Music for Mountain Roads

Things I associate with other things:
The MN State Fair and mini-donuts
Bare feet and the beach
The smell of alcohol and hospitals
Indian mountain roads and very loud music through headphones

*   *   *   *   *   *

On the way down from the hill town of Munnar, we bounce and shimmy over a road that is almost wide enough for two vehicles to pass comfortably. Sometimes, leaping around a switchback, we meet another vehicle. Both lurch to a halt. The drivers communicate with complicated hand signals and abrupt jerks of their chins. Usually the coming-down-the-mountain vehicle reverses, maneuvering backwards up a hairpin turn or two. We find a place to squeeze by, like a passenger in the window seat scooting up to the airplane aisle. Now imagine doing that if, instead of the seatbacks in front of you, there’s nothing but a drop-off and empty air. I peer out my window as we rattle past a truck; it may as well be 10,000 feet down.

As soon as we’re clear, the car sprints forward. This is less of a flat-race than hurdles: we spend a great deal of time partially airborne, crashing back to the road with elephantine grace. I hold the Oh, Jesus handle. (Would that be a Hai-Ram handle in India?) Unlike the USA, where the Oh, Jesus handle is so called because it’s what passengers grab in an emergency or accident, here in India, these situations are so constant they lose urgency. You learn to hold the handle (or the prayer, if you swing that way) the whole time. You keep your bag zipped up so that when it is flung onto the floor all your stuff doesn’t fall out and roll around. My headphone cord is arranged in such a way that it will not strangle me if I am flung onto the floor (learned that the hard way); the phone it is plugged into is wedged carefully so it does not become a projectile (same incident). 

I am listening to Kanye West: aggressive, misogynistic, smart and melodic: Everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster. I turn it up all the way. The sound is fantastic.

I have (have always had) diverse musical tastes. Growing up, I was as likely to listen to Air Supply as Iron Maiden, Billy Joel as Peter Tosh. But when it came time to buck over the narrow, nearly vertical paths and ruts of the Himalaya of my childhood, I always chose the loudest, most parent-disapproval-earning, ear-drum-punishing sound for my headphones. When I was young, it was as much escape from my family as anything else. I don’t know why I do it now.

Kanye threatens, howls and opines: I mean this shit is, fucking ridiculous…

I listen to the pounding bass and observe the bewildering tragicomedy of Indian billboards: smiling sari-clad women loaded in gold jewelry, a child sprays water at an Audi, half-dressed men lurk on motorcycles and scowl, happy couples jump for joy, a swami floats beatifically over a temple, a group of anxious people are menaced by a gigantic snake. There are signs for something called Globstar Sofas (that is not a typo). Every single person in every single ad could pass for white. The signs are mostly in Malayalam, a language I can’t read or speak. Besides the sofas, I have no idea what the ads are for. Movies? Wedding jewelry? Undershirts? Motorcycles? White folks?

Praises due to the most high Allah
Praises due to the most fly Prada
Baby, I’m magic. Ta-da!

I settle my sunglasses more firmly on my face (they will shake lose again in a couple of minutes) and glance over at Urban. He is wearing a fine, cream-colored cotton shirt, and a lungi (the sarong-like garment traditionally worn by Indian men). It looks good with his fair skin, unruly blonde hair, and the ease with which he carries himself. His eyes are closed and he counts prayer beads on his mala: he is meditating. I look down at myself: I am wearing capris and a shirt I bought at Ridgedale. Kanye thumps and cusses in my ears.

We got nothing to lose, motherfucker, we rolling. Motherfucker, we rollin. With some light-skinned girls…

I am the Indian one, although all the Indians in the billboards now rushing past at roughly the speed of sound have complexions closer to Urban’s than my own.

Ain’t no question if I want it: I need it. I can feel it slowly drifting away from me…

We pass painted trucks & indifferent cows, sometimes whipping by inches away. A group of shirtless men squat by the roadside drinking chai. A young woman in a pink salwar kameez roars by on a motorcycle. Our eyes meet. She does a double-take at Urban and gives me a grin and a nearly suicidal thumbs-up.

Would you rather be underpaid or overrated?
(I consider this line for some time, and try to imagine a scenario where I would have to choose between these two options. Then I realize that I already have both. This makes me happy.)

Turn up the lights in here, baby: extra bright, I want you to see this.

Urban finishes his mala, digs around for his headphones, and plugs them into my phone. This is possible due to a device that goes with me everywhere. I call it The Nifty Dual Headphone Jack Adapter Thingy. Getting all this technology out of bags and connected while the car jumps and spins takes some doing. Now Urban is trying to take pics of the billboards while holding on to the Hai-Ram handle with one hand. I turn the music down for him, a little. Kanye is picking up steam:

No more drugs for me; pussy and religion is all I need. Grab my hand and baby, we’ll live a hell of a life.

We pass a bus with an Indian-looking Mighty Mouse emblazoned on the back. Urban & I grin delightedly. We reach out to each other, but the car careens around a corner, and we have to clutch our respective handles to avoid being thrown across the bench seat and out my open window.

Exchanging amazed glances at the world outside, the same music in our ears, we can’t hold hands because the ride’s too wild. Coming down the mountain, hurtling toward the sea: we have no idea what we’ll find there.

That’s one hell of a life.

Riding Home

From the gate of your mother’s house, you could swing up on a horse, clop down a few quiet streets, cross the river and then there was nothing but packed dirt roads good for a gallop, tiny temples perched on mountainsides, villagers gathering firewood and grasses, miles and miles of rice paddy. You would come around a hill and see the paddy rising in terraces from the valley floor, marching ponderously up the slopes, shrinking as they go.

These hills are as big as some mountain ranges. They are foothills only compared to the sweep of the snowpeaks that float behind them: The Himalaya. When you saw the mountains you would finally feel that the city was behind you. It’s not that you could relax: things here require your full attention.  But something in you eased, a little.

You would follow broad forest paths through the hills then take goat tracks that clung to the mountain and shed pebbles into steep drop offs as you rode by, going too fast on an unpredictable horse. You would pass through villages, and tiny old ladies would call to you from the fields. They would ask you to have chai and chapattis (flatbread) with them. You would sigh, because it meant dismounting, which meant remounting. The mare would stand steady and quiet while you held her, and walk like an angel when you took a village kid up in the saddle for a quick pony ride, but when it was time for you to mount up she basically tried to kill you. If she knocked you down, she would then trample you. You had to vault up quickly, hauling her head around to the right so she didn’t give you a bite on the ass to hurry you into the saddle. She was sinewy, tough, and quick as a snake.

You get to know the villagers. You help haul firewood, you carry packages and messages between the scattered settlements. You are given chai and admonitions. They joke and call you “Kalki didi,” after the last incarnation of Vishnu who will come to end the world, riding a pale horse. It is better than what they call you in the city.

You mount up (quickly), turn your body toward home and the horse beneath you follows and carries you at the same time. You ride her like a current. You go home in the dusk to the sound of temple bells and prayer call. Cows are coming home, plodding and lowing. 

Many years later you read a book by a woman returning to India after an absence and she describes this time of day and what haunts you is her line “the air was dust and jasmine.” Haunts, because you read her words and you feel warm dusty air and breathe in jasmine. You hear hoof beats. 

*  *  *  *  *

You have been gone for 10 years now, and these memories are even older than that. Now you come back, and there’s an airport with a glass elevator. There are luggage trolleys, a gift shop. You get in a Toyota and the driver takes a back way home because Rahul Gandhi is speaking at the Parade Ground and there are crowds. You remember when his grandmother was assassinated and there were riots and killings. You remember when his father was assassinated, too. You were in the States by then, and you remember thinking: that bloody country. You think about this as you take the back way home. You are excited to be here. You know it’s going to be different. You’re ok with that.

The roads you take are packed with vehicles: trucks, cars, putt-putts, scooters. Everything has an engine. Traffic is both lumbering and nimble. Car horns sound, not in complaint but orientation: a wolf howl, saying: I am here. I am here. You swerve and bully your way through. You parry and dodge.

The roadsides are packed with stalls and carts selling: pyramids and piles of oranges, apples, red winter carrots, potatoes, T-shirts, shoes, and everwhere everywhere plastic plastic plastic: buckets and bags and baskets and toys. There are no sidewalks and no parking lots, the traffic and the bicycle guys and the pedestrians come together with the inevitable and irresistible force of the sea meeting the land. Road verges foam like surf. Everyone is in motion but nobody gives ground. Pedestrians in jeans and dhotis, leather jackets and shawls, weave and thread through moving and parked vehicles and talk on their phones. A dog sits down and has a good scratch. Everyone goes around him, not even looking down. The dog trots off.

Behind the pedestrians and the carts are the shops. Steel shutters on cement block and plaster buildings, built to last. They are streaked and mottled with black monsoon stains. Above are apartments and homes, washing hung out to dry, kids hanging off crumbling railings. The buildings are solid, the doors and windows square and steady. Everything else: doors, curtain rods, shutters, is askew. The city is festooned with electric wires, a snarled canopy of current. A festival of lights.

Amid this are shanty tarps and tin roofs. You have no idea if the rickety shack you are looking at is a shop, a home, or both. These structures look fragile but seem to have stood for a thousand years. Here and there a massive tree survives, propping up the world.

You pass by a man squatting on the ground, his head tilted back. There is another man behind him, holding a straight razor to his throat. Only after they vanish in the dust of your wake do you figure it out: a barber, shaving a customer on the side of the road.

The road is curvier now, you take disorienting turns onto side streets with less activity and fewer crowds. It is still wall-to-wall buildings but the noise has lessened. Now and then you catch a glimpse of the hilltops: a familiar confluence of peaks catches your eye. You ask the driver what the massive cement building under construction on your left is, and he says they are building an IT park and call centers. You feel a sense of dread. The road curves left, right, left again. You look around, crane backwards, look up at the hills, look at the city surrounding you and think: no. No. It’s not. But the next curve is a sharp one to the right and you are descending towards the riverbed and then you have to acknowledge that you know where you are.

These are your dirt tracks, your goat paths. These are the fields where you helped gather grass for winter forage. There, where the IT center is rising: that was the maze of camelthorn bushes with their small, bright flowers and vicious thorns that left your calves bloody when the damn horse swerved into them. This rusty steel bridge, this is the shallow curve of the levee over the riverbed, hard packed dirt with a good sight line so it was safe to canter. 

Beyond the next curve, finally. This, here, is the straight open stretch where you could leave off the battle and let her run, full and true at a gallop, nothing between you, nothing holding you back, nothing before you but the hills. You had to remember to slow down before the next rise and look for rare but lethal trucks barreling over the hill: you could never hear them over the reverb of hoofbeats, the wind in your mount’s lungs and your own. The beating of your hearts drowned out the world. 

This is your refuge: built upon, populated, grimy. Strewn with trash. Crumbling as though it has been like this for a thousand years. As if there were never anything else here at all.

*  *  *  *  *

Some days later, you walk down to the Ganga during arti, the evening prayers to the sacred river. You have to stop at the market first, to buy offerings: little leaf-boats are piled with marigolds. A rose makes a scarlet ruffle amid the orange petals. There is a rough clay dish with a hunk of camphor to light, and two graceful incense sticks leaning out at an angle. The whole thing is about the size of a soup bowl. Although you are in a hurry, you raise the leaf-boat up to examine the construction. It is woven together by the fragile stems. Nothing more.

Priests are waving towering oil lamps at the river, and chants are broadcast on loudspeaker. There is a crowd milling around the priests and their dramatic accouterments but the verges are peaceful. Most people are carrying garlands of marigolds and roses, or little boats like yours. People spread out into clumps, then groups, then families. Some young guys strut around. The beach is rocky and the water is swift. It is not the color of any North American water you have ever seen. Not clear blue, this, but jade and opaque. You have journeyed to the source of this water, high in the Himalaya. There, it is white as milk.

You all huddle around and try to light the lumps of camphor in your flower boats. It takes some doing, what with the wind tearing down from the hills.

You take your shoes and socks off and wade in. It is cold. Offerings buck and scurry past. Rocks shift under your feet and the current urges you downriver. You stub your toe, plant your feet. You offer prayers for others, but when you light your own you don’t have anything to pray for. Everything seems ridiculous. Well, I carried it this far, you think, lowering the bright cup towards the water, so, here…just, take it. 

It is dark now. The flame of your offering mingles with the reflections of electric lights. The priests are wrapping up their ritual. For now, their voices cannot reach you. Take it away, you think again. The river rushes on, ignoring you. The river rushes on, unchanging. Because of this, you will never be the same.

 

Looking Down at Clouds

The world is encompassed in oval glass. The engine roars to keep you aloft; it should be deafening, but the enormity of where you are, how fast you’re going, how you stay here, is nothing more than a background hum.

Clouds scoot along a level scrim of sky, imperceptibly contracting, expanding, disappearing. You feel you could reach out and pop one into your mouth. Beneath that, the world stretches and rolls out a map of itself. These are the Great Plains. Vast marbled sweeps of floodplain and cleared fields are chocolate brown and fudgy black, luscious and rich enough to eat. Scattered forests look bushy; they curl darkly in on themselves. Rivers slide and muscle through the land. They are never blue.

Occasional cities clot and sprawl. Gleaming downtowns are bar graph topography at the center of large grid-plains of streets. Ringing this, you see lobed arrays of roads, trees and houses arranged in orderly arabesques, everything in agreement. Cars are sparkles of light, Morse code flashes against the dark flow of road. But these cities are not what cover the land. Most of what you see is farm. Tangram fields are puzzled together: straight edged and serious. Silos rise and flash beside arrangements of angular buildings: bright as a polished blade, tidy as a place setting.

Where is the wilderness? You’re surprised at how much land is strapped and planed and boxed up, neatly. Knife-edged. The sky remains the horizon.

Immersion ~Belize part 2

I always have some fear when I swim out the first time, after an absence from the Sea. I love the Ocean, but depths frighten me.

It is especially unnerving because right now I can’t see anything; this is not the clear brochure blue Caribbean but a slightly marshy seaside with a muddy floor. The waves stir everything up and visibility is about what I expect in a blizzard, except with coral heads and parrotfish suddenly materializing in front of me. We have vague directions to the little reef (“About 200 yards North off the dock of the house with the barking dogs”). We periodically stop, pop our heads out of the water and pull our facemasks up to squint at the shore. The waves have a different idea of which way we should be heading, and disagreeing with them is tiring. The water is choppy and not really that warm. I tread water and try to untangle strands of my hair from the clasp that holds snorkel to mask; I hear them rip. I yank the mask down, lower my head, and swim. The snorkel sometimes offers air, other times, salt water. My breath sounds amplified, loud and fast: Darth Vader having a panic attack. I feel both claustrophobic and exposed. I try to relax and slow my breathing, which only makes me realize how not-relaxed I am.

I feel simultaneously afraid, foolish for being afraid, and afraid of showing my fear. Are fish like tigers? Can they smell fear? I feel like turning around and swimming back for shore, back to where I can see what’s coming at me.

I’m tired. I float for a minute, facedown, bobbing. My limbs relax.  My back is warm then cool, warm then cool, as small waves come between flesh and sun. Out of the gloom a 5 ft Eagle Ray soars by in slow motion. My head turns to follow its glide. The waters swirl, then I am alone again.

I stop breathing for a moment. Silence rushes in my ears. This is what being a priestess is like.

I have spent so much time gazing at the surface of the Waters. It is mirrored. It’s all the same Ocean, but there is a lot of publicity about the clear places where you can see below. I never seem to end up there. I always end up in the obscure, muddy parts, where the light bounces off the surface. There’s only one way to know what’s there. I wade until the ground drops out from under me and I’m forced to swim. Any given directions are vague, meaningless once I’m on on my way.

I paddle through a vast and murky Sea, not sure where I’m going, not sure what I’ve come to see, not sure I really want to be out here at all. 

Immersion is a constant caress, both distant and intimate. Invisible currents carry me along; I fight against them, wanting to go my own way. I am beneath the surface, but barely. There are unimagined depths below. I do not understand the nature or intentions of the deep, or what may dwell there. The speculation chills me. I long to see, but fear the encounter. Things seem to appear out of nowhere and I am startled by their grace, their belonging to this place. I flounder around, awkward and scared; my tension only makes it worse. Insight is only a byproduct of exhaustion. Be still and listen. Nothing can give me the release I am seeking; I have only been struggling against myself. I am more water than flesh: I am made of the substance I am immersed in. I have been gliding farther into myself, into my own Waters. I am the deep.

My breaths are the waves beneath the waves. Movement is effortless. The depths I fear are what bear me up.

The Vargus Debacle of 2010

Who knew dolphins could be so much trouble?

We live in the middle of nowhere, way too far to take a cab or get a ride to the airport. When we go out of town, we drive to our friends Larry & Valerie's place in St Paul (near the MSP airport) and leave our car there. If they are working & can't give us a ride, we just catch a cab.

When we returned from Beilze, we got a cab from the airport. After 24 hours in transit, we were relived to finally make it to our car. Urban started to pull on his seatbelt, froze, and exclaimed "Where's Vargus?"

Vargus is a small rubbery dolphin, one of a small rubbery menagerie that we got out of a vending machine in Cannon Falls, MN. He's tiny enough to fall into a bottle of beer. He hatched out of a clear plastic egg & lives on the dashboard of the Red Barron (our hybrid SUV). Most of his brethren are still rolling around in their plastic eggs on the floor of the car, but Vargus is special. Urban asserts he is a "Bluetooth-enabled navigator dolphin" and is very, very attached to him. He does a little squeaky voice for Vargus, who calls him "boss."

If the car is ever stolen Urban will probably call the cops, totally distraught, and say "Help! Someone took my dolphin!"

Well, there we were, in the Barron, with no Vargus. This was clearly not an accident, as in his place was a little (previously floor-dwelling) octopus. After a frantic search, Urban determined that both Vargus and the empty egg were missing.

Our friend Valerie had kidnapped Vargus. Or, as Urban put it once we realized what had happened, MY friend Valerie.

We are frequent travelers, yet we somehow managed to get lost on the way home. From the airport. To the house we’ve lived at for six years.

For the next two weeks, every daily traffic annoyance, like missing an exit or long red lights, would cause Urban to mutter that this wouldn't happen if Vargus were here. Since we have an identical dolphin, I suggested that we put it on the dashboard. He looked at me like I was insane, and said "That is not Vargus, that's just some stupid rubber dolphin." Every time we got in the car, he looked so disgruntled it would give me the giggles, which would make him look even more disgruntled, which would (of course) make me laugh even harder, until I was practically rolling around on the floor with the stupid rubber dolphin.

Yesterday Urban finally went to St. Paul to get Vargus. He texted me a pic of Vargus on Valerie's shelf, in his little plastic egg, with the caption "Hostage."

Negotiations were successful! We got in the Barron this morning and there he was in all in his tiny rubber dolphin glory. I said "Hey, Vargus, you're back!"

In his squeaky dolphin voice, Vargus replied: "I'm not talking to you."

You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby. ~Belize part 1

There are some places you visit that are so idyllic as to be unbelievable. You get there, look around and say: This place is so great, it’s unbelievable! You hang around, do vacation things, but now and then you find yourself stimulated by a sunset or drink or really good moment to say it again: unbelievable, as if reminding yourself of its unlikelihood somehow helps to fix or define its reality. When you leave, you’ll look back and remember, but pictures will not capture or express what you only fleetingly managed to grasp. You’ll remember the things you did, the little or large adventures. Or, you’ll remember that nothing much happened. Nothing had to; it was enough to be there, to partake in the experience of how unbelievable it was.

Then there are the other places.

Places that are so deep in their own reality that they make you question yours. The place you came from seems unbelievable. You have arrived in the hyper-real. Every moment is piercing. Every other place ceases to exist. You’ve come here for the first time but you’ve been here before. You remember the sounds—the rush of the river, the movement of trees and breeze, twilight frogs, and birds that scream at dawn and wake you up. You feel the humidity and there is no instant of wondering where you are. The memory of teak pulses under your feet as you rise and open the screen door and step out into the spicy air that seems to settle on, then penetrate, your clothes and skin and hair. The slap of the door cuts off the avian cacophony. You walk into the quiet heat, down the stairs, the railing is satin under your palm, the boards like warm marble under your feet. At the bottom of the stairs, the grass is wet and cool, with squashy mud underneath. Something shakes the underbrush as you pass. Something else zooms by in the air, either a small hummingbird or large bug; you don’t really want to know. 

You walk the few steps to the boulders overlooking the river; the rocks are warm, both rough and silken. They are damp, shiny grey and shaded pink. Sleek white veins run through them like rivers. You leave faint red-mud footprints. Although you stand upon them, you can feel their heaviness, as if gravity is always upside down when you’re standing on the bones of the earth.

The hills rise around you, cradling the watercourse. The air has a presence and mist is coming up over the trees. The birds have dismissed you and started up again. The river is before you, fast and slow, squeezed by boulders to jump, bubble and froth, then smoothing out into deep pools that throw themselves over into descending falls again until, weary, it calms and steadies to flow sure and quiet between overhung banks. This is a twice green river: milky agate water reflecting shimmering jade dark trees as it  uncoils itself downstream and disappears beyond the bend. You wonder where it goes.

You look around and realize a thousand greens.The river green before you, the bushes and trees green around you. Green as light as white, as dark as black. Greens glossy, streaked, spotted, mottled and matte. There are slashes and spots of flowers and hummingbirds: crimson, orange, hot pink, like licks of flame amid the smoke of green rising from steaming soil.  Life is crammed together. There are things growing on other things: strange spiky plants sprout from the joints of trees, vines climb and hang in heated tangles, lichen and moss cover everything. Some of the trees have leaves larger than you. The air tastes damp and rich and gigantic. The sky is silver gray-green, heavy with rain; granite above and granite below, water before and water behind. This is the only place you’ve ever known.

The jungle is silk, the jungle is around you, and the river goes on forever.

All Who Wander

I wrote this in bits and pieces between 1999 and 2002. Usually when I read something I wrote a long time ago, I wince. It always seems slightly foolish, poorly written and melodramatic; I have to resist the urge to rewrite it completely.

Although I think the writing holds up pretty well, this one was especially hard to read: not only was it was written during a time of particular melodrama and deep personal uncertainty, but the newborn puppies mentioned at the end are long grown, and gone.

These days I’m trying to have some compassion for my younger self, drama and all, and let her speak for herself.

* * *

I set forth into the mysterious, crumbling beast of the city just as the morning haze is dispersing under the sun. Delhi awakens: flower-sellers set out bright baskets of marigolds and roses; shawl-muffled taxi drivers huddle around small fires, steam rising from strong brewed cups of chai; diesel belching trucks careen along deserted streets. The buildings are dingy in the rising light, caked with decades of soot. There is no bustle to detract from the filth. Refuse is everywhere, the atmosphere nearly post-apocalyptic. My taxi stops at a light and I look out the window at  worshippers traipsing into a 15^th century temple with an AT&T ad painted on the side. It is all so…Indian; for a moment it looks alien, a dirty leftover country, and I have a fierce and sudden desire for the clean, predictable lines of the West.

I wonder what I am doing back here, why the tide of my heart draws me, again and again to return to the country I fought to leave for so long. I hated India when I was dragged here by my parents, and spent my years tense and snarling like a dog on too short a tether, straining for release, for home, for America. At what point did the meaning of home slide in my mind from the west to the east? The irony of it sits uneasily on me; I suspect that returning to America gave me the luxury to feel unfulfilled.

The taxi drops me at the faded sign for Lodi Gardens. Once a glittering example of Mughal decadence, the sprawling, unsafe acres are now overgrown with wild vines and towering Eucalyptus trees, their bark as white and smooth as bones. I creep along a narrow maze of trails through walls of brambles. It is just after the monsoon; nature is riotous, lush and green. I relax as the smell of city fades into the overpowering scents of jasmine and magnolia.

I have not explored these acres for nearly eighteen years, but memory leads me to a decaying pavilion standing amid scattered stones and slumped column fragments. I clamber around the ruined walls, picking my way through refuse and broken marble screens, and finally settle myself on a cool, pockmarked block of sandstone. I have a partial view of a Frangipani tree, waxy golden blossoms weighing the delicate branches nearly to the ground.

I survey my surroundings cautiously, wondering if I really have sat here before, if this view moves me with its beauty or if some chord of memory resonates, too low to be heard by my conscious mind. When we arrived in India, I was ten years old, and saw these gardens from the hotel where we passed the first hazy, crazy days. My father took us for walks in these gardens, droning about history and culture while I straggled behind in sullen confusion. The gardens were maintained then, and I had to struggle against their beauty.

The sun has climbed higher, straggling rays waver through the canopy to illuminate the journal laying open in my lap. I have not written anything. Suddenly, I become aware of the haunting notes of a bamboo flute drifting over the abandoned gardens. Startled by the sound of the mountains here in the metropolis, and relieved to be rescued from the accusing glare of blank paper, I scramble down to begin a mostly aimless search through convoluted undergrowth for the source of this melody.

I burst into a grassy expanse of a small clearing; there, squatting under the spreading limbs of a Sal tree, sits the elusive flute player – an old, wizened, saffron-clad sadhu, one of India’s wandering sages. His matted dreads hang down his back, forehead anointed with rune symbols, begging bowl at his side, bare feet look hard as cracked earth…eyes closed as he draws fantastic music into the air. I hover, fascinated and afraid of intruding.

He looks up after a moment, and regards me without surprise. “Sister,” he speaks in oddly accented Hindi, “look, I have come upon a brother who is without his family. Come and sit, that we may send him out of this life with comfort.” For the first time I notice, laying on the ground, breathing in harsh panting gulps, a half-bald, filthy stray dog. The sadhu reaches over and caresses the  animal’s sore-ridden flank. “Sit.” The old man speaks again, dark eyes snapping, “He has no family, Sister, and he is afraid.”

There is no way I am going to touch that animal. I open my mouth, but everything I consider sounds too petty, so I sink down to the dog’s side. The sadhu shuts his eyes and keeps playing. We sit as time passes around us, the music from the scarred bamboo lifts and trembles. Green parakeets wing through the trees, luminous streaks against dark foliage. I fell utterly disconnected from myself, yet painfully aware. Life ebbs slowly from the shivering dog who has somehow ended up in my lap, and as I look at him, this nameless animal of the streets, I feel a sense of vertigo. I am spinning away from myself, into myself, and I realize what this is to me, a dying dog in my arms, and I am taken, unwillingly, to memory.

* * *

Ruby was my first. First love, first death.

When we finally settled into our small town in the mountains, I began to fight bitterly with my parents over many unremembered things, but oh, I wanted a dog, needed one, as only lonely children can. My festering dislike of India had only grown with time, especially when I, the outspoken, sociable one, was unable to find much common ground with other children. My parents eventually relented, and I procured an unlikely companion: a 70 pound, military bred and trained Doberman Pinscher, the legendary Ruby Tuesday. She personified my rage: stubborn, protective and unpredictable.

We went nearly everywhere together, into the ancient hills, through the bustling bazaars. It was in the market that I often felt I had a glimpse of Ruby’s world, amid the varied and overpowering scents, I felt a kinship with her madly twitching nose.

It was not until after I had escaped India, finally, that she died of poisoned meat thrown over the wall by neighborhood thugs. I got the call from my mother in the middle of the night, waking in a cramped studio apartment next to my first lover. Like my rage, Ruby had been forgotten, buried deep. When I heard how she died, convulsing and vomiting blood, my anger overtook me and I realized how quietly things sink below the surface of life.

I had something of India taken away from me, and I wanted it back. I wanted to return to my wandering in the hills, easy in the saddle and my big, disreputable dog at my side. I wanted back eerie pine forests that filtered light into gloom, the impossible neon green of young rice paddy, and the serene sweep of the high Himalaya rising white and cool beyond the hills. As I sat sobbing on the edge of my bed in Minneapolis, I wanted, desperately, to have come home for her, just once more. The idea of her dying, waiting for me, was overwhelming. As I cried alone after my boyfriend rolled back over into irritable sleep, I realized the truth of every cliché about dogs. Ruby and I had been each other’s; in a way that only India had borne witness to, only India could understand.

I am back now. She is still gone.

The dog trembles once, spasmodically, and finishes dying.

I gingerly push the filthy carcass from my lap, thinking about fleas and communicable disease, and face the holy man’s shrewd face. He creaks to his feet and motions me to follow.

We wind our way through a corridor dressed with bold red slashes of hibiscus, talking about nonsense – Delhi traffic, crime, politics. I am in a daze and unable to contribute much. I cannot place the cadence of his speech, although it seems very familiar. I imagine he must be from some remote village with some dying dialect, perhaps raised by a family of priests, learning chants under the ancient pillared pavilion of a Banyan tree. I ask him where he from, and his native language.

He turns to me with a mischievous look, and says, in crisp, precise, unmistakably Oxford English, “I was raised to speak the Queen’s own, little sister.”

I gape. He ignores my stammered questions and explains that he was born in England, of Indian parents, educated at Oxford and practiced law. He never married, and he tells me, with an emphatic shake of dreadlocks, that every year seemed greyer than the last. He realized that he was living a life he hated. He sold everything, bought a one-way ticket to India, and has been wandering the sub-continent for the last fifteen years. The clipped accents of England emerging from this spiritual hobo totally disorients me.

“I was rich and comfortable, but ill at ease. I felt a lack without knowing what I longed for.” He speaks gently, as if to soothe a frightened animal.

I am still unable to speak, and only stare after him as he touches my head in blessing and dismissal. He moves off into the deep green shadows, empty begging bowl at his side.

* * *

It is a long time later, and halfway around the world that I find the image of the old sadhu reoccurring in my mind. Another dog is lying in my lap, breath rattling. Kalia is five, and has lived with me as long; she is in labor. Her usually sleek form is obscured with the bulk of pregnancy, her sides ripple with contractions. Her usually calm eyes are round and startled, as if she has no idea what is happening. I am exhilarated and terrified for her. It is a messy business, the bringing in of life, but with surprisingly little fuss, Kalia delivers nine wet, squirming Doberman puppies.

In a rare moment of accord, my husband and I sit next to the new family, proud as any grandparents. Urban glances over and gives me a wide, uncomplicated grin. I forgive him everything, for a moment.

So much has happened between us since I sat in the lush Indian garden, taking part in an experience that I think I have understood. We are on the brink of disaster, he and I, my mind spirals outward to the future, which has stopped being about us, and started being about me. India pulls me again, and I find myself looking at him and wondering what I am doing back here in America.

I have told Urban the tale of my strange encounter, read to him from my scarred old journal. When he looks thoughtful and says, “I understand.” I look at him with furious contempt, thinking, you couldn’t possibly.

* * *

Kalia looks very dark against the white walls of the waiting room, her attention focused completely on the plastic laundry basket full of puppies. They are three days old, blind and mostly ignorant of the world beyond their mother, who submits patiently to the prodding examination of the vet. There is something wrong with her, and I have forgotten India for the time being.

When the vet says “Lymphoma.” my hostility to Urban is also forgotten, and we reach for each other. Kalia, unconcerned, snoozes on the floor between us, nose pointed at her future.

I take her for a walk later, leaving the husband and the puppies to their own devices at home. The light has a peculiar bright cast, like deep water. Brilliant colours have bled the green from the leaves. The air feels alert with autumn. I climb around the crumbling, shabby cliffs of Minnehaha Park, slipping and scrambling against the rough, wild bark of oaks and maple. There are a few late wildflowers clinging through the season. I do not know their names. I wish Urban were here, and I long for the simple comfort of his presence.

This is our favorite place. My family used to come down here with a raucous band of neighborhood kids, chaos on the move. Urban and I have been coming here since we started going out, but this is my first walk by the creek since my return from India.

We come to the place where creek meets river. I haul myself up the twisted roots of trees, exposed by tenacious erosion and unreliable sand. The roots are over ten feet tall and look fantastic, otherworldly, as if the trees were in the process of humping themselves elsewhere. I am pleased with my perch. These trees have been here a long time, and the rate at which the sand has worn away from the roots has happily coincided with my growth. They are one structure I remember from childhood that has remained in proportion. Kalia cranes her head up and wags her stumpy tail uncertainly. When I pull out my journal, she huffs and trots off in disgust.

I have been scribbling for some time when I feel a sudden, familiar, dislocation, and look up, confused. For a moment, I swear I hear it, the deep notes of a flute, then I realize it is only my mind, memory plucking a note that resonates through me. I take a breath and look around, at this sweeping part of the world where I have lived, left, returned; at my dog, unfettered and flying across the beach; at the page open in my lap and the names of the two pups we are keeping, names chosen before we knew of Kalia’s dwindling days: Dagaz, the rune for the peak and turn of the cycle, and Asha, hope. I am drawn back to the image of an unlikely holy man, and of midwifeing a death in the garden of my childhood.

For the first time, I begin to understand.

Holi ~ Hindu Spring/Minnesota Winter

It’s Holi!

Holi is India’s answer to Carnival, if you can imagine Carnival including a nation-wide water- and colored-powder-fight. It’s bright and obnoxious and loud and fun: a hue and cry.

The “Festival of Colors” harkens Spring. It occurs on Phalgun Purnima, or the full moon at the end of the last winter month. In some parts of India (not mine; I lived in a pretty boring part of India, festival-wise) it’s preceded by fifteen days of worship and revelry, including a huge bonfire the night before.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, takes part. In the morning, you put on white clothes and go to the temple; the adventure is getting home. You spend the rest of the day drinking bhang (if I have to tell you what that is, you don’t need to know), throwing bright colored powder and water balloons and soaking family, friends and total strangers alike with water guns full of colored water.

On Holi, traditional behavior and boundaries break down. Class and caste are forgotten. Employees gang up on their bosses, students throw water balloons at teachers, kids waylay grandparents. Although technically a Hindu festival, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs flood the streets as well. If you’re out of the house—old, young, rich, poor—you’re fair game. Reluctant people are often pulled out of the door and mercilessly soaked by friends. You are going to party whether you like it or not!

On this day, India is ruled by Krishna, the mischievous lover. Social rules and reserve are washed away in a raucous flood of  procreative play. Holi is a boisterous and beautiful sexual thrill, an ancient wet T-shirt festival. For little kids, clueless to connotations, it’s just play. For teenagers, half innocent and half knowing, it’s a day of permissiveness and unleashed energy. For adults, it’s a day of freedom, a chance to relax the tension of propriety and embrace the primal. Wives and husbands flirt like young lovers. People chase each other, catch each other, smear each other with color, soak each other with Spring. The thin cotton clothes of men and women alike become plastered to bodies painted sky blue and sea green and saffron and that crimson that looks redder and richer and brighter in India than anywhere else in the world. The country goes mad with color.

Gangs of kids and young men, faces smeared red, bodies painted like warriors, will roam around,  defend a territory from other gangs, ambush strangers and roar with laughter. It does get violent in the city, and unsafe for women. Spring fertility rites and modern Indian cities are a dangerous combination. The heady and the horrific keep close company.

When I was little, Holi was a neighborhood thing, wild and exciting but pretty safe. It got rougher as I got older, so we used to go to a friend’s village up the mountains to celebrate. Adults and kids alike would chase each other around the huts and small houses, tear through the forest, powder clutched in one hand, squirt gun in the other, whooping and shrieking with dismay or triumph or both.  Everybody got crazy, everybody had fun. It makes me smile to remember.

This is the one time of year that I ache for India. Festivals who were popular in their native land can get lonely when they live abroad. We make Hindu holidays our own, here on a Minnesota farm: celebrate Diwali by filling the house with the scent of chai and the light of candles; Shivaratri with reflection and conversation. But trying to celebrate Spring Rites in a Midwestern February…well, there are limits. The white clothes of Winter remain pristine, untouched. Only the sky, too distant to tint the snow, shines with color…but it is a blue brighter and cooler and sharper than any other sky over any other place on earth.

To know more than one place is to be stretched thin, ever longing for the home you’re not in. I keep having flings and then falling in love with other geography. Just when I think I’m settled and safe, I’m pulled out my door by the rough and colorful friends I’ve made of other places.

I’m staying in today, remembering old loves and feeling happily married. Urban and I will cook Indian food: Panir (famers cheese) with peas and mushrooms, peppers with cilantro and lemon, rajma (kidney beans in a tomato gravy) saffron rice; and listen to music: Nine Inch Nails, Modest Mouse, Pink, Santigold. Maybe even some MIA and Indian fusion, who  knows? We’ll laugh and trip over the dogs and tease each other and argue about what to listen to and chase each other around the kitchen. We’ll make the day our own. We’ll color it, sweet and deep, and it will be like no other time or place on this earth.

Our Lady of Morphine

Every time I go in for surgery, I say a prayer to Our Lady of Morphine, the Patron Saint of Pain Control, the Angel of Analgesics.

I drew this  self-portrait (ink and sparkly pen on recycled paper)sometime in late January/early February 2002, while in hospital in Dehradun, India, where I almost died. It’s where, raging with infection and gallstones, I would experience what the doctors called “episodes;” it always made me wonder why I was stuck watching this crappy show. It’s also where they fed me such large amounts of morphine that when I got back to the US, my doctors thought the hospital reports were loaded with typos. But, man, that pain was CONTROLLED!

I remember the Doc at Abbott—O, blessed Abbott, with your uniformed nurses, sterile gloves, and well-lit, pristine bathrooms-- looking at me incredulously over a clipboard and saying “You travelled commercial in this condition, while taking these doses? I assumed you were airlifted.” Nope. I was so out of it that my sister, standing in that 2 am fog outside of Delhi airport (mingled smells of jasmine, diesel and Jet A) had to gently steer me towards the bright airport doors;I was wondering off into the mist. She had to insist I get a wheelchair. “No, no.” I remember saying vaguely, “I feel fine.” The look on her face!

Changing planes at Schipol, sisterless, was a little more traumatic. I’ve had wonderful experiences in Amsterdam (who hasn’t?) but I’ve found that Holland, or at least it’s main airport, is not the most brown-skinned-people friendly place on the planet. I couldn’t get anyone to take my request for a wheelchair seriously. I wandered around, in tears, clutching my carry-on and a mysterious little ceramic house (it sloshed!) handed to me by the flight attendant in the First Class cabin. Ok, so I wasn’t airlifted but I honestly don’t think I would have lived through economy. I sat down, in considerable pain, self-pity and confusion, at a deserted gate, and started paging through my journal for my flight info. I came across Our Lady, and sat staring at her. Pills are scattered everywhere. Massive syringes drip. Doctors and nurses cavort. Our lady sits, serene, amid it all. I started to laugh.

I made it home, to encounter such wonders as Abbott NW Hospital, a husband nearly obscured by roses, a singing and dancing pig wearing a chicken suit, culture shock in the form of mac and cheese, and hippies in the basement. But that’s a story for another day.

I’ve had what I like to refer to as “health challenges” since then (I blame the pig). But just to be clear: the dimly lit, slightly grubby hospital in India saved my life. The non-uniformed nurses, who had a distressing habit of setting loaded syringes with unprotected needles down on my crowded bed-side table, would hold my hand and sing to me until the drugs kicked in. There are many kinds of pain control.

But also: when someone in my family is having a health crisis, we say: Hell, at least this isn’t happening in India.

I dug this picture out of The Grey Cloth Journal, April 12, 2000—February 15, 2002 –a big fat one, and a pain in the ass to lug around. But it’s a treasure trove of narcotics-inspired art.

Our Lady has been letting me down a little lately, so I thought maybe she’d like it here. Feel free to leave an offering.