Varanasi: karma catching up

Dear Nicki,

Varanasi.  A place where they say your karma catches up to you.  A place where they say if you die, you are released from the cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth.  Freed.  It is intense, this place where people come to die.  Where people come to bathe in the holy rivers of the Ganga, washing their karma from them, sort of like the Christian waters of baptism.  Where people come to study.  Where people come to see India – in all its messiness.  It’s been an intense place for me and Jonathan to be – we’ve talked a lot about us and our future.  There’s a real sense that this relationship is not going to last forever, even though we love each other and I so desperately want this to be the one.  Gosh, the emotions of all of that, visceral, physical emotions that seem to tear me to pieces and spit me back out.

The Ganga: view from our guest house

Sweat drips down my face as I sit in a close windowless cyber cafe with a fan whirring ominously above.

Nick, Jon and me

Yesterday, J and I were kind of feeling low, me not sure whether I needed to go out walking and enjoy getting out into the town or just curl up and rest.  J was ready to head out and do some exploring, when a friend of ours from Vipassana in Kathmandu showed up (J had found out that he, Nick, was in Varanasi and told him our guest house – River View Guest House right on the ghats).  The timing was really perfect.  It meant I sort of had to pull things together and it made me feel normal and good and beautiful.  I found reserves of strength and beauty and groundedness that I had forgotten or not known I had and smilingly went out with Nick and Jon.  We wandered a bunch, through the narrow alleys where tourists from all over India and the world gather, through to the wider streets of the bazaar, wider but so much more clogged with people.  We got food and I got the best paan I’ve ever eaten, then we wandered and talked some more.  Eventually we made our way back to our hotel, where we parted ways with Nick.

Rooftop view

Later in the evening, J and I ventured out to the ghats where the evening rituals are held – lots of people and a mixture of the feeling of ancient ritual mixed with cultural performance (the audience was a mix of Hindu pilgrims participating peripherally in the ritual with their voices, hand claps and butter lamps added to the mixture of things, then there were also Indian and foreign tourists on the steps leading down to the performance spot on the river’s edge and also in boats crowding in for the closest view from the water).  It was a strange sort of scene at which J and I stayed only a little while.  From there we headed to a temple to which an Indian man with henna-oranged hair led us.  When he found we had not brought our passports, which would allow us entry, he offered to take us to some burning ghats, which he did.  There another man met us and explained the process of cremation to us – surrounding the ghat on three sides are mother Theresa Hostels where the sick and old come to await their death.  20-30 cremations take place a day here, with iron wood used to burn the bodies (200kg of iron wood at rs150 a kg – rs30 000 to cremate a body – almost US$1,000 – a LOT of money).  We watched and listened, rivulets of sweat coursing down our bodies.

We made our weary way back to our hotel at last.  That was yesterday.  And today a new day.  Despite the incredible uncertainties of the future, we are still holding things together, still committed to being together into the coming year.  I don’t know what Jon’s move to Portland will bring for us.  Long distance is not my forte, not something I really ever wanted to do.  I can’t wait to talk to you about all of this.  And I’m excited to continue to explore Varanasi, a city with so much depth.  You can almost hear the history whispering through the cracks in the walls.

The computer’s acting up, so I’m off.

Thanks for being you.

thandiwe

arriving in Varanasi

Sunrise on the Ganges

August 25, 2010

Dear Mum, Dad, Mandla, Nicki and Shawnrey,

How do you five like to be the folks that I send off my brief note about arriving in Varanasi?  How are you all?  J and I had a bit of a funny time leaving Orissa.  We actually missed our train because we had changed the date of our ticket to a couple of days early and assumed that we were on the same train leaving at the same time and didn’t bother looking at our tickets (I know – stupid) until we actually got to the train station at 11:30 for our 12:15 train and Jon took out the tickets and asked, “Why does it say departure 1055?  Wry smile. Anyway, we decided to turn our lemon into the best lemonade ever, sucked it up and paid for tickets for the next train out of Puri at 9:50pm, giving us the entire day to bum around the town.  We checked our bags at the train station and headed to the old part of town and the Sun Temple to check it out again.  Good times and some cool photos taken of all the pilgrims there.  We had some lunch then decided, upon my request, to splurge and spend the beautiful day at a swimming pool where I could swim in a bathing suit (as opposed to the full-length mumu/nighty/dress that I wore in to swim in the ocean near Konark).  So we went to a hotel we’d read about in a guide book, but their pool was being cleaned.  They recommended another place called Hotel Hans Coco Palms (I know, hilarious name!) that was across town.  We hopped into a rickshaw and headed over there.  It turned out, we had missed half of Puri!!!!  The area the rickshaw drove us through was jam packed full of hotel upon hotel built for Indian (primarily Bengali, I think) tourists!  There must have been 2 solid miles of hotels two or three deep across from a promenade and the beach.  The hotels were generally larger, shinier and overall more expensive looking than the backpackers’ lodgings over on the side of town where we had stayed.  Saari shops boasting Orissa hand-woven saaris and men’s churidars filled in the spaces between the hotels, and the restaurants clearly catered to an Indian clientele.  As we drove in, the beach was lined with covered carts, and I mused as to their opening in the evening.  We figured the swim was going to be worth it just to have witnessed this other part of town which, so it seemed, most westerners (including us, almost) missed entirely.

The pool was beautiful – a bit of a splurge, but for an afternoon of utter escape and relaxation (in a bathing suit, no less), it was well worth it!  The water was about the same temperature as the air, aqua blue with frangipani trees leaning over it in some places and spreading its flowers’ sweet aroma over the water. It turns out J loves water as long as it is warm, so he and I had a blast paddling around, reading Kipling’s “Kim” (a brilliant book for any of you who hasn’t read it and is interested in a delightful look into India 100 years ago, with surprisingly much still the same now) and simply lounging.

We ventured back out around 7:15 pm, after it was already dark, and the streets that had previously been cleared by the blazing afternoon sun was now mobbed with people and stalls selling all sorts of knick-knacks, pearl (fake or otherwise?) jewelry, light-up and noise-making toys, brick-a-brack and tons of snacks (including deep-fried, soft-shell crab, which J and I had to give a try!).  The beach had taken on a carnavalesque atmosphere with people’s conversation, venders calling out wares, lights, the smell of fried foods.  Hm!  Smile.  Jon and I had stepped into another world, the Indian beach resort side of Puri, otherwise mostly an Indian pilgrimage site.  And what a world it was!  Grin!

Boats on the Ganges

Anyway, we DID catch our 9:50 pm train out of Puri and arrived in Bodhgaya the day before yesterday at 2:00pm.  I’m glad to have gone to Bodhgaya, but have to say that of all the Buddhist spots I’ve hit so far, it is probably my least favorite.  Im sure it would be different in the winter time when Buddhists come from all over the world in great numbers to spend time there.  The Mahabodhi temple is certainly worth seeing, but neither Jon nor I were charmed by anything else.

And then Varanasi…..  We got dropped off (we took an auto rickshaw from the train station to the heart of the city) near the ghats – they are mostly covered by the river, swollen in the monsoon rains – and walked down toward them and the guest house that had been recommended us by J and my friend Davey.  It was a little bit of a challenge to find, and we ended up following signs through a dingy corridor littered with paper and bricks and debris, up some dark stairs to a little awning where sat a roundish and jolly man.  He showed us a small room – sparse by any standards but that lets out onto a little balcony that overlooks the river.  J and I, immediately charmed, agreed to stay.

The proprieter and his wife are lovely!  And I think J and I will feel quite at home at the little guest house (whose name has changed from “sun view hotel” to “river view hotel”).  We stepped out after a very little bit of unpacking to get some dinner and had an incredibly delicious thali (meal) of rice, papadam, a daal with greens cooked in (make my day!), some sort of sauteed green bell peppers, okra and yogurt.  We shared an Indian sweet and paan for desert and came a-searching for the internet, which J has been needing to use for a few days.  I will soon try to get inspired and work on a blog that I have decided to begin: it will consist of my mass emails and perhaps some other random writings from when I first started sending out the emails 5 1/2 years ago, on my first trip to India.  It should be fun to put together and hopefully fun for folks to read as well.  Speaking of which, Mum, Dad and Shawnrey, do you have any of those first emails I sent out?  I sent them from my Pomona account and don’t have access to that account anymore.  It would be lovely if you would forward them my way.  I’ll send you the link to the blog as soon as I have anything up on it!

Anyway, this email turned much longer than I expected.  Perhaps I’ll send it out to my email list as well – there are tons of stories from Sikkim and Orissa that I have yet to tell.  Oh my.

I love you all lots and can’t wait to see each of you soon, I hope.

Much  much love,

Thandiwe

Return from the Sun Temple and reflections on relationships

Dear Mum and Dad,

Hi again from Puri.  J and I headed North to Konark to see the Sun Temple there yesterday afternoon, spent a lovely night and morning and are back again.  Your emails yesterday and today have been wonderful – your thoughts and reflections.  For whatever reason, getting Ana’s email yesterday morning along with one from Nicki really did a lot to recenter me, that with a little bit of time on my own was what I needed to reground me (perhaps that along with the readiness to feel better) yesterday.  I ended up being in a wonderful mood and having a magical time with Jon!

With the scooter at the beach

We had rented  a scooter and we took this with us to Konark.  On the way, we stopped at a deserted beach and went for a swim, just us, two bicycles and one fisherman in the distance.  I still was modest and wore a full-length mumu in the water. It’s funny where I can and do feel comfortable crossing cultural broundaries and when I don’t.  I guess to a large extent covering my body is a way of being culturally appropriate that also affects my own safety and comfort (I’d rather be covered than make a spectacle of myself, even if noone is obviously watching).  Smile.

The Sun Temple is beautiful!  Built in the 13th century and just amazing!  The walls are covered in intricate carvings of animals, beautiful women and then lots of tantric sex (a la kama sutra).  It was pretty funny to have an Indian guide this morning explaining to us what some of the images were (many of which were pretty explicitly clear without explanation – laugh).  He managed to do it without being creepy or inappropriate either, which was nice.

In terms of me and Jon?  Well, I do think there will be lots to talk about when I am in England.  J and I have talked about the future, and I have been pretty clear that I’m ready to say, yes, I want to commit to this, for the rest of my life.  And Jon’s not there now.  And he’s said that he may not ever be there.  But where he’s at is being committed to now and being committed to staying together in the short term – for the fall when I am back in Chicago and he’s traveling here, seeing each other in November and spending Christmas together on the west coast and then reevaluating.  We both know what a good thing we have going – we do both love each other a lot, and we are kind and caring and happy together.  So, like you said, Tod, a lot of it is being in the present moment and doing what’s right now.    So, yes, being in the present and continuing to be open and honest about our hopes for the future.

being present; looking forward

Anyway, those are my current thoughts.  I’m feeling much better about all of this than I was when I last wrote.  It will be interesting to see how things continue to develop.  Sometimes I feel sure that we are going to walk this road together for ever, I guess, and other times I feel quite sure that a fork in our roads approaches sooner or later.  I continue to be sure that walking this journey together now continues to be right.

thanks for your love and prayers.  Thinking of you lots and good luck moving! Thandiwe

Konark – Seaside Temple

Temple on the road between Puri and Konark

From Puri, our adventure took us by way of a little scooter (such a great way to travel in India) to Konark, home of the Sun Temple, once covered in Sand.

They say that when it was built, there was a powerful electro-magnetic stone suspended in the top of the temple that affected boats and ships sailing off the coast.  The walls of the temple are covered in incredibly beautiful and intricate carvings and it’s particularly famous for its erotic carvings.  Looking back, I wish I’d taken more photos of those just to give a sense of the extent of this artwork.

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Puri Photographs

mid August, 2010

As white tourists (read: non-Hindu outsiders), I was not able to enter into the temple grounds, so all of these photographs are from the outside of the temple complex.  I’d love to have input on captions for the photos – pick a number and suggest a caption.

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News and Rules (discerning love)

8.19.2010

Dear Mum and Dad,

Thanks so much for the email and the instructions to honeymoon bridge and spades!  We’ll have a fun time playing those on the train.  Quick question about honeymoon bridge – what do you do with the two extra hands that were dealt?  Are these just put to the side or do they get played?

So funny to read the beginning of your email, too.  I have been feeling sort of down yesterday and today – just blah.  Frankly feeling tired of India and, as the London analogy goes, therefore feeling tired of life.  Not a great way to feel.  At all.  Things are good with Jon and yet sometimes (as our conversation made clear this morning), there is a sense of an imminent end looming ahead.  Jon is not at all ready to get married.  Smile.  He loves me and is very committed to the relationship now, and then I think he swings back and forth – sometimes feeling like this is something worth investing in that we could commit to making last and other times he feels that it won’t last and it’s a matter of time before life takes us in different directions.  I on the other hand am quite positive that if it’s what we both want (which is as yet unclear) and what we both commit to, we can and will make it work and have an adventure of it.  And I have said as much to Jon.  I am left in a place where I know that I want to get married and have a family, and really I’d love to do this with Jon, but he’s not sure and doesn’t know if/when he will be sure and so I can either keep going as we are (which is wonderful) or say, alright, I’m ready to get married and you’re not, so I’m going to move on.  I’m not ready for this yet, but I also don’t want to simply be waiting for Jon to be ready to marry me (something that may or may not happen).  Tod, I think your words that we are out of sync ring loud and true for both Jon and me, at times.  Right now, I am trying to stay in the present, to love and to be loved, to be okay with where things are.

On a day like today, it’s hard.  It’s easier on the days when Jon is really feeling good about our relationship – I tend to pick up on this without even knowing it.  Smile. I have found that I am quite good at picking up on other people’s feelings and internalizing them, sometimes/often, without even knowing that I am doing this.  This is something that I would really like to work on recognizing and learning how to recognize and separate another’s emotions from my own.  All hard things, part of learning to be an adult, learning to figure out what I want and what I need and how to give that to myself.  In particular, how to give those things to myself in the context of the reality – me wanting Jon to marry me is not going to make this part of a possible reality. Wry smile.  Much as I would like this to happen, more and more often, I feel that it probably won’t.  We shall see.  This is also how I am feeling at this moment, after a tough morning of tears and just feeling empty and melancholy.

Sometimes it’s also hard to know when feelings are connected to something like how I feel about this relationship that is so important to me and when they may be connected to my stomach feeling bad or being sunburnt and dehydrated (amazing how our emotions are really connected to our physical well-being as well).

So those are thoughts.  I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this stuff, and talking in person when I get to London.  It will be interesting to see where I am on all this in another month with 8-10 weeks of time with Jon in India/Nepal and me back in the states with just email and phone to keep us going for a while.  I’m sure that there will be tears to be shed in conversation in any case.  Smile.  Such is life.  Ups and downs.  But thank goodness for those we love and their ability to remind us of the wonder of the world!

How exciting that you’re moving into your new home in London!!!!  I am eager to see it and you.

J and I are in Puri – a town on the beach with one of the largest Hindu temple complexes in all of India, the Jaganath Temple.  Just a month ago, the town was mobbed with Hindu pilgrims come for the Rath Yaatra (the cart journey).  It’s a huge festival that thousands of people come from all over to witness.  Amazing as it would have been, I think I’m glad to have missed it.  Smile.

The ocean is beautiful – I’ll have to check a map, but I think it’s the Pacific ocean up here.  I’m thinking the Indian Ocean is off the southern/western coast of India and we’re way east.  We are staying in a little hotel right by the beach and by a fisher-folks’ village.  It reminds me of the super high density township right near us in Plumtree except there seem to be no public toilets, even, so the sand above the ocean ends up being used as the primary toilet.  Yikes!  The beach between the fishing village and the water is covered with fecal matter, urine and trash.  And in whatever clear space there is, the fishermen (it seems to all be men and boys who do the fishing) untangle their nets, seeming to rise from within some mist (the nets are gray light and give the impression of mist around the fishermen’s seated forms), and ready their boats, equipped with sails of sewn together yellow and blue tarp.  There are smaller boats as well, with no sail, basically long narrow platforms with shallow walls – they get swamped going over each and ever wave, but the boats are too shallow and solid to sink even when full of water.  To the south of the fishing town, the beach gets cleaner, though as I found this morning, one must still watch one’s footing – ick – and people enjoy the surf that comes crashing in on the steep beach.  Little crabs scuttle in and out of their tiny holes in the sand.  Venders with fanny packs filled with pearls and precious and semi-precious stones of unknown quality (or authenticity) wander around asking tourists (Indian and foreign alike) if perhaps they need a pearl necklace or a piece of coral for a ring.  Yesterday evening J and I even saw a young man walking a camel along the beach – photos, a ride, just a sit?  Not sure what…. Though the camel looked quite out of place despite all the sand.  Smile.

Street near Jaganath Temple

Yesterday afternoon, we ventured over to the Jaganath temple, which we are only aloud to look at from outside seeing as we are not Hindu (though Indian looking brown skin would be enough to get us entrance).  We found a great little joint to have lunch in – a dark little hole in the wall with plenty of locals eating their own lunch – and managed to get yelled at by a man who thought Jon was trying to speak to him in English or French (the offense seemed to be as simple as Jon’s assumption that the man should speak Jon’s own language; the problem was that Jon had actually asked the man a question in sudha (good/clear) Hindi – ah if only we would learn to listen and not make assumptions).

Lots of adventures.  Please keep me and Jon in your thoughts and prayers.  Me in particular as I think about the future and try to stay in the present in my relationship with this person whom I love.  Smile.  So hard.  Prayers that I will know how long to simply stay present in this and enjoy it and invest in it and that I will know when to let go and move on.  Hard things.

Anyway, this is a long email.  Thanks for listening.  I’ve been needing to talk about this stuff for a while.

I love you both lots and can’t wait to see you very soon!

Orissa: photographs (Dhaulagiri and Bhubaneswor)

These are more photographs from Orissa, specifically from Dhaulagiri and Bhubaneshwor

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Udayagiri Caves

Mid-August, 2010

From Sikkim, Jon and I took a jeep down to Siliguri and from there the train south to Orissa, a state located on the eastern coast of India, by the Bay of Bengal.  The state is famous for its coast, its sea-food and its beautiful temples.  A few days in the state’s capital, Bhubaneswor, gave Jon and me a chance to explore the cave temples of Udaigiri.  Here are my favorite photos from those temples.  The caves are partly natural and partly human-made, cut from the rocks themselves.  It is thought that the caves were originally cut out as living quarters for Jain monks.

Udaigiri Caves

Getting a sense of scale

Enter here

"If I were an animal, I'd be an elephant..."

Monks' quarters

meditation space

Courtyard lawn

Carving detail

Tree offerings

carving detail

Udayagiri current cave residents

Koetchapari Lake

Tara's footprint: Koetchapari Lake

August 2010

Jon and I relatively quickly took our leave from Pelling, taking another jeep a couple of hours to Koetchapari Lake.  We had had a friend on our study abroad trip who had done her Independent Study Project here, and she had found herself captivated by the Lake, its history and some of the people that she met.

Happy to have survived the leeches on our trek up to the cave!

Koetchapari Lake is shaped like a footprint, and the story goes that the Buddhist deity Tara made it.  Up on the hills near the lake are caves where she is said to have meditated.  This was a magical part of my journey through Nepal and India in 2010.

Our little guest house bathed in morning sunshine

The work of leeches

It was perhaps one of my favorites.  Not sure where to stay, Jon and I went immediately to the lakeside, and from there followed some signs up a hill to a little guest house.  Rustic is certainly one way to describe it: tiny rooms with little more than thin ply-wood walls, each room with two miniature twin beds and a single naked bulb.  But the hosts could not have been friendlier.

Sonam had spent a good part of his youth studying to be a Buddhist priest.  He had spent years fasting and meditating in a cave and now was living a lay life, married to a young Japanese woman.  He spoke little Japanese or English, and she spoke little Nepali or English, so they did not have much in terms of a common language, and yet in the evenings, their laughter and low voices carried and air of peaceful contentment with them.  On our first full day at the Lake, Jon and I made the trek through leech-infested forest up the hill to one of the Tara caves.  We returned to find that Sonam was busy collecting ningro (fiddle head ferns) for our dinner – Jon had told him that they were my favorite.

In Sonam, Jon and I found a font of information and wisdom: someone ready to share their experiences seriously following a Buddhist path.  Our time here was all but too short.  Perhaps later in my life or in another lifetime, I will return to this magical place.

Fiddle-head ferns

Sikkim Adventures: Pelling

The reflection of a prayer flag in a puddle

Early August, 2010

From Kalimpong, Jonathan and I did indeed venture on to Sikkim.  We took a jeep to Pelling – a little town nestled in the hills.  There we ventured to the Pemayangtse Monastery and then stopped at a very fancy hotel just to have a look.  We ended up getting cornered by one of the owner/managers – an interesting man from Australia who had a very colonial flavor to him. Jon and I listened politely but with some discomfort to his ramblings about Bengalis and Nepalis – the price I guess we paid for our hot chocolates, or perhaps they were lattes, that were on the house.

The Monastery itself was beautiful, but there wasn’t really any in to learn more about the history or the lives of the monks.

Gate to Pemayangtse Monastery

Monks' lodging and laundry?

Large Prayer Wheel

Tibetan translation, anyone?

We also found ourselves up at a smaller monastery where a funeral for a woman who had committed suicide was taking place.  The woman’s widower asked to have his photograph taken with us, and we complied. Our foreignness alone was enough to make us photo-worthy, but our ability to speak Nepali and speak it well often gave us almost-celebrity status in the Darjeeling hills, Sikkim and parts of Nepal.

Stuppa and prayer flags at smaller Pelling Monastery

Looking Somber: me, Jon and the widower