Interpreter of Maladies

But I Digress
Ahem. Back to plagiarized movies. Personally, I 'm waiting for the Bollywood version of The Big Lebowski. Now THAT would be fun. The Dude, bowling to Hindi film music - maybe a filmi Creedence dance number.

Ever-vigilant of current trends, I, too, want to try my hand at plagiarism. Maybe there's a $500,000 advance out there with my name on it. Below is my version of a Thorn Tree Top 5 someone named Hampi Man wrote last year. (His was better.)

Season of the Itch:
Top 5 Mystery Maladies I Got in India (so far)

1. The Mosquito Bite that Won't Heal: Mountains out of molehills division. It begins innocently enough - a mosquito bite on the most common place, the foot. However, this is also the most dangerous place, as wearing sandals exposes the bite, which I immediately scratch the hell out of in order to release the itchy toxin, to all manner of dirt and filth. In monsoon season Kerala, it becomes infected nearly overnight and by the second day was red and angry.

By the fourth day my whole ankle was starting to swell. I had to take oral antibiotics - the infection spread so fast that topical Bactrim wasn't enough. My feet were so covered in mosquito bites, I walked around for 2 weeks with both feet bandaged, wearing socks under my sandals to protect the Bandaids and shield the scabs from dangerous dirt. I must have looked like a geriatric Miami Beach matron.

Indian acquaintances were perplexed, as the mosquitos largely seem to leave them alone. Sort of like greedy autorickshaw drivers, the local mosquitos hone in on the newcomers. I guess both drivers and mosquitos could be considered members of the same species - bloodsucking parasites.

Oh, I know - if you don't scratch the bite, this won't happen. Well that's no fun!

2. Mystery Blisters. Small, itchy, fluid-filled blisters all over extremities (tops of feet and backs of hands). The only thing for it is to pop them, drain them, disinfect them and cover them with bandaids to prevent infection. They could be some weird insect bite but I've never been able to spot a bug nearby when they start itching. My friend Diana got them too, and thinks it's some special kind of Indian mosquito that makes this type of bite.

It did enable me to quote that immortal Beatles line from "Helter Skelter" - "I got blistahs on my fingahs!" - but there was no one around to get the joke.

3. Imperial Impetigo. According to the oral history project Plain Tales from the Raj, this plagued the colonials a hundred years ago. The sun never sets on the British Impetigo. Somewhere I still have the pictures of my entire chin, hands, and parts of my legs and torso covered in these horrible itchy welts. You can still see a white scar on my chin from the deepest one, which made a sort of hole under my lower lip.

Impetigo is a bacterial infection (related to staphylococcus and streptococcus) that flourishes in hot, humid and unclean environments. As little kids in the States, we got it sometimes playing in the sandbox during the muggy southern summer. The blisters pop to leave little wet, red craters and dry into a trademark "honey crust" scabby spot. Impetigo itched so badly that I nearly clawed myself bloody and had to take both antihistamines and sleeping pills to prevent this. All I could do was lay under the fan at AIMS Hospital in Kochi for a week. The elderly dermatologist, who seemed to enjoy holding and stroking my itchy hands (in order to examine them) just a little too much, prescribed an antibiotic.

Fortunately, AIMS has a great milkshake bar. For ten days, my life revolved around drowsily slumping from milkshake to fan to pharmacy to milkshake.....By the way, it's highly contagious, so I managed to nab a room all to myself! With cable TV!

I hope that old lecherous doctor caught impetigo from trying to hold my hands.

4. Fried Follicles. In a land where the local hair is so full and plentiful, it seems especially cruel that some combo of diet, climate and stress makes foreigners' hair fall at an alarming rate (this is well documented in Sarah MacDonald's autobio Holy Cow). My (Caucasian) dance teacher lost so much hair during her stay in south India that she was able to collect it and make a false plait from it. Long-term residents at Amritapuri ashram traded stories about how much hair they'd lost; Swamini Krishnamritaprana (from Australia) had a receding hairline by the time she left India.

I now have about half the hair I came to India with; after 1.5 years I had to hack off a few inches from the frazzled ends - they looked like a literal straw broom. A lot of it just fell out and is slowly growing back like little fuzzy baby tufts. All this happened despite my use of hair oil and covering my head with a dupatta every day!

5. Scabies: The People's Itch. All over India, you can see village folks (and those in urban slums) picking the lice out of one another's hair in a basic primate bonding ritual. I used to sit on the balcony of my friend's restaurant in Koregaon Park, Pune and watch the local housewives grooming each other this way. Despite many, many rural bus rides, I managed to avoid this, but still picked up scabies (also known as mange) while sleeping at a North Kerala temple near Kannur.

Sleeping in a temple is not as weird, nor nearly as much fun, as it sounds. Most temples allow for pilgrims to overnight in a temple dharmsala (pilgrim's shelter, usually just a stone pavillion).
Parsinikadavu Temple is famous as the only one in the world in which the Theyyam, a ritual trance dance unique to North Kerala, is performed daily. Lord Muttappan, the temple's primary deity, is considered a form of Shiva, but that sounds like later latterday Brahminical absorption of a local tradition. Muttappan was thought to have been a brave hunter in the area's forests long ago. He carried a spear, lived in a wooden house and was constantly surrounded by hunting dogs - therefore, the temple grounds were home to freely roaming dogs of every spot and stripe. This woodland hunting lord, unlike most orthodox Hindu gods, also loved offerings of toddy and meat.

Of course, the dog and whiskey motif immediately won me over. I decided I liked the primordial flavour of this lakeside temple, built in classic Kerala architectural style. What I didn't know at the time was that this temple was famous for more than just a ritual dance (performed by a pot-bellied man wearing costume and makeup that looked more Papua New Guinean than Indian). It was also known as a home for every class and caste. All the rituals were performed by members of the "lowest" castes, so naturally, many of the worshippers were from these social strata as well.

As an American, I had always considered myself immune to notions of "unclean" caste. I was soon to be proven wrong.

Determined to witness the Theyyam ritual, I happened to arrive there on a major festival day in May and every single guest house room was booked. The temple committee (when in need, look for The Guys In the Office who sit around and decide how much the pujas will cost) took pity on the lone foreigner and gave me a straw mat to sleep on in the mandap (large open foyer space) in the midst of several hundred women pilgrims and their children similarly stranded. (The men slept seperately elsewhere in the temple.) The Committee Guy was kind enough to empty one meeting room - the only one in the temple complex with a shower - so that Madame could take a bath in privacy (others were "bathing," fully clothed, in public with buckets of well water. As the only foreigner there, I was already attracting considerable notice and didn't want to cause yet more disruption by bathing publicly.)

The room's occupants - a bunch of young guys sitting round drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes - seemed annoyed that I had interrupted their private party, but grudgingly cleared out. The imbibers appeared to be enjoying some of Lord Muttapan's whiskey for themselves.

Every Indian (and every Indian traveller worth their salted nimbu pani) knows how to sleep on a hard floor with nothing but a straw mat. I got comfy on my mat in the dharmsala, using my dupatta scarf as a sheet. My female dorm mates were lovely Malayalees who spoke very little English, but there were lots of welcoming smiles all around.

Next morning, I awoke to the comforting sounds of an ancient south Asian ritual: dozens of people retching to clear their throats of phlegm (hhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaahrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk ~~~~ ptttttttttttttttttahhhhhh!!!!).

I was chalking up my points as a solo road warrior and preparing to to put my adventure into words. On the bus ride back to the city, I felt the telltale itching that was definitely not a mosquito bite. Lord Muttappan had left me a little something to remember him by. The term "unclean" had a new meaning for me.

Scabies is (are?) a microscopic critter that burrows into your skin, especially loving the warm crevices between your fingers and crooks of elbows. Scabies is (are?) highly contagious - spread through proximity and sharing things like towels, or bedsheets (or perhaps, straw mats). It's only gotten rid of by applying topical ointment which kills the little critters burrowing deep, deep into your flesh. Then, you must wash your clothes and bedsheets in boiling water. The more you scratch, the harder they burrow away to hide.

Even more appetizing, what's really itching is their feces. That's right, it's their doo doo that makes you itch.

Aren't you glad you decided to read this far? You should be itching right now just reading about it!

The Safari Within
Your journey through India will give you the opportunity to play Host Organism to an amazing variety of wildlife. Your body, especially intestinal tract and epidermis, will at times feel like a miniature safari. If you are "foreign," don't expect any local doctors to sympathize with you- they typically either accuse you of making it up, or, as one doctor at AIMS Hospital told me, "this is just some skin irritation that the fairskinned people get." Because only white people get it, it doesn't need treatment. (Can you imagine any US doctor telling someone, "that's only a disease that brown people get!") They'll be only too happy to take your money for this sage advice, though!

Shucks, that's already Five. Here are some Bonus Afflictions:

-The Flaming Tongue. This has got to be one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me (and for a nine-year resident of Manhattan, that's really saying something). For the entire first five days of the Dalai Lama's Kalachakra initiation, my entire tongue was swollen with red, sore welts from out of nowhere. This was so painful, and so inexplicable, even the Tibetan hospital had no advice for me. All I could do was eat popsicles and ibuprofen in hopes of keeping the swelling down. I Googled all the symptoms to no avail. It was so painful, I would sit like a dog with my tongue hanging out - I had trouble closing my mouth. Slowly, the welts disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

I chalked this one up to Sudden Dharma Onset - maybe in retribution for cruel words I had uttered in the past.

Perhaps in the same family of Dharma-Induced Afflictions was

-Hands Of Fire. Immediately (within a couple hours) of attending a Tibetan Tantric Chod puja at the monastery of Lama Wangdu in Kathmandu, both my hands begin to swell with burning welts. It was as though I had placed both hands accidentally on a boiling pot of water and burned them - the "burns" were precisely in such places, inside my palms and all along my fingers. By evening, the raised swelling was such that I could do nothing with my hands, including turning the key in the lock to my house. The burning, raised red weals were crippling me. I couldn't hold a hairbrush, nor my toothbrush. It was as though some angry, internal fire was scalding my hands from the inside out.

Normally, one is meant to have a ritual empowerment before participating in a Chod puja but the monks were so welcoming to me - they had insisted I should sit with the participants and recite the English liturgy. Would it have been worse to refuse their invitation? What might the wrathful spirits have done then?

I washed my hands with antiseptic, ran cold water over them, applied ayurvedic oils and finally took ibuprofen hoping to reduce the swelling. Again, I ran Google searches (it was painful to type, nearly impossible to use the mouse) and found nothing, not even as a possible allergic reaction.

The next day, the "scalded" welts began to vanish and eventually were just pink traces along my fingers. I had gained a new respect for the mysterious Chod Puja.

Time's up, and I didn't even get to cover
-Giardia (which eventually resulted in my having to take a $5 a pill drug that has been banned in the US - it gave me chest pains and has been proven to scar the fallopian tubes);

- the Five Star Buffet Barf (hmm, everything looks clean, expensive and dandy, surely the Taj Residency wouldn't give me food poisoning? Wrong again! The plus side was that, after three days of puking and diarrhea, I lost five pounds and a dress size);

- or good old fashioned Bedbugs (courtesy of the mattresses at Sri Satya Sai Baba's Whitefield ashram).

Just keep repeating: What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger. (Of course, if you don't kill the organism, it will also get stronger. Round 2!)

Photo of author, truck and goat by Andy Beatty.
Photo of Lord Mutthappan courtesy Chennai Online.
Photo of Lama Wangdu courtesy Nityananda Institute.
Movie posters courtesy IMDB.

Up for the download

Lakshman Jhula, Rishikesh, Uttaranchal

AAAGGGHHH!!!
It ONLY took fifteen minutes to get this Blogger Create page to open, after four or five "404" messages. I'd better type while the typing is good.

Sorry for being incommunicado. I haven't been able to read most emails; every five minutes, it seems, the account goes "Page Not Found." And this country is supposed to be the new IT capital of the world (one in which the power goes out, minimum, for an hour a day and the net is down as often as up). Be afraid, be very afraid. Maybe next India can claim to be the next world capital of Clean Water Delivery - it would make about as much sense. (Yes, I am sure that individual software developers and programmers here, working in individual offices in big cities carefully removed from the rest of the world, are very talented. How come none of this translates onto the ground where real people live?) Many of the engineers my dad worked with at DuPont, and lots of my Indian acquaintances in the US, were engineers. Maybe that's what's wrong - all the good engineers who should be working on the infrastructure here moved over there.

Greetings from Uttaranchal and my first North Indian summer. Uttaranchal is a new state; it used to be the Uttarakhand (literally "upper division") district of Uttar Pradesh. About six years ago they decided to take all the nice, scenic, mountainous parts away from Uttar Pradesh and make it Uttaranchal. All the major Himalayan pilgrimage spots are contained within this new state, plus many scenic river valleys and great trekking.

The dry heat is nothing to sneeze at, but it is a nice change from the soul-destroying humidity of the South. Monsoon is about one month away and the temperatures just build from hereon in. Today's high in nearby capital Dehra Dun was 95F, the low (that is, as cool as it ever gets even at night) was 72F. Here are some more examples of local weather:

New Delhi: High 102, Low 79
Varanasi: High 104, Low 85
Gaya (where the Buddha was supposed to have achieved enlightenment the first week of May about 2500 years ago, but he really just fried his brains) - High 106, Low 83
Pune: High 98, Low 72
Hyderabad: High 99, Low 80
Bombay: High 90, Low 79 (wow, made in the shade by comparison there)
Pondicherry: High 96, Low 81
Calcutta: High 95, Low 79

No sooner am I able to type than the net place is closing again. It took that long. The Garhwali village wedding was great, but I got sunstroke and nearly passed out on the way back down the mountain. Photos to come.

Hippy Hippy Shake

I'll say this for Rishikesh - it's really one place in India where a hippy can be a hippy. Every year, thousands of Western kids come to India in search of peace, enlightenment, spirituality and cool clothes, and are so often disappointed in their romantic notions. But here Flower Power is still in full flower with flowing caftans, dingly dangly rings on the fingers and bells on the toes.

Another sign of prolific hippiedom is the availability of brown rice. So far I have found no less than three restaurants that have it available on a regular basis. (My Indian friends may not recognize the significance of this for western vegetarians). So now I go to Mukti's hole-in-the-wall health food shop ("extraterrestrial mashed potatos") for my daily dose. Only yesterday, my brown rice and freshly steamed squash had some kind of flying bug in it. A dead one. I'm not sure if it's better or worse that the bug was dead when I found it.

Mukti just kind of plucked it off and handed the bowl back to me. I had to explain to him (he's been cooking for foreigners for about 20 years) that I didn't want the piece of squash the bug had died on, either. He looked puzzled as he picked out the piece and threw it away. There was no point in explaining that, by Western standards, he was meant to throw out the bug infested dish and offer a new, bug-free one. It just doesn't work that way here (unless you are in a five-star hotel - but even then, you should never ever give them the plate and let them de-bug it. All they will do is take it to the kitchen, and a few minutes later give you the same plate back, minus the bug).

Perhaps in recompense, Mukti invited me to a village wedding some 20 kms from here. A Garhwali village wedding sounded like fun, not to mention the free food. So we will take the local bus up into the hills tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 8am. It won't matter if we're a bit late - Indian weddings are an all day affair. My friend Laurie asked, "but when IS the wedding?" I said, All day. She thought I was kidding.

His Majesty's Voice

HM Gives In

Address of HM Gyanendra at 7pm today:

Proclamation to the Nation from His Majesty King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev(21 April 2006)

Beloved Countrymen,

You are all aware that, given the situation prevailing in the country then, we were compelled to take the decision of 1 February 2005 to set in motion a meaningful exercise in multiparty democracy by activating all elected bodies, ensuring peace and security and a corruption-free good governance through the collective wisdom, understanding and the united efforts of all the Nepalese. By supporting our decision, the Nepalese people made amply clear their desire for peace and democracy and the civil servants demonstrated sincerity towards their duties. We are appreciative of this. We also have high regard for the dutifulness, valour and discipline displayed by the security personnel, upholding their glorious traditions.

By visiting different parts of the country, we made honest endeavours to acquaint ourselves with the hopes and aspirations of our people, mitigate their hardships and boost their morale. We also called on the political parties to enter into a dialogue in the interest of the nation and people afflicted by violence and terrorism. However, this did not materialise. The ideals of democracy can be realised only through the active participation of political parties. In keeping with the traditions of the Shah Dynasty to reign in accordance with the popular will in the greater interest of the nation and people and our unflinching commitment towards Constitutional Monarchy and multiparty democracy, we, through this Proclamation, affirm that the Executive Power of the Kingdom of Nepal, which was in our safekeeping, shall, from this day, be returned to the people and be exercised in accordance with Article 35 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal - 1990. As the source of Sovereign Authority is inherent in the people, harmony and understanding must be preserved in the interest of the nation and people in an environment of peace and security. While safeguarding multiparty democracy, the nation must be taken ahead along the road of peace and prosperity by bringing into the democratic mainstream those who have deviated from the constitutional path. Similarly, a meaningful exercise in democracy must be ensured with the activation of representative bodies through elections as soon as possible. We, therefore, call upon the Seven Party Alliance to recommend a name, for the post of Prime Minister, at the earliest for the constitution of the Council of Ministers which will bear the responsibility of governing the country in accordance with the Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal - 1990. The present Council of Ministers will continue to function until the appointment of the Prime Minister.

May Lord Pashupatinath bless us all! Jaya Nepal!

Crackdown Town

-BLOG IN PROGRESS-I am blogging from Laxman Jhula in Uttaranchal, trying to sort out what is and isn't happening in Kathmandu.

"History. We won't know... we'll all be dead." - George W. Bush to Bob Woodward, 2005

It occurred to me that His Majesty Gyanendra and GWB have a lot in common - unelected (or quasi-elected) despots fighting losing wars. ("Cheney Declares, 'War Going Very Well in Alternate Universe.'") Much like Dubya, HMG somehow manages to ignore thousands marching in protest in the streets to declare "Mission Accomplished." His national address a few weeks ago never even made mention of the Maoists, who've been garnering credibility by actually sticking to their promises (maintaining unilateral cease-fires, initiating dialogue with the political parties - this, in between kidnapping rural children for their army, abducting noncompliant villagers, among other things).

When your government makes even the Maoists look good, that's really saying something.

"We'll all be dead." He may not be able to kill them all, but HM Gyanendra (ably assisted by the police and Royal Army) is doing his part. The Nepali King imposed eighteen-hour curfews this week (you're allowed to move around between 2am and...?) in an attempt to stifle pro-democracy demonstrations all over the country. In response, hundreds of thousands of people defied the curfew and its shoot-to-kill orders to partcipate in the demos.

When the Royal Army says "shoot to kill," they mean it. Wednesday had four demonstrators shot dead; Thursday saw at least shot dead and some 40 wounded. Reality check: these were not just folks walking around going to work, but people actively participating in the demos and in the vicinity. If one needed to visit Kathmandu, one could probably get around safely as long as the demonstrations were avoided completely. However, when there are 100,000 people in the street that's tough to manage.

And for my visa purposes, is the Indian Embassy even functioning on a normal schedule (that is, as much as they ever do - their schedule is spotty at the best of times)?

I would love to wax all starry-eyed about a storybook people's uprising, but this storybook's pages are blood-stained and sleaze-spattered. To be honest, "the people" fortunately know better than to put complete trust in the Seven Party Alliance, lots of whom are corrupt career politicians. But when your options are His Majesty's Government or the Maoists, the SPA begins to look like the best of a bad bunch. So there is a cynical tone to the "pro-democracy" demos. One angry Nepali blogger alleges that most of the demonstrators can't even name one democratic principle. Less idealistic than Tiananmen Square, but sadly, with the same potential for bloodshed and tragedy.

The Nepalis I spoke to during my five-month stay seem fond of the tradition of their Monarchy. They customarily look upon the King as their father - and this includes not just the majority Hindus, but Buddhists (of which there are many) and other minorities. A young Muslim man I met in Thamel told me that, after the Royal Massacre tragedy of 2001, his father and brother both shaved their heads. (Shaving one's head is the traditional Nepali sign of mourning, observed only at the death of one's father.) "But you are Muslim," I said. "That's not even a Muslim custom." "It doesn't matter," said Amir. "Birendra was like our father. "Here in Nepal, we have never had religious conflicts." Every Nepali history book I read bore this out.

The majority Nepalis seem to hold a real reverence for the office of the King, if not for its current manifestation, and would like the monarchy to have a ceremonial place in modern Nepal - alongside a multiparty democracy.

How is it that this tiny, incredibly ethnically (there are a couple dozen distinct ethnic and linguistic groups in nation the size of Tennessee) and religiously diverse country could do so well in terms of communal harmony, and suffer so in terms of governance? India, the "800-pound gorilla" superpower to the south, has managed to maintain functioning democracy but is plagued by outbreaks of communal violence.

What, I wonder, can they learn from one another?