Thorn

Khajaraho

Headless

Market

Jhansi, 2 AM

S. turned to me and asked, “How does it feel to be the only woman in a room full of fifty Indian men?” I laughed - I had just noticed that this was indeed the case. “I’m really enjoying it. For the first time, I’m surrounded by Indian men and none of them are looking at me.” They weren’t. Their eyes were glued to the television, just like mine.

A three-hour layover in Jhansi, Madhya Pradesh, from 11:30pm to 2:30am, is not something one looks forward to. When that layover corresponds exactly to the World Cup Final, one gets even more despondent. The irony! The one night we are actually up and out at such an hour, we are up and out in a train station.

But sometimes the universe throws her arms open wide and laughs. We discovered there were televisions in the waiting rooms in Jhansi, but the only one that worked wasn’t tuned to the World Cup and we weren’t about to start telling people what they should be watching. So I settled down to reading in the Ladies Waiting Room. Soon S. (who had been thrown out of the Ladies Waiting Room because he was, in fact, not a lady) was knocking on the glass door, gesturing frantically for me to come.

Men came and went from the crowded Upperclass Waiting Room, watching the match up until the moment their trains pulled out of station. S. and I reveled in our late night serendipity and for three hours the Jhansi train station was a magical place.

Smell

Long story short, I went three weeks in India without my luggage. My bag got held up in customs in Mumbai. Last weekend I flew to Hyderabad (and there’s another long story) to - at last! - retrieve my bag. When I got back to Vizag I dumped the contents of the bag, a big read hiking pack, on my bed. The first thing I noticed was the smell. My smell. Things are things, and I never wanted for clothes or books or soap. But when I smelled my stuff, I realized what I had been missing. Some part of my sense of self is bound up in these things, and to wash my face with my soap, and to put my lotion on my hands was to wrap my self in the familiar. Smelling those things brought back to me little pieces of who I was, which is a great comfort being so far away from so many of the places, people and things which make me who I am.

Whenever I smell fish, fresh fish, I remember Viet Nam and the parts of me that were made there. I wonder what bits of me are being made here, and what smells will help to carry them with me.

Bacteria

While mold is easily one of my favorite things, bacteria don’t lag far behind. Tiny little creatures that do amazing things, like make soil, digest your food, kill creatures orders of magnitude larger. I feel compelled to respect something so powerful yet unassuming. Which is why I want to introduce my friend Annie. Aside from being one of the sweetest and most creative people I know, she also shares my passion for bacteria. Well, at least when they’re making yogurt.

Cue the shameless plug! Annie, in all her ingenious, bike-lovin’ glory has designed a bicycle cart for the sole purpose of travelling the Midwest sharing the glories of bacteria. Well, yogurt really. You can find out more about her project, the Yogurt Pedaler, here: http://yogurtpedaler.com/. And if you’re in the Midwest be on the look out for a beautiful woman on a bike sharing the small but mind-blowing wonder of homemade yogurt.

Humor is Good, Subtext is Better

A continual point of contention, both in our home-stays and at the Institute, is how much independence female students should have. I can step back and look at this as an anthropologist and come to some kind of understanding of how and why women are treated as they are here. On my good days I can even summon some respect for it. But I do not agree with it. I do however, have to live it, in albeit limited fashion, every day. And that wears on me. It brings a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman here, and a greater appreciation for how hard the struggle was, and still is, for generations of women in the U.S. It's also exhausting. So on a bad day I made a play for greater independence. Disputes were had. Concessions made. And in proper Indian fashion, sweets were brought to "smooth over" our differences. This particular sweet is called "caja."

Sita

“Sita is my right hand,” says P. This is no exaggeration. One day as we were getting ready to go out, P. called me to the terrace. Then she called Sita over and instructed her to wipe her brow. I tried not to let the horror show on my face. “You do not have servants to do things like this in America,” says R. “No, no we don’t,” I say, my disgust thinly veiled at best. But it’s not disgust. It’s embarrassment. Sita is being used as a display of wealth and privilege that is meant to impress me. I am not impressed. I am embarrassed that anything like this should be for my benefit. I can only hope Sita knows this.

Sita is beautiful in hot pink. I saw her one day in her nicest sari - beautiful hot pink with gold. Most days she just wears dirty old saris, as she moves about the house at P.’s beck and call. “SiTAAAA!”

More beautiful than Sita in hot pink is simply Sita herself. She sings as she goes about her work, quietly, as she walks away from P. She smiles and laughs both at and with me. “Chai, chai!” she scolds if I absentmindedly forget to drink the cup of steaming tea on my desk. Lovely peals of laughter follow when she asks me something I simply don’t understand and I confusedly move about trying to figure out what exactly she meant. Something about clothes. . .

Sita lives in a small house in the back yard with her husband and two children. Her husband works somewhere, and moonlights as P.’s driver. I wish they were happy. But Sita says her husband has another wife somewhere in the city. He doesn’t come home some nights. When Sita, beautiful Sita, confronts him, he threatens to beat or kill her. P. tells me this is a problem with the servant class. P. scolds them both, like children. Sita’s husband should do better, and leave his “other wife.” Sita shouldn’t scold him. She threatened to throw him out. If I were her I would.

But I’m not. I certainly identify more with her than P. I wish I could talk to her, know what she was thinking. I want to be her friend. Our secret smiles and the warmth with which we treat each other are the most welcoming gestures I’ve encountered here. Far more friendly than all the sweets and cheek pinches P. could offer.

My goal is to communicate with Sita. Not in commands, but as one human to another. All I can do now is ask, “Baganara?” She is always, “Bagananu.”