Twenty dollars! Twenty American Dollars? That's the admission price to the Taj Mahal. I know, doesn't seem like a lot of money, but when you've been living on 5 dollars a day and consider 7 dollars a day a real splurge, 20 bucks seems like a whole lot just to go and see someone's tomb. And what do the locals pay? 10 rupees (something in the realm of a quarter). The expensive price is just for the foreigners, which might be an ongoing theme in India. Sometimes, when exercising the limited Hindi we have learned we are granted the "Indian price" for things, which turns out is about half of the "foreigner price." Oh well, this is what we get for the advantages we've had all of our lives through a simple luck of birthplace and the fact that most tourists simply get by on English. We are rather ashamed to admit, that while most Indian kids that aren't even as tall as my hip know a passable amount of English, the first words in Hindi we learned were "hello," "how much?" and "go away."
Never the less, we suck it up double time, get up before dawn, lay down the cold hard cash and wait in front of the Taj for the sun to rise. As it turns out, the cost to our beauty sleep and wallets was very worth it. Sitting in a group of most white people as the sun shyly decided that it will come up today too. The smog prevents what might be a truly spectacular sunrise, but the Taj slowly fades from a shadow in the predawn blue-blackness to a pristine white against the clear sky.
We took pictures, lots of pictures. For a day we were the tourists of our dreams. When actually walking on the monument, you are made to where little white booties over your shoes, lest the dirt and grime of your feet scar the polished marble underneath them. It was amazing though. We were marveling (yep, marveling at something non-gastronomic- unusual for us) at how they took the most impossible structural form, the circle, and built it anyway. The front of the monument is covered in floral inlay, so perfect in its permanence. The inside of building is the tomb itself, and is a great, though inappropriate place, for the echo game.
A little background. The Taj Mahal is India's proud monument to love. A Mughal Emperor built it to house the corpse of his favorite wife. Really, it's just a gratuitous gravestone from a love story without manogomy, an interesting proposition to consider. The wife was his favorite for this reason: she gave him 14 children and died giving birth to the last of them. 14, can you imagine! No wonder she was his favorite. After construction of the Taj, his son imprisoned him for the rest of his life, the country was in poverty and the emperor spent all of their funds on a monument to love, maybe not the most fiscally responsible thing to do. He died in the prison cell, where his window faced his masterpiece, to be buried by his daughter.
I later found out, in a really random conversation with an old bearded man on the bank of the Ganges that the Mughal who had it built was actually quite the tyrant. After his monument was finished, he invited all of the artists to a feast, supposedly to reward their great work, only to chop off all of their hands so nothing equal to the Taj could ever be constructed. Apparently Americans are not the only historians to leave out the dirty details, as all of the literature we found on the Taj neglected this fact. Then again, the bearded man might have been making it up, considering this topic came somewhere between his discussion of being a medicine man and his insistence that I should write poems only about love.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Converations: Delhi
After a month in India I finally manage to write a poem. Not a good one, mind you. But a poem none the less. Criticism is more than welcome.
Conversation: Delhi
Listen You,
resonate, burlap city, germinate
my pores with dust, smog. Quiver
in barren with kinks, squinted
from rooftops. Teals, the undertow
of silk, sequins sunning themselves.
Make me obsessive
mosaic of plastic bags catching wind
like kites. Roof top city. Pump cold
showers from iron faucets to private heights,
make mazes to the ground, the primate way:
ledge to laundry line, strung pomegranate
red against white wash.
City of fat fruit, cut into tulips,
the poor man's pineapple, lined
with olive colored seeds like marrow. Murderer
of pomegranates, seed blood sticking
to your hands, fingered.
Make me- infinite city-
myopic.
Conversation: Delhi
Listen You,
resonate, burlap city, germinate
my pores with dust, smog. Quiver
in barren with kinks, squinted
from rooftops. Teals, the undertow
of silk, sequins sunning themselves.
Make me obsessive
mosaic of plastic bags catching wind
like kites. Roof top city. Pump cold
showers from iron faucets to private heights,
make mazes to the ground, the primate way:
ledge to laundry line, strung pomegranate
red against white wash.
City of fat fruit, cut into tulips,
the poor man's pineapple, lined
with olive colored seeds like marrow. Murderer
of pomegranates, seed blood sticking
to your hands, fingered.
Make me- infinite city-
myopic.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Finding our ways in Alleyways
We are back in Delhi and finally I am ready to give this city a chance. Our return was not voluntary, but in order to change our tickets from Kenya we had to return here. Back in the Pahar Ganj, back in the noise and mess of people that is Delhi.
Something has shifted; we are no longer the prey to touts and rickshaw drivers that we were upon arrival. Sure, the occasional man approaches us, trying to lead us one way or the other, but it is much less of a hindrance than it was initially. Something about us speaks that we are more comfortable and more confident than we were fresh off of the plane.
Pahar Ganj is backpacker central. After Kashmir- where the only other white person we encountered was a Canadian named Nick trying desperately to escape the snow covered civilization- it seems odd and uncomfortable to pass entire cafes full of white people. In Kashmir, we were exciting and different; in Pahar Ganj we are only unique because we don't have dreadlocks.
Which is a quick point I would like to address. Of all of the foreigner’s we've seen here, we are clearly the only people from the States. Our style of dress and the way we carry ourselves screams either Australian or Israeli to the locals. There just aren't a lot of Americans in India, or outside of the US for that matter. But there certainly are a plethora of dreadlocked, sandal clad, corduroy wearing European hippies. Not to mention the wealth of Asians in the same style. I don't have a problem with hippies, I live in Boulder after all and was once the collector of various scents of Nag Champa and wanted very badly to be the owner of a patchwork skirt.
Never the less, the hippy movement in the United States came from a very specific combination of social and political events, ones that I am quite certain did not occur in Korea or Germany. Is this style simply a fashion that migrated from the US to the rest of the world, like stilettos from Italy? Do the youth of every culture long to rebel against their parents in a way that is almost historically prescribed? Most of the hippies I know have hippy parents as well, so it no longer seems like a rebellion so much as legacy. It is odd to be on the other side of the world and still see scenes I would at home. Walking by the bookstore/cafe down the street from out predominately Korean hotel is reminiscent of strolling past the Laughing Goat in Boulder.
Yet with very little effort we are able to escape the tourist epicenter. Wander just a few blocks from the shop lined Main Bazaar and you are once again in a foreign country. Some people ignore you completely, some try and point you back in the direction of the rest of the tourists, some look at you as if you might be lost and some invite you in for tea. We pick alleyways that are colorful, full of action, deserted or daunting and see where we end up. So far we have accidentally ended up in the cloth market- where bright pink, blues and yellows are sold by the yard and adorned with rhinestone or glitter, the makings of a saree. Also we found the spice market- which I had to leave after about 10 minutes because my nose was running from all of the coriander in the air. The presence of masala spices, chilies and peppers hung in the air like dirt after a horse race, many of the men covered their mouths with scarves to avoid the coughing fits I was suffering from. Leigh licked a giant, black rock of salt, which the men decided to give to her. Now she must ship it back to the States.
Who knows what is next, we like Delhi more but long to be away from monuments and tourist traps. Our plan is this: find the place that everyone tells us not to go and go there. This puts Rajasthan and Goa out of the picture and makes Darjeeling, Bangal and Megalaya look pretty good. Suggestions?
Something has shifted; we are no longer the prey to touts and rickshaw drivers that we were upon arrival. Sure, the occasional man approaches us, trying to lead us one way or the other, but it is much less of a hindrance than it was initially. Something about us speaks that we are more comfortable and more confident than we were fresh off of the plane.
Pahar Ganj is backpacker central. After Kashmir- where the only other white person we encountered was a Canadian named Nick trying desperately to escape the snow covered civilization- it seems odd and uncomfortable to pass entire cafes full of white people. In Kashmir, we were exciting and different; in Pahar Ganj we are only unique because we don't have dreadlocks.
Which is a quick point I would like to address. Of all of the foreigner’s we've seen here, we are clearly the only people from the States. Our style of dress and the way we carry ourselves screams either Australian or Israeli to the locals. There just aren't a lot of Americans in India, or outside of the US for that matter. But there certainly are a plethora of dreadlocked, sandal clad, corduroy wearing European hippies. Not to mention the wealth of Asians in the same style. I don't have a problem with hippies, I live in Boulder after all and was once the collector of various scents of Nag Champa and wanted very badly to be the owner of a patchwork skirt.
Never the less, the hippy movement in the United States came from a very specific combination of social and political events, ones that I am quite certain did not occur in Korea or Germany. Is this style simply a fashion that migrated from the US to the rest of the world, like stilettos from Italy? Do the youth of every culture long to rebel against their parents in a way that is almost historically prescribed? Most of the hippies I know have hippy parents as well, so it no longer seems like a rebellion so much as legacy. It is odd to be on the other side of the world and still see scenes I would at home. Walking by the bookstore/cafe down the street from out predominately Korean hotel is reminiscent of strolling past the Laughing Goat in Boulder.
Yet with very little effort we are able to escape the tourist epicenter. Wander just a few blocks from the shop lined Main Bazaar and you are once again in a foreign country. Some people ignore you completely, some try and point you back in the direction of the rest of the tourists, some look at you as if you might be lost and some invite you in for tea. We pick alleyways that are colorful, full of action, deserted or daunting and see where we end up. So far we have accidentally ended up in the cloth market- where bright pink, blues and yellows are sold by the yard and adorned with rhinestone or glitter, the makings of a saree. Also we found the spice market- which I had to leave after about 10 minutes because my nose was running from all of the coriander in the air. The presence of masala spices, chilies and peppers hung in the air like dirt after a horse race, many of the men covered their mouths with scarves to avoid the coughing fits I was suffering from. Leigh licked a giant, black rock of salt, which the men decided to give to her. Now she must ship it back to the States.
Who knows what is next, we like Delhi more but long to be away from monuments and tourist traps. Our plan is this: find the place that everyone tells us not to go and go there. This puts Rajasthan and Goa out of the picture and makes Darjeeling, Bangal and Megalaya look pretty good. Suggestions?
Monday, February 4, 2008
Winter Wife
When we first got off the plan in Srinigar, Kashmir, we were a little apprehensive about what we might have gotten ourselves into. Almost immediately after purchasing the package deal to Kashmir in Dehli we read about how dodgy those deals can be. Never the less, we landed, filled out all the required tourist paperwork and found the man carrying a placard with our names on it. It has always been one of my secret dreams to de-board a plane with someone waiting for me with my name on a card. We hopped into his jeep, the nicest car we had seen in India yet, drove past an obscene number of men with guns (The conflict in Kashmir is almost entirely settled, yet the Indian army refuses to leave. The people here are not happy about it) and stopped on the side of the road. Promising to be right back, he hopped out of the car and left us there to watch the people around us.
It took us very little time to notice a trend in fashion. Kashmir's climate is a lot like Colorado, so right now it is cold. Very Cold. All of the men (we saw no women until much later) were wearing gigantic ponchos. Almost all of them had one arm out and about, doing whatever task they had taken to, and the other arm was no where to be seen. We looked at each to other, wondering, "is this a country of armless men?"
After meeting many of these men (from Rashid who tended to our houseboat, to Khursheed who promptly stole us from that houseboat into another, sparking a small war in the houseboat mafia) we figured out where all of their arms were. During the winter the men wear ferhans, a poncho made of wool, which is shockingly warm. My friend Mudasir has lent me his, and while it is way too big, it is the warmest thing I've ever worn. To make things even toastier, they carry around the Kandari, a woven basket with a clay pot inside, which they fill with lit coals. They walk around, carrying the Kandari under their ferhan, creating genius insulation. When we're lucky some of the boys we've met here will lend them to us, although mostly they don't share. They call their Kandari their "winter wife" because they rarely leave their sides, except when Leigh and I manage to steal them.
Kashmir has been a wonderful and strange adventure and I defiantly think I could stay here much longer, if there wasn't the rest of India to see. Either way, I could love to return, but maybe in the summer when it is warmer.
It took us very little time to notice a trend in fashion. Kashmir's climate is a lot like Colorado, so right now it is cold. Very Cold. All of the men (we saw no women until much later) were wearing gigantic ponchos. Almost all of them had one arm out and about, doing whatever task they had taken to, and the other arm was no where to be seen. We looked at each to other, wondering, "is this a country of armless men?"
After meeting many of these men (from Rashid who tended to our houseboat, to Khursheed who promptly stole us from that houseboat into another, sparking a small war in the houseboat mafia) we figured out where all of their arms were. During the winter the men wear ferhans, a poncho made of wool, which is shockingly warm. My friend Mudasir has lent me his, and while it is way too big, it is the warmest thing I've ever worn. To make things even toastier, they carry around the Kandari, a woven basket with a clay pot inside, which they fill with lit coals. They walk around, carrying the Kandari under their ferhan, creating genius insulation. When we're lucky some of the boys we've met here will lend them to us, although mostly they don't share. They call their Kandari their "winter wife" because they rarely leave their sides, except when Leigh and I manage to steal them.
Kashmir has been a wonderful and strange adventure and I defiantly think I could stay here much longer, if there wasn't the rest of India to see. Either way, I could love to return, but maybe in the summer when it is warmer.
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