Classic

We were sitting in a too-small, overwhelmingly decorated room. Giant Hindu idols adorned the walls, covered in small colorful lights and plastic flowers and sparkles and bright red and orange cloth. The room was too small for the number of people inside; it was hot and cramped, I was sweating, and the fan was going at an unacceptably slow speed. Before us sat arguably the best Indian classical violinist in the world. Banaras is known as the city of music, and this man was poised to be the head of its prestigious Banaras Hindu University’s music department.

I knew I’d never been enthusiastic about Indian classical music. But Krishna had told us that, when played well, you don’t have to try to like it. You don’t have to be used to it. You just know it’s good. So I went to Balaji’s concert with new hope, that maybe this music would be good.

Balaji pulled his bow across the strings, sliding his fingers up and down his instrument. It whined. I cringed. I tried to be open-minded. I tried hard. Genevieve hates it when we’re negative. I hate it too. But this music was just too much.

As I sat, listening to the painful noises of his instrument, I tried to distract myself by thinking about how I would tell Genevieve that I couldn’t deal with any more of these classical music concerts, without getting her angry.

“Genevieve,” I’d say. “Indian Classical music just… isn’t my thing.”

“Come on,” she’d say. “Just try listening to something else. Some sitar music, maybe?”

No, that wouldn’t do. I couldn’t have her dragging me to another concert, violin or sitar or harmonium, or whatever else she could find. I would need to be more firm.

“Genevieve,” I could say. “This is painful to listen to. It sounds like he’s trapped cicadas and donkeys and cats in the body of his violin, and they’re all trying to get out. I want to take his violin away from him, and say, ‘That is not how you use this instrument!’ I can’t do it anymore. No more Indian classical music!”

By this point, I was so caught up in how I’d escape further Indian-classical-music-situations that I didn’t realize that my hand had been subconsciously tapping my knee, beating out the lively rhythm with more and more vigor; my head was moving side to side. It seemed that against my will, my body was – was this even possible? – enjoying the music. I felt like one of the old men sitting around me, shaking their heads, raising their arms in appreciation, shouting, when truly impressed, “Kya baat hai!” What a thing!

The music, I realized, was good. It had taken on a rhythm I hadn’t noticed before. It was loud and passionate, full of rich culture and joy, and reminded me of wedding klezmer or Irish fiddle music.


Banaras is not like New York, or Paris, or London, or any city I’ve ever visited. “City” itself is a misnomer for Varanasi. It’s hard to think of it as a dormant place, just a setting or my current location, because it seems to be much more of a living entity. Of all the characters in my life right now, Banaras is the lead role. Banaras is mischievous, intelligent, all-powerful, fickle, cruel, and loving. Banaras looks deep within you, and manifests your greatest fears and wishes. It (he? she?) figures out what you feel, and then purposely puts you in a situation to completely change your point of view.

First paan, now classical music. What new loves will Banaras bring? Someone make sure I don’t start swimming in the Ganga.

The scene

There’s a scene in Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s the one in the beginning, when Will Turner sees Elizabeth coming down the majestic spiral staircase of the governor’s mansion. She is dressed in a beautiful new green gown. From the tight laces of her corset to the perfect symmetry of her high cheekbones and pouted lips, everything about her is grace and beauty. But what really makes the scene is Will. His face when he sees her seems completely wiped blank, as if she’s stripped him of all his worries, thoughts of his responsibilities. You can see it in his eyes: all that matters, in that moment, is Elizabeth.

My high school mascot was the pirate, so naturally I loved that movie. I was obsessed with it for a while, and watched it more times than it’s healthy to watch a movie. But then, as such loves go, I knew it so well I became sick of it. I haven’t seen it in years, and only began to think of it again when I got to India.


Imagine that scene happening to you hundreds of times a day. Because for a foreigner girl, that’s how it is in India. When I walk down to the fruit seller to buy pomegranates for breakfast, there he inevitably is: the Indian Will Turner, on his bike, whose head seems to do a full 180° turn to keep watching me (I keep forgetting to ask Virendra-ji how to say “to crash,” as in “If you keep looking at me, you’re going to crash”).

Paan sellers see me passing in a rickshaw and stop rolling their leaves of tobacco to stare. Boys engaged in animated conversation stop, open-mouthed, when they see me. Some hit their friends to make them turn around and see the angrezi.

My home stay sister and I were riding home from the market one day, and she was shocked by all the boys staring. “They act as if they never saw a foreigner before!” she said, scandalized.

One guy made a loud feline noise as we passed him. Another barked. “This city’s like a zoo!” I joked to Priyanka. “There are cats, and dogs…”

“And especially boys,” she said.


In the past three months, I’ve gotten used to my surroundings. I don’t gape at the women carrying large sacks of rice on their heads, or the men selling squares of dried mango on the corner. But I’m slowly coming to terms with the truth: they’ll never get used to me.

Weavers

I'm sorry, I know I've been doing a terrible job of writing - but I uploaded even more pictures from our very hands-on walking tour of the part of Varanasi where the muslim weavers work their magic.

That's levitation, Holmes!!

And more.

Ahhh us!

Annual Giving - Princeton Pause

The newest song in

the soundtrack of my life: Paisa Paisa, from De Dana Dan

Help Seeds of Peace!

Last night, we were eating our favorite Assi Ghat apple pie when we heard an announcement for a candlelight vigil in honor of the memory of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November 26. Chhaya and I went down and lit candles with the crowd. I prayed for the lives that had been lost, and prayed that nothing of its magnitude would ever happen again. I thought about how proud I was to be a member of Seeds of Peace, which has always been an unwavering voice of reason through the most difficult times of terror.

The first week we arrived in India, we wrote down a list of group rules. One of them was "remember your roots." Seeds is where my roots are. Help them grow. Click on the box below.

For fans of Litzi Didi

She's on NPR!! Check it out.

Overheard anthropomorphism

Saumya: Oh Didi, the moon is walking!
Priyanka: Noo, Saumya, the clouds are walking, na?

"Do you want to see... what I am going to show you?"


- My ten-year-old homestay sister, Saumya, leaving me very little choice.

I caved

Last night I was at my family's sari shop, and the shopkeeper told me I will not have experienced Banaras without trying paan. I told him at some point I would, just to make him happy, but then he ran out and returned a few minutes later with paan for Genevieve and me. It was actually the prettiest paan I've ever seen, decorated with silver leaf and rose petals. It tasted very bizarre, with sweet exotic spices I can't describe. While I tried to control the gob of leaves stuck in my left cheek, he held the lehenga I'd just bought up to me, and we both looked at my reflection in the mirror.

"You now, Hindustaani," he said.

This place

I wish I could capture all the little wonderful moments of my days (because every day, no matter how difficult, has them), bundle them up and send them back to my friends and family at home. Life here is so beautiful.


Yesterday, on my walk to Hindi class early in the morning, I first began to feel the chill of winter. I've been laughing at my homestay sister, who bundles up with wool jackets and a scarf when it's 65 degrees outside, but it actually is starting to get pretty cold. The wind blew hard and I almost lost my dupatta. Cycling past, a rickshaw driver with no warm clothes, and holes in his pants torn from days of constant contact with his bikeseat, sang an upbeat song that made me smile.



Later in the day, a monkey ran into our apartment, ignoring Lizzie horrified shrieks of "Out, get OUT! THERE IS A MONKEY IN HERE AND - OUT!!!"

By the time Joe and I ran out of the kitchen, where we were making grilled cheese, it had grabbed an orange, and run back out the door to enjoy its lunch on the highest part of our roof.



Last night was the last night of Guria's concert series, Pearls of Love, part of our campaign to end human trafficking. Even one of the little girls in a tattered dress who sells postcards for five rupees each on the ghats tossed some coins into my donations cloth.



And on the way home, I asked my rickshaw driver to stop at the dobie, or washerman, by Assi Ghat to pick up my laundry. My clothes weren't ready, but his wife invited me into their house to meet her daughter's six-day-old baby. He was so tiny, and swaddled in a gray blanket. His mother had lined his eyes with smudged khol, a traditional Indian way to ward off the evil eye. She asked him to say "Namaste", but I understood when he only stared up at me. I hope I gave him a good first impression of a Westerner.

What if...

... Banaras were taken over by goats?

Aaj ka quote.

Andrew: I want to watch that Youtube video where you can see a chicken laying an egg.
Shaina: Or you could watch Animal Planet. You can see a chicken laying an egg. Or a horse laying a horse.
Joe: I don’t want to see a horse laying a horse. I want to see a horse laying an alligator. That’d be impressive.

Reading list! Suggestions?

I’ve been doing a ton of reading since I came to India. There’s a great bookstore right on Assi Ghat, where I can get almost any book I want. The problem is, since there’s so much selection, sometimes it’s impossible to choose – more than once I’ve found myself sitting on the floor in there for hours, not knowing which book to pick.

This is what I’ve read so far.

Deception Point by Dan Brown
--> The writing isn’t amazing, but Brown knows something about suspense. Lizzie was teasing me for reading him until she started reading DP recently. Totally hooked.


God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
--> I LOVE KURT VONNEGUT. It wasn’t nearly as good as Slaughterhouse Five, but it was still brilliant.


Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe
--> Possibly the worst published writing I’ve ever read. But hilarious, sometimes because the writing’s so bad, but also because it captures hippies in India very well.


Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
--> Could not put it down. BYPies were constantly getting updates on the state of my crush on Rhett Butler.


Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
--> SO GOOD. Everything blew my mind. What a genius book.


Life of Pi by Yann Martel
--> Definitely my favorite of the books I’ve read so far here. Hilarious, meaningful, so well done.


The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra
--> If you want to know what life is like in the exact neighborhood I’m staying in, read this book. I couldn’t believe how accurate the description of the environment was. Too bad the story was pretty boring.


The Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
--> Love… love.


Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
--> I think my expectations were too high because it had won a Pulitzer for fiction. It was really good, though.

Okay. I can’t remember any more that I’ve read. There are some I’d like to go back to. I had to stop reading Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai) in the middle, because it was part of a library in Kanda, and we had to leave. I also got distracted from reading Gandhi’s autobiography, which I do eventually want to finish. But I really need suggestions. Right now I’m reading Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, which is great. What should I read next!?

In other news, the Guria concert series, Pearls of Love, is going well. Tonight a new group of marginalized artists are coming, so I’m excited to see their acts. After the show tonight, Joe, his homestay brother, Sourabh, and I are going to see the latest 459374 hour music vide- I mean, Bollywood movie, Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani. We saw Blue last month. It’ll be interesting to see if Katrina Kaif is as good without her chin stud.

Quote of the Day

"I often get exasperated when aspirating."

-Andrew Lotus Finkelstein

Counting to 100

The tiny girl had slid into the rickshaw next to me, accompanied by her Burka-clad mother. She wore a frilly pink frock, with iridescent plastic flowers lining its sleeves. She stared up at me, big-eyed and open-mouthed, while her mother asked in slow, thickly accented English whether I was a foreigner. "Hain," I replied, as my rickshaw driver, Shushi, grinned at me in his rear-view mirror. He thinks it's funny when I speak Hindi.

"And... where you belong?" she asked.

"Here." I wanted to say, but I knew what she was asking. "America."

She nodded.

Her daughter, who'd been wiggling around, clung to my knee with her small hand. She began to count. I didn't realize what she was saying until she got to 63. "Sissty fo, sissty fie, sissty siss.."

She stopped when she got to "wahhn HUNRET", and I got the funny feeling I'd found Gautham's soul mate.

An illustration

Lotus and Joy try their first paan... in honor of my last blog posting?

Once u-paan a time, in Banaras...

For the first several days after our arrival in Banaras, I was convinced that all the city’s men were dying. I kept my horrifying discovery to myself, hoping I was imagining the hundreds of men I’d seen spitting up thick mouthfuls of crimson blood on the streets. I had to be careful when walking past open windows, for at any given moment, someone might stick his head out and hack up some more bright liquid. No one, it seemed, could control these bursts of bodily malfunction. Rickshaw wallas, while pedaling us down the road, would try to aim their spit on the road, but flecks of red would inevitably hit the base of my churidar pants. What could possibly cause such a widespread epidemic? Was it the custom in this area to inflict a mortal wound on the men upon marriage, so that for the rest of their life they died ever so slowly, spitting up blood all the while?

It came as a relief, then, to have paan explained to me. The men weren’t suffering from some strange ailment, but rather indulging in a popular Banarsi drug*. Kind of like chewing tobacco, paan is full of betel nuts and tobacco. As a result, Benarsi men often have a thick red coating on their teeth – when you can see their teeth at all. Most men, it seems, are always chewing paan, making it incredibly difficult to hold a conversation.

During our time in India, we’ve discovered that Indians have an almost fully functional street sign language. (A single kind of head nod means “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “why,” “where,” “stop,” “go,” and “what?” Similar questions may be asked through the use of a hand twist. As I said, almost fully functional.) In Banaras, try having a conversation with a paan chewer, and the necessity of a mouth-free language becomes clear.


“Hamlog Godolia ja rahe hain.” We’re going to Godolia. “Kitne?” How much?
The rickshaw walla, lower lip completely stuffed with the red gunk, looks at us. Uh oh. Can’t do this one with his hands. He throws back his head as if he’s about to sneeze – but really, he’s just trying to speak and hold it all in at the same time.

“Puhua!” he attempts. I feel like a dentist’s assistant trying to make conversation with a man while I simultaneously clean his teeth.

“Kya?” What?

“Punhua!” he tries again. He scrapes a little of the stuff to the side of his mouth. “Panra.”

“Oh, pandera!” Fifteen. “Tiik hai.”


Joe said that maybe the reason men here need arranged marriages is that no one would otherwise marry a man with a mouthful of paan. There could well be some truth to that, though I’d hope that on the day of his wedding, no man in his right mind would chew paan. But if it happened anywhere, it would happen in Banaras. Amid a crowd of joyous family members, a happy couple is joined in matrimony. The beautiful bride looks resplendent in her festive capsicum-red sari. The groom tilts his head back to accept his marriage vows, and the onlookers nod approvingly at the way his teeth perfectly match the bride’s outfit – a sure sign of their everlasting compatibility.








*Joe disagrees. Upon hearing this line, he corrected, “Crack is a drug. Paan is a lifestyle.”

Halloween girls

I'd already taken off a lot of my pholkumari costume, but here's the afterparty shot.

For more Bridge Year fun:

My photo album - http://picasaweb.google.co.in/shai03/India#
The Bridge Year Website (with monthly updates from the field) - byp.princeton.edu

Looking Up

Cows are sacred and beautiful animals, but there’s no denying the insane amount of foul-smelling brown mush they excrete. There’s so much, all over the cobblestone alleyways, that I spend the majority of my time carefully watching the path in front of me, protecting my faithful flip flops from a messy, squishy fate.

Luckily, at present, I have yet to have stepped in said unpleasantness. Andrew, on the other hand… Let’s just say that when I hear him curse loudly under his breath, I’m fairly certain of what he’s just encountered.

“Watch the road!” I tell him. “I can’t believe you didn’t see that. It was right there in front of you!”

“I know, I know,” he says. “Trust me. I know.”


Tonight, I was walking home from Hindi class, back to the program house. For some reason, I looked up. Maybe I thought I heard a motorcycle coming, maybe I heard a child’s yell – I can’t be sure. But for some reason, I looked up. I noticed, above the door of the house next to our program house, a beautiful design. It was a flower, outlined in red, artfully decorating the otherwise plain white building.

“Has that always been there?” I asked Chhaya.

“Yeah, haven’t you seen it before?”

No, I hadn’t seen it before. I’d been watching my feet. I hadn’t realized it before, and was a little embarrassed to admit it when I did – I just haven’t really been looking up. I’ve travelled just about as far from the familiar as I possibly could, and I’ve been so worried about keeping my feet clean that I’ve missed the details that, albeit small, make a different place what it is.

Andrew has been looking up. Without thinking twice, he takes advantage of opportunities that normal people wouldn’t even consider. A shave in a small barbershop in a remote Indian mountain village? He’s there. A stop in a traditional Indian wrestlers’ gym during a walking tour? He and Joe didn’t even wait a day before waking up hours earlier than usual to join the wrestlers in their akara. Granted, sometimes he gets a little dirty. The barber tries to overcharge him. The wrestlers in the akara are pretty rough. And sometimes, he steps in an unfortunately located cow patty. But when I think of all the things he’s gained from his experiences, those small daily risks that have made his time here outstanding, I guess it’s worth it.

I’m learning from everything around me these days – including my fellow students. I think I’ll try to be a little more Lotus-like for these next few months. I’ll just carry around a handkerchief to clean my shoes off along the way.

Seva

One of the wisest men we’ve met thus far in India is named Krishna. He is a musician with a PhD in physics, a mystical man with a story for every lesson. Last week, he came to speak to us about seva, or service with spiritual intention.

He shared with us the Eastern philosophy about service. Krishna, I assure you, said this all 100 times better than I’ll be able to, but here to the best of my ability is one of his points.

When you are sleeping, he explained, you dream up a whole world. You can find rushing rivers, towering buildings, and burning fires - all in your head. When you wake up, you think you are in the real world, but according to the mystics of the East, that too is a sort of dream world.

When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and people asked him what he did, he would reply, “I am awake.” He had become in tune with the oneness of the universe, reaching complete tranquility by transcending the pseudo reality of the world we live in.

Because of this connection of all things, we are each other. I, for example, am the rickshaw driver, the beggar outside the temple, the dog dashing between motorcyclists down a narrow cobblestone alleyway. It is simply the illusion of the physical world that makes us feel separate.

Think for a moment, as Krishna asked us to, about an arm. Pointing to his arm, a man might say, “this is my arm.” No one would point to his elbow and exclaim, “this is me!”

But hit that same man on the arm, and he will indignantly ask, “Why did you hit me?”

Through this lens, we view the other – be it the leper living in the box by the Assi Ghat steps or the sabjii walla on the corner – as separate from ourselves. No one would look at another person and say, “That is me.” But when there is suffering inflicted on one part of the universe, the entire entity takes offense.

Western social biologists spend so much time trying to discern what it is that makes humans want to help others. Is it that someday, we hope others will help us? Do we expect a parade in our honor, and a shiny medal of honor?

We serve because when we see a child physically and mentally scarred by her surroundings, we too feel that pain. Because when a country’s low literacy rate holds back its intellectual advancement, no country can move forward. We serve because when a boy who cannot walk is shunned by society as being useless, it is as if we are all ostracized for differences we cannot control.

I looked around the circle as Krishna spoke, thinking about the various seva that each of us would soon be embarking on. I had in my mind the image of an arm being a part of a whole, and each of us having an arm that had been affected by the service sites we’d visited. Be it the orphaned children Andrew works with at the Bal Ashram, Chhaya’s students at the Southpoint School and Joe’s at World Literacy of Canada, the differently-abled youths of Lizzie’s Kiran Center, or the children of women in prostitution who I care for with the Guria team; each person with whom we connect personally affects our motivation to help.

It is as if we are one of the multi-appendaged Hindu Gods, our five arms reaching out to redress the problems of the world. Documented somewhere, I’m sure, is the little-known tale of the Bridge Year Devi. Beginning with the nine months she spent living in Varanasi, India, her story ends with her riding off on her tiger in the service of her nation – and the service of all nations.

Miracles

There’s an age, somewhere between one’s third birthday and the first day of fourth grade, during which a child believes in magic. Everything and anything is possible. When I was very young, little houses built in the backyard out of twigs, with moss for carpeting and bits of bark for furniture, housed real fairies, who came every night to eat the Rice Krispies I’d left for them in acorn shell bowls. My father’s glance into my closet was enough to kill any monsters living within. I had no doubt that magic was happening all around me.

So when my mother taught me the concept of Direction of Energy when I was four, I readily accepted it as the best sort of medicine there was. Direction of Energy involved feeling the energy field around someone’s body, and then pulling negative energy out of them, while guiding in positive energy. If someone told me about Direction of Energy now, I would smile and think how crazy they sounded. But since I was so young, it seemed perfectly normal. Sure¸ it was a little fantastical, but so were my fairy friends. Once mastering the art of Direction of Energy, I used it when my friends scraped their knees on the preschool playground.

“This will help you, don’t worry.”

They believed me, and usually it did help, if only because their minds told them it would.



Sitting in the Ramakrishna Mission House, I stared down at what Bushra had become. Once a joyous, beautiful five-year-old girl, she was now a writhing mess of pain. Her stained, ripped shirt hung raggedly from one shoulder. She maintained no feeling in any part of her body, and thrashed about so violently I was afraid she’d pull out the IV that had been crudely taped to her hand. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them, and her eyeballs themselves had rolled back in her head. Worst of all was her long, high pitched wail, coming and going from a too-widely opened mouth, signaling her immense physical suffering.

Manju ji, one of the heads of Guria, spoke quietly in the corner to Bushra’s distressed mother. She was so afraid to lose her youngest child, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to afford the treatment that possibly wouldn’t even be enough to save her life. Many doctors had seen Bushra and offered no help, saying that the girl was too far gone. Many hospitals wouldn’t take her in. At last, the Ramakrishna Mission House did, and yesterday afternoon, Bushra had gone into a coma. “With this kind of brain fever, she has a ten percent chance of survival,” the doctor told her mother.

Everyone had been thinking of Bushra. At the Guria center, we’d had two minutes of silence – punctuated by Bushra’s sister’s sobs – to pray for Bushra’s life, each child praying to God to bring their friend home safely. The prayers worked, Manju ji told Bushra’s mother. No one had really expected Bushra to come out of the coma.

“Chalo, Shaina,” said Manju ji. She came back and looked down sadly at the Bushra, who had at last worn herself out and had mercifully been able to fall asleep. “Let’s go. The doctor is too busy right now… I wanted to stay and speak with him, but we’ve been here too long.” She turned, and pressed a 1,000 rupee note into Bushra’s mother’s hand.

Too busy? I thought. God, somebody help this girl. I wish there were something I could do.
Suddenly, I realized there was something. “Manju ji, can we stay for a few more minutes?” I quickly tried to explain Direction of Energy to her. I’m not sure if it made the translation from English to Hindi in her mind, but she agreed to let me try.

I sat down on a wooden stool at the head of Bushra’s short, hard bed, placing my hands a few inches from the sides of the sleeping girl’s head. I closed my eyes and began to feel a familiar tingling of energy, the hot energy of her inflamed brain tissue growing stronger and stronger. It felt prickly and angry, and just when it was about to really hurt my hands, I began to work. I visualized a blue, cooling light emanating from my palms, massaging its way through Bushra’s burning head. It soothed us both, and a minute later, I felt calm. I opened my eyes, feeling the stares of all the women around me – Bushra’s mother, her grandmother, her nurse, Manju ji, even the other women sitting with their sick children in beds around us. But I kept a soft gaze on Bushra as I drew my hands slowly away from her head. In the same moment, Bushra opened her eyes. She yawned, and attempted to sit up. She was quiet, and her nurse helped her up. Her eyes no longer rolled, and she looked alert. I couldn’t believe it. Could I have helped, even a little bit?

Stunned, Manju ji touched my shoulder. “What – what was it that you did?” I explained again, and this time it seemed as though she understood. She said something in Hindi to the other women. The grandmother, old and toothless, began wiping tears from her eyes with the end of her sari, looking deep into me and bobbing her head side to side and up and down.

Soon the doctor walked in, and looked over Bushra, who began to quietly cry.

“She is still in very bad condition, but she is much better than she was yesterday,” he said.

Manju ji and I left the room silently.



Genevieve had told us that things were different here in Varanasi, that anything can happen in this holy city. But I haven’t really believed in miracles since childhood. Walking out of that hospital, I realized, India has made me believe in magic again.

A Bridge Year Blessing

Sometimes, when lying on the roof, staring up at the vast night sky, I turn my attention down to the activity of the valley. All over the horizontal rows of earth are little splotches of light. I try to imagine the specific source of each, and its purpose. One tiny house’s fire cooks the night’s spiced potatoes and chapati. Another illuminates a small room, while in a house down at the bottom of the valley, a little boy curls up by his fire to study his English textbook.

Four nights ago, if anyone across the valley were to be sitting, looking up at the stars, and happened to notice the far glow on Mr. Verma-ji’s roof, he would most certainly have been looking at my friends and me, our headlamps alight as we readied ourselves for our mini Rosh Hashanah celebration. For Joe, that meant reading as much as he could of Harry Potter (and the prisoner of Azkaban) before Andrew finished cutting open his sticks of honey. I’d already poured a small portion of maple syrup into a small metal bowl, and fresh Indian bananas (the best you’ve ever tasted) waited, soft and sweet, beside the bowl. Genevieve, Christina, Binit-ji, and Lizzie sat in the circle with us, quietly and patiently waiting while I explored my pocket prayer book.

I didn’t know what prayers were to be said for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. My book knew what to do on normal days, on Shabbat, on Hannukah, even what to say on Purim. It had served me well in Kausani: on Saturday morning, after I’d finished a super-abridged Shabbat service, and I noticed the Himalayas had come out, the book provided me with the blessing for “seeing the majesty of the heavens, high mountains, or other glorious phenomena of nature”.

I searched and searched, and could come up with nothing for Rosh Hashanah. My companions were understanding and flexible though, and in the end we decided to say the shehechianu. “Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam,” I began, and Joe and Andrew joined in. “Shehechianu vikiyamanu vihigianu lazman hazeh.”

The prayer thanked God for “giving us life and sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.” For me, the blessing was perfect.

In its short and succinct Hebrew way, its words encompassed all that I wanted to say and more. Thank you, God, for making sure that admissions officer had been in a good mood that day. Thank you, the prayer said, for catching our eyes on the short blurb about Princeton’s pilot Bridge Year program, and thank you for instilling in us the courage to explore beyond our country’s familiar borders. Thank you for giving us the strength to write yet more essays about why us. Thank you for keeping Skype functioning long enough to be asked what we would do with no toilet paper for a year. Thank you for getting us past surprisingly intrusive swine flu checkpoints in the airports. Thank you for holding our wheels to the ground as we flew through the crowded, noisy streets of Delhi, and down the impossibly bendy one-way roads of the mountains. Thank you for keeping intestinal craziness, while clearly inevitable, to a minimum. Thank you for ensuring that our instructors were more knowledgeable and experienced than we ever could have hoped for. Thank you for inspiring us each morning with lush green hills, unearthly flowing wisps of clouds, and high, piercing Himalayan peaks. Thank you for allowing us to see our potential to improve lives, even in the small way that we had, helping to reconstruct Sadu’s small house. Thank you for giving us life, sustenance, and bringing us to this happy season.


And thank you, in advance, for everything to come.

The Machine

In seventh grade Performing Arts class, Mr. Agalias asked for a volunteer.

“Someone go to the center of the circle, and start doing something. Anything. Move your arm up and down. Turn your head left to right. Make a noise that corresponds with your action. ‘Swoosh swoosh,’ maybe, or ‘boing boing’. Just do something repetitive.”

Dan, one of our braver classmates, went up first. He turned his knee out, then back in again, saying, “Whee! Whee!” He continued the pattern until Mr. Agalias tapped my head and told me to find an action and noise that fit in with Dan’s. I bent down, and put my arm in the empty space his knee would create, pulling it out every time his knees came back to center. “Boom. Boom.”

We were the machine. One by one, Mr. Agalias would tap us on the head, and each of us would become a working gear of the contraption. Before long, we’d become a bouncing, buzzing, busy cacophony of middle school actors.


Today I find myself part of a very different machine, several thousand miles away from that small theater in Grover Middle School. The machinery of our efforts is much the same as it was those years ago, though our purpose is decidedly more useful. I am in the small tropical paradise of Kanda Valley, working to put the roof on a high new house.

It all begins with the young man on the ground, wearing a shirt reading, “URBAN CHAOS!” He is stamping dirt and rocks and cement together, while a man close by shovels it into metal pans. These pans are picked up and passed, man to man to man to man, up an efficient design of makeshift stairs and scaffolding. Their rhythm is continuous, the pattern accented by grunts and laughs and Kumaoni calls. Cement dumped out on the roof, the trays are passed down to me. I make eye contact with the man below me, and he raises his eyebrows, wordlessly signaling that it’s safe to slide the trays down to him via fraying plastic slide. Whoosh. He runs the trays to the shoveler. And the cycle begins again.

One of the volunteers above me wipes the sweat from the back of his neck, saying, “Man, wouldn’t this be easier if they just had a machine to haul all that cement up here?”

I watch the activity all around me, and shake my head. Look at us. We are the machine.

Hamara Dost

Today, as we were walking home from the village, we passed Gautham, a little boy in our homestay family. He was walking home from school with his friends, who were all dressed exactly the same way, looking like a little herd of Gauthams in their identical light blue uniforms and crooked dark blue ties.

“Gautham!” we shouted. “Gautham! Our friend! Mayra dost!”

All grammar out the window. Too excited.

I don’t really know what we expected. Did we think he’d run, arms outstretched, to embrace us? Lick our faces like a puppy? Happily introduce us to his little buddies, proudly telling everyone that these Americans lived with him?

Whatever we were expecting, we didn’t get it. He pushed one of his friends in front of him, and continued to walk, keeping his head down.

“Oh my God,” said Joe. “Did we just embarrass Gautham?”

Luckily Gautham got over his embarrassment pretty quickly – only after he coerced Joe into a game of pretty intense game of hide and seek when we got home.

“Count to ONE HUNDRED!”

“Oh no! I only know up to ten! Ek, do, tin, char, panch, che, sat, ot, nau, dos….. 18! 52! 65! Here I come!”

A good game of hide and seek fixes everything.

Scooby Doo* and the Mystery of the Anasakti Ashram

Scooby Doo wasn't actually with us on the trip, and I can't confidently say that he would have been much of a help. While he's led his posse of eager cartoon characters through dark forests and past evil creatures of the night, our mission was fairly high on the impossible-o-meter.

Christina had handed us a sheet of paper, a long checklist of everything she hoped Andrew, Lizzie and I would find in the village of Kausani.

"Are we really supposed to find all these things?"

She looked at me, her lips curling up at the edges, the way she does when she's amused. She likes it when we figure things out ourselves. Experiential learning. Get used to it.

Here's something you should know about Kausani: they're not used to tourists here. You can "Namaste" all you want, wear your traditional Indian suits, modestly look away from males, and pretend not to watch, enthralled, as an elderly man guides his cow along the road, but your blonde hair still screams, "I'm so completely different from you!"

As we made the several-kilometer trek down to the village, we tried to decide what we'd get first. Tea lamps? An Indian Flag sticker? Three handprints from the local children? When all you can confidently say in Hindi is "I am not married," the possibility of communicating your need for an Indian tongue cleaner is severely limited. We decided to start with "A pamphlet from the Anasakti Ashram."
When we came to a fork in the road, we went to the right, heading uphill on a winding path to the Ashram. Finally, we found a plain white stone building, several stories high. A sign on the front told us we were very welcome to the Anasakti Ashram, and we began the ascent up several flights of stairs.

Each stair, carved into the stone, was short. Not one was parallel to the ground, and as we climbed higher and higher, trying to keep our balance on the steps, we felt more and more like visitors to some strange location Dr. Seuss might have written about. I half expected to find the Onceler from The Lorax waiting for us at the top. When we did reach the summit of our treacherous climb, we found, not the Onceler, but a middle-aged man doing some kind of squatting meditation, looking out over the mountains. We had stumbled up onto the landing rather loudly and ungracefully, and I felt painfully out of place as his head turned slowly to face us. Behind him, a group of men were engaged in some sort of worship inside a room. A sign above the door said that everyone was required to be "present at prayer."
"We should... um... pamphlets?" I whispered, and turned to see that my companions really didn't know how to handle the situation either.

I looked back at the man, his eyes round as he watched us. I looked down at Christina's sheet. "Talk to people: make some friends!" the instructions reminded me. I looked back at the man. Back at the sheet. The man. His eyes seemed to be burning into me, branding a big "O" for "outsider" on my forehead.

"Let's go upstairs," I said.

Again, we climbed. Finally we came out onto some sort of balcony. There was a high podium covered in Hindi writing, and in the corner, a group of men in simple brown robes. They noticed our arrival, then turned back to their conversation, keeping one eye on our movements.

There are some places in the world that want people to come visit, places that encourage travelers to peak their heads in and poke around for a bit. Those are the kinds of places that take the time to write up pamphlets. But after experiencing the energy of our surroundings, we were very sure that the Anasakti Ashram was not one of those places.

In the end, we decided to take a picture of a posting of the Ashram's rules. We kept the camera low, expecting some holy man to see us with our camera and kick us out. Then we kicked ourselves out, hurrying back down the steps (as safely as possible) and back toward the village.

By then, any chance we might have thought we had of finding everything on the list was pretty much shot. “Neem” for example, does not grow in Kausani, and it was therefore useless to ask for. Nobody had any Coriander seeds, and after a few awkward attempts, Andrew stopped pursuing the Indian tongue cleaner.


In high school, I was so used to getting an assignment, and completing the task. Everything was doable. But Kausani was totally new to me. Some things were available. Some were not. Later, Genevieve would tell me that this was India. If I expected to be able to do everything completely, all the time, I’d go crazy.
We bought some vitamin C from the pharmacy, a package of bindis, a bottle of apricot oil, some postcards of the Himalaya Mountains, and a prickly green vegetable we didn’t recognize. We asked a friendly shopkeeper to tell us about Ravi Shankar, the Rig Veda, and the Prime Minister of India. We even found some things that weren’t on the list. Andrew and I bought matching hats (we’re basically bhaaii-bahan, after all), and I got a beautiful notebook painted with powdered rice made by women artists from Kumaon.

So what if the Anasakti Ashram didn't have pamphlets? By the time we made it back to the Chevron Ecolodge, our legs were tired, and our bag was full enough. Experiential learning. We're still getting used to it.


*By "Scooby Doo," I of course mean "the adventurous and open-minded BYPies, specifically Shaina, Lizzie, and Andrew because Joe was sick, and Chhaya's still recovering from surgery." But unless you're Sufjan Stevens, some things are too long to turn into a title.

Yaks

Hey everyone! I'm sorry for the unforgivable break in blog postings. I'm in India, and I've decided to post my yaks on here, too. Hope you enjoy!

Get creative!

Live out there.

You have a beautiful face.

"Use of the word “idiot” in blog posts has declined by nearly half in the last six months..."

Very nice.

Le Miserable

You know how people tell you to do things that scare you?

Ezra

Ezra's artwork was beautiful, creative, and inspiring. Unfortunately, there isn't enough of it online. What I could find comes from his blog, Charcoal Junkie. I wish you could see it all.

Rest in peace, Ezra Weidenfeld

Dear Ezra,

I'm sorry for how much I've cried today... you would not approve. Because when I think of you, I remember all the times you tried so hard to make me smile. And how happy you'd get when I did. You had so much love to give, and you spread it everywhere, especially via those massive, comforting, warm, wonderful hugs of yours. I wanted so much to be able to go camping together, and I'm sorry we never got the chance. I wish you were still here, so I could have spent more time with you. But I know you did what you were on earth to do; you did it beautifully. You made a difference in the life of everyone you came in contact with, taught them to think in new ways, look at things in a different perspective. I hope you know how many lives you touched.
But you'll never really be gone. You'll live on every time anyone thinks of K3, or plays violin, or talks about the GK3, or counts to one, or goes sledding in the middle of the night, or watches Planet Earth, or wears a headband, or dreams, or sees or makes beautiful art, or tries to think of someone who personifies goodness. You'll be there. And someday I'll hug you again.


Love for eternity,
Shaina

Best of Postsecret 3/19

Bobama

Rob wants to give you a high five.

I think it's better than Free Hugs.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

So the ending is a little dark, but this is definitely worth watching. It's crazy fun and the music is incredibly good. From the writer of Toy Story.

Obama is a secret Jew.

Tonight, Obama held what is believed to be the first-ever seder in the White House.

The Seder, held in the Old Family Dining Room at the White House with several aides and their families, included the traditional Passover dishes, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel. The White House chefs prepared the meal after consulting family recipes from several Seder participants.

Dogs + 'Derms = <3

Watch CBS Videos Online

Princeton Proposition 8

Biden is now my homeboy.

The First Night

The worst thing about death must be the first night. — Juan Ramon Jiménez Before I opened you, Jiménez, it never occurred to me that day and night would continue to circle each other in the ring of death, but now you have me wondering if there will also be a sun and a moon and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set then repair, each soul alone, to some ghastly equivalent of a bed. Or will the first night be the only night, a darkness for which we have no other name? How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death, How impossible to write it down. This is where language will stop, the horse we have ridden all our lives rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff. The word that was in the beginning and the word that was made flesh— those and all the other words will cease. Even now, reading you on this trellised porch, how can I describe a sun that will shine after death? But it is enough to frighten me into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon, to sunlight bright on water or fragmented in a grove of trees, and to look more closely here at these small leaves, these sentinel thorns, whose employment it is to guard the rose. -Billy Collins

Obama likes Tang

Obama hung out with some kids today, and called space.

“Do you guys still drink Tang up there?” asked President Obama to laughter. “I’ve got Bill Nelson here, and he says that’s been taken off the menu. That’s, by the way, before the time of you young people. We used to drink Tang.”

Speaking of the Beatles

Berrur, Berrur, Berrur, Berrur AHHH!

Everyone's favorite little asian baby.

Advice to Young Poets

Never pretend

to be a unicorn

by sticking a plunger on your head

-Martín Espada

What time is it?

! Human clock time!

Weighing The Dog

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant
neighborhoods.

-Billy Collins

Talent

I wish stories like this got more time on the front page of the New York Times. It was the top story for about .003 seconds there.

A 33-year-old actor was waiting for the subway to come, when a man fell onto the tracks, hitting his head on the rail and passing out.

Mr. Lindsey said he sensed a train was approaching, because the platform was crowded. “I dropped my bag and jumped down there. I tried to wake him up,” he said. “He probably had a massive concussion at that point. I jumped down there and he just wouldn’t wake up, and he was bleeding all over the place.”

He looked back up at the people on the platform. “I yelled, ‘Contact the station agent and call the police!’ which I think is hilarious because I don’t think I ever said ‘station agent’ before in my life. What am I, on ‘24’?”

You're sitting in a chair, in the sky.

But it doesn't go back a lot...

Keeping with the Star Wars theme...

Star Wars: Retold

Though I admit, I've seen all the movies and definitely could not remember all the details she knows.

The next Joker?

Divorce

Once, two spoons in a bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.



-Billy Collins

Animated Joy.

Sometimes you have to forget why or how, and just be amazed at what can be.

Kissing the ceiling

Fred Muram takes wonderful pictures. Among them, a collection of people kissing the ceiling.

The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy Fox.

At least, I hope they're just being lazy.

What this is for.

I usually post things I really like on Facebook. But that seems so fleeting - two or three days later, the story sinks to the bottom of my wall, and disappears into the nothingness of neglected cyberspace. I figure it will be easier for me to have everything I love collected on one site. So here it is: whatever I find and love, I will post here. Maybe it'll make you happy, too.