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.

When life introduces you: Wuhan

The great gift of family is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. 

-K. Hailey

Two and a half years ago the earth shook in Lhasa and a Chinese girl came walking up to me to introduce herself. We've been friends ever since. Life introduced us.

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The drive from the airport of Wuhan into the city was a sliding view of grime and poverty paused only for endless construction and traffic jams so dense that it felt like I was in a box which had buses crammed with people for sides. When I arrived at the school where my friend now worked to spend the next week or so with her I didn't realize at first what had changed. It all seemed the same as last years visit. Same numbingly frosty air, same sidewalks thick with muck, same girl.

Only this time, we weren't just friends...

We lived together in her apartment, and I learned what it meant to be a young Chinese professional: survivor. Words like: rickety, moldy, dusty, broken, dangerous, old, stressful, uncertain... would have populated legions of conversations regarding the general environment. Case in point: She plugged a small hair dryer into the wall for me to use and the power went out in her room. She called the landlord who sent an irritated young man to look at it. He arrived with nothing except some wire clippers which he used to knock the switch off the wall in a shower of whitewash. Later, he grumbled his way outside where he flipped another switch a few times until the electricity came back on. My friend gave him some yogurt and shrugged happens all the time. We decided that outlet was off limits.

When she wasn't busy we walked around, bought bread at bakeries, ran errands, took pictures, stayed warm, chatted, met her friends. But she was often busy. Add that to the list of defining words.

So I spent time with her younger sister. I spent time listening to a quiet girl who doesn't get heard much in the noise and rush of China. I spent time wandering with her in buildings adorned with cross and decorated with paintings of stories that she didn't know but that I was overjoyed to tell. I spent time with the truly beautiful, ignoring all the rest.

As the days slipped by and friends were met and made and milk tea was drunk and streets were walked and my friend remarked for the second time that it's so good to have you here because we have a routine now I realized that I had somehow just been assimilated into life in general, my pulse melded with the city, my chopsticks clinked in sync with theirs, my feet stomped to keep warm alongside everyone else's. I had been adopted into her family, having met all of its members, spit my fish bones out on the table next to them, laughed about nothing in particular, developed a language of shared experiences that only we could possibly understand, been bored, been cold, been tired, been irked, been amused, been accepted.

We weren't just friends because we were family.

And I realized that had it not been for an earthquake I would never have had such a family.

That is how, from Wuhan, praise went to the Shaker of the earth and the Introducer of all things.

Come here, come here, I like you: Wuhan

A dance for Su Zhuo

A dance dedicated to my dear friends Charlie Brown and Lucy who so generously allowed me to enter their lives for a week as an ever present Snoopy.

Su Zhuo is famous for its bridges. More bridges than any other city in China, even the elderly are apt to declare to you that they have walked more bridges than your foolish feet have walked streets. They probably have. Bridges just burst forth from the ground for no particular reason in Su Zhuo.

I arrived smelling acutely like two days on a train from Lhasa. I felt as though I had arrived on a spaceship from another planet; baffled immediately by the
cleanliness, beauty, and quaintness of the town-esque city I had arrived in. Ancient but with hot water. Like a fairy tale. Hobbled streets and hobbled people. Slanting roof tiles and water stains. Stone canals outlined with neon lights. The cacophony of shopping malls and the delicate twitter of birds. Flaky pastry eaten with chopsticks. Gardens, pagodas, buses, shallow boats on lazy rivers, and ragged old men selling roasted sweet potatoes from blackened ovens on wheels.

In my bowl of soup I found a fish so slender and translucent I would have thought it was an egg white save for the tiny black eyes. In my temporary residence in the Chinese student dorms I found two quilts and an electric hot water bottle I would have considered fearsome weapons had I been the ice cold draft filling the room. In my spirit I found scabby wounds I would have
thought beyond healing had I found them in any other place. In my Chinese friends I found friendship that is recognizable only to them, and now, to me as well.

We idled away our days walking through parks, taking pictures, finding places to eat, peeling oranges, escaping into heated shopping malls, chatting, wandering around, joining tour groups, trying on boots, staying warm. The places are nearly a blur to me as one day ran into the next and I learned the art of warmth from a glass jar filled with boiling water and a leak
proof lid. The sounds of that city are diluted to me because they were distinct from one another only in our pauses for breath between laughter. During my time there I learned the dance that is required for the body to receive rest, for the mind to receive peace, and for the soul to receive joy. A dance that looks like a bridge.

Some bridges are extravagant, some utilitarian, but most are simply modest. There was a bridge that was so humble one might have walked over it without ever guessing the impossibility of the walk had the bridge not been there. It was composed of two slabs of stone hardly two meters long grown old and stained permanent side by side. So many feet had trod there, so many
shoe scuffs and bike tire treads, yet the stones bore no slippery smoothness. The sludgy green water underneath it moved at the pace of a whisper or fog from a breath on a cold morning which was every morning there. We must have passed over that bridge more than two dozen times. One of many, nothing more.

A bridge takes you places you would not otherwise go. It connects two things which, by default, are not connected. A bridge uplifts, a bridge quickens, a bridge joins. All my weary semester what I've needed most is such a bridge, such a dance.

My week in Su Zhuo was a dance, it was a bridge. A bridge between a tortured yesterday and a hopeful tomorrow constructed out of beautiful scenes and dear friends without which I may have never gotten to this other side.

A dance of bridges.

More bridges than streets: Su Zhuo

My train song

Because a two day train ride spent laughing with teachers from our school, sharing meat and tea with a Tibetan couple, getting to know the train cabin mates, giving free English lessons, learning again who I am, and watching a tough semester slip away to the rhythmic chug of the highest train in the world... deserves a song. 

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The clickity clack of the wheels on the track
Massage weights off my soul
I am free
I am whole

I beat the sun to the start of the day
Bags packed, door closed, and keys put away
The city I drive through grays with decay
Reasons to leave but not one to stay

The clickity clack of the wheels on the track

Lazy yak herds and plains dusted with snow
Pass quickly by the grimy window
Boiled meat shared by a chatty fellow
Anxiety subsides and a pounding heart slows

Massage weights off my soul

Behind lies a city therein lies a past
Of calouses formed and chains tightened fast
Of joy in rare places and bruises that last
Why hope for a change when the die has been cast?

I am free

But this is my train song so I dare to sing
Of life and of love and of every good thing
The clouds of back there tossed aside with a fling
And though tears have been cried I know laughter rings

I am whole

So I'll sing again at the dawn of the day
I'll sing of friends and tea given away
And I'll sing of hope, let come what may
I might lose again but I'll step into the fray

The clickity clack of the wheels on the track
Massage weights off my soul
I am free
I am whole.