Wednesday July 16, 2008

Living at the Ashram

I am sitting on the porch outside my room at an Ashram in the mountains just outside of Udaipur. This is how I am spending my midterm break: listening to the singing crickets, the distant voices of young Americans in the dining hall, and Dadiji yelling “Hira Lal!” into the night air. Hira Lal is the name of one of the workers here at the ashram who cooks, helps on the farm, escorts the two elderly owners to and from the neighboring village and city, does grocery shopping, and is the all around go-to guy. He is the one who picked me up from the railway station this morning.

Hira Lal is only 22 years old and has already been married for 5 years with two sons. I spoke Hindi with him and the other villagers who work on the property this afternoon while Dadiji painted my palms with henna outside. There is a group of 25 American, high-school aged students staying here for a 4 week Leadership Conference (which I think is code for Christian mission). Anyway, neither I or the people who work here really see them because they are out during the day and playing silly campfire games in the evening in the far corner of the property where their rooms are situated. Thanks to their presence however, I have been placed in a beautiful one room cottage just adjacent to the owner’s one room cottage which they normally do not keep for guests. The owners of this property are Mr. and Mrs. Dr. RC Mehta, a kind Jain couple who, in one afternoon, have adopted me as their honorary granddaughter. So the wife has become my Dadiji and the husband Dadaji.

Dadaji is an expert in Agriculture. He bought this land after he retired as dean of the University in Udaipur with a PhD in Botany and Horticulture. On this beautiful green oasis in the otherwise dry and barren mountains, there is every plant imaginable. Even olives (which apparently don’t grow in India but have been sent here by an Italian traveler named Franchesca who stayed here for 6 months last year).

This morning when I arrived Dadiji fed me porridge and bananas (homegrown and organic). This is my favorite breakfast and I long for it every morning in Jaipur when instead I am served greasy fried aloo parantha or an omelet with white bread. Dadaji and Dadiji are Jain so they do not eat eggs. When I told them I don’t eat eggs either I saw their love for me start to grow. This is perhaps the only place in the world where, when I tell a 75 year old man that I am a Vegan, he smiles warmly, hugs me and showers me with praises for being such a good girl. This information delighted him, yet did not stop either of them from giving me milk chai with breakfast, a curd lassi at lunch, and Thundai after dinner. Although I am enjoying the dairy consumption here because all the milk comes from their few adorable cows who I have seen roaming around with their long eyelashes and well fed, non-emaciated bodies.

After breakfast Dadaji took me all around the property to teach me about his vegetables, fruit, and Ayurvedic medicinal plants. With a small notebook of hand-made paper that I bought in Pushkar for 25 rupees (50 cents) I walked with him taking notes on the properties of trees and leaves. This old man is an amazing fountain of knowledge. He designed the irrigation system, a transplanting method for the plants, and is teaching all his techniques to the villagers who work here. He would tell me to pluck the leaf of a shrub and ask me to either taste or smell it and guess what it was. I did so unhesitatingly, which felt out of character because I have had to be so cautious about what fresh foods I eat in India. However I knew there would no stomach ailment caused by their unwashed plants because his farm is completely organic and pesticide/chemical free. Only twice did I rob Dadaji of the joy of telling me the name of the mystery plant when I recognized the taste of Stevia and the smell of Lemongrass. He told me the Latin botanical name for every plant and was so impressed by my ability to write down their common Hindi names.

I have so long desired to have such knowledge of plants and their properties myself and I want him to teach me more than I was able to absorb in our two hour lesson. He has many varieties of each fruit: bananas, mangoes, papaya, custard apple and each vegetable: okra, bottle gourd, ridge gourd, eggplant. More fruits and vegetables than I can name. He also has every kind of lentil, a field of peanuts, plants that produce mustard oil, neem oil, castor oil, and a giant garden of red roses. I am certain that this is actually the garden of Eden.

We walked through his vegetable garden where he quizzed me on the Hindi names of each one. He thinks I speak very good Hindi (even though my skills are limited) and he and Dadiji and all the workers speak to me in Hindi. Everyone here is so kind, even when I don’t understand. I can already tell that I am going to be sad when I have to leave. I want to come back and live here.

I have eaten all my meals with my new grandparents today in their tiny cottage that has a bed and a kitchen all in one room. They told me that I am like their daughter and everything I do seems to please them to no end. They praise me for eating well, for doing yoga, and even when I am reading my book, or writing in my journal. Dadaji even wants to arrange for me to marry a nice Indian boy just as he found mates for his three sons (who are now around 50 and have children of their own).

Part of me, enchanted by these people, this lifestyle, and this place makes me entertain the idea of agreeing. What if I did marry an Indian man and lived in this country, tending to my garden, doing yoga, cooking food, sewing clothes, taking freezing cold bucket showers, and speaking Hindi?

But the idea of binding oneself to a near stranger for life is still bizarre to me. Although the couples in India seem happy enough; or at least as happy as the love-married couples I knew growing up in the States who ignored each other and slept in separate bedrooms. Dadaji and Dadiji didn’t even meet each other until they got married. I don’t know if one method is better than the other. But I do know that Dadaji called marriage a “surrender”. In India it is a dharmic responsibility that is nearly always fulfilled and never broken. As opposed to in America where it is nearly always broken.

Is it that arranged couples in India are better at surrendering to the contract of marriage? The agreement that we will join our finances and our families, live our lives simultaneously in the same home, spawn our seed, and take care of each other when we are too old and decrepit to do it ourselves. Having never first been in love, maybe arranged couples do not have unrealistic expectations to preserve that love longer than its natural lifespan. Dadaji seems to think that the American divorce rate is higher because it is just the nature of Americans to never be satisfied and always want something more and someone better. But he is forgetting the extreme social pressure that keeps many couples together here in India.

And how, if some Indians are locked into an arranged marriage at 17, like Hira Lal, do people deal with never having fallen in love? Is that why there is so much displaced desire, on westerners and in Bollywood films? Because we are trying to exercise and experience something that we were never permitted to taste? It seems that in either case marriage is still a surrender, whether you choose who you marry or not.

Rather than turning it over in my head—the value of arranged marriages—I have to make peace with certain things that, since being in India, I realize I do not understand. Much of it having to do with the interaction between men and women. With regards to marriage, to strangers on the street (local and foreign), to their household roles, and to sexuality, piety, respect, morality, and denial of physiological functions such as the unspoken shame of menstruation. I can’t pretend to understand, so I am consciously withdrawing all tendency to judge and replacing it with quiet, unquestioning observation.

One other aspect of Indian life I have to resign myself to is with regard to religion. I have been to a Sikh Gurudwara, two Hindi Temples, and a Muslim Dargah. In every holy place I was rushed from one end to the other by the massive crowd before I knew what had happened. Inside I tied a string around a post, was patted on the head by a man reciting some holy scripture then asked for 20 rupees. In every place I was given a prasad of puffed sugar rice and rose petals then asked for twenty rupees. In every temple it seemed that most people around me came to touch a goddess and be on their way. I realize that as a westerner who does not belong to any of these faiths I am experiencing something completely different than those around me, but I was still relieved to hear Dadaji’s opinion that spirituality is more important to religion and his comment of “closer to the temple, further from God.” This remark started a cute argument between the old couple who disagree on the importance of religious ritual.

Yesterday, before I was welcomed into the embrace of this ashram, I was just barely staying afloat in Ajmer at Muslim Dargah/ Sufi Shrine. It was the burial sight of a Sufi Saint. I learned that in death, Sufis do not lose their power, so their burial sights are erected as places to seek strength and guidance. In the center of the crowded temple there was a small room that contained in its center the coffin memorial where the Saint was buried. I entered the room in a sea of people before I had any idea what I was doing or where I was going. I could tell from the hundreds of people around me going to the same place that something powerful was believed to reside here.

Among mostly capped, bearded men dressed in all white and some fully veiled faceless women dressed in black I became part of the solid mass that was the crowd attempting to all enter through one doorway of a small room. Like a sardine in a moshpit I was fully sandwiched between an American student in front of me and one behind me. No part of anyone’s body was not touching another person as we circled the grave in the small room. I was so smushed by people pushing to give their plates of rose petals to the Mullahs at the grave in the center that I had no control of my pace or direction. I could have lifted my feet off of the floor. As I was pushed near a Mullah he waved a green cloth over my head, recited something, and then asked me for “money please.” I was saved from having to respond as I was carried away by the moving current of the crowd and drowned out by the shouting of the other Mullahs as they attempted to orchestrate the onslaught of offerings.

As the sounds and bodies all melded together I went internal and surrendered to the fact that I had no control over the situation and would only be able to leave the hectic place when crowd had made it’s full circle. I began to be impressed that, despite the hectic pushing I never felt the looming cloud of impatience, anger, or violation, from any of the surrounding pilgrims. No matter the situation in India, people push. I have accepted that. Lines consist of crowds pushing past one another to get to the front. And in this crowd people are pushing more fervently because they feel a sense of urgency to be close to their God, perhaps to ease some suffering.

Just as I neared the exit my optimism was thwarted. The energy became more hostile and desperate as the people making their exit competed with those entering the shrine through its only door. Right as I was almost out: out of breath and out of the room I felt a man’s large full hand press firmly against my breast. Because there were so many people, all touching one another, I didn’t even attempt to identify the culprit I just pushed his hand away with mine as I made my exit. Even more violating than his hand cupping my breast was the contact between my palm and his as I pushed it away. Our fingers perfectly lined up, and our palms, flat against one another, stayed touching for what felt like 5-10 seconds as I used him for leverage to push myself out of doors. In a way I feel like I gingerly rewarded him with the intimacy of our embraced palms.

More than anything I felt extreme disappointment and confusion. All the people, all the fanaticism, all the sincere prayers mixed with hypocrisy was too much to absorb. People seemed to be ignoring the humanity that surrounded them, especially out the gates of the Dargah. On each side of the overcrowded street that lead to the Dargah was a line of mutilated beggars. Men laying on their backs amputated or atrophied limbs with blood-puss filled wounds shook metal coin collecting bowls in the faces of passers by. The sight of disfigured faces and open wounds were enough to make me want to cry and vomit but provoked nothing from me other than an empty gaze that signaled my inability to absorb the scene.

I can not absorb, I can not categorize my experience anywhere in my brain or heart that makes any sense to me. So I resign myself to it. To the indescribable magic and terror that was there. But here, in this place of bliss and purity, I am at peace with my inability to understand.

Continue reading: India Journal 7