In this case, most of the words are “Thank you,” repeated over and over.
This is Sonnam Yutron, out and about in her wheelchair, attending the Guru Rimpoche empowerment ceremony at the lake today. It’s not clear in this picture, but Lobsang was practically in tears at being out with his wife and being able to attend the teachings.
Y’all rock. Thank you.
In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about local visiting protocols, starting with an early morning visit by five nuns and a goat. I think this bit needs a bit more explaining.
Indian and Tibetan social boundaries are very different from the Western style. One result is bizarre social situations where one walks into someone’s house to see if they might be home to receive visitors. Another has to do with the Indian art of watching other people. There’s no social restriction on staring. A Black indji lady with a lip ring and dreads is fully stare-worthy, by Indian standards, but only for about five minutes or so. After that, when it’s obvious that I’m not suddenly going to turn into a dragon or a god or an animal or whatever, folks usually give up. I can tell now which folks are from out of town; they’re the ones doing double-takes as I pass them on the street. Too, there seems to be a firm belief that work is not occurring unless there is a spectator or two on hand to watch. Sometimes, it’s a “if a mystery fells a tree in the forest, do you pay him for the work if nobody saw it” style of thing. Other times, it’s just something watchable, like TV, only a bit more interactive.
So the spectating also applies to visits. Often times I’ve visited someone’s home, only to find they were out, and had their ama, bhi or houseboy or whoever serve me a cup of tea and park me in a corner. This also meant being treated to whatever other bits of domestic life were happening, whether it was a bit of television, or explaining to chilluns home from school that they absolutely cannot have one more toffee today, and that they should go outside and play or something to burn off the sugar they’ve already consumed.
In this part of the world visitors are always welcome, and there’s usually a cup of chai and a biscuit or two offered, even if the cupboards are otherwise bare. When visiting Tibetans, the tradition gets and extra twist: you’re supposed to bring a nice treat like fresh fruit, biscuits, juice or some such. This helps your host restock their goodies for visitors, and at the same time politely ensures that they have something to serve if they haven’t made it out to the bazaar yet to stock up.
During Losar the whole business gets “kicked up a notch” with the inclusion of the holiday pastries known as kapsas. Kapsas, for those of you not familiar with them, are the special social-festival-weapon foodstuff of the Tibetan New Year’s holiday. They are a fried pastry treat made with little sugar, and enough flour to turn them almost adamantine after a while. You’re supposed to enjoy them with a cup of tea, but after encountering a few super sized kapsas at their hardest, the military applications of this treat are a little obvious. However, they also play a part in a bit of social ju-jitsu peculiar to the Tibetan culture.
Traditionally, on Losar, every household makes a bushel and a peck of these things. The next step, in a strange Tibetan version of “Tag”, is to pack up the kapsas in your house, wrap them in a fine white katak, and go visiting to leave them at other people’s houses while making a special Losar visit. The day is filled with people dressed in their holiday best–silk tchubas, fine silk shirts, and their very best silver-and-turquoise jewelry–racing from house to house in an effort to unload the kapsas menacingly piling up in the kitchen. Unfortunately for us, Lena is something of a celebrity here, and so a number of people, especially the cave nuns, competed with each other in making sure Lena got a batch of their kapsas which were so much better than so-and-so’s kapsas. So despite Lena’s best efforts to give away as many as she could, even going so far as to drag bag after bag of the things down the hill to town in a series of Losar visits, this was the result:
Scary, ain’t it? Even as of this writing, we’re still handing out the kapsas like there’s no tomorrow…in case you ever come to visit, You Have Been Warned.
Editrix’ Note: Just after I completed this entry and was about to post it, we had visitors, including a Khampa kenpo from Ziggar Monastery. Mind you, a full week after Losar. During the visit a boy politely entered the room, and deposited this:
These, of course are the gonzo Khampa kapsas, the ones that can double as cricket bats if you’re not ready to eat them yet. Now to figure out who’s left among our friends to visit…
Tso Pema has turned into something of a mob scene. In addition to the regular increase in population that comes with Losar celebrations, a huge influx of pilgrims arrived today to attend a special four-day teaching offered by a high-ranking rimpoche. Even at 6:30 in the morning, the kora path around the lake is packed with practitioners walking practically shoulder to shoulder. Losar visiting protocol has had us totally discombobulated. Apparently folks just walk right in if our gate isn’t actually locked. One morning at about 7:30 Lena got up to find five nuns and a goat who had followed them in in our veranda, wandering around curiously and wondering where we were! Well, the goat wasn’t really looking for anybody in particular. It happily found our bucket of vegetable leavings (to be fed to local cows) and was helping itself to some breakfast. But I digress.
Between the house move and the Losar visits, Joy, Lena, and I have barely been able to tell which day it is, let alone what’s happening in town. The huge temporary population means that every spare bed or bit of floor space that a sleeping bag can land on is occupied. Lena was actually chasing around town to find bedding for some guests due to arrive at our house. Meantime, I was spending time in phone shopping hell, seeking a replacement for Joy’s phone, which is still totally cooperative as a phone, but refuses to be a modem and create Internet connections. Both of us decided late in the afternoon that we had had enough errands for a little while, and stopped into Vijay’s Chopstic Restaurant for coffee. (Real coffee. made in a French press, no less.) It occurred to me to find out more about the teachings that were happening. Since everything in Rewalsar is literally a stone’s throw away, it was a real short walk over to the Drikung Kargyu Gonpa to find out the teaching schedule. As it happened, they’d run out of copies of the English translation of the schedule, so I hung out for a few minutes, getting a verbal rundown of the next four day’s events.
A large Black man entered the room. Now understand, India is just chock fulla dark-skinned people, some quite sizable. However, Westerners have a distinctive look to them, and this was the first African-American I’d seen in something like eight months. So you can imagine my shock when he turned to me, and said: “You’re Nyondo.”
“Yes,” I allowed cautiously, while wondering if any bits of my tawdry checkered past had caught up with me, half way around the planet.
“I’m Steve Daniels.”
This seemed like a safe statement to agree with, so I did so. “Okay,” I said just as cautiously.
“I read your blog!” he said cheerfully.
“You’re a blog reader?” I admit, that was a stupid thing to say. I was just in too much shock from actually encountering an actual reader of my blog who wasn’t Joy or Lena. I tried to fix things with a more prosaic, “Welcome to Tso Pema.”
After a bit of chat Steve confided in me that there was something he’d been meaning to do for a while, and was glad he’d run into me because he would have a chance to do it. Before the chills had a chance to run the full distance down my spine, he’d pulled out his wallet, and made an on-the-spot donation to the Medical Emergency Fund Joy had set up.
Behold the power of the Internets, y’all.
This fund, originally started to supply a crippled woman with a wheelchair, also supplies other medical necessities to folks in Rewalsar who are in need of medications or medical treatments, but can’t afford them. A lot of you have already met Sonnam Yutron, via Joy’s blog. Well, if you’ve ever wondered what some of the fund’s sponsors are actually like, meet Steve Daniels. I’m not sure I can adequately communicate how Joy and I are alternately awed and
ecstatic by people’s generosity in giving to this fund. So far, we’ve not only manifested Sonnam’s wheelchair, but supplied others with much needed medications, dental treatments and so on.
I forgot this part while Steve and I were in the same room, so excuse it please: Steve, you are cordially invited up to tea at the new, improved Casa de MommyWizards in Rewalsar. All you need to do is tell the bus driver or rickshaw wallah you need to get to Lena’s house, in Vikashnagar. (The yellow X.) There’ll be kapsas waiting for you!
What to do with two balls of Lorna’s Laces sock yarn when you’ve messed up the socks you were going to knit them into:
I frogged the offending socks and turned them into a perfectly serviceable Feather and Fan scarf. Nice long one, too, perfect for completely encasing the head in superwash-woolly goodness on those frickin’ cold days. Pattern? We don’t need no stinking patterns! This was one of those “pick a stitch, knit until out of yarn” projects.
Oh, all right. For you folks who must have written directions, here’s how to whomp up a similar scarf on your own:
Materials:
2 skeins Lorna’s Laces sock yarn (”Flame” colorway pictured here)
#6 needles - straight, circular, DPN, whatever
Cast on 58 stitches. (4 stitches for selvedges, plus a multiple of 18 for Feather and Fan)
Knit the first 4 rows for a garter stitch edge.
Then knit in Feather and Fan stitch:
Repeat these four rows until almost outta yarn.
Knit the last 4 rows for a garter stitch edge.
Weave in ends, and block. (Nah, I didn’t do that before taking the picture. Work with me here.)
It occurred to me today, as I was scampering hither and thither through Rewalsar in an attempt to help make the house livable before Sunday, that maybe the contents of my purse aren’t like a normal person’s. That’s the MommyWizard life for you. Every once in a while there’s a moment where you think, “Now, if I were a normal person, stuff wouldn’t be this way.” Anyway, today’s haul was the following…doesn’t it sound like an old-style
inventory list from Zork, or something?
>i
In your djola (Indian purse):
Wallet
Passport
Mala (prayer beads for kora)
Lighter/flashlight
Knitting project (feather and fan scarf)
Knitting project (Rosebud sweater, just the hem)
2 pens
notepad
umbrella
shower head
Benadryl
Epi-Pen
Hand Sanitizer (don’t go Third World without it)
lotion
eyeglass cleaning cloth
a copy of the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra
an invoice from the Ashwani Radio Company for two voltage stabilizers
Hindi, Urdu & Bengali: Lonely Planet Phrasebook
copy of an email listing tasks for plumber
In your hands:
toilet seat
>l
You are at the house above the statue.
>Drop toilet seat
dropped.
>w
The room is full of befuddled mysteries, no two alike.
>s
The room is full of befuddled mysteries, no two alike.
>e
The room is full of befuddled mysteries, no two alike.
>n
The room is full of befuddled mysteries, no two alike.
>chai
You stop and have a cup of masala chai with the mysteries.
>s
The room is full of befuddled mysteries, no two alike.
Customjuju is a concept. Customjuju is a mode of thinking. Customjuju is a way of life. It is the belief that magic is as useful a tool as a RJ45 crimper or a Hitachi Magic Wand. That floating in a tank is as productive as sitting behind a desk. That the global village really is right next door.
