Twilight Zone theme music...

Do do do do, do do do do, do do do do...

-Kelly, Mr. Huang wants you to have a dinner with his friends... do you know him?
-Nope.
-Yes you do, he's short.
-Oh yes, him, sure I know. When's the dinner?
-Tonight. Are you okay?
-I'm okay.

Do do do do, do do do do, do do do do...

I stood at the school gate chatting with some students about the topic of choice: dinner. The wind blew cold off the snow dusted mountains and I checked my watch. A gray Buick minivan pulled up and the side door slid open. Kelly, get in. So I did.

The owner and driver of the minivan was indeed a short Chinese man with a dimple in his left cheek whose name turned out to be Mr. Huang. Mr. Huang from Jiangsu province. Mr. Huang whose Believing son was studying in America. Mr. Huang the vice president of our school. I didn't know it as the minivan swerved and screeched down the road making even the taxi drivers nervous, but I would know a lot more about Mr. Huang by the time the night was over.

As we were ushered into a restaurant famous because the waiters all wore Mao outfits and random bits of plastic fruit hung from the ceiling, I was informed by the nearly ecstatic Mr. Huang that since I would soon be leaving it was important for us to have a dinner together. One look into the room, steamy from mushroom hot pot bowls and crowded with about twenty people I didn't know, I was sure the dinner was not in my honor. So I did what any foreign girl whose been in China for nearly three years would do: took up the role of banquet decoration with finesse. 

The food sat idle and strong Chinese liquor was downed as the table of Chinese men I would later discover were all provincial leaders of some sort made comments about my professional use of chopsticks, the way that sunshine escaped from me, how perfect my spice consumption was, my respectful countenance... and when the man sitting next to me proclaimed to my translator that I was like an angel I knew I had successfully completed my role as foreign face giver to the, now slightly drunk though still beaming, Mr. Huang.

Before I had taken three sips of my favorite sweet rice porridge Mr. Huang announced that dinner was over, though how he came to that conclusion was a mystery to me since it seemed like most people had done little aside from smoke and there was enough food left untouched on the table to feed a moderately sized village. Nonetheless, the entire dinner party made our exit, politely leaving the kadas given to us by the singing waitresses on the chairs. Ten minutes later the sun set, casting golden shadows over the sluggish Lhasa river and we arrived at the largest Karaoke club I'd ever seen.

The multicolored lights in a web pattern on the outside of the building blinked in time with the Twilight Zone's theme song and the now euphoric Mr. Huang guided us all inside to a room decorated with gaudy chandeliers, cream colored columns, renessiance-esque life sized paintings of mostly naked buxom women, and glass tables supported by golden cherubs. We ordered glasses of rose tea, which unfortunately didn't come with ear plugs, and by the time we had settled into the sage colored couches everyone had gone completely silly.

Songs were added to an on screen playlist by the various leaders we had dined with but the first up was 'Xiao Fang', an 80's Chinese love song of the highest order, and the only one I could sing any part of. Suffice it to say that a rousing duet remix with Mr. Huang and the night had only begun. At least four songs were sung/ attempted in honor of 'foreign friends', I stumble giggled through a slow dance with Mr. Huang who later insisted I sing Lionel Richies version of 'Say you Say me' which I had never heard until that moment, and didn't find out that 'One love' by the pop group Blue was an option until after the party had ended, about two and a half music blaring head pounding culturally confusing hours later.

The next time the minivan door slid open it was under a starry sky at the entrance to our school and I could have sworn that the shadowy trees were humming do do do do, do do do do, do do do do...

And as if life in general could make less sense I got on a bus this afternoon and sat next to a very creased Tibetan grandmother wearing a belt with a prominently placed wicked looking little knife hanging from it who stared at me until she got up the nerve to shake my hand with a spontaneous vigor I did not see coming and gave me the Chinese equivalent of an icey pop as she hobbled off the bus. How could she have known how much I love those things?

And just a moment ago I got a text from a student that contained a rather cryptic message reading:  "wu wu can you help? me please" to which I didn't respond, not having the faintest idea how one could respond to that.

Do do do do, do do do do, do do do do... Twilight zone theme music couldn't be more appropriate... except that the zone is for real.

A plea on behalf of others...

For all of the visually imparied girls whose only assistance they can offer to their ailing grandmothers is a gentle massage...

For all the teachers and staff who have to tout party lines and wear masks and avoid intimacy...

For all the tiny girls whose parents dissappear on an evening leaving them out in the cold and dark until after ten at night when in desperation they come banging on the only door that will open to them, a foreigners...

For all the nuns who can't leave... 

For all the beggar children who go about disheveled and thin, discarded by the world, with piercingly honest requests for only bread and a place to wash their filth scarred hands...

For all the students with drunken, abusive parents and horror stories hidden behind shy smiles...

For all the aging janitors who have a tendency to lean from exhaustion into those who dare to stop and chat with them...

For all of the students who ache with a desire to be known and safe that they cannot name but is plainly revealed in their furtive glances and cryptic remarks about loneliness and fatigue...

For all the vegetable sellers with swollen, pussy hands and permanently twisted fingernails that visibly tingle with pain...

For all of the monks who can't explain...

For all of the young women with explosive husbands who refuse to give them even a second thought as they rage about divorce and leave them to shed violently silent tears during a break between classes...

For all the victims of change...

For all the prisoners of idols...

For all the slaves of fear...

I offer you, Holy of Holies, this modest plea... come save.

Even now my witness is in heaven, my advocate is on high. My intercessor is my friend as I pour out my tears to the Holy One.

A conversation with the Wind

The wind is angry tonight. It pounds its fists against the nonchalant concrete of the building and bullies the frail windows till they shudder and start. You can hear its anger as it rips though the prayer flags on the buildings near by and you can see it as it throws masses of dirt and garbage in every direction. It screams its rage and obscures the valley with its fuss.

What are you so angry about, Wind?

Sometimes I wonder if the classroom itself seems grayer because the students are so colorful and dear to me. They have changed a lot in three years, my students, yet somehow, noting their sly way of photographing me with their cell phone cameras, not at all. A recent conversation in which a student reminisced about a lesson on clothing I had taught my first term in Lhasa had me laughing until tears formed in my eyes which stayed there and I had to blink away when I realized that our time together had been memorable for her too.  Maybe they, not really changing at all, have just allowed me to behold their openness... a passerby who only sees a bud would hardly recognize the same petals in full bloom... I rubbed my icy chalk covered hands together, and thought about the best time to dispose of the homemade barley beer candy I'd been given fistfuls of by the same grinning students only moments ago.

From my adoring reverie during the mid class break, I was beckoned out into the familiar dullness of the hallway by the newly returned, bearing gifts of kangaroo printed wallets and kangaroo jerky, Mr. Wu. Your students will not have class for at least one month he intoned and the new teacher will not come until maybe mid April... he handed me a crumpled half sheet of paper... so you will teach her classes, starting next week. I nodded, not even phased by the sheer randomness of life any longer. No problem, I replied, to his visible relief.

But when I returned to the classroom it was with a mixture of deflation and a vague sense of some far greater plan unfolding with the painful slowness of all things oxygen deprived. More time that I had longed to have with these my students had been stolen from me... but it was being given to others. I finished up our week of review, which seemed now like a week made valuable just because I had been among them rather than anything I had taught, and set about planning for totally different classes.

The schedule that now requires my temporary fulfillment has only one class of students that I know, having taught them for the past year, and two classes that are completely unknown to me. Though confused by the presence of more than eighty unfamiliar students in my last semester in Lhasa, gratitude for getting one last chance to be among the other class that I have come to know and love pretty much overwhelmed me.

This afternoon I was met at the gate while the sun hid behind a thick cloak of clouds by a few of those students. Quintessentially Chinese, they asked if I had eaten and offered me their newly purchased bananas which I declined. We chatted for a minute more and I mentioned, with utter sincerity,  how happy I was that I could see them in class tomorrow. One slim girl squinted with effort and asked beseechingly Ms. Kelly, will you now be our teacher forever? Though everything in me wanted to respond affirmatively, I knew I needed to explain the temporary nature of the schedule. After doing which, I couldn't tell if it was the sky or only their faces that darkened.

Wind, maybe I understand your fury. Something, perhaps everything, smacks of injustice so deep that even the snot running down my neighbor's daughter's nose as she merrily draws pictures of me while we sit entertaining each other in my apartment can't help but display it. And, Wind, you can throw tantrums that steal clothes from the backs of beggar children and rip our fingers and faces to cracked shreds, and pound and howl until we wince with your pain, but know this Wind... all your raging will not change it.

There is only One Righteous Judge that I know.

He gives and He takes away. He gives classes and schedules and He takes them away and gives other ones. And everything He gives is good. And everything He takes away is for good.

I understand your anger, Wind, but I needn't join you... I'm a little too caught up in grace.

Folly's Ferris Wheel

Just when I feel like I'm starting to understand things around here it's like life moons me and runs away laughing...

...and all of my best guesses about what's going on are so far off the mark it's like I showed up at target practice with a monopoly game instead of a bow. 

And I realize that I've somehow gained admittance to this amusement park for the hilariously ridiculous... Today's ride: Folly's Ferris Wheel. 

**************************************************

The classroom full of students back from a semesters worth of practice teaching and two month holiday were all lined up ready to get on. They had come to the first day of class prepared with maybe a dozen sheets of paper and about three pens between the forty of them. I couldn't help but grin along with their innocent faces of dismay and their blundering attempts to remember what the meaning of school was along with where they had left all of their materials. On an assessment test a student wrote: He is skart. Folly gleefully collected tickets.

A break between classes was just enough time for my dear beggar friends to catch sight of me and shout out 'Hello hello how are you?' as though my name was 'Hello'. We went shopping for some snacks and I asked them about their family before meeting two colleages for a lunch of fried lettuce and the Sichuan equivalent of fatback. I found the thrill of the upward swing of the ferris wheel too compelling to take the nap that I wanted before my afternoon class. At the break a teacher from the neighboring classroom came over and sniffed me, asking me about my scent brand. The only thing I could smell was burnt oil from lunch. Folly, waving at us from below, had let my colleage into the same bench with me on today's ride.

After class I was dragged through the ferocious wind and freezing weather over to where the entire staff of Lhasa Teacher's College was planting very large, bare looking sticks they called trees. Nearing its climax, the ferris wheel swung wildly in the breeze. The leaders passed out shovels and shouted orders. I was given a tree that made me feel dangerous and my face chapped from the cold. Teachers pushed the great gusts of dusty wind around the mutant trees lying in shallow holes. We laughed, ate and bathed in the dirt, and two shovel fulls and a dozen pictures later I proclaimed my exhaustion and cold and headed in, begging a teacher just arriving to plant a tree in my honor. From the height of her great wheel, we could hear Folly's contagious laughter echo as she turned it. We, teased into amusement ourselves, caught our breath at its downward swing.

I returned a veritable dust monkey just in time to receive a bag of stale breads and hard cheese from a student who I insisted joing me for dinner. Over a bowl of noodles like the Tibetan cure for cold we made grand plans for things we must do together in this our last semester. We sipped tea and discussed Losar traditions, we leaned back into wooden benches covered with stained towels and she described her month long hospital stay, we zipped our jackets and pulled back the heavy door blanket to make our way back to campus. I saw the shadow of Folly urging guests off of her ride to make way for the legions of others crowding to get on.

A quick stop at a couple of colleagues' apartments not far from my own and our ferris wheel bench neared the ground. We laughed breathlessly at pictures from the afternoon's tree plant on a computer and talked about how filtly we were from it. I looked the impatient Folly imploringly in the eye and asked gently, hopefully, won't you let me go around just once more...

She, errupting into laughter, of course consented... You are a forienger in Lhasa, your ticket never expires... she merrily explained.

Staff tree plant: proof that life is unpredictable

Fireworks and horseshows and a pot of fragrant flowers

I turned my trusted heater on and with a pop and a sizzle that smelled briefly like burnt glue I could trust it no longer. Luckily my winter travels taught me how to stay warm with only hot water on hand and besides this semester is heading for summer. I wheeled my formerly favorite, now busted, household appliance out to the hallway with only the slightest shiver of regret.

My fifth return to Lhasa had made no headlines. I breezed through security in Sichuan, arrived with my luggage and without a headache, and came back to an apartment that, save for the layers of increased dust, was exactly the way I left it. Not even one of my plants had died.

We walked down the gray familiar street past the quiet frenzy of last minute Tibetan New Year's preparations to a noodle shop that must have mourned our absence. My Chinese colleague, who tried to convince me she'd been working the entire break, while we slurped spinach noodles like they were manna from heaven, impressed on me two significant facts: 1. I need to eat more noodles because I had just returned from a long journey and 2. I need to be more careful and stay at the school for my own safety. I nodded my frustrated acquiescence and ate more noodles.

My head swam a little bit on the walk back to school, as much from the altitude as from the news that I would be refusing New Years celebrations from most of my friends in the city. Perhaps noting my reserved politeness or the uncontrollable glimmer of joy that I get when walking past bicycle carts of potted flowers, my colleague stopped in front of one. She asked me which plant I wanted and I restrained my impulsive answer of 'all of them' opting instead to pick out a serene light hued plant with wildly contorting sage colored stems and humble white flowers. It is my New Year gift to you, she said and I gushed with pleasure.

That night burst and sparkled as the entire cityscape of Lhasa was illuminated by the fizzle and explosion of fireworks that would have put Disney World to shame and made the usually sullen city resplendent with color. I, yet again thankful for the mercies of a well placed window, sipped hot water and watched another years potential reflected in the vibrant flashes of the fireworks as the festivities meant to usher in the new year destroyed the silence of the night.

When the gate security guard had held my ice cold hands as a greeting and welcome back and had urged me to come to the small room shared by him and his wife to celebrate the new year, my heart had twinged with gratitude. My Tibetan rusty from the two month vacation, I went over with a bag of goodies and somehow mistook their offer of chang for cha and ended up with a small glass of foul smelling milky yellow fermented barley beer in my hands when I had been expecting tea. Not able to conjure up the language to refuse now with glass in hand I drank it, the three prescribed sips, before nearly choking on the pungent bitterness of the Tibetan drink of choice, which I had deftly managed to avoid for three years. I put it aside and made diversions by asking about the room's decorations, among which I found a picture that I had taken with him my first year, long before our relationship was anything more than passerby, and had given to him on a whim. The chang bit at my stomach and I marveled at the profound simplicity of the overlap of lives.

A text message from a student and permission granted from the school gave me the opportunity to go for a walk to the nearby horse racing track featuring newly built concrete bleachers. I met my dimpled student at the gate and we promptly cut in front of the hundreds of other people waiting in line in their finest Tibetan outfits and walked straight to her family's house behind the track for a quick snack of meat dumplings washed down with butter tea. Return after the show and stay for a while implored her famed mountaineer of a father in an endearing mixture of English and Tibetan. I nodded and was half dragged out the door by my now impatient student.

Sitting on a mat on concrete bleachers absolutely stuffed with spectators while the sun pierced through the dust and the cold highlighted the horses snorting breath I learned that Tibetan horse shows are not for the faint of heart. Think Cirque du Soleil on horseback at speeds which make your eyes water. Arrows and knives wielded at small targets, girls riding backwards and weightlessly doing handstands, men flipping and hanging now near the horses' pounding hooves now near the fluttering manes. And a chubby Tibetan baby with wispy curls of hair like a halo around her face missed it all because she chose instead to entertain herself by staring at me.

Afterwards, I found myself morphing into a family member of this student as we sat around her relative packed living room drinking various kinds of tea, cutting off hunks of boiled yak to dip in spice before snacking, sharing stories of the holiday, taking understanding for granted, eating gluttonous amounts of prepared dishes, watching visitors come and go, and amusing toddlers. Comfort was obvious and as abundant as home brewed chang, which I knowingly declined, as we went about the business of Losar-ing and it seemed stranger for me to refuse the of a bed to take a short nap on than to accept, though refuse I did. When the afternoon got late and the men went outside to play sho I also made an exit into the bluest afternoon sky I'd ever dreamed of, made bluer by the bareness of the tree limbs against it.

Back in the apartment, I threw off my unnecessary for the afternoon sunshine jacket and flopped gently on the hard couch... just as I chanced to catch a whiff of a pleasantly rich floral fragrance. Shocked by so welcome an aroma in this land of evil smells, I followed my nose to the modest little plant given to me by my colleague a few days before.

May this year be one that dazzles like fireworks, mystifies like horseshows, and delights like tiny white flowers... and may the Artisan who weaves relationships be honored.

Happy Tibetan New Year.

India has everything...

An Indian departure

I sat on the space between two chairs and spooned bits of a sweet fried dough ball into my mouth between sips of very dense tea. Around me plates clattered, cows tails swished, children leaned against a wall and cracked green chickpeas into their mouths. Another dusty rural Indian afternoon.

The bus stopped and the sun beat down. We said our goodbyes as someone threw our luggage into a hole in the back. There was no mistaking the rickety mother of all tin cans, complete with dingy upholstery, a slightly tilted wall clock, and Indian pop soundtrack for the super deluxe two by two which we had been waiting for. We took our seats near the front, amid the coming and going of legions of other passengers, and enjoyed the open window as the bus rattled and threw dust all the way back through the Indian jungle towards the nearest town with a train station, Riagarh. 

By the time we had arrived there it was dark, and my friend had turned my lap into a compost pile for all the peanut shells and banana peels she had attempted to throw out the window. Our train was scheduled for eight pm. With our suitcases miraculously stuffed in a tiny motored vehicle, we were just in time.

Just in time to drag ourselves through a smaller version of the Kolkata refugee camp and glance at the much abused whiteboard listing train times. Our super fast express was fifteen hours late. So we wheeled our suitcases to the nearest hotel without even flinching at the thought of a night spent in a real bed of sorts. Delightfully Indian, our room came complete with an electric mosquito repellent (used immediately), plastic bathroom stool (should you choose to sit under the faucet to take your cold shower), and no top sheet. Get away from me you nasty blanket were the last words I heard from my friend as I drifted into a dusty sleep. 

We awoke to the depressing news from the train station whiteboard. A fifteen hour delay turned to eighteen, and would change to become later with each passing hour. I begged my friend to stop checking it. After a breakfast of samosas eaten hot and greasy off of the mornings newspaper and a walk to the bustling tea shop next door for a quick burst of sugar the windowless hotel room did nothing to ease my mounting regret at the time lost. So we decided to take in the city.

Oh Raigarh. You forgotten city lost in the bowels of India. Is there another place that can compare to you in terms of dust? Are the cows which grace your heaps of garbage in the middle of the street part of the permanent decor? Do your citizens enjoy the slickness of beetlenut spit stains on their bare, broken feet? Did your buildings wilt from the combination of heat and time or where they so depressed to begin with? When did car exhaust become your perfume of choice? Oh Raigarh, perhaps your pride lies only in the occasional monkey sighting and extremely delicious lassi... if so, well done.

I bought a cell phone battery from a man whose features I cannot remember at all.

We made our way back to the hotel in no hurry whatsoever as the hours passed by and our train remained absent. I selfishly mourned the loss of time that I could have spent in Kolkata, that city of dreams and nightmares where the curious wrestles with the ridiculous in a pit of filth so fascinating that no western mind can fully absorb it, and in so doing became aware of my own avoidance of my Father's heartbeat for Raigarh.

Sitting on a forlorn bench as flies crashed into my face and took up residency on my legs, watching the leeringly deserted tracks at the Raigarh train station I sensed a pulse so deep and aching that it could only have come from the Creator of the people of this small place. Despite the fact that I took inordinate relief from angrily throwing peanut shells onto the floor, and nearly went completely silly when my friend began to sing in Hindi accented English I've been waiting on the superfast express, all the live long day... I feel certain that our train was twenty one hours late because my Father wanted to share that heartbeat with me. I failed miserably to understand it, but I received it anyway.

I was in no mood to board the train, which I wanted to kick, by the time it arrived... but board it we did.

The night was long made longer by the fact that no trains were allowed to travel that area at night and we sat on the tracks for six hours in the bleary midnight darkness. I took up pacing the car. The slow rhythm of the wheels on the tracks seemed to be mocking me and got slower as we neared our destination. I was immensely grateful for the tea and samosa wallahs who hopped on from station to station to hawk their wares to the nearly empty train car where we sat.

As we neared Kolkata train station I stared out the windows at other trains pushing past us filled to the brim with every imaginable aspect of humanity squished on tired wooden seats and leaning out the doorless metal openings. The train station was again a blur of people and packages and pain and potential as we dragged our patience thin bodies to the prepaid taxi line. A man took our bags and loaded them demanding a tip afterwards. My friend drank from a rouge water bottle we didn't know. The taxi wandered dangerously through the ceaseless traffic. The air was so thick it was chewable.

Arrival at the house of friends who had picked me up at the airport and taken me to the train station nine days earlier was a little like waking up in the garden of Eden, had it been populated with hilarious Hindi English accents and fussy family members. To my delight, we were forced to taste everything edible in the house. I learned to make something delicious out of red carrots stewed in milk. We bought some Indian mixtures at a disastrously organized shop across the street. Between food tastings and meals and laughter I found myself drawn to their large, ninth floor window from which I could view at my lesiure a city I hadn't the time to meet. 

Later that night, our abused bags once again stowed in a car trunk, we drove out of the apartment complex and stopped immediately on the street outside. You MUST have paan, our host asserted. Visions of teeth stained the deep orange color of halloween nightmares caused me to protest, albeit weakly. Upon the urging of my friend I followed our host to the tiny stall which appeared to grow out of the wall itself where paan was bought. An older man sat with a large belly over thin crossed legs surrounded by enough jars of indescribable substances to make the Macbethan witches green with envy. He used his pinky fingernail to mix varieties of slime and powder around on a leaf, folded the leaves into neat parcels, coughed, and handed them to us. I walked, nearly stunned, back to the car.


Chew it slowly, when you have too much juice you can then swallow it, instructed our host after affirming that there wasn't any beetlenut in the leaf parcel of strange. Before I had time to even make eye contact, my friend had stuffed hers in her mouth and I shrugged and followed. Then my mouth exploded with taste like an altoid mint gone horribly Indian and I chewed until I understood the curious delights of oddly stuffed leaves. My mind tingled with dreams of paan tours of Kolkata as we bumper car-ed our way to the airport.

After a trip through the rustic airport so convoluted that I had to write it down in order to remember should I ever go back and have to navigate it on my own, the clock neared one am and we took our seats on the plane.

I leaned my exhausted head against the window and before we had even left I became quite confident of a future return.

Stillness: India's secret

India is a land of infinite and ancient motion. The whole country teems with movement from the wing of a fly to the heavy hoof of a water buffalo to the rubbery rotation of a bus tire. Chickens dash in front of jeeps, shopkeeper's heads bobble on their necks, saris flutter in the breeze, water is pumped and poured, ant lions crouch in holes, children chase cloth balls, fingers are used as spoons and licked, old men erupt into laughter, dust settles and resettles, and even the sleeping toss and turn.

There is something very precious about waking up to a morning in which no word forms on your lips. Silence tastes like honey.

From wedding to school to presentation to meal we dashed like a drunken bird caught in a powerful tail wind. We danced in circles and drove in circles and talked in circles around metal plates of rice and curry. We bumped and jostled along roads that were really bike trails and past other doing the same thing in other directions. Our motion turned to madness turned to motion and riddles were uproariously funny and even the jeep's automated voice system joined in the fun.

There is something very quiet about the dew on a spiders funnel like web in a rice field and something very gentle about steam easing off a cup of tea.

Small town bazaars were just another excuse to move and so we did prancing around mats of minuscule potatoes, edging past baskets of puffed rice, and swerving to avoid piles of dried fish. We skirted creepy followers, admired a banyan tree whose elegant roots stretched ever downwards from great and astounding heights from all sides, and steadied our footing as bicycles careened past and women carrying earthenware pots on their heads squeezed by. In that bazaar I realized that motion had a color, which was an orange-y brown with flecks of every other color swirling around.

There is something very tender about an evening rain which dampens and cools as it dots the earth like kisses from unseen lips. Peace feels like rain.

The school was like a beehive and the students stood in lines, crowded into classrooms, filled empty plates which filled empty stomachs, washed clothes and hair, scribbled on note books, nibbled on biscuits, and sang songs deceptively cheerful. The groups of students became nebulous mobs oozing and sliding between buildings and across the yard. Teachers wandered around as if they were unsure how they had arrived at such a place and pushy Indian men slicked their hair to one side and urged us to join staff parties. So caught up were we in the activity that we gobbled snacks and attended assemblies as though it were our very lifeblood.

There is something very somber about the unexpected gifts of guavas, glass bracelets, and brass cups from tortured women with beautiful bleeding hearts.

Goats tugged at tamarind trees and women carried timber. We balanced on rims of dried up rice fields and dodged stomping water buffaloes. A woman's sandal broke and she tossed it aside and kept walking. Rotis puffed and were stacked in steaming heaps. Flowers were threaded onto strings and laid over foreigner's heads. A tailor grinned a vibrant orange and spit and ignored a request. Trucks blasted obnoxious horns and flipped off of bridges. Rats clawed, dogs barked, mosquitoes hummed, and tears were cried.

There is something very timeless about a sunset and something very profound about a night sky so expansive and twinkly you would snap your neck to see it all.

India is a tangled mass of gnarled and twisting motion. It is so convincing as such, so intoxicating, so overwhelming, you would never know it was a facade hanging on the framework of abundant stillness, a framework held in place by the ridiculing jester of time, until you dare to look past the mayhem all around you and back into the long stares of their eyes.

Stillness: deep, life-giving, merciful... India refined that in me.

A concrete floor perspective: what I learned from India's children

They frightened me, the children.

The multitude of small bodies in a variety of heights and clothed in every assortment of vibrantly colored rags imaginable. They stood, each entirely unique from the other, socks sliding down into ill fitting shoes, toes twitching in plastic flip flops, bare feet leaving prints in the dust, the only commonality was the endless depth of their penetrating blank stares.

One evening, after a walk through the rice fields where we were entertained by puddles of vanishing frogs, we stepped into the school yard just before dinner. The children sat in small groups, the air trembled with the silence of their stares. Dadingdading chimed one disembodied voice, then in a mystery of transformation the yard of hungry students became a field of ringing bells dadingdading dadingdading and it wasn't until we had passed completely through them that I realized they had been saying Didi (older sister), good evening.

They frightened me because their stares would hunt me and find me. They would stand at the gate and stare. They would peek through the bushes and stare.  They would beckon me with flowers to come and sit with them on an empty school bus and stare. They would walk right up to me and stare.They made me shy with their stares.

One night, we invited a group of small girls over to the house to learn an English song. There was no power and I saw them only slightly by dim battery operated lamp light. The curse of the stare was nullified in the face of gentle darkness and we sang together and held hands.

The next day we had an assembly. I stood at the back and watched shyly as the children filed in and took up seats on the concrete floor. Two girls, tiny and brave, came up to me grabbed my hand and led me to a spot amongst them on the floor. We sat close enough that every part of me was touching another girl and, though I couldn't really communicate with them, it was from the concrete floor that I learned what it meant to be one with them...

I learned the language of the hand squeeze, the dance of restless sitting, the community of minty sweets passed from hand to mouth, the secret of entertainment in a glance. I learned the pulse of giggles hidden by hands over mouths and the beat of sleepy eyes and sore knees. I learned that their stares had weighed me, inspected me, knew me... and still let me sit among them.

My newly gained concrete floor perspective found and loathe to forget, I instead put it to good use.

A small, very dark, sullen, forgotten looking little girl constantly pushed aside by her peers and always about the work of some dusty chore, in clothes ill fitting and drab, caught my attention. I let her stare in silence. As we wandered around the girls dorm I dropped my hand to my side. I left it there dangling and open. She stared. We moved among the crowds of others taking pictures and chattering and she stayed by my side, her hand open as well. She edged closer and in a moment that was so small and silent as to be totally lost in the mayhem that we moved through, I dared to take her hand in my own. And there it stayed, along with a slightly shocked and shy smile on the face of my dear little one, until school began.

He was different because his grin was so quick to appear. A little cowlick of dark greased hair perfectly complemented his thin askew tie and pants belted just a little above the waist. His grin became reminiscent of the Cheshire cat in that as soon as I noticed it he would disappear completely. I sat in the garden one damp morning in a spot that I had picked specifically because I was hidden. So I thought. Then before my eyes this cowlicked Cheshire cat appeared and handed me a page torn from a coloring book which he himself had colored. His name was Suraj and with haste I drew a picture of an elephant for him in exchange.

When the children's stares became replaced with tasteless biscuits hailed from hidden pockets in their uniforms I knew that my lessons had been well learned.

I wrote my name in dry chalk on a painted on the wall blackboard before a small class of students in weary thin desks. I blinked hard. The deep blankness of their ancient eyes had been replaced by an engaging brightness that revealed the fullness of their youth. They asked me questions about the great wall of China, about how I teach English to people who can't speak English, and about why I love rotis. They laughed and struggled to produce even more English and twenty minutes after the lunch bell sounded they sat attentively in their desks and begged me to stay and continue talking with them. They were the ones that tempted me to throw the rest of my life away alongside them in that very village and when their voices reached through my friend's telephone at the train station where we sat ready to depart asked why did you leave? no answer seemed legitimate.

I gained many things from India, but perhaps the most valuable to me was the concrete floor perspective which I owe to the children.

The vastly curious: cultural collision in rural India

Cultures are so fascinating. When cultures collide dangerous things happen... wars, oppression, violence, Kolkata traffic... or you end up at strangely familiar, perhaps more strange than familiar, birthday parties and weddings in villages in India.

The jeep had long left the entirely relative predictability of the paved roads and daylight by the time we stretched our legs to get out of it. A low wooden door stood open to a small home, quiet and dark among the stark trees and dust. After a round of hand shaking that I had to learn was more like palm touching, we were ushered inside to a narrow room and sat down in plastic lawn chairs facing the door and wall. A gas lamp in the far corner illuminated a few feet of the home and left the people faceless like dark ghosts. Bare feet made ticklish shuffling sounds on the swirly cow dung floor as more guests filed in from outside and around some unseen corner of the house. Aside from a few low remarks as people entered, the dimness of the room seemed to silence our souls. Two figures bearing water bowls moved down the row to wash our hands and we were given small cups of sugared ginger tea, followed by thin plates of puffed rice and sweet milk balls. We munched in peaceful silence.

In the mystery of a cool dark Indian night the room filled. Straw mats were laid on the floor and women, children, and a few men neatly folded themselves in order to fit everyone in on the floor. The narrow room full, a western style cake with icing was brought out and set near the gas lamp where we could nearly sense its shyness from being so out of place. A two year old squirmed and kicked on his mothers lap. A man stood. They began to sing. They sang songs of an unfamiliar beauty making sounds I realized with a tingly pleasure I was hearing for the first time. My friend's father stood and in his restless joking Hindi began to speak about birth, parents raising children, and other words of truth. The two year old had nearly fallen asleep, the women covered their heads, we asked for a blessing for the child from our Father.

The two year old was then roused and made to blow out a candle which it was clear he had no idea how or why he ought to do such a thing. The scene reminded me vaguely of my first time using chopsticks, or drinking butter tea. I simply had no framework for how it should be done. Nonetheless, the goal of smoldering candle completed, the child was given a new shirt and pants which he quickly put on. Cake was passed around and the guests sitting on the floor vanished into the moonlight outside. Low tables materialized in their place and heaping portions of rice were covered in curries and lentils which we scooped with our hands to our mouths. A bowl of water was brought round and poured over our greasy hands. Then we too disappeared into the brilliance of moonlight outside.

As the jeep rattled underneath a starry sky I wondered at such a collision of cultures that would place a birthday cake in a world it didn't belong. I didn't know it at the time, but I would have ample opportunity for such wonder.

In the much more crowded jeep again, another day and time, we bumped our way deep into bare Indian jungle and arrived just as the bus load of young men with drums and loud voices unloaded. The air was pulsing with excitement of people taking their places and we found ourselves in a courtyard pavilioned with leaves and colored clothes and lined with straw mats. We were greeted and taken into the house where we watched a sullen looking girl get adorned with make up and lace and other finery by friends. Out again into the bright sunshine and across a field where the drummers began to set up. I found myself arm in arm with a dark gentle looking Indian woman who spoke to me with her hands and seemed to think it quite natural that we were so close and who drew me closer and dragged me into a circle of women dancing modestly around the much more showy dancing of sweating men. Feet miraculously in time with the wild pounding of the drums, arms linked with strangers, the twirl of saris and scarves, laughter and sunshine and dust and so we danced. My arm partner broke the dancing chain and dragged me over to a crowd of people watching a the groom with yellow stained feet get rubbed with oil and hoisted onto the hip of a young girl. The bride was carried on the hip by a young man and off across the field to the beat of drums and dance of neighbors they went back to the courtyard.

The guests settled on the straw mats under the pavilion and watched silently as the ceremony took place. It was the same ceremony I've seen countless times, same pattern as any wedding in America, only in Hindi. It seemed almost like a surreal pause in the middle of the actual wedding festivities. Vows finished, women rose from the crowd to place flowered garland on the necks of the newly weds. Somewhere the drumming began again and the crowds dispersed to recline and receive snacks on thin paper plates and a small girl with a dress falling off her bony shoulders because it lacked a zipper in the back came closer with her deep still Indian stare.

We ate another curried meal with our hands from plates of dried leaves before piling into the jeep and departing in a cloud of dust. We vanished this time into the shimmery jungle heat and I wondered: what would the birthday, the wedding, indeed the country, have looked like if our cultures had not managed to meet and shake hands?

Curiouser and curiouser. Cultural collision and a country mutates. No wonder India is vastly curious and endearingly confusing.

For the laugh of Virginia: a one woman portrait of India

There once was a cook named Virginia.

She pressed her dried lips into tight lines over disorganized teeth and stared that deep blank Indian stare with thin arms folded under her stained sari and became a disgruntled statue with only dark eyes following the movement of a stranger. Days past and her response, like an eerie character in a wax museum, never changed.

But I love rotis. What is it about warm flat bread that I find irresistible? I could hear the roll of the wooden pin on the board thinning out the dough, followed by the flap of the newly formed circle onto the griddle, and instinctively, quite nearly against my own will, found myself by the stove just in time to slide it fresh off the top of a pile of steaming breads.

She would stare at me. Unblinking.

But rotis have a puzzling charm. One enchanted morning I again found myself stove side waiting for the next roti long before breakfast time. She stared. I grinned in my most endearing fashion. The roti puffed on the griddle. Without removing her stare, she snatched the roti off the stove and to my shock and nearly ecstatic glee gently gave it to me and patted my arm. Her face never betrayed a single discernible change. Everything had changed.

The day she laughed.

We were amusing ourselves with some video footage of a friend dancing. She stood, a shadow among shadows in the kitchen door, her dingy shaw wrapped tightly over her body with her nearly unbreakable stare penetrating that corner of the room taking our hilarity into her silence. A glance and a wave brought her to my side and I demanded that the video be played again. Having seen the video, I now watched her: Her small frame was bent in places that betrayed hours of household labors that were both her livelihood and her duty, black coarse hair braided behind her back, dark face serious with the weight of an ancient tribal culture met with as much modernity as could be found in the midst of an Indian jungle. Her red and yellow sari was dusty at the bottom hem and her ragged bare feet stood motionless on the cool cement floor. Her stare followed the video. Then in a flash that was divine and life giving, her face broke into a smile laugh that tilted her head back, made her body shake, and allowed her shaw to slip from suddenly weightless shoulders. Oh how we laughed.

The day she communicated.

I stood in my favorite morning place letting the sun creep over the garden towards my feet and listening with the intensity of a deaf person hearing for the first time to the sweet chatter of birds in the trees and children preparing for school. The flutter of her sari drew my attention and I threw my arm over her small shoulders. She stared at me, with an uncomfortable stare turned familiar, and then in Hindi, a language that never failed to sound remarkably like the melody of time, and with her hands she told me they can all go, but you, you stay here, don't go, you stay. We laughed together at the impossibility of it, both the request and the fact that I had understood it, and then sobered immediately at the impossibility of it.

The day she touched.

She had asked us to accompany her to a friend's son's birthday party. So we had set out, flashlights in hand, across the school grounds and down the street to the modest assembly. On the way back, as the kapok trees stood silently silhouetted against the moon and our flashlights gave a pale pool of light at our weary feet she and I linked arms. The brilliance of a universe of stars twinkled overhead with laughter at the mystery of time and space and divinity that cause two very different arms to rest in each other on a cool night in India. She says she will remember you, my friend translated as we plodded back to our homes.

The day she invited.

India moments became those times when you caught yourself dreaming of leopards and spices in the middle of the afternoon heat. I was aroused from an India moment by a light slap on the shoulder and with a full body motion that I took to mean come on I followed her grim face, now prone to bursts of brightness, across the garden to the small concrete and cow dung home where she lived with her husband and two of her children. I sat on the bed she cleared for me. A man totally enshrouded in a dull beige blanket groaned and turned on another bed. She brought out sickly sweet tea in mismatching tea cups on a metal plate and filled another plate with the infamous Indian snack mixture and donuts then sat on a plastic chair facing me. She pointed at things around the room and people wandering in and out and spoke about them and I strained to understand anything in the unfamiliar language. She nearly rolled out the chair laughing as I made motions for having eaten too much and becoming fat and then led me to the door and back to shade where my India moment had been interrupted.

The day she braided.

The skin crawling deep stares had nearly disappeared. Now, when our eyes met we usually just laughed. She had taken to grabbing my hand and squeezing, I had taking to patting her shoulder as I passed. She sat down next to me tried to straighten my dusty hair pulled back in a pony tail. I pointed to her hair casually braided, then my own. Her rough hands like a sandpaper comb swept through and in moments had made a twin of her braid out of my own hair. Silky she said in an accent so heavy it was hard to discern as she patted my face.

The day she revealed.

I squatted on the floor and smeared a dollop of Neosporin on the slight crack in my heel before plastering it over with a bandage. Before I could rise again she stood before me, my eyes level with her knees, and she pointed down to her own feet. Wincing back tears, I looked at darkened shoeless feet so deeply cracked in so many places I felt her pain shoot up my own legs. I grabbed her arm, stuffed my pockets full of extra bandages and together we marched back over to her little house across the garden. I had wanted to carry her. She sat on a bed and the, apparently permanent, man covered in a blanket on the next bed stirred. I stumbled around the primitive kitchen looking for water and a rag which she ended up having to get for herself. After she had washed the dust off and dried her feet, I took them one by one in my own hands, filled the cavernous cracks with great globs of Neosporin and stuck bandages anywhere they would fit. She rustled around in a pile of cloth and produced two socks. The broken feet were now covered, but their image would remain to haunt me.

The day she cried.

The deep stare had returned. Even as she laughed at my feeble attempts to make rotis and smiled when I chanced to get it right, I could see her lips begin to tighten once again. Long stares. Stares which spoke a language I didn't know and couldn't understand. I hugged her, she stared. I rolled my bag to the car, she stared. I said good bye and I love you and don't worry and she stared. I reached to shut the car door and this time I stared, at tears like tiny jewels resting and swelling at the inside corners of her dark now endearingly familiar eyes, still staring, but softened, speaking a language of sorrow that the whole earth understands.

An Indian arrival

India is a land of infinite stories... the next few posts will be a feeble attempt to record a few of mine... but first, I had to arrive... 

I stepped off the plane onto the tarmac and into what could have been mistaken for the world's basement. I waited for my bag to be tossed onto a conveyor belt slowly cranking through piles of discarded looking things and people. I stepped out of the only door possible and was greeted by muggy air in a parking lot. Kolkata, but only for about eight hours.

The sing song prayers of children in unison are fresh as a breeze and gently give way to bird song in guava trees.

Kolkata traffic blessedly dimmed by the darkness of evening though still horrifyingly present and friendships are made between two girls and an ice cream wallah who became the evening's driver. In an erratic burst of energy markets are visited, ice creams tasted, bare feet mourned, coconuts drank, and man run rickshaws ridden. A visit to a tea bar where neon lights cast a glare on swinging tables as tea is sipped leaves the distinct taste of possibility.

The patter of rats feet on the ceiling above disturbs no one and smells of fish curry frying on the stove waft through the room.

Waves of nausea mirror waves of extreme poverty rolled past the car windows. The Kolkata train station could have been a refugee camp for the groups of people sitting around in the dust every manner of cross legged. Free water available from faucets teeming with wrinkled hands, the jangle of ankle bracelets nearly drowned out by the splatter of orange spit, and a sleepy white girl stepping carefully around the reclining crowds. Billboards of ticket reservation papers mobbed by sweaty searching hoards and a strange name easily found among the Hindi: Kelly A Bastowcox. Now to find the train.

The low voices of a language that sounds like time itself chatter on and a now familiar black tea is sipped as dusk settles on the rice fields outside.

Friends stay by my side until the train shudders and they are only faces seen sliding past a grimy window. The four hour detour to avoid missing tracks, and rebels, and derailed trains is not even felt by a girl so hard asleep she could have been on the moon. Awakening to light slicing through the cheap curtains and a landscape like an African mirage disorients and a grumbling stomach gives thanks for curry stuffed rotis left over from the night before. Men with bulging stomachs that remain still as shoulders heave with laughter tell tales of mythical heroes and tricksters and answer shy questions with riddles ripe with everything. You never know, comes the eerily oft repeated phrase, our paths may cross again.

Dusty feet ache from the trails of the day as a screen door slams in the next room. Almost, almost time for stars.

A familiar face at a tiny station in a tiny bit of nowhere India. A Jeep ride past a strolling monkey into jungle that looks nothing like jungle and the strange echoing sound of truck horns obscured in billowing clouds of red dust. Meager shops huddling together strain to look like towns dot the road of engineering headaches. A wedding procession provides momentary diversion before the silence of trees and dust again reigns. When the car stops once more it is before dancing rows of school children and a handful of flowers pressed from dark wrinkled hands into my own.

Leaves become bats awaken from the trees, the night pulses with dark and then the bright eyes of the heavens begin to blink open one by one. And I laid down under tightly tucked mosquito netting marveling at the fantastic confusion of my arrival in this country. India.