Perhaps There Were Yaks…

I got back from a 2-day trip to the Nubra Valley today. This was accomplished in a “taxi” (in this case a white 4 X 4) that took us out of Leh and over the highest motorable pass in the world, Khardung La. It was somewhere about 18,000 feet up. Oh, that reminds me. When I said Leh is over 3000 feet above sea level, I should have said 3000 METERS. Pesky metric system!

Who is us? Us was me and my three travel friends, all of whom happen to be exceedingly mellow-tempered Israelis in their early thirties (in contrast to the swarms of Israelis fresh out of the army that clog the streets of Leh walking around in their clingy yet billowy “pirate pants”). One part of the trio was a couple (Roee and Netta) and the other was another solo traveller (Yiftah). We found each other at our guest house and somehow, seemingly effortlessly, soon found ourselves wedged together in the taxi, wending our way up the Himalayas to Khardung La.

The trip to the Nubra Valley takes about 5 hours, the length resulting from the amount of winding that must be done to get up and down each mountain. There was a satisfying rhythm to the drive, as we wound our way above Leh, moving away from it and then back towards it, only at a much higher vantage point. It felt like being inside the mechanism of some gigantic scenic clock.

When we reached the pass we said goodbye to the view of Leh. Disparaging remarks were made (by me) about the cleanliness of the glaciers near Khardung La (they were grey in some spots). Roee suggested I volunteer to scrub the glacier.

The pass was like a high-altitude party in the morning. People got out of their taxis and walked to the top of the hill where prayer flags hung. I rang the bell at the little stupa. We took pictures in front of the Khardung La sign and I told Yiftah that I wanted a picture with the Sikh soldier. His navy blue turban would have looked so cool against the aquamarine-blue sky. But I wussed out and couldn’t approach him. Perhaps the memory of the Sikh soldier who tried to politely hit on me at the Delhi airport was stopping me (How long you stay India? Have you been to Golden Temple? Do you have a friend?). Or perhaps I felt a pang of shame for exploiting the man’s religious garb for its aesthetic value. Yiftah took a picture of me by myself in my all-orange outfit (I’d not done laundry for a while).

After we crossed the pass the landscape changed. From the dusty raw umber of Leh the mountains turned to a filmy pale green. The shapes and colors looked like Connemara or the Scottish Highlands. We could see down into a valley with a shallow river, and spotted some lumbering animals that Netta and I both hoped were yaks, but were more likely just hairy black cows. Near the cattle, groups of nomads huddled around their lunches at the side of the road.

After a while the mountains changed again into mesa-like formations, again yellowish but less craggy and wrinkly than Leh. We spotted a prairie dog-like animal standing at attention near the side of the road. This was cause for much excitement for me and Netta, by now clearly the only ones inspired to squeal over novel beasts.

We stopped in a small army station for a snack and some tea. I had some Indian Cheetos (they’re called Kur-kure….Cheeto in form, spicy like a samosa…in other words, the perfect junk food). I paid with a 500 rupee note. This can be dodgy because people seem to never have change, so I was a bit regretful I didn’t have a smaller bill. But never fear! My waiter came back with a wad of bills…and three sticks of bubble gum.  I got change in bubble gum. I think that is incredible.

The toilet cost 5 rupees so I went down behind the river bank instead. A line of perhaps 40 Indian soldiers stood behind barbed wire across the street as Yiftah pointed me to the spot that he’d found for ideally discreet outdoor bathrooming. They all wore the same bemused expression. When I emerged a minute later from behind the bank the soldiers were all beaming, literally all wearing the same expression.  I sensed they wanted some reaction from me. I addressed the soldiers: “Did you enjoy that?” Then, as though they all shared the same emotional timing, they all laughed in the exact same way. It must be boring to be a soldier in Northern India.

We reached the Nubra Valley in late afternoon, stopping in Diskit for lunch. From the restuarant’s second floor we watched an old woman set up an informal vegetable market on the cement base of a roundabout sign. Her face had more wrinkles than the mountains in Leh but she had the mannerisms of a little girl. We watched her for many minutes with endless commentary.

I drank some curd at lunch that I probably shouldn’t have, but I am still alive!

Not Quite Clint Eastwood, But Close Enough!

I have never felt as Western than I did this past Sunday, nor have I really appreciated what that meant.

That morning started off auspiciously. I joined a group of other tourists for a visit to a Buddhist school, monastery, charitable organization and meditation center. It had a large campus out in Choglamsar, an eery moonscape of a place with dusty ochre mountains rising up on three sides and the Indus river glowing down below on the other side. The other tourists along for the tour were a group of middle-aged ladies from Europe. From the very start they were a bit stiff and reserved. I got the feeling they didn’t feel entirely comfortable but were determined to have an experience.

Since November of last year I’d been sliding slowly into feeling like a member of a meditation community in New York. The ideas passed down through Buddhist practitioners over the centuries, and now chewed over from week to week in my group, have had a viral-level effect on my life, if it’s possible for a virus to be a positive thing.  When I planned this trip to India I knew I wanted to experience Buddhism as it exists here. Ladakh has a majority of culturally Buddhist people…it’s even called “Little Tibet.” I was looking forward to my first visit to a Buddhist institution.

Indeed, when I got off the plane in Leh I felt an immediate connection to the spaciousness of Buddhist philosophy. It’s easy to see how it would flourish here in this quiet, clean place surrounded by mountains that literally knock the wind out of you. When I walked past the hilltop stupa near my guesthouse, I stopped and gawked (I didn’t go up because it was many, many steps up on a winding, very vertical staircase and I wasn’t yet acclimatized enough to brave that climb). Looking up, I had a visceral emotional reaction to the place, a feeling at once awed, ecstatic and bittersweet. I was also still suffering from altitude queasiness and fatigue which made me feel supple and dreamily receptive.

So as we toured around the campus of the meditation center in Choglamsar, I felt at home. I walked hand-in-hand with one of our guides, a young Ladakhi woman. I looked with curiosity into the classrooms for the blind. I listened in to whispered Ladakhi conversations between my friend and the blind students, unable to understand the content but getting the feeling of longstanding affection. I walked along the path for walking meditition, strung with rippling prayer flags and surrounded by steep yellow foothills. I watched white lizards skittering through the sand on the path, and I was glad the place was open to visitors, glad to have come.

Feeling at home, I was soon reminded, is a highly culturally relative thing. For me, feeling at home means I feel free to look admiringly and critically at things. I was impressed by the level of friendliness and affection that the foundng monk exuded. As he guided us through the campus and spoke about each place we visited his smile never left his face and authentic smiles came his way from every person we met who was living and studying on the campus.

I was less impressed with the tone of condescension to us Westerners, who were slighted ever so slightly on a few occasions for our violent, consumerist tendencies, our lack of community feeling, and our inablity to sit in lotus position for very long.

By lunchtime the poly-blend welcome scarf I’d been given upon arrival was burning up my neck, so I folded it up and put it in my bag, which met with a disapproving comment about showing respect from one of the ladies from the bus.  She was right; the talking-to from the monk had ignited some sartorial rebelliousness in me.

It turned out to be a rather moot point, because after lunch our group of respected guests were plopped in front of a promotional video about the center, a choice that was made last minute by our guides to fill time taken by some other, more eminent visitors from Korea who had been accidentally booked for our time slot. This was one too many passive communication situations for me, so I went outside and read my book, Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake. Ironically, the part I was reading was about the author’s travels in China and his attempts to see China for himself, not what his image-conscious and highly controlling state guard wanted him to see.

The afternoon, post-video, was spent in the prayer hall. The young members of the monastery were there, called humorously but accurately the “small monks and nuns.” Some looked to be as young as six, all shaven-headed and maroon-robed. The small monks were squirmy and mildly flirtatious with us, casting us impish glances and fidgeting on their cushions. The small nuns sat still for the entire 90-minutes-plus of chanting, Dhammapada recitation, silent meditation and head monk-led discourse.

There were times during the prayer session that were moving on a gut level. The chanting in unison with high young voices, the loving smiles between the monk and each child who stood up to recite, the hymn that one of the European ladies stood up to sing in Latin…all of these were delicious and had the feeling of something alive passing between us and sustaining us. The dharma talk from the monk, however, was rife with preachiness and redundancy. In between cliches there was some useful review and interesting takes on the Five Precepts (don’t take life, don’t steal or use more than you need, avoid sexual misconduct, don’t take intoxicating substances…I know there’s one missing but I’ve forgotten it). I made an effort to listen, to just take in all that was presented nonjudgmentally. It went on for so long though, that I couldn’t listen anymore. I was exhausted. I cheered a silent cheer when the stoic Swiss lady next to me gave a surreptitious grimace and said something to the effect of, “Eh, das gibt’s doch nicht!” (a German expression of disbelief).  Finally the Respectful Ladies were beginning to crack.

As the end of the talk neared, I mused about repetition and passive listening in education.  I realized as I sat with cramped legs that I’d learned something from my time in traditional classrooms. It’s not necessarily bad practice to be redundant. It can be a pedagogical choice, a method for teaching when uniformity of message is important. I remembered elements of it from church, from both my childhood and my brief employment in the world of the Catholic church. I give such instruction myself from time to time! There is a sweetness to the surrendering to the droning voice, to the certain authority and sure words. I remember this and can feel some refuge in it, but I was not raised solely in this way, in this pedagogical framework. I need dialogue, dissection, and active, obstreperous engagement.

After a good 30 minutes of this rambling discourse, I absolutely could not sit still any longer. I got up and stretched my legs around the outside of the prayer hall.

As I walked, I was confronted with an insight I’d never seen quite so clearly before:  I’m a product of every open discussion I’ve ever had, every opportunity I’ve had to talk back, to figure things out and decide for myself.  No doubt I’d feel differently had I been a small nun, but I wasn’t. I was a small Westerner, saving my allowance for Star Wars figurines and getting in snowball fights in between taking First Communion and avidly reading my First Golden Book Bible.

When I got back to Leh I rushed back to my guesthouse at New Yorker pace. “You can take the girl out of New York, but….” I thought as I zoomed past shambling locals and glacial-paced cattle. When I reached my room I took off my Indian kurta and put on my most Western outfit. I gave myself permission to break as many of the Five Precepts as possible that evening. And then I did.

Holy Crap!

I flew into Leh this morning. Holy crap. It’s amazing. As soon as I stepped off the airplane I felt this involuntary smile take over my face. I am smiling against my will. It might be the altitude sickness (Leh is at slightly over 3000 meters), but I think maybe not. Maybe not.

My toiletries all got super-pressurized in the flight. They were full of air when I unpacked them and I had to open each one carefully. Some squirted out a bit of stuff.  I feel the same thing is happening to my brain, in a good way.

Make Your Own Iconography

A while back I read a book called Migrations, by Rebecca Solnit. I recommend it highly.  She writes about traveling in Ireland and investigating historical imagination and metaphor.  There is a chapter about visiting the Natural History Museum in Dublin, where she looks at loads of taxidermied animals in glass cases and talks about how the sources of our descriptive language for human character traits are based in people’s actual experiences with animals. These animals we now largely experience from a static viewpoint.  I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I travel and look at animals, and as I take in the multitude of unfamiliar religious iconography that covers India.

I’m having lots of experiences, face to face, with animals that I’d only seen in zoos, and I find that I can’t get enough.  This is always a top priority on travels, having time to sit and watch new animals, to make internal movies of them. I travel best with others who have this same tendency, and right now I am missing you, Caitlin and Shayna, and am replaying memory loops of sea urchins in the tide pools at Lapush and Weinberg snails on the Baltic Sea bike path.

I’m also looking at art in temples, and in museums…so far it’s been a lot of Hindu iconography. I went to the Benares Hindu University museum and gawked at voluptous deities for a long time.

Monkeys. I love monkeys! I could watch them all day. Scratching their tummies, carrying babies, taking baths, scampering along rooftops, pulling down people’s laundry. It’s all endlessly watchable.

I saw some iguanas at the Red Fort in Agra. By the time I’d gotten to the Fort I was overdosed on Mughal architecture, but getting six inches away from an iguana the size of my hand….that was worth the 250 rupees entry fee.  The iguanas just hopped out of a hedge into the path. The first one stood there while I looked, and did some bouncy push-ups.  This made me so happy.

On a daily basis in Varanasi and Agra there were pigs (bristly, black-haired pigs with crows perched on their backs), goats, cows (the kind with eyeliner markings and a hump on the back, often wearing jewelry), lizards (one fell out of my hotel curtain when I pulled the shade back).  All of these animals are living right in the middle of dense human activity, and they all seem comfortable.  Oh, and in Varanasi I saw chickens getting their throats cut on the street, and pigs hanging skinned from hooks, right in the open air.

There’s no right way to look at animals, and I like that.  When I’m looking at them I find myself pretending to be them…not in a freakish, bystander-attention-getting way, but in a more internalized imagination kind of way. I see a pigeon lying dead in the street, and I imagine having a tiny body, lying in the street with my eyes closed, finished with my life of flying.

Looking at Shiva’s massive, Barbie-like boobs on the stone carvings at BHU, I noticed that the time spent looking at animals was helpful in getting away from a textbook viewing of icons.  I do wonder, why are Hindu deities so sexy? Eileen? Want to fill me in?

For the moment until my religion-major sister gets back to me, I’m content just to look at the carvings and know about as much as I know about the dead pigeon in the street, but to have an indescribable feeling of getting something, like a sideways glance that gives a fuller picture than a head-on stare (or reading a caption on a museum wall).

More About Agra

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was partly due to the unprecedented heat level in my room which wasn’t affected by the ceiling fan (usually the fan is enough), but it was also due to a creeping feeling I had. That creeping feeling wasn’t due to the millions of tiny roaches in the room, though that was rather unappealing. It was because I had that trip to Agra on my mind,  having written about it last night.

It’s not really a matter of whether or not the Taj Mahal is all that…it’s more a matter of whether or not you want to wade through groups of street children to get to see it.  I had seen and talked with street children in Varanasi and had, perversely, quickly gotten used to them.  In Sarnath my travel friend Richard and I were constantly followed by begging children, the last one being a small girl saying, “Hello….banana? Hello…..hello….banana-hello!”  I didn’t buy that child a banana, but I have bought food for kids when I was prepared with small money in my pocket.

It’s not the existence of these children that’s creeped me out.  I knew that homeless kids were going to be here when I planned this trip, and I knew I’d want to see the extent of their situation, the other side of the global economy that gets me my cheap groceries and clothes from H & M.

But what I hadn’t bargained on was the way that the children are there and yet not seen.  They are in the courtyards of temples, in train stations, roaming through the Tibetan colony, and outside most tourist attractions.   When the sun is at its hottest, you can see them lying under trees, trying to rest. Sometimes they are running and laughing with each other, and sometimes they are approaching people for food or money.  The employees of the tourist attractions and train stations ignore them or shoo them away.  My rickshaw driver in Agra gave a small girl a punch in the shoulder when she got too close for too long to his rickshaw. She frowned and rubbed her shoulder, and I stood there stunned. By the time I had processed what had happened I was halfway to my platform.

Then, on the train platform I watched as a European man and his son spoke with a young girl begging from them.  The man took out a bag of some snack or another and handed it to his son, but motioned for the son to wait. Then he got out his big-ass Nikon camera with the long lens and had his son and the street child pose to capture the moment of generosity.

There is the answer to this creeping feeling; it’s this revelation of street children as a souvenier image to take back home. Just make sure you don’t get a picture of the  rickshaw driver delivering that child a sneaky punch.

Shopping In The Dark

Okay, already, I’m sitting down to write an India post! Stop hassling me!

Actually, please keep hassling me. I like it.

So I’m writing my first update on my whereabouts from the New Aruna Nagar Colony in New Delhi. It’s a colony for Tibetan refugees. It’s a semi-secluded bunch of buildings off the side of a road in northern Delhi near the Yamuna river.

I couldn’t see the colony too well when I arrived on my train from Agra late last night. The rickshaw driver had a hard time finding it, and then he dropped me off on the opposite side of the highway than the colony. I had to trot across four lanes of traffic, and as I stepped onto the median I nearly tripped over something…a stiff, bloody and bloated dead dog. Eek! That’s what I actually said. Such things inspire authentic eeks.  I wasn’t prepared to come across a dead dog, despite already having seen a large dead animal that morning.  On the side of the road in Agra I saw a dead horse, also stiff and bloated, lying on its side with its four legs straight out, parallel to the road. It was still strapped to a cart.  That sight proved my growing suspicion that the best thing to do in Agra is pretend you are NOT in Agra, preferably by sleeping in an air-conditioned room with the blinds closed.

But wasn’t the Taj so beautiful?? Yes, it was. It was beautiful! It’s so many shades of white all at once, and it looms in a very impressive and moving way as you change your position. But what is it for besides looking at? It’s not really for anything besides looking at.  This is kind of distracting in its simplicity.

Far more interesting than gazing at the Taj Mahal was strolling through the Tibetan colony today and coming across a small group of Tibetans riveted to a TV screen in a shop. I heard a familiar voice coming from the TV and thought, “Could it be….?” And it was. It was Al Sharpton.  A few of the Tibetan guys standing and watching nodded as Al talked.

It was helpful to see Mr. Sharpton at that moment. Most of India is so new and unfamiliar that a known face can help make things more comprehendable. It’s a reference point, a point of comparison. There’s a tendency I feel, being in this place that is very new to me, to try to know and understand things without context.  I’m trying to cultivate an open, not-knowing and curious stance at the same time as I look for context to help me understand the place I’m traveling in.

Much of the time I feel like I am looking for something in the bottom of a dark bag, reaching around and searching by feel.  I know there are things I want to see here, to experience, but I have a hard time putting it into words or setting out to do it purposefully.

My first consumer experience in India illustrated this feeling  superbly.

I discovered on my first morning walk down Marine Drive that the Indian clothing Eileen and I had shopped for in Jackson Heights was woefully unsuited for the heat in Mumbai.  The monsoon season feels like being in a steam bath all day–a steam bath with taxis and loud Hindi music.

Desperate to change out of my poly-blend straitjacket and into something cotton, I went looking for FabIndia, the place that Hillary had called “The K-Mart of India.” It’s a huge store that sells millions of kinds of natural fiber clothes and textile products.

The store was a challenge to find because the sign was quite small, but after three passes along the same stretch of road, I found it.  I walked up the steps but stopped before going in because something wasn’t right; the lights were off.  I stood squinting into the store, feeling like I should know why the lights were off, but having no idea.  I wasn’t even sure the place was open, but as my eyes adjusted I started to see movement; people were there.  An embarassed-looking saleslady approached me and said, “There are lights on upstairs.” I asked her why the lights were off, and she smiled and shrugged.  I stood for a longer-than-necessary moment, wishing that I had looked like the sort of person confident with shopping during a power cut.

Just as I was making a move to go upstairs, I thought, “Perfect. Somehow this is like me, like how I am conducting this trip…shopping in the dark.”