I know I’ve kept silent for a good long while.
Part of the reason for that had to do with a little adventure I had back in July. My lungs, for reasons known only to themselves and [insert name of higher power here], decided to no longer play well with others, and quit doing the whole process-oxygen-in-a-timely-manner thing.
For those of you following along from the States, know that the whole Indian hospital experience is definitely a “kids, don’t try this at home” style of activity. As a bonus, getting to the Indian hospital is a whole separate “adults, you must be this high to take this ride” experience. “Ambulances” here are basically a taxi service to transfer people between diagnostic labs, clinics, and hospitals, but aren’t available for emergency services. So for emergency transport, you call a friend with a vehicle, and hope they’re home. Or a taxi. The drive from Rewalsar to Mandi is, at the best of times, 45 minutes or more of scary mountain driving. The somewhat nervous taxi driver attempted to drive slowly so as not to jostle the sick Western lady, and it took a little bit of hypoxic yelling to explain the need for speed. After which the hills and valleys fairly flew by.
So, the hospital. Ya know those emergency room scenes like on Grey’s Anatomy, or House, or whatever, where the sicko du jour speeds in on a gurney, and oodles of medical professionals pop out of nowhere with all sorts of arcane equipment at the ready? Yeah, well, about that…in a remote Indian hospital, that all fails to happen, pretty much. What did happen is the taxi driver and a friend dragged me up the stairs into the trauma department–the local term for the ER–where a gentleman was prepared as could be with….um…pen, notebook, and stethoscope.
Editrix’ note: Some time after getting out of the hospital, I learned that in the ER doctor’s opinion, if I had waited one more hour to come to the hospital, I might not have made it. How long does it take to drive from Rewalsar to Mandi again?
A good friend stood by and translated my wheeze-filled symptom descriptions into proper Hindi. During the intake, a woman in street clothes marched into the room with an uncapped syringe, and attempted to inject me. Doctors, it turns out, don’t necessarily wear white coats or uniforms, although the “behaniya” (”sisters,” referring to nurses and female medical assistants) wear coats and uniform salwar suits. There was a tense couple of minutes while I got the newcomer to understand that doctor or no, she wasn’t injecting me without telling me what was in the needle. That settled, I finally allowed the injection, and a few minutes later was admitted.
My hospital room was downstairs. Elevator? What elevator? Good thing I arrived with enough muscle to transport me down the stairs to my bed…
The two most important things to know about Indian hospitals are:
- You play, you pay. The whole nightmarish American healthcare model–where a worker comes in to check on your health insurance and your ability to pay as soon as you’re in the door–gets replaced by a much simpler scenario where you get only the health care you can pay for directly.
- You never go to a hospital by yourself. Always take along a “looker-after,” someone to see to your meals and chase down a nurse if you need something.
That second rule doesn’t sound like much, but it actually means all the difference between getting better, and, well….not. In an Indian hospital, the basic assumption is that you can do stuff on your own if you don’t have a handler standing by. My first morning in the hospital, a lady bounced in to tell me my medications were waiting for me in the pharmacy, two floors up. All I had to do was walk up two flights of stairs to retrieve them.
I looked at her, looked at the IV dripping high-velocity antibiotics into my arm, looked at the oxygen feed tethering me to the wall behind my bed, and shook my head.
My visitor repeated her good news about the meds, and looked at me expectantly.
I shook my head again, and explained in my horrible but by now somewhat passable Hindi that a trip two floors up to the pharmacy would not be happening soon.
Finally, my medical messenger seemed to see the IV and the oxygen feed for the first time, and reluctantly allowed as how she might have the meds brought to my room.
Later I discovered meals could be ordered from the hospital canteen, only three flights up.
About a couple hours after this, a man cheerfully entered my room, to inform me that I needed to get an X-ray, one flight of stairs up. “Chello! (”Let’s go!”) It’s time for your X-ray!” No amount of polite refusals or pointing at the oxygen and IV feeds could dissuade this man, so up I got. After taking about five minutes to walk from my bed to a meter or so down the hallway, my X-ray escort asked me if I wanted a chair.
I agreed instantly, thinking he meant a wheelchair. Silly me. This is India, so the x-ray guy literally meant a chair–one of the plastic ones good for indoors or out. Once seated, three other guys were drafted into carrying me up the narrow flight of stairs and into the X-ray lab.
By the time I was carried back to my room, Chinta (our current bhi-bhi) had finally arrived to act as my looker-after. For the next four days, she slept in the room with me, chased after nurses whenever my breathing went south, fetched in food, water, and the very occasional chai, helped me wash, and basically acted as my legs within the hospital.
I suppose I should mention the occasional power outage, which would instantly shut off the flow of oxygen from the machine in the wall…fortunately the hospital did have its own generator for such magic moments. Just outside my room was some loud machinery or some such that ran noisily and randomly at odd hours. This being India, I found the noise reassuring, because as long as I could hear it, I knew the neighborhood had electricity.
When I finally got discharged, as is the Indian custom, I bought sweets for the behaniya, medical assistants, x-ray techs, chief doctor, and other folks who helped me fail to die while in the hospital.
The month of August was spent taking more antibiotics, and not moving around much. The worst thing about being that sick was the combination of boredom and cabin fever. Looking at the same four walls for a solid month, with only the occasional bathroom or kitchen break, was so boring that any reason to take a trip out of the house was welcomed as a major expedition. My first trip to town on my own feet took forever as I negotiated the rocky footpath, but it was worth it to be back in town and hoisting cups of chai again. It was only recently that I got back into the routine of going to town on my own.
So yes: much better thank you. To the list of prayers recited during kora I’ve added one extra one along the lines of, “Can we not do that again, any time soon?”
October 14th, 2008
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Seven hundred and thirty days, give or take or week.
Seven thousand, five hundred and twenty hours.
Two years since I first stumbled off a plane in Mumbai, severely jetlagged, stupified by the 82 degree heat baking the city at 2 AM, and somewhat doubtful that my latest MommyWizard adventure was a Good Idea.
The original plan (well, yes, there was one) was to stay in India for several months, and then rejoin civilization. As those of you who have followed along with the blog for the last two years already know, I never did quite get around to boarding a plane headed out of the country and in a westerly direction. At times the timing for a trip to the West simply didn’t work. At others, financial snarls of this-and-that combined to make a plane ticket hard to obtain. So I stayed, keeping my visa legal with obligatory trips to Nepal, and finally registering for residency.
In that time, I’ve done my share of “going” local. Instead of T-shirts and jeans, my wardrobe consists of salwar kameez suits, kurtas, and dupattas. (Dupattas are an absolutely necessary item. An Indian woman would sooner forget her head and leave it home, than leave the house without a dupatta draping her shoulders. It’s just the way it is.) Chai is the drink of choice, rather than coffee. I no longer grumble when the Sikh temple begins broadcasting prayers at 5:30 AM. In fact, if I don’t hear it, I grumble more, and light a couple of candles to shower by, because the silence means the power’s out again. And I now snicker along with the local ladies when a Western tourist slinks through town wearing yoga clothes and attempting to look mystical.
I should really expand that last thought, because I had a similar experience after spending several weeks in Mexico. San Miguel was far enough off the beaten track–despite the large expatriate population–that I soon grew used to moving through crowds of short, brown-skinned people, all with straight black hair, all close to my height. On my return to the incredibly spiced melting pot that is the Bay Area, it took me a little while to readjust to crowds of people that were all shapes, sizes and colors.
The process does not work at all well in reverse. Rewalsar is, like San Miguel, far away from anything cosmopolitan and filled with crowds of short brown people with straight black hair. Westerners tend to stand out. And….well…
They look funny.
Part of the problem is the Western perception of India as a sensuous place devoted to physical sensations. You know, the Kama Sutra. Yoga. Temples filled with the smoke of exotic incense. All of which overlooks the India with moral conventions out of the 1950s, Sanjaya, and a fetish for cell phones and cricket matches. The result is usually an attempt to dress “Indian” without really buying any Indian clothes. So from time to time we have folks putter through wearing kurtas and pants made from the material that’s normally used for djolas (purses) or as mattress ticking. Sorta like wearing a jacket with a “Saranwrap” or a “Tempurpedic” logo….Then there was the one young lady who attempted the “yogini” style of dress. Unfortunately she decided to wear salwar pants with a white tank top. To most Indian women she looked like she had forgotten to get dressed before heading outside, and they wondered aloud where the rest of her outfit was. I know, I did my share of wardrobe malfunctions before understanding how clothes actually functioned socially here, but two years is long enough to have me snickering along with the natives at other folks’ faux pas.
India is a place where there is no social restriction against staring. Having been the staree for at least a year, it’s sometimes surprising to find myself now the starer–especially at Westerners kitted out in the tourist uniform of t-shirt, shorts, sandals, backpack, hat, and expensive camera. Strange to step through the mirror, and see out…
June 14th, 2008
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A comment from Deepa on the Hindi signs blog entry mentioned the fact that many of the signs were actually in English, simply spelled out in Devanagri, the Hindi script. Actually, the practice is not so absurd as it sounds. What’s spoken in Rewalsar by many native residents–especially older, more traditional, folks in the remoter villages– is not “pure” Hindi, but actually a dialect that sometimes bears as much resemblance to formal Hindi as the twang of an Appalachian hillbilly does to the more neutral tones of a Midwestern news broadcaster. Nominally, both people are Americans, speaking English; but, realistically, they’d have a hard time communicating.
Too, Rewalsar’s function as a pilgrimage point means there’s a steady influx of people speaking different languages–Sikhs from the Punjab, Buddhist pilgrims from the Himalayan foothill regions of Kinnaur and Ladakh, saddhus from Rishikesh, contract workers from Bihar. Yeah, officially, all these different folks are Indians who speak Hindi. However, the Punjabis will favor their own language when they can. The Biharis, from way the other side of the country, have their own version of the national language. And the Kinnauris and Ladakhis, who are strongly related to Tibetans, speak a variant of Tibetan rather than Hindi. If the Hindi dialects don’t match up when two people meet, they’re as likely as not going to try English to communicate. And so, the enterprising Rewalsar shopkeeper has his signs painted in Devanigari that phonetically spells English words. Add to this mix sanjoor (refugees) from Tibet, MommyWizards from California, backpackers from Czecho, doctors from France, tourists from China, and you have a polyglot mess that promotes as much confusion as it does world peace.
What this also means is that the Hindi that’s presented in most textbooks and tourist phrase books is useful, but only up to a certain point. For example, I go produce shopping just about every other day. Most days I try to get a few nimbu (limes). The juice makes a tasty drink, and also has a few household uses. According to my Hindi text books, my conversation with the subji wallah is supposed to go something like this:
Me: Namaste. Kya aj nimbu hay?
Wallah: Ji nahi. Aj nimbu nahi hay.
Me: Accha. Namaste.
Me: Hello. Are there any nimbu today?
Wallah: No. There are no nimbu today.
Me: I see. Good-bye.
In actual practice, however, the conversation that takes place is a drastically abbreviated exchange, punctuated by the infamous Indian Head Bobble:
Me: Namaste. Nimbu hay?
Wallah: (head bobble) Nahi, nimbu ni hay.
Me: (head bobble) Thik’.
Me: Hello. Any nimbu?
Wallah: (head bobble) Nope, no nimbu.
Me: (head bobble) ‘Kay.
Multiply this kind of slang-ridden conversation by a factor of three or four–since it also happens with Tibetan, English, and some of the local dialects, and you can see how the town sign painter might have his work cut out for him…
September 18th, 2007
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Rewalsar is a small Indian hill town. It’s not Delhi, or Mumbai, or Bangalore.
This being so, living in a house just outside Rewalsar means more than a few lifestyle changes. Occasionally I’ll get a bit of mental whiplash when I look back on the differences between the modern life I had in the Bay Area, and here. Just to give you guys a taste, I thought I’d spend this post listing some examples…
1) Making Coffee:
Bay Area: The night before, pre-load coffee-maker with ground coffee and water.
The next morning, stagger out of bed and into kitchen. Push button on coffeemaker. When the coffee’s done, pour and add fixin’s. Drink.
Rewalsar: The night before, fire up the stovetop (see below) with an electronic lighter. Fill up the humongous teakettle with water, and wait for it to boil. This is a good time for a few rounds of a sock or sweater. Once the water boils, pull over a footstool and put the water flask on it for ease of filling. As always, marvel at the the amazing way the flask keeps liquids hot for, like, ever. Everyone in town has at least a couple of these things, designed to keep tea hot during a day of visits from friends and neighbors. The flasks are a kind of super-thermos that use cork stoppers. After filling the flasks, place on counter to await the morning coffee-making procedure.
In the morning, stagger out of bed and go on kora. About an hour and a half later, put a drip filter over a different flask, and pour hot (Yes! Still extremely hot!) water through the coffee. Once the water pours through, pour coffee and add fixin’s. Drink.
2) Acquiring milk:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive to Safeway. Buy milk. Take home, place in fridge.
Rewalsar: In the morning, wait for a small Indian child (the son of our landlord) to call “Auntie?” through the front gate. Open gate and offer small cook pot for child to pour milk into. Reward child for bringing the milk with a toffee, or a piece of fruit. Reward cow for supplying the milk with a bunch of vegetable trimmings from last night’s supper, by handing it to the child. This milk is usually still body temperature from the cow. If I were a more “eat
local“-obsessive foodie, and had the Hindi vocabulary for it, I could probably find out which udder the milk came from. Stick pot on stovetop. Fire up the stovetop with the trusty lighter, and heat milk to foaming. Take milk off burner. Once milk cools, place in fridge.
3) Using a gas stove:
Bay Area: turn knob. When burner puts out blue flames, adjust height with knob and start cooking. No gas? Call the gas company.
Rewalsar: turn knob and listen for hissing gas. Put the trusty lighter next to the burner, and click the button-trigger. When burner puts out blue flames, adjust height with knob and start cooking. No gas? Switch the hose connector from your empty propane tank to a full one. Meantime, it’s time to get the empty one replaced.
Editrix’s note: everyone uses propane-fueled stovetops. The only true ovens in Rewalsar belong to bakeries. The tanks are a combination of reliable and indestructible, sporting a collection of dirt and dings from hard use. It’s not uncommon to see a chai-wallah sitting right next to the tank attached to his stovetop, smoking a cigarette or bidi while brewing the next glass. One of the tanks’ big advantages is that they work during power outages. Try that with your microwave.
To get the tank exchanged, ask neighbors when the gas truck will be coming through. If the truck isn’t coming today, give thanks for your second tank. Otherwise, everyone checks along the road to see if they can spot the truck. Whoever sees it first goes to the other houses to let folks know it’s time to drag out the empty tank downstairs and to the side of the road. An alternate alert method is to listen for a distinct “CLANG” from next door. The family matriarch, rather than drag the tank downstairs, simply tips it off her balcony. The tank will land next to the road, just in the right place where a propane-wallah can hop off the back of the truck, grab it and exchange it for a full one.
Meantime, a second propane-wallah carrying a purse hops out of the truck. Hand this man your money for the tank. Then go to the truck’s driver, and hand over your gas customer book–this book tracks your gas deliveries. The driver makes notations in the book and hands it back. Now for the fun part: dragging a full propane tank back upstairs.
4) Getting a snack:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive 4 blocks to 7-11. Buy Slurpee, preferably blue, or Pringles. Drive home.
Rewalsar: Leave house. Walk down path to town:
Go to general needs store. Purchase potato chips, or an Indian snack like aloo bhujia, and cold soda. Alternately, stop by a namkeen (snack) wallah for a few pani-puri. Walk back up path, or catch a bus or rickshaw.
5) Feeding a cat:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive to PetCo. Buy bag of food. Go home, and open bag. (Do not have cat help you.) Pour food in bowl. Place in front of ravenous cat.
Rewalsar: Leave house. Walk down path (see above) to town . Go to Butcher.
Look at carcass hanging in window. If the tail is long and hairy, it’s goat; if it’s a bit thicker and woollier, it’s mutton. Then check out bits on butcher’s counter. Ask for a kilo of meat, and have him hack it into small bits. Ignore flies in butcher shop. The butcher will hand over a flimsy plastic bag filled with meat bits. Take bits home.
Once home, cut bits even smaller, removing any bone chips and tough, stringy tendons. (Do not have cat help you.) Small reject bits with meat attached can be fed to ravenous cat immediately. Place bits in blender. Crush several washed eggshells to small powdery bits, and add to blender. Then add a couple handfuls of cooked rice or tsampa (ground roasted barley). Blend to a paste. Put half in fridge, half in freezer. When cat asks you what happened to the rest of the meat you bought, put one serving in a bowl, and place in front of ravenous cat.
April 18th, 2007
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“Mehla” means “festival.”
One of the first things a Westerner might notice about India is the sheer number of festivals and holidays. Every couple of weeks, it seems, there’s another holiday honoring a god, a season, or some aspect of the family. Rural India, our friend Pia tells me, has so many festivals because they provide a kind of emotional relief for the poor. For a day (or two), even the poorest person can stop work, put on their best clothes, sing, dance, and eat treats they don’t normally do.
Well, the latest mehla to rumble through Rewalsar is Baisakhi Mehla, a festival marking the Punjabi new year. After all the madness that was Losar/Kumbh Mehla/Shivatri etc., I thought we were due for a little normalcy. But, um, no. Baisakhi is significant to the Sikh religion. And just to add to the festivities, Baisakhi also coincides with the Hindu New Year. Since Rewalsar is home to a pilgrimage site that’s holy to both Sikhs and Hindus as well as Tibetans, people are properly motivated to put on a party. Or two. Or six. The town’s population has literally tripled with the sudden influx of annual pilgrims and vendors. That’s how the sleepy area around the Hindu temples turned from this….
to this:
The Sikhs have festooned Rewalsar’s gurudwara with enough holiday lights to illumine the entire valley. The Hindus, in turn, have also dressed their temples in lights. So far the last couple of days, street lights aren’t really necessary in our neck of the woods. Or, for that matter, night lights. As with most religious festivals, the bells, drums and chanting started nice and early around 5:30 AM Saturday. Actually, they didn’t start at 5:30, because they hadn’t really stopped from the night before. During the day both Sikhs and Hindus had their respective processions. The Sikh procession included a group of blue-garbed warriors demonstrating their martial arts sword-swinging skills. One of the things I like about the Sikh religion is the sheer practicality of the “fifth K“– carry a nice sharp “kirpan” (sword) with you at all times, in case you need to defend yourself or the helpless and oppressed from any godless idiots who don’t know no better. Meantime, the Hindu processions included parade after parade of local gods from the surrounding villages. For Baisakhi these deities all wander down from the hills, to the sound of drums, flutes, and horns, and have a big convo down by the temple. Each one also goes on kora around the lake, and pays obeisance to the big honchos like Shiva and Ganesh.
Despite all the religious hoo-hah, though, Baisakhi is really about two things for most folks: eating and shopping. This is one of the holidays where villagers and pilgrims who don’t normally come to Rewalsar actually trouble to make the trip, piling themselves and about 8 or 10 other family members into a jeep or truck to get here. The first wave of visitors are itinerant vendors, hoping to making a killing within the three days or so of the festival. The kora path on both sides is solid with vendor booths. By 5 or 6 o’clock they’re all awake already, making breakfast, washing up, setting up their wares. The Sikh dentist-optician wallahs are the most surreal: they have tables out, filled with dentures, crowns, and eyeglasses. I’ve actually been told the dentist wallahs are pretty good, bearing in mind that anything they put in your mouth has been sitting out on the table in the street for a while, with the dust and the cows and the dogs. Okay! Moving on!
With all of the vendors selling …
shoes, bracelets, underwear, cap guns, plastic storage containers, stove lighters, knives, coffee cups, radios, belts, chappali, bubble toys, foil hats, fresh pressed sugar cane juice, posters of the gods, vermilion powders, “action bindi”, curtains, dolls, glassware, neon-toned plastic flowers, Vedic astrology readings, jalebis, socks, watches, silverware, plastic buckets, jewelry, hair ties, fabric, toy kitchenware, “ready-made” children’s clothes, samosas, “OM” stickers, buzzing toy magnets, flutes, peacock feather fans, dhoop (incense), toe rings, pepper peelers, soaps, cosmetics, pujabhu (ceremonial Hindu puja plates), bill hooks, axe heads, and so on….
…the kora path looks like someone exploded a K-Mart (or maybe a Woolworth’s–remember them?) and artlessly dropped the various shelves around the lake. Then there is the pasture/playing field north of the lake, which in normal times is home to maybe a few piles of construction materials and the hard-working horses who carry it up into the hills. Every so often the monklets from the different gonpas will play a cricket match. Now, the same field looks a little different:
Like everything else in this part of India, the carnival rides are carried in and pretty much assembled by hand. There’s a lot of screaming involved whenever these things are in operation, but whether the screaming is happening out of happiness or fear is beyond me. As a spectator–especially one who’s seen the rides being assembled by hand–I would vote for fear, but that’s just me.
By far the trippiest aspect of Baisakhi is the traffic jams in front of the house, which is nowhere near town. Yesterday a bus, two jeeps, and two scooters vied for dominance over the one-lane road that runs between Rewalsar and some villages to the west and the holy caves. All vehicles were literally stuffed to bursting with people. I think each scooter was carrying a family of four. Just for reference, a typical Rewalsar traffic jam happens maybe once a week, and looks like this:
April 14th, 2007
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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…
February 25th, 2007
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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.
February 6th, 2007
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If you’ve been following our blogs for any length of time, chances are you’ve already got the idea that we MommyWizards have been through our share of adventures. And now here we are at the winter holiday season, and ready to celebrate our usual Happy-Holi-Hanu-Kwanzaa-Mas time. Since we’re in a part of the world where sending or receiving physical presents is a logistical nightmare, this year I’m sending out mostly good wishes, and a heartfelt endorsement of the people and businesses who made our adventures possible. Please pass along the good cheer by giving these fine folks your custom–or at least paying them a visit–should you have an opportunity.
And ya know, over the past couple of years, we’ve surfed a lot of couches, cried on a lot of shoulders, and shared many laughs over cups of coffee. If you are someone who blessed us with your help and aren’t listed here, consider yourself well hugged by the three of us anyway.
Tien Chiu @ Traveling Tiger, San Francisco, CA
Dr. Michelle Riddel ( and family! ), Oakland, CA
ShDiva Black, Oakland, CA
Allison Walton and Filomena Serpa @ FLOAT, Alameda, CA
Linda Cleary @ Savvy Travel, Berkeley, CA
Lori Bushbaum @ Hawksong, Berkeley, CA
Dr. Ellen Gurian, Albany, CA
Earle Jennings, Kensington, CA
Winna Hofstetler, Bolinas, CA
Tom Strickland, Seattle, WA
Sheila and Jonathan Bosworth @ Journey Wheel, Acton, MA
Elaine Miller @ Elaine Miller Dot Com, Vancouver BC Canada
Silva Tenenbein, Vancouver, BC Canada
Lama Wangdor Rimpoche, Rewalsar, HP India
Thupten Gonpo Hara, Rewalsar, HP India
The Lotus Lake Hotel, Rewalsar, HP India
The Chopstic Restaurant, Rewalsar, HP India (contact: Vijay Kumar)
David Broman @ Mani-Tech, Rewalsar, HP India
Pasang the Tibetan Herbalist, Rewalsar, HP India
Surfers Paradise Internet Cafe, Mandi, HP India (contact: Inderjeet Singh)
Himalayan House, Majnu-Ka-Tilla, Delhi, India
Wongdhen House, Majnu-Ka-Tilla, Delhi, India
Gangchen Tours & Travels, Majnu-Ka-Tilla, Delhi, India (contact: Karma)
The Souvenir Guest House, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal (contact: Madan Karki)
MSN Cyber Cafe, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal
Tashi Deleg Restaurant, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal
The “red shack”, Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal (Ask for “Momma”)
Dragon Travel, Bouda, Kathmandu, Nepal
The babes at Babeland
The folks at Fiber Universe
The souls at Sheep Thrills
eBags.com
PortableApps.com
December 25th, 2006
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I think I’ve already mentioned that the bus I took to Kathmandu was not the tony, more tourist-oriented “Volvo” bus but a more proletarian Tibetan-style “deluxe” bus. Everyone else was either Tibetan, Indian, or Nepali. The bus stopped every three hours or so for the men on board to hop out and water the nearest trees. More female oriented stops happened every six hours or so. The ride takes approximately 36 hours, starting from afternoon in Dehi. Unlike other trips I’ve taken, the traditional morning tea-and-pee happened at about 3:30 AM, as usual at a dhaba set up in the middle of nowhere. A couple of gentlemen wrapped in shawls casually toted rifles over the shoulders. They didn’t have police or military uniforms. My best guess was that they were either hunters, guards for the dhaba, or dacoits (bandits) on break.
Some hours later, the big daylight morning stop was at this dhaba in the middle of bumfuck India off to one side of the highway. Eastern India, right before the Nepal border, is extremely rural, extremely dusty, and extremely desolate. You can look out the window and be very hard pressed to guess what year–or even what decade–it is. Off to one side of the dhaba, where tea and food were available, was a huge cement block with several water spouts set into it for everyone to wash at. The bathroom was a nice big open field, with room for everyone to pick a spot.
Things changed dramatically at the Nepali border. Or rather, they changed just before the Nepali border. One of the bus crew informed me I needed to get off the bus to deal with my Indian exit visa. With me in this adventure were a mixed race couple who seemed to be the only other bus riders who weren’t Nepali or Indian. Both were dressed Western style–he in dress shirt and jeans, she in black t-shirt and black pants and sporting a facial expression I came to think of as “disaffected Heroin addict”. Before I learned otherwise, I’d assumed the woman, with her pale, peaches-and-cream complexion, black outfit, and sullen expression, was someone’s 14-year-old daughter who’d been dragged to India on some kind of budget educational tour. I kept checking around the bus for her parents. Come to find out that she was not only an adult, but was traveling with her Nepali husband, who, like me, had a relative or two in the States.
Alrighty then. First the Indian exit visa, where once again I put up with the question as to whether the Indian man who was looking over my visa could come back with me to the States. Just to save y’all any suspense, the answer’s always “no”. Next came the surprise: rather than reboard the bus, we were expected to walk into Nepal for the Nepali entry visa, while our luggage rode the same distance.
All of fifty meters, but, still.
Those fifty meters’ worth of walking immediately brought us under an overpainted arch that crossed the street and into a place called Behaliya, which is evidently Nepal’s answer to Tijuana. Outside the office where we picked up our Nepali entry visas were no end of liquor stalls, hotels, kukhri knife sellers, fruit vendors, beggars and touts. One guy just marched right up to us, explaining that everyone from the bus was already at his restaurant, and all we had to do was follow him. Uh-huh. Instead, we stayed where we were, eventually got back on the bus, only to get off after a left turn of about ten yards.
From then on, the bus magically turned into a party bus as the Nepalis on board started seriously drinking and dancing during the ride. The Nepalis were partying hard partly because they could–Nepal, as opposed to India, is not a “dry” country–and also partly because they were celebrating leaving India. Having been there myself, I can understand how most Nepalis might feel about India the way folks from Vegas might feel about New Jersey. It’s more expensive, less festive, and the food just isn’t as good. We rolled into a Nepali dhaba to have “thaklis”–a Nepali style thali plate festooned with a dal soup, curried water buffalo or chicken, a vegetable pickle, and all the rice you can sock away. Throughout all this I’d been hanging out with the other Western couple. The festive atmosphere might have continued from there if the following conversation hadn’t ensued after the husband had an extensive phone call in Nepali with somebody.
“Well,” he chirped, “I finally found you a room…”
“Er…what?” I said. “I have reservations already.”
“It wsn’t easy, the first place didn’t have any spaces…”
“That’s okay,” I insisted. “I already have a room set up.”
“The other place though, has a room for you. I didn’t get a price. If it’s too expensive, you can always move the next morning…”
“Um. But. You’re not understanding. I already have a room, reserved, through a family friend…”
Believe or not, this man kept insisting I stay at his hotel in the unpriced room he’d just set up. I politely and firmly kept refusing. This particular reservation at a Nepali guest house had been set up via the same guy who’d put Joy and Lena up throughout the little revolution Nepal was having back in May, so we knew he was pretty trustworthy. Meantime, I was having to argue a complete stranger out of finding me another room. The disagreement continued, I kid you not, until after 2 in the morning–at which point I actually had to tell the taxi driver to drive me away from him to my guest house. The driver couldn’t find the place for about an hour, but that’s another story.
The main thing to know is months ago, on my first day in India in fact, I’d already gone through the “no record of reservation” scam at the Mumbai airport. This time in Nepal, I stuck with my reservation without thinking about why–until much later that I realized that my new-found friends might have been insisting I put up at their guest house, so they could get a discount on their own room for bringing me in….
December 12th, 2006
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Travel, India |
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