Discovering Rajasthan

Jodhpur

Once again, only the best highlights:

We took a half-day tour of the Bishnoi villages outside of Jodphur, where the original “Tree Huggers” once lived. Bishnoi translates to “Twenty-niners,” for the 29 rules to be followed by the people according to lord Vishnu. They highly value nature, especially animals and the local trees. When the 1730 Jodhpur Maharaja decided he needed to fell their trees to construct a new palace, a massacre of 363 Bishnois occurred, as they hugged the trees and accepted beheading as a sacrifice for the sacred wildlife.

Jodhpur Fort, overlooking the beautiful Blue City (homes painted in indigo to protect from the heat and the insects) introduced us to the beauty of Rajasthani architecture. Swooping window awnings and carved latticed walls to allow windflow, and to “allow women to look outside without the lusty stares of men.” Hmm. Gorgeous nonetheless.

A young boy approached us while we visited the blue city, and told us all about how Obama is good and Bush was very bad. His name was Viky and he took us to into his home up on a hill, and introduced us to every cousin and brother and sister. His mother made us chai, and his sisters complemented just about every piece of jewelry I was wearing.

As Rebecca and I wandered around the clock tower bazaar, we had the chance to glimpse three men playing trumpets late at night in their tiny music shop, and old women singing religious songs in their small temple. It was great to explore Jodhpur at night, to see all of its hidden surprises.

Recycled textiles are a wonderful invention by handicraftsmen all over Jodhpur and Jaipur. I found a small shop in the bazaar that featured hundreds of different cloths made from parts of women’s salwars and sarees from the villages. The village women cut up their old clothing, match the colors, and patch them together. The colors and designs are amazing, and it is so cool to imagine that all different people wore bits of a single textile for years of their life.

Bikaner

We took a two-day camel trek out of Bikaner. Laura had the funniest camel, who either farted or made a mating call every 30 seconds. The mating call consisted of blowing the inside of its throat out its mouth like a second tongue, and gurgling. Very attractive.

It was wonderful to be away from all people for a couple of days, in a country where solitude is rare. The stars were glorious at night, and I loved following tiny animal tracks in the sand. I saw giant lizards, antelopes, foxes, and vultures, and as we made our way through a small village on the way to the desert, all of the children chased our camel caravan shouting “Ta Ta!”

Jaipur

Lassiwala had the absolute hands down best lassies I have ever had. They were served in honey-comb shaped pottery, and tasted like heaven.

The pink city itself was beautiful. By law, every shop must be painted pink. It’s great.

We made good friends with an autorickshaw driver, who at one point took us to his friend’s Italian restaurant, where we were served beer from a teapot (unlicensed to serve alchy) and he told us about his life as an autodriver. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to school, as he was the youngest of 9 children. He can’t read or write, which impedes him from becoming a guide (his aspiration). He doesn’t want to get married, because he commiserates with Bob Marley by saying “No woman no cry.”

He let Laura drive the rickshaw past the lake palace. I considered trying, but I thought I would kill us all.

I later met a girl on the street in Jaipur who designs jewelry in her father’s store. She took me into her local temple on her way to work.

At one point, nearing the end of our journey, we laid down in the hotel bed to rest, and turned on the TV. On came the Amazing Race, and the contestants were headed straight to Jaipur! Go figure! It was hilarious to watch them muddle their way through Indian transportation to all of the sites we had just visited that day, and to see a newcomer's reaction to India compared to our accustomed view.

Overall, my trip put my faith in people on a bit of a roller coaster ride. Sometimes I felt like all friendship here comes with a price. Other times, I truly believed in the genuine friendliness of the people I was with. It all comes down to taking every new interaction as a fresh start, and seeing what happens. Not everyone is out to get paid, although it so often feels that way.

You know, Agra!

Watching the sun set from the beach, on the river behind the Taj Mahal, was the best and cheapest way to experience the breathtaking wonder of the world.   My friends and I sat in the cool sand and attempted broken Hindi with locals.  And wore the occasional beard.

In the late evening, it was wild to observe men on the Agra rooftops conducting a well-choreographed routine with their squads of trained pigeons.  With a series of whistles, they control a group of about 30 birds swooping through the air.  I got it on video, don’t worry.

Paneer butter masala and malai kofta.  Yum.  Cheesy, buttery goodness. 

I woke up for the sunrise back on the roof of our hotel, and loved seeing the warm light spill across the city.  Big monkeys popped out of the shadows onto the rooftops to begin their day, and about six local mosques commenced their morning call to prayer, only with a pleasantly un-synchronized two-minute delay between all of them.  

PS:

(There have been clouds in Hyderabad this week, and there have been absolutely beautiful skies.  I missed clouds!  But the heat is getting a bit outrageous, and my farmer's tan is becoming comical.)

 

A Moment in Delhi

Only days before leaving for my big trip up north, I resigned to visit the health center on campus, despite my bad habit of ignoring my parents’ good advice.  I had made a decent recovery from that special time in the library, but I wasn’t able to fully shake the mystery sickness.  I tried eating Sunday night Chinese, and relapsed.  Laying awake late at night after finishing a paper, running to the bathroom every 3 minutes, I started feeling short of breath and a bit dizzy.  I hit up the infirmary instead of giving a presentation the next day, was admitted, and laid down next to a student with hideous burns all over his arm.  The health center was quite the contrast to the medical care I’m used to.  I staggered around for a while looking for a receptionist or something, and was eventually pointed into a curtained room where a woman recorded my woes and sent me into the emergency unit.  Picture a nurse in a white saree sticking an IV into you without gloves or handwashing, then being given pretty pills in the hand that you just had to make real use of in the Indian bathroom with no toilet paper or soap with the other hand out the door connected to the IV.  This is all a bit graphic, but trust me when I say I am omitting the worst of it. 

Arriving in Delhi, I hoped it wasn’t a poor life decision to be traveling for 9 days after the whole ordeal.  Luckily I started feeling much better after a day or two.  My friends and I had a real whirlwind tour of the major northern cities, and got a great taste of north Indian culture.  Instead of listing everything we did and saw, I’ll just give a description of a few of the most memorable moments from each place, starting with Delhi.

Delhi

After watching a huge parade travel down the main street, we lost ourselves in an amazing bazaar down an alleyway, which sold everything from beads to saree borders to festival decorations to felt jewelry displays.  There were fabrics upon fabrics, kitchen supplies, spices and perfumes.  Amid the bustle of the narrow alleys, bicycle rickshaws with large loads of goods were constantly yelling at us to get out of their way.  They really sneak up on you compared to the putting, beeping autorickshaws, known as “tuk-tuks” in some places because of these characteristic noises.  In the bazaar we happened upon the most beautiful street of tiny, stacked homes I have ever seen.  Like a solace in the center of a never-ending market of shouting and selling and squeezing past strangers, the street had three people walking down it.  Lined with pink and yellow and turquoise apartments with intricately carved and painted doorways and potted flowers and plants on every doorstep, the street gave us a chance to catch our breath and see the understated beauty that could be hidden anywhere here in India.

I ate at my first Indian McDonalds in Delhi.  It smelled exactly the same.  (Beefless, of course)

A pigeon found its way into the huge, silent Lotus temple, where everybody was meditating in the quiet cool.  The marble temple is shaped like a giant lotus flower, with high ceilings, large windows, and rafters curving down to the floor.  The pigeon had no place to land, and I followed it with my eyes as it flew in circles around and around, confused.  The temple workers were so strict about peacefulness, that they even asked parents with crying children to leave.  Their silence was disrupted, however, with the loud smack of the pigeon on one of the large glass windows.  The thud echoed throughout the airy temple, and I had to stifle a laugh.  The bird was okay, don’t worry.

I also bought a beard in Delhi, which would come in handy in making our Taj Mahal pictures a bit different from everyone else’s.

Our 6-hour bus from Delhi to Agra made a stop in the middle of the countryside at a small collection of food stands.  I needed to use the bathroom, and it took me a while to realize that the pink, roofless, concrete box was the ladies’ lav.  There were two-foot high partitions between the “stalls,” and everything just drained out a hole in the wall at the back, but the floor was basically flat.  An old woman came in with me, and chattered to me in Hindi while I tried to figure out how to not pee on my feet.  After all this time she made me wonder if I’ve been using Indian toilets backwards.  Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me.  Unfortunately my Hindi’s not THAT good yet.

I’ve digressed again, however- Sorry!   Delhi was a neat old city, more metropolitan and complete than Hyderabad with its half-finished buildings.  

HOLI.

There's so much I'd like to say about Holi.  It's a fantastic Hindu holiday celebrating the coming of spring and referring back to a Religious story about the burning of the demon Holika by a devotee of the god Vishnu.  The holiday celebrates colors, and people used to throw handfuls of crushed-flower powder at their friends in order to protect them from summer sicknesses like chicken pox, but now most of the powders have slightly harmful chemicals in them, which is a bit ironic.  Potential health risks aside, Holi transcends caste, skin color and gender -related social constraints.  The village people were some of the first to attack us Americans, and boys and girls attacked each other brutally.  I got egged.  

I wish I could say more but I just threw up all over the library bathroom.  I put up tons of photos, though, so you should get a great depiction of the holiday. Ugh. Bed.

Life At Your Own Risk, and ... Recycling?

I do my painting in the fine arts studio, next to the talented graduate students perfecting their impressive portfolios.  The building is old, with blue shutters on its barred windows, peeking out from a curtain of vines dangling lazily from the roof.  It is a beautiful place to create, despite the fecal stench of the septic system located next door.  I have discovered a large exposed pipe with a gaping crack next to the entrance to my studio, from which I suspect some of the stink is escaping.  Usually lots of loud shouting in Hindi provides background noise as I paint, probably due to the fact that the Health Inspector’s office is adjacent to the studio.  He must have a lot on his plate. 

The concepts of Health and Safety are certainly very different.  Some regulations exist, but few are enforced.  This definitely has its positives and negatives:  Positives being time and cost efficiency, negatives being the potential for nasty accidents.  The fear of the lawsuit, of course, is barely present.  Seat belts are suggested but rarely seen, helmets are only expected in major cities for motorcyclists.  Autorickshaws quote a 4-person maximum on their yellow sides, but I’ve managed to fit 10.  Today as I rode my bike to the library, it was comical watching one school bus regurgitate about one hundred fifty uniformed children, running excitedly towards the “Save the Tigers” photography exhibition in our campus auditorium.  They were squashed in that bus like peeled, stubby crayons stuffed into a fraying Crayola box, bulging at the edges.  Aside from the precarious yet functional transportation, people aren’t generally kept in or outside barriers.  There aren’t safety railings up the sides of the touristy temple trails on the mountains in Hampi, or guards to yell at you for just hopping across the train tracks at a station to get to the other platform.  Nowhere seems really “off limits,” whether you’re sitting on roofs or exploring sites.  The exceptions are my hostel, which is like a fortress with bodyguards, or major public attractions like shopping malls, or movie theaters where you must walk through metal detectors and get patted down upon entry. 

On the dietary front, I usually find a few hairs in the occasional meal and we eat with our hands.  And that’s the pampered life of the guest house.  Recently my friends had a meal cooked on a fire fed with camel dung out in the Rajasthani desert- and they liked it!  I haven’t seen the preparation of meals in the average Indian restaurant, but I’d say that most would fail American health inspections in a heartbeat.  Nevertheless, the food is fantastic!  Street food, however, is delicious, but often is accompanied by an abdominal attack.  All water we drink should be bottled, but most lower-caste locals drink from the tap.   Warm showers are a luxury, and so are washing machines.  But being sweaty is totally legitimate in this heat, it’s been up to 106° recently.  As for the loo, it seems more sanitary to me, minus the lack of toilet paper.  No sharing a dirty seat!  Even medicines, cheaper equivalents to those in the US, are readily available at numerous pharmacies, but many people would rather use homeopathic remedies.  The other day Tabbu was telling me that she was using a unani medicine for her skin, and at Charminar I passed men sitting on the ground selling homeopathic medicines (involving porcupine quills and other intriguing objects).  We have been discussing this topic in my Sociology of Health, Sickness, and Healing Class- it’s very interesting.  All I mean to say is that there is less anxiety about germs and accidents and life here is very much “at your own risk.”  I find that kind of liberating in a way.  

Despite the fact that there is trash littered about almost everywhere, and no real recycling programs, Indian people will manage to re-use just about anything.  Cars that look like they were made in the 70s will be repaired and repaired until they won’t run any longer, and their parts will go back into circulation for years.  And when those parts no longer work for a car, they’ll be used in some other appliance.  The Mazaa drink (yummy mango juice) sold at any shop comes in a glass bottle, which when you have finished, you give back to the shop and they will ship it back to be refilled.  I watched the refill truck leaving campus last week, empty Mazaa, Thumbs Up, and Almond Milk bottles rattling on the back.  A couple of weeks ago, the sole fell off of my best pair of sandals.  Instead of throwing them away, I took them to the cobbler on campus yesterday and paid the equivalent of 12 cents to have new soles put on.  There’s a cobbler on campus!  And a tailor!  The cobbler is down this alley at “shopcom” (the main shopping center on campus with a bookstore and convenience store with the same meditation mantra playing in the background every day all day and a guy who owns the shop who generally has answer to my every problem) and it is literally a room full of shoes.  It’s GREAT!  I have even seen restaurant bills written on the backs of old receipts, and paper plates made out of old cereal boxes. That’s what I’d call recycling.   People go through trash, too, and take what they will find useful later. The organized response to the litter is quite funny actually.  Everywhere you’ll find these trash cans shaped like big bunnies or penguins that say “Use Me,” over a big hole on the animal’s stomach. 

Overall, things are going well over here at the University of Hyderabad.  If I could vote for the next student body president, I’d probably lean towards the student named Nelson Mandela.  He seems like a good guy.  It’s funny to see his campaign signs all over.  This weekend our program is taking us all to Mysore, which will be interesting with 30 people on the train- we’ll take up a whole car.  I pity the poor people who’ll be stuck listening to our banter.  And then I’ve got a few big trips coming up after that up North and then way down south to Kerala.  I’ll also be performing tabla on Monday for National Women’s day at my school, which should be entertaining after a weekend of no practice.  I hope everyone is surviving the snow back at home, I miss and love you all!