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Published in the Livingston Enterprise May 6th, 2008.

Bike trip pauses battle with Indian traffic to smote rural poverty 

    Three gaudily decorated trucks careened down the road towards me.
Behind me, a cacophony of deafening horns indicated another convoy
fast approaching from the rear.  The road being barely wide enough to
accommodate two trucks, I had to jump my loaded bike off the pavement
and onto the rock and refuse-strewn shoulder.  The trucks roared past
me, not slowing a bit.  I regained the road, only to be forced off a
few moments later by more trucks.
       It took us little time to discover biking on India’s national highway
was no fun.  For a major road, the traffic is light, but passing cars
leave no room for bikes.  Luckily, India has a considerable network of
small roads that wind casually through the countryside.  On these, we
could take time to enjoy the fresh green rice paddies gliding all the
way to the horizon, the huge trees standing protectively by the
roadside, and the small villages clinging to high spots.
       Because it is impossible to legally bike through Myanmar, we
reluctantly boarded a plane in Bangkok, Thailand that took us across
the Indian Ocean to Kolkata, India  We intended to push as far west as
possible.  Although other routes to Europe from Thailand exist, they
would involve considerable time, and would have forced us to bike over
the Himalayas in late winter.
       Flying meant missing out on the gradual changes to which biking had
accustomed me.  While I missed easing into Indian culture, I wasted no
time appreciating it.  Kolkata, unlike most Chinese cities was never
razed to the ground and rebuilt.  Decaying stone buildings erected by
the British connect one with India’s past. Rebuilt fifties-style
automobiles serve as taxis, and streetcars, rickshaws, bikes, ancient
buses and motorcycles compete with pedestrians for street space.  Few
cities possess such energy as Kolkata’s bustling thoroughfares and
back alleys.
       The women of India wear the most striking fashions I’ve seen on the
trip.  Bright saris and shalwar kameezes in pastels and neon colors
set women apart from the drab clothes of their male counterparts.
However, it seemed the women were always on the move.  They rarely
paused in their march through the streets.  They never sipped chai
from the many stands around which men constantly gathered.
       In Southeast Asia, women were almost always the owners or proprietors
of restaurants and hotels.  However, in India, I rarely talked to any
women, because men exclusively worked in the shops and restaurants.
Women, it seemed, remained at home, and I only saw them on the street,
hurrying from one place to another.
       After acclimatizing to our new environment, we set out on our bikes
to visit a friend of mine doing development work north of Kolkata.
The organization with which he works, Street Survivors India, is run
by a woman named Shabnam Veraswamy.  This woman, with her perfect
English, staff of workers, and private car, seems out of place small
Indian village.
Her organization aims to increase quality of life in the countryside
by providing education and work opportunities.  They focus on women,
who not only usually take more responsibility for raising families,
but are more vulnerable to exploitation due to the patriarchy still
alive in parts of India.  By increasing their knowledge and
self-reliance, Shabnam hopes to help not only them, but to raise the
standard of living for the whole village.  She saw in our ability to
play music an opportunity to widen the horizons of village life.
Consequently, we found ourselves on a stage in front of the Street
Survivor’s compound, lit by lights powered by a generator thumping
away nearby.  Sound equipment amplified our voices and instruments so
the crowd of villagers could hear us over the generator.  Ironically,
despite our location in the middle of the undeveloped Indian
countryside, it was our biggest and most technically sophisticated
concert.  Between Shabnam’s spirited explanations of our mission and
the novelty of watching foreigners, we held everyone’s attention until
a storm threatened rain and everyone retreated to shelter.
Later, we visited the Jalgriti School, another Street Survivors
project, and one of the best hopes for empowering the girls and boys
in the village.  It was the first day of school.  Crowds of excited
children strolled about the grounds in their snappy brown uniforms.
Younger children wailed their anxiety.
The school had not yet hired a music teacher, so we filled in by
playing for the music classes.  We gave those children brave enough to
try brief lessons on how to play the instruments.  They impressed me
with their excitement and intelligence.  It occurred to me that many
young minds would go to waste were it not for the school.
Regretfully, we took our leave of Katna and headed back on the road.
Though we felt welcome and helpful in the village, we still had a long
way to go.  Our mission is not to fully understand one area, but
rather to better comprehend many areas, so we returned to do battle
with the horns and exhaust and baroquely bedecked trucks.  Now,
however, we had a much better appreciation for education’s role in
beating back rural poverty.

For whatever reason, I’ve gained about 16 lbs since I started this bike trip. It’s a good thing that means absolutely nothing to the people of rural India, where the more love handles peeping through the curtains of your sari, the better. Skinny married women are ostracized for staying skinny after having kids. The main priority of my new friends is to feed me.

“You eat breakfast, ma,” they say after wetting my palette with a seasoned cucumber and fresh coconut water, an appetizer to the real meal of coconut poongal (a kind of fried rice  cereal) and chutney they sneak in at the end to make me stay. Is it possible for your stomach muscles to get strung out?

When I ask some of my unmarried women coworkers what they do for fun, they say that they go the temple to pray and buy jewels (fake gold earrings, bindis and the likes). Otherwise, not much. Life seems to be an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, eating, working, drinking tea, eating, drinking coffee, chatting, eating, catching buses. And this is only amongst the women who have jobs. At least they have an outlet.

“You take more, ma,” as they refill my plate with another heap of rice and chutney. I eat so much here – in between meals, when I am not hungry, second breakfasts, second servings – that I wonder if there is any other social pastime.

True, alcohol is reserved for men.  There is no similar social tool for women. It seems that friendships stop after marriage when women leave their childhood towns to live with their in-laws. Relatives and next doors neighbors seen in passing replace friends.

Men play cricket while women stay at home. Men go to tea kiosks to read the newspapers and catch up on the latest job opportunities. Women stay at home, where they get news from the neighbor, who is often their sister-in-law. Men migrate to urban areas like Chennai, or international job centers like Dubai or Singapore to earn salaries in higher currencies and escape demeaning farm work. Women stay home and wait for the checks.

My neighbor whose apartment has indoor plumbing and tiled floors, a luxury in this mud hut village, showed me pictures of her husband who’s been in Malaysia for four years. It wasn’t clear if he was making or selling the pottery he was sitting behind. I asked her if she had ever visited. She said of course not. Then served me a deep fried snack with tea (the tea is boiled in milk and strained through a filter).

When I left the fueledbyrice team in Kolkata, I joked that they would have fabulous adventures biking the Himalayas while I got fat down south. This was an omen.

But like I said, it’s a good thing fatness doesn’t matter in rural India. Even if I had the trimmest little body, I would be asked to cover it up in a sari or a salwar kameez or at least a scarf.

Cycling everyday with men for 6 months, I haven’t felt my womanness in a long time.  And I like my womanness. I come from the land of consumer feminism where women make enlightened investments in cosmetics and fashion to procure their youth and sexuality so that they feel empowered.  A recent Citibank ad in which a woman used her kitchen as a closet pinpoints this new postmodern feminism: I’m too hot to cook.

But after visiting Brian Heilman’s Muslim village in West Bangal, where I caused social havoc by wearing a fitted shirt, a below-the-knee flowing skirt with leggings underneath, AND a scarf, I was sharply reminded that yes, I do indeed have D-cups, and yes, they do cause erections.   Men in another village were calling Shabnam’s (Brian’s boss) cell phone complaining of their discomfort.

Things haven’t changed down south, where people are mainly Hindu, more educated, and said to be more socially relaxed.  My co-workers gasp whenever I wear Western clothes and they beg me to wear a scarf when the male staff are around.  

I am no anarchist. If I want to understand a culture and the reasons behind it, I have to abide by its rules. I have to suspend my disbelief and let it unravel itself to me on its own terms. So I am giving myself time to fumigate my innate annoyance at the irony that men’s owns inability to control themselves is made the responsibility of women. I am waiting for the day that this salwar kameez and scarf feel less like the infernal insides of a camel’s colon and more like a natural more modest extension of my skin.

Maria, Brian’s roommate from New Jersey, said, that after a while, she felt naked without her full dress. I am too starting to feel odd whenever I walk to a kiosk to buy soap or the newspaper without my curves hidden. I don’t know if the cause is modesty or embarrassment or guilt. Sometimes, I don’t know what is right or wrong – a salwar without the scarf? A scarf over the T-shirt? Surely, I can’t wear the same two kameez’s every single day. It’s hard to feel sexy in a shapeless dress. Maybe I am oversexed. Maybe I should pretend I’m a Japanese meiko, and that sexuality is all in the mind.

Maybe I should just stay home and drink tea.

The women elected members of the local governance[i] with whom SCORD, my NGO, works, would shake their heads and yank me by the arm out the door. They are the leaders of self help groups (SHGs) which empower women by giving them a platform to support each other, address their issues with a unified voice, save money and receive loans for group and individual enterprises, train in income generating skills, educate themselves on their rights.

 In such a patriarchal society, these women have had to work through that icky feeling of having done something wrong every time they left their homes to attend a meeting.

During the formative stages of SHGs in Tamil Nadu (a leading state for women’s rural development) in 2002, women regularly faced teasing and hissing when they “dressed up” on their way to meetings.  Their mother-in-laws refused to take care of their children while they were away and asked blankly, “Who will cook when you are out there organizing?”Their husbands were interested in what, if not money, they were going to get out of it, and didn’t want them to go to another village to attend the meeting as they were often organized by the male directors of grassroots NGOs.

Yet, these women blasted on. Their need to control of thier livelihoods and the future of their children outweighed the odd feeling gurgling inside whenever they did something out of the norm.

It seems that everything about the unofficial marriage system is set for men’s ultimate domination: a woman must pay a dowry (which is illegal but still immensely practiced even in the cities) to the groom, which must be sufficient to avoid the wrath of abusive in-laws, she must move into her in-laws house often in another village and so is cut off from her own family, and a bride is preferred to be at least four years younger than her husband, and less educated.

Even the heavily clothed, ankle length sari seems the Indian equivalent to the impractical Japanese kimono in its symbolism of planting a woman’s feet firmly in the house.

Still, some resourceful women work it by pulling their saris up around their thighs while working in the fields.  In the absence of husbands who have died or migrated for work, many women take up farmwork. Economic demands in a newly globalized society, much like industrialism during WWII in the US, are pulling women out of the house and into the workforce.  SHGs or sanghas (the rights-oriented term) have become a necessity for these newly employed heads of the household to defend their rights and demand their needs.

Women’s rise to local governance in rural India, the only place in India where women’s leadership is a de facto reality with a 33% reservation fully implemented and taken advantage of (in Nagapattinam, a tsunami hit district, women make up 47% of the local governance), have extended those strides out of the home and into banks and classrooms and the offices of politicians.

Kanika Kaul, the Tamil Nadu state project co-ordinator of The Hunger Project, an international NGO that promotes women’s leadership and a ground up approach versus aid giving to development, said that her organization promotes women because they are the one’s at the basic level of society who would therefore understand society’s most fundamental needs the best.

Her organization has partnered with SCORD for three years to help rebuild the tsunami affected district of Nagapattinam with a stress on strengthening the local Panchayat and women’s leadership in such.

According to Kanika, women will fight for education because women know what its like to be deprived of their education as children. They know what its like to be dependent on their husbands and in-laws because without an education, there are very little jobs they can do. They want their children to have more opportunities. Women will fight for healthcare because they are the ones who have to take their children to get immunized at  local public clinics. Women ask for clean water tanks to prevent illness in their families.

At the recent Gram Sabha (monthly Panchayat board meeting) in Nagapattinam, men board members pressed for better infrastructure and electricity to fuel the economy.

At a recent SCORD organized women’s leadership workshop, Panchayat women board members pinned alcoholism as an economic problem. They, the ones who balance the books at home, have done the calculations and deduced that their husbands’ chronic profligacy of 50 Rps at the wine shop, half his daily earnings, is driving their families, the village families, into perpetual poverty.

At this level of development at least, it seems as though men are concerned with the bigger structural problems, while women look at the problems that are more intimate and practical. And in this way, more sustainable.  More responsibility is put on the shoulders of the needy rather than victimizing them into a perpetual position of asking for aid. Not that demanding one’s due benefits from the government is wrong, but until people understand what they really need as opposed to what they want, they won’t know where to properly allocate those benefits to procure real development.

Perhaps it is my womanness crying to be let loose from the swaths of cloth I must wear to stay modest in rural India. Maybe it’s the fat rolls. But sitting at this workshop and watching women work in a country where women’s leadership is not to be taken for granted, I suddenly felt a powerful sense of sisterhood. That maybe the womanness I was seeking to emblazon, the take-back-the-stilettos sex-powered feminism, was out of place.

Here, womanness lies in the powerful position of the traditional wife and mother, who understands society at its most basic level, because she lives at its most basic level. She knows how to manage its most basic resources so that they last, so that they benefit women, men, and children.

Here, a woman’s body image lies in its ability to provide for her children.

Both feminisms, and I do dare to call them that – the sex-powered modern and the subservient traditional woman – are valid as they are crafty. They both embrace the man-authored roles that have typically relegated women to subordinates and sexual objects respectively.  They’ve willingly donned the aprons and the mini-skirts, but have inverted their roles into a female directed design in which women decide how they will play the cards they are dealt.

Like African Americans have changed the word “nigger” (at least among each other) from degradation to endearment, like GLBT individuals now use the formally degrading “queer” as a cool term to describe sexual ambiguity, women have taken a bad thing and made it good.

Identity inversion.  Fat you’re matter doesn’t it.   It doesn’t matter if you’re fat. Being fat is phat, yo. Love your curves, they love you.

It’s the exposure, the experience of the opposite, the possibility of an alternative, this widening of scope that gives us perspective on our lives. For the consumer-feminist who invests in diet-crazed beauty magazines to empower her sexuality, it’s sobering to know that real women invest their energy and money in bigger issues than the size of their waists.

[i] Sorry for the annoying usage of this seemingly contrived word. But “governance” is a term specific to Indian village leadership because, being so far removed from the central government decision making, and so reliant on non-governmental structures like grassroots, national, and international NGOs, youth groups, school groups, federations, self help groups, and sanghas (rights oriented SHGs), the term government is actually inaccurate, misleading, and non-inclusive.

Before Kathmandu, we dived off the perfectly good main highway and headed for the bush.  We traversed good roads and bad, but wound up on terrible roads.  The rocks projecting out of the surface often bounced the fun right out of riding.

While the jolts tormented our joints, sunsets fired narrow draws with the soft warm light of molten metal.  Narrow terraces dived steeply down thousand foot hills.  We had airplane views of the landscape earned by the sweat of our constant climbing and descending.

The Nepali people also sent us on roller coasters.  Children followed us up hills, panting their pleas for money, chocolate, food into our annoyed ears.  We could not escape, the hills were too steep, the children too determined to milk us into compliance.  Before, we had encountered beggars only in cities, but here normal children with houses and fields and parents harassed us to no end.  Our respect for the people diminished.  Before, we held their tough mountain culture in high esteem.  After several kilometers of mobile begging, we began to reassess the impact of tourism.

The children had been taught to beg.  Tourists (that terrible T word!) had pitied their slightly dirty clothes or tough lives.  No doubt, they have tough lives.  However, handouts haven’t helped anyone; they only breed dependence and encourage roguery.

Goofing around, not begging.  Hooray!

The children made me sick.  We tried to discourage them with words, by begging back to them, by pointing their behavior out to their parents.  Our efforts to rid ourselves of the beggars sometimes only rewarded us with rocks lobbed harmlessly by small hands.  Harmless maybe, but it is, as they say, the thought that counts.

Later we found we’d been biking on the road to Everest.  Not all kids begged.  Some unquestioningly threw their shoulders into the trailer and helped us push it up the hills.  Some merely ran alongside, happy for the unique experience-as were we. To them we will be grateful, but as for the others, they make me ashamed for my fellow travelers who have so carelessly bred dependence into a people and erected a hopelessly tall wall between me and kids who-save for their eager greed-I might have had a chance to befriend.

Perhaps I am a callous, hard-hearted miser.  The number of requests and demands and complaints I often receive in touristy areas have encased my compassion beneath a thick crust of suspicion.  Yet, I still struggle to treat people with respect, even as they cling to me and block my path.

We met two gentlemen, Andrew and Jesse, in Kathmandu who worked for a Christian service organization called Word Made Flesh.  They have committed to three years of service in Kathmandu, providing physical and spiritual help to drug users, victims of prostitution, homeless children and the infirm elderly.  Only in the country for a few months, they already have a truck load of emotionally heavy tales.  It is no half measure of faith that compelled them to come.

Over lunch they related their own struggles to see Christ in everyone who approached them, from drug dealers to beggars to sales people.  This sentiment resounded with me.  Not everyone is a Christian, but there is a fundamental act of metaphysics in the manner in which we approach each other.   “Seeing Christ” in a person guarantees a failure to objectify.  Christian or not, objectifying people serves only to degrade them, to isolate yourself, and to fail to create a connection, and denies people their spiritual autonomy.

Through a connection of Andrew’s, we met a pastor in Kathmandu named Mani.  We shared dinner with him, and he in turn invited us to a prayer meeting with a few college students to whom he ministers.  I found not the calm bible interpretations I expected, but instead challenging questions from the pastor and his students.  For an hour we talked about the reasons for the trip, difficulties we experienced, and happy moments, both spiritually and otherwise.

What humbled me was the belief held by meeting participants that they could learn something from us.  I suppose I pompously inscribe opinions into this blog, but to have someone actually ask me meaningful questions about my experience was illuminating.  Such experiences would be impossible without first shedding prejudices and opening one’s self to what someone has to give one, not what one wants or expects.

After an therapeutic hour of meaningful discussion, I found myself recharged and ready to confront whatever sort of person Nepal might through at me next.   We all felt especially great after the pizza Mani procured for us.  I guess the positive truth I gained from this experience was a little hospitality goes a long way.  The children of demands left a bad taste in my mouth, but my palate was cleansed soon enough with tomato sauce and cheese.  I can only hope other travelers on the road to Everest have the gumption to act responsibly and the luck to find those authentically friendly Nepalese who make an experience truly meaningful.

Pastor Mani (middle holding daughter) with FBR and local students at a prayer meeting in Kathmandu.

Three bearded boys from FueledByRice made it to the center of Nepal two days ago, to a town called Pokhara.  This is the gateway to trekking in the Himalayas, and so it is the most tourist-visited area in Nepal (according to one guide book a-skimmed).   The beauty is certainly an attraction.  The town is situated on a mountain lake, hemmed with pines and the green slopes of foothills.  When clouds aren’t cloaking them, the white peaks of Anapurna and M…. rise from the Himalaya heights for a stunning backdrop.  (I’ve seen pictures — the clouds haven’t yet lifted but enough to see just a glimpse of white rocky slopes one afternoon after a rain).

The town’s feel is laid-back, a nice contrast to Kathmandu’s Thamel area bustling with hustling and hawking and honking.  So, we run into other tourists and have English conversations and go to eat together at times.  Last night we met a nice Dutch cyclist for dinner who’s doing basically the same route as FBR, only backwards in time for the Olympics (anyone inform CCTV?).  We also met a German cyclist who gave us tips about Europe and a warm invite to his place if we go by.  A group of three Israelis are motorcycling, but are interested in trying out the Bi-Cycle, motored by legs and rice.  They’re staying at our same hotel.

So, we poke around Pokhara, not trekking–to the chagrin of many-a-would-be-trek-organizer–but rather resting and eating and reading and frizbeeing and meeting others, with a little time here or there on the vast network we like to call cyberspace, and resting the puzzling soreness of our posteriors (as Jim might say).

Small Villages, Big Imaginations

I am big shit in this tiny farming village in rural South India. I am a foreigner and I have the default status of being knowledgeable in everything from computer programming and how to run a local NGO despite my educational or occupational background. I also have the added advantage of being black among the chocolate hued people of Tamil Nadu.

Holding their forearms up to mine, natives contently comment, “Same color.” They are thrilled that someone from the big big foreign land where everything is more developed, where there are jobs with higher wages, and where everyone is richer and more educated, with bigger houses and nice cars, is the “same color” as them.

In villages this small, imaginations are big. Most women get the news from their neighbors as they fetch water from the street pumps in the morning. Most don’t know where Europe is.

The men are more aware. They read newspapers, watch TV, and talk about the latest strike with their morning tea at the local kiosks.

They often leave their wives and children at home, and move to Malaysia, Singapore, or the Arabian Peninsula to rake in higher wages in the booming market for unskilled and semi-skilled Indian laborers. Daily, I am asked if I would sponsor someone to my country to find a job and work. I am then grilled about the types of jobs, working hours, salaries, and the visa procedures for an Indian coming to my country for work.

This is despite the fact that I currently have no job in India or at home in The Bahamas.

Though 99% of Tamil Nadu’s population has access to education, the tendency to drop out is still high. Teenage boys want to leave asap to start making money. Girls, who often achieve higher test scores and are generally more interested in learning, are often taken out of school because their parents deem their education not a worthy investment since they will just be married off to live with their in-laws.  While the West views tertiary education and health as indicators of development, the new wealth made through the emigration process is often apparent only in the size of the house, its fixtures, and the types of vehicles (car? motorcycle?) owned. The men who return build lavish two story concrete mansions across the street from their neighbor’s grass huts, thereby fueling the imagination of the youth to take the chance and go abroad.  Life must be better in this distant land.

Even the people working at my NGO seem to get some sort of guilty pleasure out of the popularity they garner from their association with SCORD. My friend Gunar said that everyone knows her and Nadiya (her partner) as the two SCORD field workers always riding their bikes around the area counseling and collecting data. The men like the officiality of sitting behind a desk, writing checks, and managing projects in a village where the main occupation for men is farm labor. They too, are big shit in a small town.

The Exposed Village

I have terrible reactions to people trying to rip me off in the market. I take it personally when someone tries to sell me fruit for twice the normal price. Our experience in Vietnam was almost shattered by the people who would raise prices suddenly in a restaurant or overcharge at a hotel. I called these people greedy. An Indian I met on the train describing Indian investment in Africa called them good businessmen.

The world is globalized. Every dusty pint-size village we rode through in China had internet bars loaded with youngsters playing online games.

People in villages tucked behind the coconut groves that curtain the rice paddies of South India have cell phones. Companies like Airtel and Vodafone have even tapped into the Self Help Group (microfinance and rights focused groups for the marginalized) and NGO market as a way to link village women to banks and networks with clusters and federations.

People who live in thatch houses on stilts leaning against the splintering wind of passing trucks on Laos’ highway 1 have TVs. I sat with about 25 villagers in the living room of such a family who let me sleep on their floor as the sun went down in Laos, and wondered what a shampoo commercial featuring a Laotian woman with white skin and smooth thick hair had to do with the sarong wearing, lice-infested, brown woman with six children, and a coughing husband at whose house I rested.

In villages this small, the internet, TV, and cell phones are magic wands that stir big imagination. It is the same as putting upscale apartments across the street from the projects in New York City, or mansions in Santa Barbera overlooking the slums of Oakland, California: when people see wealth, they want to have some. Even if they’ve sufficed without it for most of their lives, looking at all the jewels the world has to offer gives us more to shoot for, broadens our horizons.

And shouldn’t it? Isn’t this how it’s always been? Haven’t people always tried to achieve more, work harder to give their children what they didn’t have?  To strike it rich, haven’t people always moved?  Migrants in China move from the rural areas to the cities to find jobs. Indians move to nearby countries with more jobs and better salaries. Mexican migrants have populated rural Minnesota to provide farm labor.

The rags to riches story has spread through the wires of transnational companies and their factories and outsourcing agencies. Schemes to achievement (migration) are as quick as the instant exposure (TV, mobiles, internet) which provides instant gratification in a world of increasingly shorter attention spans. 

Perhaps this deserves more research than I am willing to present for this blog, but I tend to look at lavish hip hop videos as manifestations of this romance that the marginalized or traditionally poor have with instant riches.  For the young person sitting in the window of an apartment (or trailer park) crowded with dysfunctional family members, no clear way of achieving his or her dreams, a hip hop video with all its profligate scenarios, its hot women, its tight beats, is an escape, much like the 1930s Gone with the Wind and Shirley Temple musicals were Depression era escapist movies.

And like TVs and cell phones, they give people a heightened view of the riches that exist in the world.  They put people who resemble target audiences, only prettier, more bejeweled, lighter skinned, and with more lustrous hair, in front of cars or kitchen appliances, and sell an image of self-betterment, which comes arbitrarily with the message in fine print: what you have is not good enough. Get better.

Village Voice

Being black in dark-skinned Tamil Nadu, I suppose I am an image of that very same message. Only, I am real. I can talk and explain things, dispel myths. Reveal to the people at my NGO that even though I do have a college degree, I am in fact less skilled than they are at handling the computer or organizing a grassroots level NGO sensitive to the needs and rights of the people of their own community, people who they’ve gotten to know and respect through countless field visits to counsel and organize.

I can tell the people in my village that I have no idea who the famous West Indies cricket player, Brian Lara is (but where would the fun be in that really?).

I can tell them that not all Caribbean people like to or can dance well. That all black people are not from Nigeria, nor do they run.

I can tell them that contrary to the images taken out of context on the big screen, Western women are in fact not easy. And the fact that we are educated make us less easy, more in control of our sex lives, and not to messed with. That not just because we choose how we dress and we like to feel sexy doesnt mean that we actually want to drop trow right now anyhow anyway.

And I can tell them that though the currency is stronger and the salary is higher in The Bahamas, the cost of living is through the roof, and that there may not be provisions to protect the rights of illegal immigrant workers.

When I first started this bike trip, I had a serious issue with our philosophy and the fact that we even had a philosophy. I mean, who gave us the right to “spread cultural tolerance”? I promote cultural tolerance everyday as a black woman living internationally for the last 9 years.  To promote biking as an alternative to cars or planes… in China or India?  Such a project, I thought, would be better felt in the US, where people are dependent on cars.

But having seen how people in the West – through media, transnational and international cooperations, and globalized products – are often producers of what people strive to attain in most developing countries (The Bahamas included as a developing country), I now see the point of setting a better example. Here, face-to-face with people who look up to me, I see the power I have to influence, to alert people of the consequences of energy excesses of hyper-industrialism in the West. To give people confidence in their own slow mode of transportation by riding around the world on a bike and loving it. To give people confidence in thier own simple towns and cultural life by riding there in the first place instead of just sticking to the five tourist spots mapped out in the guidebooks. 

 I have the power to dispel racial myths and fantasies about Western women built up through movie and music images taken out of context. Doing this in India and in China is even more important as these countries’ influences on the global economy and business environment will grow exponentially in years to come.

Spreading a message on a slow-moving bike, without aid of loudspeaker, is the most grassroots way of silent and peaceful protest against the world’s energy excesses and cultural hang ups. And I am more of a small-steps-kind-of-girl than big-shit-in-a-small-town.

From the depths of slumber I begin to hear roosters announcing the arrival of the morning seemingly before it has arrived. Women are moving about, bringing their water jugs and pots to fill at the iron hand pump within 10 feet of my head. I stir and feel the mosquito net embracing me, everything so far assuring me its just another day as FBR. Looking at the woven bamboo walls plastered with newspaper letting the faint morning light in beyond my net, however, I suddenly remember that this is no ordinary home stay. I’m waking up in a Bhutanese Refugee Camp.

As I slowly get my bearings I remember that this all started yesterday morning at breakfast. I’d prayed that the Holy Spirit guide us to meet the people we were supposed to meet that day, hopefully kind people who wished to help us and from whom we could learn.

In the evening, we stopped to bathe and eat at a small town along Nepal’s main east-west Hwy 1 in the flat lowlands. We chose one of many small restaurant stalls that also had several hand pump wells out front. We quickly drew a crowd, curious to see foreigners, including one young man who eagerly pumped water for me while I bathed, and another young man who talked with Drew, named Santhos. When Santhos learned that we were planning to camp in a field that night, he invited us to stay at his church - he was Christian and his older brother was the assistant pastor. I’d learned from a boy who had biked with us 10km before town that there was a Bhutanese refugee camp nearby, and as we followed Santhos on his bike in the dark a bit out of town and up to what appeared to be a rural village, I realized that his church was located within that very refugee camp.

He led us into the center of the camp after getting approval from the guards. We put our bikes inside the woven bamboo church. Santhos’ older brother, Mouikumar Maga - the assistant pastor in his 30s - came out to meet us and the crowd of children and other onlookers we’d picked up biking and walking through the camp’s bumpy dirt roads. After we briefly introduced ourselves and our trip goals, he invited us to go back to his home for tea, and at our suggestion, music.

Walking between the homes in the camp

The momentum was rolling along and soon there we were seated in Mouikumar’s humble UN-funded, refugee-built bamboo house with swept mud floor and Drew, Jim, and I realized we didn’t know anything about their situation. As Mouikumar’s wife prepared tea, we began asking questions about Mouikumar and his neighbors in this camp.

“The political situation in Bhutan didn’t allow us to stay, so we came here [Nepal] in 1992 as refugees,” Mouikumar starts. He, the other 24,000 people living in this camp and the other 75,000 refugees living in other camps in Nepal are ethnically Nepali. Their ancestors immigrated to Bhutan in the 19th and early 20th centuries as laborers. Instead of casting aside their language and culture to assimilate, the Nepali people living in Bhutan tried to maintain their original cultural heritage including language, dress, and for some of them, their Christian religion. Over time and generations the Bhutanese government became more and more concerned about their lack of assimilation. The issue came to a head in the 1980s when the Bhutan government enacted policies seeking to catalyze the Nepali’s integration by not allowing them to study Nepalese in school and persecuting those who were Christian. When the situation was too dangerous in 1992 and they were clearly unwelcome in Bhutan, Mouikumar, his family, and many of his fellow Nepali-Bhutanese decided to flee across international borders to Nepal, at which point the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stepped in to help by drilling hand pump wells in their camps and providing funding for the refugees to build their simple mud-foundation, woven bamboo houses/huts.

Although preserving their Nepali heritage was important to these Bhutanese, Nepal doesn’t feel like home to them and moreover Nepal lacks the social and economic structures to absorb these 100,000 refugees. They and their parents and grandparents were born in Bhutan, making this a situation similar to asking German Americans who have kept their heritage alive to go back to Germany - in the end, they are still Americans and Germany is not their home. After 16 years of waiting with their real lives on hold, the US and several European countries have agreed to slowly accept small groups of families. Mouikumar’s older brother, Michael Thapa, was the senior paster of their church. He emigrated with his family to Atlanta, Georgia last year where he is continuing his ministry. Mouikumar and his family recently completed the lengthy UN interview process for resettlement and hope to join his brother in Atlanta in 4-5 months. Mouikumar’s neighbors are all on different schedules, but most will be waiting for the foreseeable future before they move out of their refugee camp.

In the pause in our conversation, everyone pondering their situation, them no doubt for the umpteenth time, and us for the first time, Mouikumar broke the uncomfortable silence and asked us suggestively if we brought instruments to play music. We grabbed the guitar, er hu, and bongo drum and he asked if I would open our music session with prayer and said he’d lead the closing prayer. I was struck with how clearly and fully my morning’s prayer had been answered, the more than mere coincidence that lead us to be in Mouikumar’s bamboo hut living room surrounded by his family and neighbors at that moment. I prayed and we played. Mouikumar plays guitar too, making for a nice exchange mixing secular songs with Nepalese and English praise songs.

Around 9pm, Mouikumar suggested that we wrap things up so the neighbors watching and listening to us could go to sleep. “The 8pm curfue has already passed in the camp, why don’t you sleep here instead of at the church.” Our sleeping bags, tooth brushes, and change of clothes were all back with our bikes inside the church, but it was a 10 min walk away and technically people weren’t supposed to be out anyway. “You can sleep here,” as Mouikumar lead us into his own bedroom containing two small double beds. “Oh no no, we don’t want to trouble you, and where will you…” Mouikumar cut us off insisting in a way we couldn’t argue with. After making sure we had everything we needed, Mouikumar and his wife left us - humbled - alone in their own room in their own beds in their simple home, complete with mosquito nets.

After waking up early, Mouikumar and his wife couldn’t send us off without breakfast. The chapati (flat bread) and potato curry was freshly home made and excellent.

Mouikumar (white R off cen) and his family in his living room

With brothers Santhos (red L) and Mouikumar, (white R) on the side of their church.

Outside and inside the refugee camp’s church, where they let us store our bikes over night.

With other Bhutanese refugees on the side of their church.

A big THANK YOU to Mouikumar, Santhos, and their family for the amazing hospitality! I sincerely hope that my fellow Americans will be thoughtful, aware, and empathize enough to extend half the welcome and hospitality the Bhutanese extended to us.

We were warmly welcomed into a refugee camp, shared music, and learned a people’s story we previously didn’t know about - quite possibly a perfect Fueled By Rice day.

For more information about the Bhutanese refugees’ story on the other side, settling in the US, see this related news article:

** From Bhutan to the Bronx **
Dumeetha Luthra meets some Bhutanese refugees who have arrived in the
 US from Nepal.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7372916.stm >

Friends,

I am saddened and greatly concerned over the growing divide and wall between east and west, between China & the US, and between Europe & China over the Tibet conflict.  We have a responsibility, as educated peace-loving people, to work hard to close this divide and break down this wall NOW, before it gets too high.  As this article in the International Herald shows, the wall is not only being built in China, but also in the US at the countless American universities that Chinese students are attending.

Clearly media on all sides are failing to give us accurate facts and unbiased reports.  Because we know that, we can vigorously apply our critical thinking and analytical skills with a cool head to dare to explore perspectives different than our own on this issue.  We must strive to understand all sides with empathy.  I am seeking to more deeply understand Beijing’s perspective, and I desire to know more about what ordinary Tibetans think and want, the latter of which is not clear in many news articles.

Above all, we must remember that we are brothers and sisters, world citizens, and that the conflict in Tibet is affecting us all. Through civilized and intelligent (and certainly always non-violent) debate, approached with humility and an open mind to listen to the other sides, we will slowly get at the truth and, I hope and pray, discover and craft a creative and respectful resolution for all connected issues.

Ping An, He Ping, Peace,
Peter

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/29/america/29student.php

Typical of any time we tried to stop and rest in the plains of Nepal, we couldn’t get away from people. First, the children showed up. They clumped around one of us as we sat on the ground, reading or writing, and would suddenly rush to their next victim with no apparent reason. They sniffled loudly, placed their hands on our shoulders to lean in for a closer look, and demanded I show them the postcard I had tucked into my book for safe keeping.
Later, adults drifted through our rest area in the trees. They paused to watch us at a respectful distance, a few spoke a few words of English.
During the day we cycled through several groups of kids. In the late afternoon, we found ourselves speaking with a semi-circle of villagers. One younger man had the build of a boxer, and constantly smiled to reveal his white teeth. His mother constantly giggled to reveal her delightful personality. They asked if we wanted to stay in the village. We protested the normal protestations: we’re a big group, we have lots of crap, it will be troublesome for you. We received the usual answer from the shiny-mouthed would-be host: no problem. “First,” he said, however, “you play music.”
So we got out the instruments. No sooner had we commenced, than a bus stopped alongside the road. Its occupants wandered out and joined the concert. The bus people were city people and spoke excellent English. Our would-be hosts were country folks and spoke a little English. In between songs our hosts lost interest in the long complicated questions put to us by the bus people. Then another bus stopped. Was this a publicized concert? we asked ourselves.
Later, the buses left, but our hosts were gone. We were led to the village by a child. We stowed our bikes in the goat pen. A high school student offered to take us around. He introduced us to various important personages, the old village deputy, the part-time football (soccer) coach.

We wound up at the soccer field, which was being prepared for the district tournament to begin the following day. Andrew wowed everyone with his soccer skills. Then he brought out the frisbee. Hordes of little urchins chased after the soft arcs it made in the sky. They bit and kicked and fought like wild cats or she-devils or politicians or things even worse than that for the privilege of throwing it lamely into the ground.

After dark, on our way back to the village, the former police officer blew sweetly acidic declarations of brotherhood at me. “Do you like to drink?” he asked me five times.
We paused for water and instead ate dinner. A huge crowd formed a circle. The drunk constable danced. “Now you dance Nepali,” everyone ordered. The constable escorted us one by one into the circle. We tried to follow his dance moves. He girated his hips, wiggled his arms, performed great swan dives on the ground. With me he did a flip, a move I determined not to follow. Hoots and giggles followed guffaws and titters. I got the feeling the constable did this with all the foreigners who came to the village.
We finally made it back to the home of our friend of the bulging biceps and giggly mother. “You eat cow?” she had enquired earlier. We had hoped against hope and indeed, there in the plate was cow. It was the first meat we’d had in a long time. The previous dinner left us quite stuffed, but we gobbled this one down nonetheless, even the seconds our smiling host refused to rescind once she had the pot dangling over our plates.
That night, while our bikes displaced the goats, we displaced our hosts as they had given us our beds. This was the second time this had happened in Nepal. We were touched. We also considered our previous dinner of an ambiguous nature. The villagers were certainly entertained. We were not exactly humiliated. Everyone left happily. Perhaps that is the final measurement of cultural exchange.
The next morning, when we tried to leave without breakfast, the woman who had kicked herself out of bed and spent her beef on us smilingly thrust two huge fruits into my hands. If I ever return to Jamnivas I know who I will be most eager to see again.

Six days of serious mountain cycling on rough rocky roads has left me exhausted.  Having entered Nepal on the far east side from Siliguri, India, we spent 5 days making serious distance on Nepal’s low-lands Hwy 1.  90km days were becoming routine, and we were fortunate to meet a number of great people in the low lands, including a nice village stay we’ll write more about later. 

But 90km / day on a flat road was too easy.  I mean, how could we come to Nepal and not go into the Himalayas?  So we turned north in our ignorance of what we were beginning, in our ignorance from our low quality map.  It looked like a shorter way to Kathmandu.  We turned north on a reasonable looking secondary road (one of the few besides the 3 main highways in all of Nepal) towards a town typed in bigger print than the thousands of villages dotting our map connected only by mountain “tracks,” called Sindhulimadi.  Riding straight into the Himalayan foothills which quickly became mountains, without snow mind you but mountains none the less, we made it to Sindhulimadi which turned out to be more like a village anyway. 

The pavement quickly gave way to dirt and rock.  After Sindhulimadi though, the gravel miraculously turned into brandnew Japanese pavement and one heck of an incredible uphill switchback road and drainage system climbing up over a tall pass.  But the people told us time and time again, the road’s not finished, its only a walking path.  But we pushed on. 

We camped near the top of the pass the Japanese road conquered, and biked down through the construction of the road on the otherside.  Foremen told us the way ahead was difficult, but after some coaxing they would admit it was possible.  They were right in both.

Lucky for us, the steep walking path only lasted 1km, after a narrow cable bridge, and that 2 local boys were eager to help us carry the band wagon over this most difficult stretch.  After the Japanese road ended though, the roads were all rock roads, not small gravel rock, but big rocks that greatly threatened the integrity of our already burdened wheels.

Slowness.  30km days that felt like 100km days.  Sweating even in the cool air and often pushing bikes up up up.  Yet beauty and silence and peace, among sparsely populated mountain communities scattered about.  Though physically difficult, it was well worth it. 

Now, we rest.  After 11 tough days.

She came home and put on her “ordinary sari,” the one she cooks and cleans in.  The blue one, with not too much conceit in it, the cloth relaxed enough to exercise in.  She suggested I wear it for my morning run.

We slept on the floor of her mud-brick home last night. Three in a row on straw mats with a foot pillow lay at my feet: she, her fifteen year old son, and me on the living room floor. Her husband is a security guard in distant Coimbatore, the big city 300km west.

I really wanted to sleep well to make this night perfect. This was one of those amazing experiences you realize just how amazing in the middle of it and you curse yourself for not having your camera. But I didn’t. No visual proof that I actually slept in a mud hut in a mud hut village in the middle of nowhere in South India. So you, the reader have to suspend your skepticism of what sounds like thwarted logic, but is in fact, the unadulterated, only occasionally sensationalized truth.

And I didn’t sleep well. I tossed and turned beneath the capricious ceiling fan that at first swished and swayed away the revolting heat, then turned villainously cold much like love does overnight.  And when the fan was turned off, its villainous spite hung in the aftermath’s vacuum like the drool of a carnivorous ogre, waiting to be picked up like a baton by the mosquito militia who rushed in truculent, shoulders hunched forward, salivary needles aimed to feast on the ocean of new blood lying mangled and weak from sleeplessness.

I am accustomed to sleeping without a bed. Without a roof even, in the cold, in the rain, in the middle of a field armed by farmers lugging AK-47’s like handbags. Still, the spaghetti smell of your own sleeping bag with of your own sweat, a pad, mosquito net and a tent set up in the prime real estate of a harvested rice field behind a hill or in the middle of a bamboo forest trumps the solace of a night in the new environs of a house that is not your own.

The trauma must have been too much, because my body revealed its stress in ruthless revolt: I woke up to clinking pots and scraping grains completely and ludicrously voiceless. The ludicrous part being that when I opened my mouth to speak at any given moment, I only had enough breath to utter: “Vannakam. En peyar Nakia. Unkal peyar enna? (Tamil for Hello. My name is Nakia. What is your name?)”  Then all energy would drain synoptically from my voice to the rest of my body – my eyes, head, legs, hips – like blood leaving the heart for more mobile places. Like a daughter leaving home. What a horrible curse!

But this is not about me leaving home. This is about the aforementioned she, Latha Selvaraja, born in the coconut fringed village of Kuvanalangottai 100 km into the flat green plains of Tharangapadi Pillyarkoviluranipuram Taluk in the orange mud district of Kol. She was married at somewhere between 18 and 21 years old to a man 16 years her senior.  Her wedding pictures show a properly fed beauty feeding her newly introduced man with cake and a sly smile that betrays her peace with so astronomical an event.

The young Latha Selvaraja likes the sensation of splashed water. She likes to put her hands in a clean pool and watch it swell beneath the surface. She grabs the elusive water in her palms, individual fingers eclipsed by the depth, right before breaking the surface and tossing the water out and onto her feet, onto the grass, darkening the green moss of the backyard, until everything is wet.  It is a trait her elder husband has to attribute to the puerile recklessness of his young bride in order to restrain himself from cutting off the water supply to the house.

This night in these pictures, her family packs a van with a virgin, a dowry of clothes and pots and electronic items, and a stranger (who wasn’t actually a stranger but in fact her long lost uncle) to play husband in the epic story of marriage. 

“How did you feel?” I pointed to my face, and then screwed my eyes to indicate tears 16 years in the future when she has invited me to her “poor house” to feast on a self-replenishing mound of red chicken biriyani, chicken gravy, and pickles.

“I was afraid. But this is my life! My life is my husband and my son. Without them, I would have no life.”

Scratching my head, I crept back into the past, disguised as one of the sari donning aunties, and tried observed the young confident, elegantly jeweled 18-21 year old Latha Selvaraja.

She wears an ocean blue sari, this one silk and embroidered with gold, adorned by a dazzling cone-shaped bindi in the spot between her eyebrows. From there, the bindi points upward to gold loops that hangs from the crown of her head down over her forehead, orchestrating the bride’s face in an optical atlas that gives the eyes direction to the god within her. When she bows to her husband, the message is clear: the god in me recognizes the god in you.

A thali, or marriage locket, has just been placed around her neck. Neither she nor her husband look at each other as if to contain the laughter that would break out if they were to catch sight of each other’s bashful blushes. They focus instead on the aunties and sisters and cousins attentively putting food into their mouths.

I inch in between the crowd of wedding officials, Brahmin, auntie, sister, and eavesdrop on her inner thoughts:

I hope that your mother is nice. And that you have a good job. I won’t need too many jewels, just a pair of nice gold earings, a nose ring and a silver anklet for each leg. I hope i can have a son.

Luckily for Latha Selvaraja, the van that arrived to transport husband, wife, and dowry only had to turn the block and drive 3km before it came to a sputter, shaking out its hood, fanning out its hind, and rest its laurels at a tiny house across the street from her sister’s. She, having married her uncle, would live in her maternal village, where her father, mother, sister, brother, and extended family would always be around to give her milk to make curd rice and coconut chutney, firewood to cook with, and an ear to voice the concerns of adult life.

But Latha Selvaraja, who had the acumen to know that once you start complaining, life would never be good enough, never turned into a moaner.  She woke up at 5am the morning after her wedding, rolled the dough for the parotha, put the wedding clothes in a bucket to soak, swept the painted concrete floor, put the new pots and pans in order, and took a splash bath before her husband awoke for his first cup of chai at 7am. Happy with the swell job of housewifery she was doing, Latha Selvaraja continued the same tasks for 14 years until things got tough and raising a teenager became unsustainable on a landless laborer’s back.

Around that time, news of urban jobs where people wear crisp uniforms and watch as much Bollywood music videos as they wanted came on the backs of cart-pulling cows in the lazy little town of Kuvanalangottai.

When her husband left, Latha Selvaraja continued her private water splashing fantasies, but added a twist: she would splash water over the interior walls of the entire house and scrub it from ceiling to floor as if to shave away the smell of her husband, whom she didn’t want to miss while he was away.

The village Kuvanalangottai is scattered with mud huts, temples to Shiva, god of destruction and his wife Mari Amman. Tea kiosks selling biscuits squat with overweight men and women in moomoo’s chatting to customers. The temples sit next to ponds with marble steps where people sluice themselves before praying. The huts are awned with thatch roofs that flop to the ground like straw hats. They have grown out of the earth like an extra digit. It is hard to know whether the house starts and where the ground ends. Everything is smooth and rounded here like a Gaudi invention: no sharp edges, no straight lines. Only the old women have bent at 90 degree angles from years of planting rice paddies.

Latha Selvaraja’s house is just a rectangle, with every room serving as a corridor for the other, each visible from the street.  There is no privacy. Every matter is a village matter. 50 of Latha Selvaraja’s siblings have already come sneaking in through the living room to meet me.

 On the morning after I did not sleep, I was visited by Latha Selvaraja’s three mothers, the oldest of which had a pigment discoloration that seemed endemic in Indians as far as West Bengal. Her hair had gone as white as her skin in the shock of age and its battering of the body. Her energy, flushed out like the melanin in her skin, was mollifying.  She invited me for my second cup of coffee at 8am on the wooden cot of Latha Selvaraja’s father’s firewood store.  Caffeine ravaged my heart as I “took rest”, widening my eyes to show delight at the syrupy coffee, wobbling yes and no answers, waiting for someone to invite me to leave.

In India, the nation of villages, it is absolutely necessary to sit down and take chai before anything occurs.  To be hasty is to fight against the treadmill of the universe, which recycles itself, coming back with second rounds of tea, and three rounds of mothers. You will only tire yourself if you fight against it.

The second mother dropped in as if to relieve the responsibility of the 1^st. Her hair was also white, but her skin still a supple almond brown. She spoke quickly, first to first mother, then to me, as if to indicate to both of us that she was talking about me, but not expecting an answer.

Then third mother, the haughtiest of them all, hobbled in, back bent at 90 degrees, and hair as white and curly as Punjabi’s beard. She was the type that didn’t let you get away with murder. She gripped my wrist in her slippery shaky hands and pointed at herself then out the door, to indicate that it was her home I had refused to go in for tea the night before when it was raining.  I, pretending to be stricken by her grip, bowed at the god in her, and asked forgiveness with my eyes. She wobbled her head: “Ok. We cool,” then sat next to me to me to display the fractured bone jutting out from the side of her knee.  

In this land of ludicrously green rice paddies, unpronounceable names and complicated family relations, I am unperturbed by the dearth of language. Communication is as simple as a Tom and Jerry cartoon.  Gestures are amplified, and even a mute can communicate. A smile is repaid with an invite to tea.  And a hand gesture with a head wobble, yes. My face is undergoing significant exercise as I learn to use it much like I used my voice.

I have learned to sing with it: raising my eyebrows so that they almost touch my hairline, stretching my smile so that my lips touch my ears and nose simultaneously, all the while keeping my eyes flexible so that they can look up and down, slant sideways and swivel much as my voice would hold a high note ripe and maneuverable.

Once, as I sang with my eyes, and Latha Selvaraja, with her helium voice, we hit a note of such symbiotic harmony that it was hard to separate us, and we almost morphed into the same person, my body sucked like pigment into the supple swathes of her blue sari. I felt my skin loosing its color. I saw the hair on Latha Selvaraja’s head begin to sizzle into short steaming kinks. I saw what looked like a white face peeking through the wooden planks of the entrance room separated from the living room by only a curtain.

Then, her son, the amazingly strong shot put champion Boominayagi, sauntered in pushing the world forward with his broad shoulders, and sucked back the energy of his mother. All eyes on him, Latha Selvaraja, shifted back to hostess mode and immediately asked me if I liked parotha. I nodded, and she rolled the dough, slid the twigs of firewood into her clay stove carved from the very mud of the house walls, and fried flattened wheat pancakes on an iron skillet.  She reheated the chicken gravy from the previous night, reached into a silver pot and pulled out eight magical rice flour cakes and a bag of coconut chutney. Four for me, four for Boominayagi. Then, when I started preparing my stomach to devour the feast already laid out, she reached into the voluptuous layers of her blue, ordinary, housewife sari, and pulled out an entire white icing cake!

The sly Latha Selvaraja of the marriage pictures has softened into a woman plump with love.  She pinches my cheeks then kisses her hands, the Tamil version of a blown kiss.  I am weak with love for a woman I’ve known for less than a week. How is it possible?  In the distant lands of my birth, it is not uncommon to drag an engagement on for three years, then two more just to be safe, then divorce after three years of realizing you were just not meant to be. Best friends start in primary school and go on through college and old age.  Love is slow. Life is fast.

With Latha Selvaraja, it is the absolute opposite. I have just met her and I am now sleeping with her. I have fallen in love overnight.  This is a crash course in best friendship. Relationship immersion. Like two people alone on a desert island. Differences minimized. Necessity draws action. Intentional bonding occurs.

Latha Selvaraja’s mothers, the three witches came cooing as Latha Selvaraja took a splash bath in the back yard. Meanwhile, Boominayagi sat on the table watching antediluvian Tamil music videos inches away from the ancient TV.  They talked to each other as they circled me like I was a vat, scratching their chins with their scrawny fingers, rolling their erratic R’s beneath their sharpened K’s, as they pulled the kinks out and watched them roll back in like a pig’s tail. They delighted over my mystery.

I sat, voiceless, and concentrating on the mental picture to capture this moment in my head. I enjoyed the commotion and found the fingers titillating. The clinkety clank of thier gold bangles soothed me like water.  I could hear the shaking of their old bones as they wiggled in and out of loose sockets.

Latha Selvaraja, dressed in her official sari, salmon with gold fringes, came in singing Tamil pop songs by Chitra.  The mothers suddenly intensified their evil finger work, moving down to the muscles in my face, until my non-vocal sounds began to merge with Latha Selvaraja’s voice.  

Our melody built as the the notes of a distant sitar wafted through the corridors. Thammátama drums kept a delayed beat that pulled my hips in the opposite direction of my torso until I was swaying like a snake from a basket. The witches began to clap their hands and galumph their anklet bejeweled feet, swirling the tortuous rhythm into a rapture. Latha Selvaraja’s 50 cousins reappeard at the door along with 50 of their sisters and brothers.

This was a festival of colors. Of cultures combined. I was loosing myself in the welcoming arms of Kuvanalangottai.  My bicycle tan draining away. My thigh muscles softening beneath the heavy lethargy of South India’s sun.  Could it be that this was my destiny? That I rode a bicycle for 6 months across several countries only to arrive quiescent and content in a village that would never leave me, whose sisters and brothers and cousins would always be there for me to borrow pots and deliver freshly squeezed milk?

To be continued…