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On Inhabiting India
back by popular demand, here is another one of zach's letters (only the 3rd draft...i guess he wants to edit. again). he wanted me to edit the music paragraph which you might want to disregard because it's not really...accurate, well some of it is. i'll edit it eventually. here it is:
I blink my eyes and see a modernish flat-screen monitor on a corner table
in an internet caf頷here the air and the hair share more than
conditioner. There's a palpable feeling of home and sweat as Google News
thoughtfully partners stories of human tragedy in Lebanon with
untelligent op-eds about a "dwarfish ?atholic bigot with a fondness
for blonde fans." [i] Oh Jews, you're the ones chosen to keep me
entertained and appalled.
I've spent the past week living with my host family in a
small but roomy flat far, far from anywhere. Finding a rickshaw that
will take me from class back home has forced me to rediscover curse-words
I left behind in middle school, and during a rare inspired moment, to
invent a few of my own. Rickshaw drivers seem as oblivious as the cows
to the French I mutter as we bounce along backstreets searching for
smooth surfaces among islands of potholes. In the stretches of open road
where there's no standing traffic, standing water, standing people or
standing cows, where big construction equipment isn't parked, where the
pot holes aren't, where no one is begging, selling, buying or sleeping,
and the on-coming traffic confines itself to its side of the road, I
simultaneously watch as the rickshaw buzzes down the road and the
fare-meter skips digits: 5.1 (kilometers), 5.2, 5.6, 5.8, 5.9,
6.1,...Rupees drain from my pocket like chai from my glass, taking the
warm, happy feeling of a superior exchange rate as they go.
Despite their inconvenient real-estate, my host family is
really good. Or I should say, my host widow (whom I've taken to calling
My Widow, which sounds like I'm her deceased husband, God rest his soul).
Aunty, as I call her to her face, is 66 years young, mostly blind,
half-deaf and sweeter than diabetic blood. She loves to laugh, and sounds
like a little girl when she does, which is something I cherish in a
non-Michael Jacksonian kind of way. Her food is awesome, the apartment
is clean, and her English is gooder than mine. She's helping me learn
Marathi, and I help her make her bed. (For the duration of my tenancy in
her apartment, she's given her bed to me and is sleeping on the living
room sofa. [And for some reason my grandma complained when we put her in
a nursing home with cable TV!] I feel awful about this, but in her
words, "I'm Indian, I will manage." Old Indian people know how to rock
it oldschool. Take that, Grandma).
I'm sharing Aunty's apartment proper with a Persian student.
Mosin (Mo-seen) is really nice and really strong, and a devout Shi'ia
Muslim. He wants to come to America for more schooling and maybe an
American wife (and I thought my dad was the only one). I ride with him
to school each morning on his Hero Honda motorcycle, running a gauntlet
of nouns from the second paragraph. At night, we discuss language,
religion, and regional politics over Indian and Persian tea. My entire
apartment complex is full of Persian students, studying at one of Pune's
30+ universities: Sia (See-ah) lives right below Aunty and me, and
speaks very quickly with a pseudo-French accent. Fasil lives next to
him, and occasionally we rock the hookah. Ali lives one flight up from
me, and we sip coffee, smoke cigarettes and discuss deep things like
which Indian actresses are the prettiest and what will be the next major
development in the Middle East.
I've learned a lot from the Persians. All of them speak
conversational English, and none of them really likes India (it's too
dirty. And how). They hate their government and the theocracy, and they
love George Bush. They think attacking the Taliban and Saddam was the
best thing since pita bread. I've met more Bush supporters in two weeks
in India than in two years at Grinnell. But it is Grinnell. They want
their government gone, they really don't like Arabs for some complicated
reasons, and to them, Israel isn't an issue. The Persians I know want
what anyone wants: job security, a high standard of living, and peace for
their family. They have none of these at home, and many are using study
in India as a way to learn English to eventually work in America or
Europe. I help them with their English, and they teach me some Persian
Farsi (which makes my Marathi a lot more challenging, but whatevs).
I was kind of bummed when I arrived in India because my aunt from Iran
was visiting my dad in America and I didn't spend much time with her, but
living here is like coming home. Theses are some of the nicest people
I've ever met, who will bend over backwards to help me out. In one week,
I've been invited to a club, been given daily rides to school, used a
mobile phone, had my beard trimmed and shaved, borrowed shoes and drank
more tea than the Queen of England, God save her. These guys are my
friends and a surrogate for half of my family that I never knew. I
couldn't be happier with them.
In the past week, I've seen a few dance and instrument
performances set up by our office. Like their chicken and women? Indian
music and dance has a different flavor than western performance. Dancers
don't usually bend their waists or lower their heads, using their arms
and torsos (a la Shakira) to express the music. Hand and finger position
is very precise, and only the most prude Pilgrim could call their clothes
revealing. I've heard that dance is considered one of the lowest forms
of Indian music because it involves the feet, and in this part of the
world, feets is nasty (shoes, though, are far worse). Having been brought
up with Britney Spears and N'SYNC (not personally, but in a larger social
context, I swear) this style of dance doesn't really interest me, so when
I get bored I think about how the dancers would look if they all had
heads like the elephant god Ganesh.
Indian music, though, is something else. If you think of
your favorite songs, you'll probably remember the melody and lyrics, with
the notably sexellent exception of the theme song from Shaft. (The
following sentences are my best, rudimentary understanding of Indian
music, and should not in any way be construed as correct or even good).
In Indian music, melody and lyrics are not really emphasized. Instead,
timing and emphasis is stressed. One style of music, Raga music, has
something like 200 different patterns that are thousands of years old. A
musician playing tabla (hand drums), violin, sitar, or harmonium (like an
acordian in a box) will play a certain Raga, consisting of a fixed number
of notes (no more than 16). The scale, or series of notes, has an
ascending order and a descending order, and have to be played in the same
order, with specific emphasis. For example, the order might be
1,2,3,4,1,2! (emphasis),3,4, 1,2,3!,4,1!,2,3,4 (repeat). After
repetition, the musician can change the timing and some other features of
the song so it becomes totally spontaneous. The coolest thing is that
all of the musicians and dancers (if present) know the raga scale before
hand, so no matter what the musicians do to change the beat or emphasis,
everyone is on the exact same page. Far from rehearsed performances,
Indian music is totally spontaneous and totally collaborative. Imagine a
jazz quartet that is all soloing at the same time, with each musician
knowing exactly what every other musician will do next but none of them
having heard it before. Crazy, right? Right.
Tomorrow I'm going to Mumbai to witness a Hindu wedding.
Hindu weddings are like parties at Rick James' house; they last for days
and everything is paid for by the host (unlike parties at Rick James'
house, no one gets laid, drunk, kidnapped, drugged or abused. Also, no
one is asked what the five fingers said to the face. b****!) I was
invited to this wedding by my Indo-Japanese friends in America, who have
more Mercedes than Germany and more Porche's than Beverly Hills. It will
be niece to see some American faces in India, even if those Americans are
Indians. The rest of my group is taking an overnight hike to some
forgotten part of India to living like farmers and hike through a fort,
or series of forts, or something touristy (I kind of was daydreaming
about beautiful Indian bridesmaids while they where describing the trip).
Alls I knows is that I'm going to be partying high-caste style while
they're getting rained on by monsoons or peed on by monkeys. Sometimes,
life isn't fair. I'll write more to y'all when I have time and money,
and when there's a lot of Marathi to study. I love hearing back from
you, so write me back with summer hook-ups and let-downs, general
updates, and crazy stories of your own!
Xoxo
Zach
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