Treasures Dug, Things To Hold Onto For the Storms Ahead

I could tell you some days are all right and some days aren't but that's not really exact. It's more of an hour-to-hour thing... minute-to-minute. 

Thought-to-thought.

Whole blocks of time may go where I feel engaged, happy, and optimistic. But there has not been a day gone by when I have not had to think about loss. About never having one more lingering conversation, one more revelation, one more laugh. To know she's gone.

This is inevitable. I stumble upon articles on anthropology, lefty politics, child rearing, and start thinking: "What would Jennifer make of this?" I hear songs and I think of her and then all the books and films that I knew she enjoyed or would enjoy. There are so many things in this world, that only with her I could share, for we had our own language, with its own codes and symbols and jokes. As a friend wrote me of a memory from 2001 of witnessing the two of us after drinking way too much coffee:

the two Lotmans turned into a pair of flying, autistic monkeys, bouncing off walls, dodging, and running in and out of doors, little kids with their private language and unbounded energy. It was something to see, that is, from a middle-aged perspective. And that's when I knew that you and your sister were twinned, not by birth but by disposition and circumstance.

This cache of sibling ciphers now amputated, means so much more than it once did but has no more energy to run. It's gone.

So I go on, without her, but wonder how much will be lost when I "move on." Will "acceptance" entail putting it all in a tiny box, only to be taken out when crying is permitted, when sighing is the only sound I have in my heart? Will that box within eventually be misplaced so that what was once was my sister, Jennifer Lee Lotman, slips into abstract form? What then? 

The wise people remind me, Be thankful for what you've got. 30 years of Jennifer in my life is more than anyone else in the world save my parents. It's to be celebrated as much as mourned. 

There are things we can hold, thoughts we can cherish.

I want to share with everyone this video, which Jennifer discovered somewhere. It is a Brazilian anti-globalization video from the 1970s that she translated and then recorded in English for an anthropology class that she was teaching in Binghamton. I know how much she appreciated clarity of thought and in just under twelve minutes, these filmmakers reveal the tragedy of our economic system. It is wonderful for me, not only the content, but the chance to be able to hear her voice.

You would not believe how something like this affects the preciousness of everyday objects.

Scouring through computer files and old journals for traces of the past, I get lucky occasionally. For example, I found this video, where she sings to Miles:

Four years ago I went to visit her in St. Affrique, France, via an eight-month journey through the Middle East and Africa, where I had enjoyed many adventures and undergone difficult trials. I was feeling tough and brave and very much my own man.

But arriving in St. Affrique I discovered my sister had become a woman, a mother, a pastoral goddess. Miles was just five weeks old and very much in love with his mother. The French countryside, as lovely as you can imagine, was just a five-minute walk from their doorstep.

This is a diary entry I have from that time: 

It was mostly foggy with winter moving in but the one day we had a perfect sun we hiked through the forests to a Paleolithic tomb. Along the way we picked mushrooms. Jenni knew which berries were edible and which were poisonous, what was ripe and what was not worth picking. We plucked grapes and spat out the seeds.  She could spot a fig tree from a kwong (sp?) and praised fig leaves for their use as an alternative to toilet paper. She was in touch with the land in a very unique way, benefitting from its yields in a method I thought that many of the people I'd met in the Middle East and Africa--in their rush to modernize--were forgetting.

We had waked over six km and decided it would be sensible to hitch back. Because there were four of us Benoit walked ahead while Jenni and I remained behind at the T-junction. She'd done her masters thesis on hitchhiking and was teaching me the nuances. Full cars were obviously forgivable but single passenger vehicles could be condemned as it was Sunday and they likely knew that there was no public bus available to us. Drivers paused at the junction, looked us over, and drove right past! Four-wheel drivers, forget it: heartless, ungenerous personalities. There wasn't much traffic and the passing motorists couldn't be bothered to consider our circumstances. I grew despondent. I felt the human race was selfish, lacked empathy. Samaritan instincts had dried up and chivalry was an antiquated virtue. "Don't worry," my sister consoled. "Don't lose faith. I get depressed too and then one car will stop and pick you up. They take you where you want to go, expecting nothing in return except a little conversation, if that. One good person makes up for all the bad."

Within five minutes of her solace, we were picked up by a chef on his way to work. He took us home. Again, her faith in humanity had been redeemed.

More difficult for me to move through was this entry, which described our last night together before I was to board an early morning bus to Montpellier and the train onwards to Barcelona:

Back in the apartment Benoit picked up two Guienneses and a bottle of wine. He said they'd have failed as hosts if I didn't leave with a hangover. Jenni cooked stirfry tofu while I packed. We talked to Mom and Dad separately. We mulled over our fates. Benoit wanted to play dominoes but we talked about our past and the future if we could buy a house anywhere in the world and live together with our families. We looked at a map of the world for a long time and decided on Vermont, Chile, Morocco, and Thailand--somewhere stable politically but we were aware that nothing in the world was forever. But this house wouldn't even have to be a place to live; it could be a refuge. We talked well into the night--what would have become of us if one of us had never existed?

Sadly, the question has evolved into something else entirely. Another dream is farewelled for good and I can only wonder at the laughter and love lost in its passing. 

I look into her son and the stories and memories of her friends. 

There, she lives on. 

Elegy for a Courageous Anarchist Bird-watching Sister

You don’t know what you’ve got until its gone.

It’s probably the simplest, most straightforward maxim regarding the mourning of what’s been lost to us. No matter how large this pearly wisdom shines when you’ve held it in your clammy hands, it seems to belong in someone else’s net. For tragedy is unimaginable. You’ve spent your whole life recognizing patterns and the square pegs fitting into square holes. Nothing out of place, as everything arrives with a nearly fatalistic clockwork: a meaningful narrative, riddled with setbacks but leading towards some grand purpose revealed at the end of our lives, as it had to be, as we always thought it would.

I write this listening to Paul Simon’s “Concert in the Park, August 15, 1991.” It used to belong to my sister. The listening is a seed to various trees of thought: she was thirteen years old when Simon sang this in Central Park; she was supposed to go to NYC for the first time in March to attend an anthropological conference; she and I listened to the album, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” a lot when I was staying with her in a village in France over two weeks in the autumn of 2005. I hear Simon sing about the “Sounds of Silence,” and the lyrics have a novel context for me, one that cannot be easily dismissed. They convey not silence but emptiness and the foreverness of that.

Context: for me it is shapeshifting my view of the world, molding new emotional responses to an old set of words that have taken on a tragic resonance: simple, everyday words like “sister,” “sibling,” “death,” “she died,” “pneumonia,” “ashes,” “Upstate New York,” “Jennifer.”

The fifth of May. In Mexico, it’s called Cinco de Mayo and in Japan it’s Children’s Day. It’s supposed to be a special, happy day. It’s supposed to be celebrated. My parents were married on May 5th, 1972. And my sister, Jennifer Lee Lotman was born on May 5th, 1978. My parents are no longer married. And my sister is no longer alive.

My sister, who handled her words with the delicacy of a collector arranging flowers in a Ming vase, would probably have minded my saying that she was the best sister a person could ever have. As a student of anthropology, she would criticize me for my subjectivity and as someone sensitive to nuance, she would likely be critical of such absolutism. But I cannot help myself. I have always been a sentimentalist and have therefore been very busy with memory over the past month.

We played as children, though we were indoor kids, rather than outdoor ones. Toys, computer games, board games. Role playing. Comic books: she introduced me to the X-Men when I was hero-worshipping Batman, Spiderman, and the Incredible Hulk.  We spent many afternoons drawing together and putting dialogue into the avatars' mouths. 

As teenagers we drifted apart.  I decided on a conventional path: sports and girls. Drinking buddies. She got into Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Morrissey. She published poetry, read French literature.  She went to art school at Oberlin and wound up in Santa Cruz. Eventually she moved to France and moved around there for six years. There anarchy became not an idea but a way of life. A practiced philosophy. She never backed down on a protest. With her thumb pointed out, she traveled freely throughout the continent, doing her masters there on hitchhiking. In French. An oral presentation.

By the summer of 2001, whatever adolescent hang-ups we might have had with one another was behind us. I was visiting her in Paris. I remember in particular a lovely afternoon with her in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise. We had gone for a long walk alone, after a meal at a Moroccan restaurant and wound up near the stone for Oscar Wilde. We spoke of each other's dreams, of our loves, and our secrets.  Childhood and the future. After so many years managing on our own, we had become friends, finally, and we would never have another fight again.

Simon says:

And I see losing love

Is like a window in your heart,

Everybody sees you're blown apart,

Everybody feels the wind blow

In Binghamton I took the Paul Simon CD home with me after driving with my mother for the last time to Binghamton, New York to pick up my sister's things. It had been a melancholy drive, pouring rain, sleet; knowledge that she would not be by the kitchen window when we pulled into her parking spot, heating some soup she discovered in one of the various cookbooks my mother had sent her. 

The apartment, nearly always dark because of the inadequate natural light and already inclement New York winter weather, had a foreboding quality when we entered. Toys were scattered through the den and bedrooms higgledy-piggedly, signaling the abruptness that had interrupted our days. Like gravediggers, we were hunting for souvenirs of what my sister had left behind, something to help the living. In her office, we excavated some of her papers—I was crazy to find anything she might have written, particularly in her characteristic cursive. My mother looked in vain for Jennifer’s wedding dress as well as her eyeglasses.

I took with me her binoculars, which she must have used to watch for birds. Or riot police. Or the margins. The small stuff.

I filled the car with books from her doctorate studies, but that very well could have been there for her personal pleasure: Chomsky’s “What Uncle Sam Really Wants,” Levi-Strauss’s “Tristes Tropiques,” “Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective,” “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America,” “Scenes From the Bathhouse and other Stories of Communist Russia,” “Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace,” among many, many others. You can get a good idea of who a person is when you peruse their library shelves. I cleared the bookcase, filling the back of the car with stacks of books, planning to read them, all of them, no matter how many years it would take me— hoping that once I’ve absorbed their ideas, in some way I will be able to carry on my sister’s spirit as she might have intended.

One book that particularly stands out is “We Are Everywhere: the Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism.” Inside the book on page 286 is a woman dressed up like a magic peacock fairy being chased by about ten policemen in black riot gear. “Balls to the IMF” it says in the caption. It’s from a protest in Prague, the Czech Republic. The picture is dated September 26th, 2000. This was the day and place when and where my sister met her husband, Benoit Vincents.

Simon says: Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together.

Benoit is a third-generation communist from a family of Parisian architects. He is tall, blonde, lanky. When they met my sister could barely speak French. Within a year she was fluent. She and Benoit spent the next six years hitchhiking throughout Europe. They opened squats in Marseilles and Paris and ran a library for immigrants and activists.

In the novel that I wrote about my family, I turned Benoit into Khalil, a French born Arab. I did it for dramatic purposes as well as to politicize the novel.

Their lives were pivotal enough without my distortions.

In addition to Paul Simon, I took with me U2’s “Joshua Tree,” The Cure’s “Staring at the Sea: The Singles,” a compilation called “Surf Beat Behind the Iron Curtain,” Dead Can Dance’s “Toward the Within,” Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet,” and an Italian punk group called CCCP Fedelialla Linea.

You can also tell a lot about a person’s interests by their musical tastes.

Something Benoit told my family when she was sick in the hospital: that my sister loved the CD compilations I used to send her. That when school and bureaucracy became too much for her to handle, she would shut the door and turn on one of my mixed CDs very loud. Privately, she would dance to the music for about thirty minutes or until she had exorcised whatever troubled her. Now knowing this only after her passing, I see it as a communion we had, though I had not known its intimacy.

Benoit played these compilations when my sister was in a coma, dying. Her hands and feet had turned purple from the lack of circulation. By this time, her pneumonia had become septic shock in which all her blood was working just keeping her vitals going. But her organs were already failing at that point and the doctors were not sure how much oxygen her brain had been deprived of. They had given her a 20% chance to survive. Benoit played the music, the music I had in mind that would organize her rhythm into dance steps, but now intended to diffuse through dimensions into some kind of consciousness not yet lost to us.

Like me trying to carry her on by reading her books, a husband hoping the splendidness of music could be absorbed by his wife, fast asleep and falling deeper into the place where no whispers are heard, where no laughter forms.

Another thing about music: at the memorial service in Binghamton, New York, Benoit stood before the audience and spoke of how when nihilism got the best of him and gloom and doom became his voice, my sister would put on the folk song, “I’m Just Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail.” He spoke how she would sing the lyrics and dance around him until he managed to turn a smile.

Hope: that was the feeling she promised, even when it seemed there was none.

At the funeral, Benoit played the song as their three-year-old son Miles Raphael ran up and down the room, laughing—no idea what had become of his mother. Me, like nearly everyone else in the room, shuddered with our tears.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Jennifer intended to complete her doctorate in France. She was supposed to do this in Vannes, a lovely coastal town in Brittany. There she planned to work with recovering heroin addicts on alternative treatment programs. She wanted to understand the nature of addiction and treatment within a certain political economy, how “micro-level and macro-level structural contexts lend themselves to an equivocation between the objectives of therapy and social control.” To quote further from her application to a foundation for scholastic funding, Jennifer wrote, “The applicant’s aspiration is that the confrontation and alliance of different theoretical perspectives will forcefully contribute something new to anthropology.”

“How did you learn how to write like this?” I wrote to her, completely bamboozled by the language of academia. She responded that you “learn how to write like an academic or you get the boot.”

Because of my extensive traveling, my mother likes to tell people that I am at home anywhere, with kings and paupers. But it’s my sister who learned the languages to survive. Who could speak French with an Algerian refugee and then teach him his civil liberties… who having hitched a ride on some woebegone country road could keep the long-distance driver awake deep into the night with her storytelling… who was bound to learn the language of addicts and what there was to help them in their recovery.

Me, I come and go, there and back again. Like a ghost.

She was supposed to finish the year in France.

She was supposed to visit me in Japan this year.

I have been living or traveling from Tokyo for the past six years. Because Jenni lived in France for much of the decade we only saw ourselves intermittently. I always expected that there would be time enough for travel together, that our future had at least another fifty years and that another fifty years was a very long time indeed. Meanwhile, she finally had some money saved and was intending to spend a week in Tokyo.

When she was put in a coma and things went from a 50/50 chance of survival to possible organ failure, my imagined experience of us skipping through streets together was how I meditated upon her recovery. I thought if I could just concentrate hard enough on simple pleasures—sipping coffee on my balcony in the mornings, karaoke in the afternoons, dancing at nights, the food, temples and parks, Jenni discussing topics with Ariko’s mother in French, long, long walks together where we talk and talk: I so very much wanted to see Japan through her eyes, to hear from her what I might have missed while taking things for granted—if I focused on these inspirations I could somehow bring her back. These visions were how I self-medicated during her illness, these unanswered prayers.

For I never ever thought she was supposed to die.

When the doctors had become infectious with their pessimism, my father had to sneak a mobile phone into my sister’s room. It was against hospital regulations but my father wanted me to have the chance to say goodbye. I had had the idea that he do this as well before he had offered. But I had no intention of saying goodbye.

Because she was not supposed to die.

Although she had been in a medicated coma for five days already, he cupped the phone to her ear. I said many times, many, many times, “Come back to us, Jenni. I love you.” And I told her of all the fun we would have in Japan and that if she wanted, I would fund us to go to Thailand or India and we would go hiking in the Himalayas or swim in the Andaman Sea and that within a year she would get better but in the meantime I would take care of her. I told her how we would never-ever take time for granted again.

Simon says: Who am I to blow against the wind?

I had been in America with her the day she caught the ill breeze that had infected her. By the time my mother contacted me in Japan a few days after my return, she was at the hospital in an induced sleep. With dire prospects.

The reason I had been in America was because of my grandfather’s funeral. After a long bout with cancer, he was going to be buried in Arlington Cemetery with a 21-gun salute, a hero’s sendoff.

It was unseasonably warm for February. And the sky a rich blue fancied by poets. My sister looked beautiful in a black dress and silver fringed shawl. In contact lenses and tights, her hair shoulder length and brushed back she did not look like an academic so much as a folk singer. For all the sadness a funeral deserved it had been a happy day for us and my mother and sister lingered as long as they could in the Washington area before the long drive home to central Virginia. Because we were saying goodbye and we didn’t know when the three of us would manage to be together again. My mother said that after we fare-thee-welled, my sister talked about how much she wanted to turn the car around and spend just a little bit more time with me.

On the way home, Jenni insisted on stopping by the market for flowers. It was the twelfth of February and she wanted to Valentine my mother with some carnations.

When she was at the hospital with a temperature of 104 and was coughing blood she insisted that my mother leave her side to go to the market and buy her husband cigarettes. He was at home watching their young son and she knew that he needed his comforts too.

Nothing better reveals my sister’s character: to be on her deathbed, considering her husband’s tobacco fix. It’s always the small things that say so much.

Six days later she was dead.

6:30pm. Saturday the 21st of February. A Sunday morning in Japan.

I flew out the next afternoon for an evening service.

Everyone tells me that I was lucky not to be there. That after the bacteria and antibiotics had worked their way through her system she was not Jennifer anymore, as she had been physically disfigured by her illness. My father’s girlfriend told me that her death had to have been painless, that according to cancer patients who had survived such comas a person feels like he or she is “floating in a warm blue ocean.”

At the service in Fredericksburg, Virginia, two days following her death, my father said to me, “I really need to get back to Los Angeles, but I can’t seem to get motivated to do so because I keep thinking that if I stay here, she will come back but if I leave she will be gone.” And his voice broke halfway through this observation.

I knew what he meant.

When would death become real? When I read through the death certificate? When I open the box to sift through her ashes (she had been cremated with her high school journals—secrets taken to her grave)? Does it have to be real? Is it unhealthy for me to imagine what would have come if she had managed to visit me in Tokyo this year?

The essayist Joan Didion wrote a memoir about the year she lost her husband of 39 years, John Gregory Dunne, in which she described this exact fallacy of thought. She called the book, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

Contexts: I’d read it a year ago and moved on easily enough to another book.

This second time around, I got it.

When I discuss my sister’s life with friends and family, they tell me how lucky she was to live life on her terms, that she had been extraordinary and lived as a burning candle, burning so bright before being extinguished, exhausted by her exertions.

Death, the realists point out, is inevitable and that it is best to get on with our lives. They speak of a course of action, like “acceptance,” and “moving on” but I have had to experience her death every night in dreams since this tragedy erupted nearly a month before. What does “moving on” entail? Sweet dreams? A good night’s sleep? An end to the hypothetical “What if…?” questions. A day in which I do not think about Jennifer and feel a profound sense of loss?

For as a writer I had lost my best editor. For as a brother, I had lost my greatest link to childhood. But do not feel sorry for me. I had thirty years to witness my sister in her many incarnations, to observe her maturation and appreciate her inspirations. Feel bad for her three-year old son. Feel bad for the education he has irretrievably lost.

I should consider myself lucky. We had as fond a relationship as a brother and sister could. There is really nothing to regret about the past. But it is not what’s unsaid, but what’s undone. Fifty years of living shared. Kids and grandkids and books written and cultures observed and so much laughter between the two of us.

Last night I dreamed she had survived her sickness. In this alternate reality that only dreams can compose I had a letter from her in my hands (written in her lovely cursive) in which she described the longest dream she had ever had and what it had been like to wake up from her coma and how thankful she was to be alive.

Long before, when my life had been normal and cast full speed ahead, the night before she checked into the hospital: I received a phone call about ten a.m. Japan time. Too hungover to answer when I awoke and seeing that I had been rung by my mother's house, I had not bothered to return the call, busy as I had been with a day of work.

Later after the dust had settled I had asked my mother if she had called me that night. She had not. It had been Jennifer, with a little less than twenty-four hours of consciousness left in her life, seeking me out. She had not left a message. I can only imagine what she had wanted to say. I can only do my best not to let the regret burn too badly.

At the wake in Binghamton, New York, Jennifer had a remarkable turnout of professors, colleagues, students. The head of the department came over to me and in expressing his condolences told me that Jennifer had been one of the best thinkers the university had ever had and she had been bound to make an impact, whether it had been in the field or as a pedagogue. A woman crossed to the microphone. Hesitant to speak at first, she revealed that she had a serious problem and when she looked for support no other teacher was willing to help her until the end of the semester. Only Jennifer responded to her inquiry for help, "Just tell me when you need me and I'll be there."

A friend of hers told me that in a bar the month before her illness her friends were being hassled by a large, drunken, bellicose Iraq vet and it was only Jennifer who had the chutzpah to confront him directly, defending their honor and pacifying the situation.

I say: In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by her trade.

At the wake one of her friends, clearly impressed, commented to me that the first three rows were taken up by her undergraduates. Two of these students approached the microphone to say their piece. They were 18 years old, freshmen, at the point in their lives when anything can happen, when you are making philosophical declarations that will guidepost you for whatever was to come. They spoke of inspiration, how my sister had shown them that there are many ways of seeing and to never take any one truth to be self-evident. That this receptiveness—open eyes, open mind, open heart, would reveal things of this world to them not yet discovered. And it was Jennifer that showed them how it could be done.

My sister: a giver of contexts, a sharer of secrets.

Knowing Jennifer she probably would have found my sentimentality amusing and that she might resent me for trying to find some lesson in her life, for as she wrote in one of her short stories, "Anarchists don't trust any moral to any story anyways."

Nevertheless, as I struggled with grief over a loss that could never be quite filled, I told the standing-room-only audience that there was but one direction from which we should move in honor of my sister’s memory and that she would not be happy if we were to be remiss:

Live brave.

Live true.

Live free.

And live with love.

Two Sides of the Same Bridge

A highlight for travelers visiting Africa is white-water rafting the Nile just north of its principle source, the great Lake Victoria, near the town of Jinja, Uganda. There are five Grade 5 rapids, several points of Grades 3 and 4, and inevitably the inflatable rubber raft you ride capsizes, the violent current swallows you whole and tumbles you like a filthy sock, but because of your life jacket you are spit back up towards the surface. There are crocodiles lurking in the area, but the agency that sponsors these excursions has the rafts escorted by members of the Uganda Olympic squad, who kayak ahead chasing off carnivorous predators with good solid paddle whacks. As a preliminary, release forms are signed beforehand and when you are being helplessly tossed about the foamy currents, the thought crosses your mind that a crocodile bite would hurt, perhaps gravely. Much of the thirty kilometer journey, however, is a torpid, tranquil drift downriver, eating watermelon down to the rinds, gabbing about 'where you from?' and gazing with lazy, sunburnt eyes at the jungle-- a lush and flourishing wilderness crowding the river's edges. The boat courses through a quiet, undeveloped Africa, not quite tame yet not very mysterious either. Something, some unquantifiable emotion seems to be missing, or perhaps it has just been lost.

At the end of the journey, the rafts capsize for the last time. The tourists are thrust into the rapids where two strong currents collide to form a whirlpool nicknamed 'The Bad Place.' Afterwards, soaked adrenaline junkies tramp up the hillside (there are porters to take care of the rafts) where a large banquet has been prearranged in a large, grassy picnic area overlooking the river. Stacked on huge plates are piles of grilled pork, fried chicken, and salads. The coolers containing ice-cold Nile Specials, the local Ugandan beer, are completely raided within thirty minutes. Later that night at Bujagali campsite, amid conventional rock and roll anthems and the cash bar making a handsome take,  the rafters are called together to enjoy a DVD production edited to bam-bam go-go music from The White Stripes and Nelly. The video stars we rafters, being smashed and throttled and occasionally surmounting the brutish currents heroically. Much whooping and whistling punctuate the larger wipeouts.

Of course the DVD is available for purchase, $45, which sounded to me a bit of a kick in the stomach after the $95 price tag charged for the trip itself. Cash preferred but credit cards are accepted with a five percent surcharge added. "Sweet!" was the buyer's exclamation handing over his greenbacks. A prefabbed memory, now post-packaged.

This is the other side of Africa. Not all the continent is defined by civil wars, diamond mines, child soldiers and the smuggling of antiquities. A busy industry for outdoorsmen in particular thrives on the border of darkness from which Kurtz never returned. Enjoying Africa at its most picturesque or romantic is not for cheapskates. It takes a solid credit rating to go on safari ($65 to $200 a day), to climb Kilamanjaro (at least $800 to do it appropriately) or even visit an economically disadvantaged South African township ($50).

Many of the continent's prime visiting centers run a very sophisticated tourist infrastructure. These businesses are run with foreign capital catering to a clientele almost uniformly Euro-American (there were no African tourists getting dunked in the Nile when I was there). Perhaps that would be inevitable in a pattern that many Africans perceive as an outgrowth of neo-colonization. According to international trade laws operating ostensibly in the interests of debt-ridden Third World countries (encouraging foreign investors to do business in Africa requires a hefty lure), transnational companies build branch offices, use trademarks and most importantly, repatriate their earnings. Thus, lucrative profits cannot be taxed by the host country, denying revenue for improving basic infrastructure. There are many ugly words for this sort of parasitism, but the designation ballyhooed by boosters is the much more marketable term, 'globalization.'  

Perhaps nothing emblemizes this trend better than enormous 4WD utility vehicles preferred by young backpackers on overland journeys. Customized itineraries between Masai Mara and Cape Town provide the tourist with a desired experience without having to get one's hands dirty. These monster cars are designed with optimal window space: mobile isolation chambers perfect for gawking at perceived dangers, whether they be maneating lions or savvy street hustlers in Nairobi.

photo by ARIKO

About a thousand miles south of Jinja, on the southern tip of Zambia lies a town called Livingstone.  The square concrete one- and two-story units and bubble-gum advertising remind me of an ordinary town in the California suburbs. It is a rather unremarkable place, colorless for an African city. However, the ubiquity of billboard signs, upmarket hotels, and big family restaurants suggest prosperity. There is money to be made in Livingstone, a boom town in the vicinity of Victoria Falls, arguably the greatest waterfall in the world.

Victoria Falls (another colonial sticker) is known among locals as Mosi-oa-Tunya in the indigenous Kololo language: 'The Smoke that Thunders' (a much more appropriate appellation). At 1708 meters wide and falling between 90 and 108 meters it is the largest waterfall on earth, so large in fact, that it straddles two nations, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In 1855 its Anglican name was christened in honor of the Queen of England by the Scottish explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone, who was exploring the interior of Africa by means of the Zambezi River. Today, most backpackers have given it the shorthand epithet 'Vic Falls.'

Because of its runaway inflation and resulting crime waves, I had no intention of visiting Zimbabwe, content to view the cataract on the Zambian side. The lip of the falls is accessed along a pedestrian walkway. The morning I was there was bright and beautiful, the park crowded, mostly with African tourists. Engaged couples come here for wedding photographs, as cascades (think Niagara Falls) for some reason have always figured prominently in the romantic psyche. An ebullient atmosphere pervades the occasion and the rising mist from the surging torrents feels cool on this warm, winter day.

The falls of Mosi-oa-Tunya are a phenomenon to itself, but for some it's just another waterfall. For those with greater expectations, numerous activities abound. Livinstone and its sister city on the Zimbabwe side, Vic Falls, are competitively self-aggrandizing, both boasting credentials to be Africa's adrenaline capital.  From either side of the falls extreme sports enthusiasts can arrange skydiving, bungee jumping, microlighting, abesailing, white-water rafting and canoeing on the Zambezi, gorge-swinging, river-boarding, horseback riding, elephant-back safaris, tandem kayaking, jetboating, and sunset booze cruises. 

It's all there. All you need is the cash.

I didn't have the cash or at least I didn't have money allocated for bungee jumping but I did want to check it out before I left. The jumping point was not at the falls themselves but a fifteen minute walk outside the national park to a bridge that represents in both physical and psychological terms the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. To access the bridge immigration officials issue you a sightseeing pass allowing entrance into this 'no-man's land.'

The jump is into a huge ravine carved by the Zambezi and extraordinary geological forces. It is the second-highest jump in the world and when I arrived at the site it was a hullabaloo. I did not see any alcohol but a fiesta temperament prevailed. I could not believe the Top 40 teenybopper punk shrieking from tinny speakers (wouldn't you think the thunder emanating from the world's greatest waterfall had already enhanced the drama of the moment?). Those yet to take the fall paced the railing in the anticipatory adrenaline rush while the just-initiated, flushed and effusive, were frothing with excited, hurried talk. Jumpers on the platform sported huge 'can't-blame-me-for-trying' grins. You could see their chests rising with great gulps of air, the survival instinct manifesting itself-- a contact high that makes your own heart begin to rush when the countdown is cried by the gleeful participants.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One!"

The jumpers plummeted into the gorge, popping back up with the 'hang loose' sign, A-oking their dopamine high before bouncing away again like ham dangling loosely from a tethered meat hook.

What is particularly surreal about the experience and sums up the two conditions of this continent with alarming eloquence is the stream of Africans on the other side of the bridge shuffling along. They look exhausted, weak, and some of them from the condition of their clothes, nearly indigent. Why were they crossing this bridge? For family? work? a new beginning? And what did they think of the sport of wealthy white men hurling themselves into oblivion for a hundred dollars a pop when there was a famine of maize crop in Zimbabwe and 50% unemployment in Zambia? They passed on the other side of the bridge inconspicuous to the jumpers because they did not get in the way and hardly made a sound.

I watched three guys find their rush, a future cocktail boast, and returned to the falls. On my way at the Zambian checkpoint a large clunker of a bus coughed to a halt in front of the fenced gates. The roof of the bus was loaded with suitcases, garbage bags, even furniture, perhaps the total belongings of some of the passengers. One of the park's many baboons, a curious and mischievous rabblerouser leaped onto the roof and moseyed through the chattel, scavenging for edibles. An apoplectic driver hopped out of the bus and shook his fist at the primate, who reacted to the man's curses indifferently. Travelers, slouched and exhausted, filed past the driver expressionlessly to present their passports and paperwork to immigration officials so that they could cross the bridge, where they would rejoin the bus and continue onwards towards wherever they were headed, to Zimbabwe, or beyond.
Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

The Serendipity Factor Divided by the Butterfly Effect

Those skilled in 'Where's Waldo?' workbooks would perform admirably in any sort of safari but particularly in one in which we are searching for the Siberian Crane. You presume we would have to journey into the Russian heartland in order to spot this large and gorgeous bird, yawning its dazzling wingspan, wading in some ice-cold creek, scouring for small fish with an elongated, orange beak. Well, the Siberian Crane is a migratory bird, sensibly fleeing the miserable Russian winter for the savannah plains of Keoladeo National Park in India's eastern Rajasthan. Only, this year, as it has been annually for nearly a decade, the rains failed, the monsoon didn't hit and the water levels at the park looked depressingly shallow. So the birds did not come, flying the proverbial coop, resulting in a tranquil landscape, but eerily so.

Fortitude, patience, and an encyclopedic knowledge make bird watching quite worthwhile; skills most of us lack in considerable sums. Nevertheless, I journeyed into the park optimistically. Hardly an expert on the birds of South Asia, I was mostly excited to ride a bicycle through a national park. Before that, I hired the service of a cycle rickshaw driver hoping he might acquaint me with the prime vista spots.

Unfortunately, he was able to reveal very little. The birds must have flown across the continent, thousands of miles, bursting with anticipatory glee for the Indian winter only to be disappointed by the water levels and compelled to continue their peregrinations. Or had their expectations already been lowered considerably? Maybe this year they flew right by, or simply paused long enough to rinse out the dust.

As we rode past kiosk signposts with illustrations of the migratory birds, the rickshaw driver mumbled in a low voice, "No come." The greylag goose: "No come." The Asian Open Bill Stork: "No come." The truly radical Painted Stork: "No come." But he pointed out the kiosks, regardless-- something to look at since there was nothing much moving in the trees. "Many parrot sightings," someone at the hotel had quipped facetiously. He might have added crows, swallows and various sundry fowl familiar from home.

There are no Big Five birds to market the pastime (as there is such a trademark in African safaris where you can count on five fingers your sightings of rhinos, cape buffalo, elephants, leopards, and lions). Like all cultural subgroups, birders have a particular vernacular that isolates them from the greater population who "doesn't get it." One theory that explains their phenomenon is its relation to the male hunting instinct. Another is that it appeals to the male habit of "systemizing" (men are disproportionately represented in this particular pursuit). Birders can be handy if you are in the market for new binoculars or a telephoto lens. Of course they have a thriving online presence. On birdwatching.com, you can peruse new technologies ("gifts for birdwatchers"), advice on birding with your kids, tips for "watching birds with your ears", and even a special section entitled "Birding for Hard Times," which contains a number of bromidic themes referring to the activity's high returns on a low-cost investment: stress relief, good exercise, family fun, friendship, and happiness: "the ultimate wealth." However, in Keoladeo, morale was low among the amateur ornithologists, birders, and bird nerds, who grumbling into their zoom scope, spoke wistfully of better days.

Riding through a small, narrow path on my bicycle I spotted an altogether different sign posted explaining all so much: "In your next incarnation you might be an endangered species. Please help save the Siberian Crane." Appealing to one's better karmic instincts is a nice maneuver, especially in a Hindu nation. However, as far as animal conservation goes, India's karma is somewhat dubious. Bureaucracy has done little to heed the warnings of animal rights activists. The Bengal Tiger-- one of the symbols of India's majestic history and its many kingdoms-- is near extinction. As for the birds, the droughts have not helped. Yet even when the monsoons don't fail, there is not enough water for India's ever-expanding population. And as tourism and industry improves the lot of many, an emerging middle class is going to use more water simply because it can. With the arrival of new money lifestyles evolve in kind. Consequently, when golf courses go up so does the dust from an empty lake. And the birds: they just fly on, abandoning the park for something greener, wetter, and perhaps more pristine, wherever that may be...

I spent two days exploring Keoladeo. Unfortunately, officials insist that visitors use bicycles issued by the National Park. Thus your sole option is a noisy, clanky, single gear bicycle, which tends to notify most wildlife of one's presence long before you are able to view the animal yourself. There is no element of surprise. Nevertheless, there were a few moments of accidental sightings. I surprised a family of jackals savoring a cow's carcass and a mongoose and I enjoyed a fierce stare down. I was charmed by mud flap turtles, giant creatures, wrestling in their gooey environment beneath a small copse of deciduous. Owls and kingfishers delighted.

And that night I dreamt of the Siberian Crane. She was lovely in that cavernous, blue sky.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2006

A View From the Train

photo by ARIKO

Something is amiss on the express train from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Kapira Mposhi, Zambia. As I awaken I want to urinate but struggle to dismiss this urge, as the train is stopped and one is only supposed to use the commode when the train is in motion, as to better disseminate waste. It is just after eight in the morning and everything is very still and soundless. Lying there for several minutes wishing a return to deep sleep, I overhear a passenger talking to one of the conductors; his english isn't good and the duration of the dilemma is not clear. He may have said it was a six-hour delay or six hours to our destination. The locomotive is broken down and they are waiting for someone to arrive and fix it.

The Tazara line between Dar es Salaam and Kapira Mposhi is one of Africa's most famous railways. It's nearly 2000 kilometers long but not long enough. It finishes in Kapira Mposhi, a depot for copper transport but rather inconvenient for most travelers as a terminus goes. Kapiri is the hub of the region's copper belt but commuters and wayfarers must take a three-hour bus ride to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, for all ongoing transportation options. Thus the railway feels uncompleted, as if the money just ran out.

No matter, the Tazara line is the technological pride of Zambia, as the country, fetal-shaped and perhaps its potential unborn, is large but landlocked and without the rail system could not conduct its commerce with nearly as much efficiency. Zambia is poor in comparison to its southern Africa neighbors, especially Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, who have benefitted from lucrative amounts of diamonds and uranium under their terrain. Zambia is at the mercy of the copper market which fluctuates more often towards depression than boom and the country often collapses into famine. Unlike other African nations it has a crisis of resources and lacks its neighbors' potential for growth.

Built as a socialist project co-sponsored by the Chinese, the Tazara line has fallen into disrepair. Millions of dollars are required to rehabilitate tracks and the locomotives themselves. Workers' paychecks are overdue. Of course, the financial crisis has affected the price of copper and volume of traffic, underperforming at all levels. Ironically, the service will betray its people's power intentions and be privatized, most likely sold to foreign capitalists from... China.

The train has been stopped for nearly three hours when I rise from my couchette to investigate. Outside my window on the adjoining rails, children wiggle in discarded secondhand rags in an attempt to stay warm. It is quite cold in the winter morning-- the train had traveled a great distance from Dar es Salaam and we were probably close to a thousand kilometers south of the equator and well into the region's Southern Highlands-- but the kids giggle and hop. They are twirling. That was the thing about Africa that struck the visitor, the streams of joyful children, dressed in scuzzy hand-me-downs, bereft of baubles, doohickeys and knickknacks who had but their own bodies to bid play, a joy of movement, of jumping and leaping and laughing. It's not at all easy to romanticize-- too many are pushed into labor at a young age. Education is something they will never have. Instead, they carry baskets of bananas, oranges, potato chips; the stronger ones wield buckets of bottled juice and soda. They hustle for trade wherever the train slows to dislodge passengers. Many have a habit of standing still, trying to look you in the eye long after you have turned their offers down. There is a vast range of emotions to draw from the window of the train and the casual observer can be confused as to whether his hopefulness can be substantiated or is just plain wishful thinking.

photo by ARIKO

There is nothing to look at beyond the depot where we are broken down and so the children don't intend to leave in spite of the windy winter chill. It is unlikely they see many foreigners and they cast playful glances at the window. It is an eventful day when the locomotive breaks down near their village, a spectacle to be appreciated. This is backwater country and mostly the train charges past imperviously, not disclosing its myth or mystery.

The train begins chugging again but we're several hours late. You take arrival times in Africa as optimistic conjecture-- an arrival time is a great variable.

The train's compartments are somewhat cushy and travel in first class isn't crowded as each room contains four beds. My girlfriend and I are sharing quarters with an elder Englishman and his African paramour, a young Tanzanian with beautiful plaited hair and jackpot eyes. Bearded, portly, and a gentleman rough around the edges, Raymond the Englishman, conveys his opinions with a frank earnestness and upon complicated questions elaborates for Judy, his beloved, so that she can follow in on his talk. He is patronizing at times, offhandedly acknowledging socioeconomic discrepancies and her coming up in the world with his numerous references to Judy's matriculation in a computer course. He's old enough to be her dad and probably big enough to crush her but there is something honest and intimate in their relationship nonetheless.

Raymond often refers to a detailed topographical map. You could almost picture him as a lieutenant for Mr. Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist and diamond magnate, who once envisioned a transcontinental Cape-Cairo railway that had it been realized, would have been a fairly profitable crown jewel in the British empire.  Raymond's giddiness peaks as we zoom past some godforsaken station so that he can correspondingly zero in on the map. Only do the curmudgeonly aspects of his personality come out when dealing with moneychangers, bureaucrats and dangerous traveling logistics. "Thieves," he snarls at me, under his breath when stray African eyes linger as they pass our compartment: "Will you please shut the door?"

There are few Western travelers. Some Australians have a problem with two intoxicated customs authorities who board the train and demand $25 for a Zambian visa when it is clearly not required. These officials are very drunk and stubborn and only become more angry when the afflicted Australians point out the absence of any documentation to prove their point. There is a middle-aged American academic traveling onwards to Botswana; she is performing a comparative study between HIV/AIDS in that country and Tanzania ("Do you want me to go into this disaster...?"). Otherwise, the other passengers are Africans, many of whom crowd the dining car: inebriated commuters hollering to be heard over the thundering din of the locomotive. They yell for more beer from exasperated waiters, suffering these humiliations in kitschy uniforms of slacks, bowties, and leopard-print vests. The beer is flowing but otherwise the kitchen suffers issues of privation. There was no coffee loaded onboard in Dar es Salam. And culinary selections run the gamut from fried chicken to fried beef to fried fish. Being that the chicken is woefully undernourished and the fish terrifying, I subsist on beef, requiring serious mastication for its leathery toughness.

Upon awakening, I had originally surmised that our train's delay had not been due to an engineering malfunction but that the police had mandated our delay in order to investigate. For the night before the breakdown a passenger had been caught stealing from the cupboard. Thrashed by an angry mob, the offender was marched down through the train to the caboose and involuntarily expelled to the abyssal night. This was not uncommon in Africa, where vigilante justice compensates for inadequate investments in security.

This uproar is a brief spark of frenzy. Mostly I sit back and watch the countryside. The railway runs through the Selous Game Reserve but despite my best efforts for the thrill of a herd of giraffes or elephants viewed from a rushing train there are no lucky sightings. But after so much looking, it hits me: there is so much space in Africa! All one hears on the other side of the ocean is the common refrain of a population spiralling out of control. But the revelation gathered from the train window is that there is space, so much space and Africa is big, so big, you can't write the continent off. Violent dictators, misuse of agricultural land, and the AIDS crisis have done damage but none of it irreprable. There is potential here. Its mark is the untouched land, which reminds me of a 19th century America on the verge of breakthhroughs.

 

For the moment, however, wintertime grips the land in signature despair: yellow grass, weeds, skeletal, half-dressed trees-- and land not yet touched, farmed, irrigated. So much of it. Occasionally the train zips by the occassional village composed of mud and straw, whizzing past the farmer leaning on his shovel to observe the noisy serpentine machine careen past, creating for a brief moment in his day a gust of exuberant pandemonium.

photo by ARIKO

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

The Queen of Chapati

During a festival seven years ago, Shashi, a woman of the prestigious Brahmin caste lost her husband when his best friend murdered him over a sum of 35,000 rupees (the equivalent of about $1,250). During the 45-day period of mourning Shashi was not allowed to leave her house and was expected to lament his death with the many members of his family as they arrived day-by-day to pay respects. When it had come time to move on, Shashi was not allowed to remarry or to work, and if she were to follow her role in Hindu tradition she was required to shave her head and dress in white rags, living the remainder of her life in poverty, for those who supposedly knew better held her responsible for this senseless tragedy, which had certainly been a terrible consequence of dour karma. With two young sons to raise the option of renunciating the world was quite unfeasible. She needed work or at least help of some kind but her husband's family, who lived upstairs, refused her requests for aid and in fact stopped paying her utility bills. Shashi's downstairs flat went into a dry darkness, as she lost access to water and electricity. These were the desperate circumstances in which the widowed mother of two had to restart her life.

That Shashi would eventually manage to overcome the tragic circumstances endemic in this "secular democracy" is a tale of perseverance. Her story is not generally heard by most vacationing westerners and is not on Saturday's itinerary sandwiched between Buddhist rock caves and Jain temples. And if it weren't for her ingenuity I might not have been fortunate enough to meet her and her story would have remained an internal affair, a covered-up pimple nevertheless scarring the diamond face of India.

Two Women, Jodhpur

Shashi lives in Udaipur, which any badge-pinned guide worth his hyperbolic salt will tell you, is the "Venice of the Orient," flying past exaggeration into outright distortion, Venice being a coastal city of canals and Udaipur being an inland, aggregated city situated around a lake. The city is certainly most famous for being the primary setting of Octopussy, one of the James Bond franchise episodes in which Roger Moore is at his most cheeky (the movie plays ad nauseum every day in the numerous lakeside restaurants; will play in all likelihood until the end of the world—a waiter told me he's seen the movie 10,000 times). When the monsoons are good and drought is remote the lake shimmers, landmarked by a gorgeous palace in its center (rooms about the better suites running $2,500 a night). In fact, water—as a source of life and nourishment— is nearly supplementary to its aesthetic value, for when the lakebed dries business dies and India being a large country, the tourists roam elsewhere.

Shashi is not from Udaipur but from a neighboring village with very traditional values. Being from a good family of respected caste, Shashi was wedded to a handsome man of similar social standing and solid career prospects. Like most marriages in Hindu tradition, her marriage was arranged and the day before the wedding she had not yet met the man she was to spend the rest of her life with, having only seen his photo once before the ceremony. After the marriage, she left her family and village and the people she had known all her life for the big city.

Her husband ran a lakefront restaurant geared towards tourists. Like nearly all eating establishments in Udaipur, meals were served on the roof with a view to the lake and palace, insinuating the romance of the maharaja and a more gilded age. She bore him two sons and their family lived well. When a ten-day festival came to Udaipur seven years ago, Shashi's husband and his best friend set up a food stall to cater to the crowds. Their profits were excellent and when it came to split the money, the best friend proved to be his worst enemy. After arriving by scooter at his house, the friend suggested supper before business. Unbeknownst to Shashi's husband, the food had been heavily drugged and after he passed out his friend used a plastic rope to strangle him to death. Despite the cover-up, a police investigation found evidence of rope marks but even though the friend was indicted, tried and convicted for murder, he managed to bribe his way through the courts, serving a jail sentence of just one year, allowed to keep the balance of his dirty money.

Meanwhile Shashi received nothing that was rightfully hers and no compensation for the heinous crime. Instead of empathizing with her situation, her husband's family blamed her for the bad luck, cutting off her electricity and water hoping she would go away for good. They lived right upstairs, they saw her every day, and they did nothing for her.

Left to her own device, Shashi betrayed the rules of her caste. She had her sons visit the guesthouses to retrieve laundry, which she washed in the very early morning as not to attract attention for she was not supposed to work. Later she snuck out at dawn to clean hotel rooms. It went on like this for nearly five years, a desperate time with almost no money and both fear and shame dominating her emotions. Then, less than two years ago, one of her sons brought home two Australian tourists who wanted to learn how to make chutney. And that was how she found a way out of the darkness and a calling that would utilize her charms and talents: cooking classes.

In Udaipur, the competition is cutthroat. Around the streets of the tourist enclaves on the north side of the lake, signs, bulletins, and flyers for cooking classes are as ubiquitous as announcements for the 7pm Octopussy showing. Many of these schools have been in operation for years and in becoming profitable have, in the balance, lost a certain homespun touch. Classes can fill a dozen spots, can charge up to $25, and with nearly all the vegetables prepped there is little hands-on participation for students—consequently the event is more that of an expensive meal rather than a learning experience.

Shashi restricts her classes to three students for that is the limit that can fit comfortably in her kitchen. The kitchen adjoins her living room, where her home-from-school sons put their feet up on the family bed and watch television. It took us four hours to prep and cook the entire menu—masala tea (mixed with fresh-ground cardamon, peppercorn, and ginger), potato and onion pakora, coriander and mango chutneys, aubergine and tomato curry, vegetable palau, naan with cheese and tomato, potato parantha, coconut sweet parantha, and a stack of chapatti, the dishes variously spiced with anise, oregano, garlic, tumeric, cumin, chili pepper and sugar, a comprehensive overview of a very regular Indian diet.

Two years ago when Shashi began her classes she did not speak a word of English. Raised in a Rajasthani village and a fixture in the household under her husband's shadow, she did not learn any vocabulary until she discovered her talent for teaching. In the beginning she relied on hand signals for communication, but being attentive to the tourists' a-ha exclamations regarding what she wanted to express, Shashi catalogued a phonetic dictionary of common words, culinary and otherwise, that began to pepper her vocabulary: "grind," "stir," "heat," "boil," "flip," "cauliflower," "peas," "waste," "burn," "knead," "dough," "rolling pin," "spatula," and eventually she learned the tragic words which chronicled her life story: "murder," "bad man," "police," "bribe," "injustice," "widow," "bad luck," "abandoned," "shame," "fear." In conversation she makes the grammatical mistakes typical of people speaking English as a foreign language, dropping noun articles and mixing tenses; she has a preference for imperatives ("Flip now!"). Nevertheless, her concise speech is quite clear, her culinary directions nearly flawless, and it is quite a feat to learn how far she has come in so short a time as a result of her assiduous note-taking.

Indian food continues to be a mystery for Westerners. Quality in most restaurants is often elusive. I could taste the difference in the food Shashi taught me to cook: the recipes being quite specific about spice content, length of cooking time, the balance of ingredients. Her precise interpretation of common Indian dishes is spectacular. Having spent six months in India on various trips, the food I cooked under Shashi's guidance had been one of the great meals I have had. She is a bit of an underground sensation in Udaipur, surviving and succeeding on word-of-mouth alone. Still despised by her husband's family she shares the building with, she is now envied for her good luck and the well-deserved popularity that she's earned for herself. Her sons are nearly of age, university-bound, likely for positions of hotel management and decent salaries which according to Shashi means the misshapen fortune that darkly characterized the family in the past is gone and they have grown to be most eligible bachelors.

It's been suggested in some Indian literature that a woman directly transfers her emotions into her chutney so that the eater of samosas and pakoras consumes not only mango, mint, or coriander but regret, sorrow, love, indulgence, heartbreak, tenderness…and perhaps this may be the very reason her meals are so wonderfully palatable. There is a strong, redemptive spirit here, seasoned with salt and lemon juice, blending effortlessly into the chili taste. Like all the very best meals, it is rejuvenating.

Prayers Made, Rishkesh

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2008

To Be Legal Or Not To Be Legal

Drugs are, without a doubt, dangerous. There is nothing to debate there. But so is tobacco and alcohol. Surfing and skateboards are too. In the U.S. alone, there are six million car accidents annually, leaving more than two million with permanent injuries and killing more than 40,000. These are shockingly dangerous numbers. Should the automobile be put on the black market? The debilitating effects of eating junk food daily are well-documented. Bootleg Twinkies? Oh, and what about all those guns?

As Obama said in his inauguration speech, "the time has come to set aside childish things." American leaders have a bad habit of treating its citizens as petty, naughty children, promising to know what's best for us. Perhaps this trend reached its apogee in the Bush years with his terror alerts and the culture of fear that infused his State of the Unions. But although the government might claim to know what's best for us, its pretty clear it doesn't know how to manage money very well. Ten trillion dollars in debt with a huge stimulus package and more tax cuts looming, it's just going to get worse. If we are going to avoid inflation, then we are going to have to act decisively as well as creatively.

Some states, deeply troubled by huge deficits, are trying to legalize some forms of gambling to cover shortfalls. This is a good idea. I don't gamble and feel bad for the families whose fortunes are ruined by addicts but gambling, like all vices, thrive on one of the most classic American homilies ever followed: "When there's a will, there's a way."

It's the same with prostitution. Luckily, like gambling, I have no need for it, but I am not so close-minded I cannot overlook its necessity. The irony of the existence of prostitution is that it is the rigid dogmas of Judeo-Christian society that create unhappy marriages, loveless, single men and the desperate women that have to turn their bodies into profits. Through legalization we can regulate the industry with regular health checkups for workers which would then do a little to turn back the tide of AIDS. I could even see prostitution as a feminist issue. If it were legalized, they would have their rights protected by police authorities against dangerous and violent men. Put those pimps out of business! It could be win/win for both Libertarians and puritanical capitalists: legitimize the work of the afflicted and then tax them! 

 

Finally, there's narcotics. Like the windfall created by legalizing the sex trades, the income derived from taxes on hallucinogenics and related paraphernalia could be incredible. (Who knows? You could even create a special deposit account in which the government revenue from marijuana funds universal health care--considering how lucrative the drug trade is, it wouldn't take as long as you think). But why stop at marijuana? Cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, even heroin-- are they anymore dangerous than extreme sports or supersizing every meal at McDonalds for one month? For every user, there's a dealer in the shadows. Not only would legalization wipe out kingpins, on a street level it would strip gangs of their raison d'etre. After all, the sensational turf wars tolling death and destruction in America's inner city neighborhoods are fought over who gets to deal where. 

There are over 2.3 million Americans in prison, a higher percentage of incarceration per population than any other nation in the world. It goes without saying that this is absolutely shameful. Moreover, it is unaffordable. With legalization, it would not be right to move ahead without granting amnesty to all nonviolent drug offenders. The money saved from paying for the upkeep of the prison system could be used in social programs providing a soft landing for those looking forward to a second chance. 

Rather than swim any more against the current, in the First Hundred Days of Roosevelt's Presidency the government repealed Prohibition. It did not fix the Great Depression but it certainly provided revenue and castrated the bootlegger.

What is more dangerous? A sixteen year old smoking pot in his front yard or a devalued dollar made worthless because of irresponsible fiscal spending.

The logistics of such an endeavor would be difficult, to say nothing of the leap into the great gap of the Culture War. It would entail great courage from politicians willing to risk outrage from a general public conditioned to view drug use as a crime rather than a disease.

Like I said, we are going to have to get creative if we are going to get out of this financial catastrophe.

Yes, we can.

You Don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone

From the Center for Research on Globalization, we are now learning that the large media conglomerates, including Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Comcast, are teaming up to usurp Internet Neutrality. What this means is fast service for corporations who can afford the adjusted rates and very poor speeds for small businesses and individuals. The benefit from the corporate standpoint would be two-fold: greater profits as well as the suppression of dissent. In the last decade we have experienced an open vein to information like never before in history. Should these conglomerates succeed in their intentions it would be a coup de grace for freedom of expression.

Even though there are Democratic majorities in Congress and the White House, I remain concerned, for after all it was Bill Clinton who signed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated radio outlets leading to enormous consolidation of corporate media.

I cannot help but wonder that the power structure was a little taken back by the potential of the Internet to unite grass roots organizations, as it did to great success in the election of Barack Obama. Every year, the potential of the Internet seems to be improving, a purposeful tool for organization and knowledge.

We should cherish this right.

Speak up.

It's Great To Be Indian (And Not...Pakistani)

As soon as I exit the taxi four small children carrying handfuls of India's national flag surround me. One of them, waving the saffron-green colors, yells, "Go, India, yeaaaa! Go! Go! Go!" I push off, following the large crowds past tea vendors and other makeshift refreshment stands. Everyone is walking very quickly because we are late for the performance. At the gate I am shocked when I see the grandstands. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people, murmuring excitedly, many of whom carrying those little flags sons and daughters whirl in the air, pockets of color flashing against the falling light.

Every evening, the sleepy border community of Wagha improvises quite a party. People from all over India drive some hundreds of miles just for the event, which in its pomp, spectacle, music, dance, and lowbrow entertainment is not much different from a circus though one could fairly call it a political rally with a not-to-be-taken-lightly subtext. What is happening is the daily closure of the border between Pakistan and India, a checkpoint between the electrical barbed-wire fences where visa papers are examined, passports are stamped, and bags occasionally searched, a process of dull but necessary bureaucracy. But life in India is hardly ever dull. So if life can be dressed up at all, then it may as well put on a great costume.

And certainly the border guards look great. India has a huge standing army, largely kept in place because of frequent diplomatic fallouts with Pakistan over the situation in Kashmir. Like the United States, the army in India represents an opportunity for social mobility and perhaps glory. So they have a large talent pool from which they can cast stars and the border guards are stars. Very tall, lean, and handsome, they sport handlebar mustaches of a quality I have only seen in photographs of French Foreign Legion officers. Their hats are indescribable: a dark cap with a striped, tasseled sash wrapped around, crowned by a Chinese fan in red and gold colors. To me they look like cockatiels rather than gladiators though I am not sure what the intended effect is. It becomes comic when you examine the whole uniform: the brown shirts look all right but the chinos finish halfway down the calves and white underpants with stirrups trail down to shiny, polished boots.

I am ushered into the stands. The seating capacity is huge, probably roomy enough for three thousand, yet it's such a large turnout there are hundreds sitting on the sidewalk. Literally, it's standing room only. On the other side of the international gates, the cheering potential for Pakistan looks dismal in comparison. Not only were the stands smaller, they were barely half filled, a last-place team kind of crowd. Just the day before, in India, an explosion had detonated an international train killing around 70, most of them Pakistanis, though Muslim extremist groups were suspected. I didn't know if the mood at the border ceremony would consequently be subdued or hot-blooded. Instead it turned out to be vaguely ridiculous.

I don't suppose the program varies too much regardless of current events. An emcee moderates, while guards march back and forth in exaggerated gaits. Then a male performer finds the spotlight, leaping and lunging and lip-syncing to some Bollywood hit with operatic intensity. He looks like a regular Joe, a little pot-bellied, but he has great hair and Elvis sunglasses. When his performance concludes, dozens of men rush the stage and start dancing. A few modern women form their own circle and the dancing goes on for about ten minutes with the stadium crowd clapping along. I can't believe how weird this all is.

After some time the emcee breaks up the party and we get back to marching, along with some call-and-response vis-a-vis the audience. Some of it was in English and some of it in discernable Hindi. The emcee would cry, "HINDUSTAN!" which the audience would repeat. This was followed by "ONE DAY!" which again the audience repeated. The context of the cheer was disturbing: India is ostensibly a pluralistic society. There are 130 million Muslims as well as substantial populations of Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. The northeastern regions near the Burmese border are so "wild" and "tribal" that some practice animistic rituals,  living almost completely independently of the greater economy. It's commendable that India should have as its motto, "Unity in Diversity." But hearing such a chant now declared in such bald language causes me to wonder how genuine is the sentiment Indians regard their multiculturalism.

There's more marching. And then the guards line up and sound off a long cry into a microphone while their nemesis competes for the biggest lung pull on the other side. There's some more marching, more call-and-response. And then the flags are rolled down, carefully folded, and locked away. I feel something's missing like fireworks or a cannon boom. Everyone poses for pictures with the handlebar mustaches and attempt to stride past little kids aggressively hawking the show's DVDs.

When I return to the parking lot I find the taxi driver, who leads myself along with the other passengers up to the side of an embankment. He points to the electrical fence. Every now and then a crow is fried when alighting the wire. The taxi driver is a small man and excitable. In his wallet there's a 1973 military identification card where he looks handsome and slightly defiant. Proud of his service, he tells me, "India is great." This simple, declarative axiom is a bumper sticker you see on buses and taxis all over the country. When we climb down the hill there are a few kids waiting by our taxi, stragglers with flags bunched in their tiny hands.

Of all great human passions, the one I find least endearing and probably most dangerous is nationalism. This is a sad fact in America, of course, where people confuse patriotism for nationalism (which is perhaps an inevitable consequence when the military is wealthy and education underfunded). No one, and I mean no one, should love their country without reservations. Though they go out of their way to proclaim otherwise, governments (including the United States), do not have the interests of their people at stake. To put brutal policies into effect— war, counterterrorism, as well as the revocation of "certain, unalienable rights"—devastating measures are promoted, masked in Orwellian double-speak, dressed up as the devil or the debutante, depending on the expedience of the situation.

Samuel Johnson, a British lexicographer, famously said patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel; perhaps you could say in my nation's case, so-called patriots draw the line between America and the un-American. But though I may loathe my congressmen and the former Bush administration, I feel very patriotic about my country. I'm not ashamed to be American and I have never lied about where I'm from and have defended it against those who blindly attack it baselessly. For me, patriotism is wanting what's best for the people of a country, not what's best for the state's power, which is nationalism, an unexamined allegiance to authority. This simple discrepancy in semantics is typical in the United States, where the educational system fails to inspire curiosity in the details of day-to-day governance. Politics: along with sex and religion one of the great dinner table taboos. Add a mainstream media complicit in simplifying the message with its narrative filters and sound byte propaganda, the citizen's misinformation opens them up for irrational military programs that they would otherwise protest.

And then there's the idea of a nation-state, a country that is supposed to represent our collective interests. Despite advances in technology, especially television, which have led to homogenization, I still feel the idea of a country is an abstraction, especially as a tool for defining personality or social characteristics. For example, in America, there are many cities where I'd feel out of place, philosophically as well as socially. I prefer the city to the suburbs, walking to driving. An empty street makes me nervous—it's not right, counter to millions of years of evolving social beings. Red State/ Blue State: in only the most general sense is there something so encompassing as 'American culture' (which if one is to believe the media has been at war with itself since the 1960s). I think of culture as a disposition, a perspective as well as a common knowledge, much more micro than macro, grass roots rather than 'sea to shining sea.' It can be aesthetic like an interest in the arts or it can be functional, related to sundry necessities like shortcuts to beat freeway congestion or the location of a town's most authentic tacos. I'm talking about intimacy in culture on an everyday footing.

India, as a country, is even a larger abstraction. The facts supporting this are indisputable. For one thing, what has come to define the modern state more than anything is a shared national language. India has eighteen of them. English is the language of politics and finance and the lingua franca of the rich. Most people in the north speak Hindi though it's very rare you will find a native Hindi speaker south of Bombay where most people speak Dravidian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada. Ironically, Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, India's arch-enemy, is an Indo-Aryan language: thus northern Indians would be able to converse with Pakistanis better than hundreds of millions of their own countrymen!

Beyond the difference in language are the details that make cultures so unique: religion, cuisine, music, dance, art, literature. Then there are different concepts of political thought, economics, and education. Boston and Miami may be pretty different in temperament but that is nothing compared to Madras and Kochi, which are roughly in the same region.

Because India is unnecessarily large it has always been in a sense, unmanageable, three regions, in particular: Kashmir, the Northeast territories, and Bihar in the Gangetic plain have been in open revolt or characterized by rampant lawlessness for years. Violent banditry in the historical holy land of the Buddha has devastated Bihar while secessionist movements in Kashmir and the Northeast have been exorbitant for the government to suppress. The conflict in Kashmir in particular has precipitated four wars costing tens of thousands of lives, years of civil unrest and has led India to the expensive and dangerous program of nuclear proliferation. When India detonated its first nuclear weapons in the Thar Desert in 1998, it was met with great jubilee. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the madness of irrational nationalism than the fact that the greatest exultations were among the poor, who have had basic services like education, health care, electricity, and basic plumbing denied them because of the disproportionate investment in war instead of infrastructure. Substituting basic human decency for a national identity has preserved a status quo of Dickensian disparity.

It doesn't make sense. Why should India fight four wars in addition to an ongoing civil insurrection to keep Kashmir? After all, more than seventy percent of the population there is Muslim. Just as important, the common language is Kashmiri, which though similar to Hindi (as a branch of Indo-Aryan), is nevertheless distinct. A region of tall mountain passes and rugged peaks, Kashmir for centuries has celebrated a unique and vibrant culture in arts, literature, and especially music. Yet I met only one Indian out of dozens who believed that Kashmir might be better off without India, seceding and becoming an autonomous state. Everyone else believed that it was to be subdued and preserved at any cost, even if were to bring the conflict with Pakistan to an irrevocable brinksmanship.

I tend to empathize with Indian (or should I say Keralan) author Arundhati Roy, who interpreted the explosions and resultant fervor as a "crisis of imagination." But that's where nationalism leads us, up in the smoke of a mushroom cloud.

The first thing Indians will want to know when I meet them is where I'm from. And I always want to know where they're from too. I'm always dumbfounded when they tell me, 'India.' That seems rather obvious. But of the hundreds of conversations, very rarely did anyone tell me first and foremost, they were from Delhi, Bombay, or regions like Gujarat or Tamil Nadu. India would always come first as a point of identification.

But what's interesting is how much people love India. Kids and people who don't speak English will shout out at me, "India #1," prompted simply by my foreignness. Sitting with businessmen or guesthouse owners I learned how optimistic Indians are for their economic future. I heard many businessmen speak of India's glorious future quoting fancy forecasted numbers for GDP and GNP growth. One businessman told me that within thirty years India would be wealthier than America. I thought of the rickety, overcrowded bus I had taken that day, bouncing against potholes, passing rural settlements made of mud and straw. He had decided to focus on numbers rather than what was happening right in front of him.

It's true India has enjoyed tremendous economic growth in the last two decades. This bull market began when the national government decided to privatize the economy. What did deregulation mean for India? Outside conglomerates trickling into the country buying up India's major industries. Control of the nation's resources moved from the state to private enterprise. Monopolization of industries as well as bribery have enabled special interests to run India as a corporate oligarchy. The rich getting... you know where this is going. Twenty-five percent of the population lives below the poverty threshold. Roughly estimated we're talking about 300 million people living on about one U.S. dollar a day. That is nothing to be proud of. It should bring great shame to the patriots. But the media, like its counterpart in America, crops the picture to fit the story. "India Shining," as the government's current promo-tag is called, beams its spotlight selectively.

As I'm in my thirties I find it amusing along with other Americans when we discuss how powerful the Pledge of Allegiance shadows our unconscious. I adore pop music but I cannot seem to remember the lyrics to any of my favorite songs. Yet, I can place my right hand over my heart and recite the Pledge verbatim. I can do it in my sleep. It scares me sometimes. And it should scare you.

I bring this up only because I found a clue to Indian nationalism while on a bicycle ride on country roads outside the fallen kingdom of Vijayanagar or its present offshoot, Hampi. This was in the morning and I stumbled upon a school assembly. I had been attracted by the drumming, which sounded martial in its cadence. I found a few hundred kids standing in locked formations while a principal yelled and the students called back, all the while the drumming never ceased. I imagined this went on every day of these school children's career until they entered the university.

What I think the kids were saying was something like, "I pledge allegiance…"

How do I stay optimistic then? For India's sake? I must admit there was a bit of flair in that border ceremony. The mustaches, the dancing, the music, and the crowds contained all the elements of the absurd. Rather than interpreting the show as a playful method of indoctrination, I want to believe that this was, if not an outlet, then another opportunity to indulge in a love of spectacle. I didn't think anyone there would feel comfortable annihilating Pakistan. Anyway that would not be good sportsmanship. As long as we could scream louder than the other side, maybe that would be enough.


Edited from an earlier draft dated 2007