Drunkards and Chainsmokers

Just riding in a car in India is dangerous. Driving verges on the surreal. On Sunday, we had to swerve around a giant elephant crossing the national highway and then almost slammed into a horse-cart.

Luckily, it appears that the university will pay for us to have a driver.

Great.

A few weeks prior to getting our car, our smiley and adorable security guard, S****l, asked in broken english if he could be our driver. We thought we would give him a chance. So for a week (while we waited and waited for the car purchase to be sorted) he sat outside of our house, with a fresh driver haircut wearing his civilian clothes, waxing poetic to his junior entourage, and otherwise polishing his motorcycle for hours and hours. He would just sit on it in the driveway and fake-drive.

Fake-driving is something I am a bit of an expert in as Zazie has perfected the skill.

Vroom.

A few days after that our maid, G**ta, comes in and asks if her husband, K****n, can be our driver. She says that he is a very good person, not a "drunkard" or a "chainsmoker" and very trustworthy. I tell her that S****l asked first and that we are going to give him a chance.

Finally Vik goes into Delhi to pick up the car and S***l comes too. The car is delivered after much hassle. Vik gives S***l the keys. S***l looks like he is going to throw up. White knuckles grab the keys and cold sweat sits in the drivers seat. He grinds the gearshift around like a mortar in a pestle. He hits a curb and makes a point of never reversing, he leaves the radio on static, and doesn't adjust his seat or any mirrors, just straight ahead across six lanes of Indian traffic to a fuel station. He pulls into the most convenient petrol pump, and the attendants laugh and point him to a diesel pump, not quite as convenient. He pulls the car up about three feet from the diesel pump at an awkward angle facing the pump. Instead of backing out he turns the wheel as sharp as he can as he heads for the pump and then back into traffic. The steady din of horns become more unsteady and confused, and for the first time, Vik sees the other cars not as a chaotic swarm but a complex hive, with every car swerving in coordination with every other, mostly swerving around his own vehicle. Within a kilometer, Vik asks Sunil (or at least thinks of asking), Do you know how to drive?

At that very moment at home, K***l, Usha's driver is telling Usha and I that S***l has never driven before and just that he "fancies" driving, everyone in the village knows. The WHOLE village is worried for our lives.

When they arrive at our door step, I walk out to greet them and Vik looks green. I don't even see the new car. I grab Vik and say, K***l said S***l can't drive. Vik says, I can confirm that.

That night we make sure S***l can still work as a guard and then sack him (via translator). Firing someone via a translator is awesome. I just look sympathetic and sweet and they (poor Usha) take the heat. S***l is dejected. He is probably thinking that he should have let the dragon stay in the boot room.

While not a driver, we conclude that S***l is--like a peanut butter enthusiast or a calculator enthusiast--more like a "driving enthusiast."

Supervisor-ji the head security guard, agrees that S****l is a nice boy, but no he can't drive at all, he's just fond of cars. With that, he offers to find us another driver. We mention that G***ta had volunteered K***n. Supervisor-ji says, no, no, he will find the best driver, a straight-laced, over-30 non-smoker from the village, as good as his own son (who is Usha's driver K***l by the way; nice guy, but prone to smirking. Vik said he seemed a little too amused seeing S***l pull in).

The next day, Driver No. 2, S###r turns up, adorable, smiley library science graduate. He looks nice. He speaks a little English (which is 100% more than S***l) and claims to have been driving for eight years. So we give him a try. He shows up on time, tries to get a little leeway on his hours ("for the gym") and drives forwards and backwards (again, one direction more than S***l). It seems that things are settled. Great.

No.

This morning our maid, G**ta, comes in looking grave, sallow and very sad. She tells me something in complete confidence (you won't tell anyone will you?) that our driver is a "very third class character." She says that his character is no good and that he is a "defaulter." She implies that he is a womanizer. She says her husband knows this about him--that the whole village knows about him--and that because Lacey Madam is such a good person she had to tell me. She apparently stayed up the whole night worrying about us. Her husband said he didn't think we would believe her. She was very grave--like Aunt Sharon telling us about the night the Crazy Purple Lady died one rainy night in the country--big eyes, low voice, long pauses. Then she begs me not to tell anyone in the village. Because this boy will come to her house and try to fight vigilante style. The moment is portentous. I have goosebumps just thinking about this third class character in our Ford Fusion weaving in and out of traffic, eve-teasing and defaulting. Really, chills. Then she throws in that S***l was a ganja chainsmoker and drunkard and it is very good we gave him the boot.

So then I tell Vik about this and he tells me that he has been reading a lot about real vigilante justice and honor killings in the Jat communities of Haryana (which includes our local village). He says, we should take any threat seriously. Then I really get goosebumps.

So what to do? Who to trust? Who to believe What to do? One of the women in our village (um Ashleigh, another colleague-sort here) questions G**ta's impartiality. She thinks that we should ask her again while making clear that we will never hire her husband. She asks whether it could just be a matter of S###r not being part of K***n and G**ta's trusted inner-family.

S###r picked up Vik today and as the Ford Fusion pulled out Vik saw K***l in the rear-view mirror smiling mischievously again. On the drive home, he confirms that S###r can drive, that he is in fact a proud Jat, that he knows K***l well, and that at the casual mention of G**ta and K***n, he jumps in that their names don't ring a bell.

Usha asks her maid, D***a (who has a rivalry with G***a and is somehow related to K***n) about S###r , she says that if there were any rumors going around about him (or anyone in the village) she would be the first to know. Supervisor-ji guarantees he has watched him grow up from childhood, and he is first class (not third class). The guards outside say that they will keep their eye on him and drive us anywhere in an emergency. All we are able to confirm is that everyone in the village has prior dealings with everyone else, and no one is neutral about anyone. And in the never ending soap opera of the village, we're the newest characters.

Time and Milk

Khoya (or khoa or khova) is milk that has been reduced to one fifth of its original volume. It kind of resembles something between ricotta cheese and home made play dough. It is used to make Indian sweets (particularly burfi, gulab jammun, and halwa). It took me about two hours and a half to turn two litres of milk into khoya the other day. Like in a trance, I stirred and stirred until my forearms ached, then I stirred until I could feel the arthritis I am sure to get, then I stirred some more. A few days prior to this, I made desi (or usli) ghee. This involved skimming the cream from the milk for two weeks, turning the cream into yogurt, whipping the yogurt into butter, and then slowly heating the butter so that all the casein and liquid evaporates and the butter is clarified. Agitating something for hours is busy work.

We finally got our car today. We started the process on September 21. It is October 24. However, it was only in the last week that things started happening.

Monday:

We demand that the car be delivered.

We don't have the color you want.

Give us another color.

Okay, we will drive it out to you first thing in the morning.

Tuesday morning:

We don't have payment.

[Call accounts, where is the check?]

Okay, you need four signatures on this check? You have how many?

One.

Tuesday afternoon:

Can you take a check that is half signed.

Okay, okay, no problem. We will bring the car today.

Wednesday morning:

You didn't bring the car.

Car? What car? That car has been sold.

Wait. Didn't we just buy it from you?

Actually, we haven't received the car from Jaipur. It is on a truck. It will be delivered first thing tomorrow morning.

Wednesday night:

Still, no payment sir.

[Call accounts, where is the payment, oh great, you got a second signature.]

Thursday:

Do you have the car? Do you have the check?

Don't worry about the check. We will work out something, as for the car...it has been detained outside the city. There are no trucks allowed in the city during business hours. Tomorrow, tomorrow.

Friday:

Tell me is the car on its way?

No, no sir, no payment.

Are you planning to sell me a car?

Of course.

[Calling accounts] Are you actually going to send payment?

Right now.

Friday night:

Where is the car?

Car? What car?

Saturday morning, at the dealership, in Delhi, with Sunil, our security guard-cum-driver in tow:

Hi, I want my car.

No problem. Here are the keys.

[Within seconds of pulling out, the car stalls, and we drive over a curb.]

Excuse me, Sunil, do you actually know how to drive?

Koi baat nahin (it doesn't matter, don't worry).

Saturday evening (the present):

Sunil, I am sorry, but you cannot be our driver.

Koi baat nahin.

In our driveway, our new car is parked, like a ghost in time for Halloween. The power is out. The single lamp from the kitchen haunting it from above. I kind of drove it around the block. My rusty standard transmission skills seems good enough, but the left side of the road is disorienting.

Steeped in the long tradition of women with an excess of time and milk, I am no longer satisfied with merely making cheese and curd and buttermilk. I am not sure if I need increasingly complex recipes or maybe just those that take a very long time. Either way, I need more practice. The ghee was burnt and the khoya was runny. The car sits there. Even after hours and hours of agitation, after constantly moving, even while standing in place, I see that neither patience nor will are enough to turn circles into spirals, to turn milk into manna.

Coffee and Cigarettes

So it is 4:30 in the morning and I just fluffed my hair.

I just woke up. I woke up to sit in my dark house, alone, in front of the computer, listening to a miscellaneous professor at a miscellaneous university talk at length about some miscellaneous detail in my miscellaneous degree.

But none of that matters.

What matters is that as soon as I woke up, I walked to the kitchen to make coffee and looked out my curtainless window across the dark plains to see a lone orange cinder and a shadow, burning like a firefly just outside my window.

That was when I fluffed my hair.

I have written a few times about the fact that the university has provided each of the professors with 24 hour security service. Let me elaborate. We have a boy (hopefully, at least 18 years old) who sits outside of our house from 7am to 7 pm. Come 7pm his (only slightly) older brother (or perhaps, cousin?) shows up for the 7pm-7am shift. It is this slightly older boy who smokes. And it was his lit cigarette that greeted me so early this morning.

Oh, Man. Someone. Is. Out. There.

Okay, get it together. Fluff hair, scrub drool from cheek, pull pajama pant leg down. Shake it off.

...I am not fooling anyone.

I stumble in the middle of the night looking for the filter coffee and look like a first year acting student trying to pantomime "making coffee" for her class. Suddenly I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness.

Take the coffee out of the cabinet. Put it on the counter.

Take the milk from the fridge. Put it on the counter.

Find a spoon. Where is the spoon. What is a good, "I can't find a clean spoon face?" Better, make the "Aha, here is a clean spoon" face instead.

Oh no, spilled some coffee on the counter. "Look" around. Find a dish rag. Gently shovel the spilled coffee into the sink.

Honestly, the thought crosses my mind, Make it more believable. I try harder. Making coffee, making coffee, what is it the humans do? How would a human wait for it to brew? And for the first time in about fifteen years, I twirl a lock of hair. "Waiting."

The little orange cinder moves away.

I realize that he has gone behind the security shed to pee. All it takes to turn yourself into an object is to cast a shadow, to be visible.

Maybe he is "peeing" instead. His shadow is definitely up to something.

Maybe we are doing a self-conscious dance where we exchange quotation marks, lurking from behind them, longing for privacy, for security, for comfort in our own skin. So, instead of these things we get windows, but no curtains; shadows, instead of men (or women), and quotation marks instead of... well, instead of coffee.

Bedtime Story Help: Mother Nature's Button Room and Rabelais

For a few weeks, I have been telling Zazie this story at night before she goes to bed. She loves it and repeatedly requests for me to tell her a little more about Mother Nature's Button Room. However, it has taken a surprising turn of events and I have no idea how to continue it.

Suggestions?

Each of these events is a story in itself. This is just the cosmological gist:

Mother Nature has a shed, a big one. In this shed there are thousands of buttons, lever, gears, toggles and switches. Every possible surface is covered with a dial, knob, tuner, or adjuster of some kind/

Each device controls one aspect of nature. Push a button and the autumn leaves change color, another and some baby elephants are born. Pull down a lever labelled "a/c" and the summer breeze begins.

However, like all mechanical devices, somethings things get mixed up.

Like the time that the pipes to the duck eggs and the alligator eggs got switched. Or the time that Mother Nature's naughty niece visited and covered the whole of northeastern Malta with stargazer lillies. It seemed like an improvement at first, but after a few days the stench was something terrible.

Well, it turns out that there is a little door, hidden in a dark corner near the agricultural section, near the maize and soybean buttons, that is locked. And if you lie on the floor and close one eye you can peek through the keyhole. This is the secret door where Mother Nature keeps the rainbows. All we see are the rainbows' shadows. No one know where Mother Nature keeps the key or knows why she locks them up.

This is where I stopped. Any promising suggestions...?

For Halloween, I think I am going to work on a toddler version of Rabelais' "Island of Tools."

I don't care if Barack Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize, we are keeping the yoga mat.

Zazie is blogging today. Here is what she had to say:

Dear Ashleigh and Jonathan,

Thanks for dinner the other night. I don't know where you scored that little bag of green gold, but I will trade totally invite you over one night when my maid cooks dinner for the source of that basil. I didn't want to tell you at the time, but I was sneaking extra raw leaves under the table to munch in secret later. Also, my Mom's pockets are still full of pistachios looted from your house.

All of this is a long-winded way to say, sorry, I think we are going to have to keep the yoga mat. I didn't know it, but a yoga mat is the only thing that has been missing from my life. For some weeks now, I have needed a parking lot. And your yoga mat seems to really work for the purpose.

Do you see the cunning order and logic, the arrangement of color and form? Do you see the beauty of the light yellow yoga asphalt underneath? Notice the deft juxtaposition of the NYC taxi cabs and the Indian auto-rickshaw. There is even an small airport for emergency landings and take-offs. I like to think of myself as an artist. My medium is little cars and now realize that the only possible canvas for this work is your yoga mat.

Oh, and no, my Mom can't really reimburse you. Since you have made two trips to the international foods grocery store without even asking us if we needed enchilada sauce or cake sprinkles, she spent all of her money at the village grocery store.

She said we are going to have "pizza" tonight. I don't know why she said it with the little air quotes, but I know that instead of delicious, mouthwatering basil, she is going to make it with this stuff:

I hope it doesn't taste like the last cheese we bought there. I could barely finish my chiplet:

However, if you want to buy *me* a surprise, you can get one of these car-scented air fresheners:

I have already decided that I will name it Lorileia and you can get it at the car accessory shop in the village. As an artist interested in synesthesia, Lorileia would really heighten the experience of my work. I think I am ready to take my stuff to the next level.

Love,

Zazie

Making and Making Do

I just had to explain to Zazie why she could not really smear strawberry scented lip gloss ("itch cream for dolls") all over Cup-cup (a soft doll), no matter how urgent the surgical procedure. She nods solemnly and says, Because if we mess Cup-cup up, we can't get another one. Right, I think. (But luckily, we can always do more surgery.) But then I pause. Why can't she smear lip gloss all over her? I mean, poor Cup-cup spent the whole morning in Poison Ivy; she needs this stuff.

We've spent a lot of time try to escape commercialism, brazen consumerism, and all the trappings of letting marketing execs have all the fun, while we sit around and watch. It is almost working. She is just about convinced that we can make anything she needs and about once a day, she says coyly to herself while playing: Wow, did you buy that beautiful toy? No, I MADE it. Wow.

Then she promptly destroys/crashes/demolishes whatever it was and starts over (well not all over, there is always a little bit of starter she can re-use for the next operation). "Instruction" is her favorite game. That is her parapraxis for "construction." (Avital, I'm calling, but Vik thinks it is just a spoonerism...). Still, I do learn something each time she constructs her imaginary world. Am I naive to think that the more she "makes", the less she will "want"?

Anyway, for some time, I have thought we have been doing a pretty good job. But then we moved to India and frugality, recycling and deconstruction have each taken on heightened meaning.

In a different way, we have a garbage can half the size of the one in the US and it takes twice as long to fill it up. And if I weren't so afraid of the rats, we would be composting and then it would take even longer to fill up the can. Why should anyone care about the size of our garbage can? Because it is the space between our garbage--the space between the rotten food and the cereal boxes, literally, the compost and the paper lanterns--between the size of our garbage and our daily use, that our world is being made.

I am a (somewhat) reformed hoarder and squirreling things up for a rainy day project is second nature, but the scale of this is important. While we have less than ever before in our lives, we are using everything we have. E v e r y t h i n g is being used. And re-used. And operated on and repaired. So it isn't only the making, but the using that is so important.

I guess it isn't deconstruction that I mean, but rather phenomenology. The perception of the scale of our waste is what I want Zazie to understand. So when I say no, we can't replace Cup-cup, I mean that while we can't replace her, we can suture her wounds and remake her and reuse her and let her be. And even if she has other dolls--er, other patients-in-waiting--that she must take care of this one and care for it and to have a soulful relationship to her things that connects her to this wide, expansive world and hopefully, help her move towards wholeness, towards responsibility, and towards experience.

The super-super secret origin of Baby Num

This morning we were talking about what could possibly stop Zazie’s imaginary friend, Baby Num, from eating everything up (not only all the candy in Moppie and Poppie’s candy drawer, but also all the people and the buildings and the toys and the cars and tow trucks)? See, if Baby Num goes to jail, she eats up jail, if she goes to prison, she eats up prison and then if she eats too much prison and goes to the hospital, then she eats up the hospital.

So Vik said what is she afraid of?

Baths! Oh, but then she would just eat up the bath.

Maybe she could be held in an air prison, like a tornado. She can’t eat up air.

Yeah, but could swallow it. We could just put her on Moppie and Poppie’s front porch. The gate would hold her. She would never escape from there.

Prison can’t hold her, but Moppie and Poppie’s little white picket gate is foolproof. But then there would be all that access to the candy drawer.

Vik says, Zazie do you know what superheroes are?

Baby Num’s Daddy is a super hero and her Mommy is a Princess!

Of course, for Zazie, all princesses are arch-villains, so this is the perfect origin myth where the superhero and villain marry. Of course their spawn is Baby Num. Who else?

Well, then Baby Num’s Daddy’s name is Clark Kent.

You mean Clark Kent Clemson. Her Mommy’s name is Bef. But we did some paperwork and we had to change her name.

Yes, Clark Kent Clemson and Bef Clemson. Well Clark was born on a red star and was sent on a baby-sized rocket ship to earth.

And he had to bring all the Numbies with him, right? In his pocket?

And he was found in a corn field by a kindly couple called Ma and Pa Kent.

Can they be called Ma and Pa Ol’ Joe Clark? More paperwork.

They soon discovered Clark had superpowers. He could fly, stop trains, and run really fast.

Like a gnome? Gnomes have six times the strength of humans and can run really fast, especially if they ride express goose.

Um, yes, but Clark can also fly.

Ooh, they are flying gnomes. Clark is a fairy gnome!

Clark’s Mommy made him a costume out of his red and blue baby blanket and nothing could tear it.

Like my gnome, he wears red and blue. I think his clothes are made from trees.

Well, Clark’s earth Mommy said that he had to use his powers for good.

Like to be an animal doctor?

Or to help the police, like when they can’t stop a train from falling over. And Clark’s Mommy put an “s” on his costume, because they called him…

S Train! He is the S Train, and I am the A train! (Runs away looking for her NYC Subway t-shirts).

Yes, so Clark Kent Clemson, Baby Num's Daddy, is the gnome “S Train” (which is probably for the best, as we narrowly escape the introduction of another popular media character limiting Zazie’s irrepressible imagination). And we learn a little more about Baby Num.

Dust redux

Zazie is officially obsessed with our maid, Geeta. The University is paying for a cleaning service and that comes in the form of Geeta, a lovely, strong-willed, efficient and savvy woman who lives in the nearby village.

"Why is Geeta hanging our clothes out to dry in the wind?"

"Will she wash my subway shirt?"

"Why can't Geeta spend the night?"

"Why does she help us so much?"

"Will Baby Num eat Geeta?"

"I love Geeta so much I want to eat her up."

Granted, it is strange having someone in our house. But I don't think we could do it all by ourselves. We have shiny tiled floors and live in the middle of the dustiest place in the world. The landscape reveals a country full of shameless litterers, but we could eat off of the floors. (Though it only takes a few hours for the floors to be covered with a thin layer of dust and dirt. Not to mention crumbs, but that is the three year old who likes to see if we really can eat off the floors.)

Also, Geeta speaks a little English. So for about an hour each evening, we get closed captioning to the hidden-in-plain-view intimate world that surrounds us. She gives her perspectives on things like letting us know that the pots and pans the University gave us are cheap and will melt in the fire of the gas stoves, and that Usha's night time guard keeps falling asleep, and that the generic brand of window cleaner is basically useless, and that one time, when her Dad worked at a bank, they gave him a television for Diwali. She asks if she could take the jug that our cooking oil came in from the garbage and I give her all the green chilies that the guy at the farmer's market throws in to round up to a kilo. (She helped me make dal one night: the. spiciest. thing. I. have. ever. eaten.).

The other day, Zazie and I were reading a danish folktale, "The Wonderful Pot." In the tale, a very poor and starving man sells his last possession--a prized cow--for a talking three-legged pot. The pot runs to the stingy rich man's house and gets the wife the fill him up with pudding and then the pot returns to the poor man's house and they eat for the night. The second time, he is filled with enough wheat for the poor man's family to eat for years and the third time, the pot returns with all the rich man's gold and the poor couple become rich.

Part Robin Hood, part Sweet Porridge and part Jack in the Beanstalk (the pot ultimately abandons the rich man to the North Pole), I realized that this story--already a complicated tale about poverty, greed and benevolent thievery--is made virtually untenable by our fancy housing colony's proximity to this impoverished village in India. Our colony is only separated by a short concrete wall. On one side pavement and grass, on the other, dirt roads and garbage heaps. Geeta will sweep and mop and clean until all the dirt is gone, but she always leaves the back door open. The wall between her house and mine is small. And for all the efforts to make it feel like we are hermetically sealed in an aseptic world, the wind keeps us colliding into each other.

After reading the story, Zazie said, "Why is the pot going to steal our pudding?"

I blathered something like, don't worry as long as you are kind to people and generous, everyone will always have enough pudding.

This lie is as meaningful as that short concrete wall that separates their pot from our pudding, that sweeps their dust from our tiles. It is difficult to see my sweet baby grow into this complexity, to see my little girl who doesn't see those things yet, but yet still knows we are the ones with the pudding, that we are the one who could eat off the floors, but choose not to (most of the time).

Bonanza!

Recently, Usha and I--with kids in tow--bandied about town.

That isn't us.

Well, by town, I mean the little city that is near the little village that is a bit away from our little area. Driving anywhere in India is famously horrifying. However, I really encourage everyone to try it with two children neither of whom are in car seats.

No comments please. We are working the details out.

We were going to town for blood tests. Apparently, you have to give your blood type in order to get a student id in India. And also if your spouse or father works at a university, then you need to tell someone your blood type. The clinic was clean enough. Still, we just tossed our bloody cotton balls into an open garbage can full of miscellaneous hazard. We weren't too focused on that as promising Zazie palaces made of chocolate was paramount.

However the treasure trove came in the form of a random sewing shop. It was the end of our day. Usha took her baby to sit in the car and I made mine sit--patiently, patiently--as I "went bonkers" (her words, not mine). It was an Indian trim, lace and ribbon shop.

A little bit later the shopkeeper called me pagal (hindi for bonkers) when I asked for "cut" pieces of fabric (scraps) and dumpster dived into a huge vat of fabric pieces while twelve amused tailors looked on. I am telling you it was a crafter's dream. I am thinking of selling it by the pound as my new export business. I would too. Except I am too greedy. Also, I would feel guilty because I paid only 30 rupees (about 60 cents) for a pretty big bag. Crazy? Nahi. Crazy like a fox. (That is for you, Mimi).

Finally, I thought I would send a few pictures of our drive home so you can see the competing traffic: