Life on the Ganges

We’re in an airport again (there’s certainly been a lot of that, this trip!), this time in Varanasi, the city where we’ve spent the last three days with our friends Jeanne and Wally. Now we’re about to fly to Chandigarh, not too far north of Delhi, where we’ll meet up with them again tomorrow morning. The reason we’re going separately is that they are taking an overnight train from Varanasi to Chandigarh – not only a 12+ hour trip to begin with (they leave in the late afternoon, and arrive at 4:30 a.m.), but also, according to the Internet, one for which the average delay is nine hours. When Bob heard those statistics, there was NO way he was going on that train. Jeanne argued that prolonged train rides, delays and all, were an important part of the full Indian experience, which may be true, but this was a part of the full Indian experience that Bob wanted no part of. So we are flying to Chandigarh instead.

After living in gritty, land-locked, Anand for three months, I found Varanasi liberating by contrast. The hotel we were staying in, the Ganges View, was right on the river, with sweeping views of the water and the ghats (the stepped plazas leading down from the city to the water’s edge). Converted from an old mansion, the hotel had spacious terraces, colorful with many pots of flowers, on the second and third floors on which you could drink your morning tea while looking over the lively scene below. Both the terraces and the rooms were furnished with beautiful old furniture that looked like it could have come from the original mansion, as well as decorated with paintings, masks, textiles, and other art pieces depicting gods, goddesses, and scenes from the various Hindu epics. It was a lovely place.

The first morning I woke up in time to see the sun rise over the Ganges, which was gorgeous, since the view was directly to the east. The sounds at that time of day are also glorious: the clanging of bells and the soothing music of chanting as people do morning worship before starting their day. Below on the plaza closest to the river at the bottom of the ghat on which the hotel sits (Assi Ghat), people are beginning their day’s activity: boatmen taking their first load of riders out on the river, stall owners setting out their wares, flower sellers piling up bright orange garlands in their baskets. I was happy just to sit and watch the swirl of humanity. The other wonderful thing about that time of day is the weather, which is cool and refreshing; as the sun rose, it got progressively hotter, so that by 11 or 12 it was intensely, and unpleasantly, warm. That was the major downside of being in Varanasi in late March, as opposed to January, which is when I visited once before on my first trip to India. In the middle of day, the heat was exhausting.

Mostly while we were there we just walked along the river by the different ghats, each with its own particular character (some busy with commerce, some almost deserted, some set aside as cremation ghats for the funeral pyres of the dead – it is a great honor to be cremated in Varanasi, by the holy Ganges). But we did try to go to the biggest Hindu temple – I’ve forgotten its name – which is down a twisting maze of alleys crammed with multitudes of shops selling scarves, spices, souvenirs, and jewelry. For reasons I’m not sure of except general levels of “communal” violence (this is the term that’s used for Hindu/Muslim conflict), there was a huge amount of military and police presence – uniformed men with guns stationed regularly along the alleys, and clustered at the entrances and exits that led into or out of the temple grounds. When, after winding our way through what seemed like a corkscrew journey, we finally came to the place that led directly into the temple area, we had to give up our cameras, cell phones, and purses (we let Bob and Wally, who were willing to go second, held on to them, rather than the soldiers) before going in. Once we were inside, it turned out there was an extremely long line of people waiting to get into the temple, many of them holding offerings of flowers or fruit – and that even if we had been willing to wait on the line (which looked like it could easily be more than a half hour wait), we weren’t going to be allowed into the actual temple anyway, since only Hindus could go in. We glimpsed the grounds through some openings in the fence, and took our leave.

It was also in Varanasi that I had my first -- and really only -- experience of feeling totally alien from the Indian experience, when one night at our hotel there was a concert of "dhrupad" singing. I find a lot of Indian classical music something of an acquired taste, with its unfamiliar scale and wandering, unaccustomed melodies, but this was truly extraordinary. Two large stringed instruments -- I'm not sure of the name -- put out a constant, almost one-note drone, and two brothers, who were the singers, made sounds that had almost no "musical" qualities in the western sense whatsoever, but seemed to emerge and disappear out of nowhere, mostly quite quietly. At the same time, the "singing" was accompanied by gestures and heavenward looks by the brothers that could only suggest either a deep devotional trance or being completed stoned. Jeanne was so shocked by the performance that she whispered to me it must be a fraud meant to bamboozle the western tourists who stay at the hotel, but if it was western tourists they wanted to appeal to, this was not the way to go! Besides, the audience was actually more Indian than western, and I was pretty sure this was, in fact, a totally legitimate art. It was, however, something I could not relate to in the least -- perhaps if I had been stoned, it would have worked better for me. Discreetly, I left about midway through -- as did the rest of our party.

The Final Weeks

I’m writing this as we drive down the highway from Anand on our way to the airport at Baroda, where we will catch a plane to Varanasi to meet our friends Jeanne and Wally. I can’t quite shake the feeling that now I’m leaving home rather than returning home; somehow that apartment on the IRMA campus really became home to me in the three months we were here. We’ve been saying our good-byes to people in the last few days – to Kajri and her husband over supper, to Ajay and Mokul at Café Coffee Day, to Vivek over a South Indian meal at a restaurant downtown, to Ashok on the telephone, to two of the students who came by our apartment to say good-bye as we were finishing our packing last night – and it made me realize that despite the disruption of our late February trip home, we really did start to make strong connections to people. I console myself by imagining that I’ll be back, although I have no idea how or when.

Since I think the picture of the town of Anand that’s been given in this blog has not been very flattering – I’ve described it mostly as a dusty, unattractive, small-town outpost, which is true enough, but perhaps not the whole story – I want to close our time in Anand with a peek at another side, as illustrated by these photos. One is of an event we came upon one day as we bicycled just before dusk down one of the dusty, littered, residential streets riding back from shopping in town: a circle of girls and women right in the middle of the street, dressed in gorgeous saris, clapping and dancing a slow, simple dance to rhythmic music pouring from a boom box, some of them balancing brass water jugs on their heads. Round and round, round and round; it reminded me of people dancing the hora at a Jewish wedding. And indeed, when we asked later, we were told that most likely it was exactly that – dancing as part of a wedding celebration, which often goes on for several days. An unexpected, public, sudden beauty – with people on motorbikes, us and others on our bicycles, the usual stray dogs and cows, casually passing by.

The other two photos are the two main buildings of a temple complex that is a short walk down a dirt track off Amul Dairy Road, one of the main downtown streets. You go from a road full of honking cars, auto rickshaws, buses and other vehicles, strewn at the edge with trash, plastic bags, pedestrians, and mangy-looking animals, crammed with stalls selling everything from snack foods to auto parts, to a quiet open space with grass and flowers from which the temple buildings rise. Shoes are lined up at the bottom of the steps; each person, as he or she enters, rings the brass bell at the front of the temple; and on the floor sits a small circle of worshippers, melodiously chanting and clapping, over and over and over. Here, for me, is the soothing other side of the noise and chaos – not the religion exactly, which, to be honest, means little to me, but the sense of something outside of the busyness of normal day-to-day life, something that has nothing to do with striving and getting, something that just repeats itself, timelessly, pointlessly, comfortingly, like a nursing mother or an old grandfather in a rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth.

Picking up the threads

As most of you who are reading this know, our time in India was interrupted in mid-February by the sudden illness and death of my father, and the difficult trip back to the U.S. which that entailed. This isn't the time to write much about that, except to say that I think my Dad himself, who as he got into his eighties feared nothing more than a long, lingering illness, would have been pleased with the way it happened: while healthy and still playing golf three times a week, he entered the hospital for a minor adjustment to his pacemaker, but went into congestive heart failure and passed away within a week. The good news is that despite being so far away, I was able to get back in time to spend his final day with him while he was still conscious and able to communicate; I arrived in Florida, where he was hospitalized, on February 20, and he passed away on the morning of the 21st. Tova and her partner Harris, having a much shorter flight from New York, had already arrived the day before. So we were all able to be together with him on his last day. He died 12 days short of his ninetieth birthday.

Since I still had half the semester left to complete in India, I decided that I would like to return, and Bob agreed to come with me. It was a bit bewildering to settle in again after the intensity of the time in the U.S. -- not to mention just the physical toll from two trans-Atlantic flights and several flights in both the U.S. and India in the course of two weeks -- but actually returning to this green and peaceful campus was very calming, as was resuming the routine of classes and class preparation, which gave a familiar rhythm to my days. What had changed, however, was the degree of energy I had for activity beyond my teaching: I was happy to be at IRMA, and enjoyed my time in the classroom, but apart from that I was more likely to want to read a book or watch a movie on the one English-language movie cable channel than anything more ambitious. Perhaps not surprising. It's only now, almost a month after returning, that I feel I'm fully "waking up" from the not-unpleasant daze that I've been in. Which explains the long gap in this blog.

But, for the relatively short time remaining to me in India, I want to resume writing, which I enjoyed doing immensely in the first month and a half we were here. My course is now over -- my last class was this past Wednesday -- and tomorrow, Monday, afternoon my students will take their final exam. I think one hint that I was fully "awake" again was how much fun I had coming up with the questions for the exam -- something I don't get to do at exam-adverse Hampshire. Since one theme of the last part of the course was to investigate the pros and cons of biotechnology (including genetically modified crops) and the efforts that are being made internationally to regulate it; and many of the students here are familiar with the dairy industry, since Anand is the home of the huge and highly successful Amul dairy cooperative and the government's National Dairy Development Board; I decided to come up with a question about biotechnology and the dairy industry. I considered use of artificial growth hormones or applicability of GM techniques, but after a little Internet searching I discovered that there has actually been commercial cloning of prize cattle to serve as breeding stock for future generations -- so that the genetic advantages of the original prize cow can still be taken advantage of after its death. Who knew?? Anyway, that led to a question about cloning of prize milkers and selling their milk -- amazing to realize that what seem like "science fiction" possibilities to someone of my generation will be the actual choices of my students' generation. Not surprisingly, polls in many countries around the globe indicate that consumers don't like the idea of eating meat or drinking milk from cloned animals -- but then, how do consumers in the U.S. feel about the fact that almost all the packaged food in their supermarkets already incorporates genetically modified corn or soy? I doubt that most of them think about it at all, and if they were told, they'd be surprised. Over the last twenty years, GM crops have proliferated tremendously as consumers weren't really paying that much attention. Now, even in places that were much more GM-averse than the U.S. (which was always a booster at the government level), such as the EU and India and Africa, GM crops are mushrooming. As I tell my class, this is one of the hardest issues for me to reach a definitive personal opinion about. It's true that there's no hard evidence to suggest that these crops are harmful to human or ecological health -- and some to suggest they can actually be ecologically helpful, as for example by less pesticide use. And the alternative argument often used by some on the left -- that GM techniques allow multi-national corporations to take over the agricultural seed supply -- doesn't end up holding much water when you actually look at the facts (consider, for example, Ronald Herring's work on Bt cotton in India, see http://www.agbioworld.org/pdf/CASHerringMonsanto2006.pdf ). Supposedly, as a sophisticated academic, I know better than to oppose something simply because of the gut feeling that "it just isn't natural" -- after all, a heart or kidney transplant isn't "natural" either, and I certainly don't oppose them. But I don't know. Although it's hard to pin down exactly what's wrong with GM food, if anything is -- and, given how rapidly the acreage planted in it is increasing all over the world, the question may be moot in any event -- I'm still left with an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.

But you probably are wondering with some concern: "Did she re-start this blog in order to give us lectures on genetic modification?" -- and indeed I didn't. So let me end this entry with a forecast of what lies ahead for us in India until we return to the U.S., and then, perhaps next time, I'll pick up on whatever interesting events I've missed during this month of blog-silence.

As I said, my teaching here is completed, so once I grade my final exams, we are going to move on. On Thursday 3/26 we're flying to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, where we're going to meet up with our good friends Jeanne and Wally from Miami -- he's a doctor who's come to India for several weeks of consultation with Indian colleagues in different cities, so they're combining work and vacation. Varanasi is the one place I visited on my previous trip to India that I really wanted to visit again, so we'll see how my impressions this time compare. I found the eerie spirituality of it -- people bobbing in the holy waters of the river, mist rising off the water, bodies burning on the cremation ghats, monkeys jumping around the walls of the temples -- completely captivating. The head of the Fulbright Program here in India, Adam Grotsky, recommended a hotel overlooking the river that was converted from an old Indian mansion (or haveli) that looks quite lovely on the Internet, and it sponsors concerts and art exhibits as well, so I'm looking forward to that. I remember the sitar concert that my friend Lydia and I attended when we were in Varanasi in 2001, which was quite amazing.

After Varanasi, we are flying to Chandigarh, where Wally has medical business, and Jeanne, Bob, and I will be tourists. Chandigarh was designed as a "new city" after independence with input from Le Corbusier -- and according to the guidebooks, it's very different from any other Indian city. We shall see how that strikes us. After that, Jeanne and Wally are going off to Rajasthan, and Bob and I are flying to Dharamsala, where I am going to be meeting with a small group of lawyers and administrators from the Supreme Justice Commission of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. I am very excited about that. And then, on April 4, we fly back to Delhi for our flight that night to the U.S. -- so on the morning of April 5, we will land at Newark Airport. I am excited and sad, delighted and bemused, about going home -- even after 3 months, it feels in some weird way like this is my home and I will have to get used to having that other, Northampton, one. But more on all of this soon -- now that I've started, I will be a regular blogger again.