what these lungs had in mind. It’s hard to understand what my leaving means to this place, also. There are lots of redundant thoughts pacing around in this little room, their footsteps all muddied together. I don’t know what thoughts are coming and what are going; if thinking about my plans is really preparing to be home or just the hatching of a desire to escape that, honestly, has been incubating ever since I came back. And then, after all that doubt, I find out that I don’t really have any plans..?

In other news, we just brought in our first harvest from the mushroom project that FINALLY began, after many many months of delay. I wasn’t able to be as involved as I would have liked with this project – it was too far away and I’m never really free. But the experience itself, nonetheless, was an unforgettable one.

Tomorrow is Uttarayan – the Kite Festival day… I haven’t made any plans, and since I’m still pretty pathetic with flying kites (haven’t really managed to fly one… ever…) I am not thrilled for it – but hoping something nice happens, maybe I’ll go to the old city, watch the sky flood with paper.

I just need to make it to the end of this month; then I can think.

Last night it rained, and it felt like a real miracle.

Arnold and Antje

One of the many things that is so wonderful about having the group of Dutch artists here is that I they want to do all of the things that someone who lives here would never really do. Going out to eat expensive (but artfully done) Gujarati food; going on a waking tour of the Old City at night. Which, was so incredibly spooky and weird, and beautiful, and awkward, since we were walking through someone’s neighborhood at night, through tiny alleys and in front of open doors, walking by people washing dishes, street dogs nursing their pups in dark tunnels in the catacombs of the ancient city…

At the Mangaldas Haveli

The Old City really is special, though. It refers to what remains of the original structures built inside the walls of Ahmedabad, before the walls were torn down in the 1920′s (I think?) to make way for the rapidly expanding city. Many of the houses of the old city, hundreds of years old, are still existing, and occupied. A few (like the one pictured above) have been restored. Many have crumbled or been destroyed. But all of this is squeezed in so close, there’s really very little room to differentiate between what’s ‘history’ and what’s still alive, which I think is what is most fascinating about the Old City.

Perfect arcs of Beteljuice (spit from the window on the right, to the window on the left...)

spooky window

And at the very center of this, guided by flashlights, we came to the tomb of Ahmed Shah, the founded of the city. The tomb is beautiful, especially at night. The building has two entrances, and one can walk around inside the building all around the tomb itself, which is a separate room in the middle with honeycombed windows looking in. Women aren’t allowed to go inside; but instead, on those windows, women who want to ask for something can tie a red string to symbolize their wish.

Heavy strings

& weightless things

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.

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;

Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice. I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother.  We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get ‘insaf’—justice—from India, and now believed that Azadi—freedom— was their only hope. I met young stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

Arundhati Roy

October 26 2010

The reason I’m writing today about all of this is that, just today, Arundhati Roy, as well as a well-known activist and pro-Kashmiri separatist Ali Shah Geelani, have been booked under IPC 124-A for recent remarks given at a conference called “Whither Kashmir? Freedom or Enslavement”.

And what did Roy say to incite hatred and “disaffection” towards India?

“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India which is a historical fact. It is a historical fact…India fought in Nagaland, in Manipur, Punjab and in Kashmir. It projects a biggest democracy in the world and emerging economic power but at the same time it oppresses its states and the people of diverse cultures.”

Kashmir today is one of the world’s most militarized zones, with nearly 500,000 Indian troops stationed in the region, supposedly to keep the region “stable” and to squash the popular uprising for Kashmiri independence.

Over a hundred protesters have been killed in the last four months alone.

- from above,

,

or from the ground...

Any way you look at it...

It sucks!!

But on another note, doesn’t the stage look good in black??