Close Up of My Elephant

Nice portrait of my girl.

My Elephant

Every Saturday morning an elephant and her mahoot (owner, trainer, rider, boss to) came down the street in front of my house in Madurai, wearing a bell that rang to let everyone in the street know she was there.  You give her a coin, she  passes it to her mahoot, and taps you on the head in blessing.
I always ran out, saw it was the elephant (and not the peanut man, the water man, the ice cream man) ran back in and got the coin, ran out through the gate, and stood in the road in front of the house.  She takes the coin very adeptly, the tip of her trunk fully able to pick a small coin from my hand and hold it as well as any human fist, me waiting with chin down, top of head exposed, for the firm tap from the trunk on my head.
After a couple of these encounters I took to scratching her forehead, on the theory animals like being scratched and in places like that.  (She was turning into a very big dog in my thinking.) She started to anticipate my scratching by bowing her head toward me, offering her forehead.  Of course, I obliged.
Then I left Madurai for good.  On the Saturday after I'd been gone two weeks the elephant bell rang and my host and best friend, Premi, was outside.  The mahoot asked "Where's the white lady?"  "Oh, she's gone, gone for good," says Premi.  The mahoot clicks for the elephant to walk on, but she stands there, bangs on my gate with her trunk and doesn't go.  Premi says she dipped her head too, really insistently, and Premi thought she wanted some forehead scratching, but Premi is terrified of elephants so that was out.
Finally, my elephant walked on, her mahoot saying she was looking for the white lady.  And so was he.

Elephant at the Gate

My elephant, my gate, Premi in silhouette on the left, neighbor on the right, mahoot up top.

Black Jesus

My host family are Christians.  As with most Indian Christians, their forebears converted from Hinduism trying to escape the caste system, but the escape was a failure.  Indian Christians have a caste and my family is unusual for being of mixed caste background.  On appah's (father's ) side, they are of "forward caste" (high caste) origin and on mother's side, of "very backward" (very low) origin.  As with all mixed matches, the lowest status prevails.   Our street was pretty diverse.  There were Brahmins across the road with whom we were friendly and other mostly Hindu families of varying castes.
My family is dark brown skinned, black hair and eyes, exceptionally good looking young men of 25 (Doodle) and 20 (Gifty).  
There are pictures of Jesus all over the house - a blond guy wearing an English nightshirt, and Leonardo's Last Supper guy - a very fair Italian.  The bible's only description of Jesus, I discover through Google, is that he had "woolly hair".  I tell the family "Jesus was black - he looked just like you Premi," because obviously he did, including that Premi has "woolly hair".  She is ecstatic to hear this news and wants pictures immediately.  Again with the internet and my Sally's quick assistance, I provided two lovely images, printed in big glossy format.  Premi has hung them in the sitting room, but I want the blond guy taken down and these two framed and put in his place.  Premi is on it.
But here's the kicker:  Steven is a family friend and religious man who is as black as black can be in Tamil Nadu, the very darkest people in India.  The family know him through their (Methodist) church.  When I tell Steven that Jesus was black, he smiles nicely and says "No. Can't be.  No. No. No."  "What about the woolly hair?" of which Steven is fully aware. "No, can't be, Jesus was too great to be dark, could not have been anything like my color.  He looked like you."  And he argued my Jewishness against me, for once figuring out what to do with the strange fact that Jesus was Jewish.

Steven Who Says Jesus is White

North India

Tourist destinations attract beggars.  Children do gymnastics in the traffic, knocking on the windows of cars with foreigners in them, gesturing towards their mouth for food.  Families circle the parks, sending tiny little ones up to the tourists to say 'Money, money' and then you see they live in huts made of scrap metal and empty burlap cement bags alongside construction sites, building fires of garbage because it's cold in Delhi now.  Old people bed down for the night on scraps of blankets under the overhangs of restaurant marquees.  Whole communities of huts cluster under the highway overpasses, everyone using the road for their toilet.  We take the leftovers from our meals in the restaurants and hand the fancy bag to the first person we pass who lives in the street, not looking into the faces, too distraught to make that much contact.  One old man touches my feet as a gesture of thanks and I think I'll faint with horror.

What I Saw On The Road

Hours and hours and hours of riding in a car at night, from one nowhere town to another throughout Tamil Nadu for trainings.  A giant tanker truck, coming straight at us; a western-style four lane highway without warning becomes a rocky dirt road, more trucks still coming straight for us.  Every vehicle, including ours, uses only high beams, except to flash that we are passing - on the right, on the left, down the middle.  Signs say "Respect lanes"; meaning unknown to all.  And people: men standing on the roadside, back to the traffic, in that characteristic stance which immediately says "taking a whizz"; people squatting, less immediately obvious, but no doubt the purpose; and people walking.  On two nights now, there have been thousands of people walking along, spread out for miles, all barefoot, many with children, going to some temple for some special puja (prayer) to some particular god.  They'll walk for 3 or 4 days, through the night, into the morning, and sleep in the fields in the heat of the day.  On the first night they were all carrying small yellow bags with the god's picture, and most were wearing orange skirts - dhotis (man-skirts) - or orange sarees - and some were pulling carts covered in artificial and real garlands of flowers, statues of the god and general wildly colorful decorations.  On the second night, they were carrying orange bags and wearing turquoise skirts and sarees - different god, different puja, same idea.  They walk on the shoulder of the road, sort of, but that's dirt and rock, so many walk on the road itself, sometimes fairly far out onto the road.  It's black as night (well, it is night, after all) and the only light is from those high beams, which suddenly illuminate crowds of them right in our path.  When the road is paved, we're moving at about 50 mph, whizzing by them (we stop to whizz as well) and I know that some will die, because last week I saw a dead person in the road, nothing to do with pilgrims.  A not-too-quick flash of blood and flesh and a white dhoti;  I said to the driver, knowing the truth, "An animal?" "No, a person." he replied, as he touched his face in the ritual pattern of pujas. 
My host mother waits up for me whenever I'm coming home from one of these trips.  Tonight I got in at 2:15 am, just a little later than I'd predicted on the phone.  We embrace and she goes to bed, saying now she can sleep.

Shaking Hands

We arrive at the conference hall for a training on mediation skills for lawyers - same thing I always do.  The tiny, scrawny cleaning man, with glasses an inch thick, looking 75 years old (perhaps only 50 in fact) is startled when I take his picture.  Then, when I shake his hand, he looks like he will swoon.  He grins, he sways, his eyes widen to saucers, and he says to my helper, in Tamil, "She touched me!" My helper says now he will be devoted to me for life because he is untouchable and in fact no one does touch him - certainly no one important.  No "advocate" woult notice him, much less greet him.  He gets me water without my asking; he wipes my chair off, he hovers to see what I might need.  I smile and say "Nandri, nandri" (thank you, thank you) which always gets a laugh because a foreigner is saying somethinig in Tamil and because it is quie formal (perhaps like saying "Your courtesy is greatly appreciated.") but this cleaning man again looks as if he'll faint.  My helper says he's sure no one in life has ever said "nandri" to this man.  (Indians actually say "Thanks" mostly)  Then the man is called away and I don't see him again.  Remember also, the lawyers I am training all call themselves "human rights advocates".

Cleaning Man after Shaking Hands

Mysore Palace

It is all that it is cracked up to be. Now I must research about it because the information given is so sparse and eccentric - it was built in the late 19th century by the British and the maharajah, after former versions burned to the ground, but nothing victorianesque about its style. No photography allowed inside and no books for sale with any real photos (just as well - luggage is a problem).  Signs say things like "elephant" under a stuffed elephant head.  A library, which required permission to enter but I just walked in and the fellow guarding the place was fast asleep, had the oddest collection.  Some few truly unique volumes of records of the place itself, but mostly books in English (almost all the books, actually), ranging from Indian symbology to Eskimo art.  Really, quite a number of random anthropolgy books having nothing to do with India, incuding one that was a text book assigned in my introductory anthropolgy class in college "Selected Readings in Anthropology and Archaeology".  The library was totally quiet - a welcome respite from the noise of the crowds everywhere else.  This is the noisiest place I've ever been - the whole of India, not just Mysore.  Beep beep, honk honk, RING RING, and music at a volume that would make your average boombox blaster seem relaxing.