Preparing for a Trip (Aliyah

I’m leaving for Gujarat in two days, or so is my plan and tickets, and I couldn’t be happier. Living in a place I don’t like makes it easier to leave. I’ve read most of Bhoomi’s books that don’t relate purely to psychiatry, filling a lack that I felt strongly at Kuthur. I’m going to visit Jyothibhai and Malini Behn Desai, long-time Gandhian workers and friends. I will report back from there, or at least I will try, as I can’t remember there being anywhere within ten kilometers that might have Internet access.

This morning Amma and I went to visit a friend of hers who runs a hostel for destitute women in Chennai. Currently she is running it out of a few rooms in a rented apartment building, which is not very satisfactory, and she hopes to get a better space. There was a row of treadle sewing machines, a pile of suitcases, and a strange profusion of young women in their late teens. We ate breakfast there: idlis, sambar, coconut chutney, and vadai (a donut-shaped, onion-containing concoction the ingredients of which I have never been able to fathom), with a sweet dish the name of which I have forgotten. We took back large bags of bananas and flour for Appa’s kanji (porridge).

This evening, we were visited by a relative Amma referred to as “Gandhi’s cousin-brother.” Apparently I got the relationships wrong and Gandhi is related to Jagannathan, not to Krishnammal. He is Jagannathanji’s grand-nephew, his brother’s grandson. It makes more sense to me now that Gandhi would have a family deity in Madurai, and would have to go there for Gokulmitra’s ear-piercing.

This house in Chennai is decent, but the only thing I really like about it is the series of terraces on the roofs, complete with hanging laundry. It’s more peaceful up there, above tree-top height, with the crows flying at eye-level, and the air seems cleaner. I can see a long way. Why do people like living so crowded together into cities? I don’t understand.

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Last day in Chennai. I’ve been packing, doing laundry, and trying to get the area around my bed out of the disorderliness into which it has fallen. I’m much better at causing messiness than fixing it. Jothi is cooking onions, Muthukumar is tearing herbs, and Jagannathan seems to be relating the story of the prawn struggle. Krishnammal is walking from one place to another.

It’s another bright morning, already hot at eight o’clock. I don’t have too much to say. I’m looking forward to getting out of this city, but at the same time, I wish I could bring these people with me!

I went shopping on Thursday. I bought some presents for various people, but didn’t find everything I wanted. That’s how it goes.

I now have a slightly better idea of how to make sambar. You put the cooked lentils in after you cook the vegetables with oil, then water and sambar powder. Amma’s recipe still doesn’t make much sense.

Goodbye for a few day.,

Cherries (Aliyah!)

Sigh. Still here in Chennai, at Bhoomi’s “closet”. The apartment has a long and complicated story attached, involving a military lottery and a contractor who ran off with the money and invested it in prawn farms, that would probably infuriate Jagannathanji if he knew the half of it. There’s not much here -- no phone, few cooking facilities, but there is a collection of books and Krishnammal has yet another closet full of saris. (I once tried to figure out how many she has, but couldn’t. There are at least a few dozen, some of which she has probably owned since before I was born, almost all hand-me-downs from Sathya.)

Jagannathan is currently telling his stories of struggles to another elderly man, who is collecting them and writing them down. I really wish I could understand, but he’s speaking in Tamil. Krishnammal has been in meetings and discussions with government officials dealing with rural development. Sathya has come a few times, once bringing her dog, Tipu, a hyperactive, white, long-haired spitz named after a famous sultan.

We are on the fourth floor (what in India is called the third floor) so we’re too high up for mosquitoes, but the traffic noise sounds day and night. There hasn’t been too much for me to do but read, as I can’t understand any of the meetings, and I feel, frankly, out of the loop.

Sathya brought cherries this morning. I have no idea where she bought them, but I’m happy, since I missed the cherry season at home. Hopefully there will be peaches and blackberries when I get back. I love mangoes and bananas and all the food here, but I’ve been thinking longingly of good, wheat-flour bread. I’ve been watching people make sambar, so maybe I’ll have a better idea of how to make it myself when I get home.

This evening, I plan to go shopping for some presents, so I should make a list of what I need. I don’t mind shopping in India as much as I do in the U.S., but it’s still not one of my favorite activities. I have never understood spending money as a form of entertainment. I like looking at things, but I don’t particularly care for buying them, and I am definitely frugal to a fault. I have to constantly remind myself of the exchange rate here.

Aliyah

Ear Piercing

Writing again from the apartment in Madras. Today Krishnammal is in Madurai, taking a flying trip there to attend the ear-piercing and hair-cutting ceremony of Gandhi’s daughter, traditionally performed at a temple on a child’s first birthday. Why does it have to be done in Madurai, when there are some very nice temples in Tiruvarur, where Gandhi lives? Because the family deity is in Madurai, of course. I wonder if this would be Krishnammal’s family deity as well. (And it is where my middle name, provided by Jagannathan, comes from.) As I remember, Gandhi is her nephew or grand-nephew, but I can never keep the siblings straight. On Friday, I met another of Krishnammal’s sisters, the twelfth and last child of the family, when I thought I had already met the only still-living sister in Gandhigram.

Yesterday, I bought my train tickets, and now I feel much better. I’m going second class instead of AC (“air conditioned"), because I would have to get on a waiting list for AC, and even though I would probably get on, it would still worry me. I spent much of the rest of the day listening to a four-hour meeting of which I didn’t understand a word. It was about government-sponsored alcohol-selling, I believe, a subject about which I know very little. Jagannathan decided to hold it; this is an old struggle of his. As a Gandhian, he is in favor of complete prohibition. While I understand the great problem of alcohol abuse, this is not an attitude that I share. I’m glad I brought a book to the meeting. Bhoomi has a fairly extensive collection here, of which I have been making use.

Two pigeons are having a serious fight on my windowsill. I keep banging on the window, trying to break it up, but they keep coming back. I slept like a log last night, despite the traffic noise. Sathya should be arriving this morning.

Aliyah

Travel Plans (Aliyah)

July 8th

I am sitting here in Bhoomi’s “cloakroom” (his unoccupied apartment) in Chennai, in the middle of a minor panic attack. Maybe writing this will help me to calm down. Maybe it will make things worse. This panic has to do with my travel plans, as usual.

I am, in most things, a very disorganized person. My bedroom looks like a tornado just swept through it (in fact, the first sentence of my college entrance essay was “my room is an archeological dig”), my desk is usually just barely usable, and my notes are so illegible and unorganized that they only help me in studying because if I took a note of something, I am more likely to remember it when combing through the layers of the “garbage brain” that I inherited from my father.

But I am a creature of habit. I like my meals to be at the same time every day, and I do not mind if there is not much variety in them (it surprises Krishnammal that I don’t care if rice and sambar and curd are served every day as long as they taste good, and they do!) I can’t go to bed at 11 on weekdays and 3 am on weekends, which sometimes limits my weekend activities with my fellow college-student friends. I have to have a base of habit as a foundation to build my life.

I particularly dislike disruption in my travel plans. Travel is a removal from one’s usual habits and the formation of new ones, and when even the plan for the changing is disturbed, I become upset. Last winter, I was stuck in an airport for two days due to a snowstorm, and by the end, I was ready to scream at everyone in sight.

Here, trying to figure out tickets to Gujarat, I feel like the man in the Gospel who builds his house on the shifting sands. Krishnammal keeps changing her plans, or rather has no plans, and I’m trying to plan around her. She’s going to Delhi on the 20th and could come back any time between the 26th and the 30th. I thought we were going back to Kuthur on the 15th but apparently we aren’t. I leave India August 2nd. Plans rush through my head, each as unsatisfactory as the next. Should I leave the 15th or the 17th or the 20th? Should I come back the 24th or the 28th? Should I go back to Kuthur or not?

Finally, after praying with Krishnammal and Sathya and leaving to take Sathya to the new and fancy Chennai bus stop, I feel more settled in mind. I realize that whatever I choose, when I look back on it, it will probably not matter much. I remember that whatever happens is part of a pattern, and that. even though I cannot see the order in it, I am sure that there is one. I still don’t know exactly what tickets I will buy, though I think I will leave on the 17th, return on the 24th, and spend a few days back in Kuthur Bbut I am no longer so worried.

In later life, I think I will probably become either an activist or a hermit. The monk in his monastery is considered to be in close touch with God, but to me the person who moves about in this wide, wild, sometimes terrifying world, and still lets God have control, is far more extraordinary, and pursues a far more difficult goal. It is a goal I would love to reach, but I am so far away from it now. I know it will take me years of practice, but that is only a greater reason to start now, with such a trivial matter as a train ticket to Gujarat.

Arut perum jothi,
Thani perum karunai.
Arut perum jothi.

Aliyah

Monsoon (Aliyah)

Here I am, still in Kuthur. I spent Saturday and Sunday going to and from Chengalpattu by train. I was trying to go to Gujarat to visit my friends the educators Jyothibhai and Malini Behn Desai, but there are big floods in Gujarat and the train was canceled. I may try to go again later, or I may not. Much as I would like to see Jyothi and Malini, I want to have as much time here as possible. My departure date is coming up, much too close.

I went to a wedding yesterday, of one of Krishnammal’s beneficiaries. The great show and loud music only confirmed in my thought that, if I ever marry, I want the plainest Quaker wedding possible. Actually, it will not be the plainest possible, since I do want to have an actual wedding. My parents were married four times to each other (long story) and never had a wedding. Everyone looked happy except the bride and groom.

Krishnammal never met the President. She was going to go, but she learned that she would not actually be able to talk much, and there would be a huge crowd. She was definitely not going to go just to see a man she doesn’t know. We are going to Madras on the 7th for some sort of prawn meeting. I have been trying to decipher the provisions of the new Coastal Aquaculture Authority Bill. Basically, the bill is neither good nor bad. What matters is who is appointed to this new Coastal Aquaculture Authority.

It poured yesterday afternoon. The roof became a swamp, the dry tank began to fill up again, and a broad brown river ran through the ashram courtyard. I rushed out to rescue some drying mangoes on the roof that no one else had remembered. The rain soaked through the shoulders of my shirt in seconds, and the trailing hem of my skirt became sodden as I bent to lift the cloth, mangoes and all, out of the ankle-deep water. The courtyard is still a bit muddy this morning, although the day is bright and clear. It never becomes cloudy until mid-afternoon.

I finally bought a new pair of chappals. The dog eventually completely ruined my last pair. The new ones look a great deal like Krishnammal’s. I hate shoe-shopping with a completely irrational passion.

Appa wants me to drink milk after dinner. All right, I’ll drink milk after dinner. It’s his goal that by the time I leave I should be six inches taller and ten kilos heavier. I may be on the way to being heavier. Trying to grow taller, I fear, is a lost cause. I remember, when I was ten years old, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Having always hated this question (please ask me what am I now!), I answered “Taller!” Later I decided that I wanted to grow up to be an octopus. I’m currently in training for this profession.

Wow, this is an entry of really scattered thoughts. Sorry.

Aliyah