writing about india isn't the same as being in india. which is overly obvious, i guess. i'll try that again:
writing about india is hard--nearly impossible--when you're fresh out of the bath, when it's one in the morning, when you're between so-clean sheets, on your back, laptop on your stomach, listening to the huge silence that is the tiny new hampshire town where you grew up, in winter, in the middle of the night.
is that better? writing about india in a graduate school application essay isn't the same thing as writing about india for yourself which isn't the same thing as writing publicly about india "for yourself" (oh, blogging) which isn't the same thing as not writing about india at all. if i'd already reached that point, i guess it'd be time to go back again.
i painted my fingernails three different colors today before i found one that looked alright. a friend in kathmandu told me they're up to eleven hours a day of power cuts. after dinner, i watched an hour long special on kids who are addicted to huffing computer cleaning products. a friend in bodh gaya told me his aunt just arrived from tibet, and he is so happy to see her. now it's one in the morning and i'm trying to write an essay about india, and i'm supposed to make myself look simultaneously talented but humble, experienced but in need of education, young but worldly. i actually wrote it weeks ago, but now when i read it, it sounds like a shell of a story of a person. i could send them everything i've ever written about india--there's so, so much, and some of it is terrible and some of it is beautiful and most of it is somewhere in between. but i've got to write one new thing, a couple pages that sum it all up: the life i've lived in india that, right now, i'd rather just be living. honestly, i miss it terribly.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
ten observations after ten days in the U.S.:
1. restaurant servings are shockingly huge. literally shocking.
2. indoor places--like malls and airports--smell like sugar.
3. people say thank you a lot. thank you thank you thank you, no thank you.
4. strangers smile at each other when they pass on the sidewalk.
5. people often pretend that they understand what someone else is talking about, even when they don't (which i know isn't unique to the US, but i'd forgotten how often it goes on here).
6. this country is crazily segregated.
7. it's amazing how much toilet paper you can put in a toilet and it still won't clog.
8. so much goes to waste. ha. that's funny, considering number 7.
9. people are invested in reality television.
10. obama isn't such a big deal any more. kind of incredible, kind of sad.
2. indoor places--like malls and airports--smell like sugar.
3. people say thank you a lot. thank you thank you thank you, no thank you.
4. strangers smile at each other when they pass on the sidewalk.
5. people often pretend that they understand what someone else is talking about, even when they don't (which i know isn't unique to the US, but i'd forgotten how often it goes on here).
6. this country is crazily segregated.
7. it's amazing how much toilet paper you can put in a toilet and it still won't clog.
8. so much goes to waste. ha. that's funny, considering number 7.
9. people are invested in reality television.
10. obama isn't such a big deal any more. kind of incredible, kind of sad.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
a smattering of pictures
i wanted to post these pictures as i took them, but alas, the internet in nepal was too slow for uploading photos. and then once i got to india, i was on vacation and didn't spend much time online. enjoy.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
somewhere between newark and boston:
I'm giving myself a gentle welcome to the U.S.: Aaron Neville, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan--old, beloved friends, guys my dad loves, too, words I know by heart.
To me, the Newark airport smelled like sugar. Everywhere, everywhere, things to buy. I rode the moving walkway and stared like a voyeur at all the stores, the restaurants, the bars, at all the clean, richly dressed people going into and out of them. Sometimes when I get home, Americans disgust me a little; today, I felt in awe of them, separate and lesser.
So it's old men's voices for me, ear buds pushed in deep to create a seal. I won't be here just yet. On power-cut nights in Kathmandu, with road strikes and taxi-fires outside, I reach for obscure indie rock--of-the-moment-music to make me feel like I'm still part of the things that people my age and nationality are doing. But today, on this sun-lit, too-bright airplane, on the way to meet my parents after five months in Asia, I just want to be comforted.
"This morning" (it was almost forty eight hours ago, now) I was at a five star hotel restaurant, eating Goan pao bhaji in a mini skirt. Just a morning before that, I was cross legged on a Tibetan carpet, eating tsampa under a slowly rotating fan, watching sun patterns on the bare, brown shoulder beside me. And a morning before it was Bagga, and a morning before Calamcute (all four of us sleeping on the floor in one room), and a morning before, Arambol; I woke up on the porch, looking at the ocean. Our toilet didn't have a seat and there was only a bare bulb for a light, but I was happy and didn't care much.
What's a week in Goa, anyway? What's a week of waking up in a different room, a little sandy, a little salt encrusted, still tired, already warming and ready to rise? What's fifteen hours on an airplane? What's crossing the entire globe in a single day? It's something and it's nothing. In a lot of simple and complicated ways, it's just my life: lie to Customs, ("tourism"), spend some time in the states, go back again. Fall in love again, or something like it.
On the plane, I thought a lot about a friend of mine who doesn't know his own birthday. He's twenty seven or twenty eight. He can tell you about your Tibetan astrological sign but he doesn't know his own. (I'm a water pig and my friend says it's going to be a good year).
To me, the Newark airport smelled like sugar. Everywhere, everywhere, things to buy. I rode the moving walkway and stared like a voyeur at all the stores, the restaurants, the bars, at all the clean, richly dressed people going into and out of them. Sometimes when I get home, Americans disgust me a little; today, I felt in awe of them, separate and lesser.
So it's old men's voices for me, ear buds pushed in deep to create a seal. I won't be here just yet. On power-cut nights in Kathmandu, with road strikes and taxi-fires outside, I reach for obscure indie rock--of-the-moment-music to make me feel like I'm still part of the things that people my age and nationality are doing. But today, on this sun-lit, too-bright airplane, on the way to meet my parents after five months in Asia, I just want to be comforted.
"This morning" (it was almost forty eight hours ago, now) I was at a five star hotel restaurant, eating Goan pao bhaji in a mini skirt. Just a morning before that, I was cross legged on a Tibetan carpet, eating tsampa under a slowly rotating fan, watching sun patterns on the bare, brown shoulder beside me. And a morning before it was Bagga, and a morning before Calamcute (all four of us sleeping on the floor in one room), and a morning before, Arambol; I woke up on the porch, looking at the ocean. Our toilet didn't have a seat and there was only a bare bulb for a light, but I was happy and didn't care much.
What's a week in Goa, anyway? What's a week of waking up in a different room, a little sandy, a little salt encrusted, still tired, already warming and ready to rise? What's fifteen hours on an airplane? What's crossing the entire globe in a single day? It's something and it's nothing. In a lot of simple and complicated ways, it's just my life: lie to Customs, ("tourism"), spend some time in the states, go back again. Fall in love again, or something like it.
On the plane, I thought a lot about a friend of mine who doesn't know his own birthday. He's twenty seven or twenty eight. He can tell you about your Tibetan astrological sign but he doesn't know his own. (I'm a water pig and my friend says it's going to be a good year).
Monday, December 28, 2009
en route.
this is essentially an all day lay-over--except that my next mode of transport is a train, not a flight, and i'm in airy, beautiful apartment, not a waiting room. i'm lucky that amber has spent so much time in bombay (and has such close--and generous--friends here), because i've eaten home cooked food and washed my face, and even though you can't see the ocean from here, you can smell it. at 11 tonight we'll get on a train for goa (there was some kind of mix-up that amber has thus far avoided explaining to me, but we've been bumped from 3rd AC to sleeper; I don't even mind). and tomorrow morning we'll be at the beach (i suppose we already are at the beach, but we'll be at the beach we're really going to). and then it's sun and coconuts and strappy dresses and scooters and sea food and outdoor markets and all the rest. i hope we see dolphins.
but before that, i want to pause on bombay. i've been here for two hours. it's my first time in this city. (if this matters to you, in my head, i just formed the tibetan sentence "i have never experienced this city" before i thought of the english language structure of the same idea. interesting). i've never experienced this city. I've never been here. but salman rushdie is my favorite writer and some of my most beloved novels take place here. when we drove along the ocean, i knew we were passing chowpatty beach, but i knew it from books and not from life. it looks how i imagined it would. i know the ocean (i grew up next to it), and i know india (i partially raised myself here, 20 and onwards) so it wasn't hard to mash the two ideas together into an image that looked something like this. but as we drove the forty five minutes from the airport to this apartment, i kept thinking, "I've never been here before; I'm in a new part of the world. I'm in a new part of the world." yes, i could picture an indian city next to the ocean, but it was an educated guess; a well informed estimation of a place, and not a place. driving through bombay to this apartment, i was somewhere. i was somewhere new. tomorrow will be another new part of the world. i almost wish we were staying here longer. amber says she'd take me on a food tour. she says bombay has the best snack food in the world--and that girl knows her snack food.
this is almost too much, it's almost too good, i'm almost too lucky. in less than ten days i'll be back in the states. that's abstract and mostly impossible to imagine. maybe going somewhere new so close to the end is a bad idea; maybe i'll wake something up inside myself that wants to stay awake but for some reason doesn't know how to in america. i can already feel the waking-up happen. i should quiet that part of myself now, but it feels cruel. i want to walk through every neighborhood i've only ever heard the name of. i want to eat the snacks amber described to me in detail in the taxi. i want to ride trains all over india and look out windows at landscapes i've never experienced and remind myself, i'm in a new part of the world. i've never been here before.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
coffee shops.
how many coffee shops does one town need? i first came to mcleod ganj in 2004. there were more coffee shops--REAL coffee shops, espresso-brewing coffee shops--than i'd ever seen in one little indian town. almost six years later, their number has multiplied, tripled, quadrupled, erupted into more and more coffee shops everywhere you turn. i'm so caffeinated i can hardly sit here and write this. i am a jittery foot tapper with too many plans to fit into one cold, bright day.
people say moon peak has the cutest waiters, but i think it's an idea left-over from a time when it was true. next to it now--a physically bigger little brother--is mandala coffee, complete with wi-fi. (little brother always gets the good stuff). and down the hill by the temple, coffee shops are opening so fast i don't even know their names--white spaces with cushioned seats, exposed bricks, thick mugs with matching platters, sugar in slender paper tubes, mini spoons meant just for stirring. and everywhere, everyone drinking coffee--tourists and monks and amdo boys in leather jackets--coffee coffee coffee. stopping to greet me in a patch of unexpected sun, a tibetan friend sipped my latte and grimaced. "american drink," he said, but i drink more coffee here than in america. i drink so much coffee i forget to eat. i drink so much coffee that i've stopped sleeping. i drink so much coffee that i feel the need to exaggerate. this is the MOST coffee i've ever had. i'm speaking in superlatives. it's just the coffee; it'll wear off.
there's a place on bhagsu road (this is no time for names) where i once fell in love and there's a place past the post office where i once fell out of it, and there's a place crowded in by kashmiri tourist shops where i always talk politics, and there used to be a place behind some stairs where i pretended i was in america, and there's a tiny, smoke-blackened place where i used to deny i was american, and there's all the other places in between. coffee. how could there be so much in this one little town? yesterday i met a friend on the road--i'd thought he was in nepal, but no--who greeted me with, "let's go drink tea," but tea has become a euphamism for coffee, and he lead me back towards the bus stand, pulled as if by gravity, to his favorite cafe--"there's a nice new place," he said--and then we were descending shaky stairs into a new coffee-shop/internet-cafe cross breed, where we at underneath a giant, blaring flat screen TV. i can't say i liked the place but coffee is a personal thing and in this town, there's room for strange choices.
maybe coffee is a necessity of life here. maybe when you pile so many people up on top of each other, so many peoples, so much history and language and politics and so, so many different agendas, you need an extra push just to face it all. but probably not. coffee is hip. spaces where one drinks coffee are hipper. everyone likes to feel cool, like they're part of something--cigarettes and fingerless gloves and popped-up collars and half-read books and partially-filled-out visa applications and flirting and writing and stretching after that first cup--it's all a ritual. i wish i weren't so revved up, so edgy, but i take part in it all because i like it.
but i've got to stop writing now. i'm meeting someone. guess where.
people say moon peak has the cutest waiters, but i think it's an idea left-over from a time when it was true. next to it now--a physically bigger little brother--is mandala coffee, complete with wi-fi. (little brother always gets the good stuff). and down the hill by the temple, coffee shops are opening so fast i don't even know their names--white spaces with cushioned seats, exposed bricks, thick mugs with matching platters, sugar in slender paper tubes, mini spoons meant just for stirring. and everywhere, everyone drinking coffee--tourists and monks and amdo boys in leather jackets--coffee coffee coffee. stopping to greet me in a patch of unexpected sun, a tibetan friend sipped my latte and grimaced. "american drink," he said, but i drink more coffee here than in america. i drink so much coffee i forget to eat. i drink so much coffee that i've stopped sleeping. i drink so much coffee that i feel the need to exaggerate. this is the MOST coffee i've ever had. i'm speaking in superlatives. it's just the coffee; it'll wear off.
there's a place on bhagsu road (this is no time for names) where i once fell in love and there's a place past the post office where i once fell out of it, and there's a place crowded in by kashmiri tourist shops where i always talk politics, and there used to be a place behind some stairs where i pretended i was in america, and there's a tiny, smoke-blackened place where i used to deny i was american, and there's all the other places in between. coffee. how could there be so much in this one little town? yesterday i met a friend on the road--i'd thought he was in nepal, but no--who greeted me with, "let's go drink tea," but tea has become a euphamism for coffee, and he lead me back towards the bus stand, pulled as if by gravity, to his favorite cafe--"there's a nice new place," he said--and then we were descending shaky stairs into a new coffee-shop/internet-cafe cross breed, where we at underneath a giant, blaring flat screen TV. i can't say i liked the place but coffee is a personal thing and in this town, there's room for strange choices.
maybe coffee is a necessity of life here. maybe when you pile so many people up on top of each other, so many peoples, so much history and language and politics and so, so many different agendas, you need an extra push just to face it all. but probably not. coffee is hip. spaces where one drinks coffee are hipper. everyone likes to feel cool, like they're part of something--cigarettes and fingerless gloves and popped-up collars and half-read books and partially-filled-out visa applications and flirting and writing and stretching after that first cup--it's all a ritual. i wish i weren't so revved up, so edgy, but i take part in it all because i like it.
but i've got to stop writing now. i'm meeting someone. guess where.
Friday, December 11, 2009
majnu ka tilla and woody allen.
it has been a while since i've written--here, that is. i've rediscovered writing by hand, and i like it, but the problem is, i'm thoroughly disorganized. i lose all my notebooks (not to metion my pens) and i always write out of order; i'll find a half-filled spiral bound in a random corner or bag or drawer and just start writing it in again and i never date anything, and therein lies the confusion. but sometimes i wonder if writing by hand helps me to connect to the part of myself that started writing when i was five years old. i think it does.
i'm in delhi and i keep confronting the feeling that i'm back in a place that i know. not that it's a bad feeling; it's just that i was starting to feel that i "know" kathmandu, and being here challenges that. walking down majnu ka tilla's main street this morning--not really a street, even, more of an alley--someone said in tibetan, who is she? and he was talking about me or he wasn't, but i turned my head to look at him and we made eye contact, and i wondered suddenly, how well can you know a place if you don't understand the converstions happening around you everyday? language is complicated. i see speakers of languages as insiders. it's a password, it's a ticket, it's a membership. but actually, it's not. look at all those foreign dharma students in nepal who speak fluent tibetan but don't have any tibetan friends. i need to complicate my undertandings of insider-ness, maybe.
i'm sick. i have a cold which, in my life, always means i have the flu, too. i've been treating it with room service and amerian movies on t.v. last night was thenthuk and dirty dancing 2 (have you seen that movie? it's terrible). this morning was chai, tibetan bread, and woody allen. match point. i hadn't seen it before. it was good. i think i'm suffering from inertia. my students are gone; we brought them to the airport a couple of nights ago, and this small part of me wished i were getting on the flight, too. there's a feeling of release that happens when i fly back to the states. or maybe it's a feeling of superiority. maybe it's a feeling of giving-up-the-fight; surrendering. it usually only lasts for the duration of the trip home. then i'm back in the states and washed in the understanding that i am-myself-everywhere. india, nepal, america--i take me with me. but i can imagine sinking into an airplane seat, reading junk novels and eating junk food. it could be relaxing.
instead, i'm going to dharamsala on the over night bus tonight. there's no agenda. okay, there are a million tiny agendas. i'm starting to feel light headed from this cold and from staring at a computer screen. maybe it's time for another round of room service and t.v. also, i need to buy a shawl for the bus. it's going to be freezing in mcleod.
someone just walked into this internet cafe who i know. knowing a place is knowing people, so i guess i know this place.
i miss you guys,
e.
i'm in delhi and i keep confronting the feeling that i'm back in a place that i know. not that it's a bad feeling; it's just that i was starting to feel that i "know" kathmandu, and being here challenges that. walking down majnu ka tilla's main street this morning--not really a street, even, more of an alley--someone said in tibetan, who is she? and he was talking about me or he wasn't, but i turned my head to look at him and we made eye contact, and i wondered suddenly, how well can you know a place if you don't understand the converstions happening around you everyday? language is complicated. i see speakers of languages as insiders. it's a password, it's a ticket, it's a membership. but actually, it's not. look at all those foreign dharma students in nepal who speak fluent tibetan but don't have any tibetan friends. i need to complicate my undertandings of insider-ness, maybe.
i'm sick. i have a cold which, in my life, always means i have the flu, too. i've been treating it with room service and amerian movies on t.v. last night was thenthuk and dirty dancing 2 (have you seen that movie? it's terrible). this morning was chai, tibetan bread, and woody allen. match point. i hadn't seen it before. it was good. i think i'm suffering from inertia. my students are gone; we brought them to the airport a couple of nights ago, and this small part of me wished i were getting on the flight, too. there's a feeling of release that happens when i fly back to the states. or maybe it's a feeling of superiority. maybe it's a feeling of giving-up-the-fight; surrendering. it usually only lasts for the duration of the trip home. then i'm back in the states and washed in the understanding that i am-myself-everywhere. india, nepal, america--i take me with me. but i can imagine sinking into an airplane seat, reading junk novels and eating junk food. it could be relaxing.
instead, i'm going to dharamsala on the over night bus tonight. there's no agenda. okay, there are a million tiny agendas. i'm starting to feel light headed from this cold and from staring at a computer screen. maybe it's time for another round of room service and t.v. also, i need to buy a shawl for the bus. it's going to be freezing in mcleod.
someone just walked into this internet cafe who i know. knowing a place is knowing people, so i guess i know this place.
i miss you guys,
e.
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