India to Atlanta

In Atlanta, I walked downtown along the Bike Path of Freedom. It ended into the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial Park, with its lawns barely worked up to a springtime green and jolly man on a lawnmower who smiled and waved at me as I walked by. The air smelled of mown wild onions, which were growing up tall and green in clumps through the yellowed grass.

I walked down the Civil Rights Walk of Fame, where people like Jesse Jackson and Ted Turner have their names in black marble in the sidewalk, and there are plaques inscribed with beautiful quotes from M.L.K. Jr. that ring true today as much as they ever have. At the end of the Walk, a bronze sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi greeted me. He wears his spectacles and his lungi and his shawl, as he did through his life. And there I was, in my jacket stitched on the plane ride back from India from a simple wool blanket, and in my wool pants from Munna the tailor. The smell of chives in my nose. Bills with Gandhi’s face printed on them still in my pocket. What a strange world we live in.

Margins of error

I nearly ran over a blind man's cane today on my bicycle ride to Sunderpur. Many other near collisions I don't even notice--because they are behind me. Things that I cannot see are outside of my control. The streets here are ruled by little more than the laws of physics, and how badly can you get hurt when nothing is moving faster than 10 mph? But you see blood, almost daily. Cow's hooves cracked, their tails grazed, countless three-legged dogs. There is no margin of error here.

This place seems perpetually on the verge of collapse. Perhaps two months ago on my way to Sunderpur, I saw the most beautiful of load-bearing columns--an impossible column, made of unmortared brick, curved in a beautiful "S" up to the corrugated sheet-metal roof. It fell days later. One slip can ruin a family.

Maybe this sounds dark or bitter. It is neither. Here only is an urban jungle that is characterized by constant struggle for survival. There is something about the rawness that I love, and that I will miss. A very small part of this struggle I have come to embody, and will carry home with me on Monday.

Flight, flightless

Sushma's name means "natural beauty", but she has always reminded me of some injured animal. She is like the calf I saw with the broken hoof, or the black dog with the nerve-damaged leg who lies down in front of cars hoping to be killed. She is the dove with one wing painted red and one painted blue, wheelingg around and around the sky. There are two slices of apple left on the plate, and one broken morsel--"This is you, and this one is John-sir," she tells me, giving me the two slices. "And this one is me." She pops the broken piece in her mouth.

She is my petite weaving teacher, now friend. She has hands of a porcelain doll. Perhaps she reaches five feet tall, but she folds her shoulders in like a pair of neglected wings and appears smaller, still. It used to be that she was afraid of me--I think she is afraid of the whole world. I might be, too, if every close female relation fell deathly ill in the last year and a half--Shushma, 22 years old, slept, curled about her mother until her mother was diagnosed with TB and nearly died last spring. A year ago, her sister suffered a dangerous bout of chicken pox, and then found herself inexplicably paralysed. Her sister-in-law just had her gall bladder taken out. For herself, she tells me, "Physically, I am okay. It is sentimentally I am not okay...."

Our friendship has become such that her smile is real, and I can tell that she is happy to see me. Sometimes she slaps me on the back and I resound. Some formalities remain--the empty glass for my filtered water and biscuits that she brings me when I arrive at her house to weave. The way she blesses herself and the loom every day, before we start working. We take chai at 5pm, just when the sun is sinking lower, just before I trundle back to my home. These formalities I would not change, if I could.

But then, there is the gulf between us. The duties that she bears as daughter, woman, Orthodox Hindu. I am... what am I? American, I guess. Woman and daughter, too, without a subscription to any particular god--but woman and daughter are words I can say without imagining myself in shackles. Sushma dreams a little of feminism, of independence. She's told me so herself. But her family and her religion come before everything else, certainly herself. And how can I judge the way she will live her life? How can I come close to understanding why she makes the choices that she will make? What is so wonderful about the choices I have made--my flight from responsibilities?

River. And Riven.

Heather and I just saw the largest flock of birds ever. Millions and millions of... swallows? swifts? flying inches above the dusk-clad Ganges, up-river. The flock was quite wide and it took about 10 minutes for them all to pass. They were like a 2nd river, an anti-river; I was awash in easy poetry. Heather kept getting distracted by an adorable and very much dying puppy with a feather stuck to its nose. Death is everywhere here, it's true.

And I realized last night that India has broken me down in certain ways. I often feel that I'm nothing here. I'm not good at anything. I sit at home all day struggling to make any noticable progress on a maddeningly difficult instrument. And still, I'm ok. In the past few weeks I discovered that the thing that could most easily make me crazy is illness. When sick for a long time, it's like I'm in a long-distance relationship with myself: I start fighting just to remember what's good about me, what I'm actually like. Heather keeps saying that she and I are very "immediate" people. I suppose I also subscribe to the "one is what one does" theory of being, which is proving problematic. Guess I'll have to start moving towards the "inherent self-worth" theory. Dammit.

Bacon, Lettuce, Tuberculosis

I've been sick for a week. Heather and I made the mistake of eating at the only 5-Star restaurant in Varanasi (they even offered a BLT?!) and as a result Heather was sick for a few hours by the northern route while my body decided to take the slow, southern road. Never felt so weak for so long. So damn frustrating to build myself up to a high level of tabla practice only to have the muscle melt away in a matter of days because I couldn't digest anything. Heather's been amazing to me through all of this. She even wanted to stay home with me on New Year's Eve, which I find unbelievable. Phil whooped it up for both of us. I'm getting better now. No need to fret, Mom.

In an effort to spare you all, we haven't been posting most of the bad stuff. Here's a quick rundown:

- Giardia is a hilarious and awful parasite that makes the sufferer continually burp, fart, and shit stuff that stinks like rotten eggs. Times I have had a bout of Giardia in the past 5 months: 4. Heather wins with 6 bouts. We finally found the right antibiotic.

- Heather and Phil have been repeatedly and savagely attacked by the cat we lovingly feed; no rabies, though I suddenly feel justified in my feline indifference.

- I ate what I thought was an Indian sweet, but was really a ball of Bhang. I thought I was dying, terrible puking, 8 hours of believing in death, seeing skulls, etc.

- Heather has gracefully survived 3 sinus infections and at least 5 serious dances with the deadly treenut.

- Every American who has visited us has been nailed by a nasty stomach bug by their 3rd day, except for Phil, who (perhaps because of previous India visit) is impervious to all the bugs here!