Karoline, Karoline and Karly do Kerala

Surprise! I'm not in Rajasthan anymore. This might seem abrupt but in my mind it's been a long time comin'. There are a lot of stories, reflections, and thoughts I'd love to put up here from the past two weeks of finishing up my internship and then my entire academic program, but for the sake of catching up to the present I'm just going to have to skip over those for now. Or else I fear I'll be forever stuck in the past!
April 29 at 4:35 AM marked the beginning of phase three, my 20 or so days of exploring the rest of India. We arrived at the Delhi airport at an ungodly hour, charmed our liquid bottle-filled luggage through security using our Hindi as a lubricant and by 9 AM found ourselves staring at nuns in habits under palm trees outside the Ernakulam airport, our sweat glands working over time from the sudden humidity.
We've spent the past two days exploring Fort Kochi, a small, relaxed city on a peninsula jutting out into a bay opening out into the Arabian sea. Like most port cities, Kochi is a smorgasbord of cultures, left behind by the various people that have come before (Dutch, Portuguese, Jewish, Chinese, Chola, and other ancient Indian dynasties names and dates of which I can't keep straight).
I spend most my time here thinking about the ways in which Kerala is different from Rajasthan. Examples abound! Food: a preference for rice over roti, fish, idli and sumbar, coconut in the curries, poori, porrotta. Language: English and Malayalam, the script of which looks like curly-cue doodles you'd write in the corner on your notebook for a boring class. Needless to say, Hindi doesn't do us much good here and the phrase "Ham Hindi sikh rahi hai" ("We are learning Hindi") doesn't have quite the currency it did back in the airport. Weather: we got soaking wet in a thunderstorm today, the first rain I've seen or felt in three months. It was wonderful. Religion: a strong Christian influence from the Portuguese and the Dutch. People have names like Thomas, churches and Christian iconography prosper. We attended an evening mass today and realized that worship has a distinctively Hindu flavor. Politics: the Communist Party is a stronghold here, even though Congress just won the recent election...The people even look physically different, hair curly from the humidity, skin darker, features softer, and men stockier. Women wear flowers in their hair; I wore a hibiscus behind my ear today and was soon warned that that broadcasted to the Keralan world that I was angry. I quickly tucked into the braid behind my head.
All this difference makes me wonder how the hell this country stays together. The only source of similarity I can think of (one India has over America) is the uniform time difference.

“I’m an adventurer, looking for treasure."

Caroline and I have returned to Jaisalmer from a short reprieve in Jaipur for our mid-internship seminar, and we’ve returned with new vigor. Our first day back started with a bang, quite literally, as we were woken from our sleep at 7:30 in the morning by a violent shaking. Everyone groggily jumped up, yelling “Uper, uper, uper!” as we ran outside. “Kya hai? What was that?” we asked, and I soon discovered that I had survived my first sizable earthquake; after, of course, a few minutes of inevitable language confusion. Unfortunately the Hindi word for earthquake, bhukamp, sounds an awful lot like bomb, and thanks to the profusion of Border Police, army tanks, soldiers, and trucks in the area, we’re quite aware of our close proximity to the border with Pakistan. Not until I found a Hindi newspaper clipping lying around the office a couple of days later did I find out that it was a 5.3 on the Richter scale. Cool!

Caroline and I have been accompanying Vimalaji and Anoopji on their daily visits to the surrounding villages and we’ve kind of settled into a rhythmic routine. In the morning we head out either on the back of Anoopji’s motorbike, which makes us feel like we’re about to go save the world, or, if Vimala is with us, in a public bus, which usually just makes us feel like sweaty animals being gawked at in a cramped zoo. When we arrive at the village of the day little kids and women quickly catch word that white people are in town and flock to the meeting sight. During these field visits Anoop is supposed to be holding a meeting with a Mixed Group (a kind of Self-Help Group) consisting of 10-12 locals that URMUL has organized, but thanks to us the register signed at the conclusion of the meeting usually has at least 25 names on it. Once chai is offered and introductions are made, we’re instructed to take a photo and “bat karo” (converse!). But, remember? We don’t really speak Hindi. So our conversation, rather than illuminating the complex cultural reasons for the high rate of female infanticide in rural Rajasthan, or the specific challenges of providing health care in a desert village, quickly turns into a kind of characterized cultural exchange. We can count on being asked what kind of food we eat in America, why we don’t have chapatti, if we’re married, why we’re not married, what kind of animals there are in America, if it is hot in America, if we work hard in America, what time it is at that very moment in America…once we were even asked what kind of trees there are in America. God knows why. In turn we ask everyone what their names are, how many brothers and sisters they have, how many children they have, and what they do for a living; all information we promptly forget in a minute’s time. All of this bat karo-ing is conducted in a kind of Hinglish that Anoop and Caroline and I have gradually established over the past couple of weeks with each other.

In the village of Kanode we explained that we eat fish in America while making a swimming motion with our hands. Anoopji said, “Sank? Ap sank khati hai?” with a shocked expression on his face. We said yes, not really knowing what sank actually was and the whole group erupted into various expressions of surprise and laughter. Thinking that the idea of eating fish was simply absurd to people that had probably never seen the ocean before in their lives, we put the incident behind us. Not until the next field visit, when we caught Anoop explaining to the group that in America, they eat snake, did we realize our mistake. So thanks to our unofficial diplomatic visit, the entire population of Kanode will most likely go on thinking that Americans eat snake for quite a while. Oops! Guess that’s why I’m not an International Studies major.

Anyways, our first day back, the day the earth moved, was full of more surprises and the bhukamp proved to be a good omen. We were scheduled to visit two villages situated close to one another, and we had traveled there with just Anoop on the back of his motorbike. After our first meeting we stopped at the village of Hamira, where Anoop’s in-laws live, for some khana and rest. As we were sitting in Anoop’s father-in-law’s room one man came in who spoke surprisingly good English. Not only that, he knew where Minneapolis was (Caroline’s hometown); and had been there. A little more discussion revealed that his name was Khete Khan and he was a world-class Indian classical musician who had traveled to and performed in over 40 countries, many of them with Zakir Hussain, a famous percussionist. We accompanied Khete Khan back to his house to hear him play and found out that, in fact, the whole family is of the musician caste and patrons of the Rajputs, historically the ruling caste of Rajasthan. Khete Khan’s parents began touring when they were young, and the superior condition of their house made it clear that their ability to find alternate channels of patronage allowed Khete Khan’s family to harness the advantages of globalization and continue to prosper.             

Not only all that, but when I met Khete Khan’s brother, he looked familiar to me. It turns out that we had seen them play in Jaipur about a month back when we had gone to a concert with Caroline’s homestay parents. The concert had consisted of a handful of groups representing different musical traditions from around Rajasthan, but Khete Khan’s group had been by far our favorite. And now we were getting a personal concert from them in their own home!

Each boy would learn to sing and play these songs as soon as physically possible, songs that had been handed down orally for hundreds of years. There was one boy no older than two who was already singing and, with some coaxing, learning to tap out rhythms on his thigh. From talking with Khete Khan and his family, it was clear that they were all immensely proud of their craft, their history, and their recent global accomplishments. They had traveled all around the world, and still came back to this small village in the middle of the Thar Desert, because that was where their family was, yes. But also, in my opinion, because of this deep pride and connection to the past. They could confidently say that there was no other place in the world they'd rather be.

To Survive and Savor

“Travelers tend to regard time spent here as a right of passage to be survived rather than savored.” I’ve been trying to plan my after-program travels and this quote from my Rough Guide describing Mumbai made me laugh at first and then made me think about my own experiences. The difficult transition into my internship knocked the wind out of me a bit, a blow I’ve now fully recovered from. At the point I read this quote I was still trying to pull myself out of one of those infamous lows on the study abroad culture shock graph. “I don’t want to just survive, but lately that’s all I’ve been struggling to do,” I thought and said aloud to Caroline. She of course reminded me of all the savoring we’d been doing as well.

I met a woman from Hungary last week that had come to the country for a month before and had “fallen in love with India.” Now she’s back for longer. I’ve already been asked here “So how do you like India so far?” and I have no idea how to answer such a seemingly simple question. Usually whoever asks is someone who only speaks Hindi, so I just leave it at “Achchha laga,” and call it a day. But I come up stumped when I try to figure out how I’m going to answer that same question when I return home. I find myself jealous of the Hungarian woman, who could state so easily that India has claimed her heart. I too came to India heart open, ready to, even expecting to fall in love. But India has proven to be a tricky lover. What a naïve, selfish girl I was! Expecting India to fill up all of my empty spaces, without taking any of my blood, sweat, or tears in return.

So as all the wonder and excitement of India’s newness wears off, I’m starting to map out a different kind of love, one strengthened by an interwoven blanket of both survival stories and savory moments. I can see now how the surviving reinforces the savoring, just like Caroline assured me. It’s a kind of love that will still be impossible to explain in passing conversation, but hey, that’s the best kind of love anyways. Now, in order to survive the lows that have grown increasingly shorter in length, intensity, and frequency, I go back to one lazy, hot Friday afternoon spent with Surjan Ramji last week. I sat in his office, while the rest of Phalodi was so quiet it seemed the entire town was taking its after-lunch nap at once. The only noise was the fan above us as we ate apples and grapes in smile-filled silence. I finally stopped wishing my Hindi was better and just accepted the silence, and watched a trail of tiny ants doggedly climb the wall next to me, and felt the kind of understanding that can only pass between two people without a common language. 

Divine Bovine: A Photographical Offering