Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Take off your shoes..

The place is so surreal sitting as it does in Malibu, California, that I don't mind the broad expanse of blistering marble on my bare feet in the August heat, though I was grateful for the cool water I used to clean my feet before I put them back in my shoes.  I can't imagine it being any cooler in the heat of Mumbai, or Agra, unless it is by moon light.  

Malibu Hindu Temple
1600 Las Virgenes Canyon Rd.
Calabasas, CA
I don't realize it at the time, but my traveling companion and I unknowing crash a ceremony of some sort. We enter a small building in the center of the complex where a young Hindu couple are holding their days old baby in one corner and in a very different corner an Indian grandmother scowls at the interlopers. I didn't see her, because I was so determined to absorb the experience of it all.  My traveling companion told me we'd been given the "stink eye", my words, not hers.  I use the expression because I suspect the grandmother was giving us the Hindi equivalent.  For all my heartfelt intent to show only the respect I felt, I made a mistake of oversight. I lay in bed that night and I feel bad, but only for a moment.  I've been clumsy. I've offended her in the place where she and her family mark birth, life and death, but I also realize I really have traveled and have committed the unintentional offenses one makes when one is out of place.  I forgive myself, hope the grandmother will and think,  "Namaste,"  in her direction, in the direction of her grandchild, and in the direction of all the other people who at least tolerated us for the afternoon we spent trying to see the world through their eyes

I've often quoted E.B. Browning's take on "seeing".  Those who see take off their shoes in reverence for all that is.  The rest sit round the common bush that is afire and pluck blackberries. I should have paid more attention at breakfast because the blackberry syrup I poured on to my pancakes that morning was trying to give me a heads up. 

Friday, August 13, 2010

Lust



I have pined for India since I sat in the The Clay Oven while a man named Pravine talked about his home country. As he talked, I could see the whole of the Western hemisphere, including his own restaurant, retreat from his awareness.  His body was in Irvine, California, but the parts that matter were in Mumbai. It was as inspirational to hear as the yogurt and rose petal jelly was to eat. Pravine’s wife makes it from the flowers that grow in their garden and each tiny spoonful was an orgy of exotic floral sweetness bathing my tongue.  As deserts go, it was a little obscene now that I think about it.
The pining only got worse after a recent dinner during which a man who was both born in Tamil Nadu and has such a deep love for his home country that he has every intention of returning to India with his family next year, told me that there wasn’t much to see in Agra other than the Taj Mahal.  Like you’d need more.  He’s Indian. His expectations are a lot higher than mine, but he did say  I should go anyway. 
     “When you go to Agra, time your trip so that you can see the it during the day, but wait until night fall and go back.  You need to see it by the light of a full moon.”
 I would have kissed him on the mouth for saying that, but I’d just met him, my husband doesn’t like that sort of thing and in fairness it really is bad form. Still, I’ve had enough foreplay.  I’m taking a day trip to India.
          That is much easier to do if you live close to Artesia, California than say, Winnsboro, Texas, but I suspect it’s do-able even then.  The internet, the library and your local grocery store make it so.   Do a google search for images of India to fill your mind with what your feet can't experience. Go to the library and check out every single beautiful book you can find about the place. If you haven’t already, read Kipling’s The Jungle book, or as I’m doing now A Passage to India, though it’s a little dark unless you like cultural misunderstanding as a plot.  For something lighter, read or at the very least go see Eat Pray Love

Go to the store and buy a bottle of curry powder and throw more than you think you should into a pot of browned deboned chicken thighs and onions, cook it until the curry releases its story and your house smells like not your house Add some whipping cream ( you’re on vacation here, just do it ), vegetables of your choice then simmer until it marries. Spoon it all on top of basmati rice, or heck plain rice and lavish it with chopped cashews or peanuts, flaked coconut, raisins and if you can find it, a jar of chutney.  
If that’s too much, boil some cinnamon, ginger and cardamom in some hot tea, strain it and add milk to taste and you get Cheating Chai.  Download Pandora (it’s free and I promise it won’t eat your computer ) and find some Indian music. 
Or, if extraordinary laziness is your forte, you're like me, so just buy the tea, then toss the spices into a pot of simmering water.  You do it for the holidays. Why not for Fridays?

Point is, travel in place. 

Monday, August 9, 2010

Seeing beyond the inner and outer

 I write for my sister  whose wild life can be summed up well by the photo of her middle child. Writing with her as the intended audience was an idea suggested to me by my husband and it has made writing a lot more fun than trying to write for an anonymous reader or a publisher and thus my checkbook.  I relate this because of something she said about this blog. She told me she liked Guided Tour but she preferred my other blog because she “liked to read about ‘life’ stuff”. We were talking online and though I didn’t tell her at the time, when she said that, I laughed out loud, and not the polite cyber messaging type either. It was the kind of laughter that brings your husband from the other room to investigate..  This blog is really about my sister’s life or at the very least, inspired by it because she traveled a lot when she was younger and doesn’t so much now.  I want to travel and can’t presently get reality to settle into a workable pattern in that regard.
My sister, L, lived in Jamaica as a teenager and speaks fluent Spanish because she lived in Mexico as a young adult, where she met her beautiful Argentinean husband, who won’t let that adjective rest if he ever reads it.   She spent summers in Italy and tragically only on one occasion, did she and I go to Europe with an aunt who still travels the world with wild child abandon and a cousin, who speaks fluent French not to mention teaches Italian.  I think her English is pretty good too, but she lives in Australia now and the Aussies might not agree.  I’d have to hate all these women if I didn’t love them. 
Marriage and children will reduce the flow of passport ink down to a trickle and here is the point of inspiration:  L still travels but she does it within her current life, and more locally on a regular basis.   She goes out into her world and experiences it.   If you happen to have three children all under the age of ten, you know how remarkable that is once you know she hauls them with her.  Maybe that’s just me. I only had one and she was the child people see and say, “Don’t have another. You only get one easy child.”  They didn’t tell me the easy child might lose their mind at 15, but that’s okay..  She found it a couple years later and left home, but when that happened, I found myself sitting around waiting.  I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but my sister unknowingly pointed me out the door.  I like to think it’s possible to work a day job and see the world. She certainly is.