No. He’s got to be on his way and he has his limits. He doesn’t even want a drop.

Poonam speaks slowly and with joy. These people are the best people, she says of the Singhs. And they do such good things with their lives. She points to Mister Singhs’ quiet wife. This lady is so loving. Her touch is so nice. I was not going to stay. I was just going to stop for bit, but then you never know what life brings. Now I stay for dinner and talk with you. That’s how life is! She scoops the air again with her hands.

Before long, Mister Singh joins us and fixes himself a drink.

Mister Kundari invites me again to his temple to feed the hungry at five in the morning: “So you will come on Sunday? You will see what good people we are? You will bring camera. You will remember for rest of your life.”

I tell him I’ll see him on Sunday and he smiles. “Happy?” he asks. This is a habit of his.

“Yes, I’m very happy. Thank you,” I tell him. He must be going. He will see me on Sunday. And I should bring my friend to dinner at his place on Friday. I should let him know if I can by tomorrow. He says goodbye to Mister Singh and disappears down the marble hallway.

Mister Singh with his great white beard and eyebrows joins me on the couch. His house helpers begin to bring in snacks. There is salad: little slices of cucumber, carrot and radish. Then there are chips and cheese puffs in little bowls. Mrs. Singh happily munches away on these.

“You will see on Sunday that the Sikhs feed everybody. Hindu, Muslim, it doesn’t matter. Anybody who needs to eat can come. One thousand people we feed,” Mister Singh explains.

“What is religion?” Poonam adds, hands waving again. “I think religion is love. Isn’t it? Isn’t that what religion is? Whatever it is you love, how you love? You love your friends, your daughter, your sister. Whatever the relationship, it is still love.” Her face is beatific with the thought as she gazes upwards, lost in this thought.

Only in India can a girl be treated to such philosophy over salad and chips with relative strangers, I think.

Mister Singh fetches a photo album. There are pictures of the dedication party of the garden that he and Mister Kundari maintain across the street from his house. The high commissioner of this and the minister of that were present to give out awards and dedicate the park.

Next, there is an album full of photos from an eighteen day European tour that Mister Singh and his wife took several years ago. There are the Swiss Alps. There is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “We saw the Mona Lisa.” It is the first thing Mrs. Singh says all night.

Then there are two large, framed photos of Mister Singh’s family with Bill Clinton. These are displayed prominently in his sitting room, but he carries them over to me for closer inspection.

The girl who gave Mrs. Singh the shot brings out more snacks. There is a delicious whitefish with a mint sauce that Poonam makes sure I try. Then there is a crispy round bread called papadum, I think.

Then there are more pictures. Here is an album full of people who attended Mister Singh’s twenty fifth anniversary party. This person is dead now. And this one. And this one. “That is how life is,” my host says.

Next he brings out a book about the Golden Temple at Amritsar and tells me the story of Sikhism. The Sikhs are a marshal people. They rose up to fight against the tyranny of the Mughal Empire and, even though they were vastly outnumbered, drove them out of India. They rose up to fight because the Mughals wouldn’t let others practice their religions freely. They wanted to convert everyone to Islam. But the Sikhs took up arms and fought for their freedom. They created an army out of the downtrodden caste that no one else would allow to fight. Sikhs don’t believe in caste, Mister Singh explains. They believe that everybody is created equal.

He pages through the book and tells me that thousands of people volunteer to keep the Golden Temple at Armritsar clean. There’s not even a speck of dust in the place.

There is a picture of a man with a giant book atop a pillow. At the temple, each morning, they bring in the 300-year-old handwritten copy of the Guru Granth Sahib. This is the Sikh holy book, written in a common language, the language of the people. This is another way in which Sikhism differs from the Hinduism that it arose from. In Hinduism, the holy texts were traditionally in Sanskrit and relegated only to the Brahman caste, much like the Christian tradition of saying mass in Latin when no one understood it. He tells me a story about a man who came to do a ceremony and sang the completely wrong song but no one even knew.

Even Poonam is interested. “You are telling things that even I do not know. It is interesting for me. I am Hindu, you see,” she tells me. She tells Mister Singh he should take me to Amritsar when he goes. Mister Singh doesn’t seem too excited to be volunteered for this schlepping, but he is gracious all the same.

At about quarter to ten, dinner is served. We turn the lights off in the parlor and Mrs. Singh lays down in the cool darkness on the couch. Her dinner was the potato chips and cheese poofs, I guess. “Come,” Mister Singh says as we walk into the dining room. There is an okra subzi and a rice dish with peas. There is chicken and, of course, a dal (the bean or lentil dish that is served with every meal). He offers me chicken but I tell him I’m a vegetarian who occasionally eats fish. He immediately has more fish brought to the table.

Poonam decides she’d like some Indian pickles. Have I ever had them? Yes, I say, but don’t add that I’m not terribly fond of them. I notice, then, a buffet full of big jars of dead-looking dark things. It could have been the shelf in my junior high biology classroom where Mrs. Leistikow kept all the souvenirs of her dissections, but instead it was Mr. Singh’s store of Indian pickles. Poonam chooses a jar of onions and a jar of limes. She dishes me a lime pickle and three onion pickles. The onion pickles aren’t too bad. The lime, though, stops me in my tracks. I eat a small corner of the brown shriveled thing and can’t go any further. It stays on my plate and luckily no one makes an issue of it.

Just when I think we’re done eating, a young man brings out three dishes of homemade kulfi for us. Mister Singh tells me how it’s made. You keep boiling milk until it condenses, then you add dried fruits, then you freeze it. He shuffles off and comes back with the little cones that you use to make the distinctive shape of kulfi. Then he’s off again to get a whole file full of papers he’s accumulated organizing massive blood drives for disasters in India.

Poonam decides she’ll have another lime pickle. She fishes it out of the big jar and dunks it into her water glass, accidentally dropping it all the way in. It begins to make the water brown and cloudy as she jambs her fingers into the narrow drinking glass and fails to retrieve it.

Mister Singh is still trying to find his Red Cross file to show me about his blood donation work, but I ask Poonam if she needs a spoon or something.

“No. It will come. Where there is will, there is way,” she says like this is a revelation, and finally gets hold of the saturated, brown lime, pulling it out, dripping.

Mister Singh is back with his file. He’s got lists of donor’s names and piles of thank you’s dating all the way back to 1994.

Poonam is barely done with her sopping brown lime when she places both palms on the table. “May I be excused?” she says, as she rises to leave. I forget that it’s proper form to run away immediately after eating.

But Mister Singh tells me to stay a bit. I should see an Indian household. I should see how he lives. He takes me upstairs and shows me the room where his granddaughters grew up. He shows me the spacious and well appointed second story living room that belongs to his son and daughter-in-law. He takes off his slippers and opens the door to a small roomful of pictures of the Golden Temple. On the floor there are two decorative daggers and a small temple-shaped structure. This is the family’s meditation room. The second floor also has a small kitchen, “for making tea and coffee and snacks,” but the main kitchen is downstairs and is shared by all the families living in the household.

Mister Singh wants to know if I’d like to stay and sit for a while, but it’s nearly eleven o’clock by the time we finish our tour of his home. I thank him for the lovely evening, and he walks me out past his garden. I'll see him on Sunday when we go to his gurdwara, his temple, to feed the hungry.

I get home just in time to catch Scott on Skype at his lunchtime and tell him about the lime pickle and the cloudy lime pickle water. It’s the most comic moment of the evening and worth a little narration.

God In My Pancake

Tuesday

Tuesday is a pretty standard day at work, except for the fact that while I am working, I also upload a few photos to Photobucket. So to see just a fraction of the pictures I’ve taken while I’ve been here, you can go to: http://s458.photobucket.com/albums/qq302/vkrajewski/

On the way home from work, Palminder pounds into an auto-rickshaw that stops short in front of us. No one stops or gets out to exchange information, but a few miles later, he pulls over to assess the damage. I think of Susie’s admonition over the weekend: if you’re ever in an accident, get out of there as soon as possible. These events can rapidly escalate into violence. I’m glad Palminder didn’t stop on the scene or make a big deal out of it.

He gets back into the car with a grimace. I ask, “Tikka? Is it okay?” He shakes his head back and forth. It is not okay. There is damage. I hope I don’t loose another driver over the matter, but if I do, I hope the new one speaks more English than Palminder. On second thought, maybe a driver who doesn't speak much English is just fine. The relationship is much less complicated that way.

After work, I walk to the tailor. I had to take the twelve dollar silk skirt I bought on Saturday to him after I wore it on Sunday and noticed it completely unraveling. I’d be walking and there’d be a pile of threads wound around my sandals. There was no hem in the bottom layer of it. It was just cut fabric, and it was totally fraying after just one day’s wear and tear. I also noticed a red stain on it like Kool Aid had been dripped on it. I guess even at the government emporiums you need to be very careful about what you buy. Paying more for something is no guaranty of its quality here.

The tailor’s booth is lit up against the gathering darkness, but he is nowhere in sight. I am just getting ready to leave when he appears from behind the back wall.

“Namaste,” I tell him.

“Namaste,” he replies.

I pull out my wallet and he stops me. “Small,” he says, and points to a hem he’s put in the side of the skirt. “Problem,” he says. “Problem. Which is up? Which is up? You no understand? Which is up?”

It takes a second, but finally dawns on me what he is asking. The skirt is a reversible skirt. He doesn’t know which side to put the hem in, so he hasn’t sewn it yet. I show him which side I’d like the hem in, holding the skirt to me to show him how I plan to wear it.

“Tikka. Tomorrow. Sorry,” he says.

“Tikka, acha,” I say. “It’s okay. No problem,” I tell him. He folds his hands at his chin and bows his head to me. I do the same. I’ll see him tomorrow.

I walk to the market. I’m not that hungry, but I think I’ll eat at Sagar’s anyway. I order a paper masala dosa. It arrives in front of me, a rolled pancake, thin as paper and crispy, and about two feet long. It is an exceptionally odd looking dish. Stranger, even, than my UFO bread. I take a picture of it. The waiter squints my way. Who is this woman who keeps taking pictures of our food? They must wonder.

The paper dosa is not only exceptionally strange; it is exceptionally good. The crispy, light crepe-type dough is the perfect way to enjoy the coconut dipping sauce and zesty sambar stew they provide in unlimited quantities. I am slightly ashamed and slightly amazed when I eat the whole two feet of the thing, leaving nary a crumb behind, but this is the way it always is at Sagar. I think, I’ll just eat a little bit of this thing. I’m not that hungry. Then the food arrives and it’s no morsel left behind.

There is a family sitting at the table in front of me. Their teenage son wears a t-shirt that has a swirling design and the word “STUDFARM” sewn onto it in all capital letters. I wonder if he knows what a stud farm is. I wonder what other t-shirts he owns.

Back at the Ahuja Residency, I again have trouble trying to talk to anyone on Skype. I call Alok, who is in charge of the hotel’s IT. I tell him “Hello, it’s Vicki from the Ahuja Residency.” He says, “I know.” He recognizes my voice on the phone. He asks me how long I’ve been having this trouble. Three days, maybe, I tell him. He wants to know why I didn’t call him earlier. I thought it might have been a passing issue. I thought it was just a lull in the network and it would repair itself, but it hasn’t. I need his help again. He tells me he can come over tomorrow and take a look at it. For tonight, though, I’ll need to talk to Scott the old fashioned way: on the phone.

After our call, I read a little Vivekananda. He is talking, of all things, about the suffering of humankind, referred to in Hinduism as maya. He says that to change the object (the world around us), we have to change the subject (ourselves). To prove this, he explains that the things that bothered him as a child no longer bother him as an adult. He used to cry when he was hungry, for instance. Now he no longer weeps. This is because he has changed.

Further, he says that we will understand and overcome suffering when we recognize that God is in everything. The flooding in Bihar, the violence in Kashmir, the lovely lizard who has come calling on me this week, my giant, wonderful crepe: God is in all these things. This knowledge, he says, changes our outlook on life. This is the knowledge we need to change ourselves.

It strikes me that this is the exact same thing that Julianne was trying to explain about how God has changed her life when we were talking about suffering on Sunday—only this time it kind of makes sense to me.

And this is exactly why I’m interested in looking at religion from different angles. I have come to understand the same thing by a different path, one that is less ruined by personal associations with bad American politics, by far right-wingers who use religion to forward their personal agendas and who, by so doing, create resistance and walls that I can’t get over. These people who use religion to beat people, to judge people and to get power just make me angry and send me packing. They muck it all up for me.

It’s possible that here in India, there are the same kinds of twistings and controversies, but not in the books I am reading on the subject, not in the basic facts of the religion. And that’s all I’m looking for: the basic ways of thinking about God and the self that are at the root of religious thought here. Vivekananda is a great introduction for this. I am happy to have had this book loaned to me; I would never have happened upon it myself.

I read a little bit longer than I should and go to sleep a little bit later than I should if I want to wake up at six thirty to start heating my hot water. But when I finally go to bed, I am relaxed and fall asleep quickly, knowing that God, if he exists, is surely with me and my pet lizard who I’ve just spied outside my balcony door.

Ood Ight

Monday

I walk down to the breakfast table and George is there. “There’s an American invasion today,” he says. There’s a woman at the table from Florida. She’s so friendly. She chatters the whole time. She’s been here strictly on pleasure. She was up north doing a lot of hiking.

At work, Amar tells me he’s just read my blog. Only 44 days left, huh? I must go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. I must. It’s dirty. Very dirty, he tells me. “Dirtier than Delhi?” I ask. Yes, he says. This is hard for me to imagine. It’s a bit of a fright, actually.

Amar continues talking up the place. I shouldn’t go alone. There are a lot of touts who’ll try to separate you from your money. If you acknowledge them, you’ll never get rid of them. You have to ignore them. Oh, and the roads are bad. Very bad. So when am I going?

Hrm. I can’t wait.

There are other places I should see in Agra as well. There is the Agra Fort, another Mughul red sandstone masterpiece. Then there is the tomb of Itmad-ud-daulah. This tomb was actually designed by the wife of Emperor Jahangir while he was busy being strung out on opium and blitzed out on alcohol. His wife, Nur Jahan, actually wielded a lot of power and basically ran the empire for her chemically-altered other half. Since she was Persian, the style of the tomb is different, Amar says. It’s actually more intricate, even, than the Taj Mahal, though not larger or more magnificent.

At three thirty, I step out for my follow up appointment. The eye doctor wanted to see me again today. This time when I get to the front desk to check in, I wait a long time in line and, just when it is about to be my turn, a woman steps right in front of me and proceeds to get her business taken care of. It is a long and involved matter, none of which I understand. Another man walks up. He also looks like he’s going to step right in front of me. I have to get right up on the woman at the counter to prevent him from stepping in.

The woman at the next desk finally calls me over. I tell her I have a four o’clock appointment with Doctor Rajesh Gupta. She tells me he’s not here yet. I’ll have to sit down and wait for another ten or fifteen minutes, then she’ll prepare my bill. This means I have to also wait in this intake line all over again. I am not pleased. I’m also not pleased to spend a lot of time in the crowded lobby with sick people after just getting over my bubonic flu, but what can I do? I sit and watch the clock. I watch a small, thin boy with a plaster cast wait while his father with henna in his hair transacts business at the intake desk. The boy’s sling is a thin, dirty piece of cotton cloth tied in a knot. He holds a green plastic bag that says “Jain Bookstore” on it. There is a big Jain bookstore in Connaught Place. I wonder if this is something like the Catholic school system: religious-sponsored education.

Twenty minutes later, the woman calls me back to the front desk. She takes my two hundred rupees and sends me upstairs where I wait again. Two men are installing a wooden door in the waiting room. The door is only half stained, there is no glass in the opening, and there are nails sticking out of it. I think of the story Jonaki told me about the roads being built with substandard building materials. That’s why they’re falling apart so quickly. I think this problem is endemic. I am watching these men install a new door and it already looks old and dilapidated.

An Indian soap opera plays quietly on the television. There is dramatic music, then a close up of a woman with a glittering bindi and nose ring under a bright pink veil.

The men pound a hinge into the wall, then remove it because the door is crooked and won’t close. It strikes me that this is my method of assembling things: trial and error. I never hang a picture without putting at least three holes in the wall. I would think that professional craftspeople, though, in whatever country, would have a better system than I do. These men, however, do not.

I wait and wait and wonder if the doctor is exacting a karmic punishment on me for busting in on him so rudely last time when I came back thinking the medicine he prescribed me would give me eye blisters.

When I finally get called into the office a half an hour late, he gives no indication of being hurried or running late. He simply asks how my eyes are. They’re better, I tell him. What percent better, he wants to know. Eighty percent, I estimate.

He peeps into my eyes through his little apparatus, asking me to look to the right, then left, then up and down. He lifts my lids, then leans back. There is no sign of infection, which means it must be an allergy. I should keep wearing my glasses for the next five weeks or so.

“Five weeks!” I exclaim. “I never wear my glasses.”

He seems a bit taken aback. “I am sorry I have to tell you this news, but your eyes will probably get irritated if you wear your lenses again.”

I think I’m willing to risk itchy eyes, but I don’t argue with the guy.

He draws an elaborate scheme out to show me how many eye drops I should take for the next four weeks. Instead of writing out “week one: four drops a day,” he makes a little picture: a loopy line with four drops coming off of it.

It’s cute and all, I just don’t think I can keep wearing my glasses for that long, especially if there’s no infection and my eyes truly are eighty percent better already. Five weeks is the rest of my time in India. I refuse to be Ugly Betty’s red-haired bespectacled cousin for the rest of my trip.

I thank him for his time and get the prescription refilled just in case my eyes actually do bother and I need it. At the chemist’s downstairs, there is a poster that I hadn’t noticed before. It reads, “Help us fight the menace of spurious drugs. Insist on a bill.” I’m not sure what this means. I wonder if I’ve had any spurious drugs. I wonder if half the people here know what spurious means. It seems a complicated word for people whose second language is English. Why not say “fake” drugs, or “bad” drugs? Finally, how does insisting on a bill fight this menace? I am confused on many counts.

Back at the office I almost finish editing my chapter on marketing. It is such a welcome change to edit something readily understandable, unlike the morass of text on international financial management. This is almost too easy by comparison. I feel like I’m cheating.

On the way home, we pass the collection of painted Ganesh statues that has appeared in front of the crumbling brick village. One day there were hundreds of white statues, some six feet tall. Then the next day, some of them were painted fantastic pinks and reds and blues. Then more of them were painted. Now they’re all painted and people walk up and back browsing, shopping for Ganesh statues.

I decide to walk to the market for dinner. As I’m walking past Mister Kundari’s house, he pulls up in his car. I tell him hello. He shakes my hand and smiles largely. He heard I was sick. Am I better? Yes. Can I still come to his temple some Sunday, I’d like to know. Of course. And I should come over the day after tomorrow at eight thirty—no, eight fifteen.

At the market, I decide to try a different restaurant. I go to Moets, which everyone raves about. Amar and Tehseen came here the other night. Shabnum’s fiancée said I should try it sometime.

Moets is actually four different restaurants with different cuisines. There’s an Italian place, a seafood place, a continental place and a Muglai/Kashmiri place. I choose Curry Leaf: the Kashmiri place. The inside is decidedly posh with large fabric lanterns and crushed red velvet booths for seating. I order something I can’t pronounce and have to point to on the menu. It’s described as being made of red pepper and other ground vegetables. When it comes, it looks like four large cigars, garnished with onion and beet. The flavor and texture are okay, but it is decidedly dry. I only eat two cigars worth and have the rest packaged to go. Since I still have room, I ask for sweets (that’s what they call desserts here). The waiter recommends kulfi. “Indian ice cream,” he tells me.

He brings the ice cream and a bowl of rice noodles beside it. He tells me I can mix these in and eat it together if I like it.

I like it.

The kulfi tastes like sweet flowers and is full of coconut. It’s melty and milky and delicious. This dish I finish completely. It makes up for my strange cigar food.

Back at the Ahuja Residency, my Internet is on the fritz again. I can only hear every third word that my husband says, and our calls keep dropping. It’s frustrating to be unable to talk to him.

We say goodnight, or, should I say, “ood… ight,” and I walk into the other room to turn off the light.

There, by the door, I notice I have a visitor: a tiny pink and green lizard has dropped by this evening to say hello. I spend a good deal of time staring at him in his complete stillness. He even lets me take a flash photo of him without moving a muscle. I figure he’s going to camp out for a while, but when I leave the room and come back, I find he’s vanished completely. It was a brief visit, but a lovely one. I hope he comes back sometime soon, but not as much as I hope the Internet comes back.

The Spirit Is Willing But the Flesh Wants Another Head Massage

Sunday

I had some vague intentions to awaken at five in the morning and accompany Mister Kundari to his temple to feed the hungry. However, I hadn’t been able to run into him during the week to ask if I could come with him and, anyway, it’s so much easier to sleep in than get up at that hour.

Julianne knocks on my door at 9:15 and we walk down to her roommate’s banana yellow car to go to church.

At church, a woman from the Emanuel Hospital Organization gives a slideshow about the flooding in Bihar. Four million people have lost their homes due to the recent flooding of the Kosi River. Four million people.

I think she’s going to ask us for money, but she just asks us to pray.

They do a reading from the book of Habakkuk, one I’ve never even heard of before, in which the prophet Habakkuk gets pissed off at God for letting bad things happen. “Why do you tolerate wrong?” Habakkuk wants to know why injustices and violence and strife are so prevalent in the world. God answers him by saying something to the effect of, “If you think that’s bad, just wait and see what I do with the Babylonians.”

Habakkuk complains again and God basically explains the concept of wrath to him. Bad things happen because people are being punished.

I think of the four million homeless people in Bihar and basically stop listening to the sermon being offered to us today by Prakash George, who tends to talk endlessly in circles. The people in Bihar are no better or worse than me. Why are they suffering a calamity when I’m not? Why does it seem that Indian people suffer much more than their fair share of calamities? I think of all the limbless beggars and children in poverty I see on the streets everyday. It’s not because they deserve it. I’m with Habakkuk. What the heck, God?

I can’t believe that bad things happen because God is meting out justice. If this is the case, God has a really warped sense of justice--because bad things happen to good people all the time and vice versa. This is the kind of quackery that makes kooky people say that God sent Katrina to New Orleans because there was a gay pride parade there. Nevermind that the 1500 people who died in the disaster that followed were the poorest, most helpless among the population—not the gayest. Does God just have bad aim? He’s shooting for one thing but hits another?

When the sermon finally ends, Julianne wants to know about my searching. She’s been reading my blog and it looks to her like I’m lost. I can’t talk about anything but the frustration I feel with the day’s sermon. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair what happens to people with alarming frequency in India and the world, really. We are subject to disaster, war, disease. Julianne tries to console me by saying that God can change your life even in the midst of tragedy. She’s concerned about me. It seems like I’m looking for something in places other than the Bible and the Christian church. The truth is, I am. I want to know what I can learn from other religions. I want to see how they explain things like suffering and see what I can take from it. I’m not out worshipping other Gods or converting to Hinduism, but I do think there is a benefit in getting inside other people’s worldview at least a little. And what better time and place to do such a thing?

For lunch, we go to a restaurant called The Big Chill. I was hoping it would be colder inside than it is, but the name is not due to the temperature. The name is an allusion to the movie of the same name. The interior is covered in American movie posters. We sit by The Birds and are handed menus the size of small posters. There are over five hundred different dishes to choose from: most of them pasta, though they also have pizza and Panini and actual salads. In India, a salad is a pile of raw onion and maybe some cucumber. I get a “salad” with my lunch everyday, but I rarely eat it. This menu has Caesar salad on it. I order one, along with a cheese and tomato Panini that says it comes with basil. On Julianne’s advice, I also get a milkshake. A real milkshake is also a rarity here. Most times you order and get milk with a flavored syrup in it.

I think the menu is supposed to be American food even though it is almost strictly Italian. There are no French fries, no burgers, but no worries either. As a vegetarian, I don’t miss burgers one bit. I could use some French fries with my Panini, though. Or potato chips. The salad will have to suffice.

Two girls have joined us for lunch today. They’re college seniors, roommates, here together for a semester. This is their last day in Delhi before they ship off to Bihar to help with the flooding. I ask what they’ll do and they’re not sure. They think they’ll be teaching. They say they need to get a lot of stuff done today: everything they won’t be able to do in Bihar, like email. I can’t imagine being that cut off for an entire semester. Susie asks them what their families think of their adventure and they grimace. They don’t understand really.

I ask them what they did while they were in Delhi. I expect to hear about sightseeing, but I am wrong. “We visited this guy in the hospital. He got in a bad accident and was in critical condition. And we clothes shopped. You have to wear Indian clothing in Bihar. It’s not like Delhi. You need the dupata and everything.” At least they saw the Taj Mahal while they were here.

Lunch turns out to be expensive. It’s ten bucks for my salad and sandwich and milkshake. But it’s worth it.

Afterwards, we walk out front and catch auto-rickshaws to Malviya Nagar. We’re going to Style N X’s, the salon by Susie’s place, to get pedicures and eyebrow threading. Susie is excited to be able to participate this time. Last time we came, she couldn’t get a pedicure because she’d just lost a chunk of her toe at Qut’b Minar. Today she’s got blisters from walking home from a church function the night before, but she’s going to brave it anyway.

These guys aren’t gentle. They lean into my feet and rub hard on the calluses. Susie winces when they get to her blister.

“Are you going to miss these once you get back to the States?” she asks. Yes. It’s not like I can’t get a decent pedicure in the United States, but I certainly can’t get one for FOUR DOLLARS.

The guys finish up our feet and a woman motions to Susie to come to a chair for her eyebrow threading. There are no fancy chairs here, so Susie has to lean way back in the black plastic number, pretending like it’s reclining. A second woman helps hold the skin around her eyes taught, and the first woman expertly catches the hairs between the long thread she’s holding up to Susie’s eyebrows. She pauses so Susie can see the first eyebrow. Is it okay? Tikka? Susie wobbles her head: the Indian sign for “yes.” I wonder if she does this consciously or if it’s become an involuntary gesture for her after being here for over a year. I wonder if my head will be wobbly before I leave. I know I’ve picked up a strange habit of saying “yeah” a lot already. I say it now at the end of statements like, “So the pedicure is two hundred rupees, yeah?” Or when I agree with someone, I say “Yeah yeah.” I’m trying to figure out where this came from and I can’t quite place it. I have to have heard someone else doing this and had it seep into my brain.

I get my eyebrows threaded when Susie is done, not because I have bushy eyebrows. In fact, they are practically invisible because they’re so blonde. I’m just curious as to what it feels like and how it works.

It hurts much less than plucking. It feels like the thread is just getting rolled along my skin. It’s quick and painless. The only awkward thing is the chair, in which I have to slouch all the way down and lean my head back at such a strange angle that I get a crick in my neck and a head rush when I stand up.

We finish up and the proprietor recommends a dermatologist to Susie. He noticed during her pedicure that she has eczema on her legs. He has eczema too, but this clinic cured him of it. Susie’s had it since childhood, so a cure would be something miraculous. I’m curious to see if they have a magic potion that will work for her. I know the condition can be rather intractable, but maybe there’s some Indian specialty that will do the trick.

When we’re finished, Susie says she’s going to another salon to get a haircut. It’s cheaper than Style N X’s. Once again, Susie is braver than I am. After my Verma’s experience, I wouldn’t let anyone in India touch my hair, let alone someone in a “cheap” place. I tell her I’ll go with her so she doesn’t have to go alone. She may need the moral support.

As we walk to the second salon, she tells me, “You should get a hot oil head massage so you’re not just sitting there.”

I should?

“Okay,” I say, wondering exactly what a hot oil head massage is like. We descend into a basement where a man is sitting behind a desk. Susie tells them she needs a haircut and I need a head massage. She sits in front of a mirror and describes to the woman in the smock what she wants: layers, steps, but long. My God, I think, this could go so badly.

A woman who looks closer to Chinese than Indian wraps a towel around my shoulders and comes back with a little orange bowl of warm oil, which she begins to slather onto my scalp. She rubs in little circular motions until my whole head is warm and oily. This is going to feel gross on the way home, I think. Maybe I can pay them for a shampoo when I’m done.

The woman rubs my head up and down and back and forth. She massages firmly behind my ears. She massages my neck and shoulders. But mostly she massages my scalp. I think it is the most relaxing thing I’ve ever done: more hypnotizing and relaxing than even a full body Swedish massage, with none of the guilt for paying a lot of money for it. I have to struggle to stay awake. I think, “No wonder dogs love me so much. I do this for them all the time, minus the hot oil of course, but still.” Who knew getting patted on the head could be so amazing? I think I could do this every day.

About a half an hour later, the woman wraps a hot towel tightly on my head. She’ll leave the oil on there for a bit so it can condition my hair, then we’ll rinse it out and shampoo my head. Thankfully.

Again, the chair doesn’t recline and it hurts a bit to sit at such an odd angle to get my hair shampooed, but if this is the price of the hot oil head massage, I am willing to pay it. I am so relaxed, the whole place could cave in around me and I’d just be sitting there, contented, breathing deeply.

Susie and I finish up at about the same time. Her haircut is actually adorable. It’s not what she asked for, but it looks cute all the same. They ring up her haircut and my massage together. For both, the cost is ten dollars.

She asks if I’d like to come hang out for a while, but it’s already after five o’clock and I’m behind on my blogging. She walks me back to the road where I can catch an auto and helps me get one for fifty rupees. I hope we can have another salon day before I leave. I’ve spent practically the whole day being pampered and it cost me less than ten dollars total.

Sure, I didn’t wake up at five in the morning to feed the hungry. Sure, I didn’t do any reading in my Vivekananda book, but I thought about it.

The spirit was willing but the flesh had an all day salon appointment, and what an appointment it was.

Back at home, I even blow off my blogging. I am just too relaxed to bother. Besides, there’s still more time to be deep before I leave.

A Classic

Saturday

I wake up on Julianne’s couch at eight o’clock. Julianne wakes up at eight thirty, gets dressed and walks down to the road with me to help corral an auto-rickshaw. I could call my driver, but I only get him for eight hours on Saturday and I’m planning on being out late tonight with the people from work.

It’s always an adventure taking an auto. They never know where C-83 Defence Colony is, so they typically have to pull over and keep asking guards outside different buildings until they actually get the right directions from someone.

This time, as we near the guest house, I recognize the drain. It’s a big ditch with walls on both sides that runs the length of the road that leads to C-83 if you come in the back way. I’m able to direct my auto wallah down the block past the misleading address signs to the place we need to turn to find the Ahuja Residency. He seems to disbelieve me. I doubt myself as well at first, but tell him, “Straight. Ceda.” He eventually listens to me and drives all the way to the end of the street before turning left. We arrive with no problem. I even have thirty rupees change to pay him.

I confess to hoping that someone at the guest house would have cared that I didn’t come home last night, so when no one bats an eyelash as I walk in, I get a little alarmed. I feel a little alone. If I had disappeared, if I had been kidnapped, no one would be looking for me. It’s a frightening feeling.

Back at home, I have plenty of time to set up my computer and eat breakfast before my Skype appointment with Scott. I find Marie out on the veranda. She asks me to join her and even pours me a drink from her teapot. “I hate waiting for tea in the morning,” she says.

She tells me about an old, restored fort that you can stay in. It’s half way between here and Jaipur. It was purchased and renovated by a Frenchman who came here with his wife and family, then fell in love with India, then fell in love with an Indian boy, then sent his family back to France without him. The fort is no luxury experience, she tells me. There are no phones and no tv, and some of the bathrooms are still outdoors, but it is amazingly decorated with local handicrafts. I think I’ve had enough of the unplugged experience, but I act interested anyway. She seems so excited about the place.

She likes the kurta I have on today. Where did I get it?

Lajput, I tell her. She widens her eyes. That place. She can’t find anything there. It’s too much. Even though she’s lived here, she says, she can’t find her way around Lajput. It makes me wonder what some of the other markets I haven’t been to yet are like. Are they better? Lajput is certainly a zoo.

I tell her I had a friend show me where to shop when I went there. I didn’t tell her my friend has only been here for six months and seemed to know the place inside and out. This amazing fact I keep to myself. Go Julianne!

Marie with her smile and her diamond stud nose ring and her Indian husband says I’m lucky to be here at this time of year. The weather is only going to get better. I’ll be able to eat breakfast on the veranda and sit out evenings on the balcony. I’ll be sad to leave, she says. I think she is projecting. “I have to go back to cold London,” she says. She takes off after dinner at 2 a.m.

I’ll be waiting for the weather to improve. The last forecast I saw predicted highs near 100 for the next seven days.

Upstairs, I finish Friday’s blog entry and complete a paint-by-numbers puzzle that Scott created and sent to me. He also sent me a little portable watercolor set as something to occupy my time in moments just like this.

When I’m done with the puzzle, I walk to the market. I’m not so much hungry as bored. I go to Sagar and order an uttapam and eat the whole thing. When I’m done, I decide to try out the Baskin Robbins. I just want a single serving of ice cream, but the woman sells me a 190 rupee container of Jamocha Almond Fudge. That’s four dollars worth of ice cream. It feels exorbitant, especially since my whole lunch just cost less than that.

She packs the ice cream into the little plastic container and covers it with tinfoil. On my way out of the market, I see Palminder standing around in his grey shirt and grey pants in front of Colonel Kabab’s. I’m a little overly excited to see someone I know in the market.

“Palminder!” I exclaim. He looks slightly embarrassed. I tell him hello and I think I’ll be needing him around four o’clock.

I walk home with my ice cream, resisting my urge to stop and pet the dogs who wag their tails at me.

As I walk up the stairs, Mira stops me. She is speaking English but I only understand when she says, “Jonaki.” Jonaki must have called while I was out. I call her back and she says I can meet her at four o’clock at the British Consulate Library. We can meet Shabnum for shopping after that.

I call Palminder and ask him to pick me up at three thirty. He obliges. We have a hard time finding the British Consulate building. He has to stop and ask directions three times. At one point, Jonaki calls his cell phone to see if she can help him find the place. We finally pull up to a large grey building with black stripes snaking up the façade. There are guard posts outside. Jonaki stands in front of them.

She laughs about calling Palminder. “I think he is like my reluctant cousin,” she says. She has had many communications with the poor man between our adventurous trip to the Himalayas, our outing to the reading last week, and now today.

We make our way through the security check, getting searched with a wand and putting our bags through an x-ray machine.

The library is up a flight of stairs. It is one half of one floor of this large building. We browse for a bit, then Jonaki decides to check if they have any Calvino, the author that the theatre group is reading next. They don’t. I wish I could loan her my books. “I’m going to send you some Calvino when I get home,” I tell her. I take it for granted that I can get any book that occurs to me that I want. If there’s an author I want to read, I can do it. But not here. The books in this library are mostly British, and understandably so. It is the British Consulate Library. Even then, it’s a collection of limited size that you have to pay to access. Even then, the number of books you can check out is restricted. No dragging out laundry baskets full, like I am apt to do when I’m really researching something. If you have the more expensive family membership, you can check out eight books at a time. A single membership has a lower limit.

Jonaki chooses about seven books, and we walk outside where she calls Palminder to come pick us up and drive us to Connaught Place, or CP, where Shabnum is waiting for us.

We walk through the searing heat to the government emporiums off the main circle. I find a number of beautiful clothes in the first store we visit: a reversible, flowered silk skirt and an elaborate mirrored outfit called a lehenga and choli. I’m not sure when I’ll get to wear the lehenga and choli, but I am so bewitched by it, that I’ll just have to find an occasion. These purchases are expensive by Indian standards. The emporia we’re shopping at have higher prices than the daily markets. Marie told me that often what happens is traders shop in markets like Lajput, then mark up what they find and sell it for much higher prices in the boutiques. I wonder if any of this stuff came from Lajput. I think it’s probably different when you’re shopping at a government emporium. These goods are supposed to come from the different regions of India that the emporia represent.

The silk skirt I buy is 650 rupees (around thirteen dollars), and the lehenga and choli is 1700 rupees with ten percent off, so I wind up paying around twenty five dollars for it. I think it’s the most expensive thing I’ve purchased while I’ve been here—more expensive than my bus tickets and my doctors visits by far.

The next store we visit is a Rajasthani emporium. There are statues and tables and chairs and vases and seat cushions and rugs and blankets. There is fabric and clothes and jewelry, all of which looks like it could be in a museum. I’m sad that I had to leave my camera at home so I can’t take good pictures of all the things I can’t buy. I take a few snaps with my cell phone, Sonu style, but I’ll have trouble getting these low resolution photos onto my computer. I don’t have the cable to do it with.

While we’re shoe shopping, all the lights go out and the air turns off. The experience gets uncomfortably hot in a matter of minutes and I have an urgent need for water. Thankfully, there is a vendor just outside.

We call Palminder again and he drives us around to a restaurant that is done up to look like a tube station in London. This is where we’re meeting up with Shabnum’s fiancée. The four of us walk to a Chinese restaurant called Flavours. In the meantime, Jonaki’s received a slew of calls from Amar and Tehseen. They are debating whether or not they will go to Haze tonight to hear blues music. Amar likes the place. Tehseen thinks it’s a little boring and quiet. Finally a plan is hatched. We’ll all meet there around nine o’clock.

I mention at dinner that I watched Main Hoon Na. “Oh, with the bicycle rickshaw chase?” everyone laughs and wants to know. Yes. That’s the one. It’s apparently infamous, the most Bollywood of Bollywood movies. I’m glad I’ve seen it. Now I can definitely say I’ve seen a Bollywood movie.

We find Palminder again and Jonaki tells him in Hindi where we need to go to find the bar where we’re meeting Amar and Tehseen. I’m glad she can describe it, because I certainly can’t. It feels like we take forever to get there; we just keep driving and driving. “This is where all the embassies are,” Jonaki tells me as we drive down a wide, dark highway. She recalls driving down this street on the back of a photographer’s motorcycle when she was on assignment for the Times of India.

We finally come to the market that the bar is in. Palminder looks exasperated. How long are we going to be? He wants to know. Jonaki tells him we’ll be inside until 10:30 or 11:00 at least. I think my eight hours with him ends at 11:30, so I can’t be much later than 11:00.

We wander into the market and ask a few restaurant attendants where Haze is. One points us in the wrong direction. The second guy points straight up. Haze is on the second floor, but there doesn’t appear to be a staircase leading to it. “How do we get there?” Jonaki asks me. I point to a ladder comically propped up seemingly just so I can make this joke. We ask a few more people. We have to walk around the back of the building.

Thankfully the alley we need to traverse is short. We’re still a little uncomfortable standing outside the bar, two women by themselves, in the dark. We don’t wait long, though. Amar and Tehseen appear and lead us inside, where Tehseen has reserved the best seats in the house: right in front of the band.

Inside there are several Jimi Hendrix posters, as well as posters from 1940s American movies, such as Gilda starring Rita Hayworth. It’s a strange combination to say the least. Three guys are warming up on the drums, a bass and a lead electric guitar. They sound groovy.

Tehseen introduces us to an Indian woman wearing a wide headband and a white tank top with light blue rolled up jeans and camel colored boots. She sits with us as we order drinks. I want a Bacardi Breezer, but they’re out, so I settle for a rum and Coke. The coke is flat and tastes different because they sweeten it with sugar rather than corn syrup. Everyone else has Kingfisher beers.

The guys finish warming up and the woman sitting with us gets up and takes the stage. She gets out a large acoustic guitar and sits on a stool. “This is a song called ‘Imagine,’ by John Lennon,” she announces, then starts playing a series of chords that I don’t recognize. I think, “Maybe it will sound better if I don’t try to think of it as the song called ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. Kind of like that pizza that we got up in Manali that tasted better with the spicy oil on it but no longer resembled pizza at all.” This doesn’t work.

She finishes with “Imagine,” then says, “Here is a Cyndi Lauper classic.” She plays some chords and sings “Time After Time,” getting most of the words right. She flips through her folder full of chord progressions. I think she must be getting them from a bum website or something. She belts out the classic “Proud Mary,” and the part about pumping a lot of gas down in New Orleans brings into relief how foreign this music is. It’s like when I found that freezer burned container of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in the market for fifteen dollars.

She sings the Jim Croce classic, “Cats In the Cradle” in the style of Alanis Morissette, even growling at one point. Then she says, “Now I’d like to do something a little different.” Everything she’s done already has been a little different. I am curious to see what’s next, and just how different it is. She sings an Alanis Morissette song. She’s got one hand in her pocket and the other one is giving a peace sign. No one can fault her for going half out. Every word of every song is a conviction; a loud, screaming conviction.

It’s getting uncomfortably hot in the bar as the crowd grows. It’s smoky and my eyes sting. The songstress leading the festivities sings “Everybody Hurts,” and it’s so true. I wonder how much longer she will go on. I wonder what happened to the guys with the electric guitars.

She finishes her set and bounces over to take her seat next to us. “It’s so smoky in here,” she says. “I had to keep drinking water. It’s bad for my voice!”

The guys take the stage. They play like they are weaving a collective spell. It’s slightly Jimi Hendrix-inspired, but also a style of their own making. I don’t recognize the tunes, but they sound good. The lead guitarist’s fingers slide up and down the frets and he leans back and lets the notes waver. The music is easy to listen to; I forget about the smoke and the heat completely.

It seems like just a few minutes later when Jonaki tells me it’s eleven o’clock. I have to go. My car is going to turn into a pumpkin. I’m going to leave a slipper behind as I run for my ride.

Amar and Jonaki walk me back to where Palminder parked. Jonaki calls him one more time. We’re ready. Can he pull the car around?

He does. Amar offers to drop me off. I can send the car away and they’ll drive me home when they leave. But I really should be going anyway. I’ve still got that cough and my infected eyes, and the bar probably isn’t doing these waning maladies any favors.

Jonaki gets her library books from my back seat. She’ll stay at Amar’s tonight instead of going back to east Delhi by herself.

Even though it’s over a bit too soon, it’s been a great night. A classic, to be sure.