Where am I?

In a bright and airy first-floor apartment, in the Sanjaynagar locality of Bangalore, listening to the early morning traffic and the scratch of my sister's pen on paper in the room next to me, recuperating from a long, surprising day On the Town, meeting and spending time with friends of friends and defying sleep at 7 AM. Trying to configure words to put a shape to how I got here, where I've come from, and what it was like along the way.

I've traveled some 1,700 since my last post, and have another 300 or so before I sling down my pack for more than 24 hours. From Sangatya in Udupi region to Mangalore, to Bangalore on an overnight train; to Zahirabad on another overnighter. I spent two weeks with Usha on her little homestead outside Machnoor village in Andhra Pradesh and all too quickly had to leave again with hardly a chance to consider how much I'll miss her. My time there warrants far more energy than I have for it now; I'll have to devote some words to it later. Back to Bangalore on the same train, going the opposite direction, with the purpose of meeting Dove at the airport and getting a jump start on our month together roaming the mighty India. Thanks to the great kindness of Usha, who put me in touch with her friend Shailaja and her niece Anupuma, and the generosity of Anupuma herself, who left town for a holiday in Goa but left the key to her apartment in my care (after knowing me for, you know, an hour or so. We call that Trust and I dig it.)--Dove and I have had a safe, comfortable place to spend the wee hours of the morning sipping tea and chatting away, catching up on a long separation and playing show-n-tell with the contents of our backpacks. I guess I'm through being amazed; somehow it doesn't seem strange at all for her to be here, suddenly a part of this edge of my life that has until now been foreign and estranged from the rest. Maybe it's the sleepless night talking, but it seems natural. I'm happy to see her, happy to have this time together. Pleased as punch that she's in my life.

Today we'll roam Bangalore lazily and hop on a train to Mangalore in the evening. By lunchtime tomorrow we'll be back at Shreekumar's little tropical paradise, ready to throw off our packs, put on our work clothes, and dig in.

The earth is good to me

My back is sore from dragging a pick accross the ground, and stooping to drop seeds of black gram into the furrow behind it, and carrying enormous baskets of dried leaves on my head. My arms and ankles are marked with a lattice of scratches from the thornbushes woven into the straw mulch. I'm feeling slow and sated after a dinner of fried rice & sprouted black gram, vegetable sambar, and coconut idli. In short, I haven't got the grace to tell this story well, but I'll tell it to you anyway as it comes to me, in spurts and starts.

I'm having a wonderful, life-affirming time here and I feel utterly at home. Here is Sangatya farm, a little piece of land, 6 acres, about an hour from the Karnataka coast. (If you want to see it on a map, look for Mangalore. 60 km north you'll find Udupi, and inland from there you'll find Karkala, the nearest town) I've been here for 12 days now. It's a farm that's trying really hard to be a non-hierarchical, sustainable farming community, but has run up against the fact that there aren't enough people who want that. At one point there were 8 people living in this little house and working the land; now it's dwindled down to one, with visitors. Shreekumar is the farmer, a gentle and articulate man with a background in anarchism and environmental/political activism and an upper-tier education in engineering. He teaches thermodynamics and other engineering courses at a university in Mangalore, which means he's gone from the farm 3 days a week. He speaks 4 languages. Then there's Vijayendra (Viju), a 68-year-old “professional revolutionary” who hasn't been formally employed since he was 20, a writer of eco-anarchist pamphlets and short stories, a consultant and our scribe. Between the two of them they speak 6 languages that I know of. Hindi, English, Tulu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi.

And then there's me.

I've been here for 12 days, farming, educating myself and being educated, napping in the sun and swatting mosquitoes. I'm mostly very, very happy here. As a farm, right now we have coconut palms, banana plants, a motley crew of vegetables in a little patch of garden, a mango tree in bloom, a curry tree, itty-bitty hot peppers, and areca palms that we're ignoring, because they're leftover from the last farmers who lived here and they're a useless, inedible cash crop used to make gutka and betel, the chewing tobacco of this part of the world. In the rainy season we grow rice, and a lot of it, and we're munchng our way through the dried reserves of black gram, horse gram, millet, and more. There's too much for Shree to do here alone, and I feel necessary and appreciated for the work that I do. My work so far has been planting a whole field of maize and black gram (a kind of small bean), digging new beds and gathering leaves to mulch them, watering and digging irrigation; spreading coconuts and millet to dry in the sun. All of the work is done by hand and with simple metal & wood tools. It's not hard work, just simple work, and it takes time. The black gram and the maize have sprouted in most of the field and I derive great proud and nurturing pleasure from watching them grow from seeds to sprouts to what look like real live plants. It's beautiful.

As for the rest of my time here, I've been learning a million things. Most of life here centers around food, and we eat a lot of it. Our diets are built on rice and coconut, supplemented with dal, bananas, vegetables from here and from the store, and other odds and ends. I'm afraid I'll grow fat here on rice and coconut and rice and coconut, but I'll at least be in good company. We have tea and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon. I've learned how to use a solar box cooker, how to cook on a wood fire, how to make sambar, dal, gati, idli, coconut chutney, and other local dishes. How to crack a coconut and catch all the juice, how to wash dishes using ash and coconut husk, the local method for sprouting mung beans. That the stem of a banana plant is edible and pretty tasty when cooked with the right masala, as are green, unripe bananas. I've also been learning in a less culinary direction, from books and talks with Viju and Shree. I'm up to my elbows in anarchism, here, and reading everything from organic farming techniques (“On Composting”, by Venkat, the father of permaculture in India) to classic and new anarchist literature (Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj; Vijayendra's Regaining Paradise) and a treatise rejecting vegetarianism (The Vegetarian Myth), which is a remarkable piece of non-fiction. I've been bathing and washing my clothes in the river, and letting the little fishies nibble at the dead skin on my feet.

There are so many sounds here, and most of them are birds and insects. Viju is a bit of a naturalist, and he's taught me the names of many of the birds we see each day—drongos and warblers and golden orioles, cattle egrets, cormorants, crow pheasants, sunbirds (which are tiny and brilliantly bejeweled in red and green and purple, like the prettiest hummingbirds, but they perch and flit instead of humming). Peacocks are actually pests here, eating the tender shoots of plants we mean to grow. There are huge spiders and tiny frogs, and rat snakes draping in the trees, and biting, stinging ants, and small lizards that run up and down the wall eating bugs that stray into the house. The mosquitoes have stopped biting me, and I've stopped using mosquito repellant.

This place is radicalizing me and educating me. I want to lead a good life and a peaceful life, and I want to educate others, and I want to grow my own food and defend as much land as I can. I want to reject conventional agriculture and its wanton destruction of entire ecosystems, its depletion of topsoil and gulping down rivers for irrigation and forests for fields. I want to make a difference, or at least find myself an island of sustainability, responsibility, love, and compassion and refuse to be a part of the World at Large. It's a lot to ask, I know. I'm prepared to work hard for it.

Hop, skip, jump

I'm setting down in southern Goa for the night, taking a moment to relax in this fan-cooled cyber cafe in Magdaon before catching a bus to Benaulim beach. Since I left Palitana early on January 13, every day has had its component of backpack-lugging and public transportation, and I am worn out and feeling harried and dirty. I'm tired of being on the go. I'm ready to pause for a couple of days and take a breath, or a few, but I'm dashing down the coast in a bit of a hurry, to get to Sangatya by the end of the week.

Up before dawn on January 13th to catch a bus to Ahmedabad, where I stowed my luggage and bought a ticket for a night train to Mumbai. I strolled around the city, or approximated a stroll while avoiding being run over by rickshaws or beaten by sullen begging ladies (no joke). I walked a lot, my feet and legs still aching from my two ascents up Shatrunjaya, and without a map, and somehow managed to miss every tourist attraction in the Lonely Planet. Go figure! I did see, however, long market boulevards lined with many-coloured carts and stalls selling kites, kite paraphernalia, noisemakers, and other glittery, festive items in preparation for Makar Sankranti, the international kite festival hosted by Ahmedabad on January 14th. I started feeling sensory overstimulation pretty quickly, and spent my last few hours in the relative sanctuary of the train station. I hopped on a train to Mumbai and set up camp on the top bunk for the night.

Tom met me in Mumbai, after a little classic confusion--he was waiting for me, I was waiting for him, seated probably not 10 meters apart, but somehow we missed each other. In his long, light kurta he just blended right in, curly halo, white skin, and all! We rode the rails up to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, then down to Colaba, got a skeezy hotel room for the night and set about being tourists. We spent the next afternoon at Sanjay Gandhi, sitting in a little clearing in the woods eating papaya and noodling on the ukulele: pretty much exactly what we would have done had we met anywhere in the world. There is something totally surreal and uplifting about connecting with a friend and countryman on foreign soil. It has something to do with the bizarre coincidence of it, being in the same place at the same time for different reasons, and for different timespans, and in different roles. It also has something to do with the sudden opportunity to speak grammatically complex English instead of pidgin, and to speak about your experiences, impressions, opinions, and beliefs with a like mind and kindred spirit. It was--thank you, Tom--replenishing in ways I can't express.

So I got on a night bus from Mumbai to Ganpatipule on January 15th, and arrived early morning in that little dusty seaside village on January 16th. Nothing to report, really; beautiful beaches and two streets lined with resorts. It's a popular Hindu tourist destination, due to the beachside Ganesha temple. I walked up and down both streets more times than I remember, entertaining myself as best I know how. I hung out on the beach with my book and uke, tried and failed to make a long-distance call to America, and went to bed early.

January 17th--that's today! I was up before dawn again to zip down to Ratnagiri, where I caught a train, 2nd class, general seating, to Magdaon. My journey is almost over for the day (just a 15-minute bus ride to the beach) and I'm so unutterably relieved. I haven't decided whether or not I'll leave town tomorrow, but by Friday I should be in Karnataka, at Sangatya farm, where I'll plop down my backpack and unpack it for three and a half blissful weeks of stasis. Hallelujah, forever and ever amen.

Many legged journeys

Claudi and I left Jaisalmer on a night train to Jodhpur, where we grappled with the aggressive noise and bustle (still shell-shocked and timid from 10 days of quiet, slow village life) for a whole 11 hours before hopping on an evening bus to Udaipur. The bus jolted and bumped up across some mountains in the dark, and I sat white-knuckled and lock-kneed, leaning into each turn and willing the wheels away from the edge of the narrow, rocky strip of pavement. When we arrived in Udaipur, it was around 11:30 PM, and the prepaid taxi counter (where you can get a fair fare of 50 rupees to anywhere in town) was closed; our first impression was a rickshaw driver twisting our arms for a 250 rupee fare. We bargained and haggled and whittled him down to the normal fare, but when he delivered us to the hotel we had to fight to get him to stick to the agreed-upon price. We slept and rose in the morning to roam the city.

Is this what the Lonely Planet does to a city? Udaipur is a weird, sad place, distinctly segregated into a tourist playground in the once-romantic, charming Old City, and a real, plain and garish, loud and smelly Indian city. Our hotel was well outside the tourist area, so we walked through the real city on our way to the area surrounding the mammoth City Palace. It's as though someone flips a switch as you turn onto Lake Palace Road from the main thoroughfares; all of a sudden the signs are in English, and every shop is selling the gamut of bottled waters, toilet paper, postcards, 'handicrafts', miniature paintings, jooti (pointed Rajasthani sandals), Ali Baba trousers and paisley scarves for foreigners. Cyber cafes, rooftop restaurants, Your Best Stay in Udaipur! Indian Cooking Lessons! Touts and rickshaws and shopkeepers jumping out at you (“Hello what is your name you like pretty shirt I give you very good price!”--all one sentence). I realize that tourism brings a lot of money to a place, but here it doesn't seem to improve the lives of the most, and instead it causes people to scrabble, wheedle, and con to get every last rupee. It has made a lot of the places I've visited very ugly, the steady flow of foreigners who don't understand the way this culture works. Not that I do...I felt guilty for what has happened to Udaipur, which was a really lovely place once, I'm sure, even though it's not my fault. To me it felt colonial and dirty, the white Europeans coming to town to get their shoes shined and their backs massaged and their hands decorated with henna by the dark-skinned, head-bobbing, obsequious natives.

Claudi and I were both disillusioned with the city—I might even say I was disenchanted, Udaipur—but we still managed to have a good time, and we stayed there for four days deciding our next move. We took a few yoga classes with a kind and welcoming man who teaches for donations. The classes were pleasant and interesting but not particularly inspiring, though I learned some simple new postures to help with digestion. We ate our breakfasts at little eateries whose existence is perfectly summed up with the title “Hole in the Wall”--niches just big enough for benches and narrow tables crammed together, with a specialized cooking station cranking out one or two delicious dishes in alarming quantities for 10 or 20 rupees a plate. If you want parantha or puri with dal and curd, you go to one little hole in the wall; if you want lemon rice or samosa, you go to another. We drank heavenly sugarcane juice in the shade outside the Sajjan Nivas city garden, freshly squeezed by fantastic machines like tabletop printing presses with roaring engines. We took a lesson on painting henna with an artist sitting on the floor in the Namaste Cafe; he liked us, I guess, because we agreed on a price for 1 hour's teaching and after two and a half hours he would only accept what we'd agreed upon. And we discovered the best eats in Rajasthan, at Bawarchi restaurant, a bustling diner-like place, where the food is guaranteed delicious and bottomless and the tables are in constant rotation. The thali arrives, a large round silver platter with small silver cups, and one by one the waiters come to dollop something on your plate: one waiter handles rice, one handles dal and raita, while another keeps your plate full of three different vegetable curries and someone else flips fresh chapati onto your plate every time he passes. We were monstrously hungry, but we had to beg and plead with them to stop refilling our plates after we'd eaten our fill. We ate there two nights, because we knew immediately there were no better options. The place was clearly the local favorite, and rightly so.

We took a day trip to Ranakpur, an intricately styled Jain temple supported by 1,444 hand-carved marble pillars, none of which are the same, a feat of skill and devotion that left me in awe. It was a place of peace, a place that gave me (as I expressed it to Claudi) a “fullness in my heart” The place was stark white and bore no decoration beyond the architecture itself and the saffron-and-sandalwood paste dabbed ritually on the foreheads and bodies of the Jain idols. Still, though, I tbreathed with a life and a joy that made it feel more open, relaxed, and welcoming than the dark and cloistering churches and cathedrals I've seen in Russia and Italy. The wind blew freely through the open structure. It felt ancient, but also timeless. The word devotion began to get lodged in my head.

Finally Claudi and I parted, she making a last-minute decision to board a bus to Ambaji and then Kutch, the Wild West of Gujarat, and I similarly deciding, finally, at the bus stand, to go to Palitana. In one day I traveled from the hills of Southern Rajasthan down across the table-top flat expanse of the Saurashtra peninsula, 7 hours from Udaipur to Ahmedabad and 5 hours from Ahmedabad to Palitana. We hugged in the aisle of my bus and exchanged a hurried goodbye; the last I saw of her she was still asking everyone with any reason to know, in a slow and clear German-accented voice, about the bus routes from Ambaji. I don't think it occurs to her to be scared.

Just. Like. That. I was alone again, after almost 3 weeks of her company, at the mercy of India. Luckily, India is very merciful. My newfound head-wiggling skills won me smiles and reciprocal head-wiggles (the quintessentially Indian gesture of good will), and the folks around me were kind and generous. My neighbors shared their orange with me, and fellow passengers invited me to their home to meet their families and have dinner. I declined as politely as I know how, and all the same one of the men helped me to find my next bus in Palitana, wiggling his head all the while. On the bus to Palitana, nobody spoke English, not even the bus driver, but it turned out fun and fine. I remember worrying about traveling in India with no Hindi, and now I see how unfounded my concern was. In a larger city, where you're likely to be cheated or you or your property to be harmed, someone will always speak enough English. And in small towns, off the tourist beat, Indians are, by & large, not dangerous. They are kind, friendly, respectful, caring, and helpful almost to a fault. There are those who will cheat and steal, but people here care for each other unbelievably. I remember, also, being chastised by a babushka on my train from Moscow to Kiev for leaving my backpack unattended for a moment. And for good reason—Russians are often dangerous. But here I feel no need to lock my door. It's not a question of poverty—people here are poorer by far—instead it seems to be a matter of dignity, hospitality, and straight-up brotherly love.

I took a room at the Hotel Sumeru for 100 rupees a night and slept peacefully and happily.

Palitana is a pilgrimage site for Jains, because of the hilltop temple complex at Shetrunjay / Shatrunjaya mountain, which lies at the top of 3,300 stone steps built into the side of the hill. It takes about an hour to climb, without stopping, and most people have to stop along the way. Shatrunjaya is also the reason I came here. I set out on my first morning looking for breakfast, thinking I'd start the trek in the afternoon, but the streets flow like a river to the base of the hill, and I found myself pulled there. I surrendered. A young man named Pawas showed me around the temples at the bottom of the ascent and tied a beaded bracelet on my wrist for good luck. I dlimbed it! When I wandered through the temples at the top I was awed, again, by the devotion. The ways we worship, I thought like a mantra, The names we call god.

Here at Shatrunjaya all those many carvings on the temple walls—ecstatic dancers, musicians and laughing bodies in joyous motion—seem to make sense. At Ranakpur, with its warm and peaceful silence, there were no such carvings—and that also felt right. But here the air was filled with bells and music, bright and celebratory chants and songs with harmonium, tambourine, sitar-like stringed instruments, many voices echoing up through the maze of temple shrines to the vibrant blue sky. The shouts and prayers of pilgrims and devotees blanket the place, and the carved dancers seem to laugh along, moving with the rhythm of some god's love. The offerings of puja, from coconuts and melons to sweets and incense, flowers perfuming the air, intricate images of holy symbols drawn with colored rice, the bright orange and saffron yellow of the monks' draped uniforsm—this place felt alive with color, lights, belief, love. Each visitor was deep in their own expression of devotion, carrying trays of offerings from idol to idol, sitting with tiny tables in front of selected shrines. The ways we worship, the names we call god.

Some people stay in a dharamsala, a pilgrims' rest-house, for one month to perform the arduous pilgrimage of 99 treks up and down the mountain. That's 3 or 4 every day. Those who are weak or injured and unable to climb up themselves can hire, for an exorbitant fee, a dholi, a chair suspended from a bamboo pole, carried by two to four people (men or women).

I came to a little bit of magic just as I was about to leave, when a young man pointed out a Muslim temple built a little apart from the Jain complex, but inside the main wall. I checked it out—an open courtyard in white and green, round, with niches like coffin-shaped cupboards in the walls, each filled with bedding and personal possessions. A man slumbering in the courtyard rose and invited me to sit, explaining that the Muslims who had come to Palitana in ages past had set up camp there, with their leader stating that “Adinath”, the ringleader of the Jain gods, and “Allah” are different names for the same god. Ahmedkah, the Muslim mystic, the crazy old saddhu, invited me to eat lunch, and we passed around a little stone chillum. We got high and met god, meditated, drank chai, and the other woman sitting with us, Bijia, saw that I have no jewelry and gifted me to bejewelled bangles from her own wrist. I decided to come back up before I leave Palitana, to say hello and goodbye and pay my respects again. (Today I began the ascent at 7:30 AM and had breakfast with Ahmedkah and his family. I carried my ukulele up the mountain to sing him Cat Stevens--"If you want to sing out..." He sang me "We shall overcome" in Hindi.)

The walk back down was difficult, with the wide stone steps encouraging you to run down and my rubber sandals chafing at my feet. I took them off when blisters formed and ran down barefoot. Pawas found me at the bottom of the hill and brought me to his friend Bharat's English class for children, where I sat and talked for 3 hours with students from age 7 to 17, asking and answering questions. Bharat's wife Kujbu invited me for dinner, and Pawas picked me up to listen to some music at a Jain temple in town. He dropped me back at the Hotel Sumeru, exhausted and bewildered and full of magic, and I staggered to bed. People are generous and whole-hearted here.

The next day Bharat picked me up in the morning and I spent the whole day talking with his students, with a new class assembling every hour. They asked me innocent and piercing questions: “What is the name of your god?” (The Earth, I say) “From which caste do you come?” (No caste, I say) “Why did you come to India?” (I can't answer) Kujbu and Bharat fed me lunch as well, and I practiced kite-flying with Kujbu and their 4-year-old daughter Nensy (which is a sweet misspelling of Nancy). Kujbu is a beautician; she does bridal makeup, hair, and mehndi—henna tattoos. She offered to mark my hands.

On my last day in Jaisalmer, 8 days ago, I walked to the lake and watched pedalboats wander bewildered on the water's surface, and I wrote in my journal what I felt about January 4^th, 2012. India owns my body, I wrote; she has marked it for her own. I am swaddled in her cloth, with her leather on my head and feet. Her scarves, draped across my shoulders, her knapsack on my back. Her roiling, clenching sickness in my guts, her spices fiery on my tongue. It's taken less than a month for India to conquer my body, and now she goes to work on my soul, or spirit, or whatever lives inside me. Not the microbes rioting in my intestines, not inside me, but whatever moves my mind and heart.

Today, January 12^th, I'm glancing down at my hands, decorated in deep ochre and burnt orange brown, and trying to understand just how conquered I am. India, you are in my skin. You are seeping into my follicles and staining my hands, you are decorating me, the way you claim your own. Mehndi, henna, beauty given as a gift. Adopted, adapted, accepted, allowed.

It's exactly one month today.

Farm #1 and afterthoughts

The numbers tick up awfully fast from 01.01, and the days that go along with them. I returned from Dumpal Khadin organic farm around noon on January 1st and I've spent the days since then leisurely at Shiva's guest house and strolling the streets of Jaisalmer. A glorious hasteless dream, where time creeps by one moment at a time with jolts where whole hours have passed. I like it here.

The farm was, as far as farms go, a letdown; I'm not sure what I expected (patches of chickpeas interspersed with rows of cumin and mustard? Picking fresh from the garden every day?) but the reality was a vast monoculture of chickpeas and a scraggly patch of cilantro, which village children uproot to nibble on. There were two other WWOOFers there when I arrived, Jan and Claudia. They had come to the farm at the same time and both are German but by coincidence; Jan left the morning after I arrived, bound for greener pastures, and Claudia stuck around for the whole 10 days I was there.

We came on the back of a motorbike, with my backpack straining against my back. In the morning Shiva took Jan back to Jaisalmer and left me and Claudie alone in the desert with his brother's family.

We lived in the desert with Moto, his ailing mother, his wife Shandni, and their three children (6 years, 3 years, and infant). Not to mention a downtrodden sandy-colored dog named Anda (“egg”), a cow and two calves, and a handful of goats. The house one stone and cement block and three huts made of mud and cow dung, clustered around a packed-mud/dung courtyard. The chickpea field is several kilometers away, a 30-40 minute walk across open scrubby desert.

Living in the Thar desert is difficult, in plain ways. To drink, we draw water from a concrete tank in front of the house in a shiny silver pail on a rope (but don't drop the rope, because it's not attatched on the other end!). To bathe, wash clothing, and repair the house, we take from the pond (rainwater accumulated July-September), which serves as watering-hole for the goat and cow herds. It's a 10 minute walk to the 'lake', where we wade in the soft kneaded mud, adding our feet to thousands of hoofprints in the mud, and fill 10-liter metal jugs with brown-grey water, which we carry back on our heads, water sloshing down our necks and faces. The day is measured out in steps down and back up the path to the rapidly-diminishing pond. Water is too precious to waste on things like washing dishes, so we use sand.

The sun is harsh during the day and the nights can be very, very cold. The night I spent in a grass hut next to the chickpea field, I could see my breath in the air. I layered all the warm clothing I brought, saying a prayer each night to the Merino gods.

While we were fetching water on my first working-day, Claudie informed me that though the farm is mostly organic, they are spraying the chickpeas this year because the insects are especially bad. I felt cheated and disappointed, but not surprised; life is hard here, and they don't want to take any chances at losing the crop. I spent one day weeding in the chickpea field, glaring up at Moto's distant figure walking down the rows with a backpack sprayer. I planned to make a fuss, since I didn't sign up for front-line exposure to pesticides. But It didn't become an issue, since most of the weeds had already been pulled and that afternoon was the only one we spent in the field.

Life moved along in an unhurried, steady way like the gait of a lazy cow, but I was constantly anxious, since I was never sure what would be expected of me. Whenever idle, I felt like I needed to be doing something to earn my keep. After we finished weeding the chickpeas we were mostly entrusted with small tasks and home-improvement projects. We swept the courtyard, gathered firewood, ground wheat flour by hand, milked goats. Claudie and I spent one day putting up a roofless structure for storing goat-n-cow food, constructed out of supple sticks and rope, then moved all the grain into the new structure. We also spent one day helping Moto to cut grass for a new thatched roof. Most of our time, though, was devoted to refinishing the house with a mixture of sand, water, and cow shit on the walls. (When they talk about cow shit, they call it “cow shit” in English, without crudeness or shame; for them, that's the word to call it.) So we fetched jug after jug of water, and then fetched pans of sifted sand, and mixed both with big piles of wet cow shit using our bare feet on the floor of the courtyard. We spread it on the walls of the house with our hands. There's a feeling at first of complete, utter revulsion, when skin first touches crap, and then a sort of resigned disgust that turns into prideful stoicism. Which in turn gives way to a gross fascination and finally a sort of visceral enjoyment at the texture between fingers and toes, muddy and smooth. In short, it's AWESOME.

Christmas came and Shiva came from Jaisalmer to throw us a little party for it; we built a campfire at the grass hut (Shiva's “farmhouse”) and made dal, rice, and rota, little round biscuits cooked in the coals. Shiva brought real chocolate cake from town, and homemade whiskey from his brother's stash. We walked back, staggering, through the dark, scaring each other with desert ghosts and the threat of wild boars. New Year's Eve passed unmarked, though I woke up early to salute the sunrise on the first day of the year. “One Year Ago Today....” I thought about it. Two years ago today....three years ago today I shaved my head bare. Two years ago I drank champagne in the freezing cold at the top of a sledding hill. One year ago today I was struck horizontal with the worst hangover of my life, in St. Petersburg, Russia, with friends I hope to see again someday. On January 1^st we walked 6 km to the highway and flagged down a little truck to bring us to Jaisalmer for 20 Rupees.

Claudie's company was indispensable to me. We talked about our experience, whether it was good or bad. Often it was both—extremely frustrating, challenging, but simple and rewarding. A full belly at the end of a day of hard work. Hot tea in the cold morning. And I learned. Our position was a strange one at the farm. On the one hand, we were guests, and in India the guest is god. So we aren't allowed to help cook, and we were always served our meals and chai before the family. On the other hand, our purpose for being there was to work, and we had to earn our keep. We were the low ladies on the totem pole, so we are given all manner of menial tasks. The women, who have domain only over their own children, and the children, who have never had power over anyone, delighted in ordering us around. I felt a little like the dog, Anda, who walks with his tail slung low around his bum, for he knows his place is low. It was discouraging and dismaying that no one bothered to learn my name but addressed me & Claudie both as “gori”, which means “white-skinned person”. So...when I went into the desert my name changed from “Madam” to “Whitey”. Charmed, I'm sure. We felt like outsiders, gawked at by the children, who, even when we were elbow- and ankle-deep in cow shit, jabbed their hands out at us asking “10 rupees? 1 rupee? School pen? Photo?” Only Moto and his older brother Mogu spoke any more English than that. One of the goat-herd boys would stride by with a big smile on his face repeating the only words he knew--”Hello! Camel Safari! Camel safari hello!” The experience was not pleasant, but I can't say it was bad.

It's hard to begin to talk about it; the structure of life is so different from any I've ever experienced, and it seems like there's no way to translate the daily tasks and necessities without providing a floor plan, without diving into a series of nesting explanations, descriptions, and definitions that set the stage and provide the context for what little story I can offer. And there are too many stories I feel that I'm leaving out. The story of the food meeting my digestive tract and two days of horrible, dehydrated stomach cramps, the story of my clothes being dirty, dirtier, then cleanish, then dirty. The story of the kids and their sticky fingers on the fretboard of my ukulele. The birds flying in and out of our room whenever we opened the door. The goats bleating. The story of the sun rising, climbing, and slowly trekking across the sky.

Now Claudie and I have decided to cast our lots together for awhile, since we're both traveling alone. We've been living in Shiva's guesthouse in Jaisalmer for three days, cooking and cleaning and unsure if we're supposed to be paying for our room or not (we'll find out when we leave, I guess). A few local characters have learned our names and shake our hands as we walk down the street. If you stand still in one place long enough (and long enough is not long at all) someone here will offer you tea and conversation. You could spend a lifetime in Jaisalmer on front stoops and in little shops, sipping chai and talking about the world. But we're leaving tonight on a train back to Jodhpur, where we can catch a cheap bus to Udaipur. I'm happy, though these past days I've felt comfortable and at home. I'm starting to get itchy to move on.

Out into the desert

I bid Jodhpur a fond farewell, after one lass makhaniya lassi and some fresh cucumbers. I bought myself a vegetable peeler so the range of raw things I can safely consume has widened greatly. Goodbye, Jodhpur! I'm on a color tour of India, from the Pink City to the Blue City to the Golden City.

I spent my few hours last night refreshing the Indian Railways ticket-status page, hoping to see my Jodhpur-Jaisalmer ticket change from "W/L 7" (waitlist; can't get on the train) to "CNF" (confirmed, hop that sucker!), back in the rooftop restaurant paying too much for dal fry and roti, listening to Canadians kvetch about being "over India". And the numbers changed, so I popped my backpack up on my shoulders, holstered my ukulele, and armed with iodine-purified water, toilet paper, and my new diary, I haggled my way to the train station for 40 rupees and hoisted myself up to the third-tier bunk that my patience won for me. Night train to Jaisalmer, 6 hours, 11:45 PM and arriving at 5:30 AM. Cold. The desert is cold. Because it's winter.

Shiva the farmer met me at the train station with his motorcycle, and in the pre-dawn chill we careened through the streets--me juggling backpack, ukulele, and shoulder bag--to his guesthouse so I could get a little bit more sleep before riding out into the desert. When I woke up there was water boiling for me to shower, and hot lemon-ginger tea for my sore throat, and we climbed up to the roof to soak in the sun and dispel the lingering chills of the night. Then Shiva went to deal with guests and turned me loose at the 500-year-old Jain temple complex to roam and entertain myself for the day.

Jaisalmer is peaceful and relaxed, my favorite place so far. The streets are narrow and the number of auto-rickshaws is low. It's quiet and there is less pollution than in any of the other places I've been. The stonework on all the old houses is incredibly intricate, and the Jain Temples were overwhelming in the beautiful craft and painstaking skill that went into them. It makes me want to study art again. Shiva asked me over tea on the roof if I like India--the big question that I'm not in any hurry to answer yet. I like pieces of India, the answer I came up with. I like the kind people and how beauty is so prized, how people surround themselves with beauty (painting the cows, the elephants, the cars, their doorways, their motorcycles, their skin with henna). I like the food. The rhythm can be fatiguing. The garbage is heartbreaking. But I love Indian art. It strikes me deeply as sincere and vibrant. I feel movement in the Jain sculptures and I feel song in the paintings on walls and papers. It feels sacred even when it's secular. So much feels holy here.

Yeah, Jaisalmer is nice. People walk most places. The buildings are all made of a honey-amber-colored stone that I've heard glows gold in the sunset, but I haven't gotten a sunset yet and we're hoping to ride out to the farm. I did buy myself a tiffin and a beautiful camel-leather fedora to shield my eyes from the sun. I feel like a pilgrim. I look like Indiana Jones in loose Indian ladies' clothing.

So I'm out into the desert for two weeks, no electricity, no plumbing, and (I think it goes without saying) no Internet. Just the sun and the sand and the chickpeas we're nurturing along.

Here I go!

One Week

The air is cool and comfortable, filled with music drifting up from--somewhere--it sounds devotional, but maybe it's Bollywood. I'm seated on the floor on the roof of the Cosy Guest House in Jodhpur, the Blue City of Rajasthan, eating bananas and oranges and sweet peas from the pod (only things that come in natural packages). I burned my mouth on a samosa and the juice from these sweet little oranges stings and smarts on my lips. I'm barefoot happy and wrapped in the soft gauze scarf I haggled for and won in the market today. My body is clean but my clothes are dirty, and the smells wafting from the kitchen make me wish I hadn't spent my budget for the day. But the scarf is warm now and shaded me from the sun, and today I also bought sunscreen, so it's worth it for my skin.

I've been on the ground in India for one week today. I'm at a loss to understand how I've managed to live so much in one week. It seems like I've always been here, but if that were the case then I wouldn't be so disoriented. And my Hindi would be much, much better. I've had a few scary moments with Indian men overstepping boundaries, and a few really stupid moments where I was naive enough to get cheated out of a tidy sum of money. But I'm learning from those, and the good parts are much better.

Short version goes like this: I was in hotels in Jaipur for three nights, then spent two nights at my newfound friend Rahul's family home in Amber, a town right outside Jaipur and full of life. His family didn't speak much English (the kids learn English in school, but it's rudimentary still) so we communicated mostly through food, headbobbing, gestures, sheepish smiles. The food that Rahul's sister cooked was incredibly delicious, but had me dashing in and out of the toilet room and doubled over with stomach cramps. Turns out that when it's spicy going in, it's still spicy coming out...enough said. Rahul and his friends Lala, Mann, Vinod, and Vijay went out of their way to show me a wonderful time in Amber, from introducing me to a baby elephant to throwing a party in honor of my older brother's birthday. And then on December 18th I hopped a train to Jodhpur, the Blue City. How long have I dreamed of coming to Jodhpur? Long enough. It's not as blue as I imagined it, though to be fair it's pretty blue. And tomorrow I'm jumping on another train to Jaisalmer, to meet up with Shiva Singh, who runs Dumpal Khadin organic farm, my first WWOOFing connection.

My innards seem to have quieted themselves, and the food here in Jodhpur has been amazing. Amazing masala omelettes for 50 cents on the street; amazing saffron lassi from a shop under the clocktower (they have a whole menu, but Lonely Planet mentioned their saffron lassi and now they don't sell anything else; they don't even ask when foreign people come in, but just clunk a saffron lassi on the table. and it's incredible); the best samosa I've ever had (I had three for lunch/dinner). Even the cheapest street food here tastes wonderful. Everything is full of flavor. Surprisingly, the sweets aren't great. Jalebi, little fried squiggles of sugary dough, turn my stomach. Really, it's just fried sugar. Raju, a boy I met in Jaipur, insists that people eat them for breakfast. Yeah, right. And most of the other sweets I've had so far are similar concoctions of sugar and butter (held together with a little gram flour) without much flavor.

Today, really for the first time since I got here, I was alone. In Jaipur Rahul and his friends were my constant escort, and yesterday in Jodhpur I met this awesome American couple at the railway booking office and ended up spending all yesterday and a lot of today with them. They've known each other since they were 15 and have been traveling for something like 5 months, on an epic journey around the Ring of Fire starting in Alaska and down the West Coast, then to south Pacific and across Eastern Asia into India. They were so even-headed, so real. They helped me to break through my inability to haggle, and they helped me to find a new notebook and pens (which was a day-long journey from bookstore to stationary store and everywhere in between). And they recommended the omelette shop where I'm having breakfast again tomorrow. The dude who runs the omelette shop has been making omelettes there and nothing else for 13 years; he goes through over 1,000 eggs each day. Lonely Planet talks about him, too, so of course everyone goes there. In the afternoon I parted ways with Galen and Jeff (they're bound for Goa) and I hiked up to Jaswant Thada, this beautiful white marble memorial to some Maharaja or another, built in 1899 and overlooking the whole city. There's a garden there where I sat and broke in my new notebook. I felt peaceful and relieved to be alone. I heard the call to prayer resounding out above and through the whole city. It's so eerie and amazing: several lead voices on PA's, sounding amplified as if only by reverence and spirit, and this deep thrumming beneath of thousands of voices amplified only by their unity. I want to get up before sunrise tomorrow and hike up to the hilltop to see the sun come up over the edge of town. It's my last chance to do so, since I'm getting on a train tomorrow night for Jaisalmer. Maybe I'll just watch the sunrise from the roof of my guesthouse, which is a bit above the main part of the city, in the Old City, the blue part of the city.

This is a really challenging place. I'm learning strength and awareness, and dealing with a lot of thoughts about necessity, luxury, equality, entitlement, humanity. Waste, garbage. Generosity, kindness. Desperation. I'm reading a dark and cynical William Burroughs book called The Western Lands, based in ancient Egyptian writings. He writes of Sek, the second soul, life energy that abounds in disaster and desperation. This place is rich with life energy, with Sek, fertile with life energy.

I've only been here a week; seven days seems like an awfully short time to change your life.