Coconut Water and Continental Breakfasts

A trip for coconut water: I walk part of the way down the street, the traffic is heavy, I stand on tip-toe and waver, suddenly the trip becomes a choice again. I want coconut water, but I don’t feel like crossing this street, or like standing by the cart and drinking it alone while having to avoid people’s eyes. If I relax, I will meet people, lots of people and they will ask me where I am staying (nearby), why I am here (to study), what is my name, what is my number (I have so many names in my phone now I never know who is calling), if I don’t smile and try to delight them, I will feel cold and lonely. So I don’t get coconut water after all, I turn around with purpose, as though I just forgot that I didn’t turn off the stove (why do I put on these performances, these acts, in my head?), and I walk back the way I came.

I cook tonight, first, for an hour I pop peas out of their shells. At the market a woman told me they were in season and put the leafy stocks in my hands.  Gauri tells me that most people buy them pre-shelled, but I don’t mind taking the shells off one by one as I listen to Dzongsar Kyentse Rinpoche tell me about the non-duality of compassion.  Dirt and dead leaves from the plant stick to my red pants and I walk, cupping most of the foliage in my shirt, heading outside barefoot, dusting myself off. I let the small pile of green peas tumble into a pot of water. I take out the gigantic sack of salt and pour some of it into a clean yoghurt container and then take a pinch of it and sprinkle it over the now bubbling pot of water, I will need to learn how to buy smaller amounts.  When the peas taste like I imagine peas should, I drain them with a cloth and pour them into a bowl. I chop garlic, tomatoes, ginger, and onions with a butter knife. The onions are especially hard to cut with such a dull blade; I begin to rip, letting the tears drip.

Happy Makar Sankranti! Today in Pune people are flying kites and offering laddu and little multi-colored sugar sweets to one another. When I offer the little bag I bought for five rupees, friends take a few and then pour half of them back into my hand. I am told that it symbolizes a kind of sweet interchange, a very auspicious kind of 'beginning again.' Each day here has been such an adventure, such a flood of new information, that when night falls I am utterly exhausted. It is exhilarating,  eye-opening, frustrating, and beautiful, I don't think anyone could ever peel away all the layers that make up such a place. It makes me rethink all of my conceptions of culture.  The clouds of exhaust turn the sun a bright, hazy orange in the evenings and I often sit on the roof of the apartment building where the air is fresh smelling, looking out over the city. I have never before felt such an intense need to have moments of quiet. There are people everywhere, under bridges, wheeling vegetables, selling coconuts, carrying bricks on their heads, babies in their arms, cupping chai in their hands. I hear Hindi music floating from kitchen windows and the cellphones of rickshaw wallahs. More and more I see the ways in which 'modernity' problematize any static conception of 'tradition.' The cinema here has an alter draped with marigolds and lit by candles! There are such strange mixtures everywhere I look. In the morning, for 80 rupees, I can watch films in a packed movie theatre. They are so long, they need intermissions and there are never English subtitles, but I like watching the audience, which is much more engaged and expressive than at home.  The beautiful Bollywood actress always seems to transform from a silly carefree girl into a 'proper wife' who covers her arms and cries on her father's shoulder.  This story, and its implications, makes me glad to be taking a course in Women's Studies this term. We will discuss the representation of women in popular culture and the messiness of how we (I might not be contained in the 'we' the professor will be discussing) conceive of modernity in India. It is especially fascinating to hear how my Indian classmates perceive the rape in Delhi and its coverage. English courses have not yet begun, but I have been sitting in on a refresher course for college professors of Literature and have been loving it. This morning a gay, Parsi poet gave a lecture on Pound's influence on Indian writers. It was brilliant! I wish you could have heard him. The professor had a long white beard, and as he spoke I couldn’t help but feel that he was our guru.

Every morning during my first week in Pune, I would make my way across the perilously busy street and sit at a small table facing the road and a little stand that sells paan. I never tried the paan because I could see a little boy preparing the sugar mixture behind the stand pouring suspiciously cloudy water into the orange sweet jelly and stirring it with a stick he would set upon the dusty cement. When he began scraping tiny jars out with his fingers while he crouched, I decided to try paan in a place I do not know so intimately. Each morning I would sit in this little restaurant, protected from the emerging rays of the sun by a blue tarp strung between the trees for breakfast. Ordering, like everything else that is goal oriented in India, was never a straightforward affair.  I challenge you, my fellow foreigners, to try to order the “south Indian breakfast” consisting of two pieces of idli and some sambar from this particular menu and this particular waiter. Try it! Try to point, to mime, to insist as I do every morning. The waiter stares at me and smiles, his eyes look glassy. “Continental?” he says, in a melodic questioning way, nodding his head ingratiatingly, soothingly, placatingly side to side. I smile, “no, no, South Indian please,” I say. “ha, continental” he says, confirming it to himself. This "ha" is yes, but it quickly becomes more like a laugh, a light-hearted yes that is unmoored from any relationship to the question. Either he doesn’t hear me or he is sure he knows what is best. He cannot conceive of me wanting curry for breakfast. He knows foreigners better than I do. He looks at me, such a child, so confused, he smiles and turns, he will take care of me, a poor little plain milk and corn-fed creature, so lost, so out of place in this world of colour and spice. So I eat cornflakes drenched in hot milk and crust-less cucumber, butter sandwiches for breakfast and, warm and strangely comforted, I wonder if this waiter isn't right; I am far from home.