Today I had a coffee with a friend of mine from Yemen. I really like her. I like the way she talks with these spots of a British, even Cockney accent. Unlike me, she seems to pause before she talks, not an accented pause, but just a space of thought.

We sat at Coffee Day. The power was out, so we sat dripping in sweat, drinking Lattes (maybe in protest?), while some workers drilled and hammered a door-frame into place.

Amidst the din, my friend told me about her family, showed me pictures of her kids, and their outings around Hyderabad. As a little back story, the two of us had been running into each other all week. She told me she heard about my lunch with a Palestinian family we both know. And in mock offense, asked why I went to their house and not hers. And then she said something that had stuck in my head all week, had prompted me to ask her for coffee. "Ashley," she said, "I want you to come to my house and see me there, how I live. There I dress just like you, I look and act as you do." Of course, I knew this. But, on a sub-conscience level, I also noticed a distinction between she and I. So I asked her, "What color is your hair?" and the conversation started.

I had recently had lunch with a Palestinian family. I had sat with them for hours, lounging on pillows eating watermelon and watching their kids try on some newly-purchased outfits. And when I got up to leave, standing just outside of the threshold, I turned to say goodbye to the woman of the family (I don’t want to call her a wife or mother, because I think firstly she is just a woman), only to find her head surrounded in a black veil. This is the first time while that I have been so taken aback by the veil. Though I see it everywhere, groups of girls at bus stops with backpacks and water-bottles, sometimes at dusk they look like swarms of fireflies with their Hijab buttons and jeweled designs reflecting the headlights, I don’t really think of them as a single person, but as a group of Muslim girls. But this woman was just that, a woman who only a few moments ago had shown me her beautiful saree. Honestly, it was hard for me to look at her.

So back to the coffee shop. With this story in mind, I posed a question to my friend. Not “why do Muslim women wear a veil” type question, but more, "Who do you wear a veil for? you or your society?" She said she had been thinking about that a lot recently. That she had had a hard time returning to her country after living in England. That she had felt the restrictions on her freedom.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think I am forced to wear this. I think I believe in it. I believe that it protects me and keeps me safe.”

I understood her. And yet, it was hard for me to wrap my head around. Was I less safe in jeans and a t-shirt? How had I been able to travel the world in such clothes and feel mostly ok, and she hadn’t?

When I lived in Russia (this is a jump, but I promise it makes sense), another American friend and I decided one Thursday to checkout the bath house on her block. I was barely 20 at the time, and like most Americans, not too accustomed to being naked around people I didn’t know. The locker room at the Jewish Community Center in my hometown had always made me rather nervous and disgusted. My friend was much more progressive, i.e. she had taken some 'gender theory classes' and was now 2nd hand schooling me. Even so, entering the bath house we were both a little squeamish about the sheer nakedness of the women. I mean, there are many degrees of naked, and these women were 100 percent naked. Also, since it was the middle of the day and a quiet snowy block outside the city center, the only women bathing that day were grandmothers. Big, blotchy skinned grandmothers, with breasts that rested heavily on the tops of their bellies. We were forty years younger and a good 60 pounds lighter. Nervously, we took off our clothes, both stopping and deciding in a look to keep on our underwear. As we walked to the showers and from the showers to the hot room, the women largely ignored us. When they did look at us, there was this laughter in their faces, this sort of mocking smile. “What, do you think is so special about yourself, that we don’t have?” their eyes and smiles questioned. After twenty minutes, our underwear was wet with sweat, the elastic bands basting our skin with salt water, and we decided: Off with the underwear!

On entering my literature classes, I am met by the same feeling, only from the opposite angle. There is a woman, probably in her mid-thirties, who wears a thing grey scarf around her head and over her shoulders. She is the only head-scarfed woman in the class. I look at her and without an ounce of cynicism, and to be honest, a touch of frustration, I wonder, “What is so special about you, that I don’t have?’

I asked my friend from Yemen, and she said that all this is a personal choice. Maybe, that is the best answer.

The last few months have been crammed with festivals. I have been trying to keep track and participate in as many as I can. And then, when two major festivals fall on the same day, that I start to realize how interconnected calendars in this part of the world are.

The 15th of March was both Ugadi, the Telugu and Kannada New Year and Charshambet Soori, "the last Wednesday of the year in the Persian calendar". Both these festivals fall near the Vernal Equinox, that completely symmetrical day in Spring, that I have never noticed, maybe because it is perfectly black and white?

In the morning, I drank "Pachhadi" (pictured above) with my Telugu friends, a drink that helps one predict how the following year will be. Every one in the group predicted: 'tangy'. We sat around talking as the IPL played in the background. The thing that felt most like New Years, was actually playing with my friend's sister's new baby (yet to be named). It seemed kind of exciting for this new kid to be born at the start of Spring. Maybe he has something ahead of all of us September-October babies.

Then, in the evening, I went to a friend's house to make a fire in the abandoned lot out behind their apartment. Anarchic, no? Though political scientist claim Russians were the some of the first anarchists, maybe it was actually Zoroastrians. Chaharshanba Soori is an ancient Zoroastrian festival which is debated, among my friends, to be anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 years old. Wikipedia claims 3,000, but only cites BusinessWeek and the UN. My friends cite their pride.

Anyway, on Chaharshanba Soori every one is supposed to jump over a fire, giving the fire the paleness and weakness acquired over the last year and soaking up some of the fire's health. We did small fire hopping at home, and then went to EFLU where a host of Iranis, Tajiks, Afghans, Uzbeks, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Kurds danced and skirted around a much more official fire.

So with the coming of Spring inscribed in my head, I wonder, why doesn't the US celebrate the coming of Spring? Why don't we notice the day when both halves, night and day, are just that halves? I don't have an answer. Neither does Google, just some sites about horse-racing (go figure) and picture of barbecues and block parties. I was hoping for something more incendiary.

The abacus is alive

Who knew the abacus would have a come back?

A few months ago, I went to visit an abacus training academy in a central district of Hyderabad. I saw the advertisement pasted to a cement wall and followed the flyers to a small green stucco building with a rusted gate and no front door. I went upstairs and met Mr. Raganath, the PR and marketing manager of the academy. We spoke for a while about the abacus and its origins, and he showed me the basics:

The middle row of beads is called "our brother's house" and is where all calculations must start. To the left the beads represent whole numbers - going as high as the abacus is long, and to the right decimals.

Raganath continued: the abacus has the power to train the mind, not just for calculations, but for higher concentration and the exponential improvement of memory. The children are taught from the beginning to hold the abacus with their right hands and to tick the beads up and down with the index and thumb of the left. Index and thumb. This he said was an ancient technique, inexplainable, but used by rishis, buddhist monks, catholics chanting their rosaries. These fingers, he said, were the trick.

For proof, he told me to come back on Saturday around 2 for class.

On Saturday, the building looked even more deserted. But when I got to the second floor I heard the eruption of young voices and click click of the abacus:



The professor stood at the board, writing numbers in an endless string.... 87, 65, 104... and the kids would add, subtract, divide or multiply as they were told. I sat towards the back as they checked their workbooks. The kids ranged in age from 5 to 12 (I had repeatedly been told by Raganath that after thirteen the tactics and training 'just doesn't have much effect'. I instantly felt like somewhat of a failure.) The ones in the back had only begun the course two weekends prior. They seemed a little nervous, but they did the problems hungrily, trying to catch up with their classmates.

The star of the class was a boy named Deepti. He had won several international abacus competitions. He could not have been more than nine. He is the boy in the clip saying 'Amma-ma-ma-ma'. in Telugu this means 'mother' but in little kid speak, more like 'aw jeez..'.

While the beginningers clicked the beads, Deepti had his left hand in the air and with each number he would kind of vibrate his fingers, like he was counting imaginary beads, twirling an imaginary abacus.

Here is a compiling of the sounds of the day. I didn't cut the section when the instructor is reading out the problems simply so that you could set your watches to see how fast these kids calculate in their heads. (Excuse the jumps and auditory glitches, I am working on Audacity and there are some shortcomings on both sides).




These kids are amazing, and I have no doubt that the abacus is triggering something in their minds. But the question remains: what do the thumb and index finger have to do with concentration and memory?

I have asked a few neuroscientists in Hyderabad. Though they tell me there is an answer, they say they don't readily know what it is and that it would take too much rifling though notes and textbooks to find.

This only feeds my curiosity...

A joke

When I was in the Himalayas long train rides and circuitous bus routes led to lots of singing and joke telling. Here Priyanka, a spitfire little girl from Bangalore, tells a joke about India.

An Afternoon Funeral

Finally, the other day I took a walk through the cemetery. Finally, because I had been looking at it for months, and each time I thought of going, usually after sunset or late at night, it’s corroded iron-gate was locked. Not that I respect locks, but it seems too almost unnecessary to break into a graveyard in India after hours.

Starting in the late morning, I heard drums somewhere around the corner. I have problems detecting sounds in India. Maybe because of the openness, there is no ricochet to orient my ear. I don’t think it completely registered in my head that these were funeral drums. I walked to the cemetery with my camera thinking, if people weren’t there I would take some pictures of the graves, the Telugu inscriptions. You see, the reason the graveyard had interested me originally was:

1. I thought it was an ironclad rule that Hindus only burned their dead. So, in finding a cemetery in India, I thought I had uncovered an anthropological anomaly.
2. The cemetery itself is beautiful. The graves are all shades of pastels and someone has even started a planned garden off to the side. Plus the fact that it is behind a wall made the place seem like a paradise (I have been schooled by my Iranian friends that paradise is actually an old Avestan word meaning ‘walled garden’ – so let’s play with it in that context and cut the biblical umbilical chord.)

Walking in I was met with the usual stares from people I decided were either grave-diggers or afternoon degenerates. They sat along a central path, about 50 men, picking at their bare feet, drumming their legs against the low stone walls. On the right I noticed a bath house and a bunch of spickets... this will come in handy later.



I don’t know why but I was nervous to take out my camera. I felt this distinct Catholic sense, the same surge or uneasiness that is expressed as faux piety that I feel upon entering a church. I think, cemeteries are places where people breakdown, where the most private of emotions are communicated with the incommunicable, and that bond between death and longing should be respected.

The moment I pulled out my camera to take a photo, this man appeared at my side:



Mr. Romulu

He spoke to me in Telugu. I tried to say I understand a little Telugu, but speak really poorly. Like almost all situations here, somehow we communicated. He led me to the nether-regions of the graveyard, and people walked alongside us, asking Mr. Romulu who I was, where I was from etc. The cemetery expanded into graves and paths and small trees, not necessarily rolling hills (don’t get an Anglicized picture) but I couldn’t see the end of it. People sat alongside on rocks and piled up railroad ties. It didn’t really seem like they were mourning anything, just sort of passing the time. Near a far wall three women crouched around a grave lighting incense and doling out food to the dead. Women and men had formed groups and were chatting, which was supplanted by stares as I approached. Romulu introduced me, being an expert on my biography and opinions by now. I started to take pictures and the group smiled more, more women came and sat down, not posing exactly, just positioning. Then my guide ushered me over to his wife’s grave. He sat down, pulling out incense and putting his cigarette to the side and insisted that I sit on the neighboring grave, his mother’s. Once again the ghost of Catholic cemeteries restrained me, and I couldn’t make myself sit.

Men and women gathered round, perched close to be in my camera’s focus and ask Romulu questions about me. A man in flannel approach. He looked tired from the sun and squinted at me as he held up his left hand, 4 stubs of fingers. He motioned for me to take his picture. His friend told me they had cut his fingers off last night because he had insulted someone’s wife.




Then two girls and their father came up. The man spoke to me in Telugu and the girls shyly translated. They asked the questions that every one asked. Where I lived? Was I alone? Did I like India? And then the father motioned for them to bring me down to the lower part of the cemetery. It was their grandfather's procession I had heard, and they wanted me to come and take pictures. We walked down the slope, stepping from grave to grave, which I at first tried to avoid. And along the way groups of women called me over to take pictures of them, of ceremonies as they repeated the last-rites with circles of incense.

I was brought into a group of men, young and old, waiting for the body to come. The two girls warmed up to me and started to explain what a Hindu funeral was like. This was not their first funeral, they explained, 'people die all the time' the seven year old told me matter-of-factly. I stood next to the grave and an old man poured salt crystals into my hand and made a throwing motion. Looking down, I saw the grave was almost two-thirds full with large diamonds of salt.

The drumming grew louder. I asked the girls how they felt about their grandfather's death."There are so many people here," I said,"He must have been a really great man." It was something I have heard said at funerals, but it sounded strange and fake coming from me. And they said something that I cannot imagine saying at 7 or even 24.

"You know, he did some good things and he did some bad things, like every one."

They said their grandfather had died the last night, and that tradition said they should bury him the next day. Every one would stay, they said, for a few hours to sing mantras and lament. Then they would wash off in the showers and go home.

Then they excused themselves and went to join the female mourners and bring the body into the cemetery. I hung around with the men. They made some jokes ("What does an Indian have in common with a frog?"), and more introduced themselves to me and asked for pictures. My camera was dying though, and I was sick of documenting.

And then the women came. Hundreds of women in brightly detailed sarees surrounding four men who were carrying the dead body on a bamboo stretcher. The grandfather was covered in an orange sheet, and as he approached, the women broke off until only, what I am assuming were his sisters and daughters remained. His youngest sister fell on the grave crying. But her cries weren't the out-of-pitch strains I have heard before. There was a rhythm and measure to her words, like maybe she was singing. The men pushed me into the crowd. "Take pictures..." "You in the grey, move so she can take pictures." And I took a few, as they laid the body on the ground and removed the grass and dirt that had been stuffed in his mouth, replacing it with strands of gold.

I turned to go. It was no longer an expedition or a lessons in Indian funeral rites. I had come up to the boundary of voyeurism and 'making strange'* and I should make a quiet exit.

As I left, I met the sister who had been crying. Her eyes were red and the lines around her mouth and nose twitched with emotion. She stared at me. Not welcoming. Not even really noticing me. It was a face of pure grief.


*** In Russian "ostraneniya" is the process of making something that is quite everyday and normal appear strange.

Biography of a Forgotten Film Star

After months of watching current Bollywood and Tollywood movies, I have gone backwards, thanks to an Indian film class, to films of the 1950s. Most of the films focus on the challenges and possibilities inherent in the newly independent country. Socialist propaganda is woven throughout the dialogue and many of the films, though they may deal with complex and still controversial topics like adultery and paternalism, usually end with an "I love India' slogan or song.

For me, the films are comfortable to watch. The women walk with the assurance of Katherine Hepburn (some even wear the high-waisted pants) and the dialogue is clever and noted with sexual innuendo. So far, I have watched 2 hit movies from the '50s, each with almost identical casts, and both times my attention was drawn away from the main character to the side and background of the film, the domain of the supporting role. In fact, the same actress was in both films, first playing the best friend of a woman unjustly accused of infidelity and then as a prostitute dancing in a gutter bar. In both movies her main role is as a dancer and singer (though a playback singer actually sings all the roles, so she just moves her mouth in time). Her dancing is kathak-style and often overly emphasizes the Eastern aspects of Indian dance, the punjabi pants, dark eyeliner and snakelike-head and body movements.

It is in Awara, the second film we watched in class, that she plays a prostitute, who dances and nearly-charms the hero with her dance and song. This time she is dressed like Mary Margaret from 'Bye Bye Birdie', a tight crop-top and slit skirt, but her attitude is sexual and dangerous and much more interesting than the white-sareed heroine. She is the center of the movie for only 3 minutes and 25 seconds.



I looked up the movie to make sure it really was the same actress and found her listed only as "Cuckoo". Perplexed, I continued to search, but everything I found related to her was just as enigmatic. In the 40s and 50s she was apparently very well known and loved, always acting in the supporting role, often as the seductress. Her performances and songs were so popular that directors would put her in a movie for only one song, as with Awara, and the song would completely eclipse the movie. She followed in a line of kathak dancers and trained her usurper, an actress named Helen.

And that's all I found. One scant online biography reads:

Cuckoo died a slow lingering death, penniless and unattended.

It seems ridiculous that a star of over 40 Hindi films can be so unnoticed historically. Of course, the film world is at once alluring and damning for young women, especially during the 40s and 50s. 'Daughters' and 'mothers' weren't allowed to get near a filmset, lest their morals and modesty fled down a dark alley. So, maybe, her name wasn't given for fear of what it would reflect on her family? And the allure is more the less we know, but it seems strange that now when Bollywood had moved well past the back-room dances scenes, that someone would release her name, that someone would seek her name.

Paying in Kind

To be honest, sometimes I forget I'm in India. No, I don't forget that it is December and 28 degrees C or that I can now buy papaya year round... the rub is in the small things, as they say.

Generally when I go out on the street I first form a battle plan. No brilliant battleship-sinking maneuvers usually just A --> B then rickshaw to C where I might be able to find that, but I can definitely find it at D and just in case I should buy a paper since Mr. X will probably not be at E until an hour past ____. Without some sort of map, I get lost and turned and before I know it I am yelling at young boys that staring is rude and I come home defeated, drinking badam and frantically drafting a more clever plan for the following day.

So, a few days back, my plan was this. 1. Return the juicer I randomly bought on the sage advice from a friend that 'what was I going to do with a 40 lb juicer in five months". 2. buy pens and pencils and, if fortune smiled on me, some 4 by 6 notecards 3. get a newspaper ... after this the list grew vague. From experience I know that getting beyond 3 in a single day is not possible and so I resolved to keep 4 open in case I needed a tall glass of badam.

First I bought the paper, out of order, but it went smoothly. Then I went to return the juicer. The juicer that had never been opened. The juicer that had only been purchased 7 days back. The juicer that was identical to the one sitting in the window of the fancy kitchenware store...

The manager was sitting at a desk and spoke to me with a effervescent smiled, "Sorry madam, no returns. But you can exchange it for something else." His smile was so large that I took it as a joke, so I returned with, 'No, sir I don't need anything in the store, just my money back." The exchange continued for a little while as he swept his arms indicating the saber-toothed knives and Narcissus-inticing pots and pans. "You see, sir," I said, "I don't live here permanently and I stupidly thought a juicer was a good idea. It was a mistake and I am trying to remedy it." With that I opened myself up to the attack that still has teeth enough to work on me. "Madam, this is not like where you may be from. In India, you cannot return things. Never. Nowhere." And I wanted to explain that this was not a snobby view of a girl from a Western world, but a logical and and judicious and profitable for all economic policy. I started to explain, but he kept smiling. So, I did what I have seen my Indian friends do when something makes no sense: I sat and I looked down as if I was pulling the intelligence and understanding inside me up to the surface. "Well, what to do..."

In the end, I returned the juicer. No one was harmed. And the man still had a smile on his face when I left, though this time it seemed strangely genuine. ***



Feeling slightly invigorated from having completed task 2, I went straight for number 3. Pencils and pens are located on the third floor of a shopping megamall near my apartment. Now, sometimes in India I run into similar patterns from Russia. Magemalls are one, and I think simply a bi-product of quick and volcanic commercialization. Another is the creative way both countries have implemented of moving their citizens around. Buses and subways are not enough, Russia prefers small densely- packed used minivans, while India as adapted the auto-rickshaw into a sort of metropolitan school bus. So, as the man at the counter was ringing up my school supplies, I noticed that the coin trays were filled not with rupees and paisa but chocolate candies. Hundreds of golden-wrapped 'Chocolate Eclair' candies. I thought of fighting or frantically rooting through my purse for the exact correct change. In Russia, I had fought and even attempted to pay for things in chocolate candies or mints, and I will admit that I felt a certain satisfaction at having mastered a new game. But this time, I decided not to fight, and happy that my battle plan hadn't been thoroughly washed out, walked home, my wallet puffed with Chocolate Eclairs.




*** I have since looked up "return policies in India" and the internet is strangely silent on the issue. The only thing I could find was a Dell page that ok'ed returns, even on the subcontinent.