intern-national

Darpana is one of the few places I feel I can safely breathe deeply: its an oasis of clean air, or at least it feels that way. Birds of stunning blue fly from tree to tree; a harem of pea hens strut about in the trees and on the sidewalks, occasionally and ungracefully flushed away by people and dogs. There are trees of all species, shades of green, and there is a garden which is tended by a small but lively man who happens to be the father of Vasant, my friend who lights most of the Darpana shows. But to someone like me, someone who spent a full year immersed in the disheartening work of understanding environmental pollution and how it is dealt with (or, more often, not dealt with), the world outside of this safe haven quickly becomes perilous. Burning piles of leaves and plastic wrappers dot the edge of the street every night and morning as I commute to work; at each intersection my rickshaw sits, and I uncomfortably in it, in a smoggy caucus of idling vehicles. Even now, in the library, I am looking out over the river, far away there is a smokestack unabashedly pouring black smoke into the air, making a cloud like a wispy bruise in the otherwise blue sky. A bird circles naively through it…

Because there are so many other aspects of India that can seem unpleasant to a foreigner, things that, truly, are just a matter of getting used to – the hole-in-the-floor toilets, the 24-hour chorus of horns, dogs everywhere, spicy food, what have you – I think that many people (especially me) are prone to seeing complaints from an outsider as just such: things that one has to open up to, to experience and be uncomfortable and understand. I felt strange today when I said I was uneasy with the idea of being pelted with toxic dyes during Holi (which once were natural dyes, and now, because of the cheapness of all things synthetic, are mostly chemical dyes and powders). I don’t want to exclude myself from these experiences, but I don’t want to lose my common sense either. There are many things that raise stunning (but naturally-dyed) red flags in my environmental-health-trained mind, in the mind and heart of someone for whom cancer isn’t just a distant possibility but an intimate reality. Is this asbestos in my apartment? Lead paint? When I went to Chhota Udepur, I saw hundreds of people working in dolomite and quartz-crushing plants without masks. Later I found a study that confirmed my suspicions: female stone grinders in Chhota Udepur suffer unimaginable rates of respiratory illness as a result of their work. (Of the women surveyed, 59 percent experience chest pain, 61 percent experienced breathlessness, and though the majority were only exposed for 1-3 years, 12 percent already already had signs of acute silicosis visible in a radiography. A quarter of the women surveyed were under 20 years old. 89 percent were illiterate. This a is heartbreaking study.)

India, you still have a long way to go. And I’m not saying that as an outsider, but merely as someone who lives here, who wants to experience your festivals, who wants to walk through your streets.

There’s something extraordinarily good about listening to pink floyd, just like yesterday’s led zeppelin, its seems as if I am unfolding a corner in my history that I had forgotten, a time when Jesse and I would listen to led zeppelin, when I was becoming stronger and more sure of the things I wrote, the novelty of those words whose poetry has now grown the tougher skin of cliché; a time when freedom was something I sensed, however unaware I was of its consequences, to be in my possession. I don’t feel particularly free, now; in fact my time is more crunched than ever, so its not that. The walls of my submarine have to be stronger to stay intact in this ocean of thoughts, responsibilities, memories. I think its just nice to feel the company of something I know, something that no one listening will perhaps recognize. I sing in the kitchen with the chorus of my own memories. It feels amazing to be alone. Not in the sense that I no longer miss anyone or wish I had someone to be not alone with, but in the sense that there are times when I appreciate the simplicity that it brings.

I am back in my apartment making food here only for the third time since I’ve been living in India: that is to say, almost two months now. This place – Avani – apparently is somewhere that many a Darpana person has done their time in. Avani, the place for those destined for something else. I’ve moved from the front room to one of the rooms in the back; taking out the original bed, which I like because it is simple – wooden boards with two thin mattresses on top – to reveal the wall paintings behind it. Of course the bed is too small and the room is still dusty, but I like it back here. I’ve put up pictures that the Evergreen students drew when they had their night at my house. On that night, we split up in teams of three (well suited for rickshaws) and went around Ahmedabad looking for something that would remind everybody of home. What did we have? Mashed potatoes, of course. Lots of mashed potatoes. And a dance party. I don’t think anyone thought to do the ‘mashed potato’ though.

No, but tonight I think I’ve actually made something that I will enjoy eating. I won’t go so far as to give it a name, as if it were any dish in particular, but lets just say that it involves black and white dal, potatoes, okra (or ‘lady fingers’), tomato, onions, ginger, garlic, coconut oil, mustard seeds, sambar powder, and curry leaves from the tree in the courtyard (p.s. – fresh curry leaves are amazing).

cheers!

A few days ago I returned from Chhota Udepur – a beautiful part of eastern Gujarat that is very much rural and tribal and much more serene than anything I ever experience in the city. There are still paper kites tangled in the trees from the festival one month ago. I started going to yoga with the dancers and musicians, now that the Evergreen students are long gone. It is still relatively gentle, compared to Debbie’s classes, and much more repetitive, and there is more of an emphasis on pranayam and prayer (I sit silently while beautiful sanskrit is sung around me). In the morning, the sun is rising over the Sabarmati river, which the dogs, more than anybody, understand how to properly appreciate. Meaning, while we do our 14 suryanamaskars in the shade, trying frantically to remember which foot goes forward this time, the dogs are laying barely awake, vegetative, almost, in the sun as it comes across the top levels of the amphitheater.

IN the morning...

SO, finally, the claymation video that I worked on with one of the Evergreen students (she is the one quoted) for her final performance piece is now on youtube. It is not hard to tell that this is the first claymation that either of us have ever done. And also the clay we had was pretty bad… but a lovable kind of bad. The theme is only vaguely related to the concept of development. It has more to do with trying to fill three and a half minutes. Also modeled (though only in theory) after Grizzly Bear’s “Ready, Able” video.

Claylantis, as my creative partner would have it (I designed the buildings!)

This is what we did while Yadavan’s dad was working on a production plan with his producers.

What did we do? We got into a boat, of course.

Went across the harbor and came to this breezy part of cochin, with all of the empty Portuguese architecture and Chinese fishing nets (above).

the other end of the stick

I’m out on one of the many terraces of this house, mulling over a few thoughts from the morning, when Madu pulls up the thin walled-in street on his motorcycle: everything changes about the morning, because the coming of Madu means the initiation of some new adventure. And today we all recognize has no possibility of being ordinary, and I love this feeling.

Madu is the kind of person who drops in and out of ones life, but always at the most necessary times. Today, he is our driver, our ticket in to the forest, which we are entering illegally. He is a long time friend of Yadavan’s father, who has helped him on several occasions with his films, then only to return to one of several apparently consistently unsuccessful business ventures: rubber plantations, real estate, anything. But despite these various failures, Madu seems to be a conduit of success when it comes to organizing people; he’s managed to get 12 foreigners into the forest before for one of TV Chandran’s films. Hopefully one more won’t be an problem. And “its no problem” is one phrase that Madu has perfected, both in pronunciation and sincerity.

We make quick work of our final arrangements at the house – I am to borrow some flashy shoes that belong to TV, which are, not surprisingly, too small. Leeches are an issue near the water, I hear. There is a palpable feeling of freedom among us: three wild boys, finally out of the house, out of the parental purview, talking about all sorts of illicit subjects, and on top of this all this talk about leeches and I can’t stop thinking about Stand by Me.

Madu.

We’ve made four stops so far: the first for petrol, where I tried in vain to get Madu to tell me if we were actually staying inside the forest for the night or not; the second, a roadside store for chips: Jackfruit and Banana and Tapioca; cookies (“Hide and Seek” brand chocolate chips – what?); next is liquor, which takes the longest because of the line. Food for dinner is the last stop: roasted spiced chicken and parothas…

Steady business for the liquor industry in Kerala...

The drive itself took two hours with four stops, along roads that never stopped winding and bumping. I sat in the back seat, compressed into this tiny blue car, enjoying the blurring stream of scenes rushing through my windowframe: houses draped with gaudy neon colors, banana trees, roadside shops with strings of single-serving packets of shampoo, detergent, and tobacco hanging like streamers; women and trees and dust and children & motorcycles, the unpredictable, the continuous, the wave of movement steadily breaking on the ragged pavement; hotels, petrol stations, shops with the front always open and dark, both redundant and fascinating;

Bananas outside of every shop of the 'convenience' genre

There is something about the untidiness of streets that I love; the way everything moves according to the movement around it. We open the rum just before getting to the town in which we are to meet our guides. The turns become sharper, the roads narrower – soon enough, we stop the car and get out to wait for Madu to find our guides. I draw lots of smiles from children passing in cars; Yadavan says I am much more of a spectacle than any wild elephant…

Our two guides, Nasil and Pradeep get into the backseat with me. Nasil of them is shirtless and dressed in the traditional and casual dhoti, which is very simply a rectangular cloth tied around the waist. He’s skinny and has a harsh voice; I learn later that he is a logger, which is illegal, but due to the money associated with that trade, he is also a powerful person within the tribal community. This was a strange revelation. Pradeep was more short and stout with bulging stomach, which he wore proudly. As we got closer to the forest, they told me to roll up my window, which I didn’t roll down until we were in past the drunken guards at the gate.

We make it in just as the sun is setting. It was easier than I thought, but there still seems to be some uncertainty about who I am and why I am here. Later I found out that they asked if I was a Muslim, which apparently would not have been ideal; also, I accidentally corrected Madu when he said I was twenty-two. I wasn’t really nervous about this, as they seemed to like me, but I also realized that a lot was being done for my sake to make this arrangement work. We come to an abandoned guard tower and stop the car. It’s dark, we relax and have a drink and go up the steps to look at the forest around us, having now lost the colors of daylight, glowing blue and silver in the moonlight that surrounds us. Slowly I can hear all the voices of frogs and wind and somewhere, probably, people, all cloaked in mist, growing louder, fuller. We’re here, we’re inside. Finally.

After that, we drive a little further in, coming just to the edge of a settlement. Pradeep goes to get candles, I wait by the car, joking around with Madu about how ridiculous I look in my white shoes. We hike in to the forest and stopped after some time to sit on a rock by a small river running under the thick canopy cover, somewhere linking this place to the outside, the now-distant thought of the ocean. A lot of distance was dissolved during this period of going nowhere, which was supposed to be ten minutes but actually lasted over an hour: a thin man came out of nowhere, with his legs folded under him from a case of polio in his childhood, swinging across the rock on his hands, joining us in on our igneous perch above the water. We all share food and songs and I had a few conversations through a translator, others through gestures, offering packets of cookies and chips to eachother, listening to songs on one of our guide’s cell phone.I feel very comfortable by this point, different culturally but not feeling obtrusively so. After a while, Nasil gets up and asks me to come with him, and eventually I figure out that we’re going to the water. He gestures to me to go down to the water, while he coughs and smokes a cigarette further up the bank. I stay for a few minutes, listening intently but also trying not to forge some epiphany out of the moment. As we are going back I try to thank Nasil, which seems to bother him momentarily, which then confuses me momentarily, but out of all of that some better moment emerges, something that no exchange of thanks can or should solidify, some plain moment, the few bare minutes when I was down by the water, doing nothing, listening, dipping my fingers into the cool water, the voice which drifts by me, pronouncing each drop as a syllable, speaking in no hurry to no one in particular, aimlessly offering perhaps some fantastically simple truth about the constant that change itself transforms into when perceived in unison,

Nasil and I.

But our final destination is yet further into the forest; we haven’t even eaten dinner yet. Our friend with mute limbs retreats back into the darkness, and we hike on a different path until we reach a rope fence. We go in: it is a plot of land that I later can see is used to farming tapioca and bananas near the stream. There are young rubber trees dotting the hillside; a little ways up of one of these hills is a little hut with a covered cement platform outside of a locked room. We go up to this place, and Pradeep and Nasil light a fire – it’s finally time to eat dinner…

At some other time before or after this trip, Yadavan brought up this question about what is nature. Even though I know that humans and all of their cars and buildings and barbies are just as much a product of nature as anything, though we distort this fact by attributing it to ‘human nature’ as if this is somehow a different kind of nature altogether which can explain the human world and nothing else, I often find myself still using this word as something that I go to, something that I like to be in, something that I’d like to imagine I have my own special communication with. But maybe Nature is not this at all; maybe it is something that I aspire to be, it is some possibility of my own that draws me to the forest. I like to be silent and intuitive and able to listen without needing to respond, but this kind of thing has not always been as meaningful or helpful to me as a human among humans. In fact, since coming to Darpana and working at a much more intense pace of interaction with people, one which demands that I have and articulate ideas and thoughts of my own on a regular basis, I’ve been very critical towards myself of my inability to do this at that same level. I felt like I haven’t been smart enough, or that my intellectual intelligence has been taken for granted for too long and I’ve fallen out of the habit of having to prove it among my peers. Maybe this is true, I have not pushed myself enough, but there is also another thing, another truth that I am so relieved to have remembered and reconnected with. Since coming back to Darpana after this trip, I’ve been seeing a version of myself that is much more at ease with people and also full of ideas, someone remembering the depth of their own experience and knowledge and once again able to draw from it. Why? Maybe, in seeing the stars at 3AM and showing Yadavan all the constellations I know, in this wild joy of being alone in a strange forest at night, listening to elephants braying somewhere, submerged in vegetation; I think I’ve recovered some depth, I’ve opened doors to my own experiences and memories and feelings that I really never intended to lock.

We wake up at dawn the next morning; I go on my own out to see what I can see with my binoculars, which is: lots of incredible birds. I have no idea what any of them were.

While we were sitting on the rock by the water, talking and singing and drinking, one of our guides promised to find us this plant that apparently gives one lots of energy and good health. It was only in the morning after we had already left our guides in the village outside the forest that we left without our magical plant.

Nonetheless, there was plenty of beautiful flora and fauna to look at and listen to, which left me feeling pretty good regardless…

Tapioca, I'm told...

Plantains

everywhere on the ground in the morning

mystery plant

mystery plant #2

Exotic fauna

We left our little encampment after I guess they thought I had my fill of looking at the world around me through my eyes and various eye accessories (which I had not). We took a different route back, through an active rubber farm, passing by other people on the road. It was sunny and beautiful; our guides were chatty with everyone we passed, Yadavan was tuned into his ipod, busy with his camera; I was alone and noticing. Of course, many more pictures were possible during the day, and I got to borrow Yadavan’s camera for a few good shots.

rubber trees, with cocounut shells collecting the sap

Pradeep and his fantastic Stance

When we finally reached the town outside of the forest where we had first met our guides, we said our goodbyes and went to have tea in a dusty little chai room on the side of the road, with this witchy lady brewing the tea, who whisked by us, hunched over, beady-eyed, back to this huge cauldron of simmering tea and spices (ok, it wasn’t really a cauldron). The light came in from a few barred windows and spaces in the wall where the sun leaked in; a man also came in, and this resulted in one my favorite pictures that I took the entire time. I’ve always wondered if photographers have to say anything in particular to people to get them to look serious in photos, instead of smiling, as I think we tend to do instinctively. But this man, I can’t help but think that he wanted to have his picture taken in the interest of self-preservation maybe, as a way of sending a postcard to the world outside of himself, and I don’t even know what he’d want to say, what he’d write on the back of the card.

~

I know there is so much more to say, but I’ve taken so long to write this I feel like I need to just go ahead and let it go. The point is, one day flows in to another. It is no one’s fault that this experience has now become just one many ‘excursions’ that we took the Kerala trip. But what an extraordinary thing this was, that we went somewhere that Yadavan and Madu would normally go, that I never would have seen, that I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to see…

3 AM