Blank Check: The Spoils of Victory

          Before I left Montreal, I went on a date with a scientist I’d met on the bus back from Boston. Technically I met him in line, where I learned he was from Maine. Then we boarded, and after the obligatory thirty minutes of silence and pretend-sleeping had elapsed I tricked him into playing a game I sometimes play with ill-fated strangers called the Question Game.

          Players of this game tend to learn a lot more about each other than the peculiar rules of the first encounter typically allow. On top of this, our seven-hour journey was extended by unusual circumstances into a ten-hour journey. Suffice it to say that by the time we found ourselves standing outside the Montreal bus station at eleven o’clock at night, it was impossible to deny the strangeness of our sudden intimacy. He asked if he could take me to dinner sometime. I said yes. 

          By the time we actually got around to having dinner, it was two weeks later and he was in an exuberant mood. He had just sold a scientific discovery, had had the final meeting with the lawyers that day, and it was time to celebrate. He took me to a tiny seafood restaurant in the Old Port, where he convinced the hostess to seat us even though they had stopped seating, and we sat in a corner booth that was literally cut into stone. We ordered oysters and paella and many exorbitantly priced drinks. At the end I snuck a peak at the bill and nearly wet myself. 

          His place was just around the corner, so I agreed to come up for a nightcap. While he was slicing a lime I spied a chessboard. 

          “You play?” I asked. 

          “I’m not very good,” he admitted. 

          “In that case,” I said, “let’s make a bet.”

          “Ok. What are the terms?”

          Now, I’ll preface this by saying that money has never been a big motivator in my young and relatively idealistic life. But I decided then, on a whim, to make it interesting. 

          “Let’s say,” I said slowly, “that the loser has to write the winner a blank check.”

          “A blank check?” He frowned. “For how much?”

          I smiled. “It’s blank. You don’t know until it’s cashed.”

          He mused. I set up the pieces, allowing him the first move. When they were ready, he agreed. We discussed the terms: the check had to go toward the purchase of a single thing, and the loser had to be notified of what that thing was. We shook hands, and the game commenced.

          We weren’t even ten moves in when he took my Queen. I winced – it was such a rookie mistake. I wondered briefly as to the number that would make my check bounce. But luckily the fates intervened; half an hour later he was cornered, with no viable allies in sight. My rook and bishop were bearing down on his undefended King. And, to his credit, he was smiling.

          “I can’t see any way out of this,” he said. 

          “That’s unfortunate,” I said, thinking how fortunate it was. 

          And he tipped his king. The game was won. 

          He didn’t waste any time. He whipped out his checkbook. Didn’t have to ask how to spell my last name. Signed with a flourish. He even post-dated the check until after payday. I’ll admit that there was something very sexy about that blank check, sitting there on the board amidst the endgame, redeemed after a most fatal first mistake. 

          Since that day, I’ve had many conversations about whether and to what end to cash the check. I’ve listened to many divergent opinions, ranging from “buy a car” to “cashing it at all makes you a bad person” to “anyone who’s seen the movie knows you have to build a water slide.” In the end I decided not to cash it, but to keep it as a memento, and as punctuation for the end of a most unbelievable story. 

          Then the other day I began to reconsider, when a friend suggested I use it to make a donation. I’ll admit that being a student of development has made me a skeptic of most charities; the reality is that many NGO’s, despite the best intentions, waste lots of money on unsustainable projects that fall apart once the organization withdraws. And financial donations have always irked me, because you have no way of knowing what your dollars actually accomplished. For all you know the money you thought was making a difference somewhere was actually used to print pamphlets soliciting more donations. Congratulations! You’ve managed to kill more trees. 

          Then another friend reminded me of Heifer International, an organization that gives the gift of livestock to families in the developing world. I’ve made small contributions to this organization in the past, as Christmas gifts to my family; a hive of honeybees in honor of my sister the beekeeper, that kind of thing. Each animal provides food and income in some way (for example, the heifer namesake can produce up to four gallons of protein-rich milk a day) and the families can use this income to send their kids to school. On top of this, each gift multiplies because each family promises to pass on the offspring and knowledge of their animal to another family in their village. 

           So I was poking around on their website, and found a special project they have going on in Rajasthan. It immediately caught my eye, not only because it’s in India, but also because it’s directed at women. I probably don’t have to say that women in India are dealt a really shitty hand, especially in rural areas. And if there’s one thing that I still believe in after being so thoroughly disillusioned with development, it’s that of all the myriad issues that plague the developing world, the empowerment of women is the most pressing – precisely because of the ripple effect it has on other important areas. For example, when women have a source of income independent of their husbands, they are more likely to spend it on the health and education of their children. I could talk for days about how important female empowerment is for the state of the world.

          The project pledges to provide the women of two hundred families in rural Rajasthan (which is a desert, where half of all children are malnourished) with three dairy goats each (goats survive well in deserts). The goats produce milk for consumption and sale, and their manure can be used as fertilizer in a harsh environment. Goats often have up to three baby goats a year, so the gift multiplies like crazy. 

          The project is estimated to cost about $150,000. Of that, more than $140,000 has already been raised. Now, if I were ever going to cash the check at all, I was thinking it would probably be for less than a hundred dollars. But I learned about this project, and promptly wrote an enormous email to the check’s issuer requesting that he consider donating the outstanding $9,187 (which looked, in my eyes, like an absurd number). Beyond the uncertainty as to whether or not he was in the financial position to make such an outrageously large donation, I had no idea, even after ten hours of conversation and one very pleasant date, if these issues were ones that he would care about.  But, as a wise friend once told me, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. So I hit send.

          And last night I heard back from him. He said it was good to hear from me, and that he had been very curious to see what I would do with the spoils of victory. Unfortunately, while his business was doing well, he was in the middle of filing patents and funding the first leg of manufacturing. My heart began to sink. 

          But then I kept reading, about how a deal is a deal, and I’m entitled to use the check for whatever ends I so decide, and he’d spent the weekend thinking about what he’s capable of doing now and in the future…

          In the end, he told me to save the check as a keepsake. And, he proposed, he would donate $100 every month to this project, until he is in the position to make the larger donation I requested. He would like to put it under my name, and give them my e-mail address so that I can see it happening, and would this be satisfactory to me?

          Would this be satisfactory to me?

Re-Patriate Me

   A couple weeks before I left for India last year, my brother was lounging in a yellow chair lamenting my pending departure.

“What will I do without you?” he moaned.

“Come with me,” I said.  He laughed.

“Listen, the flight is $900 roundtrip. Come for two or three weeks. You’ll spend fifteen dollars a day, and we can ride elephants together.”

   These were essentially the last words we exchanged before he left with my dad for a week in Wyoming. The day he got back, I approached him with a pile of paperwork.

   “All I need is your signature and your visa application is ready to be sent to the embassy. We’ll have to overnight it, but there should be enough time. Here is your itinerary and a list of estimated costs. Oh, and you have an appointment at the travel clinic tomorrow at 9AM.”

   He balked. He was still holding his snowboard. He said, “What?”

   Turns out he really didn’t think I was being serious when I said he should just come to India. Initially, he protested. It was all too much, given that I was leaving the country in a week. I told him to think about it.

   A month later I picked him up from Trivandrum International Airport at India’s southern tip, and we went on to ride (and bathe!) elephants together. My dad also chose to visit me later in my travels, in the mountainous north of the country. I don’t want to speak for them, but I will say that their respective experiences in India, while very different from each other, were profoundly moving for both.

   A year later, my parents surprised me on Christmas morning with an opportunity to take a writing workshop in New York City. I was still half asleep. I said, “What?”

   It was scheduled to begin three weeks from that day. “I can’t just move to New York,” I protested. “My whole life is in Montreal.” 

   My mom was making a big show of flipping nonchalantly through the newspaper. “Oh, yeah,” she baited, “because you hate adventure. And you’re awful at adapting to new places.”

   I narrowed my eyes at her. At this point my dad came over and sat down. He looked at me and said: “Jess, you changed my life. And you changed your brother’s life. So this is your appointment with the travel clinic. Think about it.”

   Well. I’ve thought about it. When the universe boomerangs something so perfectly back to you, is there anything else left to say? Looks like I’m moving to New York. Anybody have any friends there?

When only our tears run down to live with the bad days

           About a month after I left Kashmir, I sent Abdul’s family a package. The primary reason I sent this package was to give a sweet Spiderman backpack to 5-year-old Arsalan, whose old backpack had broken while we were there. The backpack was filled with markers and crayons and pencils and other school supplies, some toy cars, and a copy of Where The Wild Things Are that I’d brought from home. I printed maybe thirty pictures I’d taken of the family and the various people we’d met during our stay, and with all of these things I enclosed a letter to Abdul. (NOTE: If you are not familiar with how I came to know this man, read his story.)

            The day after I mailed the package from Mcleodganj, I hopped a bus to Manali. I was walking down the street toward the town center a few days later when someone shouted my name. I turned to find Sajad, Abdul’s son, seated outside a Kashmiri craft shop.

            The last time I’d seen Sajad had been fourteen hours further south, in Delhi; he had been waving jovially at Mike and I through the window of the 24-hour bus that would bring us to Kashmir, and I was doubled over in pain from the intestinal virus that would cripple me for the following eight days. Every so often while we were staying with his dad, Sajad would call to check in with the family. He always asked to speak to Mike and I.

            And now, here he was, hours away from both Kashmir and Delhi, shouting my name in the street. It was such a trip! Sajad invited me into his cousin’s shop, where he told me over chai that it was just too effing hot in Delhi for him to stay another day. We hung out a few times after that.  He would text me to come to the shop. When I showed up there was invariably another traveler there, and he was usually trying to convince them to go to Kashmir. Whenever he introduced me he would say my name, followed by “she stay with my family in Kashmir.” Then he would turn to me. “Tell them.”

            A few days before I left, Sajad invited me to lunch at his cousin’s home. While we were eating he told me his parents had received my package and that it made them very happy, especially the pictures. This warmed my heart. I told him to give them my love when he went home. I had asked Abdul to write me back, at the end of my letter, but in truth I didn’t really expect this to happen. Receipt had been given; life would go on.

         Then I flew back to Rhode Island, where I passed the summer working as a field teacher at an environmental education camp. Mike came to visit in September, and he asked if I’d been reading about all the things going on in Kashmir. I hadn’t; I’d been in the woods the whole time. Did I remember the convent school across the street from where we’d stayed in Rajbagh? It was gone now, reduced by a bomb to a pile of rubble.  

           Just six weeks after we left Srinagar, a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed by police, sparking the biggest separatist demonstrations to take place in the last two years. More than eighty civilian protestors have been killed since June, and countless others wounded. A strict curfew was imposed on Srinagar in September, and armored vehicles are currently patrolling the streets with orders to shoot on sight anyone out after hours. According to a September article, “The current unrest is reminiscent of the late 1980s, when protests against New Delhi’s rule sparked an armed conflict that has so far killed more than 68,000 people, mostly civilians.” 

             The internet told me all of this, and on my last night in Rhode Island my father surprised me with a yellow envelope he’d been unwittingly hiding in his car. It was from “Houseboat New Shining Star” and addressed to “Jassica Mastos.” The full text of the letter can be read here.

             I read it, and burst into tears. What to say to him? What to do? Send them money? Attempt to funnel tourism into a conflict zone so that Abdul can feed his family? Petition the Indian government? Lament the state of the world? Seal my heart off indefinitely? 

             I wish there were an easy conclusion to draw. For now, all I can think to do is write about it.

My Street

            I wrote this for my class on travel writing. The prompt was “write about your street.” 

***

            The last of the sukkot tents are coming down today, before the rain sets in. The singing ended weeks ago, the autumn harvest long over. The sky is cloudless, an almost unnatural blue. The sun casts the long lines of late afternoon. On the pavement, three chickadees jockey for position with two towering pigeons over a discarded kosher biscuit.

            Of what might be three hundred people living on my stretch of Rue Jeanne Mance, approximately two hundred and eighty are Hassidic Jews. Most of them are children, forced to wear the same plain smocks and coats as their siblings. Every Friday groups and pairs of married men can be seen walking slowly together in contemplation, supporting impossibly heavy-looking fur hats atop their heads.

            One day last week, I was regarding the street from my balcony. My view was partially obscured by the maple tree to my right. Its leaves were barely singed by the cold; still full and green in places, still holding tight to their branches in the face of a petulant wind. A Jewish mother was trying to leave the house across the street with her two small girls. All three were dressed in black; the mother’s hair covered by a white scarf.

            The smaller child sat in a stroller. The other child was throwing a fit. She clearly did not want to go wherever they were going. She was whining forlornly in Yiddish, trying valiantly to pull her mother’s arm out of its socket by sitting down on the sidewalk repeatedly. In the midst of their struggle, the mother glimpsed me watching from above. Just as quickly her head dropped, and fierce whispering ensued. The mother straightened abruptly, her daughter’s resistance disappeared, and they both began walking south with renewed purpose behind the stroller. The air in their wake bristled with agitation.

            It is exceedingly strange to have neighbors who never look at you; who seem almost afraid to acknowledge your presence. Even the little ones pretend they don’t hear you if you say hello (or bonjour) – even when there is no one else around. Sometimes it is hard not to feel like an outsider, seated just outside your own home. All I want is some eye contact, a small smile; a moment of sheepish recognition from the woman that watches me put my key in the door next to hers every day.

            Curiously enough, one of the reasons I moved back to this city was to regain the sense of belonging that eluded me in India. I returned to Montreal in part to escape from otherness – a phenomenon I’d never truly understood until it was all I experienced. Now, living in the geographical core of such an impenetrable community, I have to laugh at the world’s impeccable sense of humor and flair for irony.

            Today I’ve been sitting for hours at Depanneur Café, just down the street, listening to local musicians take turns belting their ecstasy and heartbreak in exchange for a free meal. I’ve sat through two piano solos, a string quartet, and a trance-inducing Spanish guitar performance. The guitar players were a man and a woman, both in their mid-fifties, both with hair that curled past their shoulders. Their fingers danced deftly over the strings, which hummed their secrets so sweetly that an hour passed in minutes. When they finished, the final chord resonated in such a way that the crowd remained silent and focused long after it had ended.

            I was so moved by this performance that I felt compelled to say so. It wasn’t until after I’d tapped the woman on the shoulder and was telling her how much she had affected me that I noticed, for the first time after an hour of watching her, that she had a lazy eye. She smiled, and thanked me warmly in French.

           And the realization hits: otherness is not something to be feared or resented. Feeling othered is not something other people can do to you. You can feel isolated anywhere in the world if you want it bad enough. People are different from each other; it’s what makes us beautiful. I love this neighborhood because it offers a vivid picture of the foundation on which this city is built: that our otherness is to be reveled in, and celebrated.

              And must we always participate in order to appreciate? Just now, returning home with a bag of fresh Saint Viateur bagels, three little boys raced past me up the sidewalk, their curly sideburns bouncing underneath matching yamakas as they chattered in voices pitched high by excitement.  They sounded like birds. They were no more than four years old. 

            They are children. The bagels are hot; the world is vast and new.

Enchanté

Today is the day I would have flown back to India. 6pm Eastern Standard Time, departing from Logan International and landing, a day and a half later, at Indira Gandhi. Layovers in Paris and Manama. 

Instead, today, I’m sitting in ART café with my good friends Des and Hope, spending the equivalent of three hundred rupees on a mediocre lunch and watching the rain outside. I got a refund for $119 yesterday from a woman at Gulf Air named Joanna.

Later I took the bus downtown, and the rain had driven everyone else in Mile End to take the bus too. I was standing, leaning awkwardly over a seated woman to brace myself against the bar. The breathing of a hundred people steamed the windows as the bus halted and lurched.

Halt. Lurch. It’s so hot and crowded, I thought.

Then I had a flashback, and realized that at least five more people could fit comfortably into the space around me. It happens to me occasionally in restaurants, too. Suddenly the context abandons me, and I marvel at how empty the place is, this room that could fit two hundred people and yet serves only sixty.

And I listen to the endless stream of thank you’s. I hear at least twenty thank you’s a day here in Montreal, and probably say it more. There is no word for thank you in Hindi. Show me your gratitude. How do you mean it?

And I walk down the street, and look up and catch someone’s eye, and that person immediately looks away as though I’ve caught them thinking dirty thoughts. I flash back to the feeling of having a thousand eyes on me at once, unapologetic; mostly male. It’s a physical feeling, being observed by that many gazes in a single moment. It’s electrifying. People in this city want to pretend that we are not an observable phenomenon; we spend all our energy fastidiously ignoring each other, making like other human animals don’t interest us. It’s no wonder people feel alone. 

Yesterday I was walking home in the rain. A man passed me, walking in the opposite direction with a huge green umbrella. I walked a few more yards and then he was calling after me. “Est-ce que je te peu aidez?” He walked with me for two blocks, chivalrously guarding me from the drops.

“Comment vous applez-vous?” he asked.

“Jessica. Et vous?”

“Abdul,” he said. “Enchanté.”

I Got Your Back

I was tempted, for this post, to offer two grand lists of all the love-able and hate-able peculiarities that make India so compelling. I even went so far as to compose the lists – entitled, respectively: Things I will Miss About India and Things I will NOT Miss About India. The lists were brutally honest and very precise and perhaps forever doomed to being woefully incomplete, despite their considerable lengths. But I noticed that after every third bullet on the ‘Hate’ list, there followed this stipulation: (I will also miss this). And vice versa, on the ‘Love’ list.

I recalled the wise words of one contender for the hand of cheesy romance novelist Danielle Steel: “Half of what you love about it is all the things you hate about it.” I recalled, also, that lists are only fun for the one making them. So instead, I write this post from a most honest place: the place where Love and Hate have their backs to each other, for moral support. The place where the rigid dependability of dualities, such as the one that assumes these emotions to be opposites, starts to fall apart.

So, I guess the question is… What is it about India? 

***

It is the super-hard and undrinkable water that leeches skin and hair of all its vitality. 
It is the dust that congeals in your nostrils to filter the many pungent smells. It is the vivid colors, the playful trucks and turbans, the flashing of gold against brown.
It is laundry hung up to dry and flower garlands dressing doorways and things that are hand-made. It is burning trash and open sewers and monkeys that swagger and glare.

It is the eerily beautiful call to prayer, dividing the day like slices of pie. It is the smears of ash on the foreheads of those who recognize forces greater than themselves. It is the mini-shrines in the rickshaw dash and the bumper stickers that say I love you in loopy red cursive. It is the endless stream of fellow travelers who think they are free and open-minded or on a spiritual quest by virtue of being in India, and the other travelers that judge them for thinking such things.

It is the shamelessly affectionate way that men hold each other by the hand, neck or waist as they walk. It is inviting strangers in for tea, not tomorrow or whenever you are free but right now. It is the lack of concepts such as personal space or personal property or lines of any kind. It is the doctrine of necessity, which ensures you will never be left high and dry in a time of real need. It is the relentless staring, borne of simple curiosity, which makes Indians such experts at the subject of each other. It is the head-waggle, which instantly disarms.

It is the way little kids giggle when you repeat the things they say in Hindi. It is little Indian kids in general, with their big soulful eyes and teeny bindis and preposterous eyeliner. It is the cows that chew contemplatively over the meaning of life in the middle of a screeching traffic circle. It is the constant honking, which allows the seven-person family and twenty dead chickens on the back of one motorbike to emerge from said screeching traffic circle, miraculously unscathed. 

It is the omnipresence of Gandhi on all currency notes, which enables you to say I’ll bet you ten/fifty/one hundred Gandhi’s. It is the fact that ten rupees (22 cents) can get you two chai or five cigarettes or else a small mountain of chickpeas with diced cucumber and tomato and onion and cilantro and chilly and lemon, eaten off a piece of newspaper with a cardboard square for scooping. It is the constant attention to and interpretation of the smallest belly-rumbles. Should I be worried? To take the Cipro; to not take the Cipro? It is the ever-wet surfaces surrounding squat toilets.

It is eating hot parathas that were hand-flipped by the shirtless guy standing next to you. It is the ghostly-pale imitations of beer and chocolate that always fail to satisfy. It is the way a waiter can convince himself he is in love after serving you two meals in two weeks. It is the flies that ensure you will never eat a meal alone.

It is the monotone of the chai-wallahs, the bits of trivial conversation that inevitably end with come into my shop. It is the flexibility of any rule; the constant uncertainty over whether to bargain or accept. It is resentment for being ripped off and pride for having not been, and the guilty confusion that follows because you really can afford either price. It is the dull and tired look a shopkeeper gives you when you ask about his day, just before he says: “every day the same.”

It is people looking as mangy as the dogs that loiter and roam the streets. It is club foots and missing hands and six-year-old kids supporting two-year-old kids on their hips, both faces streaked with grime and resignation. It is the impossibly low tone of voice with which these kids mumble as they walk beside you, eyes cast away and palms outstretched, as though the words don’t matter. It is the way they react with surprise if you interrupt their mumbling monologue to ask them their name. It is your glaringly clean bill of health and the money forever burning holes in your pockets.

It is the way a man to a woman can be either stranger or husband or friend of husband – but nothing in between. It is being entitled to a different and more suffocating set of rules and expectations by virtue of having a vagina. It is the way that white skin reigns. It is the impossibility of escape from otherness. It is the possibility of everything else.

And it is the way saying her name makes your body feel: The resonance of the first syllable in the chest; the gentle touch and flexing push of the tongue’s tip against the roof of the mouth; the release of the final sighing exhale: India.

No Apologies

Think about yourself: Can you accurately sum yourself up in one word, or two? Is there anything about you that doesn’t require a caveat? Are you simply a waitress, an engineer; or do you sometimes dance or juggle or read to your niece before bed? Are you young or old, or does it depend on the day? Are you a teller of truths, or occasionally a teller of lies? Is your selfishness constant or does it relent? Always a lover; sometimes a hater? Always open; never closed? Do you always know, or are you sometimes uncertain?

None of us is simply one thing. The reality is that we contain countless selves, and they constantly compete for our attention and indulgence. I believe that this is one of the biggest sources of disquiet in life; this is why we go out seeking. Seekers use many words, but it seems that all of them are seeking the elusive state of balance among their many flawed and contradictory selves.

I think this is a big reason why India is so attractive to seekers – because no one thing is India. India is frozen and hot and dusty, moody and mountainous and full of towering pines, like the ones in my backyard at home. India is teeming and listless, vivid and treacherous and kind; generous and resentful and conniving and shy.

And more, to infinity – all of this in a single corner of the world. All of this somehow combines into one country. The people who seek want to know the secret: how can you honor so many things at once without splitting at the seams? Everyone wants to know how they can do that.

India draws them in, never having promised anything; mercurial in her choice of what to deliver. Plenty of people might envy her freedom, her ability to revel in the kind of chaos that’s laden with meaning. Plenty of people want to be close to that, to learn from that, and find it too hard. And at the end, it’s simply not possible to love India or to hate India for what she gives to you. There are just too many love-able and hate-able things about a place that is so alive. A place that doesn’t apologize for her choice of which self to indulge on any given day.

I wonder if a person exists, or might ever exist, who could go to India and say that they felt nothing. A person who could come home saying, “Yeah, I’ve been there – I feel indifferent.”

Kashmir Flashback

Before Papa Bear left India, we managed to escape together into the foothills of the Himalaya, where wild strawberries and fiddleheads and many expensive medicinal plants grow wildly free for the picking. Our destination: Kareri Lake, elevation 3360 meters (11,000 feet).

Four days took us through many surreal landscapes, to the top of many breath-taking heights, and past many herds of gymnastical goats. There were many beautiful moments. Once we were charged by a territorial water buffalo. Another time a small group of barefoot goat herders wordlessly convinced my father to try a tobacco pipe for the first AND second time in his entire life, after they’d prepared chai for us in the middle of a boulder-strewn valley miles from the nearest road. The man in charge of the chai wiped down the cookware with the handkerchief that had previously resided under his hat. He poured the water from a mysterious blue gasoline container. You could really taste the goat’s milk.

Our guide for the occasion had the same jovial crow’s feet and perma-smile that Abdul had, and at first I found this comforting. On our first day he introduced himself as Dané, which we heard the outfitter call him many times as they prepped our food and other gear. Later, Dané asked my dad if he remembered his name. Dad said, “sure – Dané?” But he was corrected. Apparently we were supposed to call him Mister Tapas. Oh?

I would later recognize this telling exchange as a moment of glorious, almost textbook foreshadowing. Something was off.

For the first two days Dané would walk up the 45-degree incline as fast as his short frame would allow, and then rest loudly above us – as though trying to make us feel the toll that our slow, meditative stepping took on his progress. For the final two days he decided I should no longer be allowed to take up the rear of the single-file line, and would stand obstinately, waiting for me to precede him, saying “let’sgolet’sgo” – as though the seconds I wasted would somehow cause the weather gods to crack the skies with  thunder and lightning  (which actually happened on our second morning, propelling us to take refuge in a tiny abandoned water buffalo shed for three cramped and hilarious hours). Then he would walk right on my tail, so close that I could see his walking stick poking its way into my peripheral vision.

Dané was unnervingly particular about where we stepped when it was steep or wet, which way we went around big rocks or to the distant ridge to see the sunset, where I sat when we took rests, how much I ate, and other small happenings of the trek. “You sit there. You take more.” As someone whose instinct is (admittedly) to do the opposite of what people tell me to do (something I’m working on), it was interesting to watch myself submit to him. “Yes, ji,” was about all I could manage to say. Even my father, who accepts responsibility for having taught me not to take any crap from anyone, reacted the same way. Once, when I came upon my dad next to the dying fire that Dané had been tending before he disappeared, I went to pull some sticks off the enormous pile of sticks nearby, with the aim of coaxing the fire back to life. My dad immediately told me to stop. I asked him why, and he said, rather sheepishly, that Dané had scolded him for doing the same thing moments earlier. Uhhh?

Abdul and Dané shared the same profession, the tendency to laugh at inappropriate times, and the expectation that I should be able to consume twice what I actually can consume. They both loved to have conversations with passers-by in languages that we could not understand, without any nods toward inclusion. But this is where their similarities ended. As a person for whom anxiety is typically rare, it was strange to realize that my level of general unease was inversely proportional to my distance from Dané – something I never felt with Abdul.

Even the laughing-at-inappropriate-times, shared by both guides, differed fundamentally between the two. Abdul laughed after telling us a particularly uncomfortable or depressing story. He told us, over breakfast one morning, of a story he had read in the newspaper, about three Indian soldiers stationed in Kashmir. They’d been repeatedly denied permission to leave their posts to visit their dying mothers in mainland India, and so they’d all committed suicide. As our expressions transitioned from the enjoyment of a tasty omelet to the horror of senseless death, Abdul laughed. “Very bad,” he said, still laughing. He laughed as though the many sad truths that expose themselves every day could somehow combine into the great, overarching joke that is life.

Dané’s choice of stories and ensuing laughter was of a much different material. On our first afternoon he chronicled the rise of inflation in India, which had made prices rise by something like 700 percent in the past fifteen years. This was due to the influx of “tourist like you. You have money. You pay high price, Indian can’t. Indian very poor.” As soon as he said this, he burst into laughter – while looking closely at my father, urging him to take part in the apparent hilarity of rampant inequality, of which we were the cause.

The thing about Dané, I gradually realized, was this: he needed us to know that he was in charge of this trek. Even though the absurdities of nationalities and the world market gave us the power everywhere else, he was at least in charge of this one trek. This was his domain, and we would do it his way. He resented us not for who we were, but for what we represented; in the same way that he resented everyone upon which his employment depended.

By our last day Dané had softened enough to let us see that he wanted to like us, but couldn’t let himself due to all the forces at play. He kept telling us about the longer treks he does, to the Kullu Valley, to Manali – two and four week treks. It was clear that is was only with this kind of time that he could allow his heart to open to the personhood of the Westerners he led into the mountains.

Fortunately our porter, Anal (pronounced Ah-nul, for all you perverts out there), had none of these hang-ups. He was thrilled to teach me words in Hindi and even invite us into his home on the way back to Mcleod. Anal, together with the impossibly wise-looking dog that quietly followed us for two days, almost entirely redeemed the group dynamic. (Dad, you were pretty fun too.)

A Glimpse of His Holiness

This past Saturday, Father and I marched down more than two hundred stairs at seven-thirty in the morning. We purposefully passed other tourists on the street as the meandered aimlessly uphill – regarding potential breakfast spots, admiring potential purchases.  We did our best to suppress the smug smiles that tugged at our lips.

We had a secret.

The secret was this: we were going to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak at the temple in town. We’d heard of the event from a fellow traveler the day before, a guy named Dustin from Texas, who speaks Tibetan. Apparently HH’s appearances around the area of his home-in-exile (Mcleodganj) always take place in a nebulous and impossible-to-verify kind of way; everything is spread by word of mouth. So you have to be in-the-know. And here we were, in-the-know. It felt pretty cool.

We arrived a half hour before the big cheese was due to show. The contents of my backpack have never gotten a more thorough going-through. Each pen was de-capped and examined. It was clear that no one was about to get any contraband near the holiest of Tibetan holies. We staked out spots on the cold stone floor, right behind a group of maroon-clad nuns with shaved heads. Perhaps three quarters of the crowd in attendance wore maroon. Every few minutes another nun would appear and the seated ones would manage to create a square foot of space where there had been none before. They sat on their sandals.  Most attendees deftly fingered prayer beads as they murmured under their breath. Minutes stretched into tens of minutes. Bums everywhere shifted and fell asleep. The air hummed with excitement.

Then! A group of musicians appeared to line the entrance, carrying bass drums and bagpipes. I could practically hear the collective thought of every Westerner in the room: Bagpipes? The bagpipes were green. The players wore vests of embroidered gold over white collared shirts. Each one had a tiny Indian flag tucked into his waistband. Thirty minutes of silent, absent-minded mallet-twirling ensued.

Then! The bass drums were struck as the car brigade rolled up. The bagpipes were sounded, in a way much softer and more melodious than I remembered bagpipes to sound (from that one time they played behind our high school wind ensemble in the field house, where the vaulted acoustics made it so loud I couldn’t hear my own flute). Hundreds of important-looking people flooded the walkway. And there, jostling in the middle, we saw it: the wide and be-spectacled face of His Holiness himself, radiating guileless good cheer in that easy and effortless way of his.

Once he was seated on a throne-like seat, there was a song and dance performance, which HH seemed to enjoy (though it was hard to tell since he seems to enjoy everything). Unfortunately for us, all the speeches that followed were in Tibetan or Hindi. We gathered that the theme of the celebration was to say “thank you” to the government of Himachal Pradesh for giving a home to the Tibetan community in exile for the last fifty years. One speech was in English, and a few very fine things were said to affirm the friendship between the Indians and Tibetans, such as:

“They say that friendship among evil people is like the first half of the day: the shadows start out long but then get shorter and shorter until noon, when there is no shadow. But friendship between good people is like the second half of the day, because the shadows start out short but then get longer and longer. When the Tibetans first arrived we had no idea what to make of them. But now we really love them. The friendship between the Indians and the Tibetans is like the second half of the day.”

After each speech His Holiness would bequeath white scarves onto the shoulders of various Indian officials.

I wish I could say that it was a heartwarming experience, to witness this display of Indo-Tibetan love. But it was all very diplomatic, very political. Only two weeks prior my friend told me of a fight that had broken out at a night venue just down the street from where we were eating momos, between crowds of Hindus and Tibetans. Dozens of people got involved, and it was bloody.  Not to mention the fact that the area India allotted to the refugees, while absolutely beautiful, is also prone to earthquakes – so no one really wanted to live there anyway.

After gaining just a shallow understanding of the central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, I find it impossible to conceive of a group of people more deserving of peace and security. And yet those Tibetans whose age and health permits them to escape the brutality of Chinese occupation by making the month-long trek over the Himalaya remain essentially homeless, forced to eek out a living on the margins of another country – a country that’s already tripping over its own struggle for cultural cohesion.

On top of that, two weeks ago an enormous earthquake decimated the Yushu region of Tibet, destroying ninety percent of buildings and claiming as many as two thousand lives. The disaster displaced hundreds of thousands of survivors and yielded enough dead bodies to necessitate huge funeral pyres, which conflicts with the Buddhist tradition of individual funerals. Given that the prevailing religion of Tibet assumes love and compassion for all sentient beings, there could be no greater or more tragic irony than the fact that the Tibetan community continues to bear so much oppression and hardship.**

While I was retrieving my father from Delhi, I had the opportunity to read an American newspaper. One of the twenty-word blurbs that decorated the left hand column said that France and Russia had decided to “draw lines under the issue of Tibet” in order to move their relationship with China forward. Casting aside for a moment the kind of horrendous journalism that allows such meaningless words to go to print, the question remains: why won’t anyone just call a spade a spade? What the headline should say is this: 

We are willing to allow violent and systematic cultural destruction and displacement to continue as long as it remains politically and economically convenient.

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** There are tables set up all around Mcleodganj where volunteers are collecting donations to fund relief efforts in Tibet. Donations made to this cause via Mountains will be matched. Please consider that even a few US dollars is a huge sum when converted to rupees. Any help is sincerely appreciated (and will generate good karma for everyone involved).

Take me Down to the Cricket Pitch

The ten-day silent meditation retreat that I finished a few days ago was a total trip. I’ve decided not to write about it here, because my heart can only absorb and project so much at once and still keep pumping, but suffice it to say that it was a beautiful and uplifting experience that changed the way I think about the nature of many things. I highly recommend this course to anyone who has the vaguest interest in Buddhism or meditation, or even if you simply have an open mind and time to kill (next course starts on April 29th and they continue through June).

Instead this post will detail the ensuing descent “back into the swirl,” as Mark-the-meditation-leader so accurately put it. After clumsily coping with re-entry for three days, a most surreal rickshaw ride brought Mike and I (reunited at last) down the mountain into D-shala proper – to watch the Kings of Punjab crush the Chennai Superkings into sweet, sweet oblivion.

Unfortunately, certain circumstances landed us at Gate 3 a few minutes after the game had already started, and the line was two hundred strong. Rumor had it the game had been oversold by a thousand tickets! (All of which advised participants, in so many words, to leave their coconuts at home.) Soldiers guarded the stone walls of the castle-like stadium – a veritable vision in red. The gate was officially closed – but our chances were “50-50” according to the man in front of us. We stuck it out and crept forward in sporadic bursts.  As Mike and I waited, continuing our five-year legacy of trying (with minimal success) not to fight, we saw a soldier push a man as he attempted to scale the wall – and promptly fall back into the aluminum-enclosed inner waiting area.

Then: domino effect. One push became many. One person became the whole crowd, and before we knew it the metal sides of the inner area exploded – and out poured a stream of laughing and yelping Indians. Mike and I watched from outside (we were that far back in line). The soldiers slammed some wooden blocks across the entry, clearly not amused, and at that point we decided our 650-rupee tickets were useless. We retreated to the park next door to consider the situation (if only we’d brought some contraband! Just one little coconut to console us!) and Mike gave his ticket to a young hopeful. We decided to leave.

But apparently the universe wasn’t ready for us to do that. On our way out, a young boy asked us hurriedly if we wanted to see the game. We said we’d given up our tickets, it was just not possible. Then he pointed to the metal roof of the building next to the line, where we’d watched hundreds of Indian men gradually staking their claims over the course of the past hour. We said: “Roof?” He said: “Jee.” And we went.

When we saw the access point, however, we hesitated. The rusty metal edges and lack of viable footholds screamed disaster. The Indian men at the top were very excited about our ascent – but their faces quickly deflated when we reconsidered and turned to leave. Then: shouting and commotion! When we looked back, a ladder had mysteriously appeared in the very spot we’d been considering. All the Indian men had renewed their cheers. After they had (somewhat miraculously) removed the only obstacle to our company, we simply couldn’t say no. We had splurged for tetanus shots, after all.

They hauled us aboard. I know I say this a lot, but this is another time that we were literally engulfed by a sea of Indian men. Mike came up after me and we shared a glorious few moments of unadulterated laughter from a few meters apart. Then we ventured a glance at our hundreds of adoring fans – all of them shouting for our good names and countries, the game behind them nearly forgotten in all the hullabaloo.

The roof had peaks and valleys, all made of corrugated tin, and we had to awkwardly balance on a 45 degree angle as we climbed over and across them. Any time I made eye contact across the valley, furious motions were made to encourage me to move to the next one, and these were met with equally fervent urges and pleas from those seated next to me not to go there, where the bad men supposedly were. My green flip flops (they’ve been through so much!) somehow appeared in the hands of some guy across the way, like bait.

Then I spotted a man in a red shirt who had secured what could be  accurately dubbed the best seat in the house: at the front of the first peak, the seat that all eyes naturally pointed towards, as it was closest to the pitch. He was offering it to me. After a few minutes of crouching contemplation, I stood up – much to the chagrin of my neighbors on the second peak – and went for it. Many hands were offered, but I refused them all. I made my own way, praying silently that I wouldn’t slip and fall on the dusty metal incline, tumble all the way down to the gutter-like valley, and give hundreds of excited Indians the excuse to surge downward and “help me up.”

Thankfully I didn’t slip. I braced my foot against the first peak and grabbed red shirt’s hand, though, and as he pulled me upward I felt the fat balding man behind me grab my bum. I was already up and out of harm’s way, so I let it slide this once.

I can’t even describe the view from this seat! How I ached for a camera, any camera! The stadium looming like a  red cathedral, the trees shrinking away from it, all the people denied entry loitering outside Gate 3 spread out under my feet, all of them thrilled to wave and shout back at me. A guy on the ground took shots of us with his super-sweet camera as an  Indian flag waved over our heads. My red-shirted friend said we would be in the next day’s paper. I’ve never felt like more of a celebrity in my life. We pretended to watch the game that we couldn’t see and roared with glee whenever fireworks went off – a sign that the batter had hit a six. The Kings of Punjab were coming out strong! It was sweet vicarious glory.

Then the first drops of rain fell, and my mind quickly shifted gears. Getting up here was challenge enough, but now my mind flooded with images of a stampede across wet sloping metal with jagged, curvy  edges. It took me ten minutes to get Mike’s attention, as he was seated further down the first peak. We commenced the get-down.

This is where it got tricky. The same fat bald man who’d grabbed me offered me his hand. I went for the guy next to him, who was much less threatening. Then I jumped down, managing to land on my feet – except that when I straightened Sir Fat Bald Man abandoned all  pretense and laid his hands flat against my chest. I was shocked and also not shocked and I shoved him away, hard. He landed in the gutter as I advised him not to touch me.  The others gave me space.

Further along the obstacle course there was a crush of many bodies, and a young boy used the opportunity to covetously pinch my bum. I turned and smacked him lightly on the head. “Kyaa!” he shouted incredulously. I said he knew what he had done. He grinned, slow and sheepish.

Then I was peering down at the ground: a ten foot drop onto broken glass. I was in the middle of considering which body part I most preferred to sacrifice when a very tall man very ceremoniously put down the things he was carrying in order to give me a hand from below. You might think this was helpful – but ten feet is still ten feet, and I was wearing pantaloons. In the space of the ensuing second, ten more Indians gathered below to help. I mentally steeled myself, and then five Indians above and the ten below seamlessly transported me to the ground. They had all done their best to use their hands appropriately, and for this I granted many smiles and handshakes and photos taken with mobile phones once my feet were safely on the ground. There was not so much as a smudge on my pantaloons.

Mike also made it down, and the crowd began to disperse back to their seats, or home because of the rain. Red Shirt invited us to have coffee, and while we sipped it he said:

“Jessica, I am very sorry if anyone was rude to you. You are in my country. Your happiness is my job. I should protect you. I am sorry for those men.” His hands were pressed together in front of his chest, his eyes cast down.

Sometimes there are no words for how India makes me feel. We learned later, thanks to Mike’s text-message update, that the Chennai Superkings took the lead at game’s end. The picture that appeared in the newspaper the next day was indeed of the roof – but it had been taken before I’d gotten there. It was in color – I could pick out Red Shirt and all.