Ladakh: The Ten List

Top Ten Things I Love About Living in Ladakh

1. Open window in morning. See Himalaya.
2. Milk is fresh from the cow’s teat. The meat had a pulse that morning, the carrots are sweet and the goat is free-range.
3. Child has chance for direct life experience learning animal names since cow/chicken/goat/cat/stray dog/donkey is mooing/clucking/braying right next to you in road.
4. Built-in free community childcare. Can pass off Aamir to in-laws anytime and have him make 12 new friends with gangs of neighborhood kids playing outside window. It takes a village.
5. No commute.
6. Renowned Buddhist Rinpoche happens to be an in-law and neighbor. Can borrow sugar and maybe some enlightenment.
7. The lovely trickling sound of water I hear in the villages is real. No more need for iPhone app played in former office.
8. Morning run under Royal Palace. Not bad.
9. Free healthcare. Meds cost $3.15.
10. Happiness comes without thinking.

Top Ten Things I Hate About Living in Ladakh

1. When I step out the door, the entire town is whispering about who I am and what I’m wearing. Please.
2. Despise oppressive Catholic guilt felt with Shiite Muslim family. Let’s have some fun and stop worrying so much about Allah.
3. Child developing diabetes and tooth decay owing the sheer amount of candy and chocolate received from anyone he glances at in Ladakhi community.
4. Knuckles bleeding from laundry.
5. Husband now man of house. Three-year American retraining of male-ego lost in one month. Why so bossy?
6. Fickle electricity = no internet for days. Experiencing first-world mental hernia.
7. Don’t really take showers anymore.
8. Takes four hours to accomplish anything. Locals think mental institution would be worthwhile in face of trying to enforce American timing.
9. Time and deliberation taken to establish a healthy schedule for toddler since birth – banished. What is a schedule?
10. Trying to stave off need to go to world concert, see modern art museum, have deep soak in porcelain bathtub and eat red licorice. Imagining doing this for at least ten more years. Hm...

Launder for Love

First off, I’d like to say that if my second child (emphasis on “if”) is anything like Aamir, I am going to perform matri-suicide. Five years from now, I pray for a little girl who will quietly play with her color sets in the corner.

Now some deep thoughts on the mundane. There are solely 2 advantages when you do laundry in the Himalaya. First, your clothes dry in an average of 10.5 minutes because the combination of sun, heat and desert climate pretty much zap away any moisture in your clothing like a Laundry Superheroine Goddess with zappy rays emanating from her head. Plus, there’s bleaching for whites with UV rays like laser beams - although take heed lady-of-the-house, your blacks fade to light gray in one sunlit exposure.

Second, hanging clothes on a clear night when I’m on the roof underneath the blanket of the Milky Way – and yes, you can see every. Single. Pinpoint. Of a star - is a truly breathtaking combination of the sacred and mundane; while securing my hubby’s undies to the line, the black sky is a glittering dome, and I feel I can grasp at the darkness and part the clouds, and the top of my head is littered with starlight. There is something reassuring about taking that vastness and bringing it into yourself, and my actions take on a very Zen nature. I’m pinning wet clothing to the line, nothing more, nothing less, and feeling very relaxed that I can do so little and just be wonderfully, silently, growing into myself again. Aamir has noticed these twinkling lights – he’s spontaneously broken out into renditions of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” which has given Abbass and I amazing bursts of happiness.

(My son is now delicately aligning a blue ribbon into the crack on the wood stairway and telling me there is “poo-poo” inside. Beware the “poo-poo”. One of the main hazards of raising a toddler in India is that the puddle he just stepped in contains a toxic waste melange of cow piss, dog poo, human spit, henna, detergent runoff, maggi noodles, antifreeze, sari dye and/or dead rat fur. Yes, I saw that the other day for real. One visitor told me cow piss wasn’t that bad because urine, in scientific terms, is sterile. Thanks, I know. It’s just that the cow ate out of the trash bin that contains all that toxic stuff, including gallons of male piss coming out of the laborers from Bihar who attend the Bollywood cinema next door, which apparently, for all its years in existence, does not have a proper urinal despite the 3-hour showings.)

Photo: Do you want YOUR child to hold the offshoot of this between his toes?

Now for the dark side. Himalayan laundry expands Indian Standard Time. That’s right. The task has the amazing ability to extend my “laundry day” to ALL day. Yes, all fucking day. This is why I cuss Mother: The first task is waking up and eyeing the red indicator light on the switch to see if there happens to be electricity that morning. I have one chance in three. Second is beating my sister-in-law to the washer, which is impossible. She’s a Ladakhi woman and she’s making bread at dawn for god’s sake which she kneaded with her knuckles the night before, and already has a huge kettle of ginger chai prepared with fresh cow’s milk for her robust Himalayan children. Her bare, leather fingers can pick up boiling pots. My first-world wimpyness (just sitting on a stupid computer all day) is no match.

Then it’s operating with Murphy’s law: I’ve made it to the washer, I have detergent packets ready, my soapy hands can’t open the plastic packets with my teeth, and the electricity goes down for another 5 hours. During this moment, the churning washer slows down like a big, dying cow and the suds crackle like Rice Crispies in dissolution. So sad.

Finally, it’s the plain fact that spots don’t come out with an 8 kg. washer by Samsung. I can pick up this machine with my two hands and carry it to the opposite corner if I happen to not jive with the feng-shui in the washer-room closet that day. It’s a plastic shell with a Dutch water wheel in the middle, but a cute little thing, and obviously manufactured by Asians with its small yet functional proportions. The water runs black and yet, after twisting the sheets with my hands and wee biceps, rinsing the load again in a bucket of fresh water to ring out the soapy water, and carrying up the laundry up a steep flight of steel stairs to the roof to dry, I’m hanging out all my lovelies and finding shmears of black dirt running in rivulets across my white towel. The damn spinner is broken again (that’s the manual term for “dryer” here).

Photo: view my whites in all their glory.

Aamir can continue looking like a nomadic child from the lakes area. I have American dollars in the bank, time on my hands, many meditations and confessionals to work out while squeezing a fresh pillow case out with waters from the sacred Indus. I’ve told myself many times here already that I can choose whether to allow the dailies bother me in India, and grace over them with quietude.

Playgrounds of Kingdom Come

After several frustrating weeks of not being able to get online - an experience that no one should undergo after working in digital advertising for 5 years - I'm here! At an internet cafe with my beloved Apple! My friends think are probably dead amidst the Himalaya. But yes, we are alive and well and kickin' it at 11,500 feet. Now I have The Next American Novel to post after traveling through Germany, France and Switzerland, then Delhi and finally Ladakh. So what's been happening:
Inevitably there will be a period in Aamir’s life when he will shudder when I pick him up from ice hockey practice for merely existing as his mother; already at two he takes his small hand and slaps me on the cheek with a firm “NO” when I lean over to threaten his autonomy with a bushel of kisses. In 16 years, I see him gunning his motorcycle and race off onto the road in bitter rebellion for having his computer social networking privileges taken away. I will unfold these photos from our trip, and with a faint tear quivering in my eye, say…”Dear. When you were a wee one, just over two years old, your faithful mum and pop took you TO THE BEST KICKASS PLAYGROUNDS IN THE MOST AMAZING MOUNTAIN RANGES IN THE WORLD.” What child gets to frolic on a swing in the frickin’ Swiss Alps and Himalayas by 27 months? Yes, you did Aamir, I will say. So hand over the keys and pay humble respect to those who created you.

Here's Aamir playing in the Himalaya in Ladakh's one and only official playground. Albeit it’s a bit dry and the slide would be a target for American lawsuits, but the setting is pretty sweet. (Apparently the entire playground concept is kind of a strange one in Ladakh. But I guess when you have stones and huge mountains and rivers it's not really necessary).

When we were in Switzerland, our lovely Swiss friends took us to another playground for Aamir in the woods near Cham. It’s the same woods that all those European painters inspire to capture when you walk the halls of stately museums and gaze at those 7 feet by 4 feet oil paintings. Disgustingly, it’s how our Swiss friends Caroline and Klaus celebrate the first day of the New Year. They take the clean, efficient tram up into the hills, and embrace the sky and hope for openness and happiness. Usually for my New Year’s, I do anything possible to prevent labeling myself a loser before my parents succumb to sleep by 10:30pm and I’m left cursing the people in Times Square on television for having lives.

We broke cheese and drank bubbly Swiss water in petite plastic cups and enjoyed the fresh air. (This Swiss cheese is the type the natives eat in moderation. I eat the stuff in big chunks like bonbons and get a cold sore or zits the next day from the salt and fat.) In this photo, which I wanted to deem “Merry Christmas from our family 2010”, my camera lens was fogged up and makes me look like I have a cloud sitting right over my face. So my holiday photo idea got canned:




We walked up the road and rounded the corner to be greeted by a golden field of mountain spring flowers. Abbass and Aamir took the occasion to sit amidst the splendor. Interestingly enough, there is a similar childhood portrait of Abbass about the same age as Aamir sitting amidst a huge field of golden barley with his late mother in Ladakh.


Then we hiked towards The Best Playground on Earth that Aamir will never remember. As a mom, the best you can hope for, among the 3am calls to comfort, the diaper rash cream, the bum wipes, is that somehow, somewhere, 19 years down the line, the total sum of all these small yet significant actions that your child will never remember will provide some semblance of excellent social adjustment and happiness. So somehow I hope that having Aamir play in the Swiss Alps will do just that. If there was a Bentley of children’s playgrounds, this would be it. Aamir spent the rest of the afternoon running up and down the log kingdom and screaming gibberish back to his new friends when they spoke Swiss German to him. There was a cluster of about 4 boys who became immediate friends. The playground was made of sturdy Swiss tree logs and was nestled between a flowering field and the edge of the forest. They had a clean public bathroom on the grounds which, for being in the middle of the woods, still had a motion-sensor for the tap and the dryer. I have never failed to find myself impressed by those Swiss.


The playground also consisted of a set of ropes that I usually see at company bonding retreats for conquering your worse fear and getting along with coworkers you hate. Apparently the Swiss get their kids started on mountain rope exercises as early as 18 months. We sat and ate wedges of Swiss chocolate set in a square biscuit. Meaning I ate about twelve and happily got happiness zits the next day.