4D$$AMMMNNNN

Hello.
My name is Nina and I possess frustration! Frustration, which I am letting go of… of course, because what else can you do in India? Just blow in the wind like a kite at milky sunset.

Frustration reason #1:
I have an effing RASH on my effing FACE.
Mystery rash, I like to call it. My little friend, as I ironically like to refer to it. A really large annoyance, as I most accurately can describe it.
This mystery rash jumped up on my cheek and chin and mouth area earlier this day. Did I eat something? Did that cream I got from the ‘chemist’ do something awful to my visage? Does India like to make my face itch inconsolably?
It feels like I smeared glue all over my cheek and upper lip, and now it’s dry and not letting me move my face very much. To the touch, my skin is roughed – swollen, too. It looks a bit like I got my wisdom teeth out, if my wisdom teeth were my incisors. MY FAAAAAAAAAAAACE.

Semi-Frustraion-but-mostly-humerous #2: Our apartment floods.
The monsoon knocked on our door today. This morning, actually – it was our wake up call. Claps of thunder and then the faucet turned on for a wash wash wash of thick pelting drops that flooded the street flooded the park* and flooded our front room. After stuffing two rugs underneath the door as a makeshift damn, we watched the rain from foggy windows until it let up enough for us to open the gates [doors] of our living room. The drains on our roof also were plugged, clogged, and choking on mud and leaves which made the roof well up with water and then the water spilled down our indoor stairwell and made the entirety of the spiraling steps a Titanic set of running water.
*By ‘flooded’ park/streets – I mean that the grassy knoll turned into a lake and the cement street into an ocean.

At least the monsoons keep the air fresh and the sky clear-er. Opens up the air, too; disintegrates the heat.

Frustration #3: Mosquitoes just LOVE my legs. I look like I was just in a paintball battle and have circled red wounds spiraling down my legs. It’s awesome.

Frustration #FOUR: Okay I JUST came up with this one; a fresh discovery of sorts. My ‘FOUR’ key no longer works!

Frustration #5: My face. Sweet sticky syrup on my face – that’s what it feels like, more than glue. If someone mistook my face for a pancake and loaded it up with some Auntie Em’s or whatever that syrup woman is called and now it’s just a mess…
Oh, life. GET OFF MY FACE.

In other news, I had my ‘first day’ of class last week. On Tuesday, I met with the head of the psychology department, as well as two other professors who teach some ‘papers’. For every class, there is only one hefty paper at the end of it, for which you must designate a topic with your professor and then mesh in all your new-found knowledge. So instead of being asked, “what classes are you interested in?” it was, “what papers are you interested in?” You don’t really sign up for classes here, by any means. It seems as though students just head to school in the morning and wander around the cracked white hallways until they find themselves ushered into a class they want to take. Anyway, that is why we met the head of our department – the only way to really get into a class for sure is to talk face to face with the professor and express your interest and why. The classes are small. Communication lines are thick.

I decided on a class called Indian Paradigms in Counseling Psychology, and another Buddhist Philosophy course in the philosophy department. Hindi, as well. So for the next four point five months I am going to write two papers and learn how to survive using Hinglish. That’s awesome.

MY FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE.

FRISKY FLIES

There are a lot of people in Delhi. Everywhere.
Sometimes we find ourselves in places where the ‘lot’ of people is even more concentrated than our usual experience. Lives swarming the streets. Water vendors, poor men with squinted eyes covered in flies on the ground, a rich family bumping their plump hips through the crowds as they saunter, women with ratty hair holding a baby too hungry to cry, shopkeepers inching away from their merchandise to lure you in, people yelling everywhere, masses of flies traveling in waves and bunching onto sweet sticky messes, unfinished construction as stacks of bricks and tile and debris in piles dribbling onto the foot path, traffic pouring like molasses through the streets in dense walls of tire and metal (Delhi Thrill Ride #54: Crossing the street.)

This afternoon we took the metro the Chandri Chawk – near Old Delhi, a definite artery of the city pumping all kinds of life through it. As soon as we skipped off the metro, we were met by the line of bike and autorickshaws lining the street and calling calling asking asking “ma’am where are you going, ma’am?” Our destination: the spice market. We asked for directions from a nearby woman, which we assumed to be a safe bet… however, in India, asking for directions is a hit-or-miss process. Even if the person doesn’t have a clue which direction to point you in, even if they only have a vague notion of where you want to go, even if they can hardly tell you how to navigate there, you will almost always get some sort of answer; confident and assured, not wanting to displease you, a stranger will send you off on a wild goose chase…

Thus, we managed to navigate around a large square of space before we got to the spices, and we passed a lot of sites that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. (Delhi lesson #454: Getting lost in Delhi is never a loss of an experience.) Such as, wizard woman. Wizard woman was only one of the many people we brushed past – how can I describe this sort of ‘many’?
Imagine looking at a black wall, and then realizing that the wall is black because it is actually covered in ants.
Needless to say my visual inputs have been completely overwhelmed by my afternoon…
This woman had ratty hair, natural interspersed dreadlocks, and wore shiny reflective cloth wrapped around her body. Gold jewelry hanging from her face, like a gypsy, maybe, and in her hand, a wand pointed outwards. A long, nubby wooden stick of a wand. And her face was beaten by the dust and her body was stuck in her casting-a-spell posture.
The next moment this image was gone and replaced by thousands of others as we pushed ahead on the uneven cement…

The spices. The nuts! The dried fruit. The spices! Puddles of spices in open white sacks, shop after shop…
Just, everything.
And a spicy meal before heading back.
I am being rushed away from this writing experience by Kelly Donohue. Time ticks! Words sparse!

Ta Da

Alright, Delhi.
So it appears that you do, in fact, posses the ability to unsheathe your stars! I can see circa 20, at the moment. On my roof –

This roof. North Delhi. Close to the campus. Seven of us white university of California students have just heaved all of our baggage and incense and clothing and sweaty bodies over to an apartment one metro stop away from the University. A metro, still in progress, yet hadn’t been this close to being completed merely last year. Shall we consider ourselves lucky? Go.
Metro trains come once every couple minutes. The metro map sprawls all over Delhi – but the south of Delhi is the part that has yet to be completed. Unfortunately, the south of Delhi is where the ‘night life’ is at. Far from campus. Far from us.

Tonight we returned to the Urban Pind club which we visited our first week here. The incentive of the free beers at ‘Ladies Night’ was enough to pull us away from our fresh homely haven of an apartment. It took us two tuk-tuks and a brief metro jaunt in order to make it there. After running our of free beers and our dancing feet, our ride back: a 30 minute motorized rickshaw tumble down the roads and roads and roads and roads… Easier than I thought. Delhi is large, stretched… but able to be navigated! Now that I am getting settled here, I realize that my fingertips can spread to its edges…

Back to our roof, though. Only our apartment has access to this lovely viewpoint. We live on the top floor of a four story green cement building with plants draped across every balcony. In front of us, a park, is splayed with children and power-walking women in saris once the sun drops lower in the sky to relieve us of its brutal heat, so that it can leave us with a less abrasive, yet just as suffocating, heat.

I’ve described Delhi’s stuffy gray sky in previous posts – but today Delhi showed it’s blue. Since returning from Mussoorie, Delhi has lifted its veil, its dusty diaphanous veil, surprising us with its blue tint and white fluff [clouds]. The pollution is still thick and trudges around the outskirts of the sky – but the sky does exist in Delhi. Proof.
This evening as the sun warmed itself behind the milky clouds, drenched in orange and pink, I counted twenty-some kites taking flight off of the surrounding roofs. Kites?! How is this not magic?
Tumbling spilling
But catch!
Before they fall.

Our apartment has a vast living area, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and an open kitchen area that is currently barren, but welcoming. The counter space is a dream. Hopefully it shall be used for cooking and serving. Potential for delicacies.

Hey now Hey now Delhi is BACK

Delhi again welcomes us into her firey arms.

The first round in Delhi was an onslaught of sights sounds faces… Delhi can see our fresh faces. Delhi understands our vulnerability of being in the madness of this new place. Then, we were ripped away and taken to Mussoorie. Coddled between her mountainous mossy green. A small place that wasn’t too intimidating. Taught us Hindi. Taught us how to be comfortable and familiar. Now we return to this Delhi Delight again, seasoned. The heat also isn’t as abrasive and there are tons more white faces here now. It’s nice to feel like I have somewhat of a grip on this place. Like Delhi isn’t just running me round in circles. I can actually navigate my days…
Delhi is a beast. A beast that never sees the sun – and the sun never really sees. Instead of existing as a golden yolk in a pale blue sea, the sun is merely a presence of reflective clouds tinting the sky to a shocking white. There is something spooky about a place the sun never really sees. A vast land of honks and sweet red paan and roundabouts…

India curried me a happy birthday… jumping through my rite of passage into the legality of alcohol consumption – though I won’t have to use my ID as verification for the ensuing months… proloooonged sigh. Dancing. Sweat. More dancing. Flooding the dance floor with our limbs. All I wanted.

bon voyage Mussoorie

Final exam came and went this morning. How have I been here for one month? Time is where –

Thank you Mussoorie for your beauty –
The red tin roofs where rain pats, pours, and pounds.
The red tin roofs where monkeys screech and tumble at six in the morning. WWF monkeys have adopted the position of our alarm clock during the week.
The clouds that billow and tuft in between the foothills.
The fog that rolls through to hide the trees.
The moss that shades the concrete fresh green after it rains.
The steep hills that wring out our breath.
The dogs that sleep on the streets, hugging corners, in nooks, under awnings, on cement railings… shaggy splotchy and lazy.
The shop keepers who don’t speak much English; when we can only communicate on a word-to-word basis, a puzzle!
The juicy mangoes –
No clean way to eat one. I’m like a five-year-old gnawing at an ice cream cone and having it melt and spill down my arm and make sticky sugary ring around my mouth when I eat a mango. Too juicy. Perfect. Never have I eaten so meaty of a mango.

My teachers. My four teachers that I’ve seen almost every day for the past month who have shared stories and spirit… One of them adjusts her glasses with the palms of her hand and furrows her eyebrows disapprovingly when you say something wrong (it sounds just as encouraging as it really is.). The next one sold me a jar of honey from her brother’s bee farm, and let her voice lilt and fade away at the end of every phrase. After a 30 minute chai break, my next teacher’s voice scraped his nostrils – I have no idea quite how to describe this man – his hair thin and wild, his face darkly rugged and blemished, and he closed his eyes when he spoke a good amount of the time, all the better to hear his voice scraping gently across every word. His laugh was more of a giggling chuckle and revealed a charming gap between his front teeth – turning his frazzled mystical look into a silly, er, mystical, look.
The day before yesterday, four of us ended up visiting his home. We drank chai in his sitting room while he smoked bidis. He showed us a fraction of his owl collection (owls in India are considered stupid, however, not wise! Yet this man is obsessed.) which completed is about 2,000: golden owls, marble owls, glass owls, owls that take pictures with their eyes, owl magnets, carved owls, big owls, small owls – he even has a beautiful art collection of personal drawings with graceful inky owl feathers in front of etchy scenes… we crowded into his ‘office’ – a room just big enough to fit a few dusty bookshelves and a twin bed covered in blankets, his ‘desk’.

My last teacher of the day – an ex-alcoholic (‘this is the fun of drinking!’), always chewing paan, walking over to the window to swiftly spit it from his mouth while we stumbled through our reading. My favorite day in his class was a story day in his class – about the opium trade through the middle east and throughout India and beyond… an honest black market. It’s the ‘chains of corruption’ that keep it moving along so well.

Another quote of that man: “We experience many things. Sometimes we don’t do these things, but we still have the experience of it,” through stories, through others, through many other pathways… it’s so true though, eh? We pass on stories to create an experience in itself.

The Wheel of Ferris

Ferris is the man who spins the wheel. Walking down the main road in Mussoorie, on our way to Happy Valley, we passed through a pseudo antique carnival. Popcorn salt cotton candy greasy smells and the cable cars –
A rusty cave as the mouth from where the cable cars descend, rifles to shoot a wall of balloons no bigger than a poster, small metal cars with chipping paint that only the smallest of three-year-olds could fit in, and ferris!
Ferris is a man who stands atop the spinning metal wheel – no more than twenty-two feet high, yellow paint rusting away dangling small benches swaying. What does Ferris do aside from balancing at the top? Suddenly he lets his feet slide down the side of the frame and creates a force to propel the entire circle round. Ferris hops off onto the ground, letting the giant wheel spin spin on spin on… yellow rust wheeling around in the passing fog.

So we saw a manual ferris wheel. Manual.

Happy Valley is a Tibetan community. As we approached the village we ran into more and more Tibetan faces, and once there we were completely immersed in an entirely different looking people. We spun prayer wheels in a Buddhist temple – the dragons painted on walls exploded with color and snarled at us. Tibetan flags rained from houses, all with green tin roofs. Every house green tin roof green tin roof. Ate beef for the first time in India in a small restaurant with no paint on the walls. Well, white and gray paint – chipping. Might as well have been no paint. The menu was a slip of paper. The less the place looks like it has open arms for tourists, the better the food – but we all know this, don’t we?

Strode past a soccer field – mud. Mud and wet. The entire center of the field one big gaping puddle; dull muddied water. A lively game was going on with quite a collection of spectators.

It was nice walking into this area – much more quiet and peaceful than the bustle of Mussoorie tourism. Less harsh stares, as well. Less honking.

youngsters

Bus ride down the winding hillside to Perkal – a Youth Development Center for women and children of a small nearby village. Began ten years ago with three children and now the place is bulging with two hundred. All of the money that supports the organization comes from personal donations – no government support. An Australian woman who does a lot of the administrative work is taking classes up at our language school and invited us to visit.
So we did.

Small school bus cramped legs humid air pouring in –
Arrived at the small school. First thing we ate lunch in the ‘dining room’ – small with two long wooden tables lined with wide wooden benches. Circular metal plates like disks hung on wall racks. Two women (cooks) in bright colored saris in the corner serving food; rice and beans a salty mushroom and pepper curry, fresh veggies, sweet sticky mango for dessert. We spaced ourselves out on the benches so that children could squeeze in between us. I spoke with a 12 year old beauty who punctuated all of her statements with “ma’am” (something they all did) and told me she wanted to be a doctor.
”Why do you want to be a doctor?”
”Well, ma’am, I originally wanted to be a teacher here. Because I liked the idea of teaching kids like me.
(most of the teachers working their were previous students)
“But then one day I went to the doctor. I told him that I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. He told me that a lot of doctors nowadays don’t know how to take care of their patients well enough and so their patients die. Now I want to be a doctor so I can help patients not die.”

RIGHT?

These children go to school from 7:30 to 5:30 six days a week They get breakfast, lunch, a snack, and something to eat before they head home. They do everything from math to science to art to yoga to basketball to computer science to English to Hindi… the school is taught in English. Uniforms are provided for them and they are obviously surrounded by love and support. After graduating students still provided support from the organization and go on to become engineers and psychologists and the like…
That’s the children.

The women – in a facility just across from the school, bent over sewing machines or simply with needle and thread at hand, illuminated by the golden backlight pouring in from dusty windows, making quilts quilts quilts!
Fabric patches lined white cupboards.
Beautiful quilts of an eclectic scene involving the sea or the prairie or a sunflower patch… they sell these quilts and keep the profit. The organization merely provides a place for them to work.

Right before we left they divided us EAP children into small groups and sat us in front of separate classrooms of children so that they could drill us with questions. The children all ranged from young to old. Classrooms equipped with only the necessities. Desks – blue. White board. Chairs. Teacher.
“Favorite food? Favorite hobby? Know any Hindi movies?”
”What do you like about India?”
”What do you think of Obama?”
”What is the difference between our school and yours?”
“What do you like about USA?”
“What do you not like about USA?”
“What is the difference between USA and India?”
“What is your aim?” (i.e. What do you want to be when you grow up?)
“What do you think of terrorism?” (wtf?)
“What is your least favorite part of India?”
“Do you go to school with Indians?”
“Why are you learning Hindi? Do you think it’s practical?”

That last question was asked by one of the older girls. I told her that growing up with English was both a blessing and a curse. English is already very useful, but I can’t help but to feel ignorant for not knowing the inner language movements of another culture – I am just thankful to be able to communicate across any other language field besides English. I wanted to talk to this girl more. The older kids tended to have more conversations amongst themselves during this exchange… made me feel silly sitting up there answering questions as if I were on some special panel… the teacher sat off to the side of the room with a stone-stiff face; bland expression. (Apparently other EAP kids had more lively and participating teachers…) It added a little discomfort to the air, though. What did they think of the four of us sitting there?
The younger kids, more curious. The older kids, more territorial… camaraderie in the midst? Je ne sais pas…..

Road back. Small bus. Powering through fog that dampened away the trees…

chicken of the buttery sea

Listening to the rain pelt pelt pelt the tin roof
And gently swish in the leaves of the trees
A river of sound surrounding my mental spece
Growing louder…
Sitting on my bed moldy sheets that never seem to fully dry in the humid air
Legs extended
Candle light
Lights out.

Tonight we tried to explain what the state of being “hot” is to one of the workers here at the hostel… “beautiful. Is. Very beautiful is,” using what little Hindi we had to bridge the communication gap The fact that everyone speaks English here is entirely too convenient – but it’s fun to meet people that DON’T speak English, and that have just as limited of a vocabulary in my language as I do in theirs. It makes communicating more of a game. We both are human. We both are thinking. We just can’t transmit our thoughts in full fruition – we have to use the sparse tools that we have. And there isn’t any other way to excel in using them than to use them. To stumble.

How does everyone in this world seem to speak English? Daily I am reminded of America’s ignorance in creating bilingual youth.

Tonight we swaddled down the main road, 17 deep, to a restaurant bar named Sikoh. I shared a metal bowl full of “butter chicken” – a spicy tomato and cream dish that saturated pieces of chicken in a thick sauce. And some rice mixed with cumin seeds. A few times we were videotaped by men on their camera phones – right up to our faces. “Enough! Enough!” we yelled in Hindi. The amount of blatant staring that is socially permitted is overwhelming. I am trying to imagine what would catch my eye so much to videotape another human being having dinner at a restaurant…

R. Kesh – do you mind if I call you that?

Just had a beautiful drive home after a short long weekend in Rishikesh. Two days is not enough time to experience anywhere, but I am tired nonetheless. The drive home was lovely; we trekked through many a landscape. The sun was golden and gasping through purple clouds bathing the dusty road in golden yolk. As we made our way up the hill to Mussoorie the fog swept in and carried away the humidity. And now we are left with trees caked by the gray mist and again bombarded by the scraping pounding speaking tapping sounds of the kitchen, which is nearby the room we are staying in here at Dev Dar – have I mentioned this place before? It’s a ‘hotel’ – but I would consider it more a room&board hostel. We take our cold showers from a bucket. Tasty.

So Rishikesh. White hippie HAVEN, damnit. It wasn’t teeming with tourists the same way a big city would be, really, but I just saw an inordinate amount of white travelers curious about practicing yoga. Half-expected to see someone I knew strolling out of an Ashram. It is definitely a safe place to travel if you are a girl in India – for the first time I wore a tank top and didn’t feel uncomfortably stared at (just the normal stared at. The stared at where we get people pointing their camera phones over their shoulders in a not at all nonchalant attempt to capture our ever so interesting white faces. The dead pan stares. The people asking to take a picture with us. The video cameras.) We stayed in an Ashram on the Ganges. The brown Ganges. The swirling Ganges. The rapid water stirring up the fine dusty sand into its current. Cool to the feet.

On Saturday night we watched some sort of Hindu Ceremony on one of the river banks. One of the most amazing parts was the music that accompanied the ceremony, the entire way through. The drums, the accordion-like miniature organ thing, the singing voices sailing over one another in a rhythmic harmony. We had prime sitting spots, in my opinion, on some marble steps mere meters from the musicians. At my feet were young males dressed in the orange Sadhu dress. (Like alter boys! Except… not quite Catholic.) They clapped and sang along with the music – devotion! In front of us the Ganges sailed and a large tall large robust tall statue of Vishnu sat atop a marble platform protruding from the river. Just tickles me that all those people can be gathered to believe in something, together, on the banks of a holy river.

That morning I also had the pleasure of taking my first yoga class in India. Amazingly, YTTP isn’t really that far off from the source – the people here just don’t call it ‘superman/woman’ or ‘bicycle crunches’. And instead of being taught by a beautifully powerful Swedish woman, I was taught by a flexible stick man dressed in white, greasy wavy hair, and his VOICE – luscious. Can I say that? Yes.
“Full relax full relax”
“Breath in good energy. Breath out bad energy. Down past your naval…”
And then an “Om” at the end that could challenge a singing bowl. It’s amazing to think that this religious man who fasts and has a dot between his brows does yoga for spiritual purposes. Moving and stretching and shaking out his ankles and building back muscles and sitting in invisible chairs and wrapping limbs.... and through this practice comes spiritual living.

Today – banana honey crepes and chai for breakfast.
Today – walk/hike to mini waterfall. Stood under its jutting spraying cool water. Coated me with ice. It’s so humid here, though, that becoming drenched in a waterfall’s locks while completely clothed is the utmost relief you can feel from the hugging air.

India you are a magical maze of beauty. Curling your lips up at the corners; amused at our curious travels.

Fourth of July actually came complete with fireworks and beer, huzzah America. We bought a fair amount of fireworks – the kind that give off sparks like a geyser and a few that went way way way up and then boomed into sparkling tentacles. We even belted out the national anthem at one point, and I must admit it’s a lot easier to feel patriotic when you are in a different country in a white mass of 40 amazing college children, trying to represent what little tradition we can all dabble in. The rains came around 11:00 and we danced in the muddyness wetness of it all, completely surrounded by a thick gray foggy mist that wouldn’t allow sight beyond the gate at the edge of the hills. Thick rain pelted me as I stood with open arms standing against an opaque wall of bushy grayness.

And speaking of America… I had a conversation about America vs India today with a shopkeeper. As I was purchasing an umbrella to protect me from the monsoon falls, the shopkeeper asked me about the differences I found between America and India. I mentioned things like the importance of timeliness and efficiency in America, and how that is replaced here by the importance of relationships and interaction it seems. Our time is precious, in America, and we often find ourselves in time ‘crunches’ of sorts, because we constantly have a mental ticking clock scheduling our lives day by day. Here, I feel like people let their day carry them by its events, and the people they run into. Things do get done, but just on a different, more flexible and unpredictable schedule.
Especially in a place like Mussoorie - it's small. A shopkeeper can give you change out of his pocket. There are no large corps or systematic inventories and schedules that trickle into the daily grind of this commerce.
Upon returning the same question to the shopkeeper, I got an honest polite reply that euphemized, “Americans are selfish.” We would be okay with letting our neighbor die, he said, because we don’t know them and we don’t care about them. We wouldn’t go fetch medicine for our neighbor, pay for treatment for our neighbor – we would say, “That’s life,” and go back to busying ourselves with… ourselves. And we also don’t give a shit about our country. [That was the abbreviated version.]

It’s hard to compare two places without distinguishing one as good and one as bad. One way as good and one way as bad – it got me thinking that the various societies which exist and the various ways of life which exist. It is entirely impossible to say that one way is the right way and one way is wrong – our societies and cultures work the way that they do because of all the ingredients which make them up. It isn’t that Americans birth selfish babies and thus perpetuate an individualized ideal of living. And it isn’t that living collectively can be perfect in India either – but the troubles in both places cannot be ameliorated in one day, and every for every trouble there is good. For every curious conversation I have here over a cup of chai, I know that I am still stripped of the ability to be outside past dark without a male ‘escort’.

Also – what IS patriotism? Do I really not give a fuck about my country? That comment definitely got under my skin. I am grateful for what I am able to do and be and feel and eat and see in my country, but it’s probably true that THAT sort of patriotism doesn’t exist in the same fashion of Indian patriotism. I would never get an American flag tattooed on me. I would feel like a douche bag. Can I feel both proud and ashamed of the good and bad aspects of my country? Yes. Fuck.

But I’m not here to compare. I am not here to analyze our differences and make judgments. I am here to experience this place and learn from this place, and take whatever it offers me.

Shum Shum SPLASH - Janki Chatti/Yamunotri

So happy fourth of July??
As it was put by someone on this trip, “organized chaos” is India. This being said as our taxi driver wove us through traffic and dodged oncoming cars and waited on the edge of a cliff for a jam of buses and jeeps to pass by. We just returned from a weekend at Janki Chatti. It’s crazy to think that I probably will never ever ever return to that place in my life. To get there, it took us eight hours to navigate 130 km around the Himalayan walls over bumpy rocky uneven terrain. We stopped a few times for chai breaks (India Lesson #465: You can’t do anything in India without a chai break) and parantha breaks and a lunch break and a skinny dipping in the Yamuna river break. Well… almost skinny dipping – the eyes of the Indian landscape can even intimidate the extent of my non-modesty. The water in the river was cool and gorgeous. It went shhhhhhhhh splashing over rocks creating white airy caps.
Janki Chatti is a small village, one road winds through it, up up until Yamunotri, Saturday morning we were awoken by someone pounding on our door and providing us with cups of hot chai, before we delighted in a roti breakfast. We hiked 6 km up the path, some of us on horseback. (Two other options were either being carried on a lounge chair-like wooden structure by four men, or curled in the fetal position in basket perched on the back of some poor man.) The path was nestled in between tall green lushy hills, jagged pieces of stained rock jutting out of its side. The aroma of horse shit tingled our nostrils the entire way up, and we avoided it as best we could with our steps. My sweat warmed me against the cooler mountain air. Right before we hit the temple there were tents and tents of chai and samosas and trinkets. THEN –
Natural hot springs, baby. Heck yes. Women and men had their separate respective hot spring; so us ladies were free to splash around with topless Indian women in the boiling water. Hot enough to cook rice. Hot enough to boil your dumplings. Hot enough to make you head dizzy and your brain wispy after ten minutes. The men’s hot spring area was in open air and about three times the size of the women’s, which was hidden in a cave-like damp dark covered room. Steamy steamy steasmy like a thousand tea pots. The Indian woman jumped up and down in the water. Splashing us and smiling with us.
We meandered through the temple and I ended up with a red dot between my brows. Before we walked back down I sat on a stack of rocks by the river and listened to the shhhhhh and wshhhhhhh of the water – an overwhelming sound that isn’t so apparent when the eyes are open.
We are always the center of attention whenever we go places here. A fat group of 43 white children hiking in their rain jackets squeezing by 80 year old women draped in beautiful saris and men with big beards. Staying in Janki Chatti made me feel like a walking neon sign. Regardless of what people think, their eyes can’t help but catch. The picture taking and video taping and purring (yes, we were purred at?) and being asked if I liked to have sex didn’t dampen any part of this adventure, though. The sky is bluer here, I tell you. The clouds are more majestic and milky and soaked with moisture and the hills are more mossy and the stars twinkled free of ambient city lights so that they could show themselves freely. For as many uncomfortable stares, there are curious stares and people that will smile when you sing “namaste”. On Saturday evening before dark, I had some momos and roti and a bittermelon mixture to scoop with the roti underneath the tents of Janki Chatti, on the brown smooth dirt. The tents all have people cooking and eating and washing and sitting; smoke seeping from the spicy food over a fresh fire.
I feel intensely lucky to be having these experiences. Unreal.
Another good quote “it’s like we are walking through National Geographic.”