Death in the City of Light – 4/6/15

                When I came to India, I never been to a wedding nor a funeral. I was excited to go to an Indian wedding (and fully expected to) and never really gave any thought to the possibility of going to a funeral. Living in Banaras, a place where people come to die, I’d seen funeral processions and bodies burning on the ghats, but it was not so sad because I did not know those people. The only other time I can think of someone who I knew who died was my friend’s mom in preschool. Even then, the only memory of her that I have is at Sunday school she taught us the song that goes “I see London. I see France. I see _______’s underpants!” and we thought it was hilarious. I don’t remember finding out that she died, but I do remember asking my parents, dressed all in black, if I could go to her funeral with them. When you’re three, though, death doesn’t hit you the same way as when you’re older and can understand it.

Stephen’s homestay father passed away early Monday morning. To say that it was totally unexpected would be untrue. After all, he had been undergoing dialysis treatment for some time and was so weak he could barely walk to the bathroom from is bed. That being said, it also was very much a surprise. We hadn’t really thought of death as something that could actually be an immediate result of is sickness. Just last Thursday we were at their house for Stephen’s birthday with him, singing songs, eating cake, and dancing (he sat in a chair and looked on). We helped carry him up the stairs to his bedroom after the party and said goodbye without giving it a second thought.

Most people found out via a text from Caleb-ji on Monday morning. I was showering when Caleb sent the text and then didn’t check my phone when I got out and left for the program house. When I walked in and Caleb told me the news, I didn’t know what to feel. It was sort of a sad numbness. I didn’t know Mr. Sachdeva that well, but of the people in our group I knew him best next to Stephen. He volunteered at Nirman before he got sick and would joint teach the 6^th graders math with me. I had snacks and water at is house a few times and bonded with him over the University of California Berkeley (where he received his master’s degree and where my older brother studies now). It didn’t feel real when Caleb told me. Ben P and Jenny were sitting quietly at the program house in a sort of gloomy silence. We heard the plan for the day – no work, meeting at 11:15 at Stephen’s house for a short ceremony, and then the boys would accompany the procession to Manikarnika, the big burning ghat where open fire cremations take place (girls are not supposed to go). More people trickled in to the program house and joined us as we sat in a cloud of melancholy. In the kitchen Muni-ji (the woman who cooks breakfast for us) was blasting cheery Bollywood music that was eerily out of place, but none of us bothered to ask her to change it.

Upon finding out about Mr. Sachdeva’s death, many of us suddenly felt the need to contact our family and make sure they were still okay. Death seems so unreal sometimes. You sort of get double think knowing that you’re going to die someday, but at the same time not actually expecting it to ever happen. When someone does pass away, however, reality gives you a punch and all of the sudden everyone becomes so mortal. It seems like anyone you know and love could just be gone in an instant. The worst scenarios jump into your mind and you just want the comfort of knowing that the people you love are still alright.

Hemant-ji showed up for our yoga class, but we told him to cancel. He sat with us for hours, though, first talking about culturally what you’re supposed to do when someone dies (since all of us were clueless on the matter) and then about other things, occupying our minds so we would not have to dwell on the sad news until eleven. At an Indian funeral you are supposed to wear brightly colored or white clothing (anything dark is considered inauspicious). You bring malas (flower garlands) to place on the body and once you arrive are not supposed to leave until after the body as left the house on the procession to the burning ghat. The procession consists of close friends and family members and typically involves carrying the deceased, wrapped in colorful cloth and covered in garlands, on a stretcher to one of the two burning ghats in Banaras, Manikarnika (the bigger one closer to the old city) or Harishchandra (the smaller one closer to Assi). During the procession the family/friends chant “Ram nam satye hai!” (Ram’s name is truth – Ram is a warrior king in Hindu mythology). After visiting the home with the dead body, Hindus believe that you have become impure and must bathe/wash your clothes before touching anyone/thing or going into the house. More of my thoughts on this practice in another blog. As it got later in the morning, our group split up to change clothes, tell our host families, etc. before coming to meet Stephen and is family at their house.

I didn’t expect to cry at the funeral. I’m not usually an extremely emotional person and very few of even my close friends have seen me cry. But while at Stephen’s house, I couldn’t stop the tears from creeping into my eyes and falling down my cheeks. In fact, I started crying on the bike ride over as I mentally prepared myself for the funeral. Sure, I wasn’t extremely close to Mr. Sachdeva, but I still felt immense pain thinking about what his family must be going through. Just thinking of my own father dying sent tears to my eyes and when I put myself in Stephen’s host sister’s shoes I couldn’t help but cry in earnest. When I arrived and saw Kushi and Pari (Stephen’s host nieces), I cried more because they had just lost their wonderful grandfather. What sent me bawling, though, was talking to Stephen’s host mom. I had visited her just on Wednesday to tell her about Stephen’s surprise birthday party and even then she had cried at the thought of Stephen leaving Banaras. Now, she was hysterical with grief, sobbing in garbled Hindi and English, asking what she will do when Stephen leaves in a few weeks and she will be all alone. To say it was an intense emotional experience would be a vast understatement.

What was perhaps even more disconcerting for me, though, was seeing the corpse. Only his head was visible (everything else was wrapped in colorful cloth and malas) and while I was placing the garland over is legs I simultaneously wanted to stare indefinitely at him and also shut my eyes and bolt out of the room as fast as possible. You read in books that people look peaceful in death, that they look like they’re just sleeping, but I did not find that to be the case. He certainly did not look like someone peacefully sleeping. Something was gone, was missing that made him now almost inhuman.

This funeral procession was a less traditional and orthodox than the practices that Hemant-ji had explained to us. The body was taken to Manikarnika Ghat in a hearse rather than carried by men on a stretcher and most people traveled behind it in either cars or rickshaws. Even though in Hindu orthodoxy it is believed that the soul cannot be properly released from the body unless the funeral rites are performed by the eldest son, the funeral rites were performed by Stephen’s host sister (Stephen’s host brother lives in America and could not arrive in time for the funeral).

                As weird as this might sound, I feel like this has overall been a healthy growing experience for me. I still fight back tears every time I write/edit this blog and think about what happened. I still wish that he were here and I could ask him for tips on how to manage the unruly sixth graders or talk to him about his days at Berkeley. But I can also find some consolation in the knowledge that he is no longer in pain. That he is in heaven or reincarnated into a body who will be taken care of and loved by his family (following whichever faith). His passage (or expiration as an Indian might say) has pushed me to really ponder life and death and made my experience in India more grounded and whole. I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that I have experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life while here. Rest in peace, Ashok Sachdeva.

The Festival of the Egg – 4/5/15

                My mom sent me a package that included an egg dying kit for Easter and when I brought it home, Deep (my host brother) was very interested. The funny thing is that Deep doesn’t even eat eggs since he’s a Hindu vegetarian. He was curious to know about why I had been sent egg dye and I tried explaining Easter to him. The main problem being that Easter egg dying and what Easter celebrates have very little in similar. Deep could never remember the name of Easter and instead just started calling it the Festival of the Egg. “Indu, what day is the Festival of the Egg?” “Indu, you will take me to color eggs, nah?” “Indu, will Chini and Shiv and Anandi be there?”  

                The day before Easter we ad group masti (group fun) at the local university’s sports fields where we played cricket and Frisbee. Afterwards, we headed to Caleb’s apartment for the actual Easter egg dying. We had 30 eggs and Deep probably dyed about 10 of them he was so excited. We ate macaroni and cheese and potato chips and drank “cold drink” (what people here call soda). Ben P was at Dolly-ji’s house leading a Jewish Seder (I also hear that this was very impromptu. They had to make many substitutions for the Seder platter like mutton for lamb, cilantro for parsley, papad for matza, and water wit oral rehydration salts for salt water, just to name a few. Additionally, Ben P accidentally printed out a Jews for Jesus version of the Seder service), but everyone else besides him made an appearance. Jenny, of course, made some of the most artistic and beautiful eggs including the Scream and Spongebob Squarepants, but there were plenty of other good ones. Stephen’s host nieces came as well and added even more energy to the room. Once we finished dying eggs, we decided to make an Easter egg hunt for Deep and Stephen’s host nieces. We hid twenty-four of the eggs around Caleb’s apartment and had the kids search for them. I think Pari (the older of Stephen’s two host nieces) found the most number of eggs, followed by Deep, and then Kushi (the younger of Stephen’s host nieces). Also at the party, Ben T, Alex, and I filled golgappa shells (sort of an edible hollow bread sphere thing) with candies for an “egg” hunt that we planned for the boys at Bal Ashram the next morning on actual Easter.

                Easter Day was also interesting. We started off by hiding the filled golgappa shells for the Ashram boys, but monkeys kept stealing the candy! Alex and I walked around with big sticks to try to discourage them, but they would always manage to sneak a few golgappa “eggs” while we weren’t looking. The Ashram boys absolutely loved it (the Little Stars Hostel girls were also supposed to be there, but they were being punished for not doing their chores. Later in the day, Ben T came back and hid more golgappa for them). Later, we learned how to make gulab jamun (an Indian sweet) with Ben T’s host sister-in-law (I ate wayyyy too many) and then went to a church service at St. Thomas Church. The service was all in Hindi and the hymns sounded nothing like the ones in the US, but it was cool to see how the two cultures mixed. You still had to take off your shoes before entering the church (a very Hindu tradition) and most of the church goers were in saris (one woman was even in a sari decorated with pictures of marijuana leaves). Afterwards, there was a dance party to Indian Cristian rock music and some mildly sketchy free food. When I arrived back home, the Hindu temple outside of my house was also having some sort of party (not for Easter) and I ate even more free food in the form of Prasad.

Stephen’s Birthday – 4/2/15

                Stephen’s birthday was very fun, if not a little disorderly.  We had a series of surprises for him that all sort of failed, but it was exciting nonetheless. The first surprise that we tried to pull off was a scavenger hunt. Ben T orchestrated it and made it a good mix of hard and funny. I guess this one didn’t fail, per say, since Ben T did succeed in making a good scavenger hunt, but Stephen never ended up finishing it. This was mostly because Stephen ran out of time to follow the clues since he wanted to be on time for Hindi class. The ironic thing is that Ben T purposefully designed it that way (trying to make Stephen late) so that our group could get prepared for surprise number 3.

The second surprise gone wrong was making brownies. I started making brownies at the program house and made it through the first batch alright. Unfortunately, the electricity went out before the second batch had even baked for a few minutes, so I biked to our Hindi class with a pan full of brownie batter strapped to the back of my bike (the cooked brownies were also in my possession).  Luckily, our Hindi guru-ji has a stovetop oven. Unluckily, it is virtually impossible to control its heat. We did end up making semi-decent brownies, even if they were a little burnt on the outside and gooey on the inside.

                The third failed attempt at a surprise was at Hindi. The original plan was to have everyone get to class early and be waiting for Stephen to come in at which point we would surprise him with brownies and tell him class was actually canceled so that we could take him out to dinner. In classic BYP India 6.0 fashion, however, everyone except me, Alex, and Jenny were late (i.e. came after Stephen arrived). Plus, we couldn’t go into the classroom since the class before us was running late, and the second batch of brownies wasn’t ready yet. In any event, we took him to Ming Garden for dinner and ate some really good (and equally inauthentic) Chinese food.

                Our last try to properly surprise Stephen also ended up not working. At the end of dinner we each left in a few minute intervals, telling Stephen we had to go home for one reason or another. In reality, we all biked to his homestay and set up the cake and present that we got for him. That part of the plan went beautifully and we even remembered to park our bikes around the corner so that he wouldn’t see them. The catch this time, though, was that Stephen’s host father had just come home from dialysis and was too weak to get out of the car. Some of the boys had to help carry him out of the car and into the room where the party was going to be. It was during this time that Stephen came home and saw us all before we could surprise him.

                The party itself was really fun. We danced and sang to music, ate a lot of cake (we accidentally ended up with two cakes because both we and his host family bought cakes), and drank mango juice and soda.  Stephen fed his host family and us cake as per Indian custom and Kushi and Pari (his host nieces) smeared cake on his face. The party had to end a little early because his host dad was getting tired and all of the loud music was quite jarring for his delicate state. He was so weak that the boys had to carry him upstairs to his room afterwards.

                As a present we gave Stephen nice fabric to make a new kurta along with matching thread and fancy buttons. In the end, we had a really enjoyable time and I think Stephen still liked all of the surprises, even if none of them were particularly good.

Monkeys at School – 4/1/15

                I’ve been here for so long that the animals in inappropriate places barely even cross my radar. I bike past cows in the middle of the road without even blinking (although I do sometimes curse the traffic jams that they cause). I don’t think it’s funny or strange when Stephen tells me that he prefers to wash his clothes in the morning so that the monkeys don’t steal his clothes when they’re more active in the evening. I lazily watch the mice in my host family’s kitchen and gaze at the geckos in my room. The pigs eating trash on the corner of the road by the Assi River are mundane and the sweater-donning goats sauntering down the ghats are commonplace. I wouldn’t even think to blog about them if not for talking to my family in the US.  Banaras is the about the closest you can get to an actual concrete jungle. This blog is about a hilariously scary run-in with the dubious monkeys who inhabit Varanasi.

                After school one day I was working in the library when I heard the terrified shrieks of some teachers in a classroom nearby. “BUNDER UNDER AH GAYE!!!” “MONKEYS HAVE COME INSIDE!!!” It was the sort of high frequency squeal that can shatter glass and burst eardrums. Sure enough, when I peered into the room through a window there was a monkey perched on a desk and just hanging out. A few feet away, two teachers were cowering under desks. I, not wanting to suffer the same fate as Stephen, retrieved the bat that Ben P keeps in the cupboard that we share (he futilely hopes that one day his ninth graders will memorize the poem “Casey at the Bat” and he will reward them with a period of playing baseball out in the field). Ben had already left school to go to Urdu class and I decided that someone might as well be protected from the monkeys (they leave you alone if they think you can hurt them i.e. by wielding a bat). I camped out in a corner and brandished the bat whenever a monkey started getting too close for comfort. It was from this vantage point that I watched the monkeys climb inside the library through the open windows and start scaling bookshelves, grabbing books at random and throwing them on the floor.  A few monkeys even stole books and ran and still others chucked some books at onlookers on the lower story. Finally, some of the groundskeepers arrived with long bamboo sticks and started whacking any monkeys that didn’t leave.

                As the monkeys left, I took a look around to assess the damage. A couple of chairs had been turned over and 30 or so books were not in their right places, but I think it could have been worse. Many of the teachers were still under desks as I walked around and asked me if the monkeys had finally left.

I don’t think monkeys have often been near the top of my list of favorite animals, but if they were before, they certainly are not now.

Holi – 3/6/15

                My first taste of Holi was at school on March 4 when all of the teachers and students played Holi together in the field (which perhaps should not be called the field when there actually isn’t any grass there). The first half of the day I spent giving a 3-hour-long science exam to my 9^th graders, but after lunch was all fun and games. Grades 1 through 8 did poetry recitations and dances about Holi, and even though I heard the same poem about Holi recited by most of the grade levels, it was still cute to see them all give presentations with splashes of color across their faces. After the poetry/dances, it was all out war.

                Before I go too much into describing Holi, however, I should probably go over some of the vernacular and back story. The colorful powders (some chemically colored and others herbal) that you throw/smear on other people are simply called “colors.” Powdered colors that you mix with water to shoot out of water guns and launch with water balloons are called “liquid colors.” Powdered colors are considered cleaner since you can wash them out while liquid colors stain. Getting yourself and others covered with colors is called “playing Holi” and if you don’t really want to play Holi but still want some color on your face you can ask for “bus tika” (bus meaning “only” or “stop” and a tika is a mark placed between the eyebrows and is normally applied using either the thumb or ring finger). Here’s a quick and dirty overview of the story behind Holi (it’s actually a cool story if you want to look it up in more depth). Basically, there was this evil demon king who had a son who he hated. He tried many times to kill his son, but each time the son was saved by Lord Vishnu. The evil demon king was practically invincible – he could be killed neither inside nor outside, neither by a man nor beast, neither during the day nor the night, etc. One day he thought of an ingenious way to kill his son – he would burn his son in a fire. The reason why this was so ingenious was that the demon king had a sister named Holika who possessed a magical blanket that allowed her to touch fire and not be burned. The demon king planned that Holika would sit in a fire with her blanket and the baby son and the son would die while she would survive. When Holika sat on the fire with the boy, however, Lord Vishnu summoned a great wind that swept both the baby and the blanket away. Holika was left to burn and the baby was saved! Sometime later, Lord Vishnu killed the evil demon king in a doorway (avoiding the inside/outside problem) while in the form of a half-man/half-beast creature (avoiding the man nor beast problem), and at precisely a time when it was neither day nor night (I can’t remember if it was dusk or dawn, but in any event he avoided the day/night problem).

                That’s the story of why Holi is celebrated, but the backstory behind all of color business is slightly different. The story goes that Krishna, who was dark skinned, had fallen in love with a fair-skinned girl and thought that the only reason she didn’t like him was because he was black. When he told his mother this, she told him to go and put color on her so that she wouldn’t be fair-skinned anymore. He did so and thus sprouted the tradition of playing Holi.

There are four main Hindu holidays that used to be for the four main varnas (castes). Holi was originally for the Shudra caste (the lowest caste that included untouchables) and on the day of Holi everyone is said to be on equal ground, regardless of caste. The way our Hindi guru-ji talked about Holi made it sound like a real-life purge (if you’re confused, I’m referencing a movie that came out sorta recently). On Holi it’s permissible to act like demons, so people (namely young men) will drink lots of alcohol, consume lots of weed in various forms, eat meat (or meaty vegetables), swear like sailors, and generally be unruly. For this reason, girls are not allowed out on the streets before 2 PM on the day of Holi (at 1 PM there is a ceasefire for all crazy activity).

                Anyway, back to playing Holi at school. Most teachers decided to go bus tika, but Ben P, Mallory (a previous Dragons student who came back to India to volunteer at Nirman), and I wanted to get in on all of the fun. Some students were really sweet and would practically caress my cheeks when they smeared color on my face, following that with a tika and touching my feet to show respect. Other students, however, would come up from behind and violently rub my entire head with color before darting off to find another victim. It was an exhausting 20 to 30 minutes of play, but it was also SO FUN. After the kids went home, all of the teachers went to the performance room and had a dance party. It took quite a bit of scrubbing to get all of the colors off when I got home (I basically had to take 2 consecutive baths), but it was still nothing compared to the amount of bathing I had to do after real Holi.

                The day after Holi at school was the day when Holika is burned in effigy on huge bonfires throughout the city. Since a month or so people have been adding wood, garbage, etc. to the piles and some of them in the streets got so large that they obstructed traffic (much to my consternation). Lots of Hindu religious festivals also have some sort of cleaning aspect to them. On Diwali you’re supposed to clean your house or else Lakshmi (the god of wealth) will not come in and bless your family. On Holi, you scrub your body (namely arms, hands, feet, and legs) with a mustard oil scrub and clean off all of the dead skin that you can. Later, you collect the scrub/dead skin leftovers and throw them in the bonfires.

                The first bonfire that we went to that night was a real happening place to be. There was music blasting and a huge crowd of people waiting for all of the festivities to start. Once the fire was lit and the statue of the boy saved from the flames, everyone processed around the bonfire and people started throwing dry color. I wasn’t expecting to play Holi that night and was not wearing old clothes, but hopefully the color will come out when the dhobis wash it. The second fire that we visited, the one on Assi Ghat, was considerably tamer. There wasn’t any loud music playing and people weren’t throwing color like at the other one. When we got back to Dolly-ji’s house we pigged out on Bourboun cookies (amazing fudge cookies), peanut butter, and Nutella before washing up and going to bed.

                The next day we woke up late, had peanut butter sandwiches and bananas for breakfast, and then prepared for wet Holi. All of the girls donned white saris with the exception of Chase who just wore a white salwar kameez and the boys put on their white kurta pyjamas/dhotis. We actually started with just throwing dry color which was fun and considerably less painful, especially since we all had bought herbal colors which don’t taste so bad when they get in your mouth (at South Point’s Holi I had a mouthful of the most disgusting tasting colors ever). Inevitably, though, we started spraying liquid color. We had water balloons, water guns, and buckets as our weapons and more than just each other as targets. We launched water balloons at a nearby roof and were on the lookout for any unsuspecting passersby on the road below to soak with colored water.  We stayed at this stage of Holi for a little while, taking occasional breaks to eat namkeen (salty snacks) and just take a breather in general. We were all pretty much dyed blue, purple, or red at that point, and at least I thought we were going to be finished soon, but instead we were each initiated into what we decided to call Holi hazing. Holi hazing involves one person sitting on the floor while everyone else gets a chance to rub him/her furiously with color. This is probably what made us stay dyed for so long after Holi was finished. The color coating was so intense and so complete that even our teeth were dyed colors. Even though it was fun to be “hazed,” it was also kind of painful and pretty much everyone was finished with Holi after that. We took turns crudely showering off under the cascade of water from a pipe coming off Dolly-ji’s upper roof to her lower one, and gradually people started leaving to take proper showers in their rooms.

                I probably showered three consecutive times and brushed my teeth twice and still had a bluish tint. After bathing as best we could, we changed into newly bought clothes, as is traditional on Holi, and went downstairs to enjoy puri and chola (fry bread and chickpea stew). It was interesting to see how well each person had managed to clean up. Some people were significantly more colorful than others (perhaps a sign of who has effective bathing practices and who doesn’t?) and people with blonde hair basically had their hair accidentally dyed – Caleb’s hair is still a strawberry pink and it’s been a few weeks since Holi.

                Finally, we all grabbed boxes of sweets and went our separate ways home. The streets reminded me of what roads look like at 8 am on Christmas morning. All of the stores were closed and only a couple of people were out (in fact, the only people I saw were three men chatting at a paan (chewing tobacco) shop). When I got home, everyone was asleep. Playing Holi is exhausting and it’s customary to take a nap during the time that’s after the 1 pm cease-fire but before going out at night and visiting friends and family with mithai (sweets) and namkeen (salty snacks). Following my family’s example, I passed out for about an hour before Deep woke me up because, as he matter-of-factly said, “The painting lady is here.” Married Indian women have there feet painted with beet juice for all sorts of special events like weddings, holidays, parties, etc. and Holi is an especially auspicious day to get it done. I am neither married nor Indian, but my host mom invited me to also get my feet painted with her. It was a really cool experience and both my host mom and the woman making the designs on my feet thought it was hilarious how ticklish I am.  I was squirming the entire time and tying my best not to suddenly jerk my feet and upset the bowl of beet juice that was situated alarmingly close to me. After my feet were finished and covered in beautiful bright red lace-like designs, I went upstairs to wash my face again (to try to get more purple off still) and look presentable for going out that evening.

                I generally dislike Indian mithai and find them overly sweet, so, as you can imagine, I was ecstatic that on Holi people mostly serve salty, crunchy namkeen to express their hospitality. Madhu and I went out visiting neighboring families with a bag of dry color (the evening of Holi everyone goes bus tika) and we ate various chips, rice crackers, and papad (spicy potato wafer thing). We got home and had puri subji (fry bread and stewed vegetables) for dinner and by then I was so tired I couldn’t even bring myself to bathe one more time before going to bed.

19 Years Old! – 2/17/15

                My birthday happened to coincide with the Hindu holiday of Shivratri, the anniversary of Shiva and Parvarti’s marriage according to Hindu mythology. Because of this, I had off from school and got to spend the whole day celebrating festivities for both my birthday and Sri Shiva.
                I must admit that the beginning part of my day was kind of boring. I cleaned my room and went for a run at BHU (the local university) with Caleb, followed by lunch at Flavours Café (a coffee place with good American food and cakes that are like cakes that you can get in the US). I visited some Shivalingas (shrines to Shiva) to check out Shivratri festivities, but most of the day I had dinner on my mind. You see, I had promised my group that I would make panko chicken for them for my birthday. Panko chicken is basically just fried chicken except you use dried bread crumbs to crust it and it’s really crispy and delicious. In the US it’s easy to go out and buy meat. After all, it’s cleanly packaged in air-tight containers and you can barely imagine how the pristine cuts of meat came from an animal at all. In Banaras, buying meat is a whole other ball game – you go to a butcher shop and order fresh meat.
               Ben P and I biked to the Muslim quarter where meat is readily available (unlike in the Hindu-centric communities where we live) and found a butcher with a chicken coup outside. I asked for 2 kilos of boneless meat and so the guy working there picked out two chickens for me. At this point Ben decided he wouldn’t be able to watch the killing, so he kindly left to go get some ice cream for the two of us. Killing chickens is a lot less traumatizing that I thought it would be. I have always had weird notions of it from the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” but in practice it wasn’t so dramatic. They drained the blood, feathered, and removed the bones for me, leaving me a plastic bag full of all sorts of different cuts of meat to pick through. After finishing our ice cream and buying 5 eggs from the butcher, we set off to the program house where we were meeting Caleb and Rachel to cook all of the food (Caleb and Rachel had bought the vegetables for the meal).
                The day before my birthday I had gone to the local import store to buy bread crumbs. Instead of having bread crumbs, though, they just had loaves of dried bread. I purchased the one recommended to me by the store owner and didn’t think much of it until the next day when Rachel was crushing the loaf into bread crumbs and decided to try a piece. “It’s sweet!” she exclaimed, and I was surprised. Why was it sweet? We looked at the package and found that the very first ingredient was sugar! How can you even make bread that has more sugar in it than flour??? Panko chicken is a savory dish and definitely should not be sweet, so we had to add spoonfuls of salt to it to make it taste like normal breadcrumbs. In the meantime I had been carefully cutting the meat (still warm from when it had been alive an hour previously) into usable pieces and Caleb had been slicing zucchini and eggplant for the vegetarians among us (namely Rachel and Ben T since Shivratri is a day when Hindus are supposed to fast, eating nothing but milk products and fruit).
                After a few hours of preparing all of the chicken and veggies, we had a feast of panko chicken, panko eggplant/zucchini, and steamed vegetables (it was more epic in real life than how it sounds in writing). Dolly-ji arrived with the cake from Flavours Café and they locked me in the bathroom while they put candles in the cake and brought out my present. When I came out, Chase strapped a Happy Birthday cone-hat to my head and everyone sang. I got a cookbook called Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking from the group and many notes wishing me a happy and fun-filled birthday. My favorite note was from Shiv, Dolly-ji’s son, which was written in broken English but had “I LOVE YOU” written at the end. We even got to cap off the night with a Shivratri parade that was processing through Assi when we left the party!

Calcutta – 2/16/15

                Wow. It’s hard to express how much fun our trip to Calcutta was. Maybe the trip turned out so great because I wasn’t really expecting much, but in any event we had a grand ol’ time.

                The trip started a bit on a shaky note. Thursday we had work and then I rushed home to pack before rushing to Hindi class, before rushing to Dolly-ji’s house, to rush to the train station. Then, of course, the train was delayed. We found an abandoned ticket office near our platform that looked like a set straight from a zombie apocalypse movie and naturally decided to wait there for the train. It was kind of creepy with bare electrical wires hanging down, half dismantled waiting chairs, walls marked with graffiti, and a single, pale white light to illuminate the room. To kill time we came up with the order in which we would die in a zombie apocalypse and I think it went like this (the first person mentioned is the first to die, the second the second to die, etc.):Stephen, Alex, Chase, Jenny and Ben T (they die simultaneously), Rachel, Caleb, Dolly-ji, Ben P, Evelyn. I was nodding in and out of sleep during this discussion, but from what I remember the story goes that Stephen goes first because he has a history of getting bitten/scratched by animals and wouldn’t have it in him to kill something else. Alex goes next because he’s busy reading a history book to try to figure out how to avoid the zombies when they break in and kill him and then Chase dies helping everyone else escape. Jenny and Ben T then decide to go and find help, but get killed en route. Rachel sacrifices herself to save Caleb, but then Caleb is betrayed by Dolly-ji who first uses him to help climb away from the zombies, but then doesn’t return the favor and leaves him to be eaten. Once Ben and Evelyn realize what Dolly-ji did, however, they stop helping her and she dies. Finally, Ben and Evelyn, connected by the NIRMAN bond, are about to make it to safety when Ben gets bitten on the leg. In the helicopter Ben starts changing into a zombie and Evelyn has to kill him to save herself. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered by my survival or not, but hey I’ll take it if my group thinks I have the stuff to survive a zombie attack. Coming up with the story was a ton of fun, but after a few hours of waiting we were tired and grumpy and group morale was low. We ate Zours (the most amazing candy ever created) and chocolate cookies as a pick-me-up at around 11:30 PM and felt so much better. The train finally came sometime after midnight and we all zonked out as soon as we hit our bunks.

                We arrived in Calcutta the next day around noon and the first thing that hit me was the heat. Not to say it was blistering or anything, but I have a pretty low tolerance for heat despite being from Arizona. We took cabs (yes, bright yellow cabs as found in NYC except maybe in the 1950s or 1960s. I know next to nothing about cars, but these taxis certainly weren’t from this century) and drove to the YWCA Hostel where we were staying. The hostel was pretty bare bones, but its location was hard to beat – it’s on Park Street within walking distance from tons of attractions and right near the metro station. That’s right, a metro station. Calcutta is still undeniably in India, but it’s got a distinctive modern flare that’s lacking in Banaras. We took cabs, buses, auto-rickshaws, trams, and the metro to get around the city, driving on what I would actually be comfortable calling roads and breathing air that was free from noxious burning trash and plumes of dust. Across from the YWCA was a KFC and down the street an Au Bon Pain (both of which were frequented by our group to get our Western food fix). Outside, couples walked freely and there were actually women walking about the streets (even at night!). We all felt more in our comfort zones than we have in months. The funny thing is that I think if we hadn’t been living in Banaras for so long that we would have found Calcutta overwhelming and challenging. I read that Calcutta is the second largest city in India (this might be untrue now since the book I read it in is a few years old) and is a crazy, bustling metropolis. There’s more hubbub in Calcutta than in Banaras just because of its sheer size, but it’s a hubbub that we understand and grasp, unlike a lot of the time in Varanasi. Caleb said that the first time he visited Calcutta a few years ago he found it exhausting, whereas now it was invigorating. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Banaras isn’t like everywhere else in India and going to Calcutta was a nice reminder that there exists a place in India not so terribly different from the cities we come from in the US.

                We did so much in the short time we were in Calcutta I won’t be able to do it all justice in a short blog post, but I’ll list the things we got to see and add anecdotes when I think of them. In no particular order, we visited the Victoria Memorial (outside of which we played on the grass for an hour or two doing handstands, somersaults, playing tag, taking pictures), the New Market (where we found a Jewish bakery and Chase and Jenny got makeovers), BBD Bhag (the old commercial/political district from British colonial times), Khali Ghat (a temple dedicated to Khali, an avatar of the goddess Shakti), the Mother Teresa House, two Jewish synagogues (there used to be quite a few Baghdadi Jews living in Calcutta), an Armenian church, a Portuguese church, Tagore’s House (the house-turned-museum of the writer of the Indian national anthem), Nicco Park (a local amusement park run by a Princeton alum), the flower market, the fish market, and Old China Town. There’s so much I want to say about everything that I hardly know where to begin.

                I guess I’ll start with food since that was a particular highlight of the trip. Bangladesh is famous amongst Indians for its food and sweets and due to Calcutta’s proximity to Bangladesh (the state it’s in is actually called West Bengal), the food there is to die for. In addition to the Western food we got at Au Bon Pain, KFC, and a semi-authentic Italian restaurant called Fire and Ice, we got super tasty Bangladeshi street food and went for dim sum in China Town one morning. The dim sum was SO GOOD. Stephen directed us in what things we should try and verified that the food was almost as good as you could find on a street corner in China. We ate pork buns, dumplings, fish soup, and the Chinese equivalent of mochi, just to name a few. I ate so much and it was the most fully full I’ve felt in months (fully full meaning full of substantial things like meat rather than just carbs). I skipped lunch that day and didn’t even regret it. Even though Bangladeshi food is pretty similar to that of India, there is a certain nuance of flavor that made the food we had a nice break from the mundane dal, subzi, roti (lentils, veggies/potatoes, tortilla-things) that we eat every day in Banaras. Since Bangladesh is predominately a Muslim country, there’s also a lot more meat in their dishes (a definite plus for the meat-eaters on our trip).Bangladeshi sweets are also particularly famous and we stopped for mishtidoi (sweet yogurt) whenever we saw a sweet shop selling it. You can ask anyone in our group and they’ll tell you that I’m not a huge fan of Indian sweets, but the Bangladeshi ones are actually pretty good (even if I would still prefer a piece of cake made by myself or my mom).

                After visiting the Khali temple Saturday morning we went to a flower market where almost all of us bought flowers unnecessarily (but, hey, it was Valentine’s Day). Ben T got flowers for a picture for Amber and all the girls got malas (flower necklaces). Chase even got one of the giant malas that are normally just worn during weddings. After the flower market we visited Nicco Park. It was small, but we got to ride all of the rides for free and on most of them I was so happy that I couldn’t stop laughing giddily. We met the Princeton alum and his two daughters and also got a free meal at the food court there. It was funny to see how much rowdier us Americans are at amusement parks than Indians. That also might have been because we were so excited to be there and hyped up on the thrill of Calcutta.

                There is typically a January slump in India BYP that people experience after coming back from Rajasthan that I think our group mostly missed due to Saurabh’s wedding and Dr. Bermann’s visit. I hope that after Calcutta there won’t be that onset of homesickness since we got a little taste of life back home. In any event, we have lots of things to look forward to like my birthday/Shivratri, Holi, and Stephen and Chase’s birthdays throughout the coming months. It’s hard to believe that we’ll be home in less than four months!