Last Sunday night my roommate Arun tracked me down in an internet café. “I’ve come to tell you that we can eat in a restaurant tonight,” he said, really meaning, “I don’t want to cook tonight, and I’ve just gotten my monthly stipend from Seva Mandir.” We located a nearby restaurant with an Urdu name, Ku war Kalewa, and took a seat at a table on the darkened lawn, which fronted an open, canopied structure housing a bar and several tables. No candles were lighted, no external illumination switched on. I had to hold the menu inches from my face to read it. It was my first time eating out since arriving in Udaipur.
In the gloom, stars returned to my brain, and I craned my neck to gaze at the sky. It was no less underwhelming for our murky surroundings. “Do you know anything about astronomy?” I asked Arun.
“Yes?” (“Please repeat yourself,” in Arun’s idiom.)
“Astronomy. Do you know anything about the stars, the constellations?”
“No.” He half-laughed, and I couldn’t decide whether the question seemed ridiculous to him, or whether he hasn’t really understood me after all. I let it drop.
The next morning a FedEx parcel awaited me at work. It had arrived courtesy of some former co-workers and softball teammates who, still basking in the glow of a second-place finish in the Congressional Softball League tournament, had, to my great delight, thought it necessary to ship to India my “29th Annual U.S. Congressional Softball Tournament 2007 Final Four Team” t-shirt, a card, a photo of the runner-up trophy, and several books (the library expands!), no doubt all at the company’s expense. Among the books was a thin and oversized paperback volume with an attractive bluish cover. It was called The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A. Rey. The name and the script on the cover were instantly familiar, if not immediately identifiable. Wasn’t H.A. Rey the author of the Curious George books? (I had an intense Curious George phase as a child.) What was the meaning of this book and by what uncanny power had it landed in my lap?
A blank inner page, opposite the Table of Contents, contained an inscription hand-written in blue ink. It began:
Peter,
My hope is that while in India you will have numerous opportunities to lie under a vast, dark sky and marvel at the cosmos. After several years of living in the city, I forget about the beautiful and infinite night sky I loved so much as a child. I forgot about wishing on stars and watching comets glide across the horizon. With so much light pollution the night sky of yesteryear has all but disappeared.
I was stunned. Although impossible, I felt as if a private fancy had been found out. Life’s small serendipities…
I owed this felicity to Barbi Broadus, a co-worker and close friend who had been leveraging delivery of some mysterious gift against future e-mails and correspondence—as in, you’d better stay in touch, or I won’t send you the package. She had served in Peace Corps in a village in the Malian Sahel, where the book had found its way into her hands just as she was confronting the seeming infinity of the African sky (and perhaps the seemingly infinite loneliness of the outsider). The book, first published in 1952, is, as its title implies, a deft and unpretentious introduction to the heavens. Rey reconnected the dots of the constellations in a manner he labeled “Graphic”; this in contrast to the two antecedent schools of representation, Allegorical and Geometric. In essence, he created a new figuration for the constellations, one that rendered them more representational, recognizable, and therefore memorable, all in a quest for greater accessibility and enrichment of our experience of the cosmos. Reading the first few pages, I felt a redoubled enthusiasm. But would I ever have the chance to use it?
The following day I was off to Kotra, seat of the most distant block in which Seva Mandir works, in the isolated, northernmost reaches of Udaipur District, where I was to document the impact of Seva Mandir’s first gravity-flow irrigation project, in a village called Thep. Among my fellow travelers, estimates of Kotra’s distance from Udaipur varied, ranging from 120 kilometers to 185, but the bus ride took more than four hours, and any way you figure it, that’s slow going. And cramped going. And bumpy going. The ride there and back deserves a post of its own (flat tires, an aging woman struck down by a carelessly flung spare, a doddering goat herdsman flogged in passing by our driver, numerous opportunities to calculate precisely how much of one’s butt must remain in contact with a seat to sustain one’s verticality), but I’m afraid it won’t happen, not least because I had an even more interesting jeep ride to Jhadol the morning after returning from Kotra. But I digress.
Seva Mandir’s Kotra office is situated perhaps a half-mile north of town, on a plain that slopes gently to a rocky, brush-lined stream running behind its guest house. Beyond the stream are rolling fields of stony scrub; the fields give way to modest foothills, and the foothills to the lovely forested ridges of an undulating spine of Aravallis. The two-story guest house was constructed in 2005 and seemed resortish in comparison to my accommodations in Udaipur: flush toilets, copious natural light, and a balcony! The guest house was L-shaped, and at the intersection of the L, a spiral staircase led up to the roof, where during the summer months steaming boarders take refuge from the heat and find sleep. It offered a grand view of the surrounding landscape (the second photo in a previous post, “Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction,” was taken from the roof while looking out over the stream) and, I sensed, of an effulgent night sky.
In the evening I sat on the balcony and watched darkness creep into the world. In the last hours of daylight, the stream quickened with activity. People washed clothes and washed themselves; children drove cattle to drink, then stripped down and swam gleefully among their charges; a man waded back and forth, checking his fishing nets. Birds came (a kingfisher, a pair of bee-eaters, and the inevitable crows, pigeons, and sparrows), cackled noisily, and went. As I stared off into the east, the hills grew blue, then gray, and finally black. All the while I ignored the sky, waiting for the true dark of night, when I would steal away to the roof and confront the cosmos on better terms.
After dinner I could wait no longer. It was impossible to avert my gaze from the radiance of the stars; they were immediate and importuning. Among this series of serendipities—the reawakening inspired by “The Dark Side”; the arrival of The Stars: A New Way to See Them; a rooftop perch in dark and desolate Kotra—was a final, tiny one: the night of October 9 welcomed a new moon. Thus it offered ideal stargazing conditions: a cloudless sky unsullied by the fulsome glow of its brightest celestial body. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in memory: it splashed across the center of the sky like a wide and spectral river, rending the empyrean in two. I saw more stars and saw them more clearly than I have at any time since Kilimanjaro. They twinkled and shone and all but spoke, projecting their innate brilliance and vitality across distances greater than the human mind can fathom. The sky wasn’t perfect—the lights of Kotra infringed from the southwest, and the aggregate artificial light of other dispersed human habitations roundabout dimmed the heavens by degrees—but it was more than enough to awe, to inspire “plain old jaw-dropping wonder.” I hadn’t had the foresight to bring the book, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a night to identify individual constellations, but one to revel in the ecstasy of the glorious totality. I lay on a ledge, arms behind head, staring upward until the cool breeze brought a chill and sent me reluctantly to bed.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Pt. 1 of 2: The Discovery of The Dark Side
Sometimes life’s small serendipities assume outsized significance, whether as result of circumstance, or timing, or other factors not as easily reduced to a word or idea. Part of my cargo for India included a fair amount of reading material, as drawing from my previous experiences in Africa, I anticipated having an excess of free time that couldn’t be filled by television, DVDs, chatting on the phone, or any of the other more or less mindless activities in which we fritter away large portions of our lives. I looked forward to the prospect of devoting more time to reading; like most people, I do far less of it than I would like. My portable library is dominated by books, but I did jam several back issues of magazines into my backpack before departing. Owing largely to my habit of reading issues cover to cover, I tend to develop backlogs in my subscriptions, and so leaving the country afforded an excellent opportunity to get caught up: I would have ample time to read the old issues without new ones arriving by mail to bear witness to the futility of my effort. Given that the New Yorker is a weekly publication, it has proven particularly difficult to stay current with (I used to pray for double issues). Hence, four issues of the magazine accompanied me to India.
During perhaps my second week in Udaipur, I encountered an article in the August 20 issue called “The Dark Side,” written by a man named David Owen (you can access it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen). I am in the habit of clipping and filing away articles—whether newspaper or magazine—that strike me as especially fascinating, profound, or well-written, and upon finishing the issue, I tore “The Dark Side” out immediately. As with some of the best New Yorker feature writing, it took a relatively mundane or marginal subject—in this case, light pollution—and made it seem startlingly immediate, substantial, and, in a word, vital, all the while maintaining that elegant but understated, equable New Yorker style to which all reportage should aspire. It shocked with simple facts, not with alarmist tone or fiery rhetoric or by conjuring dystopian imagery. Just facts: the brightest feature in the nighttime sky visible from the Grand Canyon is the lights of Las Vegas, 175 miles away; in a sky absent of light pollution, Venus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way are all bright enough to cast shadows; “in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on.” My connection with the last was immediate, almost visceral: during my most profound experience of the heavens, while making final ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I marveled at the frequency of shooting stars, which seemed to tracer the sky every time I had occasion to gaze upward.
Owens’ thesis: “Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder,” is powerfully argued, and not merely for the marshalling of dismal facts: his evocation of the experience of a truly dark sky, glimpsed at Bryce Canyon National Park in the desert of southern Utah, had a transporting and stirring effect on me. I put down the magazine and stepped out into the Indian night, which would surely reveal a sky that shamed the dim American firmament. But Udaipur is a city after all, and a fairly sizable one by American standards—nearly 600,000 people live here. The sky hardly revealed more than I might expect to see in a middling American city, and a good deal less than I might observe from my parent’s yard in rural northern Indiana. I was disappointed, though not crushed.
After coming to India, I formed both the idea and hope that I might establish an acute, fundamental, and enduring appreciation for the simplest of things: the taste of a chocolate bar, for example, rendered novel and especially delectable for its relative scarcity, or the physical experience of a city hemmed in by hills. India lay before me, I thought, its charms, its horizons, its forms and features and cultural incarnations inevitably less debased, purer than those of America. India promised to be a wilder, simpler world. And so it is, I think, in many ways. But it also has a population three-and-a-half times greater than that of the U.S. dispersed over an area less than one-half of that of the forty-eight contiguous states. All manner of pollution has taken tenacious hold here and will likely worsen with time: the sky, like the rivers, the forests, and the city streets alike, is compromised by human activity in many places.
The night sky—what could be a pleasure more basic than that? I had practically forgotten about the existence of stars after four years of city dwelling. Only, as should have been obvious before I rushed out-of-doors in a dumb swoon, Indian cities are heavily illuminated, just as American cities are, just as most cities in the world are, for that matter. Perhaps this fundamental human pleasure, reawakened with such fervor by David Owens’ writing, would be scuttled before it could become a regular source of joy and comfort and wonder. I still held out hope that Udaipur harbored some brilliant stargazing redoubt, perhaps on a hillside facing away from the city. But how would I ever find it?
During perhaps my second week in Udaipur, I encountered an article in the August 20 issue called “The Dark Side,” written by a man named David Owen (you can access it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen). I am in the habit of clipping and filing away articles—whether newspaper or magazine—that strike me as especially fascinating, profound, or well-written, and upon finishing the issue, I tore “The Dark Side” out immediately. As with some of the best New Yorker feature writing, it took a relatively mundane or marginal subject—in this case, light pollution—and made it seem startlingly immediate, substantial, and, in a word, vital, all the while maintaining that elegant but understated, equable New Yorker style to which all reportage should aspire. It shocked with simple facts, not with alarmist tone or fiery rhetoric or by conjuring dystopian imagery. Just facts: the brightest feature in the nighttime sky visible from the Grand Canyon is the lights of Las Vegas, 175 miles away; in a sky absent of light pollution, Venus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way are all bright enough to cast shadows; “in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on.” My connection with the last was immediate, almost visceral: during my most profound experience of the heavens, while making final ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I marveled at the frequency of shooting stars, which seemed to tracer the sky every time I had occasion to gaze upward.
Owens’ thesis: “Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder,” is powerfully argued, and not merely for the marshalling of dismal facts: his evocation of the experience of a truly dark sky, glimpsed at Bryce Canyon National Park in the desert of southern Utah, had a transporting and stirring effect on me. I put down the magazine and stepped out into the Indian night, which would surely reveal a sky that shamed the dim American firmament. But Udaipur is a city after all, and a fairly sizable one by American standards—nearly 600,000 people live here. The sky hardly revealed more than I might expect to see in a middling American city, and a good deal less than I might observe from my parent’s yard in rural northern Indiana. I was disappointed, though not crushed.
After coming to India, I formed both the idea and hope that I might establish an acute, fundamental, and enduring appreciation for the simplest of things: the taste of a chocolate bar, for example, rendered novel and especially delectable for its relative scarcity, or the physical experience of a city hemmed in by hills. India lay before me, I thought, its charms, its horizons, its forms and features and cultural incarnations inevitably less debased, purer than those of America. India promised to be a wilder, simpler world. And so it is, I think, in many ways. But it also has a population three-and-a-half times greater than that of the U.S. dispersed over an area less than one-half of that of the forty-eight contiguous states. All manner of pollution has taken tenacious hold here and will likely worsen with time: the sky, like the rivers, the forests, and the city streets alike, is compromised by human activity in many places.
The night sky—what could be a pleasure more basic than that? I had practically forgotten about the existence of stars after four years of city dwelling. Only, as should have been obvious before I rushed out-of-doors in a dumb swoon, Indian cities are heavily illuminated, just as American cities are, just as most cities in the world are, for that matter. Perhaps this fundamental human pleasure, reawakened with such fervor by David Owens’ writing, would be scuttled before it could become a regular source of joy and comfort and wonder. I still held out hope that Udaipur harbored some brilliant stargazing redoubt, perhaps on a hillside facing away from the city. But how would I ever find it?
Friday, October 12, 2007
Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction
Adrift in alien and, at times, inhospitable waters, one may naturally seek the familiar to restore his orientation—the star, common to all skies, that may guide him. Or, conversely, he may abandon his craft and plunge into the sea roiling around him and hope that he will learn the quality of this strange water quickly enough to establish a new orientation. Or, perhaps, if he is the timid sort, he will cling to the mast, shut his eyes, and set his will against the sea, waiting for the tide to bring him to shore. In India, I have attempted, at one time or another, all three courses. The first, I should say, has been the most common; the last has been employed more than I care to admit, however (it seems a default response to inevitable misunderstanding and frustration). For example, Sunday night I played solitaire and pinball on my laptop, a mindlessness I never plumb at home. The second course is the least natural for me, and perhaps the most rewarding, as well as the most dangerous. Some seek to find themselves in foreign places; others expect to lose themselves there. I, for my part, hope to retain myself. Should I return wearing a dhoti and singing Bollywood treacle, I expect a good boxing of the ears.
I don’t mean to suggest that I hope to remain unaltered by my time here—far from it, in fact—only that I hope to conserve what I find at my center, that it will not be overthrown by this experience. This may be presumptuous (that there be something worth retaining), and it is certainly a conservative attitude (I have even used the world “conserve” above). Some would say: “But you must open yourself to the fullness of this new world! Allow everything you know to be challenged! Allow yourself to be transformed!” Forgive me for rolling my eyes at this (proof twenty-eight has found me already a grumpy old man!). This is what I felt at twenty-two. I believe I now know a little of what, at its essence, I love, a little of what, at its essence, I value, and I expect that will change with age, but I don’t think I should throw it off so easily. In India, I would hope to learn to love and value more widely, perhaps even more deeply, but that it not be at the expense of what my heart already cherishes.
In one of life’s many ironies, I face, perhaps, the same challenge that Indians and so many other peoples of the developing world have confronted for years. To wit: the true challenge of the post-colonial peoples was not something so nebulous as realizing democracy, or something so narrow as achieving economic prosperity, but rather it was taking the good (of which there was some) and throwing out the bad (of which there was more) of the colonial experience, while retaining what was best and unique and abandoning what was mean and limiting about their own cultures. This dialectic lives on in the age of globalization, and even as the post-colonial battles continue to be waged, they intermingle with the skirmishes of globalization—the two are often indistinguishable. So too must I confront difference and decide what is good and bad in it, and also to hold it alongside myself, to see, in the comparison, what of myself may be sloughed off.
Granted the crucible of a year in India or any foreign culture does not approximate that of centuries of forced cultural interchange, but I still think that the analogy may be made. Much is confronted here that one cannot be neutral about. We are always adding to and subtracting from ourselves, and the experience of a foreign culture is less solving a single abstruse mathematical problem than a rapid and constant calculation of simple sums and differences. Only the grading of our efforts is never so simple.
I’d like to pause here a moment and confess that I never intended this blog to assume the character it has of late, by which I mean the gratuitous theorizing and philosophizing dressed up as fact with declarative sentences; when I originally consented to do this, it was to obviate the need for mass e-mails. I was reluctant to take on a blog because of my fundamental dislike of the medium. I fear it gives voice to the dilettante, the armchair philosopher, the shrill contrarian, the fatuous blowhard (so close to home!); in other words, voice to those who don’t deserve a forum. And now have I not become what I’ve despised?
As many before me have pointed out, ours is an age of, among other things, the democratization of art and commentary. This has occurred primarily as a result of technological advance (digital film, desktop publishing, music production software), although shifting aesthetics (the visual arts now favoring big ideas at the expense of technical virtuosity), and expanding markets (art and criticism being information in an information-ravenous age) have certainly played their part. In general, I view this as an auspicious development, but it harbors a grave danger for the masses: deluged with all manner of expression, we are even less able than normal to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. This is not so dangerous, though lamentable, where art is concerned, but it is positively perilous in regards to commentary: where art may have long ago lost its power to shape the values of nations (which is really a subject for another post and another blog), cultural and political commentary has entered a Golden Age of influence. No longer can journalists, the clergy, or statesmen claim to be supreme arbiters of national opinion, as they might have at one point in the history of the United States: this mantle is now reserved for the talking head and its invisible brethren on the radio airwaves and, yes, in the so-called blogosphere. Sound and fury is perhaps even less restrained in the blogosphere; therefore, were it possible to signify less than nothing, bloggers might very well do it. I’ve lain down with dogs.
I’m afraid I’ve been carried away—by the power that an audience confers, I mean. Forgive me: I’ve never had one before. Also, I assumed that only a few true souls would bother to regularly read the blog, while some number more would check in when it happened to be a slow day at work and the Times online was uncharacteristically slight. But this is a half-excuse if it is any excuse at all. One must always write with the audience in mind, and you are not reading this blog because you crave my half-baked wisdom. I apologize for betraying your trust…and of course I beg your pardon only so that I may continue in the same vein (didn’t the preceding paragraph prepare you for that double-cross?). It is all for the sake of courtesy. The truth: I enjoy the pontificating too much to stop entirely. And yet, there hasn’t been a single bit of retelling in this post, a standard all others have adhered to. Although it may be rooted in my emotional and mental experience of India, it is removed from my physical experience, and this cannot stand. I promise that not only will all future posts be inspired by my Indian odyssey, but they will also include some actual accounting of my experience here. I obey you letter, though the spirit be weak. I hope a couple of photos of the Aravallis will tide you over until the next post, which should be soon.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Jhadol Block, Pt. 2
We range far from Jhadol on my second day in the field, into the most distant reaches of the block. The motorbike plies a steep road of swiftly alternating elevation—the hills are bunched tightly here. The road is also heavily eroded, as is often the case after monsoon. At occasional intervals we are forced to dodge villagers repairing its most washed out stretches. Today’s village is absent many adults—mostly men—of working age: they have gone to prepare for a ceremony in celebration of Gawari, a Hindu holiday of minor significance in most of India, but one which is stringently observed here. Try as I might, I never receive a satisfactory explanation of its origin; however, I can tell you that it involves the veneration of Lord Rama, who is the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and his consort Sita, goddess of agriculture. I also learn that it is believed that its observation here forestalls natural disaster and pestilence.
After conducting a couple of interviews, Anuj and I speed off into the countryside, soon turning from the main road so that our path parallels a stream. We travel for a short distance, until a fence of thorny branches bars further progress—we’ve reached a homestead. We dismount and begin to walk along the bank of the stream, which doubles back close to the house (the house sits at the tip of a sort of peninsula). We cross the stream on foot (it is shallow and will be dry within months) and after following its rightward bend, we pass some boys splashing happily alongside a wallowing buffalo and cross again. Here, in a clearing above the stream, the ceremony/celebration/intrigue will initiate.
Existing alongside the caste-bound Hindus (82%), the remaining Muslims (12%), the Christians of the south (2.3%), the Sikhs of Punjab (1.9%), and a smattering of Buddhists and Jains (both constituting less than 1% of the population), are the indigenous tribal peoples of India, whose presence here predates the Dravidians, who came from the south, and the arriviste Aryans, who swept in from the north. Overall, tribal peoples represent about 6% of the Indian population; in Seva Mandir’s purview, they constitute 68%. Until 1952, they were officially known as the Criminal Tribes; now they are designated the Scheduled Tribes—along with the Scheduled Castes (the Dalits, or Untouchables), the Other Scheduled Castes (OSCs),and the unfortunately named Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), they are part of an extensive government quota system that puts American affirmative action to shame. Tribals exist outside of the caste system, but their native religions were long ago swallowed up by Hinduism and other major Indian faiths. I am in a tribal village, although to my eyes it is indistinguishable from a village of poor Hindus of muddled and indeterminate ethnic heritage.
I have never taken an anthropology class. I have never consciously compared distinct cultures within an anthropological framework or examined them on an anthropological basis. I am a stranger to the methods, jargon, theories, presuppositions, and hermeneutics of anthropologists. This is all a caveat for what comes next: On some fundamental level, my experience of this Indian tribal people’s observance of the Hindu holiday Gawari bears an uncanny resemblance to my experience of some tribal rituals in Africa. As embarrassing as I find the idea, it strikes me almost immediately. Though the similarities must be superficial, I cannot ignore them.
Music here is supplied by a single, two-sided drum and a metal pan clanged with a small and crude hammer. Is the beat the same? I cannot say; I can only say that it sounds similar, and that it drives the same sort of skipping, stopping-starting dance. The singing has a monotonous, chanting quality, an incantatory power that transports me to Cote d’Ivoire, where I would shake a rattling percussion piece and mimic a droning indigenous song for the amusement of my peers. There is a mask! Faces are painted. Bunches of weeds are shaken and twirled about. Perhaps it doesn’t add up to much, particularly in the retelling, but the sense of commonality impresses itself upon me. On Sunday, I will serendipitously stumble into a performance of Gujarati tribal dances, none of which will ever be confused for African.
Here in the village, differences are also illuminating. As in Shakespeare’s time, even the female roles in this ritual are played by men, and even the men not in drag wear enough jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, and dangling earrings—to rival Mr. T. Some have painted their fingernails. There are swordsmen and peacock feathers, umbrellas and spears. Much of the drama seems to revolve around spanking, pretend and otherwise. Anuj, a Hindu, is at a loss to interpret the proceedings. There is a bride and a groom, each of whom sings and dances in turn. “It is done,” Anuj tells me finally. “They are singing movie songs now.” We leave.
Development, like most forms of change, is incremental, although not unassailable, at least in the short-term. Gains can be lost; progress can be subverted by any number of variables. In the long-term, however, the world seems to be pushing toward well-being for all of its inhabitants (although the case of Africa makes me stare hard at this sentence). “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. The arc of development may very well parallel the arc of history and bend towards health and safety and dignity and fulfillment for all peoples—and what is justice if not that? It is best to measure progress in generations, for this is the most realistic timeframe for change and the surest way to avoid frustration. It may take a generation to convince people to value the education of their children above narrow economic considerations, and another generation for them to realize the insufficiency of their children’s education, to mobilize, and to press the government for redress. And how long for the government to provide a quality education to all of its far-flung peoples, to provide redress? When was Brown vs. Board of Education? 1954? Patience may be both virtue and excuse. After all, King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” also rebuked those who asked him to wait for justice: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
On my first day in Jhadol Block, I inspect an anicut that stands at the mouth of a small, stream-fed lake. It is a high and impressive structure, with a slightly sunken and crenellated center that allows water easy passage should monsoon overflow the artificial lake. The excess water rolls over a nearly sheer stone wall six meters high (about twenty feet) into two cement retaining pools at the dam’s base, which in turn spill into a rocky streambed. At this remove from monsoon, water trickles solidly over only a couple of narrow swaths of the wall.
In the retaining pools, hundreds of fingerlings swim. I watch as a few fling themselves onto the ledge which surrounds the pools, then further to the base of the wall, where the water runs. They move in frantic hops spaced around long intervals of rest. Not one is as big as my thumb. After crossing the ledge, they begin to surmount the wall. By some miracle of physiology these fish are not only able to cling to the face of the wall—which must be inclined at eighty degrees, at least—but to fling themselves up it (for it really is flinging) in fits and starts, all the while drawing enough oxygen from the meager current of water that opposes them to perform this incredible feat (a rough calculation suggests that I would have to scale the side of an eighty-story building, without using hands or feet mind you, to approximate their journey). Bit by bit, fling by fling, they make it to the lake above. It must take an entire day, at least. Some fall, but I suspect that this doesn’t deter future climbing, because the lake affords space for growth, and offers the promise of freedom and abundance that the retaining ponds cannot. Somehow the fish understand this, and however long and difficult the journey, they make their way up.
After conducting a couple of interviews, Anuj and I speed off into the countryside, soon turning from the main road so that our path parallels a stream. We travel for a short distance, until a fence of thorny branches bars further progress—we’ve reached a homestead. We dismount and begin to walk along the bank of the stream, which doubles back close to the house (the house sits at the tip of a sort of peninsula). We cross the stream on foot (it is shallow and will be dry within months) and after following its rightward bend, we pass some boys splashing happily alongside a wallowing buffalo and cross again. Here, in a clearing above the stream, the ceremony/celebration/intrigue will initiate.
Existing alongside the caste-bound Hindus (82%), the remaining Muslims (12%), the Christians of the south (2.3%), the Sikhs of Punjab (1.9%), and a smattering of Buddhists and Jains (both constituting less than 1% of the population), are the indigenous tribal peoples of India, whose presence here predates the Dravidians, who came from the south, and the arriviste Aryans, who swept in from the north. Overall, tribal peoples represent about 6% of the Indian population; in Seva Mandir’s purview, they constitute 68%. Until 1952, they were officially known as the Criminal Tribes; now they are designated the Scheduled Tribes—along with the Scheduled Castes (the Dalits, or Untouchables), the Other Scheduled Castes (OSCs),and the unfortunately named Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), they are part of an extensive government quota system that puts American affirmative action to shame. Tribals exist outside of the caste system, but their native religions were long ago swallowed up by Hinduism and other major Indian faiths. I am in a tribal village, although to my eyes it is indistinguishable from a village of poor Hindus of muddled and indeterminate ethnic heritage.
I have never taken an anthropology class. I have never consciously compared distinct cultures within an anthropological framework or examined them on an anthropological basis. I am a stranger to the methods, jargon, theories, presuppositions, and hermeneutics of anthropologists. This is all a caveat for what comes next: On some fundamental level, my experience of this Indian tribal people’s observance of the Hindu holiday Gawari bears an uncanny resemblance to my experience of some tribal rituals in Africa. As embarrassing as I find the idea, it strikes me almost immediately. Though the similarities must be superficial, I cannot ignore them.
Music here is supplied by a single, two-sided drum and a metal pan clanged with a small and crude hammer. Is the beat the same? I cannot say; I can only say that it sounds similar, and that it drives the same sort of skipping, stopping-starting dance. The singing has a monotonous, chanting quality, an incantatory power that transports me to Cote d’Ivoire, where I would shake a rattling percussion piece and mimic a droning indigenous song for the amusement of my peers. There is a mask! Faces are painted. Bunches of weeds are shaken and twirled about. Perhaps it doesn’t add up to much, particularly in the retelling, but the sense of commonality impresses itself upon me. On Sunday, I will serendipitously stumble into a performance of Gujarati tribal dances, none of which will ever be confused for African.
Here in the village, differences are also illuminating. As in Shakespeare’s time, even the female roles in this ritual are played by men, and even the men not in drag wear enough jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, and dangling earrings—to rival Mr. T. Some have painted their fingernails. There are swordsmen and peacock feathers, umbrellas and spears. Much of the drama seems to revolve around spanking, pretend and otherwise. Anuj, a Hindu, is at a loss to interpret the proceedings. There is a bride and a groom, each of whom sings and dances in turn. “It is done,” Anuj tells me finally. “They are singing movie songs now.” We leave.
Development, like most forms of change, is incremental, although not unassailable, at least in the short-term. Gains can be lost; progress can be subverted by any number of variables. In the long-term, however, the world seems to be pushing toward well-being for all of its inhabitants (although the case of Africa makes me stare hard at this sentence). “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. The arc of development may very well parallel the arc of history and bend towards health and safety and dignity and fulfillment for all peoples—and what is justice if not that? It is best to measure progress in generations, for this is the most realistic timeframe for change and the surest way to avoid frustration. It may take a generation to convince people to value the education of their children above narrow economic considerations, and another generation for them to realize the insufficiency of their children’s education, to mobilize, and to press the government for redress. And how long for the government to provide a quality education to all of its far-flung peoples, to provide redress? When was Brown vs. Board of Education? 1954? Patience may be both virtue and excuse. After all, King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” also rebuked those who asked him to wait for justice: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
On my first day in Jhadol Block, I inspect an anicut that stands at the mouth of a small, stream-fed lake. It is a high and impressive structure, with a slightly sunken and crenellated center that allows water easy passage should monsoon overflow the artificial lake. The excess water rolls over a nearly sheer stone wall six meters high (about twenty feet) into two cement retaining pools at the dam’s base, which in turn spill into a rocky streambed. At this remove from monsoon, water trickles solidly over only a couple of narrow swaths of the wall.
In the retaining pools, hundreds of fingerlings swim. I watch as a few fling themselves onto the ledge which surrounds the pools, then further to the base of the wall, where the water runs. They move in frantic hops spaced around long intervals of rest. Not one is as big as my thumb. After crossing the ledge, they begin to surmount the wall. By some miracle of physiology these fish are not only able to cling to the face of the wall—which must be inclined at eighty degrees, at least—but to fling themselves up it (for it really is flinging) in fits and starts, all the while drawing enough oxygen from the meager current of water that opposes them to perform this incredible feat (a rough calculation suggests that I would have to scale the side of an eighty-story building, without using hands or feet mind you, to approximate their journey). Bit by bit, fling by fling, they make it to the lake above. It must take an entire day, at least. Some fall, but I suspect that this doesn’t deter future climbing, because the lake affords space for growth, and offers the promise of freedom and abundance that the retaining ponds cannot. Somehow the fish understand this, and however long and difficult the journey, they make their way up.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Jhadol Block, Pt. 1
Last Wednesday I was back amongst the Aravallis on my way to Jhadol, the seat of the largest of six blocks in which Seva Mandir works—blocks being administrative sub-units of the larger district. The Hills reveal more than the antic scattering of bumps and rises of my previous sojourn beyond the city: Evidence of their former splendor appears in the form of high and far-ranging ridges, fingers of which produce a landscape of haphazard valleys and bottomlands, some transected by streams, others guttering out in rock and dust. But all is green. The land folds like an accordion, producing neat ridges; it opens onto vast expanses heaped all around with regular hillocks, like gooseflesh rising from the pores of the earth; its hill huddle together as if to whisper, their sides so steep as to admit only the intrepid. Most often these features intermingle, to striking, if curious effect. What shaped this landscape? I wonder. I would commend its insouciance, its rejection of orderliness and symmetry and expectation. Does it operate in algorithms for which we cannot yet bring account? I assume that science can mold such chaos as the Aravallis into a comprehensible tale of birth and growth and inevitable decline. Science is good for nothing if not undercutting superstition and myth, for creating the rational counter-narrative. Still, the Aravallis must lay down a challenge. I know that the proper hills were created in a Precambrian geologic event; this accounts for the high ridges that bound the valleys all around. But what of the rest? How are they to be explained? I’m not rushing for answers.
By the time I arrive at Seva Mandir’s Jhadol office, I am sick. This owes as much to the driver’s rapid two-step of brake-and-accelerator as to the jarring, twisting roads. Suitably recovered within an hour, I hop onto the back of Anuj’s motorbike (Anuj, though he works in Jhadol, stays at my guesthouse on frequent visits to Udaipur), and we’re off to a village. I visit only two over the course of my time in Jhadol Block, but this is no matter. I am only seeking a glimpse of the world in which Seva Mandir works, a glint of understanding. I visit anicuts (small dams built by communities with Seva Mandir’s support), observe existing water sources, conduct informal interviews with a few scattered households. Where do you get your water for household use? I ask. Are your children often sick? Do you take any precautions to ensure the water is safe for consumption? Would you be willing to pay 10 Rs a month to finance a supply of clean water for your family? (This may prove the rub.)
Superficially, these villages are similar to ones in which I’ve spent time in Kenya. In both places rain arrives but once a year, in a furious gushing torrent of two or three or (in a good year) four weeks. Perhaps two feet will fall. The land, for the time being, is flush. But that is temporary; for the better part of the next eleven months, no appreciable precipitation will find its way to earth. The sun is brutal and direct (particularly in Kenya, which straddles the equator); water evaporates at several times the normal rate. With no outside source of water, no piping from a distant reservoir or siphoning off of some mighty river with its provenance in the mountains, every drop is precious. What monsoon brings, what the rainy season brings, must last. Subsistence is tenuous for most. Poverty signifies readily: small children are without pants, shirts; older children wear tattered and filthy school uniforms; bellies distend. It is all very familiar. India seems more blessed for the moment—greener, more water, more forest, more fodder—but perhaps this is a trick of the recent rains. In any event, the sheen of similarity does mask some fundamental differences in the social, cultural, and economic make-up of the two places—differences in land distribution, primary income sources, valuation of education, and the reach of government, among others.
One of the first, self-evident rules of development is that one size does not fit all. I have come to the field to receive what hints of identity might be offered up by this particular subset of “all,” this peculiar people nestled away from the world in the Aravalli Hills. What size will fit them? My superiors at Seva Mandir hope I can begin to answer this sort of question, one which, over many years, they have come to answer, if not entirely satisfactorily, at least to a degree to which they are peacefully resigned. It’s not that the people here are especially enigmatic; it is only that in development, one can never be assured of continuity and replication, of understanding and success. What works in one village does not work in the next, and this conundrum presents itself throughout the world—whether in the hills of western India, the slums of Mexico City, the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Afghanistan, or inner-city Baltimore, rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and the banlieues of Paris. It hinges on questions of behavior, practice, custom, habit, belief, and values. This is the crux of development, or the implementation side of it at least: What will work in this place and why? Science fails here, or succeeds incompletely; it may tell us what should work, but it has less to say when its prescriptions falter, which is often. Its explanatory power shrinks in the face of multifarious humanity and its multifarious behavior.
The other side of development, what may be called the policy and management side for lack of a better term, involves mustering sufficient resources for a particular intervention (or more likely interventions) and then allocating them efficiently and effectively. It is a different sort of challenge, and one which I hope might be less intractable than the first. I will be dealing with both problems, but first things first: Given the world in which Seva Mandir works--its values, its beliefs, its culture, its economic and geophysical reality--how can a safe supply of drinking water be ensured? For the time being, this is my charge.
By the time I arrive at Seva Mandir’s Jhadol office, I am sick. This owes as much to the driver’s rapid two-step of brake-and-accelerator as to the jarring, twisting roads. Suitably recovered within an hour, I hop onto the back of Anuj’s motorbike (Anuj, though he works in Jhadol, stays at my guesthouse on frequent visits to Udaipur), and we’re off to a village. I visit only two over the course of my time in Jhadol Block, but this is no matter. I am only seeking a glimpse of the world in which Seva Mandir works, a glint of understanding. I visit anicuts (small dams built by communities with Seva Mandir’s support), observe existing water sources, conduct informal interviews with a few scattered households. Where do you get your water for household use? I ask. Are your children often sick? Do you take any precautions to ensure the water is safe for consumption? Would you be willing to pay 10 Rs a month to finance a supply of clean water for your family? (This may prove the rub.)
Superficially, these villages are similar to ones in which I’ve spent time in Kenya. In both places rain arrives but once a year, in a furious gushing torrent of two or three or (in a good year) four weeks. Perhaps two feet will fall. The land, for the time being, is flush. But that is temporary; for the better part of the next eleven months, no appreciable precipitation will find its way to earth. The sun is brutal and direct (particularly in Kenya, which straddles the equator); water evaporates at several times the normal rate. With no outside source of water, no piping from a distant reservoir or siphoning off of some mighty river with its provenance in the mountains, every drop is precious. What monsoon brings, what the rainy season brings, must last. Subsistence is tenuous for most. Poverty signifies readily: small children are without pants, shirts; older children wear tattered and filthy school uniforms; bellies distend. It is all very familiar. India seems more blessed for the moment—greener, more water, more forest, more fodder—but perhaps this is a trick of the recent rains. In any event, the sheen of similarity does mask some fundamental differences in the social, cultural, and economic make-up of the two places—differences in land distribution, primary income sources, valuation of education, and the reach of government, among others.
One of the first, self-evident rules of development is that one size does not fit all. I have come to the field to receive what hints of identity might be offered up by this particular subset of “all,” this peculiar people nestled away from the world in the Aravalli Hills. What size will fit them? My superiors at Seva Mandir hope I can begin to answer this sort of question, one which, over many years, they have come to answer, if not entirely satisfactorily, at least to a degree to which they are peacefully resigned. It’s not that the people here are especially enigmatic; it is only that in development, one can never be assured of continuity and replication, of understanding and success. What works in one village does not work in the next, and this conundrum presents itself throughout the world—whether in the hills of western India, the slums of Mexico City, the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Afghanistan, or inner-city Baltimore, rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and the banlieues of Paris. It hinges on questions of behavior, practice, custom, habit, belief, and values. This is the crux of development, or the implementation side of it at least: What will work in this place and why? Science fails here, or succeeds incompletely; it may tell us what should work, but it has less to say when its prescriptions falter, which is often. Its explanatory power shrinks in the face of multifarious humanity and its multifarious behavior.
The other side of development, what may be called the policy and management side for lack of a better term, involves mustering sufficient resources for a particular intervention (or more likely interventions) and then allocating them efficiently and effectively. It is a different sort of challenge, and one which I hope might be less intractable than the first. I will be dealing with both problems, but first things first: Given the world in which Seva Mandir works--its values, its beliefs, its culture, its economic and geophysical reality--how can a safe supply of drinking water be ensured? For the time being, this is my charge.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Scoop Down to Fine Leg
Tuesday morning I am cold in bed, and though it feels as if I should be getting up , my room is still gray. The morning is overcast, and water stands in shallow puddles on the slate surface outside the door of my guest house. The rain seems to have banished the humidity--the obtuse houseguest--that lingers on too long after monsoon, and a gentle breeze blows coolly. I welcome the change, not because the heat of the previous fortnight has been withering--the temperature rarely crept much over 90 during the day, and evenings have been exceedingly pleasant--but for the simple fact of difference. Though I hope beyond geography and reason, there is no hint of autumn in the breeze.
I know already--have known--that among the fiercest blows of this year (along with no family and friends, no Cheer Cheer for Old Notre Dame (although there's nothing to cheer this year), no hot homemade applesauce, no costume party on Halloween, no Washington Post at my door every morning, no Christmas carols (no frosted sugar cookies or popcorn balls either), no Happy Hours, no New Yorker, no "Oh Indiana, we're all for you!" and no March Madness, no Opening Day and buy me some peanuts and crackerjack, no Easter candy, no bicycle rides, no moviegoing with a box of Junior Mints rattling beside me, no Simpsons!) will be the loss of the seasons as I have come to know them. I will miss autumm and spring the most, followed by winter, and least of all summer, which arrives almost without distinction but is not without its charms (lightning bugs, sunlit evenings, and lily-strewn roadsides all come to mind).
I will spare you any fulsome enumeration of my love for the others: it would serve no purpose, particularly here. It's a vain taxonomy of the fond and familiar anyway, perhaps summoned understandably in an alien setting such as this, but no less useless for the fact. India offers its own bracing and transcendent natural milieu, if only I will open myself to it. For example: Tuesday night the moon is nearly full and as clear and bright as I have ever seen it. It is pure white--bedsheet white--and throws up a golden corona of impossible thickness amid the clouds that demurely ply--never crossing--its path. I am suitably awed.
In the past few days, a pair of frissons to puncture the daily routine. On Sunday, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan (equivalent to the governor of a U.S. state) visits Seva Mandir to dedicate a new floor of its library. In welcoming, Udaipur's main roads are edged with double lines of chalk--one white and one a vivid pink (also, in a few places, I notice a third line of mint green). At Seva Mandir, garlands of marigolds are wound around, draped, and hung from every surface. (My mother grew marigolds when I was young, but I never cared for them--too monochromatic. The Indians have taken that uniformity and made it a strength; the garlands radiate a consecrating warmth and power.) On the floor of the library someone has created an astonishing representation of a flower (lotus?) blossom, a brilliantly hued vision of painstakingly sprinkled and sifted chalk a full meter in diameter (see image above). Chai and cookies are served on the grounds. The ceremony itself, perhaps not surprisingly, is perfunctory--a few speakers, lots of photo ops, and then it's over. Tuesday's morning rain disperses the power of the chalk lines, like the faded batter's box after a baseball game. The marigolds in the library are browning.
Monday after work, I ride with my roommate Arun and another coworker to his apartment to watch the International Cricket Council (ICC) World Twenty20 final between India and Pakistan. Cricket to Indians is like football to Americans, if football were America's only real source of pride on the international athletic stage: It is an obsession that matters. As in nuclear bombs, in cricket, Pakistan is India's chief rival; thus, the match counts for much nationally, internationally, and psychically. Cricket matches are notoriously long (test matches are played out over 3-5 days), and the Twenty20 format is a radically abbreviated version of the sport designed, like a picture Bible, to entrap the casual fan by flash and sheer pith. Twenty20 in comparison to test cricket is the equivalent of reducing a baseball game to a contest of two innings, except Twenty20 cricket matches are still more than three hours long, and there's enough scoring that the probability of a tie is virtually nil.
India bats first and manages a mere 157 runs in its twenty overs, a fact which creates much consternation among my viewing mates. India had hoped for 180 runs; conversely, Pakistan sought to hold them to 160. The mood is somber. Alas, after an interval of rest, the Pakistani batsman don't fare much better. Here is an account, by Dileep Premachandran of the website Cricinfo, of of the match's denouement:
"With Misbah on strike, Pakistan needed 13 from the final over. After a great deal of thought, Mahendra Singh Dhoni gambled on the inexperienced Joginder Sharma. When he started with a wide, Indian fans groaned, and the situation became even more desperate when Misbah pummelled a full toss miles over long-off for six. But with victory in his grasp, his judgement failed him. Moving across his stumps, he went for the scoop down to fine leg. He didn't connect cleanly, and millions on the subcontinent held their breath as Sreesanth came under the ball at short fine leg. When he held it, the stadium erupted."
Got it? In brief: India wins by a mere five runs, in what some regard as the greatest final in any form of World Cup cricket action ever. If live television coverage was any indication, fans all over the country were igniting fireworks in celebration. Like low-grade artillery, the cracks and pops of pyrotechnics could be heard across Udaipur for hours afterward. What to make of a country that seems to have fireworks at hand for any occasion?
Meanwhile, I've visited the field again, this time for two days and a night. More soon.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
A Solitary Aravalli
On Monday, I zipped through the hills south of Udaipur in a white Land Rover, on my way to the village of Helpia, one of 589 in which Seva Mandir is working. It was my first real glimpse of the Indian countryside, and I was grateful for it: Even after four years of city living, I think I'm probably still a country boy at heart. India is undoubtedly one of the more geographically diverse nations on the planet. In addition to the Himalayas (the country's highest point is more than 28,000 feet in elevation), it hosts an additional eight mountain ranges with peaks of at least 1,000 meters. The Thar (Great Indian) Desert dominates western Rajasthan, and the largest mangrove forest in the world is located at the mouth of the Ganges in West Bengal. Tropical rainforests and jungle cover both the northeast of the country (the part that kisses Burma) and the inland western coast, and all told, India has more than 4,000 miles of coastline. The only thing it doesn't have is tundra. But maybe somewhere in the Himalayas...
My initiation into this surfeit of biologic, geologic, and pelagic riches? The Aravalli Hills, the sputtering out of India's oldest mountain range, which cuts diagonally from northeast to southwest across the entire state of Rajasthan, nearly reaching Delhi in the north and the state of Gujarat in the south. Once upon a time the Aravalli Range contained snowcapped peaks, back before the subcontinent came crashing into Asia, back, even perhaps, to a time before the subcontinent existed. Now the southern Aravallis are a haphazard series of modest hills, beaten down by millions of years of weather and erosion, and in their current post-monsoon incarnation resemble nothing so much as (if you can excuse my inelegant metaphor) a rash of green boils breaking upon the face of an otherwise featureless and largely monochromatic landscape. But if I were a young, scarlet-caped ingenue, and southern Rajasthan were a devious wolf horizontal in its nightclothes, I would remark, "My, what lovely boils you have!"
Unlike the Appalachians, another formerly forbidding range reduced to a green and stunted senescence, there is no uniformity in the arrangement, shape, or appearance of the Aravallis, at least in the ass-end of the range, where I reside. The hills are sprinkled across the land without any obvious uniting rationale: bunches here give way to a stretch of flat land interrupted, perhaps, by a solitary Aravalli, which in turn gives way to another stretch of flat, perhaps hemmed in by another bunch, utterly distinct from the first. It is a lovely and chaotic assemblage, sometimes bordering on the whimsical. The hills near my home in north Udaipur are crowned with temples that, illuminated in the evenings, beckon to the pilgrim spirit in me (or maybe it's only the prospect of an encompassing view of Udaipur that stirs). Mt. Abu is near, offering the highest peak in the Aravallis, 5650 feet above the tumult of this country.
Into these hills I rode, on a new highway that in some cases had been hewn through rock (lancing a boil, as it were), pressing on toward Helpia, where a meeting of the village GVC (Gram Vikas Committee--a local governing unit with no official mandate, begun with the urging of Seva Mandir) awaited. Off of the main highway, the road narrowed considerably, becoming too thin for two cars to shoulder past one another, and as we wound through the hills, the road snaking unpredictably ahead, we dodged all manner of livestock--cattle, goats, domesticated buffalo, and the occasional donkey. Just outside of the only town (in this case, the only grouping of habitations with a commercial center) en route, we arrived at an impasse of sorts. Recent monsoon rains meant that a shortcut across a normally dry streambed was underwater. We could attempt to ford the stream, which was quite shallow, or continue on the more circuitous route to Helpia. We watched as men walked their motorcycles across the modest current. The driver, encouraged by their progress, decided to hazard a crossing. The five passengers, myself included, disembarked, rolled up our pant legs (in some cases ditching footwear as well) and began the work of stacking large stones in one particularly perilous depression. (The water was deliciously warm, so perfect, in fact, that I thought that to duck underwater here might be the closest one could come to returning to the 98.6 degree suspension of the womb (yuck! I know). If circumstances had been otherwise, I might have joined some local kids who had stripped to their underwear and were frolicking in a nearby pool.) In two attempts the Rover made it across, and we dutifully waded after, the water reaching not even to my knee at its highest point.
Helpia lay along a seldom used road of surprising quality (much better, say, than many roads in LaPorte County, Indiana, where I grew up), tucked among the hills and fronted by a stream that bent at a right angle close to the village (like most around here, really a scattering of hamlets). After bending with the stream, the Land Rover came to an abrupt stop beneath a tree whose branches canopied most of the road. "This is their meeting place," Anita, In-Charge of the People's Management School at Seva Mandir, said. "No one uses this road." The road and ground beneath the tree were spattered with cow shit, and after some minutes of waiting for the principals to assemble, a thin, coarse carpet of a deep reddish hue was rolled out under the tree and into the road, and a long and thin cushion arrayed at its fore. The cushion would have covered the lane line had the road been marked and wide enough to accommodate lanes. In total, about ten adults gathered, with a smattering of children present as well, and three men shared the cushion, presumably as a signifier of their positions of authority within the GVC. The meeting lasted perhaps seventy-five minutes; all told, we were in Helpia no longer than two hours, during which time, by my count, only three vehicles passed on the road, all motorbikes.
Unable to follow the progress of the meeting because of my woefully deficient Hindi, my eyes wandered about the world before me: buffalos wallowed in a limpid stream, some with egrets perched on their backs; cattle quietly filed past en route to their next feeding ground; the Aravallis rose verdant all around, overshadowing the neat village homes with their red-tile roofs (owing, Anitia said, to the nearby zinc mines). Forgive me for thinking I had entered some bucolic idyll. But alas this was September, the monsoon had ended not a month prior, and the world around me would be transformed come next June. Likely the stream would be dry, the earth scorched by a pitiless sun, and the Aravellis parched and wilted to a browner shade. The hale but already thin cattle would turn skeletal. Or so I imagined. I really didn't know. But I will find out.
My initiation into this surfeit of biologic, geologic, and pelagic riches? The Aravalli Hills, the sputtering out of India's oldest mountain range, which cuts diagonally from northeast to southwest across the entire state of Rajasthan, nearly reaching Delhi in the north and the state of Gujarat in the south. Once upon a time the Aravalli Range contained snowcapped peaks, back before the subcontinent came crashing into Asia, back, even perhaps, to a time before the subcontinent existed. Now the southern Aravallis are a haphazard series of modest hills, beaten down by millions of years of weather and erosion, and in their current post-monsoon incarnation resemble nothing so much as (if you can excuse my inelegant metaphor) a rash of green boils breaking upon the face of an otherwise featureless and largely monochromatic landscape. But if I were a young, scarlet-caped ingenue, and southern Rajasthan were a devious wolf horizontal in its nightclothes, I would remark, "My, what lovely boils you have!"
Unlike the Appalachians, another formerly forbidding range reduced to a green and stunted senescence, there is no uniformity in the arrangement, shape, or appearance of the Aravallis, at least in the ass-end of the range, where I reside. The hills are sprinkled across the land without any obvious uniting rationale: bunches here give way to a stretch of flat land interrupted, perhaps, by a solitary Aravalli, which in turn gives way to another stretch of flat, perhaps hemmed in by another bunch, utterly distinct from the first. It is a lovely and chaotic assemblage, sometimes bordering on the whimsical. The hills near my home in north Udaipur are crowned with temples that, illuminated in the evenings, beckon to the pilgrim spirit in me (or maybe it's only the prospect of an encompassing view of Udaipur that stirs). Mt. Abu is near, offering the highest peak in the Aravallis, 5650 feet above the tumult of this country.
Into these hills I rode, on a new highway that in some cases had been hewn through rock (lancing a boil, as it were), pressing on toward Helpia, where a meeting of the village GVC (Gram Vikas Committee--a local governing unit with no official mandate, begun with the urging of Seva Mandir) awaited. Off of the main highway, the road narrowed considerably, becoming too thin for two cars to shoulder past one another, and as we wound through the hills, the road snaking unpredictably ahead, we dodged all manner of livestock--cattle, goats, domesticated buffalo, and the occasional donkey. Just outside of the only town (in this case, the only grouping of habitations with a commercial center) en route, we arrived at an impasse of sorts. Recent monsoon rains meant that a shortcut across a normally dry streambed was underwater. We could attempt to ford the stream, which was quite shallow, or continue on the more circuitous route to Helpia. We watched as men walked their motorcycles across the modest current. The driver, encouraged by their progress, decided to hazard a crossing. The five passengers, myself included, disembarked, rolled up our pant legs (in some cases ditching footwear as well) and began the work of stacking large stones in one particularly perilous depression. (The water was deliciously warm, so perfect, in fact, that I thought that to duck underwater here might be the closest one could come to returning to the 98.6 degree suspension of the womb (yuck! I know). If circumstances had been otherwise, I might have joined some local kids who had stripped to their underwear and were frolicking in a nearby pool.) In two attempts the Rover made it across, and we dutifully waded after, the water reaching not even to my knee at its highest point.
Helpia lay along a seldom used road of surprising quality (much better, say, than many roads in LaPorte County, Indiana, where I grew up), tucked among the hills and fronted by a stream that bent at a right angle close to the village (like most around here, really a scattering of hamlets). After bending with the stream, the Land Rover came to an abrupt stop beneath a tree whose branches canopied most of the road. "This is their meeting place," Anita, In-Charge of the People's Management School at Seva Mandir, said. "No one uses this road." The road and ground beneath the tree were spattered with cow shit, and after some minutes of waiting for the principals to assemble, a thin, coarse carpet of a deep reddish hue was rolled out under the tree and into the road, and a long and thin cushion arrayed at its fore. The cushion would have covered the lane line had the road been marked and wide enough to accommodate lanes. In total, about ten adults gathered, with a smattering of children present as well, and three men shared the cushion, presumably as a signifier of their positions of authority within the GVC. The meeting lasted perhaps seventy-five minutes; all told, we were in Helpia no longer than two hours, during which time, by my count, only three vehicles passed on the road, all motorbikes.
Unable to follow the progress of the meeting because of my woefully deficient Hindi, my eyes wandered about the world before me: buffalos wallowed in a limpid stream, some with egrets perched on their backs; cattle quietly filed past en route to their next feeding ground; the Aravallis rose verdant all around, overshadowing the neat village homes with their red-tile roofs (owing, Anitia said, to the nearby zinc mines). Forgive me for thinking I had entered some bucolic idyll. But alas this was September, the monsoon had ended not a month prior, and the world around me would be transformed come next June. Likely the stream would be dry, the earth scorched by a pitiless sun, and the Aravellis parched and wilted to a browner shade. The hale but already thin cattle would turn skeletal. Or so I imagined. I really didn't know. But I will find out.
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