No Wonder

Friday the 13th of March, 2009
Jodhpur, Rajasthan

No freaking wonder I got respiratory/chest problems upon arrival in Delhi: this little TV news screen capture says it all. The air pollution index (however they measure that) is off the charts in Delhi! Blasting past “unhealthy,” cruising easily beyond “alert” and well into “warning” en route to “emergency” levels—yikes!

I’m still getting over the head gunk from early in the trip; soon I’ll be one of those travelers you see wearing a big fat cloth mask all the time to keep at least the big chunks out of my lungs as I do my time on the streets…

Back to Rajasthan

Sun rising through the smog leaving Delhi en route to Jaipur

8:18 p.m. Saturday March 7th, 2009
Jaipur, Rajasthan

Finally, dear Delhi departed—huzzah! Not a moment too soon, I swear. I hopped a pre-dawn ride with my friend Raju’s driver Mukesh, who was returning to Jaipur at 6 a.m.—worth waking up early to grab that easy flow. Groggy as I was, it felt great to enter incredible and evocative Rajasthan again, leaving Delhi far behind.

Mukesh and I are old pals of sorts, if language-free ones—he ferried me about quite a bit on my first true Dharma sourcing mission here several years ago. Always interesting to spend time with someone when verbal language is largely missing from the communication equation. He knows about as much English and I do Hindi: “photo, tea/coffee, thank you sir, coming (as in ‘Jaipur is coming’), midway” (though that’s cheating because it’s the name of the main Delhi-Jaipur highway stopping point of food dhabas and chai walas).

Actually, I know much more Sanskrit than Hindi; all that time learning yoga asanas and chanting kirtan has paid off in kind. What Hindi do I know? Not much! And I’ll prove it here, by brevity, spelling and translation: Danyawad (thank you), nahin or nayee/nay (no), thik hain (OK, or something close to it) and my old standby, acha, which means something like “ah” or “I see” or “yep.” Pretty weak conversational tea, believe me—so here for me, it’s all about the twinkly eye contact and the heart’s intention! Lucky for me, India is about nothing if not twinkly eye contact. I fall in love at least several times a day with passing strangers and rikshaw walas and our shared moments of eye connection, nods and smiles, all in recognition of some deeper soul connection that America has managed to largely bleed out of its daily social interactivity. Our loss, in a sad and big way.

So, Mukesh and I shared a ride unpunctuated by any need to catch up on the latest news or blues to keep us amused. Still, we shared warm smiles and a hug upon me meeting him in front of Delhi’s Imperial Hotel as we had planned through Raju the evening before. In fact, we shared one of those blessed moments of twinklyness on the phone, when Raju had me on the cell and Mukesh on the landline, and was brokering the details of the meet. When I said, “oh, is that Mukesh who used to be Induji’s driver?” it all came back to Raju that of course we’d met many times, and he then shared with Mukesh that I was the passenger and we all laughed in a friendly round of “Jai Sri Krishna!”

Sometimes a little Sanskrit goes a long way.





Enjoying a 50 cent shave

It begins

Ah, the comforts of home on the road...

10:40 p.m. Tuesday March 3rd, 2009
Finally got to bed at dawn, vainly trying to adjust my biorhythms to a suddenly polar cycle, so it was early afternoon before I really got myself down to banjara alley. I clambered up on the platform and sat amidst the piles of old textiles, diving on in. It’s increasingly clear that the old style banjara textiles are done, just disappearing from the markets. I did find 16 pretty nice old pieces today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s my biggest score of the trip, banjara-wise. On the other hand, I can’t wait to get back to Jaipur where I can get even closer to the source of the gorgeous vintage Gudri cotton blankets I love. The fabrics get my blood moving, somehow.

Tomorrow I hire a car ($20-25 including driver and some mileage limits) to take me in the deep Delhi ‘burbs, Tughlaqabad Extension, to hunt for antique furniture. If it doesn’t eat up my entire day, maybe at night I’ll get to visit some folks with whom my sister Jenny recently connected on her first trip to India, family of friends sort of thing. I’m loaded down with gifts from Jenny to them, so better I see them before lugging their goodies all over Vraja and Rajasthan.

Feels like the week is starting slowly, but actually I’m ticking some things off the list too; got my bindis and bangles all taken care of today, tomorrow get the furniture ball rolling, and Thursday go to Old Delhi for musical instruments, statues and a visit to the fabled Gulab Singh oil house.

The big question now is: next stop Jaipur, or Vrindavan? Holi is coming up in about a week so that’s a factor in timing: it’s like Christmas in the States in that work utterly shuts down for one or more days. In plenty of places, the unusual temporary release from the restrictive norms that the color festival of Holi allows also breeds an element of chaos or danger that can be more than I feel like dealing with on the streets. Then the question is, where to hunker down inside a room or a compound for a few days? Vrindavan gets first dibs on that, I think, for now at least.

NYC>Delhi

Farewell from the flight Goddess of JFK airport

Early Monday March 2, 2009
I write this while nestling into my small room here at the Abracadabra guest house, tucked behind the Janpath Tibetan markets near Connaught Circus in downtown Delhi. It’s just past four twenty in the morning, and the jetlag has begun. The long flight direct from New York via a cramped middle seat on Air India finally ended, after offering me aerial glimpses of the mountains and deserts of Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Landing, phone charging and gear acquisition all went smooth, and after dropping my gear off at my guest house I hit the streets just at sunset for a quick hello.

Was very happy to see on the street some of my old friends among the banjara ladies, still holding court; I will visit more later during daylight hours. Ended up talking with a Kashmiri guy and going back to his house to drink tea and look at shawls; I met his wife Fatima and young daughters (Arvina, 8 and Sabrina, 5) who were doing homework and quickly invited me to draw pictures with them. After tea Manzoor’s neighbor the Kashmiri shawl wala showed me some truly incredible hand embroidered woolen shawls, including one that was so gorgeously done I was tempted to buy it for myself. The asking price of 85,000 rupees (or approximately $1800 US) steered me clear. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to take a photo of it later; it was a real beauty.

One fresh anar (pomegranate) juice and a thali plate at Saravana Bhavan later, I wandered back to Abracadabra and swiftly unwound into a dream state. Someone rang my mobile around 1 or 2 and I ended up being awake for the last hours. Spent some time reviewing and updating all the spreadsheets I use to track my buying, my expenses, my whole economic life over here. I imagine tomorrow will be slightly lazy, but I expect to hit the ground running and try and get all the balls rolling here in Delhi by the end of this week.

This year I have a fantasy, seemingly even more grounded in reality than every year’s phantasm, that I may be able to complete all my work within several weeks, and have a couple weeks left over to travel a bit to unseen realms and melt away into village devotional Indian life for a while. So motivation is high to work diligently and efficiently! Of course, working efficiently in India is definitionally oxymoronic, but at least I can tilt at the windmill…

5:35 a.m., and the city begins to stir. Droning, muffled chants echo through distant streets, the ongoing Doppler of traffic starting up along the offices, craft emporia and high-end hotels of Janpath Avenue. Maybe if I can sleep some more now, I’ll wake up on a local time schedule…

And in the Third Month Comes Return

Sunday April 27, 2008 2:48 p.m.
Delhi National/Domestic Airport

OK, the always frazzling final Delhi work stretch is completed: we are now cooling our heels at the airport waiting for our flight down to Mumbai, where our return on Northwest Airlines departs tomorrow night back to the states via A’dam (Amsterdam).

Since we returned from Afghanistan it has been more than 40-42 degrees centigrade in Delhi, or way above 100F—brutal. I wilt in this kind of weather—I do not know how people live in heat like this for months at a time. I suppose it’s partly the heat, partly the final wave of non-doing that is just beginning to settle upon me after pretty much 60 straight days of major doing (not counting a couple days here and there in sick bay). But I feel spent—utterly drained of energy, totally ready to come home. Or already be home, really, but first there’s 50+ hours of travel to endure, including the upcoming 24 hour Mumbai window. After all this travel, I guess another couple days shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll just keep holding the vision of strolling barefoot in the fresh growing grass back at Tree Toad Farm.

Upon arriving home, the next wave of the trip unfolds: the months of reviewing and editing footage to develop some finished video pieces from the journey. The idea is to integrate a lot of this work into the new Dharma Boutique web shop/adventure site that I am working on for a summertime launch—so it will be a busy season once I get home. A little time to decompress sounds good first, though.

Sara’s heard about some kind of evening reception on May 1st in New York, something regarding Afghanistan and photo-journalism—given our most recent adventures there, it would seem like a room we should perhaps be in. Though pulling that off barely 48 hours after we land seems a tad harsh to me. But we’ll see. The journey continues…

Sara has a post on her blog about Shira the Lion Cub of Mazar-e-Sharif—if you’re up for a good cry and some sweet photos, you can find them both there. Once I get to a semi-fast web connection, I’ll also try to throw some photos up here on some of the posts where I’ve been frustrated in uploading photos. But for now, there’s more cute puppy photos than you can throw a stick for right here:
http://www.sarakarl.blogspot.com/

But, now that our flight to Mumbai has been delayed by some unknown measure of time, I think I’ll first just lie down on the tile floor and pass out for a couple days.

Love and Death; or, Time to Go Home

Wednesday April 23, 2008 2:21 p.m.
Delhi, Hindustan

It’s hard to write now, because the tears are still filling up my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. One of the many things left unwritten in recent days has been Sara’s, and to a lesser extent my own, adoption of a sick and tiny little puppy in Mazar-e-Sharif and subsequent adventure of trying to heal her up and bring her back to the states with us. She really was an amazing little pup: a sag-e-jangi, or Afghan fighting dog, she had already had her ears and tail cut off, while being bred to engage in the local blood sport of dog fighting. Yet she had a composure I’ve rarely seen in any animal, human or otherwise. When, after buying her freedom from the proprietors of the Mazar Hotel for the cost of 100 Afghanis (or $2 US, plus $2 for a little blue towel to swaddle her with), it was time to drive 10 hours during the heat of the day down into Kabul, she barely blinked the whole ride through—just relaxing and enjoying the ride as a chance to catch up on her rest and relaxation. Whenever she needed to do her business, she’d either give us a little whimper or just hop out of her little travel pouch and do her thing outside—and then climb back into bed.

Sara named her Shira, after shir which is the Dari word for “lion,” and shirac, the word for lion cub. The poor little thing was suffering from malnutrition, some sort of nasty intestinal illness (gastroenteritis, one vet said) which made her pass blood in her diarrhea, spent a fair amount of time either throwing up or otherwise writhing in bodily discomfort, and we picked more than half a dozen ticks off of her over 2-3 days—they just kept appearing. Conrad, and many others, were convinced she would indeed outweigh Sara herself within 2 years, and likely be close to as tall—these sag-e-jangis are huge, I guess. Meanwhile, she was the mellowest and most adorable thing that side of the Hindu Kush.

Shira died today, about an hour ago. Sara, miraculously, had gotten all her papers and shots and vet stuff in order, we flew her smoothly through customs from Kabul to Delhi, and it seemed like the toughest part was behind us. Just as we had gotten her to the veterinary clinic, figuring we’d check her in for 2-3 days of rehydrating and nourishing and medical attention to get her healthier and ready for the trip to the states, she passed away in Sara’s arms while I was across the road buying the medicines and supplies the clinic needed in order to treat her. Maybe… if the taxi driver had stayed and waited like he said he would rather than making us search 15 minutes for a new ride after dropping off our luggage at the guest house; if we hadn’t been the last people to get our luggage off the flight; if the vet clinic had had any supplies in stock, rather than making each animal’s parents buy and deliver everything necessary, including the IV tubes, the betadaine and every last item that took me 30 minutes to find and buy while Sara waited with Shira at the clinic—maybe; maybe, maybe, maybe she might have lived.

But, she did not live. While I thought she was with us for a period of healing and rejuvenation and new life, and saw her health challenges in that light, in reality I guess she came to us in order to die. After probably 4-6 weeks of mostly motherless infancy, eating bread and being eaten by fleas and ticks, losing her tail and ears at the hands of those who wanted to breed her into a fighting machine, she discovered us and we all fell in love. She came with us and had several days of love and snuggling and kindness and encouragement, and just when we got her from the vet in Kabul to the vet in Delhi, she passed away. Ouch.

Shir-e-Mazar, the little Lion Cub of Mazar-e-Sharif, has left behind her mortal coil. I’m more beside myself with grief than I could have imagined possible only a few days ago. I guess I haven’t really let myself begin to love a dog like this since Gemma, our beloved greyhound, who was like an angel incarnated into the hell of dog racing and rejuvenated by the love of my partner Caroline, and the love of my own heart. I feel crushed, Sara is crushed, and sadness fills the suddenly steamy air of Delhi.

I know life goes on, and there is so much to feel grateful for. But man, the last thing I want to do now is stay in Delhi for several roasting hot days and finish dealing with money and shipping details for getting my goods en route to the USA. I just want to be home, and take a bath and stare out at springtime’s renewal in a million shades of green, and roam barefoot in my back meadow, and see my friends and family, and rest. I feel like I’ve lived through several epochs in just the last two months. I’m wrung out. I’ve found some amazing items to bring home, seen parts of the planet never seen before by me, and lived through adventures large and small. Now, it’s time to go home.

Almost.