WRAPPING UP

15 december 2006

i realize i should have told you more about some of the other historically and/or culturally significant things we’ve seen in the last couple of months...like the British Residency, the site of many tales of death and mayhem where major battles of the 1857 mutiny occurred and where there are now picturesquely semi-ruined buildings, a museum, lovely grounds to wander around in, a Sufi shrine with adjacent mosque where people seem to do namaz in a rather puja-like fashion [wall-niches painted green with incense sticks still smoking ghostlike fragrance after someone’s gone] and they’re always friendly to strange ferenghi peering in...

and Deva Sharif, yet another Sufi shrine northeast of Lucknow. actually i can think of at least 4 little shrines within the course of my daily travels where some Sufi met his or her maker. in fact it seems like in these parts the entire soil must be seeded with the bones of Sufis memorialized where they fell. that’s got to be good for us, right? actually there was another urs in the cemetery just around the corner in our own neighborhood, this one rather small and modest and i’d heard more accomplished qawwals, but just as passionate and welcoming when we payed it a visit late one full moon night. Deva Sharif though is quite big and famous, with a school attached. when we arrived the bigwigs ushered us into a reception room, gave us tea and sweets, answered questions about the place and its saint, and draped us in vari-colored rose-scented chadors [mine is very tasteful, green textured with gold starry spangles and silver tinsel fringe]. however due to stupid planning we weren’t able to go inside the sanctuary because those were their closed hours.

so instead we were forced against our own free choice to pass the rest of the afternoon at a trippy and disturbing place called Kalagaon, ie art-village, which is basically a Rural India theme park cum craft-workshop center, to get to which we drove through miles of actual rural India where actual villagers were living their actual lives [postmodern hyperreality anyone?]. although it was crammed with hordes of Indian school groups and promenading Indian families, i noticed that only the foreigners received fawning adulation and namastes at the entrance and got their foreheads anointed with red paste and sparkles and rose petals. what’s up with that?

nevertheless inside the fake village there were some enjoyable features, such as the mannequins depicting happy villagers climbing palm trees or sowing crops or doing night-watchman duty with a lantern, and a set of mannequin legs sitting on a cottage step without a torso, a live bullock cart giving fast and bumpy rides, some Rajasthani puppeteers [how’d they end up in a village in eastern UP?] some bizarre statuary such as a giant watermelon with a wedge cut out, its weirdly sexual resulting gap the perfect size for artistically posing in to take pictures of each other; the giant blue hand of a god emerging from the ground and holding a conical mountain on its finger much in the style of Magritte, i thought; and a cornucopia-like hill of sculpted vegetables we christened the Giant Sabzi-- so big that you could go inside it, look out the windows, and climb the central staircase to the top of the tunnel-slide that rocketed you out one side into a sandpit below. it was the fastest slickest slide i can ever remember riding. so the day wasn’t a total waste.

the last few days in Lucknow before break were the week designated the most auspicious for weddings in the whole year. so on practically every street at all hours you would encounter a baraat with a brass band, chains of men with blazing light-bulb-studded panels mounted on their heads, horses, elephants, revelers; or you’d pass a lawn or hall set up with tents and garlands and chandeliers and buffets and DJs and gazillions of fairy lights and a big light-up sign at the from with the names of the newlyweds and maybe some interlinked hearts or something. down the street from our house there’s an old aristocratic house with a big garden that’s rented out for such things; during this week the tents-regalia-paraphernalia stayed up for the whole time while they simply kept changing the names in front:
Lakshmi Weds Sachin.
Neerada Weds Arvind.
Navin Weds Natasha.
etc etc etc.
i was curious whether all these couples’ families had chipped in equally for the party planning or if the first and last ones got stuck with the set and strike.

on the second last day of class we had an authentic “cultural program” which featured presentations by most of the students and some of the teachers too, revealing all their hidden gifts of shairi and sangeet, including plangent songs, lambent ghazals, a rendition of Khaake Paan Benaraswala with real paan, an original courtroom drama, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s self-anointed successors the Super Secret of God Mastt Mastt Qawwali Masters, and Urdu free verse poems by me along with interpretive movement-- you know, bouncing monkeys, dying sepoys, that sort of thing. then we gorged on coffee, cake, jellabi and gulabjamun and went home.

look for poems, recipes and winter vacation report soon.

SOCRATIC METHOD

late november-early december 2006
my friend Rowena has a wonderful gift for making warm, deep, lasting connections with random people who instantly adore her. one of these is a woman she met on the train, a grandmother who teaches high school biology, writes Urdu poetry and historical pamphlets on the side, and harbors a boldly iconoclastic and exploratory mind. she is passionate about the rights of women and hates the oppressions of organized religion, but feels obliged to only allow free rein to her progressive opinions in private.

a few weeks later she invited us to her home, sat us down for tea and sweets, shared pictures of her daughter and grandchild, her poems, and back issues of magazines from Manushi [the Delhi-based social justice and women’s rights organization], and launched direct into the frank questions she wanted to ask-- in those precious spaces where which women can speak freely with one another, she said.
what do you think about premarital sex?
what do you think about homosexuality? crime, sin, choice, nature?
what do you think is the best way to deal with homosexual teenagers?
what about domestic violence?
when do you think a woman should leave her husband? if she is in an abusive relationship, what should she do?
what do you think about god?
it was a treasured experience both as language practice and as a unique human connection.

but before this, she had invited Ro to bring a couple of her friends along to speak to the students at her school and i got the opportunity to be one of them. based on the quickie tour we were given, the school itself was quite impressive. it felt happy and open rather than highly disciplinary and driven as i had perhaps unfairly expected. the student body is mostly Muslim with a few Hindus, but they were in the midst of celebrating Eid, Divali and Christmas...because they think holidays are fun plus the school is committed to counteracting communalism. in rather Hogwartian mode, there are are 4 “houses” even though it’s not a boarding school, named for Tagore, Gandhi, Mhd. Iqbal and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan; each group is photographed wearing color-coded accessories to their uniforms.

so Ro and Julie and i found ourselves seated at a table with microphones in front of a roomful of somewhere between 50 and 100 students. i’d guess the students were between 14 and 16, both boys and girls. some of the girls and some of the female teachers wore hijab, others didn’t, and it didn’t seem to be a big deal for anyone. what impressed me was that both the boys and the girls who spoke seemed extremely smart, self-possessed, confident and well-spoken...which pleasantly counteracted all stereotypical and statistical expectations about Indian Muslim girls in particular being suppressed intellectually and socially.

nevertheless i was sort of terrified, since this was much more formal and public than i’d been led to believe, and it was happening all in Hindi/Urdu! what, you want me to...speak??? first we each introduced ourselves, then students came up one by one to the mic to ask questions of our little panel, and then finally we asked them questions and they came up to answer in self-selected mode. some of their questions: [the usual.] why have you chosen to study Urdu? how did you come to be interested in India? what methods do you use in your studies? what problems have you encountered in Lucknow, and/or in your studies? what do you/Americans think about India? what do you/Americans think about Islam?

we talked about our own experiences and intentions in this language program, and were also quite honest about sexism in public spaces being a major problem for us in Lucknow. at one point we strayed toward criticism of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq but were gently diverted from this perilous path lest things get too sensitive for the school. next we returned questions like what about YOUR studies? why have YOU chosen to study Urdu as an optional elective? what do you, especially you girls, want to do when you’re done with school? what do you think about America?

they said that they liked American people but not American government policy; that studying Urdu is important to them because--shit, i can't remember that part--; and that choosing to wear hijab or not had nothing to do with whether or not a woman should work outside the home. of course she should. they wanted to be laywers, teachers, entrepreneurs. as we were leaving, some of the qirls tagged after us to shake our hands, beaming, and thank us for coming...some emotional to the point of being near tears, saying how much it meant to them for us to be there, and hoping we’d come back...i hope so too.

TOUCH THE SILVER BABY

mid-november 2006
a few of us went on a bike ride in the morning, headed out of town, just to see what we could see. it was kind of an initial foray, a reconnaisance mission-- we thought that first we’d start exploring Lucknow’s environs, and then we had high hopes of getting all the way to somewhere else, like maybe Kanpur...or Varanasi...or Nepal...on second thought, we realized that would probably be all uphill with no gear shifts...

anyway, while this particular bike ride was pleasant and refreshing, there wasn’t anything particularly exciting to report...except for this:

southeast of town we starting following this guy who was pedaling a cycle-cart loaded with plastic or plaster lawn-type statuary-- elephants, maudlin dogs, green parrots, and babies...with a gleaming SILVER BABY on top. we were enthralled. it was so delightfully surreal and really quite Southern Gothic. we followed him for a while, making this our new course-setting device, but then decided he was going too slow and who knew how long this could go on, so we passed him with the stipulation that we had to touch the baby on the way around to put some closure on the interaction. we each stretched out an arm to do this as we veered around him in the road. then later we overtook him again in a side street of villas where he seemed to be making a delivery and we were perusing pigs, ponds, and a way to turn around for lunch. i don’t think he was delighted to see us. anyway, long story short, by the time we got back to town "Touch the silver baby!" had become a catchphrase and we were determined to introduce it into frequent use except that we didn't quite know what it should mean. then we figured it out: our last stop was at an enticingly eerie-looking-despite-bright-sunlight garrison church at the edge of the military cantonment at the edge of town. as we were tiptoeing through the echoey church and feeling kind of haunted thrills and wondering where this kind of frisson comes from even of you’re not religous...and then once we were back out in the sunshine dissecting the feeling and its source-- is it the architecture, certain kinds of space, combined with other techniques that induce changes in consciousness? consensus of years upon years of agreeing that a place is special or holy? built-up psychic charge from such focused concentration from so many people? simple sense of history? mass delusion? extra-rational senses that are nevertheless valid?-- we suddenly realized that to touch the silver baby means those moments when a self-proclaimed nonbeliever can’t deny the experience or recognition of that sense of the uncanny and of unexplained "divine" presence. and i have to say, if you haven’t ever touched the silver baby you’re missing out.

HI FOLKS, HAPPY NEW YEAR..

i know i’m way behind on my updates and all of these posts should have been put up weeks ago. let’s just say i’m approximating the good old days when news from India had to travel by ship around the Cape of Good Hope. in which case i’m making great time in getting you news. so here are some belated bulletins, and next i’ll work on reporting my travels over winter break in Mumbai and Udaipur. best wishes for 2007.