An open angry letter to the press

A bunch of us went to the Teej festival in Jaipur on Thursday. The parade was amazing, with elephants and camels and marching bands. We sat in a private balcony for tourists (read: white people) and ended up on the front page in the morning. Read the article here (I’m last on the right) and then the email I sent the author. I would file a libel lawsuit if I wasn’t leaving in a week.

Click on the .pdf for the first page

I’m leaving in a week!

Dear Sana Yaseen,

When a classmate showed me a picture of 10 participants in the American Institute for Indian Studies Summer Hindi Language Program on Friday morning at school in Bapu Nagar, I felt a wash of delight at seeing my face on the front page of DNA’s After Hours tabloid insert. That delight quickly eroded as I scanned down the page to read the article that referred to us repeatedly as tourists and stated explicitly that we were “unaware of the history and significance of one of the biggest festivals in the city.” The group of “tourists” pictured has lived in Jaipur since June 14, and I personally have lived here since January. We all have spent at least four hours of every day of our summer holiday from university studying Hindi. Our instructors gave a brief lecture on Teej a week ago and informed us of various events surrounding the festival all over the city. The women in front bought their sariis with their host mother, who mendiied their hands and helped wrap the yards of fabric. Instructors complimented my classmates on how authentic their sariis looked that morning. Referring to all the foreigners in attendance as unaware, ignorant tourists, especially while picturing a group of students without interviewing them or obtaining a release to publish our likenesses on the front page of a newspaper, is incorrect, irresponsible, and libelous.

All of the tourists quoted in the article were European, and I doubt that any were even on the Hind Hotel balcony. Police officers surrounded the balcony of the Hind where we sat, and only allowed light-skinned people to take seats. A local reporter would have had great trouble gaining entry. When I entered with my classmates Tarik and Anish the police treated me with great deference while harassing my Indian looking, but distinctly American, friends. Tarik grew up in Canada and the US, and his forebears emigrated from Indian diaspora settlements in Africa. He had to explain to the police officer in clear American English that he was with us and not one of the hundreds of young men who had gathered on the street below the Hind to stare at the spectacle of foreigners above. As your article reaffirmed, the gathered caucasian and far-eastern looking people provided just as much a show as the parade.

I haven’t walked down a street comfortably in seven months. Everywhere I go, I look different and people on the street treat me like an alien. The constant barrage of empty stares, hellos, and Hindi-language racial slurs that I do understand exhausts me. I’ve had to comfort crying female friends after Indian men have sexually harassed and abused them on the street. Indians do not receive this treatment in India; nor do my Indian-looking American friends. The abuse stems from a xenophobic fascination with different-looking people. This blatantly racist treatment of foreigners in India objectifies those foreign guests and leaves them feeling less than human.

Many tourists in India are ignorant, but not all. I picked up on the irony when you mentioned that two white girls tried the kacchi ghori horse dance at the entreaty of folk dancers in the parade. The Hindi slur that roughly translates to “whitey” or “honkey” corresponds with the word for horse, ghora. But not all foreigners are tourists. Even if they are ignorant tourists, all of the foreigners in your city are humans and should receive the accordant respect. By publishing our picture without our consent and then associating that likeness with false generalizations about our ignorance and quotations that we did not make, you have opened yourself to a libel suit that I do not care to undertake. By publishing an article that perpetuates the ostracism of foreigners in your city, you have contributed to your city’s an inhospitable place for people who look un-Indian.

Everybody wants what they can’t have

I checked my email after school today and found nothing more interesting than the regular www.change.org message that I usually only skim.  One of the latest things they’ve decided to fuss about– and often that fuss turns into real change through a massive network of people who sign the online petitions– is a new Facebook application by Vaseline advertising a men’s skin lightening product, with Shahid Kapoor, a huge Bollywood star, as the leading man.  Living in India now, I suppose I notice articles about the subcontinent in my old media outlets much more.  The New York Times published a piece last week about polyandry in the Kullu Valley, where I spent a week in May.  The world is probably not becoming noticeably  more aware of India in the last six months, but at least I notice when this big country gets noticed.

Of all the things I notice here that run completely contra my American cultural norms, skin lightening and men’s beauty care have been easy to notice.  Often people I meet compliment me on my fair complexion, sometimes after calling me beautiful.  Generally people I meet are men– the tendency to say things perceivable as gay in casual conversation is another cultural difference, right in line with man-friends holding hands and cuddling in public.  At home, I work all summer outside, shirtless, avoiding sunscreen to cultivate the strongest tan possible and get the opposite compliment: “what a healthy tan you have!”  Here, women and less men wear gloves cum sleeves to keep their skin out of the sun.  Shots in TV serials (soap operas in American English) strike me as underexposed in order to make the actors’ skin look as light as possible.

The facebook app takes a profile picture and lifts an easy photoediting technique, knocking out the light tones of a portion of the picture selected with a face-shaped lasso.  A spot brush removes dark spots.  Another anecdotal observation about Indian men sheds light on this aspect of the issue.  Young, rich men here, or at least some of the sons of jewelers I know in Jaipur: 1.) love the way they look, spending hours at the gym and hair salons and 2.) love putting pictures of themselves up on Facebook, often with whatever white girls they can meet.  In some ways, this class of rich Indian boys run parallel to much-derided sorority girls at major US universities– they travel in packs, take copious self-portraits, and love to party.

Those sorority girls have another thing in common with these boys.  They want to change the color of their skin.  Light skinned people in the US use tanning beds, naps by the pool, or tanning creams (should I say skin-darkening creams to be politically correct?) to make their complexion less fair.  Months ago as I rode on the back of a motorcycle with an acquaintance, he summed it up nicely in a characteristically Indian bout of simple English profundity: “people everywhere think the same.  They want what they can’t have.”  Vaseline justified the application with this statement, lifted from the Deccan Chronicle: ““Much like self-tanning products in North America and Europe, skin-lightening products are culturally relevant in India.  In India, men use these products to lighten and even out their natural skin tone and to reduce the appearance of spots while protecting their skin from the sun.”

The main point raised in my brief survey of news coverage on this minor story is that the Vaseline campaign is inherently racist, and that Facebook shouldn’t allow it as such.  So, sorority girls, models, and I are racist too– we want to look darker.  I’ve had to learn to think about my own culture before I condemn norms here.  So does change.org.  Perhaps Indian PR people use a little less finesse when marketing potentially divisive products, or weren’t sensitized to racial issues in an America still wrought with the remnants of the civil rights issue.

Change.org is correct in asking Facebook to disallow this application, but not simply because it’s racist.  ”Racist” is far too easy a label, and a difficult one to use in India.  Whitening creams, and tanning creams, can actually be very damaging to health.  I easily notice someone using them heavily on the street– his or her skin looks terrible, unnatural, and usually fraught with pimples.  There are some allegedly carcinogenic ingredients, let alone some terribly caustic bleaches.

But we all want what we can’t have.  An irrationality of humans, maybe, but people can work to accept what they’ve got.  Media outlets can help in that cause as much as they can perpetuate unhealthy and destructive cultural norms.

Here’s the change.org petition.  Consider joining their list.  I don’t often participate, but the email is occasionally an interesting source for news.

http://www.change.org/petitions/view/dear_facebook_please_stop_running_racist_apps

Moments of routine absurdity

The first time I noticed stone-proof grating it surrounded security checkpoints full of Rashtriya Rifles troops in Srinagar.  The wire is a loose mesh of approximately 1″x1″ squares, with rectangular holes big enough for a gun.  Cars in that city have this stone-proof protection instead of proper windshields and windows.  Enough of that province’s war has been fought with sticks and stones to warrant a truly third-world security innovation.

I noticed the grating in Jaipur today.  As Kelsey and I walked to school, a bank car passed us.  In the US, Brinks would have inch-thick plating on all the walls with bullet-proof glass and two guards with shotguns in the back.  Whatever Jaipur has important enough to enjoy transport armored accomodation travels in a glorified milk truck with the grating over all the glass surfaces.  Nothing else but a shoddily painted blue outline of a shield demarcates the car from any old truck.  The driver has a small rectangle open in the windshield through which he can see, a rather difficult target for a potential robber.

In the US, banks need to worry about armed highway robbery where burglars have at least handguns.  In India, the people important enough to hire armored cars suffer a nearly comically different threat– mobs of little people throwing rocks.  The best guard against this is essentially a fence mounted about two inches above any glass surface.  Then the rock barrage simply bounces off.  No shots fired– even bankers here can’t afford guns.

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year– about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.  I attempted to buy eggs at one of Jaipur Dairy’s streetside shops.  As I picked up an egg covered in chickenshit, it felt hot enough in my hand to have likely cooked in the shell.  When people joke about frying an egg on asphalt on a hot day, they aren’t kidding– the weather is hot enough here to fry a human.  I wonder how many people get sick from these eggs that hardly ever sit in refrigeration.  I’ll have to make a road omelet some time.

We also passed a family of mildly crippled people, fresh from the hospital, on the way to school.  One man had a wrist cast on; what could have been his brother wore a brace on his right leg and ambulated with a pathetic limp.  The broken-armed man flashed the idiotic hello that ignorant bigots use for people of different color and thrust his hand at me with a pushy, poorly pronounced “hello.”  Having just left my house, I wasn’t ready to be a celebrity yet and simply squeezed between him and a car to my right.  The bastard touched me, and Kelsey said as we passed, “you should have hit him.”  ”Did he touch you?” I replied, ready to turn heel and level some justice in this world of sexism and xenophobia.  ”No, but he touched you.”

And she was right.  The treatment I and the white people I walk around with recieve here from some Indians on the street is reprehensible.  Some of my colleagues put up with it, saying that we chose to come here, that our flaunting of the affluence to afford even a plane ticket here somehow earns such abuse.  I, for one, am tired of the abuse– regardless of my affluence, race, or nationality, I shouldn’t have to tolerate strangers touching me on the street.  Indians would never touch an Indian stranger for fear of an altercation or a slap in the face.  Westerners, however, are either too sheepish or too stupid or too ignorant to stand up to such abuse.  We’ll just chalk it up to cultural difference, and peddle away embarassedly.  I’m tired of it.  The next kid who thinks it’s OK to touch me will find himself laid out for ruining my morning and violating basic respect that people owe each other.

And I’m generally a reeking pacifist.

Waterfalls

After a full day and night of rain, I padded out the front door of my hotel room in Old Manali to make use of 8:30 gray light and damp air.  The rain still hadn’t stopped but only slowed to a moderate trickle, gently beating on an unfinished bare concrete roof to my right as rusted rebar thrust from support columns or lay prone.  Through the pitterpatter of rain on concrete and tin, I could hear the roar of the engorged Beas river at least a kilometre down the valley.  An Israeli stopped back into his room to my left to grab his raincoat for breakfast– he must have thought, as I did, that the downpour must have stopped in this supposedly dry area.  The monsoon shouldn’t even think about starting until July.

New waterfalls had sprouted up overnight on the opposite side of the valley to whisk thousands of litres of fresh water down an ill-prepared forest.  Only one punctuated the green with an impressive roar days ago; now at least ten were visible from my perch.  In any other landscape, I’d describe the runoff as streams or trickles, maybe even flash rivers on a bad day.  But the Himalaya demands more dramatic words.  Its sharp new cuts into the land don’t allow water to flow, it must fall down valley sides that can easily fit the description “cliff” or “wall.”  And these are only really the foothills– still higher above sea level than the average mountain at home.  They’re new here much like McDonald’s, ketchup, or alcoholism, not worn-in or tired-out like their analogues at home.

Hopefully we’ll tackle some whitewater downstream tomorrow.  Looking out the window of a riverside cafe now, the river is so swollen that an electricity line draped makeshift across the banks, as most power lines are strung in India, is struggling to stay connected under the surging runoff.  No wonder the power has been so spotty the last few days.  If the river is too wild, we can at least go zorbing.

Police

Kelsey and I left Lady Willingdon hospital in New Manali after purchasing a course of diuretics, membrane stabilizers, rehydration salts, and peristalsis inhibitors to treat her strangely severe bout of mountain sickness.  Playing nurse, supporting her starving weakened legs, I looked for the first rickshaw available to take us up the hill to our hotel.  I saw one parked ten meters from the hospital, and veered my patient and friend toward the driver.  Out poked his two lazy eyes– not my favorite trait in a driver– and I relayed our destination in my pathetic Hindi and Indian accent.  He indicated that the journey was possible, and I perhaps too quickly flicked open the curtain to the rickshaw’s backseat.  To my alarm, a policeman’s goofily snoring face stared back up at me.  All four parties– Kelsey, the driver, the cop, and I– jumped back a little, shocked until the cop let fly with a boyish chuckle.   Everyone laughed in turn.  I’m still wondering what the hell a cop was doing napping in the back of a rickshaw.  India, huh?

Almost college

I arrived in Darjeeling on a great note after a weekend of hell. At midnight on Friday, I had a train booked to Varanasi from Haridwar, newage hippy town to newage hippy town both on the Ganges. From the top of the river, lush sharp valleys with icecold glacial water at the bottom, to the wideset Gangetic plain, a suddenly huge silted river with constant flames of cremation about the banks. When I inquired about my train whose number eluded the in-construction timing board, the little graveyard shift government worker showed a face of pity and found a young man who spoke English. “Your train is 12 hours late,” he told me, with a touch of irony and distanced regard for a hairy white man twice his size. I was exhausted at such a late hour, and the sheer absurdity of the statement– 12 hours!– drove me nearly to tears as I shouldered my pack into the head ticket counter’s office. I initially demanded a refund, but over a long mess of attempting to come up with alternative plans, I settled for a bed at the railway station for the night. My train ended up departing 7 hours late, after I got a nap.

I arrived in Varanasi around 8 that evening, a 13-hour day socked away on a train. Again exhausted, I searched for a hotel in that shithole of a holy place. It was more crowded than Jaipur, even though it’s considered one of the holiest places in India. If a Hindu can make her way to Varanasi to die, she instantly reaches liberation. The banks of the Ganges burn constantly with funeral pyres.

I met an Irish couple at dinner. They were headed to Darjeeling the next day as well, and we decided to share a taxi to the train station. I overslept of course, but I ended up catching them at the end of the journey. This train was only 5 hours late. We shared a hotel that we managed to find around 1 in the morning.

As we crawled out of a jeep that carried us to Darjeeling proper, the Irish fellow felt seasick. The obvious remedy was a cold brew. We found a dingy bar, ordered beers, and commenced a long afternoon of what I can only imagine pub life in Dublin is like. By midnight, I had met my Jaipur roommate Paul and stumbled into a hotel room. The Irish earned their reputation that I can only begin to understand with my Irish-American friends who usually drink me under the table.

Darjeeling is full of Western tourists. Over a week here, I’ve hung out with not only my American classmates who I randomly ran into in a restaurant, but a group of Australians, an afternoon of guitar-lounging with a Swedish and German man, a lovely couple from Seattle, and myriad other people I can’t help but run into. It’s like freshman year again, running into the same people over and over in a small town. We don’t have anything in common but our relative wealth and our experiences traveling. In college, the commonality rested on everyone’s displacement from parent’s homes and hometowns. Here, everyone feels similarly displaced, and the common experience of outsiderness in India provides a ground to relate. We can sit for hours and hours, swapping stories from Rajasthani villages or Thai beach raves, drinking dodgy Sikkimese beer. This morning as I ate breakfast at the place I’ve visited daily for a week, I saw solidly 10 people I’ve befriended– just like Haven dining hall in Syracuse three years ago.

Tomorrow I catch a 24-hour train to Delhi. That city will feel like hell next to Darjeeling, crowded, hot, polluted, and busy. But I’ll meet a great friend on Friday, and set off for Srinagar and Leh. A shot of hell to get to paradise.

Alone, wild

I walked down the hill from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in an exhausted haze.  After two days of their basic mountaineering course, I had become frustrated enough to cuss out the principal, get a refund, and strike out on my own.  It can only be described as Boy Scout camp for grown Indian men.  Lectures, which lasted all day, included “how to pack a rucksack” and “campsite hygiene and setting up tents” and “first aid.”  The latter lasted 2 hours and occurred twice.  The military doctor instructor presented a cardinal rule, accepted internationally, that a male should never treat a female without a female attendant present.  Many in the audience had never heard of first aid or CPR.

I walked into Uttarkashi with no plan and horrified at the prospect.  Several attempts at trekking agents yielded nothing– Indian law prohibits sale or rent of topographic maps, and all equipment available necessitates a porter because it’s huge.  I couldn’t do the solo trek I wanted to.  Disaster, desolation.  I drank a pint of rum with the wine shop owner in my hotel restaurant that night, struggling not to lose my head.

In the morning, I made a pass at my neighbor in the hotel.  He seemed odd wrapped only in a cloth around his waist, but I saw a tent draped across his room.  His body had the shriveled cut of a toughass, the type who spends a lot of time in the woods shirtless.  I greeted him awkwardly as he polished his weathered boots and listened to monstrous headphones attached to a 1980s vintage walkman slung around his neck.  He responded favorably, obviously hurting for some human interaction.

Tony told me in a heavy Brighton accent that he’s spent the last 5 weeks trekking alone around the mountains here.  He’s been doing so off and on for the last 20 years.  I subtly let across that I wanted to trek up to Dodi Tal or Gaumukh the next day, but that I had no gear and couldn’t find a map.  Out of loneliness and a kind spirit, he offered to take me along to Dodi Tal, and we left off the next day.

I departed 27 April for this trek, and will return in 5-10 days.  Look for an update around that time.  With my month of unexpected freedom, I can do anything in India.  If you’ve traveled around this country before, please comment with suggestions.  I’m thinking about trekking in Nepal, where I can buy some decent equipment, ulti-tripping around south India, or trekking in the East Himalayas.  Updates will be rare and short.

Animals (Mid-April)

“The poorest children, they live with animals all the time.  They are like animals,” replied Khem Raj after he successfully dispersed the pack that had gathered to follow us as we departed the village of Bhils.  At the first house we stopped in that evening, the crowd had begun to accumulate, staring at me.  They giggled and ogled. Khem Raj translated, “they say you are woman,” and referred to my long hair.  Slowly the little boy who started that idea recognized my stubble, and decided my protestation was correct.  Ten or fifteen kids crowded around me, silent, staring.  I attempted to return their curiosity, glancing around the circle, but the children continued their blank stares.  Not even a hint of shyness.  One little girl had rare green eyes that swirled almost blue.  They drew me in, a beautiful child, until the girl adjacent her jeered lewdly and set my mood to discomfort.

We moved on.  The children crowded around as we stepped onto the street, still silent.  I felt it necessary to speak out in English, “y’all are staring at me?  Why?  It’s weird.”  They laughed more, without any comprehension, and Khem Raj began to sense how uncomfortable I felt.

We entered the next house through a magnificently low door.  The gaggle had grown on the walk and tried to follow us in, and Khem Raj yelled at them to stay out, the first time he raised his voice.  On the other side of the gate, in an open yard, I noticed that the door was merely symbolic, as a gaping hole in the perimeter fence allowed cows and presumably people free passage.  Khem Raj’s upbraiding held the kids at bay, although they continued to ogle me through the silly door.  Khem Raj started the spiel, there’s a meeting tomorrow or job cards and to discuss BPL status, it’s at the office in Amarpura, 10 o’clock.  The tribal people before us (Bhils are a tribal group, outside of the caste system) politely accepted his invitation, but squirmed in the way I used to watch people on the street squirm from an invitation to church.  Their children sat docilely before us, with the exception of an occasionally screaming baby.  One boy had the right leg of his trousers hiked up to his crotch, with a strip of cloth tied tightly around his thigh.  When he rose, he showed an exaggerated limp, clearly in pain.  “Abscess, or something,” Khem Raj replied when I asked what had happened.  Before long the boy was using a rod of bamboo for a crutch as he hobbled out to the child assemblage, trying to interact with hyenas.

The most intrepid boys in the crowd occasionally attempted to invade.  Verbal abuse kept them at bay, but they held out the siege until we left.  I nearly had to shove my way through to get out the door, and the wait had emboldened the children to start their shrieking riot of English words and sing-song Hindi.  The noise made them seem like hundreds, claustrophobically hemming me in.  We took a shortcut through an old woman’s home to the road to dodge them, but moments later, we heard the crowd pouring down the street after us.  I wanted only to soak in the dusk over beautifully wooded hills.

When the noise started to encroach our conversation and the kids started to gain ground on us, Khem Raj kept yelling.  Outside of their village and safe from the blows of adults within, the children took no heed of verbal abuse.  Khem Raj suddenly took off running toward them, screaming the whole time as I bemusedly watched.  The tail of his kurta flapped in the wind as his sandals flopflopped on the pavement.  He began hurling stones when the charge didn’t scare the children enough.  Women in the villages often throw rocks similarly, always falling short, to chase cattle from their yards.  The kids turned heel and ran before Khem Raj had to actually beat any of them.

The children reemerged and chanted “ghora, ghora” (roughly translated to “whitey, whitey”) from the village walls as we mounted our scooter to drive home.  This was the second time children had crossed my thresholds of personal space and respect, dredging up claustrophobic panic.  A friend who accompanied me in the first experience, where 11 year old boys sexually harassed her, assuaged the guilt I felt at my rage for the children: people have to have some amount of respect for each other, no matter what their culture.  Patience appropriately evaporates with the crossing of that line of basic human respect.

For an eminently compassionate community organizer to characterize children as animals and treat them as such takes a serious transgression.  I struggled with that comment.  But the behavior exhibited by more than simply this group of kids earned it.  This aggression has not been restricted to Indian children; I’ve occasionally noticed it in particularly bratty upper-class white kids or kids from the projects in Syracuse.  Language barriers only exacerbate the problem.  The kids who act like animals simply lack parents, who stay either in the fields all day or drunk or pouring over legal documents.  Today’s kids really did spend their days in the forest with their goats, completely autonomous, with nothing to do in the village at night.

People, even those who might as well be aliens, need some respect.  When anyone, even a child, violates that basic respect, they bend my mind and lose their claims on humanity in the judgement of some.

Dying Hindus

As I stumbled off the electric scooter Khem Raj and I use to visit villages around our NGO campus, an elderly man struggled to sit up and greet us from his rope cot. His hands shook into the standard Indian greeting, palms touching held up just below the shoulders. The cot sat on the side of the village’s main road, a small metal cup sitting near one of the legs. Skin barely covered his arms. The bones barely had the girth of bones, a slight skeleton wasted by undernutrition and illness. Hollow, perpetually bewildered eyes poked out from under his furrowed brow. The only normal-sized part of his body was a disproportionate nose, cratered with decades of dirt and acne scars. As the man spoke with Khem Raj, his asthmatic chest heaved laboriously, wheezing through every muttered word. After a sentence or two the gasping would start, the man’s eyes popping out slightly for a panicked, darting search for air.
Before long, the standard questions came. “He wants know your village name,” Khem Raj translated, to which I standardly reply “America,” however much I want to say Canada or Iceland or Norway, just for kicks. Usually the villagers respond with exaggerated remarks and gesticulation about how pretty a place it is, or a quip about how my country’s foreign policy is no good and India’s is sensible. (Khem Raj surely spins the latter in translation). This man’s bewilderment escalated. I repeated myself, Khem Raj repeated me. “Amerika.”
The man mumbled a bit, and Khem Raj displayed uncharacteristic surprise. “He says he’s never heard of it.” My mouth dropped a bit, maybe too obviously. How could anyone not know of my country, the greatest, the only remaining superpower?
Khem Raj, sensing my perplexment, asked the man how many foreign countries he could name. The man paused. Khem Raj prompted: “Pakistan?” After a nod, the man rattled off “Pakistan, Gujarat…” Khem Raj felt the need to explain to me that Gujarat is a state immediately to the southwest of Rajasthan, but I knew as much and already had slipped into shock at this man’s complete lack of awareness of the outside world.
Khem Raj offered the man a swallow of homeopathic medicines, little white pills in vials that Khem Raj always carries on these village excursions. It was a generous gesture, but clearly conciliatory. This man was waiting for death.
Another man we met lay in a similar state. He’s been suffering a fever every four o’clock for six months, and his legs clearly couldn’t support his weight to allow him to leave the rope bed that sat just inside his home. Khem Raj helped him clean off the plate of porridge he finished as we walked into the house, noticing that the man’s hands hardly had the strength to lift a cup of water. After the introductions (he had heard of America,) the man looked pleadingly into my eyes and asked if I was a doctor or only a guest. Not long after I sheepishly related my complete lack of useful skills, the man lapsed into tears. He had asked an eigth standard (eigth grade) boy some time ago for help, hoping the relatively advanced education would entail some understanding of disease. The boy advised a set of religious rituals, claiming to have been graced by the divine. All the man had to do was rid himself of the bad spirits that were wracking his body. Months later, he sat alone, awaiting his feverish delirium, awaiting his eminent death.
That disease was surely treatable, perhaps simply malaria. These old– very old– men were left to suffer alone, trapped on a cot with an occasional cup of water and porridge. Their bodies wasted away, already malnourished from a lifetime of crushing poverty. These men belong to a generation for whom village life meant zero interaction with the world outside of a few acres of farm. They likely remember the first lightbulb in their village; they might even remember independence if they’ve heard of it. Schools didn’t exist, in this area before the last decade. Now, a longhair white guy comes along to visit. He comes from an unintelligible place, where maybe the youngsters in the village know of MJ.
And he is asked: “why are you here? Why have you come so far to see us? Do you want to buy wheat?”

Birthday hooch

Tribal peoples in the southeastern part of Rajasthan worship the mahua tree, a vital part of the semi-arid landscape. Not only does it provide scarce wood for timber and fuel, it annually drops sweet, beautiful flowers. Village-dwellers daily gather the buds throughout March and early April, cleaning the ground around the trees and filling bowls that will ride atop heads to each home. The yellow flowers curve in a vase-like shape, never opening as a garden flower would. They taste sweet, too sweet, with a sharp afterkick.
Once gathered, the buds sit on every household’s rooftop for a few days until dried out by the sun. They resemble raisins in texture. Villagers sell the dry buds at the market, keeping some for their truly sacred purpose—mahua wine.
India has enacted harsh liquor laws in religious fervor and reaction to a severe alcoholism problem. Booze costs almost as much as it would in the cheapest US states—South Carolina and Georgia, settings of my spring breaks, come to mind. This makes the ancient practice of mahua distillation feel like the fabled moonshiners of the US prohibition period, tribals illicitly cooking up their sacred brew down by the river. The dried buds sit in a pot of water for no more than three days, soaking into a sort of mash. Then the woman of the house will take the pot down to the irrigation canal, and boil the mash while a second pot waits in the cool water. A pipe carries the steam to the river pot where the alcohol condenses.
Gautam, my companion along with Dinesh for the day of “field visits,” procured a plastic bag full of what could be urine as we waited for supper at the village household. When they asked my age earlier, I let slip that it was my birthday, that I was now 21. Dinesh, the English speaker, expressed a bit of concern in his congratulations as he visibly puzzled over how to properly celebrate with his American guest. Gautam saved the day: “Drink? Mahua?”
My Indian companions shared a metal pitcher from which they poured my drinks into a small cup. The piss-colored liquid smelled flowery, as expected, and met the palate with a light kick. I involuntarily shuddered as I swallowed the first gulp as the whiskey-like aftertaste surprised me. “This is all natural, no added chemicals, no alcohol,” Dinesh assured me. I think he meant added alcohol. Dandelion or lilac wine must taste similar, but nothing I’ve ever had really compares. Homemade mead I tried before leaving for India comes close for its natural sweetness.
Two bags later, we sat down for a tasty dinner of dal and bhati, or, lentil soup and baked whole-wheat hardtack balls. I hardly registered a buzz—the drink affected the head as lightly as the tastebuds. But I still felt exultant, having shared “a memorable evening in Indian village,” as Dinesh put it after I let out an unsolicited chuckle, with new friends.