I am here in India getting to know Anuja and her family and her country. Tall order. People back home in the United States are going through some serious stuff and I’m only able to call them or text them every so often because of the time difference. Ukraine is at war with Russia. Sri Lanka is facing economic collapse. And here I am chilling at a coffee estate. Additionally, I write this knowing that Erika will edit it. And knowing that I am doing things she, with the limitations on her mobility, cannot. Forget just showing her the other side of the ocean and all of the money and manpower that would entail. I want to show her the top of a hill.
And I just… can’t. Part of me says: let me sit at home in solidarity. But that’s no solution at all. So at least let me write down what I’ve seen and include some pictures.
The Point
More than anything else, I want to communicate to the average reader how… different and yet similar it feels to be here. How important the similarities are. Important enough that, despite growing up 7000 miles apart, Anuja is the person I feel most comfortable with in the world. That kind of comfort where you don’t have to try. But you want to. And different enough that I’m just constantly putting my foot in my mouth. Leaving the lights on. Leaving the electric heater on in the shower.
When I am with Anuja in her country, I feel as if I am home. And yet I’m constantly learning and forgetting and relearning how to do basic things. The only way I can think to communicate this feeling is by adopting the list-style that David Foster-Wallace uses to introduce his experience on a cruise ship in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” I have always loved that section and I now consider it a much-anticipated writing exercise to give you my version. As in his work, I hope I can share with you just how much there is to share with you. V. S. Naipaul wrote a book called: India: A Million Mutinies Now. I will share with you at most 5 to seven mutinies.
A Bit of Context
So. Anuja and I have spent a week in Bangalore. Then about a week in Bombay. Then about four days in Bangalore. During the second stint in Bangalore, my mom and stepdad arrived. Now Anuja and I are staying with her mom, my mom, and my stepdad on a coffee estate in western Karnataka. So what-all have I done since arriving in India?
A Car is a Mind-Altering Substance. So is Bhang.
I have gotten so motion-sick riding shotgun up and down the switch-back roads in the Western Ghats that I briefly but earnestly longed for the sweet embrace of death. The scenery was nice, though. Not just nice. Gorgeous. And coffee-flowers are apparently so pungent that it’s overwhelming. Or maybe there were just so many of them. Which is not what you want when you’re motion-sick. Also the flowers smell nothing like coffee. They just smell like generic flowers.
I have tasted a sip—a sip, mind you—of bhang thandai on Holi. And subsequently taken a nap that was not even remotely intentional. Yeah. It turns out I knew about the THC in advance, but not the opium.
Bliss
I have become friends with, and fed potato bhajji to, a dog. He is the sweetest dog I’ve seen in… hours. Later, when we were hiking together (Anuja and I, my stepdad, and a hired guide) the dog made us look bad because we were plodding up the narrow hill-path and he was racing in between the chest-high coffee bushes like they weren’t even there. The guide was born and raised in Nepal so what we required hiking-sticks and good shoes to accomplish, he did in flip-flops.
I have sat smiling on a front stoop for the full length of a thunderstorm. The way the clouds darkened the sky and the rain pelted down among the coffee bushes, the tall, slender trunks of the silver oaks that shade them, and the black pepper vines climbing up the silver oaks… is something I never want to forget. The way the hills in the distance went from blue to grey beneath the darkening sky. The way Anuja smiled with her whole being as the rain slicked her hair and eyelashes. We just sat and held hands and breathed deeply of the fresh petrichor. (The whole tableau lasted about 15 minutes total before the sun shone through once more.)
Fruit
I have approached a tree laden with figs the size of fists, palpated them for ripeness, and walked away in disappointment upon finding them to be harder than coconut-shells.
I’ve also cracked some coconut shells. By the way, cracking coconut shells is as much fun as it looks/sounds. Also. If a Bollywood stalker-thriller-movie ever gains international traction, part of the reason will be that the stalker’s murder-weapon-of-choice is the curved monstrosity that passes for a coconut-chopper.
I’ve become best friends with a five-year-old. Only to have my position callously usurped by my own mother. Remember that scene in the movie Scaramouche where the main character idolizes his fencing teacher but then breaks up with the teacher in favor of the teacher’s teacher? Yeah me neither.
Using fresh leaves, I’ve rubbed my hands until they smelled like:
-tea
-black pepper
-tulsi (yes like the presidential candidate; commonly translated into English as “sacred basil.”)
As it turns out, the leaves of black pepper smell like black pepper. But: cardamom leaves do not smell like cardamom, bay leaves do not smell like bay leaves (that is… until they’re dry), and tea leaves do not smell much like tea (again… until they’re dry).
Halebeedu Temple, or: India has Awesome Statues
I’ve seen an eight- or nine-hundred year old temple whose outer walls were covered in carvings of:
-Fellatio
-Doggy-Style
-Krishna lifting an entire mountain one-handed like a boss
-Shiva emerging triumphant from inside an elephant-shaped demon
-Nandi (a bull, and Shiva’s steed) looking frustrated at having to carry both Shiva and his wife, Parvati. That’s not his job. He’s Shiva’s steed. She has her own damn steed. It’s a mongoose when she’s happy; a lion when she’s angry. (She’s in a good mood. You can tell because she has a mongoose. Maybe that’s why Nandi is upset. He is a steed and he has to carry someone else’s steed. That’s like a horse having to carry two people and one of them is riding a donkey.)
-Shiva’s wife dancing on the corpses of her enemies while she wears a necklace of decapitated heads.
-Shiva dancing on the corpses of his enemies (you can see why they were such a power-couple. They had the same hobbies. Sometimes they finished each other’s nemeses.)
-Various gods spilling out all of the entrails of their enemies. Just. All of the entrails.
-Shiva and Parvati sharing a body. Sometimes simply called “Shiva-Parvati.” Also called Ardhanarishwara. This is the main patron-deity of intersex and trans Hindu people.
A Thought Stirs… What Inspired India’s Sculptors?
These carvings were made over the course of some 200 years. 200 years. Was there a mini-dynasty of entrail-sculptors? Was it one guy who was obsessed with entrails and who went around the temple carving all the entrails? Or was there a love of sculpting soapstone-viscera that transcended generations? Did kings rise and fall while this guild patiently handed down the secret to depicting ropey guts spilling out of the bellies of defeated demons? I don’t have any need to wonder how they got so good at imagining entrails in their work. There were a lot of wars in that era. Indeed, the carvings on the temple were stopped some three quarters of the way through. Because of a war. Which makes the obsession with guts all the more interesting.
It’s hard to tell what they were trying to express. Comedic effect? Virtuosity (it’s probably really difficult to carve soapstone entrails on a block that’s already been fitted into place)? Sublimation of everyday horrors into something beautiful? The tour guide was very knowledgeable, but some questions… if you can’t ask the original artist, you have to make do with speculation.
I could go on but it would take longer for me to describe them than for you to come here and see them. Seriously. There were a lot of sculptures. Thousands.
Poverty
I’ve seen more begging than even in New York. I don’t really know what to say about that. When you stop in traffic, as many as a dozen people might accost you. Pedlars selling trinkets. People asking for money.
Consumerism
I’ve gone jewelry shopping like 4 times.
Gone ice-cream shopping twice. Yes, “shopping” is the word. This place had 10 flavors and I’d only tried maybe 2 of them before. And even those two were a revelation. The ice cream alone is worth the travel-time from New York. Seasonal fruits. Rose petals. If you have tasted ice cream like this before then you’ve been here before.
Gone clothes shopping… maybe 3 times? I honestly don’t remember. The clothes here are so beautiful it feels like a flex on the rest of us.
Everyone knows about the Cuisines of India. But Seriously…
I have personally eaten all of the food. There is none left for you. It was in all the papers. Don’t @ me. No but seriously. India has a food scene that is just something else. I will follow up in another piece rather than commit a writerly injustice against my subject matter. Even just the differences between northern and southern Indian food is more complicated than I feel prepared to address. And the way the recipes for pickled mangos or flatbreads or dal might vary from state to state; from household to household.
Been given a thorough tour of a chai factory: from watching the fresh leaves loaded into baskets to watching the powder agitated by a machine designed to sort the grains of dried tea into different sizes. And of course we took in the surrounding hills of low-cropped tea bushes dotted with slender silver oaks.
The Aunties of India (including Anuja) will not Stop Feeding Me
I have been asked (in all seriousness) if I wanted a snack when I had, just an hour before, eaten some three plates of food and then washed the whole thing down with a cup of yogurt. The yogurt, no, the dairy in general, is deserving of its own article. Unless you’re actually living on a farm (which I’ve now also done in the course of this trip albeit for only a few days) the milk gets delivered by an honest-to-god milkman every morning. It then gets emptied into a pot and not-quite-boiled. Some of the resulting liquid is put aside with a spoon of the previous day’s yogurt. Some is set aside as-is.
Dairy
The coffee and tea here are next level, not necessarily because the coffee or tea itself is such a revelation, but because the milk is an order of magnitude better here than anywhere else I have been. And the yogurt is sweet and flavorful enough to take plain. Sometimes, as I’m reaching for the spoon, my host says: It’s quite sour today. Such modesty can be safely ignored. The flavor is still sweet and lush enough to make you almost weep.
I have eaten food so spicy I’ve had to splash water in my face afterwards. Yes really. It was good, though. No, better than good. Again. Another article. I’m sorry I keep teasing.
Kaccha-Limboo, i.e. Tag-Along
I have learned that, if you grow up in Bombay, you don’t play “Tag.” You play “Catch-Catch.” And a younger sibling has an official protected status. They call them “kaccha-limboo” which means “unripe lime” in Bombay-Hindi. None of the players are allowed to go after them just because they’re easy to catch. Also the person who’s “it,” i.e. who gets caught and subsequently has to catch someone else is called the “denner.” I like the idea that there are special rules to allow younger players to tag along. See what I did there? Also, if you call someone your own age “kaccha limboo” you’d better be ready for them to talk to their therapist about you a decade or two later.
Other phrases stand out as well. “Time-pass” means “chilling,” but they use it for everything.
-What did you talk about? Timepass.
-What did you do in the park? Timepass.
-What is your friend like? Very timepass.
Syntax: Bombay vs. Long Island
I have occasionally adopted Indian syntax to my speech, simply to avoid having to repeat myself when I say anything to anyone. It does feel like cultural appropriation. But I don’t know what else to do. To wit:
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“What?”
“I said: Would you like a cup of tea?”
“What?”
“Chai you’ll drink?”
“Yes, please.”
To be honest, I don’t feel any grudge. I come from Long Island and our accent sounds like we’ve just come out of anaesthesia, and are not closing our mouths enough to form our consonants all the way. It’s a travesty of an accent, and if, without the implication of cultural appropriation, I could straight-up trade it for Anuja’s Telugu-inflected Bombay pronunciation, I would. Very nice that would be. Very nice. But alas not. I’m doomed to drift on a wind of nitrous oxide fumes until I go to that overpriced diner in the sky. I’m doomed to say “sursly” instead of “seriously” and “cah-in” instead of “cotton” and “mask” when I mean “mosque” and “myask” when I mean “mask.” It’s a nightmare. Weep for me, friends. Weep for all of my slack-jawed kind.
Read Adam’s whole series of Bangalore Letters
Bangalore Letter #1
Tell One Story (Bangalore Letter #2)
Indian Food: A Love Story (Bangalore Letter #4)
