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.