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.