The Mother

Jane and I are currently staying at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's guest house. Who is Sri Aurobindo? This ignorant traveler still doesn't quite know, but I do know that he and "The Mother" - a French woman who made her home here in Pondicherry- co-founded a religion. I also know that stern pictures of them stare down at me from the walls of my room and that sort of freaks me out a bit. Whenever I say something silly I see the Mother in the corner of my eye admonishing me and wondering why I don't just pay more attention to myself and my surroundings since, as I've gathered from her quotes posted around the walls and replenished in the check in area each day, heightened awareness brings us closer to enlightenment. Whatever that means.

India is the only place I've ever been that plays host to such a wide variety of people- foreign tourists with flowing scarves and an appetite for wine, native Tamil people who have no need for shoes, even when they're riding long distance buses, and women covered almost head to toe, but are still in internet cafes- simultaneously, while seeming to give each of them something to be happy about. No wonder "pagal" a Hindi word that I loosely translate as "crazy/mad" is so popularly thrown about in film, that's really one of the only ways to explain this place.

Oh yes, and dirty. Today I had one of those moments where I felt like screaming "LET'S JUST CLEAN THIS BLOODY PLACE UP!" Why, on the coastline, in coconut tree groves, and throughout every city are there piles of filth? Why does every gutter or crevice seem to be filled with repugnant, stagnant, stanky water? I know that there are reasons. This is the world's largest democracy and plays host to more than a billion people and is practically the definition of contradictory, but please, can't we just set up a garbage system that isn't just the poorest and lowest caste people being made to haphazardly pick at and then redistribute waste? China certainly felt more polluted, but India has got dirty cornered.

Enough for now, must get back to the guest house before curfew. Since I breezed through the Babysitter's Club Book I bought on a whim today, I can now settle in for some more highbrow reading and feel slightly better about the Mother's glare.

Editor's Note.

Both parents have pointed out my poor grammar in the last post and as a result I felt that some clarification is in order: blessedly, my Nana did not die in the Salvation Army in Mumbai, rather she died peacefully in London. I just had the misfortune to find out while I was in a nasty, dirty place thousands of miles away, somewhere that I'm pretty sure my Nana would have happily given me money to avoid. In my haste and lack of attention to detail (no read out louds in Goa) I made a mistake which may have been offensive, but in some ways reminds me of Nana's letters where there were always endearing misspellings, none of them painful enough to obscure the sincere meaning behind her words.

Goa

Now that my schedule consists roughly of wake up, read the paper, sit on the beach, eat lunch, sit on the beach, splash about in the warm and calm Arabian Sea, shower, eat dinner, sleep, it seems like I have no excuse for neglecting this space.

India, as usual, has been a series of highs and lows. High- celebrating New Years in the Rajasthani desert, singing songs around the fire while our camels gamboled around, grazing on plants. Low- finding out that my Nana died after having spent a day sick in bed in the Salvation Army in Mumbai, a place where most people (though thankfully not us), get bed bugs. High- hopping tearfully in a cab to the synagogue in Mumbai and being instantly surrounded by Jewish warmth (and of course, some irritating Jews from Scarsdale). Low- hour 11 on a warm Indian train cramped into a seat with a million young Indian men and realizing that the whole car was empty except for the dudes who felt the need to surround us. High- asking them politely why they were all in our space when there were plenty of other seats to take and watching as they scatter.

And it goes on.. I think we have firmly left fort exploration in Rajasthan, which is too bad because it afforded us ample time to wander around hunting for new and exciting names carved into the walls "Raju loves Pinky," and I thoroughly enjoyed my meeting with Mr. Sharma, the resident fort palmologist. I was informed that I am very fertile, have no money problems ahead of me, am healthy and will have a good career. Unfortunately Jane and Donovan both distrusted his reading, but I prefer to ignore the inaccuracies in his reading and focus on the positives that my future has in store.

I think that's about as much writing as my chilled out mind has to offer right now. Off to read the news from New Hampshire...