Settling

I haven't left campus in a few days and I'm starting to get a little bit of cabin fever.  It would be pretty easy to stay in Tagore House all the time; to take every meal here and hang out here after class.  Watch movies at night.  It's comfortable, comforting, and easy to fall into.  This is not the experience I'm looking for and it is on my mind constantly.  I am excited to have a settled schedule and be able to move about more, try new things.

Yesterday I spent all day agonizing over my living situation.  It was maybe the most interesting day I've had in a while, internally at least.  My first real experience with the knowledge that going abroad isn't a challenge just because of the culture clash.  Without family around, without the friends who know you best, making a big decision is scary beyond belief.  It was the first time here I realized how long four months could be, and how far away I really am from the places I've spent my whole life.

But it was also a wake-up call - I'm not here for any real reason.  I don't have a goal, there's nothing here that needs to be accomplished.  This is my semester to stick myself out there and try new things, and crafting a perfect experience is impossible because "perfect" implies that there can be something to compare it to. I will have no experience in India other than the one I am having.  It is already perfect because it is the only one there is, and to try to manipulate it into being better somehow makes no sense.

It's a thought I've been chewing over all day, similar to the behavior of the herd of cows I saw walking single file down the main road of campus last night.

Today I woke up again at 5:30 and was at yoga by six.  The idea of the certification is cool, but in practice I'm not that impressed with the experience.  However I did meet a nice guy by the name of Kiran who invited me to come act in the Telugu film he's making.  I went to Gay Indian Literature at 9, which is always an interesting experience.  The professor is apparently the first openly gay public figure in India, a place where homosexuality is not so much looked down upon as totally denied.  His name is Hoshang Merchant, and he looks like some guru who came down from the mountain - long white beard down to his chest, long white pony tail down his back, scholarly glasses, pale skin, deep brown eyes (he calls them his "Indian cow eyes").  But he has more flamboyent body language than anyone I've ever met, and I'm constantly floored by the fact that his very presence is a constant political statement that puts him in perpetual danger. He's written a bunch of books and poems about his sex life and life experiences, of which he shares some during class.  It's very different than any other class I've taken.  Rather than lecturing, he'll have someone read a short story, and then we'll write down answers to questions he's composed for the remaining hour.  Sometimes he'll ask us to hand our papers over to him, which is pretty nerve-wracking, but he's all around a nice guy despite the intimidation factor. 

I can also now officially write the words "jug," "python," and "sacrifice" in Hindi.  My feet are zebra-striped with tan lines, I never do my homework, and I'm considering switching out of my Indian philosophy class and taking Yoga Theory and Practice instead.  My bike is beginning to feel like an extension of my legs, I spend nearly all day in communication with other people - talking, taking notes, planning, processing.  I am making friends from Norway, Libya, Canada, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Bengal.  I am terrified they won't progress.  I drank chai three times today and ate with my hands even when I didn't have to.  I am afraid to go out at night but maybe I shouldn't be.

Tomorrow I will try to focus on the stars as I ride to yoga.  There is so much to say about being here that it becomes a slew of nothing at all - I hope whoever reads this does not get frustrated by all these nouns and verbs slung together. 

All the international kids eat in the Tagore dining room during the fixed meal times, where upturned glasses are arranged in a circle around a pitcher of filtered water.  Tanvi, the cutest two year old ever, runs around and sticks her hands in our glasses and stand with her feet on our knees, asking to wear our jewelry.  We pull up extra chairs around tables and beg Krishna for more ice cream, less rice, more hot chocolate, black tea please.  After meals I eat anis seeds.

I unpacked today for the first time and began to tape Sarah's christmas cards up on the walls.  I'll be here for three and a half more months.  It's difficult to commit to this, but I'm learning, learning, learning. 

as per request

it smells like:

Each inhale is different.  Sometimes it smells like sewage and shit but my next breath will be sandalwood incense.  Othertimes I breathe in fried fresh samosas, heaps of garbage, body odor, brewing chai, the clean halls of Tagore, nosefuls of dirt.  When I first came, I remember the night had a distinct smell, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just foreign.  I cannot smell it anymore, and I think about how Sandy told me that as soon as I start breathing the air, I'm taking India into my cells and changing my deepest biology. There is nothing subtle about india, and this is especially true for its smells.

it feels like:

having dirt in your shoes, cold showers, burning showers, freezing morning bike rides, nausea, sleeping on a hard bed made of hay, henna squeezed onto your palms from a tiny tube, soft thin loose clothes against your skin, always needing a nap, breathing harsh air into your lungs, speeding through campus on a flimsy bike, dodging traffic with the wind on your face, going faster than you would have dared to back home.  It feels like my jeans growing too tight, it feels like a pain in my foot from a tough yoga pose, it feels like an autorickshaw ride through Indian traffic with music blaring and the world spinning out around you dangerously at forty miles an hour.

Right now we have just returned from a long day of touring with the whole group - a scavanger hunt across the city.  I am sitting alone on the front balcony listening to Tracy Chapman and the murmurs of other students inside.  India is daunting, my feet are dirty, and I can only see one star through all this pollution.  It smells like chapstick and burnt food.  I will be staying in Tagore, officially, and I am regretting this decision.  Even so, I will put off unpacking.  I am not yet quite ready to settle.

I hope this helps, Mom.  Sorry to not send a more personal email, but I'm into this blogging idea right now and want to explore it a bit (you're also probably the only person reading this regularly).  So much love to everyone back home.

what i write about when i write about blogging.

here i will tell you the sights i see, the things i do, the adventures i have.  it would not be the place for more.

in the morning, the early morning when it is still dark, you can see the most stars.  it is cold beyond expectation, it is cold in a way we could not have prepared for.  i wear socks on my hands and struggle to keep my grip on the handbrake.  my bike crashes over each pothole, and i feel it reverberate through my body. ringing.  i hate this ride.  it makes me feel unstable inside - a 5am loneliness and creeping fear in central indian darkness.  the kind of feeling of 5am anywhere.

i brought stacks of books but i will not read them.  it feels like freshman year in more ways i would like to admit.  i write only ever surrounded by people.  can you hear the interruptions in this text?  here speaking to rachel, to ayeesha, to megan, here to the others who slide in and out of my room when my mouth is dry and tired from talking.

for the first time in a long time i have my own room.  it gives me fantasies of scholarly solitude, of early mornings and spiritual discipline, of meditating for long hours till the lines of my body bleed into the air.  my room has red curtains and a hard bed and walls that i have kept bare.  the floor is cold grey tile. this room makes me want to write things, read deeply and nod in understanding; this room demands a novel.  i have not fully unpacked.

the men leer at all of us with long hard eyes and it feels uncomfortable and it feels cold.  never before have my bare arms seemed so troublesome.  i wear scarves on the hottest days.

today i lost the necklace frances gave me, the silver chain with four rings that chronicle each explosive summer i spent with her.  Love.  Honor.  Spirit.  Freedom.  i feel worse than naked without these rings, and i cried when i finally biked the three kilometers back to my room in the fresh bright dawn.

my sweater is missing too.  i should not attach so much meaning to these things, but i feel weaker without them.  as if somewhere i am being forgotten.

i am wearing now kate's big balloon pants, and socks that were once left in my room by someone i wished would stay longer.  i kept them on purpose, secretly, to remember.  another worthless keepsake; i'm a sucker for sentimentals. 

india is lovely and more and more it feels like another place on earth, not a fantasy, not a movie, not an illusion.  it is a place where my left foot hurts in the same spot it does back home; a place where i still have troubles saying no.  on the balcony, under the eucalyptus, it could be any place in the world.  today there was a bandh, and the whole city shut down in fear of riots from the Telangana movement.  today we stayed on campus, safe and clean in our fresh white skin while the rest of the country had to care about what was going on.  a strange feeling; not a part of history while still walking alongside it.

it is beautiful here and horrible too.  more and more i recognize that i will never be able to fully belong, that  my ability to pick and choose the good from the bad - the bangles from the dalits, the air conditioned restaurants from the domestic abuse (a paint-by-numbers india, courtesy of my white skin and american passport) - keeps me safe and keeps me separate.

i am learning, i hope.

Kate

takes photos.  check out her flickr page to see Hyderabad in a way my words could never describe.

i'm the one getting henna, which is called "mhendi" in Hindi.

enjoy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kate_farrar/sets/72157625713384582/

Suggest You Body Relax

The University of Hyderabad offers a yoga certification course every semester for 1100 rupees, the equivalent of about 30 American dollars.  So naturally, I enrolled, as getting my certification has been a long-time goal of mine, and I am a thrifty, thrifty lady.  The catch?  The course meets at 6 in the morning, in a building that is a thirty minute walk from campus.  Supposedly, CIEE is going to provide us with bikes, but until then, those of us brave yoginis enrolled in the course have decided to make the half hour trek in the dark, through the jungle, at 5:30 in the morning, to the Yoga Center.

Yesterday was our first class.  We were rewarded for our efforts with a nearly thirty minute savasana, a meditative "corpse pose" that allowed us all to catch up on sleep.  Our instructor has a booming voice, rolling his "r"s, extending each word, relishing the way they come off his tongue. that sounds like God, or at least, Indian Morgan Freeman, booming "Suggest you body rrrelax.  Enjooooy the pleeeeasurrre of rrrelaxaation."
So this morning, I dragged myself out of bed, knowing that I would feel much better in a few hours.  I woke up in the dark, dressed, and went downstairs to meet up with my crew.  Only - no one was there.  Assuming they had all left earlier for the 5:30am warm-up class, I cursed those brown-nosing traitors and went to go find a straggler who would hazard the Hyderabad darkness with me in search of yoga. 

I knocked on Rachel's door.  She didn't answer, so, polite neighbor that I am, I walked in.  She was still asleep.

"Rachel, dude, it's 5:30.  Do you still wanna go?" 

She jumped out of bed and got dressed.  We decided to jog so we would make it on time.  The center is over 3 kilometers away, and trying to get anywhere on time on this huge campus is pretty stressful without wheels.  It was a strange run - I felt really nauseous and sluggish, and both of us noticed that there were more motorcylces out than there had been the previous morning.  We heard men chanting and shouting in the distance, and saw many more people prowling about in the distance. 

After our painful first kilometer, we saw a cluster of motorcycles at the intersection where we needed to turn.  It was like a scene from Hell's Angels (with less leather and body fat).  Immediately apprehensive, I checked my watch to see if we were making good time.  And it was weird - the time on my watch was off.  Really off.  And then I realized.

It wasn't 5:30 in the morning.  It was 1:30.

Orientation taught us a lot of useless stuff, but one thing we knew to take seriously was the fact that two young, unaware American girls should not go jogging alone at night.

The jog home was definitely more of a run.  Each passing car seemed to herald our doom, each bush hid a sadistic kidnapper, each rock was a venomous snake.  We finally made it back to Tagore, where the gaurds repeated the confused look they gave us as we headed out.  You know, just two friends wearing high-waisted pants out for a lil' jog at one am in India. 

Not one to be bested by a little mishap (okay, by one of the dumbest mistakes I've ever made), I got up three hours later and did it all over again.  But this time, I made it to yoga, where I suggested kindly to my body that it relax.  After all, it had already had quite a long day.

New Year, New Country

New Years is always a pretty nostalgic time for me.  Usually I do sentimental things I am embarrassed about later, like making an outline of all the highlights and lowlights of the year.  Or roam around Fashion Square Mall frantically looking for the perfect perfume to bring in the new era.  Or eat a lot of pancakes.  Despite my search for closure, the new year never feels new, just like a birthday never makes you feel old.

But this year, New Years feels very, very new.  My first time out of the country, my first time in India, my first time being really really really far away from home: this New Years feels just about as different as it can get.  On the last day of 2010, my friends and I undertook the half-hour walk to the main gate of campus where we would catch auto-rickshaws to Shilparamam, a craft market in Hyderabad.

The walk through campus is very beautiful, albeit long.  We take some dirt roads, some paved, and spend the entire time dodging motorbikes and bicycles under big, unrecognizable, leafy trees.  We usually run into some older women in sarees and younger women in kurtas and western clothes walking along the same paths, though the university thus far seems to be predominantly occupied by males.  Supposedly many international students hitchhike to class on the back of motorbikes, but none of us feel comfortable doing this yet (plus we were traveling in a group of nine people).  At the gate, we picked up two autorickshaws, which overcharged us pretty badly, but until we have a grasp on the language it will be difficult to find a ride that won't take us for suckers.  I mean, right now we are suckers.

Auto rides are insane.  INSANE.  They should really only fit about four or five people, but I have yet to ride in one where someone was not sitting on laps or hanging out into traffic.  Shilparamam was very, very cool - almost too much to take in.  The place was crammed with vendors, each selling amazing pieces of art: handmade clothing, ayurvedic soap, intricate paintings, beaded sarees, and these incredible paintings made out of sheets of banana leaves which are carved into and then painted over, creating elaborate, delicate, three-dimensional images.  I made my first Indian purchases: some lovely interlocked gold bangles that move up and down my arm like water, and a long handmade skirt covered in mirrors and beads and sequins (yes...I dress differently here...).  Any price a vendor gives you MUST be haggled down.  This is very fun for me, as I am naturally very thrifty and would argue down the prices at regular U.S. stores if I could.  We spend over an hour wandering around, wide-eyed, jaws dropping, and then snagged more autos to go to some mysterious restaurant called "Our Place."

Enter: the craziest ride of my young life thus far.  Turns out Our Place is pretty far off the beaten track, and our auto driver had a very hard time finding it.  Meanwhile, we are merging into two gigantic streams of unorganized traffic, we are brushing elbows with pedestrians and motorbikes, and we are hanging on to the doors of the car for dear life.  We finally found the restaurant sign, though Our Place itself was tucked away up a foreboding street.  So my friend and I waited for the second auto careening somewhere in the streets of India, carrying the rest of our equally culture-shocked friends.  And waited.  And waited.  Turns out, their driver has taken off in some direction and driven for about twenty minutes before turning around to ask where they were going.  We shared a very stressful half hour waiting for our friends, frantically calling them and in general freaking out more than was merited by the situation.

They finally arrived, and we climbed up the dark street to find....the most beautiful restaurant in the world.  Seriously.  Our Place would be a five-star restaurant in the U.S., no question.  Seating was outdoors, under over-hanging trees and strings of lights.  In the center of the courtyard a stage was set up, built in the Indian style with four elaborate arches, and inside of each you could see a musician playing either tabla (Indian drums) or sitar.  We got to listen to this incredible and peaceful music all evening long - an unbelievable change from the chaos of the streets outside.  The food was amazing, and very reasonably priced.  In Indian restaurants, you order family style, and waiters come around the table and spoon small amounts of the dishes onto each plate.  Every waiter is very formal.  They call you madam, they bobble their heads politely, they even held out our Kingfisher beer bottles for inspection before pouring them, as if they were rare bottles of wine. 

While we were eating, the rest of our friends from CIEE came in a cab, and were seated at an enormous table right in front of the musicians.  Rather than take another auto back, I opted to squeeze into their cab and enjoyed the last night of the year in paradise, sipping Kingfisher with new friends.  When the clock struck midnight, I was crammed into the back of a cab, counting down to 2011 in a silly accent as we raced through Indian traffic and watched fireworks go off in the sky.

Facing a year that is this new is pretty scary.  But it's a good kind of scary; I feel invigorated and challenged and alive at almost every moment.  I don't know where this year will take me, but I do know that whatever happens, this beats perfume shopping at Fashion Square Mall.