Friday, February 19, 2010

Leaving India

A series of days have been happening to me for a few weeks now, and I find that today is the last of those in Mcleod Ganj. Whether this emotion has any place in the constitution of a worthy international journalist (probably not), a few weeks of immersion rendered me momentarily unable to process everything going on around me. Struck with the realization that I'll soon be back in the land of the Great Firewall, it seems prudent that I lay down some reflections.

 

Beggars make me sad about myself, because they make me think about myself at all when clearly they are the ones without hands, or feet, or enough money to buy milk for their babies. Looking at a person who clearly doesn't have the resources to work on her own—who in India wants to hire the old woman with nubs at the end of her arms?—my first instinct is to try to assuage my guilt. Why doesn't the government help her? Why doesn't that guy who looks richer than me help her? Etc, etc. Obviously, the problem of poverty and inadequate resources for the handicapped in developing countries runs deeper than my self-involved blogging, so I won't attempt to dissect it here. It just sucks. I should do something about it. You should do something about it.

 

On a related note, I made a concerted effort to give my money to businesses run by those who looked just a few days away from asking for the cash without anything to offer in return. I know you've seen the commercials, but the equivalent of $60 in the hands of a displaced man struggling to sell jewelry off of a table constructed over a sewer really can render him speechless. then again, as Jason reminds me, I don't know where/how those jewels were mined. Everyone's life would be so much easier if everyone was so much kinder.

 

The Tibetan situation is frustrating, as any Tibetan will readily explain to you. Jason & I both scored private audiences with members of the Tibetan government-in-exile as part of our research for stories we wrote for Lha's monthly magazine. They're running a legit establishment up here in India's Himalayan foothills. They're keeping a close eye (as close as possible) on the fate of their countrymen and women in Tibet. Yet they're working 9-5, as one dissenter and fabulously bearded man told me, on what is, for many Tibetans, a life or death issue. The Dalai Lama will die, and this government with no bargaining chips on the global playing field (except this one: "Hey guys, torture hurts. Like, a lot. Especially electrocution. Please help.") will have its hands full trying to harness the pain of millions of Tibetans, to remind them that nonviolence is golden.

 

"Don't worry about it too much," Tashi told me in one of our conversation classes. The other day as we climbed a couple hours past the mountain snowline, he reiterated his first lesson to me, the day after we arrived here. Our enemy is our own anger. Your body is a guesthouse, a convenient vessel for you to do as much good as you can while you're here, not for you to use worrying about material things, including illusory homelands. Still, it's difficult to return to China, where admittedly my biggest physical hurdle will be finding a functional proxy to access Facebook, knowing seventy percent of imprisoned Tibetans are monks and nuns put in jail for protesting peacefully and requesting basic rights.

 

I acquired food poisoning pretty early on, but I've been eating right through it. It became kind-of a game, really, to see if I could eat enough to make input greater than output through sheer volume. Last week I broke down and went to a Tibetan doctor, who prescribed herbal pills that taste like dirt, which I have to chew (chew! three dirt pills!) at every meal. Not knowing exactly what made me sick, I wouldn't take back a single potentially infested meal. Indian food is magical. The presence of properly cooked western food, also magical.

 

February 14 marked the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year (coincidentally the same day as China's this year, though not always). Jason's student invited us to spend the holiday with his family—wife, brother, and three kids sleeping and eating in one room, with an attached kitchen and bathroom—an experience that involved basically sitting still and stuffing our faces with biscuits, candy, fruit, momos (Tibetan dumplings) and more tea than one should consume in a year, for about six hours straight. Felt just like an American holiday. As a thank-you, his student wrote us each a card (this guy just learned the ABC's four weeks ago) and his son drew me a picture of the entire family, which beats any photograph. I had to send the card, along with many other Tibetan gifts and souvenirs, home to my parents, because I can't bring any of it back into China.

 

We've met a pile of the most outgoing, kindhearted people one could hope to meet in the world. People from every corner (often from multiple corners at once), here to concentrate on their own work, meditate, help the refugee community or the local community, find themselves, nurture discarded puppies, practice yoga, learn about organic, small-scale farming, be of knowledge and be of use. I hope our paths chance to cross again, but often that's not the case. We all just take our cultural enrichment and run, better for the conversation, gallons of chai, and unexpected company.



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Monday, February 1, 2010

Oh, The People You'll See

As I’ve mentioned, there is a wide array of Westerners living in or visiting Dharamsala, drawn by altruism, pilgrimage, tourism, or the pursuit of some downright wholesome hash. Some of them are strikingly normal. Like Courtney, an Australian girl we met at lunch yesterday who accompanied us to a nearby waterfall (watertrickle.) and regaled us with stories of her solo travels throughout India. Or Milton, a retired English teacher from Arkansas who Jason assists with the advanced English class at Lha.

Others are a bit quirky or, at the very least, fun to look at. They’ve assimilated bits of Indian and Tibetan dress into their daily ensemble in the most curious of ways—dhotti pants, furry moccasins, “Free Tibet” scarf and a blanket/shawl wrapped around them expertly. My favorite one of these was a whole family of tourists, Mom, Dad, Daughter #1 and Daughter #2. Mom and both Daughters seemed to acquire a new, matching article each day, so that they were wearing Jamaican-inspired, Indian-made red, yellow and green jackets the first day we saw them, covering them with elaborately embroidered yak-leather vests the next day, and finally, after the Long Life Puja at the temple last weekend, ceremonial white scarves draped over it all.

After seeing these ensembles parading around for more than two weeks now, I didn’t think anything would surprise me. Then I saw The Most Beautiful Woman I Have Ever Seen (Really, Ever. In My Entire Life.)

An English woman, in her late sixties, perhaps, with brown and grey dreadlocks not much younger than her. Not just any dreadlocks, but dreads tied together on the top of her head, Pebbles-style, with a huge, floppy pink bow. Select dreads were wound with that really silky fabric that sometimes covers the cuddliest of stuffed animals, in a variety of colors. Her jacket incorporated green, purple, blue, and orange (heavy on the orange) in an 80’s-type design with those bizarre z’s and paint speckles all over it. The orange parts specifically had an amateurish sponge-painted look to them. Underneath, a fuchsia sweater, jeans, and pink Crocs that almost matched the sweater. She tied it together with an oversized wristwatch and a pile of hemp and beaded bracelets. I managed to note this much through sideways glances at a restaurant, and when I chanced one full-on stare I noticed there also seemed to be pieces of tinsel—the Christmas tree kind—wound into a few of her dreads, as well.

People are so beautiful.

Tashi

So this former HP consultant turned nun from Minnesota put this little, adorable black puppy into my lap, then led us down the street to purchase shampoo, milk, and bowls before we even knew what happened. Only when little Tashi was unleashed in our guestroom and promptly peed under the bed did I realize what we had done.

“I feel like a teenager who wanted a baby because they’re cute,” I remarked as he began to gnaw on Jason’s shoestring (which he later politely regurgitated at Jason’s feet). Parenting 101 became even more real when Jason began to bathe him and ended up so drenched and soapy that he might as well have bathed himself in the process. Tashi is a common Tibetan first name, and also part of their everyday greeting. Yes, this is a little bit like naming your child “Hello,” except Tashi means “good luck” or “auspiciousness,” and they love all things auspicious. So, our little guy was lucky to be in from the cold and the fat, greedy street dogs, and was named accordingly.

Tashi fit comfortably in my arms, and there were very few places I couldn’t take him—his primary activity in public was sleeping on my lap, charming everyone with his grunts and wiggles. At the guesthouse, though, the world was his playground. He made sincere efforts to remove Jason’s digits, ears, and nose with his sharp little teeth, and was equally determined to poop in the most inaccessible places under the bed. We often took him up on the roof to play, play here meaning to eat every piece of fuzz, dirt, or paint chip he could sniff out. He took quickly to me as his mother, and the instant he became tired he would seek out my lap and collapse into it, unconscious before his head hit the thigh.

Although we were in love with him from the moment the stranger deposited him in my lap, it was evident that we could not accommodate him in our one tiny room—let alone afford the $150 per flight, plus veterinary bills, to bring our wayward pet home with us. He charmed his way into the hearts of all of our ex-pat friends over the course of the next few days. Everyone “Would love to take him but…” and “Don’t get rid of him just yet, I might know someone who…” Westerners are infamous in these parts for our soft spot for dogs, and I knew that, despite everyone’s best efforts, they were unlikely to find locals who wanted to take care of a needy, 6- or 8-week-old puppy.

After three days of newspaper covered floors and 60-minute sleeping cycles all night long, we made the difficult decision to just take him to the only animal charity in town, which nurses puppies until they look big enough to compete with the other dogs and then releases them into the streets. I consoled myself with the idea that we could at least visit him there and maybe help take care of the other dogs. On our way, we stopped for lunch at a rooftop Indian restaurant, where Tashi got his own plate of fried eggs, what I thought might be his last substantial meal.

Somehow, his ravenous gobbling tugged at the heartstrings of the restaurant’s well-dressed owner, who said he had been looking for a nice male puppy—he could only find females, and he didn’t want to deal with more pups down the line. The fact that Tashi comfortably peed right next to our table and then went and pooped in the corner didn’t dissuade him at all, and as we paid our bill Tashi gleefully followed him behind the counter and began sniffing out his new digs.

Sunday night’s clueless new parent emotions gave way Wednesday night to pangs of empty nest syndrome, as Jason and I sat on the bed missing his whine to join us and chew our fingers/hair/clothes/blankets to shreds. Our human friend Tashi, a monk with a soft spot for all animals who can’t understand why Westerners don’t take home pigs and cows so readily, questioned our actions but hinted that perhaps we racked up some good karma for finding the puppy a safe home.