A Week in the City

What are our typical "Mumbai days" like, you ask? Predictably, they are spent for the most part working but are also filled with a sense of wonder (and bafflement, sometimes) as soon as we step outside. We do so almost exclusively by moto-rickshaw or taxis we hail, by the way, since we don't live within walking distance of anything but our lovely stretch of ocean.

The past, somewhat typical, week, included--besides the regular routine--many calls from me to the internet company that has owed us $100 for the past four months (yes, madam, I'll just call you back in ten minutes; the courier is just on his way; the courier has gotten lost) or, also, the phone isn't answering or the call failed. Such are the annoyances. Among the joys: my continuing art lessons, authentic Chinese restaurants which we continue to explore, somewhat authentic and quite good European-style restaurants, visits to markets like the famous Chor Bazaar (Thieves Market) where everything in the world seems to be sold--see the top picture.

Also, there are the religious festivals that arrive with the calendar fall; the one this past week was Govinda, a celebration of the god Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. Because, according t myth, Krishna was a naughty cowherd who stole from the village women, his day is celebrated by young men building human pyramids and trying to snatch the pot of ghee (purified butter) hanging from some power line, while they're being doused with water.

And, since the monsoon rains are finally ending, we are starting to take more trips, like the one this weekend to an organic farm owned by a hippie, hypnotherapy- and natural birth-propounding businessman tired of city living. 2 1/2 hours outside of Mumbai, it's a world of lush greenery and large village homes that adhere to a traditional lifestyle yet benefit from the prosperity that comes with being close to a large city.

We visited a village home where life was distinctly better than in the notorious Mumbai slums: there were several rooms, the cow dung-based floor was spotless and the kitchen utensils well kept. While the man of the house, a rice farmer, was having a conversation with our hotel owner, the women--his wife and two daughters--crouched in the corner respectfully, not saying a word. The only decoration was two clocks, one non-functional, and some magazine pictures, and the two light bulbs kept the space rather dark, but everything was well maintained and orderly.

We also visited the house of a local Warli artist--named after the pagan tribe that lives in this region and practices it, this tribal style is based on geometric, stylized figurines and almost always features the circular tharpa dance, with the central figure playing the tharpa, a kind of flute.

To round out the weekend, I learned how to make some of the local organic dishes we were served--flattened rice fried with spices, onions and lemon (a breakfast food), puffed rice fried again with spices and rice, and fried okra, also with spice, a popular side dish here. No such luck with learning how to make pappardum--a thin, savory cracker cooked directly over the stove burner, as seen here.

Fatty yet tasty comfort foods abound everywhere, as you see in the picture of the very deep-fried lentil cake we got at the local market.

All of the vegetable dishes we ate were accompanied by pickles--an inventive staple of Indian food; even starfruit can be pickled, as can be seen in one of these pictures. And, to add to the authenticity, the gas stove often had to give way (because of power cuts) to the hole in the ground lit up with firewood and the rooms were covered with thatch and straw and open on all sides, letting all kinds of insects crawl in. While not wild or terribly adventurous, it was the kind of getaway every city dweller must crave sometimes as a break from the daily routine.

To the South, Yet Again

This past weekend, we went back to the tea plantation of O'land, located on the border of the states Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in the south, for Misha's work retreat.

The trip started not too successfully, with us missing our flight. This July, Indian airlines changed their rules to not allow check-in past 45 minutes before the flight; earlier we had been allowed in as late as 25 minutes before the scheduled (an ironic word given how "on time" Indian flights usually are) departure.

We were punished with a flight to Bangalore the next day, from which we drove for 10 1/2 hours to our destination.

The inconvenience afforded me a glimpse of a very different, developed world, on the outskirts of Bangalore, the infotechnology capital of India--its unexpectedly broad highway, cleanness and modern, colorful buildings reminded me of nothing so much as Florida.

The drive through many provincial southern towns was also quite pleasant--while the dirt and poverty are there, they are not as glaring as in overpopulated Bombay, where people just seem to be piled on top of one another. Here was the charm of green fields wherever you looked, relaxed living and men dressed not in the typical city outfit of semi-formal trousers and shirt pulled tight over carbohydrate-eating belly, but long skirts (called lunghis) often rolled up to reveal spindly, muscular legs in the manner of a somewhat ragged male miniskirt.

The stay at O'land, the tea plantation, afforded some hikes, though with more obstructed views than last time; it is still monsoon time and the mountains were shrouded in a thick layer of mist.

There were activities planned for the 17 guests, specifically a cooking competition where we broke up into groups of three and made dinner for the rest of the group. The dishes were split between Indian and Western (lasagna, banana bread, orange chicken stew), with even more of the latter. Misha and I and one other person were the only Westerners, but many people had studied or lived in other countries; also, as I said before, these representatives of the middle and upper-middle class seem to exist on two planes simultaneously, to mix English and Hindi, watch Hollywood and Bollywood movies, etc.

Some of the remarkable Indian dishes were spicy Goan sausages (Goa, which was Portuguese until 1960, is the only region in India where pork is enthusiastically consumed) and pakoras, both pictured here. The latter is a typical Indian snack made of a mix of diced potatoes, onions, cauliflower, cheese, eggplant, green chillies and a dash of baking powder and rolled in a batter of basan (local flour), water, salt, finely chopped coriander, chopped fresh mint and a little bit of turmeric; everything is then deep fried and served with a dip of strained curd with added salt and garlic or coconut chutney.

In general, Indian cooking--aside from making the omnipresent rice--is quite fussier and time consuming than the Western kind; you can't get by with, say, grilled chicken and salad, not to mention that fresh salad is unknown in Indian cuisine because vegetables are always put into dishes and cooked.

Finally, because this is a tea plantation and tea picking happens year round, there was a tea gathering competition that Misha's younger colleagues participated in, collecting, between 12 of them in 2 hours, only 1/10 of what a typical teapicker gathers in a day.

I also got a lesson in the making of white tea--the most expensive kind because of the amount of labor involved. Once the tea leaves are gathered (they are pictured here next to the monkey-favored jackfruit), they have to be picked over to find the youngest, unopened ones. These are then dried in the sun for about ten days, and finally they're ready to brew.

Since I spent half an hour gathering the tea for one cup, my recent turn to art-making just might end up being a more profitable occupation.

Journeys in Ladakh, Part XI: Leaving Leh

The next morning we left Pangong Tso with some sadness, although our trip back to Leh lay through the remarkable monastery of Thiksey, the largest in Ladakh and home to some 16th-century frescoes of people and animals being flayed alive and other intriguing images that we believe Picasso must have looked at before he started painting. Another chapel housed a beautiful contemporary Buddha statue that the Dalai Lama is enraptured with.

Close to Leh, we visited another former royal palace of Ladakhi kings, Shey, and marveled at the 10th-century Buddhist rock carvings forgotten on its roadside. Both Thiksey and Shey had some of the loveliest views onto a mountain valley that featured a stark divide between a rocky desert and a green oasis with lush fields.

The following day, our last in Ladakh, Misha was working furiously and I strolled around the playground of Leh--a paradoxical city of 20,000 and 3,000 tourists (I know the exact number because it was in the news--Leh, as you may have read, was hit by a freak flood two days ago that sadly destroyed the homes of many Tibetan refugees living in its suburb and killed close to 200 people).

But on this July day, Leh was its usual, a peaceful, leafy place surrounded by mountains on all sides. Walking around this town for even five minutes is not the most transcendental experience, however, because you quickly realize that Leh sells just about everything from India to its tourists (for many of them, this is their one glimpse of the country, so they are eager to snap up everything from pashminas to turquoise jewelry to Tibetan singing bowls).

Speaking of the bowls, I could not resist--after spending an hour in a store chock full of them, I was fascinated. They are made of bronze and resound with an ever-escalating hum when you drag a wooden stick around them--apparently, this is a Buddhist meditation technique and can be done for hours. Somehow, after many screeching attempts, the one I bought does not resonate quite as beautifully as it did for the saleslady, but I do not lose hope.

Another, non-commercial, experience for me that day (besides tasting the delicious mountain apricots) was walking through the winding passageways of Leh to the little-known 9th-century Gokhang stupa. In the middle of a shady grove with a mountain stream running through it, the stupa is somewhat off the well-trodden tourist track, even despite the 5th-century carvings still visible on the rocks nearby. And, when I stood outside it and looked at its familiar Tibetan shape, with imprints of the craftsmen's hands still visible after all these centuries, I truly felt like I had been to a world where spirituality and tradition have not yet lost the fight with modernity.

Journeys in Ladakh, Part X: Over the Rainbow in Pangong Tso

We kept driving up the spiraling mountain road until the little village in the valley (seen in the previous day's photos) became smaller and smaller, the snow peaks became closer, and it got harder to breathe. We got out of our cars briefly at the Chang-La mountain pass--5300 meters high, in the snows, and occupied by an army station that hands out sticky sweet tea for free to travelers.

There was nothing much at this base beyond some barracks and an ecumenical Hindu temple with images of everyone from Buddha to Krishna to Jesus. One sign said "May Changla Baba Bless You." Another urged tourists not to stay for more than 20 minutes because of the danger of altitude sickness, and there were oxygen tanks on hand in case of emergency.

An hour later, traveling over almost-impassable roads full of potholes and boulders, we climbed down in altitude a bit but continued driving in the midst of tall, forbidding peaks, with no human habitation in sight. The terrain changed to rocks where Misha saw a red marmot lurking to fine, blinding desert sand. Here and there, where green oases cropped up, we saw animals grazing, and, infrequently, groups of shepherds lazily sitting by the roadside. It was a lost world.

And then, with a glimmer of blue in the distance, we reached our destination: Pangong-Tso, the semi-saline lake that straddles two countries, India and China, and is famous for its beauty, especially in sunlight. The pictures speak for themselves--sometimes we had to pinch ourselves that we were not in the Caribbean (but of course, we couldn't swim because the water was icy cold, despite the daytime heat). And the color of the water truly kept changing at every time of day.

Suddenly, a burst of rain brought forth a full, clear rainbow for about 10 minutes, so stark that you could study every color in it, an optical wonder that evidently only appears high up in the mountains.

For the night, we stayed in the village of Spituk, by the lakeside: it is a village by name alone, being more of a cluster of houses inhabited by perpetually sunburned nomadic Tibetans who come there in the summer to profit from the tourist industry and then retreat high into the mountains to graze their yaks. The accommodation was basic and the food, in this land where nothing grows, not too imaginative (rice and dal, the perpetual Indian lentil stew).

The sunset, however, was the most incredible I had seen, with parts of the sky being lit up one after another as if a giant fire was happening in the heavens.

Journeys in Ladakh, Part IX: Bedding down with the Monks

More beautiful monasteries were in store for us--none quite approached Alchi, but the temples at Chemrey and Hemis, the second-largest monastery in Ladakh, had some of the finer fresco work that we had yet seen.

In the evening, we took a walk around the lovely Hemis village, lying hidden in the mountains with its neat, almost well-to-do houses (it certainly beats being a slum dweller in Mumbai!) The people we saw, largely around the monastery, were engaged in making barley porridge in huge vats or working on repairing the monastery brick walls. They were medieval style, as is so often seen in India--hard physical labor done completely by hand, with dozens of people involved, passing objects to one another and doing a fair bit of standing around as a result.

Hemis was where we would spend the night--our path lay through the village and we needed a place to stay. While no hotels or homestays were available, a sign announced that the monastery rented out basic rooms. Little did we realize, at first, that the rooms, for which we could pay whatever we wanted (we gave around $10) would be monks' cells.

We were led to a truly tiny room, in the white mud brick passageway pictured here. It was occupied by two "beds" or, more accurately, thick carpets, perpendicular to each other, and a raised wooden surface which served as a table. There was a bookshelf built into the wall, filled with religious books and some pictures--no girls or rock stars but the Drukchen Lama, the second most important Tibetan lama after the Dalai and the leader of the Red Hat sect. There was another, locked case, in the wall; perhaps it held more interesting things. The compost toilet was outside, as was a place to wash, provided buckets of water were available. While the carpets were fairly comfortable, there was only a thin blanket--and it gets chilly at night in these parts, so some spiritual fortitude is needed.

In sum, the inhabitant of the cell truly lived like a monk. And, in the morning, up he got, in the room next to ours (since we were bedding down in his room, he moved to his neighbor's), said his prayers at 4 o'clock and, without attending the communal prayer at 7 (not an actual necessity, as we found out, or maybe our monk was just lazy), headed with the others into the communal kitchen (pictured at the top), to take his first meal of the day with his large extended family.