intern-national

So the Retreat, as my house is affectionately known, has gone from being filled with Rarely me, Sometimes the cook, and Always Gandhiji’s ghost, TO:

me (no introduction required) + Cristina – sharp, beautiful, and talented designer from Columbia + Arnold and Antje, 2 professional opera singers from the Netherlands working with Darpana and making the best out of the echoey rooms with their vocal warm-ups, + a very busy but happy and also talented cook who takes care of all of us beautifully.

I have lots I owe to this journal, to attempt to mend the long gap between Then and Now, for all of those who are following this stuttering narrative from afar. Things here have gotten only busier, now with a major festival coming up in December and also a new production of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, in collaboration with a theatre group from Holland coming up just before that. And so much more! I skipped off to Nepal to see my friend/neighbor/kin Cooper, and live a week of my life in the midst of his, which right now involves kayaking the major rivers of Northern India and Nepal… and then coming back to have so much to do for the festival – designing a website, organizing a photography and short film competition, working on a production to celebrate/integrate/do something new with the theme of Ahmedabad’s 600th anniversary since its founding in 1411, which falls this year. Learning how to use graphic design software and make flyers/posters/logos, learning how to use CSS and HTML code to craft a website, learning little bits here and there about a city and trying to think of interesting ways to use the space at Darpana to create a performance… many things.

So how to do this, then? I don’t really want to use this space just to talk about work, because that’s what I do during the rest of my day. Can we see some photos from Nepal? I think that would be alright.

Cooper, the man with the plan

So, briefly, this trip happened all on the fly. And beautifully, magically, too. It’s hard to believe, but I actually became known to this group as the person who was always on time, the reliable one, the translator, the helpful one (especially because I grabbed the half-empty bottle of rum that was left at the table as everyone stumbled out of the bar we went to to celebrate one of our group’s 25th). Originally, I was supposed to meet up with Cooper and crew sometime early December, at the end of their trip; but instead I got a call from him saying it would be better to meet up in November, that maybe I could join them on one of their expeditions, somehow; and that’s exactly what I did, buying a ticket for a train to Delhi the day that I left, to catch a plane to Kathmandu leaving the next day, and then arriving too late in Nepal to catch my bus to Pokhara, the other city in Nepal, which meant that I had to stay a night in Kathmandu and meet the group instead in ‘Dumre’ – a town that Cooper told me to go to over a horrible phone connection, where supposedly we would all meet up. But I actually got there, dropped off the bus into a town full of other buses coming and going, bright and hot and sunny, raucous and anonymous at the same time, a town where people to come only to wait and then go somewhere else, a town that doesn’t really exist on its own, a town stuck somewhere weirdly inbetween the feeding frenzy of Kathmandu, of sharks on dollars, and the wonderful disconnection between tourists and Real Life in rural Nepal, which seems refreshingly concerned with its own affairs.

Which, from what I saw, entails growing rice, gourds, raising goats and cows, and running a few small shops and guest houses in the few small towns that trekkers drift through and occasionally stay, but never for long.

approaching one such tiny town, perched above the Marsyangdi river

... they take the escalator, I take the stairs ...

a half-day's hike up from the river, looking in to the Marsyangdi gorge

turning sun into substance

There’s too much to really tell (tractors, leeches, hot springs, cover bands, …), now at least that I’ve let this trip drift down beneath new layers of experience, now that the space I was holding during the days after I got back to contain my understanding of why this trip was important to me has now been filled by the new urgency of this festival. So for you, as a placeholder until more words come, I give you pictures. But for me, I have only this: it’s up to me to hold on to the importance of the trip to Nepal, which to everyone else here will seem like a somewhat frivolous, expensive, poorly timed vacation. That being able to step outside of your situation, especially when it seems impossible to step out of, was probably the most helpful thing I’ve done for myself in a long time; a preview of things to come once this is gone.

I mean, having a few of my own thoughts about India to add to their experience, and also a chance to do some translating, showed to me that after all of this time working with people who, usually in the best of possible ways, show me that I still have so much to learn, to then feel that I actually learned something and could put it to use. Not that I take that too seriously; after all, it was an experiment, a series of small tasks, mostly inconsequential (I mean, despite my Hindi, Cooper and crew were better hagglers simply because they had been practicing so much), a new, clean medium in which this organism is printed onto to see what shapes it grows into in a week’s time.

The longer experiment is taking place here, and for so long it’s seemed to unsure whether or not it would be successful – whether I will feel satisfied with what I have done here, whether I will make it to the other end of this interminable list of To Do For Darpana.

But yeah, so after all of that nice revelation, I had to rush back to work, got fogged in in Kathmandu, missed my train, dumped a lot of money to buy a plane ticket and get back in time, and then was incapacitated with a fever for a day. Wheeee!

But. no matter. here I am, back in the thick of it. But still knowing that some tiny piece this place I have kept known to me;