Beauty

For two weeks, I’m traveling around India and Nepal with the girls from my Gabriel Project volunteer group. Our last day in the slums was Monday, and after teaching, we packed up the apartment and hopped on a plane to Kerala, which is India’s southernmost state. We had a busy day, and now we’re sprawled in front of the TV watching Bollywood music videos. Bollywood dance moves are dramatic, rhythmic, and expressive, so it’s really fun to watch. Beyond that, though, we are all entranced by the women who are featured as lead singers or backup dancers. They all have plenty of curves to shake and jiggle, which just isn’t seen on western TV.

I have mixed feelings on standards of beauty here. I absolutely didn’t anticipate it, but being in India has been a refreshing break from the skeletal western ad campaigns I’m so used to at home. I distinctly remember driving by a billboard advertisement for a Bollywood movie, and registering that the actress in the picture was curvy, with a little bit of belly exposed above the waist of her skirt. It struck me as so dramatically different from the airbrushed twig women decorating our highways. I mentioned it aloud, starting my sentence, “You guys probably didn’t notice…” I was wrong; everyone had noticed.

While perhaps there isn’t an obsessive focus on body fat here, there is much attention paid to skin tone. My friend Adina went to a salon, where a woman told her she ought to get exfoliated to remove her ugly tan. Yeah, right.

Even for a white person, I’m pretty white, and plus I wear SPF 85 sunscreen every day. (No surprise that I’ve never been told to exfoliate.) So for the first time in my life, my light skin is causing me to embody a cultural beauty ideal. On top of that, the clothing we wear here is loose and flowy, so I’m less aware of my body that I would be at home. Overall, my body image has probably never been better, and I haven’t even exercised in like six weeks.

I shouldn’t feel any more or less pretty based on who is dancing on TV. I suppose I'm no more or less immune to such things in India than in the US, so it is nice to really understand that beauty public policy is not as objective as American culture would have me think. 

Sad to go

Today we left Thane to embark on a tour of India. I’ll miss it here. I loved how our street is full of people even at 10PM, and that I could go around the corner to buy mini-bananas any day, any time. I loved the fresh pressed sugar cane juice I discovered two days ago by the train station, and the sweet, mild mosambi juice I’ve been chugging for two months.

The Thane synagogue is a fifteen minute walk from the apartment down a busy street. I made the trek pretty regularly in order to teach a Hebrew class for the local Jewish community, one of my favorite parts of the week. Walking down the street meant dodging merchants pushing their wares on carts around torn up potholes, taking care not to stomp on stray dogs napping on the sidewalk, and avoiding autorickshaws creatively weaving through traffic. I would pass small, booth-like businesses and watch employees go about their day’s work: huddling over a sewing machine, tinkering with motorcycle engines, measuring fabric, making photocopies, selling vegetables. Staring idly out at the street from behind a counter, and double-taking at the foreigner staring back. There is something intimate about seeing people do their work. In Thane, on the synagogue street, no one disappears into mysterious, air conditioned sky scrapers, to emerge shivering and squinting eight hours later. Women tend to children, men congregate on the corner where autorickshaws pull over. Life is so visible in a way I’ve never experienced. At home, even our car windows are tinted. We northeasterners notoriously need our space, but now I’m understanding some of what we may be missing, how we can disappear into our spaces in a way that humans aren’t meant to live.

A friend and I decided to do some last minute shopping by the Thane station during our last week here. Thane station is the greatest ever open market, plus no tourists come to Thane, so everything is reasonably priced. We stopped at a stand, its shelves stacked high with sparkling glass bangle bracelets. The shop owner must have pulled fifty bracelets off the shelves for us to try on and admire, and we each bought a few different sets. When we finally chose, he wrapped our selections in newspaper, then motioned for our wrists. We outstretched our arms, and he slid two green bracelets over each of our hands, as a gift. This man probably makes the equivalent of two dollars per customer, max. His gesture represents why I’m feeling so bittersweet about the end of my time here. Everything people say about India is true: people are corrupt, they take advantage, they don’t care about each other. But all of the opposites are true too: they are generous, they always want to help, they are humble. Everyone I’ve ever smiled at here has smiled back. I’ve never heard anyone complain about studio apartments for whole families, or one room metal shacks, for that matter.

If you have a job, you do it well. If you’re the guy down the street who photoshops passport photos, then by god, you will remove every digital forehead blemish you encounter, if it’s the last thing you do. If you’re the guy who stands between the tollbooth and the cars, passing money back and forth, if you’re one of four waiters for the same table, if you’re the woman who delivers my nail polish to the customer service desk at the grocery store so I can literally follow behind to pick it up because that’s how things work at the grocery store, then you do that job, and save up some money, and buy a motorcycle, get an education, and keep doing life. 

India isn't a simple place, but there is clean simplicity in Indian values: being with family, being devout, respecting elders, respecting education. 

I'm excited to see how I'll be different when I'm back home, cause you can't spend time in a place as crazy as this without letting it touch you. I'm really happy I came, and I'm really sad to go. 

Thinking about the end

A short essay:

I cross the railroad tracks into the Kalva slum, just outside Mumbai, India, along with my fellow volunteer teachers, our translator, and a security guard. The reek of garbage and feces hits us immediately, as though we just passed through a scent barrier that separates the slum from the rest of the town of Kalva.

We walk through a clearing covered in a film of fraying cloth, plastic bags, small trash fires, and stray dogs before arriving at our classroom. As soon as the four of us duck into the dark, tin enclosure, twenty children leap to their feet, shouting “Good morning teacher!” They reach out their little hands to yank on our arms and perform fancy handshakes.

This morning we are teaching a lesson on tadpoles, frogs, caterpillars, and butterflies. I sit on the end of a straw mat laid out on the concrete floor next to one of our students. He chatters to me in Hindi and looks perplexed when all I can say back is yes, no, the numbers one through ten, and teacherly requests: pay attention, move back, good job. The kids all imitate us, chirping “Sunoh, baitoh, listen, sit down!” and laugh at our pronunciation.

Our children are beyond eager to please, and they treat our smiles as rare treasures. Kids with dirt-streaked cheeks and non-ironically torn jeans, who don’t go to school, gather in the classroom doorway, and I ruffle their hair and shake their hands as well.

Later, I am seated on the mat next to the same student again, and when asked what baby frogs are called, he shouts “Tadpole!” I raise my hand to give him a high five, and he jerks away. I feel ill when I realize he thought I meant to strike him, and even as he sheepishly offers me his hand while I clutch my chest in apology, horror and misplaced guilt settle over me in a clammy sheen. I know there is much more to our students’ lives than what we see for an hour a day, and the bits I do glimpse can make me catch my breath.

But there are so many sweet surprises as well. I play a nature video on my laptop, and the kids scrunch together on the mats, leaning on each other’s shoulders, each nearly in his neighbor’s lap, in our laps. A little girl with red ribbons braided into her pigtails sits between her two older brothers, the eldest gently stroking her hair. When I grin at her, she smiles back, then at her brother, tickled at our exchange.   

I have been teaching in India for a month, and in a few short weeks, I’ll leave these lovely children and return to lawns, air conditioning, and carpets. I’ll think of them here when monsoon season begins, as a sea of plastic bags and crushed cartons washes down the road, and they settle onto a mat in a classroom where I will no longer be.

Food and bonus rush hour video

Food in India seems to fall into two opposing camps: exactly what you’d expect, and nothing like you’d expect. Every Indian restaurant offers a nearly identical menu listing every common Indian dish, including a “Chinese” section. Indians love Chinese food. I haven’t tried this Indian Chinese food myself, but I hear it’s either really spicy, or really salty. The Indian restaurant dishes fall solidly into the “what you’d expect” category, once you recognize the dishes by name.

On the other hand are dishes named in English, where the name conjures up an image of something an American would understand and be familiar with. Veg sandwich, for example. You’d think you’d know what you were getting, but a friend ordered that and ended up with something kind of pasty on a spongy bread. And it was spicy. Veg soup sounds pretty self-explanatory, but what arrived was a thick, deep brown kind of broth with noodles. A green salad means a plate of sliced vegetables, with no lettuce or leaves of any kind. Ginger honey tea was a slice of dried ginger and a ginger gel, partially dissolved into the hot water.  So weird.  And again, spicy.

One exception to this general rule was a meal at a Mexican restaurant in a really touristy area of Mumbai, near the Taj Mahal hotel. The meal was actually reminiscent of Mexican food, and plus, the staff knew what gluten was. The more dishes they told me I couldn’t have, the more delighted I became. It sounds ridiculous, but I always feel like I’m in good restaurant hands when a waiter is telling me I shouldn’t eat anything. (I got fish.)

Veg Pulav

So, I’ve decided that the safest thing to do is order the common Indian dishes where I know what they’re made of, vehemently gesticulate and repeat, “nehi maida, nehi atta, nehi hing” (no wheat flour, no other word for wheat flour, no spice that often has flour in it), and hope for the best. I’ve basically given up on trying to avoid dairy in restaurants, since ghee just pops up out of nowhere. For the record, I almost always order veg pulav, which is basically rice with cooked vegetables and considered to be on the less spicy side. It still sets my face on fire.

I guess the third category is food we’ve been cooking at home. It’s kind of like a camping diet plus fresh fruits and vegetables. Rice, potatoes, tuna, other canned food, cereal. One of us just graduated from culinary school and has turned out some fantastic meals from the above ingredients.

Recently, two of us attempted to replicate some canned salmon-potato patties our chef had invented a few meals earlier. We mixed together canned salmon, mayonnaise, mashed potatoes, and caramelized onions. Instead of frying them, as she had, we spread the mixture in the bottom of a glass dish and baked it.

Our attempt at dinner

I’ll digress here to mention a story which has become family lore. When my mom was a kid, my grandma prepared a layer cake for dinner. My mom and her brothers were so excited; cake for dinner seemed like such a treat. It was tall with white frosting. When they tasted it, though, they were hugely let down to discover that the layers were tuna salad, salmon salad, and egg salad, and the frosting was sour cream.

So the dish we attempted in our apartment reminded me of what a single layer of that cake must have been like, even down to the taste of disappointment. Our chef roommate got a huge kick out of our attempt, at least. My next couple meals were the ever reliable boiled potatoes and ketchup.

Mosambi juice

Mosambi display

Mosambi juicer

I’ve included some pictures of my favorite exotic juice. Mosambi is kind of like a yellow orange, but it tastes slightly milder. The juice is sweet and tangy, and they sell it fresh squeezed right on the street. I bought some today and sat on the stoop of a store, sipping and taking videos of rush hour in the intersection right down the street from our apartment. I actually laughed out loud a few times. I've included the video for your viewing pleasure.