Hi everyone! Long time no post. I've been in Taipei for the last couple days, doing a little high-intensity eating before I head to India for a month. I don't have my camera cable at the moment, so pictures will have to wait. Taipei is the shit, though. There's a really high density of restaurants, for starters. Just out on the street, there's food everywhere, and at the night markets, it gets really out of control. I went to the one near Shida University last night, and went pretty crazy with the dumplings and sweet potatoes and smoothies and what have you. The best thing is that most of the stands give free samples, which is a boon for people in the completeness business. English is surprisingly rare, so I've mostly been getting along with finger numbers, pointing, smiling, and my two phrases, "hello" and "thank you." I tried saying "zaocai dian" ("breakfast shop") this morning, but even when I was actually in one, they had no idea what I was trying to say. I've basically just been going around, eating substantially more than is possible, and in between meals going to temples (and the food streets nearby) or the tallest building in the world (and the amazing food court in the basement) or Yangmingshan National Park (which I think of as Stinky Mountain, after its strong sulfur odor; tried to go to a cafe there that has Blue Mountain coffee, but couldn't find it). People are super friendly and helpful: the shy dorky guy at the train station food court (way fancier than you would ever imagine) helped me shout the slogan for the Japanese sweet stand, and my noodle-eating buddy today taught me better chopstick technique. Also, everyone else seems to have the right priorities: big crowds at the noodle and boba places, and the Internet cafe I'm at right now not only has a comic book library built in, but also a variety of free drinks. As far as I can tell, they have all the necessities of life here: A/C, food delivered to your seat, magazines, and loud video games. It's also striking how laid back and polite everyone is - people are hanging out and joking and smiling everywhere, and constantly thanking each other for I don't even know what. Very different from the PRC, from what I remember.
Oh yeah, I just remembered the best part of the Kumbh Mela. We got sucked into listening to some guy in a pink turtleneck who was literally foaming at the mouth and ranting about the ancient epics and yadda yadda. Some other guy came up and started listening, and for no reason at all, the foamer turned on him and yelled, "Quit laughing! This is serious! You only think it's funny because you're an illiterate idiot!" The guy wasn't actually laughing at all, but instead standing there respectfully, listening to what the guy had to say. This in itself was a major commitment, because on his head he was wearing... his drying-out underwear.
Very, very slowly, I'm getting to things that I did months ago. There's this festival called the Kumbh Mela, which happens four times every twelve years, rotating among four locations. This year, the Ardh (half) Kumbh Mela was held in Allahabad, in eastern UP, at the confluence of the Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna and [mythical] Saraswati rivers, so Peter and Daniel and I went to check it out. Allahabad turns out to be a really pleasant town, much like Lucknow would be if the British hadn't destroyed it in retribution for the Mutiny of 1857. Aside from nice buildings all over, it also has really great rickshaws, decorated more elaborately than I've seen anywhere else. The action happens at the riverbank, but to get there, you ride a cycle rickshaw a few miles through the old city, till you have to get out at a road block. Then you walk for a few miles through the rest of the city, passing thousands of people trying to give free food to the pilgrims - kachoris and other fried things, halwa, and all kinds of things, all of it fairly delicious. If you can politely fight them off and keep walking, you eventually come to the humongous floodplain of the Ganges, and you walk for miles and miles through the sand to the water's edge. It's hard to overstate how big a thing this festival is: on the day we were there, Makar Sankranti, two million people showed up to get the extra spiritual benefit of bathing (snan) in the rivers. Everywhere, there were families, old people, and more sadhus (ascetics) than you can imagine, plus me. It was pretty interesting, because there's not really any way to be as modest as people are accustomed to being when you're surrounded by two million other people, so you saw a lot more skin, belonging to all sorts of people, than you normally do. A little away from the water, there are vast tent cities where people stay for the month, attend concerts of devotional music, get sick and well, listen to lectures, eat and answer the call of commerce.
After a fabulous vacation in California, which you, Dear Reader, were more than likely present for, I made my way through the chestnutty but snow-free expanses of London, where I stopped long enough to have a couple of beers with Amedeo, and eventually wound up back in Lucknow. As I mentioned before, I was lonely without Michele, and also without a couple of other people who vanished from our house and program, but other than that, the program has been going pretty well since I got back. My Urdu, and I think everyone else's, has made a pretty radical jump in fluency in the last couple months: in December, I felt like I'd learned a bit more than I would have had I just taken a class and studied really hard; now, it's on a completely different plane. I can speak pretty much with total fluency; my reading and listening aren't quite as good, but if someone is writing or speaking pretty much standard, non-highfalutin and non-dialect Urdu, I can understand what they're saying. It's kind of cool; I haven't been this fluent in a foreign language since I spoke Spanish as a kid.
To fill the time and spend my money, I've done a couple fun things. There's a major Shia holiday called Muharram, which commemorates the martyrdom of Muhammad's grandson Hussain and his followers at Karbala; Lucknow, being a heavily Shia town, is one of the Muharram centers of India and even the world - Lucknowis even introduced the holiday to the Caribbean in the 19th century, where it's now celebrated by all religious communities. The first ten days of the forty-day holiday are the most important, and during them, Shias attend mourning ceremonies, wear black and fast, although of course not everyone does all of that. On the first day, the royal families of Lucknow used to sponsor a huge parade. It still happens, but I'm not sure who pays for it. All around Lucknow, there are dozens of imambadas, where Muharram gatherings take place, and the main two are the Bada (Big) and Chhota (Small) Imambade, which are a mile apart. People gather to watch bands, camels, and elephants take three hours to cover that distance. People are handing out milk and tea to the public, men line up to sing and beat their breasts; children in black carry banners symbolizing the battalions of Hussain's army, hanging from silver hand-shaped staffs (the five fingers represent Muhammad, his daughter Fatima, her husband 'Ali, and their sons Hassan and Hussain); and sundry other symbolic things, capped by the two tazias, models of Hasan and Hussain's tombs. The most moving part of the ceremony is the soz, or lamentation. A man hoarsely chants a marsiya poem, describing the trials of Hussain and his followers, as they were pursued for three days into the Iraqi desert, without food or water, and finally slaughtered. The listeners gather around and weep,a s you can see in this video (the man in the front right is Nawab Mir Jaffar Abdullah):
Soz (lamentation)
The other focal point is the matam, or breast-beating. Men come together in groups and sing another type of lamentation song, and hit themselves with their fists, or sometimes with chains or flails.
Matam (breast-beating)
A few weeks after the Shahi Julus, I went to a majlis, another type of gathering where people also mourn Hussain. They take place throughout the year, usually on Thursdays, when Muslims honor the dead, but Shias consider them especially important during Muharram. We thought it was at the lovely Shahnajaf Imambada, but it turned out to be in some guy's house. Our host looked and acted exactly like Anupam Kher, the jovial dad in every Bollywood movie ever, plus Bend It Like Beckham. We stood around at the beginning for a little while, drinking delicious Kashmiri chai, which is pink and fragrant and I'm not actually sure if it has tea in it. As it happened, the same guy from the Shahi Julus was singing soz, but I couldn't hear as well as I'd have liked, because a cop was industriously befriending me. Eventually we were able to sit down, just as his gut-wrenching soz was finishing, and a handsome young preacher began a sermon. I'd never heard a Muslim sermon before, and I didn't really know what to expect. The text was Abraham and Isaac, which was handy, since I was actually familiar with it, and in beautiful and easy-to-understand Urdu, with vivid Second Great Awakening-type gesticulations and rhythm, he basically argued that the point of the story was that a real sacrifice is what you give happily:
!الله نے ابرحيم كا امتحان ليا! اور وه تهے ايك سو في صد كامياب! ايك سو في صد كامياب
God gave Abraham a test, and he was 100% successful! 100% successful! [wild gesturing]
In the same way, Hussain passed God's test, was the point. He talked about that for a while, and then segued into the lesson he was trying to teach, which was basically that what God requires of Muslims is spiritual dedication, not temporal struggle: he underlined the fact that Muhammad never attacks, he only defends. So I was pleased with the moral. Then there was a procession where they carried Hussain's coffin and paraded a white horse wearing a white cloth with red paint on it, representing Hussain's bloodied horse. Really serious, impassioned matam followed, with a succession of anjumans (neighborhood groups) coming one after another and working themselves into overwhelming frenzies. By the time they really got going, they were raising their fists way up high and slamming them into their own chests with really alarming force, while singing quite moving songs. Again, my cop buddy prevented me from paying as much attention as I would have liked. That was okay, though, because we got invited to have something to eat with some of the other guests, including the Nawab and a hakim (traditional Muslim doctor) who is a pillar of the community and who had come to talk at our school a few days before. We had some really, really, really good biryani and mutton curry, and then went home.
I'm writing this on my amazing new computer at the New Delhi train station, instead of riding on the train to Jaipur, which it turns out left from the Old Delhi train station. Whoops. Anyway, Michele got here on Friday night, and I'm overjoyed. I've survived without her here, but unhappily. Even Naheed told me that I wasn't any fun without Michele here. So we've been doing the Delhi thing, eating appam (like a steamed dosa, but better than that sounds) with coconut milk and Mangalorean tomato chutney at Sagar, like we always do. Went to Humayun's Tomb, which was pretty rad but nowhere near as good as the Taj Mahal, which we'll be at in a few days. Every time we come to Delhi, I like it more. Especially when we can escape all the other foreigners who are here, Delhi becomes a really beautiful and subtle place. We spent a while wandering around a Jain neighborhood near Chandni Chowk, where there were just tons of beautiful, perfectly preserved late Mughal houses, with all sorts of delicate carvings. Inside, they're mostly decayed or just plastered over, but a lot of them still have terrific outsides. The best thing was when we ran into some kids playing the Wheel Of Kulfi - take a spin, and who knows, maybe you'll get four ice cream bars, instead of just one!
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Now writing from our swanky and cheap hotel in Jaipur. We got here two nights ago, and spent most of yesterday looking at the City Palace and just walking around. The Jaipur palace and everything around it are painted salmon-pink, and there are huge numbers of delicate old Rajput buildings (not that easy for me to distinguish from Mughal) all over, mostly in excellent repair, and even some with old murals still intact. The palace has all sorts of cool stuff, like the so-called "Four Seasons" doors, each of which has different, elaborate 250-year-old painted decorations, and a textile museum with goodies like a humongous brocade kurta worn by the 7-foot tall, 4-foot wide, 550-lb. 18th-century king of Jaipur.
Walking the jewellers' district after visiting the palace and having a tasty Marwari (Rajasthani) lunch, we stopped at a barber shop so I could get a very seriously needed shave. I asked the guys hanging out there what was playing at Jaipur's famous Art Deco movie palace, and they told me, Vivah (Wedding). Now, I saw this movie, as I have in fact seen every major Hindi movie that's out, and I can tell you with the authority of someone who has a pretty high tolerance for crappy Bollywood movies that it might not even rate a 1 on the 1-10 scale. Like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who Am I to You), by the same director, it's literally nothing more than a video of what happens from when two people get engaged to when they get married; unfortunately, it didn't even have the great songs that HAHK had, although it did have a snappy little misogynist number called "Mera Haq Hai" ("It's My Right"). Anyway, the guys swore that it was the best movie ever, and far superior to the other movies I mentioned, all of which I'd seen and knew to be great, and which I wanted to take Michele to. Pretty soon, they cleared out and I had a nice chat with the barber, while we drank some tea and he massaged my scalp. He had a lot to say about saving money by watching films at home and the declining quality of talismans these days. I agreed with him that people should take more time to do a good job, especially when he pointed out that he could easily shave a couple of minutes off his barbering, so to speak, but that would end up with me having a red neck, and not because of my illiterate and intolerant ways. I think that the reason that barbers tend to be awesome is that they don't normally have any interactions with suckers, also known as tourists. They're not salesmen in the normal way, and so they don't have any reason to be pushy or anything other than genial and talkative.
How about this: I'm culturally Jewish, and I don't believe in God. My family celebrates Hannukah. I don't say peep when people wish me Merry Christmas. I smile and reciprocate. In return, why doesn't the wacky, angry end of the Christian team shut the hell up about the War on Christmas? It doesn't exist.
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kyobu's journal
