I Laugh With Them

I’ve just done our laundry in a bucket and hung it up to dry on chairs placed strategically out in the sun. These days are luminous. There is no wisp of cloud. The mountains rise up out of the horizon like great, snow-covered beasts. Although the shade is very cold throughout the day, the sun is unbelievably hot. For the first time in my life, I feel like I understand the pure heat of our star, piercing the frigid atmospheres of outer space, traveling millions of miles to warm my fair skin. To remain at a comfortable temperature during the day requires a delicate balance of clothing layers. Of course, in the evening, we simply wear everything we have, for when the sun goes down, it is magnificently cold and clear. The milky way is a smudge across the sky.

Yesterday I walked down from our hilltop retreat. Down, down, endlessly down to the river far below us. There is an old Shiva temple in a village down there- crooked and leaning. The gods carved into stone long since worn down to vague outlines – elephant trunk, dancing limbs, fire. The river was a little slice of pristine wild. One could almost imagine one was hiking far into the Cascades or Sierra Nevada, preparing to set up camp by a remote mountain stream. And then the man comes by with his three ponies, carrying bags of rice to the village down the way. And a troupe of women in brightly colored saris pass by with bags of gravel on their heads, laughing.

They seem to be building a road to the temple, and these women are the hardy labor force. They try to speak to me and laugh again at my incomprehension. I think they ask me where I came from, so I name the village up the hill. They seem to be inviting me back to the village to eat with them, but I can’t be sure, and I have a long, long path back up the hillside. So I laugh with them: at myself; at the absurdity and beauty of languages, and cultures, and all the things that keep us from understanding one another.

Last weekend we had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast with the students and Ashish and Deepa and family. We spent all day in the kitchen making chicken and mashed potatoes and greens and pumpkin pie and coleslaw. It was nice just to get a chance to cook again. I went to sleep feeling thankful that my hands smelled like garlic (I remember when I was living in the co-op Synergy in college and Jordan woke me up one morning freaked out that his hands smelled weird. He wondered if there was some lingering poison from the darkroom infecting him. I told him it was just the garlic he had chopped last night on the cooking crew.).

The evening lacked nothing for being a half a world away from its traditional context. In fact, I think it felt richer for being realigned with our present reality. The students were all joking that we were celebrating Thanksgiving with real Indians.

Out of my hands

I am nearing the end of a long list of job applications. I won’t say how many I have applied for – Sage is teaching me how to keep some things to myself. Before this all started I received a lot of different advice on what to apply for, what not to apply for, and where to focus my energy. One recently hired first time faculty advised that I do as he did: put all of my energy and time into applying for only a couple of jobs (he was offered the two positions he applied for). In the end I decided to cast my net wide: whether this was out of an on-going case of the imposter syndrome, or because of uncertainty about the kind of position I truly want, I am not sure. I should mention, that a piece of this decision is also based on the fact that there are quite a few exciting positions open this year. Now we are entering a nerve-racking period of waiting to hear back. I am truly thankful that Sage and I will be on the move, as of two weeks from yesterday, so that I will not be able to focus all of my energy on whether or not I am being contacted for interviews. For the first time in a long, long time the future seems truly out of my hands. I have to be confident and patient and hope that my applications not only get noticed, but that the people reading them see me as a good fit for the department and as someone they want to work with for years to come. I feel confident that I have sent off materials that reflect who I am, what I have accomplished, and what I have to offer – it is this that I will have to rely upon for the next weeks/months of anxious waiting.

The Home Stretch

A few of the students, thinking about their upcoming homestay experiences.
(Morgan Gard, Victoria Evert, Shira Stern, Erin Slomski-Pritz)

We Can See Tibet From Our House

It’s Thanksgiving today. The students are off in their homestays now, so life at Sonapani is relatively quiet. We're going to try to throw together some sort of Thanksgiving meal for the students when they return on Saturday. I was threatening to go out and hunt a pheasant if someone would only give me a gun. No one believed me, so we're just going to have chicken. I think we'll be able to make mashed potatoes and stuffing, and also a pumpkin pie of sorts. I've been asking around to see if there are any sour fruits with which I could approximate cranberry relish. The closest answer I've gotten is tamarind. hmmm. I think not.

As the fall turns to winter here, the crisp, cold air reveals the distant peaks of the Himalayas in all their glory. Every morning we can see the details of new snowfall, and make out new mountains on the horizon. Yesterday we spent some time naming the summits within our view and realized that a few of them are actually in Tibet.

The seasons are funny here. Even though it’s getting quite chilly, and the leaves are falling from many of the trees, all of the animals are giving birth as though it were spring. There are baby goats and cows everywhere. And one particular tree (a variety of wild cherry) is actually in bloom- pink petals coating the ground all over.

It’s also wedding season. Every time I go out walking in the villages, Bollywood dance songs are echoing through the valleys. Yesterday, some of the students called Keith in a tizzy. They had gone out to do some work at the NGO field office, and the staff there were not letting them walk back to their homestay because there was a wedding celebration going on in the village center. The staff were worried for the students' safety. They were worried for their own safety too. They were all women, and there were no men on hand to escort them- all the men were getting drunk and rowdy at the wedding celebration. Keith told them to have some chai and wait for the men of their homestay families to come get them. It’s only safe for me to go out walking alone because everyone assumes I’m a man- dressed as I am in pants, a hat, and a heavy wool vest I bought from the men’s shelf of the locally made clothing shop. This is a constant refrain of life in the rural villages here- the women are often left to do all the work as many of the men spend their days drunk and gambling.

Yesterday I was talking with Deepa (Deepa and Ashish own and operate Sonapani) about books (naturally). We ended up discussing Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. We both had sort of hated the author for putting us through all that misery when we first read the book. Every character is so blighted, there’s no ray of hope in their lives at all. Mistry is an incredible writer, but that book is a miserable experience to read. Deepa told me, though, that she’s come to appreciate the book more and more in the time that she’s lived here in the foothills. She and Ashish have started a sewing cooperative for some of the local women. They come for a few hours each day to an open building in the back of Sonapani with several sewing machines to make laundry bags which are sold to hotels in Delhi. With this money they’re able to buy propane for their stoves, so they don’t have to spend time foraging for wood and cutting down the oak trees in the surrounding forest. Deepa said that as they work, they talk about their lives. And every one of their stories has something of A Fine Balance in it. She says she’s come to appreciate that Mistry was telling us something important: the unvarnished truth.

For Our Friends in Seattle

AND, A mix FOR YOU TO DOWNLOAD, IF YOU LIKE.

Cutie pies!

Also, the sound of a water buffalo in heat: