Friday March 5, 2010

I awoke at 5 AM to go to the bathroom, and there was the little scrub woman squatting on the floor, cleaning the dishes and pots and pans from last night's dinner. It costs so little to hire people like this, even this family can afford it. I don't think they really believe me when I say that very few Americans can afford help, and that I do all the work at home. This woman has been with this family for many years and knows me. Sometimes while I am on my perch, I see her walking by on the street. She always smiles and waves. As she scrubs away, I look at her pretty sari, gold earrings, tons of glass bangles and silver anklets. The point of looking beautiful here is very different from our culture. It has nothing to do with being better looking than other women, or with how old a woman is. It is solely because it is a woman's duty to look beautiful for her husband. That is why when her husband dies, she no longer wears bright saris or colored bangles. Also, getting old and wrinkled has nothing to do with it. The older you are the more respected you are. Indians do not believe in romantic love. Rather love grows through the commitment to one another. I think of that old couple we met on the train to Bhopal and how he still chuckled at things she was saying.
A few corrections: it was Smita's father's younger brother who squandered the family fortune when her father died young, not her brother, who was 7 at the time; the Nalanda consortium was formed in 2006, not 1996.
The other day before Apoorva left, he, JP and I went to the post office to get stamps for my postcards. Easy, right? Not quite. First we had to find the post office. Nobody seemed to know where the heck it was and we went around in circles until someone we asked really knew its location. JP went up to one of the six men sitting at the counter and asked for stamps. The guy looked around and announced that the man who sold the stamps had wandered off somewhere. He got upset and complained to his boss that the guy could not be found. We waited a bit and started to leave just as the guy appeared. We got the stamps and JP paid for them and , of course, the stamp seller had no change. This is a constant problem here. So Apoorva got in the line for the man who gave out change and finally we were done. There are two choices here: get irritated, or laugh. We laughed. There is no shortage of change here, yet everyone seems to hoard it, now including us !
We went to the gold shop with Smita Bahoo to buy the pendant for JP's bridge buddy. The workmanship of the gold here is exquisite and they only use 22k gold. Instead of locking its wealth away in banks, India places it on the bodies of its women. When Smita gets a little money, she makes a prepayment on a bangle she wants. She considers this the safest financial move she can make. She made a prepayment that day and also got credit for the purchase we made. I was glad of this as she was the one who kept going with us to the shop. The price of gold is set worldwide every day in London. The difference is that the cost of labor is so much less expensive here and also much more intricate.
Next we went to the little book store in Asi for me to get a few more postcards. While there I saw a copy of Herman Hesses beautiful book Siddhartha and recalled a line from it: "The river speaks". I looked out the window overlooking that river and thought that, of course it speaks, because people have been talking to it for thousands of years.
On the way home JP bought enough of the Ayurvedic meds for both of us for six months. I'm pretty sure this is the same original medicines I had before, so I hope it works. I will have to wait to start taking it when I get home because I am not feeling well again and it makes me nauseous. He also bought a big clay jug for the family to cool water through evaporation. A simple method that has been used for millenia.
The huge Kumbh Mela is going on in Hardwar now. It happens once every 12 years and attracts millions of people. Madonna went to the last one as did members of JP's family. It celebrates the dropping of nectar by Vishnu onto four places in India. Hardwar is one of them. I cannot imagine being in a crowd that large.
Right before he left, Apoorva brought in two packages. In one was a cotton shirt for JP. In the other was a pair of shoes just like the ones he wears and I had liked so much. Happy Holi. JP gave him money as a gift, which will mean a great deal to him.
The weather is heating up and mosquitoes are proliferating. As we had walked on the ghat at Asi, we got chewed and are now scratching furiously. We leave Varanasi on Monday for three days in Gurgaon/Delhi before starting the trip home.

Peace,
Nadine