"V" is for Vendetta

Winter mornings in Ladakh are like waking up in a vast cathedral suspended above a lake without a single ripple on its surface. The sky seems sealed with air that has been distilled to a pure, cold vapor, cemented under a dome of silence. The tree branches are stripped down white, and extend like a dozen frozen thoughts clustered together, in a sort of pause, under a pure road of sky. It is a kind of silence that, if you are person at peace, makes you more open. If you are not at peace, it makes your thoughts rumble in the folds of your mind like small thorns, for there is nothing to really inhibit them. A professional Buddhist would be gung-ho. Now would be the time to learn a new language, read the Classics, write a novel or improve the state of one’s abdominals. I tried morning yoga yesterday and had so many toxins released into my backbone that I tossed and turned the entire night. Good start. And yes, its also very cold, the type of cold that doesn’t bode well with a native Californian, especially with no central heating. The only convenience is that you can put your child’s milk out on the counter and not worry it will curdle since the entire room is a fridge.

During these mornings waking to this biting dawn air, when doing the usual ritual of putting on my socks and jeans in a trance, zipping my thick down jacket and fumbling for a roll of toilet paper before traipsing down the dusty stairs in semi-desperation and up another to the bathroom, I’ve been having a repeated, honest thought. The cycle has come full round.

Everyone knows that at several points in life, one longs for the unfamiliar, to be taken out of the mundane routine of daily living and go for the jugular by traveling abroad. But humans carry their origins in their bones, and the memories of the familiar will start calling out at you like a Siren in the fog. (The familiar being red licorice, fifteen-minute showers, the ability to get several errands done in a single afternoon, and the beep of the microwave). There’s no avoiding it, no amount of thinking or strategic over-thinking that can chip away at the heart’s desire to be home, even if home is the gray suburban tanks of the OC. I know it’s a joke to want to return to a place that was the basis for a sitcom with blond people who have affairs and do mall shopping, versus living in shadow of a centuries-old palace and Himalayan mountains and the rays of a closer sun. But lately I’ve been having completely random, heavy thoughts like,”The Roman soldier spent an average of two years being away conquering foreign lands. How the heck did those guys manage?”

Time to go home Lian. Have a warm bath, sushi, a washing machine that can do your laundry in an hour, and catch up on the 1,472 messages in your Inbox. So now, Aamir and I are home for Christmas. Snuggled in the four square walls of a room with a white down blanket, I am typing out the rest of the chapters of my adventures that I didn’t publish since my computer died its sudden electric death in the mountains. We booked a ticket on Emirates. From Delhi, it was nice to see our flight connection to Dubai would take less than four hours: 3 hours and 45 minutes to be exact. From Dubai to LAX: 16 hours.

Emirates Airlines was a luxury. It was checking-in that was the worst experience in my life, because I got the one female employee with a sodden vendetta tucked in the folds of her neat red and beige suit. A woman airlines employee who is incompetent is worse than dealing with a female Asian driver. Far worse. Because she has the power to make every step of the 47 steps you need to take from the check-in desk to home soil a living hell.

First off, Abbass couldn’t help me carry our bags and Aamir into the airport. (Delhi international airport policy dictates if you don’t have a boarding pass, you can’t enter). We had two heavy luggage pieces loaded on a trolley and Aamir sleeping with his head lolling down in a stroller. It was a logistically impossibility, unless I was Popeye, to roll in both at the same time. Abbass watched over Aamir in the foggy morning air outside the airport door as I wheeled in the bags and check-in inside.

At the check-in desk, the Emirates lady asks, ”M’aam. Where is your son?” I tell her he’s outside being held by his father.

“You need your son here to check-in,” she tells me.

“That’s fine, I’ll get him now, but I need to leave my bags here for a moment because I can’t carry him in and roll the bags.”

“I’m sorry, you have to take the bags,” she says.

“I can’t take the trolley. You see, I can’t roll the bags and carry my son at the same time. He’s asleep in his stroller, so I’ll be right back with him. He’s with his dad outside.”

“You can’t do that m’aam. Take your bags now.”

I pause, and feel that space between my eyebrows cinch. It’s 2:30am and I lose it. If anyone knows me, I hardly get mad in public. Maybe it’s an Asian woman thing not to really get mad, just act cute. But now I’m mad. Enraged, actually. I start waving my hands in the air and spitting my words out. At the same time, my second self hovering above me says,” Congratulations. You have now become your dad. Remember how your dad lost it with the postal employees, Office Depot workers and grocery store baggers? Missy, you’ve manifested your genetic destiny.”

“DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT I CANNOT PHYSICALLY ROLL THE BAGS IN BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO HEAVY AND CARRY MY SON AT THE SAME TIME SO I HAVE TO LEAVE THE BAGS TO GET HIM? I AM TRAVELING ALONE WITH HIM.”

She rolls her eyes away from me for a moment. “Ok, go then, but we are not responsible if your bags are lost or stolen,” she mutters.

“FINE.” Let people steal a bag filled with teeny clothing, Hot Wheels bandaids, an ear thermometer and overnight diapers. I’m sure a thief will need those on his next run to create an airline bomb. I huff off and my eyes start tearing. I leave my bags and whiz past an old British man next in line who says “How are we going to load our bags if yours are in the way?” Bug off you British tart. I’m a mother traveling alone and don’t mess with me. I pad out to the door to retrieve Aamir in his stroller from Entrance Door 3.

The heavy luggage is loaded up and weighed.

“M’aam,” she looks at me again. “You’re bags at 13 K-G overweight. Unpack the excess weight now.”

“What?” I say. “They are overweight? How can I unpack the excess weight? Where am I going to PUT the excess weight?”

“Unpack the excess weight now,” she repeats like a dense automaton. She flits her pointing middle and forefinger to the luggage like she is directing traffic. She would do lovely in an airline emergency, I think, with the engine exploding and fire roaring out of windows. I’m sure she would stand there like a porcelain mannequin directing the panicking crowds to the door ten minutes too late.

I repeat my question. “Unpack the excess weight where? I can’t leave stuff here. What do you mean? Can’t I pay an excess weight luggage fee?”

“OK. But you have to pay US 50 dollars.”

My jaw tightens. I wait as she tip-taps the keyboard. She hands me a form of some sort and says to pay the fee at the excess baggage weight counter. I ask if I can pay by credit card, since I have no rupees, only a couple dollars, left in my wallet. She says yes. I ask where the counter is since there are about 20 counters in the island.

“It’s over there to the left,” as she waves her hand vaguely to the left. “It’s clearly labeled.”

O..kaaay. I swivel the stroller and walk around the crowds until I come to the end of the island. I haven’t spotted any clearly labelled “excess baggage fine pay here” sign, so I finally ask another employee.

“It’s over there, six counters down, where that man is standing in the black vest,” she says. My jaw tightens again. She’s pointing to a counter that is two counters away from my original point. I swivel back, duck under a divider with the stroller and carry-on bags hanging off both my shoulders, and get in line. There is no sign in existence. From here, I receive another receipt for payment. I hand over my credit card.

“M’aam, you have to pay in rupees.”

Dammit, but no point in drawing out this argument. I am directed to an ATM. When I get there, I realize I have left my ATM card with Abbass. I pad across the airport again, retrieve it, and as it turns out, the ATM machine can’t access my account. I slide back up to the counter, calves and cheeks burning, having thoroughly polished the walkway between Island J and Entrance Door 3, with printed ATM receipts crushed in my fingers written with “account not accessible at this time”.

So she does things the 80s way. She swipes the card to get the numbers off the carbon copy and hands me it to sign. I am directed back to the mental Emirates lady. She hands me my boarding passes. I look around for a nameplate so I can get her fired, but there is none. Wheeling across the polished airport floor one more time to Abbass, we embrace each other and he gives a loving kiss on Aamir’s cheek.

At the emigration gate, I am asked, after standing in line for several minutes, where my emigration forms are. I was never given them. Out the door I go, and retrieve it from the Emirates desk. Damn her again. Thank God Aamir is sedated with sleep.

At the security gate, I am asked where my luggage tags are so I can get the security stamp for my carry-ons. I was never given them. At this point, my brain is running at a high-pitch. I now have a silent karmic cloud storming over my head whose frothy furls are being directed at the Emirates lady. May she never get good marriage prospects in India, I curse. The security guy hands me two generic tags that are bright yellow and marked bolded with big black “X”s, which obviously stand for “loser who forgot to get luggage tags at check-in”.

At the security X-ray check, I am asked by a woman to fold up the stroller with Aamir sleeping in it. Gently, I tug at his shoulders and lift him onto my shoulder. “Can I get some assistance please?” I ask. She stares blankly and does nothing before another man standing in line folds my stroller and pushes it onto the metal rollers. Stepping through the gate, the security men are laughing and chit chatting amid their boredom. The bags are sitting there. Just sitting there. No one is pushing them through. Then one guy has the insight to shove them along so we can all get this journey started. I’m trying to retrieve my bags and stroller while carrying a sleeping child, which are out of reach. “Excuse me, can you hand me my bags?” I ask. A man tosses them over, and goes back to chatting. These people hate their jobs, I tell myself. And we board the plane for the first leg of our journey.

For the brief moment we were in that glittering city called Dubai, I already sensed what the fame was all about. The airport gleaned in the named of commerce and consumerism, with wide, polished walkways and byways, shining silver columns, and the alternating opaque and clear green expanses of curved glass surrounding every port. Outbound flights to all the major cities in the world were leaving every ten minutes: London, San Francisco, Capetown, Amsterdam, Beijing…the list was enormous. But I knew traditionalism underlined the glitterati when I passed by an ad for a healthcare company that showed a family. The man was dressed with a traditional sheik head covering and his wife, donning Gucci glasses and red lipstick, had her head and neck completely covered in a black scarf. The husband was tossing their pride and joy firstborn son in the air. Aha.

While in transit through this glittering castle, I realize with horror while looking at our second set of boarding passes that the mental Emirates lady in Delhi has assigned seats to Aamir and me in separate rows, smack in the middle of the plane without access to aisle nor window. I gasp. This was a war I already lost the first moment I got in line. That Delhi lady actually had it out for me. She had a black vendetta after I lay my first harsh words into her. Or…maybe she’s so clueless that she’s just stupidly incompetent. She probably just broke up with her fifth boyfriend in a row. Her green eyeshadow was pasted on…

“Lian Jue?”

I’m handed our passports and called into the plane. If anyone has had a chance to fly Emirates, I hope you will agree with me on this: Recall that period in history where the white European was flopping around on his farm with a couple of serfs and barely making it to age 30 in the midst of the Dark Ages, with all previous knowledge, libraries and awareness of the arts destroyed by the “barbarians” of the east? Meanwhile, during this same time period, the Arab Muslims were kicking Europe to the B-side by figuring out eye surgery, inventing algebra and navigational instruments for the seas, and creating stunning homages to Allah within the walls and delicate tiles of the most beautiful mosques in existence. That, my friends, is how it feels to ride Emirates. Because American and United Airlines can weep in their sad era of the Middle Ages as Emirates excels. The last time I rode on an American-brand plane, the seats wafted of old synthetic cloth gone bad and metallic coating, which was like a being surrounded by a cage. I don’t think they had cleaned their headrests for around 15 years.

Emirates’ video monitors had around 500 movies, television shows and updated news feeds. You can use your mobile phone while flying. The stewardesses are such a pretty lot, although they greet you with these odd hats that have a curtain on one side, which logistically, I’m still trying to figure out how that works and for what purpose. They give you fresh lime water and warm steaming towels. Aamir’s snack box consisted of baked ring chips, fresh apple slices, dried fruit, a chocolate cupcake, small colored Mentos candy, and a fun-colored toothbrush, accompanied by a thick activity book and colored pencils. His meal was chicken nuggets in the shape of stars, corn and peas with mash potatoes, and marshmallows in red, sparkling jello for dessert, all with big kids utensils in purple, green and yellow. He slept most of the way and played with the stewards in the back of the plane while shuffling on the floor in his “tiger” persona. Eventually I ignored him, especially in the last five hours, and kicked back watching interrupted episodes of Inception (excellent), Splice (kind of bad) and Eat Pray Love (boring) as Aamir spilled his toy cars across the seats.

I think we were over the northern regions of Canada making our way down the Americas at one point when I actually looked out. The small window cut in the plane door showed a brilliant red sun that developed into a piercing heavenly light cutting over a plain of clouds and uncharted mountainous terrain covered with sand and encrusted with cold. It was a naked unveiling of the land, completely pristine and barren, the first morning in the world, and the light even more beautiful and pure than most mornings I had encountered in the Himalaya. We were high above the earth in the furthest reaches of the atmosphere, and the shades of light emitted colors that blended together without interruption: light blue into orchid pink into gold into white. My mind went blank and became flooded with happiness.

When we landed, the Los Angeles rain swept through the concrete corridors outside the airport. The nice thing about travel these days is people don’t realize you can go to any place on earth in under 24-hours. It takes twenty hours or less to go from the capital of India where I was feasting on ladoo and relaxing on the steps of the Old Red Mosque to the suburbs of Orange County where I’m doing laundry in an eco-friendly washer. Less than one day. I’m also having the creeping feeling that, maybe its India that is actually the base and the US that is the place for the visit, that my heart is slowly turning its original orientation inside-out. There comes a point in your life where American money can only take you so far before the real reason for living takes over. Shopping, world news, the informational “how-to’s” that penetrated every minute of my American life from seven months ago are all faded. It feels good to be unhinged, at least for the moment.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Thanking Brahma

[Video: Aamir plays with slum kids from Delhi on the slide.]

Sloughing through culture shock this month has almost, just almost pushed me so over the edge I had to lock myself in the room today and sit numb on the verge of tears wondering if I shouldn't take up a medical drug addiction. My son screamed bloody accusations of abandonment and ripped at the door, and Abbass was yet again dumbfounded at my maternal incompetence, which is becoming more commonplace every. passing. hour.

I'll tell you what culture shock is like. First off, it goes in waves. It will hit you the first couple weeks in a new country, which is phase one, and to be expected. The cells in your limbs, and something in your neocortex, just feels like its been - need I say it - sitting on the toilet for just a little too long. It's an uncomfortable place to be, and the symptoms are pretty recognizable. (1) scream at husband for breathing and turning on tv (2) hate the sight, smell and taste of Indian spices, which means I can't really eat anything and nothing beats American chocolate chip cookies (3) complain bitterly about the weather, the traffic, having a baby, the heat, the cold and every single aspect about doing the laundry. (4) feel you might as well be dead when your Apple computer dies in the middle of the Himalaya.

Experts have culture shock mapped out in the books. In this era of globalization, thousands of expatriots, Fulbright scholars, pedophiles on the run, drugged out backpackers with bitter family ties, and diplomat families have all undergone it. Culture shock contains all the stages of death: anger, resolution, forgiveness...blah blah blah...it's all thrown in there as my self-identity becomes annihilated and the world demands to define myself anew.

Then month six hit. It's the worse. Why? Because I keep telling myself I've been here for six months and everything is familiar, and yet I'm still as uncomfortable as I was when I first landed and coped with every aspect of living. I'm back sitting on the toilet. Phase one is an expected catch. But phase four - who knows when that's going to swipe you? Or phase five? It's like that horror film The Cube, where the characters are trying to escape the traps within the machine only to find themselves back in the room they started in after going through hell to survive. It really sucks after all that effort.

To illustrate how horrible culture shock is, here's a couple situations that I've faced in the past few weeks while residing in Ladakh and the glittering, rocking city that the world embraces as Bombay:

- To stare out at the Arabian Sea amidst dancing pink candy floss, flashing spirals being tossed skyward, monkeys performing feats and dozens of children screaming in delight at touching the ocean for the first time and feel numb.

- To look at the crumbling walls of century-old Buddhist mani walls and their Bodik stone carvings on the stones - blessings for the world - and feel empty.

- To gaze at Bombay's slum cities surrounding our neighborhood where children, old women and men live, wash, play, rest and die in 5 square foot rooms facing the streets, and feel ordinary.

- Screaming with raised fists "I don't speak Hindi!" during our second attempt at getting train tickets while shoved up in the woman's line fighting some fat woman's elbow while trying to complete the purchase. Kind of needed to remind myself British English has only been around for a couple decades in this country.

It is the ultimate Curse in Self-Centredness, because as everyone knows, traveling to a world like India puts things in perspective. Versus living in LA, for example. And when you've lost all perspective in India, then the situation is bad. Really bad. There's an old woman holding out her crumbled hand begging for a coin and all I'm thinking is," Don't bother me. I can't do this today." Or actually feeling like I could slice someone if I have to eat dahl and rice again.

Perhaps that is the problem, that my culture shock has, to an exactly equal degree, inversely enacted itself in response of having missed celebrating Thankfulness in my hometown. So here is a little exercise I'm going to put myself through now. It is now 2:33am. I am here sitting in front of the computer while my son and my hubby, and my father-in-law sleep silently under the hum of the air conditioners in the next rooms.

I'm in a country of one billion people. Of these people, a majority live hand to mouth, on a few rupees a day. That means for their labour, they spend that money on food, and nothing else. Only to feed their families, and that's it. And what do I mean by labour? Try imagine riding a bicycle carrying people from one place to another all day in 110 degree heat, pounding rocks to break them up for building, wiping the floors of a restaurant as patrons walk upon them again and again, sweeping the streets of dust and grime. The Indian saying goes, and applies to most lives, that why polish a lump of coal if it is to remain black? I was born into a life that remains in the light. We have had everything we needed, nothing more, and nothing less, and for that I am, from the deepest part of myself, thankful.

Aamir recently visited a playground where three young boys from the slums joined him. Their eyes were bright, and the eldest showed a strong sense of responsibility and caring toward any boy who was smaller than him. Their father, a rickshaw driver, and their mother, a sweeper. All three sons could not afford any education, and so they spent all their passing hours in the playground, becoming experts at swinging and balancing. Two of the boys had their hands wrapped with a single strip of cloth as a way of coping with burns suffered on their hands from playing with firecrackers. One boy did not have any shoes. Soon they were racing with Aamir, coaxing him to try new tricks, sliding down the slide with him. They were all experiencing a joy together. For this moment, I am thankful.

Today Abbass brought me to a bookstore where I bought a pad of paper, a single pencil, a pen, and some paints. And that's all I need to know how to begin again. I filled one entire page with drawings and sketches tonight. Palms together in gratefulness for my little muse, who is weak at times, but still knows how to pay me a brief visit.

When I first visited India, all the pages of the Wisdom of the Ages originated here. There's the Bhagavad Gita for one. And the teachings of Yoga. And the enlightenment of the Buddha and how he got there. And ayurveda. It all happened here, and these reams of wisdom are sitting on the shelves, being piped over the tv, within entire shelves of ayurvedic products in the stores, and being manifested in meditation retreats in every town. And I realize, how wonderful to know that these things have been known for centuries. Happiness, death, suffering and forgiveness, all mapped out and understood. There are a thousand fingers already pointing the way. Thank you Lord/Allah/That Monkey God for exposing me to this, for giving me the means to travel and know this firsthand. Now if only exposure could bring on enlightenment.

Thank you for giving me happiness each time my child laughs.

Thank you for giving me a year of travel and respite so I could live and spend time with my son.

Thank you to the rain falling in a torrent on the Bombay pavement and the lights dancing off the streets from the passing autorickshaws.

Happy Thanksgiving Mom, Dad, Karin and close friends. I miss you all.

p.s. Brace yourselves for the Christmas entry.

Rickshaw Mercedes Benz

Given the weather has mellowed into a nice autumn hue and the nights are swept up in axe winter cold, I’m rewinding time back to our untold travels in Europe, which was the bridge to our trip to India:

As fellow blogger and office mate Laurenne Sala so nicely put it (check out her humansarefunny.blogspot.com and spit up laughing), one of the greatest gifts the advertising industry gave me was witnessing the creation of The Illusion, which is pretty much making people buy things - not love, not kindness, not friendship, but things - they don’t really want or need. The pundits at Chiat-Day call it The Disruption, but let’s face it folks, it’s The Illusion, or maybe, The Delusion. It’s magic really, being a Professional at Creating Desire, but how can you not feel a little soulless by the time you call it a day at the office. Our sole drive at the dawn of every workweek is to sell you cars/hamburgers/cream to make old ladies feel like they can avoid Death. Too bad at that. All it takes is a sprinkle of Photoshop and a soundtrack, sexified cinematography, and consumers are suddenly swiping their credit cards, increasing their personal debt or their blood sugar levels. And what’s amazing, it works brilliantly.

So how does this connect to Cologne? When we arrived to meet my friend Birgit and her husband Stefan, all the taxis lined up at the train station were Mercedes Benzes.

In fact, the Mercedes Benz in Germany is like the Ford of America – practical, prevalent, and just part of your standard life purchase like the gorgeous stainless steel knife set that glints with precision in every German kitchen right next to the hand-painted tiles. Everyone driving on a cloud is normal. Damn these people. It made me reflect on the Mercedes Benz ad campaign in the US and its perception of the elite driving those vehicles around the streets of LA. Bah. The silly LA people have bought into The Illusion, because y’all are actually driving German taxis. And it gets worse– if you’re an Audi driver you’re actually driving more or less an equivalent of a Volvo, and if you are driving a BMW, you’re really driving a Honda by German standards.

As we took 20 minutes to load our ten suitcases and bags (the Nordakh family of three was carrying a load for twelve – I guess we’ve truly morphed into an Indian family) onto a minivan Mercedes Benz taxi, the towers of the Cologne Cathedral loomed above us in the rain and windswept square, as in, to truly instill grandiosity and awe. This was the Costco of Christian cathedrals. Everywhere you looked, symbols of Christianity were packaged in bulk. There were dozens of saints in the entire Pantheon of Sainthood positioned like sardines in the arches. These guys wanted to sanctify them all. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact astronauts in space can peer out of their plastic head cases and see these two towers peaking through the area of land designated as Germany. It took around 900 years to complete and obviously a lot of money to do so, which may have been pretty easy to secure given God’s hold on the faithful’s manual resources. Imagine all those little metal hammers clinking on the stone surfaces to create every chin, eyebrow and regal crown. When the bells from its towers bellowed across the square, I could envision the soundwaves bursting all the way to France.

On top of its impressive structure, secured in its marble heart are relics from the Three Wise Men, preserved in a reliquary made of copper and gold and carved with beautiful 3D iconography on all of its sides. Yup, the three guys who discovered Jesus in a haystack. And here I had grown up thinking the legacy of the Three Wisemen was just another Peanuts cartoon during Christmas. I asked Birgitte how the Christians managed to find a tooth or finger or knee bone from them and keep those things preserved for two millennia, since I keep losing some precious item (like a camera or ruining some expensive piece of clothing with soy sauce) over a period of only a year. The tale, like so many others, was one of those Holy Unanswerables that took on such a force of its own, the heads of the church managed to secure a ton of expensive metal and pay homage to it in a box. A big box, since it’s the biggest reliquary in the world.
When we visited the interior of the Cathedral, my son used his tummy to wax the floor and plant his lips down on the beautiful marble mosaics. I have noticed it is becoming a little too habitual for him to clean the floor with his stomach in spacious interiors like airports and cathedrals. You have to adore Motherhood.

(Photo: Here is my son gathering sacred cathedral dust on his stomach. Planting his lips on such saintly ground did not translate into changing his naughty behavior. I wish it did.)

It was of course a real treat to see my friend Birgit again after 18+ years. We had first met during a summer through our parents when I was 16, where we played raucous card games with screaming and hi-fives in the basement of their home in Lahr, with her twin brother Ralf, who was a freckled goof. We spent the August nights watching asteroid showers while lying in the soft fields of the Black Forest, counting them off until we lost track altogether. I had gained 15 pounds that summer eating the three fresh cakes her mom had provided us every night. I wish this could be an exaggeration. One was always a Black Forest cake, a fruit cake, and a fluffy cake. My cheeks ballooned out and never fully recovered for months.

Every winter she had sent me a card with Christmas greeting from Germany, and being German, every card had lovely things like forest cottages surrounded by dense pines, or silver stars with painted sparkles very elegantly streaming across a holiday sky encased in semi-transparent layers of vellum and handwriting in silver ink. I could never understand why her number “1’s” looked like fishhooks, until I realized that every German writes their number 1’s that way. For a couple years I did not receive cards from her, and to be honest, I had never sent her one, until I got a wedding announcement from her two years ago. She was marrying a blond German named Stefan, who had a cute, bespectacled smile in his photo.

(Sidenote: Let me tell you, wedding gift shopping for a German friend is a lost cause at an American mall. Anything top quality, whether salt and pepper shakers, salad prongs, or knives, have the stamp ‘Made in Germany’. Germans, being industrialists, make their salt and peppershakers look like sleek pistons that belong in a BMW. They won’t ever degrade, and you could probably use your German saltshaker to ward off a mugger.)

Birgit had really grown beautiful when she picked us up at the train station; she had red highlights tinting her hair, and she was still tall and regal. Of course, most of the German women I know usually have femurs the length of golf clubs. Her cheeks were accented nicely with very light freckles, and had none of the teenage angst that I felt from her when I last saw her. Back then she was trying out cigarettes as a teenager and had a propensity to dress in black. Now she was dressed in an elegant black coat whose length was at her knees, and helped us shift our bags out of the station. She had bought us multi-colored gummy candy in the shape of the Cathedral towers, which Aamir promptly started chewing on and spitting out, one by one, slowly caking the interior of our luxurious Mercedes Benz taxi with dribble of colored sugar.

Birgit lives in a spacious 3-story apartment near the heart of the city that they rent from Stefan’s parents. The main living room was painted in a soft, subtle shade of lavender with deep purple accents in the pillows and vases, and opened onto a manicured garden. She had hung the off-white wood letters CARPE DIEM above the couch, which was overbaked in my mind after watching Dead Poet’s Society so many times, but I didn’t mention this. The ceilings in the apartment were very tall, and the interior furnishings were proportioned according to the height, so their cabinets and refrigerator had normal widths, but were 2 feet higher than average.

The overall impression, aside from every wall and domestic object emitting marital happiness, was that I felt like a midget - a real midget, aside from being short enough in Germany. Until we got to the basement to wash our clothes, where their washer was a wee white cube with a circular window fashioned for a submarine. When Birgit was throwing our dirty socks in, she admitted she thought this part of the house was haunted with a ghost, and couldn’t stay down there for long times at night.

Climbing the curved stairs up to our room was steep, and Aamir did a one-two shuffle on the narrowest part of them – because the tiny part of the stairs was of course made “just for him” - before taking a tumble. Mom instincts always made me catch him mid-air. The stairwells were lined with charming photos Birgit had taken on her travels around the world, from Italy to Brazil. She put us on the highest story, in a room with slanted walls because it was right under the roof, with a beach theme. Even the blue towels had shell accents that matched the color of the walls and the pictures on the walls, and the actual shells on the white shelves. When I entered the bathroom, it was also accented with white shells, on top of having the most stylish toilet flush I’ve ever seen. Those Germans. When a culture has gone so far to make toilet flushing elegant, you are in the Good Lands.

The first evening of our stay, Birgit and Stefan treated us to one of the more famous drinking caverns in the city called Stur. This place was classically German in every possible way: rooms and subrooms and siderooms with mini-bars and cellars for brewing beer, storing beer, drinking beer and musing on beer, paintings of faded bucolic scenes on the walls, decorated handcrafted ceramic tiling, warm wood stain, handblown colored glass alternating in the windows, tall wood partitions and thick wood tables, and classic chandeliers hanging from every room. With every nook emitting a glow and scents of thick meat and beer, I thought it tragic we didn’t trudge in from a blustering snow storm.

Instead of a waitress emerging with braided coils to serve us, we got a joyously rude, pudgy waiter with circular spectacles and strong arms who made raucously loud jokes. Cologne beer in slender glasses was immediately served, which was very light and bubbly. I ordered beef with apple slices and apple sauce and huge chunks of potatoes. Really, all they did was cut a large potato in half, and serve that portion. I felt full after 5 bites. Abbass, adhering to Muslim standards of halal, was a little miserable with his narrow choice of fish and asparagus, a local specialty. The fish was served cold and felt a little scaley. Abbass pretended to like it, but I knew he wasn’t completely satisfied, given he didn’t even allow himself to drink the beer. The poor guy was at real religious odds in this bastion of pork and alcohol. Aamir bit down on some thick fries before insisting on running outside again and playing in the puddle-filled streets next to the massive cathedral. I chased him with an umbrella, which was completely futile in preventing his pants and bottom from becoming sodden with rainwater.

[photo: That's meat.]



The next morning Birgit proved that she could be just as stellar a host as her mother by providing us a breakfast from Olympus. The table was littered with packets of American cereals, Nutella, boiled eggs in cute handmade ceramic eggcups, fruit salad with Muesli and yoghurt (her recipe), cheese and meat slices, German sausage deliberately served cold, tea, coffee, juice, fresh breads and croissants, honey, and jams. Aamir wasn’t really that hungry. I could have shaken that little man by the shoulders, but what kind of mother would do that to her two-year old? Instead he played with his new red German toy car from Stefan in the living room, and pulled off German philosophy books from the bookshelves, while I wolfed down every single combination of food item possible. I secretly pined for the pork sausage while momentarily considering divorce from my husband, then topped it all off with a slaps of Nutella.

Birgit’s husband Stefan was a real kick who always made the effort to tease his new wife with adoration. He works in copyright law with 10-16 hour work days, but has a sense of humor that goes beyond the straightforward bylines of the profession. Like those I envisioned in law, his blond hair was always neatly combed, his sweaters elegant, and his coat well-fitted, topped off with trim-metal specs. He and Abbass hit it off when he came back a little sweaty in his field hockey suit from the neighborhood park. Before hitting Stur, he tried to coax Abbass into a lovely before-dinner drink, which he classified as a bit of “heaven”, but of course, even in the middle of Europe with no one watching, Abbass was a pooper and politely refused.

Evening-time, I was rearranging some items in our suitcase, when Stefan came downstairs to turn off the lights in the kitchen. He spotted me in my nighties in the hallway. I was caught wearing dark green plaid pants and a dull gray REI sweater that’s probably about a decade old. “Ah,” he said. “You know, Birgit has the same pants. Very erotic!” With a wink he padded upstairs.

I told Birgit the next day. She sighed. “It’s over,” she said. “He thinks he can return to the way it was before.” We had a good laugh. After more than a decade, we had crossed the bridge, falling in love, gotten married, and now were both undergoing the motions of marriage. During our visit, I was lighthearted with the fact that 18 years could pass, and I never really lost the one melody with someone living a continent away. Both Birgit and I had finally shifted into round 2, growing into women, but the melody was the same. She had traveled around the world and had other visitors come to her in return. She talked about how hard her father continued to work in printing despite his age, the trials of ending her first engagement, how she cried after visits with Stefan’s in-laws, but it all worked out in the end. The entire trip to Europe was like that. You see friends in brief but significant chapters. You always hope to share one more glass of wine with them in celebration of life, as it was, and as it is.

More chapters of Cologne coming up.

Long Live the King

[Photos: by Jonathan Copp. Taken during his climb in Ladakh during dawn with the wild horses. Below: Jonny and Micah Dash hanging out together.]

I’m going to take a walk on a side-path for a moment since something happened to me in the early morning. I had a dream with my friend Jonny Copp, who had passed away last May 2009 while climbing a mountain in China.

Jonny was a member of an elite class of rock climbers, the kind that would book it to towers in Pakistan, Patagonia and France from one season to the next as easily as a leaping tiger. Every time I heard of his accomplishments and saw the accompanying photos of breathtaking peaks and crags, I’d be knocked on the side of the head, wondering why I was shriveling away at my desk job. From being witness to such unparalleled earthly beauty, he had a sweet philosophical embrace of life, a chuckle that finished each passing thought, and the presence of mind to be unencumbered by the trivial. He had made his choices carefully in life, choosing so carefully as to reflect who he was and what brought happiness, that he was one of the most complete human beings I had known.

We had a thread that had woven itself in and out of each other’s lives since childhood. I first met him when I was nine or so because our moms became good friends with their mutual love of Asian furniture, and saw him with his group of handsome climbing buddies every Christmas at their home in Fullerton. The gathering would always end with a drum circle and Jonny’s dad strumming sweetly on the guitar with his rendition of “Champs Elysee.” And each year I had a crush on him like every other woman in the room. When he was a teen, and me a pre-teen, his hair had grown long and was very blond. He was going through a tough-guy stage, and I couldn’t even approach him, I was so intimated by his burgeoning sense of being a man. Throughout his twenties, his fingers grew enormously strong and his shoulders seemed to grow outward and upward each year. He would have a therapeutic habit of cracking everyone’s backbone by hugging them and arching back, aside from greeting them with an strong hug. Passing thirty, his face became prematurely weathered and his cheeks had thinned out from the high altitudes and the harsh conditions on the face of these rocky towers. His hair sprayed out in all directions and he had a tuft of a little beard like a forest fawn. Still, with each greeting, his eyes grew brighter with what he had witnessed and no one else had seen, since he was truly living out his life. All the waters of the world seemed to run through his veins, all the winds of the world had thickened his hair with dust. Most of all, he was kind.

When I hung out with Jonny in the deserts of Josh Tree in California while climbing the burnt warm boulders, he’d approach climbing with the logic of a scientist and the intuition of an artist. These two mental states could exist in his mind in balance, and balance was about everything he did. If not this way, than that. If not that way, then another. Step by step, the path on the rock would open up. It was not unlike those fairy tales where the hero is in the labyrinth, and with a simple shift in perspective, the wall blocking the path is opened up with a magic key or a secret password. That’s why all of us loved him. He was astronaut on the rocks, a borderless individual.

When his family got the call from China that they had found the body buried among the rubble and snow, along with two accompanying climbers, his mother screamed out a lasting cry of sorrow. From one who has a young son, there is no pain more searing and deep, aside from war, from losing the child who has come through you, that has become your friend and your soul mate, that you have made choices so carefully for day after day. The Chinese authorities at first weren’t entirely sure they had gotten it right, but a day later, they did get it right. His closest friends that the family called his “brothers” flew to China to retrieve his body from the unstable slabs of ice and rock, and cremate him wrapped within a faithful Tibetan prayer shroud. Although we had never gotten to know each other every day, I had known him enough that his absence tore my time asunder for three days. I sat like a voiceless, static lump at my work desk, thinking that every action and piece of concern in my life was nothing but bits of sand. Jonny was 34 years old. He and his fellow climber Micah, who also perished and was never found, had attended our wedding in Ladakh. For those small moments I was given with both of them, like joking with Micah about the concerns of his very Jewish mother over his rock-climbing exploits with a cup of chai and Kashmiri meat, are the last real memories I hold.

Sometimes dreams whisper your inner voices outloud, resounding like an echo from deep within a cave. There are others where you are the Architect of the Dream. The old Tibetan masters apparently can do this, so honed are their minds they can meditate and create their own conditions while dreaming. And sometimes dreams weigh more than reality. This dream was like that.

I was on a crest on a long winding, dusty pathway in the middle of the Ladakh mountains. The air was very bright, with an inner light that seemed to exude from the land itself rather than the sky. Jonny was hiking up the road, approaching me. A wind went past our faces, and we were high above the gray waters of the Indus River. Micah and Wade, his fellow climbers, were with him. They were walking to reach a destination, and were taking pause. They weren’t quite sure where to go.

Jonny said that he knew the spirits of some mountains up the road that could tell him right path. But he didn’t know exactly which of these mountains could tell him correctly. “So the problem is," I heard myself talking to Jonny,”…is that these mountains will speak to you, you can hear them, but you just don’t know which mountain is telling the truth.”

The dream shifted. Jonny was sitting on the pass surrounded by several drums. Drums he had made. (When he was alive, he carved out these wood drums that were constructed tightly with string and neatly taut. These would make up the drum circle at the holiday parties.) In the dream, his fingers rapped across their faces, the beats reaching into the inner lungs of the valley, resounding across all the walls of rock, and creating a universal rhythm of the unspoken.

Then the final moment of the dream, I witnessed all three of them walking with sureness down the dusty path again. As if, after Jonny’s drumming, they knew exactly where they wanted to go, knew that a destination was waiting for them, safely. There were four lines of Tibetan prayer flags extending infinitely from the peak where Jonny was formerly sitting with his drums, now gone. The flags, fluttering in the winds and carrying the Buddhist prayers written on them, extended beyond the eye, beyond the depths of the horizon. I felt they carried my breath and spirit far out into the reaches of the entire world. Here was a view beyond all views. They were on their way.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they say that an individual’s mind goes through the Bardo before reaching the next incarnation of who they are, who they will become. The Bardo is the Dark Lands, a kind of netherworld where the Mind goes searching and desiring and feeling anger before it manifests in the world again in the karmic cycle of existence. I suppose it’s where a lot of our ghost folklore comes from. Jonny wrote about the Borderlands in his journal before his death, a nether-geography where he was in the shadow of the mountain, not the light, before the mountain consumed him.

But the dream showed he and his fellows had figured it out. They had long passed out of the world in which they were trapped. Everything was okay. I woke up, feeling the cold morning air against my cheek, and Aamir’s warm skin of his leg against my thigh. I stared out into the dry air for a while as the dream’s terrain slowly dissolved from my mind like water dissolving from the ground as the morning light hits it.

Jonny had given me a gift after we worked together on the Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. It is my favorite photograph of his, taken when climbing near the source of the Ganges River in the Indian Himalaya. A climber faces out towards a beautiful mountain face enveloped by clouds. The image is saturated in a deep, cobalt blue. I love it so much, but for an odd reason, not because it makes me think of the mountains. It reminds me of the ocean. There is a depth to it that goes beyond the mountains it shows. On the bottom of the frame, he took a used teabag that has the words “To remain calm is the highest form of the self” printed on the paper label. Ha ha Jonny. As those who live in the Alps or the Himalayas or the Andes already know so well, mountains are more than just mountains. They are gods. And frankly, when you live next to them long enough, your eyes stroking the monumental faces of the rock, watching the light and darkness envelop them through each passing moment of time, they are alive.

I’ll see you in the next life buddy. Your thread is still with me, even after your absence. Something lives in me and I haven’t let it go. Long live the King.

Jonnycoppfoundation.org

We Are Animals

Lately the flies have been attacking all of us with such voraciousness, it can only be Time To Die. According to Abbass, who is familiar with the nature of the fly having spent most his life in Ladakh, the flies whip up in a frenzy right before the weather drops to a degree so cold they drop dead. And sometimes wind up in your water glass. I’m still waiting for this day.

We’ve taken out the mosquito net to ward them off, especially when Aamir and me are napping together in the afternoons. The worst is when they get caught in your hair, because then you not only hear the frenzied buzzing of a fly trapped in net of strands, but you feel the damn thing whipping around its tiny legs and wings next to your scalp. The feeling is so horrid, I wonder why they don’t use it as a torture technique for prisoners of war in the last hours of the interrogation. My shoulders would be raised in the hot chair screaming out all my spy connections if they dumped buzzing flies in my hair.

Having so many flies around makes one an expert observer of the fly. When I was falling in love with my husband, he would show off his athletic prowess by catching flies with his bare hands. A fly would be on the table, he would open his palm and snatch it off the surface. He would hold his closed fist in front of me for dramatic effect. “Do you think I caught it?” he asked. I would have no idea. He opened his fist, and the fly, probably dazed from what just happened, would waywardly fly off. And yes, my heart would swoon during this moment because I found the Fly Samurai.

(Later I found out that anyone can do this by knowing two things: When flies try to escape, they fly forward, so you can scoop them up from the direction of their head. Second, they fly slower in colder temperatures, so it’s relatively easy to catch them when the winter in Ladakh starts setting in. Making me think Love is really a sick, sick drug.)

The touch of flies has been bothering me so much like having pins pricking your skin at various frequencies. I glare at them and wish them death. While glaring I’ve noticed they actually have conversations and dance with one another. Do I dare believe these little minions of the earth have consciousness? Carry out acts of justice? I actually witnessed a fly, in complete and unadulterated rage, tackle another fly off the edge of the bed. It was incredible. You could hear an accelerated buzzing noise, and bam! It hit another fly and both of them fell off the perch of the rounded wood border of the bedframe. There was anger. But mostly it’s about friends greeting friends, eating frenzies, and trying to get at moisture wherever you can.

Aamir is learning about death through flies. Today he grasped a potentially disease carrying fly in his forefinger and thumb, and told it to ‘wak.’ (i.e. “walk”). It lay drowned in a pool of chai on the bottom of a tea saucer as he nudged it, coated so deeply in liquid it looked like a black lump. “Don’t touch it,” I told him. “Oh, and Aamir, it’s dead.” “What?” he said. “It’s DEAD,” I said. “And DON’T touch it.” He touched it again, before leaving the black speck alone because it didn’t do anything fun.

So much for providing a compassionate education that everything alive in this world comes to an end to my child. About two weeks ago, I stepped beside a fluffy dead puppy in the street. It had no indication of death except in its eyes, which were dried out. Dare I say that it was tragically cute to gaze at, my heart was tempted to go numb, and I told Aamir to simply “move on” after he asked what was going on with it. In the U.S. this would be an image of grave mortal and societal concern. In India, it simply happens and no one could have done anything about it because it was destined to die as such. I’ve had fellow Indians wide-eyed when I tell them about the bakeries and fashion stores in southern California devoted only to dogs. That was when Abbass’ culture shock hit an all-time high during the first months in the U.S. as I saw him nearly smack his face into the window of one such store and then bowl over when a dog wheeled by in a dog-stroller wearing a fairly nice sweater. The thing that gets him the most is the dog wheelchairs.

Apart from the flies and dogs, India is a verifiable zoo-fest of birth, living and death. This country is so replete with every type of animal braying and buzzing about you, giving birth, having sex, and dying in the gutters, it is hard not to face facts about mortality and that humans aren’t really the only ones on the planet, although everything about the American cities makes us want to forget that. In Delhi I was sitting at a small stall sipping my morning chai near the street when an elephant walked past. I might as well have been sipping coffee at a Manhattan deli and have a mammoth thunder past the glass window. It was that unreal to have this momentous animal take its huge steps past me while doing a regular morning ritual. (My chai did not show vibrations in its surface, however.) The extraordinary thing about these large creatures is that one was able to pluck a single French fry from my hand with the end of its trunk, and gave me the gentlest hug. An elephant blessed me several times outside a South Indian temple as my camera jammed up and wouldn’t take a photo until the sixth try. Its mehendi-painted trunk hovered over my head again and again until the whole act pretty much lost its aura and its owner looked annoyed. Still, I cannot help but be in awe of their size and even the way their shoulder bones move in great slow motions when they walk.

Unfortunately sometimes these encounters can turn into a porn-fest, like when two donkeys did their thing at a football game in the Leh polo ground one afternoon. There was a lot of yah-yah’s from the crowd of male fans. Worst of all are the monkeys, whose anatomy is so directly related to humans, it is pretty much like observing a live show in a red light district window. When I took a trip to Varanasi years ago, two little monkeys were doing it “doggy-style” while perched on top of a temple rooftop next to the most sacred river on the planet. I remember watching them, laughing and feeling embarrassed like when you watch a sex scene in a movie with your parents in the room, along with all the chai-wallahs and Hindu priests along the soft pink ghat, all of us coo-ing and gawking that life, well, always has the will to perpetuate itself.

Monkeys are everywhere in India. They are calculating, playful, crazy funny and malicious. They will gather on top of the hill to watch the sunsets. You can only surmise how much they are aware as humans are aware if they appreciate that level of beauty. They are expert thieves, as I lost a number of bananas and melons through windows. A monkey even stole my black bra from the laundry line. Abbass envisioned that monkey thief doing a provocative lingerie cha-cha while holding my bra to its furry chest as I fumed about it. One time I fed a monkey round, red berries off the coast of Bombay. I picked up one and handed it to a small monkey with a delicate face and circular black eyes. The moment I handed it over, it reached out its hand, and its thumb and forefinger met my thumb and forefinger. The touch of an animal thumb against my thumb made my breath suspend itself for a moment. The next immediate thought was, Darwin’s challengers were idiots.

So as the yak meets my gaze with calm solemnity, or the donkey brays next to my jeep, or as one contemplates how the cow can signify one’s mom, and how that rat became to be the size of a small dog, the ultimate lesson India has to offer is that life feeds on life, and you will come to know this intimately. There are the usual goat sacrifices at weddings to be sure; the furry fellow will often be munching on some leaves of grass while tied to a nearby tree while children pet it. The Hindu ceremony ensues, the goat disappears with a man wielding a large knife behind a bush, and next thing you know, its head is displayed on top of a rock while the pieces of meat are being divided up.

Among the streets of Leh, like among many streets in India, the butcher shops display all the parts of the animal. I’ve pointed the entrails and heads and hooves out to Aamir matter-of-factly, ID-ing which part is which, and he nods his head and absorbs it all without a wince or a whine of disgust. One butcher took a lower leg and pretended it was clopping towards Aamir on the table. Aamir wasn’t too amused. In Old Delhi the heads of the goats would be laid out in massive piles among the Muslim butcher shops, their eyes glistening and completely inert. I took black and white photos of them, and the resulting image, with all the sinews and veins and shining surfaces, would somehow morph into a thing of beauty. How we all are of the same flesh. What does it mean to be alive when you can study death like this? We are all made of these parts, the muscles and the tendons holding everything together in a delicate circulatory dance. How tenuous the surface of the body. How meaningless in a way, although while we’re alive we put so much meaning into it.

Facing the fact that life feeds on life, nothing beats going shopping for chicken in Leh. The difference between the U.S. and India is that I have to anticipate death while shopping for chicken. Can you imagine how to anticipate death? The butcher selects the clucking animal from its cage. I intensely read the newspaper used to wrap the meat to avoid the fact this man will have to kill this animal in order for me to eat it. Kashmir is getting worse these days. There were some honor killings in the eastern region of India by the women’s relatives. My mind sings newspaper lines to itself as the butcher disappears behind the dark blue floral curtain hanging languidly in front of a single faint bulb. When the deed is done, and the clucking goes silent, the thing I fail to anticipate, while carrying back the freshly killed meat wrapped in a single layer of newspaper, is that the meat is actually emanating warmth through my fingers. Now that is a little too fresh. Even my manly-man hubby, donning his tough guy shades and ordering the helpers about the house, scurries away at the prospect of buying fresh chicken for dinner. Wimp.

Dog Eat...

You know when you are watching Animal Planet or The National Geographic Channel, and they have graphic dramatic footage of a pack of ten jackals attacking a massive water buffalo or an elephant? In order for the smaller predators to take down the larger prey, they instinctively and strategically go for the buttocks, the calf, and the neck of the animal before it falls (in slow motion footage of course) to the earth in a spasm of dust and death.

That’s what I almost felt like two nights ago.

I walked out of an internet café when a single street dog emerged from the dark on my left and barked aggressively. He was the first domino. An entire gang of dogs joined in a chorus from the right side. I was surrounded. This is actually pretty bad Lian, I told myself. I had nowhere to go. Bring out that animal instinct and fight back.

I raised my hand and pretended to throw a stone at them. I sssht and screamed at them. As soon as I did so, instead of cowering back like they usually do so easily during the day, the whole lot of them charged.

I felt the sharp piercing of dog teeth in my upper right calf and something sharp push on my left buttock. There was a grip on my coat. My strong persona shriveled like a broken balloon, I ran like a yellow chicken down the street and the canine gang pursued me. I think my yell devolved into a little-girl scream. And running just fast enough, they suddenly dropped off and left me alone with my rapidly beating chest in the half-lit vacuum of the main street of Leh, before a group of several Kashmiri men, closing shop, walked up to me and asked if I was okay. I staggered home and discovered a pierced cut on my leg.

“You get lot of shots,” says my father-in-law. “Seven.”

“You should get that checked out by a doctor,” says my husband. “I hear that dogs are eating up corpses from the flood. They are finding half-eaten bodies. So if a dog bites into you…”

“Imagine if Aamir had been with you!” says my niece-in-law. “They would have ripped his face off.”

At that point I shut the world up. I cleaned the wound, and went to the doctor the next morning, who optimistically told me that since the teeth didn’t actually pierce my jeans, the risk for contamination from saliva was minimal. That’s the last time my relatives tell me wearing jeans is not “honorable” for a woman my age. “Or we could examine the dog and see if it is infected. You probably could not identify which dog bit you?” said Dr. Gulam. I stared and wondered why an MD degree couldn’t logically compute that probability was less than one in a million in a town where dozen of street dogs roam like mafia. I discovered I had inadvertently walked into a section of the street that contained a drain where all the restaurants dump their leftover food, sauntering right into the dog gang dining table with my foul human shoes. My father-in-law advised that next time, I carry a big stick.

Like all kids, I called my parents and asked my dad to scour the files for a yellow laminated vaccination card ten years old. He confirmed I had the rabies vaccination. A decade ago, when I was so panicked about the diseases that India could scar me for life before my first trip, I wrote a $1,000 check to the Harvard Center for Woman’s Health and got immunized against everything from Japanese Encephalitis to all possible A/B/D/F/Z of Hepatitis. I remember my biceps being so swollen with shots that every vibration running up my arms from gripping the handles on my bike while riding home in the cold air on the Esplanade in Boston caused me to wince. Thank the Lord for that.

So, bygones. Another adventure (and scar) in India.

The September Earth

The heat had filled the room to the point where I couldn’t nap anymore on the bed, surrounded by curtained windows. So I moved to the couch. And by evening, the earth had cooled, and typical of the Himalaya, cools so rapidly I knew I would be clasping my arms for warmth in an hour. Aamir and I stepped outside and took the road to Tukcha, a neighborhood in the capital city Leh, whose path led directly from the corner of Abbass’ office. Down the road Aamir wheeled on his beaten red bicycle, faded a wan pink, the pedals broken off so only two metal prongs twirled while he padded the earth with his sneakers to move the bike rapidly along the road. White dust was thrown up into our faces, and settled down again.

Down the pathway we moved, the rhythm of our evening walk interrupted by the occasional car erupting around the corner, in the wake of more dust. I shouted to Aamir to move to the side, and like a little beetle, he wheeled his bike responsively to a corner away from the main street. He wanted to stay on the main road, rather than take the many stoned pathways that branched from it, whose curves followed the ancient irrigation rivers that are the circulation system of the city, veins that border every garden in every house in Leh. These walkways shaded by trees whose branches seem like a thousand fingers dipping into the fresh air. No one can tell me how old the waterways are; they go back for generations.

The earth smelled sweet and freshly cut. That is the sign for the September earth, when the Ladakhis cut their barley crops. The scent rose from a particular garden, whose stone fence Aamir had insisted on walking on weeks before, stone by stone, leaping like a spry grasshopper while I held one of his hands for balance. This time there was clear spring water gushing out of two pipeways out of the garden onto the street. He dipped the wheels of his bike into them and moved the bike back and forth like he always loves to do. The water hit the street and a coolness rose from where it splattered.

Beyond the road the diminishing sunlight held small flies in its rays. They buzzed around in random circles and appeared like grains of gold dancing in the warm light. I pointed this out to Aamir, who decided he didn’t want to go towards them.
We turned left. We spotted an old Ladakhi woman dressed in a black goncha, her hair covered by a patterned cloth, delicately holding the arm of a tall young girl whose body and face were slighted contorted, indicating some type of mental and physical disability. Slowly she walked with the girl, taking each step with patience. The old woman smiled at Aamir and cooed at him as he walked past.

A young brown cow studied us as we walked behind it on a curved stone pathway bordered by water.

Leading to a crooked, private wood gateway, a small bridge made out of corrugated metal with large holes punched at regular intervals was placed tenuously across a canal.

We came to a large swath of river that had obviously been ripped apart by the flash flood. The right bank was bordered with stacks of sandbags, colored yellow and orange, like a stack of products in a storefront. We walked down to the edge of the rushing water, where I let Aamir do his favorite thing these days: throw stones into the water. They plopped and blooped. He wanted to make “roti”, so he dipped his hands into the rich mud near the water and did the “flap-flap” with his hands, as he calls it. He took the mud and smothered the rocks with them, taking deliberate care to make sure the hard surfaces were adequately covered with the dark gray, cool dirt. He didn’t want to leave. I held his torso as he washed his hands of the rich soil in the river.

Every evening here in Ladakh is its own poem. I wonder how my son Aamir will be able to cross the continents with ease when he gets older. They each have vastly different messages. Time is not fixed here; it breathes. The mountains, huge fortresses, do not seem to change year after year, but everything in fact changes here: the form of the water, the freshly cut threads of the earth, the rocks Aamir collects in his small palms on the side of the river. It changes with the rhythm of the human mind, and not with the contrived speed of a machine.

Aamir, you were born in a hospital room where I was able to gaze at the pink dawn light bathing the Hollywood sign, and now you have landed here, where your great-great-great grandfathers were salt traders who drove small Zanskar valley horses and yak across the Silk Road route, across high mountain passes into Tibet and China. The Aryans from the west married with the Asians from the East to produce someone like your father, whose eyes glint copper in the sunlight, who has wavy black hair. Before cars, your very own grandfather walked from the capital city all the way to Srinigar in Kashmir, before guns showed themselves on the borders here, and the apple trees could blossom freely without the pollution of war. It took him a month as he slept in caves and ate barley.

When you were born, he planted 100 apple trees in your name. Today, 40 stand in the field in Chushot village, growing stronger every day. The land on which you reside has been passed down through five generations, perhaps others not recalled on top of that. You are the youngest inheritor in a long line of old souls.

Already at two years old, you have sat atop the Empire State, in front of the Capitol Building, looked through a telescope from the Eiffel Tower, and soon, we will visit the Taj Mahal together. You are more than aware of the computer, know how to operate the iPhone. You have climbed the Alps and the Himalayas. You know how to pray in the mosque by yourself, have gazed skyward at the spires atop European cathedrals, and ran through the prayer halls of century-old Buddhist monasteries. You have eaten the bread of Kashmiris and the Germans, sat with Rinpoches and NHL players both, and have already met the man we named you after. You have done all these things, although when you are older your memory perhaps will not have a clear grasp of where you were and what you were doing.

In a generation, you have crossed centuries. The idea is almost beyond the imagination of a single mind.

Flash Flood

As many family and friends are already aware, there was a terrible flood that killed hundreds of people in Ladakh on August 6 in a matter of 30 minutes. The water that stormed through the region was only a segment of a larger phenomenon running through this part of the world: Pakistan is devastated with millions at risk for cholera. Delhi’s concrete buildings have been flooded. The Punjab region has farmers sitting on miniscule mounds of earth while brown water swirls around them for miles, and China has lost several thousands. My father-in-law, a remnant of the Old World as I call him, who is 75 years old, said this was the first time he had ever witnessed something of this magnitude, and many of us surmise that, year after year, as the earth’s weather patterns become more and more erratic, that global warming is truly showing up to give us some very difficult lessons. (Probably 10 days after the flood I happened to be watching “The Day the Earth Stood Still” on HBO and was grimacing that Hollywood had pretty much gotten a good metaphorical grasp on reality for once).

Here’s what I quickly scribbled down the day after the flood:

Last night there was a flash flood in Leh and throughout Ladakh. I have never experienced anything like it. The experience of a natural disaster is extraordinary, awesome. There was a storm on the horizon and above the Royal Palace when Abbass and I went out to dinner – lightning flashed occasionally. By the time it was 12:30am, the storms had come in with a thunderous roar. My gut was absolutely twisted in raw fear. Fear of such weight that my body was carrying it in my belly. The lightning was flashing several times every, single second. I had never seen lightning flash with such frequency, but the light would dance in front of one’s eyes. The thunder as a result was a constant roar – a drumming army - and the rain that came down was a torrential, splattering wash. When I peered out my window there was nothing to see – only the gray cascade of water which didn’t seem to rush down from the sky so much as just rush OUT from every which way, and specs of mud splattered across all the windows. The feeling was terrifying, suffocating, like a tunnel of souls being sucked away and down into an abyss. Anwar (Abbass’ brother) was running up the stairs in a panic, saying to everyone that we had to get out – apparently he had run down and made the mistake of opening the doors and let a rush of water over his body. Abbass ran out and had to get empty sandbags from the backside, fill them with sand from the Ladakhi toilet and then rush out and blockade the door. Already the courtyard was filled with two feet of rushing water – the outside was a rushing river almost four feet tall.

The first floor of the guesthouse is now caked in mud and gutted. Pieces of rooftop have fallen onto the tile floor. I am exhausted like I have been wrung out; others more exhausted for having stayed up all night hauling buckets of muddy water out of the courtyard. All the major infrastructure is out – the BSNL office that holds the servers are down. The phone lines are down, electricity is out, the hospital is apparently gone with only 4-5 rooms standing. My parents know more about what is happening around us than us; we are enclosed in an island of natural tragedy, can only go so far as a human can walk – and sometimes not for being blocked by a huge sweep of muddy water. Unofficial reports say that about 200 laborers and their families from Bihar were swept away in their respective neighborhood; the main market street is all but abandoned and caked with mud; all the shops are closed and locked. It is hot; the streets seem suffocated in the sunlight as the mud and water lay secured in potholes and pockets throughout. The main market, which has become a ghost-town with wires laced from streetlamp to streetlamp as the most prominent feature – has fallen to gray and dust as all the storefronts show off their corrugated metal fronts and faded paint jobs.

What is extraordinary is the guests who have stayed here and their generosity; two male visitors hauled water buckets with Abbass all last night, with water that had filled the courtyard and throwing it out into the street; a couple from France is cleaning out the courtyard of the piles of mud with a single plastic dustbin and dinner plates. We have had the sheer luck of being positioned in the wayward labyrinth of the Old Town so the waters didn’t collect and sweep us away; and that the foundation of the house, claimed by Abbass’ ancestors five generations ago, was cemented in stone. Some guests who fled during the night have returned: 3 Canadians and an American go out each day to volunteer in Choglomsar to help haul mud out of people’s homes. Aamir had slept through the entire experience. For some reason he always sleeps straight through the loudest and the strongest of storms, sounds, journeys. I do not know what he dreams of…

Here’s more in the days afterward:

The front of the guesthouse has 2 feet of mud piled in front of it. Abbass worked to set concrete blocks the day after in case another flash flood decided to come upon us in the days following. The mud has a really insidious nature; it dissolves immediately when water touches it, but when it dries it is hard as concrete. It is backbreaking to shovel. That is why people have used it for housing. In the dry, desert climate of Ladakh, all the most traditional homes are encased in the mud. They always smell of the fresh earth, are always cool in the hot summer afternoons. And those were the ones washed away with their families. I can imagine that many are fishing out the corpses from the hardest masses of earth.

Time is passing by so slowly. We have very little that is exciting to eat. There is no fresh bread or milk in the mornings anymore, so we go out quickly and buy the sliced white bread, which is really of poor quality, because it crumbles underneath your fingers. I obtain boxed milk for Aamir, but because we have no electricity, no refrigeration, the milk curdles into a solid, sour mass in a day. Time for a chai substitute. I am glad that only a day before I got cash from the ATM and a massive box of diapers for Aamir, but alarmed to find out from our Kashmiri shopkeeper tomatoes won’t come for another month, the basis for everything, as if that is a signal for something worse and more dire to come. I surmise this might be a good time to try again for some toilet training. For some more days it is rice, dahl and packaged noodles. The second day we fit about 7 guests into the winter kitchen and feed them rajma dahl since no restaurants have opened. The kitchen was filled with philosophy and laughter that night. We had a couple from Iceland, French, Canadians, an American. There are always a lively twining of lives here.
…
Abbass and I ventured to take a drive with Aamir to see what was going on, we wear masks over our faces; for the last two days it has felt like a fishbowl where we are enclosed in rotten mud, and I am dying to see what the rest of the world sees. When we drive down towards the airport past the opening gate of the city, we discover that an entire swatch of land has been washed away, positioned unluckily in the wake of a valley of two hills. The skeletal remains of the buildings make my eyes go wide. This is the first natural disaster of this scale I’ve ever experienced. Entire buildings are gone. There is just a wide plain of mud. Others have had their walls ripped off and their insides showing. Cars and whole trucks have been tossed up against their walls like toys, or casually ripped apart. Abbass’ old elementary school is nothing but a field of mud with a single skeletal remain of a white Suzuki sitting in the middle. The Indian Army golf field is now speckled with tents made from parachute silk with those that lost their homes.

Worse hit is the town of Choglamsar. After several days the Himalayan Road workcrews – who have the extraordinary job of keeping the roads cleared and maintained after each winter in the Himalaya, so they are damn good at what they do – have already cleared the path toward the neighboring village. We drive by to see buildings so deeply buried only the roofs are peeking out from the earth. Choglamsar was actually saved, in part, because there was a large Buddhist mani wall that ran the length of the road. This acted as a barrier, but still, another large swath of land was washed away in between it, and the crews had built a bridge over the area because a river was now in the place where buildings formerly stood. 8 feet of mud was caked over the main street, with rocks entrenched in the earth, each about the size of about half a car. Huge entanglements of tree roots are showing at different points of the road. You didn’t have a chance. The storefronts had their corrugated metal doors actually knocked in so the metal looks like it was punched by a giant fist – some even have cars thrown in. Crowds of people are milling about; labourers, foreigners, members of rescue teams, the Indian Army, all working together, one heavy dishful by dishful, to haul the mud out of the stores.

Lack of good food suddenly is becoming a fact, but by no means dire. Aamir is sorely disappointed that no ice cream has been delivered to town. I explain to him what a flood is, and that the trucks couldn’t deliver his good food. He understands. I have the sudden mommy insight that this is a great opportunity for me to cut down on his addiction to sugar. More chaos seems to be erupting in Kashmir – the region has had several deaths a day, and trucks have ceased to come in from that side as well, so gone are our stocks of papaya, pineapple, sweet apples and watermelon from that rich region. Stores in town are running on the empty side, but after only 3-4 days, the road from Manali is opened again and the shelves are flushed with the usual products. Except milk.

In the streets of day-to-day, there is no public display of sadness across everyone’s faces. Only a sober look, a downward turn of the eyes, the karmic acceptance of fate so natural to Indians. They have increased the flights out of Leh to take the labourers home to Bihar. They want to be reunited with their families. I am filled with first instinct to protect my child every daily hour, wondering if I could do more to help the others. There is no mistaking that. We are more than fine. Suddenly there is primary need to keep him well-fed, protected from the results of what happened, as he tries to “make roti” between his little hands from the piles of mud outside. He is all that I am right now. Abbass has hardly gotten sleep. One thing or another happens night after night – another heavy rain came in a week later and everyone ran up to the hills. Only Abbass stayed and strategically shoveled earth so the grated irrigation ducts wouldn’t fill up and create another flood outside the house. He has lost at least 10 kg.

We are now getting real statistics. Now 150+ people officially declared dead. The hundreds that are missing can only be presumed dead and encased in the piles of hard earth. One is a relative of the family, a distant cousin, only 35 years old, whose home is situated a stone’s throw from ours in the Old Town. As is tradition, a group of female mourners gathers together. Their cries and sobs can be heard, hour after hour, for about 3 days continuously, across the old jumbled roofs. The sobs continue into the evening, as the sky clears, then erupt again into the gray and light rain that passes through the Indus Valley. Their pain spills out, hour after hour, never seems to cease. It is a rupture among the sidewinding stone streets, gets absorbed by the evening light that cascades across the bulk of the palace, a wound that cannot be filled.

Aamir meets Aamir

For this entry, I was going to provide details of the terrible devastation that tore through the Ladakh region on August 6, with the flash flood that carried the lives of over 150 people, with 800+ people still missing, but let me first begin with

I MET AND HAD A NATIONAL TV INTERVIEW WITH AAMIR KHAN. I CAN’T GET OVER IT. HUMANAHUMANAHUMANAGAAAAAGAAAAA!

(note: server is still out. Can't upload photos. It's killing me).

I know that this is possibly the worse thing to share with the world after a flash flood that killed hundreds of people, like chatting about who is going to win the Bombay Cricket Cup after 9-11, but I’m on a Twinkle Star high. My entire body is flushed with hormonal endocrine sparkles that are flowing from the tip of my head down to my dusty toes. Ever since I saw Aamir Khan in “Earth” and a singing forlorn taxi driver in Pardesi, I’ve felt he’s the most versatile actor to emerge from a film industry replete with love overdone, evil guys with mustaches and couples dancing in the Swiss hills ad nauseum. I’ve loved him ever since. In every unique film with his name plastered on the filmi poster, I have been fascinated with who he is going to play next, with what issue is going to be brought to the forefront with the wide reach Bollywood has over world audiences.

Oh yes, and we also happened to name our first-born son after him (yes friends, you know that about me).

Rumor had it Aamir Khan was visiting several schools in Ladakh, had donated several crore to the rehabilitation, and was running with the media to highlight the devastation. To meet him was a dose of karmic coincidence from several lifetimes ago. Maybe I saved people in a flood. Maybe Allah really is a Great Guy, as my hubby puts it.

My sister-in-law, her two daughters and I were visiting Stok village to meet with an old Buddhist friend of mine, and our taxi driver happened to be a friendly contact for a Buddhist lama, who was the right hand guy for this major Buddhist Rinpoche, who was Aamir Khan’s host par excellence around the region. He kept calling the Buddhist Lama to locate Aamir Khan, and thank goodness Buddhist Lamas keep cell phones on them these days, because around 6:30pm we got confirmation he was at Shey Monastery, driving a dark red Xylo SUV.

As the road converged from Stok to Choglamsar, our driver made a final confirmation call. We made a right turn toward Shey Monastery, and momentarily got blocked by a huge delivery truck and a spate of traffic, amidst collecting clouds of dust. (This actually made me really agitated, as if the billows actually could shrink minutes of opportunity). The blockage cleared, we sped through more insidious yellow clouds being whipped up from the road,and suddenly found ourselves driving straight towards a dark red Xylo. The vehicle pulls off to our right side of the road, andAamir Khan leaps out of the front seat with a white tee shirt and jeans, and walks to the stone border outside of the Dalai Lama’s summer property.

My sister-in-law is screaming.

We rapidly pop out of the car,I’m tempted to be snap happy as a manic paparazza, before realizing we are the first public visitors to be standing right next to him on the side of the road. The Aamir Khan entourage has, by sheer coincidence, stopped to conduct an interview with the accompanying television crew. Several bodyguards with branded tees are standing in a circumference around the actor in tough-guy cross-armed stance.

The next moment, my sister-in-law is getting an autograph, and the moment follows, I’m actually talking face to face with Aamir Khan. I tell him I’m American, from Orange County, California, working in LA, and then the inevitable comes out of my mouth, that yes, I named my son after him. At that moment, Aamir Khan opens his arms to hold Aamir Nordakh. Little Aamir screams “Noooo!”and clasped my entire torso like one of those Koala clips (if you ever knew what the feeling was like of wanting to eat your fist, that takes the crown). A camera lens is suddenly in my face, with a microphone from STAR TV news thrust in front of my mouth.

“Madam, you tell us how you became familiar with Aamir Khan? How do you feel about meeting Aamir Khan after naming your son after him?”

I feel hot drops forming on the tip of my nose. I start talking, as everything around me swirls to a murky hum while little Aamir squiggles uncomfortably in my arms.

“I’m speechless (chuckle from Aamir and interviewer) really I’ve always admired Aamir Khan for a long time for his unique films...like…uh…(pausing to think what that major film name was dammit)…3 idiots which addresses important issues like education and we’ve always been huge fans so to meet him here is amazing and I’ve always been a great admirer of his acting since being introduced to Bollywood several years ago….(profuse sweating as camera zooms in as I horrify myself by speaking the longest run-on sentence on human record, Aamir Nordakh then hitsmicrophone in annoyance and wants to suck it like a lollipop, which I’m sure sounds great in audio).

After blabbing for a minute, interviewer in Hindi: “And bada Aamir, do you have any words for chota Aamir?”

Aamir Khan speaks in Hindi, and tenderly places his hand on the side Little Aamir’s head. Little Aamir isn’t jiving with this entire situation at all. He starts screaming again. I missed his nap today. Perfect. Aamir Khan has a remedy. He whips out a Nestle chocolate bar and with a typical Khan gesture twiddles the package in front of Little Aamir between his fingers. Sudden silence. Little Aamir looks at the chocolate bar. Slowly takes it. Whispers a small “thank you” into the microphone. Smiles all around, even from tough bodyguards.

Little Aamir continues to ferociously scream at the camera lens to ‘go awaaaay’ like it’s the most horrid evil eye in the entire Southeast Asian continent. I am still trying to smile as serenely as possible as Aamir Khan and I chat a little more about his work. It strikes me that everything about this situation is very casual. There is a real ease about him, and a strong presence and focus. And I can’t frickin’ believe he’s standing right next to me, like a real entity made of flesh and blood rather than film. His face is filled out, eyes sparkling, his legs a little more bulky than the God of Six Pack that he was in Ghajini. After several minutes, the conversation naturally falls to close, we give each other a strong cordial handshake, and he’s off doing another interview with the same reporter.

Sidenote: I thought that with the lengthy film footage they acquired from him that I wouldn’t make the cut in the actual broadcast, because stupor and run-on sentences wouldn’t be good journalism. Two days afterwards, I find out that the footage including screaming Little Aamir on ZeeTV, Star News, and NDTV on August 19 from 8:30-10:30pm. As it goes in Leh, a bunch of folks saw it except me of course. Still working on acquiring the footage. I feel thrilled to have had it run, and the flip side, kind of chagrined that I sounded like a grammatical moron on national tv in a country of 1.3 billion people who speaks sophisticated British English.

As he’s conducting the second interview, I’m taking more photographs. Aamir Khan, for a moment in time, is looking right at me. Look away Lian! Is it the pink salwar? Aaaaa! Is it possible to fall in love with the image of a man when he's standing right next to you? Yes. Wait! Nooo. Stop it.

Aamir Khan finishes his interview, and amid a torrent of mosquitoes that are stinging the entire crew and my shoulders (a small price to pay), he gets back into the vehicle. He gives a small twinkle of a wave meant just for little Aamir, who is still whining, and then another look at me and a wave, before he's back on the road with an entourage of three SUVs.

My entire body is flushed. Later, I found out what King Aamir had told to little Aamir when speaking with the reporters in Hindi. He had essentially wished Aamir a lifetime where he gives happiness to others, and experiences happiness himself. To my little Aamir: when you are older, and you understand the people you have met, and places you have visited, and what you experienced, that is all I wish for you, that is all that is most important. After what we experienced here, when you come into existence, you arrive and face a lot of suffering, but we have a small time together with one another, to love one another. I'm so happy you chose me.