day of the dog.

yesterday was my favorite day in the south asian year. it's tihar (the nepali hindu festival of lights), during which a different animal (or sometimes person) is honored for each day of the holiday. yesterday was dog day. kathmandu is full of dogs (oh, i'm in nepal! i forgot to say that). these are perfect dogs--smallish, but with big-dog shapes and personalities. they're exactly the sort of dog i'd get, were i to get a dog (which i will, someday). yesterday, in celebration of tihar, the dogs of kathmandu were given tikkas--red blessings on their foreheads--and malas: garlands of marigolds, to wear around their necks. having spent the night at my coworker amrit's, the first thing we saw as we coasted, engine off, down the driveway on his new bike (an upgrade from his far-less-macho scooter, or "scootie," as he calls it), was a fat yellow dog stretching out in the sun, freshly clad in tikka and mala, and we both strated to laugh. how can you not love a holiday where street dogs dress like devout hindus? hmm. sometimes i think i'm meant to be a hindu. i spend so much time with tibetan buddhists and buddhism resonates in my life in a million tiny ways that i don't usually take the time to notice. i fight against it, but i grow within it. and still, i almost never have what i would describe as a religious experience in the buddhist world. but hinduism is another story; it transports me. it fills up my chest with this feeling like i'm about to cry. were i to be religious, i'd have to sing and dance. i'd have to jump around and wave my hands in the air, or i don't think i could let myself really GO there. the closest i ever feel to religious is through music, anyway, so i guess that makes sense. (for the record, i know hindus do more than sing and dance and jump around). the philosophies of hinduism and buddhism aren't so different--it's the expression of those beliefs that marks a greater divide. my connection to hinduism is mostly superficial; i visit temples, i attend ceremonial events on holidays. sometimes i want to go further. i've always been jealous of people who have religion; maybe it's time i got mine..?

i am full of chocolate cake. kathmandu is anything you want it to be, tourist trap very much included. yesterday i was a hungry ghost; i just couldn't get my fill. my coworker and i went shopping and both spent WAY too much money on clothes. today, it's all about food. for breakfast i had a nepali omelette stuffed with fresh herbs, inclding copious amounts of cilantro. then it was israeli food for lunch--hummus and baba ghanous and falafel and naan (a little south asian twist), with chocolate cake and chai for dessert. and i'm not done yet; i'll probably still eat dinner.

i feel like a real working woman. it's sunday evening now, and my work week begins again tomorrow, which is making me a little sad. not that i haven't been working this weekend (we spent about four hours on our budgest this morning), and not that my job happens in an office or anything terrible like that... what will i do if and when i DO have a job that happens from 9-5 at a desk? would i or could i ever enjoy it? do most people enjoy working? it's so hard to know when i don't have the experience of the thing that so much of the world thinks of as "work." i've worked a lot in my life--i can say that with confidence--but always at a restaurant, which brings with it the rush of staying up too late, flirting too much, acting in manic burts of energy when you're already exhausted, and then calling it quits--or in south asia, where my work and life are mostly inseparable. maybe some day i'll have an apartment in south asia and a job too, and i'll go to the job and then come home and still be in south asia but no longer be at work. huh. a bit hard to imagine, really.

well, it's getting dark outside so i'll stop--put my energy into digesting my cake... you know, that sort of thing.
love and love
e.

Driving Again.

I'm not much of a believer in state or national boundaries, but when you descend off the Tibetan plateau, you know you're somewhere else. Crossing from Ladakh into Himachal Pradesh, the changes that take root in an hour are enough to make your hair curl. Literally. You drop from a high altitude desert into semi-tropical foot-hills, and the people around you reflect the changes, and the animals do, too, and the architecture, and even the snacks for sale at road-side Dhaba's tell you that you're back in a world you know. And even your stomach grumbles and then threatens you in that old familiar way and you think, oh right: India.

This isn't new to me. My life in South Asia takes place in a strange circle around Tibet (and almost never in it), so I'm familiar with the Himalayas' varied forms. Himachal's mountains are my favorite. When I get here, I feel like I'm home--and not in the "I was born to love this land" sense, but in the, "Oh yeah, here I am," sense; in the "Am I getting old?" sense; in the "How the hell did this happen; I'm from rural New Hampshire and here's this other place that stirs up some of the same feelings" sense. Ladakh does none of that to me. Up there, the land is an alien or I am. Hard to say. Down here, I am so disgustingly human and everything is so lushly, thickly real, that I almost get dizzy. Or maybe that's just the red blood cells returning after their stint of high-altitude exile.

Driving down out of Ladakh (driving is really getting to me lately), I was sharing an ipod with my colleague Kristin. We were listening to early Bob Dyan. We were wondernig how a 22 year old ever wrote songs like that. My foot was up on the window ledge. Ladakh was turning into Himachal. We slowed to take a hair-pin turn, and there on the green embankment was a solid, shaggy, almost-black pony. We made eye contact. (We actually did). And I was washed, suddenly, in an understanding that I love Bob Dylan and I love Himachal Pradesh and I love ponies all in the same way. I can't tell you why I love them and I don't think it's my life purpose to love them, but it's in my body--I grew it there myself--and I can stifle it or fan it, but these are loves I can't kill or get bored of. Which is a reflief, really. I don't have to devote my life to my dad's favorite song writer or to Dharamsala or to horses. I can just love them because I do.

I need to set up a lecture for my students now. Otherwise they'll just drink cappuccinos all day, and we can't have that.
Love,
Emma

Mountain Goats.

sometimes i get worried that the older i get, and the more time i spend in india, the fewer eye-opening, heart-changing moments i have. actually, i would say that that IS the case.... but it's good to be reminded i can still have them. driving is usually what does it to me. call it voyeuristic, (and it is), but when you drive through india--through the villages whose names you're never going to know, past the road-workers whose lives look (to me) like hell, through all the mountains you won't ever walk over, you face yourself in a different way, suddenly. on the street, you're exposed; you're looking at the world and it's looking at you and you barely have enough person-power just to deal with chaos and confusion and hypocrisy that is (my) everyday life in india. but on a long bus ride, you pull your feet up and you cover yourself in a shawl and you put your chin on your knees and you're in india, but you don't have to face india, really, so you face yourself.

(this is arguably the most orientalist, use-distant-lands-as-a-backdrop-for-discovering-the-self thing that i've ever written. but i'm all spaced out on MSG, so go with me for a minute).

yesterday, on day three of a five day bus ride from zanskar (ladakh) to dharamsala, i was listening to the mountain goats (perhaps my favorite band) on my ipod, when my co-instructor amrit tapped my shoulder and pointed out the window. "Wild mountain goats," he said. i was listening to a song called "dance music," which is about a little kid who listens to his record player to escape the sounds of his step father abusing his mother. i was thinking about my parents (who are not at all abusive), and about their childhoods (which i'll only ever imagine, and not actually understand), and about mortality, and about all the people i'm going to lose in my life, and about all the people i've lost already. and then Amrit was pointing out the windows at the wild mountain goats (which it turned out were actually wild ibex, when we got closer to them), and the mountains around me were the biggest in the world, and i suddenly saw them, and i felt, simultaneously, how connected to them i am and how very not-connected to them i am. and i felt how much india is a part of me and how it has formed me and how much i rely on it as a formative feature in my life, and how much i'm never going to understand it. and i thought about my parents, and how formative they are, too, and how much about them i do understand, and also the parts i don't. the sound track didn't match the view outside at all, and i was somewhat carsick and somewhat cold and somewhat tired of everyone around me, but i felt an aching rush of sadness/happiness--that feeling we call nostalgia--but for which i'm still looking for a more perfect word.

and now here i am in manali, where i plan to go shopping for t-shirts and kitschy stuff that i will eventually wonder why i bought. but i'm going to buy it anyway.

love to all,
emma
p.s. don't worry--i haven't changed my name to shanti yet, and still have no plans to.