Settling In, Spouting Bombast, Announcing Hiatus

It’s funny how a life, even in a strange place, in strange circumstances—that is, engulfed in strangeness and unpredictability too—finds equilibrium, and finds it sooner rather than later. A body’s natural state, then, must be at rest, at peace, settled, whether through resignation or contentment or paralysis, or through some cause in the interstices among the three. I’ve often thought to myself, “My God, human beings can get used to anything (although rarely in reference to my own existence, which, all things considered, has been almost entirely free of hardship or extremity).” I’ve marveled at the human capacity for adaptation, and for endurance, and for survival—for it’s honestly something to be marveled at. Certainly our species is unique in its capacity to populate the most inimical of landscapes, climates, and ecosystems, but this is hardly what I mean. It is our capacity to endure change—violent, sudden, dislocating, deracinating change—and our tendency toward equilibrium in the midst of upheaval that fascinates me.

Take away everything a man knows, his family, his friends, his country, his climate, his language, his food, his culture, his dress, his moral code—perhaps he has been rustled off city streets, bound, shackled, and blindfolded, flown across oceans, and dumped in a frigid 4x6 cell—and he will likely be broken, reduced to a state of infantile abjection, without hope, agency, or will, his spirit pulverized. But then, in time—and in less time than one might think—he will adapt. In time, he will accommodate himself to his surroundings, his circumstances. In time he will even find equilibrium, or more likely he will create it. It is a universal human trait, I think, this tendency—it must be. How else to account for the induration to suffering one witnesses in the course of one’s life—the homeless who survive the bitter winters of Chicago, the polio victims who drag themselves through traffic on their hands, begging from stalled motorists, the middle-aged woman who has lost her husband to cancer and both children to auto accidents? “How do they bear it?” we think, but the answer should be self evident: in such cases of cruelest vicissitude, humanity seems to possess a native immunity to despair. Despair is often a more insidious canker, working from within when we little suspect it or little esteem its power or claim on our hearts. We endure cataclysm and its aftermath, but sometimes succumb to a slender vermiform thread which takes root when all about us is tranquility.

I have found equilibrium in Udaipur, though it cannot be said that I have been subjected to any terrible upheaval, unexpected or otherwise. When I arrived I knew, if not precisely, then approximately what I was getting myself into, what life in India, life at Seva Mandir, life 7,000 miles from home might resemble. And in truth, I’ve been as much unsettled by those hardships that I’ve anticipated (difficulty in communication) as by those that I haven’t (lingering homesickness, for example). But after a consistently difficult couple of months, my body finally has found rest, its natural state, though one may wonder if rest and ease is advisable within the bosom of so seductive a temptress as India. Yet I am content to be settled for now, if only because of that interval of turmoil that descended upon my arrival.

I have grown content in small knowledge. I know, for example, where to purchase strawberry jam, ice, or an outlet adapter. I know which fruit stand sells the cheapest kelas on Vidya Bhawan Road and how much crushed ginger to add to a pot of chai. I know the protocol for taking pata puri, the sublimity of cashew ice cream, and the hottest dosa spot in Chetak Circle. I know how many rupees for an auto-rickshaw ride from Fatehpura to Ashok Nagar and where to get prints of digital photos made. I know how much a lakh is and how much a crore, and can refer to meat as “non-veg” without laughing. I know why Narendra Modi is a political lightning rod and Nandigram a rallying cry for progressives and how the NREGA has failed to deliver on its promises. I can tell you which Bachchan is father (Amitabh) and which son (Abhishek) and can argue plausibly whether M.S. Dhoni is ready for the Test captaincy. I can identify a banyan tree and a turmeric plant and ask “Where is the monkey?” in Hindi. I can eat an entire meal with one hand and no utensils, and I can cook an entire meal without measuring a single ingredient. I hardly ever look left before crossing the street any more, and I never consider walking on the sidewalk.

It is knowledge then that settles us, and the unknown that disrupts equilibrium, because knowledge consolidates certainty, and uncertainty, along with the unknown, is the substance of a life's agitation. And, too, knowledge has a threshold beyond which only the most exceptional of events can stir this agitation, which is why, though the Udaipur that I arrived to in September is a different city than the one that tonight invades the guest house through this structure’s every crack and fissure, I remain at rest. I know enough. Though the hills embracing the city have discarded green mantle for dusty brown, and the waters of Fateh Sagar have receded from the lake’s retaining wall (by May they’ll be playing cricket on her bottom), though a permanent haze has settled like a smoldering smudge, and the sun’s rays have become slanted and feeble, equilibrium obtains. Though a chilly wind has rattled the doors of the guest house, and the lizards that scuttled across its walls have disappeared, though the season for the custard apple has come and gone, and stray dogs now seek sun rather than shade for their napping, I am not unsettled.

And now, after such hard won equilibrium, I will leave Udaipur—but only temporarily. India, that seductive temptress, has beckoned, and who can refuse? But I exaggerate for effect: it is really my family who beckons, and I am only too happy to hasten to them. I only hope that I will still be at rest when I return, though if not, I should trust in my own sententiousness and believe that it’s only a matter of time before I find that ease again.

Alas, no blog until I return in early January. I know it breaks your heart, dear reader. Tide yourself over with holiday cheer until then.

The Five Days of Dewali: Shukravar, Shanivar, and Ravivar

Friday, November 9: Friday dawns like any other in Udaipur, except that on this day I’ve been mercifully absolved of the need to trudge to Seva Mandir in order to occupy myself with work for seven hours. And oh yes, it’s all because today is the holiest and therefore most raucous day of the Hindu calendar—Dewali Day—I mustn’t forget that. Most Seva Mandir staff members have taken leave on Thursday or even earlier in the week, and many hailing from other parts of India have returned home to spend the holiday with family. Arun, however, has not returned to Karnataka, and so we meet in the Guest House in the late afternoon, both dressed to go out. “Where are you going?” he asks. I tell him that I’m headed to the internet café for a bit, and after that I’m not sure.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“I am also going out, I don’t know where,” he tells me with a rueful quarter-laugh. Having already dismissed the idea of returning to the Short-Stay Home, I think that if we’re both to do nothing for the holiday, we might do it together, but don’t venture the thought aloud. We part ways; I won’t see him again until Saturday morning. Though sunset is slightly more than an hour off, they pyrotechnics have already begun; in fact, their cracks and pops have been audible since morning.

On the way home from the internet café, I stop at a corner shop and purchase a half-kilo of sweets, which have been marked up 40% for the holiday. As with all important occasions, Dewali is observed by mass ingestion of the sort of food that induces premature death, and sweet shops throughout the city have increased production, augmented staff, and expanded their boundaries to cram the esurient maw of the people with the confections it so vociferously clamors for. Makeshift shops, often no more than a single table beneath a cloth canopy, have appeared along roadsides throughout the city like creepers crowding a tree trunk, choking egress; in addition to sweets, many sell fireworks or trinkets and other small gifts. I take the box of sweets back to my room and devour half, thinking that if I honor no other Dewali rite today, it will be this one. Though the holiday is not part of my cultural tradition, I am depressed that I have no one to celebrate with; I am also deflated by the realization that no one among the initiated will introduce me to this essential expression of Indian existence (and remember bitterly how Arun has implicitly refused that very opportunity).

I won’t allow myself to simply pass the night in my room and so venture forth into my neighborhood, hoping to steal a frisson of joy from the celebration of others. At this juncture in the night, the sound of exploding fireworks has become a near constant, like the persistent volley of a firefight. I turn down a canopied side street and enter a different world, one where the sacred and profane coalesce in a perfect, swirling maelstrom and become indistinguishable.

Beneath the street’s garish canopy, the doorsteps of every shop and home are decorated with elegant and hallowing white and umber rangolis. Tiny candles form small, glittering constellations around the chalk designs and on most other flat surfaces—along the tops of walls and on window sills and ledges. Fireworks thunder in all directions, and their furious light eclipses that of the candles; one burst has scarcely failed before another rises through the shower of its predecessor’s dying embers. I watch a family of three perform puja in a tiny shop before an idol of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, to whom the day is devoted. In the street, a group of small children form a semi-circle around a cone-shaped device, and they burst into ecstatic leaps and cheers as it throws up a slender, listing wall of brilliant greenish light. Along the roadside cows chew their cud quiescently while the deafening din of explosion rends the night all about them. Everywhere the appointed scramble with their matches or lighters, seeking cover from the sound and fury they have unleashed. All is furious—furious light, furious noise, furious joy. It is a fantastic world I have entered, and though I am in it, I am not part of it. After thirty minutes of wandering, I set off for the near shore of Fateh Sagar.

On a bench at the lake, I have an uninterrupted view of the fireworks above Old City. I am also able to watch displays near and far explode above the trees lining the road that runs along the lake’s eastern shore—I attempt to gauge their relative size and distance according to the lag between sight and sound. I am mostly alone, although two teenagers on a scooter stop to talk for a bit, and another young man laughingly shouts “Go back to your country,” as he passes on the back of a friend’s motorbike. After another thirty minutes of watching, I walk home. When I climb into bed at 1:30, the thunderous fusillade outside my window has scarcely abated.

Saturday, November 10: At 8:30 I wake and trudge to the bathroom to the familiar accompaniment of low grade explosion. Has Udaipur known any respite from the onslaught during the night? I wonder at the motivation for setting off fireworks at such an hour: is it an excess of fervor, an excess of fireworks, or both? Or is it simply delight in noisemaking? Arun has spent the night at a coworker’s flat, and returns to the Guest House around 9:30. He soon invites me to join him for an afternoon showing of the new Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster, Om Shanti Om; as I have yet to go to the movies in India, this would seem a perfect initiation into the Bollywood universe. I instantly feel better about the previous day’s snubbing.

I know of no American analogue to Shah Rukh Khan. He is Bollywood’s biggest star and in this country entirely inescapable: he is on television commercials, at cricket matches, voicing radio promos, and splashed across the gossip page of every newspaper. Shah Rukh is India big, which means the adoration of more than a billion people. This is his world, heart and soul; Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Johnny Depp are superfluous. Om Shanti Om is a Shah Rukh vehicle, and it has a Dewali release; the combination has seismic potential.

Arun and I arrive at the cinema in Chetak Circle ten minutes before the 3:30 show and find its grounds overrun with a restive mass of prospective moviegoers. The theater’s woefully inadequate parking lot and perimeter overflow with motorbikes and scooters, and thick, misshapen lines have formed in front of both box office windows. In true Indian fashion, Arun and I shoulder our way to one side of a queue, and then attempt to merge with it as close to the box office as the welter of bodies will permit (I only bemoan Indians’ flagrant disdain for the queue when I myself an not benefiting by it; that is, any time I’m not accompanied by an Indian). At the front of the line, a scrum of patrons struggles violently, each attempting to hold his ground (and they are all young men) against the mass imperative of the crowd, which seeks any vantage closer to the ticket window. The foremost are sweating profusely with the effort of restraint, despite the relative mildness of the day. Arun and I hover just outside this seething mass and wait perhaps fifteen minutes before a shouting man dissolves the queue: as I have suspected all along, the 3:30 show has long been sold out; the line we have joined has been waiting to purchase tickets for the 6:30 show, and the box office won’t open again until 6. The man tells everyone to beat it.

We laugh wistfully both at the zeal of the masses and our naïveté and rather than sticking around as many do, we instead take an auto-rickshaw to some large public gardens just east of the Old City. Udaipur’s tiny zoo is located on the grounds (Admission: Indians—Rs 7, Foreign Tourists—Rs 50), and we spend some time snarling at the leopards and searching in vain for the Asiatic lion that a sign tells us the zoo houses. Afterward Arun makes some purchases in the market (undershirts, shorts), and darkness creeps over the city. “Do you still want to see a movie?” he asks as we make our way toward Delhi Gate. I think him delusional to imagine that we might still get tickets to the late show of Om Shanti Om, but I say yes anyway.

Rather than heading toward Chetak, we take an auto to Hathipole, where, unbeknownst to me, another theater lies hidden from the road, obscured by a high wall, perfectly invisible to the ignorant; it is an older, smaller structure that features second-run movies. We purchase balcony seats for a film called Bhool Bulaiyaa, which Arun translates as Forget the Ghost—I learn later that a more accurate translation is The Maze or The Labyrinth or, more literally, The Place Where One Gets Lost. Yet Arun’s interpretation is the truer, as the movie is, at least on the surface, a ghost story. And he should know: the Bollywood version of the film is the fourth he’s seen. He’s already watched it in its Kannada (his native language), Tamil, and Malayalam incarnations (naturally he claims the Kannada version is best)—it seems Bollywood is as hard up for ideas as Hollywood.

The theater is enormous, and though our seats seem miles from its fore, I needn’t strain to make out detail—the screen is in keeping with the scale of the place. I am immediately glad that the movie’s Hindi dialogue is incomprehensible; theater etiquette in India, if it exists, is akin to barroom etiquette in the States—within legal and reasonable bounds, one may behave however one wishes. Spectators hold conversations, answer phone calls (no Indian will ever turn off a phone for any reason—I recently attended a wedding in which the priest answered his mobile in the middle of the ceremony), smoke bidis, shout at the screen, whistle, and catcall. Perhaps some of this insolence is due to familiarity; I get the idea that many among the crowd have seen the movie before.

Afterwards, Arun and I discuss the movie over masala dosas and fruit shakes with ice cream in a grimy little hotel on the Circle. Arun declares the Bollywood version the worst of the Bhool Bulaiyaa lot, and though I haven’t seen the other three, I believe him. The film, in my estimation, is a deplorable convolution of genres—comedy, suspense, romance, action, drama, and, this being Bollywood, musical—and had I been able to understand the dialogue, I would likely deplore that as well. One might justifiably wonder how I can judge with confidence the quality of a film without this essential interpretive tool. To this I reply, did one have to hear Leo DiCaprio cry “I’m the king of the world!” to know that Titanic sucked? Mediocrity is a universal language.

Prima facie evidence: Bhool Bulaiyaa’s main character, played by big star Akshay Kumar, is introduced around the movie’s halfway point by means of a music video that arrives and departs without warning or connection, whether visual or thematic, to the film—that is, other than the shared presence of Akshay Kumar (and this isn’t some intermission diversion—that will come later). Kumar’s character is both irreverent jokester and principled man of action, and in a late, improbable twist, he is also revealed to be a brilliant student of psychology. The movie reaches a climax of absurdity when, at a critical juncture, Kumar exclaims in a stream of English as unprecedented as that psychological acuity, “I must go beyond the conventional practices of psychotherapy!” Also, has a creditable work of art or entertainment yet been created whose conflict centers on a character suffering from multiple personality disorder? I don’t think so.

After dinner, Arun and I walk home. Fireworks light the way, naturally.

Sunday, November 11: Normalcy slowly finds its way back into the world.

The Five Days of Dewali: Budhvar and Guruvar

Wednesday, November 7: With no particular Dewali plans, I fall under the sway of an attractive Indian woman with a three-day program. Besides being fetching, she is also infallibly competent (I’ve begun to suspect that I am unconsciously drawn to competent women, perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance my own fecklessness), consummately selfless, a bit overbearing, serious on some subjects almost to the point of humorlessness, and, given the forgoing, likely entirely wrong for me. She is a Seva Mandir employee who spends her free time volunteering at a “Short-Stay Home” for children and women who have been abandoned or battered by their husbands—a government-funded shelter also operated by Seva Mandir. The three-day program is quite simple: Celebrate Dewali with the residents of the shelter. Given such an admirable concept and the prospect of seeing this woman outside of work, how can I say no? And so on Wednesday evening, I pile into a tempo with two other American volunteers, Lindsey and Marissa, and head north of Fatehpura on Bedla Road, to the campus of Vidya Bhawan’s Rural Institute. Seva Mandir’s Badgaon Block Office is located there, and next to the Block Office is the Short-Stay Home.

The shelter is a single story L-shaped structure of perhaps ten large rooms, all opening upon an interior courtyard. We are introduced to the residents, given a quick tour, subjected to an overlong description of the Short-Stay Home concept and its sister government program, the Child Distress Line, and ushered into a common room which will host the night’s puja. Puja is a broad term—literally, respect—that embraces a range of worships activities, almost always including prayer and often a meal as well. At the far end of the common room, a makeshift idol has been erected—it seems a color print-out of a triptych of goddesses has been affixed to a rectangle of white cardboard and draped with a garland of marigolds. A handful of votive candles flicker on a tray before it. This, in my reckoning, is the Dewali equivalent of a stunted, artificial Christmas tree, its branches drooped under a handful of vapid globe ornaments whose synthetic surfaces are unable to reflect even the feeble glow of the tree’s single strand of white lights (and perhaps beneath the tree empty boxes have been wrapped up in tawdry paper and wound with bows).

Slowly and quietly, the shelter’s remaining residents (many of the women have returned with their children to their parents’ or other relatives’ homes for the holiday) file into the common room. One of the Short Stay Home’s residents has attempted suicide that morning, which is proffered as the source of the group’s solemnity—but I wonder if cause and effect haven’t been transposed. The puja begins. The assembled sing and clap half-heartedly while taking turns before the idol in small groups, gently rocking the tray of votives together in a slow, arcing movement. It seems no one knows more than the first verse of the song, and so the singing temporarily sputters out while someone fetches a songbook. The three Americans also get a turn in front of the idol; otherwise, we attempt to keep the beat by clapping—no small feat given the multitude to choose from. “Why do I get the feeling,” I whisper to Marissa, “that in twenty years this scene will be described in some best-selling memoir about growing up poor in India?” We don’t stick around for the meal.

Thursday, November 8: Marissa, Lindsey, and I return to the Short-Stay Home and join a group of about twenty residents, staff, and volunteers who pile into two hired tempos for a ride to a street fair just off of Hospital Road. The fair is a gargantuan neon eyesore and almost exactly what one would expect of a county fair in the U.S., except bigger and without the livestock (the entire country is a county fair in that regard): rides (including a towering Ferris Wheel!), games, assorted gimcracks and gewgaws, and lots of unwholesome food. We spend about ninety minutes milling around the grounds. Balloons are purchased for the smaller children, and everyone has ice cream bars and South Indian food. The kids are permitted but one ride before it's time to head back to the Short Stay Home. I am withdrawn and sullen almost from the time we arrive at the fair, frustrated by the fact that I fail to make even a basic connection with any of the kids; I don’t even try with the women, which, given their circumstances, and given Indian culture too, is probably a wise course of action. Marissa and Lindsey get along much better with everyone. As we prepare to return to the shelter, we're given the option of leaving; the two women have an apartment-warming party in Old City beckoning, and I invite myself. While they say fulsome goodbyes and glad hand the scorned masses through the windows of the hired tempos, I wait impatiently in the auto-rickshaw we have hailed. Along the way, the auto stops at a liquor shop; we purchase cranberry Bacardi Breezers and a couple of 750 ml Kingfishers for me.

Old City is Udaipur’s tourist hub and a warren of claustrophobic streets and alleyways, small crafts shops, cafés, and chalk-white apartment buildings. It is my first time setting foot there, and I am immediately charmed. Along major thoroughfares, as throughout the city, the street is bedecked with a thick, sparkling canopy of tinseled garlands and lights—a canopy so thick, in fact, that several times over the course of the weekend I have the sensation that, rather than being outdoors, I have wandered onto some vast warehouse movie set. The apartment’s entrance is off of an alley, and the fireworks being set off outside reverberate so loudly against the walls of the surrounding buildings that they are bomb-like in their aural ferocity. This feeling, too, will become a leitmotif of the weekend: shutting my eyes and imagining without trouble that I’m in a war zone.

The apartment is on the third floor and has been newly rented by Henrik, a young Swede with short, hipsterish hair and long sideburns. We trade small talk and sip our drinks for a bit with the other guests—a Brit, three Indians, and two other Americans—before adjourning to the roof of the building, which is six stories all told. The view from the roof is generous: Old City seems less a labyrinth than jigsaw puzzle from this height. In the west, looming above everything, is the enormous facade of the City Palace, an imposing structure that attests to the Rajput (or is it simply Indian?) obsession with grandeur. It is strewn with white lights for the holiday. By the time we reach the roof, a fireworks show has already been in progress above the Palace for some time; when we leave a half an hour later, it has only gathered in intensity. At least a half dozen other displays of equal radiance are competing for the city’s attention in the skies above Udaipur, and it is a protracted battle, one that will be waged into the darkest hours of the night.

I cannot fail to appreciate the tableau before me: demigod's eye view of the prostrate city, fireworks above a palace, exotic, picturesque India at hand--and yet I cannot enjoy it. The feeling of undeserved privilege, an admittedly foolish one, rises within me uncontrollably. India cannot join me on the rooftop; if anyone should own this prospect, I think, it is them. It is their holiday, after all. We only gawk at its native voluptuousness for cheap, vicarious thrills, I think, like an old white man leering hungrily at the twirling brown bodies during a classical dance performance. For similarly foolish, although perhaps more complicated reasons, I am uncomfortable among the expatriate crowd, which I somehow convince myself is a decadent bunch of ne'er-do-wells, rather than a group of young people trying very simply to enjoy a world and a life far from any they have known in the past. As everyone heads off to dinner, I part company, and given the pleasant air, effulgent sky, and nearly full bottle of Kingfisher in my hand, decide it will be best to walk. Tomorrow is Dewali Day, and the long weekend awaits.

The Village Stay: Capturing Dhala

Dhala, according to the 2001 government census, is composed of 237 households and a population of 1,206 people, 92.5% of whom are tribal. The village literacy rate is 38.8%; only one-quarter of the village’s women can read and write. Of the village’s working population, 95.2% are employed in the agricultural sector, 77.9% as cultivators of their own land. According to the census, the village has two primary schools, two medical institutions, and two markets. I consider every bit of this information suspect. Imagine the difficulties inherent in collecting accurate census data in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. given, among other challenges, the multiplicity of languages spoken in homes and the geographic dispersion of the population. Now imagine the task of the Indian government, which must enumerate a population nearly four times greater than that of the U.S., with a literacy rate of only 65%, in a country where more than 1,600 languages and dialects are spoken, where infrastructure generally ranges in quality from bad to nonexistent, and where communities may be nestled in the mountains at more than 18,000 feet (Ladakh), become literal islands during monsoon (Kutch in Gujarat), or are menaced by Naxalite or Maoist guerillas inimical to any representative of the government, however provisional (the Northeast). Alone, the idea of accurately capturing a creature as loose and disorderly as Dhala seems daunting. Yet, in some sense, this is precisely what I am hazarding.

Dhala has been selected for the pilot, not for any reason of dire need, or because it represents in any sense the “average” village in which Seva Mandir works, but because, in theory, it offers a higher probability of success than most of the other 600 villages in Seva Mandir’s purview. The relationship between Seva Mandir and Dhala is longstanding, wide-ranging, and considered particularly fruitful. Seva Mandir has worked with the village extensively on the development of its watershed, an initiative that encompasses many activities; it has assisted with a horticulture program in the village; it has aided the community in creating a seed bank; it has worked with villagers through the government’s Joint Forestry Management program to restore government-owned forest land adjoining the village; and, as in most of its target communities, Seva Mandir is operating a balwadi in Dhala and has initiated a Gram Vikas Kosh (village development fund) managed by a Gram Vikas Committee there. This isn’t a complete accounting of the collaboration between Seva Mandir and the community; it represents only my incomplete knowledge of the extent of that collaboration. The idea, of course, is that familiarity, comfort, and a demonstrated willingness to undertake and follow through on largely externally generated initiatives will increase the likelihood of success, thus justifying expansion, the ultimate aim of any pilot project.


One, perhaps subordinate aspect of my mandate in Dhala is to observe the behavior, the practices, and the habits of the villagers, particularly as they relate to water handling, storage, and use. And even if it isn’t an explicit part of my purpose, I can’t help but observe every aspect of their lives that I am privy to, and I am privy to much of the village’s public life, and even some of its private. Of course one can’t really come to know much of a place, however small, in a mere five days. Yet I hope I could speak about some things with a measure of confidence, at least in a conditional sense, after my stay.

I learn that Dhala is, in my admittedly uninformed accounting, well-off, at least by the reckoning of rural southern Rajasthan. In the course of my perambulation, I am amazed at the number of wells that I encounter that have been outfitted with rudimentary lift irrigation systems—a diesel motor drawing water through detachable plastic piping. Seva Mandir has managed only with great difficulty and expense to install about forty community lift irrigation systems (and those only benefiting a fraction of each community) over the last ten years or more. But in Dhala, it seems a significant number of households (or more likely groups of households—several share use of the largest wells) have enough capital, not only to acquire the components of systems—a formidable enough expense—but also to make regular purchase of the expensive diesel fuel that is necessary to operate the motors (the prohibitive cost of diesel has resulted in the abandonment of several of the community systems that Seva Mandir has installed). Mechanized irrigation is a luxury that few farmers and communities can afford, and its potential economic rewards are considerable: not only does it result in increased yields, but it also permits farmers to plant two, and even three crops each year. Many farmers in Udaipur District, perhaps the majority, plant only one—a maize crop during kharif, the season following monsoon.


The irrigation issue is illustrative of, to my mind, a central truth of life in agrarian communities, and indeed, perhaps of life in the developing world as a whole. Existence at subsistence level is a quagmire; without economic security or savings, one can only hope to remain where one is, scrabbling for purchase in boggy soil. At subsistence, one cannot plan for or invest in the future in any way, and thus is doomed to indefinite scrabbling; more likely than the appearance of some sturdy branch of capital with which to begin climbing is sudden hardship or disaster—drought, flood, the illness or death of a family member—which inevitably leads to sinking. I think the logic of microfinance is founded on such ideas—that a microloan can provide enough purchase to permit one to begin to climb—but whether or not it is effective in practice is debatable.

In any event, the presence of irrigation systems shouldn’t serve as a gloss on the very real material poverty that exists in Dhala. Electricity in the village is nonexistent. Homes, with few exceptions, are constructed largely of mud brick, though it is not unusual for a wall or two to be made of concrete. Toilets or latrines are completely unknown. This last fact is of particular concern in a community that relies almost exclusively for its drinking water on open and often unprotected (without a wall or with an incomplete one) wells bunched around a low-lying watershed. During the torrential rains of monsoon, most everything in the village not rooted in place is washed downward, into the watershed and wells—plant matter, soil, and human and animal waste included. In addition, several of the wells that the village utilizes for drinking water teem with small fish and, most objectionably, frogs whose bodies are broader and thicker than my fist. The community has ten handpumps—covered tubewells that reach deep into the water table, where the water is largely safe from any form of contamination—but two are broken, and five aren’t utilized for household use because the rusting of their pipes has rendered their water unfit for consumption. I drink from one of the remaining three in use, and wash up at another—in both cases the water has a distinctive metallic taint.


I believe that isolation may also be considered a form of poverty. The village has but one phone, which is incapable of making outgoing calls, and cell phones are useless there—there isn’t a signal for miles. Transport is limited. I’m only aware of (which is to say that there are very likely others) one person in the village who owns a vehicle, a motorbike which is housed nightly in the balwadi. To leave Dhala one must walk, bicycle, or catch one of the few jeeps or auto-rickshaws that daily ply the only road into the village—and the road itself dead-ends close to Dhala’s southern edge. The nearest town is at least ten kilometers away, and the nearest settlement of any size, Jhadol, at least thirty. Without electricity, news arrives, if it arrives at all, not by radio or television (which, questions of quality aside, are the most accessible forms of media) but via a newspaper purchased in town—provided, that is, you are among the 38.8% of the population able to read.

I am stuck by the poverty of the village most viscerally when I confront the health of its children. It is not merely that some are underweight, malnourished, anemic, that their bellies distend, though this is certainly troubling enough. In fact, it is the comparatively smaller things, the milder manifestations of an endemic malaise that I find most troubling. For example: virtually without exception, all of the children of a certain age—let’s say under seven—that I come into contact with (and remember, the village preschool serves as my quarters for the entire stay), sniffle, cough, and have a perpetual apostrophe of snot hanging from one or both nostrils. They are dirty, their hair is matted and unkempt, and their clothes are soiled. One gathering on the porch of the balwadi is perhaps the most pitiful assemblage I have ever encountered—one small boy’s eyelashes are so caked with mucus he can open them no more than a squint. Who will take a damp rag to this boy’s eyes? Who will wipe these children’s noses?


The children play in the dirt among the cow dung, the goat excrement, the chicken shit, and any other ordure that might reach the ground in an agricultural community; inevitably their hands find their way to their mouths. One of the basic tasks charged to children in the village is the collection of cow dung for fuel and fertilizer. While still in bed one morning, I watch the four children who live in the house across the street (one of the wealthiest households in the entire community) gather cow dung in the general vicinity of their home. The youngest, a boy who cannot yet be two, assists, dutifully carrying a great clump in his tiny hands. He has lost a wide swath of hair to some skin disorder; the previous afternoon I have watched him squat not ten feet from his house to release a stream of diarrhea. I hesitate to suggest that it is a monstrous negligence on the part of parents that permits such insalubrious behavior and then seems to ignore its consequences. Parents are busy with the often exhausting labor of caring for their fields and their animals—they can’t keep an eye on their children every second, and so the burden of minding is often taken up by older siblings or geriatric relatives.

And I feel the greatest problem may be one of ignorance: ignorance of how illness is communicated, how disease is contracted, what may be done to forbear against infection and sickness. Though I am working under the aegis of Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit, the clean drinking water pilot is a health project through and through. The fact that some people in the village acknowledge only a nebulous connection between the cleanliness of their water and illness is a huge barrier to successful implementation. How does one convince people to adopt technology and commit financial resources toward realizing clean water if there is no acknowledgement of a problem? Most of the villagers aren't in the habit of washing their hands with soap and water after defecating; this is especially troubling considering they don't employ toilet paper or eating utensils either. What use is purifying water if dirty hands will be heedlessly plunged into it during transport or storage (as I observed time and again during my stay)? It seems clear that implementation of the pilot will be as much about education and changing behavior as it is about making suitable technology available to the "target population." And, ignoring questions of the propriety of such a focus, development has been famously unsuccessful at changing behavior. Model community or not, following my stay in Dhala, the challenges to successful implementation of a pilot are obvious. The question, then, is whether I will be up to them.

The Village Stay: Kalulal

Upon reaching Dhala, I am relieved to discover that my arrival has, in fact, been anticipated by at least some of the village’s inhabitants. More importantly, Seva Mandir has made arrangements for my room and board in advance; it has also identified someone to assist with my work. In fact, my accommodation and assistance will flow from the same source: Kalulal (above at rear, reclining on the porch of the balwadi). Kalulal is familiar with and to everyone in Dhala. His knowledge of the village—its people, resources, history, and fortunes—is substantial. He is active in the community: he sits on committees, maintains records, and speaks freely and authoritatively at gatherings. He is well regarded in the village, and though he can be imperious with children and others beneath him in age and standing, he is seldom defied. He commands respect. He is, all things considered, likely my best medium for learning Dhala. During my stay, he will serve variously as guide, intermediary, protector, sidekick, lackey, procurement agent, host, roommate, and mother hen. And as with any person with whom one spends enormous amounts of time, he will inspire within me equal measures of fondness and exasperation.

Kalulal, I learn, trims his fingernails with a scythe. His voice, which begins at stentorian decibels, can reach an astonishing, bowel-shaking plangency, as when calling up to a distant household while trudging through Dhala’s bottomland. Even his yawns, though plainly exaggerated, can stop the heart for a moment if not anticipated. He is very tall for the village, six feet or slightly over, and his feet are enormous, larger than mine, their bottoms cracked by decades of sandaled locomotion. He’s likely in his early-to-mid-forties—his black hair, so fussed over in the mornings, is tinged with gray, and his face is etched with the shallow lines of early middle-age (age, however, is difficult to estimate in the village; everyone looks older than they are). He is the voluble sort, given to a declamatory style of speech in groups and a rapid, garrulous mixture of Hindi and Mewari (the local tribal language) in normal conversation. His knowledge of English, however, doesn’t extend much beyond the curiously inopportune employment of “thank you,” and a basic knowledge of numbers.


I am fond of Kalulal because he makes my work simple as no one else has in India. Dhala is a loose clustering of around 300 (give or take fifty) households sprinkled without pattern over hill and vale; it is bounded to the east and west by hills too rugged and steep to permit expansion, and thus has a sprawling (if indeed such a word can be applied to a settlement so dominated by agriculture and natural space), north-south orientation. In two days we span the entire village on foot, visiting its every well, handpump, and waterhole—sixty-six in all—and traversing many dusty miles in our rambling (forgetting, too, the vertical distance covered in its rolling terrain). We do this during the hottest part of the day, in the pitiless sun of southern Rajasthan, beginning each morning between 10:30 and 11 and returning between 4:30 and 5:30 in the evening. Except for chai stops in the afternoon, we consume nothing but water and pilfered sugar cane while we work (and Kalulal much less water than me; the man, I determine, is half-camel). It is hot, filthy, wearying toil—and the tedium is perhaps the greatest hardship. My routine is practically invariant: I note the type of water source, whether it’s being used for household use (“Drink?” I ask Kalulal) and, if so, the approximate number of households utilizing it for that purpose; I record its longitude, latitude, and elevation; if it is being used for drinking, I test its water for dissolved salts; and if it’s a major source for the village (i.e. being used by more than ten households), I take a sample for further testing of dissolved metals.

Kalulal leads me with solicitude, without complaint, and with a sort of tireless grace, traversing the paths, ridges, fields, and streams of the village with both vigor and ease. What may have taken a week to orchestrate and complete in Udaipur, we finish in two days. In the afternoon of the first day, we pause to rest in a small copse of saplings, and Kalulal removes a sandal, places it on the ground behind him, nestles his head on it, and falls asleep. It is a rest well-earned, and, truth be told, I feel I am more in need of it than him.


I am fond of Kalulal because he provides for my comfort, ensures that my needs are met, because he feeds me (though it’s his wife who does the cooking). I don’t say he shelters me, because I don’t sleep under his roof; as I have already revealed, during my time in the village I sleep on the porch of the balwadi, and he sleeps next to me. I admit this arrangement irks me—it’s enough an affront to privacy that I must sleep outside of one of the most prominent buildings in the village (as I would well learn over the next few days, the balwadi serves not only as Dhala’s preschool, but also, given its central location on the village’s only road, as general community way station, de facto town hall, playground, and social club), but must someone also sleep beside me every night? I remember what Trushna Patel, an American-born Indian, told me, before I left Washington D.C., of her experience of life as a visitor in an Indian village: “People will watch you sleep.” I thought that she must be exaggerating, but here in Dhala, in fact, Kalulal looms, if not to watch me sleep, at least to guard my sleep. It is this stifling paternalism that will prove most exasperating during my stay; although I know that it arises from a laudable sense of duty, propriety, and concern for my wellbeing, I can’t help but chafe at Kalulal’s domineering behavior—it finds its way into virtually every aspect of our relationship.

Kalulal furnishes my bed, sheets, and blankets—more of the last than I can possibly use—and I sleep more comfortably than in Udaipur. The first night, as we prepare to turn in (it’s just past nine o’clock), I lie in bed and hold a superfluous blanket with a quizzical look (pantomime and facial expression being essential forms of communication in Dhala), unsure of where to stow it. Kalulal rises from his bed, takes the blanket in one hand, throws off my heavy comforter with the other, covers my bare legs with the blanket, and throws the comforter back over me, patting it down snugly. I think, at twenty-eight years old, I have just been tucked in. Sleeping on the porch proves much like open-air camping, only with more comfortable bedding, a less generous view of the stars, and the chirping crickets interposed with bleating goats. (Also, I can’t remember the last time, if indeed ever, I’ve encountered the world utterly devoid of artificial light, of whatever origin—it is something to be experienced.)

My first morning in Dhala, Kalulal takes me to bathe at his well. He fills a rusty bucket with water from a handpump; I strip to my underwear before several onlookers (I count one other man, three boys, and two women at some remove—I don’t know whether the women are watching), crouch down and begin to splash myself from the bucket in a manner that I think expresses a proper appreciation for the scarcity and preciousness of the resource in a water-deprived region. Kalulal stops my splashing, hoists the bucket, and unceremoniously dumps its contents on my head. I am temporarily blinded and sputter (and am reminded of bath-time as a child, when my mom or dad would gently hold me beneath the faucet to rinse my hair after shampooing; sometimes my head would be too close to the front of the tub, and part of the faucet’s stream would run unimpeded over my face, inducing a temporary suffocation); I hear chuckles. Later in my stay, while we bathe in a stream, Kalulal interrupts my mild splashing with a heavy dousing from the practiced flinging of his cupped hands—“thank you,” he tells me when the torrent is finished.

Kalulal’s family feeds me well and to excess. Kalulal refills my dishes ad nauseam, despite my exclamations of “enough!” in Hindi; without first offering, he sprinkles liberal amounts of salt on my food, too. One night he seizes my bati (incredibly dense balls of wholemeal flour) and crushes them in his left hand, so that I might dip them in dhal. I consider this a strange and double trespass: I can’t imagine another Indian, much less an American doing such a thing. Perhaps, I reflect, by the end of my stay he will push food directly into my mouth, completing my infantilization.

So it is in Dhala that I am obliged to trade independence and privacy for the opportunity to do useful, if not vital, work. Ultimately, it is a trade I am glad to make, and besides, my simple presence in the village is of far more interest and importance to its inhabitants than the fact that I sleep where anyone might see, or that I bathe half-naked before an audience, or that I am not permitted the freedom of an eight-year-old boy (in fact, they might think it strange if this were not the case). My very presence in India, of course, is likewise a trade-off, though one much grander in scale than that made in Dhala. It’s also a bargain whose ultimate value is less certain, as is true of many of life’s decisions. One must learn to deal with uncertainty, I think, or how else can one get on? I only wish acknowledging this truth regarding the unknown made it easier to grapple with. The battle rages on.

The Village Stay: A Gulp of Perspective Before the Plunge

In the interests of the success of the pilot project—my pilot project—I must come to know Dhala. If one of the first truths of development is that one size does not fit all, a related, and similarly hoary and hallowed bit of wisdom is the injunction to know the (local) context in which one is working—this is one way of avoiding the temptation to fit one size to all. Thus, my visit to Dhala had, at its heart, the goal of acquaintance with the community. It was, and continues to be necessary to both develop an understanding of the village context as it directly relates to the form and composition of the project (i.e. location, nature, safety, and reliability of water sources; sanitation and water handling, treatment, and storage practices; attitudes toward user fees for access to safe water), as well as, on an interpersonal level, to become familiar with the people of the community as individuals within the target group with whom and for whom I will be working (and on whom much of the success of the pilot will ultimately hinge!). And thus, my focus for the time being is needle’s eye narrow: Dhala village, population 1,800 (?), of Bishiwara Zone, Jhadol Block, Udaipur District, Rajasthan State, India, Asia, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Known Universe.

My first night in Dhala, as I reclined on my bed on the porch of the village balwadi (nursery school--the pink building in the foreground of the photo above) and watched the hills draw darkness close, my mind returned to a question that has often crept into my private moments in India: How is it that I’ve arrived at this waypoint in life? The question is heavy, freighted with ramifications, off-shoots, and follow-ons; it is a full interrogation of a life, its passions and decisions—and not suitably addressed here. But how does a sports-mad kid from rural Indiana come to find himself in a remote village in rural India? Of all possible career paths, how does he land in international development? And of all the myriad landing points in a discipline as broad as development, how and why a single clean water pilot project? It is this last question, or one particular aspect of it, that seizes my attention for the moment.

Three summers ago, while part of a team evaluating a small dams project in Kitui District, Kenya, I kept a journal of sorts, at the suggestion of my internship supervisor, in order to facilitate the composition of a final report of my experience—the report was required to receive credit toward my Master’s degree (I finished neither). On June 27, 2005, I had my first meeting with the rest of the team: Henry Rempel, team leader and professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Manitoba; Charity Nyaga, a Kenyan gender and community development specialist; and Hilda Manzi, a Kitui native, recent college graduate, and agricultural specialist. That evening I wrote:

Already, after one short day of meetings, I am impressed by Charity and Hilda’s insight and knowledge, especially Hilda, who must be younger than me, but must know more of the political economy of Kenya, and of Kitui district particularly, than I know of, well, anything. She said: “My one goal in life is to one day help the people from where I come. That is what I want to do.” Let there be 10 million, 50 million Hildas in Africa, and all over the developing world! She is educated and erudite (rare enough coming from “underdeveloped” Kitui), but she also wishes to work for the wellbeing of her own people. No brain drain. Not only must more be educated, but they must want to remain in their own countries and not be lured by the riches and temptations of the West. That is how poverty and misery and sickness will be defeated. Not by the World Bank and its 3,000 development economists. Right here with the little girl growing up in Kitui District. Maybe I should take that to heart. What place do I have in development work? I don’t think I could ever be a Hilda or a Charity, or know what they know, intuit what they intuit. It would take years, and few of us mzungu will commit our lives to one foreign piece of land, one foreign population of people, one foreign culture. As selfish as it may sound, I know I won’t. I want to help everyone, to lift all 2.4 billion out of poverty this instant! I don’t have the patience or fortitude to commit my life to lifting 500 or 1,000 out. And that’s how it will happen: 500 or 1,000 at a time, over many years, with excruciating diligence. Hilda can do that, and I don’t think I can….Maybe I should direct my energies toward easing the way for more Hildas, rather than pretending that I can do and know what she does and knows.

But on some level, I am now attempting to achieve precisely that intimacy of knowledge and precision of focus that I said I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or shouldn’t. In just one or two months, I hope to have learned a single strand in the shaggy mane of existence of a single small village in India, that I might then be able to, if not lift that village out of poverty, at the least improve its health, and thereby its quality of life, to some tangible, appreciable degree. Given the foregoing passage, it may be that you expect me to puzzle at the presumption inherent in such an undertaking; in fact, I feel the expectation is perfectly reasonable, if even a bit conservative in its timeframe (but perhaps my superiors are factoring in their own plodding, and after all, as has been made maddeningly clear time and again, I am almost wholly dependent on them for my progress).

It is the narrowness, the 1,800, that invites pause. Although success of the pilot will spur expansion, it is still a drastically attenuated focus for one who once claimed, only in half-jest, the desire to end poverty in the world—a desire that, quixotic as it may be, must demand a macro rather than micro perspective. In other words, a commitment to global poverty eradication first demands a focus—to return to an earlier formulation—on the policy and management side of development, specifically that residing at the very tip of the international development superstructure, a height from which the vast majority of funds descend (leaving aside developing country governments for now)—the major bilateral and multilateral donors. This in opposition to a focus on the implementation side of development, where the nitty gritty details of improving the lives of individuals—ten, fifty, 500, 1,000, 1,800 at a time—are toiled and fretted over.

Yet for the time being, I am content to prostrate myself in the nitty gritty, at the globe-spanning base of that superstructure. I am content to learn Dhala, and only Dhala—its local context, its geography, and its inhabitants. There was, after all, good reason to be lying in a bed on a nursery school porch, half a world from home, pondering the logistical challenges inherent in visiting every water source in a sprawling and formless settlement splayed over the austere charm of India’s Aravalli Hills. The thought perhaps wasn’t comfort enough to sustain goodwill throughout my time in Dhala, but it was necessary comfort—and yet it seemed likely I would also need a good host, guide, and mediator if my stay were to be both productive and pleasant.

The Village Stay: Excitement and Trepidation En Route

It was with a mingling of excitement and trepidation that I departed last Thursday for the village of Dhala, the designated site of Seva Mandir’s clean drinking water pilot project, an initiative for which I have assumed the primary responsibility. My stay was to be of six or seven days duration, I wasn’t sure which, as, along with many of its other details, the length of my visit had not been given much definition (or seemingly, concern) by my superiors prior to departure. The date of my departure, in fact, had changed twice before Thursday, and I wasn’t entirely certain, as the Seva Mandir jeep juddered its way to the Jhadol Block office, that my arrival in the village would not be greeted with surprise and confusion—that was certainly how news of my plan was received by workmates at Seva Mandir. Would I be staying at the Block office? At the Zone office? Why did they want me to stay in the village? Was it safe (this coming from a woman who had served as Volunteer Coordinator for four years)? Was someone coming with me? Had I confirmed my plans with the Block Office? I could handle life in the village, I thought, so long as I had something to eat and a place to sleep—and yet neither seemed assured. Hence the trepidation.

Trepidation, also, because perhaps I couldn’t handle life in Dhala, even with provision of necessities. I thought back to my first and only other experience of a “traditional” village, three days and two nights passed in misery in some blighted settlement in central Côte d’Ivoire more than five years past. My first night in this village, whose name I have forgotten, ranks among the worst in my life—in fact, purely on the basis of comfort and restfulness, I am prepared to say that it was the worst. Although I somehow managed a few fitful minutes of sleep on that godforsaken occasion, my sleepless nights before and since have, without exception, been more pleasant. My “room,” (I should say our room, since I shared it with another student from my program) was squalid, murky even in the light of mid-afternoon, and of indeterminate provenance. That it was designated for storage seemed the best guess, but it might have been quarters for the mentally defective relative who had been harried into the bush for our visit, or perhaps it was the guest room that had never been finished?

We slept on neat piles of enormous sacks (the fabulist in me wants badly to tell you they were sacks of grain) tightly sealed and filled with a tough, unyielding substance that recommended them as punching bags. We had brought no bedclothes and were each handed a large mosquito net and bid goodnight. I balled a t-shirt under my head to serve as a pillow, and as there was no means of hanging the mosquito net, draped it over myself as a cover; nonetheless, I was hounded, worried, and ultimately devoured by mosquitoes throughout the night. Though the village as a whole was without electricity, its school was on the grid and happened, that Friday, to be hosting a party whose music throbbed without cease deep into the night, stabbing indiscriminately into every corner of the village. Finally, at some ungodly hour, a precarious quiet descended as the party dispersed and the revelers all filed home (with no small amount of clatter and clamor)—but that quiet, so longed for, would be regularly broken for the remainder of the night by the wailing of the baby in the next room (and in truth, the baby sounded as if it were there with us in the chamber of horrors, as the wall separating our two rooms didn’t fully extend to the ceiling).

Dawn came as a gift, since it meant that I would never longer be forced to attempt sleep, to grasp vainly at that state of peaceful surrender that invites slumber. No matter that my allergies, already piqued in the night, would reduce me to a sneezing, sniveling mess for the rest of the weekend, or that the first order of the new day, following a hike of some distance in the soft light of dawn, was to swill chapalo—corn wine—from enormous calabashes in a circle of old men: my village experience had already been irrevocably ruined by that first, abysmal night. I entered the weekend hoping that in a few weeks I would receive an agricultural service assignment in a similar setting; I left believing that I’d never be able to hack it for six weeks in such a place.

Trepidation, also, because I felt the ever ponderous weight of responsibility descending upon me, a weight, I confess, that staggers me more than most. The substance of this visit was to compose a major part of the needs assessment portion of the project—the research and information-gathering phase that would inform the design and implementation of the pilot. I was to visit every water source in the village—every well, every handpump, every watering hole—dutifully recording its location with a GPS device (which itself was a minor source of anxiety—though not a technophobe, I often bungle electronics’ basic functions, and what’s more, the device was borrowed, and I was liable for its condition), performing spot tests for dissolved salts (the water in the village, it turns out, would be uniformly softer than that of Udaipur city), taking samples from major drinking sources for further testing, while also observing the water handling, storage, and treatment practices (if any) of the villagers. After nearly seven weeks at Seva Mandir, I was finally being asked to take a significant step toward beginning the pilot; I could blame past sputtering and inertia on others, but if my village stay proved nugatory, it would be difficult to point fingers elsewhere.

To be sure, progress, or the promise of progress, brought excitement as well; only I couldn’t say whether that excitement prevailed over my anxiety. I had a tangible desire to escape the city (where I had been confined for the previous three weeks), and an implacable need, bordering on desperation, to do something—anything—concrete toward beginning the pilot project. My stay in Dhala would relieve the restlessness mounting on both accounts. But what if it were a failure? The odds favoring such an outcome seemed outsized, at least in proportion to the relative simplicity of my mission—the most basic of tasks here has often proven inordinately difficult to carry off, and the number of variables involved in this endeavor—logistical and operational—seemed therefore particularly inauspicious. Perhaps most portentous was the fact that once in the village my lines of communication would be severed absolutely—no one in the village spoke English, and its only phone was incapable of making outgoing calls. I would be at the mercy of Dhala’s inhabitants, who, it seemed, might very well be ignorant of my visit and my mandate while there. I felt, no doubt in a moment of weakness and dramatic excess, that some manner of reckoning could very well be at hand.

Fortunately, two days before my departure, in a quest to marshal enough empty water bottles for sample collection, I mentioned my plans to the In-Charge of Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit (one of two In-Charges to whom I answer, but not the one who had assumed responsibility for arranging my village stay—I’ve come to realize that the floundering of my project is partially due to the lack of communication and coordination between these two); within an hour he had requisitioned both Arun and Ronak, another NRD Unit staff member, to accompany me to Dhala, where they would lead a discussion regarding the community’s seed bank and introduce me to the village. This partially assuaged my anxiety—even if Dhala wasn’t prepared for my arrival, at least I would have someone to explain my presence and to hurriedly cobble together a plan of action for my stay. But I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The Many Paths, Part 4 of 4: A Certain Quality

In my brief time in India, I’ve already come to a sincere appreciation for the value that this culture attaches to celebration. Celebration inhabits body, mind, and soul here; it is the animating spirit of the people. Indians are blithely serious about the enjoyment (as opposed strictly to the observance) of their holidays and festivals. Holidays here are legion (perhaps owing to the antiquity of the culture) and lengthy, diverse in their celebration, and this diversity exists both between holidays (Dussehra vs. Dewali) and within their observance (burning effigies of Ravana vs. submerging idols of Durga on Dussehra), according to place and custom. In comparison to this surfeit of celebratory riches, Americans are destitute. The disparity leads me to ponder the possibility of an Indian foreign aid program for merrymaking—-when it comes to celebration, we are the developing world (perhaps the UN’s next World Development Report will feature an Index of Merriment to reflect this overlooked variable in the calculation of quality of life). Technical assistance would come pretty cheaply—-any man on the street here has internalized the relevant lessons from childhood.

Let’s quickly examine the American problem. To wit: our holidays, religious and secular alike, are, taken as a whole, largely deficient in spirit and vitality. They are usually but a day in duration, and, I think, not really celebrated, except perhaps for New Year’s, which, it is worth noting, is a universal occasion, even if its observance varies depending on the calendar. Christmas is a single day (although we have the Christmas “season,” or the “holidays,” which is probably the closest we come to an extended observance), likewise Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter. The case of Easter, I think, is particularly instructive. Here we have the culmination of the Lenten season (An entire season! And how is it celebrated? Mass abstention from pleasurable activities!), a day that commemorates the single most important event, the upshot of all of Christianity: Christ rose from the dead! Eternal life is the true and tangible reward of the faithful! Our sins can be forgiven! If there is any day that should cause Christians to become utterly deranged with rejoicing, it is Easter. And yet, if not for the Easter bunny and Easter baskets and Easter egg hunts, it would be nothing but donning one’s best clothes and bustling off to church for ponderous reflection on the meaning of resurrection (or so I’m told—-I’ve never actually been to church on Easter. My family knows how to celebrate: massive chocolate intake). In other words, we had to invent a giant candy-dispensing leporid to make bearable the most momentous of Christian holidays.

Christmas is much the same. Christ is born! But where’s the outpouring of exaltation? Oh, there’s rejoicing on Christmas to be sure, but it’s too much “Silent Night” and not enough “Joy to the World.” We rely upon Santa Claus, flying reindeer, eggnog, external illumination, and the bejeweled Christmas tree (I love the whimsy of this tradition, the strangeness—-Indians would heartily approve, I think) to instill the occasion with a sense of wonder, mystery, and awe. This isn’t some “Remember the reason for the season” rant; the reason isn’t as important to me as the spirit, for it’s the spirit of the season that has been lost. It seems today Christians of the Western world value solemnity and contemplation above joy and merriment and look to the secular world to recapture that spirit of celebration that once accompanied the observance of their holidays—-without first attempting to reignite the smoldering fires of enthusiasm within the faith. I can’t help feeling that this is unfortunate, if only for the fact that, at its essence, few things in the world are better at inspiring feelings of ecstasy and zeal and exuberance than religion (ignoring, for the moment, other things it may inspire, or to what ends these feelings may be put), and these feelings make for stupendous celebrations--just ask the Indians. And one need not be Christian, or Hindu, or Jew, or Muslim to benefit from the spirit of celebration—-it’s an infectious disease that everyone is welcome to catch.

The point is not that Christians are a joyless lot, or that American holidays are dreary, lifeless events--truth be told, I genuinely enjoy them. Perhaps my favorite thing in the world is to celebrate Christmas with my family, and despite its curious, church-driven tendency towards solemnity and temperance in observance, Christmas is sacrosanct to me--I wouldn't see it changed in any fundamental way. But the celebration of most of our holidays lacks a certain quality, a rapture, or zeal, or passion--however it is named--that resides at the very center of Indian celebrations. It is this quality that inspires singing and dancing into the small hours, that demands fireworks be ignited for every occasion, that sustains a festive spirit for nights on end. Americans go shopping the day after Thanksgiving and back to work the day after Easter. We'd rather experience the tumult of New Year's Eve in Time's Square on our couches than create or join mass festivities in our own communities. We understand sacrifice as the point of Lent, and believe Advent to be for candles and calendars. We have forgotten Annunciation, Ascension, Pentecost, and any number of other minor Christian holidays. We haven't embraced the traditions of our minority communities, like Cinco de Mayo, Eid al-Fitr, or Chinese New Year. In short, we rarely celebrate deeply, passionately, or purely, and we simply don't celebrate enough. How truly unfortunate...

The Many Paths, Part 3 of 4: The Spectacle of Dandiya Raas

In Gujarat, the celebration of Navratri is famous for two unique forms of folk dance—-nightly garbas and dandiya raas in Amdavad, Gujarat's largest city, may include hundreds, if not thousands of participants and spectators. The dances are circular and repetitive and try endurance—-they wheel on for hours, often into the early morning hours. Garbas feature only women, are devotional in nature, and are performed before Aarti, a nightly worshipping ritual. Dandiyas follow Aarti, are celebratory, and feature both men and women and sticks (dandiyas)--the essence of the dance is an endlessly repeated reenactment of the battle between the goddess Durga and the demon Mahishasura, with the sticks standing in for swords. Udaipur, less than 100 kilometers north of Gujarat, has also adopted these folk forms in celebration of Navratri, and on each of the last two nights of the festival, I return to the base of Nirach Mata to watch dandiya performed in its modern, Udaipurian incarnation. It isn’t difficult to find: the music blares at such a volume that it can be heard plainly from my guest house a quarter-mile away. I only have to follow my ears.

In a schoolyard, an iron-framed canopy has been strung with tinseled silver and gold garlands and fringed with translucent pink bunting. Youth (broadly speaking—-I would say that participants range in age from 4 to 35 years, although most seem to fall between the ages of 12 and 17) form two circles around its perimeter—-girls inner, boys outer—-and while (in the case of this dandiya) dated Indian pop music thunders, the circles slowly grind in opposing directions, like the gears of a clock. Each of the youth clutch two dandiyas; they’re about the length of drumsticks, although perhaps twice as thick. Face to face, male and female counterparts strike their dandiyas together in unison, keeping the beat in a uniform pattern which, once traced, is repeated endlessly as partnerships shift with the turning of the circle. The tempo of the song drives that of the dance, which itself is simple and obeys an unwavering structure—-hit, hit, off-beat, hit, off-beat, and a final off-beat in which all dancers step to their right and the next partner. However, within its rigid structure, the dance admits individuality and improvisation: during off-beats, dancers move as they like, and each develops his or her own style, partially contingent, as well, on the character of the song being played. Within this circumscribed freedom lies much of the charm of the dandiya raas.

Variation in skill among dancers is pronounced, though this is hardly of consequence. Some are stiff and unsure in their movements, but many dance well, fluidly and joyfully; the girls are masters of a controlled suggestiveness and the boys are loose-limbed and confident. Although some do little more than step in place during off-beats, the most accomplished twirl their dandiyas in an elaborate, almost figurative style (my roommate Arun was particularly captivated by a girl who twirled herself, along with the dandiyas, between hits). Faces are also telling in their differences: many of the youngest dancers bear timid, nervous expressions, seemingly mortified by their inexperience, while other faces plainly reveal the delight, concentration, or boredom of their bearers.

The striking of the dandiyas, too, allows for variation. Within some pairings, the hits are integrated nearly seamlessly into the off-beat movement of the dancers; they become, if not incidental to the dance, a mere complement. For most, however, the striking is the dandiya's distinguishing feature, and part of the intrigue to the observer is the inevitable pairing of dancers of different styles, ages, and abilities. It is through this multiplicity of pairings that diversity is revealed to be at the heart of dandiya raas, despite the dance's formal limitations. Because the two circles move in contradiction, every boy must dance with every girl, and each partnership gives different expression to the dance. This is likely what allows dandiyas to press on for hour after hour, to midnight and beyond, for nine consecutive nights. For the dancers, the anticipation and satisfaction of pairing with a favored partner (or partners) is motivation and sustenance enough to continue spinning; for spectators, enjoyment derives from appreciation of the myriad varieties of expression born from the intersection of the dancers’ individual styles and the dance’s egalitarian structure, all realized within the constraints of a simple folk tradition. It’s just a bunch of kids dancing, and yet so much more: religious observance, cultural celebration, social adhesive, romantic catalyst (according to Arun, condom manufacturers do big business in Gujarat during Navratri), and entrancing spectacle.

The Many Paths, Part 2 of 4: The Dreadful Thrill of Nirach Mata

A week ago Sunday, I ventured forth from the guest house to the base of a large hill that looms impressively over my neighborhood--it's but a five minute walk from home and has beckoned irresistibly since the day I arrived. A Hindu temple crowns the hill, and both hill and temple are locally famous. The temple is called Nirach Mata. Last Sunday was the third night of Navratri, a nine-night Hindu festival (Navratri literally means "nine nights" in Sanskrit) in celebration of the goddess Durga and eight of her avatars (incarnations), each with her own designated night of worship. The day after Navratri is called Dussehra, and it is especially festive--it commemorates Durga's slaying of the demon Mahishasura. In West Bengal Dussehra is called Durga Puja, and Bengalis submerge idols of Durga in celebration; in Udaipur, as in many other places in India, Dussehra revelers burn effigies of Ravana, the demon king. Dussehra, like Navratri and most other Hindu holidays it seems, is celebrated differently depending on place (and in the case of Navratri, the avatar most venerated), but ultimately the universal thème du fête is the conquest of good over evil. Nirach Mata is home to a Durga idol, ten arms and all, and thus the faithful scale its hill to receive darshan (sight of the goddess/idol) and prasad (food consecrated by the goddess and subsequently consumed) in greatest numbers during Navratri. It is pure coincidence that, on this day, I should join the throngs.

At the base of the hill, I am immediately besieged by shills bearing prasad-ready bundles of incense and a single coconut. Here, in a plastic bag, is a prepackaged bit of obeisance. Pocket calendar salvation it isn't, and for pure entertainment value, the idea of commingling worship, fragrant smoke, and eating seems promising. Furthermore, incense sticks and coconuts whip the censers and Eucharist of the Catholics any day of the week. (Marge Simpson makes a good point: "I went to a Catholic wedding once, and the incense ruined my new pantsuit!") Nevertheless, I blow off the shills.

The way to Nirach Mata is steep. A carved archway announces the entrance to the temple path, and already many devout remove their sandals and shoes, intending to make the entire climb barefoot. Some whisper a quick prayer, stopping momentarily to touch the ground and mutter. In reality, there are two paths to the temple, although they intersect and overlap with regularity. One is a steep stairway, direct and strenuous, the other a switchbacking cement walkway with railings and benches, less steep but still taxing. Along with my companions, Arun and Anuj, I take both paths at varying points of the ascent. I am in a hurry--I want to reach the top before the sun sets. The view promises to be spectacular, and I am not disappointed: the entire city of Udaipur lies stretched out before me, encircled by hills that have turned a hazy brownish-gray in the evening's dying light. The white buildings of the city--stained with dust, flaking paint, shabby and decaying in ground-level daylight--seem a network of immaculately calciferous nodules from this height, like barnacles on the back of a surfacing gray whale. The waters of Fateh Sagar and Lake Pichola are a limpid looking glass, reflecting the failing light of a darkening sky.


We're forced to halt at the bottom of the temple's ultimate stairway--it is overrun with patient supplicants (see photo at right). We remove our sandals and tread through shallow puddles of filthy water to join the queue. For now the day lives on, but by the time we reach the temple, full night has fallen. Indians are notorious queue-jumpers, but with few exceptions, everyone is patient. Some cheers ring out to puncture the monotony. The temple's exterior is lit with small white lights, not unlike those strewn across town and country at Christmas. A man is splayed across the temple's surface, checking connections with a hand-held device and replacing burnt-out bulbs. Two policemen run the show at the top, operating like bouncers at a popular club. Finally we're admitted.

The air at the temple's edge is thick and sweet with the smoke of burning incense; a solitary drum is beaten slowly, methodically. The faithful ring bells that dangle in a row before a mass of burning incense, their sound more clang than ring, more discord than harmony. I pass and strike their clappers in turn, as I have seen others before me do. It is sensuous ritual: a fiery yellow light throws shadows amid the clanging of the bells and the slow, stentorian whump of the drum, the incense, the smoke. I have the unshakeable sensation of being in the midst of something pagan, something elemental and atavistic. I admit I am utterly ashamed by the idea, ashamed that I might equate strangeness in some inchoate and unarticulated way with primitivism, and yet I can't deny the feeling. I was brought up in one of the more staid and uncharismatic traditions of a largely staid and uncharismatic religion. The Mennonites, "the plain people," cousins to the Amish, kissing cousins to the silent Quakers--this is what I know of worship. Worship is silent, solemn, unadorned, like the people of God. Can I be blamed for the momentary ignorance and ugliness of my gut?

My mind keeps returning to the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen slowly rises from the primordial river, his face luridly smeared with black, eyes wild and steely, while lightning snakes and flashes in the sky all about him. Coppola overlays Sheen's creeping to and murder of Kurtz (Marlon Brando), with an image of the ritualistic slaughter of a water buffalo by Kurtz's worshippers, a primitive tribe of the remote Cambodian jungle. Earlier, Brando reads parts of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in voice-over: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The murder scene is cryptic, eerie, powerful, unsettling, and however incongruous it might be with what I encounter at Nirach Mata, it is nonetheless lodges in my mind, unbidden.

Existing within this feeling of uneasiness and, yes, even dread, perhaps even at the core of it, is thrill. Thrill, too, because of the strangeness, the sensuality, the sense of trespass--both into this world to which I don't belong, and more fundamentally, trespass as an admittedly non-spiritual person into a spiritual realm. I feel I'm getting away with something, bearing witness to something secret and sacred, and it excites me. In reality, no one cares that I am here--as Anuj points out, "We can go to church, can't we?" And yet, as I sidle up to the idol (ha!, but I really did sidle) to receive darshan, I am anxious, self-conscious: I don't know how to act. I watch those worshippers ahead of me, but no two behave alike. Most surrender their coconuts for prasad, bow, and mouth some words, but some touch their foreheads to the table before Durga, and some bring their fingers to their lips and pray, and some touch their lips and chests and bow in rapid succession. It is all done so quickly, I hardly have time to formulate a plan of attack; no one tarries before the idol. (Because I've endured many a church service bloated to ninety minute with sop, filler, and grandiloquence, on some level I can appreciate the radical condensation of this practice. One only has time for the essence of the prayer. And practically speaking, if everyone is to get personal facetime with Durga, it needs be brief, or else Hindus would lament the one-third of their life they spent sleeping, and the two-thirds they spent waiting to receive darshan. And yet, what is gained by that four second prayer? I suppose Woody Allen was right: 95% of life is showing up.)

Now I am front and center, and so I press my palms together, hold my hands to my chest, make several small, quick bows and hurry off. I am not conscious of having looked at the idol; I remember only a fierce yellow light and the face of one of the men (priests?) handling prasad. He is smiling indulgently. I catch up to Arun and Anuj. The rear wall of the temple is inlaid with swastikas (an auspicious Hindu symbol), and some worshippers reach out to it and pause for a split-second prayer. I touch it. We take some time to appreciate the temple's western exposure, munch coconut that has been consecrated by the goddess (Durgalicious!), and enjoy the relative cool and quiet of this side of Nirach Mata.

Within ten minutes, we depart. The stairway down from the temple (seen at the right in the photograph) had been relatively clear during our wait--the descent of worshippers was no more than a trickle then, and could be no more, as the temple can hold only a fraction of those waiting to be admitted. But now, as we descend, impatience and fervor have surmounted propriety, and a wave of the zealous has swept nearly to the top to meet us. There is jostling and shouting. "This can't end well," I think. The crowd seethes and churns; it is an independent organism, obeying its own logic. There is a terrible strength in this mass, and that strength is heaving about, trying to find articulation in its dumb gesturing (More of "The Hollow Men": "Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow"). Caught in the middle are an elderly couple, gray and shriveled and stooped, buffeted by the crowd. I fear for their safety. I fear for my safety. I can think only of the headline that I've glimpsed online that very afternoon: "15 Killed in Gujarat Temple Stampede". "This is how it happens!" I think. Someone lifts the rope separating the two stairways, and the old couple, harried to the last, manages to duck under. Arun and Anuj and I push downward and to the left, where a second staircase branches from the first. We slip away.

After we retrieve our sandals and continue our descent, I exclaim, "Indians are crazy!"

"What?" Anuj asks.

"All those people pushing," I say. "It was crazy."

"Oh, that happens all over India," he says matter-of-factly. He and Arun are unperturbed by what has taken place. The subject dies there.

The Many Paths, Part 1 of 4: Pocket Calendar Salvation

On the flight from Newark to Delhi, I sat on the aisle in a partial row of three seats near the back of the aircraft. The middle would remain mercifully empty throughout the trip, but when I sat down the window seat had already been occupied by a middle-aged man. His hair was graying, if not gray, and he wore glasses and a mild, benignly blank expression. He was a large man, and although not fat, his full cheeks and jowls bespoke a comfortable life. As I am not of the temperament to begin conversation with strangers, even those whose company I will share for the next thirteen hours, he addressed me first; he had the sort of smooth, drawling southern accent that I associate with televangelists and football coaches. He was going to India to visit his wife, he told me. She was finishing her second and final ("she told them she's not coming back") three-month stint conducting training for Indian employees of United Health Care in Delhi. The visit, his first to the country, would last a week, and then he would fly home, his wife following the next day. They wouldn't fly together, he told me, in the event some tragedy should befall the flight: "We couldn't do that to our kids." The kids, as it turned out, were in their thirties with lives of their own; he and his wife had recently celebrated their 38th wedding anniversary. I congratulated him and commented, out of politeness and possibly for the lack of anything better to say, that it was rare in this day and age for a marriage to last so long. "We got married real young," he said. "In South Carolina. She was sixteen, and I was eighteen, so we kind of grew up together."

There are two things I can't tolerate in strange travel mates: incessant talk (or general noisiness) and overly familiar talk. Fortunately, this man, whose name I've forgotten, indulged in neither. When he spoke it was to comment generally about his life and interests or to inquire after mine, or, less frequently, to make a passing observation regarding Indian culture (usually prefaced with the caveat or commendation--I wasn't sure which--"my wife says"). However, at one point he managed to steer the conversation to religion, and I immediately felt that this transition had a hint of the non sequitur in it--I suspected that he had intended to steer there all along. "We're Baptist," he told me strangely, almost sheepishly. He plunged on: he had accepted Christ a few years before. I braced myself, certain the conversation could go only one of two places from here: a personal recounting of his journey to faith in God, or else the dread question, Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?

But my panic proved unfounded. He took a third tack, asking merely whether I had any background in "the church." My attempt to describe the unique character of the Mennonites, I think, thoroughly flummoxed him. "So they're Christians?" he asked at the end of my spiel, which, despite its regular and longstanding employment, has never achieved coherency, even to my own ears. Later in the flight he wrestled an impressive Bible from the overhead compartment and took to studying intently by the overhead light. Every other page of the Bible was blank, permitting the reader space for liberal note-taking and reflection, a feature he was evidently proud of: "I really like it," he drawled, in typically understated fashion. Meanwhile he scribbled away in pencil.

On our descent into Delhi, we wished each other good luck, and he hurriedly reached into his breast pocket and pressed a small white rectangle, inscribed with red script, into my hand. It was a pocket calendar from the Monnett Road Baptist Church of Julian, North Carolina. "We started handing these out a few years ago," he said, by way of explanation. He cited a figure, which I've forgotten--the number of pocket calendars his church had distributed, some several thousands. I wondered if he equated this figure with a lesser, but still quantifieable number of souls saved as direct consequence. Perhaps his church had some formula for pocket calendar salvation (for every 100 calendars distributed, seven souls come to God), as fundraising organizations do for calculating the success of direct mail campaigns or phone banks.

The reverse of the calendar featured red letters, bold and underlined, in all caps: GOD'S SIMPLE PLAN OF SALVATION. Five steps to salvation followed: 1. Realize that you are a sinner; 2. Realize that sin brings forth death; 3. Realize that God still loves you; 4. Realize that salvation is a free gift. Finally, unnumbered, but having the additional emphasis of italics: Call upon God and receive His free gift! Which sounded to me as if salvation were the sweatshirt one receives along with his Sports Illustrated subscription. (Calleth our operators and they will sayeth unto you: Behold, I send to you my only sweatshirt, and it shall be called Warmer of Arms, Concealer of Guts, Absorber of Beer Spills, Cradler of Remote Controls, Proclaimer of Everlasting Love for Thee, Sports Illustrated.) And at the bottom in eye-straining script: (Please let us know of your decision for Christ). In order to refine the formula no doubt.

The Cutting Board Napoleon and Other Tales from the Scary Guest House

My Indian abode (pictured at left) has been variously identified as a guest house, a hostel, or, employing the definite article, the “Scary Guest House” (this epithet courtesy of another volunteer). Scary because dirty, and, I suspect, because of the absence, from a Western perspective, of some basic comforts and conveniences. The guest house, owned by Seva Mandir, is located on the campus of a teacher’s college and training center operated by Vidya Bhawan, another prominent local NGO; it is an eight minute walk from Seva Mandir. The campus comprises five main structures: two academic buildings, a boys' dorm, a girls' dorm, and a hostel for visiting training participants (currently sixty-seven teachers from seventeen states in India have gathered for three-and-a-half weeks of instruction in classical Indian culture and art—they’ve taken a bit of interest in me). The Scary Guest House abuts the rear of the girl’s dorm and was once a part of it. In fact, we share a padlocked interior door; I can hear the chattering of college girls just about any time of day.

I have but one roommate for the present, Arun, a south Indian from the state of Karnataka who works with Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit. He’s young (twenty-five) and recently completed a Master’s degree in Development Management. He’s a tiny man, perpetually smiling, and he has a pleasant, wheezing, hiccupping laugh, although I never inspire it, even with my liberal bungling. We each have our own room with a single bed, but there are two other bedrooms with two beds apiece, and no doubt they will be occupied, at least partially, at some point.

My room is moderately sized and modest in every sense. There are two pieces of furniture: the bed (at right) and a large and flimsy metal cabinet of four shelves where I store my clothing (I also stack my books and other sundry personal belongings on top). The room is painted a washed out yellow, almost ochre, but judging from the spots where the paint has chipped away, it was once green. Four large windows have also been painted over, to cave-like effect. Two things adorn the otherwise bare space: a page torn from an Indian entertainment rag featuring a couple of suggestively posed actors, which has been hastily taped over a rear window, and hanging beside the door, a lithographed image of three freedom fighters from the Indian Uprising of 1857.

As perhaps befits a scary guest house, cobwebs are epidemic: the guest house is large, the ceilings high, and they inhabit every corner, crease, nook, and cranny. No matter how thorough the eradication effort, the cobwebs return, as though they are sustained by the very walls. I hesitate to kill the webmakers for several reasons. First, their sheer number would render any piecemeal extermination futile; secondly, I think that they’re good luck and perform a vital service: pest control. The Scary Guest House harbors ants great and small, a symphony of crickets, and when Arun inexplicably leaves the door open some nights, a swarm of mosquitoes too—plus the odd beetles, cockroaches, and flies. The occasional trespassing of a lizard is suffered for the same reason the spiders are spared their existence.

From time to time we host larger visitors too. Much of the front wall of the guest house, including the front door, is screened mesh (the swath of blue in the first photograph), and one of the innumerable stray dogs that loll about everywhere in this country has pushed in the mesh at the bottom of the door and can be found sleeping peacefully on the stone floor of our entryway some mornings.

The Scary Guest House contains not a single chair, let alone a table. When we eat, we sit on the floor of Arun’s bedroom. Arun has more space than me, including a real closet, a small anteroom of sorts (it has a door that leads outside) that houses a low dresser mounted with the guest house’s only mirror, and access to the only interior bathroom. I use this bathroom. The other bathroom is beyond the screen door and adjoins the patio (you can see its brown door at the far left in the first photo). Its door doesn’t latch properly, and the less said about its condition the better. I saw a (different) stray dog depart its confines one morning, and Lord knows what else has taken up residence there.

The interior bathroom isn’t exactly a paragon of cleanliness either. The sink is caked with the residue of thousands of hand-washings and the backwash of thousands of teethbrushings. The toilet is Indian-style, meaning it is set in the floor with raised footpads. It no longer flushes, so waste is banished by a pitcher of water refilled as many times as necessary. It’s likely not the most sanitary method of removal, but it seems effective. Although the toilet isn’t up to snuff, in a literal sense, by Western standards, in the reckoning of India, the smell is modest: a blind man can locate a public restroom here just as well, if not better than the fully sighted.

Which brings us finally to the kitchen, in many ways the most modernly outfitted of the Scary Guest House's rooms. Since I’ve arrived, Seva Mandir has acquired, on our behalf, a countertop gas range with two burners (no more single burner glorified camp stove for us!) and, most splendid of all, a refrigerator. Arun cooks. I do not, except when he is away in the field, usually one or two nights a week. I offer my assistance with vegetable chopping or other preparatory tasks, and I wash the dishes. Arun is particular about food preparation and cooking matters. Well, to be honest, this is an understatement. The proper method for achieving some culinary aim—let’s say chopping a tomato—exists, and this is Arun’s method. Then there is everything else. Frequently—by which I mean every time—when he asks me to lend a hand in some way with the cooking, my strivings are interrupted with a lecture and a demonstration that culminates in him finishing the task for me. He hasn't any faith in me. He is a kitchen dictator, a cutting board Napoleon.

In Arun's estimation, I peel the potatoes wrong (I want to tell him: “In the U.S. we have an implement called a vegetable peeler, and if I had one right now I would peel this potato three times faster than your sorry butt.”). I cut the potatoes wrong. I chop the onions wrong. I add too much tea and not enough sugar to the chai (Arun’s version of this quintessential Indian beverage is essentially heavily sweetened milk, which is perfectly fine with me). I’m not attentive enough to the chapati (a circular, unleavened bread also called roti). I wash the rice wrong. This last quibble inspired me to tell him, “You know, there’s more than one way to do something, Arun.” It's the most I could muster. On the one night that he asks me to cook, when he has returned late from a day trip to Kotra (nine hours of miserable bus travel), he predictably hijacks the process mid-way. After we sit down to eat, he notes that I haven’t fried the mustard seed properly. “I am thinking you added the onions immediately after the mustard seed,” he says. He’s right about that.

Imagine my delight one night when, in the interest of saving time, he attempts to cook the rice in a pot instead of the pressure cooker, where dhal (a watery lentil-based mixture that is a staple of Indian cuisine) is being prepared instead. He does everything wrong: he boils an indiscriminate amount of water, leaves the pot half-covered, then uncovers it and stirs several times, then pours off some of the water and returns it to the burner. “What are you doing?” I ask him at one point, but don’t belabor it. The result of his efforts, by his own admission, is “paste.” The schadenfreude, however, is delicious.


You may imagine, given the foregoing, that I am anxious to relocate. Quite to the contrary, I am perfectly content to remain in the Scary Guest House at Vidya Bhawan. I am comfortable here, and at heart a creature who appreciates consistency and familiarity. Also, despite his authoritarian leanings, his lax mosquito admission policy, and other minor annoyances magnified by our proximity, I am fond of Arun. Plus, he’s a good cook, and he’s got range in the kitchen—it’s not just curry and dhal and rice. He’s the rare South Indian who can make chapati, and he’s prepared omelets, the occasional upma for breakfast or a snack, and is a savant with vermicelli. I’ve already been offered the opportunity to move into another Seva Mandir “guest house,” which is really a modern two bedroom flat in the middle of the city. It has furniture, flush toilets, and is implausibly clean (it’s small enough that hiring a cleaning woman is economically feasible). In almost every way, it is more appealing than my former apartment in Washington D.C. But I decided against the move, and not for any misguided notion of living a more authentically Indian existence (in any event, I think most Indians keep their living spaces far neater than ours). The Scary Guest House, for all its defects, has become my Indian home. It’s like that first high school girlfriend, who, though you may have dated smarter, prettier girls later on, you remember with an outsized fondness and think, “Maybe I should have stuck with her after all. She was solid, and things were simple, and she never gave me too much grief.” I guess what I’m trying to say without laughing is: A man can get used to the Scary Guest House.