How It Strikes Me

I am living in India.  I am not on vacation anymore, or on hiatus from my "real" life.  I have taken up residence in India.  India has taken up residence in me.

Cows in the road, dogs sleeping lazily wherever they please, sparrows the size of doves, none of these surprise me anymore.  They are a part of my life.  I get up early in the morning, just after the sun.  Not because the dogs who howl all night long have kept me up, they haven't.  I am immune to their incessant bays.  It is the birds calling and chattering away that get through to my slumbering mind.  I go into my little kitchen which has been newly equipped with a kerosene burner and a toaster so that I can begin my mornings slowly, solitarily.  I open my door to the outside world and the second gated door that keeps me locked safely inside while I sleep.  I set up a low slung chair at the top of my steps and sit and sip coffee and watch the birds do their morning dance.  Today I fed them scraps of my toast to bring them closer to me on the ground.

I roll up the mosquito nets that cover the windows, I pull back the curtains, I open the shutters if they have been caught in the wind and closed a little in the night.

I check my email.  I get frustrated with the infuriating speed of the Internet.  I should have faster speeds but the Internet guy has royally slacked off and we've been playing phone tag for over two weeks.  Chandana has been the heavy and gone to his office to intimidate him into action, but that's only gotten him so far.  Yesterday I decided to call him every 10 minutes to see if that would get through to him.  I felt like the boy in About a Boy buzzing on Hugh Grant's door: buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz...... Unlike the boy, I am still waiting for a reply.

Around nine I get dressed and load up my bike and head off to work.  Monday through Friday I teach at Antaranga.  I've started doing a little show with the 8 and 9 year olds.  They are writing it, based on an Indian folk tale that they told me.  On Sunday's I work with my Chitra girls.  In both cases, I am amazed each day how much we are able to understand each other despite the fact that we do not really speak each other's language.

At Antaranga my biggest challenge is that one of the women teachers doesn't speak English and yet wants to tell the kids what to do.  She can't know what they are to do, because she hasn't understood me.  She bosses them. Sometimes she pulls them forcibly where she thinks they are meant to be.  As a visiting teacher, part of my purpose is to give the regular teachers another method of working from which to draw from.  She doesn't understand my method of working.  I am comfortable with the learning curve.  I know that the kids may not understand what we are doing perfectly today.  But tomorrow they will have absorbed it somehow and they will get it more right, and the day after that, even more right.  That is if they are given space to fail and to find their own way of understanding.

I've discovered that "imagination" is not a word that translates easily into Bengali.  Imagination is rampant in these parts, but when I use the word, people look at me as if I've spoken martian.  This makes teaching how to use the imagination very difficult, but fun.  I've had to go about it slyly.   I've had to trick both the students and fellow teachers into using their imagination without asking them to use it.  It wonderful for my teaching skills.  I'm having to relearn how to teach everything I thought I knew already how to teach.

At 11 or so I ride to the shops or back home where I write or work on the website I'm starting for Chandana's Ahimsa programs, which is where my Chitra group gets it's funding.  I usually eat lunch made by the ladies who work in my house, I nap if it is hot outside....and it's always hot.  In the evening I may go back to Antaranga for the evening classes, or write some more, or read, or visit with Chandana.  There are nights coming up where concerts have been arranged, visits to villages, I'm not sure what else.  People are gently anxious to make sure that I am entertained.  Last night I kept to myself and went to a cafe for dinner and started to read a new book by Vikram Seth, An Equal Music, that made me weep at almost every page.

Santiniketan is easy to live in, once you accept that the well may literally run dry in the night and therefore there is no way to wash in the morning.  The electricity, too, might go at any minute.  Shopping for groceries is something you can only do between 10 and one and then again between 5:30 and 9, except on Tuesdays when you can only go in the morning and Wednesday and Sundays when you can't shop at all.

I am beginning to get a feel for the strange interplay in India between what is locked away and what is always kept exposed.  It is a common sight to see men peeing in the street.  I've even had cab drivers stop, get out of the car, walk to the back of the car and unzip to pee, then they get casually back in the car and continue on.  Indian's can sleep anywhere too, especially the men, sidewalks, fences, the edge of the railway track, the street.

When Nicole and I were waiting for the train to leave Howrah station we watched a young man of 16 or so, use the spout in the middle of the next set of tracks to take a bath and brush his teeth.  Hundreds of people were around him, either on the platform opposite or the train right next to him.  He took off all his clothes, except his underwear, washed with soap and water, used deodorant that he'd kept in a plastic bag along with his aftershave which he put on next, then he opened up a brand new undershirt, put on his pants and a belt 4 times too big, and a cleanly pressed shirt.  He combed his hair, brushed his teeth and looked a million bucks.  You'd never know he lived on platform 9 of Howrah Station, where he also, it turns out, went back to work selling fruit when his morning bath was done.

Yet all the windows in India have grates or bars, usually in art deco designs, but bars none-the-less.  All the doors have locks on both sides to keep some people in and other people out.  I haven't met a cabinet without a lock, except in the Bengal Club, originally an English domain, where presumably it is safe to leave your belongings out.  It's as if things are meant to be secured, fastened to a place, hidden away, but the most intimate daily actions of humans are lived under the stares of everyone around them.

In one or two room houses where multiple generations live and sleep together, even sex becomes a sanctioned public act.  I am thankful that I haven't moved into that part of India.

Much to the confoundment of the people who look after me, I have not abandoned my western sense of modesty, or of personal space, which is one of the most foreign things about me here, where no one gets the concept of keeping to oneself.  But I'm loosening up in that regard.  Today, as I ate my breakfast, Minou came in to take the mosquito net off the bed, to sweep, to generally be in my space, helping me.  I realized after a few minutes that it has become natural to have her here, to have her gently clearing my domain while I sit in my nightgown, hair dishevelled, eating my toast.  I don't bristle at the intrusion,  I don't even feel guilty that she is on the floor drawing the broom under my feet.  I have accepted that, for her, that is the order of things and to try and change that order would be disrespectful.

I don't speak Bengali yet.  That's what gives me away, not my skin, or my western-Indian fusion of dressing.  However, I'm learning more subtle Indian vocabularies.  First, there are the various head bobs where the chin wobbles at slightly different angles to indicate different things: "Yes", "Maybe", "I want you to think I'm saying yes but the answer is really no".  Then there is the the liberal use of "hunh," which indicates to another person that you are listening and that you have understood.

"I would like you to go...."

"Hunh...."

"...to the store..."

"Hunh, hunh..."

"....and get some lentils."

"Hunh, hunh, hunh.'

"Not the big red lentils..."

"Hunh..."

"...but the small yellow ones."

"HUNH...!!! Hunh.  Atcha.  Tik Atche." (That last part means, "Ok.   All right".)

I've been sitting in the room on countless occasions when someone I am talking to will get a call and all I hear from my point of view is, "Hunh..........  Hunh, hunh......hunh, hunh, hunh......hunnnnh....hunh....hunh....hunh.  Atcha Atcha.  Tik atche."

Do not be surprised when I come back to the States and you hear me saying, "Hunh.  Hunh."  You have been warned.

I started to write, just then, "when I come back HOME," but it didn't stick.  It didn't stick because I am home, at least for now.  Chandana asked me the other day why it had taken me so long to get to India when it obviously suits me so well.  I told her because it wasn't the right time.  But now it is.  Now I am home.

I went out to one of the Santal villages today for a festival to celebrate all the villages of the area and what they had accomplished in the last year.  There were games where women had to run the farthest carrying a jug full of water on their heads and bicycle races where the aim was to go the SLOWEST without falling over.  There was a dancing and drumming contest where groups from each of the Santal villages competed, a ferris wheel, ice cream vendors.  All this was set out in the middle of rice paddies and thatched roof houses with dung patties drying on the walls.

The woman who lives upstairs from me, Jeanne, took me out to the fair because Chandana is out of town.  As our car was taking us back home at dusk, a mist was forming over the crimson rice fields, the palm trees were silhouetted against a dark pink and blue sky.  Streams of boys on bikes who were heading to where we were driving away from, appeared and disappeared again in our headlights.  Oxen relaxed on the sides of the road, leaning against houses painted pale blue and red, after long days pulling bullock carts.  There was nothing about the scenes floating by outside the window of the Ambassador that should have made sense to me and yet it was completely normal, completely right and I said to Jeanne, "I don't think I've ever seen anything more beautiful than these villages around Santiniketan."

I haven't.  Not even my beloved Paris, or the beach in Mexico, or the Olympics rising over the Puget Sound can hold a candle to these tiny backwater towns where so many people live a simple life getting married, having babies, re-learning how to be organic farmers, weaving, holding hands, serving tea to strangers.  This place is no idyll, there's poverty, drought, and child-brides, but in a co-operative fashion the native villagers, Indians from the surrounding areas and foreigners who have taken an interest have slowly, over the last 20 years, been bringing the villages not so much into the modern age, but into balance by establishing  schools, nutritional programs, even a small local hospital.   With help from people like Chandanda and groups like Ahimsa, these villages are becoming stronger without losing their souls, their individuality, their identities.  And because of it, they have a glow about them, a sense of light unlike any I've encountered anywhere else on the planet.

I don't know what any of this means.  I haven't a clue.  In terms of me, I mean.  I just know that today this is how it strikes me.  I am living in India and I am at home, all at the same time.

Peaceful, Easy Feeling

When Eva suggested that I come to Santiniketan, she said that it’s a very different experience to be living and working in India rather than being a tourist, even if you are only working for a few weeks.


I haven’t really been working all that much in the last week. But I have a purpose, a job that is making itself up as I go along. In addition to going to the village to meet the women who I’ll be creating a short Tagore piece with, I helped Eva do two art workshops at the Antaranga School.

As the chief fundraiser for the Antaranga School, Eva has planned an exhibition in Switzerland of artwork created by the students. On Friday morning we worked with 20 of the younger kids. I started off the class with an acting excersise designed to get the kids thinking about different environments. The students were divided into 5 groups; each team was assigned a place: The Sea, Jungle, Desert, Outer Space, The Circus. Members of the “Sea” group came up one at a time and created a frozen picture of the Ocean by announcing what they wanted to be and striking a pose of that thing: wave, fish, whale, shark. Once they were in place, I had the non-sea kids count to three, at which time our “ocean” would come to life. It’s a simple, but very effective way to get kids moving creatively.

After they got their imaginations going, each team used thick finger paint to create large paintings of their environment. The paintings were great; but ended up being more specific than Eva had anticipated. She had hoped the students might work a little more abstractly so that in the second half of the workshop, which takes place on Monday, the young artists could be freshly inspired by the backdrops to imagine a new environment into which they could introduce the appropriate animals. We needed more paintings.

I thought quickly. I had all the kids gather the paint in the center of the room, then I had us all sit in a clump around the paint. I told the adults to put paper all around our circle. With Nandu translating into Bengali, I told the kids to listen to my voice and to move their hands in the air to the music I would make. If the music was fast, they were to move their hands fast. If the music was very melodic, the fingers would become softer, more flowy. The kids were really listening and adjusting accordingly, so I made the next leap.

I said, “Ok, now I want you to choose one color. Dip your hands in that color and go to a piece of paper. Don’t touch the paper till you hear my voice, then paint to the sound of my voice.” I hoped all that would get through in Bengali.

The kids coated their hands, got to their paper. I started singing, slowly. The kids started pounding the paper indiscriminately with paint. I said, “Stop! Listen to my voice.” I tried again with a very rhythmic sound. The kids just pounded at their own pace again. I said, “Stop. Nandu, tell them to watch me.” I demonstrated.

The kids got poised to paint again. I started to sing.

You could feel the coin drop. Suddenly the students were really listening and painting to the sound of my voice. Several times I told them to freeze and I would change the feel of the music and they would change their tempo, their hands would get softer or harder accordingly. It was really thrilling. I asked another volunteer, Kristin’s daughter, Michaela to sing a song. She started into Castle on a Cloud. The students basically danced with their hands on their canvases. When we were done we had a room full of backdrops for Monday’s class, a huge mess of paint on the floor, and I had a green face.

Part of what made both activities so fun was that the teachers at Antaranga were so tickled by them. The teachers at Seattle Children’s Theatre have been using the first “environment” game for years, but it was totally new here in India. I was so happy to be opening up doors in thinking for both the young kids and their mentors; they all repayed me a million-fold with wide-open faces and hearts. Because of their trust, I felt so free and creative that that second exercise just fell out of my mind. I wasn’t stressed about whether it would work, or about proving myself to anyone. I followed my instinct and everyone went with me. Of course it helped that Eva had thought so long and hard about what she wanted out of the workshop and Nandu and the other teachers were so good at their jobs. I certainly wasn’t the only one working. It was a true collaborative effort, with each soul in the room doing their part, teachers and students alike.

The evening workshop with the older kids was very much Eva’s baby. She did a stellar job. Barbara and I facilitated along with Nandu and two other teachers. I got to be the hard-nosed teacher who ran around saying, “10 more minutes!” “Five more minutes!” “Two more minutes!”

I learned how to say that last one in Bengali. It’s really hard: Du minute!

When time was up, I learned how to say, “Cess!” (Stop!) I would go to one group and say, “Cess!” then dance to the next group singing, “I’m learning Bengali-eeee!!!” Then say in my mock hard-ass voice, “CESS!” to the next group.

Today, Saturday, the school is closed so Eva, Barbara, and I had the day off. I needed to get my sandals fixed, so I took a rickshaw to the cobblers. The two shoe fixing guys work on a platform at the base of a banyon tree on the main Santinikitan drag. I sat and watched while the younger of the two guys went set about matching the purple leather of my sandel, reglueing, sewing, and pounding my shoe back to life. The older guy then cleaned both shoes. The whole process took 15 minutes and cost 50 cents.

This afternoon Eva took Barbara and I to the Saturday Hut, a market for artists to sell their wares that is held in a large field on the outskirts of town. I almost didn’t go because I was super tired after a two hour bike ride yesterday afternoon and I didn’t really feel up to another ride out of town.

I’m glad I went.

The Saturday Hut was a dusty affair, accompanied by the music of several musicians playing traditional Bengali drums and stringed instruments called Ektas. The arts and crafts were pretty fantastic, but not as amazing as the faces of the folks who made them. Soul, that’s what they all had, depth and soul. The people who were buying the goods also seemed like pretty neat folks. I wanted to talk to everyone, to know their stories. But I contented myself with basking in the whole atmosphere of the Hut which was a thick soup of heat, dust, and melody with an undercurrent of creative energy that seemed to swell from the earth itself.

I think I’m beginning to get a handle on that enigmatic shift that I noticed when I came North. In the Kerala, the people lived ON the Planet. In Santiniketan, the people feel OF the planet.

Who knows, maybe it’s just that I’m more grounded.

When Eva, Barbara and I cycled home from the market, I stopped on the dirt road to take a picture while the two German ladies went on ahead. It was dusk and the road was crowded with rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes, trucks and cars headed home from the Hut. I clicked my photo then started off again on my own. A few feet away a package fell out of the basket on my bike. I had to jump off the cycle and run to get the package before it was run over by a group of guys on motorbikes. I got back on my bike and started off again. A few feet later my scarf got caught in the wheel of my bike. I stopped again. When I took off, I only made it a yard or two before a truck ran me off the road. Then, I got back onto the road only to be caught behind a mini-van spewing exhaust. To cap it all off, after I finally got up some speed I was bumped off the road again and my shoe fell off! It was like I Love Lucy, but not quite as funny.

All through this crazy ride, I just kept smiling…really smiling. As frustrating as it was trying to get down the road, there was nowhere else I wanted to be. My body was sore and tired from all the cycling, my lungs were filled with dirt and fumes. On top of all that, men were staring at me in a way that would have unnerved me just weeks ago, but now it doesn’t bother me in the least. After every setback and through all the attention, I just kept getting back on my bike, my heart full of gladness, to continue the journey home.

When I was able to just ride for a bit, I wondered why it was that I was feeling so different, so content, peaceful and easy about all the obstacles that I was encountering. “Is it the magic of Santiniketin? Is Santiniketin even that magical? Am I just acclimated, finally, to India? Is it the yoga, the exersice? Is it going to work and being of use? Is it all of the above?”

Ultimately, I don’t suppose the reason matters. But I also don’t imagine that I’m going to stop trying to figure it out.

(More pictures will be added later to all the Santineketan posts, the internet is extremely slow in these parts....)

Bengali Stories

#1

Early evening, Eva, Barbara and I were going down the dirt road to Chandana’s house to pick up a book that had been left behind.  Eva left Barbara and I at the gate.  While we stood there, a young girl of 18 or 19 turned the corner onto “our” street, jumped off her bike, dropping her purse, shoes, books, and started running in our direction.


From around the same corner a young man of 20 or 21, came running on foot behind her.  Just as the girl might have reached Barbara and I, she turned instead into an empty lot and began clawing her way into heavily thorned brush. The girl was screaming; the man pursued her into the bushes.  The girl grabbed onto a tree trunk and held on fast.  The man wrapped his arms around her waist and tried to pull her back out into the lot.  He was talking now.  Of course, they were both speaking in Bengali, so Barbara and I didn’t know what was happening.

Stunned, at first, we finally looked at each other and said, “What’s going on?”

A man on a motorbike appeared from the other end of the road.  He saw the man and woman struggling.  He stopped, got off his bike, and approached the couple.  The older man started to interrogate the younger man, who continued to grapple with the woman.

An older woman had appeared from around the corner where the couple had emerged.  She began picking up the girl’s belongings and silently approached the scene.

Barbara and I decided that Chandana was needed.  We had no idea what was happening to the poor girl who was obviously terrified of the young man.  Barbara went off to fetch Chandana just as the young man and the older man both got a hold of the young girl who was suddenly no longer struggling.  The two men carried the young woman out of the brush.  She was not moving.  Her eyes were not open.  They laid her on the ground and started talking in raised voices.  The older woman knelt by the young woman.

Chandana, Eva and Barbara came rushing from the house.  Chandana immediately took charge in as calm yet authoritative a way as I’ve ever witnessed a person behave in a stressful situation.  Barbara and I explained quickly what we had seen.  We said the older man had just stopped to help; it was the younger man who was chasing the young woman.  Chandana spoke to each of the other players in turn, while Barbara and Eva in a wonderfully Germanic way, took charge of the young woman who was still not moving and had fallen into a deep sleep.  Barbara put the woman’s head in her own lap.  Eva raised the girl’s feet to make sure blood was flowing.  Water was fetched.

It was soon determined that the girl had lapsed into a diabetic coma.  The young man, her husband, said that he was trying to help his wife who had not eaten all day because she was distraught over a fight they’d had the night before.  He said that his wife was headed to the train tracks to kill herself.  The older man was the young girl’s father.  The older woman, who still had not spoken, was her mother.

Chandana called a doctor who said that the girl must be taken immediately to the hospital.  A bicycle rickshaw was called.  The mother climbed into the rickshaw.  The husband picked up his wife and awkwardly deposited his wife into the arms and lap of his mother-in-law whose silence was possessed by such a deep sadness I could not help but weep for her as they lumbered off towards the hospital.

#2

Barbara related this story of a man she studied cooking with in Germany:

There was an Indian man who lived happily with his wife and baby daughter until, one day, his wife suddenly disappeared taking their daughter with her.  He had no idea why.  He had no clue where they had gone.  His wife’s absence was confusing and sad, but the loss of his daughter was devastating.  He became completely distraught.  He spent weeks, months, a few years searching for his daughter. He was becoming more and more sick with worry; his friends feared for his health.

He decided that he needed to get out of India before he went crazy.  The man was a chef.  His specialty was Bavarian Cream Pie.  He decided he would go to Bavaria where he also had some relations.

After he arrived in Germany, his despair did not lessen.  He continued to get sick.  Soon he was on the verge of death.  While in the hospital he had an epiphany.  He knew there was nothing he could; he had to give up on seeing his daughter again and return to living his life.  He knew, that in time, his daughter might choose to find him, but he could not hold on even to that.

He began to get well.  He got a job cooking for a convent of nuns who lived on an island in the middle of a large lake.  The years passed.  He made a peace garden that he dedicated to his daughter.  More years passed.  He began giving cooking lessons.  Barbara came to his lessons and met the tiny Indian man with the “very large aura” who shared the story of his daughter and how he had found the way to peace through letting go of his anger and despair and choosing to live in the reality of his life with an open heart.

A few more years passed.

Barbara returned to the island for another cooking class.  This time she learned that the daughter, after 25 years had found her father on the island in Bavaria.

#3

Nandu, the principal of Antaranga School, married a woman from a lower caste, Bhatika, for love.  15 months ago they became the parents of a beautiful baby daughter.

While we were discussing what story to work with at the school, Nandu told us a very “well known and important” Bengali tale of a man from Kabul who left his wife and daughter to make money in Calcutta.  A nut-walla, he roamed the streets in his large turban, carrying big bags of nuts and dried fruits.  While passing a house, a young girl the age of his daughter, yelled over the gate a greeting.  The nut-walla returned to the house and opened its gate.  The girl saw the great man with his turban and bags and became frightened and shy and ran into the house.  The nut-walla saw the girl’s father sitting on the porch and asked him if he might just say hello to the little girl.  The father said, “yes.”  But the girls’ mother who was listening came outside and said, “No.”

There was an argument, but eventually the girl was coaxed out and the nut-walla gave the girl some nuts, free of charge.  After that, the nut-walla would stop everyday to see the girl.  Much to her mother’s disapproval, the girl and the nut-walla became friends.

Several months later, the man got into a fight with another man for some reason.  Tempers flared and the nut-walla ended up stabbing and killing the other man.  The girl’s father tried to intervene on the man’s behalf, but was unsuccessful.  The nut-walla was sentenced to prison.

The prison guards liked the nut-walla and let him sit in the gardens reserved for the warden and 7 years later the man was released since he was obviously not dangerous.

The nut-walla resumed selling nuts and fruits and went as soon as possible to see the little girl who’d befriended him so many years before.  When he arrived at the house it was awash in color and decoration.  The nut-walla went into the courtyard and met the girl’s father who did not recognize the nut-walla who was much changed after his prison sentence.

The nut-walla said, “Don’t you remember me, I am the nut-walla.  I would just like to say hello to your daughter, to tell her how much her friendship means to me.”

The father said today was not a good day.  The nut-walla would have to come back.

The nut-walla gave the father some nuts and fruit for the girl.  The father began to pay the nut-walla.

This made the nut-walla very sad.  He said, “This is for my friend.  I do not want any money, this is a gift.”

The girl heard this and came out of the house dressed in her wedding dress, for it was her wedding day.

The nut-walla took in the sight of the woman who used to be a young child and he started to cry.  He thought about his own daughter and he knew she too must also be a young woman now.

This is where Nandu ended the story.

Barbara asked, “Why is this story so special to the Bengalis?  Is about class?  Is it about race because the Nut-walla is from Kabul?”

“No,” Nandu said.  “It is because this girl was his friend.  It is because he had a daughter himself.  It is about fathers and daughters.  This is why it is so special to the Bengalis.”

Expansion

I felt the difference as soon as I landed in Kolkata.   Bengal is different, from Kerala certainly, but also from Mumbai.

Kerala is slower, more humid.  The people stare with an intensity that is unnerving, a look that feels almost impossible to read unless a smile suddenly appears which, thank goodness, can happen frequently.  The Keralan claim that they are the most literate state in India was not empty.  I didn’t encounter one person who didn’t know at least some basic English and everyone I met could write or read.  They are also a dapper lot.  The men keep their hair short and their mustaches clipped.  The women are always well dressed, their sari’s wrapped with care. 

In both Kerala and Mumbai, and this is something enigmatic that I’m about to explain, so bear with me, the people generally feel as if they are centered toward their heads.  Hmmm?  Yes, let me try again.  If they were trees, they would be thin trees with their branches dancing in the breeze. It is the branches you would notice.

In Bengal, I sense that these “trees” are weighed down by gravity.  The people have a more lived in look, rumpled even.   Where Keralites are the young, eager students who think they know everything, the Bengalis are the experienced intellectuals and they wear their deep minds with the heavy lidded look of the wise old professor.  Sure I still get stares.  But the looks have a heavy dose of indifference thrown in.  I don’t get the feeling that smiles will be quite so forthcoming in this neck of the woods.

The caste system is more ensconced up here than it is down South, as well.  Santiniketan, a small college town filled with artists and thinkers dedicated to making it’s students and inhabitants not only successful in their fields, but better human beings, has actually put a wall up recently to keep the slums and it’s inhabitants clearly on the outside, unless, of course, they are coming to work for those lucky enough to live on the inside of the wall. 

The folks who live where I am staying all have lovely art deco cottages and colorful gardens.  The folks on the outside have thatch houses, dust and dirt.  They don’t speak English, or probably even Hindi, only Bengali.

Unbeknownst to me before I arrived, this is actually the India I had in my imagination.  Even the glimpses of Kolkata which, as you know, I had no intention of seeing, thrilled me to the bone in a way I don’t think Mumbai could.  It’s something to do with the light and the dust which work together to create the exact patina I thought India would be tinged with.  There are very few auto-rickshaws.  Most are powered by bicycles; some are even pulled by men.  The streets have just the right look of sagging elegance, the winding streets fit all the pictures I’d stored in my memory from movies set in India.

On the train to Santiniketan I started to hear accents that were very clipped, round, proper.   It helped that we (Eva, Barbara and I) were in the first-class, air-conditioned car, but absolutely everyone looked like they were off to teach a class in something or other at the university.  One older man was wearing a long white Nehru jacket and I half expected Gandhi to come in and sit next to him.   Another older professor-looking man was sitting, slouched in his chair, reading Agatha Christie in English, his hair longer and more disheveled than anyone in the South of India would even think of letting their hair get.  There was an Indian woman in her late 40s, hair short, make-up done, in a tight t-shirt and jeans, who was very much in charge of her coterie of friends.  She had an air of both efficiency and disdain often getting huffy with the children who would come on the car to sweep and beg, as well as, the older folks who would get sentimental and start singing along to the traditional songs played by musicians who earned a rupee or two by playing in the aisles.

When we arrived in Santiniketan, we were greeted by Nandu, the principal of the Antunranga School.  A tall, thin man with a wide-open face, he greeted his old friend Eva with joy and love, none of the reserve of the South.  He welcomed Barbara and I into the fold, giving Barbra a little more attention, as she is the newly christened volunteer recruiter for the school.

We were shepherded to our cottage, a beautiful 1920’s home we share with a young married couple who are also volunteering with their extended family who is housed on the next block, and our cleaning lady/caretaker, her husband and their 7 year old son who live in a shed out back.

Since Eva and Barbara were kind enough to squeeze me into their quarters, I am on a daybed in the living area but it is my own space at night, cozy and shuttered from the early morning sun. 

We spent the afternoon unpacking and hanging mosquito nets and buzzing around each other.  Eva and Barbara are somewhat new friends, though they’ve known each other a while.  They live in Hamburg and Munich respectively but grew up in the same region of Germany where they spoke a sort of dialect they don’t use all the time in their grown up lives.  So there is a lot of chit chatting in German accented by huge guffaws in laughter when they both use some kind of German slang they haven’t’ been able to use in years and years.

They are very gracious and always try and translate, though after two and half days, I’ve assured them that they don’t have to tell me everything because they get very tired having to negotiate with me as an English speaker and our Bengali help.  But it makes for an interesting dynamic.  I’m temporarily ensconced in their lives, and they in mine, but in order to really be comfortable and to feel at home in our space we have to let language come between us. 

Our first night we were all invited to tea at Chandana’s house.  Chandana is the volunteer co-coordinator, among other things, for several small schools here in Santiniketan.  I would guess she is somewhere in her 50’s.  She has lived in England and Switzerland so has both a Western and Eastern hospitality.  Her party was like something out of a movie.  We sat in the garden outside of her little cottage as the sun set.  Smart Indian men and women mingled with a few Americans, Germans, English visitors and volunteers.  Tea was served in disposable ceramic cups and food was served on plates made of leaves which would also be discarded at the end of the meal.

I spoke with one man, Satish, who was headed to Kerala.  He and his wife are the caretakers of our cottage and also run a shop and café in town.  They used to be bankers or something in Mumbai and they have a worldly air.  Satish and I discussed the oddity of being in the keralan backwaters.  I mentioned that it had reminded me of the aliens watching Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five.

Satish, “Kurt Vonnegut.  Yes.  It has been a very long time since I have heard anyone discuss Kurt Vonnegut.  He was very popular when I was a student. Yes.”

I talked to a very beautiful and well-worn older woman whose name escapes me.  She is, I’ve since been told, the heart of Santiniketan.  An artist, this woman has lived all over the world, staging protests, and told me she had once been on trial in Seattle in the 1970s for protesting Trident.

Perhaps you are beginning to appreciate a little bit of the shift I’ve experience moving up north, or at least to Santiniketan.  The people here are dug in, rooted into using their minds, into shifting the world, shaping the world.

I find this, obviously, a bit difficult to explain.  The energy of this place has tilted my axis, my own mode of processing.  I feel less in my head and more rooted in my senses.  I am in the midst of some kind of energetic expansion of not only my view of India, but also my view of the world.

I start “work” this afternoon and hope to be in more of a schedule where I can carve time to write, fear not.  But it might take me a few days to find my footing.

Going Off Course

Today is my last day in Fort Cochin.  Tonight I will stay in the big city of Ernakulum at the Ramada with Gary and tomorrow we will go to Alleppey and take a houseboat for two days and nights through the backwaters of Kerala.  This is one of the must see parts of my India trip.  We will glide through small town India, stopping along the way to visit villages and see how life happens away from the tourist towns.  I can't wait.  I'll just tell you now, that I won't have wi-fi, so don't expect another posting till next week.

Which begs the question, "What's next?"  Several people have asked me privately what is on the agenda and I've been hesitant to commit.  Part of my reluctance stems from the fact that things are always always always changing here in India.  It's just what happens.  But I've pretty much settled on the next two stops after Alleppey.

First, I will venture up into the mountains to a town called Periyar.  I'm splurging on a small homestay run by a man named Matthew who, according to his website, roamed the world and found his spot in India to be the place he wanted to settle.

When I was in Cornwall I met another man who had worked in the hospitality industry, traveling the planet for years and years, and he told me the same thing about his part of the world, a place called St. Nectin's Glen.  I wanted to see a place that would capture his heart so completely.  It was truly one of the most mystical places I've ever been.  Set deep in a forested area, a small stream rambles toward a water fall. Lining the walk, stones have been arranged by pilgrims into shapes of any totem you can imagine.  Standing in the stream felt like standing in a holy well.  It radiated sacredness in a way no building has ever spoken to me.

When I was freaking out last week, I googled retreat and Kerala and found Mathew's homestay and was immediately drawn to his similar story of finding his true home after years of wandering and to the fact that he teaches yoga to his guests, his rooms look out of the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, and there are many wild birds and animals to be found right outside the doorstep.  It is a great adventure to see if his favorite spot might speak to me as well as it does to him.  I will be there till the 11th.

After that I will do something I swore I wasn't gonna do when I set off on my trip.

I am going to an ashram.

Yes.

It's true.

I realized I had to go to an ashram when I discovered that Amma is going to be in Amritapuri which is right down the road, until the 12th of February.  She is hardly ever there because she travels so much.   As I wrote before, she is known as the hugging saint because she can sit for hours, days even, simply hugging her devotees one at a time.  She demonstrates universal compassion.  She embraces the rich, the poor, the healthy, the sick, the Brahmins, the untouchables.  A poor Indian woman, she has managed to build hospitals and schools all around India for people who might not otherwise seek care or education.  She exudes peace.  So, I figure, if I'm gonna experience an ashram, her ashram is the place to go.

It also helps that Nicole was already planning to be there, so I will know someone else.

We have no idea what to expect.  Since Amma is there and the ashram can house thousands of people, I figure it will be a zoo.  There is a chance it is also a silent ashram, I can't quite figure that out.  So, thousands of people waiting for hugs, meditating, living and working together in silence.  Should be something.  I will be there for four days.

After that it looks like I might completely go off course from my original plan of sticking to Kerala and Rajasthan.  I've been given the opportunity to go to a town in Bengal and volunteer at a school in the same place where Tagore lived.  This town is apparently famous as an arts and literature center for people from all over the world.  The best storytellers in the country study and work here and that influence permeates even into the children's school I might get to go to: the Antaranga School.  I'm really hoping this works out, so please keep your fingers crossed.

Going "off course" seems to be a part of Indian life.  At least for this traveler.  I find I have to give into the wayward sway of India.  I have to trust that the answers to "What will I do next?" and "Where will I go?" can't be rushed.  I tried last week, when I was in such a panic, to pin down the entire rest of my itinerary.  I wrote to places around the country trying to get a place to volunteer for the duration of my stay, but answers take so long here.

Then, out of the blue, someone at breakfast will ask you what you want to do (volunteer at a school), and what you do back home, (I'm an actor and a writer.  So, a story teller, really) and suddenly you know where you want to go next when they say, "Oh, you must come with us.  I raise money for a small school in Bengal that is famous for storytelling.  Here's who you call."

Bengal was so off my radar that I don't have a guidebook for it.  I couldn't have even told you what part of India it lives in (North-easterly).  But life is like that, I'm finding more and more every day here that there's no way to stick to the guidebook, not if I really listen to the signals in my gut and in my heart.  It simply wasn't enough to just get up the nerve to come to India, I must summon the strength to let go of the map I had in my head of where I thought I was going once I got here.

I'm making peace with the constant shedding, the inner evolution that palpably progresses apace.  I don't understand it intellectually, but if I take deep breaths I find that I can sit more easily with it.

So, till Monday.......or so.......