Subject: Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Here in India, of course, Thanksgiving
doesn't make the radar at all. It's not Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist
or even Christian, and the only people who celebrate it are Americans
(and Canadians, though they get the date wrong). The only reason I
even know it's Thanksgiving is that they mentioned it on BBC World.
But anyway, I just wanted to let you know how thankful I am for all
my friends and family in various places around the globe. Happy
Thanksgiving, and a wonderful holiday season to you all!
From a place where Turkey is a country not a bird,
Subject: Transit After our wildlife adventure in Chitwan, it was finally time to say goodbye
to Nepal. Of course, this being the third world, you don't just get in a
comfortable box in one place and come out in another. Simply to get from
Sauraha to the Indian border town of Sunauli, we had to get back in a jeep,
this time with a motorcycle crammed into the back with us; ride through the
river again; get onto a bus that took us to a town that is almost but not
quite Sunauli; and get into a cycle-rickshaw that took us the final four
kilometers.
Sunauli is everything you'd expect of a border town between two poor
countries. It's sprawling, unplanned, filthy and unpleasant, and virtually
every business on the Nepali side was dedicated in one way or another to
providing poor services to tourists at inflated prices. Everyone in town
helpfully told us what time the train left for Varanasi, and each answer was
different. As it turned out, despite our rickshaw-wallah's assurance that he
would take us right across the border and to the train, there is no train
from Sunauli. What there was instead was a travel agent who could book us on
a bus from Sunauli to the nearest train station -- three hours away -- and
from there to Varanasi. Needless to say, neither the dishonest
rickshaw-wallah nor the travel agent got any further business from us.
Eventually we managed to fill out all the necessary forms at both the Nepali
and Indian border posts, and at last we were into India. And even though the
border is unrestricted for Indians and Nepalis, the differences between the
two countries were immediately apparent. Jenny noticed that the merchandise
in the shops was nicer, and the cars and motorcycles were nicer too. People
had better shoes. There was an entire shop devoted to sporting goods --
cricket bats, soccer balls -- which suggested that there were enough people
with discretionary income to support it.
I will spare you the complexities of our travel decisions and the
negotiations that followed, but we ended up sharing a taxi to Gorakhpur -- a
very shiny Maruti SUV, no less! -- with two Israeli women and a Nepali man
who turned out to be a member of a Gurkha regiment in the Indian army and
had been decorated in the Kargil War in Kashmir. A couple of hours later, we
arrived at the Gorakhpur train station.
Gorakhpur is a city of over two million people, most of whom can't possibly
deserve such a fate. According to the Lonely Planet, the local tourist
office provides the helpful information that "There are no sights in
Gorakhpur," and the city is regularly attacked by flies and mosquitoes in
plague proportions. The air was thick and smoky, almost as foul as Anyang at
its worst. The train station, like most in India, was a concrete vault
teeming with people, cows, people, dogs, people and more people. Once we'd
worked out when to come for the train in the morning, we retreated to a
dirty but passable hotel across the street. It boasted a restaurant, which
turned out to be nothing more than some plastic chairs and tables on the
bare cement rooftop, and we braced ourselves for the worst. It came as a
shock, then, that the chicken tikka masala and paneer dopiaza were in fact
of the highest quality. Sadly, the same cannot be said for anything else we
experienced in Gorakhpur.
The next morning, however, we got our first taste of Indian Railways, which
is good fun. The trains roll along at a liesurely pace, stopping often and
letting on an ever-changing assortment of food and drink vendors. To the
amusement of the biochemist from Lucknow who sat across from us, we sampled
dish after dish -- samosas for a rupee (2 cents) a piece, various lentil
salads for two rupies a leaf-ful -- and washed it all down with excellent
chai, similarly priced. Supposedly there are some folks who have actually
worked out which stations are best for which dishes and plan accordingly,
but we were happy with what came to us by random happenstance.
This email is now probably as long as our journey from Chitwan to Varanasi,
but we did finally arrive at the end, and so have you. Next time I'll tell
you about our adventures in the streets and silk shops of Benares.
Somewhere laborious to get to but fascinating to be,
--
Subject: Death and Silks in Varanasi
Varanasi is India at its best and worst. Colorful, crowded, ancient and
crumbling, Varanasi (formerly called Benares) is
probably the holiest and busiest center of Hinduism in the world. To
paraphrase Mark Twain, it is one of the oldest cities
in the world, and it looks like it. It strings along a curve in the holy
Ganges river for a few miles, and it has been stringing
along credulous pilgrims and tourists for thousands of years.
When we first
arrived, we were marked by our backpacks,
and everyone in the entire Old City had a hotel that was just right for us.
After wandering through the maze of back
streets for a couple of hours, we finally managed to find a location that
corresponded to something in the guidebook, and
we took a dingy room in the dingy Golden Lodge because it was less dingy
than the Yogi Lodge and we were tired.
Hindus regard Benares as the most auspicious place to die. Down on the ghats
-- the long stairways that lead to the edge
of the Ganges -- unhelpful self-appointed guides invariably point you
towards "cremation ghat." That's where they burn
the bodies of the dearly departed, in full view of whoever happens to be
walking by (though cameras are strongly
discouraged). When we passed, we counted thirteen fires in progress:
thirteen people who had died just hours earlier. As
you walk the streets near the burning ghats, chances are good that you will
be passed by a group of men carrying a
shrouded body on a bamboo stretcher while chanting a perfunctory "Ram nam
sat hai" (The name of God is true). Closer
to the river's edge are the merchants who weigh out the wood and the
incense, who sell the shrouds and flower
garlands. For the bereaved, it's a predatory process -- far worse than the
endless pressure for "massage?" and "hello boat
going?" that assaults every Westerner who draws near. To produce such a
prodigious supply of corpses, you need to
have a lot of dying people around. The Old City of Varanasi boasts numerous
dormitories that specialize in either sick or
old people; we were told that the two categories of nearly-dead are kept
separate.
Indeed, decay and death are unavoidable on its crowded streets. Dying dogs
and rats and cows are everywhere, as are
their more-or-less healthy counterparts and the waste they produce. Septic
Ganges water is pumped up into the city and
used to hose it off, which means that the streets, and especially the steep,
narrow alleyways of the Old City, are
constantly running with trickles of fecal mud and garbage. The air, too, is
filthy. The auto-rickshaws, cars, trucks,
motorcycles all pour toxins into the air, which mix with the smoke from
thousands of cooking and garbage fires. When
the electricity is out, which is often, diesel generators belch black clouds
into the main street. And on top of all that,
Varanasi has probably the worst noise pollution on earth. Every temple has
bells, and people are constantly ringing
them, but that's nothing compared to the loudspeakers. Every morning from 4
to 6, we were subjected to a woman
chanting her puja to the accompaniment of harmonium, all blasted through
low-fi cones at rock-concert decibels. The
chanting and singing and clanging of bells was then continuous until about 2
am, when they would taper off and leave us
to just the lowing of cows, the barking of dogs and the shouts of human
passers-by.
Then why, you must be asking, did we decide to come to Varanasi? What could
have possessed us to make it our *first
destination* in helter-skelter India? The answer is that Varanasi is not
only filthy and chaotic but endlessly compelling.
It's India in microcosm. The ghats and the Old City are bursting with
amazing architecture in every Indian style -- a Nepali
temple here, there a South Indian shikara-style temple, a mosque built by
the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, a white
marble Rajput palace built by the maharaja of Udaipur. There are so many
monuments of such incalculable cultural
value that half of them are lived in by squatters or converted into sari
shops. Walking the streets are women in beautiful
saris and Punjabi suits and men with their faces painted in a dozen
different ways to show their religious status and
devotions. Mendicants and holy men with long gray hair and beards wander
about in saffron or white robes. Chattering
families of shopping tourists back up traffic in the narrow lanes by pausing
en masse to bow at a Ganesh shrine which is
also a Hindipop tape shop. Standing out against the swirl and color are
black-clad Muslim women, sometimes veiled. Down by the ghats, Brahmins wash buffalo in the water, rich Indians bathe
ritually in the holy river, poor Indians do their
laundry there. Every evening an elaborate ceremony is performed, a kind of
ritual dance involving fire and incense while
bells ring and floating candles are released in their hundreds out into the
current of the Ganga.
Benares is also a center of learning and traditional Hindu culture. It's the
home of Benares Hindu University, one of the
best in the country. Like most holy cities -- think of Rome or Jerusalem -- it's a conservative town. In India, conservatism
too often means Hindu fundamentalism, which too often means anti-Muslim
sentiment. After the BJP -- now the ruling
party in India -- fomented the riots that led to the destruction of the
mosque at Ayodhya a decade ago, they let it be
known that Aurangzeb's mosque in Varanasi was next on the hit list. It's
consequently surrounded by high iron bars and
scads of police officers, and you have to go through a metal detector before
you can get anywhere near it. Just outside the
perimiter is a ring of Hindu idol shops and shrines. The atmosphere is
menacing. Behind the mosque is a no-man's land;
empty of people, it has become a popular lounging spot for Varanasi's vast
monkey population.
Hindus in Benares talk freely of war with Pakistan. Our hotel-keeper gave us
a speech that we've heard all too often. "Every day they are killing-killing with the terror in Kashmir. Why? If
India makes a war, just *one day* -- shp! -- Pakistan
finished." Disturbingly, the BJP minister of Gujarat -- a state that's been
torn apart by Hindu-Muslim violence -- has made
much the same argument, frankly challenging Pakistan to a fight. It's true
that in terms of conventional weapons,
Pakistan is no match for India. That's why Pakistan has refused to rule out
first use of its nuclear arsenal. If India
threatens to take Islamabad or Karachi, chances are good that Delhi and
Mumbai will cease to exist. When I suggested
as much to our hotel-wallah, he informed me that India would simply knock
the Pakistani missiles out of the sky.
Stunned, I tried to explain that no such missile defense actually exists --
that even America has only recently decided to
build such a thing, and many scientists say it's impossible -- but I'm not
sure he believed me. And even if he did, too
many Hindu Indians -- mostly the high-caste supporters of the BJP, like our
Brahmin hotel-wallah -- believe in their own
country's invincibility and are hankering for war.
*
Besides death, religion and scholarship, Varanasi is also known for its
silks. Before we arrived, Jenny told me she
wanted to see about finding a guide, maybe a local woman, who could take her
to a nice place to buy Indian clothes and
help her through the process. So that evening when we met an American who
claimed to be doing business at the best
silk shop in Benares, we decided to take him up on his offer to show us the
place. Colin was a cheerful young man who
runs a textile shop in Chicago; he told us he'd come to Varanasi three years
ago, and after much searching discovered
Cottage Silk Emporium. It's exactly like every other silk shop, except that
its proprietor, Anil, has impeccable taste,
access to the best silks in the city, and a friendly relationship with an
astonishingly good tailor. Colin, before he left town,
showed us the clothes he'd had made: a perfect copy of a pair of Diesel
jeans, done in thick black raw silk, and a
masterful copy of a YSL dress shirt to go with it. So when Anil asked us
what we were looking for, we told him: wedding
clothes.
Jenny and I were planning to get our wedding clothes in India. Granted, this
was our first destination in the country, but
when would we have another opportunity like this? We had good reasons to
trust Anil, and trust is a rare commodity in
India. So we went ahead and let Anil guide us through the process, which
stretched out over our entire ten-day stay.
Shopping for silks is a sumptuous experience. You slip off your shoes and
spread out on the white cloth mat while the
shopkeeper tosses out scarves or other bolts of fabric, until you are
surrounded by great heaps of shimmering textiles.
We'd been to a few shops before we discovered Anil's. Jenny bought a few
scarves, I got myself a couple of kurta pajama
outfits that actually caused me to look so Indian that people began speaking
to me in Hindi on the street, and led a
Japanese man at an Internet cafe to ask me for an ashtray. (At another
Internet cafe, it was decided that my Indian shirt
made me look like Atel Bihari Vajpayee, prime minister of India.) So we were
familiar with the process of looking at
silks, and also with the quality available. But Anil's approach was
different. When it came to our wedding clothes, he
listened closely to what we wanted, looked at the pictures we'd printed out
from the Internet, and told us to come back
that evening. When we returned, he showed us only three or four different
fabrics, but he could have stopped after the
first: it was perfect. It was a creamy white silk woven with floral patterns
in silver and gold, and Jenny and I fell in love
with it immediately.
Over subsequent days, the rest of the clothes came together. We found just
the right trim for Jenny's dress, and the right
scarf for her veil. Then came the fabric for my suit. Time was getting tight
-- Anil had to leave town for a couple of days,
so we needed to go to the tailor's shop for measuring that evening. In the
morning I agreed to go ahead with a particular
fabric, but it wasn't quite right, and by afternoon I was ready to say no.
When we met Anil that evening, I told him as
much. "I thought so," he said. "I thought, Maybe this isn't right for Josh.
So I also got this fabric." He pulled a bolt of cloth
from the shelf, and it was exactly right.
So we went to the tailor's and were measured, and then came several days of
anxiety as we waited to see what exactly
we'd end up with. (The nervousness was made worse by the bout of stomach flu
Jenny and I went through; Anil, going
way above and beyond the call of duty, took us to a doctor who gave us
medicine that patched us right up.) Jenny was
absolutely terrified that she'd asked for trim on the collar, which is not
at all what she'd wanted. More nebulously, we
were worried that we'd end up with clothes that just weren't *it*, that we
would spend our money and end up with
also-rans. We were at Anil's shop as soon as the clothes were supposed to be
ready, but this is India and there were
delays. "Yesterday no power coming," he told us, "so the tailor couldn't
finish the job. But tonight I will have the clothes."
It was a very long day, but as it turned out, we needn't have stressed. We
tried the clothes that evening and they were
perfect. Jenny thought I looked handsome in my suit, and I know for an
absolute fact that Jenny looked gorgeous in her
dress. (Yes, yes, I'm not supposed to see the wedding dress until the day of
the wedding, but who else was going to let
Jenny know whether it pooched out in the back or something?) We were so
charged up that we even let Anil talk us into
looking at traditional men's shoes and buying me a pair of silk-brocade
pointy ones. They're very silly, and fairly unlikely
to find their way to our wedding, but they were only $8 and they're good
fun. I can wear them with my Vajpayee shirt
when I feel like looking like a maharaja. In the meantime, the silks are on
their way to California via DHL, along with all
the other trinkets we've picked up on the way. Our work done and our packs
lightened, we said goodbye to our new
friend Anil and boarded the overnight train for Orchha.
*
Orchha is a place Indians have never heard of. It's name means "hidden
place," and it's a sleepy little town that boasts a
surprisingly extensive collection of palaces and temples, now largely
ruined. Our hotel was in the old maharaja's palace,
which makes it sound more romantic than it actually was. Unfortunately the
proprietors have managed to turn the
sumptuous vaulted rooms of the palace into humdrum Indian hotel rooms, with
the usual hard beds, dusty sheets and
spotty electrical work. (In this case, it was the water heater that wouldn't
turn on; we were given buckets of hot water
instead. I'm beginning to think these water heaters are largely ornamental.)
We spent two nights enjoying the peace and
quiet -- good God, quiet! -- and wandering about the parrot-infested palaces
before moving on to Gwalior.
In Gwalior, the thing to see is the fort, which is giant and reputedly
impregnable, which is why it's changed hands so
many times over its history. This afternoon we went on a lovely guided tour.
The highlight was the main palace building,
which boasted 16th-century air conditioning and intercom systems -- the
latter were tubes cut into the stone walls and
running from one room to another across the palace. There were also temples,
a Sikh gurdwara, and a surly gang of very
expensively dressed young Indian men who made a great show of not paying the
5-rupee entrance fee.
The other great
thing in town is the ridiculous 19th century palace of the Scindia family,
which is decorated in a style that William
Randolph Hearst would love. It's full of the ugliest expensive things you
can imagine, like Belgian cut-glass furniture.
There's even a gallery of bad high-end erotica, the piece de resistance
being a marble sculpture of Leda getting very
nasty indeed with her swan. Like Hearst Castle, it was definitely good for a
laugh.
So that's Gwalior. Tomorrow we head for Delhi. On the one hand, we're really
looking forward to the Western food; the hotel we've picked out is very
close to a Pizza Hut, a McDonald's, a TGI Friday's and a Bennigan's. On the
other hand, no city in India is more chaotic and congested. And unlike
Varanasi or Mumbai, Delhi is a place I've never been before. Pray for us.
Able to turn Indian in a single costume change,
--
[happy thanksgiving]
[transit]
[death and silks in varanasi]
Date: Thu Nov 28, 2002
Josh
Date: Mon Dec 2
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Sun Dec 8, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
