Local Color

Just before I left for India, I saw a listing in the UCLA Extension catalog for a travel writing course. Among other things, it promised to teach you how to introduce "local color" into your writing. I have a bit of a problem with "local color. Edward Said in "Orientalism" and all the writers who have followed him have taught us to be suspicious of exoticising the other, visiting countries and essentially seeing a series of postcards that our own culture has prepared us to see. On the other hand, I am in India and much of it is new and different to me like the two young men squatting down on their feet and washing the marble floor of the hotel lobby with damp cloths. In California, long-handled mops are used, or, if my mother were washing the floors, it would be on her hands and knees, not squatting down on two feet, with one hand for balance and one for the mop rag. And now one of them is throwing out the water into the alley from a green plastic pail.

I am in my favorite internet place. It's not my favorite because it is faster or more reliable than any place else, although it is faster than some, but because it's in a hotel lobby and not some small, cramped, noisy hot room with too many computers in it. Also there is a toilet right here. At the moment this is not a major consideration, but you never know. Mostly, I like the space and air and view out on to the alley. It's around the corner from my first hotel. I haven't been back here since I have been sick (in case I never said, it was food poisoning), and I am enjoying it. It is village life right in the middle of New Delhi. Connaught Circle, less than a mile away, is very urban. Here there are cows, goats, horse carts, street shrines, and as I wrote earlier, food being prepared everywhere. It is such a pleasure to be back here in spite of some misgivings. There are touts and beggars, and it is here where I had the unfortunate shoe shine incident. Another young boy addressed me to day for a shoe shine and I saw the "covers" ready in his hand. By the way, I now have my own shoe shine person around the corner from my new hotel. He charges 10 rupees and although the shoes look a little oily, they do shine. I also have a motor rickshaw dispatcher. I have his cell phone number. I have a favorite stand to buy water from. A barber shop. My favorite place for a South India breakfast -- I have shifted from idli to upma. I never ate upma in the South so I can compare it and it is cream of wheat with almonds and a few spices thrown in. I think sick people should eat a lot of cream of wheat. And the spices are mostly sweet spices like cardamom. And then I have a cup of South Indian coffee and I am ready for the day, practically a native.

I became distracted from my local color lecture. You get the idea. Approach the other with open eyes, and don't make it quaint, evil or exploitable. I just have to keep stretching the frame and including more and more.

Last night I thought I was going to a recital of songs from Hindi films, and then I thought it was Bengali films, and when I got there it was a recitiation of excerpts from Bengali plays. Since I had spent the previous evening at a theater event in Urdu, I passed on the Bengali. Inside I went to a play that promised to be bilingual, and it was but the English did not translate the Hindi or even refer to it. There were English bits and much longer Hindi bits. Nevertheless, it was engaged. The play was very earnest and I'm glad I didn't understand the Hindi if it was like the English. They had created the piece in a group process so I found the evening interesting watching an Indian theater company that was obviously using the same techniques I have been using in improvising all my adult life.
I have also created set pieces from improvisation using social issues as content. Their was very didatic and there were long sections where two actors looked like they were having a conversation, but in the English bits, they were more like interwoven monologues, although each actor eventually influenced the other. It was all about intolerance, communal violence and terrorism, so every once in a while everyone would pick up sticks, bang the sticks together and shout as loud as they could. Then every one would calm down and there would be another scene. People laughed from time to time so I think the Hindi was funnier than the English text.

The play was at the India Habitat Center which is an amazing place in South Delhi. It is three large office towers connected by bridges at the top with a theater and auditorium complex in the fourth corner. The towers seem to be principally occupied by NGO's so I am not sure where all the money comes from, but it is very well done. The architecture is some of the best contemporary architecture I have seen in New Delhi, although there are a couple of other new towers that I like a lot. The events are free, although the play had this Indian system where I had to go to one counter and pick up an invitation that I presented at another counter before they let me in. I have encountered this system before. Once in Calcutta there was a great fuss about finding someone with the correct keys and digging around in an office for an extra invitation before they let me in at the door. There were plenty of seats so crowd control wasn't the issue. It was protocol. I couldn't enter without an invitation in my hand.

I am well, but I still tire easily. My two things to do today are to buy "Trains at a Glance" at the railway station and go to a dance recital by a dancer from Kerala. I have done the first and the auditorium for the second is a five minutes walk from my hotel so that's no problem. I also decided that I would write for a long time this afternoon. So much has happened and I haven't been getting it down. I haven't written much in longhand. I have put off using my computer. I need to download some programs before I can use it and I have avoided finding a place with Internet access. Now I find I could have done it all along at my hotel. The computer expert is coming by tonight and he will set me up after the dance concert. I have suspected for a while that the hotel had Internet access but I was shy about finding out, and also, I think, self-protective. I needed some alone time to just vegetate while I healed. However, now I will be able to write on my laptop in my hotel room, download my pictures and with some luck, add pictures to the posts. I haven't taken a lot of pictures but I have a few illustrations I have taken along the way.

Yesterday, my two things to do were first having lunch at Karim's. Karim's is a restaurant near the big mosque that is in all the guide books. Karim's is better than I expected, i.e., not touristy at all. I actually like touristy places, but I have been eating in a lot of them in Connaught Place. Karim's is just local people eating local food. They were mostly men, but there were some women -- some with their heads covered, and some bare-headed. I have bought a new book of Old Delhi walks. I was thinking of trying it out after lunch, but I promptly got lost and decided I had my quota of things for the day, so I found a bicycle rickshaw and was bounced to the Metro station. Although I consider myself well, my stomach is a little tender and these bouncy rides aren't very comfortable. I didn't know stomachs could hurt when bounced before. I had ordering anxiety in Karim"s but did o.k. I thought I had wimped out by ordering my chicken in spinach puree (chicken saag) and naan, but the man across from had the same thing except it wasn't chicken saag, but some red-sauced chicken. And he ate about six naan to my two. The men next to me (it's family seating), had a whole fried fish with this very thin bread. When Ben gets here, I want to try that. And everyone (except my table mate and me) had ground meat kabobs. I want some of those too.

Last night for supper, it was spaghetti with meat sauce. The sauce was very heavily flavored with black pepper and tasted very Indian. It was another case where I thought I wimped out, but the choice was good. It was very tasty and I think not too hard on my poor stomach. I try to be careful, but I like fat. I like spices. I'm in India. Get used to it, stomach. The restaurant was in Connaught Circle, but although a lot of tourists eat there it is a hang-out for the Indian middle class. Actually, there aren't really any tourist restaurants in Connaught Place (which I sometimes call a circle). It's the menu I think I'm thinking of. All of these middle class places have a lot of Western food on them, but often, like the spaghetti, in India permutations.

I have a whole list of topics I haven't covered. When I was sick, I spent a day writing down my favorite movies. This turned into a little memoir of my movie going life. When I have my laptop up and running, I hope to post this on my other blog. When I created this one, I had some trouble and created a blog and then couldn't find it. It's now nestled up against this one so I am going to use it for short stories, poems, etc. I wrote a short story while I was sick and I hope this will find it's way to this other blog. I will let you know where it is once I start posting to it.

O.K. Let's do, the Crafts Museum, Anglican churches, and three-wheelers, and then call it quits for today.

The Crafts Musem. This is a great place. Free, I think this is because it is also a market of craft goods, but the collection is very good. There is tribal and folk art from around India, although principally from the north. There are styles and types of things that I haven't seen before. I intend to go back when Ben gets here and maybe again by myself. The best part is the fabric reference collection, which is case after case of saris and other types of cloth, extended full length, but laid over each other so only about a foot of the width of the cloth is exposed. It is a vast room filled with color. Among other things, it exposes the amazing variation of India. How can there possibly be so many different ways to make a sari? And they all fall into identifiable schools and they all look Indian. I want to buy some cloth, but the variety makes it perplexing. I am flirting with the idea of having some shirts made out of khadi silk. Khadi is the homespun, hand woven cloth that Gandhi made the center piece of his vision of an India that would turn its back on the modern world. I am not sure he had silk khadi in mind. When I think of Gandhi, I think of white or unbleached cotton cloth, but nowadays, khadi comes in wool and silk as well as cotton, and in a wide-variety of cotton. There were even synthetic blends in the kahdi store. Progress is hard to escape.

Anglican Churches. I have seen two, St. James Church which is in the old Civil Lines north of the Old Delhi, and the Anglican Cathedral which is in the center of New Delhi. St. James is the older of the two. It was built as the fulfillment of a vow by Colonel James Skinner, a swash-buckling, Anglo-Indian mercenary who eventually served the British. It's a large church in white and yellow, like a big version of one of the chuches Wren built in London after the Great Fire of 1666. It doesn't have the great louvres and other ventilation systems that churches farther south in India have, so it looks more European than India. It was beseiged during the Great Uprising of 1857 and suffered much damaged but that has long since been repaired. It is where I left my notebook, the loss of which added to my anxiety during my illness, but when I was well enough to return, the notebook was given back to me with many smiles on both sides. The cathredal, which is not to far from a metro station, I found very hard to find. I was very close but I kept just missing it, and it turned out when I was almost there, I would ask a question of someone and they would head me off in exactly the wrong direction. Eventually, three policemen took me under their wing and walked with me part of the way until they felt sure that even an ignorant foreigner wouldn't be able to miss it, and they were right. I was also the victim of some bad mapping and the early hour. The few motor rickshaws that were around were all full. And I saw only one bicycle rickshaw, and the driver was having his morning bath and I didn't feel like interrupting and they often have no English at all. The cathedral, when I found it is very large with a basilican floor plan. Very grand. The prayer book is in contemporary English, but is still very Victorian compared to the American prayer book. We called ourselves terrible things from time to time. They were polite to me but not friendly, except for the Bishop who happened to be officiating and who beamed at me and touched my hand when he gave me communion. We sang familiar English hymns with gusto and a couple of lugubrious ones which even the Indians couldn't work up much enthusiasm for.

A motorrickshaw driver last night gently chided me for not speaking Hindi. This after I had told him I had sat through a play in Hindi. He's write. I'm now wondering if I can find a Hindi tutor or class in Varanasi and spend my last two weeks there learning Hindi and then take a class at UCLA when I get back.

Motor rickshaws or three-wheelers. They are my basic means of transportation. In Delhi, they are green and yellow although other places they are other colors. They have a motorcycle engine. When I was here eight years ago, most of them were started by means of a long lever which the driver pulled up rapidly, usually several times. Now, most of them start with a key, but a few have the older system. They are very handy. Last night, on the way home from the play, a wedding had spilled out into a major street, leaving only a lane for cars to thread there way through -- that's one lane for both directions so the traffic was piling up fast. As soon as my driver saw it, he made a quick (terrifying) U-turn and we took another route. The taxis and other cars were not as adept and the rapidly building traffic jam was awesome. They will also use the opposing lanes when necessary. I am not a fan of this maneuver. They wait until the very last minute to slip back into the correct lane finding a chink in a wall of vehicles that looks impenetrable to me. Delhi traffic is not for the faint-hearted, neither as a passenger nor as a pedestrian. I choose not even to contemplate what it must be like for the driver. As I said above, I have my own motor rickshaw dispatcher. This is a mixed blessing. I thought we had a payment system worked out that was only a little above what the Lonely Planet charges are for similar distances. Then last night when I asked what the charges were to the new venue where I hadn't been before, it was "What you will, You are my guest." I hate that. So I paid him want I had paid for the other destination which was not that far away. In India, when I think I know what is going on, I know I am mistaken.

My friend Ben comes late tomorrow night. That marks the end of my first stretch in India and the beginning of the second.